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Observations on People, the World, and Everything Else

2025-10-30 21:23:43

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Friends,

There is a certain category of article that I find difficult to name, but which I always enjoy reading. We might call it a collection of musings, a set of opinions, a list of miscellaneous observations. Alex Guzey calls his version “Lifehacks,” Laura Deming refers to hers as “mental models,” and Nat Friedman prefaces his as “some things I believe.”

Each offers a numbered list of thoughts. Some are simple, others deceptively profound. Part of what is enjoyable about these lists is that the things I find simple, you are likely to find profound, and vice versa. Equally, those that I enthusiastically endorse, you may consider absurd.

Whatever one’s take on the individual insights, as a whole, they represent efficient distillations of someone’s mind. Read them and you feel as if you know the person a little better; as if you have gotten a tour of their inner landscape. More importantly, you start to see your own mind reflected.

Today, I’m sharing my version. It is a collection of observations that are true to me. I would be surprised if, in ten years’ time, I don’t disagree with myself, but for the moment, it is an authentic distillation of my mind. My hope is that it sparks some interesting reflections for you and perhaps introduces some new lenses through which you view your work, goals, and interactions.

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If you have one truly good idea in your life, that is more than enough.
To improve your mind, read fiction. We spend the vast majority of our professional lives in pure knowledge-gathering mode; there are different, deeper truths hidden in stories.
“Never quit” is terrible advice. Try lots of things, quit lots of things. Your time is not infinite. Sometimes you have to give up an old dream for a better one to emerge.
It’s more impactful to know your most talented contemporaries than your heroes. Meeting a hero is unlikely to change the course of your life. But if you meet the most talented minds of your generation early, you can spend the next fifty years collaborating with them as they scale.
Status transactions are happening everywhere, all the time. If you’re not attuned to this, you will miss half of what’s happening in a given conversation.
Learning how to ask good questions is a legitimate discipline worth studying. We underestimate how much insight, connection, and alpha are unlocked by the right series of words. Exponents of this art form change the texture of a conversation at any moment.
Resist other people’s attempts to categorize you. They are missing too much context to do so well.
If you want to really remember a book, buy the physical version and read with a pen in your hand.
It is possible to reinvent yourself at any moment. Cultivate a loose attachment to your view of yourself.
Debate is one of the least effective ways of making up your mind on a topic. It is only worthwhile as a theatrical enterprise. (Written debate is better.)
“Where is it written…” Assume that most conventions are arbitrary and illegitimate. Rules are more malleable than we believe.
Imagine “pulling forward” skills from your future self into the present. If you wish you were a better public speaker, imagine the future version of yourself giving that ability to the present version of yourself.
Genius is narrower than we tend to believe. It extrapolates poorly outside a given field, era, or context. A genius pontificating on something outside of their discipline is probably less reliable than a regular person.
Even the best of minds suddenly burn out. (See: Newton, Grothendieck, Fischer.) Before you persuade yourself that there must be some hidden brilliance in a genius’s proclamations, consider this.
Learn keyboard shortcuts; use snippets.
Listening to the audiobook is fine for entertainment, not for retention.
The current founder trend of prioritizing attention above all else misunderstands greatness. No legendary company won through stunts. At some point, you actually have to build something valuable.
It should concern you if you have never failed at something. You should fail badly, relatively often. Otherwise, you are playing it too safe.
The pressure to be “well-informed” has made us more ignorant. Unless you work in one of a small number of professions, there is no value in reading the day’s news. It stales quickly, tends toward the histrionic, and underweights relevant historical context. Much better to scan the headlines every couple of weeks and pick a relevant topic to learn about from higher-quality sources.
We overvalue the freshness of information. Read old books. There is usually a reason they survived.
Amor fati.
The finest practitioners of a given discipline are often the worst at articulating their craft. Too much of their skill comes from inherent qualities, or abilities illegible even to themselves. Better to watch these people rather than ask them to explain.
Most modern writing advice is copywriting advice. Be careful.
Striving for legibility is overrated. It is much better to adopt a degree of inscrutability. What you lose in definition, you gain in freedom and flexibility.
If someone tells you to pick between two trade-offs (e.g., speed vs. cost), default to rejecting the premise. Sometimes you really do have to make a choice, but you can find a way to have both more frequently than you expect.
You can neutralize most conversational risks by calling them out. (E.g. “I’m being quite direct here…”; “I recognize this is very persistent of me…”)
There is huge alpha in carefully reviewing the source material. (See: Eli Dourado.)
Question the assumptions and run the numbers yourself. Everyone assumed it was economically infeasible for a private company to build rockets until Elon opened his spreadsheet.
Test out vastly disparate career paths as early as you can. Most people test within an extremely narrow band (e.g., going from banking to consulting to big tech).
If you want to become the best at something, you have to devise a kind of differential training. You cannot achieve something new by adhering to the same path as those before you.
Great things happen at the collision between fields.
The collective opinion on who the “best” is in a given industry is usually spotty or simply wrong. Proximity is often required to assess quality, and the most skilled practitioners may not advertise their approach.
Love is easy. The difference between bad relationships and meeting your spouse is not a matter of degree, but category. Compatibility is unignorable and effortless.
Earning your first $1 on the internet can change your life.
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
If you have not changed your mind about something important in the past ten years, you should be concerned.
You cannot have an interesting conversation without an element of risk. One person, or both, must subtly push the boundaries.
Every once in a while, you’re reminded that people perceive the world so differently from you that they may as well be on another planet. This is happening all the time, whether you notice it or not.
Allow yourself to be the dumbest person in the room. You will ask better questions and go to better rooms.
“A Prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised.”
You become solely responsible for your education once you leave school. You must learn to become your own teacher; most do not.
To make an impact on the world, you must pay a debt to modernity. It is romantic to imagine succeeding just as your heroes once did, but they lived in a different time, in different circumstances. A concession to the present day is necessary.
The same skills that made you a good student may make you a bad employee.
“How you do anything is how you do everything” is a perfect encapsulation of what is not true. Brilliance is context-dependent. Energy is context-dependent. Insight is context-dependent. (See: Jobs’ pathetic job application.)
Set yourself a curriculum. What books do you want to read this year? How can you organize them? What gap in your knowledge still bothers you? These questions are your responsibility to answer.
At some point, you must internalize the fact that people will dislike you through no fault of your own, and that it is not your job to change their minds.
“Real artists ship.”
The first time you think you’ve missed the wave, there are probably still a couple of decades left. (See: the internet, crypto, AI.)
Sleeping on an important decision really does help.
Billions of dollars have been invested in making social media platforms addictive. Relying on willpower alone is a lot to ask. Invest in content blockers as you rewire yourself. Cold Turkey is a good one.
Learn to respect the process of the unconscious mind, especially in creative matters. Sometimes, you cannot chase the answer; you must wait for it to come to you.
You become the stories you tell yourself about yourself.
Respect your process. If you do your best work at 4 AM with a bowl of candied ginger, do that. Give yourself the latitude to be a difficult artist when necessary.
Simply decide that you are willing to go first. That could be raising your hand to volunteer for something, taking the first leap off the high dive, or responding to a question that leaves an awkward silence. You reduce social anxiety and increase your agency by just defaulting to taking responsibility.

