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

From a child prodigy in a genetics lab to building a company that can pause life itself, Laura Deming has made a career out of chasing time. At just eight years old she became obsessed with aging. At eleven, she joined Cynthia Kenyon’s pioneering longevity lab. At seventeen, she launched The Longevity Fund—one of the first venture firms dedicated to extending human healthspan. Now, she’s tackling her boldest challenge yet: building a “pause button” for biology. As the co-founder of Until, Laura is developing reversible cryopreservation: the ability to cool living tissue to ultra-low temperatures, hold it there, and then bring it back fully functional. By achieving vitrification (the process of turning tissue into glass instead of ice), Until aims to make organ preservation, and eventually medical hibernation, a reality. We cover: • Why longevity was once stigmatized, and what changed to make it one of the most credible fields in biotech today • Why Until’s approach focuses on preserving the living, not the dead • The physics and biological challenges of scaling reversible cryopreservation from embryos to human-sized organs • How vitrification is making cryopreservation possible • How this breakthrough could transform organ transplantation by eliminating time constraints (and eventually enable medical hibernation) • The philosophical and social implications of being able to “pause” life and effectively time travel into the future • How growing up homeschooled in New Zealand shaped Laura’s unconventional way of thinking • The story of how legendary biologist Cynthia Kenyon invited 11-year-old Laura into her lab, sparking her lifelong obsession with aging • How she learned to embrace her weirdness and trust it as her creative superpower — Thank you to the partners who make this possible GoFundMe Giving Funds https://www.gofundme.com/mario: One Account. Zero Hassle. Brex https://www.brex.com/mario: The banking solution for startups. Persona https://withpersona.com/generalist: Trusted identity verification for any use case. — Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/biological-time-travel-laura-deming — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (04:55) How Laura became interested in longevity at such a young age (07:40) The impact of homeschooling on Laura’s thinking (09:29) The invitation from Cynthia Kenyon that set Laura on her path at age 11 (10:39) Why pursuing longevity once meant working in the shadows (14:20) Why Laura shifted into VC at The Longevity Fund (17:24) How longevity transformed from fringe science to a legitimate field (19:40) Why Laura was driven to start Until (21:08) A simple explanation of reversible cryopreservation (23:10) Science fiction’s explorations of cryo (25:38) What sparked Laura’s interest in reversible cryo (27:35) How cryonics and reversible cryo differ, and the mechanisms behind each (29:00) Until’s roadmap, beginning with cryopreserved organs for transplantation (34:00) The biggest challenges in developing preservable organs (35:53) How cryopreservation works (38:30) Until’s building philosophy (42:34) How Laura learned to trust her weirdness (49:10) Finding the right co-founder in Hunter Davis (51:17) Future applications beyond medical necessity (53:00) Unanswered questions in cryopreservation (55:05) What’s missing in Hollywood’s portrayal of genius (56:21) Laura’s unique process for exploring ideas (59:58) Personal longevity practices (01:01:30) The positive impact of Bryan Johnson’s work (01:02:38) Final meditations — Follow Laura Deming LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-deming-b255362a/ X: https://x.com/laurademing Website: https://www.ldeming.com/ — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/biological-time-travel-laura-deming⁠ https://www.generalist.com/p/biological-time-travel-laura-deming — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I spent a decade of my life trying to answer this question of is there one technical problem which if completely solved and attacked would get me the thing that I want, which is to give everyone as much healthy years of life as they want.

• 0:10Mario Gabriele?

  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?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  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 this idea that longevity is the biggest problem in medicine. It is the most interesting one. I think we're going to see really incredible things next decade for sure.

• 0:34Mario Gabriele?

  How would you just explain reversible cryo to someone?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  I think what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time travel into 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?

• 0:52Mario Gabriele?

  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.

• 1:33Mario Gabriele?

  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.

• 2:18Mario Gabriele?

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• 3:41Mario Gabriele?

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• 4:24Mario Gabriele?

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• 4:43Mario Gabriele?

  More than 30,000 companies, including one in three US venture-backed startups, trust Brex to help make every dollar count toward their mission. Join them at brex.com/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.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Thanks, likewise.

• 5:11Mario Gabriele?

  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, you know, the next few decades to it?

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's totally funny to try and answer questions about when you were eight, you know, when you're like, you know, in your 30s.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  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, you know, you just have to pick a dream and go after it, and that there were all these problems and I need to go solve them. And so that was like, just what I, like, that was the matrix that I lived in. And one thing that I really, really am grateful for my parents for in retrospect is that I think I also was just very uncorrelated. So like, things that appeared normal to everyone else, like, that were very socially reinforced, I didn't have that as a kid.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Like, it was just kind of very, very uncorrelated, I would say, from the social matrix that... I kind of now understand a lot or see a lot more clearly. And so, you know, as a kid, it was like a combination of I just want to work in biology on the hardest problems. And at first it was like cancer might be the hardest problem. And then, you know, I think my dad might have suggested that aging was a harder problem. Then I was just like, yeah, great. Okay, like, you know, whatever is the biggest version of, you know, solving, you know, diseases. I want to go work on that. It's a combination of seeing people in my life who are older and suffering and just being like, this sucks. Like, they are in pain. Let's fix this. 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.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And we should also, so it's a combination of things, but I think, I think the biggest thing that I'm grateful for is that it was just so, there were no societal reinforced, there was no, there's no kind of conception that this was strange at all. Like, to me, it was just very, very straightforward. And so it was very interesting when I was like 12 and above to come and like interface with society and be like, oh, this is actually perceived as a strange belief or one that is like, you know, not ordinary.

