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

27:30That's really interesting. Okay. Well, we'll try and attack it from a few sides, maybe. But as a point of comparison for folks, I was really interested to see that the folks have been trying to cryopreserve themselves for a surprisingly long period of time, at least as much as I'd expected. I think there was a man named James Bedford, who sort of 60 plus years ago went through this process. And there are companies like Alcor, And, you know, I think there's another one in Europe who sort of have been doing some version of this. Compared to sort of that state of play, what is it that like until technology?

28:05Yes, please jump in. Yeah. So just to be very clear, that's different from what we're doing in a very specific way that I think is important. So basically cryonics is when you take someone who is sort of legally sort of post-sportum and you cry preserve them according to like whatever the best answer is at the time. and there's an assumption of like in the future we might be able to bring this person back what we're focused on and like really interested in is can we show that like you can do a full procedure so like let's take you know an or like for us it's like can you take a piece of living tissue an organ or organism high reserve them and rewarm them and show that they get back their normal level of function and have like basically just kind of like test okay like how well do these full protocols work and and so i think that that's a very important distinction that we're interested in kind of being able to, at least for ourselves, being able to like see and task like how well, you know, do these protocols that we're developing work so that we can make them better along the way.

29:01And so in terms of the mechanisms, you know, at play, like, are they just axially different than sort of these, you know, more resurrection style approaches? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how Until has done things so far in its early work. So I think one principle that's important to say about the field is a core important idea is glass, not ice. So basically that when 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 cryoprescentive agents to prevent ice formation as you cool down.

29:44the way I think about it is like you have a bunch of molecules in a cell they're like bumping around bumping around and then you know normally if you were to form ice they would they 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 very disordered looking crowd like there's not a expanding solid and that's important because then that that means that you don't have tissue structure disruption um as part of cooling.

30:13And, you know, in reading about this, this field 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 rats, brain tissue that was sort of successfully showed a level of activity post going through this process. I'm, I'm fumbling through this, but you, you might be able to give a better account of it. 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 all the progress that had happened.

30:51So for example, groups have shown that you can reversibly cryopreserve a rat kidney. 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 a month plus out. Because there's this whole field of cryobiology that's doing amazing work that's focused on reversibly cry-preserving up to human-sized organs. And so that field gives you a lot of information about what chem cells you might want to use, what are the best perfusion techniques, all that good stuff. 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?

31:30No, no. It's just like metrics return 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 the normal function. And that. Yeah. Wow. Really interesting. And you've sort of put together this phased plan for until which I thought was really interesting and sort of riffs on some of these benchmarks so far. How did you come up with that? And for for listeners, you know, what is that plan at the moment? Yeah. So, you know, we have this, you know, we ultimately would love to be able to build these hibernation pods you've seen interstellar.

32:08Like 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, you know, just like that's a very, very interesting long-term goal. And then in the near term, you know, to make a first POC, we want to show that worst book coverage genealogy works in humans, can help human patients. For transplant patients, there's this crazy thing that happens where when someone dies and needs an organ. It happens, you know, you can't predict that in advance. And so at the last minute, the surgeon will get the call, okay, get on a private jet, fly across the US, go pick up the organ.

32:39You know, it's like the patient has to wait within a few hours of the transplant center for the call that, you know, for months that they're like in the middle of the night, possibly going to get to come in and like get surgery. It's like, imagine not knowing when you're going to get surgery for this, like, you know, really insane kind of like intense surgery that, you You don't even know when you're going to get it. And so for us, it's like, and then also so many organs are lost due to timing. Because like, you know, once a patient has an organ, there's a very short time window to get it to the recipient.

33:08And so I've talked to, you know, folks where they've been, you know, surgeons who were their plane was iced on the runway on the way back. And the person was waiting for the organ to not get it because like, you know, this liver was on the runway for just a few hours too long. Our doctor's surgeons who, you know, they stay up all night when the organ comes in, literally pulling an all-nighter just to make sure that organ was transplanted in its acceptable window of quality. And so for us, it's like, if you could just cry preserve an organ, you know, and like remove basically time as a constraint from this process, it's really helpful to transplant patients, really helpful to transplant surgeons, also transplant centers.

