Your Body Is Not a Protocol. It's a Practice | Toby Shorin

**Toby Shorin** (0:00)
Even with the presence of AI, chest adoption has only grown. We don't stop playing chess, recognizing that chess is good.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:05)
I think you see this turn toward the body as platform, the body as asset, both from an athletic perspective and from a visual perspective, this idea that it's resistant to AI.

**Toby Shorin** (0:17)
The body as asset is an interaction between the natural shape of human desire and what it's really easy for humans to pay attention to, which is bodies. Seeing an attractive body is exactly like that. It's like a promise to your nervous system that never gets fulfilled.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:33)
I'm Amanda Cassatt and you're watching Endgame.

**Toby Shorin** (0:36)
Bryan Johnson philosophy is don't die. It's really a fear-based philosophy where the only thing that's left in an AI world is our ability to survive.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:47)
Now we can't just do this natural dance. We can't just do our natural community and belonging. Everything has this weird engineered goal-oriented thing inside of it that removes all the pleasure from it.

**Toby Shorin** (0:59)
What poetry is good at doing is awakening you to this experience of life where everything that you're doing has the second, more poetic meaning.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:14)
I wanted to get started with the essay you wrote called Body Futurism. I wanted to chat through what its argument is and this idea of the body as an asset. Of course, this is against the backdrop of peptides and clavicular and looks maxing, and Brian Johnson, who we had on this podcast. As you wrote in your essay, builders are becoming body builders. In the age of AI and everything that's going to change about money, is the body the asset that sets us apart?

**Toby Shorin** (1:45)
The overall argument, there's two parts to the essay. One is just overwhelming people with examples of this overall embodied turn in culture happening. So a bit more close to my normal cultural analysis style, showing everywhere from pop culture to tech culture, to hippie culture, there is this massive turn towards the body, that has been happening.
And it gets into a little bit of why that has been happening too. There's many reasons for it. The COVID swing back, people getting tired of like lifestyle companies trying to move towards practices instead of like products as a kind of organizing model for consumer behavior, which is something I had discussed in previous essay Life After Lifestyle. And then a big one is there's also a lot happening in the Academy. So there has been a movement towards concepts of personhood that are understood as being embedded in all sorts of social and environmental affordances. And these are currently out-competing, older, more straightforwardly dualistic, like mind, body kinds of...

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:59)
Like Descartes.

**Toby Shorin** (3:00)
Yeah, Descartes, although there's other versions of that too. So there's been an embodied turn in the Academy as well. And that's not something I really got into in the essay, but it's everywhere. And so that's the first part of the essay. The second part of the essay talks about how we could orient to this embodied turn in the different paths that it might take from a kind of protocolized and scripted view on the body or way of relating to the body to a profoundly free way of relating to the body.

**Amanda Cassatt** (3:32)
Let's start there.
So, bro-science, people experimenting on themselves, injecting themselves with quote unquote Chinese peptides, one in eight Americans trying GLP-1. What's up with this? Why are people turning inwards to their bodies as this kind of experimental site? Why now?

**Toby Shorin** (3:54)
I'm a little bit lossy as to the reasons for like grinder culture, which was like the beginning of this like a heavy self-experimentation quantified self thing. I'm currently reading a book about the Huxley family. You might know like how Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, but his brother Julian Huxley was, I coined the term transhumanism and was a famous eugenicist and advocate of evolutionary theory. Although his version of eugenics was very against like the Nazi version of eugenics and his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley was another famous evolutionary advocate.
So I'm reading this book about the Huxley family to sort of try to figure out what the early version of this transhumanist idea was really about and figure out how it became expressed in this biohacking, grinder, self-experimentation culture.
What I can say about it that I've discovered is one of the underlying philosophical principles is what I've been calling like morphological freedom. Is the freedom to change the shape of your body however you want. This arguments for this being important is something that we already find when we're talking about birth control, trans rights, abortion rights, rights to vasectomy if you're a man. The same kind of logic that lets us say, well, it's our personal body, so we have the right to change it however we want. With regards to our reproduction is that it's the same kind of thing that rationale for, well, I should be able to put a maggot in my hand or inject myself with research chemicals and human growth hormone and try to get righted out. I think that the cultural reasons it's happening are kind of the stuff we talked about before, but exactly with this sort of wave towards thinking more about the body, being focused on the body. But as to why it's specifically being expressed to this peptide stuff, this new wave of body first experimentation, especially with the peptides, it might have something to do with this body as asset thing that you wanted to talk about. And it's seeming increasingly important to have a performant body, a charismatic body in this weird moment of a body being very visible online.