I had not seen such an in-depth look at Peter Thiel’s views on longevity. He seems like someone any startup longevity biotech company should be targeting as an investor…
Of course, if he had the choice, Thiel would prefer not to die in the first place. In the 2000s, he became enamored with the work of Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from England who predicted that science would soon enable someone to live for a thousand years. By the end of that span, future scientists would have devised a way to extend life still further, and so on to immortality.
A charismatic figure with a prodigious beard and a doctorate from Cambridge, de Grey resembled an Orthodox priest in mufti. He preached to Thiel for hours at a time about the science of regeneration. De Grey called his research program SENS, short for “strategies for engineered negligible senescence.”
Thiel gave several million dollars to de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, helping fund a lucrative prize for any scientist who could stretch the life span of mice to unnatural lengths. Four such prizes were awarded, but no human applications have yet emerged.
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If anything, Thiel thinks about death more than they do—and kicks himself for not thinking about it enough. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he told me. “I should be spending way more time on this.”
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Thiel already does a lot of things to try to extend his life span: He’s on a Paleo diet; he works out with a trainer. He suspects that nicotine is a “really good nootropic drug that raises your IQ 10 points,” and is thinking about adding a nicotine patch to his regimen. He has spoken of using human-growth-hormone pills to promote muscle mass. Until recently he was taking semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic; lately he has switched to a weekly injection of Mounjaro, an antidiabetic drug commonly used for weight loss. He doses himself with another antidiabetic, metformin, because he thinks it has a “significant effect in suppressing the cancer risk.”
But its just one part of a longer interview with Peter Thiel:
I’ve tried nicotine gum in the past… I’ve never smoked or used any nicotine products before, but no issues with addictiveness for me. Not sure its worth it, nicotine gum is pretty expensive (compared to regular gum) and the gum tasted pretty bad.
I think Peter will get fast tolerance to it, so only improving your IQ once a week becomes viable I think.
Faster routes of administration is more addictive. Paches are least addictive as what Peter mentions, but you only take a very small part of a patch about once a week as they are high dosages. It also probably reduces risk for Parkinson’s disease.
There are lots of people who become addicted because they start with gum, start chewing all the time, then start using vapes and then they’re vaping all the time and have a hard time quitting.
Prostate cancer is clearly heavily impacted by aberrant splicing. If anyone has a high PSA (mine is really low 0.86 mcg/l) it would be interesting to see if Citrate supplementation drives that down. I know someone who has a middling to high PSA who may try it out, but I don’t have any data on this point as it stands.
I have a large supply of Nicorette 4mg gum and I only use half of a piece (2mg) occasionally when I want to clear up some brain fog. I would use it more often but it gives me a buzz that I am not fond of. It works better than noopept in clearing brain fog. It would be interesting, if I was still taking tests, to chew a piece before the test. I am pretty sure it would improve the results.
I’ve tracked my PSA for the past 20 years or more (69 y/o) genetically predisposed to aggressive pc - latest results this week are: Total 2.40, Free 0.70, Ratio: 29% - all within range as they always have been however the levels are gradually ticking in the wrong direction - 6 months ago Total: 2.30, Free: 0.60, Ratio: 26%.6 years ago was - Total: 1.87, Free: 0.69, Ratio: 37%.
I use London Medical for testing nowadays.
I’ll be happy to give the citrate protocol a try and get tested again at, say, 3 and 6 months if you could let me have your suggested methodology. I have potassium citrate in stock and magnesium citrate should be here tomorrow. I guess I’ll also need calcium citrate as a powder and how about zinc citrate?
I already take some magnesium citrate and zinc citrate in other supplements and have done so for a long time but minimal amounts I guess.
Here in the UK PSA testing isn’t done routinely under the NHS (at 69 y/o my doctor declined to even test it when requested) and it’s not easy to find labs here which offer PSA testing at all. When they do it is usually simply ‘Total’ rather than anything else. I do remember reading about ‘velocity’ and will research it again - thanks for the memory jog!
The Citrate protocol is a bit difficult because the timing matters and the balance of cations (as well as all the other aspects). I am still doing a bit of coached biohacking for people (no charge) who sign a disclaimer and NDA.
Medichecks have improved their CRP test which now goes as low as 0.15mg/l. The best I could get otherwise was Nationwide Pathology with a minimum of 0.16.
