Biohacking and the Road to Transhumanism

You know, the little metal, metal bendy things. Yes. So, so now let me ask you this. You're having a hard time picking up this paper clip. Would you cut your finger open, put a magnet in there, suitre it back up to make it easier to pick up that paper clip? Probably not, because that that does not sound

like I'm making the process any easier. Yeah, but it is kind of in human nature, the same way that we we try and vacuum up something, and if the vacuum cleaner is not picking it up, we will pick the object up, look at it, and then place it back on the carpet and then give it another go with the vacuum. Right. Yeah, technology must succeed. It is kind of like that. Yeah, so, uh, that's what we're

talking about today at its very basic form. We're gonna be talking about bio hacking in the present on the road to transhumanism. Will explain what all that means. That might have just been a bunch of gibberish to you just now if you're unfamiliar with these movements, But that's a real thing. People are really implanting magnets in their fingers, uh, and they pick up paper clips and bottle caps with them. But that's not really just why they're doing it. We'll

we'll talk about more about that later. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna look at some individuals who are either in some cases pioneers of trans humanism, innovators who are going out there hacking their bodies U upgrading their bodies with technology, as well as individuals for kind of harbingers or even profits of trans humanism who were who were engaging in these acts, uh, to sort of comment on where we

are and where we can go with our technology. And along the way, we're also going to define what trans humanism is, discuss some of the different approaches to trans humanism, the different uh, philosophies and mindsets that that entail it, as well as us a general proposed checklist for how we might know when we have become trans human as a society exactly. Yeah, And so you know, I think

a lot of you out there. Again, like if you haven't heard of this before, you've probably got some pop culture touchstones, and I'm sure Robert and I are going to be referring back to throughout the episode. But like, for me, the first one I think of is American Mary, the horror movie which you've seen right by the SOSCA sisters, in which you know there's a lot of body modification going on, but the body modification is sort of leading

to ard something more than human. Right. Also, I mentioned this, uh in our Summer Reading episode. The graphic novel Junction True is about stuff like this. Warren ellis a lot of his comics and prose work is based on this stuff like Black Summer, dr Sleepless Desolation Jones, and especially trans Metropolitan are about uh, sort of moving towards a trans humanist future and what the ethical I guess conflicts

and repercussions of that would be. And then for me, there's this game it's a role playing game called The Clips Phase, and I have been in love with it since I first read the book of it, and I actually played it one time with Joe McCormick, our host. Yeah. Uh, and basically the ideas you build your sort of trans humanist character that exists in a far future along the lines of the philosophies that we're going to present today. Yeah, well, yeah, this is of course, so this idea of just upgrading

the body with grenetic parts. You do see this in a number of different role playing scenarios. There's all video games where you're kind if you need to upgrade your character, well, get a chip for this, which exactly. Yeah. Yeah, like Fallout. I play Fallout a lot, and there's plenty of bio hacking that goes on in that, and BioShock is essentially a bio hacking game. But those are science fiction. Today, we're gonna really try to focus in on the reality

of this stuff. What's actually going on, how close are we to doing this, what are the current benefits of it? Yeah, the science fiction examples are our key two because those serve, as you know, it's kind of avatars of what is possible. Yeah, and Uh. And in any of these ideas we discussed here today, they're not They're not too far removed from the sci fi visions that at least partially inspire them. Yeah,

I agree. Uh. And I want to kick things off with a quote that I found during the research, which is from a pretty well known own bio hacker who goes by the name anonym Uh. And she says, bodily health takes a big f off second seat to curiosity when she's referring to her own bio hacking. We're gonna talk a lot more about her own biohacking, but this is the kind of philosophical ethos we're talking about here. Very d I y approach, and they're less worried about

their health and more about sort of the innovation, the curiosity. Yeah, claiming their body saying this is this is my form, and if I want to augment it, if I want to upgrade it, that is what I'm going to do. Health come second. Yep. So Okay, you're out there saying I don't know what you guys are talking about at all. What is trans humanism? Well, the basic premises something like this, right, we can improve being humans through technology and science, and

we're basically taking evolution into our own hands. Now, those of you've listened to our episode on the philosophy of cyborg ism, Uh, this is gonna sound familiar, right if there they touch on each other. There's a nice big ven diagram of trans humanism and cyborgs. Yeah, I mean a lot of it touches into this area to where you know, essentially human evolution has has has long been altered or even stunted by our culture, by by just the way that we live as individuals. Now natural selection

doesn't quite work the same way anymore. So this is the idea that the next phase of human evolution is one of largely self guided technological scientific achievement. Now it is.

We'll discuss exactly how that breaks down. Varies greatly, and it runs the gamut from like fully semi androids, cybernetic futuristic beings, uh you know that are essential essentially like technological angelic beings too, more sort of near future but sometimes lofty ideas about just simply making society better, making our world better, kind of going after that Star Trek s Gene Roddenberry inspired uh utopia ideal. Yeah, And this

is you know, what. This is a good point where I want to throw out a plug for you, which is that you last week published a piece on how stuff Works Now that was an experiment in looking at a trans human cyborg future, uh, specifically along the lines of space travel, as we discussed in our Cyborg episode, and it was called Silba Dreams of Earth and it was basically it was a great short story about a trans human or a post human I guess on Jupiter,

thinking about what life was like on Earth. Oh yeah, well, thank you. That one was a lot of fun to put together and definitely uh I spun that off of ideas that we discussed here on the podcast. Well, I think if anybody who's listened to those episodes or this episode and you like that stuff, go check that out. Go look for Roberts piece which the Silva Dreams of is the title of the short story. What's the title of the article? That's it's a question about what the

our trans human future like. I'll make sure that we link to it on the landing page for this Episodeah, you should, because it's great and it's really connected to what we're doing here. Yeah. The thought experiment thing is pretty interesting. Um, Former co host Julie Douglas also did one, and and you've been invited to so I have. Yeah, I haven't thought up of one yet. I think Julius was something about like, what would life be like if we were crawling all the time? Yeah, if we were

still sort of like quadrupeds. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an interesting had some cool illustration, So hopefully we'll see more and more of these from members of the house. Stuff works. Yeah, I'm gonna try to take a stab at it one of these days. Uh. The thing about trans humanism, though, that I want to go back to, this isn't exactly new, right. For a long time, people have sought out ways to change their bodies, in particular extending the human life. Right.

We've talked about this before with our episodes on Egyptian burials or just the practices. And they're trans humanists though they're not just interested in being immortal, that's part of it. But what about things like, for instance, adding technology to your body so you have different senses, or maybe learning how to be telepathic by having science and technology connect you to another human being. That's the kind of stuff

we're gonna be talking about today. Now there's three categories, according to our House Stuff Works article on trans humanism. I think we're gonna see a little bit more than this today, though, but help me out. There's the longevity one, which we primarily see nowadays through cryonics, the idea of you know, freezing your body basically, uh so after you die, so in a far future where there's uh, you know, technology that would be able to cure whatever you've got, Well,

I would say that's that's one version. That's certainly a lot of the word going into this, Particularly the work of Aubrey de Gray, revolves around this idea of that the death is something we can we can get or come to, right. We just have to take We have to take death divided up into the various uh approachable problems, and then tackle each of those problems individually in order to defeat death. Sounds a little lofty, but at least prolonged human life to where the average individual will live

at least a century. Yeah. The second category is becoming a what they call super well being, and that's basically guaranteeing that you have the best traits so that you feel the best possible way that you can and you can exist in the best way that you can within your environment. This is an area where and arguably there's a lot of scientific arrogance here, because the idea here is, hey, if you let science and technology take care of it, we got your well being, you're gonna be happy as if.

And I don't want to totally discount that argument, but you really get into this this clash between science and every other discipline out there that has some approach to human well being in human happiness, be its spiritual or philosophical or well, that's gonna that's gonna go beyond sciences team, right, so yeah, right, yeah, uh. And then the third one would be super intelligence, which I didn't find too many examples of in the uh the sort of practical examples

that we're encountering nowadays. But the idea here is essentially, either through genetics or technology, augmenting our brain so we're smarter or have a capacity for more memory. Right. Yeah, Well, I mean I would say we're we're already seeing like a soft shade of that in terms of our just constant use of cloud based devices and constant wireless connection. Like it's it's not a direct augmentation of the brain, but we're we're making sure that we're we're almost painfully

attached to the infinite knowledge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Right, Like when we're watching a TV show and you're like, hmmm, I don't know who that actor is, what other things has he been in? Just whip out your phone. Right, less than five minutes you figured it out. Yeah, not knowing is no longer acceptable. Ye used to. There was a day when you're when you were like, Hey, I

wonder who that that character actor is? He just didn't know you you you could maybe go research it tomorrow, but right now, just or you talk to other human beings about it. Hey, who's that guy that's on that Pete Holmes has a really good bit about this. Uh, we're basically like we've we're losing like our social connections because phones. Yeah, yeah, he does have a great bit

on this. I've heard I've heard that bit. Um. But so a lot of people equate transhumanism with the singularity, right that eventually it's going to lead to the singularity. And but what we what we mean by that is the point where artificial intelligence surpasses the abilities of biological intelligence. Now, I would say the research that we did today it's not going to take us too far down that path.

