Eureka || FreeGym

Very few people actually possess a real scientific temperament. And social media makes that painfully obvious, mostly because it thrives on tribalism. And tribalism kills critical thinking. Even those who loudly claim to be people of science are often stunted by groupthink simply because they belong to a certain camp. But the fact is true scientific inquiry doesn't belong to any tribe. When you actually dig deep into the evidence, your only loyalty is to the facts, and that gives you the audacity to ask questions. Not every question is a personal attack! When you launch health apps or wearables claiming to improve human physiology, you are answerable to the public. But because the average consumer lacks that foundational scientific knowledge, it is incredibly easy to fool them. The moment a small subset of people step up and ask the hard questions, they immediately get labeled as hateful or toxic. It is a cheap deflection tactic. They call it hate when in reality it is just basic scientific scrutiny. People need to open their eyes and see things for what they are. You can easily build a multi-million dollar health-tech company by fooling people and riding a fad. But if we want a truly innovative India, it has to be rooted in robust evidence. Innovation lies in facts and physiological realities, not fads or vibes. Stop letting the hype and vanity metrics do your thinking for you. Ask the hard questions.

Dear Concerned Indian Doctors, I see your rage against Temple on X. I have a few points to make: 1. First and foremost, a business lesson: if Temple were a scam, and any of what we said weren't true, people would know it in just a few days of using Temple. We have 14-day, no-questions-asked returns (which even Apple doesn't offer in India). If the product doesn't work, it fails out of the gate and the company dies before recovering a tenth of its R&D. 2. We have already spent $30m building Temple, $20m out of which is my own money. Selling a few thousand devices recovers a small fraction of this investment. A scam that pays nothing is not a scam anyone would run. 3. I left the Eternal CEO role to chase purpose with Temple. This is not about money. I have enough of it to last for generations. My incentives are fully aligned with getting the science right. I am not staking a reputation earned over 20 years on making a quick buck. 4. Our employees bought into our round a few months ago. The round we're raising now is mostly our customers. Scams don't build that cap table. 5. Most wearable companies start with internal studies. Whoop shipped its band in 2015, and the first published validation followed a few years later. We hold ourselves to a higher standard; pre-prints are a step prior to peer reviewed publications, and they are coming up. 6. At some point you have to stick your neck out and say: we believe in our science, and the product is now valuable enough for people to pay for and use. We believe we are there. More validation continues in public. 7. We are confident that we are building something that the world is going to be positively astonished with. We stand by our science and our methods. Each of our claims is easily verifiable by individuals and institutions alike, and you will see a lot of independent studies come up on their own when the device becomes available to use. Last but not the least, the most ground breaking features in Temple are not even public yet. And some of them, thankfully, have nothing to do with doctors 🤭 Hope this addresses some or all of your concerns. If not, keep raging 😘🤗

When someone says "my biological age is 32 but I'm xyz years older" and it's a blood test, not a methylation test. what the model is actually saying is: your pattern of risk markers resembles the average 32-year-old's. It reads your biomarker pattern, estimates your mortality risk, then expresses that risk back to you in years. If your pattern carries the risk of a typical 32-year-old, the model outputs 32. So the number is a comparison, not a measurement. Clinical-chemistry biological age works like this. you take a panel of ordinary lab values (things your doctor already orders) and feed them into a statistical model that predicts your risk of death. We call this a fancy name “ PhenoAge” A PhenoAge number is a population-level risk estimate, not a personal diagnosis. It doesn't hand you the cause. It tells you your risk is elevated, not which marker is doing it, and not what to do about it. Two people can have identical biological ages for completely different reasons. The model then converts that risk into an "age" number. The flagship study here is Levine et al. (2018), which introduced what's called PhenoAge. It used nine routine clinical biomarkers plus chronological age: 1. Albumin 2. Creatinine 3. Glucose 4. C-reactive protein (CRP) 5. Lymphocyte percentage 6. Mean cell volume (MCV) 7. Red cell distribution width (RDW) 8. Alkaline phosphatase 9. White blood cell count Look at what's on that list. CRP, white cells, lymphocyte percentage, albumin, glucose. Every one of them moves when you have an infection, when you're dehydrated, when you trained hard the day before, or when you weren't fasting. Your number can swing several years because you had a cold the week you tested. And the model was calibrated on NHANES III , a US cohort from the late eighties and nineties, followed for mortality. Deaths are rare under 40. So it's least precise in exactly the young, healthy people buying these tests. the key point: PhenoAge is a mortality-risk model wearing an age costume. The "age" is a transformation of a risk score. To be fair , it does predict outcomes better than chronological age alone. But it’s just a risk summary, not a diagnosis, and it doesn't localise the problem. This is part 1. Next post will be on epigenetic clocks and how they predict age based scores. @ycocerious startups building in this space should be transparent with this information.