Laura Deming — On Pausing Biological Time & Preserving the Continuous Self

Laura Deming is a technologist and venture capitalist focused on anti-ageing and life extension. At 17, she founded The Longevity Fund (followed by age1), the first VC firm dedicated to longevity biotech, after being selected in the initial cohort of Thiel fellows (2011). Today she is also CEO and co-founder of Cradle, a startup pursuing human whole-body reversible cryopreservation.

I speak with Laura at Cradle’s San Francisco office. We start with the philosophical question of personal identity, and ask a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, do we want to preserve? From there we explore what a “more humane transhumanism” might look like, the game-theory of 200-year lives, scientific awe as a research tool, embodied thought-experiments to see inside the cell, how the FDA could shave years off longevity-drug timelines, the anti-memetic qualities of reversible cryopreservation, and why it might be the most leveraged problem in longevity.

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Transcript

JOSEPH WALKER: Laura Deming, welcome to the podcast. 

LAURA DEMING: Hi!

WALKER: I want to do this conversation in reverse, so to speak. I want to start by talking about the philosophical and sociopolitical implications of longevity, and then finish with some metascience and the science of longevity and cryopreservation specifically. 

So, to start with the philosophical implications of longevity. Say I reject the ego view of personal identity, and I accept Derek Parfit's bundle theory: each of us is just a web of experiences shifting through time. How should that affect how I think about longevity?

DEMING: I’m very obsessed with this question right now. It feels very core. I feel like not enough people are thinking about it, even though some people are thinking about it. I would say where I'm at currently is that it's very subjective, that at the core of the next century of what you might call transhumanism or human interaction with technology is just this question of, what do you want to preserve over time? What's the thing that you care about? There's no right answer that I know of... I don't think either Eastern or Western philosophy have some correct thing that you should try to be doing here that I know of. And so I think the question is: what do you want to preserve?

And you can actually make arguments for continuity. I think you can reconstruct reasons that you might care about physical continuity over time. But I think they're very different from what you might be born with, which is like this feeling of “I need to survive, need to just make it to the next moment”... I think that becomes hard to defend — unless you just want to pick it intuitively as a thing to hold onto, which you can also make the choice to do that.

WALKER: How close are we to the point at which these debates actually start influencing how capital is allocated? 

DEMING: Like, today? 

WALKER: Seriously?

DEMING: Yeah, 100%.

WALKER: Oh, wow.

DEMING: Yeah.

WALKER: Can you say more about that?

DEMING: Well, I think the reason I'm really interested in them is I think that, today, they're influencing how capital flows in a very subconscious way. Most people are born with certain beliefs around these topics that are not that well examined, and they're guiding intuitions about what's correct and what's not correct to invest in today. And this is interesting because the investments today then determine what might be most available in the future. And that might then determine what a lot of people have access to. I think that is a strange, strange place to be in.

WALKER: Right. And which view do you think is winning at the moment, at least in Silicon Valley?

DEMING: I think what I see personally, although it might be very biased, is there's a lot of starting out with what we're born to be most adapted to. Which I think is like: I just want my physical self to continue for as long as possible with physical continuity, and just the most conservative possible perspective on preserving yourself — like ‘Ship of Theseus’ all the way. And then I think when people really think about it, often there's like kind of a one-way door, or maybe it's a two-way door, but like this door you go through where it's like, “Oh actually it's pretty hard to defend that.” In Buddhism this might be analogous to doing a no-self meditation: just repeatedly asking, what is the I, what is the I, what is the I?

I'm not that knowledgeable, but I think in Buddhism like when people just do this enough, eventually they're kind of like, “Well actually there's like…”... Maybe they come closer to Derek Parfit view. Which is interesting that both types, the philosophical traditions, kind of get to a similar place.

WALKER: Right.

DEMING: But then I think you should still be doing things to keep your body healthy and alive, and so you kind of have to reconstruct notions of what's meaningful about that.

WALKER: So I'm curious how your emotional relation to longevity has evolved over the last, say, decade or so. If I watch videos of the young Laura Deming, I feel there's this kind of fiery zeal behind your motivation to drive the field forward. And I guess I'm curious whether or how that has changed.

DEMING: Yeah, there's some stuff that I haven't written about publicly, but I'm planning to at some point. That really shifted how I felt about that over time. I think I grew up with that as a really core part of my identity. I was like, my job is to fix this problem. No one else is, or almost no one else is working on it. There's a field that's working on it that's very passionate about it, but it's not that well known. Everyone is very confused about this for some reason. Like, there seems to be this mental blocker on working on this.

And one thing that I've really understood, I think, as I've gotten older, is kind of the argument for the opposite of longevity and what's good there. I think it's still extremely incorrect to not work on longevity drugs. But I think there is a very real and very valid piece of wisdom in wanting to not think about this problem, which is it can cause extreme mental anguish if you don't accept certain things in life that feel both, to you, horrific and inevitable. 

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

It's tough because I think just factually it's incorrect not to work on longevity drugs. Just in the sense of like, if you believe in medicine, they're just a type of medicine. There's an irrationality at the heart of viewing them as different in some very core way. They're kind of like just exercise or anything else that would give you more health years. These drugs will do the same thing. 

But I think there's something that I didn't understand about the deep wisdom of how to live a good life, that it often drives a lot of opposition to the idea of thinking about longevity as emotionally.

WALKER: Can you share an example?

DEMING: I think there's this perspective that, let's say I look at you and I'm like, you're a human and you're like a really beautiful human. And you experiencing the world…. I think if you really relax your sense of self, or your experience of self, there might be a perspective of your experience of the world is as valid… like much more similarly valid to me as my experience of the world. And so there's some sense of just if all of humanity or a lot of conscious entities are having a good experience over time... I think what I'm kind of dancing around is this idea of it really depends if you get in the teleporter or not.

So, you know, this thought experiment of: there's a teleporter, it'll take you to Mars if you get in it. The way that it does that is to create a copy of you on Mars and destroy the copy of you on Earth. And some people will get in the teleporter, some people wouldn't. I think if you would get in the teleporter, there's then a question of what you care about preserving, which could be your values, or it could be very close to your current identity, or could just be that people similar to you are still around and that makes you happy, and it feels similarly good to you that that's true, that you specifically would also be around.

