Night vision. Superhuman strength. And… kale salad? In episode 95 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the weird world of biohackers, who leverage science and technology to optimize their bodies. The movement raises rich philosophical questions, from the blurry ethics of self-experimentation, to the consequences of extreme Cartesian dualism, to the awkward tension in our technological nostalgia for a pastoral paradise. If biohacking taps into the basic human desire to experience and investig...
Hello and welcome to Overthink, the podcast.
Where two philosophers hack knowledge, or in.
This case, show you why hacking is maybe not always the best metaphor.
I'm your co host, David Pena Guzman.
And I'm Ellie Anderson.
Ellie, in philosophy, there has recently been this movement called transhumanism, which is all about pushing the limits of the human.
A central figure in this philosophical movement is the thinker Max Moore, who defines transhumanism as seeking the continuation and acceleration of human life beyond its current form.
And for him, that means using science and technology as ways of promoting intelligent life, or rather their life as intelligence.
Now, the thing about transhumanism is that it takes many, many forms, but one of them is what is known as biohacking.
So what is biohacking?
Dave Asprey, this guy who's known as the father of biohacking, who got famous for promoting bulletproof coffee, which you put like grass fed butter in your coffee and then also coconut oil or coconut oil instead, I don't remember, but I actually did this for a while.
You do?
It really worked for me.
My body.
Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about this, but I have.
I am not.
I am not a stranger to some of what I have since discovered falls under the umbrella of biohacking.
I've tried all the supplements.
So, yeah, I did like this bulletproof coffee for a while and my body did not like it.
But Dave Asprey, the guy who founded this, who's a biohacker we're gonna talk about a lot today, wrote this book on biohacking, which we'll be analyzing.