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

I spent a decade of my life trying to answer this question of, is there one technical problem which, if completely solved and attacked, would get me the thing that I want, which is to give everyone as much healthy years of life as they want. When you started to think about longevity and mortality, what was the state of play in the industry, and how did you start to familiarize yourself with that? Every time people got together to talk about longevity, it felt like it had to be secretive, it felt like it had to be hidden. It's just so obviously at the heart of so many different things you're not supposed to talk about or you're supposed to talk about in certain ways. Now it's like some of the best next-gen talent they grew up with. How would you just explain reversible cryo to someone? I think what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time traveling to the future. What if you had a spaceship pod that you just walk into and then you can walk out of it five years in the future? Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Each episode, I have deep conversations with the founders, investors, and thinkers who are living in the future to help you see it earlier, understand it better, and benefit from it. Today, I'm speaking with Laura Deming, the founder of Until. Laura's story is an unusual one. She became fascinated with longevity at just eight years old and worked for legendary biologist Cynthia Kenyon as a child. After winning the Thiel Fellowship and dropping out of MIT, Laura started one of the first venture funds dedicated to longevity, backing startups trying to extend lifespans. Now as CEO of Until, she's taking on one of the most ambitious technical challenges in biology, reversible cryopreservation. In our conversation, we explore how Laura's unconventional homeschooled upbringing in New Zealand led to completely uncorrelated thinking about death and aging. why the longevity field was once so stigmatized that professors had to hide their research interests, how until is developing technology to literally pause biological time on human organs, and why Laura thinks about beautiful ideas the same way most people think about falling in love. If you enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll consider subscribing and joining us for some of the incredible ones we have coming up. Now, here's my conversation with Laura.

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including one in three U.S. venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com slash Mario. Well, Laura, I've really been looking forward to this. I've been familiar with your work and public thinking for a really long time and have been sort of fascinated from the sidelines about cryopreservation. So yeah, really excited to dig in today. Thanks, likewise. Awesome. Well, I'd love to, you know. begin with your sort of hero's origin story, which is as an eight-year-old, you became interested in longevity, which I think everyone sort of has some sort of acquaintance with mortality around that age. But I suspect many people don't become as fascinated by it as you have. How did that happen? And what did it sort of spark in your mind that felt so important and worth dedicating the next few decades to it? Yeah, I think it's really funny to try and answer questions about when you were eight, you know, when you're like, you know, in your 30s. And I think over time, I see a little bit more of what the context was. It's like for context, like I grew up homeschooled in New Zealand. And I was... basically not exposed to kind of what was normal what was like the normal societal beliefs when I was a kid like I kind of grew up in this paradigm of you can influence the world um you know you just have to pick a dream and go after it and that there were all these problems and it's we to go solve them and so that was like just what I like that was the um matrix that I lived in and one thing that I really really am grateful uh for my my parents for in retrospect is that I think I also um was just very uncorrelated so like Things that appeared normal to everyone else like that were very socially reinforced. I didn't have that as a kid. Like it was just kind of very, very uncorrelated, I would say, from the social matrix that I kind of now understand a lot or see a lot more clearly. And so, you know, as a kid, it was like.

um a combination of i just want to work in biology on the hardest problems and at first it was like cancer might be the hardest problem and then you know i think my dad might have suggested that aging was a harder problem then i just like yeah great okay like you know whatever is the the biggest version of you know solving you know diseases i want to go work on that um this combination of seeing people in my life who are older and suffering and just being like this sucks like they are in pain let's fix this um and then also i think at one point i remember being viscerally confronted with the idea of death and just being like you know this kind of psychologically horrible black hole of nothingness is really bad. And we should also, so it's a combination of things. But I think, I think the biggest thing that I'm grateful for is that it was just so, there were no societal reinforcements. There was no, there's no kind of conception that this was strange at all. Like to me, it was just very, very straightforward. And so it was very interesting when I was like 12 and above to come and like interface with society and be like, oh, this is actually perceived as a strange belief or one that is like, you know, not ordinary. Really interesting. I, you know, to an extent it's probably. unanswerable because you don't have sort of a series of other lives to compare it to. But to the extent that you're able to interrogate that experience, like what are the things that you think you took from homeschooling? You certainly mentioned one there, this sort of uncorrelation and maybe this optimism that you can change problems. But in terms of the way your mind works, do you find that you're, I don't know, more creative than the average person perhaps? Or maybe you lack some sort of set of basic information that the average person learns in sixth grade history? I don't know. I'd be curious to see how you've sort of thought through that. Yeah, I mean, always hard to say about your own mind what's true and what's not. There's a lot of things that are running the background of how it's one for two and stuff. But I think what I can say that has been interesting to see is that one character that might have been difficult in a different context, but I think has served me well in the context of being homeschooled is that...