• 7:39Mario Gabriele?

  Really interesting. You know, to an extent, it's probably unanswerable because you, you don't have sort of a series of other lives to compare it to. But to the extent that you're able to interrogate that experience, like, what are the things that you think you took from homeschooling? You certainly mentioned one there, this sort of uncorrelation and maybe this optimism that you can change problems. But in terms of the way your mind works, do you find that you're, I don't know, more creative than the average person perhaps? Or, you know, maybe you lack some sort of set of basic information that the average person learns in, you know, sixth grade history? I don't know, like, I, I'd be curious to, to see how you've sort of thought through that.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, uh, always hard to say about your own mind, what's true and what's not. There's a lot of, you know, like, like things that are running the background of how this one person did stuff. But like, I, I think what, what I can say that has some interesting to see is that, um, so one characteristic that might have been difficult in a different context, but I think has served me well, the context of being homeschooled is that I get really, really attitudeed about things that don't make sense. Like, if something does not make sense or is inconsistent, it's, it's very frustrating and irritating to me, like physically so. I get very like anxious and frustrated about it. I, I think, I think a good combination of things for, for my personal makeup was being dropped in this kind of area of idea of face space, where it's so outside of, it just kind of, you know, so it's again, you're randomly dropped in 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,

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Like drastically or just aggressively trying to make things consistent and to understand, okay, why is it that everyone else believes these things? And I'm in this part of my idea phase, where's the difference? And it's, it's very hard to reconcile those two things with understanding everything about how those ideas are built up from the ground. And so I think that, that's been a very helpful force, that, that like kind of intellectual generator, combined with being, you know, homeschooled in this way that was so uncorrelated.

• 9:29Mario Gabriele?

  That's so interesting. Um, when you began, and again, you know, it's difficult when we're talking about how young you began being interested in this space. Uh, when you started to think about longevity and mortality, what was the state of play in the industry and, and how did you start to be, you know, uh, familiarize yourself with that?

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, um, you know, one of the first things I did was get on my computer and Google, you know, longevity people and obviously Cynthia Kenyon, um, is, is still a canonical heroine of the field. I mean, she's extraordinary. Um, I was really lucky when I was a kid that, um, I got to go work at her lab, you know, this series of events where I was, um, I think, I forgot now, like 11 or something. And I emailed her and said, hi, you know, I, I love your work. Um, it was one of the first emails I'd said to somebody that I didn't know personally. You know, I just like sent it to a random person on the internet and she emailed back and, and, uh, invited me to come visit her lab. And then later, um, after I visited to work with her and, you know, I owe her the start of my career and she's done that for so many people. And so Cynthia is really the hero, is really the heroine of the story for me. Um, but I think one thing I'd say, so, so that's, that's kind of on the science side,

• 10:31Speaker 00

  you know, where I got my start, um, you know, starting to understand the field just in her lab as, as a kid. But I think what was interesting to me is, is the field sociologically and what was kind of going on at the time. And because, you know, in, in the longevity field at the time, which, which at that time was branded more as the anti-aging field, which is just, I think, um, or like it's to the, obviously like 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 had to be secretive, it felt like it had to be hidden. Like, you know, there's lots of people who were like mainstream professors in good universities, quote unquote, like Stanford or RIT and like they had to kind of hide that their interest 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

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Tool that like if she worked on this field as a young, very conceptual biologist, that she would, you know, be like an outcast from the field, basically. I mean, she was like, it would take an enormous amount of intellectual courage and bravery, I think, for her to actually pursue it. But, you know, and even her, you know, at that point, she had, she was just so obviously an excellent scientist that she could. But, um, yeah, and they feel like you had to kind of hide that you were just 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, the results showing that you can genetically mutate, you know, organisms and they live longer, that it'd be a bit less strange, but it's just, it was a very interesting combination.

• 11:48Mario Gabriele?

  Why was there that reaction to it? Was it, you know, some, some sort of almost sacred belief, you know, this just felt too heretical, too strange? Was it, you know, distrust of, of the results that had come to the fore?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  You know, I, 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, finding ideas that have this property is, you know, especially if you're a 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 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, most situations, um, you know, in, in most world contexts,

• 12:41Speaker 00

  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 perform medicine at the same time. But I think, I think longevity is one where it's so close to the psychological, like sort of paradigm that it's, it's, um, there's just a lot of stuff where, I mean, we can, we can talk for three, I mean, it's just so obviously at the heart of so many different things you're not supposed to talk about, or you're supposed to talk about in certain ways that that, yeah, really contributes.

• 13:12Mario Gabriele?

