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Our Mission To help people live healthier & happier lives
Gyroscope was named after one of the main instruments in a plane — the directional gyroscope. This dial shows which direction you’re heading. Imagine an airline that didn’t have any instruments, where the pilots flew by instinct and hoped to end up at the right airport. Would you fly with them? Likely not, even it was really cheap.
Instrumentation help us navigate, prevent crashes and reliably get to our destination. Sometimes (like on a sunny day) these tools may not be necessary or seem excessive. However, when the conditions worsen (in a storm or at night) our lives will depend on them.
This is a common insight and understood in almost every industry. A company that didn’t keep track of its revenue or know its bank balance would quickly go bankrupt. A website that didn’t track their analytics or get alerts when errors occured would never stay online. The more complex the system, the more necessary tracking and alerting becomes. This approach to instrumentation is helpful for any important long-term goal, but especially for health (where we often have no idea what is going on inside our own bodies).
The human body is no exception. Until now, tracking health for most people has been limited to a yearly visit to the doctor or an occasional blood test. The tools and monitoring for a normal person are minimal.
A third of adults in the US now have prediabetes, and many don’t even know it. More than half the country is overweight or obese. Despite billions being spent, these numbers are getting worse. Even with these bleak statistics, it is hard to truly make it a priority and tempting to procrastinate. Most people plan to revisit their health next New Year. It seems like something to worry about later in 10–20 years, or something hopefully a doctor or modern medicine will fix later once it goes wrong.
Is this our unfortunate future, or can it be changed?
Why invest in your health?
You can easily look up your annual salary or your credit score, but (until Gyroscope) there was no easy way to similarly check your current lifespan or your Health Score. These are arguably even more important than your financial health.
Let’s get some advice on balancing these from one of the most successful investors and richest people in the world: Warren Buffet. He clearly knows a thing or two about how to invest, both time and money...
“Let’s say that when I turned sixteen, a genie had appeared to me. And that genie said, "Warren, I’m going to give you the car of your choice. It’ll be here tomorrow morning with a big bow tied on it. Brand-new. And it’s all yours!"
Having heard all the genie stories, I would say, "What’s the catch?" And the genie would answer, "There’s only one catch. This is the last car you’re ever going to get in your life. So it’s got to last a lifetime."
If that had happened, I would have picked out that car. But, can you imagine knowing it had to last a lifetime, what I would do with it? I would read the manual about five times. I would always keep it garaged. If there was the least little dent or scratch, I’d have it fixed right away because I wouldn’t want it rusting. I would baby that car, because it would have to last a lifetime.
That’s exactly the position you are in concerning your mind and body. You only get one mind and one body. And it’s got to last a lifetime. Now, it’s very easy to let them ride for many years. But if you don’t take care of that mind and that body, they’ll be a wreck forty years later, just like the car would be.
It’s what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.”
This is obviously good advice. Your body is priceless. If your heart or brain gets damaged, they’re nearly impossible to replace. Game over. Though almost everyone would agree this is good advice, almost nobody actually follows it.
Even for people who are very motivated, there is conflicting information and advice everywhere. It is easy to do things that make you think you are improving your health, while having minimal impact. You can easily open an app to see how your stock portfolio is doing, but we think there should be a similar tool to check if your health went up this week and the realtime status of all your organs.
Without the right tools, implementing Warren’s advice to take care of our bodies is kind of impossible. Most people are just following old habits or trying what they saw mentioned on a podcast and praying it helps, with no compass or guardrails to keep us safe.
Our hardware (physically and mentally) operates almost identically to people 1,000 or 10,000 years ago. Though we have significantly altered the world around us (with nice houses, cars, air conditioning, cell phones, restaurants, agriculture, internet, virtual reality, and thousands of other innovations) our bodies and minds and essential organs are basically the same. The same liver, the same heart, the same lungs, and most importantly, the same neural networks. Almost all humans are running on the same obsolete operating system — homo sapiens 1.0.
The body is a marvelous and intricate system, an operating system that has evolved over millions of years. You could think of it running software similar to your phone having a base operating system. Instead of push notifications, you have feelings like hunger or pain. You have access to some “apps” like thinking and talking, but most important things happen automatically. Instead of being programmed in C or binary code, it is written with DNA and RNA. Instead of being powered by electrical current from a lithium battery, it is powered by mitochondria, mini batteries for each cell.
So there are a lot of similarities, but yet the human body is not yet upgradeable. It doesn’t yet have apps that can be easily installed. It doesn’t have any settings or monitoring where you can look up what is wrong. (At least not until this year, when we finally built this).
