PM — The allure of immortality

Good afternoon, friends. That busy news flow we’ve been signposting since yesterday morning is taking shape with some big news coming in here at home.

THE BIG STORY TODAY

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund could close in on a USD 600 mn acquisition of state-owned United Bank as soon as this month, Bloomberg reports, citing sources it says have knowledge of the matter. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) is nearly done with due diligence on the transaction, and plans to purchase the bank through its Egypt-based investment vehicle, the Saudi Egyptian Investment Company, the business news service reports.

THE BIG STORY ABROAD

The international business press has another mixed bag type of afternoon, with no single story dominating headlines. Among the stories getting front-page coverage: Microsoft purchased a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group and will help provide data and analytics infrastructure for the bourse as part of a 10-year partnership (CNBC); Aramco is in the market for investors for a planned USD 110 bn gas development project (Bloomberg); Credit Suisse extended a USD 140 mn loan to doomed financial services company Greensill Capital and accepted “suspicious” invoices claiming non-existent business activities (Financial Times).

** CATCH UP QUICK on the top stories from today’s EnterpriseAM:

• Gulf sovereign wealth funds are among 28 bidders vying for contracts to build the 21 desalination plants the government is tendering to the private sector, Atter Hannoura, director of the Finance Ministry’s PPP unit, told Enterprise.
• Shop owners won’t be able to go legit without getting security clearance: Almost all shops required to go legit under the newly-introduced Public Shops Act won’t be granted licenses unless they receive security approvals.
• Make local investors happy and the foreigners will come, says Moataz Sedky, general manager of Travco Holidays: After reading our five-step recipe for turning Egypt into a global export hub and FDI magnet, Travco Holidays’ Moataz Sedky tells us why he thinks improving the investment climate for local investors is critical to attract FDI from international investors.

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Enactus Egypt and the Citi Foundation launched the second phase of social entrepreneurship program Impact@Work, according to a press release (pdf). Some 54 university teams representing 9.7k students from various governorates will participate in the competition in July 2023 to demonstrate their efforts in generating a social impact based on their entrepreneurial ideas. The winning team will compete in the Enactus World Cup in the Netherlands in October 2023.

PSA- Companies have until Thursday to register with the Tax Authority’s e-invoicing system. Only 150k companies had signed up to the new system ahead of the previous deadline of 15 December, according to the Tax Authority’s most recent tally at the end of November, which is well below a sought goal of 1 mn companies to register under the system.

REMEMBER- This deadline no longer applies to the self-employed: The Finance Ministry pushed the deadline for self-employed professionals — including doctors, pharmacists and lawyers — to 30 April 2023 after widespread opposition to the system.

Check out our full calendar on the web for a comprehensive listing of upcoming news events, national holidays and news triggers.

☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- Expect a mainly sunny day tomorrow with a daytime high of 23°C and a nighttime low of 15°C, according to our favorite weather app.

AI selfies are the new hot new thing, but it comes with controversy: If you’re an Instagram user, you’ve probably seen tons of your friends sharing some pretty celestial AI-generated selfies. Thanks to a new feature from photo and video editing app Lensa, you can upload eight to 10 photos from various angles and generate a number of portraits including anime characters, cyborgs, and fairy princesses. The trendy new feature launched Lensa to the top of the Apple and Google store downloads — netting an astounding 4 mn downloads during the first five days of December, the Washington Post writes, citing data from Sensor Towers.

Here’s the catch: Not all the AI-generated portraits were flattering. Some users ended up with images of themselves disfigured, while others received topless images when they submitted full-body shots. The viral trend has added fuel to the great debate surrounding social media and unrealistic beauty standards as the AI portraits often depict users as thinner and younger. From an artistry angle — due to the app’s AI mining a database of images online to produce its art — an even bigger question looms over the impact on artists who make their living off commissions. Many complaints have been made about the nature of the application’s low cost and accessibility threatening their livelihood, CNN reports.

