Biological Time Travel: How Cryopreservation Could Transform Medicine (Laura Deming, CEO & co-founder of Until)

[00:00] I spent a decade of my life trying to answer this question of, is there one technical problem which, if completely solved and attacked, would get me the thing that I want, which is to give everyone as much healthy years of life as they want. When you started to think about longevity and mortality, what was the state of play in the industry and how did you start to familiarize yourself with that? Every time people got together to talk about longevity, it felt like it had to be secretive, it felt like it had to be hidden. It's just so obviously at the heart of so many different things you're not supposed to talk about or you're supposed to talk about in certain ways. [00:30] is the biggest problem in medicine. It is the most interesting one. I think we're going to see really incredible things next decade, for sure. How would you just explain reversible cryo to someone? I think what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time traveling to the future. What if you had a spaceship pod that you just walk into, and then you can walk out of it five years in the future? [00:51] Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. [01:00] Each episode, I have deep conversations with the founders, investors and thinkers. [01:05] who are living in the future. [01:06] to help you see it earlier, [01:07] Understand it better. [01:09] and benefit from it. [01:10] Today, I'm speaking with Laura Deming, the founder of Until. [01:14] Laura's story is an unusual one. She became fascinated with longevity at just eight years old and worked for legendary biologist Cynthia Kenyon as a child. [01:23] After winning the Teal Fellowship and dropping out of MIT, Laura started one of the first venture funds dedicated to longevity.

[01:30] backing startups trying to extend lifespans. Now as CEO of Until, [01:35] She's taking on one of the most ambitious technical challenges in biology. [01:39] reversible, [01:40] cryopreservation. In our conversation, we explore how Laura's unconventional homeschooled upbringing in New Zealand [01:47] led to completely uncorrelated thinking about death and aging. [01:51] Why the longevity field was once so stigmatized that professors had to hide their research interests, [01:56] How until is developing technology to literally pause biological time on human organs... [02:03] and why Laura thinks about beautiful ideas the same way most people think about falling in love. [02:08] If you enjoyed today's episode, [02:10] I hope you'll consider subscribing. [02:11] and joining us for some of the incredible ones we have coming up. [02:15] Now? [02:15] Here's my conversation with Laura. [02:18] I'm really excited to have today's episode brought to you by GoFundMe Giving Funds. I want to tell you about a new product GoFundMe has launched called Giving Funds, a smarter, easier way to give, especially during tax season, which is basically already here. [02:33] GoFundMe Giving Funds is the DAF, or donor-advised fund, from the world's number one giving platform, trusted by 200 million people. [02:41] Make a tax-deductible donation to over 1.4 million non-profits... [02:45] with zero admin or asset fees. [02:48] If you already have a DAF, GoFundMe giving funds will cover any DAF pay fees to transfer your existing fund over. [02:54] It's basically your own mini foundation, without the lawyers or the admin costs. [02:59] You get the tax deduction now.

[03:01] potentially reduce capital gains, [03:03] and then decide later where to donate from 1.4 million nonprofits. [03:08] All of this is in one simple hub with one clean tax receipt. [03:13] You can lock in your deduction now and decide where to give later. It's perfect for tax season. [03:18] Join the GoFundMe community and start saving money on your tax bill. [03:22] all while helping the causes you care about the most. [03:25] Start in just a few minutes at GoFundMe.com slash Mario. That's GoFundMe.com slash Mario. [03:32] This episode is brought to you by Brex. Fred Adler, the influential venture capitalist of the 1970s, was known for displaying decorative pillows in his office that featured a signature business philosophy. [03:45] Corporate happiness is positive cash flow. [03:49] In today's post-SERP environment, Adler's wisdom feels particularly relevant. [03:54] as founders need to make every dollar work harder. [03:56] That's exactly what Brex delivers. [03:59] Their modern finance platform was built specifically [04:02] for startups like yours. [04:03] and designed to help extend your runway when capital efficiency matters most. [04:08] With Brex, you get global corporate cards with up to 20x higher credit limits [04:13] and no personal guarantee required. [04:16] Their banking solution has no minimums and no transaction fees. [04:19] while letting you earn high yield from day one. [04:22] with same-day liquidity. [04:24] Best of all, Brex knows you were born to build. [04:27] not juggle spreadsheets and finance tools. [04:30] Their AI-powered platform brings cards, banking,

[04:33] expense management, and travel all in one place. [04:37] It's simple. [04:37] Scalable. [04:38] and designed to get you back to what you do best. [04:41] building. [04:43] More than 30,000 companies, including one in three U.S. venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com slash Mario. [04:56] Well, Laura, I've really been looking forward to this. I've been familiar with your work and public thinking for a really long time and have been sort of fascinated from the sidelines about cryopreservation. So yeah, really excited to dig in today. [05:10] Thanks, likewise. Awesome. Well, I'd love to, you know, [05:14] begin with your sort of, uh, hero's origin story, story, which is as an eight year old, you became interested in longevity, which, uh, I think. [05:23] Everyone sort of has some sort of acquaintance with mortality around that age, but I suspect many people don't become [05:29] as fascinated by it as you have. How did that happen? And what did it sort of spark in your mind that felt so important and worth dedicating, you know, the next few decades to it? Yeah, I think it's really funny to try and answer questions about when you were eight, you know, when you're like, you know, and you're [05:49] 30s. Um... [05:51] And I think [05:53] over time I see a little bit more of what the context was. It's like, I mean, for context, like, I grew up [05:57] homeschooled, [05:59] in New Zealand. And I was basically not exposed to kind of what was normal, what was like the normal societal beliefs when I was a kid. Like I kind of grew up in this paradigm of you can influence the world. You know, you just have to pick a dream and go after it. And that there were all these problems and it's we'd go solve them. And so that was like just what I

[06:18] Like that was the matrix that I lived in. And one thing that I really, really am grateful for my parents for in retrospect is that I think I also was just very uncorrelated. So like things that appeared normal to everyone else. [06:33] like that were very socially reinforced, I didn't have that as a kid. Like it was just kind of, um, very, very uncorrelated, I would say from the social matrix that [06:41] I kind of now understand a lot or see a lot more clearly. And so, you know, as a kid, it was like a combination of I just want to work in biology on the hardest problems. And at first it was like cancer might be the hardest problem. And then, you know, I think my dad might have suggested that aging was a harder problem. And I was just like, yeah, great. Okay, like, you know, whatever is the biggest version of, you know, solving, you know, diseases. I want to go work on that. It's a combination of seeing people in my life who are older and suffering and just being like, this sucks. Like, they are in pain. Let's fix this. [07:11] being viscerally confronted with the idea of death and just being like, [07:14] you know, this... [07:15] kind of psychologically horrible black hole of nothingness is really bad. So it's a combination of things. But I think the biggest thing that I'm grateful for is that it was just so... There were no societal reinforce... There's no kind of conception that this was strange at all. To me, it was just very, very straightforward. And so it was very interesting when I was 12 and above to come and interface with society and be like, oh, this is actually perceived as... [07:36] a strange belief or one that is like, you know, not ordinary. Really interesting. You know, to an extent, it's probably unanswerable because you don't have sort of a series of other lives to compare it to. But to the extent that you're able to.

