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

Speaker A: 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? Speaker B: 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? Speaker A: 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 the heart of so many different things you're not supposed to talk about or you're supposed to talk about in certain ways. Now it's like some of the best next-gen talent, they grew up with this idea that longevity 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. Speaker B: How would you just explain reversible cryo to someone? Speaker A: 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 5 years in the future? Speaker B: 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. Each episode, I have deep conversations with the founders, investors, and thinkers who are living in the future to help you see it earlier, understand it better, and benefit from it. Today, I'm speaking with Laura Deming, the founder of Until. Speaker C: Laura's story is an unusual one.

Speaker B: She became fascinated with longevity at just 8 years old and worked for legendary biologist Cynthia Kenyon as a child. After winning the Thiel Fellowship and dropping out of MIT, Laura started one of the first venture funds dedicated to longevity, backing startups trying to extend lifespans. Now, as CEO of Until, she's taking on one of the most ambitious technical challenges in biology: reversible cryopreservation. In our conversation, we explore how Laura's unconventional homeschooled upbringing in New Zealand led to completely uncorrelated thinking about death and aging. Why the longevity field was once so stigmatized that professors had to hide their research interests, how Until is developing technology to literally pause biological time on human organs, and why Laura thinks about beautiful ideas the same way most people think about falling in love.

If you enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for some of the incredible ones we have coming up. Now, here's my conversation with Laura. I'm really excited to have today's episode brought to you by GoFundMe Giving Funds. Speaker B: She became fascinated with longevity at just 8 years old and worked for legendary biologist Cynthia Kenyon as a child. After winning the Thiel Fellowship and dropping out of MIT, Laura started one of the first venture funds dedicated to longevity, backing startups trying to extend lifespans. Now, as CEO of Until, she's taking on one of the most ambitious technical challenges in biology: reversible cryopreservation.

In our conversation, we explore how Laura's unconventional homeschooled upbringing in New Zealand led to completely uncorrelated thinking about death and aging. Why the longevity field was once so stigmatized that professors had to hide their research interests, how Until is developing technology to literally pause biological time on human organs, and why Laura thinks about beautiful ideas the same way most people think about falling in love. If you enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for some of the incredible ones we have coming up. Now, here's my conversation with Laura.

I'm really excited to have today's episode brought to you by GoFundMe Giving Funds. Speaker C: 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. GoFundMe Giving Funds is the DAF, or donor-advised fund, from the world's number one giving platform, trusted by 200 million people. Make a tax-deductible donation to over 1.4 million nonprofits with zero admin or asset fees. If you already have a DAF, GoFundMe Giving Funds will cover any DAFpay fees to transfer your existing fund over.

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com/mario. That's com/mario. 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: "Corporate happiness is positive cash flow." In today's post-SERP environment, Adler's wisdom feels particularly relevant, as founders need to make every dollar work harder. That's exactly what Brex delivers. Their modern finance platform was built specifically for startups like yours and designed to help extend your runway when capital efficiency matters most. With Brex, you get global corporate cards with up to 20x higher credit limits and no personal guarantee required.

Their banking solution has no minimums and no transaction fees while letting you earn high yield from day one with same-day liquidity. Best of all, Brex knows you were born to build, not juggle spreadsheets and finance tools. Their AI-powered platform brings cards, banking, expense management, and travel all in one place. It's simple, scalable, and designed to get you back to what you do best: building. More than 30,000 companies, including 1 in 3 US venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at com/mario. Speaker B: Well, uh, 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, sidelines about cryopreservation. So yeah, really excited to dig in today. Speaker A: Thanks. Likewise. Speaker B: Awesome. Well, I'd love to, you know, begin with your sort of hero's origin story, which is as an 8-year-old, you became interested in longevity, which I think everyone sort of has some sort of acquaintance with mortality around that age. But I suspect many people don't become as fascinated by it as, as you have.

How did that happen? And, 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? Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's really funny to try and answer questions about when you were 8, you know, when you're like, uh, you know, in your 30s. Um, and I think, um, over time I see a little bit more of what the context was. It's like, for context, like, I grew up homeschooled in New Zealand, um, 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, um, you know, you just have to pick a dream and go after it, and that there were all these problems and I just need to go solve them. And so that was like just what I— like, that was the, um, 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, like that were very socially reinforced, I didn't have that as a kid.

Like it was just kind of very, very uncorrelated, I would say, from the social matrix that 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. Then I 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.

This 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. And then also I think at one point I remember being viscerally confronted with the idea of death and just being like, you know, this kind of psychologically horrible black hole of nothingness is really bad. And we should also— so it's a combination of things, but I think, I think the biggest thing that I'm grateful for is that it was just so— there were no societal reinforced— there was no, there's no kind of conception that this was strange at all.

Like, to me, it was just very, very straightforward. And so it was very interesting when I was like 12 and above to come and like interface with society and be like, oh, this is actually perceived as a strange belief or one that is like, you know, not ordinary. Speaker B: Really interesting. I, you know, to an extent, it's probably unanswerable because you, you don't have sort of a series of other lives to compare it to. But to the extent that you're able to interrogate that experience, like what are the things that you think you took from homeschooling?

You certainly mentioned one there, this sort of uncorrelation 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, 6th grade history? I don't know, like, I, I'd be curious to, to see how you've sort of thought through that. Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, uh, 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 in the background of how it's one for two and stuff. But like, I think what I can say that has been interesting to see is that, um, 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, um, I get very like anxious and frustrated about it. I think, I think a good combination of things for, for my personal makeup was being dropped in this kind of area of idea phase space where it's so outside of it just kind of, you know, so it's like you're randomly dropped inside the idea phase space. You're not really correlated to like normal beliefs. And then there's like also this machine internally that's like, 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 phase space?