A vigorous routine can increase your life expectancy: Researchers found that picking up the pace and exerting more effort during daily activities — like washing the dishes, cycling, and playing with children — leading to a higher oxygen intake, an elevated heart rate and a higher rating of perceived exertion can increase your lifespan, according to a Nature Medicine study.

The results are striking: A week long experiment carried out on 25k participants found that carrying out strenuous physical activity for 1-2 minutes three or four times a day lowers your risk of dying by 30-40% and dying from cardiovascular diseases by 48-49%. Participants’ results were measured using wearable devices that classify physical activity intensity.

Microsoft tops best-managed companies in 2022 — despite most tech companies losing their top spots: Microsoft retained the top spot for the third year in a row on the Wall Street Journal’s Management Top 250 list in 2022, while other tech giants saw their rankings fall amid this year’s tech rout. Coming in second were Apple and IBM, while General Motors and Whirlpool rounded out the top five. Tech giants like Facebook parent Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Uber have all dropped in this year’s ranking, as revenue growth slowed and customer satisfaction fell. Automotive companies posted big gains which the Drucker Institute — responsible for creating the ranking — attributes to the focus on EVs.

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Emancipation makes no effort to gloss over the barbaric reality of slavery: Inspired by the real-life 1863 photograph of a slave known as “Whipped Peter,” Will Smith’s new film on Apple TV+ is often difficult to watch. Directed by Antoine Fuqua and shot in black and white, the film follows Peter as he is snatched from a plantation, separated from his family, and put to work laying railway tracks. He hears that President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and plots to reach the Union Army in Baton Rouge for a shot at freedom. He escapes through the Louisiana swamps, battling an alligator and dodging a slave hunter with scent-sniffing hounds. The long-awaited movie was pushed several times due to controversy surrounding Smith’s slapgate incident at last year’s Oscars, but has been released just in time to be considered for an Oscar nomination. (Yes, Smith is still eligible for nomination even though he was banned from attending the ceremony for 10 years.)

⚽ It’s our last day sans World Cup matches until the semis kick off tomorrow, folks, but there’s a couple of Egyptian Premier League games in store for you tonight: Ismaily plays against Future at 5pm and Al-Ahly faces off against Al-Ittihad at 7pm.

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Get ready to laugh at some punchlines tonight with The Comedy Bunch at the Tap West at 9pm. MC Mohamed Gamal will present a roster of local comedians including Mohamed Habib, Mina Selim, Walid Khairy, and Ahmed El Hareedy.

‘Tis the season for holiday feel-good films, and Room Art Space in Garden City is kicking off the festivities with a Home Alone screening tonight at 9pm.

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A mouthwatering cookbook to inspire culinary adventures: British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal’s Is This A Cookbook? compiles 70 mouthwatering recipes, complete with kitchen tales and hacks. Each of the three-time James Beard Awardwinner and Michelin-starred chef’s innovative yet fool-proof recipes are accompanied by thoughts and stories that will take you on a culinary journey. Enticed to learn what a banana and parsley smoothie or tomato and coffee muffins taste like? Blumenthal will deliver. The book is also packed with illustrations by prominent illustrator Dave McKean, so you’re in a visual treat.

The EGX30 rose 0.9% at today’s close on turnover of EGP 2.5 bn (75.9% above the 90-day average). Regional investors were net buyers. The index is up 23.2% YTD.

In the green: Qalaa Holding (+8.7%), Sidi Kerir Petrochemicals (+6.3%) and Telecom Egypt (+3.3%).

In the red: CIRA Education (-2.6%), GB Auto (-2.4%) and Cleopatra Hospitals (-2.3%).

An elixir of life is probably beyond our reach — but how much further can we extend our lives? Modern advances in healthcare, sanitation and personal hygiene have significantly extended the life expectancy of the average person living in 2022. Over the last 120 years alone, the global average expectancy has more than doubled to above 70 years.