[07:50] interrogate that experience. What are the things that you think you took from homeschooling? You certainly mentioned one there, this sort of [07:58] on correlation and maybe this optimism that you can change problems. But in terms of the way your mind works, do you find that you're, I don't know, more creative than the average person, perhaps? Or, you know, maybe you lack some sort of set of basic information that the average person learns in, you know, sixth grade history. I don't know. Like, I'd be curious to see how you've sort of thought through that. Yeah, I mean, always hard to say about your own mind, what's true and what's not. There's a lot of, you know, like, like things that are running the background of [08:28] think what I can say that has been interesting to see is that so one characteristic that might have been difficult in a different context but I think has served me well in the context of being homeschooled is that I get really really agitated about things that don't make sense like if something does not make sense or inconsistent it's it's very frustrating and irritating to me like physically so I get very like anxious and frustrated about it I think I think a good combination of things for my personal makeup was being dropped in this kind of area of idea face space where it's so [08:58] you're randomly dropping this idea of face space. You're not really correlated to like normal beliefs. And then there's like also this machine internally that's like, [09:04] like drastically or just aggressively trying to make things consistent and to understand, okay, why is it that everyone else believes these things? And I'm in this part of my idea face-to-face, where's the difference? And it's very hard to reconcile those two things without understanding everything about how those ideas are built up from the ground. And so I think that's been a very helpful

[09:22] force that kind of intellectual generator combined with being, you know, homeschooled in this way that was so uncorrelated. [09:29] That's so interesting. [09:31] When you began, and again, it's difficult when we're talking about how young you began being interested in this space. When you started to think about longevity and mortality, what was the state of play in the industry and how did you start to familiarize yourself with that? [09:48] Yeah. So, you know, one of the first things I did was get on my computer and Google, you know, longevity people. And obviously, Cynthia Kenyon is still a canonical heroine of the field. I mean, she's extraordinary. I was really lucky when I was a kid that I got to go work at her lab. You know, it's a series of events where I was, I think, I forget now, like 11 or something. And I emailed her and said, hi, you know, I love your work. It was one of the first emails I'd sent to somebody that I didn't know personally. You know, I just like sent it to a random person on the internet. And she emailed back and invited me to come from [10:18] visit her lab and then later after I visited to work with her and you know I owe her the start of my career and she's done that for so many people and so Cynthia- [10:26] is really the hero is really the hero in the story for me um but i think one thing i'd say so so that's that's kind of on the science side you know where i got my start um you know starting to understand the field just in her lab as a kid but i think what was interesting to me is is the field sociologically and what was kind of going on at the time and because you know in in the longevity field at the time which at that time was branded more as the anti-aging field which is just i

[10:47] or like it's a little bit obviously like as a word you want to get behind i think longevity is a more interesting of a one if something was wrong or something just felt really off it was sort of like every time people got together to talk about longevity it felt like had to be secretive it felt like it had to be hidden like you know there's lots of people who were like mainstream professors in good universities quote-unquote like stanford or right c and like they had to kind of hide that they're interested in longevity from their colleagues it was seen as oh interesting cynthia was literally told that she would be like basically ostracized or like she was told that [11:17] biologist that she would be like an outcast from the field, basically. I mean, it took an enormous amount of intellectual courage and bravery, I think, for her to actually... [11:26] pursue it. But even her, at that point, she was just so obviously an excellent scientist that she could. But yeah, and the field, you had to kind of hide that you were just in longevity. I think when that's true, it's so interesting, especially when a field has real results. If that were true, we didn't have the results showing that you can genetically mutate. [11:43] you know, organisms in the old longer, that would be a bit less strange, but it's just, it was a very interesting combination. Why was there that reaction to it? Was it, you know, some sort of almost sacred belief? You know, this just felt too heretical, too strange. Was it, you know, distrust of the results that had come to the fore? [11:59] I wish we could talk for like three hours about this because there's all these different interesting things that go into why this is true. And I think finding ideas that have this property, especially if you're in venture capital, which I was for a long time, that's the meat of it, right? It's like finding ideas that are sociologically not seen, but for interesting reasons. Longevity has an obvious interesting one, which is it's so close to things that are psychologically sacred and which we're supposed, it's very difficult for us to think about in a certain way.

[12:29] strongly kind of not question the [12:33] the amount of years that you have. And it's actually psychologically very healthy. And so actually, for most people, most situations, you know, in most world contexts, you don't want to question that it's psychologically nice to just kind of have this deep acceptance. And at this point in my life, I think it's possible to have that and also to have motivation to work on medicine, like you can have both psychological health and that motivation to work on medicine at the same time. But I think I think on W is one where it's so close to the psychological, like, [13:00] sort of paradigm that it's... [13:02] There's just a lot of stuff around. I mean, we can talk with three people. I mean, it's just so obviously at the heart of so many different things you're not supposed to talk about or you're supposed to talk about in certain ways that that, yeah, really contributes. [13:12] That's so interesting. You articulated that. I mean, obviously, you've been thinking about this for a very long time, so I'm not surprised. But yeah, there's sort of a lot of instincts you have around why there might be a stigma around this. But yeah, there is sort of this, as you said, almost this evolutionary reason of, well, it's quite healthy for me to have this level of acceptance. [13:42] be able to have this massively longer lifespan. So there's, yeah, there's so many thorny pizzas there. [13:48] Yeah, and I would say just one flip side too is like if you're the person claiming to get everyone... [13:52] eternal life right like that that is that is something that and i don't think nobody feels trying like nobody feels kind of in the middle of this thing where it's like it's like the people who i think the best they feel like we're not even trying to do that they're just kind of like trying to make drugs that give you a couple years of extra healthy life you know and who knows what's actually gonna happen at this point with the e-carrant and everything but like it like you know they're but they're in the middle of this weird thing where like for a long time people have used that catchphrase to then go out and be like you get this thing that everyone hypothetically is and it's kind of we have to be in a binary state around it really interesting

[14:22] I'm glad we dug into it a little bit. You know, your... [14:26] You had this experience doing research with Cynthia Kenyon. You also obviously did research beyond that. But then sort of the next chapter of your life was as a venture capitalist with the longevity fund and age one, which was a little bit of a more of an incubator accelerator. Why did you feel like that was the right path for you at that point? [14:47] to make an impact on the field. [14:49] Yeah, I mean, so for context, [14:53] I was like 16, 17 when I started thinking about, you know, like, trying something. You know, a couple decades before other people. Yeah. The only venture capitalists I'd ever met were people that I'd seen come to MIT to give, you know, panels on biotech. And they just seemed like inaccessible. They seemed like so outside of my creativity. But at the time in the longevity field, again, I was just this kid and I was going around asking people, OK, like, what is the problem? And. [15:15] what everyone said at the time was, oh, we don't have enough money. And so I just literally took that, you know, as literally as possible. And I was like, let me go get a lot of money and give it to the field. And then it just turned out that what you call that is venture capital. But when I started working in the business, you know, like it took me kind of two years to actually figure out even that, you know, what a fund structure was and like how to think about the business aspect. But the motivation was just like get a bunch of money and give it like make sure every field has it to translate. [15:39] these ideas into companies. That totally makes sense. Was [15:43] Were people correct in assessing what the problem in the field was? Was it a money problem? From my current perspective, I think that it was more a lack of good founders and good founding talent.