33:40I think just like realizing the impact of that was an important sort of, and then it also just like, look, if you're talking about like building hibernation pods, like you sure as heck better be able to reversibly cry preserve a single human organ. You know, 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. You know, maybe it's too complicated a question for, you know, where until is at the moment, but what do you see as sort of the major hurdles in front of you to get to that stage, the stage of human organs managing to, you know, pause the biological time on those, so to speak?

34:21Yeah. 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. 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.

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35:40It's fully configurable, so you can launch in days, not quarters. Want to see for yourself? Generalist listeners get a free year of the starter plan. Head to withpersona.com slash generalist and check it out. 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 to date? Is it okay if I just try to explain to you like literally how cryopreservation works and then kind of work backwards? Yeah, definitely. That would be great. What we're doing. Okay, okay, great. So basically, the way that cryopreservation works is you have this danger zone of ice formation between, you know, when you're just at a very cool temperature down to like minus 130C and below, sorry, sorry, and below my 130C, you're kind of more fine.

36:22You'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 danger zone. And interestingly enough, rewarming is actually a bit more of a challenge because when you rewarm, you're like re-encountering all the ice crystal nuclei that were formed as you went down into that zone in the first place. So you have to rewarm a bit faster. And so basically, there's that process happening. And then there's a separate thing of like, what chemicals are you adding to the system that prevent ice formation with minimal toxicity, right?

36:53You're talking about replacing a large fraction of the water of a cell with a chemical that hasn't seen before. And it's amazing that, you know, this is actually both done in sort of human embryos for, you know, sort of like, for like a cryopreserved IBF embryos. Like this is not something that is, you know, completely outside the norm of what we do today in biology. but like in a large organ, you have to have a lot more tolerance or chemicals that are less toxic because basically they're exposed to the organ for much longer. And so it's interesting like dance. And then lastly, you're scaling up.

37:24So, you know, we know these protocols can work in human embryos. Scaling up to a whole human organ introduces this like massive volume to surface area problem, right, where you've scaled volume by R cubes, but surface area by R squared. And so if you're still relying on kind of heat going in from the outside 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 like um basically this scaling problem is quite difficult um but i actually it's such an elegant thing that like you know you you know that these protocols work for cells for embryos even for small organs and organisms and it's just this question of like okay like how do you engineer um the best scaling property for technology that like kind of takes it all the way uh all the way up.

38:09And then also, one, I think, really beautiful part of the problem is that you trade off between the difficulty of different areas. So, like, you know, 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 it's a very interesting thing where you can make the biological problem easier by making engineering, by improving on engineering, which is such a great problem. There's such a great trade-off to have in a biological problem. So interesting and so useful. So thank you for that. But to the extent that you're able to share, how do you think about those trade-offs?

38:41Is there a certain philosophy behind the way Until wants to do things that is grounded in those trade-offs where you're saying, hey, I actually think the right way to do this is to take a little more risk in this part and a little less risk here or something to that effect? No, if any, for us, it's just like make everything as good as possible. hole. With CPSF, for example, the whole field of cryobalgae has spent a lot of time trying to optimize that problem. And so you can also kind of try and work with the field and understand what the field is done best there. But yeah, I think for us, it's just literally take each part of the problem extremely seriously.

39:12In most areas of our development, you're presented with some terms. You have often no idea what caused them. You have to use tools that are very limited. So you're using a small molecule with a hundred or so atoms or an antibody with a thousand or so atoms. but like tools that basically can buy into a single protein or affect kind of a very simple interaction. And that was supposed to take a system that is like 10 to the 27 to the 28 atoms and revert it back to like a normal phenotype when you often even like don't quite understand what's going on. And so it's like this crazy hard problem in drug development.

