The Joe Walker Podcast - Laura Deming — Longevity, Transhumanism, Cryopreservation, and Optimizing for Scientific Awe

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Laura Deming is a technologist and venture capitalist focused on anti-ageing and life extension. At 17, she founded The Longevity Fund (followed by age1), the first VC firm dedicated to longevity biotech, after being selected in the initial cohort of Thiel fellows (2011). Today she is also CEO and co-founder of Cradle, a startup pursuing human whole-body reversible cryopreservation. I speak with Laura at Cradle’s San Francisco office. We start with personal identity, and ask a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, do we want to preserve? From there we explore what a “more humane transhumanism” might look like, the game-theory of 200-year lives, scientific awe as a research tool, embodied thought-experiments to see inside the cell, how the FDA could shave years off longevity-drug timelines, and the anti-memetic qualities of reversible cryopreservation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, this is Joe. Welcome back to the show. Before we begin the conversation, let me briefly introduce our guest. Laura Deming is the co-founder and CEO of Cradle, a startup working towards human whole body reversible cryopreservation. She's also a venture capitalist focused on anti-aging and life extension technologies. She founded the Longevity Fund. The Longevity Fund has since been superseded by a new fund called age one. Laura is a co-founder and partner of that fund. And Laura was one of the very first Teal Fellows back in 2011. It was a real pleasure getting to chat with Laura at Cradle's office in San Francisco.

We begin our conversation by diving right into questions of personal identity. If you're interested in learning more about personal identity, you could look up some of Derek Parfit's work. Oh, and one final thing before we begin. This episode is best watched on video because there are some visual elements involved. If you'd like to watch the video, you can find it on my YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and search Joseph Noll Walker. So with that, let's begin. Laura Deming, welcome to the podcast.

So I kind of want to do this conversation in reverse, so to speak. So I want to start by talking about the philosophical and sociopolitical implications of longevity, and then finish with some meta-science and the science of longevity and cryopreservation specifically. So to start with the philosophical implications of longevity. So say I reject the ego view of personal identity and I accept Derek Parford's bundle theory. Each of us is just a web

of experiences shifting through time. How should that affect how I think about longevity? Yes, I think, I mean, I'm like very obsessed with this question right now. It feels very poor. I feel like not enough people are thinking about it, even though some people are thinking about it. I would say like where I'm at currently is that it's like very subjective. Like that at the core of like the next century of what you might call transhumanism or human interaction technologies, just this question of what do you want to preserve over time? What's the

thing that you care about? There's no right answer that I know of. I don't think either Eastern or Western philosophy have some correct thing that you should try to be doing here that I know of. And so I think the question is like, yeah, what do you want to preserve? And you can actually make arguments for continuity. I think you can reconstruct reasons that you might care about, like physical continuity over time. But I think they're very different from what

you might be born with, which is this feeling of need to survive, need to just make it to the next moment. I think that tends to not really... I think that becomes hard to defend, unless you just want to pick it intuitively as a thing to hold onto, which you can also make the choice to do that. How close are we to the point at which these debates actually start influencing like how capital is allocated? Like today.

Seriously? Yeah, 100%. Oh, wow. Yeah. Can you say more about that? Well, I think the reason I'm really interested in them is I think that today, like they're influencing how capital flows in a very subconscious way. Like, most people are born with certain beliefs around these topics that are not that well examined.

And they're guiding kind of intuitions about what's correct and what's not correct to invest in today. And this is interesting because the investments today then determine what might be most available in the future. And that might then determine what a lot of people have access to. And so that, yeah, I think that is a strange place to be in. Right. And which view do you think is winning at the moment, at least in Silicon Valley? I think what I see personally, although I might be very biased, there's a lot of starting

out with what we're born to be most adapted to, which I think is like, I just want my physical self to continue for as long as possible with physical continuity and like just like the most conservative possible perspective on like preserving yourself like ship of the CS kind of all the way. And then I think when people really think about it, often there's like kind of a one way door or maybe it's a two way door, but like this is where you go through where it's like, oh, actually like, it's pretty hard to defend that. In Buddhism, this might be like analogous to doing like a no self meditation, just repeatedly like asking what is the eye, what is the eye, what is the eye? And kind of, I think that actually, I'm not like that knowledgeable,

but I think in Buddhism, like when people just do this enough, like eventually they're kind of like, well, actually there's like, maybe they come closer to the Derek Carpeth view, which is interesting that both like types of the philosophical traditions kind of get to a similar place. Right. But then I think you kind of should still be doing things to keep your body healthy and alive. And so you kind of have to reconstruct notions of like, what's meaningful about that. So I'm curious how your, I guess, emotional relation to longevity has evolved over the

last say decade or so. So if I watch, if I watch like videos of the young Laura Deming, I feel there's this kind of like fiery zeal behind your motivation to drive the field forward. And I guess I'm curious whether or how that has changed. whether or how that has changed. Yeah, there's some stuff that I haven't written about publicly, but I'm planning to at some point that really shifted how I felt about that over time. I think I grew up with that as a really core part of my identity. I was like, my job is to fix this problem. No one else is working, or almost no one else is working on it. There's a field

that's working on it that's very passionate about it, but it's not that well known. Everyone is very confused about this for some reason. There seems to be this mental block around working on this. And one thing that I've really understood, I think, as I got older is kind of the argument for the opposite of longevity and what's good there? I think it's still extremely incorrect to not work on longevity drugs, but I think there's a very real and very valid piece of wisdom in wanting to not think about this problem, which is like it can cause extreme mental anguish if you don't accept certain things in life that feel both to you horrific and inevitable. Like let's say that I like spent every day like just really kind of grappling

with metaphysical questions. Like that might be a worst life experience for me than not. And like worse by significant margin. And I think there's like this way in which when I was younger I didn't fully appreciate how much you should be, I think respectful of where someone's coming from metaphysically and their comfort when thinking about things like longevity. It's tough because you also, I think just

factually it's incorrect, if you believe in medicine, they're just a type of medicine. It's kind of like an irrationality at the heart of viewing them as different in some very core way. Like they're kind of like just exercise or anything else that would like give you more healthy years. Like these drugs will do the same thing. But I think there's something that I didn't understand about like the deep wisdom of how to live a good life that I think it often drives a lot of like opposition to the idea of thinking about longevity as emotionally. Can you share an example? I think there's this perspective that like, let's say I look at you and I'm like, you're a human and you're like a really beautiful human and like you're experiencing the world.