[15:54] more than the money [15:56] I think that money and branding helped the field... [16:01] be seen by a lot more potential founders that can now go start these companies. But I think at the time it was actually more that we didn't have enough good founders. Why do you think that is? Is it just such a, I don't know, it feels too far in the future for folks to sort of tractably get their hands around? Is it, you know, just combining too many disparate sort of skill sets that are hard to find in a single person? I think that there's an interesting intersection and longevity where you want someone who's a true believer in a certain way. Like you want them to [16:31] Thank you. [16:31] but you don't want them to lose touch with reality. [16:33] Um, [16:34] And I think having those two things simultaneously is extremely difficult. [16:38] with also pragmatic skills of being a great operator. And so just finding people who had the capacity to really... I didn't know if this is true for any deep tech field, but finding people who had the capacity to... [16:49] have that 100% conviction that you need to build a moonshot, but weren't so convicted that they were like, the world has to be the way that I think it is without being able to get data from the world. It's like, I think those two things together are just hard to find. I think it also was not as clear then what the field could be. I think it's a lot more clear now that, okay, this is a field that just can make medicines like any other field. It's not trying to [17:11] But I think at the time, the field was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be. That's really interesting. Yeah, it feels like on many dimensions, great founders tend to be sort of paradoxical, but that's a really specific, quite hard to resolve or find paradox, I'm sure. Really interesting. When you say the field has maybe become sort of

[17:28] almost more legible now, we can sort of just think of it as making new medicine. What was the sort of transition there and what has sort of clarified enough for people to sort of be able to feel that way? Yeah. So I mean, one massive milestone for the field is the CVM sort of division of the FDA, thanks to the work from the company Loyal, recognizing that you can have lifespan extension, [17:50] on a label for dogs, at least to start, and kind of recognize that that's like a valid, reasonable concept. And I think it's just that, like, it's like a lot of people longevity working really hard to, you know... [18:02] like focus on like what do the regulators think you know how do we make literal medicines that people or pets will take kind of I think I think just like trying to easily reduce these concepts which sound very you know ethereal and high level like longevity and all stuff into like okay like this is a medicine that will be in a bottle that someone will take to live like x amount [18:19] more healthy life and how exactly do we track the clinical path for that? And just focusing on that as like the main, if you can do that, I think it's a very reasonable problem. It's like we already do this a lot of preventative medicines. It's not actually a crazy idea, just that like, I think if [18:34] focusing on the pragmatics of it, that's when it gets a little bit more decorrelated. Yeah. I also imagine just [18:40] the sort of lack of [18:42] a big tentpole organization that maybe trained a lot of talent in thinking about this work in a sort of entrepreneurial environment makes it hard to you sort of need. [18:52] companies like Until and Loyal and others to be at the vanguard of this field and then train the next generations of it, I imagine. Yeah. Honestly, that's what's the most exciting to see now in the field. I see with H1 and with companies like Loyal and just in other companies in the longevity space, it's the quality of talent. It's flipped now. We're in the past gen. It was really hard to get the best talent. A lot of people would be interested, but they would be afraid to reveal that there was some longevity. Now it's some of the best next-gen talent, the really smartest,

[19:22] 18 year olds, 19 year olds that I can imagine meeting are foremost interested in longevity. And to them, it's just like the most odd that they grew up with like this idea that longevity is the biggest problem in medicine. It is the most interesting one. And it's so cool to see that the talent density in the field, I think we're going to see like [19:38] really, really credible things next decade for sure. That's really interesting. So was it a, out of a certain degree of impatience that you sort of decided, okay, I've got to build a company of my own because I'm just not seeing enough of the talent, uh, that I, that I want as an investor, or was there sort of another impetus? No, it was an extremely selfish, just, well, yeah, it was, there's a lot of things, but I'd say like, um, it's like falling in love. Like, you know, it's like you, let's say like you meet the love of your life. It's like, you just, that's, [20:04] you're going to go hang out with that person. That's what you do. And I think for me with Until, and the idea of reversible cryo and understanding it, it's like I'd spent a decade of my life, actually I think more at that point, trying to answer this question of, is there one technical problem which if [20:20] like completely solved and attacked would get me that thing that i want which is to give everyone you know as much healthy years of life as they want you know so we're not talking about living you know indefinite amounts of time if you don't want to it just like kind of like how long do you want to spend with your grandkids and your family and then just like let's give you that number of healthy years and then also what's something that i wouldn't where i feel like working on the company would be the biggest best adventure of my life you know it's like that was also extremely important to me just frankly like i'm someone who cannot be bored and i get and i just need to work on

[20:50] a near-versible cryo. It's like, for a long time, I didn't see it. I just thought it was this idea where ice would destroy the tissue and there's all these myths about cryo that even, I think, people in the WANJW field still had for it. [21:02] And just when I really saw what the idea was, it was like, it was like falling in love. And it's like, okay, you just have to drop everything. You have to work on it. Wow, amazing. Well, I definitely want to dig in more there. But for folks who maybe are coming to this [21:13] pardon the pun, cold. How would you just explain reversible cryo to someone? Yeah. So reversible cryo is what it sounds like. You take an organism down to a very low temperature, like low minus 130 degrees Celsius being back up to normal temperature. But I think what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time traveling to the future. It's like, what if you had a spaceship pod that you just walk into and then you can walk out of it, [21:43] access whatever's there. And my co-founder Hunter has this story of his father-in-law who was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. And if he had had just even months more of life, might have made it to the clinical trial that could have given him months of extra life and even possibly a chance of remission. There's stories like this. Every time I talk to a group, there's always a story of somebody who had this kind of experience of just missing out on that

[22:13] accomplished things like this crazy idea of like, oh, what if you could just bridge that gap and then seeing the relevant effects? And then the same thing is like, we do this all the time with IVF. You know, it's like there are embryos. The most recent news was that an embryo is cryopreserved for 30 plus years, right? And then rewarmed and then is a full human. Now, there are twins who are cryopreserved at the same time. They're rewarmed at different times. And, you know, and so there's just this crazy thing where we already take whole humans and [22:36] you know, pause time for them for decades. It's just that scaling it up is an incredibly difficult technical problem, right? And we're not sure that we can reverse the cryopreserve whole adult humans yet. Like that's something that we're still trying to understand. But the first thing along the way is, you know, let's take a human organ, reversibly cryopreserve it, and help a transplant patient get that organ they might not have otherwise. [22:57] And so it's like this, it's to me just this beautiful thing of like, okay, we have this, if we can totally solve the problem, you get this incredible moonshot technology that gives you all these things. And then in the interim, you can build a business around like a very real use case for transplant patients. [23:10] So interesting. Yeah, I think, you know, you've talked about this before and on, you know, in Until's materials as sort of a pause button on biological life, which is such a fascinating idea. And [23:23] as the sort of [23:24] Peace. [23:25] of progress accelerates. Having that ability feels all the more important just because, as you said, it could be a matter of months. That could be the difference between you living another 50 years or not at all. This is becoming more and more practical, but has historically been the realm of science fiction. The thing that I think of is Three-Body Problem and Dark Forest, where the characters sort of preserve themselves and jump a few centuries into the future.

[23:55] representations of what you're trying to do? No, actually. It's been interesting to... [24:01] search for them i i i think what feels missing there to me so what one thing that was really clear to me when we started to think about you know again if we could solve the long-term goal which is there are a lot of [24:13] science questions that are between us and that and we're you know um going after organs first we're very confident about organs we're still understanding with about to one degree like whole body you can fully get there um but they do that it's always between science fiction and [24:26] without the level of care that I think it really demands, like I think [24:30] you know, one thing that's interesting to me is like how we relate to people in our life when they're traveling, we won't see them for a long period of time or, you know, kind of like, it's like, it's really like, I think the technology and how it's presented should be a lot more about the [24:44] are dealing with the absence of someone that they love versus just like, you know, the experience of the person and I mean, that person's experience is deeply important. But it's like when the person's in the hibernation pod, it's like what really matters is the people outside the pod who are trying to understand like what this means to their life. And like, I think the biggest question that we always get around this technology is like, you know, would I still see my loved ones? Could they come with me? Like, how would it work with my social matrix? And so. [25:05] Yeah. I think that's also why it's like this technology is not going to be used if it's ever created like, you know, casually. Like it's something that you do if you if you need to do it, but it's not something that you would necessarily do casually. [25:15] Yep, that makes sense. And it's true. I, you know, I've always sort of without making any inroads towards actually making this reality assumed I might try and cryo preserve myself, because I think, you know, what's, what's, what's the downside, but I always, as a result, have to try and lobby my friends and family to do the same, because I don't want to be roused a century or two from now and be, you know, all by myself. But you mentioned that there was sort of a moment of falling in love with this concept of, you know,

[25:42] reversible cryo. Was there like a particular breakthrough that [25:47] you saw that really sparked something or just the concept itself? What was it that sort of [25:54] warmed the heart and ambition to start until? No, I mean, I think for me, it's just I've been taking some time to kind of reflect on my life. I was... [26:04] you know, traveling with a friend, just kind of thinking, you know, it's like when you're in this liminal space and they're kind of like, [26:09] have the space to step back a bit and I was just feeling so frustrated. You know, it's like I'd spent a decade plus [26:14] building the fun. I was really proud of a lot of the work that we've done, a lot of companies. And there's a sense of like, this problem is not solved yet. You know, it's like, it's like, we don't even, we don't even have the, like, you know, until we get the first drugs into humans and approved for humans, it's like, [26:27] I'm really happy that Loyal's working through a lot of that in pets. And I see a lot of progress on the human side. But it's like I didn't get into this business... [26:38] just to kind of build a successful venture capital firm. Like, the goal was to get money for the field so that we could get longevity therapies advanced. And it's this feeling of, you know, becoming a lot more from like the 10-year cycle time that it takes to get stuff into humans and how much that impacts the space of progress. [26:55] or sort of get stuff through human approvals. And so I was just feeling like, damn, it's really hard to get that cycle time down. In the absence of that, is there anything else that would be possible to do [27:05] to just have like the level of leverage with some simple problem that I care about or I don't know in the back of my mind I think that was happening and it's it's really it's really trying to explain the most beautiful thing you've ever seen

[27:16] that's incredibly complex. And it's just like, it's, it's so good. I don't quite know how to like, [27:21] The beauty of cryo is that it's so multifaceted. There's so many different ways into the problem, and they all intersect each other. They all have a very specific structure. [27:30] That's really interesting. Okay. Well, we'll try and attack it from a few sides, maybe. But as a point of comparison for folks, I was really interested to see that the folks have been trying to cryo-preserve themselves for a surprisingly long period of time, at least as much as I'd expected. [27:51] you know, went through this process. Uh, [27:53] And there are companies like Alcor and, you know, I think there's another one in Europe who sort of have been doing some version of this. Compared to sort of that state of play, what is it that like untills technology? Yes, please jump in. Yeah. So just to be very clear, that's different from what we're doing in a very specific way that I think is important. [28:23] and there's an assumption of like in the future, we might be able to bring this person back. What we're focused on and like really interested in is can we show that, [28:31] like you can do a full procedure. So like, let's take, you know, for us, it's like, can you take a piece of living tissue, an organ or organism, cryocreserve them and rewarm them and show that they get back their normal level of function and have like, basically just kind of like test, okay, like, how well do these full protocols work? And so I think that that's a very important distinction that we're interested in kind of being able to, at least for ourselves, being able to like see and test, okay, like how well, you know, do these protocols that we're developing work so that we can make them better along the way.

[29:01] Mm hmm. And so in terms of the mechanisms, you know, at play like. [29:07] Are they just axially different than sort of these more resurrection style approaches? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how Until has done things so far in its early work. So I think one principle that's important to say about the field is a core important idea is glass, not ice. So basically that one you cryopreserve. [29:31] So I think [29:33] a core advance in the field was the idea of vitrification and that you could basically infuse a tissue with enough um what are called product agents to prevent ice formation as you cool down the way i think about is like you have a bunch of molecules in a cell they're like bumping around bumping around and then you know normally if you were to form ice they would they [29:52] create this kind of like very sci-fi ordered like crystalline lattice [29:56] And instead, when you create a glass, it's like they all just like freeze in their tracks when they get down cold enough. Like they just stop moving, but it's still a very disordered looking crowd. Like there's not a expanding solid. And that's important because then that means that you don't have tissue structure disruption. [30:11] as part of cooling. And, you know, in reading about, uh, [30:15] this field on Till's website, there was some really interesting sort of discussion of some of the promising results so far, maybe for folks that, you know, aren't familiar with, I think it was parts of rats brain tissue that was sort of successfully showed a level of activity post going through this process. I'm fumbling through this, but you might be able to give a better account of it.

[30:39] Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that got me really excited about the field was realizing how much more advanced it was than I thought and how amazing it was that I had missed like all the progress that had happened. So, for example, you know, groups have shown that you can reversibly cryopreserve a rat kidney. Like you could take a rat kidney, totally cryopreserve it, rewarm it, transplant it back into a rat and have that rat still be healthy using that kidney, you know, a month plus out. [31:09] that's focused on reversibly car preserving, you know, [31:12] up to human-sized organs. [31:14] And so that field gives you a lot of information about what camp fields you might want to use, what are the best profusion techniques. [31:23] all that good stuff. You said a month plus out. Is there a point at which it does seem like, you know, these organs tend to fail at a certain point? No, no. It was just like metrics return to normal function and it's, you know, a bit of a bother to keep the rat around for years. And so that was as long as they tested. But no, I mean, the rat basically returned to [31:40] normal function and that, yeah. [31:43] Wow, really interesting. And you've sort of put together this phased plan for Until, which I thought was really interesting and sort of riffs on some of these benchmarks so far. [31:55] How did you come up with that? And for listeners, what is that plan at the moment? Yeah, so we have this... [32:02] We ultimately would love to be able to build these hibernation pods using interstellar. We would love to see if that's possible. And we know that there are some fundamental science questions around the neuroscience of that that are between us and figuring that out. But just like that's a very, very interesting long term goal.

[32:18] And then in the near term, you know, [32:20] to make a first POC, we want to show that Rostock-Royal Visionology [32:23] works in humans can help human patients. For transplant patients, there's this crazy thing that happens when someone dies and donates an organ. You can't predict that in advance. And so at the last minute, the surgeon will get the call, "Okay, get on a private jet, fly across the US, go pick up the organ." It's like the patient has to wait within a few hours of the transplant center for the call for months. [32:47] that they're like in the middle of the night possibly going to get to come in and like get surgery. It's like, imagine not knowing when you're going to get surgery for this, like, you know, really insane kind of like intense surgery that, you know, you don't even know when you're going to get it. And so for us, it's like, and then also so many organs are lost due to timing because like, you know, once a patient has an organ, there's a very short time window to get it to the recipient. And so I've talked to, you know, folks where they've been, you know, surgeons who were their plane was iced on the runway on the way back. And the person was waiting for the organ to not get [33:17] you know, this liver was on the runway for just a few hours too long. Our doctor surgeons, who have to stay up all night when the organ comes in, literally pulling an all-nighter just to make sure that organ is transplanted in its acceptable window of quality. [33:29] And so for us, it's like, if you could just cry preserve an organ, you know, and like remove basically time as a constraint from this process. It's really helpful to transplant patients, really helpful to transplant surgeons, also transplant centers. I think just like realizing the impact of that was an important sort of. And then it also just like, look, if you're talking about reverse, like building hibernation pods, like you sure as heck better be able to.

[33:49] reversibly cry preserve a single human organ. If you can't do that, what kind of company are you? And it's just ridiculous to imagine, I think, not treating that use case very seriously if you can do it. You know, maybe it's too [34:03] uh complicated a question for you know uh where until is at the moment but what do you see as sort of the the major hurdles in front of you to get to that stage the the stage of of uh human organs managing to you know pause the biological time on those so to speak yeah so i think for us it's all about quality like i think that we're [34:26] I think to us, it's like if you are talking about giving a transplant patient an organ that's using your technology, it's like... [34:34] Like it has to compare as well as possible to, um, [34:39] what their alternative might be in that situation. And so for us, it's like, [34:43] just focusing on organ quality and getting that as high as possible. Organ quality, you know, post-transplanting as high as possible. [34:50] This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud, and build trust. Fraudsters are already using AI to spoof faces, voices, and documents, so your defenses need to adapt just as fast. [35:05] Persona helps secure some of the Internet's largest and most trusted platforms with identity verification. If you're building a product where trust matters, identity should be a priority. [35:16] you've probably already experienced Persona without realizing it. [35:19] verifying your LinkedIn profile, signing up for Etsy,

[35:22] or renting a scooter with lime. [35:24] trusted by leading companies like Square, Brex, and Twilio, [35:27] Persona gives you the building blocks to create identity flows that adapt to your customers, risk tolerance, and locales you operate in. [35:35] Whether you're verifying age, onboarding businesses, [35:38] or automating KYC. [35:40] It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. [35:44] Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com slash generalist and check it out. [35:53] Maybe we can talk a little bit about [35:55] you know, untils journey so far, what have been sort of the things that you've been most focused on, uh, today? Is it okay if I just try to explain to you like literally how cryopreservation works and then kind of work backwards. Yeah, definitely. That'd be great. We're doing. Okay. Okay. Great. So it's basically the way that cryopreservation works is, um, you have this danger zone of ice formation, um, between, you know, when you're just at a very cool temperature down to like minus 130 C and below, and it's, it's, it's very, sorry. And below minus 130 C you're, you're kind of, uh, more fine. You're not going to see as much ice [36:25] danger zone, basically you want to traverse it as fast as possible. And so a lot of the field focuses on methods to very quickly cool and rewarm. [36:31] spending minimal time at your zone. And interestingly enough, rewarming is actually a bit more of a challenge because when you rewarm, you're like re-encountering all the ice crystal nuclei that were formed as you went down into that zone in the first place. [36:44] So you have to be more a bit faster. And so basically there's that process happening. And then there's a separate thing of like, what chemicals are you adding to the system that prevent ice formation with minimal toxicity, right? You're talking about replacing a large fraction of the water of a cell with a chemical that hasn't seen before. And it's amazing that, you know, this is actually probably done in sort of human embryos for, you know, sort of like, for like a cryopreserved IVF embryos. Like this is not something that is, you know, completely outside the norm of what we do today in biology, but like in a large organ,

[37:13] you have to have a lot more tolerance or chemicals that are less toxic because basically they're exposed to the organ for much longer. And so it's interesting like dance. And then lastly, you're scaling up. So we know these protocols can work in human embryos. [37:27] Scaling up to a whole human organ introduces this massive volume to surface area problem, right? Where you've scaled volume by R cubes, but surface area by R squared. And so if you're still relying on kind of heat going in from the outside... [37:44] alone or sort of traversing it out on just the boundary of the object, that's a problem. So you also have to solve this kind of like... [37:52] Basically, the scaling problem is quite difficult. But I think it's such an elegant thing that you know that these protocols work for cells, for embryos, even for small organs and organisms. And it's just this question of, OK, how do you engineer the best scaling property for technology that takes it all the way up? And then also, one, I think, really beautiful part of the problem is that you trade off between the difficulty of different areas. So if you can go faster through the danger zone... [38:17] you can maybe tolerate chemicals that are a bit more toxic and vice versa. And I think it's a very interesting thing where you can make the biological problem easier by improving on engineering, which is such a great trade-off to have in a biological problem. [38:32] So interesting and so useful. So thank you for that. [38:36] To the extent that you're able to share, how do you think about those trade-offs? Is there a certain philosophy behind the way Until wants to do things that is grounded in those trade-offs, where you're saying, "Hey, I actually think the right way to do this is to take a little more risk in this part and a little less risk here," or something to that effect? No, if any, for us, it's just like, "Make everything as good as possible." Okay, got it. With CPSF, for example, the whole field of crab algae has spent a lot of time trying to optimize that problem. And so we can also kind of

[39:05] try and work with the field and understand like you know what what the field is done best there um but yeah i think for us it's just like literally take each part of the problem extremely seriously in most areas of our development you're presented with sometimes you have [39:14] often like no idea what caused them. You have to use tools that are very limited. So, you know, you're using a small molecule to pick up a hundred or so atoms or like an antibody to the kind of thousand or so atoms. But like, [39:25] tools that basically can buy into a single protein or affect kind of a very simple interaction. And that was supposed to take a system that is like 10 to the 27 to the 28 atoms and revert it back to like a normal phenotype when you often even like don't quite understand what's going on monthly, monthly, right? And so it's like this crazy hard [39:42] problem in drug development and it's like no wonder that so many drugs make it into the clinic and don't make it all the way it's just like [39:47] It's an incredibly difficult... [39:49] set of constraints. I think with core preservation, what's fascinating to me is like, you're working with temperature. It's like the core statement of the problem is physical. It's like, take a system [39:57] reduce its temperature to like minus 130 or below, bring it back to normal temperature, and do so with mental perturbation. And yes, like there's a lot of biological questions that then become added onto that. But it's like, you're changing the system. Like you're not reacting to symptoms that are already there that have evolved mysteriously. Like you're making the change. So you get to control, you know, to some degree that part of the process. And then also it's like, because you're talking about temperature, it's like there are so many ways, so many different natural laws in physics in which the term temperature shows up. Like you can take all of those [40:27] You can look at every single... [40:29] kind of part of physics that [40:30] reference temperature and try and build systems and devices that kind of take the nuclear temperature of an organism using the specific laws. And like, you don't, you don't get to do that in most part. You don't get to like take, there's not like an Alzheimer's parameter that you get to go and you get to go look at like, you know, is PV equals NRT relevant to Alzheimer's, you know, this is the parameter. And that just, it's really hard to emphasize how much,

