Episode
257
Human longevity: Science fiction to reality
Daniel Sollinger & Keith Comito | JellyfishDAO
Additional video: Courtesy, JellyfishDAO
Related:
- Lifespan.io
- Life Noggin
- kurzgesagt
- Watch our interview with Chris Mirabile – co-founder NOVOS
- The Last Generation to Die – short film
[00:00:09] JellyfishDAO: What if we could go on? Hold the light a little longer. What if your parents could grow healthier and stay? What if all the knowledge and potential you’d gained over your life wasn’t simply lost? At JellyfishDAO were envisioning a future without the suffering and negative effects of aging.
[00:00:33] Peter Bowes: JellyfishDAO is a community of filmmakers, life extension professionals and blockchain experts who are working together to tell the stories of human longevity and life extension through movies and other media.
[00:00:49] JellyfishDAO: Greater public acceptance would move the science faster and ultimately more quickly reduce suffering and save more lives. Movies and stories are extremely powerful.
[00:00:59] Peter Bowes: Greater public acceptance. So how can it be achieved? I’m joined by two members of the jellyfish community. Daniel Sollinger is a Los Angeles based filmmaker and longtime producer of commercials, music videos, and short films. Hi, Daniel.
[00:01:15] Daniel Sollinger: Hello. How are you doing?
[00:01:17] Peter Bowes: Keith Comito is a computer programmer and mathematician and president of the nonprofit organization lifespan.io, a group which, amongst other things, funds aging research and promotes the medical technologies that could benefit healthy human longevity. Keith, welcome.
[00:01:37] Keith Comito: Thank you. Great to be here.
[00:01:39] Peter Bowes: Great to talk to you both. Daniel. Maybe we could start with you. And perhaps you could give me a more fulsome description of what Jellyfish DAO is. And that’s JellyfishDAO starting with a reason for the name. And perhaps just a little explanation behind the theory there.
[00:01:57] Daniel Sollinger: Oh. Sure thing. So, jellyfish DAO. Dow stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. And it’s a way of doing things that have been birthed by cryptocurrency. And, it enables things like crowdfunding, incentivizing people to participate in different projects and things. And, so we, we, we set up a decentralized autonomous organization with, a group of filmmakers, life extension experts and blockchain experts, and the three teams collaborate together, with the goal of funding films and media about life extension, about, healthspan. and that give it a positive view, a positive take on, what’s, you know, the technologies that are that are coming very fast and, because Hollywood has a lot of dystopian visions of the future. we are, we are we are set to set an agenda and inspire scientists and and creators and people to look at the technologies coming as a, as a blessing and as something to there will be a benefit to humanity.
[00:03:14] Peter Bowes: I think the area of this, Keith, that some people watching listening to this might be a little, maybe not fully understanding the involvement of and that is the blockchain experts. I think we can understand medical experts, scientists, researchers, life extension aficionados, but blockchain experts, can you kind of join the dots for me?
[00:03:35] Keith Comito: Sure, absolutely. And I can lead into that by sort of just getting into the double entendre of the name jellyfish DAO, in addition to the decentralized autonomous organization part. As some of your audience might know, there are certain kinds of jellyfish hydras that are essentially immortal. It’s not quite so clean as that, but so there’s a little bit of a pun in the name there. And then for the second part of the double entendre, which goes into your question, is this idea of kind of spreading out and involve, you know, through the tentacles of the jellyfish, etc., engaging all aspects of the crowd to essentially do a form of decentralized science. But in terms of not just the research here, but in funding the projects that are going to support the science through by building narratives. So as an example, what Daniel was alluding to earlier through mechanics, like having a DAO where community members have a token right, they can use that token to vote on specific things. So let’s say we have a movie that’s coming out and we might say, hey, you know, we have these three actors that could be in this role. What do you all think? You know? And you can vote with your tokens, you know, and sort of involve the community in the process. And that can extend to scientific aspects or creative aspects. And this is one of the things that blockchain technology can sort of lean into, because you can sort of clearly see these votes and track the results and know that everything is sort of like immutable. You know, it’s one of the buzzwords of blockchain. So you really know the story of what’s happening, everything can be verified, etc.. So that’s kind of where the blockchain technology comes in. Is this sort of cleaner way to really do sort of wisdom of the crowd? Crowd based initiatives. That makes sense?