I think if you really relax your sense of self or your experience of self, there might be perspective of like your experience of the world is as valid, like much more similarly valid to me as my experience of the world. And so there's some sense of like just if all of humanity or like a lot of conscious entities are having like a good experience over time, like this, I think what I'm kind of dancing around is this idea, it really depends if you get in the teleporter or not. So you know this thought experiment of like, you're the teleporter, it'll take you to Mars. If you get in it, the way that it does that is to create a copy of you on Mars and destroy

the copy of you on Earth. Some people would get in the teleporter, some people wouldn't. I think if you would get in the teleporter, there's then a question of what you hear about preserving, which could be your values or it could be very close to your current identity or could just be that people similar to you are still around and that makes you happy and it feels similarly good to you that that's true and that you specifically would also be around. And I think in those worlds, this is actually another reason why people might not be interested in longevity as one conscious entity experiencing more time. But in those worlds you might feel equally happy that just the population at whole is

still around. One argument, though, there is longevity allows you to have like caution entities that have a very long time to evolve. So they're around for a long time. And there's just a lot of beauty, I think that you might see come out in that kind of conscious experience that you wouldn't with a much shortened lifespan, if that makes sense. So you can still you can still even in that role, have arguments for why population might be more interesting, or you might see different things with like much

longer, like times for specific entities to evolve. So I have some questions about transhumanism. So I know that lately you've been searching for a more humane transhumanism and I'm curious what it is specifically about the core framing of transhumanism that you're trying to substitute for? I think there's a couple of things, uh, and I don't really understand this that well now, but I'm thinking about it a lot. Like, I think one thing is, I think I just like went on a bunch of trans, I was trying to understand at some point like what the transhumanist manifesto philosophy was because I'd been

adjacent to this movement for a long time and hadn't really understood it. So I went and read some stuff and it just, if you control F and search for like the word love in a lot of these like manifestos, like it's just not, I think David Pierce might, might mention this more in his work, but a lot of the stuff that I've read is very oriented around gaining power and just being really powerful and this drive to survive. And I don't think that's bad or even necessarily shouldn't be part of the future, but it feels pretty incomplete. It doesn't feel inspiring to me personally. I don't know. There's something there that I... And also feels... That's one part. And the other part is it feels way too confident in the types of technologies and the types of ways that things could change. And I think

the more that... I think about this stuff, the more it's interesting to me to see populations change in ways that are hard to predict versus kind of like individuals change in ways that are easy to predict. And so that feels like... So I'm interested in versions of transhumance that are more oriented towards the former and like kind of less centered around the latter, if that makes sense. So the core framing thinks it's far too focused on the individual as sort of the unit of analysis. I'm not sure. I think the thing that I know for sure is that there's some version of this that we just have no idea what it even looks like yet. And I think the things that like the individual versus population

view or like the determined versus like emergent view are two axes where it feels like there's some push and pull. But yeah, it almost feels like in my head, it's like receding from a totally different point in phase space or something. Or there's just like notions of like, like one interesting fact is like a lot of sci fi authors, I think, intentionally don't write futures that have quality very different from our own because that's very hard to relate to. And so their books would be very not popular. Greg Egan mentions this.

He's one of the most futuristic authors. I read the Passage to a certain point. I was just like, I can't write narratives that are more than a given amount of sci-fi with regards to quality because no one will relate to this book. You need to have characters that are relatable. And yet something about that also feels related to this kind of lack of, I think, really new visions for what we would call transhumanism looks like, I think. Yeah.

On that, have you found any literature that does a satisfactory job of capturing a more humane transhumanist vision? I really deeply, I think yes, but like maybe the thing that for me does this right now, and I think would make no sense to like most people is just like, well, because do we know elegies? Which I don't understand at all. Like I like understand 0.0005% of these poems, but I think they are trying to say something about something that feels relevant to this that feels interesting to me. That's it. I haven't read them. Can you describe it?

So there are these poems that they like deal that they're kind of I'm trying to remember the opening line. I think it's something like if I tried out who among like the heavenly order would hear me or something like this and kind of the, it's almost impossible for me to begin to just understand personally or even describe like what they're about, but it's about kind of individual and sometimes trying to connect with something that feels on a different level, I think of what you might call understanding or experience, that they only see very dimly. I think a theme that often comes up in the poem is angels, not even in a Christian or

any specific kind of religious sense, but just as a metaphor for something that is very dimly felt. And this feels really interesting to me. It's like an analogy for us as humans trying to kind of... I think the interesting thing about the idea of transhumanism or like a really concept of transcendence is just like that you're trying to become something you don't understand. It's like flat line. Like I do an ad bit, like you're like a little 2D thing and you're trying to like become a 3D object, but you can't even conceive of what that 3D object is in your current 2D form. And that to me is the most interesting right now, like part of transhumanism is like that

act and what it means to like try and, try and do that. Right. Um, I was trying to think about this question last night myself about whether there's any good humane transhumanist literature. I couldn't really think of any examples. I thought maybe the gentle seduction, the short story by Mark Stiegler. Yeah. So it's really interesting that you, uh, I was like, damn, one of the most

interesting sets of questions. Um, yeah, a colleague of mine, um, Kat showed me this story and it's amazing. And I think for a certain, in a certain sense, I think that sense of like the way that our company thinks about technology is something that she's been thinking about a lot and feels really interesting for the company that I run with my co-founder. But I think for me personally, it's a bit of a different flavor of, like, I think even in the story, like the types of technologies they're talking about, it's like, it's so

relatable to our current human experience. It kind of avoids the whole question of how strange the change actually will be. It just says that you should do it gently, which I might, like, maybe the thing I could have gone with the story is that like, probably it's good to care about how people feel while you're making like changes to like what we would call the human experience over time. Like that makes sense. Right. I think that actually provides a good segue into like the next thing I wanted to talk

about, which was this kind of sort of socio-political implications of longevity. Because before we started recording, we were chatting about Francis Fukuyama's takes on transhumanism. Francis Fukuyama's takes on transhumanism. So assume that we do achieve substantial advancements in longevity science and average human lifespans and health spans are, I don't know, say 150 to 200 years or any, any kind of average length that you think is most interesting to discuss. average length that you think is most interesting to discuss. What are some of the most non-obvious ways that that changes human society?

I've tried to think about this in a really principled way and I am not any con... I think my current state of understanding is that like there, I probably don't even know the largest and most important things to consider. But there are some things that I found interesting to think about. But I would say like, there might be somebody who spent 10 years thinking about just this question, I mean, the technical parts of longevity that would like answer it far better than I would. I think for me, the thing that I'm most passionate about is actually, I don't know if you ever heard of this painting called The Great Wave of Kanagawa, off of Kanagawa. It's one of

the most famous paintings of all time. You know, if you see the wave in the Ushio study. Tsunami. Yeah, exactly. It's actually fascinating. Once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. I think Wikipedia said it was the most memed image ever, maybe even more than the Mona Lisa. I'm not really sure about that claim, but it is everywhere. I see it on the street, walking down Valencia Street in San Francisco, all over people's laptops. There's probably two people in the office who have this on their laptops, just for some reason. And the painter of that work was, I forget exactly how old, but I think he was 60 or 70 when he made it.