  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, that there are sort of a lot of instincts you have around why there might be a stigma around this. But yeah, there is sort of this, as you said, almost this evolutionary reason of, well, it's quite healthy for me to have this level of acceptance. And also, within the group, it makes me look, I don't know, a bit weak, a bit grasping after something unattainable to pretend like I'm going to be able to have this massively longer lifespan. So there's, yeah, there's so many thorny pieces there.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I would say just one flip side too is like, if you're the person claiming to give everyone eternal life, right? Like, that is, that is something that, and I'm not saying the longevity field is trying to like, nobody feels kind of in the middle of this thing where it's like, it's like, the people who I think the best, they feel like, we're not even trying to do that. They're just kind of like trying to make drugs that give you a couple of years extra healthy life, you know, and who knows what's actually going to happen at this point with the AICR and everything. But like, it like, you know, but they're in the middle of this weird thing where like, for a long time, people have used that catchphrase to then go out and be like, you get this thing that everyone hypothetically is. And it's kind of the way we have to be in a binary state around it.

• 14:22Mario Gabriele?

  Really interesting. I'm glad we dug into it a little bit. You know, you're, you had this experience doing research with Cynthia Kenyon. You also obviously did research beyond that. But then sort of the next, you know, 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 or accelerator. Why did you feel like that was the right path for you at that point to make an impact on the field?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so for context, I was like 16, 17 when I started thinking about, you know, like, trying something.

• 14:56Mario Gabriele?

  All of these things are, you know, a couple of decades before other people.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  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 trajectory. 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 much capital. But when I started working in the business, you know, like it took me kind of two years to actually just figure out even that of, you know, what a fund structure was and like, how to think about the business aspect like, but the motivation was just like, get a bunch of money and give it like, make sure one day every field has it to translate these ideas into companies.

• 15:41Mario Gabriele?

  That totally makes sense. Was, were people correct in assessing what the problem in the field was? Was it a money problem?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  From my current perspective, I think that it was more a lack of good founders and good founding talent. More than the money. I, I, I, I think that like money and branding helped the field be seen by a lot more potential founders that can now go start these companies. But I think at the time was actually more that we didn't have enough good founders.

• 16:07Mario Gabriele?

  Why do you think that is? Is it just such a, I don't know, it feels too far in the future for folks to sort of tractably get their hands around? Is it, you know, just combining too many disparate sort of skillsets that are hard to define in a single person?

• 16:22Speaker 00

  I think that there's an interesting intersection and longevity where you want someone who's a true believer in a certain way. Like you want them to 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, with also pragmatic like skills of being a great operator. And so just finding people who like had the capacity to really, I didn't admit this is true for any deep tech field, but like finding the people that 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, hard to find.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  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, but I think at the time it was, the field was still trying to figuring out what it was, what it wanted to be.

• 17:15Mario Gabriele?

  That's really interesting. Yeah. It feels like on many dimensions, great founders tend to be sort of paradoxical, but that's a really specific, quite hard to resolve or find paradox, I'm sure. Really interesting. When you say the field has maybe become sort of, you know, almost more legible now, we can sort of just think of it as making new medicine. What was the sort of transition there and what has sort of clarified enough for people to sort of be able to feel that way?

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, one massive milestone for the field is the CVM, a sort of division of the FDA. Thanks to the work from, from a company loyal, recognizing that you can have lifespan extension. On a label for dogs, at least to start and kind of recognize 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 also into like, okay, like this is a medicine that will be in a bottle that someone will take to live like X amount more healthy life. And how exactly do we chart the clinical path for that? And just focusing on that as like

• 18:24Speaker 00

  the main, if you can do that, I think it's a very reasonable problem. It's like, we already do this a lot of preventative medicines. It's not actually a crazy idea, just that like, I think if people see you as not focusing on the pragmatics of it, that's when it gets a little bit more decorrelated.

• 18:39Mario Gabriele?

  Yep. I also imagine just the sort of lack of a big tent pole organization that maybe trained a lot of talent in thinking about this work in a sort of entrepreneurial environment makes it hard, too. You sort of need companies like Until and Loyal and, you know, others to sort of be at the vanguard of this field and then, you know, train the sort of next generations of it, I imagine.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, honestly, and that's what's the most exciting I see now in the field. And I see with H1 and with companies like Loyal and just another company in the longevity space, it's the quality of talent. Like, it's like, it's like, it's flipped now. We're 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, smartest, like 18 year olds, 19 year olds, I can imagine meeting are foremost interested in longevity. And to them, it's just like the most, that they grew up with, like this idea that longevity is the biggest problem in medicine. It is the most interesting one. And it's so cool to see that the talent density in the field. I think we're going to see like, really, really incredible things next decade, for sure.

• 19:40Mario Gabriele?

  That's really interesting. So was it out of a certain degree of impatience that you sort of decided, okay, I've got to build a company of my own because I'm just not seeing enough of the talent that I, that I want as an investor? Or was there sort of another impetus?

• 19:54Speaker 00

  No, it was an extremely selfish, just, 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, 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. It's just like, how long do you want to spend with your grandkids and your family? And then just like, let's give you that number of healthy years.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  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, for a long time, I didn't 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 Longevy 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.

• 21:08Mario Gabriele?

  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?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so reversible cryo is what it sounds like. It's, you know, you, you take an organism down to a very low temperature, like low minus 130 degrees Celsius, bring it back up to the normal temperature. But I think what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time travel into 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, my co-founder Hunter has the 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, 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 at remission.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  There's, there's stories like this, like 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, it's this, this interesting combination of things like this crazy. Of like, oh, what if you could just bridge that gap and then seeing the role in fact? And then the same thing is like, we do this all the time with IVF. You know, it's like there are embryos, the most recent news was that an embryo is cryopreserved for 30 plus years. Right. And then rewormed and then is a full human now. There are twins who are cryopreserved at the same time, they're rewormed 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. Um, and, and we're not sure that we can, we can reverse the cryopreserve whole adult humans.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, like that, that, that's something that we're still trying to understand. But the, 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 that they might not have otherwise. And so it's like this, 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, we can build a business around like a very real use case for transplant patients.

• 23:10Mario Gabriele?

  So interesting. Yeah, I think, you know, you've talked about this before and, and on, you know, in until's materials as sort of a pause button on biological life, which 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, preserve themselves and, and jump a few centuries into the future.

• 23:53Mario Gabriele?

  Do you have any preferred science fiction representations of what you're trying to do?

• 23:58Speaker 00

  No, actually, it's, it's been interesting to search for them. I, I, I think what feels missing there to me, so, so one thing that was really clear to me when we started to think about, you know, again, if we could solve the long-term goal, which is there are a lot of, science questions that are between us and that, and we're, you know, um, going after organs first. We, we were very confident about organs. We're, we're still understanding with about 20 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, one thing so interesting to me is like how we relate to people in our life. When they're traveling, we won't see them for a long period of time. Or, you know, kind of like, it's like, it's really like, I think the technology and how it's presented should be a lot more about the loved ones

• 24:43Speaker 00

  that 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 i- if it's ever created like, you know, casually, like it's something that you do if you, if you need to do it, but it's not something that you necessarily do casually.

• 25:15Mario Gabriele?

  Yep, that makes sense. And it's true. I, you know, I've always sort of, without making any inroads towards actually making this reality, assumed I might try and cryopreserve myself because I think, you know, what's, what's, what's the downside? But I always, as a result, have to try and lobby my friends and family to, to do the same because I don't want to be roused a century or two from now and, and be, you know, all by myself. But you mentioned that there was sort of a moment of falling in love with this concept of, you know, reversible cryo. Was there like a particular breakthrough that you saw that, you know, really sparked something? Or, you know, just the concept itself? What was it that sort of warmed the, the heart and ambition to, to start until?

• 25:58Speaker 00

  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, 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 blowing the fun. I was really, you know, proud of a lot of the work that we've done, proud of a lot of companies. And there's a sense of like, this problem is not solved yet, you know, it's like, it's like, we don't even, we don't even have the, like, you know, until we get the first drugs into humans and approved for humans, it's like, you know, I'm really happy that Loyal's, you know, in the, 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, you know, it's like, I didn't get into this business. Just to kind of build a successful venture capital firm like

• 26:41Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  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 pace of progress. Uh, or sort of get, get stuff through, um, human approvals. And so it's 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, some sort of problem that I care about, or I don't know, in the background, I think that was happening. And it's, it's, it's really, it's really trying to find the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. That's incredibly complex. And it's just like, it's, it's so beautiful. I don't quite know how to like.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  It's because the, the beauty of cryo is that it's, 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.

• 27:30Mario Gabriele?

  That's really interesting. Okay. Well, we'll, we'll try and attack it from a few sides, maybe. But a, as a point of comparison for folks, you know, I, 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, as much as I'd expected, I think. Uh, there was a man named James Bedford, who sort of 60 plus years ago, you know, went through this process. Uh, and, and there are companies like Alcor and, you know, I think there's another one in Europe who sort of have been doing some version of this. Compared to, to sort of that state of play, what is it that like untils technology? Yes, please jump in.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So just to be very clear, that's different from what we're doing and in a very specific way, um, that I, I think, I think is important. So basically Cryonics is when you take someone who is, um, sort of legally, uh, sort of postmortem and you cryopreserve them according to like whatever the best method at the time. And there's an assumption of like, in the future, we might go 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, and like for us, it's like, can you take a piece of living tissue, an organ or organism, cryopreserve them and reworm 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?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  And, and so I think that, that to us is very important distinction that we're interested in kind of being able to, at least for ourselves, being able to like see and test, okay, like how well, um, you know, do these protocols that are revolving work so that we can make them better along the way?

• 29:01Mario Gabriele?

  Mm hmm. And so, uh, in terms of the mechanisms, you know, at play like. Are they just axially different than 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.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  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 cry or preserve. So I think a core advance in the field was the de-hypertrophication and that you could basically infuse a tissue with enough what are called protective 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 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 freezing their tracks when they get down cold enough. Like they just stop moving, but it's still a very disordered looking

• 30:03Speaker 00

  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 as part of cooling.

• 30:12Mario Gabriele?

  And, you know, in reading about this this field on Until's website, there was some really interesting sort of discussion of some of the promising results so far. Maybe for folks that, you know, aren't familiar with, I think it was parts of rat's brain tissue that was sort of successfully showed a level of activity post going through this process. I'm fumbling through this, but you might be able to give a better account of it.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that got me really excited about the field was realizing how much more advanced it was than I thought and how amazing it was that I had missed like all the progress that had happened. So for example, you know, groups have shown that you can reversibly cryopreserve a rat kidney. Like you could take a rat kidney, totally cryopreserve it, re-warm it, transplant it back into a rat, and have that rat still be healthy using that kidney, you know, a month plus out. Because there's this whole field of cryobiology that's doing amazing work that's focused on reversibly cryopreserving, you know, up to human sized organs. And so that, you know, that that that field gives you a lot of information about, you know, what chemicals you might want to use, what are the best perfusion techniques, all that good stuff.

• 31:23Mario Gabriele?

  You said a month plus out. Is there a point at which it does seem like, you know, these organs tend to fail at a certain point?

• 31:30Speaker 00

  No, no, it was just like metrics returned to normal function and it's, you know, a bit of a bother

• 31:33Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, got it.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  To keep the rat around for years. And so that was as long as they tested. But no, I mean, they were, the rat basically returned to like normal function and that, yeah.

• 31:43Mario Gabriele?

  Wow, really interesting. And you've sort of put together this phased plan for until, which I thought was really interesting and, and sort of riffs on some of these benchmarks so far. How did you come up with that? And for, for listeners, you know, what is that plan at the moment?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, we have this, you know, we ultimately would love to be able to build these hibernation plas, you seem to understand it 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 we're spoken of genealogy works in humans, can help human patients. If you're transplant patients, there's this crasen 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 US, go pick up the organ. You know, it's like, the patient has to wait

• 32:42Speaker 00

  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 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. Cause like, you know, once a patient has a missing organ, there's a very short time window to get it to the recipient. And so I talked to, you know, folks where they've been surgeons who were their plan is 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 a few hours too long. I talked to surgeons who may stay, have to stay up all night when the organ comes in, literally pulling an all nighter

• 33:24Speaker 00

  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, like remove, basically time is a constraint from this process. So it will help with transplant patients, it will help with transplant surgeons, and also transplant centers. I think that's just like realizing the impact of that was an important sort of. And then it also just like, 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. 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.

• 34:00Mario Gabriele?

  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 the major hurdles in front of you to get to that stage, the the stage of of human organs managing to, you know, pause the biological time on those, so to speak?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think for us, it's all about quality. Like, I think that we're like, I think to us, like, it's like, if you are talking about giving a transplant patient an organ that's using your technology, it's like, it like, it has to compare as well as possible to what their alternative might be in that in that situation. And so for us, it's like, just focusing on organ quality and getting that as high as, and organ quality, you know, post transplant, getting as high as possible.

• 34:50Mario Gabriele?

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• 35:35Mario Gabriele?

  verifying age, onboarding businesses, or automating KYC.

• 35:40Mario Gabriele?

  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/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?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Is it okay if I just try and explain to you like literally how crypreservation works? And then kind of work back from there?

• 36:06Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Trying to explain what we're doing. Okay, okay, great. So basically, the way that crypreservation 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. And it's very, 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 re-warm, spend minimal time in your zone. And interestingly enough, re-warming is actually a bit more of a challenge because when you re-warm, 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 re-warm 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

• 36:51Speaker 00

  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 about to be done in sort of human embryos for, you know, sort of like I, for like a crypreserved IBF embryos. Like this is, this is not something that is 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 are a lot less toxic because basically they're exposed to the organ for, for much longer. And so this interesting like dance. And then lastly, you're scaling up. So, 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?

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Where you've scaled volume by R cubed, but surface area by R squared. And, and so if you're still relying on kind of heat going in from the outside. Alone or sort of traversing on just the boundary of the object. That's a problem. So you also have to solve this kind of like, basically this scaling problem is quite difficult. But I actually it's such an elegant thing that like, you know, you know that these protocols work for cells, for embryos, even for small organisms and organisms. And it's just this question of like, okay, like, how do you engineer the best scaling property for biology that like, kind of takes it all the way, all the way up? And then also, one, I think, really beautiful part of the problem is that you trade off between the difficulty of different areas.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  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 biology problem easier by making engineering, by improving on engineering. Which was such a great problem that this was a great trade off to have in a biological problem.

• 38:32Mario Gabriele?

  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?

• 38:54Speaker 00

  No, if any, for us, it's just like, make everything as good as possible.

• 38:57Mario Gabriele?