[40:49] that gets you in terms of iteration speed, how much it gets you in terms of ability to think quantitatively and clearly about the problem. And that was such an important part of me getting, I think for me, just the excitement of like, oh, you can think about this problem [41:02] really well and you can think about you can like you can physically model in your head in ways that correspond to reality and that is like so so beautiful when you find that with a problem that's so interesting. [41:11] How do you think about the sort of timelines for [41:15] this sort of a company like you must know plenty of more traditional founders in in tech in silicon valley [41:24] Do you try and model yourself against? I don't know. Uh, [41:29] traditional biotech or anything like that? Or is it, you know, just too different? [41:33] Yeah, I mean, I think for us, the question is like, [41:36] are we going as fast as possible? Like, like, and I think you just kind of know, right? It's like, so it's one thing about tech, about DTEK, right? So often you do have this, this flexibility of like, you know, the final product you might be talking about is, [41:48] a long way away. And so, you know, there's sometimes capacity if you have, you know, [41:56] you know, some time to kind of not track progress as well. But I think for us, it's just, even in the near term, it's like, there are transplant patients who might be losing organs right now because we can't reverse the curve or we can't, you know, start levatically. Like, [42:09] trying to really feel that urgency on a daily basis, like that to us is the biggest metric. But I think one that's really important to us is like building a company for the long term. Like we've selected all of our investors very, very carefully for people who have a lot of experience and understanding of like building companies for the long term, you know, and keeping very ambitious goals in mind. And so it's like a combination of like having that kind of long-term focus with on a daily basis, just like trying to really feel the urgency of the problem.

[42:39] and seeing you on other podcasts. It feels like you take a great deal of inspiration, obviously, from the great figures of science and some of the folks in this field that you've interacted with. Are there... [42:50] entrepreneurial role models or inspirations where you think, actually, the way that they did this, there's some sort of lessons for us there, or is this all sort of needs to be reimagined from the very beginning? [43:04] You know, it's really interesting because I think when I first came to Silicon Valley, for sure, I had, you know, the typical roster of entrepreneurs that I thought were amazing. And, you know, one thing that's been very, very helpful personally is getting to know a few people that I really admired from afar. [43:18] and seeing that, like, I think you can be like a [43:21] good person to be successful. I think that was something that I didn't really understand when I first came to the values. Like, you know, do you have to be like mean and kind of like, but I see people, I think are very intellectually still alive and, and have that curiosity and have like a very genuine drive to like do good. And just being people like that who are also successful, I think has been, that's been really great. But I think one thing that's been actually big for me is just dropping a lot of micro conceptions of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Like I'm a really weird person, you know, like deeply, deeply, deeply weird. And it turns out that like some of the best [43:51] that in retrospect are objectively the most successful come from following the [43:55] that weirdness. And I think for a long time, I tried to mask it and hide it and be something that I wasn't. But I think over time, it's just more and more like, okay, like the deeply weird parts of you are your alpha, you know, like that's where the good stuff is. And so I feel more comfortable, I think, being different.

[44:11] What are the examples that come to mind when you think of Weird Alpha for you? I think it's that I'm really obsessive and often I'll get obsessed with things that don't necessarily... [44:21] like they're they don't necessarily make sense exclusively if you look at what i'm trying to pull in or the influences or the kind of like obsession it doesn't quite make sense and i think i used to really penalize myself from that and i'd be like what's this weird thing and you know or you just do or and also there's a point i'm interested for beauty it's like for a long time i thought that like [44:41] That was just kind of a nice side quest, but the main things that I did needed to have this level of explicitness and they needed to have this level of structure to them. [44:49] I think over time, [44:51] It's like... [44:53] I'm [44:54] like just these ideas you know that that really like like ideals feel like my friends you know it's like or maybe this is kind of crazy but it's like when i find a really beautiful idea it feels like [45:04] this beautiful thing that's asking to be worked on. It's asking to be seen and often they don't make sense when you first meet them, but they really, really, really want to be seen and to be worked on. I think for me, cryo, it's like, [45:17] It's, it's, it leaks an interesting way to this thing that I think sort of Peter Thiel once said this interesting thing. I forget if it was like, um, something that he said in conversation or just, I heard from someone else, but like, he said that his main task for entrepreneur that to fund, or maybe that's not his main task, but just like a thing that he mentioned, he really indexed on, um, potentially again, I don't want to speak for him, but just like, was if you ask someone, will it work? Like, [45:38] what do they say? Like, just like literally directly ask them, is this going to work? And like so many people just say like, no, you know, or like they're kind of, or like they're just kind of like, I don't know. And it's like, fucking don't offend those people. Like, you know, it doesn't make, makes no sense. But it's interesting how many people like have these ideas, they kind of built up structurally, but they don't actually

[45:53] they don't actually kind of on some level deeply believe them. And I think for me, it's just like deeply internalizing that like when you work on something, [45:59] it should cut like like there's just this level of connection to what that idea is that at least to me feels extremely important i think that's yeah i mean it's not you that have to do the rest of the job right which is like 90 but like like having that as a base having these ideas that i think [46:12] really do make sense. For me, cryo is like it's a very idea-oriented [46:16] It's like, um... [46:18] it's it's when you meet it and you see it you just see all the different facets of it and you it's like it it's really hard to explain what has like a hundred it's like it just there's so many different things about it that come together to make it interesting um and and that's that's part of what makes it special i don't know how to explain it um [46:33] Yeah, that's so interesting. Have you ever wondered if you have like synesthesia or something like that? Because the way that you describe ideas is so like sensorially, sensorially rich. And that was something actually, you know, sort of almost noticed in this really interesting piece I thought you wrote maybe five years ago around your mental models. And it's struck me also that the way that you sort of talk through your ideas, [46:59] your mental processes is super linked to sensation and sort of color and light and, you know, this sort of feeling. Anyway, I wonder if that's ever something you've thought about or, you know, the particular processes going on in your brain. I don't know. I think to me it feels, and this also might sound totally absurd, but I think it's true. And I think it's about to say, it feels a lot more like love. Like it feels like literally like just like there's this thing or,

[47:29] like it's encouraging it's like okay why is it beautiful right it's like if if you solve this problem if you solve the full scope of it you have like there's this kind of sense of unlimited impact right sort of like what could you do with such a tool like let's say you actually build the full thing it's like quite unlimited it has this beautiful attractable beauty attractableness it's like okay if you if you try and work on this thing can you test your progress well like i think for me so one of the most [47:51] amazing parts coming from me is my co-founder, Hunter Davis of the company. He's one of the best scientists I've ever met, one of the best leaders I've ever met. I could not be more actively working with him. I knew when I first met this idea of cryo that people like that level of mind would be attracted to it because it spans physics and biology and neuroscience. It's a kind of idea where if you tell someone who's highly intelligent the problem, [48:14] especially if they have a physics background or have some ability to think quantically mentally and do mental models, within hours... [48:21] they'll be entranced by it. It has that kind of like deep pull, that intellectual beauty. [48:26] And so that was also part of it, just that, like, you know, it's a problem that's very attractive to people that I would really want to work with. And then I think last, it's like sociologically so interesting, right? It's like, why was this not, like, why is it that not everyone is starting a career company? Why is it that this is a field that has all these kind of things that you're, you know, you have to sort of [48:44] think about quite [48:44] quite specifically, I think the sociological part was also extremely interesting. You're reducing a change in the biological organism that you're then reversing, like that's not, that's your rare medicine. [48:53] temperature as a parameter. It's just like all these different things come together. And it's like these [48:57] Yeah, I just and then you just know that the idea is kind of wanting to it's wanting to be seen like it's wanting to. Yeah, that's very beautiful. And it's it's really it's cool to hear someone talk about their work that way. And.

