Why Even the Healthiest People Hit a Wall at Age 70

Are we currently determining how much of aging is lifestyle changes and interventions and how much of it is basically your genetic destiny?

 

[Transcript:] We are constantly being bombarded with health and lifestyle advice at the moment. I feel like I cannot open my social media feeds without seeing adverts for supplements or diet plans or exercise regimes. And I think that this really is a distraction from the big goals of longevity science. This is a really difficult needle to thread when it comes to talking about this stuff because I'm a huge advocate for public health. I think if we could help people eat better, if we could help 'em do more exercise, if we could help 'em quit smoking, this would have enormous effects on our health, on our economies all around the world. But this sort of micro-optimization, these three-hour long health podcasts that people are digesting on a daily basis these days, I think we're really majoring in the minors. We're trying to absolutely eke out every last single thing when it comes to living healthily. And I think the problem is that there are real limits to what we can do with health advice. 

So for example, there was a study that came out recently that was all over my social media feeds. And the headline was that by eating the best possible diet, you can double your chance of aging healthily. But I decided to dig into the results table. The healthiest diet was something called the Alternative Healthy Eating Index or AHEI. And even the people who are sticking most closely to this best diet, according to this study, the top 20% of adherence to the AHEI, only 13.6% of them made it to 70 years old without any chronic diseases. That means that over 85% of the people sticking to the best diet, according to this study, got to the age of 70 with at least something wrong with them. And that shows us that optimizing diet only has so far it can go. 

We're not talking about immortality or living to 120 here. If you wanna be 70 years old and in good enough health to play with your grandkids, I cannot guarantee that you can do that no matter how good your diet is. And that's why we need longevity medicine to help keep people healthier for longer. And actually, I think even this idea of 120, 150-year-old lifespans, you know, immortality even as a word that's often thrown around, I think the main thing we're trying to do is get people to 80, 90 years old in good health. 'cause we already know that most people alive today, when they reach that age, are unfortunately gonna be frail. They're probably gonna be suffering from two or three or four different diseases simultaneously. And what we wanna do is try and keep people healthier for longer. And by doing that, they probably will live longer but kind of as a side effect. 

If you look at photographs of people from the past, they often look older than people in the present day who are the same age. And part of these are these terrible fashion choices that people made in the past. And we can look back and, you know, understand the mistakes they've made with hindsight. But part of that actually is aging biology. I think the fact that people can be different biological ages at the same chronological ages, something that's really quite intuitive. All of us know people who've waltzed into their 60s looking great and, you know, basically as fit as someone in their 40s or 50s. And we know similar people who have also gone into their 60s, but they're looking haggard, they've got multiple different diseases, they're already struggling through life. 

In the last decade, scientists have come up with various measures of what's called biological age as distinct from chronological age. So your chronological age is just how many candles there are on your birthday cake. And obviously, you know, most of us are familiar with that. But the idea of biological age is to look inside your cells, look inside your body, and work out how old you are on a biological level. Now we aren't perfect at doing this yet, but we do have a variety of different measures. We can use blood tests, we can use what are called epigenetic tests, or we can do things that are far more sort of basic and functional, how strong your grip is declines with age. And by comparing the value of something like your grip strength to an average person of a given age, we can assign you a biological age value. And I think the ones that are getting the most buzz at the moment within the scientific community, but also all around the internet, are these epigenetic age tests. 

So the way that this works is that you'll take a blood test or a saliva sample and scientists will measure something about your epigenome. So the genome is your DNA, it's the instruction manual of life. And the epigenome is a layer of chemistry that sits on top of your genome. If you think of your DNA is that instruction manual, then the epigenome is the notes in the margin. It's the little sticky notes that have been stuck on the side and they tell the cell which DNA to use at which particular time. And we know that there are changes to this epigenome as you get older. And so by measuring the changes in the epigenome, you can assign someone a biological age. 

At the moment, these epigene clocks are a really great research tool. They're really deepening our understanding of biological aging in the lab. I think the problem with these tests as applied to individuals is we don't know enough about exactly what they're telling us. We don't know what these individual changes in epigenetic marks mean. We know they're correlated with age, but what we don't know is if they're causally related. And in particular, we don't know if you intervene, if you make a change in your lifestyle, if you start taking a certain supplement and that reduces your biological age. We don't know whether that actually means you're gonna dilate or whether it means you're gonna stay healthier for longer or whether you've done something that's kind of adjacent to that. And so we need to do more research to understand if we can causally impact these epigenetic measures. (...)

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are gonna be hugely, hugely important in understanding the biology of aging. Because the body is such a complicated system that in order to really understand it, we're gonna need these vast computer models to try and decode the data for us. The challenge is that what machine learning can do at the moment is it can identify correlations. So it can identify things that are associated with aging, but it can't necessarily tell us what's causing something else. So for example, in the case of these epigenetic clocks, the parts of the epigenome that change with age have been identified because they correlate. But what we don't know is if you intervene in any one of these individual epigenetic marks, if you move it in the direction of something younger, does that actually make people healthier? And so what we need to do is more experiments where we try and work out if we can intervene in these epigenetic, in these biological clocks, can we make people live healthier for longer? 

Over the last 10 or 15 years, scientists have really started to understand the fundamental underlying biology of the aging process. And they broke this down into 12 what are called hallmarks of aging. One of those hallmarks is the accumulation of senescent cells. Now senescent is just a biological technical term for old. These are cells that accumulate in all of our bodies as the years go by. And scientists have noticed that these cells seem to drive a range of different diseases as we get older. And so the idea was what if we could remove these cells and leave the rest of the cells of the body intact? Could that slow down or even partially reverse the aging process? And scientists identified drugs called it senolytic drugs. 

These are drugs that kill those senescent cells and they tried them out in mice and they do indeed effectively make the mice biologically younger. So if you give mice a course of senolytic drugs, it removes those senescent cells from their body. And firstly, it makes them live a bit longer. That's a good thing if you're slowing down the aging process, the basic thing you want to see. But it's not dragging out that period of frailty at the end of life. It's keeping the mice healthier for longer so they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. The mice are also less frail. They basically send the mice to a tiny mouse-scale gym in these experiments. And the mice that have been given the drugs, they can run further and faster on the mousey treadmills that they try them out on. 

It also seems to reverse some of the cognitive effects that come along with aging. So if you put an older mouse in a maze, it's often a bit anxious, doesn't really want to explore. Whereas a younger mouse is desperate to, you know, run around and find the cheese or whatever it is mice doing in mazes. And by giving them these senolytic drugs, you can unlock some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these mice just look great. You do not need to be an expert mouse biologist to see which one has had the pills and which one hasn't. They've got thicker fur. They've got plumper skin. They've got brighter eyes. They've got less fat on their bodies. And what this shows us is that by targeting the fundamental processes of aging, by identifying something like senescent cells that drives a whole range of age-related problems, we can hit much perhaps even all of the aging process with a single treatment. 

Senescent cells are, of course, only one of these 12 hallmarks of aging. And I think in order to both understand and treat the aging process, we're potentially gonna only treatments for many, perhaps even all of those hallmarks. There's never gonna be a single magic pill that can just make you live forever. Aging is much, much more complicated than that. But by understanding this relatively short list of underlying processes, maybe we can come up with 12, 20 different treatments that can have a really big effect on how long we live. 