Where's the difference? And it's, it's very hard to reconcile those two things with understanding everything about how those ideas are built up from the ground. And so I think that, that's been a very helpful, um, force that, that like kind of intellectual generator, um, combined with being, you know, homeschooled in this way that was so uncorrelated. Speaker B: That's so interesting. When you began, and again, you know, 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, you know, familiarize yourself with that?

Speaker A: 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 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 in her lab. You know, it's a series of events where I was, I think, I forgot 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 send it to a random person on the internet and she emailed back and invited me to come 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, is really the heroine of the story for me. But I think one thing I'd say, so that's kind of on the science side, you know, where I got my start, you know, starting to understand the field just in her lab as a kid.

But I think what was interesting to me is the field sociologically and what was kind of going on at the time. And because, you know, in the longevity field at the time, which at that time was branded more as the anti-aging field, which is just, I think, um, or like, it's a little obviously like as a word you want to get behind, I think longevity is a more interesting of a one. It's 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 like it 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 MIT, and like they had to kind of hide that their interest in longevity from their colleagues. It was seen as— Speaker B: oh, interesting. Speaker A: Cynthia was literally told that she would be like basically ostracized, or like she was told that like if she worked on this, um, field as a young, very promising biologist, that she would, you know, be like, um, an outcast from the field, basically.

I mean, she, she was like— it would take an enormous amount of intellectual courage and bravery I think for her to actually pursue it, but, you know, but even her, you know, at that point she had, she was just so obviously an excellent scientist that she could, but, um, yeah, and the field, like, you had to kind of hide that you were into longevity. I think that's so, when that's true, it's so interesting, especially when a field has real results, you know, it's like, if that were true and we didn't have the results showing that you can genetically mutate, you know, organisms and they live longer, that'd be a bit less strange, but it's just, it was a very interesting combination.

Speaker B: Why was there that reaction to it? Was it, you know, some, 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? Speaker A: You know, I wish we could talk for like 3 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 is, you know, especially if you're in venture capital, which I was for a long time, like it, and still am to some degree, like it's, 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 and which we're supposed— it's very difficult for us to think about in certain ways. So one example is in longevity, like, it's very, it's a very good idea if there's no way to impact your lifespan to strongly kind of not question the amount of years that you have. And it's actually psychologically very healthy. And so actually, for most people in those 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 longevity is one where it's so close to this psychological, like, sort of paradigm that it's, it's, um, there's just a lot of stuff for, I mean, we can, we can talk with 3 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.

Speaker B: That's so interesting. You, yeah, you articulated that. I mean, obviously you've been thinking about this, uh, for, for a very long time, so I'm not surprised, but yeah. That 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. And also within the group, it makes me look, I don't know, a bit weak, a bit grasping after something unattainable to pretend like I'm going to be able to have this massively longer lifespan.

So there's, yeah, there's so many thorny pieces there. Speaker A: Yeah, and I would say just one flip side too is like, if you're the person claiming to give everyone eternal life, right, like that, that is, that is something that— and I'm not saying longevity field's trying to— like, longevity field's kind of in the middle of this thing where it's like, it's like the people who I think the best in the field are 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 extra healthy life, you know.

And who knows what's actually gonna happen at this point with the AI paradigm 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 the one thing we have to be in a binary state around it. Speaker B: Really interesting. I'm glad we dug into it a little bit. Um, you know, you're, you had this experience, uh, doing research with Cynthia Kenyon.

You, uh, you also obviously did research beyond that. Um, but then sort of the next, you know, chapter of your life was as a venture capitalist with the Longevity Fund and, 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 to make an impact on the field? Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, so for context, I was like 16, 17 when I started thinking about, you know, like starting something. Speaker B: All of these things are, you know, a couple decades before other people.

Speaker A: 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 trajectory. But at the time in the longevity field, again, I was just this kid and I was going around down asking people, okay, like, what is the problem? And 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 2 years to actually figure out even that, you know, what a fund structure was and like how to think about the business aspect. Like, but the motivation was just like, get a bunch of money and give it, like, make sure every field has it to translate these ideas into companies. Speaker B: That totally makes sense. Uh, was, were people correct in assessing what the problem in the field was?

Was it a money problem? Speaker A: From my current perspective, I think that it was more a lack of good founders and good founding talent, um, more than the money. Um, I, I, I think that like money and branding helped the field 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. Speaker B: 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? Speaker B: 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? Speaker A: I think that there's an interesting intersection in longevity where you want someone who's a true believer in a certain way, like you want them to really believe in the power of the field, but you don't want them to lose touch with reality.

Um, and I think having those two things simultaneously is extremely difficult. 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 the people with the ability, the capacity to 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. 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 trying to, but I think at the time it was, the field was still trying to figuring out what it was, what it wanted to be. Speaker B: 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, you know, 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? Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, one massive milestone for the field is the CVM, a sort of division of the FDA, thanks to the work from the company Loyal, recognizing that you can have lifespan extension 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 in longevity working really hard to, you know, 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 basically 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 more healthy life.

And how exactly do we chart 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 proposition, right? 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 people see you as not focusing on the pragmatics of it, that's when it gets a little bit more decorrelated. Speaker B: Yep. I also imagine just the sort of lack of 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 too.

