Companies working on human enhancement

I thought this was really interesting: a podcast on companies that see their mission as enhancing humans

This cracks me up: philosophy has just started to talk about whether this is right or wrong, and in the meantime, people are doing it anyway. These companies are:

Nootrobox - drugs (more or less) to make you better (or, so they say) - this fits in really well with the discussion we had about if ADD meds or depression meds count as human enhancement
Halo - Using a targeted electrical current to the brain to improve learning speeds
Soylent - replacing food with something healthier, cheaper, and more efficient (not really human enhancement, but some have caffeine and l-theanine, so there's the drug connection)
Apeel - preserving produce longer (not sure how they ended up on the panel)

Summary:

Humans have always wanted to enhance themselves — from getting nutrition just-right to optimizing their performance, whether in sports or health or work. And food is a big part of all that.

But our current systems of food production (and consumption) are far from efficient and sustainable let alone optimizable. That’s where a whole new generation of wearable/ bio-feedback, food and nutrition, food production, and performance enhancement/ “nootropics” companies come in. How do these approaches move from the internet and online communities into the mainstream? Or from the university lab to the field? Or, put yet another way, from hobby to daily practice?

After all, what we measure, what we take in, and what we output defines what it means to be human. We discuss this “future of you” in this episode of the a16z podcast with Daniel Chao, CEO of Halo Neuroscience; Rob Rhinehart, CEO of Soylent; James Rogers, CEO of Apeel; and Geoffrey Woo, CEO of Nootrobox — based on a conversation with Chris Dixon at our inaugural Summit event.

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Feltron Variables - Monday 2/1/2015

Do you have your tickets... to the gun show? #flexin #doyouevenliftbro Please complete this to show you did your homework: Loading... So, let's talk about what makes this project hard: actually collecting data. It's not hard, but somehow, doing it every day is hard. It's easy to miss a day... then two... then all the sudden, you have missed a bunch, and it's scary and you don't want to think about it, so you don't do it. So we are going to preempt all that by putting some work in today to make it hard to forget. First, we will make a Google form. I started it for you, all you is copy it and add your 4 variables . Once you have that, you are going to use a cool feature of Google Sheets to have google email you this form every day. The form will be in the email itself, so all you have to do is open the email, fill out the form, and hit enter. Here are the instructions to follow . Don't be intimidated! You just have to copy and paste some cod...

Monday 9/28

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First day links

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