You can visualize getting older and not dying as being like a chain, except each link in the chain is a different critical component to living. For this analogy to work, think of each different thing as a link, and as soon as one breaks, you die. So the act of getting really, really old and not dying is basically being a chain where every single link stretches to its breaking point at the same time. You die earlier if one link gets stronger while the other gets weaker, then the weaker one amplifies the rate it fails at. You can also get it without one getting stronger, it just helps the weak one to fail faster when it’s surrounded by other strong ones, because increases the rate it must stretch at, for nothing else is stretching to absorb force. Thus the analogy is great, but the chain needs to be made of different systems (circulatory, breathing, mental, etc.) instead of nearly identical systems.

“We’re all born to die.”

Oh yeah? Well, life could surely be a lot shorter then, eh? Seems like we’re born to live. Why else would we keep living longer and longer? Maybe we’ve been given the tools to help ourselves, and we need only employ them.

You won’t have the problem of a 200-year-old man for at least 80 years, so don’t worry about it. In 80 years we’ll have more than enough resources to handle a cool 200-year-old dude.

In ancient Greek mythology, Tithonus was granted eternal life, but not eternal youth. So when he got old, he just stayed old, getting progressively weaker. Eventually he spent his days begging to die. As Homer wrote, “But when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.”

Imagine you stopped aging right this minute, and your body was locked in time age-wise. Now you’re offered to choose how many years you want to live at your current age, and you’ll die the moment you hit the target you write. You’re also given 20 free passes to hand out to anyone you wish to give them the same chance. The catch is, you must write it down within the next one minute, or you will drop dead on the spot. What do you write?

Bill Gates is scared of a longer life. Literally, he admits it: “If I had the right to live a much longer life, I might not use it, the world would be scary.”

A book called The Postmortal covers all the bad things that can happen if we all become immortal.

If you look above you in your family tree, you will see that 8 out of all the 10 people above you that are no longer alive, are likely to have been killed by the same two things, cancer and heart disease. Guess what this means for you? It means you have about an 80 percent chance of dying of a heart attack or cancer as well. Is it wise of you to hope that someone else saves your life? Should you leave your fate and the fate of your loved ones and offspring to the chance that someone else works to find a cure for that which is definitely coming to steal away all that is important to you?

The days of living with our heads in the sand, and hoping that someone else cures our ailments for us, are over. It is time now to take our destinies in our own hands and mold our futures in that that which we are worthy of.

The Grim Reaper is brandishing his scythe in plain view, and he’s coming for you. He’s coming to chop your head off, and the heads of everyone you love, and all your offspring. He’s coming to kill all of you, and you’re doing nothing to stop him. The more you mess around with this silliness of accepting the values of long dead people, who lost the game, the more likely you are to share their fate. They left a book that is poorly written. There’s got to be something better than this.

Giving nothing to the future.

When you diet and exercise, you only help yourself; nothing you’re doing there is helping anyone else. When you build medical technology you not only help yourself, you help all the humans that will ever exist in the future.

If you focus on the problems of today, you earn the right to solve the problems of tomorrow. Futurism is more harm than good. Nano bots are garbage. We already have a godlike Nano bot called the white blood cell. Reprogramming it will outperform “real” nano bots for the next 100 years.

If you had a longer life, you’d sure be able to make some mistakes and correct them before the end. 

What would a generous god give his children?

If you were a god, and could improve human lives in any way you could dream, what might you do? Well, first of all you could prevent bodies from aging; there’s no reason to have these nice people that we’ve worked so hard to create rotting away from birth on their way to a relatively quick and painful disappearance. This planet that we live on is the only one we know of in the entire universe that has the spark of consciousness on it. The flame is worth carrying on.

I volunteered to help create a video for the SENS Foundation founded by Aubrey de Grey. He was a tall guy with such a long beard, almost to the floor. He used to say that there were two reasons he kept doing this work. The first is that no one wants to hear about the problems of aging people, and second was his wife. She was an American fruit fly geneticist at the University of Cambridge. They divorced in 2017.

She was born in 1944, he in 1963. When I met her, she had already lost some teeth, and I could not believe she was Aubrey’s wife, I thought she was just one of the employees there. 

“I predict that the first person to live to 150 is probably already in middle age.”– Aubrey de Grey.

Just think about it, use logic. If you care about your family’s survival, which you obviously do, you should choose to implement a strategy at the family level. Would you divide your family in two equal halves and send one half to live on another side of the world and leave the rest here? In this case if one half of the world dies, the other half gets to live. But you don’t see anyone doing this, because it’s terrible. You would rather take the risk, have the entire family living close by and enjoy the time you have with your loved ones. The idea of dividing a family, set of friends, or the entirety of humanity and sending half of them to live somewhere on another planet just because we don’t want to focus on one specific issue is horrifying. Hence, if one is not happy doing it on the family level, one is not happy doing it at all.

For example, one may not so happy to die earlier because we want to move to another planet. Some may wish Elon Musk had done a little bit differently there, but he’s a massive hero. We need more of those types of people. He thought it was going to fail. He’s like, “Yeah, man. I thought SpaceX was totally going to fail.” But it’s so important that someone had to try it. Hero! Clap! Amazing, right?

We are misguided, and we don’t need to be. We can focus on aspects of life that are better. We can make improvements. We can reallocate funding. Here is a trivia question that everyone fails. Everybody. Prepare to answer incorrectly. Have you heard of cancer? Kills a lot of people.

What percentage of people die from cancer?

Every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death.

Scivive will tell you as an axiom that you can use to answer this question that 40% of people die from cancer. The other 40% was really an extra 60%. If we got 100%, 40% die from cancer, another 40% die from heart disease, which is basically heart attacks. That’s 80%. When you see people researching cancer or heart disease, they’re making the good decision, in that those two things kill almost everybody, and everything else is very small in comparison. Everything else fits in a 10% window. Well, that’s pretty interesting.

We focus on trivial things too often.

You can almost look at life as war because the conflict thing is preprogrammed in our brains to refine our focus, and our focus needs refining. Search in any book store for the ones that are going to help you fight the battle against the guy that’s coming to kill you (Mr. Cancer or Mr. Heart Disease). There are not many. Maybe there’s a business magazine that helps you invest in a company that maybe ends up curing what you were going to have a problem with. The vast majority of these other things are just quality of life hacks, and we are well into diminishing returns of the quality of life.

Imagine a situation where one’s grandparents have all passed away. It’s not awesome. If one wanted to call one’s grandpa right now, he’s dead. Can’t call him. He was a nice guy, smart guy, but gone forever. Now imagine that you could have done something to prevent it, would you ask yourself, “Did I do anything to help him at all? A single thing? No. Watched him die. Okay, could I have done something? Yeah, probably could’ve done something.”

Well, do you want to maybe do something before your dad dies? Would that work for you? Or how about yourself? Would you do it for yourself?

When does a person really die?

When does a person really die? The dream of being able to capture your own destiny and use science and progress to capture your own personal power and well-being, it just dies with a whimper. That’s incredibly sad, common, and usual, and a tragedy. How many people are sitting in old folk’s homes right now that no one cares about? That is also a tragedy of immense proportions. There was a time when those people had meaning. There was a time when those people had opportunity, power, vibrancy, life, and attractiveness. When do they really die? Is it when their heart stops? The brain stops? Or when they could stop caring? Or do they die when we stop caring?

Don’t be so busy with today that you lose tomorrow.

Steve Jobs died from the exact same thing that his father died from, and died eleven years younger than his father was; and if you didn’t know exactly what killed your father would be likely to kill you, then you’ve been living in the land of diversion. He fought the hardest that he could at the end to try and survive, and he failed. One cannot shove twenty years of research and progress into the last three months of your life.

Steve Jobs was respected by many, yet if you are reading this book right now, you are kicking his ass. The decisions you made were better than the decisions he made. He is the loser and you are the winner because you would not trade places with Mr. Jobs today if offered the chance. In the old days, if you tried to find the fountain of youth, you would be thought insane, and it’s likely you might have been. The world we live in today, the technical world, has very little in common with the world our emotions evolved in.

It might be quite useful to coin the term “Die like Steve Jobs” or DLSJ, because it really pins the point on you could be the most successful or technically smartest dude around and still die from some boring crap because the tech didn’t exist to save you.

Shock them by showing the absurdity of the status quo.

“I found a way to give my kid cancer and a heart attack. It just takes a little while to kick in, and I figure there’s chance of kicking in this year, and then it keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger as times goes on until when he’s around.”

There is a fine line between curing and promoting.

How similar is not saving to killing? How similar is not curing to promoting pain? If you have Jon Stewart doing nothing, saying nothing politically, it turns out that in order to be a cool political party, you need attractive, good things to do with co-habitants of that party. Thus, you kind of need fun interesting humorous things to do. You could say Jon was like a mascot.

It’s a fallacy that humans look for intention and human motivation or action, which is the reason they have such a hard time understanding the similarity between not doing and doing. If you see a man choking to death on the street, if you just walk on by and the man dies, then to a certain degree you are responsible. It’s our constant linear forward progression through time that makes it hard for us to see. Here in this world there’s a dead guy and there in that world there’s not a dead guy. The difference between the dead guy and not dead guy is your action. The person doing the action is some other conscious actor that we have to manipulate, and we don’t want people to get used to us doing the right thing and expect it.

