The Longevity Journey
Running a mile in less than 4 minutes was thought impossible for centuries. About a century ago, the New York Times said that human flight would probably not be possible for a million years.
At first, no one believed these things could be done.
Most people didn’t even bother trying. Then someone did it. Showed it was possible.
And suddenly, people everywhere realized they could too. The limit was only in their head. Now running a 4-minute mile isn’t a world record but something many high-school students are doing. A new startup just built a new supersonic plane.
Human potential works the same way. The limits for human health and longevity are also mostly in our minds.
Currently most people look around and see everyone around them is obese and depressed or fighting debilitating conditions, so it is easy to assume that is just how life is and always will be. A limitation of the human body, or a curse of our genetics. There’s no point trying to fight it. Better to just numb ourselves with distractions.
But actually we must. Change is possible. Now that we (mostly) understand the human body and why these things are breaking, we have the capacity to fix them. We are already seeing it at a small scale with our users, and now our mission is to bring that to everyone.
Of course, longevity isn’t achieved overnight or just with a simple pill. This post will share how to achieve longevity in a simple step-by-step journey that anyone can follow.
Is it better to live longer or better? Why not both?
Before we jump in, let’s define longevity and our goals here.
One of the biggest challenges with health right now is that there are few concrete terms or ways to understand what is happening. This results in people just making stuff up, and a large percentage of people are just arguing about carbs on the internet.
For thousands of years, humans searched for the elusive fountain of youth or philosopher’s stone, chasing immortality. It is unclear if we will ever be able to live forever (or even should), but with our current technology and understanding of the human body there are still a lot of practical improvements—now available to you with just one or two years of effort, and for less than a thousand dollars.
Here are the three benchmarks we consider as longevity:
• 1) Live to nearly 100 years old — many people have already done this, so it is achievable. However, many people currently are also dying early in their 50s or 60s from things that should’ve been preventable, like heart disease or strokes. This can be summarized as: don’t die. Obviously we can’t prevent some freak accident like a plane crash or getting struck by lightning, but we can do a lot about the most common ways millions of people die: heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, falling and breaking a bone, and more.
• 2) Reaching your full potential — this means waking up every day feeling great, with a body and mind that function the way you want. Imagine you owned a car or computer, but some days it wouldn’t start, or performed only at 50% speed. Or it would randomly stop in the middle of the road, or you had no control over the radio and the volume, or you didn’t know how to refuel it. That wouldn’t be acceptable. It’s time we manage the human body with the same level of precision and quality we expect from our other belongings. This can be summarized as strong body and mind. Ones that you control, rather than control you.
• 3) Keeping all your organ systems in shape. You have a lot of important components: a heart, a brain, a liver, two lungs, two kidneys, and a lot more. Many are currently being neglected. There are clear numbers for what is ideal with blood levels, resting heart rate, VO2Max, strength, bodyfat, blood pressure and more. They vary slightly by age, gender and other factors, but are all quite well defined from thousands of studies. To reach a Health Score in the high 80’s or 90’s, all of them need to be functioning well. Checking these early, often and continuously is our special secret sauce—because it turns out ignorance is not bliss. This can be summarized as a clean bill of health.
The step by step journey
Now that we have clearly defined our destination — living to 100 and keeping the body in great condition the whole time, with all our important organs at their optimal ranges — the challenge is how to actually get there.
If you are a human living in modern day, chances are you are quite far from that right now. Maybe you are 10-20 pounds overweight, or you don’t feel as strong as you were in college, or physically you are ok but mentally your mind is struggling. These are challenges almost everyone faces, but are also solvable with science.
However, making a change take conscious and constant effort. Unfortunately, even though we have a lot of modern technology and science, the status quo of science is extremely damaging to our health. It is 2025 and people are still selling and smoking cigarettes daily, even though this habit was thoroughly debunked decades ago.
Almost everything about our environments reduces our health rather than promotes longevity. As humans, we have a long way to go before making the status quo a healthy default. Our hope is that you can figure it out first, lead by example, and eventually we will have enough members to create a whole movement and change behavior across our species.
Currently, almost everything around us—our entertainment, our food, our jobs, our lifestyle—leads to worse health. A Health Score in the low 60’s or 70’s. Widespread obesity, even in children. Turning things around really takes quite a lot of conscious effort, and checking an app daily to see how to fight it.
However, instead of blaming big corporations for selling bad products, or the government for not protecting us, or our schools for not teaching us biology, or blaming anyone in general—there is only one practical action left to do: fix it ourselves.
Here is the step by step manual for how to do that. The journey from an average, unhealthy person with a low Health Score to someone who is on track to live to 100.
Step 1: A Healthy Bodyfat
GLP1 drugs are currently minting billions of dollars a year. Over 50% of our adult population is extremely overweight or obese and there has perhaps never been greater demand for a particular change. The way they work is quite simple: they make you feel less hungry. These GLP-1-like molecules get maxed out to levels that are a thousand times more than typical, leading to feeling much more full. Therefore, you spend less of your day thinking about food or being hungry, therefore eating less and then losing weight.
Weight loss can also be achieved without these drugs, but for people who are stuck they can be a powerful tool to turn things around.
The cost of obesity is quite high. It is extremely problematic to your health—first it just destroys a lot of bodily function, even simple things like having a spot to store excess sugar gets messed up because those spots (like your liver and fat cells) are quite full. Second, it is probably a strong symptom that you have been doing something very wrong: perhaps sleep habits, or something you’re eating daily, or not moving enough, or possibly a combination of all of these.
Therefore, turning it around (whether you are already there, or just heading in that direction) and getting your bodyfat levels (both subcutaneous and visceral fat) to optimal levels is the very first and most essential step in the longevity journey.
If you are overweight, we probably don’t need to spend much time or energy convincing you about changing it or why it is bad. It is a common goal that most people already have. The hard part is how to do it. For some people who have spent a lot of time and energy, it can feel amost impossible. Maybe bad genetics, or some other thing like a slow or broken metabolism, may make them think it is not achievable for them.
Fortunately we have found a way around all these issues and now have a reliable solution.
The Simple solution
The very simple way (as illustrated above with GLP1 drugs) is simply to eat less. This very much will lead to weight loss.
Of course, since you are a human and have a brain and feelings and thoughts and a credit card that can instantly summon thousands of calories, this can be easier said than done.
Actually tricking the brain and staying consistent with this for many months or even years is the hard part—and why some of those drugs really help people.
The other issue with this approach—of just eating 50% of what you were eating before, if you did have the discipline to see it through—is that the weight loss may be problematic.
Like those classic stories of asking the magical genie for a wish, but then when you get exactly what you asked for realizing that wasn’t what you really wanted, literal weight loss can actually be quite problematic. For example, if you just told the genie you wanted to lose weight but not specifically bodyfat, this may be achieved by losing a lot of your muscle.
That would look bad and feel bad and be unhealthy, but is partly what happens when just eating less. Bodyfat is lost, but muscle and bone also get sacrified.
But what if there was a way that you could lose just the bodyfat, while keeping the stuff that is useful, like your muscle, bone, brain and other important components? For a long time, this was considered the holy grail of weight loss, but we have finally figured it out and now you can have the secrets for free.
The Fat Loss Protocol
Whether done alongside satiety drugs like ozempic, or just done on its own, here is the simple recipe for losing fat successfully—while maintaining your muscle mass.
Here are the 12 steps needed to make it happen.
While you don’t have to do all 12 obsessively daily, each component helps your chance of success. Just one or two things (like just walking more, or just eating less) may have a very slight effect, but probably won’t work in the long term. Doing 6 to 10 of them should start to show changes. If you want to 100% lose bodyfat and it is very important, you could do all 12.
The hard part
Just 12 things? And it doesn’t cost much money? Actually it can probably save you a lot of money, as you’re spending less on food, less on entertainment (walking around a park is free!), and zero on alcohol (fancy cocktails or wine is actually quite expensive).
The hard part is that you need to do it for a long time. Everyone can probably do it for 1-2 days, and we generally see this on January 1 and 2nd of every year. The limiting factor, what separates the people who are successful, is whether they are still doing it 3 months later. Just consistency and perseverence.
It could be done by pure willpower. If you are a David Goggins style personality that loves pain and pushing yourself, then possibly you wouldn’t have gained that weight in the first place though. So for most people, we need better systems.
The good news is the human brain can be tricked quite easily. The same techniques that big companies used to get you addicted to junk food—or that TikTok and Instagram and Netflix used to get you addicted to sitting back and scrolling through their content for hours a day—can be harnessed for good, to reinforce your brain to do things that are good for you.
Gyroscope and the coaching system is designed to do this on your behalf, reinforcing when you do things that are condusive to your protcol objectives: getting enough protein, going to the gym, walking, going to bed on time, etc. After a few weeks of this—especially with techniques like variable intermittent reinforcement, done through daily tokens from your coach—you can actually rewrite your brain to do these things, and possibly even enjoy it.
Even if you don’t really enjoy it, seeing the results working is also an amazing motivator.
Detour: The Importance of leading indicators
Gyroscope was named after one of the instruments on a plane: the directional gyroscope. This looks like a compass, and tells you what direction you are heading. As you can imagine, this is an essential part of navigation. Sometimes you can get by with very simple instruments: like just looking at what street you are on, or reading the signs, but for a complex journey or somewhere unfamiliar, you probably need a map and directions.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”
If you don’t know where you’re going or if you’re on the right track, then you probably won’t reach your destination properly. But currently, most people have no instruments. The only way to tell if they are on track is if they magically appear at their destination. If they look in the mirror one day and they have abs. Of course, this probably won’t happen.
The ideal thing here is a way to see if you are on track. For example, breaking down a long journey of losing 50 pounds, into smaller challenges of losing one pound a week. Almost nothing you could do in one week would result in the 50 pounds weight loss, but losing one pound is achievable.
This needs more precise tools and instrumentation, to know if that small change actually happened—since you may not notice it in the mirror, or you may not even see it on the scale (which can fluctuate wildly). Maybe you did successfully lose some fat with a 4,000 calorie deficit through the week, but then when you stepped on the scale you had a few pounds of extra water, and actually it went up by a pound. Using old tools is like using a compass that doesn’t really work. Maybe not an optimal thing to base your life around.
The ideal solution of course is GPS. Now everyone can pull up their phone and see a blue dot showing exactly where they are, and even an indicator of what direction they are facing. It makes using maps something that was very complex that only old Jack-Sparrow style captains could figure out using a compass, to something that even a small child can do.
With an equivalent GPS and mapping system for the human body, you’ll be able to successfully navigate through this longevity journey. And when (not if—something will definitely go wrong at some point, it is just life) something goes wrong, you’ll be able to quickly reroute and get back on track instead of being hopelessly lost.
1 pound a week
One pound a week is a solid pace for losing bodyfat. You can think of it kind of like going 65 mph on the freeway. A pretty safe and solid speed. You don’t want to go much slower, but probably going twice as fast is also dangerous.
Step 2: Muscle Mass and Strength
So you successfully followed the fat loss protocol and lost extra bodyfat. Congratulations! You’re done?
Unfortunately there is still a lot more to do. You’ve just reached step 2, and now getting strong should be a high priority.
Ideally you already started strength training during fat loss in order to maintain the muscle mass, but even then some will probably be lost.
As we age, especially after 30, some muscle is lost every year if not maintained. So it can be common without any interventions to have lost most of your muscle by the time you get older. This results in falling, breaking a bone, and dying—sounds simple but it is actually one of the most common causes of death.
Remember how we talked about longevity being not just avoiding death, but also functionality? This is a big differentiator here: your strength early on will determine simple but essential things, like whether you are able to walk on your own or need someone’s assistance when you are older.
Many other quality of life things too can be determined by strength. Maybe you don’t care about being able to lift a dumbbell, but what about being able to lift your kids or grandchildren? That uses the same muscles. Or being able to enjoy your favorite hobbies? Even just being able to stand or sit without extreme pain, are all determined by actions and habits from decades before.
The best practices here are quite simple: full-body workouts three times a week. Increasing progressive overload each time to get proper volume on each muscle group. While this may sound complicated, modern AI or well-structured programs can automate most of the process, so you just need to show up.
The time commitment is about 3 hours a week (about 1 hour each session) — and in exchange you will get perhaps 10-20 more years of functional lifespan. Be able to walk sucessfully when your lazy friends are in wheelchairs, or be able to catch your balance instead of falling and dying one day.
Real Numbers
One of the cool and fun things about strength is that it is quite easy and practical to measure. With weight, the scale is kind of finnicky, but with your strength there are really easy and fast tests you can do.
- Sit/Stand test
- How many pushups can you do?
- How many pullups can you do?
- How long can you hang from a bar? (not an alcoholic bar, but a pull-up style bar) — this is actually one of the top ways to measure grip strength and biggest correlation to longevity
- How long does it take to run a mile?
- What is your VO2Max? (This degrades over time if not maintained, so seeing where it is now can easily show you at what age you’ll stop being able to walk up stairs or do basic tasks)
- Can you squat? (This measure mobility not exactly strength, but it is all part of the same system)
- Can you stand on one leg?
- Then there are dozens of other metrics measuring specific muscle groups
The good news is that all of these can be rapidly trained. As you exercise and push your body, it adapts by getting stronger. Especially when paired with things like proper sleep, sufficient protein, etc. which hopefully you should’ve mastered during the fat loss phase and kept as a basic lifestyle.
Step 3: Rewriting our mental software
Once your body is at a healthy composition—not too much stored fat, strong muscles and bones to keep you aging—you’ve checked off some of the basic boxes of longevity.
The next phase is a bit harder, but equally important: the mind.
Many people are going through life confused, stressed, anxious, depressed or just struggling. Mental health is harder to measure or repair than physical health, but determines your entire experience.