That's another episode for another time. Yeah. That that that this singularity is definitely a transition point and into an entirely different mode of existing. So let's talk about, uh, what there's different types of trans humanism. Let's let's sort of just like upfront, established the philosophies. And you found a great piece from Omni magazine in a twenty sixteen

article called trans Humanism Sexual Identity. Let's start there. Yeah, this puts a cool little article and towards the end of it, they did a great job of just laying out some of these different approaches to it um, which which serves as a nice sort of starting point for exploring some of them, and and just you know, briefly explaining the other ones. Um. First up, democratic trans humanism.

This is trans humanism for the people, for the species, the idea that only when you can you apply this to everyone at every socio and socioeconomic level, will we really be able to evolve or elevate the human race. And uh, and I find this one interesting because on one level, it's the most reasonable incarnation on the list. It's the Bernie Sanders trans humanist movement. Yeah, yeah, because like you can't. How can we say that we've evolve

the human species if we're ultimately talking about just one class. Yeah, exactly. And that's where this thing often goes, right, is like, well, is only the are the one percent going to be the only ones who can afford this kind of trans human operation, whereas like bio hacking is primarily about just like d I Y do it in your garage, your kitchen or whatever and literally cut yourself up and jam

stuff into your body. Yeah. So yeah, this is the idea that you can't you leave no humans behind if we're going to evolve as a species, We're gonna involve as a species. But it also there's a little bit of Western arrogance to it as well. And I heard Terry Gross on NPR Fresh Air interview Donald g McNeil Jr. Author of Zeka The Emerging Epidemic, and he discussed, you know, the various countermeat measures of delaying sexual reproduction in Zeka

danger zones as to have avoid the threat to newborns. Yeah. Right, it's a big topic of conversation right now. Yeah. But but as he pointed out, this sort of effort in developing nations often comes across as white people a world away telling Africans or Asians not to have babies, and they even they even avoid some of the loaded language by referring to it as spacing out births rather than

talking about birth control. Yeah. I think I don't know if we've talked about this on the show, or maybe we just talked about it in the office one time. But the idea that because of the ZA epidemic and ideas of spacing out births like this, that there will be like huge gaps in classes in various schools down the road in the future because, for instance, like a year or two will have gone by where no babies or less babies were born, right, Um, and what kind

of impact does that have on a society going forward? Yeah? Indeed, um. But but then certainly that the transhumanist angle here is, you know, do you end up go walking into all these places around the world and saying, hey, everybody, this is what it means to be human. Now you need to upgrade fingers. Yeah, so it's you're kind of danny if you do dander. If you don't, right, if you leave everybody behind, that's bad. But if you if you offer it to everybody in a little too insistent about it.

Then that's a that's also a little less shady. Okay, the next version, we have a libertarian trans humanism, and this is trans human for every Humanism for everybody, but without government getting involved. And this, for all intents and purposes, seems to be the style of trans humanism represented by the United States trans Humanist Party, who currently has a

US presidential hopeful in the form of of Zoltan. Yeah, and in fact, Zoltan wrote me on Twitter last night to let me know that he was willing to help us out with this episode. Unfortunately I received it too late into the research game, but maybe in a future

episode we can consult with Zultan. I didn't know what it was at first because I just randomly tweeted something about, oh, I'm researching bio hacking and trans humanism and I gotta ping, like midnight last night or something, and it was from him or whoever is running his account. It was basically like, if you've got any questions, come to me. Yeah. It's uh. It should come as no surprise to anyone out there.

This election cycle has a lot of there's a lot of noise and it's easy for some of the other candidates to become lost in that noise. Yeah, but I think it would be interesting, uh you know, potentially in a future scenario for the show where we might have Zultan on or we might talk to him and get

some of his input on stuff like this. Yeah, because a lot of these movements, to one of the like the really cool things about them is that they're they're very pro science, they're very pro technology, and that you know what what whatever the other lofty ideas involved there are, there is a definite pro science agenda. And similar to the libertarian trans humanism, there's also an arco trans minism. This is like the stronger anti capitalist, anti state trans

humanist movement. Uh. These individuals believe that in the wake of these advances that we're unleashing, society is going to find a democratic form without the need of government or massive corporations. This is like almost exactly how that game Eclipse phase breaks down. There's like different factions that you can be a part of. Everybody's trans human in it, but almost all of the factions line up with these factions we're talking about here right now. Like there's an

anarcho one. There's a corporate one. There's uh one that's we have extropianism down here, there's an extropianism faction. Yeah, so it's basically like within the game, you have to choose what your character is. Sort of philosophy about being trans human and modifying their body is are there is there are there any groups that just have no part

of trans humanism at all? Uh No, you're I don't think that there's a way for you in the game to just have a like straight up human body, because the whole idea is that, um, we've gotten past the singularity in the game, and you can upload your mind into any kind of body and then modify that body. In fact, like some of the characters are uplifted animals in human bodies or vice versa, human minds uplifted into animal bodies, Like you can be like an octopus with

like cybernetic augmentations, but you're human mind. That reminds me a lot of Banks. If there's an engine, I think it's heavily inspired by his work. Yeah, you should totally check this out. It's right up your alley. The religious question, though, um came up because it reminded me in um Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon series. His world involves that just an extreme use of this re sleeving of human consciousness. That's exactly what they call it in the game sleeving. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I I can't recommend this game enough. I mean, it's really smartly done. It's I mean, if you're out there and you're like, I don't care about game like role playing games, and that's cool, but I haven't even other than that one time with Joe played it. But just reading the book is fascinating because it presents all this stuff we're talking about here and then sort of like science fiction visions for where we could go down the

road with trans humanism. Interesting. Yeah, Now Morgan, in his world, certain religious groups, such as I think specifically there's a branch of Catholics, do not engage in this trans humanist re sleeving. Okay, so they're all in their original but they're all in their original bodies, and they're just kind of set apart from sort of you know, almost like normal humans, and that all these strange new approaches to humanity.

There's some kind of thing in the game's world in which there was like an apocalyptic event on Earth that prevents you from basically being born with a regular old human body. Um, I think because a I got out of control and it was like a terminator type skyp. Yeah. Well, speaking of religion and trans humanism, there are religious trans humanists. Essentially, these are non atheistic trans humanists to see trans humanist

ideas it's fully compatible with their religious views. Two interesting examples. One in particular, since we've been we've recently spoke about about Mormons space. There is a Mormon trans Humanist Association fascinating and it is quote the world's largest advocacy network for ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities. There. I would never have thought that, but that's fascinating. Yeah,

there's I was really hope to ask. I have a I have a friend, UM whose Mormon and lives out in Utah and is really kind of progressive in his Mormon views. I'll have to ask him if he's familiar with this. Yeah, I kind of want to check in with a couple of my old Mormon friends who I know. They're both UM, both definitely into science, both science UM advocates, but UM, this particular Mormon take on trans humanism it also entails something they call transfigurism uh and this is

This is from their website. Transfigurism is religious trans humanism ex amplified by synchronization of Mormonism and trans humanism. The term transfigurism denotes advocacy for change in form and alludes to sacred stories from many religious traditions. Uh. And they refer to uh uh, the Universal Form of Christiana and Hinduism, the Radiant Face of Moses and Judaism, and several other incarnations and other faiths. So I found that one interesting.

