Scammers never die
Today is the first day of the rest of your miserable life.
Question for you Scam Fam:
Would you rather…
…live to 180, but you sleep in a tanning bed, subsist on Slim Fast (you can call it Soylent if you prefer), and undergo at least one uncomfortable, unproven, time consuming, and highly involved "treatment" (e.g., cryotherapy, atmospheric cell training, weird sex stuff) per day.
-OR-
…just do you and die when death comes.
Things to consider: You're obscenely rich, obviously; there's no actual guarantee you'll make it to 180, just your expressed preference for that to be the case; and what Slim Fast tastes like (I honestly don't know, but still, think about it).
That's the conundrum Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof Coffee, was faced with as a side effect of getting rich in the extremely Halt and Catch Fire tradition of being "the first guy to sell anything over the internet." As Rachel Monroe details in her excellent Men's Health* profile of him, "it was a T-shirt that said caffeine is my drug of choice, which he listed for sale over Usenet; buyers faxed him checks." I’m exaggerating. What truly made him his millions was the coffee and the authority that came along with that, but I’m sharing the T-shirt thing to give you a sense of who we're dealing with here.
A quick aside on Bulletproof Coffee: it's coffee with butter in it. You can buy it at a store for a bunch of money or mix it yourself with an immersion blender. Since you asked for my opinion, coffee and butter are two of the best substances on earth, and it is an actual outrage that they taste this gross when mixed together. I mean, just vile. I'd rather consume a Slim Fast shake, probably. Also, it's fine that this dude made money selling this stuff, BUT people from Ethiopia have been putting butter in their coffee for approximately 1,000 years. All I'm saying is scam recognize scam.
Ok, back to Asprey, and our Would You Rather. He chose, as I'm sure you and anyone else with a brain would, option A in a landslide. He is alllllllll about that biohacking. Here are some of his zanier exploits:
Asprey once took a nap surrounded by ice packs, since cold exposure has been said to correlate with increased resilience; he woke up with first-degree burns over 15 percent of his body. Another time, he zapped himself with infrared light to test the assumption that it would help him learn faster; instead, his speech was garbled for hours. Some of Asprey’s more extreme interventions, such as the stem cells he gets injected into his brain, are not yet supported by studies in healthy humans.
I'll leave the discussion of how scammy these medical (?) innovations (I guess) really are up to students who want extra credit (send me your essays, I'll be sure they're factored into your grades at the end of the semester). I don't think I have to tell you that for all its good, science doesn't always have great answers to the question "How do I feel better?" and doctors and pharmaceuticals can only do so much to give us our best lives. Though, frankly, it's kind of underappreciated how much quality of life you get from a flu shot.
My point is, I get what's promising about biohacking, even while this description also sums up why I want nothing to do with it:
Biohacking was the perfect ethos for the moment. It took Silicon Valley’s obsessive preoccupation with productivity and disruptive technology and added a dash of L. A. in the form of herbal supplements, vague spirituality, and self-help. Finally the time was ripe for Asprey, a guy who had been tweaking his own internal systems for years; who knew how to help you get a better return on your meditation investment; who claimed he could feel when his mitochondria were underperforming; who promised strategies for turning humans into superhumans.
My other point is if you're 179 years old and you look back on your exceedingly long life and see that you've spent millions of dollars and several average human lifetimes in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, are you going to feel like a superhuman or like you maybe got scammed somewhere along the way? Happy 180th birthday, enjoy the stem cells.
Scammers never die,
Ruthie
PS: It’s possible I’ll need to go into hiding instead of writing a newsletter next week. We’ll see!
*Former lifestyle magazine editors shouldn't throw stones, so let's not get into how Men's Health aids guru types in building their imperial butter coffee fortunes.
My Week in Consumption
I have formed an unhealthy attachment to the show Sex Education. Gillian Anderson has Benjamin Buttons but it's a variation where the older you get, the hotter (Julia Louis-Dreyfus suffers from this affliction, as do I). She plays a sex therapist and her dweeby but sweet virginal son starts dispensing relationship advice at school which is an all-around solid premise. But none of that explains why I'm hopelessly devoted this show. The reason I am hopelessly devoted to this show is ERIC, played by Ncuti Gatwa, who has stolen my heart and is maybe my favorite actor to grace a screen in recent memory. I have not finished the series, but where I have left off has me extremely concerned for his well being, and the part of me that can't distinguish between television and real life wishes I were checking up on him instead of writing to you.
My expectations for Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse were low because I don't especially care for animated movies and I'm not wild about superheroes. Surprise: I adored it. I also saw Out of Sight in 35 mm at the Alamo on Thursday, and oh wow, what a perfect film that is.
Highly recommend my work pal Sophie Chou’s new newsletter Five Things I Ate. I’d tell you we’ll all be working for Sophie one day, but no way we’ll get that lucky.
I had jury duty on Tuesday and Wednesday and it was the best version of that experience you can have. I started N.K. Jemison's The Fifth Season, which is just as engrossing as promised, got lunch at one of my favorite spots, and then got dismissed after an attorney googled me. Five stars, can only hope to repeat the whole thing note for note in eight years.