One of the most exciting ideas in longevity science at the moment is what's called cellular reprogramming. I sometimes describe this as a treatment that has fallen through a wormhole from the future. This is the idea that we can reset the biological clock inside of our cells. And the idea first came about in the mid 2000s because there was a scientist called Shinya Yamanaka who was trying to find out how to turn regular adult body cells all the way back to the very beginning of their biological existence. And Yamanaka and his team were able to identify four genes that you could insert into a cell and turn back that biological clock. 

Now, he was interested in this from the point of view of creating stem cells, a cell that can create any other kind of cell in the body, which we might be able to use for tissue repair in future. But scientists also noticed, as well as turning back the developmental clock on these cells, it also turns back the aging clock, cells that are given these four Yamanaka factors actually are biologically younger than cells that haven't had the treatment. And so what scientists decided to do was insert these Yamanaka factor genes into mice. 

Now if you do this in a naive way, so there's genes active all the time, it's actually very bad news for the mice, unfortunately. because these stem cells, although they're very powerful in terms of what kind of cell they can become, they are useless at being a liver cell or being a heart cell. And so the mice very quickly died of organ failure. But if you activate these genes only transiently, and the way that scientists did it the first time successfully was essentially to activate them at weekends. So they produced these genes in such a way that they could be activated with the drug and they gave the mice the drug for two days of the week, and then gave them five days off so the Yamanaka factors were then suppressed. They found that this was enough to turn back the biological clock in those cells, but without turning back the developmental clock and turn them into these stem cells. And that meant the mice stayed a little bit healthier. We now know that they can live a little bit longer with this treatment too.

Now the real challenge is that this is a gene therapy treatment. It involves delivering four different genes to every single cell in your body. The question is can we, with our puny 2020s biotechnology, make this into a viable treatment, a pill even, that we can actually use in human beings? I really think this idea of cellular reprogramming appeals to a particular tech billionaire sort of mentality. The idea that we can go in and edit the code of life and reprogram our biological age, it's a hugely powerful concept. And if this works, the fact that you can turn back the biological clock all the way to zero, this really is a very, very cool idea. And that's what's led various different billionaires from the Bay Area to invest huge, huge amounts of money in this. 

Altos Labs is the biggest so-called startup in this space. And I wouldn't really call it a startup 'cause it's got funding of $3 billion from amongst other people, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Now I'm very excited about this because I think $3 billion is enough to have a good go and see if we can turn this into a viable human treatment. My only concern is that epigenetics is only one of those hallmarks of aging. And so it might be the case that we solve aging inside our individual cells, but we leave other parts of the aging process intact. (...)

Probably the quickest short-term wins in longevity science are going to be repurposed existing drugs. And the reason for this is because we spent many, many years developing these drugs. We understand how they work in humans. We understand a bit about their safety profile. And because these molecules already exist, we've just tried them out in mice, in, you know, various organisms in the lab and found that a subset of them do indeed slow down the aging process. The first trial of a longevity drug that was proposed in humans was for a drug called metformin, which is a pre-existing drug that we prescribe actually for diabetes in this case, and has some indications that it might slow down the aging process in people. (...)

I think one of the ones that's got the most buzz around it at the moment is a drug called rapamycin. This is a drug that's been given for organ transplants. It's sometimes used to coat stents, which these little things that you stick in the arteries around your heart to expand them if you've got a contraction of those arteries that's restricting the blood supply. But we also know from experiments in the lab that can make all kinds of different organisms live longer, everything from single-cell yeast, to worms, to flies, to mice, to marmoset, which are primates. They're very, very evolutionarily close to us as one of the latest results. 

Rapamycin has this really incredible story. It was first isolated in bacteria from a soil sample from Easter Island, which is known as Rapa Nui in the local Polynesians. That's where the drug gets its name. And when it was first isolated, it was discovered to be antifungal. It could stop fungal cells from growing. So that was what we thought we'd use it for initially. But when the scientists started playing around with in the lab, they realized it didn't just stop fungal cells from growing. It also stopped many other kinds of cells as well, things like up to and including human cells. And so the slight disadvantage was that if you used it as an antifungal agent, it would also stop your immune cells from being able to divide, which is obviously be a bit of a sort of counterintuitive way to try and treat a fungal disease. So scientists decided to use it as an immune suppressant. It can stop your immune system from going haywire when you get an organ transplant, for example, and rejecting that new organ. 

It is also developed as an anti-cancer drug. So if it can stop cells dividing or cancer as cells dividing out of control. But the way that rapamycin works is it targets a fundamental central component of cellular metabolism. And we noticed that that seemed to be very, very important in the aging process. And so by tamping it down by less than you would do in a patient where you're trying to suppress their immune system, you can actually rather than stopping the cell dividing entirely, you can make it enter a state where it's much more efficient in its use of resources. It starts this process called autophagy, which is Greek for self-eating, autophagy. And that means it consumes old damaged proteins, and then recycles them into fresh new ones. And that actually is a critical process in slowing down aging, biologically speaking. And in 2009, we found out for the first time that by giving it to mice late in life, you could actually extend their remaining lifespan. They live by 10 or 15% longer. And this was a really incredible result. 

This was the first time a drug had been shown to slow down aging in mammals. And accordingly, scientists have become very, very excited about it. And we've now tried it in loads of different contexts and loads of different animals and loads of different organisms at loads of different times in life. You can even wait until very late in a mouse lifespan to give it rapamycin and you still see most of that same lifespan extension effect. And that's fantastic news potentially for us humans because not all of us, unfortunately, can start taking a drug from birth 'cause most of us were born quite a long time ago. But rapamycin still works even if you give it to mice who are the equivalent of 60 or 70 years old in human terms. And that means that for those of us who are already aged a little bit, Rapamycin could still help us potentially. And there are already biohackers out there trying this out for themselves, hopefully with the help of a doctor to make sure that they're doing everything as safely as possible to try and extend their healthy life. And so the question is: should we do a human trial of rapamycin to find out if it can slow down the aging process in people as well? (...)

We've already got dozens of ideas in the lab for ways to slow down, maybe even reverse the age of things like mice and cells in a dish. And that means we've got a lot of shots on goal. I think it'll be wildly unlucky if none of the things that slow down aging in the lab actually translate to human beings. That doesn't mean that most of them will work, probably most of them won't, but we only need one or two of them to succeed and really make a big difference. And I think a great example of this is GLP-1 drugs, the ozempics, the things that are allowing people to suddenly lose a huge amount of weight. We've been looking for decades for these weight loss drugs, and now we finally found them. It's shown that these breakthroughs are possible, they can come out of left field. And all we need to do in some cases is a human trial to find out if these drugs actually work in people. 

And what that means is that, you know, the average person on planet earth is under the age of 40. They've probably got 40 or 50 years of life expectancy left depending on the country that they live in. And that's an awful lot of time for science to happen. And if then in the next 5 or 10 years, we do put funding toward these human trials, we might have those first longevity drugs that might make you live one or two or five years longer. And that gives scientists even more time to develop the next treatment. And if we think about some more advanced treatments, not just drugs, things like stem cell therapy or gene therapy, those things can sound pretty sci-fi. But actually, we know that these things are already being deployed in hospitals and clinics around the world. They're being deployed for specific serious diseases, for example, where we know that a single gene can be a problem and we can go in and fix that gene and give a child a much better chance at a long, healthy life. 

