- Hi there, I'm premier online content goblin Jake Young.
And this is What the Facts, our companion show
to the disgusting and fascinating animated series, WTF 101.
These week's episode we're covering the topic
of self-experimentation and kind of trying
to discover where the line is between gaining
knowledge and destroying your physical body.
To help us out, we've enlisted the help of an expert.
He is a cultural studies professor and an author,
and he has his own experiences with trial and error
and kind of pushing his own body to the limits.
Will Brooker, Will, how you doing?
- I'm doing very well, thanks for having me.
- I think the main thing, the biggest experiment
that you personally went on was you tried
to live for a year as David Bowie.
- Yes, I did.
- That couldn't have gone perfectly smoothly, right?
You had to have hit some road bumps.
- Well, yeah, David Bowie died,
so after that point, I was kinda glad I was still alive.
David Bowie died exactly halfway through the project,
which was tragic really.
It almost threw me off the rails,
but I felt I had to carry on rather
than abandon the project, but that was a real blow.
- So you can't foresee the effects of what you start
when you're doing an experiment.
You kinda have to see it through,
especially in self-experimentation,
the line between constructive and destructive gets blurry.
Obviously, in the episode they talk about
August Bier who injected cocaine into his spinal column,
and beat his lab partner senseless.
How far do you think you or one of your colleagues
could go in the pursuit of knowledge?
- Well, we would have to stay on the right side of the law.
I mean, David Bowie, so I don't know if he injected it.
He certainly snorted a great deal of cocaine,
but it wasn't for scientific purposes,
so actually didn't really serve any medical benefit.
So in that context, I regard Bier quite favorably
because at least he was trying to do some good.
He was a pioneer of anesthestics.
I mean, his experiments actually worked.
But if David Bowie was just inhaling
a great deal of cocaine for his own pleasure,
I suppose, it did result in some great LPs.
He produced great work from it,
and a lot of people take a lot of cocaine
and give us nothing, but David Bowie gave us some great art.
- But I think Bier's on a different level then.
I regard Bier quite favorably because at least
he was doing it for scientific purpose.
And I think he did have positive results.
- So there's something to be gained.
It's not just throwing stuff at the wind.
If you're gonna put your body on the line,
it better be for something that benefits humanity.
- I think that's right, whether it's art or science.
I mean, I understand College Humor isn't
called College Serious (laughs)
so it wasn't gonna be a take on what these guys
have actually contributed to,
but I think there's another way of looking
at all those cases where we can see them actually
having some benefit and providing some use.
- Have you witnessed in your years in academia,
witnessed someone kind of going above and beyond
the line in the pursuit of knowledge at their own risk?
- I think I'm my prime example of that.
I think I've gone to more of an extreme
than anyone else I know.
I mean, I did try to live on milk and red pepper
like David Bowie did in the mid-1970s,
and that was quite extreme,
using it to actually make yourself thinner.
- I mean, it's definitely a project that I've
undertaken and with mixed results. (laughs)
Less for art and more for just finding
affordable pants, but I understand.
- That's important.
That's important, as well, yeah.
- Another story that was covered is Frederick Hoelzel,
just devouring gravel and glass and metal.
It's not as extreme as milk and peppers.
- I'd rather have milk and peppers, actually.
Having had milk and peppers,
I'd rather have that than gravel.
But look, this guy, too, again,
I understand that the animation was
taking a certain take on the stories.
That guy, he recognized the importance
of cellulous flour in diet products,
so yes, he contributes to the modern diet industry.
His name's on dozens of papers, he actually--
- What's that?
- He wasn't just some guy with pica.
He absolutely contributed to the human endeavor.
But it had to have affected his personal life,
and you had to do so much for your experiment.
Were there social consequences for what you were doing?
- I didn't lose any friends. (laughs)
I say that cautiously.
I don't think I lost any friends.
I think the advantage is that being English,
we have our own tradition of eccentricity
and of tolerating and appreciating people
who are a bit odd, harmlessly odd.
I think in other countries, it might not have
flown to this same extent,
but the British maybe treated me with
a kind of amusement and interest.
I did have a moment of international media fame.
I was interviewed quite a lot,
and had my voice, my answers,
translated into other languages,
so that was a very interesting experience
to become a kind of public property.