Take responsibility—no one else is going to do it. If you think someone else is going to solve it, and you’re overly positive, you don’t do anything. If you’re overly negative, you think it’s unsolvable and you still don’t do anything. Or you can stop being discouraged and you can do something about it. You write a book about it. You can put an ad in an in-flight magazine. You can do some talk shows. You can volunteer to do video.

You do can something, right? We are at the time where we do not have to pretend that there’s nothing that can be done. There are things that can be done, and as Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel said, they’re underfunded. No one cares about them. Poor Aubrey de Grey has been giving talks on TED and at Google, and no one believes. The listeners are just thinking, “Eh, crazy guy. Death is cool.”

Make people feel responsible. Inaction is an action.

Someone may be talking about a loved one by saying, “He’s got a 15% chance every year of developing an ailment, but that’s really just what aging is.” Except you didn’t cause it and therefore people don’t feel responsible for it, but that’s the only way to shock them into understanding that inaction is similar to causation.

Perhaps your grandparents all died already. Perhaps you did nothing to help them. The same fate may soon be shared by your parents, and maybe you’ve done little to help them survive longer as well. Scientists should work on helping their family and loved ones survive with medical tech instead of spending time fiddling with A.I. or space travel. It’s fun to dream about the stars while you’re sinking into the quicksand.

Maybe you shouldn’t really care about death as much as you should pain and discomfort. You should really care about doing the best you can do to alleviate the latter.

Growing old is scary. Ever notice that constant look of horror some elder people have? Maybe it’s just the way gravity affects the very old, or maybe getting old is terrifying.

If you’re able to afford the interventions when they come, then what you need to do is pray, beg, try, preach, pay, and lobby, and hope that these things are there when you need them. You will need them. You, personally, will need help. There will be a day when your body decides it doesn’t want to play anymore. You are not going to like that day. Or even worse, you die without trying to fight it. Your testosterone diminishes and you start to care less about things. It’s harder to make friends, your social circle gets smaller, you end up in a home somewhere, forgotten about.

I had this idea one morning while I was waiting for a date. I thought it might be kind of powerful to make videos about really old people dying or having any of the diseases of old age.

You interview them and ask them questions like, “How do you feel about dying and death? If you’d have a choice, would you want to live longer?”

I was watching a video where a US Air Force captain, a pilot, ejected out of an F-15 moving at supersonic speed. The force of the wind almost tore off his limbs. He was floating on the ocean over which he had flown, hanging on to a little raft for dear life, thinking, “This is it, I’m going to die.” His determination to not leave his family, wife and kids, in trouble—living a life without him—propelled him to fight for survival.

Why then, would we not have that same feeling on our deathbeds? Why do we need to accept that inevitable destiny?

I was talking to a female lawyer this morning, the date whom I was waiting for. She made me think about that same inevitability. When I told her that if I had unlimited funding, I’d pursue ending aging (which is a question she put to me once I told her I wanted to be rich), she said, “Well, if that’s what you want to do with the limited time we have here.” Now, to me, ending aging is pretty worthwhile goal and acceptable use of my limited time here.

The perception that we don’t have a choice about dying can be changed. We can fight it. If we show what the dying looks and feels like through the experiences of some seniors going through the process, maybe we can get them to open up about how scary death is and how they don’t want to die, even by “natural” means (aging). Then maybe, we can change people’s view about the inevitability of dying of aging. 

This section will provide some tips and tricks for overcoming people’s hypnosis and bias.

1. They need to be able to sell this stuff on their own, because viral is good.

2. While teaching them how to beat other people’s silly ideas and habits, you prevent them from digging in their heels if they were the ones that had the stupid ideas.

That way they don’t have to save face and try to argue in their mind against the idea that you are trying to sell.

At what point do you just figure that out that there’s something that could actually be done here. Then, how do you get other people to care enough to act? That art of capturing the moment when someone, who really dies, wishes he could show a dancer dancing, and then, now they just can’t dance anymore. Actually the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation) people might’ve just put that up on their website. There’s a finite number of tropes. Are you familiar with the term?

Hello, thanks for reaching out. The current low-hanging fruit in longevity technology is the marketing and outreach. For the same reason that Bill Gates and others offer matching funds, convincing others to do the right thing has good force multiplication. The scope of keeping humans robust enough to survive damage and improve is so wide that it might be the hardest problem we’ve ever faced. This is great, because human consciousness is the rarest and most valuable commodity in the universe, especially yours and mine, so the expected value of the trade is quite good, even if it’s a hard task.

Directly attacking the pro-death mindset that so many people have has been proven unfruitful by anyone that’s tried it recently, thus Scivive suggests a more sex, drugs, and rock and roll approach. Give them the hedonism they want, and should want, and then pivot into the correct actions intelligent emotionally fulfilled people tend to desire. In this case, rejuvenation technology.

The first step to scale is to convince people their own lives are worth saving, and they can be saved. Skipping the outreach and directly funding research (as SENS does with the Buck Institute, for instance) isn’t as good an idea, for SENS takes in less than a few million dollars per year. And the potential for investment in the space is several orders of magnitude larger. Their pitch just doesn’t seem to resonate, so it’s time for a better pitch.

A person’s donations should both feel great giving, and have a real world measurable effect that is significant. Thus no two donations have the same meaning to them. Would you like to take a look at the book as it currently exists, and then see if it helps you choose a path?

Hide your desire to live, or just come out with it and hear lots of nonsense about it from the mal-informed

Scivive does not want to push an agenda, but if it helps people live a couple years longer, it’d be worth it. Scivive hopes to get the job done by just being straight up and telling people that living longer would be cool. For some reason, you’re hypnotized to think it would be terrible, and if you lived a couple years longer, the whole world would explode, but it would actually be all right, and if it ever wasn’t all right, it turns out there are a lot of buildings you could jump off. Just try not to land on anybody.

This is a lot like atheism. If you’re truthful about it, depending on where you live and your circumstances, you may be killed for your honesty. For instance, if you were a Muslim, and then you say there’s no God, yeah, the death penalty is prescribed. Being a Scivivor should pay you enough profit to eat the slings and arrows of outrageous idiots in most places.

The earth literally opened up and swallowed a sleeping man while his brother was in the other room. Scivive can’t imagine that this could be considered fair, when if you’re unlucky enough to live in Florida, the earth may just randomly swallow you without warning.

Might it be affordable to seismic scan all the earth under these homes?

You might want to avoid Hillsborough Country Florida, because it accounts for 2/3 of the insurance claims for sinkholes in Florida.

When you lose a limb, you get paid by your state’s workers compensation program, and the amount you get paid varies widely not only by the state that you live in but also by which limb you lost.

You could have a safer car; you could check out the local laws on what type of lights you can have on your car. What brightness can they blink? You can change the streets you drive on. You can change your orientation on the car. You could have a driver. You could sit in the back. You could even reverse your seat.

Turns out that sitting backwards in an airplane is 10 times safer than sitting facing forward. According to an article in the December 1952 edition of Naval Aviation News, “Passengers in Navy transport planes have ten-fold better chances of coming out of crashes alive, thanks to backward-facing seats which are being installed in all new planes…. The Navy has decided to install the seats after five years of development and testing showed they gave passengers much more protection for the entire back, neck, head and parts of the arms and legs in sudden stoppages. The human body can absorb more shock by the back than by the chest and abdomen, flight surgeons say.” 

Drive the safest car, at the safest times, on the safest roads, to the safest places, or better yet, just already be there.

Getting people to call 911 is difficult.

It is funny when you learn these tricks, like if you’re getting raped, don’t yell “rape,” and yell “fire” instead. This is because people are more likely to respond to “Fire!” What a weird world we live in. The reason Scivive mentions this is that we are all in that same game. Death is coming for you, it’s coming for everyone that you love and someone needs to be the guy to yell “fire,” not “death.”

(I’ve got to be the guy that points directly at you through this book of science and survival, through my word, directly in your face and tell you that you need to save your own life.)

Some people’s preprogrammed responses to interactions are better and worse, right? If you visualize a punch coming at you, you want to duck it and counter strike. That’s the natural response to when you see a punch coming. If you are carrying a weapon and see some other dude pull up, you may want to pull your weapon, right? In certain environments that’s good, while in other environments that’s bad. If you’re outgunned and there are ten of them and there’s one of you, maybe you shouldn’t draw. If you’re up against a dude that’s a martial artist ten times better than you, or he has friends alongside, or you’re drunk, maybe you should just walk away.

Your preprogrammed responses need to exist because there’s so much profit in acting quickly in so many situations. However, only after you can make sure that you’re accurately applying the correct strategy or you have a broad enough range of quick responses, you are more likely to execute the quick one. This isn’t just something that happens often, these are violent and ultimately rare. Some choose to live in the safest place in the world. These people have had enough of the areas where people pull guns on each other. They have had enough of that violent lifestyle—getting jumped, threatened, or mace-sprayed. There’s no profit in it.

Be near the exit, and know where all the exits are.

If you smell smoke, get the out, and then tell someone. Don’t tell people until you know it won’t limit your and loved ones’ ability to escape.

Nightclub fires happen, and they’re horrible.

It’s very hard to shoot a moving target, so at a distance consider running instead of complying with demands.

Sit with your back to a wall so you can see who is coming in the door.

Avoid large groups of men.

Avoid situations known to get out of hand.

There are no spectators in a riot.