This is actually another reason why people might not be interested in longevity as one conscious entity experiencing more time. But in those worlds, you might feel equally happy that just the population at whole is still around. One counter argument there, though, is longevity allows you to have conscious entities that have a very long time to evolve. So they're around for a long time. And there's just a lot of beauty, I think, that you might see come out in that kind of conscious experience that you wouldn't with a much shortened lifespan, if that makes sense. So you can still, even in that world, have arguments for why the population might be a lot more interesting, or you might see different things with much longer times for specific conscious entities to evolve.

WALKER: So I have some questions about transhumanism. So I know that lately you've been searching for a more humane transhumanism. And I'm curious what it is specifically about the core framing of transhumanism that you're trying to substitute for.

DEMING: I think there's a couple of things, and I don't really understand this that well now, but I'm thinking about it a lot. I think one thing is... I was trying to understand at some point what the transhumanist manifesto, philosophy, was, because I'd been adjacent to this movement for a long time and hadn't really understood it. So I went and read some stuff, and it just… If you ‘Control+F’ and search for, like, the word “love” in a lot of these manifestos, it's just not [there]. I think David Pearce might mention this more in his work. But a lot of the stuff that I've read is very oriented around, like, gaining power and just being really powerful and like this drive to survive.

And I don't think that's bad or even necessarily shouldn't be part of the future, but it feels pretty incomplete. It doesn't feel inspiring to me personally… I don't know, there's something there that I... And so that's one part. 

The other part is it feels way too confident in the types of technologies and the types of ways that things could change. And I think the more that I think about this stuff, the more it's interesting to me to see populations change in ways that are hard to predict versus individuals change in ways that are easy to predict. And so I'm interested in versions of transhumanism that are more oriented towards the former and less centred around the latter, if that makes sense.

WALKER: So the core framing is far too focused on the individual as the unit of analysis?

DEMING: I'm not sure. I think the thing that I know for sure is that there's some version of this that we just have no idea what it even looks like yet. And I think the individual-versus-population view or like the determined-versus-emergent view are two axes where it feels like there's some push and pull. But yeah, it almost feels like in my head it's like receding from a totally different point in phase-space or something. 

One interesting fact is that a lot of sci-fi authors, I think intentionally, don't write futures that have qualia very different from our own because that's very hard to relate to. And so their books would be very not popular.

Greg Egan mentions this. He's one of the most futuristic authors ever. He's like, “Past a certain point, I can't write narratives that are more than a given amount of sci-fi with regards to qualia because no one will relate to this book; you need to have characters that are relatable.” 

And yeah, something about that also feels related to this lack of really new visions for what we would call transhumanism looks like.

WALKER: Yeah, on that, have you found any literature that does a satisfactory job of capturing a more humane transhumanist vision?

DEMING: Not that I really deeply… I think yes, but maybe the thing that for me does this right now and I think would make no sense to like most people is just Rilke's Duino Elegies, which I don't understand at all. Like, I understand .0005% of these poems. But I think they are trying to say something about something that feels relevant to this. That feels interesting to me.

WALKER: I see. I haven't read them, but can you describe them?

DEMING: So they’re these poems that…I'm trying to remember the opening line. I think it's something like: [“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?”] Or something like this. I mean, it's almost impossible for me to begin to just understand personally or even describe what they're about. But it's about kind of an individual in some sense trying to connect with something that feels on a different level, I think of what you might call understanding or experience, that they only see very dimly. A theme that often comes up in the poem is angels. Not in even a Christian, or any specific kind of religious, sense. But just as a metaphor for something that is very dimly felt.

And this feels really interesting to me as an analogy for us as humans trying to... I think the interesting thing about the idea of transhumanism, or a related concept like transcendence, is that you're trying to become something that you don't understand. It's like Flatland, like Edwin Abbott. You're like a little 2D thing. And then you're trying to become a 3D object. But you can't even conceive of what that 3D object is in your current 2D form. And that to me is the most interesting, right now, part of transhumanism: is that act and what it means to try and do that.

WALKER: Right. I was trying to think about this question last night myself, about whether there's any good humane transhumanist literature. I couldn't really think of any examples. I thought maybe The Gentle Seduction — the short story by Mark Stiegler.

DEMING: Yeah, so it's really interesting that you... I was like, damn: one of the most interesting sets of questions. Yeah. A colleague of mine, Kat, showed me this story and it's amazing. And I think in a sense the way that our company thinks about technology is something that she's been thinking about a lot and feels really interesting for the company that I run with my co-founder. But I think for me personally it's a bit of a different flavour… I think even in the story like the types of technologies they're talking about — it's so relatable to our current human experience. It kind of avoids the whole question of how strange the change actually will be. It just says that you should do it gently. Maybe the thing I could agree on with the story is that it's probably good to care about how people feel while you're making changes to what we would call the human experience over time. That makes sense.

WALKER: Right. I think that actually provides a good segue into the next thing I wanted to talk about which was the sociopolitical implications of longevity. Before we started recording we were chatting about Francis Fukuyama's takes on transhumanism… So assume that we do achieve substantial advancements in longevity science, and average human lifespans and health spans are, say, 150 to 200 years, or any kind of average length that you think is most interesting to discuss. What are some of the most non-obvious ways that that changes human society?

DEMING: I've tried to think about this in a really principled way and like I am an economist… I think my current state of understanding is that I probably don't even know the largest and most important things to consider. But there are some things that I found interesting to think about. But I would say there might be somebody who spent 10 years thinking about just this question — not even the technical parts of longevity — that would answer it far better than I would. 

I think for me, the thing that I'm most passionate about is actually… I don't know if you've ever heard of this painting called The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It's one of the most famous paintings of all time. You know if you see the wave in the ukiyo-e style.

WALKER: The tsunami.

DEMING: Yeah, exactly. It's actually fascinating. Once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. I think Wikipedia said it was the most memed image ever. Maybe even more than the Mona Lisa. I'm not really sure about that claim, but it is everywhere. I see it on the street, walking down Valencia Street in San Francisco, all over the place, on people's laptops. There's probably two people in the office who have this on their laptops just for some reason, right. 

