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Alexandra Michel discusses the self-technologies through which people construct the culturally situated biologies that compel them to unproblematically reproduce new, market-like organizations.

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 23, 2024

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This video video presents a study analyzing significant societal changes in organizational behavior, particularly during the market turn, often characterized by concepts like financialization and neoliberalism. The speaker highlights how organizations, since the industrial revolution, have treated workers' bodies as capital, employing various techniques for productivity. Starting from the 1980s, there has been a marked increase in the overworking of highly educated professionals, with examples like bankers working extreme hours—a situation so severe that it can lead to sleeping under desks.

The notion of the "body entrepreneur" emerges, referring to workers in competitive environments like investment banking, consulting, and academia who treat their bodies as capital for achieving competitive success. Unlike traditional employees, these individuals assume entrepreneurial risks, working hard and engaging in extreme self-management, often manipulating their biology through medications and lifestyle choices to meet the demands of their jobs.

This video video also addresses how these professionals perceive their health issues, often believing that their struggles stem from personal weaknesses rather than organizational demands. This video video mindset leads them to take radical measures to maintain productivity, viewing their physiological states as malleable in response to professional needs.

The overarching themes center around the transformation of work practices, the personal consequences of intense overwork, and how workers increasingly intervene in their biology as they navigate the demands of their jobs. Ultimately, the body entrepreneur framework portrays a new understanding of the self, emphasizing a chemistry-focused view of personal performance shaped by external pressures.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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The context of this study is a radical societal change,

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that I observed in organizations.

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Um, and this change has been referred to

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and studied under different names, financialization,

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neoliberalism, reflexive, modernity,

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and I'll just refer to it as the market turn.

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Um, and, this change involves that, domains

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and societies, families, organizations

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that previously worked in one way now work differently.

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They're being structured by the market.

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And let me tell you the first cues of, how

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that became noticeable in organizations.

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Um, and that requires a bit of history.

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So since the first industrial revolution,

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organizations have used the bodies of their workers

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as a kind of capital, and they used all kinds of techniques

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to extract effort from workers.

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So, Henry Ford, for example,

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sent investigators into their workers' homes to verify

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that they practice habits that kept them productive at work.

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But as sociologists, Notto has documented,

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workers resisted, they sabotaged, they loaf, they escaped.

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Um, and then all of a sudden,

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starting in the 1980s when this market turn started,

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things changed drastically in organizations.

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So in the past and in other cultures,

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the more education you have

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and the richer you are, the less you work.

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But now what you observe is that highly educated,

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highly marketable workers, bankers, consultants, doctors,

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engineers, they work much longer than organizations can

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legitimately require a hundred hours a week.

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Uh, and, and the conditions that a sociologist has referred

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to as white collar sweat shop.

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So the kinds of organization I studied, for example,

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a banker at Goldman Sachs worked 155 hours in one week

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that left only 13 hours for sleep the entire week.

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Uh, and no time for anything else.

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And it's not unusual for bankers to sleep under their desks.

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So as I track these overworking professionals over time,

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I found not only do they work these hours seemingly

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voluntarily,

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but they also took over from organization the task

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of extracting effort from their body.

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Um, and let me give you an extract from,

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a New York Times article so that you can see

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that this is more widely occurring, not merely in my data.

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Uh, and there the wife of a silicon lawyer, a valley,

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lawyer, recalls how she cleaned up his home

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after he died from a drug overdose.

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And Peter, the lawyer, he used drugs not to get high,

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but to perform better at work.

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So here's his wife who said, Peter would joke

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that the perfect drug for him would be the combination

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of an antidepressant, a pain reliever, a stimulant.

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And when I cleaned out, I cleaned out his house,

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I found the ingredients for it,

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Vicodin, Tramadol, Adderall, cocaine, Xanax, crystal meth,

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and the kaleidoscope of pills I couldn't identify,

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but not for lack of trying.

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And so like the people I studied, investment bankers,

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Peter intervened in his body to produce the kind

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of emotion on demand that he needed to function at work.