You sort of need companies like Until and Loyal and, you know, others to sort of be at the vanguard of this field and then, you know, train the sort of next generations of it, I imagine. Speaker A: Yeah, honestly, and that's what's the most exciting to see now in the field. And I see with H1 and with companies like Loyal and just in other companies in longevity space, it's the quality of talent. It's flipped now, where 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 they were interested in longevity.

Now, it's like some of the best next-gen talent, like the really smartest, smartest 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds I can imagine meeting, are foremost interested in longevity. To them, it's just the most obvious. They grew up with 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 really, really incredible things next decade for sure. Speaker A: Yeah, honestly, and that's what's the most exciting to see now in the field.

And I see with H1 and with companies like Loyal and just in other companies in longevity space, it's the quality of talent. It's flipped now, where 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 they were interested in longevity. Now, it's like some of the best next-gen talent, like the really smartest, smartest 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds I can imagine meeting, are foremost interested in longevity. To them, it's just the most obvious. They grew up with 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 really, really incredible things next decade for sure. Speaker B: That's really interesting. So was it, uh, 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? Speaker A: No, it was an extremely selfish decision.

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 You're gonna go hang out with that person. That's what you do. And I think for me with Anthill 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 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.

So we're not talking about living indefinite amounts of time if you don't want to. It's just 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 And then also, what's something where I feel like working on the company would be the biggest, best adventure of my life? That was also extremely important to me. Just frankly, I'm someone who cannot be bored, and I just need to work on things that have that level of interestingness. And to me, reversible cryo, for a long time I didn't see it.

I just thought it was this idea where ice would destroy the tissue, or there's all these myths about cryo that even I think people in the longevity field still had. 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, you just have to drop everything. You have to work on it. Speaker B: Wow. Amazing. Well, I definitely want to dig in more there, but for folks who maybe are coming to this, pardon the pun, cold, uh, what, what, uh, you know, how would you just explain reversible cryo to someone?

Speaker A: Yeah. So reversible cryo is what it sounds like. Um, it's, you know, you take an organism down to a very low temperature, like low, minus 130 degrees Celsius, bring it back up to normal temperature. But I think what really captured my imagination around it was this 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, let's say 1, 5 years in the future, and then access whatever's there. 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 at 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 critical medicine by even just years. And so it's this interesting combination of things like this crazy idea of like, oh, what if you could just bridge that gap and then seeing the real-world impact.

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 was cryopreserved for 30-plus years, right? And then rewarmed and then is a full human now. There are twins who were cryopreserved at the same time. They're rewarmed at different times. And so there's just this crazy thing where we already take whole humans and pause time for them for decades. It's just that scaling it up is an incredibly difficult technical problem. And we're not sure that we can reversibly cryopreserve whole adult humans yet.

That's something that we're still trying to understand. But the first thing along the way is, let's take a human organ, reversibly cryopreserve it, help a transplant patient. Get that organ that they might not have otherwise. 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. Speaker B: So interesting.

Yeah, I think, you know, you've talked about this before and, and on, you know, in Until's materials as sort of a pause button on biological life, which I think is such a fascinating idea. And as the sort of pace 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. You know, this is becoming more and more practical, but has historically been, you know, the realm of science fiction.

The thing that I think of is, you know, Three-Body Problem and Dark Forest, where the character sort of preserve themselves and jump a few centuries into the future. Do you have any preferred science fiction representations of what you're trying to do? Speaker A: No, actually. It's been interesting to search for them. I think what feels missing there to me— so 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 science questions that are between us and that, and we're, you know, going after organs first.

We feel very confident about organs. We're still understanding to what degree whole body, you can fully get there. But they do that. It's always portrayed in science fiction without the level of care that I think it really demands. I think, you know, one thing that's interesting to me is 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 loved ones that are dealing with the absence of something that they love versus just like, you know, the experience of the person in the— 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, um, 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 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. Speaker B: Yep. That makes sense.

Uh, and it's true. I, you know, I've always sort of without making any inroads towards actually making this reality assumed I might, uh, try and cryopreserve 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, to do the same because I don't want to be roused, uh, a century or two from now and, 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, reversible cryo.

Was there like a particular breakthrough that you saw that, you know, really sparked something or, you know, just the concept itself? What was it that sort of warmed the heart and ambition to start Until? Speaker A: No, I mean, I think for me it was just I'd been taking some time to kind of reflect on my life. I was 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, 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 building the fund. I was really proud of a lot of the work that we've done, proud of 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, you know, I'm really happy that Loyal's, you know, in the clinic, you know, sort of working through a lot of that in pets.

And I see a lot of progress on the human side, but it's like there's, you know, it's like I didn't get into this business just to kind of build a successful venture capital firm. Like, yeah, um, 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 familiar with like the 10-year cycle time that it takes to get stuff into humans and how much that impacts pace of progress, uh, 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 to just have the level of leverage with some single problem that I care about? Or in the back of my mind, I think that was happening. And to me, it's really like trying to explain the most beautiful thing you've ever seen that's incredibly complex. And it's just so beautiful. I don't quite know how to— The beauty of cryo is that it's so multifaceted.

There's so many different ways into the problem and they all are interesting and intersect with each other. They all have a very specific structure. Speaker B: That's really interesting. Okay. Well, we'll, we'll try and attack it from a few sides maybe. Um, but as a point of comparison for folks, you know, I was really interested to see that folks have been trying to cryopreserve themselves for a surprisingly long period of time, at least, you know, as much as I'd expected. I think, uh, there was a man named James Bedford who sort of 60-plus years ago, you know, went through this process.