Share your location with friends before you go out.

If you split up, declare what you’ll each do in case you can’t find each other at the time you agree to meet back up.

Don’t loiter in dangerous neighborhoods.

Realize that bad things happen to everyone, no one is immune to the probabilities.

Your cell phone might have an option that under duress it will contact people you list.

Beware while answering the door. If people come to your house asking if you have an alarm, the answer is always “yes.” Perhaps you shouldn’t be answering the door at all really. If you don’t answer your door, you can’t be served with a subpoena, or punched in the face.

Wearing body armor is difficult. Have you ever worn body armor? Do you know how hot and heavy it is? You’ll sweat. The point is, there are some things in life that need to be faster than thought, and those things you should train to improve.

Better than training is controlling your own environment. You don’t need to be in those places where bad things tend to happen. Anyway, that’s not the important part. Everybody knows training exists, and that’s great. What Scivive wants to share with you is that there are some things for which you can train and there are some things that you can’t, and you need to know the difference.

Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)

Better to give money to the poor than science. (Family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)

Dead people make more room for new, other people. (Consider going first.)

Run out of resources. (Live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent.)

Overpopulation. (Colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)

Stop having kids.

Worse wars. (Nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220-year-old person in 2136)

Dictators never die. (They die all the time and rarely of age.)

Old people are expensive. (50% of your lifetime medical costs occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.)

Old people suck. (Death is an inferior cure to robustness.)

You’ll get bored. (Your memory isn’t that good, or your boredom isn’t age related.)

You’ll have to watch your loved ones die. (So you prefer they watch you?)

Like Tithonus, you’ll live forever in a terrible state. (Longevity requires robustness.)

Against God’s will. (Not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)

People will force you to live forever.

Do you think less people make progress faster? What’s your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years?

A complete and honest representation of people’s concerns is beneficial to all parties. Please add to or correct the list where you see fit. 

More people make more progress more quickly. Aren’t you glad your parents didn’t decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, and Da Vinci were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You’re literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we’ll know 100 years from now and decide then.

Man up, save your family, save yourself.

P.S. Curing aging isn’t immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.

See how and when you’re likely to die:

http://flowingdata.com/2016/01/05/causes-of-death/

Screen clipping taken: 9/20/2016 7:40 PM

Americans suck at staying alive

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5281aw/life_expectancy_vs_health_expenditure_over_time/

https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-and-health-spending-us-focus

The reason no cares about medical research now is because they figure that life will just gradually suck before they die, and that they’ll be happy to die.

 A high-energy molecule present in every cell, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), is the form of stored energy used to accomplish much of a cell’s activities. A theory of aging published in the journal BioEssays addressed the link between ATP levels and aging, based on broad research showing that stored energy levels decrease substantially as animals age.

It has to do with mitochondria, which generate the majority of ATP in the cell. They can fuse together to become larger or fragment to become smaller. Fragmented mitochondria are less efficient at generating ATP, while larger mitochondria generate ATP more efficiently.

The theory basically states that the more you eat, and the faster you operate, the more damage you accumulate as a function of metabolism. I think there are some problems with it, because whales seem to do pretty well for the gigantic amount of food that they eat. The Wellcome Collection Museum in London gives visitors a unique insight into what it means to be human. Many collections are nothing short of bizarre, from a Peruvian mummified man to a robot used in the human genome project. One exhibit I saw there shows a relationship between longevity and heart rate that was discovered.

If you’re in your thirties, then you should want lots and lots of more research, even at the cost of application, so that the maximum payoff from their efforts kicks in right when your health is deteriorating. If, however, you’re already in pretty poor health right now, you may be happier with getting a better doctor or facility more properly diagnosing, administering and tracking application of the current state of the art tactics to you.

You must act early. You can’t shove twenty years of research and progress into the last three months of your life. You probably agree that you would love to see medicine kicking maximum ass when you need it. In the meantime, try to keep out of the path of runaway trains and angry alligators.

Peter Thiel says that you have three options when contemplating death.

1. You can simply accept it, thinking that it is unavoidable.

2. You can care, but not believe that you can do anything about it.

3. You can choose to fight, which is the choice Thiel makes.

How valuable is your future?

If your future is important enough to save for, it’s important enough to be around for. If your future is worth saving, it’s worth Sciviving for.

Do you save money? Do you have a savings account? If you are saving for the future, so that at some day in the future, you can have more money because it provides safety, then okay—one would say that that’s a very common behavior. One would say that’s a positive behavior. It reduces the volatility in one’s finances. It’s important. If you could put 10% of your money away for savings, at least every single good personal finance guide suggests. 10% is like the most common number that you’ll find.

You should be putting some money aside to be alive to spend that money. If you’re going to plan for the future financially, you might as well for you being alive financially as well. It turns out that dying is probably more common than going broke. The chance that you will die is a lot more likely than the chance that you’ll go bankrupt.

Well, there are two versions to that. One, if some new technology comes around, you need to be able to afford it. You cannot fund it to the degree that you exclude yourself from using it, by donating so much money to research that you can’t afford the outcome of the research; that’s probably a bad decision.

If you have a choice to buy a stock in a company that heals people instead of hurts people, as in weapons vs. biotech, biotech could be better because there’s never been less war, and there have never been more people. The biotech sector is going to outperform the weapons sector.

If you can put away 10 percent of your income for the future spending, you can surely put 10 percent away for your being alive to spend it! Invest in your future, your real living future, not just your financial future! How many could comfortably contribute 10% to increase their longevity? How many people could comfortably take out 10% of the money they make? If you can put 10% of your money away for savings, you can allocate 5% of it away for survival, and join the 5% club that believes in the future through science.

The concept of putting away 10% of your earnings is a commonly used number for two things: personal finance and tithing (which is giving money to your religion). Well, how much do you give? 10%, obviously. All right, who does that? Mormons, Scientologists, and probably other people. Okay. Well, how’d they arrive at 10%? They probably figured that out in the last 100 or 200 or thousand years, so let’s just go with that number.

If you’re putting 10% of your money away so it exists when you’re dead, you may want to change your ratios up a little bit and maybe put 5% of your money away, and put 5% into being alive to spend it.

What do we need? We need more human beings doing more intelligent things that benefit other people. We need more people acting in their own best interests. We need more people to understand what their own best interests are, which means less complacency, less cowardice, and more correct, heroic, honorable action. If you want to become a scientist and you want to get into biology and biotech, great. If you’ve got money and you’re saving your money for the future but you’re not saving your health for the future, you’re doing it wrong.

There’s a group of people called futurists. What are they known for doing? Not a thing. What do futures fund? Nothing. Yeah, the future is a thing, so what? Why do you want to understand the future? What are you like, a sci-fi author?  

If you believe that science and technology can resolve most human sufferings, and if you believe that science and technology are mandatory components of our species’ survival so we will not become extinct like 99.8% or more of every species that has ever existed on this planet, it is worth believing in Scivive theory core.

There are much worse things in the world that people consider to be their values. They believe in certain social systems that have different names: Marxism, Communism, and Christianity. These “-isms” and “-ities” are certain belief systems that can do good and evil. Understanding them has its benefits, even more when they produce some good lessons that we could learn.

The 300 Club is a group of investment professionals from across the globe, established in 2011 in response to an urgent need to raise uncomfortable and fundamental questions about the very foundations of the investment industry and investing.  

The guys who started the longevity movement had the 300 Club. And so The 300 Club was like, “Look. We need some goddamn money. Give us some goddamn money. We’re a pretty good name in this club. You’ll be a member of the 300 people that tried to do something. You’ll go down in history as important.” I can’t name any I want to list. And I can’t remember how much money they gave, or whatever. But it just seemed to me like something that wasn’t compelling enough. Like, artificially limiting that number to 300, it didn’t work. I got to become a member of it. And it might’ve cost like $12,000 or something. It wasn’t - that’s just, like, off the top of my head. You can look it up. It’s called The 300 Club.

Discounts for longevity: No one’s doing it, but they should be. What’s the other way to do it? The other way to fix it is to give back to people who buy in. Give them a discount.

You have more than 1% margin, don’t you? You’re selling products. You’re working at 40%, 30%, 80% margin, depending on what you’re selling, right? So why don’t you give them a 10% discount? Everybody does that. Most other retailers offer coupons. Retailers have discount days.

Everyone has prices that float around and change. So it makes it interesting to actually keep track of what your prices are so people may actually want to buy from you.

When you get a merchant account, there’s actually a rolling reserve. And you end up having 5% of your gross sales for the last six months sitting in the merchant company’s bank account. And if you’re only working at a 10% margin, it literally means that half of all the profit you make is sitting in their bank account. No one realizes that because they’ve never billed a credit card. Maybe that’s why Stripe’s got such good market penetration. If you Google “rolling reserve,” you can read all about it. It’s a thing. Maybe it triggers at certain limits, or maybe they got so much funding they don’t care, or maybe they’ve got good fraud detection with their merchants.

(Scivive didn’t invent the term “rolling reserve.”)

This could work because a discount costs the company nothing, unless the discounts are being used by their existing clientele. So if you’re using discounts to attract new business, that doesn’t cost you anything. If you’re using discounts and the only people using them are your existing clients, then you’re just sacrificing margin, assuming that the patrons were going to become a long time valuable customer, which isn’t always the case. It is a competitive world. Prices tend to trend downwards due to competition, and increases efficiency. Mostly competition.