  Okay.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  It's to be a stuff, for example, like, you know, the whole field of cryo biology 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 like, you know, what the field is best there. But yeah, I think for us, it's just like literally take each part of the problem seriously. In most areas of drug development, you're presented with some times, 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, you've got a hundred or so atoms or like an antibody that has a hundred thousand or so atoms. But like, tools that basically can bind to a single protein or affect kind of a very simple interaction. And that was supposed to take a system that has like 10 to the 27th with the 20 atoms and revert it back to like a normal phenotype. When you often even like, don't quite understand what's going on, mathematically, right? And so it's like this crazy hard problem in drug development.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  And it's like, no wonder that so many drugs make it to 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 car 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 one thirty and or below, bring it back to normal temperature and do so with minimal perturbation. And yes, like, there's a lot of biological questions that then become added on to that. But it's like you're 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, some of 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,

• 40:26Speaker 00

  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, nuke the different organism using this physical laws. I'm 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, give this the parameter. And that's, I, 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, me getting, I think, for, for me, just like the excitement of like, oh, you can think about this problem really well. And you could think about, you could like, you can physically model in your head in ways that correspond to reality. And that is like so, so beautiful when you find that with a problem.

• 41:09Mario Gabriele?

  That's so interesting. How do you think about the, the sort of timelines for this sort of a company? Like, you must know plenty of more traditional founders in, in tech in Silicon Valley. Do you try and model yourself against, I don't know,

• 41:29Mario Gabriele?

  traditional biotech or anything like that? Or is it, you know, just too different?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think for us, the question is like, are we going as fast as possible? Like, like, and I, I think you just kind of know, right? It's like, so it's one thing about tech, about detail, right? It's like, often you do have this, this flexibility of like, you know, the final product you might be talking about is a long way away. And so, you know, there's sometimes capacity if, if you have.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  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 risk the curve or we can't, you know, sort of adequately like trying to really feel that urgency on a daily basis. Like that to us is the biggest metric. But then 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. You know, and, and keeping very ambitious goals in mind. And 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.

• 42:34Mario Gabriele?

  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, 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?

• 43:04Speaker 00

  You know, it's, it's really interesting. So I think when I first came to Silicon Valley, for sure, I had, you know, the, 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, 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 values. 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, and have that curiosity and have like a very genuine drive to like do good and just meeting people like that who are also successful, I think has been, that's been really great. But I think one thing that's been actually big for me is just dropping a lot of microconceptions of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Like I'm a really weird person, you know, like deeply, deeply, deeply weird.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  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, it's just more and more like, okay, like the, the, the deeply weird parts of you are your alpha. Know like that's that's where the good stuff is. And so I feel more comfortable, I think, being different now.

• 44:11Mario Gabriele?

  What are the the the examples that come to mind when you think of Weird Alpha for you?

• 44:16Speaker 00

  I I think it's that I I'm really obsessive and and often like I'll get obsessed with things that don't necessarily like they're they don't necessarily make sense. Exclusively, if 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 I used to really penalize myself from that. And I'd be like, what's this weird thing? You know, or you're just or I I didn't also just fall into 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, this this just these ideas, you know, that that really

• 44:58Speaker 00

  like like I I deals feel like my friends, you know, it's like, or maybe this is kind of crazy, Steve, 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 it leaks an interesting way to this thing that I think sort of Peter Thiel once said this interesting thing. I forget if it was like something he said in conversation or just I heard from someone else, but like, he said that his main task entrepreneur that to fund or maybe that's not his main test, but just like a thing that he mentioned, he really indexed on 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 gonna work?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  And like so many people just say like, no, you know, or like they're kind of like, I don't know. And it's like, fucking don't offend those people. Like, you know, it doesn't make makes no sense. But it 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, 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 you that had 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. 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. And you, it's like, it, it's really hard to explain what has like a hundred, it's like, it just, there's so many different things about it that come together to make it interesting.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  And then that's, that's part of what makes it special. I don't know how to explain it. Um, yeah.

• 46:34Mario Gabriele?

  That's so interesting. Have you ever wondered if you have like synesthesia or something like that? Because the way that you describe ideas is so like sensorially, sensorially rich. Uh, and that was something actually, you know, sort of almost noticed in, you had this really interesting piece, I thought you wrote maybe five years ago around your mental models. And it, it's struck me also that the way that you sort of talk through your, your mental processes is super linked to, to sensation and, and sort of color and light. And, you know, this sort of feeling. Anyway, it was a, I wonder if that's, uh, ever something you've, you've thought about or, you know, the, the particular processes going on in your brain.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  I have, I have, I, I, I don't know. I, I think to me it feels, um, this also might sound totally absurd, but I think it's true. And I, I think it's, I'm 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 a, like it's, I mean, cryo to me, it's like, okay, why is it beautiful? Right? It's like, if, if you solve this problem, if you solve the full scope of it, 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 limited. It has this beautiful, attractable, beauty of attractiveness. It's like, okay, if you, if you tried to 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 I've ever met, one of the best leaders I've ever met. Um, I could not be more grateful for working with him.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  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, it spans, you know, like physics and biology and neuroscience. And like, it's a kind of, it was 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 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, and then I think last it's like sociologically so interesting, right? It's like, why was this not, like, why is it that not everyone is starting a career company? Why is it that this is a field that has all these kind of things that you're, you know,

• 48:42Speaker 00

  you have to sort of think about quite, quite specifically. I, 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, that's rare in medicine. Temperatures are parameters, like all these different things come together. And, and it's like these, yeah, I, I just, and, and then you just know like the idea is kind of wanting to, it's wanting to be seen, like it's wanting to, um, yeah.

• 49:05Mario Gabriele?