[00:05:16] Peter Bowes: Yeah, it does makes a lot of sense. And it’s really interesting. Daniel, at the heart of this, which I’ve kind of alluded to already, is storytelling and telling those stories that resonate with people. I’m going to get you both just to tell me a little bit about yourselves individually. Daniel, you’ve had a lifetime of telling stories, haven’t you?
[00:05:34] Daniel Sollinger: I have I I’m, I just thought, I’m just hitting my 40 year mark as a filmmaker. I started, making short films in high schools. I’ve made a 70 feature films over the last 40 years, and all the commercials and music videos and short films that you mentioned. And, I love telling stories. I love working with storytellers. I think storytelling, is such an important part of, for lack of a better word, agenda setting. You know, that that, you know, any advertiser that’s trying to sell you a product are going to use storytelling. Any politician that’s trying to get you to persuade you to to vote with them is going to be used storytelling techniques. And my goal is to to take these storytelling techniques, we have a very highly accomplished set of filmmakers that are part of the style and have had many successful movies. And what we try to we want to take those skills and those abilities to inspire the general public, to inform and inspire the general public about life extension, longevity. Healthspan. and once you have a story that you can tell, then you can move public opinion or resources or what have you. So, let’s say, you know, with the documentary Super Size Me, that really changed the whole face of fast food. You know, you know, there’s narrative stories about climate change that have moved the needle and, you know, you know, asteroids coming from space or whatever, you know, like, like before, before these movies came out, there was not much public awareness about it. And now, you know, as these movies come out, you know, when movies come out and are able to tell a story that the audience can understand and get emotionally engaged in, then then their interest is is piqued and they extend out from there hopefully and get more involved.
[00:07:22] Peter Bowes: And Keith, from your perspective, obviously not so much of a storyteller in terms of your career, but what fuels your enthusiasm for this?
[00:07:30] Keith Comito: Sure. I mean, I would like to think that anybody who lives long enough and is, is thinking deeply about these matters would come to the natural conclusion that working against like horrific diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer is a good thing, right? That being said, I can’t deny that I probably had some personal life experiences that leaned me in that direction earlier. So without getting into too much information, when I was very, very young, I had close family members perish. and I guess you could say that got me thinking about frailty and mortality at a very early age. And then when I was in my mid-twenties, my grandmother had had sort of the worst version of Alzheimer’s. You can get like, very, very serious and then like protracted in the worst state for like almost a decade. And that really sort of clinched it for me that even if, you know, in a philosophical way, there’s some that can justify a place for death in the grand scheme of life, etc. even if you kind of have that view, that experience sort of really clinched it for me, that there’s no place for like these sorts of diseases in, in a moral society that has the ability to, to fight them. Just to dovetail into the other part of the question, I actually do have a bit of of the storyteller aspect in, in the career as well, because one of the first things that we did at Lifespan.io when when we co-founded in 2014 is engaged sort of like internet celebrities, etc., to do content. So I’m not sure if your audience knows the channel kurzgesagt, which is like a great animation channel, but I think in 2017 I helped to write the script for these two videos on aging that, you know, got like 10 million views each or something like that. And I think that really sort of helped to catalyze a shift in the perception of the field because, moreover, than just the views, the like to dislike ratio was extraordinarily high. And I think that sort of unlocked it in a lot of people’s minds, like, oh wait, we actually can’t like the public is actually there for this if we can speak about it in a logical way. And then we built off that in lifespan by having a we have our own YouTube channel, Life Noggin, with over 3 million subscribers. We’ve worked with Chris Hemsworth and people like that. So I very much second Daniel’s opinion that in any significant movement throughout history, there’s always a parallel artistic movement that drives it. And I think that’s what we’re trying to support.
[00:09:42] Peter Bowes: I think that’s very interesting how you’re using the public feedback to fuel your enthusiasm for this, and perhaps indicate to you which direction you need to be moving forward, because clearly there’s there’s media all around us. There’s social media, there’s traditional media, there’s television, radio, there’s movies. But getting that really sort of very specific feedback of the kind that we can only really get through the data that we can see today is crucially important, isn’t it?