But as we learn how these technologies work in the context of these serious diseases, we're gonna learn how to make them effective. And most importantly, we're gonna learn how to make them safe. And so we could imagine doing longevity gene edits in human beings, perhaps not in the next five years, but I think it'll be foolish to bet against it happening in the next 20 years, for example. 

by Andrew Steele, The Big Think |  Read more:

Image: Yamanka factors via:

[ed. See also: Researchers Are Using A.I. to Decode the Human Genome (NYT).]

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

K-Beauty Boom Explodes

On a recent Saturday at an Ulta Beauty store in midtown Manhattan, Denise McCarthy, a mother in her 40s, stood in front of a wall of tiny pastel bottles, tubes and compacts. Her phone buzzed — another TikTok from her 15-year-old daughter.

“My kids text me the TikToks,” she told CNBC, scooping Korean lip tints and sunscreens into her basket, destined for Christmas stockings. “I don’t even know what half of this does. I just buy the ones they send me.”

Two aisles over, a group of college students compared swatches of Korean cushion foundations. A dad asked a store associate whether a viral Korean sunscreen was the one “from the girl who does the ‘get ready with me’ videos.” Near the checkout, a display of Korean sheet mask mini-packs was nearly empty.

Scenes like this are playing out across the country.

Once a niche reserved for beauty obsessives, Korean cosmetics — known as K-beauty — are breaking fully into the American mainstream, fueled by TikTok virality, younger and more diverse shoppers, and aggressive expansion from retailers such as Ulta, Sephora, Walmart and Costco.

K-beauty sales in the United States are expected to top $2 billion in 2025, up more than 37% from last year, according to market research firm NielsenIQ, far outpacing the broader beauty market’s single-digit growth.

And even as trade tensions complicate supply chains, brands and retailers told CNBC the momentum is strong.

“We have no plans of slowing down and see more opportunities to penetrate the market,” said Janet Kim, vice president at K-beauty brand Neogen.

In the first half of 2025, South Korea shipped a record $5.5 billion worth of cosmetics, up nearly 15% year over year, and has become the leading exporter of cosmetics to the U.S., surpassing France, according to data from the South Korean government.

“The growth has been remarkable,” said Therese-Ann D’Ambrosia, vice president of beauty and personal care at NielsenIQ. “When you compare that to the broader beauty market, which is growing at single digits, K-beauty is clearly operating in a different gear right now.” (...)

The ‘second wave’

Over the past decade, there’s also been a rise in Korean entertainment in the U.S. — from pop groups such as BTS and Blackpink to this year’s Netflix hit “KPop Demon Hunters” —which has helped push South Korea’s cultural exports to unprecedented popularity.

“Korean culture has exploded on every front, and that has really shown up when it comes to K-beauty,” Dang said.

K-beauty’s “first wave,” which hit the U.S. in the mid-2010s, was defined by “glass skin,” 10-step routines, snail mucin, cushion compacts and beauty blemish creams. Most products catered to lighter skin tones, and distribution was limited to small boutiques, Amazon sellers and early test placements at Ulta and Sephora, beauty experts said.

“The first wave had some penetration, but nothing like today,” Horvath said. “It was mostly people in the know.”

The second wave has been bigger, faster and far more inclusive. It has spanned color cosmetics, hair and scalp care, body care, fragrances and high-tech devices.

TikTok is the central engine of discovery, especially for Gen Z and millennial shoppers, who account for roughly three-fourths of K-beauty consumers, according to a Personal Care Insights market analyst report. Posts tagged “K-beauty” or “Korean skin care” draw 250 million views per week, according to consumer data firm Spate. And viral products with sleek packaging often vanish from shelves faster than retailers can restock — particularly those that combine gentle formulas and low prices, Dang said.

“TikTok has changed the game,” Horvath said. “It’s easier to educate consumers on innovation and get the word out. Brands are deeply invested in paying influencers, and TikTokers talk about textures, formulas and efficacy.” (...)

The trend is visible across the Americas: 61% of consumers in Mexico and nearly half in Brazil say K-beauty is popular in their country, compared with about 45% in the U.S., according to Statista.

“Traditional retail and e-commerce remain important, but TikTok Shop is the standout disruptor,” said Nielsen’s D’Ambrosia. “It’s not just about the direct sales on that one platform; it’s about how it’s changing the entire discovery and purchase journey.”

But the second wave brings its own risks. A heavy dependence on virality could expose brands to sudden algorithm changes or regulatory scrutiny, D’Ambrosia said.

“When you have so much growth concentrated on one platform [such as TikTok], algorithm changes could significantly impact discoverability overnight,” D’Ambrosia said. “We’ve seen what happens when platforms tweak their recommendation engines. ... There are definitely some caution flags we’re watching.”

Rapid innovation

K-beauty’s staying power, Dang said, is rooted in an intensely competitive domestic Korean market. Trends move at breakneck speed and consumers spend more per capita on beauty than in any other country, according to South Korean research firm KOISRA.

South Korea had more than 28,000 licensed cosmetics sellers in 2024 — nearly double that of five years ago — creating a pressure-cooker environment that forces constant experimentation, said Neogen’s Kim.

“We develop about hundreds of formulas each day,” Kim told CNBC. “We build the library and we test results with clinical individual tests. ... Everything that’s very unique and works really well for skin care, we develop.”

Korean consumers churn through trends quickly, fueling a pipeline of upstart brands that can go viral and, in some cases, get acquired. For example, when gooey snail mucin, a gel used to protect and repair people’s skin, took off globally, skin care brand Amorepacific acquired COSRX, the small Korean brand that helped popularize the ingredient, for roughly $700 million.

The next wave of products, analysts predict, are likely to be even more experimental.

Brands are betting on buzzy ingredients such as DNA extracted from salmon or trout sperm that early research suggests may help calm or repair skin. They are also expanding into biotechnology.

“K-beauty is very data-driven. [Artificial intelligence] helps us get fast results for content, formula development, and advertising,” Kim said. “In Korea, they started talking about delivery systems. They’re very good with biotechnology.”

by Luke Fountain, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Avila Gonzalez | San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images

Every Wrinkle is a Policy Failure

A lot of people blame their frown lines on their job, the tanning salon, or aging. I blame the government.

There’s a treatment for wrinkles—Botox and similar toxins that freeze your face in place.. It can be pricey. The average price of a Botox treatment is above $400, depending on how many doses or units you get injected. But Botox isn’t patented so why is it still so expensive?

 

Some of the cost comes from buying the chemical itself. Allergan which owns Botox doesn’t have a patent on it- but it does have a trademark for the brand name. And Botox isn’t just the botulism toxin that paralyzes your face- there are a few additive chemicals mixed in and Allergan’s manufacturing process is a trade secret.

But wholesale Botox is still kind of cheap- you can get it for $3.50 a unit but the price the consumer pays is around $20 in urban areas.

If you’ve ever gotten Botox or its equivalent, you know you are not getting highly tailored and personalized injections here- you can get a same-day appointment, walk in, get injected, and walk out.

This should not require a medical degree.