There's also this Christian trans Humanist Association and they have a number of tenants here that are interesting. Include the idea that God's mission involves the transformation and renewal of crenate creation, um, growth and progress along every dimension of humanity. Uh, science and technology as a tangible expression of of the

God given impulse to explore and discover. Yeah, well that's interesting because that is something that comes up over and over again, regardless of whether it's connected to religion or not. But that's that's really what's given as like the ethical motivation for a lot of bio hacking. Yeah, so I wanted to touch on those because you see far more of the of the secular body hacking and a secular trans humanism, so it's interesting to look at a religious

spin on it. Yeah, I can't imagine. One of the things I was thinking about, like while we were doing this research was sitting down at my grandmother's house at the kitchen table and just like having a conversation with some coffee and being like, hey, did you know grant me that there's people who cut their fingers open and her magnuts in there, and just having her My grandmother's

reaction would just be like oh my, you know. But but like trying to explain to her and then adding into it because you know she's a practicing Christian, well there's a Christian element to this too, and explaining that to her as well. It would be a weird conversation for sure, But I might try to have it someday. Well I'm gonna try and blow through some of these other ones just to give everyone a basic idea here.

But essentially you have you have hedonistic trans humanists to just want to figure out how to eliminate the pain and folk is on the good stuff. You have survivalist transhumanists that are that are hyper focused on the idea of longevity. And then there are singularitarianists and their ideas that technological singularities coming. The machines are gonna outpace this. Let's get ready, it's inevitable. Yeah, all we can do

is prepare ourselves and try and steer the course. Cosmism is on here too, and that's actually something that I've been thinking about proposing that we do for a future episode. I know that there was some kind of cosmism that was working its way around Russian science thought earlier in the century that might be fun to explore. Yeah, this there's that. This is a slightly different thing that arises from the work of AI researcher Hugo did Garis, and

he's a very interesting dude and of himself. I mean, he's retired now, but he predicted a war against machines that were resulting numerous mega deaths, like essentially matrix kind

of world. Okay, Yeah, So he has this, he has this whole philosophy uh laying out and it involves this idea that um that you're gonna have the cosmists and you're gonna have the terrans who oppose uh, you know, upgrading humans and becoming this this trans human force and essentially the trans humanists are going to have to leave the planet and the others are gonna have to stay. Um people a little more complicated than that, but that's sort of the basics. Well, that sounds like something that

might be worth revisiting in the future. And if anybody out there knows more about that too, because I found when just doing kind of basic research on it, it wasn't widely available. Um, let us know, stuff to blow your mind at how stuff works? Sorry, uh, blow the mind at how stuff works dot com? Uh, and let us know if you've got some opinions on that. Yeah.

So those are some of the basic philosophies floating around in the heads of individuals who start down this trans humanist path and get into this body modification, bio hacking realm. So this all brings up a question that I want opposed. Maybe it's not one that we answer now. It might just be a rhetorical question or's something to think about as we go through the rest of the episode. With all these types of trans humanism, regardless of its religious

or philosophical or whatever, is it ethical and so. And the reason why I ask is because there are some people who compare trans humanism to eugenics as being some kind of division between superior and inferior versions of humanity, where one person is superior to another. And I guess

that's something that we should consider as we're going forward. Um, and and especially in the case of like you know, like we're saying, like, if there's like a I guess, like a capitalist faction of trans humanists and only the rich have access to biomodifications that prolong their life, is that ethical? I think there's a strong argument that it's not. I mean, you can already look at at the highest level of medical care is essentially a transhumanist endeavor, and

it is not available to everyone. So it's kind of uh, it wasn't that sort of the premise behind Elysium, that movie, the Neil blom Camp movie. Oh yeah, yeah, with the rich people in Orbit and everyone else is on Earth. Yeah, and like they didn't always have access. The people on Earth did always have access to like the medical benefits that they had. What was there, Like there's like some kind of machine that you could just climb in and wold like cure cancer or something. Yeah, and that's what

I think the whole plot was based on. There was an interesting film, a bit a bit heavy handed. Yeah, and it also kind of like went off the rails a little bit, but I kind of like it. I know most people were upset by it after blomb Camp's work on District nine, but I thought it was okay. Yeah, I think he He even admits though that he he would have he wished he could have had more time writing it than he wasn't able to get the script exactly where he wanted it, but it's still a wonderful world.

I'd love to see him potentially revisited even Yeah, yeah, that would be interesting. So we're getting into body modification bio acting, and I do want to just just briefly mentioned that when you look at ways that we have we have always altered the human form, you can sort

of look at three basic areas. They're sort of symbolic um body modification figuring in terms of, you know, stuff that's even superficial, like altering one's hair, altering one's nails, and then getting into the you know, tattoos and other things that are more permanent but still you're not altering um the form too much. Then you have things that are certainly altering the form more, and then things that

are actually altering the functionality of the human body. And that's where we we really see some of the more interesting examples of modern body modification with the trans humanist spent. Yeah. So, like examples of altering the form would be like subdermal or transdermal implants, which we have a really great article on how stuff works about in our team put together this fascinating infographic on how the whole like surgical process works.

But again, that's not sort of evolving you into another stage of humanity's enhancing you. Yeah, but like even even wearing clothes is a is a body modification and an enhancement of who you are. You are your physical manifestation. But it's certainly it's not necessarily changing the form or changing the function. And what we're basically going to be talking about here for the rest of the episode is bio hacking. Uh. And it's called that for a reason because it's the d I Y version. You get out

your own tools and upgrade your body yourself. Bio hackers ask why should we wait for the industry or for the government to catch up to our way of thinking. Let's democratize science and do this to ourselves. Right, And we're already seeing versions of this, from everything to people wearing smart watches and other wearable devices to the really extreme stuff that we're gonna talk about today. The inspiration, as with many of the philosophies that Robert just mentioned,

is basically to create and discover. It's that human urge to continuously innovate. And we're gonna talk about people like Kevin Warwick and left anonem that I mentioned earlier. These are well known bio hackers, but there are also community labs that work on this stuff too. They're basically either doing this in their kitchen or in some kind of body parlor. Uh, and they're working together as a community to share their information and their resources. Some are building

wearables that they hope that they'll eventually implant. Right. So, for instance, like, there's a hat out there that electrically stimulates the prefrontal cortex that you can wear. But what if you took that the step further and you were able to install that into your head. Uh. There's an

anklet that vibrates in the direction of due north. And I know from the research that anonem is actually one of the people who's talking about actually building that and putting it in her knee so that her knee will be able to tell her where due north is would be helpful if you get lost a lot, I would assume, yeah, uh, other dabblings that we're not going to go into full depth here on our for instance, modifying mouth bacteria so that it eats plaque and instead recalcifies our gums, or

inserting organisms into our water that detect arsenic or bacteria that you eat that kill tumor cells. Okay, so these are all things that are on the table. Yeah. I mean when you get into the synthetic biology realm, which I think we touched on some of these previous did Yeah, that's entirely different sphere of trans humanist body improvement. It takes place at the smallest level, and it's all possible because the tools are getting cheaper and more accessible. Think

of it like this. Instead of having a local bike coop where you all get together and you work on your bicycles together and make sure that you know share resources, these folks are having a local biohacker coop where they're sharing resources and information on how to do this stuff safely. Uh, and what they're getting out of it, and and we're gonna we're gonna dive into all of But remember this

is also sidestepping academia in a big way. It's getting rid of the stuffy methodology for a faster but also riskier application. There are there's dangers here when you when you're just like cutting yourself open and shoving stuff in your body. Yeah, I mean this is self experimentation and and mad science if it is yeah, uh and and I'm going to just throw this out there, especially going

back to the idea of the government getting involved. I'd say we're one major accident away from this getting a lot of attention from the media and the government getting involved and regulating what you can do with your body in terms of technology or certainly you're one new story about this is what the kids are doing exactly? Yeah, oh yeah, always think of the children. If if if kids start doing this, then there's gonna be a lot of scrutiny on it. Then what happens does it go underground?

I mean it's already a subculture, but like does it become like an illegal underground where people are modifying our bodies secretly. I don't know, but we'll have to keep an eye out for it. Yeah. And by the way, I want to add this too, because of the efforts of body modifiers, transdermal implants now have impacts on our medicine. Uh. There are examples where you can use them to create chemotherapy ports that run directly into your veins while you're

getting cancer treatment. Uh. There's also transdermal implants that are anchored directly into bone for prosthetic limbs. And some scientists are even looking into animal horns as natural transdermals that can be inserted and they won't be rejected by the body because of infection. And that's something we're gonna talk about a lot more when we get into the specifics here. Yes, stell Arc this is this is the guy that I've been fascinated with for for years, and certainly he's been

he's been around for quite a while. He was born in forty six and had his name legally changed to Stollac in nine two. He is a performance artist and Australian performance artist and you have probably seen images of one project or another of his over the years, because they often are extreme enough to capture mainstream media. I mean, I did not know his name, but I knew about the ear Thing, and I think, well, go on ahead.