[49:10] What was it about Hunter that sort of convinced you he was [49:15] such an extraordinary scientist and the right person to found this company with. Yeah, so Hunter's the absolute best. Again, a large part of [49:23] I picked working on this company very selfishly and that I wanted to work with something that was highly impactful and also that I would never get bored of. And I think a large part of the joy that I find in work is getting to work with Hunter and folks like Hunter. [49:38] or like some of the other folks that we have on the team. I think for me, it was that we had a first conversation about technology and he told me later, he was like, yeah, I thought that was totally crazy, right? It's like, you know, what are you talking about? Like, we're simply crying. It's like, literally sounds absurd. You know, for context, he's an extremely rigorous physicist, has a background, you know, at Caltech for his PhD and then was at, you know, Harvard and one of the, like, the best science slash kind of physics background labs there when I first talked to him. So, you know, he's coming at this from the effect of having been trained to think rigorously about other problems. [50:08] Geologically, he went off and for a couple of days did the calcs. He was like, okay, theoretically, if I look at, you know, what I know about ice formation and the temperature ranges and all these other factors... [50:19] does this like can I disprove this idea [50:22] And the thing happened where, you know, you start thinking about the idea and then you just get pulled in and you're like, wait, but wait, but wait, no way. But like that he built that up from first principles for himself. Like he A, didn't dismiss the idea sociologically. B, went off and was like, I'm not also going to take Laura's word for it. I want to check for myself. It was incredible. And then also just I think he's such a founder at heart. Like, you know, when we first started talking about this idea, it was very early. Or sort of, you know, like in the sense of we were still working out, you know, some like aspects of the science plan.

[50:51] You know, he basically, after the interview, flew back to Boston and like committed and then like came back with his family, you know, like, you know, just months later. It's like just this level of. [51:02] just he's just such a natural like he's one of the best founders I've ever met you know you know I'm so grateful to them for that reason but just like that level of um once you intellectually are locked into something then just like fully [51:13] going after it. Fascinating. You made the important distinction around how, you know, [51:20] what Until is doing is very different than sort of the postmortem freezing. Do you eventually expect that [51:27] folks might start wanting to use [51:29] untils technology, either as a substitute for that, wherever you think, hey, I'm getting pretty old, like I'd rather, you know, go through this process and see if medicine is way better in 100 years and I can, you know, live an extra 50 years with better medicine. Do you sort of expect that behavior to happen? We're drifting, you know. [51:51] now farther into the future in discussing these things. But yeah, I'm curious. For what we're talking about, it's like you only do this most... One thing that I've really learned over time, especially as a young woman, it's like we're here because of people that we love. It's like you wake up every day and a large part of [52:07] feeling good, feeling the person that you are often is like [52:10] deter my social context, at least I think for a lot of people that's true. And so it's like this is just [52:14] I think there are a few people who literally are just like totally oriented on curiosity. And like for them, yeah, sure, maybe it would make sense to do something like that. But I think just for most people, it's like you would only...

[52:22] do such a thing to get more time with people that you love, which means that, you know, it's only if you have a terminal illness that you consider like, [52:28] Making that kind of jump. And I think also to be clear, I don't... [52:32] I think we're focused on the reversible aspect of this because... [52:36] That's what [52:37] we want to be able to make these techniques better, and that's the only way that we know of to really iterate well. It's like really testing function that way. I think it's complicated to think through [52:46] like what you would do today if you had to make a call for yourself. But I think for us, it's just like we literally want to just be able to test. Like we feel like how well do these technologies work and make them better and just the iteration loop. [52:57] which is important for us. That's super interesting. In this, you know, mental models post that you wrote, it's an old post, so I don't know how well you might remember it, but I thought it was super interesting and a really sort of interesting way of understanding maybe how you think and how you reason through [53:15] problems and ideas. One of the things you said was most people don't deeply understand what they're talking about, me included. It sounds like [53:24] You deeply understand what you're talking about with until, but which parts are you maybe least sure about or, you know, should someone have the most curiosity about digging in more on? [53:34] I mean, there's two obvious categories, right? Like one is on the science side, you know, like what have we not yet talked about or discussed? I think, you know, one interesting thing is like... [53:43] What neuroscience questions would you have to answer [53:46] or how would you test them to understand whether the whole body case is viable? I think that's kind of interesting, like kind of, um, [53:52] part of the problem that demands a lot of work.

[53:55] And also, if anyone wants to work on it in this podcast, they should definitely come inbound. I'm taking that such an interesting question for us to be thinking about. But I think the other part is sociologically. You know, it's like when I was younger, to me, it was obvious that if you just make a medicine, it's good. You know, it's sort of like you make this medicine to give you more of your life and then they don't do with it. And I think for something like this technology, I think that really is important to me is that. [54:16] you know, if you have a loved one, [54:17] And you're going to be, let's say, there's a therapy coming out in a couple of years and you want to try and be able to make that therapy. And so you're making the decision to make that risk trade-off. [54:27] you know, how does that feel to the people that you love and that love you? And how are they processing and dealing with, you know, you being anesthetist? Like, that's such a interesting, [54:36] huge unsolved question of how do you really [54:42] think through what that spirit is like for people who are still living their normal lives. We don't really know how to think about it well, and it would be very important to get that right. [54:51] Yeah, that's so interesting. There will, you know, assuming, you know, when this technology is mature, there will be totally whole fields of study around those relationships, you imagine, and how people navigate that. That's so intriguing.

[55:21] is the biggest flaw there, so to speak. I think I might understand that a little bit differently. [55:27] with a couple years of removed i i think for what that means to me now is like you know if i think about genius often it's like the person's frantically typing at a keyboard or they're frantically writing equations on a blackboard and i think um [55:40] personally, what has felt the most standard for me in trying to find and like talk to interface with new ideas is like just giving myself room to be weird, like to kind of go dance in a field or eat a bunch of sugar or listen to just kind of following intuitions and impulses, you know, again, not all the time, but you don't spend all of your time doing these things. But I think it's [56:02] sometimes the way that you find really great new ideas isn't by [56:06] like doing things that look like very conventional and it's important to like [56:11] follow your impulses about what works best for you. I don't know. And this might sound, I think that sounds kind of generic, but there's something there that was very, very helpful for me to kind of [56:20] get comfortable with, I think. What are the ways that you are generative that might surprise people? I mean, eating a bunch of sugar and dancing in a field where I thought two good examples, if true. [56:33] Yeah, I mean, obviously I don't recommend that for a long time, but just for me, it's like to get the correct level of mental, like, I think it's like my version of caffeine, basically. Hard to say. I think for me, like emotion is very important.