- I mean, I figured if I walk out on the street
tomorrow with a lightning bolt painted on my face,
someone's at least gonna make a comment.
Everyone was just kind of like,
"Neat, good for him."
- Yeah, they would think you were him, probably.
- So when Stubbins Firth was drowning
himself in infected bio and vomit
and yellow fever piss, he was trying to prove
that the yellow fever was caused by just
the unpleasantness of the summer heat,
and people were just stressing themselves
into dying in the streets and--
- I think it was actually mosquitoes, yeah.
- In the end, it was mosquitoes.
- He had the right ideas, though.
He had the right idea.
If people don't make mistakes,
other people can't come along and build on those mistakes.
People have got to publish things which are wrong
for other people to come along and learn from it, right?
Another thing about Stubbins Firth, he was very young.
I think he was 20 when he published that research,
and I believe he died when he was 36.
He was doing that work he, was a pretty juvenile researcher.
He was kind of maybe immature, maybe too keen.
- But in your own career, what were some of the truly
spectacular examples of failed experimentation
that you got to bear witnesses?
Don't name names, it's fine.
We don't wanna embarrass anyone.
- Well, I mean, the cartoon, the animation
did pick four examples from the last few hundred years,
so the spectacular examples may be few and far between.
I like those guys 'cause they were colorful
and they pushed the envelope.
I think that's the kind of people we should celebrate,
people who try strange things to see what would happen.
A lot of people don't do that.
We remember the people who particularly push there,
who went to extremes.
- What made it important that you
had to experiment on yourself?
Why didn't you create a group?
Why didn't you create a blind,
double-blind, Bowie doppelganger study?
Why did it have to be yourself?
- I'll tell you why.
Because that's the most ethical way to do it,
to do it to yourself.
I like those guys too, the guy that injected
loads of cocaine and then cut off his own leg
or whatever he did, yeah.
Do it to yourself because you don't
want to inflict on other people.
If you wanna be prepared to do something,
I think you've gotta take the risks yourself.
You're in control of your own body,
and so I treated my own body as a kind of
experimental site by putting it on certain diets
certain substances and so on,
putting it through certain experiences.
And then you've got part of yourself
which is kind of immersed in the project
and another part of yourself as though
just satellite observing, yeah.
So you've got to almost keep different sides of yourself.
One part of you's going through the process
of what would it be like to have David Bowie's experiences,
and the other part is taking notes and commenting on it.
So you have to split yourself into different parts,
the experiment and the subject.
- So we covered the ethical route,
but just for the hell of it,
let's go unethical for a second.
Has there ever been a grand social experiment
or scientific experiment you've ever wanted to run?
Say you could get half the world
to participate in something.
What is something you desperately wanna know?
- Yeah, you know what I would do?
The snappening, (fingers snap) man, like Thanos.
- Oh, you'd just go full Thanos? (laughs)
- Yeah, I would, have to do Thanos.
- It's either to see how humans adapt
to loss on a grand scale,
or just you're just sick of the line at the post office.
- Well, the first thing.
- Okay, okay, the first thing.
- The first thing, I'd like to see how humans
adapt to that world, yeah.
- Will, thank you so much, once again, for joining us.
I really think we got a little bit
inspirational this time around.
Is there any way people can follow you online
or keep track of your work?
Any upcoming projects we should know about?
- Yeah, if people wanna see some online quality content,
they can follow me on Twitter @willbrooker,
just my name, and I've got a new book about David Bowie
coming out in November which is called Why Bowie Mattered.
It's not an academic book, it's for anyone.
And it does what the title suggests,
it discusses why Bowie matters to us
and what we can learn from him,
what we can learn from his example.
- Thank you so much once again,
and good luck, and thanks for the knowledge bombs
that have been dropped so graciously.
- Thank you for having me.
- Well, that was enlightening and surprisingly
less nauseating than I expected.
Good job, Will.
Tune in next time when we're gonna get
traumatizingly sexual with animals.
And yeah, that's how we're gonna phrase that.
Don't forget to check out WTF 101 on dropout.tv.
And until next time, hey, keep being curious.
How's that for a thing?
Keep being curious.