[00:10:14] Daniel Sollinger: I would say, you know, I think this is what’s so great about the blockchain is that, you know, there’s it’s another level up from just fans. You know, fans will like, you know, go and watch movies or, you know, buy memorabilia or swag, you know, for their favorite actors or films or whatever. But the blockchain really enables the community to not just be a passive, be passive in the media making process. But, but, but to be active, to vote, let’s say, oh, there’s this great science fiction novel we want as a DAO to use our treasury to option, you know, the whole group can get involved, and then they’re invested in it. They’re invested in it. At the time you make that decision, they’re invested in every step of the way. So then when it comes out, there’s there’s a whole army of people, supporting it rather than just the filmmakers out there trying to convince the general public to to be supportive. I don’t think you’ll find, communities any more enthusiastic than crypto communities around their particular projects. I mean, the level of enthusiasm and engagement and involvement is so much higher than any other place that I experience.
[00:11:26] Peter Bowes: And Keith, you mentioned your early life experiences that might have may well have clearly have influenced your your train of thought and your enthusiasm for this area. It often interests me trying to identify at what point in life people actually become aware of their own potential lifespan, or healthspan to to a point that they think about doing something that is going to influence how long they will live. What are your observations there in terms of, apart from those maybe more dramatic early life experiences, the kind that you talk about? But for most people, what kind of things do you think really influence people to begin to take notice?
[00:12:09] Keith Comito: Yeah, I think in that sense my story is kind of typical. The people that I’ve encountered that seem to be younger, involved in the anti-aging, broader work seem to have all had some sort of formative experience, some relative that had some horrible disease or something like that, that really started to make them think about this earlier. But I think for the broader public, it is something that comes in a little bit later in life and there’s data to support this. So as an example, I’m not going to have the hard numbers in my mind. But like if you poll, you know, a bunch of 20 year olds and say like, who wants to live to be 120 years old, even assuming health and all and all that, you know, your friends are still alive, you’re still healthy. You know, you might have like a 50:50 on that, right? But if you poll a room of like, very healthy 80 year olds, do you want to live to be like 90? Well, then it’s like almost unanimous, right? So I think it’s more also as you become closer to it, you can’t not look at it. It sort of comes more in your view and you’re like, no, wait a minute. I actually love life, actually. Right.
[00:13:12] Peter Bowes: It’s really interesting. You just used the expression anti-aging, which is something I, I kind of try to avoid using. I prefer the concept of pro aging that we’re all going to get older, and the task is to make the best of it, and to extend the number of healthy years. I think it might be just interesting to get, because we probably all have different perspectives on this in terms of what the ultimate goal is in terms of life extension, what that actually means to you. Are you just talking about extending Healthspan to maybe 85, 90 or 100 or 120, which seems to be the the maximum that most people think that we could potentially extend life to. But maybe, Keith, first of all, where do you stand on on the range of potential life extensions that people talk about?
[00:14:00] Keith Comito: Yeah, that’s a really good question. And you probably even noticed on my face when I was saying anti-aging, I’m like, I’m not sure if that’s the best term, right?
[00:14:05] Peter Bowes: I did,
[00:14:06] Keith Comito: Yeah, there’s a lot of different terminology, but I do like your framing there because I just think it’s better, generally better to always come to a topic with a frame of like, what are you for? Not for not what are you against. Right. So personally, like when I sometimes I see some longevity, long time pro longevity or healthy longevity advocates get asked the question directly like do you want to live 200 years old? Like what’s it about? Right? There might be a little bit of like hedging, you know, like, well, it’s it’s not about it’s not about life expectancy. It’s about health and all this kind of stuff. Right. Which I think is absolutely true. That’s a key point. Like you do not get one without the other like that. That in my opinion, addresses a lot of the potential concerns that people have about like getting old and decrepit or, you know, all this sort of thing. It’s like the only way that you’re going to get significant maximal life expectancy is if you actually promote, like the years of good health, which is what I think everybody wants. Right? But between you and me, like I feel that at least, you know, from knowing, knowing these people personally, it’s a little it does come off as hedging. So when I get asked this question, my answer is simply for my personal self. It must be implicit in the value proposition of life extension, that life is good, that life is wonderful. And I think that so as a consequence of me thinking that I currently would like to live indefinitely and defer that option to my future self, maybe in a thousand years I’ll think differently. And more importantly than that solipsistic aspect, I want everybody to have that choice, whatever they want to do with it.
