Four For Friday | May 26, 2023
Four For Friday | May 26, 2023
LF51 | Uni of Chicago's Market Shaping Accelerator, Saudi spends $1bn / year on longevity, McKinsey's latest aging report and $10k for a digital penguin.
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week relating to systems change, healthy longevity and / or Web3. Enjoy!
University of Chicago embraces market shaping
The home of homo economicus is embracing market shaping. The new accelerator, launched with a blizzard of Nobel laureates, has $2m to fund novel systems change ideas to address pandemics and climate change. The approach will be influenced by ‘advanced market commitments’ that have successfully created drugs for otherwise ignored diseases.
Saudi spending $1bn a year on aging
Announced last year, Saudi is putting $1bn a year into longevity research. Other than the rather unfortunate name, Hevolution, this is an interesting effort to support quality global projects that could benefit the nation’s rapidly aging population and potentially revive its rather poor brand image.
Report: McKinsey’s global survey of older adults
McKinsey sureyed 21,000 older adults about later life health and aging. Purpose was #1 driver of good health, together with stress, movement, learning, skills and volunteering. Worth reiterating that medical care and genetics didn’t feature. What was fascinating was the inverse relationship between perceived health and life expectancy - suggesting that people living longer lives feel those extra years will be in poor health.
Web3 B2C play Pudgy Penguins sells $500k of products
This child’s toy comes with an NFT. Billed as a way to onboard people into the Web3 ecosystem, this soft toy retails on Amazon for around $20 (selling 20k of them in 2 days), and comes with it an NFT as a digital certificate that provides access to an online version of the toy, together with traits. Rather than spending $20 on the physical object, you can buy a digital representation for $10k from OpenSea. What are you waiting for??
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen