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Speaker A: Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. And today, on this episode of our Zoozalu series, we are exploring some new frontiers. New frontiers and new technologies, all of which are poised to completely revolutionize the world and change everything about the o... |
Speaker B: Bankless nation. We are once again at Zuzalu, and I'm here with Patrick Lyndon. And Patrick Lyndon has a hot take for the world. Patrick, what's your hot take? |
Speaker C: It's very simple. That life is good and death is bad. |
Speaker B: How dare you? |
Speaker C: Well, we should do all we can to avoid death, basically, is my idea. |
Speaker B: Why have you gotten. And the story here is that explaining this, that death is bad, there's more to this story, but society pushes back on this frequently, so maybe we can unpack this a little bit more. Why is this a hot take? And why do you get resistance for this? |
Speaker C: Well, there are two groups of people. So one group will say, what's your next book called? Kittens are cute, pizza is delicious. That is, they take it as. As obvious fact that death is bad, but not only death, but also the slow death. Aging, of course, is bad. Right? And then there's the other group of peopl... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I think just a lot of people aren't ready to put themselves into the mindset that the human project is one of seeking life. And that's a novel area for people to consider. And so when we say, like, life is good, like you said, like, many people are like, yeah, but then when we start unpacking what that... |
Speaker C: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I don't personally think immortality is the right word because immortality logically means that you're unable to die. And that would be very dangerous proposition, because what could happen if you actually couldn't die? You could have an accident and be buried in a house, and then ... |
Speaker B: So we're not talking about, like, supernatural powers. We're not talking about super men. We're talking about simply the lack of aging and the lack of biological processes that cause us to die. |
Speaker C: Well, so what I object to then is the fact that we are forced to die before we want to die. So it's a little bit about, essentially about expanding human freedom, as I see it. So I find it a prison, really, for us that we have this set limit that we just can't break through. So far, we're trying to. And so w... |
Speaker B: Right? Yeah. So I think there's two boundaries on this argument, that living forever is good, that life is good. One boundary is, like we said, like, well, we always want the option to be able to die. That is an option that we would like to retain. And so we don't want the curse of watching the machinations ... |
Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So in reality, the longevity will come as an effect of the health. And everyone who works in this area see health as being the means to longevity. It's not mere survival that anyone is interested in. Well, I am interested in mere survival. But having the quality of your life being what also ca... |
Speaker B: What would your answer be? |
Speaker C: Well, my answer is I can't give a number. It would be ridiculous to give a number. I don't know what my life is going to be when I'm 200 or 1000 or 5000. If I say 200 would be enough. What happens on my 200th birthday? I'm sure I have tennis scheduled for next week. I'm sure I have some book I haven't finish... |
Speaker B: Right? Yeah. So I think people, when they wake up every single morning, they don't really ask themselves this. But, like, if for the thought experiment, you can wake up in the morning and be like, do you want to die today? And the answer is probably going to be no. And then you can ask yourself again that sa... |
Speaker C: Exactly. But even when you explicitly postulate that we're not going to have, as you put it, the decay function, people still say 90. |
Speaker B: 90, right. Yeah. Well, because they're stuck in that mindset. |
Speaker D: Right. |
Speaker B: It's like Stockholm syndrome. They're, like, stuck in this world where, like, yeah, we live to 100. |
Speaker C: And then it's a. Yeah, it's interesting when you say Stockholm syndrome. So if not all listeners aware what that is, it's basically when it comes from a kidnapping case in Stockholm. In Sweden, actually, it was. The kidnapped victim started identifying with her captors. And so the idea here is that we are ca... |
Speaker B: I will go gracefully into that. Good night. |
Speaker C: Oh, yeah, it's going to. You know, this is just how it is. This is what I want to. I wouldn't want the opposite, you know, and then people start intellectualizing it. So what can I say on behalf of my captors? Aging and death, how can I paint them in a positive light? Okay, I can't escape, but I can kind of ... |
Speaker B: This is like bargaining, right? We're bargaining with death. |
Speaker C: So, philosophy in Montaigne's world, the french philosopher Montaigne is, he says, all, all geared and all history geared towards having us accept death. And he himself tried to. I mean, he was himself in that school of thought that this is something we shouldn't be afraid of, we shouldn't resist, etcetera. ... |
Speaker B: Yeah. I think what you're saying is it's just this blind spot that we've accepted that maybe, like, the medical field, the medical areas of academic study, and actual practitioners, just, like, just don't look there. Because nowhere in humanity have we had the tools or the conversations to actually point our... |
Speaker C: Well, so now is. Well, the thing is, yes, it is now, because now it's what we have. But it could have been. It could have been something we've done the whole last century. It could have been the focus. And, of course, there were people who thought it should be the focus of science very early, like Francis Ba... |
Speaker B: Right? I think it is worth noting that a lot of the world of the health industry, the health academia, health research, health practitioners, the hospital system, like, if you ask a cancer researcher what they're doing, they're saying, oh, I'm trying to, I'm trying to cure cancer. If you ask some like infect... |
Speaker C: Yeah, I'm very hopeful. And I think that the practice, the science, the advent of medicine that actually works on aging, an intervention that works on aging, together with the ideological change, they will feed each other. So the more hope that's rationally based, that people can prolong their youth, the mor... |
Speaker B: So, of course, because you're extending the worst parts of your life. |
Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. It's a terrible waste of money, and it's a terrible, wasted opportunity to relieve suffering. So there needs to be a kind of mindset change here in terms of. |
Speaker B: Dollars spent versus suffering. Reduced is the worst allocation of resources that we have, because it actually probably net increases human suffering. |
Speaker C: Yeah, it's terrible. I mean, of course it's great when you have something that can manage a disease or patch it up or even cure it, it's fantastic. But it's much, much better to have us, nothing get sick in the first place. And it should be obvious. And in fact, I like what you said before, when you describe... |
Speaker B: Healthy people saves us $38 trillion. |
Speaker C: Yeah, it's worth $38,000,000,000,000.01 year. One year. So, yeah, this is where progress can be made. And even if you can't make people see that, it's good for them to live longer, which is absurd that you can't make people see that. But even if you can't, you can say, look, this is how much suffering we're ... |
Speaker B: Yeah. Financially and economically it makes sense. And because keeping somebody alive at like 90, 95, 100 years old is the most costly and precarious time in their life to keep them alive, because when they're dying of cancer at 90, like atherosclerosis or dementia or Alzheimer's, is not far behind them. And... |
Speaker C: Absolutely. And there are more dimensions to it because it's also the fact that when people are youthful, they can work. So you also get taxes from healthy people because it's, you know, we see in France now they're trying to increase the pension age and so on. That's a today necessary, most likely. But it's... |
Speaker D: Right. |
Speaker C: So you have to have to do this in an intelligent way. But all in all, what you get is people who are healthy are able to work longer, which itself is an incredibly good, good for the economy, certainly. |
Speaker B: Patrick, you've written a book. Yeah, yeah. What is that book called? |
Speaker C: It's called the case against death. So that pretty much explains it. And of course, the absurd thing is that I have to write a book like that. It was provoked by, well, I was basically triggered by people's acceptance of death. And how much I have to hear this, uh, that, that, you know, I had people, you kno... |
Speaker B: Right, right. |
Speaker C: But it's just, of course, these all nice people, and it's not that they are evil, it's just that there is a, you know, that concept of the banality of evil. In some sense it just happens. And everybody has that justification and so on. Of course, here it might be to protect themselves from the horror of deat... |
Speaker B: Yeah. There's like four or five big reasons why people will die. Like, one of them is cancer, one of them is metabolic disease, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's. Like, these account for, like, the vast majority of people's deaths. And these all have, like, overlapping comorbidities, right? These all. If you have... |
Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And so if, for example, you accept something like David Sinclair's view that it has to do with, you know, real information, and if you are like CD, the CD gets scratched and so on. I mean, there's nothing good about having a scratched CD, right? I mean, what's good about that? Nothing. You ... |
Speaker B: Patrick, for all the listeners out there that are peaked and curious as to what to do next, what to read next, where to go next, what advice do you have for them? |
Speaker C: Well, my book is very good. |
Speaker B: Surprised that you would answer this. |
Speaker C: The case against death is very, I mean, it's very good because I go through all of the arguments that people use to justify death, and I trace these arguments back to their roots, philosophical roots. So I talk about ancient philosophy and psychology and things like that. Right. And myths, because it's like ... |