Why Psychedelics Might Be the Breakthrough That PTSD Patients Need | Kevin Ryan (The Godfather of NYC Tech)

2025-10-28 20:03:36

“Psychedelics increase the neuroplasticity in your brain that we can measure. I could look at your brain before and after psychedelics. Before, it looks like an internet map of Africa — some areas don’t have connectivity. Afterward, it looks like an internet map of Europe, with condensed connections everywhere.”

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Often called the godfather of NYC tech, Kevin Ryan is one of America’s most influential entrepreneurs and investors. He co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Transcend Therapeutics, and continues to build and back new companies each year through AlleyCorp. Earlier in his career, he led DoubleClick from a 20-person startup to a global leader, taking it public before its acquisition by Google.

In this episode, Kevin shares his insights on two surprising pockets of the future that he’s betting on: psychedelics for mental health and AI-powered materials science. He unpacks how psychedelics are showing remarkable success in treating depression and PTSD, and why AI may discover revolutionary new materials, from helicopter blades to smartphone glass, that humans never imagined possible.

We explore:

The promising results of psychedelics in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction
How AI is accelerating materials discovery by exploring combinations humans wouldn’t try
The challenges of building successful incubators and why most attempts fail
How MongoDB lost $1 billion before turning a profit (and why it was worth it)
Why e-commerce businesses like Gilt Groupe often struggle against physical retail
How AlleyCorp plans for the future when shaping its investment strategy
What it really costs society to imprison someone for a year
The hard truth about Europe’s tech ecosystem and why it struggles to compete with the US

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(04:30) How Kevin collaborated with Scott Adams

(07:11) The origins of AlleyCorp

(08:33) The challenge of incubation

(10:00) Why intellectual flexibility matters

(10:54) What made MongoDB a breakout success

(13:49) How shifting market dynamics hurt Gilt’s business

(16:22) What Kevin would do differently if he built Gilt again

(17:45) Juggling AlleyCorp’s long-term vision with day-to-day demands

(20:26) How to make boards more productive

(22:25) Why Kevin believes investors should also found companies

(24:18) Future spaces Kevin is excited to invest in

(25:52) Kevin’s interest in psychedelics and founding Transcend

(28:20) Psychedelics for mental health

(32:03) How psychedelic therapy is being conducted

(34:11) Transcend’s work and the path to approval for methylone

(37:47) The challenges of psychedelic research

(40:28) How the Trump administration aims to accelerate psychedelic research

(41:50) The size and growth of the psychedelic market

(44:28) Materials science: What it is, its design tradeoffs, and how AI speeds discovery

(49:02) Radical AI’s work creating new compounds

(50:34) The industries Radical AI is targeting

(52:50) The state of European tech and why it still lags behind

(58:26) Final meditations

Follow Kevin Ryan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinryan3/

X: https://x.com/alley_corp

Resources and episode mentions

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Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.

