DJ PAOLETTI
Cambridge, MA
// hi.

I'm Dylan. I think about
how to not die.

By day I'm building a company doing genetic circuits for cancer. The rest of the time I think about how to make humans live a long time. The body falls apart on a schedule. Nobody has a serious plan to stop it. I have one, written down here.

There's also a separate page for things I like and things I think: music, half-baked opinions, predictions I'll probably regret.

Email's in the footer.

nowBuilding genetic circuits for cancer readingComparative longevity genomics writingthe longevity notebook updatedApril 2026
DJ PAOLETTI
// things I like and things I think living draft · 2026

Stuff I like & stuff I think.

Not in any particular order. Updated whenever.

AuthorD.J. Paoletti · Cambridge, MA
§ 01

Music

What I actually listen to.

01
Rihanna
Always.
02
ABBA
Genuinely incredible. "The Winner Takes It All" is a masterpiece.
03
Coldplay
I'm not sorry about it.
04
Lady Gaga
Obvious reasons.
05
Adele
Crying-in-the-car music.
06
Whatever's loud enough to drown out my thoughts
Late at night, mostly. See § 03.
§ 02

Places

The city matters less to me than what's around it.

Where I live matters less to me than what's near me. At this stage of my life and career, two things make a place worth being in: density of relevant talent, and proximity to the people who write the checks. The rest is decoration. Boston-Greater clears the bar. The Bay Area clears the bar. A handful of other cities do too. Most don't, and I think people who optimize for views or weather over those two things underrate how much of who you become is determined by who you're around. I can play tennis and do science most places. I can only maximize my odds of achieving greatness in a few of them.
§ 03

Half-baked ideas

Things I think but haven't fully argued for. Probably some of these are wrong.

01
Most "personality" is just energy level
Watch how someone acts when they've slept ten hours and eaten a real meal vs. when they haven't. The former is who they actually are. Give people the benefit of the doubt.
02
Anime is doing things movies and TV currently can't
The medium is in a quiet golden age and most people outside of it haven't clocked it yet. The animators are cooking.
03
A walk at night with really loud fucking music is one of the best ways to collect yourself
No phone in your hand, no destination, headphones at a volume that's bad for your hearing.
04
The fastest way to read someone's pretentiousness level is "movies" vs "films"
It works almost every time. "I love movies" and "I love films" are not the same sentence. The latter usually wants you to know they took a class. Calibrate accordingly. (You'll never jump to that conclusion using this method with me though -- I consciously say "movies" because I refuse to be sorted by my own vocabulary. You'll have to figure it out just how pretenious I am some other way ;)
§ 04

Predictions

Stuff I think happens. Receipts kept; will mark the wrong ones one day.

01
A working drug for one specific aging hallmark by 2035
Probably senolytics.
02
First widely (legally) accessible sleep-compression drugs around 2040
Drugs that compress sleep, and by proxy elongate conscious human lifespan, become widely adopted around 2040 -- bumping expactancy by 4-6 awake years (is my guess). Yes I have the scoop on this. No, I can't/won't tell you.
03
AI eats >95% of software venture capital within 4 years
AI overdemocratizes the ease of shipping SaaS, which destroys most of software venture as a category. The money will rotate into sectors where humans are still needed for most execution -- deep tech, hard tech, biotech re-absorb it.
04
I live to 200+ and die a horribly tragic death
No middle path. If I and others like me make it to escape velocity -- the point where each year of medical progress buys you more than a year of life, so aging stops catching up -- the odds of dying from age-related disease fall off a cliff, and the odds of going out the ugly way (car crash, drowning, fire, shot, freak accident) climb to fill the gap. Death doesn't get prettier just because everyone's healthy. It just gets more surprising. (I'm OK with that.)