I get really, really agitated about things that don't make sense. Like if something does not make sense or it's inconsistent, it's very frustrating and irritating to me, like physically so. I get very like anxious and frustrated about it. I think a good combination of things for my personal makeup was being dropped in this kind of area of idea face space where it's so outside of, it just kind of, you know, you're randomly dropping this idea of face space. You're not really correlated to like normal beliefs. And then there's like also this machine internally that's like, like drastically or just aggressively trying to make things consistent and to understand, okay, why is it that everyone else believes these things? And I'm in this part of my idea face-to-face, where's the difference? And it's very hard to reconcile those two things with understanding everything about how those ideas are built up from the ground. And so I think that's been a very helpful force, that kind of intellectual generator combined with being, you know, homeschooled in this way that was so uncorrelated. That's so interesting. When you began, and again, it's difficult when we're talking about how young you began being interested in this space. When you started to think about longevity and mortality, what was the state of play in the industry? And how did you start to familiarize yourself with that? Yeah. So one of the first things I did was get on my computer and Google longevity people. And obviously, Cynthia Kenyon is still a canonical heroine of the field. I mean, she's extraordinary. I was really lucky when I was a kid that I got to go work at her lab. It was a series of events where I was, I think, I forget now, like 11 or something. And I emailed her and said, hi, I love your work. It was one of the first emails I'd sent to somebody that I didn't know personally. I just sent it to a random person on the internet. And she emailed back and invited me to come visit her lab. And then later, after I visited, to work with her. And I owe her the start of my career. And she's done that for so many people. And so Cynthia. is really the hero in the story for me. But I think one thing I'd say, so that's kind of on the science side, you know, where I got my start, you know, starting to understand the field just in her lab as a kid. But I think what was interesting to me is the field sociologically and what was kind of going on at the time. And because, you know, in the longevity field at the time, which at that time was branded more as the anti-aging field, which is just, I think,

Obviously, as a word you want to get behind, I think longevity is a bit more interesting of a one. If something was wrong or something just felt really off, it was sort of like every time people got together to talk about longevity, it felt like it had to be secretive. It felt like it had to be hidden. There's lots of people who were mainstream professors in good universities, quote unquote, like Stanford or MIT. And they had to kind of hide that they're interested in longevity from their colleagues. It was seen as badly. Cynthia was literally told that she would be... like basically ostracized or like she was told that like if she worked on this um field as a young very constantly biologist that she would you know be like um an outcast from the field basically i mean she was like it would took an enormous amount of intellectual courage and bravery i think for her to actually um pursue it but you know and even her you know at that point she had she was just so obviously an excellent scientist that she could But yeah, and the field, you had to kind of hide that you were just in longevity. I think that's so, when that's true, it's so interesting, especially when a field has real results. You know, if that were true, we didn't have the results showing that you can genetically mutate, you know, organisms and they live longer. That would be a bit less strange, but it's just, it was a very interesting combination. Why was there that reaction to it? Was it, you know, some sort of almost sacred belief? You know, this just felt too heretical, too strange. Was it, you know, distrust of the results that had come to the fore? You know, I wish we could talk for like three hours about this because there's all these different interesting things that go into why this is true. And I think finding ideas that have this property is, you know, especially if you're in venture capital, which I was for a long time, like it, and still at some degree, like it's, that's... the meat of it right it's like finding ideas that are sociologically not seen but for interesting reasons longevity has an obvious interesting one which is it's so close to things that are psychologically sacred and and and which we're supposed it's very difficult for us to think about in certain ways so one example is in longevity like um it's very it's a very good idea if there's no way to impact your lifespan to strongly kind of not question the amount of years that you have and it's actually psychologically very healthy and so actually for most people in most situations um

you know, in most world contexts, you don't want to question that. It's psychologically nice to just kind of have this deep acceptance. And at this point in my life, I think it's possible to have that and also to have motivation to work on medicine. Like, you can have both psychological health and that motivation to work on medicine at the same time. But I think longevity is one where it's so close to this psychological, like, sort of paradigm that it's... there's just a lot of stuff around. I mean, we can talk with three people. I mean, it's just so obviously at the heart of so many different things you're not supposed to talk about or you're supposed to talk about in certain ways that that, yeah, really contributes. That's so interesting. Yeah, you articulated that. I mean, obviously, you've been thinking about this for a very long time, so I'm not surprised. But yeah, there's sort of a lot of instincts you have around why there might be a stigma around this. But yeah, there is sort of this, as you said, almost this evolutionary reason of... Well, it's it's quite healthy for me to have this level of acceptance. And also within the group, it makes me look, I don't know, a bit weak, a bit grasping after something unattainable to to pretend like I'm going to be able to have this massively longer lifespan. So there's yeah, there's so so many thorny pieces there. Yeah. And I would say just one flip side, too, is like if you're the person claiming to get everyone. eternal life right like that that is that is something that and i don't think nobody feels trying to like nobody feels kind of in the middle of this thing where it's like it's like the people who are i think the best they feel like we're not even trying to do that they're just kind of like trying to make drugs that give you a couple years of extra healthy life you know and who knows what's actually going to happen at this point with the aircraft and everything but like it like you know they're but they're in the middle of this weird thing where like for a long time people have used that catchphrase to then go out and be like you get this thing that everyone hypothetically. And it's kind of, we have to be in a binary state around it. Really interesting. I'm glad we dug into it a little bit. You had this experience doing research with Cynthia Kenyon. You also obviously did research beyond that. But then sort of the next chapter of your life was as a venture capitalist with the longevity fund and age one, which was a little bit of a more of an incubator accelerator. Why did you feel like that was the right path for you at that point?

to make an impact on the field. Yeah. I mean, so for context, I was like 16, 17 when I started thinking about, you know, a couple of decades before other people. Yeah. The only venture capitalists I'd ever met were people that I'd seen come to MIT to give, you know, panels on biotech and they just seemed like inaccessible. They seemed like so outside of my career. But at the time in the longevity field, again, I was just this kid and I was going around asking people, okay, like, what is the problem? And what everyone said at the time was, oh, we don't have enough money. And so I just literally took that, you know, as literally as possible. And I was like, let me go get a lot of money and give it to the field. And then it just turned out that what you call that is venture capital. But when I started working in the business, you know, like it took me kind of two years to actually figure out even that, you know, what a fund structure was and like how to think about the business aspect. But the motivation was just like get a bunch of money and give it like make sure one day every field has it to translate these ideas into companies. That totally makes sense. Was. Were people correct in assessing what the problem in the field was? Was it a money problem? From my current perspective, I think that it was more a lack of good founders and good founding talent more than the money. I think that like money and branding helped the field. be seen by a lot more potential founders that can now go start these companies. But I think at the time it was actually more that we didn't have enough good founders. Why do you think that is? Is it just such a, I don't know, feels too far in the future for folks to sort of tractably get their hands around? Is it, you know, just combining too many? disparate sort of skill sets that are hard to find in a single person. I think that there's an interesting intersection in longevity where you want someone who's a true believer in a certain way, like you want them to really believe in the power of the field, but you don't want them to lose touch with reality. And I think having those two things simultaneously is extremely difficult with also pragmatic skills of being a great operator.

And so just finding people who like had the capacity to really, I didn't think this is true for any deep tech field, but like finding the people who have really the capacity to like have that 100% conviction that you need to build a moonshot, but weren't so convicted that they like were like, the world has to be the way that I think it is without being able to get data from the world. It's like, I think those two things together are just hard to find. I think it also was not as clear then like what the field could be. Like, I think it's a lot more clear now that, okay, this is a field that just can make medicines like any other field. Like it's not trying to. But I think at the time, the field was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be. That's really interesting. Yeah, it feels like on many dimensions, great founders tend to be sort of paradoxical, but that's a really specific, quite hard to resolve or find paradox, I'm sure. Really interesting. When you say the field has maybe become sort of almost more legible now, we can sort of just think of it as making new medicine. What was the sort of transition there and what has sort of clarified enough for people to sort of be able to feel that way? Yeah, so I mean, one massive milestone for the field is the CVM sort of division of the FDA, thanks to the work from the company Loyal, recognizing that you can have lifespan extension on a label for dogs, at least to start, and kind of recognize that that's like a valid, reasonable concept. And I think it's just that, like, it's like a lot of people longevity working really hard to, you know, like focus on like, what do the regulators think? You know, how do we make... literal medicines that people or pets will take kind of, I think, I think just like trying to easily reduce these concepts, which sound very, you know, ethereal and high level, like longevity and all stuff into like, okay, like this is a medicine that will be in a bottle that someone will take to live like X amount more healthy life. And, and how exactly do we track the clinical path for that? And just focusing on that as like the main, if you can do that, I think it's a very reasonable problem. It's like, we already do this a lot of preventative medicines. It's not actually a crazy idea. It's just that like, I think if people see you as not,

focusing on the pragmatics of it, that's when it gets a little bit more decorrelated. Yeah. I also imagine just the sort of lack of a big tentpole organization that maybe trained a lot of talent in thinking about this work in a sort of entrepreneurial environment makes it hard too. You sort of need companies like Until and Loyal and others. to sort of be at the vanguard of this field and then, you know, train the sort of next generations of it, I imagine. Yeah, honestly, that's what's the most exciting to see now in the field. And I see with H1 and with companies like Loyal and just in other companies in the longevity space, it's the quality of talent. like it's like it's like the it's flipped now where in the past gen it's like it was really hard to get the best talent like a lot of people would be interested but they would be afraid to reveal that they were some longevity now it's like some of the best next gen talent like the like the really smartest um like 18 year olds 19 year olds i can imagine meeting are for foremost interested in longevity and to them it's just like the most odd that they grew up with like this idea that longevity is the biggest problem in medicine it is the most interesting one and it's so cool to see that that the talent density in the field i think we're gonna see like really, really credible things next decade, for sure. That's really interesting. So was it a out of a certain degree of impatience that you sort of decided, OK, I've got to build a company of my own because I'm just not seeing enough of the talent that I that I want as an investor? Or was there sort of another impetus? No, it was an extremely selfish. Well, yeah, it was a lot of things. But I'd say like it's like falling in love. Like, you know, it's like you let's say like you meet the love of your life. It's like you just that's. you're gonna go like hang out with that person like that's what what you do and i think for me with until and the idea of reversible cryo and understanding it it's like i spent a decade of my life um actually i think more at that point trying to answer this question of is there one technical problem which if like completely solved and attacked would

get me the thing that i want which is to give everyone you know as much healthy years of life as they want you know so we're not talking about living you know indefinite amounts of time if you don't want to just like kind of like how long do you want to spend with your grandkids and your family and then just like let's give you that number of healthy years and then also what's something that i wouldn't where i feel like working on the company would be the biggest best adventure of my life you know it's like that was also extremely important to me just frankly like i'm someone who cannot be bored and i get and i just need to work on things that have that level of interestingness and to me reversible cryo it's like i for a long time i did see it. I just thought it was this idea where ice would destroy the tissue and it, or, you know, there's all these like kind of myths about cryo that even I think people in the WANJW field still had. And just when I really saw what the idea was, it was like, it was like falling in love. And it's like, okay, you just, you just have to drop everything. You have to work on it. Wow. Amazing. Well, I definitely want to dig in more there, but for folks who maybe are coming to this, pardon the pun, cold, what, what, you know, how would you just explain reversible cryo to someone? Yeah. So reversible cryo is what it sounds like. It's, you know, you take an organism down to a very low temperature, like low minus 130 degrees Celsius being back up to normal temperature. But I think what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time traveling to the future. It's like, what if you had a spaceship pod that you just, you know, walk into and then you can walk out of it, you know, like, let's say one, five years in the future and, you know, then access whatever's there. And, you know, my co-founder Hunter has this story of his father-in-law. who kind of, you know, was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. And if he had had, you know, just even months more of life, might have made it to the clinical trial that could have given him, you know, like months of extra life and even possibly a chance of remission. There's stories like this. Every time I talk to a group, there's always a story of somebody who had this kind of experience of just missing out on that critical medicine, but even just like years.

And so it's this interesting combination of things like this crazy idea of like, oh, what if you could just bridge that gap and then seeing the relevant impact? And then the same thing is like we do this all the time with IVF. You know, it's like there are embryos. The most recent news is that an embryo is cryopreserved for 30 plus years, right? And then rewarmed and then is a full human. Now, there are twins who are cryopreserved at the same time. They're rewarmed at different times. And, you know, and so there's just this crazy thing where we already take whole humans and... you know, pause time for them for decades. It's just that scaling it up is an incredibly difficult technical problem, right? And we're not sure that we can reverse the cryopreserve whole adult humans yet. Like that's something that we're still trying to understand. But the first thing along the way is, you know, let's take a human organ, reverse the cryopreserve and help a transplant patient get that organ they might not have otherwise. And so it's like this, it's to me just this beautiful thing of like, okay, we have this, if we can totally solve the problem, you get this incredible moonshot technology that gives you all these things. And then in the interim, you can build a business around like a very real use case for transplant patients. So interesting. Yeah, I think, you know, you've talked about this before and on, you know, in Until's materials as sort of a pause button on biological life, which is such a fascinating idea. And as the sort of pace. of progress accelerates having that ability feels all the more important just because as you said it could be a matter of months that could be the difference between you living another 50 years or or not at all you know this is is becoming more and more practical but has historically been you know the realm of science fiction the thing that i think of is uh you know three body problem in dark forest where the the characters sort of uh preserve themselves and and jump a few centuries into the future. Do you have any preferred science fiction representations of what you're trying to do? No, actually, it's been interesting to search for them. I think what feels missing there to me. So what one thing that was really clear to me when we started to think about, you know, again, if we could solve the long term goal, which is there are a lot of.

science questions that are between us and that and we're you know um going after organs first we're very confident about organs we're still understanding about to what degree like whole body you can fully get there um but they do that it's always between science fiction without the level of care that i think it really demands like i think you know um One thing that's interesting to me is how we relate to people in our life when they're traveling and we won't see them for a long period of time. I think the technology and how it's presented should be a lot more about the loved ones. are dealing with the absence of something that they love versus just like you know the experience of the person and the i mean that person's experience is deeply important but it's like when the person's in the hibernation pod it's like what really matters is the people outside the pod who are trying to understand like what this means to their life and like i think the biggest question that we always get around this technology is like you know would i still see my loved ones could they come with me like how would it work with my social matrix and so yeah i think that's also why it's like this technology is not going to be used if it's ever created like you know casually. Like, it's something that you do if you need to do it, but it's not something that you necessarily do casually. Yep, that makes sense. And it's true. I've always sort of, without making any inroads towards actually making this reality, assumed I might try and cryopreserve myself because I think, what's the downside? But I always, as a result, have to try and lobby my friends and family to do the same because I don't want to be roused a century or two from now and be all by myself. But you mentioned that there was sort of a moment of falling in love with this concept of reversible cryo. Was there like, a particular breakthrough that you saw that, you know, really sparked something or, you know, just the concept itself? What was it that sort of warmed the heart and ambition to start until? No, I mean, I think for me, it's just I've been taking some time to kind of reflect on my life. I was, you know, traveling with a friend, just kind of thinking, you know, it's like when you're in this liminal space and they're kind of like have the space to step back a bit. And I was just feeling so frustrated. You know, it's like I'd spent a decade plus.

building the fun i was really you know proud of a lot of the work that we've done a lot of companies and there's a sense of like this problem is not solved yet you know it's like it's like we don't even we don't even have that like you know until we get the first drugs into humans and approved for humans it's like and you know i'm really happy that loyal's um you know in the clinic you know sort of working through a lot of that in pets and i see a lot of progress on the human side but it's like there's you know it's like i didn't get into this business just to kind of build a successful venture capital firm like yeah the goal was to get money for the field so that we could get longevity therapies advanced. And it's this feeling of, you know, becoming a lot more from like the 10 year cycle time that it takes to get stuff into humans and how much that impacts the pace of progress or sort of get stuff through human approvals. And so I was just feeling like, damn, you know, it's like, it's really hard to get that cycle time down. In the absence of that, is there anything else that would be possible to do to just have like the level of leverage with some problem that I care about? Or in the back of my mind, I think that was happening. And it's really trying to explain the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. That's incredibly complex. And it's just like, it's so beautiful. I don't quite know how to like. The beauty of Cryo is that it's so multifaceted. Like there's so many different ways into the problem. And they all intersect each other. They all have like a very specific structure. That's really interesting. Okay. Well, we'll try and attack it from a few sides, maybe. But as a point of comparison for folks, you know. I was really interested to see that the folks have been trying to cryopreserve themselves for a surprisingly long period of time, at least, you know, as much as I'd expected. I think there was a man named James Bedford who sort of 60 plus years ago, you know, 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 untills technology? Yes, please jump in.

Yeah. So just to be very clear, that's different from what we're doing in a very specific way that I think is important. So basically cryonics is when you take someone who is sort of legally sort of post-mortem and you cryopreserve them according to like whatever the best methods are 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 let's take, you know, for us, it's like. Can you take a piece of living tissue, an organ or organism, cryocreserve them and rewarm them and show that they get back their normal level of function and have like basically just kind of like test, OK, like how well do these full protocols work? And so I think that that's a very important distinction that we're interested in kind of being able to at least for ourselves, being able to like see and test, OK, like how well, you know, do these protocols are developing work so that we can make them better along the way. And so in terms of the mechanisms, you know. at play? Are they just axially different than sort of these more resurrection style approaches? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how Until has done things so far in its early work. So I think one principle that's important to say about the field is a core important idea is glass not ice. So basically that one you cryopreserve. 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 cognitive agents to prevent ice formation as you cool down. The way I think about it is like you have a bunch of molecules in a cell that are like bumping around, bumping around. And then, you know, normally if you were to form ice, they would create this kind of like very sci-fi ordered like crystalline lattice. And instead, when you create a glass, it's like they all just like freeze in their tracks. when they get down cold enough. They just stop moving, but it's still a very disordered-looking crowd. There's not an expanding solid. And that's important because then that means that you don't have tissue structure disruption as part of cooling. And reading about this field on Till's website, there was some really interesting discussion of some of the...

The promising results so far, maybe for folks that, you know, aren't familiar with, I think it was parts of rats brain tissue that was sort of successfully showed a level of activity post going through this process. I'm fumbling through this, but you might be able to give a better account of it. Yeah, for sure. One of the things that got me really excited about the field was realizing how much more advanced it was than I thought and how amazing it was that I had missed like all the progress that had happened. So for example, you know, groups have shown that you can reversibly cryopreserve a rat kidney. Like you could take a rat kidney, totally cryopreserve it, rewarm it, transplant it back into a rat and have that rat still be healthy using that kidney, you know, a month plus out. Because there's this whole field of cryobiology that's doing amazing work that's focused on reversibly crypreserving up to human-sized organs. And so that field gives you a lot of information about what chemicals 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? No, no. It was just like metrics return to normal function and it's, you know, a bit of a bother to keep the rat around for years. And so that was as long as they tested. But no, I mean, the rat basically returned to 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? 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, you know, these hibernation plans you've seen interstellar. Like 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 revisionology works in humans, can help human patients. You know, for transplant patients,

There's this crazy thing that happens where when someone dies and donates 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 U.S., go pick up the organ. You 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. Like imagine not knowing when you're going to get surgery. for this, like, you know, really insane kind of, like, intense surgery that, you know, you don't even know when you're going to get it. And so for us, it's like, and then also so many organs are lost due to timing because, like, you know, once a patient dies amid some organ, there's a very short time window to get it to the recipient. And so I've talked to, you know, folks where they've, you know, surgeons who, where their plane is iced on the runway on the way back. And the person who was waiting for the organ did not get it because, like, you know, this liver was on the runway for just a few hours too long. Our practice 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 cryopreserve an organ, you know, and, like, remove basically time as a constraint from this process. It's really helpful to transplant patients, really helpful to transplant surgeons, also transplant centers. I think just realizing the impact of that was an important sort of... And then also just like, look, if you're talking about building hibernation pods, you sure as heck better be able to reversibly cryopreserve a single human organ. If you can't do that, what kind of company are you? And it's just ridiculous to imagine, I think, not treating that use case very seriously if you can do it. Maybe it's too... uh, complicated, uh, a question for, you know, uh, where until is at the moment, but what do you see as sort of the, the major hurdles in front of you to get to that stage, the, the stage of, of, uh, human organs managing to, you know, pause the biological time on those, so to speak. Yeah. So I think for us, it's all about quality. Like, I think that we're 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 um what their alternative might be in that 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. Persona helps secure some of the Internet's largest and most trusted platforms with identity verification. If you're building a product where trust matters, identity should be a priority. You've probably already experienced Persona without realizing it. Verifying your LinkedIn profile, signing up for Etsy, or renting a scooter with Lime. Trusted by leading companies like Square, Brex, and Twilio, Persona gives you the building blocks to create identity flows that adapt to your customers, risk tolerance, and locales you operate in. Whether you're verifying age, onboarding businesses, or automating KYC. It'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 minus 130C, you're kind of more fine. You're not going to see as much ice formation. But in that danger zone, basically, you want to traverse it as fast as possible. And so a lot of the field focuses on methods to very quickly cool and rewarm, spending minimal time in that 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 be more a bit faster. And so basically there's that process happening. And then there's a separate thing of like, what chemicals are you adding to the system that prevent ice formation with minimal toxicity, right? You're talking about replacing a large fraction of the water of a cell with a chemical that hasn't seen before. And it's amazing that, you know, this is actually basically 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 a lot less toxic because basically they're exposed to the organ for much longer. And so it's interesting like dance. And then lastly, you're scaling up. So we know these protocols can work in human embryos. 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 it out on just the boundary of the object, that's a problem. So you also have to solve this kind of like... Basically, the scaling problem is quite difficult. But actually, it's such an elegant thing that you know that these protocols work for cells, for embryos, even for small organs and organisms. And it's just this question of, how do you engineer the best scaling property for technology that takes it all the way up? One, I think, really beautiful part of the problem is that you trade off between the difficulty of different areas. So if you can go faster through the danger zone, you can maybe tolerate chemicals that are a bit more toxic and vice versa. And I think it's a very interesting thing where you can make the biological problem easier by improving on engineering, which is such a great trade-off to have in a biological problem. So interesting and so useful. So thank you for that. To the extent that you're able to share, how are you, how do you think about those trade-offs? Like, you know, is there a certain philosophy behind the way Until wants to do things that is grounded in those trade-offs where you're saying, hey, you know, I actually think the right way to do this is to take a little more risk in this part and a little less risk here or something to that effect? No, if any for us, it's just like make everything as good as possible. For example, like, you know, the whole field of crab algae spent a lot of time trying to optimize that problem. And so you don't can also kind of.

try and work with the field and understand, like, you know, what the field is done best there. But yeah, I think for us to just, like, literally take each part of the problem extremely seriously. In most areas of our development, you're presented with some terms. You have often, like, no idea what caused them. You have to use tools that are very limited. So, you know, you're using a small molecule with a hundred or so atoms or, like, an antibody with a hundred 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 reverted 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. And it's like no wonder that so many drugs make it into the clinic and don't make it all the way. It's just like, it's an incredibly difficult set of constraints. I think with cryopreservation, 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, like, there's a lot of biological questions that then become added onto that. But it's like, you're changing the system. Like, you're not reacting to symptoms that are already there that have evolved mysteriously. Like, you're making the change. So you get to control, you know, to some degree, that part of the process. And then also, it's like, because you're talking about temperature, it's like, there are so many ways, so many different natural laws in physics in which the term temperature shows up. Like, you can take all of those and, you know, look at, like, you know, people's not a T. Like, you can, like, look at every single kind of part of physics that... reference the temperature and try and build systems and devices that kind of take the nuclear temperature of an organism using the specific laws and like you don't you don't get to do that in most part you don't get to like take there's not like an alzheimer's parameter that you get to go and you get to go look at like you know pv equals nrt relevant to alzheimer's you know this is the parameter and that's it's really hard to emphasize how much that gets you in terms of like iteration speed how much that gets you in terms of like ability to think quantitatively and like

clearly about the problem. And that was such an important part of me getting, I think for me, just like the excitement of like, oh, you can think about this problem really well. And you can physically model in your head in ways that correspond to reality. And that is like so, so beautiful when you find that with a problem. That's so interesting. 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 D-Tech, right? So often you do have this, this flexibility of like, you know, the final product you might be talking about is. a long way away um and so you know there's sometimes capacity if if you have um 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 automatically like trying to really feel that urgency on a daily basis like that to us is the biggest metric but but i think i think one that's going forward 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 understanding of like building companies for the long term um you know and and keeping very ambitious goals in mind and so it's like 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 your writing and, you know, seeing you on another podcast, it feels like you take a great deal of inspiration, obviously, from the great figures of science and, you know, some of the folks in this field that you've interacted with. Are there entrepreneurial, you know, role models or inspirations where you think, you know, actually the way that they did this, there are some sort of lessons for us there. Or is this, you know, all sort of needs to be reimagined from.