39:43And it's like no wonder that so many drugs make it into the clinic and don't make it all the way. It's just like, it's an incredibly difficult set of constraints. I think with carb preservation, what's fascinating to me is like, you're working with temperature. It's like the core statement of the problem is physical. It's like, take a system, reduce its temperature to like minus 130 or below, bring it back to normal temperature, and do so with mental perturbation. And yes, there's a lot of biological questions that then become added onto that. But it's like, you're changing the system. You're not reacting to symptoms that are already there that have evolved mysteriously.

40:11You're making the change. So you get to control, to some degree, that part of the process. And then also, it's like, because you're talking about temperature, it's like, there are so many ways, so many different natural laws in physics in which the term temperature shows up. Like, you can take all of those and, you know, look at, like, you know, PV equals NRT. Like, you can, like, look at every single kind of part of physics that references temperature and try and build systems and devices that kind of take the nuclear temperature of an organism using the physical laws. And, like, you don't get to do that in most part.

40:38You don't get to, like, take... There's not, like, an Alzheimer's parameter that you get to go and you get to go look at, like, you know, PV equals NRT relevant to Alzheimer's, you know, this is the parameter. And that's just... It's really hard to emphasize 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, I think, for me, just the excitement of, oh, you can think about this problem really well. And you can physically model in your head in ways that correspond to reality.

41:06And that is so, so beautiful when you find that with a problem. That's so interesting. How do you think about the sort of timelines for this sort of a company? Like you must know plenty of more traditional founders in tech in Silicon Valley. Do you try and model yourself against, I don't know, traditional biotech or anything like that? Or is it, you know, just too different? 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 one thing about tech, about DTECH, right? I would say often you do have this flexibility of like, you know, the final product you might be talking about is a long way away.

41:50And 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 curve or we can't, you know, start them adequately. Like trying to really feel that urgency on a daily basis, like that to us is the biggest metric. But I think one that's really important to us is like building a company for the long term. Like we've selected all of our investors very, very carefully for people who have a lot of experience and understanding of like building companies for the long term, you know, and keeping very ambitious goals in mind.

42:28And so it's like a condition of like having that kind of long term focus with on a daily basis, just like trying to really feel the urgency of the problem. Really interesting. from sort of 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 some of the folks in this field that you've interacted with. Are there entrepreneurial role models or inspirations where you think, actually, the way that they did this, there's some sort of lessons for us there? Or is this all sort of needs to be reimagined from the very beginning?

43:04You know, it's really interesting because I think when I first came to Silicon Valley, for sure, I had, you know, the typical roster of entrepreneurs that I thought were amazing. And, you know, one thing that's been very, very helpful personally is getting to know a few people that I really admired from afar. And seeing that, like, I think you can be like a good person to be successful. I think that was something that I didn't really understand when I first came to the Valley. It was like, you know, do you have to be mean and kind of like, but I see people I think are very intellectually still alive and have that curiosity and have like a very genuine drive to like do good.

43:34and 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 micro conceptions of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Like I'm a really weird person, you know, like deeply, deeply, deeply weird. And it turns out that like some of the best 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.

44:06That's where the good stuff is. And so I feel more comfortable, I think, being different now. What are the examples that come to mind when you think of weird alpha for you? I think it's that I'm really obsessive. And often I'll get obsessed with things that don't necessarily make sense. If you look at what I'm trying to pull in or the influences or the kind of obsession, it doesn't quite make sense. and I think I used to really penalize myself from that and I'd be like what's this weird thing you know or you just do and also there's a falling instant 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 need to have this level of kind of like structure to them I think over time it's like I'm like just these ideas you know that that really like like like ideals feel like my friends you know it's like or maybe this is kind of crazy but it's like when i find a really beautiful idea it feels like 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 to be seen and to be worked on i think for me cryo it's like it's it's it leaks an interesting way to this thing that i think sort of peter seal once said this interesting thing i forget if it was like um something he said in conversation or just i heard from someone but like he said that his main task for entrepreneur that to fund or maybe that's not his main test 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 on some level deeply believe them and i think for me it's just like deeply internalizing that like when you work on something it should cut like like there's just this level of connection to what that idea is that at least to me feels extremely important i think that's yeah i mean it's not you that have to do the rest of the job right which is like 90 but like like having that as a base having these ideas that i think really do make sense like for me cryo is like it's a very idea oriented thing it's like it's like um it it's it's when you meet it and you see it you just see all the different facets of it.

46:23It's really hard to explain, but it has like a hundred. It's like 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. 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. And that was something actually I sort of almost noticed in this really interesting piece I thought you wrote maybe five years ago around your mental models. And it's struck me also that the way that you sort of talk through your mental processes is super linked to sensation and sort of color and light and this sort of feeling.

47:06Anyway, I wonder if that's ever something you've thought about or the particular processes going on in your brain. I don't know. I think to me it feels, um this also might sound totally uh absurd but i think it's true and i i think it's about 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 an encouraging it's like okay why is it beautiful right it's like if if you solve this problem if you solve the full scope of it you have like there's this kind of sense of unlimited impact right sort of like what could you do with such a tool like let's say you actually build the full thing it's like quite unlimited it has this beautiful attractable beauty attractableness it's like okay if you if you try and work on this thing can you test your progress well like i think for me so one of the most amazing parts coming from me is my co-founder you know hunter davis of the company like he's one of the best scientists have ever met one of the best leaders i've ever met i could not be more actively working with him it's like i knew when i first met this idea of cryo that people like like like that level of of mind would be attracted to because it's it's so it spans you know like physics and biology and neuroscience and like it's a kind of deal it's like if you tell someone who's highly intelligent the problem especially if they have like a physics background or like have some ability to think kind of think quantically mental and do mental models like within hours they'll be entranced by it it's like it has that kind of like deep pull that intellectual beauty and so that was also part of it just that like you know it's it's it's it's a problem that's very attractive to people that i would really want to work with and and then i think last it's like sociologically so interesting right it's like why was this not like why is it that not everyone is starting a career company um why is it that this is a field that has all these um kind of things that you're you know you have to sort of think about quite specifically, I think the sociological part was also extremely interesting.

48:48You're inducing a change in the biological organism that you're then reversing. That's not, let's say we're in medicine, temperatures are parameters. All these different things come together. And it's like, yeah, and then you just know that the idea is kind of wanting to be seen. It's very beautiful. It's really, it's cool to hear someone talk about their work that way. What was it about Hunter that sort of convinced you he was, you know, such an extraordinary scientist and the right person to found this company with? Yeah. So Hunter, Hunter's the absolute best. I, again, a large part of, I, I picked working on this company very selfishly and that I, you know, one of the things that was highly impactful and also that I would never get bored of.

49:31And I think a large part of the joy that I find in work is getting to work with Hunter and folks like Hunter or like some of the other folks that we have on the team. I think for me, it was that we had a first conversation about this technology and he told me later he was like yeah i thought that was totally crazy right it's like you know what are you talking about like you're versibly it's like literally sounds absurd um you know for context he's an extremely rigorous physicist has a background you know at you know caltech for his phd and then was at you know harvard um and one of the like the best in our science uh slash kind of physics background labs there when i first talked to him so you know he's coming at this from the perspective having been trained to think rigorously about other problems the thing that he did though was instead of dismissing the idea sociologically he went off and for a couple of days did the calcs he was like okay theoretically if i look at you know what i know about ice formation and the temperature ranges and all these other factors does this like you know kind of disprove this idea and the thing happened where you know you start thinking about the idea and then you just get pulled in you're like wait but wait but wait no way you know but like that he built that up from first principles for himself like that he didn't dismiss the idea sociologically b went off and was like i'm not also going to take Laura's word for it.

50:37I want to check for myself. It was incredible. And then also just, I think he's such a founder at heart. Like, you know, when we first started talking about this idea, it was very early or sort of, you know, like in the sense of, we were still working out, you know, some like 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 such a natural, like he's one of the best founders I've ever met, you know, and I'm so grateful to them for that reason.

