As many of you know, our book, The Forever Factor, had its genesis in a conversation with Jim Goetz, one of the most successful (and despite his modesty, famous) venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. We had long wanted to write a book together, so we got together to brainstorm themes. Jim brought a number of themes to our dinner, but the stuff that interests him and that makes for successful startups doesn’t quite transfer to the screen, large or small.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell. The kind of idea that attracts VCs often distinguishes itself by its technical depth, which will lose a viewing public from the start. The exception is an idea like Uber (what if anyone who owned a car could turn it into a money-earning taxi?) or Netflix (turn your home TV or laptop into a movie theatre). And those ideas, even for someone like Jim, are hard to come by.
It was when we were catching up socially and started talking about surfing (a shared interest) and what we’re doing to stay in shape that the movie idea, without either of us trying, came out. Jim had just come back from a getaway with a cadre of friends, their shared passion being biohacking: trying to live healthily as long as possible—just short of ‘forever’—using your own body as a test site (or guinea pig). When Jim started going through the range of activities available for biohackers, I knew then it was the germ of something that would make a great story. The early research that I did—learning about who was practicing biohacking and what they did—showed that our problem wouldn’t be in explaining the underlying science (though that was challenging and needed both Amanda’s background and contacts and my trip to MIT) but making the real-life anecdotes I gathered from VCs and biohackers alike believable to a general audience.
The other item that was a concern was not making biohacking too attractive. I’m not suggesting that our book would inspire deadly forays into this world, but it’s clear from both our research and our conversations that biohacking is not for amateurs (or people who don’t read caution notes). It’s easy to go from taking healthy supplements that your doctor approves of to the scary world of DIY gene editing and body implants.
I’ll close with a personal example of entry-level biohacking. For years I’ve had problems with sleep. After trips to the Stanford Sleep Center, it was determined that these problems, if untreated, would take years off my life because of the stress of constantly waking up without the benefits of REM sleep. So I tried all kinds of therapies, including the dreaded CPAP. As a last resort my doctor suggested Inspire. I’ll spare you the technology behind Inspire (www.inspiresleep.com, if you’re interested), but the bottom line is that it involves inserting a small device (think of an iPod Shuffle) in your chest and running a small wire up to your jaw.
Sounds fun, huh? The reason I tell about it here is to show you how cavalier some people are about inserting things in your body. Trust me, I’m not one of them. But when you get to the point that a doctor says you’re going to die early if you don’t take action, you broaden your definition of what’s acceptable. At the same time, I can state that if I hadn’t been doing the research behind expanding/extending life, I’d have had less trust in my doctors and would have put off inserting the device until I was 100% sure of its safety.
Is Inspire biohacking? Biohackers would say it’s baby steps. And really, who knows and who cares—as long as it works and isn’t harmful in the long run. And if nothing more, it gave me a personal connection to a great topic for a book.