The point is, you could promote bitcoin or any social endeavor with a membership tied to a discount. Who else does this? The AAA. The AARP. The NRA. There are many groups that give discounts and referrals. Mensa gets discounts. When you join Mensa, you get a membership card and you can get discounts on Hertz Car Rentals and other goods. What does it cost these companies to do that? Nothing. It’s even good marketing, right?

If you pay with Bitcoin, you get your product. If you pay with credit card, you might not get your product? Why? Because they don’t trust you. Oh, another funny thing; People think that when you advertise, say, a 2.9% discount rate, that if you bill $100, the business gets $97.01. That’s not how it works. That 2.9% discount rate, you also have a rolling reserve for six months, which means that another 5% to 10% of your money will only be released later and doesn’t get paid to you for six months. (That’s to protect the processor.)

You know only science is going to save your life, and so scientists need funding so they can eat and buy cool machines. But you’re worried because you’re greedy, that when you buy a stock in a scientific company that it’s going to go down and cause you to take a financial loss.

The price of the stock going down only matters if you are going to sell; and if you sell, how are they supposed to do any of the science that they need to do in order to save your life decades from now?

In effect, if you buy a stock in a company that may eventually save your life through one of the cool products they make, then, if the price drops in half, it doesn’t matter. Whatever investment you put into that company, they utilized to do a good thing. Now you have to cancel out the effect of other people selling their stock by definitely not selling yours, or by even buying more so that they can continue to have the funding necessary to keep doing working and producing and discovering miracles. In effect, if you really do want to save your life by investing in biotech, you need to never sell your stock; and if, in fact, you’re never going to sell your stock anyway. it almost doesn’t matter what happens to the share price.

Let’s say you’re a gay man. And you care about saving you and your loved one. Wouldn’t it be great if you could donate to prostate cancer? It’s going to pay off better than the breast cancer because both you and your partner are 80 times more likely to get it than breast cancer. Anyway, my point is that I’m glad that somebody figured out to do what I plan to do and have been planning to do for a decade, that I’ve been too addicted to games to care.

A donation has been made under your name to the humans fund.

What?

Why do we have a “Save Your Trees” global awareness fund, but we don’t have a “Save the Humans” global awareness fund? Humans matter more than trees. If we care enough about trees to try and save them, we should care about the humans. So, we need a “Save Your Ass” fund.

So, imagine it’s the year 1980, and you thought, “You know what? I really wish there was some kind of software that I could put in my computer that would let me run everything and be simpler. It would talk to the printer it would let me play games. It would let me use the internet, and it would let me run any software I wanted to. I don’t want a main frame that’s has to have specially designed software that runs on it. I want a general-purpose personal computer and I want some software that will let me do that. I wonder if there are companies that are out there building that.

“Wait, there already are—Microsoft and Apple. I should invest in one of those companies, because if it works, I’m going to get really rich, plus I’ll be able to actually use the thing they built.”

Now imagine you had that logic then, before Microsoft was huge and imagine how rich you’d be. You’d be very rich. Why? Because you invested in something that solved a personal problem for you that also solved a problem for billions of other people what better thing could you invest in? That’s what Scivive suggest you do with health technology.

If you make a unicorn and cash out a billion, you are still better off convincing people to build the tech to save their own lives, rather than use the extra money to try and buy your way to health.

What is worth investing your time and money?

You really can’t avoid that question. If you didn’t make that determination, then you at least have to make the statement that certain things that we spend money on pay off better than others. If you want to help the general populace, you need to stop caring about global warming and start caring about mosquitos and water. Once mosquitos and water and some other low hanging stuff are fixed, then you can start focusing on these other things that matter less. They matter less. And all this is fun and games until we get hit by a meteor and we all die, right? Maybe we should be looking at those extinction level events as well.

We analyzed research funding distribution for different cancers in the United States. Based on burden metrics including incidences, mortalities, economic costs, and years of life lost, (YLL) we identified inequities in cancer research funding relative to burden. Overfunded cancers include breast cancer, prostate cancer, and leukemia; underfunded cancers include bladder, esophageal, liver, oral, pancreatic, stomach, and uterine cancer. We recommend redistribution from overfunded cancers to underfunded cancers to improve the effectiveness of cancer research funding.

Lots of animals go extinct every day. We don’t want to be one of them.

Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket very carefully.

Whom does the interplanetary resource allocation benefit? Resources allocated to interplanetary redundancy enhance the survival of the people “over there” at the cost of you being more likely to die “here.” I prefer to amplify the chance that my loved ones and I survive, instead of splitting 4’s at the blackjack table. Also, you shouldn’t be sitting at the blackjack table.

What people will pay for, and are willing to work at, dictates the world we live in.

Let’s say you could flip a switch and turn everyone in the world into a doctor. Now you have more and more people who excel at fixing others, and a little more research in the sciences and projects that future doctors would have relied on. There needs to be a healthy ratio of application and research. We are so very far away from a healthy weighting amongst these things that improvements can be easily had.

For example, if we assume that the humans in the world we live in do what they do because they choose to, which is more or less the idea behind abolishing slavery, then we can infer that what humans do is a function of what humans want to do. The question then becomes, how healthy and useful is what humans currently and are likely to want in the near future compared to what’s possible?

If you were forced to make a list of the multifarious ways humans waste their time, you’d probably die with hands crippled from the effort long before the task was complete.

People do what they care about, and they care about what they are very well advertised to care about, and to the things they already have a natural emotional propensity to develop a caring for. That competitive “I’d prefer that they die instead of me” kind of feeling we have comes so rarely in life, because we lead such a life of leisure. That’s part of the reason that sport is so popular. You can experience those same emotions of “this is really important, and I have to win,” but the funny thing is that it’s just a construction; you are constructing something that you can think is important so that you could feel those feelings that used to be much more common. That’s what a haunted ride attraction or a scary movie is for, to trigger some emotions that you rarely get to feel.

Scivive wants to use the language, and create the framework that bring out the light that will unhide this piece of junk that comes and kills us in our sleep as we are enjoying our lives that no one is noticing or paying attention to.

You never read the same book twice. It’s a cool saying. It’s like never stepping in the same river twice, but until you actually have seen the same movie twice and then thought, “Oh, I didn’t notice many of the small elements the first time around. I’m a different person.” It doesn’t have the same mental effect. And so if you’re not old enough to have watched a movie, and then re-watched it as though it were new, and noticed a million new things, maybe you can truly understand how much a person changes.

Maybe you would have to interview someone who hates their old tattoo of, for example, Nickelback, maybe then you could understand what it’s like to truly change in taste.

Anyway, Scivive agrees with the American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett on a lot of stuff, particularly the problem—the theoretical, hard problem—of consciousness, and his position on free will. All of these neuroscientists are trying to say that human beings don’t really have free will because they can measure our brains, and know what we’re going to do before we do it.

One could counter by thinking, “Well, that’s great, but I’ve been with myself for longer than you’ve put that machine on me, and so I have the chance to meta-influence. Even if you could predict what I was going to do before I did it, I’ve had the chance to meta-influence the directionality of my decision making for a longer period of time, so that perhaps while I don’t have infinite power to control what I’m doing in the microseconds before you, after you measure and you can predict it, I did hours ago.”

Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.

Transhumanists have a time-frame problem. They’re very concerned with the opportunities and problems of people who are not going to affect them. You must earn the right to be around to face those future challenges. As it stands, just like nearly all of the futurists of the past, they’re dead, they don’t get to see all the robots, flying cars, and shiny clothes of 2017.

If you like nano-bots, try your hand at the white blood cell, it’s pretty great at what it does. You’ll get farther hacking it, than trying to build your own nano-bot version.

Same for trees. Pick up where nature left off. Nature’s already done a pretty great job of it over the very long time it’s had. Imagine the difficulty of building an artificial but very “alive” tree, compared to the efficiency of planting more of nature’s already provided methods.

Build the future you wish to see. Biotech, the life you save may be your own.

Transhumanists are to progress what moviegoers are to filmmaking: Spectators.

Whole brain emulation (WBE), mind upload or brain upload (sometimes called “mind copying” or “mind transfer”) is the hypothetical futuristic process of scanning the mental state (including long-term memory and “self”) of a particular brain substrate and copying it to a computer.

Mind uploading won’t work; the memory isn’t in the meat, it is the meat. The reason mind uploading will not work is that human memory can’t be extracted from the substrate, the physical meat. If you could, you would probably cease to be you. 4chan hackers may own your soul.

A way to understand this is the experiment in evolutionary circuitry where they let code edit and evolve itself to hear and identify two different tones. And after a couple thousand iterations it did a really good job at it, and the time came to find out how the chip evolved to do the task.

It turns out they couldn’t figure it out, and that removing unused pieces of code broke it, and moving it to a different chip broke it, it was using things that we don’t know how to use. They theorize it had to do with threshold voltages, and that the very specific entropy and uniqueness of that individual chip was basically the epigenetics that wouldn’t allow it to be transferred to another chip.

Additionally, digital security is a competition, and whoever has more money wins. If your brain becomes data, you will be hacked. Or perhaps there’s so many copies of you, you don’t mind losing a few. The good news is as long as the meat is the data, there shall be no mind uploading, so you don’t have to worry about digital OPSEC.