Uh, and, 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, to sort of that state of play, what is it that like Until's technology— yes, please jump in. Speaker A: Yeah. So just to be very clear, that's different from what we're doing and in a very specific way, um, that I think is important. So basically cryonics is when you take someone who is, um, sort of legally, uh, sort of postmortem and you cryopreserve them according to like whatever the best methods are at the time.

And there's an assumption of in the future we might be able to bring this person back. What we're focused on and really interested in is, can we show that you can do a full procedure? So let's take, for us, it's like, can you take a piece of living tissue, an organ or organism, cryopreserve them and rewarm them and show that they get back to their normal level of function and have basically just kind of test, okay, how well do these full protocols work? And so I think that that to us is a very important distinction that we're interested in kind of being able to, at least for ourselves, being able to see and test how well you know, do these protocols that we're developing work so that we can make them better along the way.

Speaker B: And so, uh, in terms of the mechanisms, you know, at play, like, are they just axially different than, than sort of these, you know, more resurrection style approaches? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how UNTIL, uh, has done things so far in its early, early work. Speaker A: So I think one, one principle that's important to, um, say about the field is, is a core important idea is glass, not ice. So basically that one you cryopreserve. So I think a core advance in the field was the idea of vitrification and that you could basically infuse a tissue with enough what are called cryoprotective agents to prevent ice formation as you cool down.

The way to think about it is like you have a bunch of molecules in a cell and they're like bumping around, bumping around. And then, you know, normally if you were to form ice, they would create this kind of like very sci-fi ordered, like, crystalline lattice. And instead, when you create a glass, it's like they all just, like, freeze in their tracks, um, when they get down cold enough. Like, they just stop moving, but it's still a very disordered looking crowd. Like, there's not an expanding solid. And that's important because then that means that you don't have tissue structure disruption, um, as part of cooling.

Speaker B: And, you know, in reading about, uh, this, this field, uh, on, 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 rat's 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. Speaker A: 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. Because there's this whole field of cryobiology that's doing amazing work that's focused on reversibly cryopreserving, you know, up to human-sized organs. And so that, you know, that, that, that field gives you a lot of information about what chemicals you might want to use, what are the best fusion techniques, all that good stuff.

Speaker B: You said a month plus out. Is there a point at which it does seem like these organs tend to fail at a certain point? Speaker A: No, no. It was just like metrics returned to normal function and it's 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 normal function. Yeah. Speaker B: Wow. Really interesting. Um, and you, you've sort of put together this phased plan for Until, which I thought was really interesting and, and sort of riffs on some of these, uh, benchmarks so far.

How did you come up with that? And, and for, uh, for listeners, you know, what is that plan at the moment? Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, we have this, you know, we ultimately would love to be able to build hibernate, you know, these hibernation pods using Interstellar. Like we, we, 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 to us, that's a very, very interesting long-term goal. And then in the near term, to make a first POC, we want to show that reversible cardiomyopathy works in humans, can help human patients.

For transplant patients, there's this crazy thing that happens where when someone dies and donates an organ, it happens. You can't predict that in advance. 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 that for months that they're in the middle of the night possibly going to get to come in and get surgery. It's like, imagine not knowing when you're going to get surgery for this really insane kind of intense surgery that 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 once a patient dies and donates an organ, there's a very short time window to get it to the recipient. And so I've talked to folks where they've been surgeons who, where their plane is iced on the runway on the way back and the person was waiting for the organ to not get it because this liver was on the runway for just a few hours too long. Our phlebotomist surgeons who've been in the state, they 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.

And so for us, it's like, if you could just cryopreserve an organ and remove basically time as a constraint from this process, it's really helpful to transplant patients, really helpful to transplant surgeons, and also transplant centers. I think that's just realizing the impact of that was an important sort of— and then it also just like, look, if you're talking about building hibernation pods, you sure as heck better be able to reversibly cryopreserve a single human organ. If you can't do that, what kind of company are you? And like, you know, like, like, like, like, it's just ridiculous to imagine, I think, not treating that use case very seriously if you can do it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, we have this, you know, we ultimately would love to be able to build hibernate, you know, these hibernation pods using Interstellar. Like we, we, 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 to us, that's a very, very interesting long-term goal. And then in the near term, to make a first POC, we want to show that reversible cardiomyopathy works in humans, can help human patients.

For transplant patients, there's this crazy thing that happens where when someone dies and donates an organ, it happens. You can't predict that in advance. 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 that for months that they're in the middle of the night possibly going to get to come in and get surgery. It's like, imagine not knowing when you're going to get surgery for this really insane kind of intense surgery that 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 once a patient dies and donates an organ, there's a very short time window to get it to the recipient. And so I've talked to folks where they've been surgeons who, where their plane is iced on the runway on the way back and the person was waiting for the organ to not get it because this liver was on the runway for just a few hours too long. Our phlebotomist surgeons who've been in the state, they 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.

And so for us, it's like, if you could just cryopreserve an organ and remove basically time as a constraint from this process, it's really helpful to transplant patients, really helpful to transplant surgeons, and also transplant centers. I think that's just realizing the impact of that was an important sort of— and then it also just like, look, if you're talking about building hibernation pods, you sure as heck better be able to reversibly cryopreserve a single human organ. If you can't do that, what kind of company are you? And like, you know, like, like, like, like, it's just ridiculous to imagine, I think, not treating that use case very seriously if you can do it.

