Some of us will live forever.
And if you’re reading this, that may or may not be you.
I am so bullish on this that I just renamed my company to Immortals.
Below: + why I think this + early signs of success + how to increase your odds
Yes, I know this sounds crazy.
Immortality has been an ambition for humanity since the beginning of recorded history.
The immortality I’m referring to is specific: increases in life expectancy will outpace the rate of aging. Meaning, we will no longer, by default, expect to die of natural causes.
I believe this for three reasons.
#1: Immortality already exists
Biology can reverse some features of aging, and in a handful of organisms escape it almost entirely. For example, a sperm and an egg from two people in their 30s carry the legacy of bodies that have aged for decades (the egg in particular has been arrested inside the mother since before she herself was born), yet they combine to produce an embryo that resets the aging clock to zero.
The immortal jellyfish goes further and resets itself within one lifetime, reverting its adult cells to an earlier stage through transdifferentiation and starting its life cycle again. And in the lab, scientists have begun doing this deliberately, making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from mature adult cells such as skin fibroblasts, and using partial cellular reprogramming to turn the clock back in the tissues of living animals.
#2: AI offers new potentials
Biology is a hard problem. For most of history that complexity was beyond native human capacity. AI was made for this complexity. The clearest demonstration so far is protein folding. Predicting the three-dimensional shape a protein folds was an unsolved problem for roughly fifty years, and it mattered because a protein's shape determines what it does in the body.
DeepMind's AlphaFold2 effectively solved it in 2020, reaching a median accuracy of 92.4 out of 100, a level long thought to require the slow, painstaking work of crystallizing a protein and solving its structure by X-ray crystallography. It then released predicted structures for over 200 million proteins, nearly the entire catalogued protein universe, in a fraction of the time anyone expected.
#3: Early signs are encouraging
These aspirations are not imaginative. With the current tools in biotech Sid Sijbrandij, the co-founder of GitLab, was diagnosed with an aggressive bone cancer, osteosarcoma in his vertebrae. He treated his own disease like an engineering problem, he used AI to help direct several experimental, personalized therapies in parallel and drove the cancer into remission after standard medicine had given up. Around the same time, an Australian named Paul Conyngham, with no medical or biology background, did something similar for his dog. He used AI to help design a personalized mRNA vaccine targeting the specific mutations in his dog's tumor, and after it was given alongside another immunotherapy and within a few months the main tumor had shrunk by roughly three-quarters.
How to increase your odds…
I. Don’t die in the meantime
We don’t know when these longevity therapies will become available. Your goal is to be around when they come out. Buy yourself as much time as possible by looking after your body to the best of our scientific knowledge. Good diet, sleep, exercise will get you 80% of the results.
II. Find your achilles
Longevity therapies will likely be outcome specific. Individual specific drugs/therapies that target specific things like…
> prevent and remove arterial plaque > prevent and reverse neurodegeneration > specifically target and eliminate cancers, or pre cancerous legions > prevent frailty and muscle loss, and regain muscle mass, strength and, bone density > reverse skin aging > rejuvenate eye health > restore lost hearing > etc
We don’t know what therapies will be available first. Your goal is to find what your body is struggling with most and keep that problem at-bay until a therapy is available that can fully cure or reverse it.
For example, do you struggle with cholesterol? Blood glucose control? Cognitive decline? Find your achilles heel and reduce your risk systematically.
III. Invest in the future
There are three macro trends happening on planet earth right now, and the people who bet on these areas have the highest risk + reward.
> AI > Immortality > Energy
As we know, power comes in many forms: money, social, political, health, etc. Those that can collect power in these fields will have the greatest chance of positioning themselves in the Immortal future.
With time, Immortal therapies will become broadly available.
If you’re reading this: don’t waste your chances by burning down your life points on a yolo-like mentality. Grind culture, addiction, social media pollution, fast food, porn, alcohol, these are all corporations turning your life into their profit. This is the Die Economy.
My company Immortals has the sole objective of turning your time, attention, and life into more healthy, functional, and prosperous minutes, days, and years. The Don’t Die Economy.
Good luck.