Profit cuts through bullshit. Many things that waste people’s time have been the result of building things at great expense that people truly didn’t want, and definitely wouldn’t pay for. Charging for things is the universal decision maker. If what you are doing is awesome, you can charge for it. You should charge for it. An interesting saying is “Never do what you’re good at for free.” You don’t have to be charitable, you do have to focus on solving the problem, even for profit.

You don’t have to figure out what’s best, you do have allocate 5 percent. Foundation, allocate funds, take 5 percent of gross income as revenue. The 5 percent club. Find alternatives to allow parallel investment if they don’t like you. Profit if they don’t’ like charities, and like profit, then give them list of profit seeking startups who, if successful, further our cause. As for government, give them a list of low hanging fruit that can be side channel marketed, without the longevity battle conversation.

If 80 percent of medical costs occur in the last year of life, let’s just move that last year as far away as possible.

Example—diabetes research through SIRT pathways. Results in massive side benefits are likely.

As an exercise to understand how important it is to cure things, imagine a world where many diseases exist in various forms, now imagine that you had the chance to cure them all, and you did it 20 years earlier. Now it’s hard to imagine how important it is because you didn’t have a chance to see how bad it used to be. You have to imagine the way the world could be but isn’t due to lack of work in the right fields. And then take that same lesson and apply it to how the world could be, but must not be because of your hard work.

A great reason to cure a thing is that you would not have to treat it anymore, and you don’t have to consume other people’s lives with the treatment. The majority of the costs involved with taking care of old people are the human costs that it takes more than one person to take care of one person, so you have a problem that’s very hard to solve. This is the reason why it might be more effective to cripple an enemy soldier than to kill one, because you are technically disabling more than one enemy unit with the injury, whereas with the death, you are only getting rid of one.

However, you would have to account for the return to battle one day in the future of the non-dead soldier, so you could consider it a short term gain with a long term cost.

The older you get, and the more things you see, the easier it is for you to make connections. It becomes easier it is for you to see connections where they don’t really exist or where they do exist, but not in the way you imagined. If for example, you find some interesting coincidence, let’s say you Google one thing, and then you’re going through the day and you Google some other thing, and then those two things somehow magically both relate to a third thing.

What you’ll find more often than not is that the reason that those two seemingly so distantly related things actually relate is because all of you—the thing that influenced the first result, the thing that influenced the second result, and the thing that influenced you—were all quite popular and were pre-selected for popularity.

When you use Google, it gives you popular responses. When you get the results that are on Google, the things that are referenced are popular things that people are aware of. And due to this compounding popularity effect the likelihood that one unrelated thing is seemingly attached to some other unrelated thing, then you find them actually related—it’s because that relation is it’s a side effect of being directed through you by a third outside cause. It’s not because the two things were actually pushing on each other.

It’s not the world trying to fulfill your goals and your destinies because you’ve been looking at your dream board. It’s a side effect of you creating the dream board because you were influenced, and those guys having little internal dream boards of their own being influenced in the same way, as in referencing each other and being found by Google in similar ways.

A better example may be, if you are reading the news and hearing about Islamic terror, then you may have seen an image that says that a possible solution to this is by tainting the methods of executing people guilty of executable crimes.

The theory is that if these people are willing to kill for their beliefs and their beliefs say that you’re strictly punished if you are convicted of any crimes, that you may be able to use people’s beliefs that you may consider to be crazy beliefs, however they may feel are quite rational. You may be able to use their beliefs in order to enhance the likelihood that they remain lawful and don’t commit crimes—particularly crimes that have death penalties attached to them in many societies.

Richard James Hart turned out to be a hidden secret older brother to Al Capone. His name was actually James Vincenzo Capone, and he was born not in the United States but in Naples, Italy, in 1892. 

Al Capone was an alcohol smuggler, and his older brother Richard James Hart was actually an anti-alcohol smuggler who put guys like that in jail. One of the claims to fame that “Two Guns” Richard James Hart has is that he was commended by General John “Black Jack” Pershing for the good performance he had in war. It was just interesting that you find a legend of a man over here, and then only hours later after searching and finding some trivia, you see that same, long-dead General mentioned again.

You think that somehow these things are being shown to you because they’re trying to fulfill your goal and the thing that you’re searching for. The reason that you search for the first thing and the reason that you search for the second thing include a unifying factor between these two seemingly unrelated things. But in actuality, Google found both of them because they were both popular. Richard James Hart was originally something-or-another Capone—he invented that name; he chose it, and there were reasons why he chose it.

He also chose to mention that he was commended by this person for the same reason that he chose to mention that he was commended by that guy is the same reason the legend chose that guy. It’s not that those two people are being shown to you to fulfill some dream that you had that maybe on your dream board and that you’ve manifested this into reality.

In reality you are all, all being effected by a third cause. General Pershing had a cool name and went down in history as a cool dude because he did a ton of really interesting things with his life and he had a very interesting name. Similar to “Two Guns” Richard James Hart, because you don’t get a cool nickname like that listed in Wikipedia or mentioned in popular culture unless you did some pretty cool stuff to earn it. They were all influenced by the same desire to achieve the same objectives and to look or sound cool or be knowledgeable and effective in this world.

In the future, we think that something in the present is influencing the world to make these things pop up. In reality what’s influencing these things to pop out now are things that occurred 50 and 100 years ago that are only coming to fruition today.

You could consequently say that people that are choosing to mention this war hero for props and respect for the good that they did in wars today, you know, they’re going to mention that guy because he was the general and he served with them and it really happened. A century from now, that’s what’s going to show up in your Wikipedia page when people look you up is this guy was third-party approved to be cool by this guy who was widely respected to be an authority on who should be given commendations and what they should be given for in the realm of war, so to speak. In summary, what you’ll find is you’ll have more of these feelings of serendipity the more you use Google or voice recognition.

There’s literally a meme that makes fun of this called the “Half Life 3 Confirmed Meme” where you just choose random things and then say that those random things share very well. Half-Life 3 Confirmed is a catchphrase associated with the rumored announcement of the fifth installment in the popular Half-Life franchise developed by Valve.

Let’s just give an example. Half Life 3 has the number three in it. Gabe Newell runs Steam. Steam made Half Life 2. Gabe Newell spoke three times this year. He didn’t speak four. He didn’t speak five. Therefore, Half Life 3 confirmed. Then you just make all those abstractions larger and larger to the point where, yes, if you’re willing to count the letters in a thing and you use first names and presume relation to some other factor.

If you know how the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon works, if you’re willing to make very loose connections and count them as significant, then almost everything in the world is only six degrees away from everything else.

If you’re willing to take any single thing and count all the things that touch it, and then all the things that touch those and then all the things that touch those, and do that six times, you end up with all the things that have ever existed. It’s probably less than six degrees if you accurately count all the connections between one thing and another thing that are possible. Everything in the world might be joined by four connections. That is to say, as effective pattern-finding machines with the power of Google and other advanced search tools that are always going to give you an interesting result and pre-select to know what you’re going to find interesting because they’re monitoring what other people are clicking.

They generated the list in the first place by charting human understanding of what is important for certain key word searches. But they know because they count how many people point to that page with the anchor text of what you’ve searched for.

There is a habit of Google following what people think, and of trying to figure out what people think by reading the links that they create. It’s actually a challenge for the engine to know the difference between purposefully intended as a joke, and political statement, linking behavior, and then more natural links created to help users find what their looking for style of behavior.

In an interview with Craig Venter, he states that you can literally make a photo of a person from just their DNA, and turn their DNA into their voice, and know their age. And that only a few years ago he would have told you some of that was impossible. So if that’s accurate, and it likely is given Venter’s reputation, then anonymity is over. Even if you try to not have your DNA sequenced, we’re leaving DNA everywhere all the time, and it can’t and shouldn’t’ be protected by law, and thus, there’s no advantage to not being sequenced. Basically you’re just giving the world less of a head start on doing the things that might save your life.

Keep in mind that repair components are eukaryote cells, and they have two built in rules that are important here:

1) Any individual cell, once X energy passes through them, they senescence.

2) From the ovum you grew out of until the last cell alive when you die, only 128 cell divisions happen in that line.

That means there is a finite supply of these repair components, these cells, and so there is a limit to how much energy can go through your body before you die.

Therefore, you probably want to make sure “peak” effort in any reasonable time interval (e.g. a month or a week) is pretty high, to encourage the machinery to remain well-maintained, but average effort is as low as possible. You should exercise to have a huge amount of effort for maybe 10-15 minutes per week, sprinting for instance, getting your heart rate up to 130+ and keeping it up for a short while, maybe 20-30 minutes, no more.

Other than that, you should probably avoid exercise and eat healthy. There are other reasons gym workouts are not the best forms of exercise. It’s just not very natural. Running or biking in the real world, aside from being more fun than in a gym, is also a lot better for you.

And probably, having a weekly game of basketball is far better than that.

The difference between working on extinction level events and working on longevity is that longevity is guaranteed to give you dividends; guaranteed to have a pay off at some point, perhaps even by accident. Working on extinction level events is not guaranteed to make you prepare very heavily for an asteroid strike, and when it doesn’t occur, you re-task it for asteroid mining. All you may end up with is a lot of effort into something that was entirely wasted and didn’t work.

Your joints only get worse, teeth only get worse, lung capacity, strength, hair moves from the top of your head to out your ears and on your back. When you have a compelling reason to use soap on your scalp and shampoo on the rest of your body, you’ll know what it means.