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And so the people I study, they don't only need

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to work these long hours, sometimes 120 hours a week,

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but also on demand to generate the kind of emotion

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and cognition that makes them effective with client.

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So if you're working all night,

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but then they meet the client,

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and they need to be pleasant

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even though they're half asleep.

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But then the lawyer comes in to negotiate, a deal.

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And so now they need to be hostile

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to represent the client in the best way.

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Next moment, they need to write a selling memo

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and they need to be creative.

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Uh, and then they need to turn to another task,

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where they need to perform in a highly analytic manner.

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Uh, and so they need to switch rapidly

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through these cognitive emotional states.

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Uh, and typically we think that that is something,

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emotion is something that works inside out.

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But since the livelihood of my informants dependent on

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how well and how flexibly they could do it,

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they work their emotion from the outside in.

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Uh, and that's one aspect

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of the body entrepreneur using the body as capital,

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just like the old organizations did.

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But now they do it for themselves,

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and they intervene in their body,

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much more aggressively than organizations legitimately can.

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So to continue Peter's story, the wife writes,

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the last call he ever made was for work, Peter vomiting,

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unable to sit up, slipping in

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and out of consciousness, had managed somehow

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to dial into a conference call.

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So in addition to modulating emotions on

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and cognitions like Peter, the bankers tried

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to fix various breakdowns,

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that this intense overwork incurred.

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And I'm giving you this example to show number one,

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they intervened more radically than

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organizations possibly can.

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Uh, number two, it shows

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that this is very different from the health orientation

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that we saw in employees in the 1970s.

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You know, the aerobics where people use health to signal

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that you were a high performer here,

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people intervene in their bodies regardless of health.

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And so these anecdotes raised two questions

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that my study addressed.

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Number one, what causes these changes in

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how workers orient to work?

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Uh, and the brief answer that I would love

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to elaborate if you allow me, is a new set

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of competitive work practices that uses market logics.

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Um, and you will see, that

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that is also observable in other organizations and law firms

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and invest in other investment banks, in academia.

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And so the quest, the second question is,

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what changes in workers when they intervene in their

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bodies sos radically?

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Um, and here the key finding is that biology

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manifests in historically new ways that I have alluded to.

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So typically we think biology works inside out,

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and it's not under our control.

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The best we can do is provide good conditions, but Peter

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and the bankers believe

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that they run their biology from the outside in.

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And so I followed a group

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of investment bankers over the period of 20 years,

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starting from the entry into, two,

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into the two investment banks that wish to stay anonymous.

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Um, and that allowed me the opportunity to study the market,

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turn in the organizations that are at the heart of it,

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and track the changes in people as they occurred.

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So to now turn to your question,

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what is a body entrepreneur?

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Well, the body entrepreneur,

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is an employee typically in a highly competitive work

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context such as investment, banking, consulting, law,

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academia, who orients to the body in new ways, namely

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as a kind of, capital, capital to be exploited

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for competitive success.

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And so if you allow me to continue briefly, I would like

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to tell you the answers to these two questions.

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Number one, what are these new market practices

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that are more prevalent in organizations?

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And number two, what are these changes that occur in bodies,

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these changes where all of a sudden biology works from the

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outside in for competitive success?

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The one puzzling finding is, so why do these workers work

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so hard and why do they exploit their bodies as capital?

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Um, and the answer is that

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these organizations call their employees, employees,

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universities call their professors employees,

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but in fact, these types

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of workers are positioned more as entrepreneurs.

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And, and what do I mean with that?

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Well, typically organizations assume market risk.

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And what that mean is means is they pay

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individuals for that time.

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Uh, and firing is a means of last resort, right?

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So if there's something, if something changes in the

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organization's environment, the organization deals with it,

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the worker still gets paid for their time.

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But that isn't the case for the investment banks.

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The bankers weren't paid for their time and effort.

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They were paid when they closed deals.