Speaker B: This, you know, maybe is too, 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? Speaker A: Yeah. So I think for us it's all about quality. Like, I think that we're like, I think to us, like, it's like if you are talking about giving a transplant patient an organ that's using your technology, it's like it, like it has to compare as well as possible to what their alternative might be in that situation.

And so for us, it's like just focusing on organ quality and getting that as high as organ quality, you know, post-transplanting as high as possible. Speaker C: 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. 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.

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Speaker B: Maybe we can talk a little bit about, you know, Until's journey so far. What have been sort of the things that you've been most focused on, uh, to date? Speaker A: Is it okay if I just try to explain to you like literally how card preservation works and then kind of work back from there? Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. That'd be great. Speaker A: What we're doing. Okay. Okay, great. So basically the way that cryopreservation works is you have this danger zone of ice formation between when you're just at a very cool temperature down to like -130°C and below.

And it's very, sorry, and below -130°C, you're kind of more fine. You're not going to see as much ice formation, but in that 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, spending minimal time at the danger zone. And interestingly enough, rewarming is actually a bit more of a challenge because when you rewarm, reencountering all the ice crystal nuclei that were formed as you went down into that zone in the first place.

You have to be a bit faster. And so basically there's that process happening. And then there's a separate thing of 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 been seen before. And it's amazing that this is actually mostly done in human embryos for cryopreserved IVF embryos. This is not something that is completely outside the norm of what we do today in biology, but in a large organ, you have to have a lot more tolerance, or chemicals that are a lot less toxic, because basically they're exposed to the organ for much longer.

And so this interesting dance. And then lastly, you're scaling up. So we know these protocols can work in human embryos. Scaling up to a whole human organ, introduces this massive volume-to-surface area problem, where you've scaled volume by r cubed, but surface area by r squared. And so if you're still relying on heat going in from the outside alone, or sort of traversing in and out on just the boundary of the object, that's a problem. So you also have to solve this kind of— basically, this scaling problem is quite difficult. But I actually 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 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, you can maybe tolerate chemicals that are a bit more toxic and vice versa. And I think that's a very interesting thing where you can make the biology problem easier by improving on engineering, which is such a great problem, such a great trade-off to have in a biological problem.

Speaker B: So interesting and so useful. So thank you for that. Um, to the extent that you're able to share, how are you, how do you think about those trade-offs? Like, you know, 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, you know, 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? Speaker A: No, if any for us, it's just like make everything as good as possible.

Okay. With CPSF, for example, like, you know, the whole field of cryobiology has spent a lot of time trying to optimize that. Problem. And so you can also try and work with the field and understand what the field is on best there. But yeah, I think for us, it's just literally take each part of the problem extremely seriously. In most areas of drug development, you're presented with symptoms, you have often no idea what caused them. You have to use tools that are very limited. So you're using a small molecule, think of 100 or so atoms, or an antibody, think of 100,000 or so atoms, but tools that basically can bind to a single protein or affect a very simple interaction.

And that was supposed to take a system that is like 10^27 atoms and revert it back to a normal phenotype when you often even don't quite understand what's going on molecularly. And so it's this crazy hard problem in drug development. And it's no wonder that so many drugs make it into the clinic and don't make it all the way. It's just an incredibly difficult set of constraints. I think with cryopreservation, what's fascinating to me is you're working with temperature. The core statement of the problem is physical. It's like, take a system.

Reduce its temperature to like -130 or below, bring it back to normal temperature, and do so with minimal perturbation. And yes, there's a lot of biological questions that then become added on to that, but it's like you're changing the system. You're not reacting to symptoms that are already there that have evolved mysteriously. You're making the change, so you get to control to some degree that part of the process. And then also, because you're talking about temperature, there are so many different natural laws in physics in which the term temperature shows up.

You can all of those and look at PV nRT. You can look at every single part of physics that references temperature and try and build systems and devices that mimic the temperature of an organism using the physical laws. And you don't get to do that in most parts. You don't get to take— there's not an Alzheimer's parameter that you get to go and you get to go look at, is PV nRT relevant to Alzheimer's? This is the parameter. And it's really hard to emphasize how much how much that gets you in terms of iteration speed, how much that gets you in terms of ability to think quantitatively and clearly about the problem.

And that was such an important part of me getting excited. I think for me, just the excitement of, oh, you can think about this problem really well and you can physically model it in your head in ways that correspond to reality. And that is so beautiful when you find that with a problem. Speaker B: That's so interesting. How do you think about the timelines for this sort of a company? Like, you must know plenty of more traditional founders in, in, uh, tech in Silicon Valley. Do you try and model yourself against, I don't know, uh, traditional biotech or anything like that?

Or is it, you know, just too different? Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I think for us, the question is like, are we going as fast as possible? Like, like, and I think you just kind of know, right? It's like, so it's the one thing about tech, about deep tech, right? It's like often you do have this, this flexibility of like, you know, the final product you might be talking about is a long way away. And so, you know, there's sometimes capacity if you have, 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 CARP or we can't, you know, store them adequately. Like trying to really feel that urgency on a daily basis, like that to us is the biggest metric. But then I think one that's really important to us is building a company for the long term. We've selected all of our investors very, very carefully for people who have a lot of experience and understanding of building companies for the long term and keeping very ambitious goals in mind.