And he has this incredible quote where he says that he feels at the end of his life as though he's only just begun to learn how to draw like, you know, a line or an animal. And he's like, maybe when I reach the age of, I may be misquoting a little bit, but like maybe when I reach the age of 100, I'll be able to draw things which are truly alive for every line, every point, it has its own. And then he died, you know, a little bit after giving that quote. It's just this idea that look, this one most incredible works of art that is persistent in this, you know, even this competitive environment, this work of art just shows up everywhere. It's got this depth to it, it's got this originality, and it's created by somebody who spent their whole

life preparing to do this one thing. I think when it gets back to what we were talking about earlier with this idea of what do we care about with regards to self? Like it's created by somebody who spent their whole life preparing to do this one thing. I think it gets back to what we were talking about earlier with this idea of what do we care about with regards to self? I think an interesting idea around why you might want a conscious entity to live a long time. It's like, what could happen if you have this kind of evolution over a long period of time of conscious entity that you might not be able to install deterministically if you just kind of like, instantiate something from scratch. It might be very hard to get to that same point of evolution for a certain kind of process. And so I think that to me is just beautiful as an idea of like, what could we see that we've never seen before? And especially if you can give those minds kind

of fluidity and longevity, and this is not talking about minds that are aging to the point where they then become unhealthy, it's talking about keeping minds creative and fresh and kind of changing and finding ways to do that. Like that feels so interesting. I think another thing that feels really interesting to me is this idea of in-game theory of, you know, often if you have a single round game where you have two agents playing with each other, they will, you know, it's in your interest to defects and hurt the other person. But if you have, let's say, either a very long number of rounds, or I think the, if I remember correctly, which could be incorrect, it's that you don't know how many rounds you're playing with the other person. I think that's the point at which it becomes advantageous for you to cooperate.

And so, yeah, one thing I'm really interested in, although I think there's lots of reasons why this might not be true, but just one constant I'm fascinated by is this idea that if you have so much time and unknown amounts of very why this might not be true, but just one constant I'm fascinated by is this idea that if you have so much time and unknown amounts of very long periods of time in society, how might your behavior be different? There might be some bad ways where you might be more conservative or other things, but there might be ways in which you are incentivized to be a lot more pro-social. Although that's just a thing that I'm fascinated by. I don't know that I can defend that empirically with current human... I think there's lots of reasons why that might not be true, but I think that's just a thing that I'm fascinated by. I don't know that I can defend that empirically with current human. I think there's lots of reasons why that might not be true, but I think that's a fascinating

... The game theory of what society looks like is very interesting. On the negative side, I think one of the strongest things that I've been able to think of personally that is true about longevity is that it could mean if you have a lot of capital at the start, let's say the fourth generation that lives a very, very, very long time, but then you have just like this insane advantage of like, youth is no longer this advantage that it was. And it's such like being born way earlier as a form of inequality where you get like much more time

to compound capital. And you can still argue that like maybe you need innovation. And so if you don't innovate, you know, and just stay where you were that like, whoever does innovate will be able to take you over. And so that there's some reasons why this might not be so bad, but I think that there might be different ways that you'd want to structure society or like tax wealth over time that would come more into play in that world.

And then that feels like a real thing, that way that would change that might be tough. On the first idea, it's interesting to apply this to scientists and to wonder what would have happened, say if we had Einstein for like an extra 50 or so years. Yeah. An important thing is it's not, not just Einstein, but I have a friend, I, I need to fully understand if this is correct, but I, my understanding is that Einstein had a period in the middle of his life where he got quite sick and then became much less productive during and after that period. And so not just lifespan's fun, but also I think feeling robust, vigorous, feeling like a lot of health and a lot of plasticity. Those are important concepts.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because obviously things as simple as your energy levels make such a great difference to your ability to do great work. So I wonder like what the other sort of dependencies or assumptions are here. So another notable thing about Einstein is that some people, at least, I think like, so in the James Glyke biography of Feynman, I think he talks about how Feynman and Freeman Dyson thought that Einstein sort of lost his creative powers at the point at which he stopped thinking in like concrete physical images. Is that like, I wonder how much that kind of like stultification in thinking is linked to the aging process or if it's just like

a generational thing or if it's just some kind of other contingent factor. So if we did, obviously there are other things that affect a scientist's productivity than just their vigor. But if we did have Einstein for an extra 50 or so years, yeah, I wonder whether he would have been able to achieve that level of productivity that he had during, for example, the Anas Mirabilis. Yeah. So this takes you back to a question that we started with, which I think is the core, which is like, what do you want to preserve over time? And there's this question of like,

you know, if a lot of people like you might see in their life that let's say they go through a divorce or they have some huge loss of faith or some big like realization and change. I think there's this process that happens, which I might characterize as like, I don't know if you know, like the hero's journey, but kind of like this, I almost think I often think about it and this might be incorrect, but personally for me, it's like a very helpful analogy for identity change or personality change where you go through this dark subconscious process and then come back out on the other side, a different, changed in some deep way.

And I think in my head, when I see heroes during these stories, they often feel personally to me very much like they're describing subconscious experience of personality change or identity change. And so I think the question is maybe if Einstein wanted to be the kid that he was when he was, I forgot how old, 27, 28 during last year, maybe a lot earlier, he was 23 and then like, you know, goddamn. But if Einstein was like, I want to preserve as much of that person as possible, perhaps it would have been difficult. But let's say that Einstein had some openness to changing him, parts of his identity as many of us do. And he had some ideas of what principles he wanted to

guide that change. Like I think that that's kind of where you would expect there to be more of a potential for continued like relevance. Hmm. Hmm. So one of the concerns that Fukuyama raises in his book with respect to, so there's a chapter on longevity. One of the, one of his observations is that our worldviews are shaped by our formative experiences, often the formative experiences we have in our youth. And there's like a generational effect here where, so people growing up in the Great Depression or the Second World War will share, or the sexual revolution will kind of share a set of youthful experiences that like quite

durably affect their worldview. And that's why you, you often see in kind of like social and political dimensions, these sort of like revolutions or changes where we go from like one generation to the next. So from like the Kennedy years to the Reagan years, for example, or, you know, to or from like the sort of New Deal era.