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Uh, and deals could fail to close for a variety of reasons

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that are not under a banker's control.

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So markets could tank buyers

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or sellers could change their minds, regulations could fail

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to come through, due diligence could reveal

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negative surprises and so on.

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So all of this has nothing to do

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with a banker's performance,

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and yet they only get paid if deals close.

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And there's a caveat. So imagine you've just brought in a

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deal that generates hundreds of millions for your bank,

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but you're being paid competitively at the end of the year.

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You are ranked against your peers

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and the top performers, they get paid millions of dollars

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and the lowest 5%, for

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Example, at Goldman, they get fired.

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Doesn't matter how much you bring in.

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So you bring in millions of dollars,

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but even if, if others bring in more,

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you can get fired anyway.

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Uh, so you might think that this is peculiar to Wall Street,

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but lawyers and consultants get paid this way

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and academics, right?

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So in research universities,

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you are promoted based on publications and top journals,

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and these can take years to produce.

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So one is not paid for the time,

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and these journals are very competitive.

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So articles can get rejected for reasons that has nothing

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to do with your performance.

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So, why does that produce the kind

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of indiscriminate overwork that I talked about is

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because you don't know

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how you're stacking up during the year.

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You only know that there are 60 other people who are just

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as talented as you, who work just as hard as you,

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and you need to come out on top.

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So in a consulting firm that I will not name,

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they want to, appear to their clients

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that they have these Renaissance individuals who

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during weekends, do these fascinating things

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that have nothing to do with work to then be refreshed

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and creative for their clients.

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But as it turns out, they, consultants work secretively

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to achieve these results.

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Uh, and to come out on top just like the bankers do.

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I, chose the term entrepreneur,

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because it, the banks

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expose these bankers to market forces.

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Competition is a market force.

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So, let's say, in, at the two investment banks,

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when the market, in one product market, let's say an m

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and a declines, bankers in another area get fired

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for reasons that has nothing to do with their performance.

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It reflects market forces.

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So like entrepreneurs,

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they are being exposed to market forces.

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The organization does not protect them. Like entrepreneurs.

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They need to be sensitive to opportunities in the market,

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let's say, to find deals.

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Uh, and they need to place betts on these deals, right?

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They talk to clients, well, will this deal pan out or not?

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Should I spend my time,

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on deals in the healthcare industry

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where they could be bigger?

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So they need to take all of these risks

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that typically entrepreneurs would take.

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Uh, similarly academics, right?

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If you want to work on a publication,

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that gets published, let's say in a SQ,

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that will take years of your time.

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So you need to make betts along the way,

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about the marketability of this.

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Uh, so all of these are entrepreneurial considerations,

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and that's very different from an employee.

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Employees typically do what you tell them to do.

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They're working on role-based considerations.

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And as I mentioned, if something

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happens in the market, right?

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If, the market in one area, declines,

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it doesn't affect them, they still get paid if they perform

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their role, there's overwork, right?

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But, there's also, there are these deep interventions,

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that are observed in bodies.

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Um, and I had a few quotations that I want to read

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to you later on, but so,

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when this overwork goes on for decades,

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as it did in the bankers that I've observed,

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bodies start to break down.

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Uh, and initially bankers went to doctors,

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but doctors just told them, well, this is normal

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for your age and workless.

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And so one,

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and of course that wasn't satisfactory to the bankers

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because their livelihood depends on them working as hard

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as they possibly can.

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And the surprising thing was

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that I never heard the term burnout, in the bankers.

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Nevertheless, that term,

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is very prevalent in the literature and overwork.

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Uh, and that's revealing

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because burnout is a critique of organizations.

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It involves that they have unreasonable demands

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that exceed the worker's capacity.

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Um, and then the remedy, also Bos on the imaginary

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of the industrial machine, you recharge, you refuel.

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But bankers believed it's not the organization's

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problem, it's their problem.

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They thought, I'm weak, I just have s****y genes.

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Uh, and also they believed that they could not take time off

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because clients would simply go to competitors.

