What Biohacking Is Missing

A more accurate word to describe the modern biohacker is a neurotic, narcissistic slave to their biology. Not a hacker, in any sense of the word. Hackers write code to exploit systems. The modern, spoon-fed, biological slave to the system of late-stage capitalist "biohacking" does not exploit biological systems. They run a series of protocols fed to them by so-called experts on social media. And they feel very insecure about whether they are doing it right. Luckily, if you are reading this. that's not you.

Biohacking has become an epidemic of optimized, often times wealthy and intelligent individuals who do not understand biology, themselves, or their unconscious drives. Everybody is running protocols. These protocols come pre-digested. Almost nobody is reading and digesting the science for themselves anymore. Everything is regurgitated. Like the mama bird who chews the worm and spits it into the baby's mouth. And the gap between those two things - between doing the thing and understanding why the thing works - is the entire reason why modern biohackers' protocols are so fragile. The marketing machine has convinced us there is always a missing ingredient. We need more supplements, more apps, more PURCHASES. But the missing ingredient is not a consumer good, it is understanding. And I know that sounds like way more work than pressing add to cart, but it can actually be fun.

Let me show you what I mean.

Most people who take creatine know that it can help build more muscle. Some people even know that it is also beneficial to the brain and to cognitive performance. But why? Why does this compound help with building muscle and cognitive performance? What's the link? It is actually quite fascinating and not that complicated. Here is what is happening at the molecular level. Creatine helps the human make more ATP, which, assuming you are a human reading this, is the energy currency of every cell in your body. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that handles decision-making and focus and complex thought, uses a lot of ATP. Five grams of creatine a day raises the available ATP pool. More ATP means the prefrontal cortex has more juice.

So you probably get where this is going. because what else likes to have more juice? Muscles. Now we are getting it. and downstream stuff starts to be more obvious. The studies show it works particularly well at maintaining the prefrontal cortex if we are sleep deprived… right, because we have more juice. We can predict that it works synergistically with compounds that juice up the mitochondria, because mitochondria are where ATP is made. We can predict that vegans will see a bigger benefit than people who already eat a lot of red meat, because creatine is found in red meat. Just from understanding a little bit about one molecule, you now have a working model that connects to tons of different biological mechanisms and data points.

The biohacker who understands biochemical mechanisms, even in a simple, metaphorical sense like knowing ATP is juice for the human cell, has a model. The person who just takes the capsule has a habit. Habits tend to eventually become disrupted by external variables. Mental models compound. The juice is worth the squeeze, so to speak.

And this is the difference the modern biohacking industry doesn't really care if you get or not. Because protocols are something you can buy. A protocol is a list. It tells you what to do. Marketers can package it, brand it, and sell it.

As more money gets involved in biohacking - which I can tell you is one of the fastest growing industries in the world right now - there is less and less genuine science and less genuine philosophy. Not because people are evil, but because people are typically not that smart. This leads to a natural ratcheting up in fluff, bullshit, unsubstantiated opinion, and AI generated, hallucinated slop.

A philosophical framework is something else entirely. A way of seeing. A way to generate your own protocols, and adapt them to whatever conditions you are actually living in.

Ok cool. So you're sold on the framework idea. but what is my framework and what's my god damn point? Let me give it to you in three words. Body. Brain. Mind. Three layers with one trajectory. The body is where you start. The brain is where it gets interesting. The mind is where the whole thing actually goes. Most people never even get past the first one. Let's walk through the door together.

The body is the simplest of the three, and optimizing it is actually stupid simple. Don't stay up all night smoking crack. Get off your ass and walk around a little or god forbid go to the gym a few times a week. And if you are really serious about this stuff, ingest or inject a small list of molecules, and the body responds in mostly predictable and radically positive ways. That is why this is where biohacking starts. The body is the entry point. It is the easiest layer to read, the easiest layer to adjust, and the easiest layer to monetize. 99% of people get stuck here.

The brain is more complex, and it functions in a way that is a lot more complicated than a muscle or a fat cell. In a sense, neurochemistry decides how much of the conscious experience you get access to. So you could say the brain is trying to mind-fuck you. And the placebo and nocebo effects are real - often times more powerful than many of the compounds and habits themselves.

A great class of compounds to fully explore this mind-fuck is anti-depressants. Probably the most controversial and misunderstood pharmaceuticals ever. The most cited researcher in this space is a guy named Irving Kirsch. He went and looked at the FDA's own data - the same data the drug companies submitted to get their pills approved. And what he found can only be described as wild. I'm surprised he didn't slip and fall after revealing this… if you catch my drift. Anyway, what he found is that in the trials, the placebo group - the people getting sugar pills with nothing in them - got about 80% of the improvement that the actual active drug group got. What does that mean? The actual molecular contribution of the SSRI was significant. but minor on top of what the brain was doing to itself just by expecting to feel better from getting pills from a psychiatrist. Only in the most severely depressed patients did the drug pull meaningfully ahead of the sugar pills. For everyone else, what looked like a chemical effect was mostly the brain doing what the brain does regardless of chemical interventions - adjusting mood based on what it expected to happen, specifically at the recommendation of a perceived expert. And this is nothing new. It is just a modern day confessional booth, with a modern day priest, and a modern day absolution from your perceived sins… which were 80% just your own insecurities manifesting as mental pain.