So if we were able to massively extend human lifespans and health spans, I mean, presumably those sort of like generational effects wouldn't change. One question you might have is whether then that leads to a somehow like less dynamic society if there's like less turnover in certain positions because people were able to live and work for longer, but they're still affected by those, you know, they still have that generationally inflected worldview, whether that somehow produces a society that's less dynamic? I think there's a lot of, I think there's like, with a lot of, I think,

rebuttals to, or ideas that are kind of, not counter longevity, but kind of like, here's reasons why it might be bad. It's like, yes, I could definitely construct a version of society where longevity might be bad. One in which everyone joined a company, had a job, and then never left that job, no matter how their beliefs might be relevant or not. And there was no change in the society and no way in which holding onto beliefs from the past that were no longer solved in today affected

your position in the society. Sure, I could construct a society where this would be a problem. But I don't think we live in that society even today. I think if you look at a lot of artists, I love Linkin Park growing up and they're still huge. We still love Linkin Park. They're still huge. But they're not necessarily the dominant sound, the same way they were when I was growing up in the 2000s. That's not necessarily because they kept making music. Actually, a lot of their work I think is a little bit similar to, or has some vibe to,

they started out with, there's some argument about how much they deviated. It's like they were replaced by different styles because people like different styles of music and those became like more dominant because the culture shifted and like that's what people responded to. So I don't know, I would just, I think Francis is a point,

but it's, I don't even know if we live in society right now that that wouldn't be the strongest, if that makes sense. I see, yeah. So I wanna talk about some meta-scientific questions now. One of the themes that just juts out to me in your online writings is the importance of the emotions of joy and awe in science and scientific discovery. Is it possible to train the ability to feel scientific awe? Yeah. I really, I really, I really hope it is. And I don't know if it is. Yeah.

For people who are capable of feeling it, do you know whether it's possible to have it on demand? So yeah, for me at least. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Okay. So, so for me, sometimes I'll have like feelings of scientific, or maybe it's like, it could be something incredibly fringe, like, I don't know, I'm looking

up at the stars or something and I just have that moment of like, what's this all about? I really hope, I really hope I live to see the answer to what we're doing here. And then, so I have that feeling of awe and then maybe I won't have it again for six to nine months and I have it again. And two things happen. One is, or the first thing is that I have it again. And two things happen. One is, or the first thing is that I have the feeling. The second thing is I noticed or I remember like, oh, that's that feeling.

I'd kind of like forgotten what it was like to feel that almost in a similar way that when the seasons change, like when you're in winter, you kind of forget what it was like to be warm. And then when you're in the summer, you kind of forget what it was like to be warm. And then when you're in the summer, you kind of forget what it was like to be cold. And I haven't, I haven't been able to conjure it on demand by just like, okay, the next day, let me try and have the same thoughts and like recover that same feeling. It feels like you sort of like lose sensitivity to it or something. So, um, I'm curious that you might, you might be able to conjure it. And I was hoping you could share more about that. Yeah. I have spent an enormous number of hours thinking about this.

Oh really? Yeah. There was a point in 2018 or 2019 where I had this experience of my friends right of town for the weekend. I was alone by myself in our house. And I just had this like intense absorption into an evolution question that I was thinking about. And I just got really into it. And I remember feeling like, oh, I can see the universe. I can see like what you might call your conception of God

or like my personal feeling of just seeing, being one with the universe. And I was so excited by it. I was like, I can't forget. And so the thing that I did, which, you know, honestly, I'm terrified might be like really bad for my personal health, but I wrote on my hands a number and it was a number of hours that I wanted to be in that state of just intense awe and absorption. And then every couple of days when it rubbed off, I would rewrite the number on my hand so that I would remember. Like it was like the most personal kind of tattoo you could imagine of like trying to remember like to be connected

with this. And I've spent a lot of time iterating on different things. I actually have a page on my website that goes through the things that work for me to get into the States. So for me personally, it's really important to be in some kind of grassy open environment, to have music playing, to have eaten sugar recently, to have some kind of set of mental objects that are developed enough that they feel like you can interact with them in the state. I think cell biology is very, very good for this. But I think if you read Einstein's work and a lot about his early education in high school, I think there's actually this whole tradition in like mathematics that Einstein was also exposed to of high school teachers who would ask their

students to do very visceral things. Like I think I read about a math teacher who was like telling his students to like hold apples in one hand and like, you know, some amount in one hand, some amount in the other, and then get an intuitive sense for quantity that way, and then use that kind of somatic intuitive sense in their thinking. And I think Einstein's high school had some kind of tie to this kind of visceral or kind of, they had some very specific philosophy of education that was weighted to this. And yeah, so for me, there's just a set of things that work to get into the state, but

also there's a lot of preparation, I think intellectually, to get objects that actually you can then manipulate once you're there. Would it be fair to say that that is the emotion you optimize for in life? Absolutely. Yeah. How many, like, I don't want to kind of like kill, kill the vibe by trying to quantify it too much, but like how many, I don't know, how many like hours per week or per month do you think you would spend in that state? So 512 hours since 2018. That's amazing. Wow. When you think about the role of scientific awe in doing science, would you characterize

it more as a kind of behavioral thing where it's just like an important way of helping you maintain motivation and persevere at very difficult long-term projects? term projects, or would you characterize the importance as more about helping you actually achieve better insights in the short term by putting you in a state where you're somehow more creative? What was the first thing again? I guess the first thing was more of like a behavioral thing where if you're, if you're experiencing this pleasant emotion, if you're experiencing this pleasant emotion, maybe you just like stick at a difficult project for longer.

And then, so that's like indirectly better for doing science, but there's nothing about the state itself, which in the moment makes you more creative than normal. Yeah, that makes sense. I think, um, you know, honestly, I struggle with this enormously. I think when I first encountered the state, I was like, this is everything. This is the state you should be in the state all the time. And I do optimize most of my life from being in the state. And at the same time, over time, it was like, yeah, a lot of great scientists probably aren't

in that state ever. It's not clear that being in that state solves all your problems. Like for a lot of shitty work that you might, or for a lot of work that might be, like I just, it's not clear at the state actually, I don't know how much being in that, I think a little bit is certainly very, very good, but I don't know how much being in that state is going to like make you more likely to win a Nobel prize or something. Probably most people who have won a Nobel prize have been in that kind of state at some point, I would guess. But honestly, over time, it's just like, I don't care at all how much... I think part of the state does feel that it's tied to some idea of truth or something. And I think that feels important

to me, like the idea that being in this kind of state, it's interesting. I've had a lot of experiences that are more, I don't know if non-dual that's correct, or I don't know if I've ever experienced that, but just more meditative, let's say, where it's like, oh, I feel great, or I feel some kind of calm, or I feel peace. And this feels different than that. I've always been confused about the difference between these two. This feels much more like there's some laws of the universe that are real, and I get to talk to them, and they like me, or they want to talk, and this feels much more like there's some laws of the universe that are real and I get to talk to them and they like me or something and they want to talk and they want to hang out. And, um, I think I just, I just like the state for itself. I don't like it for any functional reason.

