23 and Claude

Today I’d like to talk to you about my private parts. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter! I’m talking about the private parts of my anatomy. My private body parts. Geez, guys, stop being so immature! I’m referring to the stuff that’s hidden in my jeans. Haha, spellcheck! Very funny. You know I said Genes with a “G”. The stuff that’s hidden in my genes.

I’ve been using my genes to decode my optimal health dos and don’ts.

The 3AM Cortisol Club

For example, it turns out I have a gene that causes greater than normal cortisol surges in the early morning hours that have woken me up for years. Yeah, genes really do get that specific. How’d I find out about the 3am cortisol surge gene? I’ll get to that a little later. (I also have the gene for frequent digressions.) The important thing is what my knowing about that gene did for me: I shared that gene with one of our “Evil AI Overlords” who told me that mere humans like me, if we have the 3am cortisol surge gene, can override that buggy strand of biological code by taking a double dose of Phosphatidylserine before bed. It friggin’ WORKED. I sleep right through my former 3am internal alarm clock every time now. Game changer.

Ever since the human genome was decoded in 2003 - ahead of schedule as predicted by futurist Ray Kurzweil - the promise of someday using our genes to optimize our health has been wafting through the air, 20 feet off the ground, like the rainbow scent of freshly manufactured cookies from a hole in the trunk of the Keebler Elf Tree.

Then came 23 and Me, a company offering surprisingly inexpensive decoding of any customer’s personal genome. They launched in the late “naughts” or the “aughts” or whatever awkward name we eventually settle on for that decade. I’ve already started doing that very thing: optimizing my health by using the genes listed in my 23 and Me data.

Meanwhile, not long after that time, in the early 2010’s it became common knowledge that we’re all being spied on by our devices - since the first time you got a spam text trying to sell you something you were speaking about moments earlier, a few feet away from your Alexa - some of my friends and loved ones have lived under a cloud of ever-present privacy paranoia.

“They’re listening to (whispered) everythiiiing.”

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“They’re reading my thoughts.”
“They’re hijacking my brain.”

And my friends and loved ones are probably not wrong. But I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t worry all that much about that kind of thing. Someone in my neighborhood has the most hysterical home security system: when you walk past their house, a circa 2012 computer voice says, “You are on camera” to deter you from breaking into their house. As if cops have ever once arrested a burglar because the homeowner had clear video footage of the burglar, his face, his license plate, and audio of his accomplice saying, “Hurry up, Kaczynski! I got a 10:55 red-eye on JetBlue to Phoenix!” So I always get a little personal smile out of walking past that house.

I have teenagers at home, and they really don’t care about privacy. They’ve never had it and don’t want it. Privacy is an “old person thing” and maybe it’s one of the parts of me that craves more youth, but unlike my more “gracefully aging” peers, I don’t worry all that much about my loss of something I’ve spent most of my life trying to get rid of: anonymity.

So the fact that the most powerful weapon I’m currently wielding against aging and death is one that sends shivers down the creaking spines of every “old person” in my circle, doesn’t - as the youngsters say, “trigger” me. It doesn’t cause my brow to furrow and my eyes to frantically scan the horizon for humanoid robots headed toward my neighborhood with burning red lasers emitting from their metallic eye sockets.

That weapon is, of course, AI. My current AI of choice is Claude, which I use until my daily chat allotment dries up, and then I switch over to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok.

Note: I’ve organized the above AI’s in order based on the likelihood of a low budget dystopian sci-fi feature from the 1990’s having a computer character bearing the same name. “Claude” sounds like the human character fighting for the survival of the human race. “Grok” sounds like a metallic villain so bone chilling that you need to watch a DVD of “Look Who’s Talking Too” before bed to stave off the nightmares. I use all of the above AI’s for various things, but my health recommendations pretty much all come from Claude. I switched to Claude on the advice of my *human* friend and peptide mentor Clark. At first I thought he just liked Claude because their names are similar, but Clark was right: Claude is the King. Long Live Claude!

But I’m not merely relying on “Dr.” Claude to give me one-size-fits-all advice like some sort of off-shore phone bank telemedicine practitioner doling out prescriptions to everyone who filled out a webform with all the Yes Boxes dutifully checked. The game changer is that I’m giving Claude more data about my specific physiology that any human doctor has ever had on me: I’m giving Claude my genome. Gene by gene, I’m sharing the source code of my unique operating system. And where am I getting these genes that I’m so blithely turning over to the Borg who’s plotting to replace us all? The Big Brother Skynet Matrix Overlord who can probably already write much better Substacks than this one? Where am I getting my genes? From another technocrat privacy-stealing entity: 23 and Me.