And so it's a combination of having that kind of long-term focus with, on a daily basis, just trying to really feel the urgency of the problem. Speaker B: Really interesting. From reading some of your writing and seeing you on another podcast, it feels like you take a great deal of inspiration, obviously, from the great figures of science and, you know, some of the folks in this field that you've interacted with. Are there entrepreneurial, you know, role models or inspirations where you think, you know, actually the way that they did this, there's some sort of lessons for us there?

Or is this, you know, all sort of needs to be reimagined from the very beginning? Speaker B: Really interesting. From reading some of your writing and seeing you on another podcast, it feels like you take a great deal of inspiration, obviously, from the great figures of science and, you know, some of the folks in this field that you've interacted with. Are there entrepreneurial, you know, role models or inspirations where you think, you know, actually the way that they did this, there's some sort of lessons for us there? Or is this, you know, all sort of needs to be reimagined from the very beginning?

Speaker A: 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, you know, 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 and seeing that, like, I think you can be like an— you can be like a good person and be successful. I think that was something that I didn't really understand when I first came to the Valley, is like, you know, do you have to be like mean and kind of like— but I see people I think are very intellectually alive and, and have that curiosity and have like a very genuine drive to like do good.

And just meeting 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 my preconceptions 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 things that I've done or like the things that in retrospect are objectively the most successful come from following 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, 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 now. Speaker B: What are the examples that come to mind when you think of weird alpha for you? Speaker A: I think it's that I'm really obsessive and often like I'll get obsessed with things that don't necessarily like, they don't necessarily make sense explicitly. 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 make sense.

And I think I used to really penalize myself from that and I'd be like, what's this weird thing? You know, or you're just doing— or, and also just following Einstein for beauty. It's like for a long time I thought that like 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 kind of like structure to them. I think over time it's like, I'm like, there's just these ideas, you know, that, that really Ideals feel like my friends.

Or maybe this is kind of crazy to say, but it's like when I find a really beautiful idea, it feels like 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 links an interesting way to this thing that I think Peter Thiel once said this interesting thing. I forget if it was something he said in conversation or just I heard from someone else, but like he said that his main task for entrepreneur 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, 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 like, they're just kind of like, I don't know. And it's like, fucking don't fund 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 they don't actually kind of on some level deeply believe them. I think for me, just deeply internalizing that when you work on something, 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, you have to do the rest of the job, right? Which is like 90%, but having that as a base, having these ideas that I think really do make sense. For me, cryo is like, it's a very idea-oriented thing. It's when you meet it and you see it, you just see all the different facets of it and it's like, it's really hard to explain, but it has like 100, it's like, it just, there's so many different things about it that come together to make it interesting.

And that's part of what makes it special. I don't know how to explain it. Yeah. Speaker B: 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 rich. Uh, and that was something actually I, you know, sort of almost noticed in, you had this really interesting piece I thought you wrote maybe 5 years ago around your mental models. Um, and it, it's struck me also that the way that you sort of talk through your, your mental processes is super linked to, to sensation and, and sort of color and light and, you know, this sort of feeling.

Anyway, it was, uh, I wonder if that's, uh, ever something you've you've thought about or, you know, the particular processes going on in your brain. Speaker A: I have, I have, I don't know. I think to me it feels, um, and this also might sound totally, uh, absurd, but I think it's true. And I think it's not bad to say it feels a lot more like love. Like it feels like literally like just like that I, there's this thing or it's, yeah, just like, it's encouraging me. 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, there's this kind of sense of unlimited impact, right? It's sort of like, what could you do with such a tool? Let's say you actually build the full thing. It's quite unlimited. It has this beautiful attractiveness. It's like, okay, if you try and work on this thing, can you test your progress? Well, I think for me, one of the most 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 grateful to be working with him. I knew when I first met this idea of cryo, that people like that level of mind would be attracted to because it spans physics and biology and neuroscience. And it's the kind of deal where if you tell someone who's highly intelligent the problem, especially if they have a physics background or have some ability to think quantitatively and do mental models, within hours they'll be entranced by it. It has that kind of deep pull, that intellectual beauty. And so that was also part of it, just that it's a problem that's very attractive to people that I would really want to work with.

And then I think lastly, it's sociologically so interesting. Why is it that not everyone is starting a cryo company? Why is it that this is a field that has all these things that you have to think about quite specifically? I think the sociological part was also extremely interesting. You're inducing a change in the biological organism that you're then reversing. That's not— that's rare in medicine. Temperature is a parameter. All these different things come together. It's, 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, um, yeah.

Speaker B: That's very beautiful. Um, it's, it's really, it's cool to hear someone talk about their work that way. Um, what, what was it about Hunter that sort of convinced you he was, you know, such an extraordinary scientist and, and the right person to found this company with? Speaker A: Yeah. So Hunter, Hunter's the absolute best. I, I, again, a large part of I picked working on this company very selfishly in that I wanted to work on 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, or some of the other folks that we have on the team. I think for me it was that we had a first conversation about the technology and he told me later, he was like, yeah, I thought that was totally crazy. It's like, what are you talking about? You're forcibly creating a server? Literally sounds absurd. For context, he's an extremely rigorous physicist, has a background at Caltech for his PhD, and then was at Harvard in one of the best neuroscience/physics background labs there when I first talked to him.

