@nthony

mostly autistic | building something

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Things I've been warning about for 4 years: Decels would be weaponized by CCP as useful idiots to sabotage technological / AI progress.

The recent datacenter psyop is exactly this. Luckily we've been preparing for years.

It's time to fight this psyop with some techno-optimism

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.

I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.

After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.

By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.

The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.

The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).

I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.

When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.

Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.

Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.

Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.

Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.

We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.

Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.

Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.

If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.

With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.

We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.

We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.

Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.

The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.

While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.

On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.

Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.

Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.

Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.

The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.

Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.

We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.

Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.

We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.

We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.

If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.

We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.

We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.

For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:

https://t.co/gZKafCw6Ia

[kache @yacineMTB]

I can see the future so clearly. It is a little overwhelming. I truly do live in the future, most of you Dear Readers live in the future as well.

I'm really social. I strike up conversation with people outside all the time. They have absolutely no idea

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

There is a potential future that is super amazing is we all fight hard to achieve it

[kache @yacineMTB]

There are simply too many insane smart people in the world for this to stop . They want to see . They will see

[Mark Zuckerberg @finkd]

I wrote about why we believe the future is for everyone. More coming about a positive vision for a world with superintelligence soon.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

e/acc is about having loyalty to the future

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

https://t.co/PTeDiv1b6L

[roon @tszzl]

in hindsight peter thiel really cooked with the antichrist/armageddon thing in a way that wasn’t obvious at the time

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

The future is not distributed equally.

Democratization is a LARP promised to you by the most egregious centralizers. The government gatekeeping who gets access to certain AI models allows others to pull ahead of you. This is why you must support open source. You must own your own hardware. You must be running your own models. Bad actors hide behind false moral and virtuous language: safety, decentralization, inclusivity, etc. These are shibboleths providing moral cover for bad actors who only want control and have dominance over you. Unfortunately it works, on many, but hopefully not on you.

Support Open Source (that could even mean just use it), own your own hardware, run your own models, hoard your own media, don’t give your data freely, try every day to become increasingly self-reliant.

Owning your hardware, running your models, using this method of self-reliant thinking, will be invaluable to you and is the correct armor to wear going into our new and unknown future.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

Questions are everything.

Because the people who never stop asking are the ones who find answers.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Some of us will live forever.

And if you’re reading this, that may or may not be you.

I am so bullish on this that I just renamed my company to Immortals.

Below:
+ why I think this
+ early signs of success
+ how to increase your odds

Yes, I know this sounds crazy.

Immortality has been an ambition for humanity since the beginning of recorded history.

The immortality I’m referring to is specific: increases in life expectancy will outpace the rate of aging. Meaning, we will no longer, by default, expect to die of natural causes.

I believe this for three reasons.

#1: Immortality already exists

Biology can reverse some features of aging, and in a handful of organisms escape it almost entirely. For example, a sperm and an egg from two people in their 30s carry the legacy of bodies that have aged for decades (the egg in particular has been arrested inside the mother since before she herself was born), yet they combine to produce an embryo that resets the aging clock to zero.

The immortal jellyfish goes further and resets itself within one lifetime, reverting its adult cells to an earlier stage through transdifferentiation and starting its life cycle again. And in the lab, scientists have begun doing this deliberately, making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from mature adult cells such as skin fibroblasts, and using partial cellular reprogramming to turn the clock back in the tissues of living animals.

#2: AI offers new potentials

Biology is a hard problem. For most of history that complexity was beyond native human capacity. AI was made for this complexity. The clearest demonstration so far is protein folding. Predicting the three-dimensional shape a protein folds was an unsolved problem for roughly fifty years, and it mattered because a protein's shape determines what it does in the body.

DeepMind's AlphaFold2 effectively solved it in 2020, reaching a median accuracy of 92.4 out of 100, a level long thought to require the slow, painstaking work of crystallizing a protein and solving its structure by X-ray crystallography. It then released predicted structures for over 200 million proteins, nearly the entire catalogued protein universe, in a fraction of the time anyone expected.

#3: Early signs are encouraging

These aspirations are not imaginative. With the current tools in biotech Sid Sijbrandij, the co-founder of GitLab, was diagnosed with an aggressive bone cancer, osteosarcoma in his vertebrae. He treated his own disease like an engineering problem, he used AI to help direct several experimental, personalized therapies in parallel and drove the cancer into remission after standard medicine had given up. Around the same time, an Australian named Paul Conyngham, with no medical or biology background, did something similar for his dog. He used AI to help design a personalized mRNA vaccine targeting the specific mutations in his dog's tumor, and after it was given alongside another immunotherapy and within a few months the main tumor had shrunk by roughly three-quarters.

How to increase your odds…

I. Don’t die in the meantime

We don’t know when these longevity therapies will become available. Your goal is to be around when they come out. Buy yourself as much time as possible by looking after your body to the best of our scientific knowledge. Good diet, sleep, exercise will get you 80% of the results.

II. Find your achilles

Longevity therapies will likely be outcome specific. Individual specific drugs/therapies that target specific things like…

> prevent and remove arterial plaque
> prevent and reverse neurodegeneration
> specifically target and eliminate cancers, or pre cancerous legions
> prevent frailty and muscle loss, and regain muscle mass, strength and, bone density
> reverse skin aging
> rejuvenate eye health
> restore lost hearing
> etc

We don’t know what therapies will be available first. Your goal is to find what your body is struggling with most and keep that problem at-bay until a therapy is available that can fully cure or reverse it.

For example, do you struggle with cholesterol? Blood glucose control? Cognitive decline? Find your achilles heel and reduce your risk systematically.

III. Invest in the future

There are three macro trends happening on planet earth right now, and the people who bet on these areas have the highest risk + reward.

> AI
> Immortality
> Energy

As we know, power comes in many forms: money, social, political, health, etc. Those that can collect power in these fields will have the greatest chance of positioning themselves in the Immortal future.

With time, Immortal therapies will become broadly available.

If you’re reading this: don’t waste your chances by burning down your life points on a yolo-like mentality. Grind culture, addiction, social media pollution, fast food, porn, alcohol, these are all corporations turning your life into their profit. This is the Die Economy.

My company Immortals has the sole objective of turning your time, attention, and life into more healthy, functional, and prosperous minutes, days, and years. The Don’t Die Economy.

Good luck.

[𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ @Grimezsz]

Every woman on earth should be demanding solutions for menopause - your heart, your bones, your connective tissue, beauty, mental health, intellect - And no one tells u about this

Whoever invests in this now will be rich. Please God spare the millennials

[Naval @naval]

It's the Age of Builders.

(sorry financiers and talkers)

[roon @tszzl]

people in san francisco say “agi pilled” as a general term of art for describing people who reason about the future with any degree of analytical skill. it has been imo a good proxy for human capital generally

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

The biggest pivot you can make as a founder is building something that finally makes you feel like yourself.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Elon acquired Cursor
Dario acquired the Vatican

Elon wants to conquer the cosmos
Dario wants to conquer minds

One climbing the Kardashev scale
The other maximizing hedons

World of atoms vs world of bits
e/acc vs EA

Game on.

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Palantir embraces the neurodivergent.

Join us.

[Sam Altman @sama]

man its good to be back on twitter

there is comfort in the skills of a wasted youth

[kache @yacineMTB]

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding