IEET:  What is LongeCity’s professional category?

Peter Carimico: LongeCity is a 501C3 nonprofit that aims to help people live indefinitely, meaning 1000s of years in a state of good health. I'm of the opinion that we'll eventually be healthier than we were as teenagers as we've got aging pathologies at every age and probably just don't notice them. Aging starts early. We’ve found children as young as 8 with early stage cardiovascular plaques. People as young as 20 have been detected with beta amyloid, which is involved with Alzheimer's Disease. Imagine when you're sick and your fever breaks, you suddenly feel better. Now imagine if you were a teenager and a different kind of "fever" broke, suddenly your body and mind are functioning better, you're stronger, more durable, and more neuroplastic. That's what LongeCity is all about. We want to stop diseases that hold us back at every age. 



IEET: What is LongeCity's history? 

Peter Carimico: LongeCity was founded by Bruce Klein in the early 2000s as the Immortality Institute. Some of the current leadership such Caliban and Mind have been around since the beginning. I was just following the site around that time.  Around 2011, the name was changed to LongeCity. The Immortality Institute still exists; you just need to be a member to be part of it, and then you get opportunities to vote on our future work, become a moderator, or take leadership roles.

IEET: What are LongeCity's primary activities? 

Peter Carimico: LongeCity engages in monetizing our community discussions as a method of fundraising. We sell advertising through google and other services such as blog ads. More information is available under the Support Us > Sponsors tab of our website. We also sell annual ($25 or $50) and lifetime memberships ($500). The money we generate from these activities, as well as volunteer efforts, help us to support the ideas on our forum (See Project Ideas), as well as sponsor scientists, students, social media workers, and others with grant funds of various sizes. We'd love to see more grant applications.  Look for details under Collaborate > Grants. We also contract writers for articles. 

IEET: How many members does LongeCity have?

Peter Carimico: LongeCity has around 30,000 registered users, and around 350 paying members, about 40 of which are Lifetime members. Of them, around 5000 of them have visited in the last year, 1800 in the last three months, and 1000 in the last month. That doesn't account for visitors who don't register however. We get posts from around 500 registered users a month. Based on that, I'd estimate we earn an average of around $5/mo per user who posts. This is just the best estimate I can come up with in a short time. Old topics still generate revenue, but supporters who only visit infrequently and want us to succeed should buy a membership subscription. If you don't visit regularly, or don't click many of our ads, please consider purchasing a membership to show your support or make a donation. Memberships and donations are a crucial means of accomplishing our goal and growing our community. We're doing some great things for the world, including for the past (those in cryostorage), the present, and future. Everyone stands to benefit from our activities.



IEET: Where is LongeCity headquartered?

Peter Carimico: Though we have no physical address and our officers and volunteers work from home, we receive payments in Wausau WI, and have legal arrangements in Alabama. Our President is out of the UK, our Treasurer and Membership Secretary are in Wausau WI, and I'm in Delaware.

IEET: What are the main topics discussed at LongeCity?

Peter Carimico: The main topics on our forums are generally about the latest and greatest in actionable rejuvenation and cognitive enhancement. They change periodically and act as early surveillance for results from actual users as opposed to "testimonials" from advertisers. Signing up and becoming a member will even allow you to send unlimited private messages to the users on our forums if you want, though if you don't want to be contacted, you can choose not to receive private messages. I've met a lot of people and got a lot of things started this way. Over time, I've gone from being educated mostly in the area of communications and business, to having a great deal of understanding about biochemistry and how the brain and other systems work. If I was a scientist, or a student studying a bioscience or healthcare topic, I imagine I'd be getting straight As. In fact, we have commissioned forum moderators, which we call “mayors” who get a stipend to moderate and develop areas of our forum.  They get paid to be social about their passion and area of study, how cool is that?

IEET: What is your official title?

Peter Carimico: My title is Lead Navigator. We also have a President (Filled), a Membership Secretary(Filled), a Treasurer (open - pending), a Lead Editor (Technically Open), Lead Engineer(Open), Lead Moderator (Filled, but possibly open), Then there are Moderators (always looking for more), Directors, including the Chairperson (some positions open), Guardians who are former Officers and Directors, and other Volunteers and honorary positions are also awarded.

IEET: You also have Grants, stipends for Travel Expenses, and Writing Commissions?