[00:15:40] Peter Bowes: That’s what you would like. What do you think is going to happen?
[00:15:44] Keith Comito: Okay, so one of the key points here is that I think there should be no illusions that there’s going to be a magic silver bullet that’s going to come out in five years, that you’re going to take a pill and boom, you’re immortal. It’s going to be whatever happens, whatever the upper limit is, it’s going to be a bootstrapping process. So right now, I think we’re at the period where certain small molecules, you know, things you’ve probably heard of or your audience have probably heard of, like, you know, calorie restriction mimic, mimic type things like NAD plus, you know, and etc. those types of things might give you a very marginal sort of increase, maybe a few years here or there. But again, nothing is better right now than just a thing your mama always told you to do. You know, sleep. You know, don’t stress, etc. but I think in the near term, within five, ten years there’s going to be the next wave of therapies your, your things called like for example, senolytics these drugs that could help clear out kind of zombie cells in your body and maybe pairing that with some sort of stem cell technologies. You know, maybe now you’re maybe you can get a ten years or something like that, right? And then in the future, in the farther future, you have technologies that are slowly coming to bear nanomedicine, etc., that I think could do much more systemic things. So I’m to answer your question as clearly as I can, knowing that this is very up in the air, I’m optimistic that people who are youthful now, through that bootstrapping process, might see a future where they live much longer, hundreds of years. But I think it’s going to be a slow and steady and incremental process. And there are a lot of unknown, you know, we might uncover to your point, like right now, 120 is probably like the limit, right? So say if we solve all the problems that we know about, right. There might be some other protein aggregate that builds up that we’ve never heard of. That only comes into play if you live 130 years. Right. So there’s always like unknown unknowns of like where the upper upper bound is.
[00:17:35] Peter Bowes: Daniel
[00:17:36] Daniel Sollinger: Yeah. I want to weight in just for a second because I think the challenge is, is that there’s a, there’s a group of longevity people in the longevity space who are the dreamers who can, who can, who can see or dream of this, this, this bigger future. and I think that but I think there’s an effort, you know, like, I think I think it’s a hard time communicating that because it’s scary. It’s, you know, when people say something like, oh, a thousand years, it sounds crazy or whatever, and, and, and, and, and I think that what’s the public the public thinks linearly, you know, 112345, six, you know, and after 30 you’re at 30 steps. But what’s happening in technology is it’s an exponential growth rate. And and we see it like, particularly now with AI. And as AI is applied to medicine, there’s, there’s there’s just these leaps and these bounds that, that, many of us in the longevity community believe will happen. We don’t know exactly how it will play out, but we think, you know, the sky is the limit. However, saying that and you know is it gets met a lot of resistance. And and honestly, that’s what’s great about filmmaking is that we can make movies about these ideas and, and they be broadly accepted or it’s entertainment and it’s not sort of challenging people’s ideas about God existence, you know, the nature of the species, you know, it can just be fantasy, you know? But, you know, I certainly believe that that some of these things that, you know, can be fantasy or, you know, any scientific, you know, progress actually had somebody before the scientific progress happened who dreamed about it and, and wrote or sang or made plays about it or wrote books about it and in fictional form. And, you know, I don’t know when that sky is the limit is reached. But I do know that technology is exponential and that, you know, computing power doubles every 18 months and that there’s there’s that things will happen a lot quicker than people realize because our brains don’t think exponentially.
[00:19:43] Peter Bowes: It’s interesting, you should say that some aspects of life extension aspirations are scary to perhaps people who might just hear about it, not fully understand what you’re talking about, but think, well, yeah, that is scary. The thought of living eternal life, or even just living to 150 years old, that it’s unrealistic, that it’s verging on science fiction, and then trying to correlate that with the argument that we started with. And that is you want to bring the general public onto your side through storytelling to understand and accept what people like yourselves, like me, like many others, are talking about when they try to raise the issues of human longevity and what it takes and the interventions that are scientifically proven to work that can be applied to ourselves just to improve our health span. There’s a there’s a divide between the science fiction side of things and the realistic aspirations of people. And I’m just wondering in terms of your storytelling, therefore, what how you join the dots in terms of that dilemma, do you try to be fairly modest and realistic in terms of your aspirations when you’re you’re telling those stories, or do you go all in to the to the edge, which is science fiction for a lot of people, but perhaps risk losing an audience because they think it is just that. That it’s just science fiction. Keith.