Your heart continues to pump night and day without any input. When you eat, food is automatically digested and used. You breathe in and out to constantly provide your brain and body with oxygen. When you feel threatened or afraid, cortisol and adrenaline automatically come out to help you fight. There are thousands of other features, some used daily and others lying dormant. If you stop and think about it, this is really amazing. It is so amazing that most people may never give it much attention for their whole lives. It just works, so why bother?
When this operating system works smoothly, it requires no attention and is pretty marvelous. However, it is failing more and more frequently.
The world has changed considerably. Old systems that used to serve us well — like hunger or stress — no longer guide us properly in the modern environment. Like a compass taken into an electrical storm, they are malfunctioning.
Social media can easily hijack our dopamine pathways to show more ads, while food companies take over our metabolism us addicted to their sodas and processed foods, cleverly engineered to trick our brain into reaching “bliss point” while trashing the rest of our bodies. Many other simple changes, even blue light or digital screens, can have unintended consequences, like tricking our brains into thinking it is daytime at midnight. Convenient things like food delivery or work from home can reduced our activity levels to near zero, while a thousand years ago that would’ve been unthinkable.
Of course, we are not proposing getting rid of electricity, internet, phones, cars, and everything else. It’s really not an option, even if we wanted to. But something needs to be done, for ourselves and for future generations.
A software update to fix this
If the human body is a complex machine with an operating system that is increasingly incompable with our modern world, is there any hope for us?
Let’s take another platform which is much younger, but was able to rapidly adapt. When the original iPhone came out, it was revolutionary. It quickly changed the world. At the time, it was far more advanced than any other phone, but how long did that last?
Now we have a similar challenge, especially with new life-forms like artificial intelligence on the horizon. Extinction or irrelevance is likely if we do nothing, but what can be done?
Just 10 years later, can you imagine still using an original iPhone 1.0? It is an antique that belongs in a museum. It was missing almost everything you now use: no LTE, no iMessage, not even apps.
Yet somehow, we are content using obsolete tools for the human body — hunger 1.0 to decide when and what to eat, sleep timing 0.1 beta that could be 2 lines of code: if it is dark, then go to sleep... or stress 1.0 alpha (if someone is angry at you, then you will probably not get to sit next to the fire with the tribe and therefore be eaten by wolves). Or liver logic 101: if we are presented with some rare fructose, let’s stash it bodyfat to survive the next famine (it doesn’t know your chance of experiencing a famine are 0.001%).
All the major improvements to the iPhone came later through iteration and frequent upgrades, especially once the entire world was involved as developers and users. Now, every year it gets better, with new hardware and software.
Our mission is to do the same for humans. The human body can soon be monitored, connected and upgraded, the same way our phones are. And then the same playbook can be applied! We have already done this for many industries, from cars to computers. Humans are a little trickier (and harder to replace), but many principles apply.
Once all humans are connected and able to contribute, the pace of innovation and improvements should rapidly increase. This will allow us to solve problems like obesity or depression that are currently affecting almost every human, and so far getting worse. Not just damage control, most excitingly it will let us proactively improve the human experience, helping people achieve new frontiers and unlock their true potential. Creativity, family, even enlightenment. With the right platform, these will be accessible to all humans, rather than people spending their lives struggling to get by.
Similar to the release and development of new features on the app — especially once millions of developers and real users got involved — we want to kick off the development of all the missing features for the human body: the ability to track yourself, to store long-term memories without forgetting, to see health issues before they become critical, to understand and change your diet, to have full read/write access to your body composition, custom workout programs to edit your body and strength as easily as you change settings on your phone, and AI coaches to help debug your neural networks and keep you in good shape, like a firewall protecting you from outside threats.
What we have now with our bodies is like the original iPhone. It is a pretty good system, but it still needs significant improvements and maintenance to work well with our modern world. Since it was “released” 10,000 years ago, our body has developed some serious bugs and vulnerabilities, and is overdue for a major update!
Old systems that used to work well — like hunger or stress — no longer guide us properly in the modern environment. We are no longer at risk of being eaten by a tiger or starving to death, though much of our body hasn’t been updated to know that. Social media can easily hijack our dopamine pathways to show more ads, while sugar companies get people easily addicted to their products at the expense of their metabolism. Modern luxuries like food delivery or big TV’s reduce our activity levels to near zero, while productivity tools keep our chronic stress levels at an all time high.
Proper monitoring and guidance are needed to navigate this increasingly complex world. This is the problem we have spent the last 10 years working on, and finally have working. Are you ready to install this critical update for your mind and body?