Peter Carimico: Yes, we have grants. They can take up to 30 days to process, sometimes longer depending on the scale and degree of vetting that is necessary for approval. So apply ASAP if you're thinking about it. They won't be made retroactively. Having a grant denied isn't the end of the process either, it just means that we're looking for improvements of some kind. It's generally worth your time to give it a try and get feedback. This is how you learn to write better applications.  We hope not only to give you a grant if you can help us accomplish our mission, but as our grants and fundraisers are typically less than $30,000 we also want you to get some good experience with writing grant applications and get some insight into the process so you'll be more effective with organizations that will give you even bigger grants or investments so you can make even more progress along your career and return the support.

So, with that said, we offer everything from micro grants (less than $240), to matching fundraisers where we help you fundraise your project through social media and match dollar for dollar with our funds and sometimes funds from our donor network. Small grants are up to $500. Writing commissions are $108/article, and travel expenses can be up to $500. Grants and travel expenses can be for any kind of research or advocacy that helps our mission. We often have other opportunities and will sometimes receive ideas through our Project Ideas sub forum. Though this usually requires a little extra work, as you'll need to get the community pumped about it. But that's as easy as inviting other users to the topic and getting them interested. Please, share our topics of interest on your social media sites. It helps!

IEET: Do you have Quantified Self people on your forum?

Peter Carimico: I think we do. Or at least people who are quantifying their results with logs of their activities and nutritional regimens and nootropic regimens. Myself, I've posted workout logs detailing the number of calories I've burned on my elliptical along with weight measurements and details of my nutritional regimen. We also have a blog feature on our site [where] you can write the story of your life as a person persevering against death and aging.

IEET: Do people at LongeCity often talk about genetic engineering?

Peter Carimico: Yes we've been fairly keen on genetic engineering and we've received at least 2 grant applications in recent history. 

My opinion on BioViva is mostly positive. I worry about people injecting this stuff until more is known, but I'm glad to see people taking the initiative to get stuff done. Though right now I'll just focus on getting vaccines as they will help prevent aging to some extent IMO and are more affordable in the mean time.

IEET: Are there many disagreements on your forum?

Peter Carimico: I wouldn't say we have disagreements so much as “productive discourse.” It's not scientific to get into fights, it's better to talk things out and give your knowledge base a frame so you know what you know and know what you don't. This way a hypothesis will be a hypothesis, and a fact will be a fact. 

IEET: Does LongeCity frequently have “insider” information?

Peter Carimico: Do we have information first? Sometimes. A good example is C60, it nearly doubled the lifespan of Wistar rats. It was published first elsewhere, but we started talking about it on LongeCity and people started trying it and giving it to their pets and they saw health improvements. It's an ingredient in cigarette smoke and any other kind of inhaled smoke as it's generated in vacuums and is also found in the environment as leftovers from our planet's ancient past forming in the vacuum of space, so it's nothing new to the human body, but we're taking it in higher doses, in purer form (there are other types of harmful carbon nanospheres similar to C60 that occur in impure vacuums and without smoking the cigarettes etc.) A few thousand people decided to risk it and give it a try and we started discovering benefits and theorizing how it might be doing what it's doing and enough people had positive results that we now have legit companies making it cheaper. Even the raw ingredient has come down in price substantially. Last I looked it was $55/kg! Down from around $100/g! It has to be attached to a lipid in order to get into your bloodstream, so don't go swallowing the raw material. 

IEET: Who is the average LongeCity member?

Peter Carimico:  We see alot of people signing up at LongeCity. Many come from STEM fields, but we have users from many different backgrounds. We probably have more people who take supplements or nootropics than the rest of population. Supplements and nootropics are a hot topic on LongeCity as are cosmetics and cosmetic and medical procedures.

IEET: What are LongeCity’s long term goals? 

Peter Carimico: LongeCity's longe term goals are essentially to cure aging, restore youth, and remove from us the need for coffins and funeral urns. The original mission statement still is "To conquer the blight of involuntary death and aging.” But to me it's so much more. I'd like to see our mission statement evolve into something like "Progressively developing rejuvenation solutions for all." 

If you're reading this, please consider making a donation or getting a membership. For every 500 annual members we get (memberships are $25 or 50), that'd be $12,500-25,000 that we'd have to budget towards increasing lifespan. I'd really like to see that. Almost half of our money comes from memberships, your contribution definitely matters.