[00:21:07] Keith Comito: No. Excellent question. So I’m sure Daniel will have a lot to say as well in terms of specific films. But what I think this brings up, which is very germane, is that persuasion is a science, too, you know? So if you want to sway the public, you want to study things like cognitive biases, right. And, you know, for example, to answer your question specifically, it’s not a good tactic to present something like, hey, this is the way it should be. And if you don’t understand it, you’re an idiot, right? Like, like you’re not going to win people to your side. It’s much more effective whenever you can, to put interesting seeds in people’s minds that let them come to the conclusion on their own, like it’s their own idea, right? And it will be their own idea. So and it’s also very useful to use metaphor to tease out these concerns and then speak to them. So as an example, in that course video I had mentioned earlier, we use the myth of Tithonus, an ancient Greek myth, to sort of speak to the innate fears that people have. Like if you just say, hey, do you want to live to be 150 years old? Most people will immediately think of that as like, I’m hooked up to machines and being kept alive, like Darth Vader or something like that, and nobody wants that. And that’s what the Greek myth of Tithonus really addresses. So we can say, hey, oh, you don’t want that. Well, we don’t want that either. That is actually what the current system of medicine maximizes. We’re trying to, like, not do that. So you you’ve really been on our team the whole time. You just didn’t know it. That kind of thing is one specific example, and I just want to give one more point based on the exponential and linear thinking that Daniel was talking about. It’s also through the mechanism of just reasoning. And then this could work its way into to art projects as well. It’s a sort of understand sort of, in a sense, sometimes the broken machinery of our human minds and how to speak to it. So I typically ask three questions sometimes when I’m speaking in crowds to tease out this linear versus, you know, exponential aspect where I’ll say, who here wants to live to be 150 years old? Even assuming health and happiness and friends, you know, you might get a 5050 and say, okay, forget about this question. I’m going to ask you a different question, a different set of two questions. Who wants to be alive tomorrow? Everybody says yes. Who thinks that? The answer to that question, assuming health and happiness, would change tomorrow and people will think about go no, tomorrow, I’m still going to say I want to be alive the next day, right? Assuming hell, well, by mathematical induction, I literally just asked you the same exact question, literally. But the answer was 50% yes. Over here the answer is 100% yes over here. Why do you think that is? And the answer is that in the second framing of it, you’re now thinking about it in terms of your actual self, like infinite tomorrows, where in the first question that 120 year old me is like some other person, so you’re you’re jumping over that gap of what’s called hyperbolic discounting by the way you structured your questions. So that’s just like one example of like when you’re making a movie, you could be aware of these kind of things and try to design your narrative to sort of like, you know, work around or speak to these elements.
[00:24:15] Peter Bowes: So I’m just curious, what style of documentary is this? Do you, for example, start with a blank piece of paper or maybe a piece of paper with a question on it, and that you go on a, as some people say in documentary making a Journey to try to answer that question.
[00:24:29] Daniel Sollinger: Well, I’ve made, several feature film documentaries and what I you know, what I’ve discovered over time is that the writing happens in the edit room, and the best way to go about it is to go, I’ve gone with, you know, very specific treatments and very specific ideas and agendas. And I have found generally that those get thrown out the window. So on this one, I’m definitely it’s totally an exploratory process. and we started shooting. We went to the Bucks Institute and shot a bunch up there, and, we, we noticed how many women there were in the space. And so we started to focus in, on on the women in the space. And just because that seemed interesting, you know, and we cut a little and then we, we sort of wanted to focus more on X Prize. And for me, it’s an exploratory journey. I’m not sure right now what it’s going to be. I have a treatment, you know, and I’m very, you know, very eloquent and long treatment. But, for me, it’s it’s it’s a process of discovery and it’s a journey and it really comes out of the subjects because, somebody that I thought would be a great subject and we start shooting them and following them, they’re interesting, but they’re not as dynamic as maybe somebody else that wasn’t even on our radar that we ran into. So it’s right now it’s, it’s it’s we know that we want to our goal is to communicate to the general public what is happening in the science of longevity, that that is the goal that that we know that’s the broader framework. But how we’re getting there is, is we’re we’re finding out as we go along.