And the painter of that work was — I forget exactly how old, but I think he was 60 or 70 when he made it. And he has this incredible quote where he says that he feels at the end of his life as though he's only just begun to learn how to draw, you know, a line or animal, and he's like (I may be misquoting a little bit), “Maybe when I reach the age of 100, I'll be able to draw things which are truly alive. For every line, every point has its own…” And then he died a little bit after giving that quote. It's just this idea that it's one of the most incredible works of art that is persistent in even this very competitive environment — this work of art just shows up everywhere. It's got this depth to it. It's got this originality. And it's created by someone who spent their whole life preparing to do this one thing. 

I think it gets back to what we were talking about earlier with this idea of what do we care about with regards to self? I think an interesting idea around why you might want a conscious entity to live a long time is just: what could happen if you have this kind of evolution over a long period of time of conscious entity that you might not be able to install deterministically if you just instantiate something, you know, from scratch. It might be very hard to get to that same point of evolution for a certain kind of process.

That, to me, is just beautiful as an idea, of what could we see, you know, that we've never seen before? And especially if you can give those minds a kind of fluidity and longevity. And this is not talking about minds that are ageing to the point where they then become unhealthy. It's talking about keeping minds creative and fresh and kind of changing and finding ways to do that. That feels so interesting. 

I think another thing that feels really interesting to me is this idea in game theory of, you know, often if you have a single-round game where you have two agents playing with each other, it's in your interest to defect and hurt the other person.

But if you have, let's say either a very long number of rounds or — if remember correctly, which could be incorrect — it's that you don't know how many rounds you're playing with the other person, I think that's the point at which it becomes advantageous for you to cooperate. And so yeah, one thing I'm really interested in, although I think there's lots of reasons why this might not be true, but just one concept I'm fascinated by is this idea that if you have so much time and unknown amounts of very long periods of time in society, how might your behaviour be different? There might be some bad ways where you might be more conservative or other things, but there might be ways in which you are incentivized to be a lot more prosocial. Although, you know, that's just a thing that I'm fascinated by. I don't know that I can defend that empirically with current human... I think there's lots of reasons why that might not be true but I think the game theory of what society looks like is very interesting.

On the negative side, I think one of the strongest things that I've been able to think of personally that is true about longevity is that it could mean if you have a lot of capital at the start… Let's say the first generation that lives a very, very long time, but then you have just like this insane advantage; youth is no longer this advantage that it was, and instead just being born way earlier as a form of inequality where you get much more time to compound capital. 

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

WALKER: On the first idea, it's interesting to apply this to scientists and to wonder what would have happened, say, if we had Einstein for an extra 50 or so years.

 DEMING: Yeah. An important thing: it's not just Einstein, but… I have a friend… I need to fully understand whether this is correct, but my understanding is that Einstein had a period in the middle of his life where he got quite sick and then became much less productive during and after that period. And so not just lifespan, but also, I think, feeling robust, vigorous, feeling like a lot of health and a lot of plasticity — those are important concepts.

WALKER: Yeah, absolutely. Because obviously things as simple as your energy levels make such a great difference to your ability to do great work. 

So I wonder what the other sort of dependencies or assumptions are here. So another notable thing about Einstein is that some people… So in the James Gleick biography of Feynman, I think he talks about how Feynman and Freeman Dyson thought that Einstein sort of lost his creative powers at the point at which he stopped thinking in concrete physical images. I wonder how much that kind of stultification in thinking is linked to the ageing process, or if it's just like a generational thing, or if it's just some kind of other contingent factor.

DEMING: Yeah.

WALKER: I mean, obviously there are other things that affect a scientist's productivity than just their vigour. But if we did have Einstein for an extra 50 or so years, I wonder whether he would have been able to achieve that level of productivity that he had during, for example, the annus mirabilis.

DEMING: Yeah. So this takes you back to a question that we started with, which I will just keep… I think it is the core, which is: what do you want to preserve over time?

WALKER: Right.

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

And I think in my head, when I see hero's journey stories, they often feel personally to me very much like they're describing subconscious experiences of personality change or identity change. And so I think the question is: maybe if Einstein wanted to be the kid that he was when he was — I forget how old, 27, 28, during the annus mirabilis, maybe a lot earlier if he was 23. You know, God damn. But if Einstein was like, “I want to preserve as much of that person as possible,” perhaps it would have been difficult. 

But let's say that Einstein had some openness to changing parts of his identity, as many of us do, and he had some ideas of what principles he wanted to guide that change. I think that's kind of where you would expect there to be more of a potential for continued relevance.

WALKER: So one of the concerns that Fukuyama raises in his book with respect to… So there's a chapter on longevity. One of his observations is that our worldviews are shaped by our formative experiences — often the formative experiences we have in our youth. And there's a generational effect here. So, people growing up in the Great Depression or the Second World War or the sexual revolution will share a set of youthful experiences that quite durably affect their worldview. And that's why you often see in social and political dimensions these sort of revolutions or changes where we go from one generation to the next — so from like the Kennedy years to the Reagan years, for example, or to or from the New Deal era.

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

DEMING: With a lot of rebuttals to, or ideas that are not counter longevity, but kind of like “here reasons why it might be bad,” it's like, yes, I could definitely construct a version of society where longevity might be bad. Like one in which everyone joined a company, had a job and then never left that job, no matter how their beliefs might be relevant or not, and there was no change in the society, and no way in which holding on to beliefs from the past that were no longer relevant today affected your position in the society — sure, maybe I could construct a society where like this would be like a problem.

But I don't think we live in that society even today. Like, I think if you look at a lot of artists, right. You know, I loved Linkin Park growing up. And we still have Linkin Park, they're still huge, but they're not necessarily the dominant sound the same way they were when I was growing up in the 2000s. And that's not necessarily because they didn't… They kept making music. Actually a lot of their work I think is a little bit similar to, or it has a similar vibe to, what they started out with. There's some argument about, you know, how much they deviated. 

But they were replaced by different styles because people like different styles of music, and those became more dominant because the culture shifted and that's what people responded to. So I don't know. I think Francis has a point, but I don't even know if we live in society right now that that point would be the strongest, if that makes sense.