A lot of people are talking about how stress in the body, like for instance, adrenaline being commonly present, might addict the child to adrenaline.

You should never chew ice.

Apparently if you change the position of your legs and you squat while you defecate or maybe you lean over real far on the toilet, and it helps with your processing.

The safety position of being turned on your side when you’re passed out drunk or knocked out ensures that If they throw up they don’t choke and die on their own vomit.

All of those things seem like they would be great additions to like the user manual on how to use your body. They should teach you these in school, but most never get taught.

Some people think they are cool and not needy because they’re down with death. They don’t realize that every minute drawing breath is a giant “screw you” to the Grim Reaper, they’re just as uncool of the rest of us still breathing people.

A few centuries ago, kids were not given names until they reached about five years old. Perhaps this is because young children died so often that to name them early could be a waste of time and only increased the grief.

Treating causes instead of effects, ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure.

Correct action is difficult and requires quality data. These things people need to know. If you don’t know them, you can’t make good decisions. Some of the most powerful, intelligent people in the world that you meet don’t know them. How can you expect them to have correct action? If people don’t realize that curing cancer is only worth three years, how can they come to the conclusion that increases in lifestyle may get you three years?

It literally means that if you did a marketing campaign for fitness and diet, you might do better for mankind than curing cancer. That sounds ironic, and is hard to believe. You wouldn’t know that unless you knew the statistics.

40% of people die of cancer, which is an interesting statistic. If you cured cancer—cured it, eliminated it, and it’s no longer a thing—how much longer do you think people would live?

A newborn child is born into a world where cancer doesn’t exist. How much longer is he going to live?

The answer: Four years longer.

Curious fact, by the way. If you cure heart disease, you also only get three years.

But mathematically, if you cure both cancer and heart disease, you get seven years.

Anti-aging technology that could make you 30 again, when you’re 50, gives you another 20 years to kick ass. That’s great. That’s fabulous. People have this thing called the Tithonus error, which is named after the Greek myth where Tithonus wanted immortality. He gets tricked, and he gets to be immortal but not youthful, and becomes more and more physically deteriorated. He has a horrible life, but he’s still alive.

Well, turns out that real longevity research doesn’t work like that. Once you become frail, you’re screwed. We can maybe prevent you from becoming frail for a really long time, if that works. But once you’re frail, we can’t really help you.

Why does Scivive mention that? Because the number of people who are defeatist about aging research is so great and so heavy handed that you almost want to skip it entirely. If this book was written for a lower intellectual level, you would want to skip it entirely and just make it fit into readers’ existing belief structures, and just present, “Hey, create the subset of diseases that is the most related to aging, and then focus on curing those.” And then you get these hidden side effect benefits that you don’t mention. If we’re going to cure diabetes and as a side effect, it also fixes something else, it should make us live a lot longer.

The vast majority of human beings care about their family, themselves, their loved ones, their friends, more than they care about random people that they couldn’t speak to no matter how hard they tried.

There was a Reddit thread on things that you can actually be happy about that are going on in the world. One of the posts mentioned that we’ve gained six years of life expectancy since the year nineteen-ninety. That’s pretty cool.

It could be the case that you should run your anti-aging investment the same way that you care about your life in that if you don’t really care if the universe continues to exist after you die, and you’re alright with everything coming to a stop when you do, then you really should only focus on non-extinction level events. The preparation for X events only pays off in the very rare case that an X event actually occurs, whereas the negatives of aging is guaranteed going to happen to you unless you get hit by a bus, therefore be intellectually much more interested in doing the things we know are coming that aren’t X events.

At this point, one of the problems is longevity research; in fact, Peter Thiel talked about it quite a bit. At a university seminar, he was asked, “Well, what is the technology that you are looking forward to?”

He paused for a moment, as a matter of fact, this was Thiel’s answer: “You know, that question is a little bit tricky, because if I answer it, basically, I’ll be screwing myself out of some profit.” Instead, he talked about research on ageing.

Why is that worrisome? Because it means Thiel is not working on it. So if an internal mental thought process was, “I don’t want to give away anything here, but I do want to speak about something that matters,” then his thought process was, “What important thing could I mention that I wish someone else was working on, but I’m not?” That was Thiel’s answer. It was a compelling answer. It was nice. Scivive is glad he cares, and it shows in his funding, and it shows in his interviews.

It’s well understood. It’s a fact. People make billions of dollars every year on knowing these things the right way, and we know them the right way. What do we need? Well, compare—so if the SENS Foundation’s research works out, and if people live longer, how much better would the world be? The answer lies in where progress comes from. Progress comes from heroes, and the accidents that they make. People are working in one place, and then this new amazing thing happens. Sometimes this new amazing thing is actually the thing one intended. That happens too.

What if the heroes stopped dying? What happens to these guys?

They get to the swing of things in their 20s, do some great work, and you get about 40 years’ effort out of them before they die.

But what if they stopped dying? What if the people are at the top of their game, and we’re still around, kicking ass for much longer than 40 working years? What if Albert Einstein didn’t have to pause to die, and just kept working? And what if he wasn’t alone? What if the other people whose ideas he built from, and the other people that built off of his ideas, were all still alive and all still working together?

You would get the sum greater than the parts. You would get Metcalfe’s law. It states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of participants. Or put simply, every time you connect another person into a network, and are therefore able to make many more connections, the impact is multiplied, and becomes exponential.

You would get not only more progress but better progress and faster progress, because the forefront of technological understanding and advancement keeps rotting and dying. It’s a huge problem for mankind, and a pretty huge problem for the person that died.

Don’t just dream, but dream and do. Longevity enthusiasts are too focused on an outcome and not on the actions to obtain it. When you focus on what you want to the exclusion of the behaviors that are required for it, your dreams don’t come true. Dreams are only as useful as they turn into behaviors.

If you are able to cure cancer before it develops within you, then you may get more than three additional years of life, because whatever you are doing to fix it is going to fix the other things that that could also harm you. Cures that affect more than just the ailment you are trying to specifically target give you a multiplicative curative effect.

Cure cancer—get three years.

Cure heart disease—get three years.

Fund biotech—get more than three years.

The whole concept of marketing and profit eating 1/3 of the money that goes into health care is very tragic. The best outcome for the world of health care is for health insurance companies to be dissolved. The state, that’s already in charge of keeping the humans safe via the military and police, (i.e. in charge of the legalized violence), should also be in charge of the health care system.

The countries in the world that get the best outcomes for their citizens in the health arenas, and at the lowest costs, are the countries that don’t lose 1/3 of their budget to useless advertising and profiting for huge swaths of people that aren’t doing any healing. Corporate executives and marketers can neither prescribe you anything, nor cut out a tumor, nor set a bone. Those people are just leeches on the system. Let them go find more honest and gainful employment by dissolving their industry.

Insurance companies don’t keep clients long enough these days to care about their long term longevity.

If we’re going to be fast and loose with our claims, arguing publicly against medical research and progress results in the deaths of children. The things we work on help all humans, young and old, and so no matter how hard we might try to focus on just aging things, the work we do will help some children as well. Thus in effect you’re arguing for dead kids. Nearly all medical research ends up being useful one day or another to saving the lives of children.

By the way, this progress is going to be made whether you argue against it or not. When you’re dead and rotting, those of us still around will still be making progress in medicine, and at some point whether we intended or not, we’ll live longer. The only question is, is it better to have it faster to help our loved ones, or to watch our loved ones die before the tech exists? If you want to die early, go by yourself, don’t ask me and the rest of the world to join you.

We have famine and war and poverty. Which one of those killed 100,000 people today?

If you support the idea that it’s better for humans to die earlier instead of later, then you should be overeating and not exercising, because it will assist in bringing death to you sooner.

Think of all the ways you land on medicine as the correct path. Tired of spending money on old people? 90 percent of the health care budget? Kill them, or heal them. Which do you prefer? What about people who might just get there soon, should we kill them before they start racking up healthcare bills?

If you must group people and label them, better you label them by profession than race. Profession over nationality is good as well. What has more of an effect on what you know, what you do, and how you think about things, the work you do for a living, or the location of your birth?

Wow, the longest living people are dying off and have negative population growth, because not dying is only valuable linearly, but childbirth is valuable geometrically.

Working on aging doesn’t make you immortal, and it doesn’t stop death, it just works on aging. Working on aging doesn’t pay quickly, it only pays very slowly over time. If you did it perfectly, you would only add about one extra year per year, if you didn’t die from the non-aging- related things.

You saw a man walking around town with a bicycle helmet on—in this case, a very special bicycle helmet. This helmet had a firearm attached, firing directly into the wearer’s head. You’d have to ask the person why they would wear something that was supposed to protect them, and then defeat the purpose by having something that was supposed to harm you sticking right through it.

So imagine you ask this man, “Why are you wearing such a dangerous thing?” and received this response:

“Don’t worry about it, I know it’s there, but it’s better to live my life not worrying about it. The trigger only pulls very, very, slowly. I know it will kill me one day, but that day is likely very far in the future. As long as I don’t get hit by a bus or killed by something else, it’s better. I want to live my life how I want to live it! My ancestors all died from headshots from these types of helmets, so it’s quite normal. I don’t wish to be missing out on life by trying to find a way to get out of this trap, so just leave me alone!”

