A Newsletter That Pays You to Make Newsletters
Set up a newsletter at your own domain. Write about topics like reversing aging. Earn $100 in BTC if your site is chosen.

• 6 min read
It's not obvious, but if you want to live forever you should start a newsletter.
Why? Because as this essay explains, media sets the agenda for society. And society doesn't think aging is a disease. That's why the entire medical establishment is only treating the downstream symptoms of aging, rather than aging itself. However, changing course requires a wholly new story, and we can't rely on legacy media corporations to provide it. We're going to need an entirely fresh cohort of people in the writers' room. That'll mean technological progressives from around the world, running a thousand individual newsletters, constantly pushing for technology in general and reversing aging in particular, writing like their lives depended on it. In other words, blog or die!
Media. Media. Media. @balaji believes we need to tell our own stories to survive. Otherwise others will tell your story for you. This gives them power over you.
— Nathan | LongevityMarketcap.com (@realNathanCheng) February 24, 2021
The NYT is telling anti-longevity stories for us. We must take control of our own story. Own your media. pic.twitter.com/Ef0pSLkQmY
Amazingly, the technology to reverse aging may already exist, at least in part. There are enough different promising results to start pushing hard. The blocker now is society, it's policy, it's ideology, and most of all it's media infrastructure.
Life extension is the most important technology we can invent. To get there, we must build the infrastructure to tirelessly evangelize for technological progress.https://t.co/8xjrrrmHKf
— balajis.com (@balajis) July 19, 2020
Specifically, if we can organize a few thousand anti-aging activists with their own newsletters, social media channels, and (literal) never-say-die attitude, we can start putting this on the agenda of the founders, funders, writers, and regulators around the world. We appear to have inspired one; with the task at the bottom of this post perhaps we can inspire ten more.
It'll be a big lift. We're talking about reversing a multi-generational slowdown in ambition and biomedical innovation, visualized in part by Eroom's law:
And we'll need a similar group of zealous technological progressives to reverse Eroom-like stagnation in energy, transportation, and construction.
All of that means content creation: writing, yes, but also podcasts, videos, games, memes, movies, the works. Newsletters are a good place to start because they can be the conduit for everything else. And that newsletter should be at a domain you control, because over time we may need the full panoply of crypto-based censorship-resistant technologies to get around the informational blockades.
Why? Well, on biomedical matters in particular, third-party services have made themselves enforcers of an ever-shifting conventional wisdom:
Someone I know has had some quite useful COVID-related posts removed from Medium, LinkedIn, and Nextdoor—they've been deemed "COVID misinformation". (It's not what the WHO endorses!)
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) December 15, 2020
Remember when wearing masks was discouraged, before it became mandatory? Or when we were told that avoiding handshakes was paranoid?
Compiling a list of the official misinformation from press & state.
— balajis.com (@balajis) March 23, 2020
- Flu is more serious
- Travel bans are overreacting
- Only Wuhan visitors at risk
- Avoiding handshakes is paranoid
- Virus is contained
- Tests are available
- Masks don't help
What else?
There's no doubt that genuine breakthroughs on life extension will be subject to similar noise as the whole COVID situation, and we'll need both technological megaphones and microscopes to arrive at decentralized truth. Megaphones to make sure we can't be censored, and microscopes to make sure our facts are rigorously accurate.
With regards to uncensorable megaphones, in later tasks we may explore going full crypto, with decentralized domains, hosting, payments, and maybe even some fancier stuff. And with respect to unimpeachable microscopes, we're probably going to need to reinvent scientific communication of the raw data required to make the case for a technical proposition, via the ledger of record plus reproducible research or something like it (1, 2, 3, 4).
But step one is to start building your voice.
If you haven't already done so, go set up a newsletter at your own domain, one that allows you to get in touch with your readers via the original decentralized protocol (email!). Let’s call it a blog, but it’s really more than a blog - it’s your homestead on the internet.
Here are three we recommend:
If you just want one recommendation, do this detailed tutorial for Ghost. Some of the screens will look a little different because Ghost 4.0 just came out.
Once you've set up your site, or if you already have one, submit the form below. You'll earn $100 in BTC if we think it's pretty good and if it has content that helps advance technological progress. That means it should have at least a few posts! Not necessarily just on aging, but on the kinds of things that technological progressives are interested in. For inspiration, check out these sites:
Submit a link to your site below and we'll pay prizes for the 10 best submissions. For extra credit, put up a post that updates the Ghost tutorial for version 4.0 and tell us you did in comments.
The following ten newsletters received $100 in Bitcoin for their coverage of technological progress. Go check them out!