[00:26:07] Peter Bowes: And what do you say, both of you, to those members of the public? And I hear this all the time when you mention the science of longevity, that word longevity, which has become a bit of a buzzword these days, that it’s an instant turn off or even something that would prompt a negative reaction from people, a kind of shoulder shrug, that look that you get, that you’re, you know, you’re chasing something that is unrealistic, that it’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of money, and you might as well. And this is the phrase I hear so much just live and let live now, and just think about today and tomorrow will somehow take care of itself. Keith.
[00:26:44] Keith Comito: Sure. To answer the last part first, which is more philosophical. Yeah, I think that there are benefits to be gained from sort of the the Buddhist non-attachment mindset. Right. You know, of I think that that is good, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t work to fight Alzheimer’s disease. Right? So I think these things can actually be co-joined I’ve found from sort of being on the front lines of the public engagement side of this, through the work at lifespan and crowdfunding and working with celebrities and YouTubers. My boots on the ground assessment is actually that if you just use very sane terms to add, you know, adding the term health does a lot of work. You know, healthy longevity, increasing healthy human lifespan, then it sort of becomes kind of inarguable. And I have found that there’s much less of a negative perception than one might think. There might be a vocal minority there. But again, to call back to the Kazakh example where like it was like 99.99 of like tens of millions of people saying, no, we want this. I think that there’s it’s largely changing now, and we’re having a different problem of maybe, you know, combating snake oil and charlatans and stuff again, because it’s it’s starting to become kind of mainstream. So we’re having the different issue, in my opinion, but I find that the public is absolutely there for these kind of technologies. I mean, almost everybody has a family member with Alzheimer’s disease or something like that. So if you just position it that way, like our goal is to address these things that go horribly wrong with us and cause suffering. And oh, as a byproduct of that, you’re going to hopefully live healthier, longer. Most people have absolutely no problem with that. So as long as you don’t go out of your way to make yourself sound crazy, I think actually there really isn’t too much significant pushback there.
[00:28:28] Peter Bowes: Yeah. And in fact, you’ve just touched on the way that I generally try to respond to that question, which is I will say, well, imagine, remember back to the worst times in your life. And they nearly always surround health, the health of your own health when you’re particularly sick, or the health of your loved ones, or your very close friends. Just that almost that black hole that you sometimes find yourself in thinking, I’m never going to get out of this. And you suddenly, in those moments, appreciate what it’s like to have good health. So imagine if you could only just maybe just delay by a few years, those bad times that your parents or your grandparents or your closest friends are going to experience so that they can enjoy the best of times for longer. And that’s maybe a little clumsy way of explaining it, but that’s essentially Daniel, what I say to people, and hopefully it’s something that can resonate.
[00:29:24] Daniel Sollinger: Yeah. And it’s something I think that you can see evidence of, I mean, you know, like, the former Vice president, Dick Cheney. Like, if you look at his relationship to cardiovascular disease, you know, and how his healthspan has been extended by all this technology that’s come along over the years that, you know, if he had been born 50 years before, would not have been able to extend his life. You know, my dad, just recently passed away, and, he was getting, a tailored cancer treatment that, you know, did not exist five years ago and gave him extra time, you know, so I think if when you think about it in terms of that or you can sort of demonstrate or show how today things are improving our lives, improving our health, giving us, you know, more. I had more time with my dad than I would have had had the, you know, he had stents. He had, you know, gone through other processes. He had, a robot had done some surgery on him at some point, like all this stuff wasn’t possible, you know, 50 years ago. And it meant that I got to spend another, maybe another ten years between all those different things with him than I would have been able to spend, you know, previously.