Unfortunately, in some states only physicians or nurses supervised by physicians are allowed to. The obvious solution is to just let more people inject Botox- I can’t imagine a state just fully deregulating injection rights, but allowing pharmacists (who already handle a huge share of vaccinations), pharmacy techs under pharmacist direction, or registered nurses could make getting Botox way cheaper and make the number of facilities where you could Botox way larger.

The cost savings to the consumer might actually be larger than what you would think given the difference in labor costs. There are already cheaper alternatives to Botox that work just as well like Dysport or Xeomin (which is pure toxin without the additives) . But in the U.S. where we’re already paying so much for labor, the cost difference of the injectable can be overlooked. But in other countries, Botox alternatives are outcompeting Botox.

Liberalizing injection laws would make Americans look younger and spend less per treatment.

Are You Using Tretinoin?

Botox regulations aren’t the only way the government tries to make us look our age.

I think most of my readers here are straight men but if I could give you some non-policy advice, it would be that you should consider using tretinoin. It’s a cream you can use for acne but unlike a lot of woo-based anti-aging products it actually works to reverse the effects of sun on skin aging. [ed. Retin- A, Avita, Renova, others]

Unfortunately, you need a prescription to use it even though it’s incredibly safe as long as you aren’t pregnant- and if it irritates your skin just stop using it. So every time I see an urgent care doctor for whatever reason at the end of the appointment, I always ask “could I have a prescription for this?” It has never failed.

Tretinoin is still pretty cheap but the necessity of the prescription drives up the price in terms of time and inconvenience. Federal rules require it to be prescription-only but states have a lot of discretion to make “prescription required” a fairly nominal requirement. For example, states could allow pharmacists to prescribe the cream so instead of scheduling a telehealth or doctor’s appointment, you just show up at the pharmacy and ask for it. States can also make laws friendly to telehealth.

While I think every state should do this as well as make it easy to inject Botox, Nevada or Florida seem like the perfect first-movers. Both attract a ton of tourists, both have a lot of sun (photoaging!), and both just have the Botox-friendly vibes. You could also throw in easy-to-prescribe finasteride rules to help out balding men.

by Cold Button Issues |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Botox and GLP-1's (Ozempic, Wegovy etc,). Everyone wants to look their best.]

Did Your Cancer Treatment Just Get Taken Away?

It starts with a little bump on your neck. You notice it when your hand brushes against it while you’re washing your hair, but at first you don’t pay it much attention. Then your spouse looks at your neck and asks you “What’s that?” It’s a little brown bump, maybe a mole. You think that maybe you should get it checked out by a dermatologist, but you forget to make an appointment, because work has just been so busy lately.

Then a few weeks later you look at the bump again, and it looks noticeably bigger. This time you call the dermatologist, but the soonest they can get you in is three weeks from now. By the time you’re in the doctor’s office, the bump is at least double the size it was when you noticed it. The doctor is tense and concerned, and he does a biopsy. Five days later you get the result over the phone: Melanoma.

“That’s cancer, right?” you ask, just to confirm, feeling something fall away in the pit of your stomach. “Yes,” the doctor’s assistant confirms. “That’s cancer.”

Cancer. The word is like the fall of an axe, cutting off the future you had imagined for yourself. Now instead, the days ahead are filled with surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, CT scans, MRIs. You will never again entirely be free of the eternal gnawing fear of discovering that the cancer has spread. Your hair is going to fall out, you’re going to go under the knife, you’re going to be weak and sick. You’re going to to read everything there is to read about cancer, and it still won’t help. It may go into remission, or you may die, but your life will never read the same.

This story reflects the sad reality of life for millions of Americans. Cancer is the second most common cause of death, just barely behind heart disease, killing over 600,000 every year. And every year, almost 2 million Americans are diagnosed with new cases of cancer. Some kinds, like prostate cancer, are usually manageable; others, like pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, are practically death sentences.

Now, there’s a common myth that cancer is an intractable disease that will never succumb to modern medicine. In 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the so-called “War on Cancer”; for many years, it was fashionable to say that cancer had won the war. But in fact, since around 1990, humanity has been making steady gains. Thanks to advances in early detection, screening, and various treatments, as well as the drop in smoking and a vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer, death rates have fallen at every age for almost every type of cancer. For a while this was masked by an increase in lung cancer from the smoking boom, but now that’s over too:

The problem is that since the population is growing steadily older, overall death rates are still higher than they were in Nixon’s day:

We’re delaying death from cancer, but not eliminating it.

In recent years, however, an explosion of new therapies has promised to accelerate our progress in treating the disease, changing the very nature of what it means to have cancer. The most promising of these are immunotherapies — medical techniques that use the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. And of those therapies, one of the most promising is mRNA vaccines.

Yes, mRNA vaccines — the same kind of technology that we used to vaccinate Americans against Covid during the pandemic. But it works a little differently. These mRNA cancer vaccines aren’t something that everyone takes in advance, to prevent themselves from getting cancer — instead, they’re a type of therapy that you take after you get diagnosed with the disease. Often, the vaccines are personalized, meaning that they develop a specific vaccine for your particular cancer.

mRNA vaccines, in combination with other therapies, promise to contain many cancers, turning them from a death sentence into a manageable, non-fatal disease. These vaccines are currently in development to fight all of the biggest killers: lung cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma. They’re even being used against glioblastoma, the most aggressive and common type of brain cancer. There are even some tantalizing results suggesting that mRNA could soon be used to create a universal cancer therapy.

Imagine how the story I told at the top of this post would go in an age of highly effective mRNA therapies. Instead of being sentenced to years of gut-wrenching fear, possibly followed by an agonizing death, someone diagnosed with cancer would simply sigh and realize that they would have to spend a bunch of money on treatments for the foreseeable future. That is the world toward which science is taking us.

And yet now all of this is in danger. The MAGA movement, which now holds near-absolute political power in America, has gone to war against mRNA technology. RFK Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and a prominent vaccine skeptics, just canceled a large amount of federal funding:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced this week it is beginning a "coordinated wind-down" of federally funded mRNA vaccine development.

This includes terminating awards and contracts with pharmaceutical companies and universities and canceling 22 investment projects worth nearly $500 million. While some final-stage contracts will be allowed to be completed, no new mRNA-based projects will be initiated, the HHS said.

Officially, all of the cancelled funding is supposedly for mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory illness — basically, Covid and anything that looks remotely like Covid. So officially, cancer research isn’t being cancelled — yet. But cancer researchers are terrified that this move will derail their whole field, and with good reason. The chilling effect of this funding cancellation will cause a general loss of enthusiasm for the technology.

If you’re a researcher developing an mRNA treatment for lung cancer, how would you rate your chances of RFK Jr. approving your therapy for mass use when it has “mRNA” in the name? If you’re a private funding organization, do you really want to fund a technology that the government — and a large chunk of the American electorate — has an irrational vendetta against? What lab is going to want to allocate resources toward a field that’s marked for destruction? And what aspiring researcher is going to want to dedicate their career to it? (...)

So it’s very possible that thanks to RFK Jr., the Trump administration, and the MAGA movement writ large, cancer vaccines will not be available nearly as soon as it looked like they would just a few months ago. Eventually, the technology will be developed, with some combination of funding from Europe, China, private companies, and so on. But in the meantime, many people — including many Americans — will experience the nightmare of a traditional cancer diagnosis, like what I described at the top of this post.