Speaker B: Patrick, thank you so much for helping us tell this story and showing us the top of what seems to be a very cool and interesting rabbit hole. So thank you for helping us explore that today. |
Speaker C: Thank you very much. Thank you. |
Speaker E: Cheers. All right, bank of Nation, we are here at the Zuzalu network state, and I'm here with Sergio Ruiz, who's going to help guide us down the path of longevity, which, before we hit record, I realize, has an interesting intersection with some of the events that happened in the 2021 bull market. But we'll ... |
Speaker F: Thank you so much for having me. |
Speaker B: So one of the very, very important. |
Speaker E: Topics at Zuzalu is longevity. And this is a topic that I know Vitalik is intimately interested in, and I've had my own small history with it. But for a lot of our listeners, that longevity is a new subject for them. Maybe we can just start with the basics. And I think that really starts with the conversatio... |
Speaker C: Sure. |
Speaker F: So aging itself is the tendency for our bodies at all levels, from a cellular level to a tissue level, an organ level, systemic level, or a systems level, to head towards atrophy and degradation. So eventually, the forgetting of performance, the forgetting of creation of a new material, the creation of new m... |
Speaker E: Yeah, and the idea of slowing aging or preventing aging, I think, is a pretty common sense practice. As in, like, you eat good food, you exercise, you don't drink alcohol. And I think this is all things that most people know intuitively at this point. But that's also not necessarily the conversation of longe... |
Speaker C: Sure. |
Speaker F: I mean, longevity means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's actually a term that has been used and abused quite a bit. For me, longevity is the combination of health span and lifespan. Whatever intervention, whatever kind of endeavor, project, therapy, drug, helps you not just live longer, but in a heal... |
Speaker E: Okay, so maybe you can just help give us the lay of the land of longevity tech and longevity startups, right? Because from my knowledge that I've been able to gather here, the idea of, like, a longevity community and research efforts very young, it's maybe only a couple decades. So now that we are in the era... |
Speaker F: So, longevity research is very mature, right? In 2000, just to give you a kind of a chronological, or to center us in a chronological spectrum, early 2000, it was immoral to study aging. 2005, the Methuselah Mouse Prize for extending the lifespan of a mouse was very successful in showing the scientific commu... |
Speaker B: Yeah. |
Speaker E: So it's not just operating inside of its own vertical, its own silo, it's being able to find ways. It's probably helpful just to have that integrated with pre existing companies and pre existing, like, domains of knowledge. But just to really make sure I understand the answer, it sounds like actual applicati... |
Speaker F: I would say not only that, we're at the point where professional big funds, beyond VC's, even these are $50 to $150 million check writers and above, are bringing in money so that this technologies can go in human, which is to me, or having been in longevity for twelve years, is the holy grail, is where is th... |
Speaker E: Sure, let's try to make longevity a little bit more real for the listeners. And also for myself, we talked about the idea of epigenetic reprogramming. Reprogramming that allows us to shave off the years and sounds like shave off specific amounts of years going back to a specific time. And we just are talking... |
Speaker B: How does this work? |
Speaker E: Can you make it a little bit more real for listeners? |
Speaker F: Sure. So in the long run, you do want a systemic approach. You want to be able to go in, get some kind of injection or some kind of iv drip system that goes all over your body and starts rejuvenating across different types of cells and such. Unfortunately, that is not the best way to get to market. The best ... |
Speaker E: So the idea is, like, more targeted applications. And so targeting, you said micro needling. It sounds like it's local to the injection site. |
Speaker F: Correct. |
Speaker E: And what are we actually injecting into you? The skin. |
Speaker F: Yeah. So one of the things we could do is like microneedle into the hair, the scalp, and rejuvenate, you know, hair. And that's going to have even some hair coloring applications where gray hair is going to be reversed. But what it's going in is actually these little fat bubbles we like to call lipid nanopar... |
Speaker E: And just to unpack the name epigenetic reprogramming, this is actually taking me back to my biology days. Epigenetics means above genetics. And so it's like this layer above your DNA that chooses what parts of your DNA to turn on and off. And my intuition, from what you said, is that the ability to read the ... |
Speaker F: That's a great way of putting it, by the way. |
Speaker E: Thank you. |
Speaker F: Great job. I like to, I mean, we, some of us understand, and maybe a lot of your listeners understand like computers, right? So if you think of your DNA as the zeros and ones, right, the binary code that makes the computer at the very basic happen in startup, and all these programs are at an epi level, right... |
