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Our Mission To help people live healthier & happier lives
Gyroscope was named after one of the main instruments in an airplane — the directional gyroscope.
This dial looks like a compass and shows which direction you’re heading. As you can imagine, that is useful to know. 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 can 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). And the human body is more complex than any of these other systems.
Until now, tracking health for most people has meant a yearly visit to the doctor or an occasional blood test. The tools and monitoring for a normal “healthy” person are minimal. Our mission is to change all that, by giving you all the essential tools and trackers needed to manage your body.
The consequences of not tracking or managing our bodies are everywhere. 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.
Why is this happening, and how can we fix it?
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.
We believe (and have seen with our users) that these types of tools help people understand what is going on and cut through all the noise of conflicting or confusing advice.
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. But with Gyroscope, you finally have a new operating system and can start to invest in your own health.
Your new operating system
Our hardware — the liver, the heart, our two kidneys — operate almost identically to humans 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 running the same software. The same liver, the same heart, the same lungs, and most importantly, the same neural networks. Almost all humans are running on the same out of date operating system — homo sapiens 1.0.
The body is a marvelous and intricate system, with complex hardware and an operating system that has evolved over millions of years. Similar to your computer or phone, it has software and advanced capabilities. Instead of push notifications showing a message, you experience sensations like hunger or pain or fatigue when the system has an alert.
Your consciousness has access to some “apps” like thinking and talking, but most important things like heartbeats or immune response happen automatically in the background without any thinking. Instead of being programmed in C or binary code, your body’s operating system is written with DNA and RNA. Instead of being powered by electrical current from a lithium battery, it is powered by mitochondria, microscopic batteries for each cell that also need to be charged.
So there are a lot of similarities, but one key difference is the human body is not easily upgradeable. We can install apps on our phones or change the settings to adjust the behavior, but our bodies don’t yet have that ability. And there is no monitoring to look up logs and see what went wrong when things break. (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, our bodies are really amazing. It is so amazing that most people may never give it much attention for their whole lives, or take it for granted and make it work extra hard. It seems to work, so why bother understanding or taking care of it?
When this operating system works smoothly, it requires no attention and is pretty marvelous. However, these days it seems to be failing more and more frequently. It was just not designed for this world.
Though our bodies and minds function roughly th esame, the world has changed considerably in the last few hundred years. 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 and need to be repaired.
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. Old features that used to help us like dopamine reward systems or palatable foods are now vulnerabilities exploited by big corporations.
Many other simple changes to our environments, even blue light or digital screens, can have unintended consequences like tricking our brains into thinking it is daytime when it is after midnight. Convenient things like food delivery or working from home can reduce our activity levels to near zero, while a thousand years ago that type of sedentary lifestyle would’ve been unthinkable.
Of course, we are not proposing getting rid of electricity, internet, phones, cars, and everything else. But something needs to be done — us.
A software update for humanity
If the human body 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 quite good. It quickly changed the world. At the time, it was far more advanced than any other phone, but how long did that last? After a year, a new model came out and the old one was obsolete.
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.
Just 10 years later, can you imagine still using an original iPhone 1.0? It is an antique only found in museums. It was missing almost everything you now rely on: no LTE, no iMessage, not even apps.
Yet somehow, we are still using obsolete tools for the human body — hunger 1.0 to decide when and what to eat, sleep timing 0.1 beta that is just 2 simple lines of code: if it is dark, then go to sleep... or stress V1.0 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 the “chance_of_experiencing_a_famine” constant has gone from 50% down to 0.001%).
Major improvements to the iPhone came later through iteration and frequent upgrades, especially once apps could be installed and people could start customizing the software. Now, every year new capabilities are added and old features are improved upon. Billions of dollars are spent updating something as basic as your phone, we believe the human body should get even more care and high-quality software.
Our mission is to create the same continuous updates for humans. The human body can now be monitored, connected and upgraded, the same way our phones are. And then the same playbook can be applied—setting up monitoring, creating a network, adding artificial intelligence, and so on!
We have already done this optimization in many industries, from cars to computers. Human bodies are a little trickier (with no documentation and harder to replace when things go wrong), but many of the same 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.
Our current focus is solving the most urgent problem facing humanity: reducing obesity to zero by 2030.
After this, there is much more to do. Moving beyond just damage control, most excitingly this system can let us proactively enhance the human experience, helping people achieve new frontiers and unlock their true potential.
Creativity, family, even enlightenment is possible. With the right platform, all goals will be accessible to all humans. Everyone will be able to reach their full potential rather than spending their lives just struggling to get by.
The cure for obesity
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. One of the many symptoms of all these issues is the growing rate of obesity, which brings along many other problems like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, depression and more.
Proper monitoring and guidance are needed to reverse this unfortunate trend. This is the problem we have spent the last 10 years working on, and finally have working. It is a software patch that will help solve the issue and then prevent it from happening again.
Are you ready to install this critical update for your mind and body?