[56:50] There are many people, I think, who are able to just think about ideas and it doesn't mean something emotionally to them. And it's like they're just thinking about the idea literally. I think for me, it's really important to feel that the idea itself is really beautiful and to connect to it aesthetically and emotionally. And I think that just gives me a lot of interest. My attention is then just very much on this beautiful object and then it gets a lot more kind of compute. [57:15] But I think being at peace with like that, that's a reasonable thing to want for yourself and to be at peace with like that ideas that have those properties. [57:22] you know, might be. Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe just like learning to follow your creative. Yeah. Yeah, but there's something, yeah, I don't quite know how to describe it. No, it's interesting to hear you talk through it. Um, [57:35] You've been interested in longevity, obviously, in different ways and different problems for such a long time. [57:41] Have there been... [57:43] other beautiful ideas beyond this, you know, pocket of science or pocket of the world that like have almost been [57:51] so beautiful and so enticing that they've [57:54] I wouldn't want to say dragged off course because that suggests, you know, there's only one path, but sort of taking you in a different direction. [58:01] Yeah, I mean, I think there's a funny meta-beautiful idea, which is what makes ideas beautiful. I was just going to optimize for like, okay, like a number of hours of life spent in this like state of being really like... [58:15] interested in an idea and pursuing and kind of like spending a lot of compute on it and then there's this like this meta idea of like what makes your night can i just find all the ideas that have this property um right now is like basically a lot of mathematicians i think talk about mathematics as a very deeply beautiful process for them it's like taking the veil off the face of you know the the beauty of the universe or whatever and um i'm really curious whether my intuit my basically i i mostly have this for biology it's like for me biology is very

[58:45] get inside the cell and able to navigate around, can I have a similarly immersed and enjoyable experience thinking about mathematics when the objects are less or much more foreign from the way that my brain works? And I'm interested in trying to understand that right now. Have you found other biologists, scientists who share the same sort of experience as you do when, you know, commuting with a cell or with these ideas? [59:10] Kind of. I think a lot of them... I think a lot of them, it's maybe so much more of their daily job that it's kind of a little bit less... I think for me it's this desperate quest to get more of this beauty, and I think for a lot of folks it's like, I've just... [59:21] I have eight hours of this a day. You know, like I actually don't want to talk more about it at the end of the day. But yeah, for example, like Rob Phillips at Caltech made this incredible resource called Bionumbers.org, where I think he really lays out like how to think about biology quantitatively in a way that also feels very beautiful. And that book's definitely a huge inspiration personally. Really interesting. Yeah, because I do think, as you said, you hear about it all the time with mathematicians. You obviously hear about it with artists. And it seems almost a universal phenomenon in some respect once you... [59:49] achieve a certain level of insight or something like that around a lot of these things. So it's really cool to [59:57] to hear that. I'm curious, like if there are things for your own longevity that you've over the years become, you know, very. [1:00:05] set on or are very convinced are important to do, you know, maybe beyond the obvious things like, you know, moving a decent amount and eating reasonably well? Are there things that you really try and maximize for?

[1:00:20] Yeah, so I mean, definitely I could ask this question a lot. I think, you know, to be clear, I think the area where I have a level of intellectual differentiated expertise is like, [1:00:31] are there drugs that we could take through critical trials that might have a predictable and significant enough effect to measure on human longevity? That is the area where I have some amount of knowledge. I think that it's actually a much more complicated subject in many ways. What [1:00:46] what an average person do best to do more of. And so I think for me personally, [1:00:52] The thing that I know is like, I'm not living lifestyle optimized for like number of years right now because I'm stressed out of my mind, you know, like 90% of the time. You know, it seems like it would be hard to do that as a founder. Yeah. [1:01:03] Yeah, I think if you're a fan of just like look like you're [1:01:06] I think it is possible to get there where you're a lot bringing up really levels of stress, but just getting to what a normal lifestyle might get you when you're kind of trying to put in a lot of folks' tension and you have that level of just literal physical stress is I think that even just getting to a normal baseline is probably the first thing for me personally. That makes sense. You know, this is... [1:01:26] Maybe also something that I'm just sort of curious about. I think when folks think about longevity at the moment, they think a lot about someone like Brian Johnson and his sort of end of one study from the perspective of. [1:01:40] someone who's [1:01:43] interested in the field, [1:01:45] Are there things that Brian is doing that you're like, this might end up being valuable for the broader industry in how we understand things? Or is it just, you know, so limited because it's because it is just a one person sample size? I think that like to the degree that.

[1:02:02] like [1:02:03] like, doing... [1:02:05] like certain communication things gets a lot of people excited to eat healthier just like in a way that's [1:02:10] relatively change forward or exercise more like that that seems like it's good for me people to do those things yeah the evangelism yeah i i think i think that that that effect of of it um [1:02:23] Yeah, I mean, I'm like that. That seems like it's good for people to think about their health a lot and to think about health as an important thing and to be able to kind of like... [1:02:32] not be seen as bad for thinking about health, but to be, you know, sort of celebrated for thinking about health. That component seems good. Amazing. Well, I always like to wrap up with a few sort of more abstract philosophical questions. Maybe this is an easy one to answer given what you do, but if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would love to run? I think if you actually gave me that, I would take like five years to think about it. I think selfishly, a thing that I want to find out in the near term is like, if I took [1:03:02] great mathematician and scientist in the world who spends a lot of time in their mind. And I asked them about like basically their internal... [1:03:08] like structure, kind of mapping out the space of ways that people [1:03:12] feel ideas and then can just [1:03:16] Yeah, understanding, like making like a large compendium of ways to like, it's like making a good learning curriculum, but one that's very much around the feeling of experiencing the idea as opposed to like being able to be someone useful with the idea, which is also important. But just like that's for me personally, what I'm really fascinated by is experiencing the idea. [1:03:32] That's so interesting. What's a tradition or practice from another culture or era that you would like us to adopt in the present day more frequently? I think for me personally, I'm...

[1:03:44] someone who thinks in a pretty embodied sense, like I need to move to think. [1:03:49] And I think that it's very culturally normal to sit [1:03:52] and be very still. Like, I think that's important to not freak people out. You don't want to be flailing. But I think just being okay with movement during conversation and thinking as more normal and being able to find ways to do that that feel good, I think that would be nice. I like that a lot. Also, much of my best thinking is just doing walking or things like that or whatever it is. Okay, last question. If you had a chance to assign a book [1:04:22] what would you want to assign people? [1:04:24] I mean... [1:04:24] insanely selfishly probably book.bionumbers.org, which anyone who's listening to this podcast can go look up. There you go. That's awesome. But what I mean by... But what I can understand is I think that, to me, it's like the best experience of science is one that feels like... [1:04:40] the literal like [1:04:41] best artistic experience you've ever had. It's like, it's like, it's like, imagine the most of an emotionally moved. [1:04:47] and then imagine that, [1:04:48] in the context of seeing the literal deepest and truest laws of the universe in their most compressed form and to have internalized those as much as possible in that moment of emotional, [1:05:01] just ecstasy, honestly, and just those two things together. I wish everyone had that feeling just once and had a sense of that for themselves and they could find that in some... Having that

[1:05:18] thing that we have [1:05:20] you know, that capacity. [1:05:21] for sure. Amazing. Well, I'm going to definitely buy a copy. So that's as good an endorsement as I think I can imagine. It's a totally free textbook online, too. Oh, great. The website is just like everything is, yeah. Amazing. Well, Laura, thank you so much for taking the time. I learned so much. And yeah, really excited to see what the next few years hold. [1:05:44] Thanks. Likewise. That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, [1:06:00] I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. [1:06:02] For all past episodes and more, [1:06:05] Visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. [1:06:08] dot com. [1:06:09] See you next time as we continue to explore. [1:06:12] the future. [1:06:13] *music*