Why is this happening? Why is the U.S. government attacking the technology that offers us the greatest chance to defeat one of humanity’s oldest and most terrible scourges?

It’s pretty easy to trace the reasons historically. During the pandemic, the antivax movement took over the American right — possibly because of fear of needles, possibly as a macho way to express bravery against the virus itself, possibly because of instinctive dread of modern technology or expert consensus or government recommendations. But whatever the reason, Trump — despite having authorized the project that created mRNA vaccines, and despite wanting to take some deserved credit for defeating Covid — was forced to accede to the wave of antivax sentiment, and to ally with it in order to win reelection in 2024. Part of that meant hiring RFK Jr. and putting him in charge of HHS — a political marriage of convenience.

But fundamentally, it’s hard to fathom just how America arrived at this juncture. We’ve certainly seen both sides of the U.S. political divide embrace blatant lies in order to express solidarity. For the right, the biggest lie was always that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by humans. Climate denial might seem like a lie without consequences — after all, the worst harms from climate change are going to arrive decades in the future. But because green energy technologies also happened to become cheap, the right-wing dogma that anything “green” is bad is causing the MAGA movement to oppose the cheapest and most reliable energy sources available:

Not having cheap energy is certainly bad. But dying of cancer? You’d think that would be a bridge too far, even for Trump’s followers. But recall how during the Covid pandemic, right-wing types died in droves because they refused to take the life-saving vaccine: 

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: OurWorldInData

Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

“The scientific paper is a ‘fraud’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”

This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant experimentalist whose work on immune tolerance laid the foundation for modern organ transplantation, Sir Peter understood both the power and the limitations of scientific communication.

Consider the familiar structure of a scientific paper: Introduction (background and hypothesis), Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. This format implies that the work followed a clean, sequential progression: scientists identified a gap in knowledge, formulated a causal explanation, designed definitive experiments to fill the gap, evaluated compelling results, and most of the time, confirmed their hypothesis.

Real lab work rarely follows such a clear path. Biological research is filled with what Medawar describes lovingly as “messing about”: false starts, starting in the middle, unexpected results, reformulated hypotheses, and intriguing accidental findings. The published paper ignores the mess in favour of the illusion of structure and discipline. It offers an ideal version of what might have happened rather than a confession of what did.

The polish serves a purpose. It makes complex work accessible (at least if you work in the same or a similar field!). It allows researchers to build upon new findings.

But the contrived omissions can also play upon even the most well-regarded scientist’s susceptibility to the seduction of story. As Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience (Marseilles, Fr.) recently explained,

“when we are reading a paper, we tend to follow the reasoning and logic of the authors, and if the argumentation is nicely laid out, it is difficult to pause, take a step back, and try to get an overall picture.”

Our minds travel the narrative path laid out for us, making it harder to spot potential flaws in logic or alternative interpretations of the data, and making conclusions feel far more definitive than they often are.

Medawar’s framing is my compass when I do deep dives into major discoveries in translational neuroscience. I approach papers with a dual vision. First, what is actually presented? But second, and often more importantly, what is not shown? How was the work likely done in reality? What alternatives were tried but not reported? What assumptions guided the experimental design? What other interpretations might fit the data if the results are not as convincing or cohesive as argued?

And what are the consequences for scientific progress?

In the case of Alzheimer’s research, they appear to be stark: thirty years of prioritizing an incomplete model of the disease’s causes; billions of corporate, government, and foundation dollars spent pursuing a narrow path to drug development; the relative exclusion of alternative hypotheses from funding opportunities and attention; and little progress toward disease-modifying treatments or a cure.

The incomplete Alzheimer’s model I’m referring to is the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer’s is the outcome of protein processing gone awry in the brain, leading to the production of plaques that trigger a cascade of other pathological changes, ultimately causing the cognitive decline we recognize as the disease. Amyloid work continues to dominate the research and drug development landscape, giving the hypothesis the aura of settled fact.

However, cracks are showing in this façade. In 2021, the FDA granted accelerated approval to aducanumab (Aduhelm), an anti-amyloid drug developed by Biogen, despite scant evidence that it meaningfully altered the course of cognitive decline. The decision to approve, made over near-unanimous opposition from the agency’s advisory panel, exposed growing tensions between regulatory optimism and scientific rigor. Medicare’s subsequent decision to restrict coverage to clinical trials, and Biogen’s quiet withdrawal of the drug from broader marketing efforts in 2024, made the disconnect impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, a deeper fissure emerged: an investigation by Science unearthed evidence of data fabrication surrounding research on Aβ*56, a purported toxic amyloid-beta oligomer once hailed as a breakthrough target for disease-modifying therapy. Research results that had been seen as a promising pivot in the evolution of the amyloid cascade hypothesis, a new hope for rescuing the theory after repeated clinical failures, now appears to have been largely a sham. Treating Alzheimer’s by targeting amyloid plaques may have been a null path from the start.

When the cracks run that deep, it’s worth going back to the origin story—a landmark 1995 paper by Games et al., featured on the cover of Nature under the headline “A mouse model for Alzheimer’s.” It announced what was hailed as a breakthrough: the first genetically engineered mouse designed to mimic key features of the disease.

In what follows, I argue that the seeds of today’s failures were visible from the beginning if one looks carefully. I approach this review not as an Alzheimer’s researcher with a rival theory, but as a molecular neuroscientist interested in how fields sometimes converge around alluring but unstable ideas. Foundational papers deserve special scrutiny because they become the bedrock for decades of research. When that bedrock slips beneath us, it tells a cautionary story: about the power of narrative, the comfort of consensus, and the dangers of devotion without durable evidence. It also reminds us that while science is ultimately self-correcting, correction can be glacial when careers and reputations are staked on fragile ground.

The Rise of the Amyloid Hypothesis

In the early 1990s, a new idea began to dominate Alzheimer’s research: the amyloid cascade hypothesis.

First proposed by Hardy and Higgins in a 1992 Science perspective, the hypothesis suggested a clear sequence of disease-precipitating events: protein processing goes awry in the brain → beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulates → plaques form → plaques trigger a cascade of downstream events, including neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation, synaptic loss, neuronal death, resulting in observable cognitive decline.

The hypothesis was compelling for several reasons. First, the discovery of the enzymatic steps by which amyloid precursor protein (APP) is processed into Aβ offered multiple potential intervention points—ideal for pharmaceutical drug development.

Second, the hypothesis was backed by powerful genetic evidence. Mutations in the APP gene on chromosome 21 were associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The case grew stronger with the observation that more than 50% of individuals with Down syndrome, who carry an extra copy of chromosome 21 (and thus extra APP), develop Alzheimer’s-like pathology by age 40.

Thus, like any robust causal theory, the amyloid cascade hypothesis offered explicit, testable predictions. As Hardy and Higgins outlined, if amyloid truly initiates the Alzheimer’s cascade, then genetically engineering mice to produce human amyloid should trigger the full sequence of events: plaques first, then tangles, synapse loss, and neuronal death, then cognitive decline. And the sequentiality matters: amyloid accumulation should precede other pathological features. At the time, this was a thrilling possibility.

Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation.