I think he's had some influence on our pop culture too. Yeah, he uh, I mean, the guy is essentially feels like he stepped out of William Gibson novel because if you if you see an interview with him and hear him talk about his work, he is a like a very thick Australian accent that it feels like it would be more in keeping with just almost like a backwoodsie like down to earth kind of guy, especially now as an older, older man. He might seem just like it was just

an older Australian dude. And I think didn't didn't Motherboard do like a documentary on him or something like that? Pervice. Yeah, so if you really want to see him in action, you can probab watch that. Yeah. Yeah, he's and uh he comes off pretty uh pretty down to earth even in one off in one of these interviews, he's also hooked up to a large mechanical spider body because he's also been and he's long been involved with some pretty extreme stuff. Between between seventy six and eighty eight, he

completed twenty five different hook body Suspicion performances. So now that seems to be kind of like the groundwork of his body modification slash performance art world. Yeah, and this is the one that I think, uh, I have to imagine that the people who made that movie The Cell, the character of Vincent Dinofrio must have been inspired by a stell Arc in some way, because I don't know if you remember, but he was hanging from hooks a lot in that movie. That was like part of Oh yeah,

I forgot about that aspect of that. That movie is pretty loaded with stimuli. Yeah. Um so, so from here he engaged on a whole string of projects that involved it basically came back to his is his thesis, right, yeah, which is essentially, we're progressively extending ourselves into our environment through technological artifacts. Sounds like trans humanism to me. Uh So his argument is that we're making ourselves both cyborgs

and zombies by doing this. Yeah. So, so many of these projects they're they're not necessarily about Hey, I'm doing this thing with my body and technology that's useful but it's more about a comment on what we are already doing and what we will be doing. So just to run through some of his projects here, he did the third arm project. This was a grasping and risk rotating mechanism with the rudimentary sense of touch that was attached to him and activated by e MG from other body areas.

He uh, he had, he has this, He had his stomach sculpture and this one I read almost killed him. Yeah, there were this is certainly he's all about getting into that area where health comes second to the art, to the technology. But this was the thing that was into scopic went down his throat into gopic cameras. It would open up like a like a metallic flower and then there would be a light and a lot of this

was you know, conceptual. You know that the stomach is a dark, lightless place that with this technology there's light and movement in there where otherwise there would not be um And yeah, fortunately it did not kill him. There was an exoskeleton project that he did and this involved like these this large array of pneumatic spider like legs, this big walking machine that that he kind of sat in the middle of and allowed him to control the

machine through arm juicers. He essentially looked like a like a spider man villain and yeah, very dark, thinking of those what are the dn D monsters dried? Yeah, yeah, that did look a lot like centaurs with spider bodies. Yeah. He also did a few different performances fractal flesh, pink body, and parasite and these explored involuntary and remote uh internet choreography for the body with electrical stimulator stimulation of the muscle,

so essentially outsourcing his movements to direct control via the Internet. Um. He did a project with his partner Nina Sellers where they took essentially they took different biomaterials such as um, subcutaneous fat, peripheral nerves extracted from both of their bodies, put them in this uh, this slurry and this pressurized tank and then it just kind of gets um blended up periodically. Yeah. Um. And then what do they do with it afterwards? Oh? You just you just kind of

look at it. Okay. I thought I was thinking it would be like Ghostbusters too, where they like put it into like those uh squirt guns maybe squirted on ghosts. Now, I think this one was more about like like bodily identity, and I would happened to be taken like this mass is still human if it's just this Yeah, yeah, this is this one was probably one of the more grotesque creations, but it depends, like us, where you stand on his

most famous work the third year. So this and we touched on this a little bit in a previous episode. But this involved taking a bio compatible scaffolding surgically inserting it into his left forearm. And this happened in two thousand six, creating the shape of an ear, and then over the in the years to follow, additional surgeries after they found the surgeons willing to do it, uh to to form this out even more. And I don't think they still need to add an earlobe to it. Yeah,

and I think we should clarify here. He has just added the shape of an ear to his arm. And the way that we described va grown organs as being sort of framed by scaffolds, this is not a functional ear on his arm. No, it's it's not his actual ear, but but creating the form of the ear on the arm. And then the big plan is to have a microphone in there that is connected to the Internet, so that allows the ear to hear, so that you might be able to say, go to his webs sight and then

listen through his artificial ear. It has not come to fruition just yet. There was a previous attempt to install the microphone and there was an infection and they kind of had to scrap that. But my understanding is that he's currently moving towards getting a second attempt and this time hopefully it will stick. He needs to kickstart that. I don't know if Australia. Yeah, surely he gets a

lot of he gets a lot of funding. Where is he getting the funding from, like like like a private equity or is it like from grants or something different? Grants Like he's he's been the artist in residents at various universities um so. And also I feel like maybe he's like general generationally, maybe he's not as into the kickstarter culture, but probably not, but I could see this

being a highly successful Kickstarter or they stellar Patreon account. Yeah, you get to you get to listen to his ear arm for an hour every day if you chip on ten dollars a month. But it's it's an example of how the project is a is commentary on where we are with the technology, how interconnected we are, and what are the you know, what are the limits of my body as identity once we get all this technology involved.

So he's one of those those guys that just throughout his career he has he has been kind of an avatar, kind of a harbinger of trans humanism, exemplifying things that are kind of scary and inhuman about what's possible, but also highlighting where we are already. Yeah, so there's a couple other bio artists that I want to cover before

we get into real like bio hackers. Stellarc is, you know, essentially doing art with his body modification, but he's not necessarily trying to take his body to like the next level of human evolution. Uh. I guess you could say, like the third arm might function that way, but but having an ear on your arm isn't necessarily going to give you that much of an advantage, right, He he is an artist first and foremost. But there's this great Ionine article on the topic, and so I just wanted

to cover a real quickly. A couple of these ones that were listed in here. The first was Orlan, who is a bioartist that uses cosmetic surgery to transform her face into different forms with elements of famous paintings, So that sounds interesting. There's Jennifer Genesis Briar p Oorridge, not Porridge. This is a person who explores gender, occultism and sex work. They did something called Project Pandrogeny with his wife, Lady j where they tried to create an amalagam of their

two bodies together. They underwent breast implants and other physical alterations to basically get closer to being the same being. Yeah, she Lady Jay sadly died in two thousand seven, But there's a very well received documentary came out in two thousand and eleven called The Ballot of Genesis and Lady j Um. If you want to know more about that project, check that out. But Genesis po Orage in general is a pretty important figure just in the history of industrial music.

If you're familiar with Robbing Gristle, Psyche tv um, just a very influential artist. Okay. Eduardo cac was also listed there, And this is a person who took the Book of Genesis, translated it into Morris Code, and converted it into base pairs of Genetics This sounds familiar because we talked about showing that in one of our recent episodes, but not with Genesis. It was a different book. Uh. Then they implanted the genes into bacteria. He also created a green

fluorescent rabbit named Alba. Uh. And this is something we've talked about on the show before too. If you take the green fluorescent protein that's found in certain jellyfish and you and plant it in other animals, it turns out you can make them also biofluorescent. So we did that to a rabbit. Natasha Vita Moore. Her best work is Primo post Human, which shows a futuristic version of the human form that is overcoming disease and aging. So kind

of more along those immortality lines of trans humanism. Uh. She proposes, I don't believe that this is something that was actually built. I think this is a sort of sci fi proposal, an outer sheath of smart skin that would be both It would have design and communication purposes. It's also going to be engineered to self repair with nanobots, both the epidermis and dermis, and it would tell the brain the texture and tone of the surface required on it.

It would also alter your body's temperature, tell you the percentage of toxins in your surrounding environment, and extract radiation effects from the sun. Now this sounds like bio hacking if it was real. Yes, though without knowing a lot about the project, I have to say that a number of the things that the second skin does the the the actual skin already. So yeah, you're not getting any superpowers from this one. Like it already self repairs, it

already absorbs energy from the sun. Um you know, it already regulates my temperature. You get into problems when you cover that up. But that's a separate tangent. Yep uh. There's also Micah Cardinas. In two thousand and eight, she performed Becoming the Dragon, which was a three hundred and sixty five hour mixed reality performance that took place in Second life. That's why it was in two thousand and eight, because I don't think much people many people would watch

a performance in second life. In sixteen, she took the form of a dragon in there and basically lived her life as a dragon in second life, and that was part of it. So that's a it's a little more virtual than of what a lot of these other people are doing and The last one listed here is Amy Mullins, who is a paralympian athlete. She collaborated with a fashion designer named Alexander McQueen project and yeah he's great. Yeah, so he basically built her. She she her legs were

amputated when she was one year old. Uh so he built out hand carved wooden prosthetics that had integral boots connected to them and built those out for her to pose in. So those are the art versions of this. But then we've got a whole another group of trans human pioneers, and these are the These are the bio hackers that are really looking at ways to build things into their bodies that give them more than human perception

would allow. So functional trans humanism over symbolic transhumanism exactly. Okay, So let's start with probably one of the most infamous bio hackers, known as Captain Cyborg. His real name is Kevin Warwick. Warwick In launched the first phase of what he called Project Cyborg, and he designed and r F implant to perform basic tests like basically use a signal to open remote controled doors or control lights in his home.

It's basically like it sounds like he had nest in his arm right like, Uh, he could send commands to computers with it. Surgeons inserted a glass capsule that contains several microprocessors into his body. Phase two of this project, Cyborg, began in two thousand and two. Warwick installed an array of electrodes directly into his nervous system to monitor the activity at his median nerve. As a result, he was able to control a robotic arm with mental action alone.

He also implanted these in his his wife, Arena, and he wanted to see if they could record their sensory experiences together, including pain, pleasure, and sex. Uh. They didn't reveal what the results of that were, but they could correctly identify one another's nerve signals percent of the time. So that's kind of interesting. Um, there's a lot of interviews with this guy. He's all over the place. He's a interesting figure. He's also pretty public about the work

that he's doing. And he said in a w magazine interview that his primary interest was in this one so he could come up with electric electronic procedures to combat diseases like Parkinson's blindness, arthritis in schizophrenia. But too he wanted to upgrade humans to be able to do pretty much anything. Sounds like trans humanism to me. He's also had some involvement in attempts to beat the Turing test.

You might remember this from a couple of years ago, the infamous example where Eugene the computer program was basically celebrated as having finally beaten the Touring test. If you're unfamiliar with the Touring test, the idea is basically that a computer program would be able to trick a human into thinking they were talking to a human and not

a computer. So yeah, he was involved in that. Lately, he's been talking about ways to increase the number of neurons in the human brain because he thinks that our brains are getting bored. Uh, and he wants to connect brains and incubators to robots. He claims he's actually working together with one of his students on a learning, living brain that's connected to a robot body via bluetooth. So

that sounds fun. It sounds like uh. In Fallout, like I was talking about earlier, there's these robots called robot brains, and they're just these like kind of clunky, lunch box looking robots. But there their CPU is a brain in a job seeing. But now you don't have to have the your brain in a jar on bot. Your your RoboCop too can be empowered from the next ram. Yeah, exactly. UM. There are others who have sort of sprung off of

Warwick's research. So, for instance, in two thousand four, there was an experiment inspired by him to use electronic implants to enable basic communication between two people's nervous systems. Brown University also developed rechargeable neurotransmitters to communicate from human bodies to external devices. They hope that this will allow humans to communicate telepathically with multiple nervous systems. I can tell you we're spoilers. We're gonna get into this later. That

has happened. Uh and and act Uh. It was a team of international researchers who did this. They've built the first human to human interface. And in front of us, Robert and I have this and I suggest that you go look it up. It was it's part of a really good article on this that was on Extreme Tech called the first human brain to brain interface has been created. In the future, we will all be linked telepathically. UH.

And what we're looking at here is basically how it works. Um. So, one researcher attached a brain computer interface to themselves and they were in India and they were able to send words into the brain of a researcher who was in France, and that person was wearing a computer to brain interface. So what we're talking about here is essentially telepathy. But how does it work. It's not like you're hearing their thoughts right, Basically, you're moving data. You're putting it into

someone else's brain. Uh. And the B c I uses an electro and cephalogram. The c b I uses a transcranial magnetic stimulation rig something that's very similar to the transcranial magnetic stimulation that we've talked about on this show and many other has to have worked shows before. It's

kind of an obsession around here. The idea of blasting your brain with electricity to maybe get smarter kind of works the same way the words getting coded into binary they're transmitted and then translated back to the recipient's visual cortex. They then see flashes of light uh, and it triggers their body to produce phosphene that makes this light appear to them. So basically, it's like Morris code, like this

flashing light that only your eyes see. So that's you know, it sounds like, oh, well that's not that big of a deal, but they're doing this from India to France. It's kind of a big deal. Uh. It's basically brain to brain Morse code essentially once they're translating it. Yeah, and this is something that even in this this small example, even in just the what's what's provable and doable today, it it alters our perceptions of what it means to

be a singular human entity. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean I think this is really where a lot of trans humanists would like to see this go, right, is a uh, it's using technology to be able to improve both our senses but also our understandings of ourselves, uh, changing what we mean by identity all that stuff. So certainly if you're able to communicate with one another, even just through Morris code without speaking, that would I would be a step forward in that direction. Then we have a few

different versions of the eyeborg. Yeah. So the one I read about was an artist named Neil Harbison, and he went to the hospital and and basically said, hey, can you help install this stuff in me. I'm color blind. I want to be able to detect colors. So he used this device called the eyeborg that translates colors into

vibrations in his skull that he can subsequently here. So to me, sounds like trans human synastasia basically, yeah, taking taking one form of sense day to transforming it into another, enabling them to experience these colors through uh, through bone conduction of sound waves. Yeah, but you have other eyeborg

applications here too. Well, yeah, there's there's one other main one, and that's uh that has to do with this guy, Rob Spence, Canadian film director, and he uh sustained permanent damage to his right eye, and in two thousand nine he hooked up with camera provider Omnivision as well as a group of engineers, first ocularist Phil Bowen, then engineer uh Coasta Grammatis, and then electrical engineer Martin Ling to

replace his prosthetic prosthetic eye with a functional digital video camera. Interesting, I wonder if some of our guys here in our video production team would be willing to do that, if they're willing to give up an eye, and uh, they have some talented individuals to because one of the problems is then you have to try and fit everything in to that eye ball um space. Yeah. Yeah, and it's you know, it's it's fairly sounds like a cenobyte, Yeah,

one of those. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a task that you have to you have to pull off without the individual looking like a cinabyte. Yeah. Um, well, given and harder with two thousand nine technology and technologies come along life. Yeah, That's what I was gonna say, is like, given how small the video cameras in our phones are nowadays, that's

that wouldn't be that hard. So he was able to to do to do this, to replace his prosthetic eye with a functional digital video camera uh, touted as quote the world's first literal point of view, uh, including glancing around and blinking. Wow. Yeah. And he's on Twitter, he's uh you can follow his efforts here his ongoing efforts with the with the ibor project. He's on Twitter as

Iyborg and his website is eyeborg project dot tv. Okay, so I'm imagining he does like a lot of periscope events, but on fortunately in his periscopes you can't see him. You just see what he sees. Yeah. I mean, well, there's something beautiful in the idea, right that you you take this injury and then you turn it into something

that actually enables your passion, enables your career. Yeah, exactly, And I think that that's a lot of what trans humanists are looking to do, or bio hackers are looking to do, you know, like especially like come up with ways for the quote disabled to be able to operate in almost uh enhanced fashion, right, Yeah, which brings us to Jerry je Lava Uh, a finished software developer who in two thousand nine lost half his index finger in

a motorcycle accident. So if he was working with the with with doctors to get a prosthesis there, he did what came natural, do you? Uh? You simply have a USB drive there in the end of your your new artificial finger, so you can just remove the cap from the end of your finger and you have USB drives. So he's got all of his data. I hope it's a good USB drive though, like one of those ones with a couple of gigs. It's not like one of those cheap OH ones that have He's got like a

couple of MP three's in his finger. At the time it was a two gigabyte storage drive. I can only imagine being a software developer that he has he has far more storage capacity now if he still has kept with it, hopefully modifiable, and he can just keep putting new ones in as the technology improves. Yeah, so then you know, this is kind of neat. It's also kind of it's it's kind of spy movief, the idea of

inserting your finger into a computer. Yeah. Yeah, And I think also it's like the USB drive comes out because because once you sort of break to break it down, it's not very practical to just set there because he only got one hand operate the mouse and the keyboard. But I can only imagine it it played well at parties and the bar trick like, hey, you want to see my USB drive. Well, speaking of fingers and party tricks,

let's talk about subdermal magnetism. So this is what I insinuated or implied at the beginning of the episode with the idea of installing tiny magnets into your fingertips. Uh, this is a thing that a lot of people have done. The magnets are coated with materials I couldn't exactly figure out what the materials were that they're coated with. But this seems to be a common thing so that the