How many great people have died the same way their parents have? You see a parent destroy a life with alcohol, and then you see the offspring do the same. Why is it so hard for people to put up a fight against something that is so obviously going to kill them?

We all have invisible guns pointed at our heads, and the triggers are being squeezed slowly. Some things we do shake the triggers dangerously; some things relieve the pressure on the trigger a bit. Some of us put up a good fight against inevitability, others, not so much.

Learn from others’ mistakes. Everyone’s invisible gun helmet is a little different. They seem to be handed out at birth like a combination of your mom’s and dad’s, just like you yourself. Some peoples have long trigger pulls. Some have hair triggers. Some fire a bullet of such a low caliber that you can survive the first shot, maybe even the second. Since the gun in invisible, you have to figure out what yours looks like by the effects of your parents had on them.

Know thine enemy. Know thyself. How did your parents die? Their parents? Now fight. DO NOT DIE LIKE THEY DID! PUT UP A FIGHT! Have the courage and responsibility to die with a fight and not a whimper. We’re lucky enough to have the tools to actually put up a great fight these days!

There are aging populations worried about losing their perceived former greatness, and they think that importing all kinds of new blood within the borders of their country is the path to greatness. They also want to have some backs to load the weight of their aging populations on top of.

If they were slightly smarter, they would learn from Apple and America’s example; you can take all of the profit from a business and all of the excellence from a business, and leave the slavery and marginalized working for free (and danger and pollution) in someone else’s country, while you get to keep all the profit and intellectual property, and quite literally get farther ahead to the point where you are the most profitable consumer products company in the world.

You not only don’t get any of the pollution from the manufacturing, you can externalize all the costs of destruction to the earth, and you can have below market wages that would be illegal where you operate. You don’t even have to bring your profits back, either; you can leave your profits outside the country as well and let them grow tax-free.

Part of the reason that people don’t fight hard enough for life is that they’re perhaps not that passionate about life. If you really wanted to sell someone on the idea of survival, perhaps the same things that influence in their day to day life would work here, for instance, procrastination.

Die later, not today.

Scivive would like you to consider this original math: for every day you extend the average human lifespan, you get an extra 270,000 entire human lifespans out of it because you’re applying that across 7.5 billion people. This example used an average health lifespan of 70 years; you’re getting at least 250,000 extra entire human lives out of increasing the average human lifespan by a single day. That’s worth fighting for.

What if cryonics started working? Cryonics is weak. Only because they’re quite terrible at it currently, and if the tech appeared to put you back together after being frozen solid, then the tech could also exist to make mass copies, edits, and remixes of you.

The most precious commodity in this universe is human consciousness, and the only place we are aware of it is in the human mind.

In a speech by Paul Graham, who was talking about the book he wrote called The Hard Thing About Hard Things, he says that the future is where biology meets information, which is funny because all biology is information. Every single living thing that we are aware of in this universe is merely executed code in the language of DNA. No DNA, no life.

He isn’t the only one to feel this way. We now have Human Longevity, a San Diego-based venture launched in 2013. Its goal is to build the world’s most comprehensive database on human genotypes and phenotypes, and then subject it to machine learning so that it can help develop new ways to fight diseases associated with aging.

We have Calico, a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan.

We have $500 million of synthetic biology startup funding this year alone (2015). There’s a conference in San Francisco, and there’s a synthetic biology startup accelerator headed up by Bill Liao in Cork, Ireland.

Google also has X Development, concerned with “moonshot” ideas. X Development (formerly Google X) is Google’s semi-secret research and development facility and organization, which has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet’s corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. Work at X is overseen by entrepreneur scientist Astro Teller, as CEO and “Captain of Moonshots.” The lab started with the development of Google's self-driving car.

Y Combinator is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, started their own moonshot team and funded their first synthetic biology company. The tides are turning so that we will have the tools that we need to save our very own lives. Y Combinator now has a fund for biotech headed by Vijay Pande.

As great as these things are, more is better. The availability of microchips and electrical components in the 1980s allowed Apple to get its start in a garage, and so must the tools to improve our own bodies be available at home to get the same type of experimentation and progress. When we can tinker with biology the same way that researchers love to tinker and engage with electronic gadgets today, we will see an explosion of innovation and progress.

What do we need?

We need more people becoming researchers now to create the products within the next ten years to go through the FDA for 5 or 10 years to be ready in 20 years, when you actually need to use them. If we work on saving people who are already old and doing more of what we already know, it may not save you, but it’ll save your children. If we work on getting safer from Russians, it won’t save you, it won’t save anybody.

By the way if you work on making the world a better place by improving the economy, that’s like trying to suck researchers through a very small straw. You can make fewer people have to drive taxis, so now there’s fewer people wasting their time driving cars, so now those people can flip burgers, and the burger flippers can become secretaries and the secretaries can become researchers and then somehow, you might get a researcher out of the deal—maybe somehow.

That’s ridiculous! Let’s get great progress directly. And if the world gets better in the meantime, which is likely, that’s fabulous. But let’s not pretend that we’re curing people’s diseases by making cars run better or curing people’s diseases by making paint last longer, or curing disease any other way than curing the disease.

Scivive believe the following categories are the most important to care about:

• Biologically related things.

• Processing artificial intelligent things that allow us to do biology better.

• Machines and imaging and diagnostics and science.

• Material science that allow us to do things in biology better.

Things in that area, along with computing, electronics, and intelligence theory; those industries are very likely to help.

Who do we care about? We care about everybody, but we care about them at a different time. Do we care about students? Yes. In 20 years, students just getting out of college can start to make a difference. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to wait 20 years? How would I shift those productive discoveries 15 years earlier? By not injecting information into somebody that has such a long time before they hatch.

Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that advocates using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others.

Example: The cost of a guide dog for the blind is $42,000. As an alternative, the cost of performing surgery to correct trachealis, the blinding stage of trachoma, often costs as little as $40 in developing countries. This surgery is 80% effective. Therefore, sight can be restored to 840 people for the cost of one guide dog, and the guide dog does not restore sight. 

One need not be a billionaire to have no idea at all what is going on in other peoples’ lives. To live in a bubble is more the rule than the exception.

Although some suggest everyone should delete Facebook, let’s be fair to Zuckerberg. If the people on Facebook were better, Facebook would be better. Much of the problems of Facebook come from the problems of the people on it. Sadly Facebook seems to amplify these problems by optimizing for time on site, making hidden decisions about what you see and what you don’t, etc.

A billionaire trying to make the world a better place is usually better than a billionaire who is a greedy bastard. There’s surely exceptions. It’s not the status of billionaire that’s important per se, but the quality of their charitable endeavors.

“Connecting” the world is just a tactic, a means to an end, advocating for better ends is superior. Sometimes people take the power you give them and do worse. Technology on its own can be used for good and bad, you must advertise hard for the good if you want the good to manifest. In the end, if the world deleted Facebook, it would be far better off than any charitable deployment of funds the Facebook founder could make.

The world needs more Scivivors.

The more Scivivors there are, the happier and healthier we shall all be.

Life is quality multiplied by quantity.

Quality is far into diminishing returns. Quantity can be multiplied tenfold. The best in their fields die, right when they’re most useful. What would Edison, Tesla, Franklin, Bell, Feynman, etc., be producing currently if still alive?

Since quantity is literally the hardest problem we are aware of, how shall it be attacked? By charity? Let’s be serious, look around yourself right now, point to the things charity created. Now cease the futile exercise.

1. Marketing as Bill Gates does. However, all lives are not worth the same; you, your kin, your friends, they are worth more. Fund the research that saves them, do not dream the silly dream that all lives are worth the same.

2. Profit not charity. Take a look at osfund.co (human longevity Inc.). Sustain and grow, instead of using charity until running out of runway.

3. Longevity Fund, or “save your assets fund.” You can buy the S&P500, why not the biotech index minus the companies solving problems you won’t have? Reduced malaria drug allocation, increased cancer and heart disease. If you survive malaria, you are still going to die of cancer and heart disease, so let’s work on those 40 percent killers.

4. First book, personal excellence, things you can do to Scivive. Get rich, be loved, and live forever... If selling ideas is good enough for Bill Gates, e.g. Gatesnotes.com, givingpledge.org, it is good enough for me and you. Spread the word. This genre seems easier to understand.

5. Second book, things that are important. However, they are rarely actionable in your personal sphere of influence (politics, currency, voting, economics, geopolitics, environment, interesting yet un-actionable for the common man things.

6. Longevity fund. Biotech index minus things unlikely to be useful in saving you and your loved ones’ lives.

7. Companies not a subset of NASDAQ Biotech Index, too small, or in a different jurisdiction.

8. Biotech / Sym-bio startups.

9. Popularity improvement, aka “The Martian,” whereby science and tech are portrayed as heroic. The world needs not hero worship, and the leather-ball-throwing and kicking, non-scaling great strategies of 2,000 years ago. Let’s make heroic the things that actually work these days. We need 20-year-olds in school now, learning for five years, creating for two, and getting their approvals through FDA in five years. It could be as long as 17 years before these new scientists can directly help you. How many humans can you heal? Can you save thyself and thy family?

There are a limited number of strategies. You can kill your way through, but in order to do that, you’ve got to be more than a good storyteller. In order to kill your way through, you’ve got to be a badass killing machine who can recruit, influence, control, and maintain order with other badass killing machines to kill so many people that the ones that are left are like, “You know what? I would rather believe this new cool story and stay alive than believe the old cold story.”