But wait… there is a concrete difference between the pills of a psychiatrist and the holy water of the catholic priest. And that difference is biochemical. SSRIs do contain active compound, and the compound is actually miraculous in those 20% of cases, and still significant I think in a percentage of the others too for a variety of reasons. I am generally pro-SSRI under the right conditions… which I bet you didn't expect. I can go further into my thoughts there in future essays - if you want,. But the facts are the facts. Despite SSRIs being in many cases literally a miracle drug for the depressed and anxious human brain - from a neurochemical standpoint - our subjective psychological experience still accounts for 80% of that equation.

Now you might be thinking, cool story bro. What about something physiological, like my dick… or if you are a lady listening, a hypothetical dick? Something you can measure in inches? Something we can really wrap our mouths, I mean our heads… around. Let's talk about the elephant in the room, Viagra. About 11% of men on placebo sugar pills with no active sildenafil (that's the chemical name for Viagra) reported it fixed their issue. Some studies got that number as high as 41%. We are talking about a physical event in the body, which, when the active chemical is involved, involves actual vasodilation… literally more blood going to an area. And the brain alone, given the right expectation, was producing a meaningful effort to drive more blood to the region.

And here is something even wilder. There are real studies showing that for some men with psychogenic ED - meaning the cause is anxiety - when they take Viagra for a stretch of time and then stop taking it… they retain the benefits and actually solve their erectile dysfunction. How does that even work? It works because the type of ED they had was not an issue of blood flow or hormones. It was an anxiety problem. The drug worked the first few times. The brain registered the success. The fear of not being able to perform - which was the actual cause all along - got broken. And once the fear was broken, the body did what it was always capable of doing. The drug's main job ended up being to give the brain enough proof to stop sabotaging itself. And that is not nothing, but it is not what the drug was designed to do. It was designed to improve vasodilation, not penis related anxiety… you see what I mean? The clinical research on this is pretty clear: the men who maintain the gains after stopping are the men whose mental state shifted while they were on it. The pill opened the door. And the brain walked through, the cock simply followed.

What does that tell us? It tells us that the brain is the interface for the body itself. Expectation shapes biology. Belief shapes blood flow. The dial we are turning when we take a substance is sometimes the substance, and also it is the anticipation of the substance, the confidence in medical experts, and the scared child inside us that wants the problem solved getting a digestible solution that makes us feel less scared and anxious. This is the complicated, powerful reality of psychopharmacology.

How your brain responds to inputs, both consciously and subconsciously, determines whether you can focus, whether you can feel motivated, whether you can sleep, whether you can fuck, whether you can love, whether you can experience the world fully or only through a fog. We can learn to move these dials. Now… we are hacking. Or beginning to.

Then… there is the mind. The mind is infinite, or at least from the brain's perspective. There is no known ceiling on what a mind can integrate. Every concept connects to every other concept. Every insight unlocks another five. And when you optimize the body and the brain in service of feeding the mind, that is when we are reaching true biohacking.

But here is what biohacking culture gets wrong, and I want you to really sit with this. We optimize the entry point. And we call the entry point the destination. We optimize a bunch of biomarkers and then… what? A beautiful body on paper and no idea what to do with it. The body was never supposed to be the goal. The body and the brain are the foundation that lets the mind do its actual work. And if you optimize the foundation but never build the house, you are just a really expensive hole in the ground.

So why did we forget this? It is simple, and I call it "the capsule economy." It is much easier to sell someone a pill than to teach them how to think. The industry was built around the pill. And now the pill is becoming the injection. Cool. The real biohackers have been injecting peptides for a decade already. What else is new? My mom was finding needles in my room and freaking out. Now she is shooting BPC157 because a lady in her healthy moms Facebook group told her it is good for her gut health.

So what is the answer? Curiosity. The thing that pulls the thread from creatine to ATP to mitochondria to CoQ10 to metabolic flexibility… and far beyond. Until you have a working model of your own biology that you carry with you forever. And then that biological model extends to chemistry, physics, philosophy… and so forth. The curious biohacker asks why the protocol works, and ends up generating better protocols than the original.

You are your own experiment. Your genetics, your environment, your neurochemistry, your sleep, your stress, your unconscious drives - none of that exactly matches anyone you will ever meet. Every intervention is a hypothesis. Every day is data. Nobody else is running your experiment. Which means nobody else is going to figure out what works for you. The job is yours. The agency is yours. The understanding has to be yours.

The destination was always our species learning to direct its own evolution. Me, you, and everyone else reading this are in that boat together. Three point three million years of tool use, all of it building toward this exact moment - when an organism can finally use the scientific method, understand itself, and modify itself with intention. We are at the doorway. And most of us are still too blind to open the door, obsessed with the design of the doorknob.

We are the species which modifies itself, and we will never stop.