51:08But just like that level of once you intellectually are locked into something, then just like fully going after it. Fascinating. You made the important distinction around how, you know, what Until is doing is very different than sort of the postmortem freezing. Do you eventually expect that folks might start wanting to use Until's technology either as a substitute for that, wherever you think, hey, I'm getting pretty old. Like, I'd rather, you know, go through this process and see if medicine is way better in 100 years and I can, you know, live an extra 50 years with better medicine. Do you sort of expect that behavior to happen?

51:49We're drifting, you know, now farther into the future in discussing these things. But yeah, I'm curious. For what we're talking about, it's like you only do this most, like one thing that I've really learned over time, especially as we all know, it's like we're here people that we love you know it's like you wake up every day and like a large part of um feeling good feeling the person that you are often is like deter my 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 a few people who literally are just like totally oriented on curiosity and like for them yeah sure maybe it would make sense to do something like that but i think just for most people it's like you would only do such a thing to get more time with people that you love which means that you know it's only if you have a terminal illness that you consider like making that kind of jump and i think also to be clear Like the, I don't, I think we're focused on the reversible aspect of this because that's what, like we want to be able to make these techniques better.

52:39And that's the only way that we know of to really iterate well. It's like really testing function that way. I think it's complicated to think through like what you would do today if you had to make, you know, a call for yourself. But I think for us it's just like we literally want to just be able to test. Like we feel like how well do these technologies work and make them better and use the iteration loop, which is important for us. That's super interesting. in this, you know, mental models post that you wrote, it's a it's an old post. I don't know how well you might remember it, but I thought it was super interesting and a really sort of interesting way of understanding maybe how you think and how you reason through problems and ideas.

53:17One 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? I mean, there's two obvious categories, right? 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 do you test them to understand whether the whole body case is viable?

53:49I 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 they should definitely come inbound taking that such interesting question for us to be thinking about but i think 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 get more of your life and then they don't do with it and i think for something like this technology i think that really is important to me is that you know if you have a loved one and and and you're going to be cry to 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 a interesting huge um unsolved uh you know question of how or how do you really think through um what that experience is like for people who are or still living their normal life.

54:47We don't really know how to think about it well. And it would be very important to get that right. Yeah, that's so interesting. There will, you know, assuming, you know, when this technology is mature, there will be totally whole fields of study around those relationships, you imagine, and how people navigate that. That's so intriguing. 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, is the biggest flaw there, so to speak. I think I might understand that a little bit differently with a couple of years of remove.

55:28I 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 standard for me and and trying to find and like talk to interface with new ideas is like just giving myself room to be weird like to 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're doing these things but i think it's like acknowledging that um sometimes the way that you find really great new ideas isn't by like doing things that look like very conventional and it's important to like follow your impulses about what works best for you i don't know and this might sound i think that sounds kind of generic um but there's something there that was very very helpful for me to kind of get comfortable with i think well what are the the ways that you are generative that might surprise people i mean eating a bunch of sugar and dancing in a field where i thought two good examples if if true um yeah i mean obviously i don't recommend that for a long 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 i think for me like emotion and it is is very important um like if i'm trying to think about an idea um the way that i i know there's 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 is really beautiful and to connect to it aesthetically and emotionally um and and that just like gives me a lot of like my attention is then just very much on this beautiful object and then it gets a lot more kind of compute um but i think being at peace with like that that's a reasonable thing to to want for yourself and to be a piece of like that ideas that have those properties you know might might be yeah i think yeah maybe just like learning to follow your creative yeah this there's yeah but there's something yeah i don't quite know how to describe it no it's it's interesting to hear you talk through it.

57:34You 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 sort of taking you in a different direction. yeah i mean i think there's a there's a funny meta beautiful idea which is what makes ideas beautiful but i kind of i was just going to optimize for like okay like a number of hours of life spent in this like state of being really like interested in an idea and pursuing and kind of like spending a lot of compute on it and then there's this like this meta idea of like what makes your night can i just find all the ideas that have this property um yes 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 and um enjoyable experience thinking about mathematics when the objects are less or much more foreign from my the way that my brain works and i'm interested in trying to understand that right now have you found uh other biologists scientists who share the same sort of experience as you do when you know commuting with uh with a cell or with these ideas 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 quest to get more of this beauty and i think for a lot of folks it's like i've just i have eight 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 um yeah for example like Rob Phillips at Caltech made this incredible resource called bionumbers.org, where I think he really lays out like how to think about biology quantitatively in a way that also feels very beautiful.

