Biohacking: How Not to Spend Your Life Trying to Extend It

Biohacking, longevity and the fight against aging are becoming more and more popular. But where does caring for your health end and the desire to “hack” your own life begin?

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at why people really want to live longer, what lies behind the desire to prolong youth, and why the length of a life in itself says nothing about how a person lives it. What would change if we lived to a hundred or a hundred and fifty? Should we strive to control aging? And most importantly — an exercise that every person should do in order to see their life more broadly.

Why longevity has become such a popular topic

– Where does this desire to extend life, to “hack” aging and yourself, come from in a person? What is it, and what should you do about it if you notice it in yourself? And how do you tell where the line is: when you are simply taking responsible care of your body, your health, and when it has already turned into trying to “hack” this life?

– That is a great question. When I saw this topic, I thought it was very interesting right now. My sister had just come to visit me, and we were discussing how a huge number of people have now appeared who show themselves at an older age and run blogs. She says: “Sasha, listen, I don’t think our parents looked at fifty or at forty the way we look now. So many people show themselves at fifty and say: look how good and young we look. And the person really does look quite good.”

To which I told her: “Listen, I think it’s a question of who you compare with. You’re simply comparing specific examples — us with our parents. But if you compare, say, our parents with some of their friends, the picture starts to diverge. Or if you compare us with the classmates we went to school with — it diverges too.” She said: “That’s true, I met up with my school classmates about five years ago — or eight, or ten, it doesn’t matter. It seemed to me that many of them were twenty years older than me.” I said: “That’s the whole point. It is just a construct of perception: who do we compare ourselves with, and how?”

And so, of course, biohacking is now an incredibly widespread topic — first and foremost, and this is very important, because people have been given the opportunity to talk about it more widely and more often. Imagine: I have three channels on YouTube, plus Telegram and Instagram. There are groups, places where information spreads. Before, such volumes of information sharing were generally unavailable.

Take my ToTheMoon channel — about the world of technology and artificial intelligence. Yesterday I released a video, and fifteen thousand people have already watched it in a day. Can you imagine that reach? What would it have meant fifty or a hundred years ago for fifteen thousand people to see information about you? It could only have been television — and even that depends on when it appeared and in which countries. And that’s it. You could fill a hall.

Rudolf Steiner traveled everywhere, wrote works, gave three and a half, or five, or however many thousand lectures. How many people came? Two hundred people come, three hundred come. Someone may have gained access to his work and read it later. But how could you even read that work? Go to a library, or copy it out by hand? How much effort did that take?

Now, of course, the opportunity to tell people about something has become much broader. Far more people consume information, and we consume it in much greater volume. It was never consumed like this.

Yesterday I was talking with the children about cartoons, computers and everything else. My sister asked my wife whether she had played computer games as a child. And my wife says: “But Sasha played all day long as a child. He talks about it all the time.” I say: “I really did get a computer in 1991 or 1992, and I really did spend a lot of time on it, playing.” But that “a lot” is nothing compared with how much access to electronics a modern child has.

They pick up their mom’s phone, they have computers at school, there’s a television with an incredible number of series and everything else. Did I have Netflix or YouTube as a child, so that I could open it and watch eighty-nine seasons of “Masha and the Bear” with five thousand episodes each? Of course not. You waited a whole week to watch one episode of some series, about forty minutes long, on a little television standing in the corner. You had no access to this information at all. Its volume was limited, and we rewatched films or videotapes six, eight, fifteen times. Everything was limited. To watch a movie, you had to go and rent a tape or watch something on TV. And on television the programs were often repeated — it wasn’t some unique content.

Today the amount of content is simply staggering. You ride in a car and endlessly watch content; you sit on a chair and constantly watch content. You don’t need a television for that. And a television could switch off, the power could go out, the antenna could work badly, the television could be taken by another family member. And even then you were told: “Enough watching, go do something else.”

The question of this access matters a great deal for your question. Because has people’s desire to do biohacking really increased? If we take human life expectancy over the past several thousand years, we will see that it has already grown as it is. What’s more, far more people now live on planet Earth — with a better quality of life, with a higher average age. Mortality has generally fallen thanks to an accessible health care system, quality food and nutrition; life expectancy has only grown, not fallen.

And people did not control any of this — this is very important: humanity did not control the number of people on planet Earth. Now everyone keeps saying that mortality will fall somewhere, that some country will disappear or appear. But that’s only logical. We have always lived like this, and we didn’t control it when there were fewer people. So who wants to control it now that there are more? It was the same before.