Speaker E: Maintenance work, right? |
Speaker F: Maintenance work. So that's what we're doing. We're not changing the zeros and ones, but we're reminded we're coming in with the cleaner and the antivirus to come in and just get rid of all the crud and doing the debugging so that your computer runs as optimally as possible. |
Speaker E: And just to really drive this point home, the idea is that this works at your DNA level and your DNA is you. And so I think this is kind of surreal to really try and think about, okay, we can make our skin better. |
Speaker B: I can imagine that. |
Speaker E: I can imagine my skin being ten years ago, the hair, etcetera, my eyesight get better. But then when you apply it holistically to the whole body, that's, I think, kind of when it gets weird for folks, it's like, so imagine you take some 70 year old and you do this program. Do they just rewind back to 20 year... |
Speaker F: So it's good not to give an answer that is absolute. But what I would probably see is, what I would probably say from an speculatory perspective, is you start seeing a lot of benefits on how you feel and how your body performs. Unfortunately, most of the things that are important about aging happen internall... |
Speaker E: You gotta take a nap. |
Speaker F: So that's what we'll probably see a lot of the rejuvenation happen internally, but what I'm most excited is eventually we'll rejuvenate the brain. So neuroplasticity, all of a sudden, you'll be able to remember things or learn new things. Right. One of the things against longevity is like, oh, well, you're g... |
Speaker E: Yeah, certainly. And there's a podcast that Vitalik was on that the clip of this went viral when he said it, that he thinks that somebody's already alive today that's going to live to be 3000 to the year 3000. Do you also believe something along this. |
Speaker F: Nature that's rooted on something called longevity scape velocity? So the CEO at the Methuselah foundation, my business partner, David Goble, actually came up with his idea and it was postulated publicly and popularized by Aubrey de Grey, which is the goal that, you know, eventually interventions that are go... |
Speaker E: If you can, if you can keep yourself alive to the point where technology has advanced to the de aging peak where our technology allows us to de age, then you're good, you've made it. |
Speaker F: Exactly. And that's ultimately the goal. I think that is something that is very possible. I think in five years from now until 2030, it's a very critical stage. So for all those who are thinking of supporting longevity and biotech, now is the time, because I think in the next seven years, we're going to see ... |
Speaker B: Sure. |
Speaker E: Sure. How will this industry, the longevity industry, impact listeners and people today? Or the first, what's going to happen in the near term? What's the first few products that are going to come out of this industry? |
Speaker F: So right now, there's a rush towards creating longevity clinics. And unfortunately, I feel it's just a little bit more of a hype than anything else. Like, you look at a lot of longevity clinics and all they do is just like, vitamin B infusions, right? Whether or not it's longevity treatment, that remains to ... |
Speaker E: What's holding back the longevity industry? Like, what's, what are the obstacles that longevity as a, as a, as an academic study or as an industry needs to get over? |
Speaker F: There's a, there's a few things that are holding back, not just longevity, but the next generation therapies. Very first thing I would say is delivery there's a lot of really cool stuff that's happening at the lab level, at an academic level, that will never make it into a human, because mice are not humans,... |
Speaker E: And how would longevity, in addition to all of the awesome things that might be able to do for us on an age standpoint, just impact other areas of medicine and the healthcare system? What's the conversation like there? |
Speaker F: That's a great point. I think costs driving costs down. I think it's important. I think there's a paper that came out explaining that $47 trillion is what humanity is going to spend by 2030 every year on taking care of an aged population. 47, three. I mean, if you give me $47 trillion, I could do a lot with ... |
Speaker E: Growth in GDP that gets from having a working population. Right? |
Speaker F: Exactly, exactly. A population that is more productive, a population that has neuroplasticity to invent more. A population that is not worried about having to work, you know, seven days a week. But now they've been given more time to kind of reflect about what they can do with their life. What's the best way... |
Speaker E: Yeah, Sergio, maybe you could just take a moment to tell us about yourself and the companies that you're working with and also just if listeners want to learn more, where should they go? |
Speaker F: So thanks for that. I like to help different companies create products in the context of longevity. I've been working with Tern bio, so www dot tern biology dot leucadiatx.com leucadia has a novel approach to solving Alzheimer's. My grandma died with Alzheimer's. After fighting for 17 years, I became indigna... |
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