WALKER: Yeah. So I want to talk about some meta scientific questions now. One of themes that just juts out to me in your online writings is the importance of the emotions of joy and awe in science and scientific discovery. Is it possible to train the ability to feel scientific awe?

DEMING: To feel scientific awe? I sure as hell hope so. Like, it'd be really sad if not. Yeah, I really hope it is, and I don't know if it is. Yeah.

WALKER: For people who are capable of feeling it, do you know whether it's possible to have it on demand?

DEMING: Yeah, for me at least. Yeah.

WALKER: Oh, that's so interesting. Okay, so for me, sometimes I'll have feelings of scientific awe. It could be something incredibly cringe, like, I don't know, I'm looking up at the stars or something, and I just have that moment of, “What's this all about? I really hope I live to see the answer to what we're doing here.” So I have that feeling of awe. And then maybe I won't have it again for six to nine months. And I have it again — and two things happen. The first thing is that I have the feeling. The second thing is I notice or I remember, “Oh, that's that feeling.” I'd kind of forgotten what it was like to feel that. Almost in a similar way that when the seasons change, like when you're in winter, you kind of forget what it was like to be warm. And then when you're in the summer, you kind of forget what it was like to be cold.

And I haven't been able to conjure it on demand by just: “Okay, the next day, let me try and have the same thoughts and recover that same feeling.” It feels like you sort of lose sensitivity to it or something. 

So I'm curious that you might be able to conjure it, and I was hoping you could share more about that.

DEMING: Yeah, I have spent an enormous number of hours thinking about that.

WALKER: Oh, really?

DEMING: Yeah. So actually, there was a point in 2018 or 2019 where I had this experience of my friends were out of town for the weekend. I was alone by myself in our house. And I just had this intense absorption into an evolution question that I was thinking about. And I just got really into it, and I remember feeling like, “Oh, I can see the universe. I can see what you might call your conception of God,” or my personal feeling of just seeing being one with the universe. And I was so excited by it. I was like: “I can't forget.” 

And so the thing that I did, which, you know, honestly, I'm terrified, might be, like, really bad for my personal health — but I wrote on my hand a number. And it was a number of hours that I wanted to be in that state of just intense awe and absorption. And then every couple of days when it rubbed off, I would rewrite the number on my hand so that I would remember. It was like the most personal kind of tattoo you could imagine, of trying to remember to be connected with this. 

I've spent a lot of time iterating on different things. I actually have a page on my website that goes through the things that work for me to get into the state. So for me personally, it's really important to be in some kind of grassy, open environment; to have music playing; to have eaten sugar recently; to have some kind of set of mental objects that are developed enough that they feel like you can interact with them in the state. 

I think cell biology is very good for this. But I think if you read Einstein's work and a lot about his early education in high school, I think there's actually this whole tradition in mathematics that Einstein was also exposed to of high school teachers who would ask their students to do very visceral things. I think I read about a math teacher who was telling his students to hold apples in one hand and, you know, some amount in one hand, some amount in the other, and then get an intuitive sense for quantity that way and then use that kind of somatic intuitive sense in their thinking. And I think Einstein's high school had some kind of tie to this kind of visceral... They had some very specific philosophy of education that was related to this. 

And yeah, so for me there's just a set of things that work to get into the state. But also there's a lot of preparation, intellectually, to get objects that actually you can then manipulate once you're there.

WALKER: Would it be fair to say that that is the emotion you optimise for in life? 

DEMING: Absolutely.

WALKER: Yeah, wow. I don't want to kill the vibe by trying to quantify it too much, but how many, I don't know, how many hours per week or per month do you think you would spend in that state?

DEMING: So 512 hours since 2018.

WALKER: That's amazing.

DEMING: Yeah.

WALKER: Wow. When you think about the role of scientific awe in doing science, would you characterise it more as a kind of behavioural thing where it's just an important way of helping you maintain motivation and persevere at very difficult long term projects? Or do you characterise the importance as more about helping you actually achieve better insights in the short term by putting you in a state where you're somehow more creative?

DEMING: What was the first thing again?

WALKER: I guess the first thing was more of a behavioural thing where if you're experiencing this pleasant emotion, maybe you just stick at a difficult project for longer and then that's indirectly better for doing science, but there's nothing about the state itself which in the moment makes you more creative than normal.

DEMING: Yeah, that makes sense. Honestly, I struggle with this enormously. I think when I first encountered the state, I was like, “This is everything; you should be in this state all the time.” And I do optimise like most of my life around being in this state. And at the same time, over time it was like, yeah, like a lot of great scientists probably aren't in that state ever. It's not clear that being in that state solves all your problems…

I think a little bit is certainly very good, but I don't know how much being in that state is going to make you more likely to win a Nobel Prize or something. Probably most people who have won a Nobel Prize have been in that kind of state at some point, I would guess. But you know, honestly, over time it's just like I don't care at all how much... 

I think part of the state does feel that it's tied to some idea of truth or something. And I think that feels important to me, the idea that being in this kind of state… 

It’s interesting: I've had a lot of experiences that are more… I don't know if “non-dual” is correct, or I don't know if I've ever experienced that, but just like more meditative, let's say, where it's like, “Oh, I feel, you know, great, or I feel like some kind of calm, or I feel like peace. 

And this feels different than that. I've always been confused about the difference between these two. This feels much more like there's some laws of the universe that are real and I get to talk to them and they like me or something, and they want to talk and they want to hang out. And I think I just like the state for itself. I don't like it for any functional reason.

WALKER: I see. It's like a hedonistic thing.

DEMING: Totally. Yeah, 100%.

WALKER: That's awesome. And so it sounds like quite a spiritual experience.

DEMING: Yeah. I think at some point reading descriptions of people having intense religious experiences, I was like, “Oh, like, that's… I'm just… For some reason my brain is wired so that I experience something that sounds like what they're describing, but in response to reading a physics textbook.”

WALKER: Can you recall any recent moments or insights you've had that triggered that state that you'd be happy to share?

DEMING: Yeah, I mean, one that always gets me there — I don't want to jinx it — but, normally, is just this idea of being in a cell. 

There's this exercise you can do called ‘powers of 10’. I have a video about it that I did a while ago that's like super jank. But it is the thing that at first was helpful, which is: you can probably imagine a cell. You know, it's like you have some idea of a circle and there's some stuff in it...