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And then they took it upon themselves

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to fix every single dysfunction that came their way.

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And let me give you one example.

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And this example, comes from an interview

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that I did, in 2012.

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So the mechanisms

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that you hear about now may be quite well known,

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but at the time it weren't.

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They weren't. So here's the banker to fix brain fog.

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I learned about blood sugar and that helped, but not enough.

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Could it be hormones? And tests came back normal.

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So it turned out to be my gut,

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which had been troubling for me for a while.

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But, you know, why was the gut inflamed?

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So I learned about digestive enzymes.

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I learned about the microbiome.

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Um, but my gut didn't get enough enzymes

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because the gall bladder wasn't producing enough bile well

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with the ducts closed.

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So add bile to the mix and so on.

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And so to function at the level that I need to,

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I ended up having to keep all

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of these different systems at an ideal level.

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The hormones, the blood sugar, the neurotransmitter,

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the gut biome, the enzyme, and so on.

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So I'm running my body like a cockpit.

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And that's the body entrepreneurial orientation.

14:12.265 --> 14:13.365
The body is capital.

14:13.905 --> 14:16.925
It is something that you can engineer from the outside.

14:17.385 --> 14:19.205
And so over time, they learn how

14:19.205 --> 14:22.685
to run every single organ from the outside, not

14:22.705 --> 14:25.565
to be healthy, to restore some kind of normal function,

14:25.985 --> 14:27.205
but to perform in a way

14:27.205 --> 14:29.445
that a given deal situation demanded.

14:29.865 --> 14:32.005
So here, is another banker.

14:32.235 --> 14:35.205
When I had this massive breakdown, my doctor cycled me

14:35.205 --> 14:37.205
through all kinds of heavy duty medications

14:37.985 --> 14:41.365
to keep me functioning at work, antidepressants, stimulants,

14:41.405 --> 14:43.965
anti-anxiety, painkillers, cognitive enhancers.

14:44.425 --> 14:48.045
And this taught me to design my physiology from the outside

14:48.345 --> 14:51.870
for one purpose only staying productive and successful.

14:52.465 --> 14:55.405
And here the last quotation, is from a woman.

14:55.585 --> 14:56.605
Uh, infertility.

14:56.675 --> 14:59.965
Infertility, was, quite frequent,

15:00.025 --> 15:01.485
in professional women overall.

15:02.105 --> 15:04.605
Uh, and here the woman, in, during her treatment,

15:04.605 --> 15:06.685
when they gave me hormones, I could tell all the things

15:06.685 --> 15:07.725
that one hormone does.

15:08.075 --> 15:10.605
When I took more estrogen, I was better with colleagues

15:10.605 --> 15:12.965
and had solitary work because I was in a better mood.

15:13.385 --> 15:15.245
Uh, when I took testosterone, I was better

15:15.245 --> 15:17.245
with tough clients and then negotiations

15:17.245 --> 15:20.165
because I was more confident and had more stamina at work.

15:20.785 --> 15:23.285
And now I regulate my hormones depending on

15:23.285 --> 15:24.605
what kind of performance I need.

15:25.425 --> 15:28.285
So in the process, what you hear here is

15:28.285 --> 15:30.885
that bankers develop a new orientation to the self.

15:31.435 --> 15:35.045
It's not an inner psychological space that, you know,

15:35.065 --> 15:36.845
you explore and that's fixed.

15:37.345 --> 15:38.645
Uh, but it's spread out

15:38.645 --> 15:40.925
and it's interconnected with other affordances.

15:41.265 --> 15:44.125
So as one banker said is what I thought was me,

15:44.395 --> 15:46.085
it's really just a chemistry soup.

15:46.345 --> 15:48.805
If you put different chemicals into your body,

15:49.065 --> 15:50.885
you can become a radically different person.

15:50.945 --> 15:53.205
You have a different personality you want

15:53.225 --> 15:55.085
and feel different things,

15:55.145 --> 15:56.765
and you can accomplish different things.