The good news is that some of it is simply physical: just exercising and being active and getting enough sleep and fueling your body with all the nutrients it needs, will definitely help here. For some people, that may get them 80% of the way there, or be totally life-changing.
But beyond that, there is plenty more to do and improve. At this phase, we can start fine-tuning our mind.
Like a software program that was written for decades and never maintained, our minds are currently probably a mess. It is time to start editing and upgrading our mental software.
There are many ways to do this, and the protocols here can be more customized per person.
Some people may struggle with focus or procrastination and getting things done at work. Others may not be confident. Commonly, different attachment styles formed in childhood may make it hard to have successful relationships. These can all start to be tracked and fixed.
Beyond just damage control, then there are proactive upgrades. This is where meditation and other techniques can come in handy. You can literally upgrade your mind to achieve happiness and enlightenment. And you can start to define your own life purpose, and work towards it—whether it is success at work, solving some hard problem for society, being there for your family, or something else.
This phase is what will unlock your true potential, and change life from being boring or difficult to something you truly enjoy and want to extend.
For many people, this may still sound like an impossible fantasy. Perhaps you are still on Phase 1, so it may feel like a daunting task. However, it is achievable and some people are already starting to do it.
Just like the 4-minute mile, as more people start to achieve success here and show what is possible and share their insights, we can make this a reality for more and more people.
Step 4: Managing Blood Levels
After completing these 3 steps, you will likely feel (and look) like a completely different person. Life should hopefully be fun. Not perfect or stress-free, but much more manageable and rewarding. And something that you want to extend for as long as possible.
Currently, the state of longevity is that most people say they don’t want it. It makes sense—if you are already struggling, why prolong your misery. But if you can fix your problems and upgrade your body (and the good news is that you now can), then you will probably want to enjoy the results for as long as possible.
Here is where deeper tracking of things like blood levels and micronutrients tsarts to matter. Many of the current trackers people use daily are wearables that track simple things like steps or sleep.
These are things that we are already somewhat aware of, but tracking them helps give a deeper level of precision.
However, there is another class of data that is not intuitively knowable. That can only be measured through testing, and that the human brain doesn’t really have any direct sensors for.
That is our internal blood levels. Most people focus on calories and weight, which makes sense in the first phase, but actually we are a collection of thousands of complex molecules, interacting in very complex ways a million times a second.
Measuring a few key blood levels helps to get a better picture and debug these processes. While some are useful for checking for disease status or acute organ failure (especially the ones your doctor may check), others are more forward-looking and proactive.
This includes monitoring the metabolic system and heart disease risk, with metrics like ApoB, triglycerides and more. It also can tell us more about the mind, with things like Vitamin D, cortisol, testosterone and other hormones. Your level of inflammation with things like Hs-CRP and HbA1c. And there are many other metrics for many other organ systems. Most of these are not commonly covered in the medical system, since they are difficult to change.
While these being out of range won’t kill you immediately (so they are not treated as an amergency), fixing them proactively and keeping a closer eye on them can be optimal for long-term longevity.
This is the final piece of the longevity puzzle. Changing these complex metrics requires a strong feedback loop of data and lifestyle changes, especially to do naturally. But done correctly, this can let us keep our bodies really in mint condition, and also get early feedback when something isn’t working. When something starts to break or needs attention.
It also allows for a much greater level of precision. Not just for your specific DNA or habits, but what you actually need right now — as any of these things could be too low or too high. Generally there is a sweet spot to maintain, and finding the right balance across all these variables is the challenge.
With the latest technology, and combining quarterly testing with realtime coaching, what was once a science-fiction future is now a reality. Until now, this level of care was limited to rich millionaires or elite athletes, but now anyone can start to do it with just a few hundred dollars.
What’s next?
This isn’t theoretically anymore. It’s already happening. Our team and many of our early members are already using this system daily, and starting to see the results.
Some people have already chosen to take control of their bodies and minds, and are making their way through their longevity journeys.
The 4-minute mile was impossible… until someone did it.
Then, high schoolers started running it every day.
The same will be true for longevity.
Once you see what's possible, once you have friends who have started and seen it working, it becomes inevitable.
So the question is not if it is possible. Now the science has been solved, and it is also affordable. All that remains is actually starting.
The one catch of longevity is that it needs to be started early. Before the problematic systems start to happen. 10 years before the heart attack or cancer diagnosis. When everything seems to still be ok, and you have the luxury of waiting or procrastinating.
We are building Gyroscope for the people who want to act early. To fix the problems before they become serious. To invest in their future, and do the hard work now to enjoy the benefits in the future.
The only question left is:
Are you ready for a better future?