The Exchanges

Q So, I'm gonna fast forward through a bunch of, like, lab work you did, and going to MIT, and being a Thiel Fellow, like, why a longevity fund?

A Me just being very literal, like, at the time that I was interested in longevity, I think if you ask the average person in the field, like, what's the big problem? Most people would say, well, we just can't get enough funding for our projects, and so that's the big problem, and I just took that literally, like, when I was a teenager, so. I'll solve that problem. Yeah, I was just like, literally, like, I should just get a lot of money to, like, help push longevity drugs forward, and the name for that happened in venture capital fund, but it definitely wasn't working downstream of the idea of venture capital, like, that came after this idea of, like, Um, just getting money for projects that should have money and didn't.

AI assessment note: “we just can't get enough funding for our projects... I'll solve that problem”

Q Maybe it's useful to zoom out and just say, like, what is the goal of Until?

A I would think about our goal as trying to create a new form of critical care. The example that I would give that is sort of the core of the company is there's some years where certain diseases such as, like, Metastatic melanoma go from being like, like sort of in a single year, like metastatic melanoma went from being something that you had like a six to nine month prognosis, like less than a year of expected survival, to with like, you know, new combination immunotherapies, you might have a decade plus of expected survival, or like 50% of people sort of surviving over a decade, um, uh, you know, without getting sort of, uh, death from melanoma. In fact, I was starting to have other things at that point. The tagline is like, Single years can make the difference between a patient dying of maternal illness and, like, living long enough to make the critical cure. But right now, like, there's no way to press pause on their biological time. Like, what if you had an ambulance for the future, right? Like, what if you could take someone who is on their deathbed and, um, you know, find some way to, you know, just sort of hibernate them, basically, until, um, the sort of critical cure for the disease comes online. And, like, you know, and in this context, we're not talking about necessarily decades or kind of, like, you know, much longer than that. Initially, it's just kind of in the con…

AI assessment note: “I would think about our goal as trying to create a new form of critical care.”

Q How do you recruit Uh, and, like, lead in a company that has, like, let's say, an unclear, like, timeline around a really big scientific goal like that, like, in terms of both finding people that are the right fit, motivating them, and how do you think about urgency in that context?

A I mean, I think we have a pretty clear timeline for our first product, which is, like, get a reversibly cryopreserved, or, so, uh, basically transplant patients today surprisingly frequently miss organs that are on route to them because there's a timing problem, um, so, like, you know, organs expire, um, very quickly after they become available from a donor, um, and... That's very unfortunate. Yeah, and it's crazy because, like, they're the, they're, like, one of the most precious resources we know of, and yet, like, people regularly charter private jets, You know, like it's like you're putting a surgeon on a private jet to go pick up an organ, get it back to the patient in time. Like, and you're doing all that at the last minute and scheduling the patient for surgery at the last minute. So the patient has to wait within like a two hour radius of a transplant center with a pager on them or like a notification device at all times. And so the first product that we're aiming towards is just, you know, being able to pause time for the organs. The patient doesn't, you know, you can take as long as you need to get the organ to the patient. Um, and that, that's very near term. Like that, that's not long term ethical. That's like, we're aiming to get that into Like, frequent studies into the clinic as quickly as possible. So I think it helps to have a very concrete goal that clearly is…

AI assessment note: “it helps to have a very concrete goal that clearly is relevant to a long-term”

Q With your co-founder Hunter, was it like an immediately obvious, yes, we should work on this together?

A He's one of the few people where if I ask him a question, like he'll come back the next day and give me an answer. He's literally thought through from first principles, like what the correct answer is. Like, I remember at some point I realized that he'd written a doc on like the principles of like, you know, Like most people, you know, like, like would write that from the literature or kind of like citing different sort of, um, sources at various levels of granularity. Hunter went back and like re-derived fundamental laws of stat and mech as part of like, this is what you should know in craft preservation doc. Like, I, I really admire how much he builds up from like, like, uh, like really simple models to try to create coherent, like technical pictures that, that are more complex. He's like the most fun, interesting, best person to work with, um, ever for sure.

AI assessment note: “He's like the most fun, interesting, best person to work with, um, ever for sure.”

Q the nature of consciousness, but one thing that you don't know is that my, like, very long ago wished for technologies that I wanted to exist were telepathy and, like, Upload the ability to, to freeze time for humans. I didn't actually think that was something you could go work on. So apparently it is. How do you end up working on that or being interested in longevity at all?

A There's two different questions. So yeah, I come from longevity background, but in my mind, like, um, reversible prior preservation is, is applicable a bit outside of that as well. I don't know. I mean, I think I'm really obsessed with areas that feel like they should be worked on, but aren't. Um, and You know, when I was a kid, I think naively just growing up, that seemed really obvious for longevity. Um, and it was really surprising to realize that, you know, it's not the case that most people like are working on that explicitly as a goal. And in fact that like, it's, it's kind of like, I think longevity and aging kind of occupy this weird realm where because they're not like explicitly diseases in a way that's fully socially recognized yet, they're not seen as valid to work on. But like, that's not really for, I think, technical reasons on some level. It's, it's more for like classification reasons. Because, like, you know, you, you can extend the lifespan of, like, uh, sort of many different organisms using technology, um, and how much you can do that in humans, we have no idea, and, you know, it could be very small for technology, but sort of, like, I think longevity is interesting because it feels like an area where there's a social blind spot around something, and I find that's very interesting.

AI assessment note: “I'm really obsessed with areas that feel like they should be worked on, but aren't.”

Q Given that's true, why don't you think it's been worked on? Um, I realize I'm asking an answer for other people, but I'm like, well, that's very odd.

A Yeah, I mean, I, I think even the field of, like, organ reversible crop preservation really had trouble for a while attracting the resources that would be required to, to scale it, and it, and I, I really give a lot of credit to the field pioneers, like, you know, Greg, you know, is just an incredible example of somebody who fought tirelessly to make this field a reality and sort of make rectification a thing that people were taking seriously and, You know, like, like through a long period where I think it just wasn't kind of something to focus on, but I don't know how to put it, but like in venture, like, I think my whole, my whole job sort of in that part of my life is like picking trends that like sort of feel like, oh, this, this thing is, it just feels weird or it seems kind of hard to think about, but technically like there's nothing kind of that corresponds to that. And I think like, for example, like whole body, reciprocal crab preservation, like now seen as just much more kind of reasonable, but whole body, reciprocal crab preservation, definitely an area where I, I think there's just, like, so much possibility for conflation with, like, really extreme, like, like, it's, it's, um, it's hard to talk about it rationally. People either, like, love it and they love it so much that they won't question it, or it's, like, they're worried that thinking about, that associating …

AI assessment note: “worried that thinking about, that associating with it is a little bit too science fiction”