59:35And that book's definitely a huge inspiration personally. Really interesting. Yeah. Because I do think, as you said, you hear about it all the time with mathematicians. You obviously hear about it with artists. And it seems almost a universal phenomenon in some respect, once you achieve a certain level of insight or something like that around a lot of these things. So it's really cool to hear that. I'm curious if there are things for your own longevity that you've over the years become very set on or are very convinced are important to do, maybe beyond the obvious things like moving a decent amount and eating reasonably well.

1:00:16Are there things that you really try and maximize for? Yeah. So I mean, definitely could asked this question a lot. I think, you know, to be clear, I think the area where I have expert, where I have a 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? 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?

1:00:49And 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 percent of the time like you know and seems like it would be hard to do that as a founder yeah yeah i think if you're a founder just like look like you're you know i think it is possible to get there where you're a lot bringing the 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 folks tension 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.

1:01:23That makes sense. You know, this is maybe also something that I'm just sort of curious about. I think when folks think about longevity at the moment, they think a lot about someone like Brian Johnson and his sort of end of one study from the perspective of, you know, someone who's interested in the field. Are there things that Brian is doing that you're like, this might end up being valuable for the broader industry in how we understand things? Or is it just, you know, so limited because it's a because it is just a one person sample size? 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.

1:02:13That seems like it's good for people to do those things. Yeah, the evangelism. Yeah, I think that effect of it, yeah. I mean, that seems like it's good for people to think about their health a lot and to think about health as an important thing and to be able to kind of like not be seen as bad for thinking about health, but to be, you know, sort of celebrated for thinking about health, that component seems good. Amazing. Well, I always like to wrap up with a few sort of more abstract philosophical questions. Maybe this is an easy one to answer given what you do. But if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would love to run?

1:02:53I think if you actually gave me that, I would take like five years to think about it. I think selfishly, a thing that I want to find out in the near term is like if I took every great mathematician and scientist in the world who spends a lot of time in their mind, and I asked them about like, basically their internal like structure, kind of mapping out the space of ways that people feel ideas, and then kind of just, yeah, understanding, like making like a large compendium of ways to like, it's really like making a good learning curriculum, but one that's very much around the feeling of experiencing the idea as opposed to like being able to be something useful about the idea, which is also important, but just like that's, for me personally, what I'm really fascinated by is experiencing the idea.

1:03:32That's so interesting. What's a tradition or practice from another culture or era that you would like us to adopt in the present day more frequently? I think for me personally, I'm someone who thinks in a pretty embodied sense. I need to move to think. And I think that it's very culturally normal to sit and be very still. I think that's important to not freak people out. You don't want to be flailing. But I think just being okay with movement during conversation and thinking as more normal and being able to find ways to do that that feel good, I think that would be nice. I like that a lot. Also, much of my best thinking is just doing walking or things like that or whatever it is.

1:04:15Okay, last question. If you had a chance to assign a book to everyone on earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign people? I mean, insanely selfishly, probably book.bionumbers.org, which anyone who's in this podcast can go look up. There you go. That's awesome. But what I can understand is I think that to me, it's like the best experience of science is one that feels like the literal best artistic experience you've ever had. 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 just ecstasy, honestly.

1:05:03And just like those two things together, 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 universe to me is just like such a extraordinary thing that we can, we have, you know, that capacity for sure. Amazing. Well, I'm gonna definitely buy a copy. So that's, you know, as good an endorsement as I think I can imagine. It's a totally free textbook online too. Oh, great. The website is just like, everything is, yeah. Amazing. Well, Laura, thank you so much for taking the time.

1:05:38I learned so much. and really excited to see what the next few years hold. Thanks. Likewise.

1:06:09See you next time as we continue to explore the future.