I see. It's like a hedonistic thing. Totally. Yeah. 100%. That's awesome. Um, and so it sounds like quite a spiritual experience. Yeah. Like I think I've, at some point, reading descriptions of people having like intense religious experiences, I was like, oh, like that's, I'm just, for some reason my brain is wired so that I experience something that sounds like what they're describing, but in response to like reading a physics textbook. Can you recall any recent moments or insights you've had that triggered that

state that you'd be happy to share? Yeah. I mean, one, one that, um, always gets me there or you don't want to jinx, um, like normally is, is just the idea of like a being in a cell. So like, if I just, I think when I was, yeah, just there's this exercise you can do called powers of 10. I have a video about it that I did a while ago that's like super jank, but it is the thing that first was helpful, which is like, maybe you can, you can probably imagine a cell, you know, it's like, you have some idea

of a circle and like, there's some stuff in it. It's kind of like, but there's a thing you can do where, you know, I did ever as a kid have like spirits of a circle and like there's some stuff in it. And it's kind of like, but there's a thing you can do where, you know, I did ever as a kid have the experience of going into an imaginary world where like you construct an imaginary world and you feel like you are actually there. Have you ever had that? So like imagine combining those two things where you have enough, let's say you've read enough about this, like I've seen enough pictures that you kind of have some sense and you know, some of like what might be true of the long

lives, which is the real interesting part. And then you can connect the feeling of being an imaginary world with being in a cell and you can use your brain to track the kinds of laws that are true in a cell such that the world that it's generating actually corresponds to reality in some very deep way. Like it's pushing, like you push the world and it pushes back at you in a way that reflects what the cell would actually do. And so you can explore around and actually find out stuff. Like that's magic. And I think a lot of physics experiments have that kind of flavor if I under like potentially.

Yeah. So like one thing embedded in that is you need a very robust understanding of the actual laws that govern, for example, molecular biology, right? So you need to have all of that scientific understanding at your fingertips. I think you need to have, I would think about it like you need to have enough to render

a world that has some, like maybe it has enough. I have someone I worked with for math education who this brilliant concept of toys in mathematics. You just want a toy and they can poke it and push it. It needs to have at least as much complexity as let's say a math problem. A simple math problem that has some stuff where you can poke the math problem and it'll push it back in ways that it's telling you something. The world needs to have at least a little bit of that. Okay.

Are there any ones we could do right now? Can we do a guided visualization? Um, I would, I maybe it won't work for that reason because I need a, I need to be able to render it properly in my mind. Maybe we could do one which conveys a sense of like logarithmic, the logarithmic scale. Maybe. It's not where my brain is right now, but one thing you can do is the thing called powers of 10, which is like, basically imagine like your arm in front of you. And then you like hold that

mentally. And then you imagine, hold that mentally. And then you imagine your hand and then you imagine expanding your hands. So it's the size of your arm. You just like do that. And you see this large hand is in front of you, right? And then you put your thumb out next to your hands. So I have to physically do it. If you can imagine it visually and generally, that's great, too. And then you expand out your thumb so it's now as big as your hand.

And basically, I forget the exact expression, but if you do this down like seven more, sorry, eight more steps, you get down to an atom. And you know, it's like eventually get down to like a mammalian cell and then a fibroblast and then a might have been a virus next and then maybe a protein after that. Although I might be getting a little bit confused now, it's been a while. And then yeah, the last step is an atom, which is about 10 to the minus 10 meters across. And you realize that you're just 10 steps away logarithmically from an atom. And then you have this kind of ladder where whatever visualization you're doing, you can kind of move up and down the ladder to the correct scale and see what's happening there. And then leave it there and

then go to a different part of the scale and see what's happening there. But like everything is short. You don't have to say goodbye to any part of the world, which feels really satisfying. Right. That's cool. So this kind of, I suppose, embodied thinking, we like it because it can help produce feelings of scientific awe. Does it help give you counterfactual scientific insights? It has for me, but I think I've become a lot more uncertain about how much in general it would do this.

Like actually one thing that it was very helpful with is thinking about cryo preservation, which is the topic I work on now with my co-founder at Credo. And initially, it was just helpful in doing thought experiments. Like initially it was like, I didn't have a good way to think about cryo, but seeing that if you just look inside a cell, you just see a bunch of molecules just bumping about. And that basically there's this really weird thing about cryo, which I'm writing a piece

right now just trying to express some of this, but it's like, it's incredibly strange that cryo, you can cryo preserve and reworm anything. Because if you think about it, if you... Let's say that you took like a really complicated factory, right? And you stopped everyone in their tracks in the factory. And so they just stopped moving. And then you spun them around and had them walk in a completely random direction, and then had them go back to their normal walking speed. But everyone's walking in random directions. That's what cryopreservation is. It basically, the way that it works, and I'm not sure if it makes sense to explain it, but it just randomizes them with their motion of all the molecules

after you go to zero, if you go to very low temperatures, which is super weird, right? And almost everything that we build at the human scale is incompatible with that kind of... We don't really have systems that are invariant to that kind of randomization, but cells are for some reason. And this was immediately obvious, or I think it was pretty easy for me to guess why that might be quickly personally. I'm sure this has been described elsewhere in literature, but just because I'd already been doing a lot of thought experiments in the cell, it's very clear when you do that, just like the cells run on passive diffusion and how strange that is.

The cells run on molecules bouncing about in random directions. Everything in it is oriented around, or there's some phases, but it's just... I don't know if I'm doing a justice to the concept but like unlike a computer where you have you know, like, sort of, you kind of know that if you start current off here then it might go here or like you know there's some, in a cell so you just have this bag of molecules that's being shaken all the time and like that's how it runs. Like and nothing is guaranteed to be in a particular place unless it's like very bonded to be in that place.

And so that's just so different from how we design objects ordinarily that then when you think about things from that perspective, it makes a lot more sense what core preservation is even possible. But if I hadn't spent so much time hanging out in the cell, or this was obviously pretty early on, that I think I wouldn't have really have internalized how much passive diffusion, how weird it is that the cell is just trying to passive diffusion. Does that make sense?

I think so. And so for context for people, here we would be cooling, for example, like resected brain tissue to minus 130 degrees Celsius. Below. Yeah. Below, yeah. Past that threshold. I mean, it's funny. One of my questions was going to be, do you have any toy models for thinking about cryopreservation? So this is clearly an example. Yeah. And it's complicated because like you could argue that, well, you know, because we empirically know that you can cryopreserve things like what the, what good is this toy model, but just, um,

I mean, I do feel like I understandopreservation is better for seeing the link between this property and the fact that cells evolve to run with very high amounts of thermal noise. And therefore, like it has all these properties that make them so good at being invariant to this, like randomization that we induce with cryopreservation and how strange it would be that we would think that would be true for any other system, you know? Right. One other question on embodied thinking. So do you think certain types of science or certain fields of science are more amenable to that mode of thinking than others?