magnets aren't rejected by your body. And the hackers say that this provides them with a sixth sense that allows them to feel magnetic fields. It creates basically sensations in their fingertips. Uh. And as I said at the top of the episode, you can pick up paper clips and bottle caps basically. Um. And I do find the paper clip thing hilarious because such an outdated thing for trans

human is to be messing well. And one of the guys was even saying that, like, I think his broke, like the magnet itself like broke apart in his finger, and then the mag pieces kind of came back together again naturally over time, but the magnetism was weaker. He's like, I can only pick up small paper clips now. I used to be able to pick up large paper clips, but no longer. But there is something else to this. It's not just the paper clips. They're really interested in

the sensory stuff. But big warning right up front, do not do this and then climb into an m r I machine, because it will rip the magnets right out of your fingers. Also, airport security is problematic. If you're walking through airport security and you've got magnets built into your figer fingers, it's going to mess things up. Yeah. Trying to explain to the t s A. Agents that you are a trans human um and you have magnets and plant in your body, I can only imagine that's

just gonna lead to more delays. Absolutely, So I pulled up a couple of different articles on this that we're interesting. Gizmotos really covered it in depth. They actually had a piece by Dan Berg on Gizmoto where he shared his experience of having one of these implanted into his pinky finger. He was initially wary after seeing the early prototypes and what they did when they broke down and corroded inside somebody's finger. He goes through the procedure pretty clearly, he says,

and this is a direct quote from him. My finger was marked in two places where the magnet was going to go, as well as the incision spot around a quarter to a half an inch away from the final resting spot for the magnet. His body modifier then made the incision with a scalpel, used a tissue elevator to separate that tissue, slid the magnet into place, and sealed the incision with surgical glue. Next, a bit of tissue compression went on. They wrapped his finger up and he

was on his way. He said it took fifteen to twenty minutes total. However, it took him months before his finger regained full sensation. But he was noticing vibrations from magnetic fields, primarily in cash registers, microwaves, and laptop fans. He also noticed that when he handled other magnets, the magnet in his finger would flip uncomfortably. He said. It wasn't painful, but it was uncomfortable. Uh. He said this especially happened with the speakers and his iPad because those

are magnetized. Uh. Over the years, he noted too, that the magnet in his finger has lost strength. Huh. You gotta have a certain amount of confidence in what you're doing too. Yeah, I I definitely think so. I can't imagine doing this myself. Um, it sounds intriguing the idea of having the sort of magnetic sense, but I don't know that I would want to go through the process. Uh.

Then Ionine and Gizmodo. They also talked with Eric Boyd who's at hack Lab in Toronto, which is one of these bio hacking sort of community centers, and he says, you know, he clarifies, this is more about sensory augmentation. It's not about the party tricks of pick picking up paper clips. It's useful for people, especially who work with electronics because they can feel the difference between live and dead wires. He mentions a group called Grindhouse wet Wear

that I'm going to come back to later. Uh, there were working on a device called bottle nose that fits over your finger if you've got one of these magnetic implants, and it augments the experience further. It could, for instance, since infrared, it can also transmit information through vibrations, or it could be used to measure distances as a ranging device.

It's supposedly safest if you're going to get the magnetic implementation to do so on your ring finger, on your non dominant hand, because it is quote your least useful finger. So apparently, like if you have to choose, like if you're in like a game throne situation and somebody's gonna cut off one of your fingers. If you have to choose, the ring finger on your least dominant hand is the best one to go because it has the least to

do with gripping action. Interesting. So, but you also have to be careful that this is not placed between uh, your touch surface and the bone, because if you're like in an emergency situation where like, let's say you fell off of something, you have to grip it really hard, right, it would crush the magnet, So it's usually embedded on the inside corner of the finger. Also note that the body artists who performed this, they're not allowed to use

anesthesia because they don't have licensing for that. So it's real painful. Uh. And the basically all they can do is put your hand in ice water to numb it. It takes some say less than ten minutes, and damn earlier said fifteen to twenty. So we're talking to some real cowboy trans humanism here, Like you put a stick between your teeth and staring into the campfire bite not a bullet, yea yeah. And they use standard neodymium magnets

for this. Uh. What you need to do though, there's the whole biocoding thing and that's you know, as we've talked about with background organs and organ transplants and all that stuff, your body rejects foreign material, so you need this biocoding to help it keep that from happening. You definitely don't want this to fail and you don't want the magnet to shatter, otherwise you're gonna end up with head V metals exposed to the inside of your body.

One other thing to note, the magnets are too small to wipe out at hard drive, so don't worry about that if you're planning on getting this done. Yeah, that would be because that would be especially problematic. Give finger on this hand, as the usped of a divide finger on this hand is a powerful magnet, and you do, like the small wonder thing or sorry not small wonder out of this world. You touch the two fingers together

and you raise all the information off your USB drive. UH. The other reason why people are doing this in their fingertips is because it's one of the areas in our bodies where we have the highest nerve density. UH. The movement of the magnet there in response to e M fields. Basically, it stimulates the somati sensory receptors in your fingertip. These are the same ones that are responsible for us to perceive pressure, temperature, and pain. Now grindhouse wetwear that I

mentioned earlier. They've also inserted something called Circadia into one of their members. It's a biosensor that accumulates weeks of body to amperature data and sends it to a smartphone via Bluetooth data. The idea is basically that eventually we'll have something like this that will give us biometric data, like quantify what's going on in our real time evaluation of what our body is doing. That is a very useful trans humanist daema. Yeah, it's sort of like a

fitbit in your body, but with more application. So many of the problems that arise with our health you don't have like real time knowledge of, but you find out months down the line, maybe years down the line, far past to the point of easy intervention. So the biometric possibilities of trans humanism I think are some of the most exciting and most most useful. Yeah, it makes me think back to like it's very easy to sort of dismiss this stuff and just be like, oh, whatever, this

is like this crazy subculture. But like again, like think about like the transdermal how transdermal implants ended up becoming useful for chemotherapy. Right, so there are are some applications here that are going to, you know, spring out of this that I think we're gonna start seeing in medicine in the future. All Right. That brings us to who left anonym who I started off the episode quoting, Uh. She is a Berlin based Scottish d I Y bio

hacker uh. And there is an interview with her and Wired magazine that just gave me kind of an overview that I want to present to you all. She does most of her work in her own apartment, sterilizing her equipment with vodka. This definitely sounds like a Saska Sisters style bio hack. It hurts a lot, she says, and

she's also passed out before while she's been doing this. Uh. It's the kind of d I Y body hacking that is referred to as grinding when you're just and this is not to be confused with grinder, the social media application for dating. This is grinding, as in like you're in your kitchen with a scalpel and uh some something to separate the flesh out, so you and put devices into your body on your own. She does all her own surgeries with a scalpel. She does have a spot

or there with her in case she passes out. She once tried to implant a temperature sensor transdermally that would show varying brightness under her skin to indicate what the temperature was. But this was a total disaster. She didn't buy a proof it right away, so she ended up in the hospital, and she's ended up in the hospital several times because of bad implement implementations. Her implants have actually rusted under her skin, and her surgeries have turned septic.

She did the whole magnets in the fingers thing too, except she didn't want to go through the effort of paying a body artist to do it. She thought that was too expensive. So what she did was she coded the magnets in suguru, which is like a silicon putty, is my understanding. Or sometimes she just uses hot gun glue. She said something to the effect of like, you wouldn't believe how many things I've put in my body that

are covered in gun glue. Uh, And she inserted the magnets into all of her fingertips, and she said, well, that only costs twenty pounds, so she got the magnets. I mean, I don't know if she's like ordering these on eBay or Amazon or whatever. She just gets the magnets, some hot gun glue and a knife and vodka and just did it herself. Now, I imagine a number of people are thinking right now, this sounds an awful lot

like mental illness. And maybe. But but I do want to remind everyone of the old adage, if I'm repeating it correctly here, that the pioneers are often massacred and it's settlers that profit. So we're definitely talking about pioneers here. Oftentimes pioneers don't have the best outcome. These are the individuals that are trying new things, going into new places, and it's gonna be the people that come after them.