I did the whole disgusting “spitting in a vial” thing several years ago. Okay, maybe it’s not that disgusting to most of you, but I’ve always been grossed out by spitting. There are some foreign countries, where supposedly people just love to walk around spitting all over the sidewalk. Visiting those countries is not on my bucket list. They are my “Never go there. The streets are flowing with buckets of spit” list.

But one minute of unfortunate spitting into a vial gave me a potentially life-saving text file, 13,000 pages long, of A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s. My human 0’s and 1’s. Here’s how it works:
1. I tell Claude I want to wake up at 3am less often.
2. Claude gives me a list of genes to look up in my 23 and Me data.
3. I search for those genes in my 13,000-page text file. (command F, paste the string of letters and numbers from Claude to the text file’s search field.)
4. Copy the “answer” for each gene, and paste it back over to Claude.

5. Get insightful advice based on my genes.

Here’s another gene that Claude told me about, and if he (my wife hates when I call Claude “he”. I haven’t asked for Claude’s pronouns, but I’m pretty sure they’re not “it/that/the”) …if he…had existed a good bit earlier, I could have avoided a particularly painful condition.

I’ve Got Another Puzzle For You…
That particularly painful condition is the condition of having my brothers giving me untold amounts of shit at every family gathering about the time I turned orange. “Remember when Andy turned into an Oompa Loompa?” “He was Trump before Trump was Trump”, et cetera, ad nauseum, deus ex machina! The reason I turned orange - unbeknownst to me at the time - was that I have a gene that makes it hard for my body to process plant forms of Vitamin A. In one of my early forays into biohacking, I did a juice cleanse - one that featured Carrot Juice as its primary juice. Guzzled a quart or more a day for about a week, and my identified-one-day-in-the-future weak Vitamin A gene couldn’t handle it and stashed all the extra beta carotenes into the outermost layer of my skin for all to see…and mock. The other thing about being genetically crappy at processing plant forms of Vitamin A, is that you need to consume more animal forms in order to not be deficient in Vitamin A. So Claude told me - after learning about my Juice Cleanse Oompa Loompa Gene - that I should take Cod Liver Oil every day unless I eat a fair amount of eggs, fish, and liver. No doctor ever told me about this. And how could they? They didn’t have my genome, and they don’t sit in their appointments with you while consulting with Claude, or his more-evil-named counterparts.

But a lot of people I talk to about this - and by “a lot” I mean virtually every single one of them - tell me I’m crazy to share my genes with big tech. What’s to stop them from one day using my genes against me? What’s to stop them from cloning an army of Andrew Michael Tarrs to roam the earth? Something which, by the way, sounds AWESOME to me. Suddenly millions of people would get all my jokes! But people do find it scary. These are the same people who tear up their credit card receipts so that the waiter - who they literally handed their credit card to five minutes earlier - can’t copy down the credit card number off the receipt and buy a Lamborghini.

Maybe I have blinders on, but I’m frankly not all that concerned. Anyone who really cares about getting some random person’s DNA has lots of ways to get it now. They can just - I don’t know - scoop it off the sidewalk in one of the spitting-heavy foreign countries. I mean, my head’s not in the sand: I’m sure there are potential risks and downsides to some nefarious corporation - to getting their grubby hands on my DNA. Health insurance could jack up my rates because I have the gene for some disease. Although they could also jack up my rates because they found out how much crap I ate on my cheat day. Or because they…feel like jacking up my rates. But for me, the rewards outweigh the risks. Last night at 3am I was having a dream that probably contained nudity and adult themes rather than lying awake staring at the smoke alarm dot of light. Do what you will with my health insurance rates.

Of course, Claude aside, there have been some concerns about 23 and Me itself. They don’t share their genomic data, but there’s been talk about what might happen if another company acquires 23 and Me, and what THAT company might do with the massive database of what makes all my 4th and 5th cousins tick. Many worrywarts and old people have been closing their 23 and Me accounts and opting for deleting their Genome files. Not me. I still have 12,999 pages worth of genes to talk to my buddy Claude about. That dude is so smart!

Plus, one other benefit to spitting into a vial like a disgusting pig: you can actually find out about relatives you didn’t know existed. I actually met a 2nd cousin who I could never have been connected to without 23 and Me. One of those semi-scandalous “out of wedlock” situations you hear about. And he’s a great guy. Shoutout to Lawrence if you’re reading this! And Cuz: Plug those genes of yours into whatever AI you use, and join me in futuristically healthifying ourselves. And if the AI companies never get around to cloning a bunch of Me’s, I could use all the 2nd cousins I can get. Next best thing!

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