I think so. Although I don't really know. Biology to me feels so natural for that. It feels so natural to imagine yourself in a cell as a starting point. I think physics also feels very natural. I'm starting to understand this tiniest amount of mathematics the past couple of years, and I think that feels just super different. To me, mathematics, the little that I think about feels much more like a totally foreign object than it does like I'm just embodied person using my normal world simulation but in a different scale of world or a world with different rules. It feels like I'm just dealing with objects that are so different from my normal experience

that I just have to kind of assume that they're different in space and kind of go with that. So it's a similar level of maybe immersion, but at least personally it feels super different in terms of like how much you can use your 3D everyday intuitions from walking around in the world. Right. One of the other themes that stands out to me about your career is mentorship. And I had some questions about scientific mentorship because you've both been both a mentee and a mentor. You began volunteering in Cynthia Kenyon's lab when you were 12. I'm curious, because obviously you were a very precocious 12 year old, but being able to receive and interpret tacit knowledge in a scientific lab requires like a ton of context. So I'm, I'm curious how you would describe the most important

things you learned in Cynthia's lab. I haven't thought about that really. Um, I'm taking a long time. So it's interesting. Um, That's interesting. I'm not really sure. I mean, Cynthia's, to be clear, like an extraordinary person, and she's extraordinary as a, she's like one of the most extraordinary mentors I think I've ever met in that she has this bravery, which she believes in ideas before everyone else just because she thinks they're right. And she's not, it's not from any kind of motivated reasoning thing. I think it's just like, she just really was at the time was like development

biology controls, you know, certain processes. Why not also this process? I don't know if you know, but she was, I think the framework was the lead author or at least like did a lot of the work herself on the seminal paper from her lab because no one in her lab, maybe it was a rotation student in her lab was took on the project, but that nobody else in her lab would take on this risky project that she was so excited about.

Was this the age one paper for C. elegans? This was the dafty paper, which is related mutation that, yeah. And so she's amazing. But also, I mean, she's just an incredible mentor, especially to, I think, unconventional people. Like in the sense, like, I think, unconventional people, in the sense like I was not the only person who was off the beaten track that she took into her lab. And I think the same things that make her incredible with ideas where she just can see what's there and that just kind of is the thing that's important to her. I forget

if it was weekly meetings, but she would meet with me and treat me as seriously as a grad student in terms of her attention and care towards my intellectual development and explaining things to me, giving me projects that were extremely advanced in retrospect for what I could have been seen to hold. I just felt extremely seen by her as somebody who just took me seriously intellectually, even though I was 12 years old. And in retrospect, I don't know if I would have the capacity to be as gracious and thoughtful about it as she was at that time. Like I really think, in retrospect, it really moves me when I think about it because I think

she's so special. And I just didn't understand at the time how special that was for her to do. Yeah. I wonder whether maybe the most important thing you learned in her lab was how to be a scientific mentor. Maybe that or I think also just like the self-confidence of being taken seriously by somebody that I thought was like the most amazing person in the world. Like that's probably also was scientifically like, I think there's a lot of stuff where

I now have a lot of memories of like looking at glowing worms under microscopes and trying to like a plate their gonads that are kind of funny. And, you know, like we're just kind of funny time. Um, and that, yeah, but yeah. Yeah. So if we think of scientific, if we think of mentorship as a, a talent search problem, does it differ in any unique ways from other talent search problems like finding a co-founder or finding employees or investing in founders as venture capitalists?

I think mentorship is like so beautiful and it might be the case that training and strategy explicitly destroys any actual insight or any actual kind of stuff there. But I think for me, what feels really important is to try to be a mentor to people where you feel very strongly that they have something beautiful inside them that you can see. Like it might be the case that everyone has something very beautiful inside them, but it might be the case that I'm only best able to see that in a certain kind of person who might like similar things to what I like or just has some...

I think for me, I really respond to what feels like authenticity and deep care and love for ideas. When I meet somebody who has that, I think like, I feel very interested in them being able to express that well in the world. And I feel able to think through what might help do that well sometimes. Um, so that, that feels really interesting to me. Yeah. Beyond Cynthia, is there any kind of mentorship you wish that you'd had or that you could have right now? Oh yeah. And yeah, I think I, uh, I think Silicon Valley is a very industry town and I came

here when I was very young and I didn't appreciate how much that I think quashed a lot of creativity that I had for a long time. And I would have really appreciated, I think, somebody who could have given me the affirmation that I needed when I was younger, that it's good to be creative, it's good to be loving, it's good to be intuitive. I think I really, as you just get trained when you come here to overfit to these very specific patterns of being that are just so, they just, they really destroy a lot of originality, I think, and a lot of like very, very interesting stuff that is at the heart of doing new things. Yeah.

What's an example of a Silicon Valley pattern that destroys creativity? I mean, if you're pushed to fundraise from an early age, I think you're very aggressively trained to, it's like, it's kind of like sales. You have to very quickly make an argument for your competence and your trustworthiness and your knowledge very quickly. And then you have to kind of hold... This is what I used to think. I think I feel this way less now. Because you're young, you don't know anything. And so it's like you're trying to, I think it almost feels like you're trying to both be honest with who you are, but then also trying to pretend to have this competence and this confidence that when you're 17 and you've just come here.

I think when I was younger, I did feel very confident. But in retrospect, it was like, it was kind of just like me hyping myself up internally. It wasn't, I think now I'm like, when I have an idea that I'm really passionate about, I feel confident at the core of my being from the idea itself. It feels like this idea is just correct. I don't care what anyone else says. I mean, maybe it's incorrect and I'll find that out later, but just like, I kind of have this deep sense of like, yeah, this is, this is right.

I think when I was younger, it was like, I'm going to make this happen because I have to, you know, it was kind of more where a lot of the confidence was coming from. And that feels different to me. Yeah. When you're mentoring someone, how do you think about the right balance between actively helping them versus kind of just like letting them figure it out themselves? I think for me personally, it's almost never actively helping someone. Although I do have friends or I haven't thinking recently about like, maybe you should push yourself or people sometimes, but it's like this extremely like it's like, I think you just see the beauty in someone and you're like, this is extremely beautiful. And how, like what from the outside could help that beauty grow or something? Yeah, that's, that's how I think about it.

Okay. Some questions about longevity and cryopreservation to finish with. So there's this book, Morton Myers called happy accidents about serendipity and drug development. And if I remember correctly, and this was true, at least at the time the book was written, think. So I think this, the fact was of all of the drugs on the market, only about 50 of them were being used for what they were originally designed for.

How should longevity science grapple with this problem of serendipity given that if things, if there's a drug that could have an effect on all cause aging, presumably it would need a long time to reveal its benefits. So how do you grapple with serendipity in drug development in longevity science? Those feel like a little bit distinct to me, like the difficulty of running longevity trial. I would say to my current understanding, which again, the field is now in a place where I want to be careful and respectful. There might be something that I might be comfortable on, but there just isn't a good way to get around running very large, very difficult, and in many cases, very expensive trials for the first longevity drugs. That is just locked in to actually talk about lifespan extension and showing that.