They're gonna have the easier time of it and maybe actually benefit um in a larger sense from the from the advancements. Yeah, this is true and left anonym I mean, I can tell you she gives a lot of lectures about this stuff, so she's treated seriously. A lot of people invite her to come and speak about her experiences and how they've gone. But you know, uh, this is

the more brutal side of bio hacking for sure. At the time that the article was written, which was in two thousand and ten, she was talking about installing a compass chip and a power coil and her left knee so she could sense magnetic north. And I mentioned earlier the device that you would wear. It was a wearable that would do the same thing. She wanted it in her body. Okay, here's uh so that's that's an individual.

But we got another. Um, this is a really good one. Uh. And it and it comes from another sort of collective. It's mainly two guys. They called themselves Science for the Masses. And you may have heard of this story as it was making around. This is the kind of thing that comes across Robert and my desk on a Monday morning, and we wonder do we write about this this week or is this is this bogus? And it turned out

it wasn't bogus. Uh. They created night vision eye drops uh, and they described themselves as an independent bio hacking collective. In their experiment experiment, they used the chemical chlorine E six, which is a relative of chlorophyll. It's been used to try to treat cancer, and it occurs naturally in deep sea fish to enhance the light receptors in their eyes.

In cancer treatment, it's used in combination with energy from low powered light sources to destroy cancerous cells by inducing apoptosis, which we've talked about on the show before as such, if you're gonna put this stuff in your eyes, you really want to stay away from bright or ambient daylight because it could harm your eyes cells and cause permanent damage.

Their idea came from the work of a guy named Ilias Washington who's at Columbia University, and he wanted to test this chlorophyll derivative to make proteins in our eyes respond to red light instead of green light. He tested it on mice. What he didn't tell other people was he also tested it on him self and he didn't report the results. Uh. They were inspired by this. They were also inspired by an experiment that was a patent that was filed by Totada our Shanta is a Georgian

doctor who lost his license for medical fraud. Dr Nick, Yes, it does sound like him, doesn't it. Um. What they did was, they said, well, like many bio hackers. Well, we can't get you know, actual academic approval for this, so we're intested in ourselves. So Gabriel A. Chinia, I believe is how it's pronounced. He was the subject and his co conspirator Jeffrey Tibbitts was the one who applied it.

They put fifty micro leaders of the C six, together with sailing and insulin, into his eyes with a drip. Within an hour, it interacted with the photo receptors in his eyes. He could distinguish images and symbols beyond fifty meters in the darkness. He was also able to identify

people up to fifty meters away in the dark. The effect did wear off after some time, however, uh and I should also mention like he had to wear these sort of eerie looking demonic black contact lenses over his eyes while he was doing this, So when you see pictures of this, you'll see a guy with just completely black eyes. That's not because of the stuff they put in his eyes. Is because of the lenses he was

wearing for protection. The idea of the insulin being in there, well, that was to allow absorption of the chemical CE six into his eye. They also used a chemical called d M s OH to increase the permeability of the cellular membrane, basically to allow the free passage of the chemicals into

his eye. Uh. There is a high risk of cellular toxicity here though, especially if you're gonna the d M s O. It allows that chemical into your eye, but it also allows outside contaminants that could be absorbed with the chemical, so it should be totally handled with caution. This is this is not uh, don't do this at home. Yeah, this is some pretty heavy biohacking here. This is incredible, and especially because that stuff can all so be absorbed

through your skin. From their site, uh itself, from Science for the Masses site, they have a review on the whole experiment and this is what they said. First of all, I want to just say it's really cool. The research that they did is all under the Creative Commons license, so anybody can go look it up and they can see exactly what they did and follow their notes. Uh. They provide a disclaimer right at the top, and they say increased light amplification may have adverse effects on the

cellular structure of the eye. So some materials in this mixture should not be used on animals or humans, and that there had been previous research in the patent I mentioned earlier that claimed the mixture would absorb to the retina increased vision in low light. So basically, here's how

they did it. They pinned open his eyes like clockwork orange style with a speculum and had a micropipette to slowly add the solution to his conjunctival sac Then they placed the black Sclero lens as I mentioned earlier, into each eye. Then on top of that, they gave him sunglasses. All this was to reduce the potential light that was entering his eye because they didn't want this stuff to start destroying the cells in his eyeball. His eyesight returned

normal by morning. Twenty days later they checked him out. There were no noticeable effects. Okay, so he's okay for future research. What they want to do is they want to take a gans filled stimulator and an electro electro tinograph to measure how much electrical stimulation the eyes actually receiving during this kind of experiment. They want basically quantifiable numbers so that they can measure the ranges of vision that are being amplified. So this, I mean, this is

this is bio hacking to the extreme. Right. They're giving us superpowers. You're giving what indungeons and dragons would be called low light vision, uh to a human being and then having to wear the the the black contact lens is the sunglasses, essentially wearing sunglasses at night to keep track of the vision. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Uh. These guys have since like broken up their collective. Licinia has worked in a handful of molecular biology labs tibots as

a registered nurse. These guys are professor professionals. Other bio hacking groups have tried this experiment as well, but no one has the money for testing it on a large scale. This is one of the things that people don't talk about with bio hacking is that because it's not through a big institution like a company or a university, there's no money at hand, especially for the proper legal ramifications that might come if you run clinical trials on people

as volunteers. Uh. And look, the National Institute of Health is not likely to fund somebody who's just going to drop chemicals into a humans eyeball for night vision, right, Um, but what about other people who might fund this, so they said, uh, these are the guys who perform the experiment. They actually said military contractors got in touch with them afterward,

and we're interested in it. They also said a voting magazine contracted them and said that could have applications for sailors who were working at night and instead of having to put on like heavy goggles or machinery or whatever so they could see at night, they could use this night vision stuff. And if you happen to have a very spacious basement with a pit in it, you know, it's just a no brainer, perfect way to test it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, as long as there's lotion in the pit as well.

Um Lacinia when he was interviewed by Gizmoto, he said, let's be fair here, it's kind of crap science. So he's not, you know, fooled in anything like thinking that they've made some big headway, other than you know, they basically took what an academic wrote down in a paper and just did it in their garage. It sounds like um. They also wanted to clarify for the media they didn't inject this stuff into his eye. They used eye droppers

to put it in his eye. So there's some problems here as well too, right, Like, so the biohacking thing kind of gets around the I guess pure you nature of academic papers in that, Like there's no way to really follow up on this, right, Like what if he already had better than average night vision, or what if it was a placebo effect that was taking place and they didn't have a control group in place to sort of measure it against you, Like, if I go to

these to these extremes to improve my night vision, I'm gonna kind of want my night vision to be improved, and that's gonna potentially have an effect on my perception exactly right. All right, One more totally crazy one. Have you heard of aquaman crystals? Who I have? Not a synti street drug? Yeah, man, everybody's doing it. No. Aquaman crystals came out of a study at the University of Southern Denmark. They discovered a crystalline substance. This is actually

one that's not really bio hacking. It happened at an university. They discovered a crystalline substance that absorbs and stores huge amounts of oxygen. Now these are synthetic, but they're derived from cobalt to lifeen oxygen from both air and water, and they might let people breathe underwater. It hasn't been tested yet, but it could also help people who need like an oxygen tank, for instance, if they have lung ailments. So you should have a small Yeah, I do remember

when this research came out. I I'm not mistaken. This is the one to where the other sensational spin on it was that you could suck all the oxygen out of a room with a bingo that actually comes up right in the next notes Motherboard cover it, and they said, if you use ten liters of this stuff, which is called crystalline cobalt salt, it can draw twenty one of the air out of a room like instantly. Uh. It binds basically to individual oxygen molecules and it works like

artificial hemoglobin. So the idea here is that it would be able to operate indefinitely. UH. The oxygen would bind to the iron in your blood, it would also bind to the metal cobalt that are in the crystals and then just sort of replenish itself. Um. And according to them, they say a few grains contain enough oxygen for one breath and since it continually resupplies itself, a diver needing oxygen would only need a few of these grains. So

this is like something out of the ABYSS, right. I think in the Abyss they use liquid oxygen, but sort of like you would inhale a couple of these grains and then you can just breathe underwater indefinitely. Yeah, just the micro micronization of existing technology. Yeah, exactly, So another potential medical application there. All right, So we've talked about sort of the trans humanist dreams, we've talked about some of these biohecking realities. We've talked about the the Harbingers, uh,

and the Pioneers. You're probably wondering, well, how do we know when we get there? How do we know who we've actually achieved trans humanism? I mean, needless to say, if we if we reach the point where we have these like really crazy out there sci fi incarnations of human existence, yeah, we're trans human at that point. But but what actually has to take place? Yeah? I mean Google glasses and trans humanism right now, you can't check