2025-10-23 20:32:01

“I’m new to VC and you’ve given me access to learnings from the best of the best! Appreciate you!” — Zhu, a paying member

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Friends,

At its core, “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins is about the difference between the drive to define something and the drive to understand it. In a few sparse lines, Collins contrasts the way he wishes readers would appreciate poetry with the manner in which so many do so. Rather than appreciating its contours and marveling over its intricacies, most readers prefer to pummel a poem for information. Instead of holding it to the light “like a color slide” or “waterski[ing]” across its surface, they “begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.” In their drive to define the work in front of them – to analyze and probe it – Collins’ readers neglect its beauty, and miss what really makes it tick.

Though Collins is talking about poetry, he could just as well have been describing any craft. No matter the discipline, there is always this tension between defining and understanding, controlling and observing, grasping and witnessing.

When it comes to the craft of venture capital, Mike Maples, Jr. is one of its great appreciators. Over the past two decades, the Floodgate co-founder has built a remarkable track record by attuning himself to the frequency of great entrepreneurs, observing their quirks, and seeking to understand. As Mike himself describes it, his praxis is not about thinking faster or exhaustively analyzing a market, but simply listening differently. That approach has allowed Mike to make many outlier investments long before they broke out, backing Twitter, Twitch, Okta, and Applied Intuition in their messy infancies.

As part of The Generalist’s “Letters to a Young Investor” series, we’ll explore the nuances of Mike’s craft. To learn how one of the best early-stage investors of the past twenty years spots the future and identifies anomalies, read on. To enjoy the full correspondence and the rest of The Generalist’s exclusive interviews, join as a premium member for just $22/month. For the price of a single business lunch, you’ll unlock the strategies of some of the world’s best investors, founders, and operators.

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Mario’s letter

Subject: Finding pattern breakers
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Mike Maples, Jr.
Date: Tuesday, October 7 2025 at 4:20 PM BST

Mike,

I’m sitting down with a cup of coffee, a stack of notes, and a well-worn copy of Pattern Breakers to begin this correspondence with you. It’s one that I’ve been looking forward to for some time, admiring your career for many years. That’s as much to do with the respect with which other investors talk about your work, as the formidable string of winners you’ve backed. You have always struck me as a true venture craftsman, with an unfakeable obsession for startups.

Reading Pattern Breakers only makes this sincere fascination more evident. I wish more exceptional investors would take the time to transcribe and distill their insights so thoughtfully. As you know better than I do, so much of early-stage investing relies on intuition and subtle signaling – a reality which often makes it difficult for even great practitioners to articulate their work. That can lead to the impression that venture capital is pure luck. No one can deny chance’s role, but to minimize it to spinning a roulette wheel misses the hazy art that the best have mastered.

Pattern Breakers is an insightful articulation of your version of the craft. It outlines the lessons you’ve deduced across twenty years of investing and countless hours of further research. It contains many wonderful observations I find myself mulling over regularly. One particular favorite is that great startups force a choice, not a comparison. As you note, Airbnb did not try to build a better version of the Four Seasons, but competed on entirely new terrain. While the Four Seasons promises to deliver a high-quality, consistent experience, Airbnb offers authenticity, giving travelers the chance to “live like a local.” Neither is inherently superior. Rather, they appeal to different customers and sensibilities. I’ve found myself returning to this heuristic repeatedly since I learned it.

To set the stage for our conversation, I’d love to dig into Pattern Breakers more deeply and examine the philosophies animating your investing. Rather than asking you to rehash the book’s major points (which I recommend readers enjoy wholesale), I wondered if we might try to understand its ideas “in action,” so to speak.

To paint a familiar scenario: Imagine a founder has walked into Floodgate’s offices to pitch you for the first time. How do you go about assessing whether you might have a pattern-breaking business on your hands?

I am sincerely interested in this at the most granular possible level. Do you prefer to sit directly across from an entrepreneur or kitty-corner to them? Do you prefer going for a walk to a formal pitch? Does it help you ask better questions to review materials beforehand, or do you want to hear everything fresh? To what extent are you analyzing small clues about their posture, attire, speaking speed, and so on? Are there any initial indicia that excite you? These might sound frivolous to some readers, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these little details really influence the conversation you’re able to have.