So he's coming at this from the perspective of having been trained to think rigorously about problems. The thing that he did though was instead of dismissing the idea sociologically, he went off and for a couple days did the calcs. He was like, okay, theoretically, if I look at what I know about ice formation and the temperature ranges and all these other factors, Does this, like, you know, can I disprove this idea? And the thing happened where, you know, you start thinking about the idea and then you just get pulled 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. Was incredible. And then also just, I think he's such a founder at heart. Like, um, you know, when we first started talking about this idea, It was very early, or sort of, you know, sort of like in the sense of we were still working out, you know, some like after the science plan, 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 just, he's just such a natural, like he's one of the best founders I've ever met, you know, you know, and I'm so grateful to be working with him for that reason, but just like that level of, um, once you intellectually actually are locked into something than just like fully going after it. Speaker B: Fascinating. Um, you, you made the, the important distinction around how, you know, what Until is doing is very different than sort of the, the postmortem freezing. Do you eventually expect that folks might start wanting to use Until's technology, uh, either as a substitute for that, where if you think, hey, I'm getting pretty old, like, I'd rather you know, go through this process and see if, uh, 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, now farther into the future in discussing these things. But yeah, I'm curious. Speaker A: For what we're talking about, it's like you only do this most— like, like, one thing that I've really learned over time, especially as I got more— like, you know, it's like we're here of people that we love. You wake up every day and a large part of feeling good, feeling the person that you are, often is determined by social context. At least I think for a lot of people that's true.

And so it's like, this is just— I think there are people who literally are just totally oriented around curiosity. And 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 do such a thing to get more time with people that you love, which means that it's only if you have a terminal illness that you consider making that kind of jump. And I think also to be clear, I think we're focused on the reversible aspect of this because that's what— 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 really test and function that way. I think it's complicated to think through what you would do today if you had to make a call for yourself. But I think for us, it's just that we literally want to just be able to test how well do these technologies work and make them better and use the iteration loop, which is important for us. Speaker B: That's super interesting. Um, in this, you know, mental models post that you wrote, it's a, it's an old post. So I, you know, 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, of understanding maybe how you think and how you reason through problems and ideas.

Um, one of the things you said was most people don't deeply understand what they're talking about, me included. It sounds like you deeply understand what you're talking about with until, but which parts are you maybe least sure about, or should someone have the most curiosity about digging in more on? Speaker A: 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, what neuroscience questions would you have to answer 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 part of the problem that demands a lot of work. Um, and also, if anyone wants to work on it and is listening to this podcast, they should definitely come and bounce things. That's such an interesting question for us to be thinking about. But I think the, the other part is sociologically, you know, it's like what— 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 people more years of life, and then they know what to do with it.

And I think for something like this technology, a thing that really is important to me is that, you know, if you have a loved one and you're going to be, you know, make, let's say like you, there's a therapy coming out in a couple 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. 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 in stasis?

Like that's such an interesting, huge, unsolved, you know, question of how, or how do you really think through what that experience is like for the 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. Speaker B: Yeah, that's so interesting. There will, you know, assuming, you know, when this technology is mature, there'll be totally whole fields of study around those relationships, you imagine, and how people navigate that. That's so intriguing. You also in that post talk about how Hollywood doesn't do a good job depicting scientific and entrepreneurial innovation.

And genius. And it made me curious to hear what you think, you know, gets wrong most often, is the biggest flaw there, so to speak. Speaker A: I think I might understand that a little bit differently with a couple years of remove. 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 personally, what has felt the most generative 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, like, again, not all the time, like you don't spend all of your time, you know, doing these things, but I think it's like, acknowledging that sometimes the way that you find really great new ideas isn't by, doing things that look very conventional, and it's important to follow your impulses about what works best for you. I don't know. I think that sounds kind of generic, but there's something there that was very, very helpful for me to kind of get comfortable with, I think.

Speaker B: Well, what are the ways that you are generative that might surprise people? I mean, eating a bunch of sugar and dancing in a field were, I thought, two good examples if true. Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, obviously don't recommend that for a long period, 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. Like if I'm trying to think about an idea, the way that I think that there are people, there are many people I think who are able to just think about ideas and it doesn't mean something emotionally to them.

And they're just kind of, 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 compute. But I think being at peace with that, that's a reasonable thing to want for yourself and to be at peace with that ideas that have those properties might be— Yeah, maybe it's just learning to follow your creative— Yeah, but there's something, yeah.

I don't quite know how to describe it. Speaker B: No, no, it's interesting to hear you talk through it. You know, you've been interested in longevity, obviously in different ways and different problems for such a long time. Have there been other beautiful ideas beyond this, you know, pocket of science or pocket of the world that like have almost been so beautiful and so enticing that they've, I wouldn't want to say dragged off course because that suggests, you know, there's only one path, but, uh, sort of taken you in a different direction.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a, there's a funny meta beautiful idea, which is what makes ideas beautiful. I was just trying to optimize for like, okay, like the number of hours of life spent in this like state of being really like interested in an idea and pursuing it 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, yes, one thing I'm working on 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 viscerally like it's like a 3D, um, game that I'm playing when thinking about a cell to get inside the cell and able to navigate around. Can I have a similarly like immersed enjoyable experience thinking about mathematics when the objects are less or much more foreign from, from my, the way that my brain works.

And I'm, I'm interested in trying to understand that right now. Speaker B: Have you found, uh, other biologists, scientists who share the same sort of experience as you do when, you know, commuting with a, with a cell or with these ideas? Speaker A: Kind of. I, I think a lot of them, I think a lot of them, it's like, it's maybe so much more of their daily job that it's kind of a little bit less like, like, I think for me, it's like this desperate requests to get more of this beauty.

