Four For Friday | November 29, 2024

LF150 | Calley and Casey Means mean business, digital twins for democracy, longevity escape velocity, Australia's social media ban + anti-spam granny

Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!

The Calley and Casey Means Show

The Joe Rogan Show was one of the reasons Trump got elected. The macho motor-mouth is adored by legions of young men among his 19m subsribers, looking for meaning and a role model. He isn’t afraid to take pot shots at the establishment, and though there’s a fair amount of conspiracy theories, sometimes he’s right on the mark.

His interview with public health advocates Calley and Casey Means was fascinating, and crosses political boundaries, These siblings are authors of Good Energy, both health tech entrepreneurs and the force behind the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement.

Joe hardly got a word in as these knowledgeable, articulate and passionate advocates for transforming the US health system roamed across the dysfunctions of our current malaise, laying blame at the door of corproate food, pharma, farming and medicine, and the politicians in their pocket. The collective mess has prioritzed profit at the expense of a national health crisis.

A few snippets:

• A chronic care crisis. There’s a massive increase in chronic conditions, with half of the population being obese, and a third of children having pre-diabetes. There’s been a 3x rise in early onset dementia in last decade. Half of Americans will develop cancer in their life. A quarter of men under 40 have erectile dysfunction and 800,000 people a year die from preventable heart disease.

• ‘Oestrogen stew’. Women are now going through puberty as young as ten years old due to massive amounts of oestrogen in our society, and as a result we’re swimming in an ‘oestrogen stew’. This is likely caused from:

  • Plastics. The decay and breakdown of 8 billions tonnes of plastic that’s been created in the past century resulting in microplastics. These can now be found in every organ of our bodies (including the ovaries and sperm cells) and approximately half a percent of our brain mass is now microplastics.

  • Pesticides. America lets companies put thousands of chemicals in the environment as pesticides, fertilizer, and food itself (which doesn’t need to be proven safe before it ends up on the shelf). Certain pesticides increase aromatase, which converts testosterone to oestrogen.

  • Visceral Fat. Driven by sugar, increasing amounts of visceral fat acts as an organ that converts testosterone to oestrogen.

• Blinded by science. The pair believe in science but also believe that it’s disingenuous to demand for expensive, human, randomized, multi-year, double blind randomly controlled studies to prove that for example, ingesting toxic chemicals is bad. That model of one individual intervention having measurable impact ignores complexity science, which suggests that you need to ‘join the dots’ and look at bundles of impacts holistically.

• Corporate corruption. According to the duo, Tufts nutrition school receives 80% of its funding from the food industry and Stanford’s medicine school gets half its funding from pharma. Calley worked as a lobbyist and recounts ‘successes’ his former industry getting Coca Cola on food stamps (where it’s the biggest budget item) and getting drugs such as anti-depression pills and Ozempic becoming the first line standard of care. Given the lack of education about nutrition in medical schools, most doctors and especially politicians seem unaware of the benefits of good food, sleep and exercise, and further that it can be paid for by a prescription today.

The So What: The next few weeks will be fascinating to watch how many of these transformational thinkers and doers get government roles in the new US administration, and whether they’ll be able to swim against the embedded political-industrial machine.

2 hours of interviews to create a 85% accurate digital twin

A Stanford project got 1000 people to do 2-hour interviews with an AI bot, and after that the a digital twin was able to replicate with a high level of accuracy how that person would answer questions.

Initially created as a way to get synthetic data to ease consumer research, the same approach could be applied to start to rethink how democracy works in an age of AI (“My digital twin voted on 300 bills today…”), and also how this level of fakery will be used for harm.

The So What: Yuval Hariri suggests it should be illegal to have tech create fake humans - that ship seems to have sailed, so let’s harness these bots to ensure we all have access to them, and they report to us.

Ray Kurzweil: longevity escape velocity coming by 2029

Futurist Ray Kurweil suggests longevity escape velocity will arrive within 5 years. “Past 2029, you’ll get back more than a year. Go backwards in time. Once you can get back at least a year, you’ve reached longevity escape velocity.”

The So What? Kurzweil has been right a lot about tech, so worth considering this a non-trivial likelihood, and asking what the second order implications of this would be.

Australia passes social media ban

Social media companies have 12 months to make sure that under 16 year olds can’t access their services. This is a complex debate with 75% of the Australian public supporting the ban, yet, now that it’s passed, the question is how companies such as Facebook and X are going to address it.

The So What? Social media usage among teens is finally being recognized as the epidemic that it is. This brute force approach is one strategy, and is likely to spark a whole host of important conversations.

Bonus - Fun AI Story of the Week

A story that nicely turns the tables - Big Corporates and AI have created a ‘digital granny’ (a voice AI agent) that wastes the time of hackers. Of course, the scammers too are increasingly using these tools, so the arms race continues.

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen