Emerging Technologies

July 31st - August 6th

Will Sullivan
August 07, 2023

SPECIAL EDITION: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

This week’s edition of the newsletter is going to be slightly different. Instead of highlighting tech and business headlines, I'll be sharing some brief thoughts on two emerging technologies:

Alternative Proteins
Longevity & Health Sensors

I closely monitor the progress of over a dozen industries and their respective technologies. Among the numerous companies developing the technologies mentioned above, I’m not confident enough to tell you which ones will succeed, fail, or become the most popular. Nevertheless, having tracked their progress for a few years now, I’m betting heavily that the technologies themselves will reach large-scale adoption in the years to come.

Alternative Proteins

I believe we will look back on our commercial livestock practices several decades from now and be shocked that they continued the way they did for so long. 92.2 billion land animals are slaughtered annually in the global food system. Putting aside the obvious ethical implications of such actions, the process of raising, handling, and slaughtering animals is incredibly inefficient. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories, in addition to causing 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

The need for a more efficient solution could not be more apparent. That’s where alternative meats come in. Alternative proteins, encompassing both plant-based meats and cultivated (lab-grown) meats, are positioned to become the new normal. While plant-based meats are pretty well understood (Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are almost universal household brands), cultivated meats are not. Put simply, cultivated meats are "meats" produced by culturing animal cells in a bioreactor to develop muscle tissue, mimicking the complex structure of conventional meat. Some of the most well-known companies working on cultivated meats are Eat Just (GOOD Meat), Upside Foods, and Believer Meats.

The bet I have on alternative proteins doesn’t force me to choose between plant-based and cultivated meats. As long as what I’m eating smells, tastes, looks, feels, costs, and has the same nutritional value as "real" meat, then I don’t care if it’s made of plants or grown in a lab. (This is coming from someone who only a few years ago described in a college application essay that plant-based meats are "arguably the greatest con since the ‘healthy’ nature of Wonder Bread"). Alternative meats are not quite at the point of being indistinguishable from the real thing, but their exponential improvement suggests that the transition away from real livestock protein will be here sooner than you might expect.

Longevity & Health Sensors

The saying goes that you can't buy more time, but let’s say you're a billionaire with all the money in the world, why not try to buy some extra time, right? Well, turns out some billionaires have figured out a way to do just that - by extending their own life expectancies. Legendary entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferris once said that one way to find the next big idea is to look at what rich people are doing now that everyone might be doing 10 years from now. The ultra-wealthy are pouring tons of money into their own health and using technology and data to protect it, so we should pay attention.

Bryan Johnson, founder of Braintree Payments (acquired by PayPal for $800 million) and brain activity recording startup Kernel, has received a lot of press for his personal endeavors to reverse his aging. Project Blueprint is Johnson’s rigorous anti-aging regimen, consisting of a strict diet, injections, pills, exercise, and the use of proprietary and experimental technologies and substances. Its aim is to reverse the aging process in each and every one of his organs back to that of his 18-year-old self. During this process, Johnson is measuring everything imaginable about his body to get a comprehensive understanding of his body's aging process, from the number of hours of sleep he gets to the subfoveal choroidal thickness of his eyeballs. He goes as far as to say he’s the most measured man in human history.

For Bryan Johnson, the answer always lies in the data. The data doesn't lie. It tells an objective truth about his health. Measuring and quantifying human health is the future, and it’s already here. In its most basic form, it’s the Aura Ring, Apple Watch, and Fitbits that track your activity and sleep, but it's also the new technologies like Lumen, the world’s first hand-held and portable device to accurately measure metabolism. It’s also the semi-permanent health-sensor patches that will soon provide real-time data about your blood health. Those types of devices, in addition to other methods of measuring the body, like full-body health scans offered by companies like Neko Health, will protect our health today and ensure that we have a tomorrow.

Now back to the familiar newsletter format…

Visuals

Three visuals worth taking a look at...

Wages are finally keeping up with inflation in the U.S.

The economics of Domino’s Pizza.

Apple's road to a $3 trillion market cap.

Wisdom

Two quotes of wisdom...

"Unlike in school, in life, you don't have to come up with all the right answers." ― Ray Dalio

"The most dangerous phrase in the English language is: We've always done it this way. It raises the question, ‘Are we doing this because we always have, or because it's the right thing to do?" ― Grace Hopper