What i want to build

Health

Continuous monitoring

• Digital biomarkers: COVID-19 could be predicted with an Apple Watch. What other measures of health (e.g. aging) can be predicted from just digital biomarkers?
• Insights from data aggregation: We have so much data but no decent solution to aggregate everything and give us insights. I want not just dashboards (e.g. Gyroscope), but something that can answer questions like “why am I so tired even with 7 hours of sleep?” intelligently.
• Biosensors for everything: We already have CGM — what other biomarkers can we continuously monitor? What about biomarkers for mental health?

Democratizing medical literature

• Better WebMD

Reforming nutrition

• Nutrition is one of the most important yet misused and misunderstood field — it is the basis of several physical but mental illnesses. How can we reform nutrition at both individual and systemic level?
  • Past failed attempt: NuSi

Emotional/psychological fitness training

• This is more than just meditation or mindfulness. It’s about learning tools to deal with the curveballs life throws at us in a variety of ways besides just stoicism — channeling anger, frustrations, sadness into something productive:
  • Building it into school curriculum
  • Augmenting with technology: training people by putting them into emotionally-charged simulations
  • Creating a physical gyms for emotional/psychological fitness

Purpose

Self-knowledge tools

• I believe democratizing self-knowledge is one of the most important things one could work on. Self-knowledge is the basis human flourishing — it enables us to know the life we want to lead, gives us the courage to believe in our taste, and ultimately makes us responsible for our fate. Some ideas:
  • Better liberal arts education
  • Simulating lived experiences through technology (BCI, AR/VR, etc.)
  • Psychedelics
  • Software for thoughts
  • Tighter feedback loops

Democratizing mentorship

• Our imagination can be limited by what we know. One of the best ways to stimulate personal growth is adopting frameworks from others. With AI and aggregation of profiles of influential figures, we can easily ask questions such as “What would George Washington do in my situation?”

Fostering non-complacency

• How do we incentivize people to be more proactive about their lives? From maintaining one’s health to choosing a life partner, most people continue on the course of their lives without periodic re-evaluations. These are decisions that have a significant impact on quality of life, but people are not intentional enough to make major life changes without external forces.

Economic security

• TBD

Happiness and Relationships

Improving the happiness baseline

• Is there a way to improve the happiness baseline with the current technology we have? How do we deploy them at scale?

Applications of states of consciousness

• Certain states of consciousness are beneficial but come with bad health effects. Can we simulate these states through other means? (e.g. finding ways to produce the benefits of alcohol without the bad effects — VR to make one feel more hyped and social)

Intentional relationships

• Matching: Dating apps are incentivized to keep us there. How can we design matching tools that are more incentive-aligned with the users
• Building and maintaining: There are several dating apps but few that help keep relationships strong.

Intentional communities

• How can we build durable communities that reduce loneliness and promote personal growth?

APIs for the atoms world

Biotech

• What if we could run bio experiments from our laptops?
  • There are companies such as ECL, Transcriptic which focus on robotics to automate experiments — but is there a way to leverage existing CROs and human labor for these APIs?

Supply chain

• What if we could make starting a hardware or physical products company as easy as starting a software company?

Building cultures of excellence

How can we encourage more ambition while still making life great for the average people?

Arts

• Create compelling vision of the future through arts (film, fiction, music, etc.). Bring back techno-optimism of the Space Race. Make people fall in love with progress.

Play and curiosity

• Our ambitions are followed by our tastes, and those tastes are refined by our curiosity. Great scientists like Hamming and Feynmann became great because they followed their curiosities and approached life as some sort of play. How do we foster this childlike wonder in adults? How do we make sure societies do not stifle this in children?

Safer to fail

• We need to enable people to explore more early in their lives.
  • Reimagining K-12 education: our Founding Fathers went to college when they were 13 - 16, when the prerequisites for enrollment were much more rigorous than today. Have the standards fallen? Are we wasting the time of our brightest minds? Maybe college is not needed after all, because all the baseline education could have been covered much earlier.
  • Solving the college debt crisis
  • Talent identification: how can we scale a way to identify talent without credentials?
  • Reforming healthcare

Experimental cities

• Building new cities to integrate all of these above

Reducing existential risks

Our dreams, ideals, principles no longer matter if we are wiped out. As technology progresses, there is a high chance that tools for mass destruction are in the hands of one individual. We need to optimize for survival, which includes:

• AI safety
• Biosurveillance
• Studying the history of long-term stability
• Studying civilizational collapses
• Preserving human knowledge

Avoiding the local maxima

As technology progresses, there is a risk that we might optimize towards the local maxima.

Human diversity

• How can we ensure that we don’t optimize for locally maximal traits when gene editing becomes inevitable?

Stagnant systems

• How can we accelerate destruction of stagnant organizations and civilizations / ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?

New ways of doing science

Systemizing discovery

• Can we industrialize scientific research by creating a blueprint for discovery that everyone can follow? Can we automate insights? (h/t Jose)

Better funding and regulations

• The US funds more science research than any other country. However, are we really doing this well? Are we allocating too much funding to known fields with incremental progress?

Robust tools

• Summarizing state of the art of a given field: it's still very hard for people to understand what is going on in a field. What if we could have a place where all landmark papers, open questions, current roadblocks, etc. are curated for each field?
• Better scientific papers: some current efforts are Distill, Fermat's Library

Ecosystems for deeptech companies

Streamlining utilization of government grants

• In the early stage, government grants such as SBIR are the lifeline for deeptech companies. However, the process of applying to them can be painful and time-consuming. Ideally, we could make a MainStreet for grants.

Making investing in deeptech more attractive

• We need better marketing and fund structure to make investments in deeptech more attractive.

New or improved SBIR

• Some R&D shops have solely made their money through SBIR grants. The current way the grant is structured is not suitable for high-growth startup, and the program should be revamped or another program should be created.

More resources for entrepreneurs

• Helping scientific founders find business partners, creating infrastructure for shared lab spaces

Curing aging

Curing aging would fundamentally change the game in most of these areas — we would be able to improve human flourishing and create infrastructure for progress as people take a more long-term approach to lives and have more time to take risks. Furthermore, if we could understand aging, we would have be able to find better cures for diseases than just through trial and error as we are currently doing.

Cognitive enhancements

Understanding our own architecture

• Which features of the human brain are most important for intelligence? How important is computational power vs. brain architecture vs. accumulated knowledge?

Brain-machine interface

• e.g. Neuralink

Pharmological interventions

• TBD

Preserving and extending fertility

Male fertility

• There have been concerns about declining male fertility. What are the causes, and how can we reverse the trend?

Female fertility

• If we are going to live longer, we need to extend female fertility window as well. The need for this is already happening — women are having children much later.
• Reversing menopause might also contribute to curing aging

Climate change

A good primer.

Space settlement

Becoming a multiplanetary species is essential. The question is: how will we survive and thrive in space? Inventions to make space more habitable could even have applications on Earth itself (terraforming, synthetic biology, etc.)