[00:30:38] Peter Bowes: Let me ask you both this. And I think I’m going to get some interesting answers here. It’s a question I frequently ask people interviewed on this podcast, and that is based on your own experience and especially your research and your intense interest in this area. How do you live your lives today with your longevity in mind? And Keith, I think we touched on clearly it is diet and there’s exercise and there’s good sleep, but can you just give me a snapshot of a day in your life? Or maybe it’s not just a day, maybe it’s focused over a week or a month, but basically what you do to try purely for yourself, to extend the number of healthy years and perhaps extend your health, your lifespan as well.
[00:31:20] Keith Comito: Sure. The good news here is that I’m very sort of OCD and regimented in this regard. So I can give you a very clear answer, because I kind of do the same thing.
[00:31:27] Peter Bowes: I thought you might be. Yeah.
[00:31:29] Keith Comito: obviously, you know, I spend like an hour to an hour and a half in exercises every day, mostly things that are not going to cause damage to the body. You know, your yoga, your tai chi, things that you can do with your own weight, like push ups and pull ups, etc., but no damaging, you know, as an example of a damaging exercise. It might be like Muay Thai kickboxing, where you’re kicking a tree trunk and deaden your nerves not doing that sort of stuff. something else is that I take. I don’t go Kurzweil level, but I have a couple of supplements that I take, you know, NMN there’s a, there’s a company that I helped to in the founding process called Novos. I don’t mean to shill, but if anyone’s familiar with that, that’s a, that’s a supplement that I take that has, you know, ten different ingredients.
[00:32:10] Peter Bowes: We’ve talked about Novos on the podcast.
[00:32:12] Keith Comito: Yeah, yeah. So that was Oliver Medvedik and myself from lifespan. We’re working with Chris in the early days to kind of come up with the formulation and sort of kind of like it’s not an official spin out, but sort of related, in a sense, to lifespan.io So there’s that something that I know is objectively necessary for longevity, but I am bad at is sleeping properly. I’m a voracious night owl. I’m typically up until like 4 a.m. and getting up at like 10 or 11, which is bad, But the reason why that is, is because I’m in sort of like a longevity advocate catch 22 here, where because I’m so under the gun, I guess you could say of like how important that I feel this work is. It can sort of be a little bit self-destructive in a way where it’s just like, I can’t go to sleep because I have to have a meeting with this person, and it’s too important and it’s too important, you know, it’s it’s that kind of thing. So, that’s basically what I do is, is, exercise properly, take supplements that I think are good, but not a million supplements and try to sleep. But I could do that better.
[00:33:15] Peter Bowes: And attention to your diet and nutrition.
[00:33:18] Keith Comito: Yeah. I’m not like super. You know, I’m not like a hardcore vegan or anything like that. But generally, I guess you could say like doing a lazy best effort there, you know, not going out of my way to eat to excess, you know, have a lot of salads and that sort of stuff. But I’m not like, I must not have these four things. I’m not like that regimented. You know.
[00:33:39] Peter Bowes: Daniel.
[00:33:39] Daniel Sollinger: I keep it pretty simple. I exercise every day. I do try to do my sleep. The my my fail. My sort of failing is in the diet side. I’m totally addicted to sugar, and I know it’s absolute poison for me. And I hope that that one day that I’m able to let go of that. And, I think, you know, a community, it shows that, you know, like having community is like a really important element. I work on, my stress levels and, and building community and being in community, a lot as a way to, just improve my life, you know, and I don’t I used to do a lot more supplements. I haven’t really been on that, lately. I think, I get so much benefit from, like, the exercise and the and these other things that, I may reevaluate that. Also, it feels like very often, you know, there’ll be something that’ll come out like, oh, this is this is the magic bullet. And then, you know, years later, there’s, you know, oh, no, that wasn’t it. This other thing is, you know, so I really I really haven’t gone down that, I went once years ago, I went down that supplement rabbit hole, and I. And I just really haven’t been been doing that, I think, I think the, I think mental, emotional, spiritual health is really what’s important, you know, to me in terms of, having a healthy, happy life.
[00:35:07] Peter Bowes: Yeah. And I actually think we’re increasingly understanding more about that because when you mentioned community, Keith, you were nodding there and it was an aspect of your regime that you didn’t talk about. But social connections, I think, we’re beginning to realize just other people and how we relate to other people, especially for older people. If you get over if you maybe stop working, if you’re sort of retirement phase, that is when it’s still crucially important to nurture those social connections. And we’ve heard many times that loneliness, loneliness can kill in a way that cigarette smoking can kill.