15:57.625 --> 16:01.365
So, that is as much as, I have time

16:01.365 --> 16:04.245
to tell you about the, body entrepreneur.

16:04.475 --> 16:08.365
It's someone who works the body from the outside in

16:08.505 --> 16:09.645
for competitive success.

00:00 - The context of this study is a radical societal change, that I observed in organizations. and this change has been referred to and studied under different names, financialization, neoliberalism, reflexive, modernity, and I'll just refer to it as the market turn.

00:19 - and, this change involves that, domains and societies, families, organizations that previously worked in one way now work differently. They're being structured by the market. And let me tell you the first cues of, how that became noticeable in organizations. and that requires a bit of history. So since the first industrial revolution, organizations have used the bodies of their workers as a kind of capital, and they used all kinds of techniques

00:51 - to extract effort from workers. So, Henry Ford, for example, sent investigators into their workers' homes to verify that they practice habits that kept them productive at work. But as sociologists, Notto has documented, workers resisted, they sabotaged, they loaf, they escaped. and then all of a sudden, starting in the 1980s when this market turn started, things changed drastically in organizations. So in the past and in other cultures,

01:25 - the more education you have and the richer you are, the less you work. But now what you observe is that highly educated, highly marketable workers, bankers, consultants, doctors, engineers, they work much longer than organizations can legitimately require a hundred hours a week. and, and the conditions that a sociologist has referred to as white collar sweat shop. So the kinds of organization I studied, for example, a banker at Goldman Sachs worked 155 hours in one week

01:56 - that left only 13 hours for sleep the entire week. and no time for anything else. And it's not unusual for bankers to sleep under their desks. So as I track these overworking professionals over time, I found not only do they work these hours seemingly voluntarily, but they also took over from organization the task of extracting effort from their body. and let me give you an extract from, a New York Times article so that you can see

02:26 - that this is more widely occurring, not merely in my data. and there the wife of a silicon lawyer, a valley, lawyer, recalls how she cleaned up his home after he died from a drug overdose. And Peter, the lawyer, he used drugs not to get high, but to perform better at work. So here's his wife who said, Peter would joke that the perfect drug for him would be the combination of an antidepressant, a pain reliever, a stimulant. And when I cleaned out, I cleaned out his house,

02:57 - I found the ingredients for it, Vicodin, Tramadol, Adderall, cocaine, Xanax, crystal meth, and the kaleidoscope of pills I couldn't identify, but not for lack of trying. And so like the people I studied, investment bankers, Peter intervened in his body to produce the kind of emotion on demand that he needed to function at work. And so the people I study, they don't only need to work these long hours, sometimes 120 hours a week, but also on demand to generate the kind of emotion

03:27 - and cognition that makes them effective with client. So if you're working all night, but then they meet the client, and they need to be pleasant even though they're half asleep. But then the lawyer comes in to negotiate, a deal. And so now they need to be hostile to represent the client in the best way. Next moment, they need to write a selling memo and they need to be creative.

03:49 - and then they need to turn to another task, where they need to perform in a highly analytic manner. and so they need to switch rapidly through these cognitive emotional states. and typically we think that that is something, emotion is something that works inside out. But since the livelihood of my informants dependent on how well and how flexibly they could do it, they work their emotion from the outside in. and that's one aspect

04:16 - of the body entrepreneur using the body as capital, just like the old organizations did. But now they do it for themselves, and they intervene in their body, much more aggressively than organizations legitimately can. So to continue Peter's story, the wife writes, the last call he ever made was for work, Peter vomiting, unable to sit up, slipping in and out of consciousness, had managed somehow to dial into a conference call.

04:45 - So in addition to modulating emotions on and cognitions like Peter, the bankers tried to fix various breakdowns, that this intense overwork incurred. And I'm giving you this example to show number one, they intervened more radically than organizations possibly can. number two, it shows that this is very different from the health orientation that we saw in employees in the 1970s.