How—with Unlimited Time and Money and a Little Scientific Despair—to Make a Transgenic Mouse

“Mouse Model Made” was the boastful headline to the independent, introductory commentary Nature solicited to accompany the 1995 Games paper’s unveiling of the first transgenic mouse set to “answer the needs” of Alzheimer’s research. The scientific argument over whether amyloid caused Alzheimer’s had been “settle[d]” by the Games paper, “perhaps for good.”

In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.

First Rule of Making a Transgenic Mouse: Don’t Talk About How You Made a Transgenic Mouse

How did Athena pull it off? Hard to say! What's most remarkable about the Games paper is what's not there. Scan through the methods section and you'll find virtually none of the painstaking effort required to build the Alzheimer’s mouse. Back in the ‘90s, creating a transgenic mouse took years of work, countless failed attempts, and extraordinary technical skill. In the Games paper, this effort is compressed into a few sparse sentences describing which gene and promoter (nearby gene instruction code) the research team used to make the mouse. The actual details are relegated to scientific meta-narrative—knowledge that exists only in lab notebooks, daily conversations between scientists, and the muscle memory of researchers who perform these techniques thousands of times.

The thin description wasn’t atypical for a publication from this era. Difficult experimental methods were often encapsulated in the single phrase "steps were carried out according to standard procedures," with citations to entire books on sub-cloning techniques or reference to the venerable Manipulating the Mouse Embryo: A Laboratory Manual (We all have this on our bookshelf, yes?) The idea that there were reliable "standard procedures" that could ensure success was farcical—an understatement that other scientists understand as code for "we spent years getting this to work; good luck figuring it out ;)."

So, as an appreciation of what it takes to make progress on the frontiers of science, here is approximately what’s involved.

Prerequisites: Dexterity, Glassblowing, and Zen Mastery

Do you have what it takes to master transgenic mouse creation? Well, do you have the dexterity of a neurosurgeon? Because you’ll be micro-manipulating fragile embryos with the care of someone defusing a bomb—except the bomb is smaller than a grain of sand, and you need to keep it alive. Have you trained in glass-blowing? Hope so, because you’ll need to handcraft your own micropipettes so you can balance an embryo on the pipette tip. Yes, really.

And most importantly, do you sincerely believe that outcomes are irrelevant, and only the endless, repetitive journey matters? If so, congratulations! You may already be a Zen master, which will come in handy when you’re objectively failing your boss’s expectations every single day for what feels like an eternity. Success, when it finally comes, will be indistinguishable from sheer, dumb luck, but the stochastic randomness won’t stop you from searching frantically through your copious notes to see if you can pinpoint the variable that made it finally work!

Let’s go a little deeper so we can understand why the Games team's achievement was considered so monumental—and why almost everyone viewed the results in the best possible light.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

Gil Scott-Heron

[ed. Ed Brady, guitar (Part II).]

GLP-1s Are Quietly Killing Your Cravings (and Maybe Your Bad Habits Too)

What happens when you can actually watch sugar cravings disappear from someone's brain? — You've probably heard people talking about 'food noise’. It’s that persistent, nagging voice in your head that keeps whispering about donuts, pizza, or cookies.

For many struggling with obesity, this chronic craving for sugar and fat feels like a voice you just can't mute.

But when people begin taking GLP-1 medications, it's as though someone finally found the volume knob and dialled it down to zero. The experience is something like an instantaneous liberation, so surreal and dramatic it almost feels like magic.

Recently, a good friend described starting tirzepatide this way:

"Bro, my food noise just vanished. Gone. Poof. I finally had the freedom to think about other things. And my shopping basket changed overnight. I actually wanted leafy greens and sweet potato. Sweet potato! Do you know how crazy that is?”

Stories like my friend's are piling up everywhere. So what's actually happening inside the brain when food noise just... stops?

When the brain says no

We've known for a while that GLP-1 meds like semaglutide dial down cravings, but now we've got visual proof of it actually happening in the brain.

A groundbreaking randomized controlled trial just published in Nature Medicine, used functional MRI (fMRI) scans to watch people's brains in real-time as they looked at images of high calorie, high sugar foods (think pizza, cakes, burgers etc) while taking tirzepatide, liraglutide, or a placebo.

Average brain activity shown on scans at the start of the study (baseline) and after three weeks of treatment (week 3). Bright colours (red and yellow) indicate higher brain activation in areas linked to cravings and reward when participants viewed images of high-fat, high-sugar foods.

Average brain activity shown on scans at the start of the study (baseline) and after three weeks of treatment (week 3). Bright colours (red and yellow) indicate higher brain activation in areas linked to cravings and reward when participants viewed images of high-fat, high-sugar foods.

After just three weeks on tirzepatide, the brain regions that light up when we see junk food went quiet. The areas responsible for cravings and reward anticipation (like the cingulate gyrus and medial frontal gyrus) showed roughly 170 % to 220 % less activation than they did on placebo, meaning these brain regions actually went into suppression. (...)

You’d think a drug like this would just crush hunger everywhere, like a sledgehammer smashing through a wall. Nope. Tirzepatide works more like an elite sniper perched on a rooftop, laser focused and zeroing in on your strongest cravings for high calorie, high sugary crap and picking them off with precision.

Amazingly, it leaves your appetite for fresh salads, crisp veggies, and sweet raspberries untouched.

Cravings for healthier foods (fruits and vegetables) remained virtually unchanged

The $1.2 Billion Question

Now, let’s zoom out for a second. What happens if millions of us suddenly lose that intense urge for soda, chips, or those wonderful chocolate chip cookies from subway (my fave)?

Agricultural economist Brian E. Roe calculated that even moderate levels of adoption of GLP-1s, say 10% among overweight people and 20% among those with obesity, would lead to a 3% drop in total calorie demand in the U.S.

That translates to around 20 billion fewer calories eaten daily and $1.2 billion less spent each week on food and drinks.

In other words, companies like Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, and Nestlé, who’ve built sprawling empires by tapping directly into the very cravings we've just seen silenced on MRI, may soon face an existential threat.

Some innovative companies, however, have already started adapting.

Smoothie King sensed the winds shifting first, cleverly rolling out high-protein, GLP-1-friendly shakes to capture the health-aware consumer.

Expect other fast-moving brands to dive headfirst into a wave of products customized specifically for people freed from the constant grip of food cravings.

The rest will need to pivot quickly or risk fading into oblivion.

GLP-1s as Impulse Dampeners

But tirzepatide might be doing something even more profound than silencing food noise. The same study suggests it's actually rewiring impulse control in the brain itself.

The researchers measured impulsiveness using the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, a validated psychological tool that captures everyday impulsive tendencies like “acting without thinking” or “struggling to resist urges.”

After 3-6 weeks of tirzepatide treatment, participants reported feeling significantly less impulsive than those who received the placebo.

They reported feeling calmer, more in control, and far less prone to snap decisions or irresistible urges.

This is important when you consider that impulsivity is the engine behind pretty much every self-destructive habit out there. Whether you're talking binge-drinking, gambling, chain-smoking or falling into the black hole of substance abuse.

If GLP-1 meds can dial down the noisy circuits in our brains screaming 'just do it!', we might be staring down the barrel of an entirely new way of treating addiction and it’s devastating consequences.