But there's a thing you can do where…Did you ever, as a kid, have an experience of going into an imaginary world where you construct an imaginary world and you feel like you are actually there? Have you ever had that? 

WALKER: Mmhm.

DEMING: So imagine combining those two things where let's say you've read enough of the cell, you’ve seen enough pictures, that you kind of have some sense — and you know some of what might be true of the laws, which is the really interesting part. And then you can connect the feeling of being in an imaginary world with being in a cell. And you can use your brain to track the kinds of laws that are true in a cell, such that the world that it's generating actually corresponds to reality in some very deep way, like you push the world and it pushes back at you in a way that reflects what the cell would actually do. And so you can explore around and actually find out stuff. Like, that's magic. 

And I think a lot of physics thought experiments have that kind of flavour, potentially.

WALKER: Yeah. So one thing embedded in that is you need a very robust understanding of the actual laws that govern, for example, molecular biology, right? You need to have all of that scientific understanding at your fingertips.

DEMING: I would think about it like you need to have enough to render a world that has some… Someone I worked with for math education who has this really concept of toys in mathematics — like, you give someone a toy, and they poke it and push it — and it needs to have at least as much complexity as, let's say, a math problem, a simple math problem that has some stuff where you can poke the math problem and it'll push back in ways that it's telling you something. The world needs to have at least a little bit of that.

WALKER: Are there any ones we could do right now? Could we do a guided visualisation? Or maybe it won't work for that reason, because I need to be able to render it properly in my mind? Maybe we could do one which conveys a sense of logarithmic scale.

DEMING: Maybe… It's not where my brain is right now, but one thing you can do is this thing called ‘powers of 10’, which is like: basically imagine your arm in front of you and then you hold that mentally. And then you imagine your hand, and then you imagine expanding your hand so it's the size of your arm. You just do that and you see this large hand is in front of you, right?

WALKER: Mmhm.

DEMING: And then you put your thumb out next to your hand.

WALKER: Do I have to physically do it?

DEMING: If you can imagine it visually, internally, that's great too. And then you expand out your thumb so it's now as big as your hand. And basically — I forget the exact progression — but if you do this down eight more steps, you get down to an atom. Eventually you get down to a mammalian cell, and then a fibroblast, and then — might have been a virus next —, and then maybe a protein after that. Although I might be getting this a little bit confused now, it's been a while. And then the last stop is an atom, which is about 10^-10 metres across. 

And you realise that you were just 10 steps away logarithmically from an atom. And then you have this kind of ladder where whatever visualisation you're doing, you can kind of move up and down the ladder to the correct scale and see what's happening there, and then leave it there and then go to a different part of the scale and see what's happening there — but everything is short. You don't have to say goodbye to any part of the world. Which feels really satisfying.

WALKER: Right. That's cool.

DEMING: Yeah.

WALKER: So this kind of, I suppose, embodied thinking — we like it because it can help produce feelings of scientific awe. Does it help give you counterfactual scientific insights?

DEMING: It has for me, but I've become a lot more uncertain about how much in general it would do this. Actually one thing that it was very helpful with is thinking about cryopreservation, which is the topic I work on now with my co-founder at Cradle. And initially it was just helpful in doing thought experiments. Initially I didn't have a good way to think about cryo. But seeing that if you just look inside a cell, you see a bunch of molecules just bumping about and that… 

Basically there's this really weird thing about cryo… I'm writing a piece right now just trying to express some of this. But it's incredibly strange that you can cryopreserve and rewarm anything. 

Because if you think about it, let's say that you took like a really complicated factory, and you stopped everyone in their tracks in the factory, and so they stopped moving, and then you spun them around and had them walk in a completely random direction and then had them, you know, go back to their normal walking speed — but everyone was walking around in directions — that's what cryopreservation is. Basically the way that it works (and I'm not sure if it'll make sense to explain it), but it kind of just randomises the molecular motion of all the molecules after you go to very low temperatures. Which is super weird, right? And almost everything that we build at the human scale is incompatible with that kind of… We don't really have systems that are invariant to that kind of randomisation. But cells are for some reason. 

And this was immediately obvious… Or it was pretty easy for me to guess why that might be quickly, personally, and I'm sure this has been described also from literature, but because I'd already been doing a lot of thought experiments in the cell, it's very clear when you do that, just like the cells run on passive diffusion — and how strange that is. Like, the cells run on molecules bouncing about in random directions. There's some phases, but it's just like… I don't know if I'm doing justice to the concept. But unlike a computer, where you kind of know that if you start current off here, then it might go here…. 

In a cell, you just have this bag of molecules that's being shaken all the time and that's how it runs. And nothing is guaranteed to be in a particular place unless it's very bonded to be in that place. 

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

WALKER: I think so. And for context for people, here we would be cooling, for example, resected brain tissue to minus 130 degrees Celsius.

DEMING: And below.

WALKER: Yeah, and below, past that threshold. It's funny, one of my questions was going to be, do you have any toy models for thinking about cryopreservation? So this is clearly an example.

DEMING: Yeah. And it's complicated because you could argue that, well, because we empirically know that you can cryopreserve things, what good is this toy model? But I do feel like I understand cryopreserving better for seeing the link between this property and the fact that cells evolve to run with very high amounts of thermal noise and therefore have all these properties that make them so good at being invariant to this randomisation that we induce with cryopreservation. And how strange it would be that we would think that would be true for any other system, you know.

WALKER: Right. One other question on embodied thinking. Do you think certain types of science or certain fields of science are more amenable to that mode of thinking than others?

DEMING: I think so. Although I don't really know. Biology to me, feels so natural for that. Like, it feels so natural to imagine yourself in a cell, as like a starting point. I think physics also feels very natural. 

I'm starting to understand this tiniest amount of mathematics the past couple years and I think that feels just super different. To me, mathematics, the little that I think about, feels much more like a totally foreign object than it does. like I'm just embodied person using my normal world simulation but in a different scale of world or a world with different rules. It feels like I'm just dealing with objects that are so different from my normal experience that I just have to kind of assume that they're different in “latent space” and kind of go with that. So it's a similar level of maybe immersion, but at least personally it feels super different in terms of how much you can use your 3D everyday intuitions from walking around in the world.