05:11 - You know, the aerobics where people use health to signal that you were a high performer here, people intervene in their bodies regardless of health. And so these anecdotes raised two questions that my study addressed. Number one, what causes these changes in how workers orient to work? and the brief answer that I would love to elaborate if you allow me, is a new set of competitive work practices that uses market logics.

05:40 - and you will see, that that is also observable in other organizations and law firms and invest in other investment banks, in academia. And so the quest, the second question is, what changes in workers when they intervene in their bodies sos radically? and here the key finding is that biology manifests in historically new ways that I have alluded to. So typically we think biology works inside out, and it's not under our control.

06:12 - The best we can do is provide good conditions, but Peter and the bankers believe that they run their biology from the outside in. And so I followed a group of investment bankers over the period of 20 years, starting from the entry into, two, into the two investment banks that wish to stay anonymous. and that allowed me the opportunity to study the market, turn in the organizations that are at the heart of it, and track the changes in people as they occurred.

06:41 - So to now turn to your question, what is a body entrepreneur? Well, the body entrepreneur, is an employee typically in a highly competitive work context such as investment, banking, consulting, law, academia, who orients to the body in new ways, namely as a kind of, capital, capital to be exploited for competitive success. And so if you allow me to continue briefly, I would like to tell you the answers to these two questions.

07:11 - Number one, what are these new market practices that are more prevalent in organizations? And number two, what are these changes that occur in bodies, these changes where all of a sudden biology works from the outside in for competitive success? The one puzzling finding is, so why do these workers work so hard and why do they exploit their bodies as capital? and the answer is that these organizations call their employees, employees, universities call their professors employees,

07:46 - but in fact, these types of workers are positioned more as entrepreneurs. And, and what do I mean with that? Well, typically organizations assume market risk. And what that mean is means is they pay individuals for that time. and firing is a means of last resort, right? So if there's something, if something changes in the organization's environment, the organization deals with it, the worker still gets paid for their time.

08:09 - But that isn't the case for the investment banks. The bankers weren't paid for their time and effort. They were paid when they closed deals. and deals could fail to close for a variety of reasons that are not under a banker's control. So markets could tank buyers or sellers could change their minds, regulations could fail to come through, due diligence could reveal negative surprises and so on. So all of this has nothing to do

08:33 - with a banker's performance, and yet they only get paid if deals close. And there's a caveat. So imagine you've just brought in a deal that generates hundreds of millions for your bank, but you're being paid competitively at the end of the year. You are ranked against your peers and the top performers, they get paid millions of dollars and the lowest 5%, for Example, at Goldman, they get fired. Doesn't matter how much you bring in.

08:58 - So you bring in millions of dollars, but even if, if others bring in more, you can get fired anyway. so you might think that this is peculiar to Wall Street, but lawyers and consultants get paid this way and academics, right? So in research universities, you are promoted based on publications and top journals, and these can take years to produce. So one is not paid for the time,

09:22 - and these journals are very competitive. So articles can get rejected for reasons that has nothing to do with your performance. So, why does that produce the kind of indiscriminate overwork that I talked about is because you don't know how you're stacking up during the year. You only know that there are 60 other people who are just as talented as you, who work just as hard as you, and you need to come out on top.

09:46 - So in a consulting firm that I will not name, they want to, appear to their clients that they have these Renaissance individuals who during weekends, do these fascinating things that have nothing to do with work to then be refreshed and creative for their clients. But as it turns out, they, consultants work secretively to achieve these results. and to come out on top just like the bankers do. I, chose the term entrepreneur,

10:14 - because it, the banks expose these bankers to market forces. Competition is a market force. So, let's say, in, at the two investment banks, when the market, in one product market, let's say an m and a declines, bankers in another area get fired for reasons that has nothing to do with their performance. It reflects market forces. So like entrepreneurs, they are being exposed to market forces.