  That's very beautiful. It's, it's really, it's cool to hear someone talk about their work that way. What, 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?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Hunter, Hunter's the absolute bust. I, I, again, a large part of, I, I picked working on this company very selfishly in that I, I, you know, one tour company I 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 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, we're simply trying to serve hope. It's like, literally sounds absurd. You know, for context, he's an extremely rigorous physicist, has a background, you know, you know, Caltech for his PhD and then was at, you know, Harvard and one of the, the, like the best neuroscience slash kind of physics background labs there when I first talked to him. So, you know, he's coming at this from the fact of having been trained to think rigorously

• 50:04Speaker 00

  about kind of 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 calc. 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, can I disprove this idea? And the thing happened where you know, you start thinking about the idea and then you just get pulled in and you're like, wait, but wait, but wait, no way, you know, but like that he built that up from first principles for himself, like that he A didn't dismiss the idea psychologically, B went off and was like, I'm not also going to take Lars' word for it. I want to check for myself was was incredible. And then also just, I think he's such a founder at heart. Like, um, you know, when we first started talking about this idea, it was very early or sort of, you know, sort of like in the sense of we

• 50:48Speaker 00

  were still working out, you know, some like after the science plan, you know, he basically after the interview flew back to Boston and like committed and then like came back with his family, you know, like, you know, just months later, it's like just this level of just he's just such a natural, like he's one of the best founders I've ever met, you know, you know, and I'm so grateful to be working with him for that reason, but just like that level of, um, once you intellectually are locked into something, then just like fully going after it.

• 51:14Mario Gabriele?

  Fascinating. Um, you, you made the, the important distinction around how, you know, what Until is doing is very different than sort of the, the postmortem freezing. Do you eventually expect that folks might start wanting to use Until's technology, uh, either as a substitute for that, wherever you think, hey, I'm getting pretty old, like I'd rather, you know, go through this process and see if, uh, medicine is way better in a hundred 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, we're, we're drifting, you know, now farther into the future and discussing these things. But yeah, I, I'm curious.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  For, for what we're talking about, it's like, you only do this most, uh, like, like one, one thing that I've really learned over time, especially as I go more, it's like, we're here because of people that we love, you know, it's like, uh, you, you wake up every day and like a large part of, um, feeling good, feeling the person that you are often is like determine my social context, at least I think for a lot of people, that's true. And so it's like, this is just, I, I think there are people who literally are just like totally oriented around 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, I, I, I don't. I, I think, I think we're focused on the reversible aspect of this because

• 52:36Speaker 00

  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, 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, if you like, how well do these technologies work? And, and, and make them better and use the iteration loop, which is important for us.

• 52:58Mario Gabriele?

  That's super interesting. Um, in this, you know, mental models post that you, you wrote, it's a, it's an old post. So I, I, you know, I don't know how well you might remember it, but I thought it was super interesting and a really sort of interesting way of, of understanding maybe how you think and how you reason through problems and ideas. Um, one of the things you said was, most people don't deeply understand what they're talking about, me included. It sounds like you deeply understand what you're talking about with until, but which parts are you maybe least sure about? Or, you know, should someone have the most curiosity about digging in more on?

• 53:35Speaker 00

  I mean, there, there, 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, I, I think, you know, one interesting thing is like, what neuroscience questions would you have to answer? Or, and how would you test them to understand whether the whole body case is viable? I think that that's kind of interesting. Oh, like kind of, um, part of the problem that demands a lot of work. Um, and also if anyone wants to work on it, and this is a podcast, should, should definitely kind of inbound. I think that's an interesting question for us to be thinking about. But I think the, the other part is sociologically, you know, it's like, what, when I was younger, to me, it was obvious that if you just make a medicine, it's good. You know, it's sort of like you, like this medicine can be a warrior's of life and then they know what to do with it. And I think for something like this technology, a thing that really is important to me is that, you know, if you have a loved one

• 54:17Speaker 00

  and, and, and you're going to be, you know, make, let's say like you, 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. 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, of how, or how do you really think through, um, what the experience is like for people who are, are still living their normal lives? We don't really know how to think about it well. And it would be very important to get that right.

• 54:51Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, that's so interesting. There will, you know, assuming, you know, when this technology is mature, there will be totally a whole fields of of study around those relationships you imagine and and how people navigate that. That's 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 is the biggest flaw there, so to speak.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  I think I might understand that a little bit differently with a couple of years over. 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 front with typing at a keyboard or they're frantically writing equations on a blackboard. And I think personally, what has felt the most generative for me 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 know, doing these things. But I think it's like acknowledging that sometimes the way that you find really great new ideas

• 56:05Speaker 00

  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's not so generic. But there's something there that was very, very helpful for me to kind of get comfortable with, I think.

• 56:22Mario Gabriele?

  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.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, I mean, obviously, I don't recommend that for 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 I think for me, like, emotion is is very important. Like, if I'm trying to think about an idea, 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. And I think that just like gives me a lot of interest, like my attention is then just very much on this beautiful object and then it gets a lot more kind of compute.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  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, there's, yeah, but there's something, yeah. I don't quite know how to describe it.

• 57:31Mario Gabriele?