WALKER: One of the other themes that stands out to me about your career is mentorship. And I had some questions about scientific mentorship, because you’ve been both a mentee and a mentor. You began volunteering in Cynthia Kenyon's lab when you were 12. I'm curious — because obviously you were a very precocious 12 year old, but being able to receive and interpret tacit knowledge in a scientific lab requires a tonne of context. So I'm curious how you would describe the most important things you learned in Cynthia's lab.

DEMING: I haven't thought about that really in particular in a long time. So it’s interesting. I'm not really sure. I mean, Cynthia's, to be clear, an extraordinary person, and she's one of the most extraordinary mentors I think I've ever met in that she has this bravery where she believes in ideas before everyone else just because she thinks they're right, and it's not from any kind of motivated reasoning thing. I think she just really at the time was like: “Developmental biology controls, you know, certain processes. Why not also this process?”

I don't know if you know, but she was, I think if I remember correctly, if not the lead author, at least did a lot of the work herself, on the seminal paper from her lab because no one in her lab — or maybe it was a rotation student in her lab who took on the project — but then nobody else in her lab would take on this risky project that she was so excited about.

WALKER: Was this the age-1 paper for C. Elegans?

DEMING: This was the DAF-2 paper. 

WALKER: Sorry, the DAF-2 paper. Yeah. 

DEMING: Which is a related mutation. Yeah. And so she's amazing. But also, I mean she's just an incredible mentor especially to unconventional people… I was not the only person who was ‘off the beaten track’ that she took into her lab. And I think the same things that make her incredible with ideas where she just can see what's there and that just kind of is the thing that's important to her…

I forget if it was weekly meetings, but like she would meet with me and treat me as seriously as a grad student in terms of like her attention and care towards my intellectual development, and explaining things to me, giving me projects that were extremely advanced in retrospect for what I could have been seen to hold. I just felt extremely seen by her as somebody who just took me seriously intellectually, even though I was like 12 years old, you know. 

And in retrospect I don't know if I would have the capacity to be as gracious and thoughtful about it as she was at that time. In retrospect it really moves me when I think about it because I think she's so special and I just didn't understand at the time how special that was for her to do.

WALKER: Yeah. I wonder whether maybe the most important thing you learned in her lab was how to be a scientific mentor?

DEMING: Maybe that, or I think also just like the self confidence of being taken seriously by somebody that I thought was like the most amazing person in the world. That's probably also… 

Scientifically, I think there's a lot of stuff where I now have a lot of memories of like looking at glowing worms under microscopes and trying to ablate their gonads that are kind of funny. It was just a funny time.

WALKER: So if we think of mentorship as a talent search problem, does it differ in any unique ways from other talent search problems like finding a co-founder or finding employees or investing in founders as a venture capitalist?

DEMING: I think mentorship is so beautiful and it might be the case that trying to describe it explicitly destroys any actual insight or any actual kind of stuff there. But I think for me what feels really important is to try to be a mentor to people where you feel very strongly that they have something beautiful inside them that you can see. Like it might be the case that everyone has something very beautiful inside them, but it might be the case that I'm only best able to see that in a certain kind of person who might like similar things to what I liquor… I think I really respond to what feels like authenticity and deep care and love for ideas. When I meet somebody who has that, I feel very interested in them being able to express that well in the world, and I feel able to think through what might help do that well sometimes. So that feels really interesting to me.

WALKER: Beyond Cynthia, is there any kind of mentorship you wish that you'd had or that you could have right now?

DEMING: Oh, yeah, enormously. I think Silicon Valley is a very industry-town, and I came here when I was very young and I didn't appreciate how much that, I think, quashed a lot of creativity that I had, for a long time. And I would have really appreciated, I think, somebody who could have given me the affirmation that I needed when I was younger that it's good to be creative, it's good to be loving, it's good to be intuitive. 

You just get trained when you come here to overfit to these very specific patterns of being that are just so…. They really destroy a lot of originality, I think, and a lot of very, very interesting stuff that is at the heart of doing new things.

WALKER: What's an example of a Silicon Valley pattern that destroys creativity?

DEMING: I mean, if you're pushed to fundraise from an early age, I think you're very aggressively trained to… It's kind of like sales. You have to very quickly make an argument for your competence and your trustworthiness and your knowledge. Very quickly. And then you have to kind of hold… 

This is what I used to think. I think I feel this way less now. But because you're young, you don't know anything. And so I think it almost feels like you're trying to both be honest with who you are, but then also trying to pretend to have this competence and this confidence that, you know, when you're 17 and you've just come here… When I was younger, I did feel very confident, but in retrospect, it was kind of just like me hyping myself up internally…

I think now, when I have an idea that I'm really passionate about, I feel confident at the core of my being, from the idea itself, it feels like this idea is just correct, I don't care what anyone else says. Maybe it's incorrect and I'll find that out later. But I kind of have this deep sense of like, yeah, this is right. I think when I was younger it was like, I'm going to make this happen because I have to — is more where a lot of the confidence was coming from. And that feels different to me. 

WALKER: When you're mentoring someone, how do you think about the right balance between actively helping them versus kind of just letting them figure it out themselves?

DEMING: I think for me personally, it's almost never actively helping someone. Although I have been thinking recently about maybe you should push yourself or people sometimes. But I think you just see the beauty in someone and you're like, this is extremely beautiful. And what from the outside could help that beauty grow or something? Yeah, that's how I think about it.

WALKER: Okay, some questions about longevity and cryopreservation to finish with. So there's this book by Morton Meyers called Happy Accidents about serendipity and drug development. And if I remember correctly, and this was true at least at the time the book was written, of all of the drugs on the market, only about 50 of them were being used for what they were originally designed for. How should longevity science grapple with this problem of serendipity, given that if there's a drug that could have an effect on all-cause ageing, presumably it would need a long time to reveal its benefits? So how do you grapple with serendipity in drug development in longevity science?