it off the list just because you have some Google Yeah. Well, uh, as with everything trans human it's kind of in the eye or the bionic eye of the beholder. But bio ethicist Kyle mckinrick weighed in on this in two thousand eleven and Discover magazine piece that he did, and he was basically expanding some previous comments where people would ask him, well, how are we going to know? What are the what

are the qualifications for transhumanist evolution? This is a great article, by the way, I really liked his tones, right, he had some funny bits in there. So these are his seven qualifiers. First of all, prosthetics are are preferred. This is the basic idea that you're going to get to the point where not only is a prosthetic limb as good as the limb you're replacing, not only is a synthetic organ of that grown organ or an artificial organ

as good as the original, but it's actually an improvement. Obviously, we're a bit far away from that being a reality. Yeah, but but I'm just thinking, like man, like every week, I feel like stories just pop in more and more and more about prosthetic limb enhancements and b c I s being used to control prosthetic limbs. Yeah, and they're if you're selective in how you judge it. Certainly we have examples of say, you know, runners with artificial legs

that are able to perform to you know, a high level. Uh. So, depending on how you look at it, Yes, prosthetic limbs are getting you know, crazy good at at replicator or sometimes even exceeding normal perform performance. But across the board when it comes to performance, uh, you know, the sensory realm uh, there's still a lot of room for improvement. So we can't check that one off just yet. The

next one better brains. This is the idea that beyond coffee, beyond taking whatever brain enhancement drugs are available, this would be the use of of of neural implants, of cybernetic enhancements to upgrade the human mind. And it would have to be a situation where we wouldn't worry about brain doping. This would just be the natural thing to do with the available technology. And this is why so many people get excited about a transcranial direct stimulation that I mentioned earlier,

that the possibility of that being the avenue for this. Yeah. So we're seeing some promising developments here, but we're still not quite there. Right Next, artificial assistance this would be ubiquitous use of AI and augmented reality in our daily life.

I have to say, I feel like we're very close in this one, because I'm constantly having to drive places where I put my my phone up there I use Ways or another map based program, and it's thinking for me, and it's displaying a version of reality that I'm depending on to get somewhere in real life. Oh yeah, totally

same for me. Like I have gotten horrible, especially since moving to the city of Atlanta at like learning my way around the city on my own because I rely on Google Maps or whatever to tell me how to get there. Uh maybe if I do it like repeatedly over and over again, it sort of works out that way. But if it's a location that I've never been to before,

I don't retain that information because why why would I? Yeah, it's it's the natural part of our our cognitive economy is that is that if you can outsource something to another person or another thing another source, your brain does it because it has a tight ship to maintain. So think about Ways and which I think Google bought Ways and incorporated into Google Maps to it also tells you information about traffic patterns that you wouldn't be able to

experience through your regular senses. You wouldn't be able to see that far down the road to know that there's a roadblock, So you have sort of superhuman information in a matter of speaking. Ways in these other programs, are are are getting us close to checking off this artificial assistance uh um qualifier, but also playing into the better brain idea because we are you know, augmenting our our neural ability, are cognitive abilities via this external device and

its properties. Absolutely. The next one, number four on this list is amazing average age, longer life from everyone, with a roughly hundred and twenty year average lifespan for humans. So we have a long ways to go in this one, but when you start breaking down uh death mortality into smaller winnable battles, it does seem more and more likely we could get to that point. Uh. The next one

is responsible reproduction. So this one is very interesting and gets into some of that the potentially problem problematic um. You know, Western rich people telling developing nations not to have babies, so sort of this uh the borderline ethics of like is this like eugenics talking about superior humans

versus inferiors. So in this scenario, mccentrick is saying that we would we need to all start treating human reproduction and or parenting as an act to be undertaken by choice and uh and responsibly, rather than as a mere biological occurrence. Uh. The obvious benefits here are, you know,

global population woes, swelling of orphanages, many a troubled home life. Um. Because I mean, seriously, what what sort of selfish moron is going to thank him or herself futuristic and evolved with the robot eyes if they're still blind to social horrors that arguably stem from all these overpopulation woes and unwanted birth. So that's like sort of taking the bio hacking thing to like the larger scale, like um population hacking. Yeah. Really, And if you think of human the human population is

kind of the meta organism. It's saying, not only am I gonna let's let's not only take control of the individual organism, let's take control of the meta organism, its form, it's function, and let's streamline it as well. But then how do you get into that scenario without getting into eugenics, without getting into imperialist um, you know, dog Yeah, absolutely, it's it sounds very like a dangerous road to go down. But it also reminds me. I see this on Facebook

all the time. Uh. I have friends who don't have kids, and they'll say something along the lines of, you know, you have to have a license to drive a car, you should probably have to have a license to have a kid. Um, And this is basically that, right. Yeah, So there's plenty of plenty of room for argument and hurt feelings and strong emotions on this one. And speaking of which number six, um Munkinstrick refers to as my body, my choice. So obviously you need to own your body

in order to augment it. That means voluntary self surgery, ownership of what your body does and how it's defined. And this is really getting into the regulation aspect of like whether or not the government's going to get involved. Yeah, because think about, you know, to any degrees in different countries, how much control the and the government already has over your body and what say you have already concerning your body. So this gets into everything from sexuality to reproduction to abortion,

physical augmentation. Um. Some of the limits than the natural progression of this too is going to go down to the vaccination route. Yeah, indeed, I mean that's that's another another um, you know, face of this problem. Um. I mean on the surgery side, we see this a lot too. We see individuals who want something dramatic but they can't go to just a normal surgeon to get it done. Um and no anesthesia. Right. It reminds me a lot of the work of plastic surgeon Joe Um Rosen, who

have brought up on here before. This guy is a huge advocate of like let people be what they want to be through plastic surgery. Plastic surgery allows to change the body and therefore change the sof you want to be a tiger, right, Like the isn't that one of them? The Tigerman is like the big body modifier. I think he might have passed away actually, but you know what I'm talking about, right, Like he like modified, so he had fangs and cat eyes and kind of um stripes

on his skin. Yeah. One of the examples that Rosen always brings up is why is it okay for someone to walk in and say I want bigger breaths and they can make that happen. But if you say you want blue nipples, that's too far for some reason, you know why, So we have to That's that's another hurdle to really embracing this trans human um notion. And then finally, the seventh caveat on Kyle mcintrick's list is person not people.

So this is the idea that we're gonna have to depend more on concepts of personhood rather than mere human rights. So we're talking grill as, dolphins, robots, computer aies, because if we're gonna step beyond and outside of the traditional human experience, we need to, you know, have rights and stuff. We new humans need to be people to even if they have thumb drives and wings. This is what that

Eclipse Phase game is all about. And so I think it's I think it's a really interesting, like it's interesting is a game, but it's also just like an interesting like site to go to and kind of read through what they're working on there for their fictional reality, just because like it's addressing questions like this and saying like, well, okay, if we uh, if we take a gorilla or a dolphin and we give it uh an enhanced intelligence and then we upload it into a human body, does it

have rights? Interesting? Wow, that's now I'm just trying to imagine that the dolphin human gorilla hybrid body. Oh yeah, there's all kinds of weird ways to go with it. But I mean some of it's science fiction. But as we revealed here today, I mean we're on our way towards this stuff. Yeah, I mean, like all great science fiction, science fiction, echoes, the the the are contemporary fears, hopes, uh, and dreams concerning our current technology are current science. All right,

So that about wraps it up. But I want to know from you guys out there, talk to us right into us. Let us know, would you do some of these things? Would you put magnets in your fingertips? Or would you drop night vision goo into your eyeballs? Uh? You know? Or would you like a hook up some sensors to your body so you could feel your wife's sensation of pleasure and pain? Are those things that you would be interested in? And also, here's the thing that

I want to know, what did we miss? Because there is this whole bio hacker community out there that like we barely scratched the surface of, and I'm sure there's lots of cool stuff going on out there that if you're a bio hacker and you're out there listening, You're like, oh, these guys they don't know a bunch of squares. They completely missed all this cool stuff. But let us know right into us, tell us what you just finished under your forearm or your yeah yeah. So what are the

ways to do that? Well, you can start with social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, we're on Instagram. On all of those we are blow the Mind. You can also visit us at our mothership stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you're gonna find all of our podcasts, all of our videos, the articles and galleries and lists and all that stuff that we put together. And then there's the final place, the final frontier, where you can write to us. And what's that, Robert,

that's right. You can always send us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands of other topics How stuff Works dot com. Little bit first