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The “2060” Foundation: 40 years to change everything

I have recently created the “2060” Foundation with a small but visionary group of highly determined people: https://2060.life . Our purpose is to help Humanity defeat ageing by 2060. I describe in this article the rationale behind the creation of this Foundation, and also some details on the status and progress of the work being done by our team.

The World Today

The Modern Western Civilisation has been suffering from a chronic disease for the last 5 decades, and it’s only getting worse: it’s terrible and it’s called short-termism. It has become harder and harder to plan and execute any major long term project that spans on more than 5-10 years. We see it in Venture Capital: I’m over-simplifying, but no VC would invest in a startup having the potential to offer 1000X returns in 20 years. We see it in Politics: no politician will sponsor a project which will have results in 20 years from now, when his election term will be long gone. We see this short-termism everywhere.

There are some countries which are able to execute long term visions, and envision and plan for the future decades, such as Saudi Arabia, Arab United Emirates and China, to name a few. But winning the war against aging is one of Humanity’s biggest challenges, and need to be considered at the global scale.

The “2060” Foundation Vision

We have created 2060 to thwart short-termism: the Foundation will bear projects that promote longevity, and are not directly profitable or offer too long-term ROI horizons to make them fundable by public or private funding. We’re here to push and accelerate Humanity towards the tipping point beyond which the Longevity field will inevitably become mainstream.

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in a decade. Audacity, grit, determination and long-term resilience will pave the way towards major breakthroughs in the Longevity field. We will support all the initiatives and execute all the long-term projects that no one wants to focus on, but which are nevertheless of essence to move forward in Longevity.

“2060” is a Foundation and not a company because by definition a foundation doesn’t make profit (or the profit is reinvested by the Foundation back in Longevity projects). We want to be very explicit about the fact that our organisation is about adding years of healthy life to oneself, to the ones we love, and to Humanity as a whole, not for profit.

Thinking globally and long-term, acting locally and short-term

Having set the vision of the 2060 Foundation, we execute our plan with daily small and practical steps. No place for daydreaming! Here’s the projects we’ve started working on at the Foundation these days:

– legal paperwork for the “2060” Foundation. For now, in legal terms, “2060” is a “association loi 1901” incorporated in France, not yet a Foundation. This gives us a legal entity on the short term, until the more complex paperwork allows our Foundation to officially come into existence.

– a Longevity Investment Club. Finding Investors who understand and are interested in Longevity is still rare nowadays. Finding credible Startups and Entrepreneurs in the field is even harder. We’re gathering both groups of people around our Longevity Investment Club, to increase efficiency and transparency in the ecosystem. We want to see as many startups and investments as possible in Longevity. The Longevity Investment Club is up and running.

– a Longevity Community. We’re offering whoever wants to know more about longevity, a community of like-minded people (now Slack), with online and offline events about this fascinating topic.

– a Worldwide Longevity Network. Online presence is great, physical presence is even better. It’s not enough to meet online. The longevity community needs physical places to meet, hang out with like-minded people, do some blood tests, use some specific machines (like a DEXA scan for example, impossible to find in Marseille for example to my knowledge).

– as the team grows, and more and more people resonate with the Foundation goals, many other projects will be initiated by the Foundation during the weeks, months, years and decades to come. Stay tuned!

2060 and you

If our goal resonates with you, and you want to get involved in the Foundation, you can do a couple of things:

– sign up as an investor or entrepreneur in Longevity here, it’s free.

– sign up as a member in our foundation, and find out more about longevity and the fascinating people who push the field further every day, here

– last but not least, talk about 2060 and invite your friends to join for free

See you soon!

Mapping the longevity ecosystem

This article is a summary of what I’ve learned through the whole year 2023 about the longevity ecosystem, by talking to as many scientists, entrepreneurs, influencers, policy makers and investors I could. The longevity community is vibrant and dynamic, but very small and niche. Thanks to the tremendous scientific progress from the last 15 years, we are the first generation of humans for whom indefinite lifespan is an ambitious yet attainable goal. However, the future depends on us and we have to create it by ourselves.

The structure of the longevity ecosystem

The longevity ecosystem is split in 2 subgroups:

– the “healthspanners”. This group of people advocates for the more modest yet realistic approach of taking into consideration the state of knowledge on longevity as it is now, and applying it to the population. There is reasonable evidence that a mix of lifestyle choices (physical activity, food, sleep & mental health), and drugs/supplements, can extend an average human life in good health by 20 years or more. It requires self-discipline, a long term proactive mindset, but it is 100% realistic and within our reach as of today. With some tweaks, and some foreseeable medical breakthroughs yet to come in the next decades (but nothing crazy or science-fiction), the average human lifespan could be further extended even more. However, these basic methods will not allow humans to live beyond 120 years, which seems to be the ultimate hard limit for the human species as we know it.