DEMING: Those feel a little bit distinct to me. The difficulty of running longevity trial… My current understanding, which again, like the field is now in a place where I want to be careful and respectful: there might be something that I might be incorrect on… But like there just isn't a good way to get around running very large, very difficult, in many cases very expensive trials for the first longevity drugs. That is just kind of locked in, to actually talk about lifespan extension and showing that. There might be a world in the future where we have better proxies for ageing and for longevity that we can use to more quickly do trials, so better biomarkers. But I think we're not to the point where those are sufficient to imply longevity.

WALKER: I see. I'm curious to get your current takes on ageing. Is it mostly the result of sort of noise and randomness or is it more the result of programmed or quasi-programmed patterns? Which theory of ageing do you favour at the moment?

DEMING: I mean, I think that it's an extremely strange but true fact that there are single genes that we can change in many organisms that just change lifespan, and sometimes in the positive, and sometimes in very small organisms to an insane multiple. And that we really don't know how much those genetic changes… how far we can push them and how much they translate to humans. We don't know how much they translate to humans, to be clear. I think we don't know the causality of how much changing very simple things that we’re good at changing in drug development in humans could lead to lifespan extension yet. But it's just really weird that it could be programmed at all. It's incredibly strange.

I think the default assumption is that it's mostly just a system breaking down over time in a way that's not very simply programmed, but there seems to be just some nonzero component that you can control, at least, again, in a lot of non-human organisms — and potentially also in humans, there might be some things that we could change. Yeah, it's really strange that that's true.

WALKER: Say a bit more about why it's so strange.

DEMING: I think it's similar to cryopreservation where I just always… I might be unique in this regard but I start off usually feeling very sceptical of things in biology because we're like 10^27 to 10^28 atoms arranged in this incredibly complex fashion. We're very robust in some ways, but we're not made to be robust, to a lot of the changes that we're considering making. I think to some degree we've evolved to have modularity. 

I think just the more I look at biology and biological systems and see the number of atoms that are interacting in these really complex ways, the more it's surprising to me when we can make very simple changes and have the whole system kind of change.

And again, there are some physiological systems that I think it makes sense that they be evolved to be simply regulated. But for stuff that's not necessarily as evolved, I think your prior should be that's not likely to be plausible or something.

WALKER: And to give people context here, the interventions that we can make on the worm C. Elegans can increase its lifespan by about 50%.

DEMING: You can go up to 2x. I think that they're, if I remember correctly (at this point, it's been a while), but it might be sixfold. There might have been higher lifespans reported, although I'd want to go back and just double-check to see if someone's replicated that stuff at this point because it's been a while now.

You can just do insane amounts of lifespan extension in things like worms. In mice it's more like let's say 60%, maybe a little bit higher, depending on what you wanted to define as an intervention, but still quite substantial. I think the argument with mice is often that maybe these mice are sick or maybe they're not representative of the most healthy human population. But even in that case it's surprising that you can change one thing and have them live differently.

WALKER: Yeah. Okay, so say you're appointed FDA Commissioner tomorrow. What are some of the first things you're doing to reduce regulatory bottlenecks to longevity drugs?

DEMING: I think I would lay the groundwork for ageing as an indication. I think there's a lot of regulatory work to be done to conceptualise what it could mean for a longevity drug to exist for that indication. So I put that groundwork in place. 

But honestly the most important thing would be I would just find some way to shorten timelines for review cycles, while still being effective and thoughtful, from let's say six months to ideally a couple of weeks. Although, I don't know if that's actually plausible for the FDA. I’d want the FDA to do what it had to do to be safe and effective.

But I think that the six month review cycles for preclinical companies can be very... It's basically just like: every time you want to make a change, you have another six months of iteration, of waiting and just kind of like you submitted something and you're not really sure. And there's some parts of the FDA that are amazing and very collaborative and very helpful and will give you a lot of feedback so that this process works well. But I think just that uncertainty… 

Again, it might be that it’s required for some kind of internal process. But just that is I think such a huge contributor to timeline uncertainty for companies. So anything that would help the FDA shorten those processes by functioning more quickly in some way — that's very helpful for companies.

WALKER: So The Longevity Fund closed its first fund in 2013 and several of its portfolio companies have now IPO'd like Unity Bio. Now that you've started to see some of the results of the investments, I’m curious whether you've noticed any patterns among the founders or companies that have been most successful?

DEMING: Yeah, I mean we started out investing in a lot of companies that… I think we were all over the place in terms of stage… And in the first fund, I think there was a huge focus on just doing things that felt very conservative in terms of they looked like normal biotech companies, but there was some way in which they were quite linked to ageing if you looked at the biology. That felt important just to give the field examples of companies that we felt biotech understood but that were also longevity. 

Over time though, it's just become really clear. The most important thing for us is they're very founder oriented companies going after actual moonshot ideas that we're interacting with from the early stages. Like, if you look at every company in our portfolio that's done very well, they kind of have those characteristics. I think that’s just because that's what we understand best.

WALKER: So before we were recording we were talking about evolution and you've been self-teaching or studying evolution for a few years now. I'm curious what’s surprised you most about the field of evolution?

DEMING: I don't know. I mean I think I'm pretty naive about this stuff. I definitely don't understand evolution almost at all. But I think one thing that's been really interesting is just that evolution and natural selection are two different things. Natural selection is the combination, like we're talking about [before recording], of replication, variation, and selection. And evolution I think is just the idea that things change over time in some continuous way, and just the observation that that's true. So I might know that there's this species’ fossil record, but that doesn't tell me why that's true. And so you can use natural selection as an explanation for evolution.

I think the only thing I understand now is just that evolution is almost never used in a way that to me feels like the person who's using the term understands it or that using the term is actually helpful if that makes sense? So often it's just used to mean ‘change’, or people will often say like “we evolved to be this way”. To the extent that they're invoking an idea of natural selection in that statement, it's often unclear what's the basis on which they're invoking that claim. It's like if we evolved, everything in our current life, because of natural selection, like that just that doesn't actually add... That doesn't necessarily… 

It's also not just not true that everything that we see around us is selected for. Many things might just be neutrally… just take our population from a perspective of neutral drift. 

And so I just get really bothered a lot honestly now by the phrase ‘evolution’ being used and then just not really being used in a way that's helpful at all.