There was the Roman Empire — it owned everything. Or Great Britain, which owned everything quite recently. We were driving the other day and studying the conflict between Israel and Palestine together in the car. Just seventy years ago, those territories were owned by Great Britain. And there it was conflict after conflict: someone took the land, someone received it. A piece for this one, a piece for that one.

Did people at that time think about how to improve their lives? Of course they did — in different ways, just as they do now. Some thought about seizing territory, others about their health, about using the right remedies. And today there is the well-known idea of going to some village, to some tribes, and asking them which special plant to rub on yourself to extend your life. Strange, isn’t it? Because those people did not live that long. They have a strange way of life in general, and very often they don’t live in society.

Today we don’t understand the consequences of what is happening at all. People smoked cigarettes and switched to electronic cigarettes. People started smoking fifty times more electronic cigarettes than they smoked ordinary ones. And there is no research at all into what will happen to a person from electronic cigarettes. There are no proper, long-term studies.

In general, the world is afflicted when it comes to research. All the studies are significant today. And exactly ten or twenty years later people say that everyone used to be stupid and now they are the smartest: “Now we have made progress, every year we make progress.”

Look at how business develops. If you walk into most businesses today, there is an endless race for growth; everyone is endlessly racing somewhere. An enormous number of companies are racing, and there is no result. But the race goes on. They are racing all the time. Where are they racing? What is going to happen?

In the same way, people now, of course, pay a lot of attention to this — it started probably about fifteen years ago; that kind of trend took off. Once again: the trend took off because social networks and channels for spreading information appeared, and information became accessible. Of course, people began to aggregate it and talk about it. Today you will find a blogger on any subject: a profession, a subprofession, a field, a subfield.

Not just a blogger about how to make good-quality water, but a blogger about how to stick on a label or how to pour it. There are bloggers who explain how to pour water into a glass properly, how to drink properly, when to drink, what to drink after, what to drink before. Anyone at all — even an individual person who talks only about that. You will find an enormous number of companies endlessly doing all this. And it’s money. Most of these people talk in order to make money. There are also companies that make preparations to make money. What are their goals? And what are the goals of biohacking startups? What goals do they have?

As it happens, speaking of biohacking, I live in a house where Elizabeth Holmes once lived — a well-known American entrepreneur in medicine, or you could say in biohacking. She claimed that she could do any tests from a simple blood test at home. And now she is in prison. It’s just that some people are in prison and some aren’t — some have been proven guilty. And opinions differ, even about Elizabeth Holmes: did she do it intentionally or unintentionally? Was she deliberately deceiving people — or did she plan to make it work and simply fail?

But all biohacking is deception, Olya. Someone will just say whether it was intentional or unintentional.

Why people want to live longer in the first place

But the question is the goal people set when they engage in biohacking. Now we come to the next, most important part of my story: why do people do it? That is actually what you were asking. We just definitely need a foundation to rely on.

Why do people come to this? Why do they become interested in hacking their health? What for? To live longer? For what exactly? And does a person understand the causes and effects if they live longer? They will live longer — but what will be happening around them at that time? They will say, for example: “My mind will be clearer.” But will it be clearer — or will life around them be falling apart?

What exactly do you want to hack? And why? That is the most important thing.

Imagine, Olya, that people now lived on average not sixty or seventy years — I don’t know what the average life expectancy on planet Earth is — but two hundred. Do you know what the most interesting thing is? In exactly the same way, people would want to live not two hundred but two hundred and fifty. Or they would single out people who lived a long time and say: “A hundred and twenty is no longer interesting, but three hundred and fifty is super cool.”

It used to be exactly like that. If we rewind fifteen hundred years, someone who lived to eighty was simply unreal. That was a mythical structure of incarnation, an avatar of who knows whom — that is precisely why he lives so many years. Read the enormous number of treatises that describe how this person lived a hundred and thirty years. In other words, age matters as a way of showing how developed a person is. Developed in what?

So how should one live after all? Preserve your body so that it lies in some vacuum for five hundred years? There are people who think about freezing their body so that it can be woken up later and they won’t die.

But that is simply diabolical absurdity. It is not just schizophrenia: in general, having such parameters is a persistent illness from the standpoint of sound medicine, specifically social medicine. And from the standpoint of the spiritual world, a person simply has certain energies, certain impulses and certain states. So if you descend into the social world — this is obviously a sick person, psychiatry. And if you go into the spiritual world — nothing terrible is happening at all. The person is simply in certain energies of perception.

In exactly the same way, there are other people who say: “It doesn’t matter to me how long I live, because my life has no boundary. I have incarnated now, lived this life, and I will incarnate next time. It makes no difference to me at all how long I live. Why do I need a long life, why would I lengthen it?”