[00:35:42] Keith Comito: That’s just what I was going to say. So I was going to cite that specifically. So 100%. Yeah. I didn’t mention it. But Daniel and yourself are absolutely right. The data is, in my opinion, incontrovertible on that fact.
[00:35:54] Peter Bowes: Well, look, both of you, as we just draw this to a close, it’s a fascinating conversation and we could probably go on for three hours talking, diving, diving deep into human longevity. Just want to both of you in terms of your aspirations, especially with Jellyfish for the coming months. You’ve mentioned a few of the projects, but but what’s on your mind and what are your goals for the coming year or so?
[00:36:15] Daniel Sollinger: This could be a big. Year for jellyfish. we are going to be launching, a token and, to broaden our community. and, be able to deploy Treasury to these goals and aspirations that we have, will continue making ageless. We have another movie.
[00:36:34] Peter Bowes: Let me just jump in.
[00:36:35] Peter Bowes: When you say deploying a token, can you just explain that a little bit?
[00:36:39] Daniel Sollinger: Yes. Of course. So, the reason we’re DAO is because we want to take advantage of the world of cryptocurrency, the community of cryptocurrency. And, so we’re going to launch a jelly token. The token is a cryptocurrency that will be called Jelly. And by, uh, acquiring that token, you’ll be able to participate in the governance of the decentralized organization, and you’ll be able to, you know, participate. I mean, that’s the main thing is it’s it’s it’s a community building thing. And through that process that that we’ll have a treasury that will be able to be deployed. We’re already in production on Ageless. We have another movie called Last Generation to Die, which is going along very well. There’s a it’s based on a short that people can watch on YouTube right now, The Last Generation to Die, made by Tim Maupin: we’ve been that’s been gone through the development process. We’ve cast some Oscar nominated actors into that project. And, that is moving along and we’ll, we’ll hope, hope to come to fruition in the next 12 months, I would hope, depending on how things go.
[00:37:49] Peter Bowes: Sounds good. Keith. The future.
[00:37:51] Keith Comito: Yeah, to build off of that, obviously the most exciting thing is what Daniel mentioned is this launch of a token so that the community can get directly involved. And I would love to see the successful launch of one of these movie projects. To piggyback again onto what Daniel said, I think The Last Generation to Die short that you can find on the internet, if you search those terms by Tim is really actually emotionally impactful. So I’m very hopeful that we can get that to become a feature length film, because I think that will actually really touch people. The short touched me, and just in terms of what I’m generally excited about that Jellyfish dovetails into is that I think we’re at a tipping point now in sort of the societal perception of longevity research or whatever we want to call it, is that it’s now shifted into from this is totally impossible. What are we talking about to. Mhm. It might be possible, but is it a is it a good thing? Let’s talk about that. Let’s explore that. So what I want to instill your your listeners, your viewers with is that this is exactly the kind of thing where, like, everything matters. The conversation you have at your dinner table with your parents like, matters. So, you know, reaching out to a policymaker, reaching out to a celebrity that you might know to say, hey, you know, what do you think about this? Right? There’s a narrative that’s going to develop. And I really believe whether that zigs and zags could mean the difference between millions of lives here. So like, I want to instill everyone with a sense of agency, like no matter what you do in your life, even if you’re just like a kid, you know, like sitting on the internet right now, you have a part to play in what I see as a microcosm of the grand human story, you know, this inflection point of whether we choose to take agency over our own sort of biology is kind of like a critical point in human history, and you get to be a part of that, which is kind of amazing. So don’t take that for granted, whether it’s by getting the jelly token or some other way. Stand up for life, you know, get in, get involved. Right?
[00:39:49] Peter Bowes: Stand up for life. I think that’s a beautiful way to sum up this conversation. Keith, I like your idea of an inflection point or a tipping point, which I agree with you. I think we are at that point at least. I hope we’re at that point and the future looks quite exciting. Keith and Daniel, thank you both very much.
[00:40:06] Keith Comito: Thank you for having us.
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