Just imagine a world (to borrow from John Lennon) with fewer overdose headlines, calmer Friday nights in emergency rooms, shrinking gambling debts, maybe even drops in domestic violence and incarceration rates.

Researchers are taking this seriously.

Major clinical trials already underway are testing whether GLP-1 meds might quiet the destructive impulses behind addiction itself. If they're right, we're looking at something much bigger (and far more important) than just weight loss.

by Ashwin Sharma, MD, GLP-1 Digest |  Read more:

Image: GPT/GLP-1 Digest Illustration; Nature Medicine

[ed. See also: How GLP-1s Are Breaking Life Insurance; and, Why are GLP1 drugs good for everything?]

What Could Go Wrong?

Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life

Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it was acquiring a company called io, an artificial-intelligence-forward product-development firm co-founded, last year, by Jony Ive, the vastly influential designer known for his work with Steve Jobs at Apple. Ive led the designs of the original iMac, the iPad, and the Apple Watch, among other era-defining products. Then, in 2019, he left Apple to start his own design firm called LoveFrom. The news of his move to OpenAI felt something like learning that LeBron James was joining the Miami Heat: Ive had become synonymous with Apple’s success, perhaps second only to Jobs. Now, after a period of independence, he was choosing a new team. The announcement of the deal with OpenAI—for a reported $6.5 billion in OpenAI equity—came via a press release, featuring a rather cuddly portrait of Ive with OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder, Sam Altman (shot by the British fashion photographer Craig McDean) and a faux-casual videotaped interview session between the two at San Francisco’s Cafe Zoetrope. In it, Altman describes “a family of devices that would let people use A.I. to create all sorts of wonderful things,” enabled by “magic intelligence in the cloud.” The symbolism of the partnership was clear: Altman is the new Jobs, and together he and Ive promise to create the next ur-device, a personal technology that will reshape our lives just as the iPhone did. Once it’s ready, they say, they’ll ship a hundred million devices “faster than any company” ever has.

We don’t know what it will look like just yet, but Altman swears that it will be “​​the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” Ming-chi Kuo, a respected analyst of Apple’s Chinese manufacturing, posted on X that the product is planned to be “as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle” and that it will have “cameras and microphones for environmental detection.” It might resemble other early A.I. devices announced or launched in the past year, such as Friend, another pendant-like chatbot companion; Humane, an A.I. pin with a laser projector; or Rabbit, a small handheld gadget. Yet the functionality of these nascent inventions is severely limited. “Vaporware” is a term of art from the nineteen-eighties that was popularized in the early internet era, referring to new software or technology that overpromises and underdelivers—if the product is even released in the first place. However many breathless headlines about OpenAI’s acquisition, it’s just vaporware until Altman and Ive prove otherwise. Hype, after all, is one of OpenAI’s primary achievements—despite predictions about ChatGPT changing the world, the company is losing billions of dollars a year.

What we can do, in the meantime, is imagine what an iPhone of A.I. might look like based on the A.I. technology that so far exists. Generative A.I. has already been integrated into many of our daily digital experiences, whether we want it there or not. iPhones now summarize text threads using A.I. and allow users to generate custom emojis. Google recently announced an “AI Mode” that it intends to supplant its traditional search box with, a development that threatens to slow open-web traffic down to a trickle. Meta’s “AI Glasses,” a collaboration with Ray-Ban, integrate voice chatting and live translation with the company’s A.I. assistant. And chatbots with distinct personalities, like Replika and Character.ai, are becoming increasingly popular as they get better at mimicking human connection. Perhaps Altman and Ive’s machine will mingle all of these functionalities: it might listen to and interpret the sounds around you; it might respond with predictive text, delivered to you instantaneously and in a customizable tone; and it might become your main avenue for accessing information, like a personal concierge. It will reportedly not attempt to supplant the other technologies you depend on: according to the Wall Street Journal, Altman described it as a kind of third device, meant to work within an ecosystem that includes your laptop and smartphone. But it will effectively be a self-surveillance machine that creates a technological scrim for your personal reality. The involvement of Ive invites inevitable comparisons with the iPhone, but this is not necessarily a compliment; to many of us, an iPhone of A.I. sounds less like a utopian promise than like a threat that A.I. will soon become ubiquitous and unavoidable. Smartphones have already absorbed us in our screens, creating personalized information bubbles; omnipresent A.I. will only intensify that atomization while being more automated, more inscrutable, and more inescapable.

The video claims that more information about the new product will be shared next year, which would mean that we’re currently in the Palm Pilot stage of A.I.—with the iPhone-like invention looming around the corner, poised to obliterate the competition. But there are vast logistical hurdles to achieving this optimistic timeline for ubiquitous consumer A.I. More than a billion people in the world own iPhones. Some research estimates that generating a typical e-mail using A.I. consumes a bottle’s worth of water to siphon heat away from the data centers’ servers to separate cooling towers. This means that, if we all started using our personal A.I. machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll of our personal technology would skyrocket—imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck. This, in turn, would warp the direction of global economies, requiring the construction of ever-larger data centers. The economic and environmental overhaul would be done in the name of outsourcing our human thoughts and memories to an omnipresent machine resting in our pockets or hanging around our necks. (...)

Speculative mockups online imagine an A.I. companion device that looks simple, like a rounded metal amulet—it would be Ive’s style to make the design approachable yet austere. Yet the sleek and frictionless object will rely on a vast infrastructure of factories and server farms; the labor of human maintenance workers and moderators; and, ultimately, the corpus of information that has been digested as training data, which is effectively the entire history of human thought. The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ariel Davis

[ed. See also: ‘Humanity deserves better’: iPhone designer on new partnership with OpenAI (Guardian).]

Sisters of the Valley
Images: Raquel Cunha/Reuters
[ed. Great pics.]
"Sisters of the Valley is a non-religious group founded in 2014 that has pledged to spread the gospel of the healing powers of cannabis. The Sisters argue that the fight against drugs in Latin America has been a failure, leading to widespread violence and mass incarceration"

Crashing the Car of Pax Americana

[ed. Excellent.]

My ask of you in reading this note is that we make an effort to hold several conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time. Like, for example, that the American socioeconomic system desperately needs fixing after decades of venal corruption from (mostly) Democratic but (also) Republican Administrations AND there is an underlying global system worth preserving that gives the United States enormous privilege, wealth and freedom of action in the world. Or, for example, that there’s no reason to doubt the authentic intentions of Donald Trump and his Administration to improve the position of the United States AND their economic policies can have the unintended consequence of blasting the underlying global system to smithereens, making it impossible to achieve their goals. It’s really not easy to hold all of these ideas simultaneously! Every bit of party propaganda from the left and the right, every big voice on social media, everyone wants you to give yourself over to a single idea of party purity and ignore everything else. But it’s just not true.

The truth is that the United States became as sclerotic and bloated under Joe Biden as the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, and that Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and its obscene cover-up made the United States government a global patsy and a domestic feeding trough. The truth is that our border policy was stupidly permissive. The truth is that we really do need to eliminate vast swaths of the Federal bureaucracy and the Christmas tree funding programs that always grow and never shrink. The truth is that a Department of Government Efficiency is a really good idea.