But how much longer can a person live? That’s the objective of research into aging, which has taken off in recent years as researchers strive to make meds that can delay, halt, or even reverse the aging process in people using the life-prolonging discoveries made in animal trials, the Wall Street Journal reports. Other self-proclaimed biohackers have taken the matter into their own hands following strict eating, sleeping, exercise, and supplement regimens that they claim will extend their life expectancy and could even reverse aging, according to the Guardian.

Do people even want to live to 100? It depends on who you ask. A recent Ipsos survey in the UK found that younger respondents were more likely to want to live to 100 than older people, who were more likely to have had more exposure to the effects of old age. Men also were more enthusiastic about the prospect of being alive for a century than women, with 43% of men wanting to live to 100, compared to only 28% of women. Although the poll doesn’t indicate why, one theory is perhaps since men have lower life expectancies, they are less likely to take long lifespans for granted. One specific cohort seems especially determined to live past 100: Wealthy men.

Silicon Valley tech bros, obsessed with extending their lifespans, have adopted rigorous lifestyles: Twitter founder and long-time biohacker Jack Dorsey eats just one meal a day and a morning concoction of water, lemon, and Himalayan salt. Entrepreneur and VC founder Bryan Johnson blends together lentils broccoli and mushrooms for breakfast, and consistently monitors his organs with hospital-grade medical equipment and adheres to a strict exercise regime. Johnson’s VC firm OS fund, which invests in early-stage science and technology companies, is one of the several VCs that have collectively invested USD bns into biotech companies. Most of USD 4.4 bn invested in the last five years has gone to Altos Labs, which focuses on cellular rejuvenation programming to restore cell health to reverse disease.

Biohackers unite at a posh longevity Swiss conference: The first in-person Longevity Investors Conference took place a few months ago in Gstaad, an upmarket resort in the Swiss Alps, according to the MIT Technology Review. The highly exclusive event had just 150 people in attendance, 120 of whom were investors prepared to invest mns or even bns in the longevity project. Several prospective attendees that were willing to pay the USD 4.5k ticket were turned down for not meeting this criteria. Over the course of the conference, researchers, scientists and founders of biotech companies all vying for investments presented their methods of elongating the amount of years people live in good health.

One common practice among conference attendees and people interested in living long healthy lives at large is taking supplements. One of the conference’s co-organizers takes NMN, a supplement intended to increase levels of NAD+, which helps provide cells with energy, a “booster” supplement that contains resveratrol, a chemical found in berries and red wine praised for its anti-aging properties, every day. While both are marketed and sold as longevity-boosting supplements,there are no studies suggesting that they elongate lifespans. Supplements, unlike medicine, are less regulated and do not need FDA approval to be sold in the US so long as they do not claim to treat or cure diseases.

These supplements can ironically end up causing harm: Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, used to just think that they were useless but harmless, but has grown more concerned about what new supplements created to target functions associated with aging are doing. Barzilai is also concerned about how the multitudes of supplements people are taking are interacting with each other, given the lack of research on the matter. Evelyne Bischof of the Shanghai University of Medicine, a medical doctor that changed her focus from oncology and internal medicine to longevity medicine has been treating patients that have gotten sick from taking supplements. “They came to me almost in kidney failure in their 30s, because they jumped on a very high dose of supplements and it was just not good for them,” she says.

Don’t hold out for a miracle drug that “makes life expectancy jump from 80 years to 150” being developed anytime soon, despite biotech companies and academic research centers being backed by an influx of funding from VCs and the US National Institute of Aging’s USD 3bn annual budget, the WSJ reports. Increasing life expectancies by 10-20% past the current US 80-year average for men and women however “is quite conceivable,” according to Steven Austad, chair of the biology department at University of Alabama at Birmingham. There is a misconception among biohackers and the longevity obsessed that scientists are closer to achieving the jump, but in reality there are several financial, regulatory and technical obstacles impeding progress. The FDA does not classify aging as a disease, which makes obtaining approval for drugs targeting aging more complicated, instead, trials have to target specific age-related illnesses. A drug that could be taken by a sizable healthy population would have to pass a strict safety standard.