  No, it's it's interesting to hear you talk through it.

• 57:35Mario Gabriele?

  You know, you've been interested in longevity, obviously in in different ways and and different problems for 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 taken you in a different direction.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a there's a funny meta beautiful idea, which is what makes ideas beautiful. How to call it.

• 58:08Mario Gabriele?

  There you go.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  I was just gonna 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 just like this meta idea of like, what makes your night, can I just find all the ideas that have this property? And one that I'm watching 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 I'm really curious whether my into it, my, basically, I 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.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Can I have a similarly like immersed and enjoyable experience thinking about mathematics when the objects are less or much more foreign from from my, the way that my brain works and I'm I'm interested in trying to understand that right now.

• 58:59Mario Gabriele?

  Have you found other biologist scientists who share the same sort of experiences you do when, you know, commuting with a with a cell or with these ideas?

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Kind of, I I think a lot of them, I think a lot of them is 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 want 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 by numbers.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 that that books, I think, huge inspiration personally.

• 59:37Mario Gabriele?

  Really interesting. Yeah, because I do think, as you said, you 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 or something like that around a lot of these things. So um, yeah, it's really cool to to hear that. I'm curious, like, if there are things for your own longevity that you've, uh, over the years, become, you know, very uh, set on or are very convinced are important to do, you know, maybe beyond the the obvious things like, you know, moving a decent amount and and eating reasonably well. Are there are there things that you really try and maximize for?

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, definitely I get asked this question a lot. I I think, you know, to be clear, I think the area where I have expert, where I have a level of intellectual of um, 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? But that that is the area where I have some amount of knowledge. I think that like, it's actually a much more complicated subject in many ways. What would an average person do best to do more of? And so I 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, like, you know, and

• 1:01:01Mario Gabriele?

  Seems like it would be hard to do that as a founder, yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think if you're a founder, just like, look like you're, you know, I I think it is possible to get there where you're a lot bringing in really levels of stress. But 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 stresses. I think that even just getting to like a normal baseline is probably the first thing for me personally.

• 1:01:23Mario Gabriele?

  That makes sense. Um, you know, this is uh, 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, and of one study. From the, the perspective of, you know, uh, 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?

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  I think that, like, to the degree that, like, like, doing, like, certain communication things gets a lot of people excited to eat healthier, just like in a way that's relatively straightforward or exercise more like that. That seems, I'm like, it's good for people to do those things.

• 1:02:16Mario Gabriele?

  Yeah, the evangelism.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think, I think that, that, that effect of, of, of it, um, yeah. I, 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, as an important thing. And to be able to kind of like, um, not be seen as bad for thinking about health, but to be, you know, sort of celebrated for things about health. That seems, that, that seems, that, that, that component seems good.

• 1:02:39Mario Gabriele?

  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?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  I, I think if you actually gave me that, I would take like five years to think about it. I think selfishly, a thing that I want to find out in the near term is like, if I took 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, um, relate, feel ideas and then can just, yeah, understanding, like making like a, a large compendium of ways to like, it's a bit like making a good learning curriculum, but one that's very much around the, the, the feeling of experiencing the idea as opposed to like being able to be something useful with the idea. Um, which is also important, but just like that's, for me personally, I want to really fascinated by is, is like the experiencing the idea.

• 1:03:32Mario Gabriele?

  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?

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  I think for me personally, I'm someone who thinks in a pretty embodied sense. Like, I need to move to think. And I think that it's very culturally normal to sit and be very still. Like, I think it's important to not freak people out. You don't want to be, like, flailing. But I think just being okay with, like, movement during conversation and thinking as more normal and being able to find ways to do that that feel good, I think that would be nice.

• 1:04:07Mario Gabriele?

  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?

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  I mean, insanely selfishly, probably book dot bio numbers dot org, which, you know, anyone who's listening to this podcast can go look up.

• 1:04:30Mario Gabriele?

  Really? Wow, okay. There you go.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  But I think what I mean by, but like, what I'm going to understand is, like, I think that, like, to me, it's like, the best experience of science is one that feels like the literal, like, best artistic experience you've ever had. It's like, imagine the most, you've ever been emotionally moved, and then imagine that in the context of seeing the literal deepest and truest laws of the universe in their most compressed form, and to have internalized those as much as possible in that moment of emotional, kind of, like, just ecstasy, honestly. And just, like, those two things together. Like, I think I wish everyone had that feeling just once and kind of had a sense of that for themselves. And they could find that, you know, in some, having that generated by understanding the

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  universe, to me, is just like such a extraordinary thing that we can, we have, you know, that capacity, for sure.

• 1:05:22Mario Gabriele?

  Hmm, amazing. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna definitely buy a copy, so that's, you know, as good an endorsement as I think I can imagine.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  It's a totally free textbook online, too.

• 1:05:32Mario Gabriele?

  Oh, great.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  The website is just like, everything is, yeah.

• 1:05:35Mario Gabriele?

  Amazing. Well, Laura, thank you so much for taking the time. I learned so much. And, yeah, really excited to see what the next few years hold.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Thanks, likewise.

• 1:05:45Mario Gabriele?

  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.