There might be a world in the future where we have better proxies for aging and for longevity that we can use to more quickly do trials, to better biomarkers. But I think we're not to the point where those are sufficient to imply longevity. I see. I'm curious to get your current takes on aging. Is it mostly the result of sort of noise and randomness or is it more the result of like programmed or quasi-programmed patterns or I guess like which theory of aging do you

kind of favor at the moment? I mean, I think that it's extremely strange but true facts that there are single genes that we can change in many organisms that just change lifespan. It's sometimes in the positive and sometimes in very small organisms to an insane multiple and that we really don't know how much those genetic changes, how far we can push them and how much they translate to humans. We don't know how much they translate to humans, to be clear. Like, I think we don't have the causality of how much changing single gene, changing very simple things that we're

good at changing drug development in humans could lead to life span extension. Yeah. But it's just really weird that it could be programmed at all. Like, it's incredibly strange. I think the default assumption is that it's mostly just a system breaking down over time in a way that's not very simply programmed. But there seems to be just some non-zero component that you can control, at least again in a lot of non-human organisms and potentially also in humans there might be some things that we could change. It's really strange that that's true. Say a bit more about why it's so strange.

I think it's similar to cryopreservation. I might be unique in this regard, but I started off usually feeling very skeptical of things in biology because we're trillions of, 10 to the 27th to 10 to the 28th atoms arranged in this incredibly complex fashion. We're very robust in some ways, but we're not made to be robust. A lot of the changes that we're considering making, I think to some degree we've evolved to have modularity, but I think just the more I look at biology and biological systems and see the number of atoms that are interacting in these really complex ways, the more it surprises me when we can make very simple changes and have the whole system change. And again, there are some physiological systems that I think it makes sense that they'd be

evolved to be simply regulated. Um, but for stuff that's not necessarily as evolved, like. Yeah. I, I, I just think your prior should be that like that, that's not likely to be plausible or something. Um, and to give people context here. So the, the interventions that we can make on the worm C elegans can increase its lifespan by about 50%.

You can go up to 2X. I think that there, if I remember correctly, at this point, it's been a while, but it might be sixfold. There might have been higher lifespans reported, although I'd want to go back and just double check to see if someone's replicated that stuff at this point because it's been a while now. Yeah, you can just do insane amounts of lifespan extension in things like worms. In mice, it's more like, let's say, 60%, maybe a little bit higher, depending on what you want to

define as intervention, but still quite substantial. I think the argument with mice is often that maybe these mice are sick or maybe they're not representative of the most healthy human population, but even in that case, it's surprising that you can change one thing and have them, um, live differently. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So say you're appointed FDA commissioner tomorrow. Um, what are some of the first things you're doing to reduce regulatory bottlenecks to longevity drugs? I think I would like make it like, like lay the groundwork for aging as an indication. I think there's a lot of regulatory work to be done to conceptualize what it could mean for longevity drug to exist for that indication.

But honestly, the most important thing would be I would find some way to shorten timelines for review cycles while still being effective and thoughtful from let's say six months to like ideally a couple weeks. Although, you know, I don't know if that's actually plausible for the FDA. I want the FDA to do, you know, what it had to do to be safe and effective. But I think, I think that the six month review cycles for preclinical companies are, can be very like, it's basically just like you, companies can be very... It's basically just like every time you want to make a change, you have another six months of iteration, of waiting and just you submitted something and you're not really sure. And there's some parts of the FDA that are amazing and very collaborative and very helpful and will give you a lot of feedback so that this process

works well. But I think just like that uncertainty, again, there might be that's required for some kind of internal process, but just like that is, I think, such a huge contributor to timeline uncertainty for companies. So anything that would help the FDA shorten those processes by functioning, uh, more quickly in some way like that, that's very helpful for companies. So the longevity fund closed its first fund in 2013 and several of its portfolio companies have now IPO'd, like Unity Bio. I'm curious whether, so now that you've started to see some of the results of

the investments, whether you've noticed any patterns among the founders or companies that have been most successful? Yeah, I mean, we started out investing in a lot of companies that I think were all over the place in terms of stage. And in the first one, I think it was a huge focus on just doing things that felt very conservative in terms of like they looked like normal biotech companies, but there was some way in which they were quite linked to aging if you were looking at the biology. That felt important just to kind of like give the field examples of companies that we felt like biotech understood,

but that also relate to longevity. Over time though, it's just become really clear. Like the most important thing for us is, is there very founder oriented companies going after your actual moonshot ideas that we're interacting with from the earliest stages. Like you look at every company in our portfolio that's like done like very well,

they're like kind of have those characteristics. I think I just feel like that's what we understand best. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Vanta. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses use Vanta to establish trust

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with automation and AI throughout the platform, Vanta gives you time back so you can focus on building your company. Join over 9,000 global companies like Atlassian, Dovetail, and FireAnt who at Vanta.com slash Joe. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash J-O-E for $1,000 off. So before we were recording, we were talking about evolution and you've been like self-teaching or studying evolution for like a few years. Now I'm curious, what surprised you most about the field of evolution? I don't know. I mean, I think like I'm pretty naive about the stuff. Like I definitely don't understand evolution, like I, almost at all. Um, but I think one thing that's been really interesting is just that evolution and natural selection

are two different things. Natural selection is the combination that we're talking about of replication, variation, and selection. Evolution, I think, is just the idea that things change over time in a continuous way and the observation that that's true. I might know that there's this species fossil record, but that doesn't tell me why that's true. And so you can use anti-reflection as an explanation for evolution. I think the only thing I understand now is just that evolution is almost never used in a way that to me feels

under the person who's using the term understands it, or that using the term contributes to... Using the term is actually helpful helpful if that makes sense. So often it's just used to mean like change or that like things are the way like people often say like we evolved to be this way. It's like to the extent that they're invoking an idea of natural selection in that statement, it's often unclear what's the basis on which they're invoking that claim. It's like if we evolved everything in our current life because of natural selection, that doesn't actually add, that doesn't necessarily, it's also not just not true that everything

that we see around us is selected for. Like many things might just be neutrally, like just take our population from a perspective of like neutral drift. And so it's just, yeah, I think it's all, it's really, I just get really bothered a lot honestly now by like the phrase evolution being used and then just like not really being used in a way that's helpful at all. So the problem though is like there are other ways that you can evolve. Like you can have one mutation take over a full population but not be fitness giving.