How a view of the spiritual world changes your attitude toward longevity

And here, you see, Olya, it is always a question of approach — how a person relates to life. If they think that life is limited to their physical body and their personality, and that they need to live specifically a hundred and fifty years, then they can do this.

But you should know that all these people never think about other people. Because while doing biohacking, they never stop to consider that the word contains “hacking.” If you are hacking into something, aren’t you harming other people by doing so? You can harm another system and other people. Or aren’t you? Of course you are. Socially you certainly are, from the standpoint of ordinary physical space.

But if this same person goes into a church and crosses himself, attends certain events or turns even a little toward the spiritual world, then the concept of “biohacking” is absurd — an absurdity of cause and effect.

And show me, Olya, even one biohacker in the world. There is a book — I once liked it very much, and on the one hand it looks cool. I don’t remember its title — I think it’s called “The Age of Happiness.” It shows a great many people at an older age who do some extraordinary things. I have a big question about the idea that in old age you need to do extraordinary things, just as in youth. Skydiving at seventy is probably strange, isn’t it? The chance of dying is even greater. And is a person doing it out of happiness, or out of complete absurdity and a failure to understand what is happening? That is a big question.

My nephew was telling me that at his university in Poland — a fairly serious university, a serious field of study — an eighty-year-old instructor teaches Windows 10 and Windows XP, how to take screenshots. Someone looking on will say: “Now that’s the age of happiness. A man has taught at a university as a professor all his life and at eighty is telling young students about technology.” But on the other hand, he is destroying consciousness — this man should be shut away and never let out anywhere, because he tells kids complete nonsense and rubbish.

And notice how interesting this is. Part of society will consider him a distinguished person — and how happy he is to have the opportunity to teach at eighty. And a huge part of society will suffer and say to someone: “And you just sit at home, helpless.” But at least that person sits at home and doesn’t harm other people. While this man goes around harming other people by telling them things that should not be taught in modern society. It’s deception. He is deceiving them. What Windows 10? Windows 10 should have been taught in ’98 or, I don’t know, in 2000. Those were the years to teach Windows. I don’t remember when Windows 10 or Windows XP came out — I think Windows XP was the nineties.

The dark side of wanting to extend your life

Of course, this impulse has a dark side of energy. It further increases a person’s desire for power — power over nature, power over other people.

Why is there no central, endless impulse in modern society to love other people, one that would be broadcast everywhere?

What country conveys this as a whole? There are religions that convey it. There are communities that convey it. But what country conveys it? What society? It is clearly a more interesting story than spending your whole life thinking that another nation is bad. Or thinking that the enemy is nearby. Then the enemy is also your own child. And for most people in the world their own child is exactly that enemy, because they don’t know how to interact with them.

I made a video on the channel precisely about how to find justification in another person. Although the word “justification” may not be quite my style — it was a phrase from a book. You can go back to that video: it explains this topic quite well — how to see the good in another person, why you need to see it, and what to strive for.

The spiritual consequences of biohacking

In other words, it will make a person an idiot, a simple village fool — to put it in plain Russian words. In Russian, everyone loves Ivanushka the Fool. Notice the overall attitude toward people: first, the attitude toward the word “Ivan” at the base — and “the fool.” This is a consciousness instilled by society, and it will make a person a fool.

Last week we were sitting with the children; my nephew was there too. My daughter sometimes likes to say that she isn’t smart, that she doesn’t know things, and that there are lots of smart people at school. I told her: “Listen, please rate yourself at school on a scale from zero to ten.” She gave herself a six. I asked my nephew: “And you rate yourself at school.” He says: “Ten.” I say to my younger daughter: “And you rate yourself.” She goes: “Six. Maybe seven. Actually, I’ve thought about it, and I know everything in math.”

Although the daughter who gave herself a six rated herself strangely. I ask: “What’s your logic? What do you have in math?” She says: “An A.” “And in chemistry?” “An A.” “And here?” I say: “Then how is it a six? Does everyone there have some kind of A with fifteen stars, or what?” She says: “It’s nothing special.”

I say: “Now let’s look at other aspects. Imagine there is a person who does poorly at school but helps everyone. How many points would you give them at school? And imagine this person is also unattractive and fat.” That’s how society usually judges.

Even the world of spiritual teaching says: a healthy spirit in a healthy body. Where did they get this phrase? “A healthy spirit in a healthy body.” I know a great many healthy bodies that kill people in the world and live very long — and then also sit in prison for forty years, until ninety-five. And those are healthy bodies.

I say: “So where would you rank them? What score would a person get who helps everyone — sincerely, truly, straight from the heart, simply glowing with it — but studies terribly, doesn’t study at all, doesn’t understand anything? Comes to class and wonders: what are they talking about?”