So the problem though is like there are other ways that populations can evolve. Like you can have one mutation take over a full population, but not be fitness-giving. If you have a random walk, then you can have a mutation completely 100% take over a population just through random walk. And that actually might happen a lot. I think we currently think that it does happen like a significant amount of the time. And so, yeah, a large fraction of the population got here, changed over time in a way that looks like it was selected for, but wasn't maybe.

WALKER: Right.

DEMING: And so then you have to really defend: okay, if I'm talking about natural selection specifically, what's the evidence for that having been the mechanism? And it's like, well, how do you actually prove that? Which I think is an interesting challenge. I think natural selection definitely happens, but it's like, how do you know when it happens? How do you justify when you use that as like… And what does it tell you if it happened about what's there today?

WALKER: And presumably your interest in evolution was motivated by ultimate explanations for ageing?

DEMING: Not at all. No.

WALKER: Oh, wow. Just pure intellectual curiosity — or something else?

DEMING: I was really obsessed when I was a kid. I was like, I want to figure out what Newton's laws are but for biology. And after thinking about this for a while, I became convinced that laws around how populations learn to coordinate were kind of… I don't know if they're actually missing from evolution, but they're just kind of like the thing to focus on: communication in populations. And so I had to understand evolution to understand that concept, and then just got really, really confused about evolution. And I'm still confused about evolution.

WALKER: Me too. But we should continue trying to work it out. So, okay, some questions on cryopreservation to finish. Firstly, through The Longevity Fund, you would have obtained a nice broad view of the field of longevity. I'm curious: of all of the different things you saw and all of the different emerging technologies, why you chose cryopreservation as the thing for you personally to work on.

DEMING: It's so obvious. Like, it's so obvious. Like, I can't tell you how… To me, when I think about the problem of cryopreservation… You know, I feel like a mathematician who spent their whole life trying to find the perfect mathematical problem, and one day you just find this thing and you're like “oh my God”, you know, it has all the properties. Cryopreservation is so intensely fascinating. I often talk about it like it has… Let's say you want to pick a problem to spend your life on. Things that I care about that I think are not unique to me are: I want to pick a problem that's:

• very impactful; 
• a problem that is technically tractable — you can work on it and make progress (we might not be guaranteed success, but like you have a fair shot); 
• and that almost no one else is working on seriously. 

To be clear, there's a lot of cryopreservation work in academia. I think there's just a very low number of companies working on it from a company perspective as there could be. 

And cryopreservation is just the best answer to this question I've ever found. If you fully solve medical hibernation, then plausibly any terminal illness that is worrying you or hurting someone you love, you could potentially imagine using cryopreservation as a way… And when I say ‘cryopreservation’, what I'm referring to is reversible cryopreservation. So let's say I had the perfect device. I think about often a one-way time machine. Like, let's say I can put you in a box and then in one to two years you can get out of the box and kind of walk around as your normal self… 

I know somebody, my co-founder knows someone, who you know, got stage four metastatic cancers. And in my case the person lived. In my co-founder's case, the person died. They were both about, let's say, half a year, a year, away from… in my case, the person made it to the drug coming out that saved their life. And for my co-founder they were, let's say, even months away from when they would have been eligible for that drug.

If you just had something to bridge the gap to therapies that we know are going to come out that would save your life... You know, we're not talking even about living infinite amounts of time; it could just be a normal lifespan. But it's just getting you the best access to medicine that might be very, very close to where you are — that feels just so urgent and important. 

And so leveraged, right? Like, often in medicine, it's like you want to solve every problem and yet you're focused on solving one problem. To be clear, medicine needs to continue for cryopreservation to be at all relevant. So it's not an argument for not working on medicine. But if you solve this one problem completely, you then get access to all these other things in the future. And so it's so leveraged.

And then technically it's certainly an extremely difficult problem, and there's worlds in which it's not solvable. But it's so much like neurotech in the sense that it allows you to use engineering and physics to interface with a problem in a way that's just so deep and so not true of almost any other problem in biology. It so intimately allows you to use these technologies to quickly develop new solutions and use the full palette or the full spectrum of ideas and physics to attack the problem. 

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

WALKER: Right. So perhaps this isn't a useful way to carve up the space here. But if we think about the four different categories of ageing interventions — restoring, replacing, delaying, and then pausing —, obviously cryopreservation fits into that last category of pausing. Is that category somehow inherently more tractable than the other three categories?

DEMING: To me… And I've written a whole post on this that I'll post at some point. But it has a number of characteristics that, as a single problem… I think if you want to solve all of longevity or all of cryopreservation, I think the latter will be a more straightforward problem just because it's more fully defined and it has more places to plug in tools from physics and engineering in ways that give you a lot of leverage to solve the problem. So cryo definitely feels to me a lot more tractable as one problem. 

Now, a lot of people should still work on all of longevity. But I'm just saying if you want a particular single problem to work on, it just feels really perfect — or it feels like it has a lot of amazing characteristics.

WALKER: So you mentioned there's somewhat of a taboo around cryopreservation. So I assume it's fair to say that public communication is more difficult for cryopreservation specifically than it is for the field of longevity in general?

DEMING: It's incredibly complicated… Or actually, I'm avoiding... I think it's very anti-memetic. Like, there are things that I can't talk about publicly that I think are just such amazing reasons why it's under-worked on. But because part of the power of them being good at shielding the field is that, if you talk about them publicly, then it leads to these other things that you might personally want to do. There's just very interesting reasons why it's so anti-memetic. I think that's changing. I think a lot of the reasons why that was true are now changing. But it's incredibly, incredibly well-crafted to not be noticed, I think.

WALKER: Is there anything more you can say here that you can share publicly? I'm just really interested in this.

DEMING: Yeah. You know, maybe in a couple years, but right now not really. What I can say is in addition to the stuff that I'm gesturing to, there's also just a lot of things where it's like, I think cold things… People don't like being freezing or very cold. This is actually a huge deal. Like, there's a lot of like intuition of not liking the idea of cryopreservation that I think adds another level of veneer. But yeah, there's just a lot of stuff...

WALKER: Okay, interesting. So it runs counter to a lot of intuitions.

DEMING: Runs counter to a lot of intuitions. Yeah.

WALKER: Okay. Watch this space. 

Well, it's been lovely to talk with you. Thank you so much for joining me.

DEMING: Yeah, thanks.