Just like randomly, you know if you have random walk, then you can have like a mutation completely 100% take over population just through random walk. Right. And that actually might happen a lot. I think it, I think we currently think that it does happen like, like assuming out of the time. Yeah. And so yeah, large fraction of the population got here changed over time in a way that looks

like it was selected for, but wasn't maybe. Right. Um, and so then you have to really defend, okay, if I'm talking about natural selection specifically, what's the evidence for that having been the mechanism? And it's like, well, how do you actually prove that? You know, which I think is an interesting challenge. Like I think definitely happens, but it's like, how do you know when it happens? How do you justify when you use that as like, and then what does it tell you if it happened about what's there today? Yeah. about what's there today. Yeah. Presumably your interest in evolution was motivated by

ultimate explanations for aging? Not at all. No. Oh wow. Just pure curiosity or something else? I was really obsessed when I was a kid. I was like, I want to like figure out what Newton's laws are, but for biology. And after thinking about this for a while, I became like convinced that like And after thinking about this for a while, I became convinced that laws around how populations learn to coordinate were kind of like, I don't know if they're actually missing from evolution, but they're just kind of like the thing to focus on in communication and populations. And so I had to understand evolution to understand that concept. And then just like, I got really, really confused about evolution. I'm still confused about evolution. Me too, but we should, we should continue trying to work it out.

So, okay. Some questions on cryopreservation to finish. Firstly, so through the longevity fund, you would have obtained a nice broad view of the field of longevity. I'm curious of like all of the different things you saw and all of the different emerging technologies, why you chose prior preservation as the thing for you personally to work on. It's so obvious. It's so obvious. I can't tell you how... To me, when I think about the problem of car preservation, I feel like a mathematician who spent their whole life trying to find the perfect mathematical problem, and one

day you just find this thing and you're like, oh my God, it has all the properties. I feel like a mathematician who spent their whole life trying to find the perfect mathematical problem. And one day you just find this thing and you're like, oh my God, it has all the properties. Power preservation is so intensely fascinating. I often talk about it like it has, if you want to, let's say you want to pick a problem to spend your life on. Things that I care about that I think are not unique to me are I want to pick a problem that's very impactful, a problem that is technically tractable. You can work on it and make progress.

We might not be guaranteed success, but you have a fair shot and that almost no one else is working on seriously. Specifically, I mean that there's a lot of criperation work in academia. I think there's just a very low number of companies working on it from a company perspective as there could be. And cryopreservation is just the best answer to this question I've ever found.

If you fully solve medical hibernation, then plausibly any terminal illness that is boring you or hurting someone you love, you could potentially imagine using cryopreservation as a way... When I say cryopreservation, what I'm referring to is reversible cryopreservation. Let's say I had the perfect device. I think about it often like a one-way time machine. Let's say I can put you in a box and then in one to two years, you can get out of the box and kind of walk around as your normal self. And if you have a terminal illness for which... And I know somebody, my co-founder knows someone who got stage four metastatic

cancers. And in my case, the person lived in my co-founder knows someone who got stage four metastatic cancers. And in my case, the person lived and my co-founder's case, the person died, they were both about, let's say, like half a year, a year away from, in my case, the person made it to the trial that or to the drug coming out that saved their life. And for my co-founder, they were like, let's say even months away from when they would have been eligible for that drug. And if you just had something to bridge the gap to therapies that we know are going to come out that would save your life, you know, we're not talking even about like living infinite

amounts of time. It could just be normal life span, but it's like just getting you the best access to medicine that might be like very, very close to where you are. That feels just so urgent and important and so leveraged, right? Like often in medicine, it's like you want to solve every problem and yet you're focused on solving one problem. To be clear, medicine needs to continue for cryopreservation to be at all relevance. So that's, it's not argued if not working on medicine, but like if you solve this one problem completely, you then get access to like all these other things in the future. So it's so leveraged. And then technically, it's certainly an extremely difficult problem. And there's worlds in which it's not solvable.

But it's able to... It's so much like neurotech in the sense that it allows you to use engineering and physics to interface with a problem in a way that's just so deep and so not true of almost any other problem in biology. It's so intimately allows you to use these technologies to quickly develop new solutions and use the full palette or the full spectrum of ideas and physics to attack the problem. And then last thing, compared to all those things, it's not worked on. I think mostly

because it's just too weird. There are some ideas that are just too weird. And it's something that I believe so much now that I started my career, I was like, there's no way it's true. It's like my friends used to say, like, it's just more true than you would think that the markets are inefficient. But just like it's, I think because cryo is so weird, it's not worked on. And there's also actually a bunch of other reasons, but like it's just, there's a lot of baggage around it that makes it an idea that has like a force field around it. It's kind of like an egg force field. But then once you're inside it, you're like, this is so beautiful and so impactful. And like it's so underworked out for what it could be.

Right. So perhaps this isn't a useful way to carve up the space here, but if we think about the four different categories of aging interventions, so restoring, replacing, delaying, and then pausing, obviously cryopreservation fits into that last category of pausing. Is that category somehow inherently more tractable than the other three categories? To me, I'm like, I've written a little post on this, I'll post at some point, but it has a number of characteristics that as a single problem, like I think if you want to solve all of longevity or all of cryopreservation, like I think the latter will be a more straightforward problem just because it's more fully defined.

And it has more places to plug in tools from physics and engineering in ways that give you a lot of leverage to solve the problem. So prior definitely feels to me a lot more retractable as one problem. Now a lot of people should still work on all of longevity. But I'm just saying if you want a particular single problem to work on, it just, it feels really, really perfect. It feels like it has a lot of amazing characteristics. So you mentioned this sort of like a, a somewhat of a

taboo around cryopreservation. So I assume it's fair to say that public communication is like more difficult for cryopreservation specifically than it is for the field of longevity in general? It's incredibly complicated. Like, um, or actually I'm avoiding, I think it's like very anti-mimetic. Like there are things that I can't talk about publicly that I think are like just such amazing reasons why it's under worked on. But you like because the because like they're part of the power of them being good at shielding

the field is that if you talk about the publicly that it leads to these other things that like you might personally want to. Yeah, There's very interesting reasons why it's so anti-mimetic. I think that's changing. A lot of the reasons why that was true are now changing, but it's incredibly, incredibly well-crafted to not be noticed, I think. Is there anything more you can say here that you can share publicly? I'm just really interested in this. Yeah, maybe in a couple years. But right now, it's not. Yeah, not really. What I can say is like, in addition to the stuff that I'm gesturing to, there's also a lot of things

where it's like, I think, cold things that like, like, like cold, people don't like being freezing or very cold. This is actually a huge deal cold, but if you don't like being freezing or very cold, this is actually a huge deal. Like there's a lot of like intuition of not liking the idea of cryopreservation. That's I think adds another level of veneer, but yeah, there's yeah, there's just a lot of stuff that. Okay. Interesting. So it runs counter to a lot of intuitions. It runs counter to a lot of intuitions and yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Watch this space. Well, it's been lovely to talk with you. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah. Thanks. You've had so many topics.