from the very beginning? You know, it's really interesting because I think when I first came to Silicon Valley, for sure, I had, you know, the typical roster of entrepreneurs that I, you know, thought were amazing. And, you know, one thing that's been very, very helpful personally is getting to know a few people that I really admired from afar and seeing that, like, I think you can be like an, you can be like a good person to be successful. I think that was something that I didn't really understand when I first came to the Valley is like, you know, do you have to be like mean and kind of like. But seeing people, I think, are very intellectually still alive and have that curiosity and have a very genuine drive to do good. And just meeting people like that who are also successful, I think that's been really great. But I think one thing that's been actually big for me is just dropping a lot of my preconceptions of what it means to be an entrepreneur. I'm a really weird person. Deeply, deeply, deeply weird. And it turns out that some of the best things that I've done or 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, OK, like the deeply weird parts of you are your alpha, you know, like that. So that'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 like I'll get obsessed with things that don't necessarily. like they don't necessarily make sense. If you look at what I'm trying to pull in or the influences or the kind of like obsession, it doesn't quite make sense. And I think I used to really penalize myself from that. And I'd be like, what's this weird thing? And you know, or you just do, and also there's a flying 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 needed 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 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 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 else 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 offend those people. Like, you know, it doesn't make sense. But it's interesting how many people like have these ideas. They kind of built up structurally, but they don't actually, they don't actually kind of on some level deeply believe them. And I think for me, it's just like deeply internalizing that like when you work on something, it should, 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 don't have to do the rest of the job, right? Which is like 90%, but 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 um it's it's when you meet it and you see it you just see all the different facets of it and you it's like it it's really hard to explain it has like a hundred it's like just there's so many different things about it that come together to make it interesting um and and that's that's part of what makes it special i don't know how to explain it um yeah that's so interesting

Have you ever wondered if you have like synesthesia or something like that? Because the way that you describe ideas is so like sensorially 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. to sensation and sort of color and light and, you know, this sort of feeling. Anyway, I wonder if that's ever something you've thought about or, you know, the particular processes going on in your brain. I don't know. I think to me it feels, and this also might sound totally absurd, but I think it's true. And I think it's about to say it feels a lot more like love. Like it feels like literally like just like that. There's this thing. Yeah, just like it's encouraging. It's like, OK, why is it beautiful? Right. It's like. If you solve this problem, if you solve the full scope of it, 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 try to work on this thing, can you test your progress? Well, 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 I've ever met, one of the best leaders I've ever met. I could not be 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 it because it's, it's so, it spans, you know, like physics and biology and neuroscience. And like, it's a kind of deal where 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 quantitatively mentally and do mental models, like within hours, they'll be entranced by it. 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 a problem that's very attractive to people that I would really want to work with. And then I think last, it's like sociologically so interesting, right? It's like, why is it that not everyone is starting a career company? Why is it that this is a field that has all these kind of things that you're, you know, you have to sort of think about quite...

quite specifically, I think the sociological part was also extremely interesting. You're inducing a change in the biological organism that you're then reversing, like that's not, let's say we're in medicine, temperatures are parameters, like all these different things come together. And it's like, yeah, I just, and then you just know that the idea is kind of wanting to, it's wanting to be seen, like it's wanting to, yeah. That's very beautiful. 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, wanted something that was highly impactful and also that I would never get bored of. And I think a large part of the joy that I find in work is getting to work with Hunter and folks like Hunter. or 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 the technology and he told me later, he was like, yeah, I thought that was totally crazy, right? It's like, you know, what are you talking about? Like, we're simply crying. It's like, literally sounds absurd. You know, for context, he's an extremely rigorous physicist, has a background, you know, at Caltech for his PhD, and then was at, you know, Harvard in one of the, like, the best science slash kind of physics background labs there when I first talked to him. So, you know, he's coming at this from the perspective of 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 and 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 a didn't dismiss the idea sociologically b went off and was like i'm not also going to take laura's word for it i want to check for myself was incredible and then also just i think he's such a founder at heart like um you know when we first started talking about this idea

it was very early or sort of 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 i'm so grateful to them for that reason but just like that level of um once you intellectually are locked into something then just like fully 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? We're drifting, you know, now farther into the future and discussing these things. But yeah, I'm curious. For what we're talking about, it's like you only do this most like like one thing that I've really learned over time, especially as you know, it's like we're here to people that we love. You know, it's like you wake up every day and like a large part of feeling good for 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, 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 and that's the only way that we know of to really iterate well it's like really testing function that way i i i think it's complicated to think through like what you would do today if 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 and make them better and use the iteration loop which is important for us that's super interesting um In this mental models post that you wrote, 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. One of the things you said was most people don't deeply understand what they're talking about, me included. It sounds like. you deeply understand what you're talking about with until, but which parts are you maybe least sure about? Or, you know, should someone have the most curiosity about digging in more on? I mean, there's two obvious categories, right? Like one is on the science side, you know, like, what have we not yet talked about or discussed? I think, you know, one interesting thing is like, what neuroscience questions would you have to answer? Or how do you test them to understand whether the whole body case is viable? I think that that's kind of interesting, like kind of part of the problem that demands a lot of work. And also, if anyone wants to work on it in this podcast, they should definitely comment down. I think that's an interesting question for us to be thinking about. But I think the other part is sociologically. When I was younger, to me, it was obvious that if you just make a medicine, it's good. You make this medicine to give you more years of life, and then they know what to do with it. And I think for something like this technology, a thing that really is important to me is that if you have a loved one... And you're going to make, let's say there's a therapy coming out in a couple of years and you want to try and be able to make that therapy. And so you're making the decision to make that risk trade-off. How does that feel to the people that you love and that love you? And how are they processing and dealing with you being in stasis? That's such an interesting, huge, unsolved question of how do you really...