AND the truth is that the purpose of government is not efficiency for efficiency’s sake. AND the truth is that the quality of mercy is not strained and neither is due process, so that justice may be sure but never cruel. AND the truth is that spending money to curry political favor abroad through CIA USAID programs is a lot cheaper and a lot more efficient than sending in the Marines, AND is a lot more profitable than seeing the Chinese take our place in the world. AND the truth is that we have three co-equal branches of government, where the unconstitutionality of a President ‘vetoing’ Congressionally-authorized spending programs through Executive Order is well-settled law. AND the truth is that government debt isn’t like our own personal debt, so that we can’t go broke as a nation AND we’re nowhere near having a budget crisis AND we have the strongest, most vital economy in the world AND we can still grow our way to a more equitable prosperity without breaking a global system that works so formidably to our advantage.

This underlying global system has a name. It’s called Pax Americana.

• Pax Americana is the Bretton Woods monetary system and the Plaza Accords and the SWIFT banking system and the unquestioned dominance of the USD as the world’s reserve currency.

• Pax Americana is the NATO alliance and the Pacific Fleet and CENTCOM and the NSA and the unquestioned dominance of the US military as the world’s security arbiter.

• Pax Americana is the American brands, American universities, American entrepreneurialism, and most of all the American stories that have dominated the hearts and minds of everyone on Earth for the past 50 years.

• Pax Americana is the ability of the United States to set the rules for every coordination game in the world. The rules of trade, the rules of intellectual property, the rules of money, the rules of culture, the rules of war … all of those rules were made by us. Only by us! And in return we gave the rest of the world two things: global peace (pretty much) enforced by a blue-water navy with force projection capabilities anywhere in the world, and unfettered access (pretty much) to the buying power of the American consumer.

The results of Pax Americana?

• The United States has seen more than 300 million citizens lifted into the highest standard of living in the history of the world, as we have exchanged intangible things like services and the full faith and credit of the US government for tangible things like oil and semiconductors and food at an unimaginable scale.

• The world has seen more than a billion people lifted out of crushing poverty, mostly in China and India but everywhere else, too, as the capacity to make tangible things has shifted permanently (yes, permanently) from West to East.

My strong, unwavering belief is that Pax Americana is a damn good deal for the United States AND the world, especially as American leadership in AI opens up an entirely new realm of intangible things that the United States can trade for tangible things. Is it a perfect deal for the United States? No. Do other countries free ride on our provision of security and an end-market of the American consumer? Absolutely. Has the system been internally captured by oligarchs and professional politicians, so that the distribution of this great wealth flowing to the United States goes less and less to ‘average’ Americans? 100%. Should we aggressively prune and reform the Pax Americana system? Should we root out its foreign free riders and domestic leeches? Yes, please!

But that’s not what this Administration believes. Neither Donald Trump nor his key advisors believe that Pax Americana is a good deal at all, much less a damn good deal like I believe. They believe the United States is being cheated and taken advantage of without end, both internationally and domestically. They don’t want to fix the Pax Americana regime of coordination through multilateral rule-setting. They want to blow up the entire deal and replace it with an America First regime of competition through bilateral engagement.

I appreciate their frustration. I share a lot of it. But I am desperately opposed to crashing the Pax Americana car, Annie Hall style, because the America First system that this Administration wants to have as a replacement is not a stable system that is possible to have as a replacement. The end result of blowing up Pax Americana and its – yes – globalist system of rules and institutions and alliances that coordinates the flow of capital, labor, goods, services and culture without ‘winning’ any head-to-head relationship will be a system that is both worse for the United States AND the world. Here’s why: 

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:
Image: Annie Hall

[ed. From the comments:]

***

I spent almost eight years working in the Appalachian Basin. You have no idea just how bad it is and how deep the pain runs. (You also probably don’t know just how hilariously well armed the Amish are in that part of Ohio; some of those guys could put on a gun show by doing nothing more than opening their barn doors)

How can we keep Pax Americana going in a way that benefits all Americans - and by benefit I mean offers lives of dignity with meaningful work, meaningful relationships and recognition of value?

What if that’s not what a lot of those people want? Because in my experience down there this was not a universal goal, nor would it even carry the majority of the population on any given day.

When the shale boom came it brought with it billions of dollars of absolutely free money that was handed out in exchange for what the residents previously believed was damn near worthless land. Tens of billions flowed from the ground and into the pockets of landowners. All the hotels and motels were full every night for years. Every restaurant was packed day and night. Energy companies paved roads, donated to every local community organization, soccer team, bought every animal from every 4H kid at every county fair. Every county courthouse was filled with landmen who spent all day making copies of deed records, at 25¢ a page. Thousands of pages, by 15-20 guys, every day. The Recorder’s office was running a machine that spat out $5,000/d, every day, for months. Companies cut checks directly to the county for expanded hours so their people could work before and after regular closing times. They paid tens of thousands for a few extra hours a day over the course of a few months. Government revenues ballooned.

Then what happened?

Hundreds of good paying jobs were created overnight…and most went to workers from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, not Ohio or Pennsylvania. Know why? Nobody could pass a drug test. No, I’m not shitting you. I had a friend who had a wireline company and he tried to hire two locals. Both didn’t even show up for the drug test. That was the last time he bothered to even advertise his job opening in the area. He hired professionals from out of state. Less hassle.

Before a single cubic foot of gas or barrel of oil came out of the ground the local Ford dealership made news as it catapulted to the top of the list of highest volume dealers in the state. It seemed like every farm large and small had a new F-150 in the gravel driveway.

The casinos across the river had multiple record years in a row after a decade of a slow decline. Strip clubs boomed.

And nobody really built anything. The families who were rich before were simply even more rich after. One prominent local attorney—whose conduct would have gotten him disbarred in any other place—tightened his grip on the area, and after a particularly major payout bought a second home in Lake Como, Italy.

The old men dying of black lung kept on dying. The young men continued their drift into addiction, which had started to take hold years before that. Crime went up despite poverty going down.

The local wastewater treatment plants were at least smart enough to make deals with the service companies to clean the used frac water. Again, government receipts grew, but how much of that made it to the people? (Not much)

Nobody bothered to clean up the brownfields and open a new facility making drill pipe. That ended up happening an hour north instead. It took two years for the owner of a previously defunct gravel yard to open back up, despite the fact that he was sitting on a gold mine. (I know this because I tried to buy part of it from him and he not only wouldn’t sell but quite literally did not understand the magnitude of what was about to happen)

Very little changed because the people didn’t want anything to change. Many of them talked about Weirton Steel as if it was still 1981, and cursed the foreigners (ArcelorMittal) who owned what was left of it. (And in a small twist of irony the man who bought that bankrupt company off of the employees in 2002–for a hilariously low ball price—would go on to be the Secretary of Commerce under the first term of the president that they voted for in overwhelming numbers) It’s been 15 years of oil and gas money steadily flowing to the area, and nothing has changed. The complaint that “there aren’t any jobs” is old enough to drink. Some people had the good sense to leave. Everyone else was just more comfortable staying and watching everything die.

I’m not unsympathetic, but the way these folks are talked about—and talk about themselves—you’d think they had no agency of their own. They think their salvation is just around the corner, if only we’d just blew up every working institution around the globe they’d make it to the other side of this mess. It’s paternalistic horseshit that Trump is selling and they’re lining up around the block to get their wheelbarrow full of it.