– the “lifespanners”. This group of people aims for “radical life extension”. They don’t want to live only 10 or 20 years, but 100 years longer, or maybe even reach “indefinite lifespan”. However, in order to reach such a goal, and break the limit of the 120 years lifespan, humans have to re-engineer themselves at the cellular/genetic level. This is where fascinating research and development in longevity comes into play, with some top notch scientists working on crazy projects such as cryopreservation, organ 3D printing, gene therapies, stem cell treatments, cellular reprogramming, organ replacement and regenerative medicine. However, these projects are about fundamental R&D in biology, which is by definition a long term, uncertain – high risk high reward – initiative. Because of these features (long term + uncertainty), there is very little private money invested in it. At the same time, public funding, which should finance fundamental R&D, is inaccessible to longevity research because from the legal point of view, aging is not considered (yet) as a disease. Without private nor public money, the lifespanners’ field is dramatically underfunded, living at the expense of some rare billionaires who fund a couple of startups (ex. Altos Labs, Calico, Retro Biosciences, etc …) and in so doing they further push the field in the unfortunate position where the public opinion associates it with yet another spoiled rich people’s hobby.

Reaching indefinite lifespan

As Abraham Lincoln said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. But how do we create a world in which humans can live as long as they want?

Well, the best and most realistic mental model to reach this difficult but reachable goal involves audacity, a unique combination of short term and long term plans, as well as a notion called “longevity escape velocity”.

The action plan to reach indefinite lifespan requires decades to execute, and involves 3 components :

– the first component is an ecosystem of profit making longevity companies. The time is ripe for “healthspan” startups to be created and pave the way to the transition from the “sick care” – where people wait to be sick before they see a doctor, and when they do it’s often too late – to “health care” – where the approach is to monitor one’s health to prevent disease long before it actually occurs. This transition from “sick care” to “health care” is in itself ambitious and hard to succeed, because it requires dramatic changes in society, against very well organized and powerful groups of interest: the pharmaceutical industry, which needs to transition from selling expensive treatments to sick people, to selling preventative medical services to healthy people; the agrifood industry, which produces unhealthy but cheap and tasteful food; medical services and doctors, who in most countries are educated and live on treating sick people, and do not support preventative medicine; last but not least, politicians and Governments, who have to do more to promote healthy lifestyles. Despite the obstacles, this shift from sick care to health care is a short term realistic step towards living longer and healthier.

– the second component is an ecosystem of NGOs, think tanks and influencers, whose role is to bear the longevity projects which are not profitable (at least not directly and/or not in the short term). These projects can be financed by the aforementioned profitable “healthspan” companies, as part of the longer term strategy. Indeed, the transition from “sick care” to “health care” will allow people to live 20 years longer, but in order to go beyond, fundamental R&D needs to start right now, so that in a couple of decades, research projects starting now will hopefully yield positive results in 20 or 30 years. Thus, if the short term game is to create and fund as many profitable longevity “healthspan” companies, the long term game involves different projects, such as: a bottom up strategy, consisting in awakening the public opinion to the prospect of living longer healthier; a top down approach, consisting in reaching out to political decision makers, and advocating for larger public budgets for fundamental R&D in longevity; last but not least, funding and creating more “moonshot” longevity biotech startups.

– the third and last component of the overall strategy consists in applying the “longevity escape velocity” principle to our own lives, to benefit from the first 2 components – the short and long term action plans. Indeed, we can create and use the services of the “healthspan” companies to optimize our healthspan using common and accessible medical knowledge as of today. This will preserve us longer, and will increase the likelyhood of still being in good health in a couple of decades, when – if we execute well on the longer term plan – fundamental R&D will deliver new scientific breakthroughs. This will in turn allow us to benefit from those futuristic technologies, that will be available at that time, which may prolong our lifespan even more. This “longevity escape velocity” is a beautiful notion that dramatically increases our odds of success, because the probability that we would discover the cure against ageing in 40 years is lower than the probability of discovering a set of sequential less ambitious treatment (say every decade we discover something that allows us to live a decade more), which could ultimately lead to the final understanding of the aging process and how to stop or revert it.

Practical steps

The best solution I could come up with is to create a two-headed legal structure:

– a startup studio, that will incubate profit making longevity startups.

– a foundation, that will own a major portion of the shares (if not all) of the startup studio. This foundation will bear the unprofitable projects (nevertheless necessary for the end game), such as political advocacy, public opinion campaigns, as well as the fundamental R&D in the biology of aging.

Doing this requires a lifetime of dedication for an army of people, if you think it’s worth it, join me!