stanete

Maybe what's dangerous is awful UI/UX; not touchscreens

A lot of newcomers wonder what to work on longevity. The longevity field is young and complex, much like a solar system in its early days. Most attempts to map any aspect of it will look both like oversimplification and overengineering. But I've spent the past weeks talking with many people (scientists, investors and founders) and I've mapped, at a high level, what I (or anyone) could work on longevity: funding, talent, media, practical applications, therapeutics and infrastructure for the field. Far from being a complete guide, a post like this would’ve been super helpful a few weeks ago. So here it is for everyone else. I hope it helps.

I’m trying to add just supplements I need. NAD+ or its precursors would be nice in a few years (maybe when I’m 35). I’m curious though: why mushroom complex?

Yeah. I don-t do Zone Diet anymore. Today I just try to eat as varied as possible focusing on getting at least 2g of proteins for every 1kg of weight (I live in the Mediterranean so it-is pretty easy to do). I am trying to introduce intermittent fasting though.

used to be over 95kg (210 pounds) and totally out of shape. I didn't exercise, I didn't care about my health, and I was dealing with severe stress and anxiety. But things are different now. Almost 30 and I'm in the best shape of my life. But the journey has been long and it's not yet finished. If you have a similar story I really want to hear it.

I’ve found that the more context I give to it, the better it is to help me solving a problem. If I spend a bunch of minutes giving info about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what I personally know about the problem space, it will usually help me to either explore more or to arrive at the solution faster.

When I talk about coaching I meant that I told ChatGPT to answer only with questions. In a way, ChatGPT is good at having socratic conversations. Sometimes it gets out of character but it depends mostly on your answers or questions.

This. And AI assistants will mostly help people who are good at collaborating. Think of Jarvis and Tony working together to solve a problem. Now think of you and ChatGPT filling a Value Proposition Canvas or preparing the questions for a user interview. ChatGPT’s current limitation is that it doesn’t have enough context about the problem space. So to get good results I have to talk to it for a bunch of minutes to explain everything. But I’m sure they’ll fix this pretty soon so I could feed it additional context (a bunch of documents or the code of my project).

For me the unreliability is not a problem because I’m not using ChatGPT to search for information but rather to help me think and solve problems. ChatGPT can make incredibly good questions and can create relationships between concepts that it would take me hours to make on my own. So ChatGPT just become my private coach and a really smart actual assistant.

It's all about perspective. From where you are, 100 seems enough. For a 7 year old, 42 seems enough. But if could die tomorrow and you'd be offered the chance to live another day, you'd probably take it. And then the next day, and then the next. And days will become months and months will become years and so on and so forth.

I guess it has been portrayed the wrong way for a long time. All fringe ideas get thrown in the same basket. Singularity, anti-aging research, wormholes and interstellar travel, etc. But most research today is trying to solve aging, not death. It's trying to maintain people from getting in that state of frailty and maintain youth for as long as possible. I got interested in longevity a decade ago but only came back to the community this year and the field has evolved quite a lot. I started blogging again about it and I addressed this specific topic: https://www.stanete.com/coming-of-age/.

The point of drug discovery to slow down or stop aging is not to keep people in that frail state of life for as long as possible. Instead is to keep people in their 30s for as long as possible. Most research out there is trying to solve aging, not death.

If you were going to die tomorrow, and if you had the option to live another day, what would you choose? Then days become months and months become years and so on and so forth.

I felt this way many times. The desire to see everything that will come, to experience it all. Being nostalgic for the future also implies that we're optimistic about what's to come.

It doesn't seem that life extension is going to be unreachable for the majority of the people. Look at what happened with DNA sequencing. Anyone can get their DNA sequenced today (yeah, I know some people in very poor countries can't afford it because they don't even have food but hey, you had breakfast today). Comparing with the human genome project, the target price of most drugs that are in clinical trials today is ridiculously low. And it has to be that way because investors wouldn't be interested in those companies. As a biotech/longevity company, you need a reasonable plan on how to market and sell your research. "Immortality is only for the rich" is cyberpunk science fiction.

That's why what most research is trying to extend healthspan and lifespan. All drugs that are in clinical studies today are either trying to push the old part to later in life or just targeting what is making us old so we don't well, get old. The goal is to maintain that youth.

It doesn't seem to be happening that way. Current research doesn't seem to aim at indefinite life extension but at some decades more of healthy life. The current goal of most companies and foundations is to make 90 the new 50. So it seems that it will happen gradually.

In a few months I'm turning 30 so maybe the fact that I'm again interested in longevity and aging it's not a coincidence. In the past month I've read many books that go over the science of aging so you don't have to. And I made a summary of most of it.

Thanks. I’ll take a look.

Wooow, you killed me with the last words of your comment: “snow on the ground”. Sounds amazing. I’d like one day to be able to swim in the freezing water as well. How and why did you start?

Have you ever took an ice bath?

I usually shower twice a day (morning and post workout) but the morning shower is only water cause I’m already clean. I plan to eventually ditch the hot water in the morning altogether.

Actually there is no need to do it every day as long as you stay under the cold for more than 11 minutes per week. For me, doing it every day seemed easier to ramp up. Once I get to 3-4 minutes under the cold water per shower I’ll think about doing it maybe 3 times per week.

Why are you doing them, for how long and what benefits have you observed?

Wow. Nice. I thought I added the link but I wrote about it here: https://www.stanete.com/cold-exposure/.

I also started doing the same. Start with a normal shower and then turn off the hot water. About the benefits, Huberman said you need at least 11 minutes per week. I do feel leas soar that normally. And about the time, in theory it’s better to not do the cold showers in the evenings because a cold shower will make your body to generate heat and for sleep you want the contrary effect.

I’m interested in what you mentioned about longevity framework. Do you have one? How you got interested in that?

Hey HN. I just wanted to share a change I made in my life recently. Yeah. The cold shower itself was actually pretty terrible but now I’m feeling pretty great. This is not my first time though; I've been taking cold showers for the past weeks. At first I started doing them to recover faster (soon I’ll be 30 and I’ve set the goal to get there in the best shape of my life). But now I've incorporated them in my longevity framework as part of my day to day. Anyone else is doing cold showers or ice baths? I’d love to know more people doing this and your experience with it.

I just finished watching Limitless in which Chris Hemsworth explores the different ways humans can live better for longer by taking on physical challenges such as diving in ice or climbing skyscrapers. I'm surprised to see how in less than a decade longevity advocacy has gone from a fringe topic to a mainstream movement. In a different way than I expected and hoped back then but maybe... the only way.

Why so tall? First plans we saw were underground structures.

Lately I’ve been reading and hearing that leadership is about being a facilitator. And that may be true at some level but it sounds shallow. I want to dig deeper and share with you some of the leadership models Lick used during his career that inspire me in my day to day.

Reid Hoffman talks in his book Blitzscaling about the sacrifices a company needs to make so it can scale aggressively fast. And when your job is to lead a team and you join a company that’s blitzscaling, nobody tells you what was sacrificed.

There may be structural problems, missing information, lack of trust between teams, poor defined business goals, lack of a unified engineering or product strategy, communication problems between departments, huge dependencies between teams, a lot of bureaucracy and the list goes on and on. I’ve faced some of these problems. I tried to solve some, I had to accept some and I’m still frustrated with others. Here I'm sharing my experience about how to identify and deal with some of them. But I also want to know yours.

Compound Returns on Engineering Excellence is just a mental model. A metaphor for a simple initiative I'm working with my team to improve our Engineering Excellence. A way of giving meaning to my quest by telling an interesting story.

Startups are chaotic shit shows. Nothing makes sense. Ever. Even if sometimes it seems it does. And for a short period of time, the anxiety fades away. But the next morning everything changes. Again. And our brain starts trying to solve the puzzle of uncertainty. Again.

At some point in a Product Engineering team you will be tired of every bug or issue being urgent and critical. This usually happens after dealing with several problems informed by late night Slack messages. At this point nobody really knows which issue is an urgent incident, which is worth waiting to the next morning and which isn’t even something worth solving. All this is harmful for the team’s culture and for the business itself. When everything becomes urgent, nothing is urgent and nobody cares anymore.