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How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years
HughPickens.com writes Bloomberg News reports that venture capitalist and paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has a plan to reach 120 years of age. His secret — taking human growth hormone (HGH) every day, a special Paleo diet, and a cure for cancer within ten years. "[HGH] helps maintain muscle mass, so you're much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis," says Thiel. "There's always a worry that it increases your cancer risk but — I'm hopeful that we'll get cancer cured in the next decade." Human growth hormone also known as somatotropin or somatropin, is a peptide hormone that stimulates growth, cell reproduction and regeneration in humans and other animals. Thiel says he also follows a Paleo diet, doesn't eat sugar, drinks red wine and runs regularly. The Paleolithic diet, also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era. Thiel's Founders Fund is also investing in a number of biotechnology companies to extend human lifespans, including Stem CentRx Inc., which uses stem cell technology for cancer therapy. With the 70 plus years remaining him and inspired by "Atlas Shrugged," Thiel also plans to launch a floating sovereign nation in international waters, freeing him and like-minded thinkers to live by libertarian ideals with no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.
They'll dump it overboard and let the market incentivize cleanup.
mh
They wont need to collect the trash since they will be floating in international waters with no regulations, they will just throw it overboard and let us deal with it.
I actually am a scientist, and coincidentally, I work for the National Cancer Institute (a part of NIH). While I don't want state anything in absolute certainties, I seriously doubt we'll be able to "cure cancer" in 10 years. Other than the exercise, I fail to see how any of those things will help him live to 120. They may give him a high chance of reaching 80, or something like that, but most of his approaches are probably being used for the wrong purposes. I mean, cavemen (and women!) didn't live very long lives, even accounting for frank injuries from dinosaurs, sharktopus, and whatnot.
Disclaimer: Didn't watch the video.
Read up on the anthropology, especially about the value of grandparents. Also be careful to avoid means as averages in such cases.
Hint: healthy humans don't undergo menarche until they're about twelve, and human children do not survive well if their parents die off before they're eight.
There's evidence that life expectancy went down with agriculture, though housing heralds an improvement for infant mortality so the means go up, though tempered by increased disease.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Lets all hope that they lax building codes bring the houses on their little island crashing down on them.
The big problem with these kind of rich a**holes is that don't want to contribute to society but they want society to help them. Personally I am praying for a pirate attack on this island or something else. Then they will cry for a state to help them. We ordinary people is only a tool for this kind of persons.
Wanting to live to 120 is something we don't want for these kind of people. That gives them more time to use their fellow man. The only fair thing today is that even the super rich dies. If they don't, then we ordinary people will suffer even more under even more dysfunctional 500 year old people with to much money.
Puberty starts 8-12 in modern humans. Puberty of women is the only thing that matters (a single post-pubescent male can inpregnate hundreds of women, but one woman can't carry more than one child at a time (exceptions for rare twins and such). And it doesn't matter if you live after giving birth, other than to reproduce again. It's only been about 100 years since the number 1 killer of women was childbirth. The non-breeders raised the breeders. One man would impregnate as many women as possible, and fertile women would be pregnant as much as possible, until dead.
6-8 years of parenthood was enough. And the tribe would raise the children jointly, as the males died often getting food or warring with others, and the mothers were either pregnant or dead.
Learn to love Alaska
Cancer is just one of many, many things that are likely to kill you before you're 120.
Yup... and its not even the worst of the bunch. I'd put Alzheimer's on the top of the list; maybe advanced Parkinson's after that. Or a bad stroke...
Yeah, I think people underestimate the difficulty of extending life.
It isn't just one thing that needs to be fixed, some immortality gene that needs to be turned on. It's everything.
Our bodies are designed to work really well for about 45 years, and decently well for another 15-20 after, but after that we're operating outside of spec.
None of our systems evolved to work after seventy, they don't all breakdown at the same rate, but they all break down.
I think we'll hit the singularity or cyborgs before we hit average humans passing 120.
I stole this Sig
Ultimately, you can't be a slave to any ideology or fad. You have to actually have some self knowledge. You need to observe yourself and adjust accordingly.
We are not factory stamped duplicates. We are each a very complicated machine each a fork of some very complex bio-mechanical software. The idea that we are not all the same should be obvious to anyone on this site.
The idea that some of us thrive on habits that would be bad for others should be not terribly controversial.
You just have to be methodical and make the observations and sort yourself out and not blindly follow anything else.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Puberty starts 8-12 in modern humans.
Very modern humans with excellent nutrition. It can be delayed by poor nutrition. I'm pretty sure I've seen people talking about that number dipping lower in recent centuries. I suspect it was higher in neo/paleolithic ages, when the food supply was less consistent.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
You are confused. His goal is not to improve humanity by creating cures for all of the things that will kill him before he turns age 120. His goal is to give a big "f*ck you" to the society that will create all of those cures for him.
He intends to benefit from society without contributing to it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
someone needs to give this guy a primer on cancer and its 'cures'.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
(That could be better or worse, of course...)
So let's summarize this. Some rich person think they are smarter than everyone else and that they have the ills of the world figured out. Namely: a cure for cancer is just around the corner (based on what evidence?), so they choose a diet that is totally unproven to do anything good or bad, they plan to live forever and they will retreat to some mystical artificial island where they can do what they want and not be bothered by anyone not of their own kind. So far so good.
What I don't get is why they think welfare is bad. Obviously they don't need it, they're rich. But not everyone can be rich, this would be the same as everyone being poor. So given that in any society there will be richer and poorer people, welfare simply ensures that even the poorest get some minimum access to services, typically health care. This does not prevent richer people to get better services. Explain to me why this is bad? Given that rich/poor status is mostly a question of luck, being anti-welfare has always struck me as being selfish.
I agree with you on that count, but the paleo diet is still flawed in that its fundamental premise - that at some point in the past mankind was somehow in sync with their environment, and their diet at that point was perfectly aligned with their nutritional needs.
This is apparently because our ancestors evolved to a stable state on one diet over a very long period of time.
This is a massive, and wrong, assumption. Humans were never in perfect harmony with their environment, even if such a condition is at all possible.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Mr. Thiel,
You were born rich to obviously rich parents who could afford to send you to Stanford for your undergraduate and graduate degrees.
You're still rich today.
Congratulations. You did not lose your fortune, something almost impossible today due to favorable taxation for the wealthy.
Once you're rich you stay that way forever in the United States unless you're a very stupid person.
Sincerely,
The 99%.
The fact that he has wacky ideas does not surprise me. Rich people are born that way, being given every advantage in life. People don't get rich by being particularly intelligent. They pay people to do everything for them, and unless they're very stupid they get much richer in the process.
Sigh. "Socialism in particular fails because the only motivation []is to improve the lives of others."
You need to go talk to people who work in a co-op business. A co-op is The People Owning The Means Of Production. Socialism. And it's awesome. It's not about making life better for others. It's about making life better for YOU. Imagine if you can, owning part of your workplace. Being able to have a say in how it's run. Being able to share in the gains. That's a LOT better (and a little riskier) than being a wage slave like you are now. It's also Totally Worth It.
I hate it when people make sweeping generalizations about something they have no practical knowledge of. Slashdot Armchair Philosophers, oh, socialism fails... You should go experience it and see just how awesome it can be.
Also, socialism isn't the best way. Neither is pure capitalism. The countries that have the happiest people in the world are mixed economies, and embrace that idea. Anyway.... I just wanted to gripe.