Welcome to the fifth edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

PSYCHEDELICS WILL MAKE YOU LIVE FOREVER!

Ok that’s not true. But now that I have your attention, let’s talk about psilocybin, the active psychoactive compound in ‘magic mushrooms’. (pronounced like “*sil-o-sigh-bin*”)

In the last 10-15 years, there has been extensive research done on psilocybin showing its profound, fast-acting and lasting benefits for issues that modern medicine has yet to truly solve. These include major depressive disorders that are often resistant to standard treatment, alcohol use disorder, and even stopping cigarette smoking.

Now new research published this week has not only added to the confirmation of these past studies, it has blown the door wide open with a pretty insane conclusion: psilocybin can make you age slower & live longer.

How is that possible? Researchers decided to test this with both human cells & in mice, finding that psilocybin increased the lifespan of human cells by 29-57%, which is a truly mindblowing increase!

Imagine your cells had a 50-year lifespan of functioning at a normal level, this would in mean that, in theory, your cells could function normally for an extra 15-25 years with psilocybin treatment.

These treatments delayed the slowdown of cellular growth and reduced cellular stress markers that lead to cellular breakdown and aging. But the biggest kicker comes with something called ‘*telomere length*’

For a quick recap, think of telomeres like caps on the end of our chromosomes, which are made of DNA. If our chromosomes are shoelaces, the telomeres are the plastic tips at the end that prevent the shoelaces from fraying at the ends, helping protect us from losing important genetic information.

A large body of research has shown that our telomeres shrink as we age, and that being able to increase the length of our telomeres slows aging. This study has shown that psilocybin treatment preserves the length of our telomeres, and might even extend it. (Telomere length is also associated with things like depression and anxiety)

I try to stay calm about things like this, but this study is next-level and has some absolutely crazy implications moving forward, both for mental health and our lifespans/longevity. It not only validates the mental health benefits of psilocybin, it shows the mechanisms of how it improves our mental health AND cellular health overall.

Piggybacking on the Curiosity section above, recent research out of Brown University decided to take a look at how life expectancy stacked up for Americans and Europeans, based on the amount of wealth a person has. Generally, the wealthier live longer, but the research found some pretty staggering results when comparing wealthy Americans to poorer Europeans.

They found that the wealthiest Americans not only lived less years than the wealthiest Europeans, but the wealthiest Americans had life expectancies equal to the poorest Europeans, from countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands.

Woah.

To understand this, we have to look at the public systems and systemic issues in each country.

European countries traditionally have stronger public systems, with universal health care and income support, which help everyone live longer.

The United States doesn’t really have anything comparable to these systems, creating a long list of systemic issues, such as chronic stress, poor diets, economic inequality, environmental hazards, and few social safety nets.

These findings are a pretty damning critique of the American system and it’s lack of support for all of it’s people, not just the poorest. These issues are as much psychological as they are practical.

Let’s say you’re an adult who is active and loves to play sports, and you break a bone. In Europe, treatment is stress-free. In the U.S., that injury comes with a massive bill and prolonged stress.

In a country with universal health care, you wouldn’t have to worry about major costs, you just go to the hospital and it gets dealt with.

However, in the United States, there is a ton of extra stress and anxiety that comes from worrying about the cost. That stress continues beyond the surgery, as you stress about the financial impact it will cost you for months or years to come.

These things deeply impact our ****quality of life and life expectancy, and even if you don’t get injured, living in a country like the United States, without universal health care, creates a stress that impacts all your decisions before anything bad even happens. It might convince you to stop playing sports altogether, because you can’t risk the financial impact of an injury like that in your 30s or 40s.

We all know about echo chambers, but new research from March 2025 shows how even our search words reinforce them.

In 21 experiments involving 10,000 people, research from the National Academy of Sciences found that people’s prior beliefs influence the search terms they use, and search engines then narrowed the focus of those search results based on the terms used in the search.

This created a feedback loop that strengthens our prior beliefs, not challenging them, even when people aren’t trying to confirm their views.

To better understand this, one example from the study focused on caffeine, and the words people use to search for information about it.

Someone who thinks caffeine is good might search something like “benefits of caffeine”, someone who thinks caffeine is bad might search: “caffeine dangers”. These small wording differences result in very different search results, leading to polarized beliefs.

Most people weren’t actually trying to confirm their beliefs, they simply used search terms that felt “natural.” But because search engines are designed to deliver relevant, instead of balanced results, they unknowingly trap us in personalized echo chambers.

Hoping Google and others will change their algorithms to deliver more well-rounded results is probably a waste of time, but this is a good reminder for all of us to pay attention to the words we choose while searching, and to always seek to have our opinions and biases challenged, to get closer to the truth and provide stronger evidence for our beliefs.

P.S. I have a hypothesis that this effect probably also occurs with ChatGPT, which already tends to agree with us and make us feel good, so we all must ask GPT to challenge, not confirm, our beliefs.

Thanks for reading the fifth edition!

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