think through what that spirit is like for people who are still living their normal lives. We don't really know how to think about it well. And it would be very important to get that right. Yeah, that's so interesting. Assuming 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. I think for what that means to me now is like, you know, if I think about genius, often it's like the person's frantically typing at a keyboard or they're frantically writing equations on a blackboard. And I think personally, what has felt the most standard for me in trying to find and like talk to interface with new ideas is like just giving myself room to be weird, like to kind of go dance in a field or eat a bunch of sugar or listen to just kind of following intuitions and impulses, you know, again, not all the time, but you don't spend all of your time doing these things. But I think it's like acknowledging that 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 generic, but there's something there that was very, very helpful for me to kind of get comfortable with, I think. Well, what are the ways that you are generative that might surprise people? I mean, eating a bunch of sugar and dancing in a field where I thought two good examples, if true. Yeah, I mean, obviously I don't recommend that for a long time, but just for me, it's like to get the correct level of mental, like, I think it's like my version of caffeine, basically. Hard to say. I think for me, like, emotion is very important. Like, if I'm trying to think about an idea, the way that...

I think there are many people, I think, who are able to just think about ideas and it doesn't mean something emotionally to them. And it's like they're just thinking about the idea literally. I think for me, it's really important to feel that the idea itself is really beautiful and to connect to it aesthetically and emotionally. And I think that just gives me a lot of interest. My attention is then just very much on this beautiful object and then it gets a lot more kind of compute. But I think being at peace with that that's a reasonable... thing to want for yourself and to be a piece of like that ideas that have those properties, you know, might be. Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe just like learning to follow your creative. Yeah, but there's something, yeah, I don't quite know how to describe it. It's interesting to hear you talk through it. You know, you've been interested in longevity, obviously, in different ways and different problems for such a long time. Have there been other beautiful ideas beyond this, you know, pocket of science or pocket of the world that like have almost been so beautiful and so enticing that they've uh i wouldn't want to say dragged off course because that suggests you know there's only one path but uh 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 it and kind of like spending a lot of compute on it and then there's 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 beauty of the universe or whatever. And I'm really curious whether my Intuit might... Basically, I mostly have this for biology. It's like for me, biology is very viscerally... Like, it's like a 3D 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...

enjoyable experience thinking about mathematics when the objects are less or much more foreign from the way that my brain works. And I'm interested in trying to understand that right now. Have you found other biologists, scientists who share the same sort of experience as you do when commuting with a cell or with these ideas? Kind of. I think a lot of them, I think a lot of them, it's maybe so much more of their daily job that it's kind of a little bit less, 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 yeah, for example, like Rob Phillips at Caltech made this incredible resource called Bionumbers.org, where I think he really lays out like how to think about biology quantitatively in a way that also feels very beautiful. And that book's definitely a huge inspiration, personally. Really interesting. Yeah, because I do think, as you said, you hear about it all the time with mathematicians. You obviously hear about it with artists, and it seems almost a universal phenomenon in some respect once you 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, you know, maybe beyond the obvious things like, you know, moving a decent amount and eating reasonably well? Are there things that you really try and maximize for? Yeah, so I mean, definitely I could ask this question a lot. I think, you know, to be clear, I think the area where I have a level of intellectual differentiated expertise is like, are there... drugs that we could take through critical trials that might have a predictable and significant enough effect to measure on human longevity. That is the area where I have some amount of knowledge. I think that it's actually a much more complicated subject in many ways. What would an average person do best to do more of? And so I think for me personally, the thing that I know is like...

I'm not living lifestyle optimized for like number of years right now because I'm stressed out of my mind, you know, like 90% of the time, you know, and seems like it would be hard to do that as a founder. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you're a founder, just like, look like you're, you know, I think it is possible to get there where you're operating for 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 just like literal physical stresses. I think that even just getting to like a normal baseline is probably the first thing for me personally. That 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 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 that seems like it's good for me people to do those things yeah the evangelism yeah I think I think that that effect of of it um yeah I mean I'm like that that seems like it's it's good for people to take to think about their health a lot and and to think about health as a is an important thing and to be able to kind of like um not be seen as bad for thinking about health, but to be celebrated for thinking about health, that component seems good. Amazing. Well, I always like to wrap up with a few more abstract philosophical questions. Maybe this is an easy one to answer given what you do, but if you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would love to run? I think if you actually gave me that, I would take 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 ask 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 basically 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 for me personally, what I'm really fascinated by is experiencing the idea. That's so interesting. What's a tradition or practice from another culture or era that you would like us to adopt in the present day more frequently? I think for me personally, I'm 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 like... But I think just being okay with movement during conversation and thinking as more normal and being able to find ways to do that that feel good, I think that would be nice. I like that a lot. Also, much of my best thinking is just doing walking or things like that or whatever it is. Okay, last question. If you had a chance to assign a book to everyone on Earth to read and understand, what would you want to assign people? 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 and their most compressed form and to have internalized those as much as possible in that moment of emotional ecstasy, honestly, and just those two things together. I wish everyone had that feeling just once and had a sense of that for themselves. Having that generated by understanding the universe to me is just such an extraordinary thing that we have that capacity for sure. Amazing.

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