10:45 - The organization does not protect them. Like entrepreneurs. They need to be sensitive to opportunities in the market, let's say, to find deals. and they need to place betts on these deals, right? They talk to clients, well, will this deal pan out or not? Should I spend my time, on deals in the healthcare industry where they could be bigger? So they need to take all of these risks that typically entrepreneurs would take.

11:10 - similarly academics, right? If you want to work on a publication, that gets published, let's say in a SQ, that will take years of your time. So you need to make betts along the way, about the marketability of this. so all of these are entrepreneurial considerations, and that's very different from an employee. Employees typically do what you tell them to do. They're working on role-based considerations.

11:35 - And as I mentioned, if something happens in the market, right? If, the market in one area, declines, it doesn't affect them, they still get paid if they perform their role, there's overwork, right? But, there's also, there are these deep interventions, that are observed in bodies. and I had a few quotations that I want to read to you later on, but so, when this overwork goes on for decades,

12:02 - as it did in the bankers that I've observed, bodies start to break down. and initially bankers went to doctors, but doctors just told them, well, this is normal for your age and workless. And so one, and of course that wasn't satisfactory to the bankers because their livelihood depends on them working as hard as they possibly can. And the surprising thing was

12:24 - that I never heard the term burnout, in the bankers. Nevertheless, that term, is very prevalent in the literature and overwork. and that's revealing because burnout is a critique of organizations. It involves that they have unreasonable demands that exceed the worker's capacity. and then the remedy, also Bos on the imaginary of the industrial machine, you recharge, you refuel. But bankers believed it's not the organization's

12:53 - problem, it's their problem. They thought, I'm weak, I just have s****y genes. and also they believed that they could not take time off because clients would simply go to competitors. And then they took it upon themselves to fix every single dysfunction that came their way. And let me give you one example. And this example, comes from an interview that I did, in 2012. So the mechanisms

13:18 - that you hear about now may be quite well known, but at the time it weren't. They weren't. So here's the banker to fix brain fog. I learned about blood sugar and that helped, but not enough. Could it be hormones? And tests came back normal. So it turned out to be my gut, which had been troubling for me for a while. But, you know, why was the gut inflamed? So I learned about digestive enzymes. I learned about the microbiome.

13:42 - but my gut didn't get enough enzymes because the gall bladder wasn't producing enough bile well with the ducts closed. So add bile to the mix and so on. And so to function at the level that I need to, I ended up having to keep all of these different systems at an ideal level. The hormones, the blood sugar, the neurotransmitter, the gut biome, the enzyme, and so on. So I'm running my body like a cockpit.

14:09 - And that's the body entrepreneurial orientation. The body is capital. It is something that you can engineer from the outside. And so over time, they learn how to run every single organ from the outside, not to be healthy, to restore some kind of normal function, but to perform in a way that a given deal situation demanded. So here, is another banker. When I had this massive breakdown, my doctor cycled me

14:35 - through all kinds of heavy duty medications to keep me functioning at work, antidepressants, stimulants, anti-anxiety, painkillers, cognitive enhancers. And this taught me to design my physiology from the outside for one purpose only staying productive and successful. And here the last quotation, is from a woman. infertility. Infertility, was, quite frequent, in professional women overall. and here the woman, in, during her treatment,

15:04 - when they gave me hormones, I could tell all the things that one hormone does. When I took more estrogen, I was better with colleagues and had solitary work because I was in a better mood. when I took testosterone, I was better with tough clients and then negotiations because I was more confident and had more stamina at work. And now I regulate my hormones depending on what kind of performance I need. So in the process, what you hear here is

15:28 - that bankers develop a new orientation to the self. It's not an inner psychological space that, you know, you explore and that's fixed. but it's spread out and it's interconnected with other affordances. So as one banker said is what I thought was me, it's really just a chemistry soup. If you put different chemicals into your body, you can become a radically different person. You have a different personality you want

15:53 - and feel different things, and you can accomplish different things. So, that is as much as, I have time to tell you about the, body entrepreneur. It's someone who works the body from the outside in for competitive success.

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