And I think for a lot of folks, it's like, I've just, I have 8 hours of this a day. You know, like I actually don't need 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 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. Speaker B: 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. It seems almost a universal phenomenon in some respect once you achieve a certain level of insight or, or something like that, uh, around a lot of these things. So, um, yeah, it's really cool to, to hear that. I'm curious, like, if there are things for your own longevity that you've, uh, over the years become, you know, very, uh, set on or are very convinced are important to do, you know, maybe beyond the besides the obvious things like, you know, moving a decent amount and eating reasonably well?

Are there, are there things that you really try and maximize for? Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, definitely get asked this question a lot. I think, you know, to be clear, I think the area where I have expert— where I have any level of intellectual, of intellectual differentiated expertise is like, are there drugs that we could take through critical trials that might have like a predictable and significant enough effect to measure on human longevity. Like that, that is the area where I have some amount of knowledge. I think that like, it's actually a much more complicated subject in many ways.

What would an average person do best to do more of? And so I think for me personally, 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, and seems like it would be hard to do that as a founder. Yeah. Yeah, I think if you're fine with just like, look, like, you're, you know, I think it is possible to get there where you're at a lot bringing up your levels of stress, but it's like just, just getting to like a normal, what a normal lifestyle might get you when you're, when you're kind of trying to put in a lot of focused attention and you have that level of like just like literal physical stress is I think that even just getting to like a normal baseline is probably the first thing for me personally.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Um, you know, this is, uh, maybe also something that I'm just sort curious about, uh, I think when folks think about longevity at the moment, they think a lot about someone like Bryan Johnson and, and his sort of N of 1 study. Uh, from the, the perspective of, you know, uh, someone who's interested in the field, are there things that Bryan is doing that you're like, this might end up being valuable for the broader, uh, industry in how we understand things? Or is it just, you know, so limited because it's a— because it is just a one-person sample size.

Speaker A: I think that, like, to the degree that, like, like, doing, like, certain communication things gets a lot of people excited to eat healthier, just like in a way that's relatively straightforward, or exercise more, like, that, that seems— I'm like, it's good for me to be able to do those things. Speaker B: Yeah, the evangelism. Speaker A: Yeah, I, I think, I think that, that, that effect of, of, of it Um, yeah, I mean, I'm like, that, that seems like it's, 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, um, not be seen as bad for thinking about health, but to be, you know, sort of celebrated for thinking about health.

That seems, that seems, that, that component seems good. Speaker B: 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? Speaker B: 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?

Speaker A: I think if you actually gave me that, I would take 5 years to think about it. I think selfishly, a thing that I want to find out in the near term is if I took every great mathematician and scientist in the world who spends a lot of time in their mind and I asked them about basically their internal structure, mapping out the space of ways that people feel ideas and then understanding, making a large compendium of ways to— it's basically making a good learning curriculum, but one that's very oriented around the feeling of experiencing the idea as opposed to being able to be sold with the idea, which was also important.

But just like, that's for me personally, what I'm really fascinated by is experiencing the idea. Speaker B: That's so interesting. Um, what's a tradition or practice from another culture or era that you would like us to adopt in the present day more, more frequently? Speaker A: I, I think for me personally, I'm someone who thinks in a pretty embodied sense. Like, I need to move to think. And I think that it's very culturally normal to sit and be very still. Like, I think that's important to not freak people out. You know, you don't want to be like flailing, but I think just being okay with like movement during conversation and thinking as more normal and being able to find ways to do that that feel good would— I think that would be nice.

Speaker B: I like that a lot. Also, uh, much of my best thinking is just doing, doing walking or things like that, or, uh, whatever it is. Um, okay, last, last question. If you had a chance to assign a book book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign people? Speaker B: I like that a lot. Also, uh, much of my best thinking is just doing, doing walking or things like that, or, uh, whatever it is. Um, okay, last, last question. If you had a chance to assign a book book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign people?

Speaker A: I mean, insanely selfishly, probably org, which anyone listening to this podcast can go look up. Speaker B: There you go. Speaker A: That's awesome. But I think what I mean by— but like, what I mean by understand is like, I think that, um, like, to me, it's like the best experience of science is one that feels like the literal, like, best artistic experience you've ever had. It's like, it's like, it's like, imagine the most you've ever been emotionally moved. And then imagine that 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 kind of, like, just ecstasy, honestly.

And just like those two things together, like, I think I wish everyone had that feeling just once and kind of had a sense of that for themselves. And they could find that, you know, in some— having that generated by understanding the universe to me is just like such an extraordinary thing that we can, we have, you know, that capacity for sure. Speaker B: Amazing. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna definitely buy a copy. So that's a, you know, as good an endorsement as, uh, I think I can imagine. Speaker A: It's a totally free textbook online too.

Speaker B: Oh, great. Speaker A: The website is just like everything is. Yeah. Speaker B: Amazing. Well, Laura, thank you so much for, for taking the time. I learned so much. Um, and, uh, Yeah, really excited to see what the next few years hold. Speaker B: Amazing. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna definitely buy a copy. So that's a, you know, as good an endorsement as, uh, I think I can imagine. Speaker A: It's a totally free textbook online too. Speaker B: Oh, great. Speaker A: The website is just like everything is.

Yeah. Speaker B: Amazing. Well, Laura, thank you so much for, for taking the time. I learned so much. Um, and, uh, Yeah, really excited to see what the next few years hold. Speaker A: Thanks. Likewise. That's it. Speaker C: 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, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at

com. com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.