A few days ago I was at an OpenAI conference — a fairly closed one. And they gave out a Chromatic — a thing like an old Game Boy that you can program with OpenAI. I got my Game Boy in 1991 or 1992, I don’t remember exactly. It had the Mario game. My sister remembered: “I never played games, but I did play Mario.” And my wife picks this thing up, switches it on and says: “What do you do here?” She looks at the buttons — there’s a joystick, B, A, Select, Start. She looks: what nonsense, why would people need this? And she tossed it aside.

And I took this thing, connected it to the computer, updated some drivers, did a few things, went into Codex and created a game. And now it writes to me: “Choose your name: Iveta, Damian, Igor, Sasha, Polina.” I choose Damian. It writes: “Choose a game.” I choose a game. It writes that Damian has a superpower, and so on. It was a bit of fun. I don’t play games at all, I’m not a gamer and not an advocate of this topic when it comes to games, family and everything else. But this thing came along.

Notice: this thing is very easy for me, completely elementary. I understand it not just at the level of pressing a button and playing. How can it be unclear: here are the arrows — go left, go right, and press. It’s all clear: you press a button — if not this one, then another will do. It’s like moving your fingers forward, left and right on a keyboard. Which fingers do you move? Anyone who has played Counter-Strike or Doom, of course, knows how to move forward or back, left or right. And someone who hasn’t played has no idea how to do it. They don’t understand it at all, don’t grasp it, aren’t aware of it.

This is such ordinary micro-knowledge from the material world — stupid, elementary. What I just described — loading a game — is stupid, elementary knowledge. You don’t need super-energies for it. So what can be said about knowledge or states that are embedded in a person’s energies? And these energies are not under that person’s control. An energy has appeared. They have extended my life.

What to spend your time on in life

The length of life is just some parameter in, I don’t know, eight-hundredth place in defining or describing you — or maybe in fifteen-millionth place in describing you as a human being.

There is a well-known man in America who does biohacking — I don’t remember his name, I won’t name him now. A friend and I once laughed about it: this man spends three or five hours a day extending his life. So why are you spending thirty or forty percent of your waking day extending your life into the future with no guarantee? What is the logic? Let’s spend fifty years in order to live another fifty years ahead. And will you live those fifty years?

And here the question arises, Olya: how do people die? For what reasons? Do you know anyone in the world who died of their own free will — apart from suicides? A person who told himself: “I think I will die at eighty-three, on the fifteenth of October, at four p.m.” Do you know anyone like that? Hardly. You’ve read about such people in books. Usually people don’t want to die at all.

Some people wait for death. My grandmother waited for death for a very long time and broadcast this energy onto everyone. Some fear death and agonize over it. But she really was waiting. I think at around sixty or seventy she bought herself a suit to die in.

This, by the way, is an interesting story. A friend of mine lives in Italy, and we were driving and talking. He told me that someone asked an Italian or a Spanish grandmother — somebody’s: “Do you also buy a suit for your death and set money aside?” She says: “What for? I spend my money. Why set it aside? What’s the logic?” They tell her: “Where we come from, people save, because it matters where you are buried.” She replies: “I don’t care at all where I’m buried.”

Can you imagine how different the consciousness and perception of people living at the same time can be? And what kind of energy did my grandmother have that she bought herself a suit in advance? But that doesn’t make my grandmother either a minus or a plus. A huge part of society in the world lives this way.

Many people have already buried themselves at thirty and say: “That’s it, my time is gone.”

You are young — fairly young by today’s notion of youth — and you already have thoughts that time has been lost: “I lost a year here, or a year and a half.” Such thoughts can already appear. What are these thoughts about losing time, anyway? A person doesn’t even want to think about how much longer they really have to live and what real meaning that has.

Exercise: what if you had three months left?

There is a very good exercise for this. I have often given it — recently, I think, I gave it in our “Life” group. Tell yourself that you have three months left to live. Will you start doing different things, or simply continue living this very same life? Or will you do something else?

If you have three months left, will you be making a video with me, and I with you — or will we do something else? You’ll say: “No, I won’t make any more videos with this man. Let Volchek deal with himself. I’m gone. I’ll take care of my own tasks.” Do you want to get in touch with someone, call someone, change something, eat something? Someone will say: “At last I’ll eat croissants. I didn’t eat them, and now I’ve been given the chance, I’ve been allowed. That’s it, for three months I can eat croissants.” Or will you eat the same way you ate before?

What will you do? Will you spend more time with your children, or the same amount? With friends, with parents, visiting certain places? Will everything stay the same, or will something be different?

It is very sobering, it makes you stop and understand. Although this exercise, of course, is not easy. For us it is truly not easy.

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