Wealth, power and domination. Fill your mental environment with what you want to become. If you think about baseball all the time instead of sales and pricing, you are going to get better at one and worse at the other. That is a funny thing about being human. If you learn a thing but you don’t use it, eventually you don’t know it anymore. It’s just like fitness—if you get fit and then stop working out, one day you aren’t fit any more. It is, however, possible that the post-forgetting state is better than the pre-, because you can refresh back to knowing faster than the first time you learned something.

If science is so great, and science is responsible for nearly all the awesome things we have now, then why hasn’t science become more popular? Why aren’t there many science t-shirts? And why aren’t there many science songs? And why aren’t there many science heroes?

Because no artsy-smartsy creative person has gone through the effort.

Until science has cheerleaders and sports teams and songs, why would you want to join the science club at school? The science club is not getting you laid, and the science club is not getting a suntan and banging shots on Daytona Beach at spring break. We’re kind of programmed for that type of state change to be favorable to us.

If you want science to start outperforming other things, then you better start meeting the needs people have that science doesn’t seem to care about. Science cares about truth and learning about the real world—human beings, not so much. It will never be considered a success if it doesn’t increase the number of people who see medical progress and science as something good to do. Increase funding, make better career decisions, and establish an unconscious weighting of human behavior that puts healing the fellow human first. It will also be carrying your family medically and yourself medically. If one were forced to make a choice between wealth and survival, good living comes before profiteering.

For the religiously inclined, if one of the best things Jesus did for this world was to heal people of sin and heal people of pain and disease, then you might want to learn from this example. If you were given the power to heal your fellow man or yourself, you should feel obligated to do so; for if you don’t, that just an indirect form of suicide.

There are some alternative paths that can be sold with longevity as a checkpoint. For instance, if you care about the progress of technology, and you want the smartest, most effective, cutting edge badass people of the world to not rot and turn into worm food, then to keep producing and innovating they need to survive. Perhaps not forever, but maybe just a year longer. Maybe that would be great.

Logo, song, dance, ritual, handshake, stuff that takes time to enforce “us versus them” mentality, and right of passage, thus no freeloaders, transactional cost to avoid freeloaders. Viral spread, unique benefit statement. What is the minimum viable associated bullshit that has allowed other collective groups to be effective, such as Scientologists, Freemasons, and I guess some dumb ass cults, although I really hate to look to those guys for what works. I guess there are things to learn from EST Forum in regards to group thinking, experience or something. There’s a Wiki page on LGAT (Large Group Awareness Training).

 In the grand scheme of things, it’s just as well because you should really be focused on the near present and not shifting around subjects so often anyway.

Melt the chains of the past to forge the tools of the future.

Terms like Faith, justice, liberty, honesty, truth, honor, love, and god have old, less useful meanings. Redirect their energy into your own.

Like taking over a machine gun on the beach at Normandy, you can now point it at the team that used to control it. The great power that they used to wield has now gone the other direction and increased the amplitude versus them.

Liberate them using weapons forged from the chains that bound them.

Great marketing involves branding, stylization, packaging, color, contrast, and texture in all the things that make one product sell better than another product. Literally, you will see 100% more value on the better-packaged product.

Why do you think a video card comes in such a big box? All video cards can come in little tiny boxes. It’s all empty space. Why the big boxes? Because packaging matters a lot, and perception matters a lot. What someone else told you about something matters a lot.

What would be the best thing to put on an idea to represent an idea? What would be the best thing to put on a book to represent a book? What’s the best thing to put on a company to represent a company? What the world has converged on as the most hyper-useful symbolism, it is a logo or a symbol. You’ll see throughout history that the most powerful ideas are associated with a logo. Even countries have flags. A flag is a logo for a country. Families used to have a coat of arms. A coat of arms is a brand able logo for your family corporation group.

This concept of assigning a powerful, unique, brand able, memorable symbol to a thing which can be believed in, or bought, or understood is super powerful, because I’m selling people a way of believing and a way of existing that I think is better than most of the other ones people actually follow. I don’t know how much of the good life that I’ve had has been a result of executing a lot of these beliefs I have. If you want to measure up, for instance, people that create belief systems and where they were when they created them, I don’t know of anyone else that was successful anywhere else before they created their belief system. I don’t think Marx was successful in business. I don’t think Keynes was successful in business, but he’s responsible for all the economic policies we have, and those are more important than anything else.

Maybe terrorism is coming up as being more and more important as WMDs become easier to acquire. Many of the people who have created all of the ideas that are executed in the world that we live in were worse off than I am. I’m doing better than all of those guys. If you want to think that there’s some prerequisite performance that you have before you create a belief system that you can feel confident in spreading around, look at all the other belief systems that are out there and examine where the people were in their lives before they created those systems. The first thing they ever did that was good was start selling that idea; prior to selling that idea they weren’t making cash, having sensual success nor doing anything that a man would really be happy about.

Now, that’s a wide brush. L. Ron Hubbard, the guy who invented Scientology that affects millions of lives and has billions of dollars of assets—he was a science fiction author. That’s what he was. A failed science fiction author who became like a god to millions of people. Scivive can spread better things with more wholesome intention, with less of a cult-like appearance.

If you want a man to like you more, ask him to do a small thing for you. Once he does that small thing for you, now he’ll like you because he thinks that he should like you because he just did something for you. This creates incongruence in your head.

Benjamin Franklin coined that. If he didn’t identify it, he at least popularized it. Just like Ford didn’t invent the assembly line, he popularized it. He didn’t invent the automobile, he popularized it. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, but he made one that worked.

Use the tools of business to sell great ideas. Companies and ideas are best represented by symbols and the reason that you see symbolism being used is that it predates human language and human speech. Symbolism and assigning meanings to symbols has been around for a really long time.

It’s really effective. It’s the reason that most successful companies have a logo and a certain color scheme, and a certain placement in the purchaser’s mind in regards to whether they’re better or worse than other companies for a specific thing.

That’s why companies use halo products because they want all their other products to look better. Therefore, they release one amazing product so at least you know that the company’s capable of great quality when they choose to be. Then, you assume that that applies otherwise in other places in their life, just as you assume that a person that is good at something has a capability to be good at other things as well. Or, as a person that is to the best of your knowledge good at nothing, you’re likely to assume is good at nothing anywhere else as well.

Good movements should have logos, brands, the mnemonic techniques, slogans, placement and unique benefit statements and money back guarantees and every interesting useful, powerful effective thing that exists in business for selling products. These should also exist for selling ideas. If product packaging is so important in the retail areas of life, then why don’t we see ideas with as much focus on the packaging?

“Hey! Become Jewish! Jewish people are some of the richest people in the world, because what we do works!” Now that can be true or false, who knows, but some portion of the people exposed to that idea would see it as compelling, and would act upon it and may give competitive advantage to Jewish people for the acquisition of new followers.

There are all types of packaging around ideas, phraseology, product placement, money back guarantees, and unlimited time offers, and things that motivate human beings to adopt products. Those things are the result of well-structured, well-designed marketing. No one is majoring in idea packaging and sales for ideas that aren’t profitable. This is because some of the best ideas you’ll ever learn, no one’s making any money on.

If I teach you that the best way to divide a cake between two children with the children cutting it is to introduce the restriction that one person cuts and one person chooses, I would be showing you a magical logical strategy that has no equal. I’ve looked and will continue to look for that type of amazingly simple, awesome, fairness generating strategy; that if one person cuts the other person chooses. The person who cuts will make the absolute most perfect cut down the middle.

It’s similar to how we have prevention of conflict of interest. One lawyer can’t represent two parties that are in a conflicting arrangement. A doctor can’t make money prescribing you to get tests. A judge can’t make money by sending you to a for-profit jail; can’t be paid by the customer and get a check every time he sends a new person to that jail. Those strategies for preventing conflicts of interest and assuming that even honest people can be corrupted with strong enough perverse incentives. I think that that type of great thinking and great logic, an application of successful business practices should be picked, employed in less profitable but infinitely more wholesome and useful places in the world in regards to being ethical, and a good person and doing good things. Those ideas aren’t being promoted, packaged, or branded. They also aren’t being made exclusive and don’t have a member’s reward card and don’t get you discounts. But they could. Whoever solves that problem makes the world a much better place.

The point of that last paragraph was the successful billions and of dollars, trillions of dollars of commerce that runs on those strategies should be used for good ideas and religious strategies. If those good ideas out there in the world that aren’t being promoted using business tactics and they’re not being promoted using the religious tactics, at some point must admit that those things aren’t being promoted properly. If they’re worthy of it, someone needs to actually do that form of promotion.

Doctors apply what researchers create. Researchers create with fancy computers, machines, imaging, chemicals, compounds, and the like. Lots of non-medical science goes into nearly all the things that the medical industry considers progress. There is no medical progress without general scientific progress. General scientific progress is the tide that lifts all ships.

Obviously we can influence which parts of the science get focused on to be more useful to the medical fields. There’s also all kinds of side benefits from great science that improves the quality of life that you just can’t get by focusing on medicine alone. You really can’t forget the engineers, businessmen, legal systems, salesmen that allow all these great things to reach you.

But if you are making a “rate-my-sandwich” app, I truly hope you find a more empowering and fulfilling use for your creative skills.