We could spend a full other letter on questions alone. Which are among your favorites? (Bezos reportedly loved, “Are you a lucky person?” for example.) Which questions give you signal most frequently? You’ve noted before that you liked to ask, “Is this from the future?” What does that question tell you? How long does it take to realize a business might be truly special? How long do you take to make up your mind? What does your internal process look like to get to conviction? How much still, after all these years, comes down to feel? How much time do you spend analyzing the person versus the idea?

While reading your book, I found myself thinking about the tension between assessing an idea and assessing a person. Pattern Breakers covers both, but at least in my reading, it is primarily interested in the characteristics of game-changing ideas. You elegantly outline the importance of a startup building on (1) an “inflection” – some material technological, commercial, or sociological change, and (2) an “insight” around it. Lyft is a good example: Logan Green and John Zimmer recognized that smartphones with GPS were an inflection point, and then had the insight that this might enable a new kind of taxi network.

But you’ve remarked that 80% of your best investments came from pivots. Which makes me wonder: what signal do you get from a startup idea, knowing that it’s liable to change? Is it simply a proxy for a founder’s insightfulness and acuity? Are you using the current canvas to understand how their mind works? Or do you need to sincerely feel as if there’s an inflection and insight at the heart of it?

More broadly, what do you look for in a person? You’ve written about the importance of disagreeableness. Do you try to test for that explicitly? How so? Are there certain patterns you’ve noticed recur across outlier people? What shared alleles might you find if you put Ev Williams, Emmett Shear, Todd McKinnon, and Logan Green under a microscope? I am certain they have more differences than similarities, but equally convinced that there must be some unifying quality.

With much appreciation from one venture “anorak” to another,
Mario

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Mike’s response

Subject: When Tomorrow Shows Up Early
From: Mike Maples, Jr.
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Friday, October 17 2025 at 7:40 PM PST

Dear Mario,

I really like your questions, because they get to the messy part of seed investing. It’s not about spreadsheets or pattern-matching. It’s about sensing whether someone is already living in the future and inviting the rest of us to catch up. You’re not just asking about mental models. You’re asking about the feel.

One of the first times I felt the future, I was in a Palo Alto cafe, and a 23-year-old Justin Kan walked in. He had a webcam strapped to a baseball cap and a mess of wires leading to a backpack. I was already skeptical. And that was before he said he planned to livestream his life. All of it. Twenty-four hours a day, like an internet reality TV show. It almost sounded like a prank.

But then he spun his laptop around, and there I was, live on the internet.

Suddenly, it felt different, and my curiosity started to take over. “How did you do that, and what’s in your backpack?” I asked. Justin opened it, and inside was a Linux computer, a video encoder, EVDO cellular hardware, and some Python code held together mostly with duct tape and conviction. But it actually worked, and keep in mind this was in 2007. YouTube had only existed for 18 months. Most people still had flip phones.

The cafe hadn’t changed, but my sense of possibility had. It didn’t feel like a pitch anymore. It felt like stepping through a portal to a different future. He wasn’t selling me. He was already living in a different reality and offering me a fleeting glimpse. And even though there were many pivots and years between Justin.tv and what became Twitch, the basic insight that millions of normal people would want to stream content was right, no matter how heavily disguised it was in the initial idea.

For a long time, I confused being early with being smart. Seeing things first felt like a superpower. But the seed investors that are rewarded most are not the futurists who can predict. They’re the ones who notice. Catching radically new futures feels less like investing and more like witnessing.

There are a few small habits I find helpful when I’m trying to catch a pattern-breaking future described by a founder:

Don’t label startups. The moment you call something “Uber for X,” you lose too much resolution to see what’s truly different about it. Labels turn messy ideas into something that fits into our current understanding, but they make you believe you understand things you don’t. The best startups break the current patterns of our current understanding. When you jump too quickly to a label, you’re more likely to miss the small, magical details that matter most.

The Trillion-Dollar AI Hardware Opportunity | Navin Chaddha (Managing Partner, Mayfield)

2025-10-21 20:03:39

“That’s the scale of the hardware opportunity. It’s not hundreds of millions of dollars when you launch. It’s in billions of dollars.”

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Navin Chaddha has spent three decades at the forefront of innovation—first as a founder, and now as managing partner at Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture firms. A 17-time member of Forbes’ Midas List, Navin has guided generations of entrepreneurs through waves of technological change, from the dot-com boom to the AI era. At Mayfield, he champions a philosophy rooted in the firm’s founding ethos: investing in people, not markets. That approach has shaped his perspective on what it takes to build enduring companies. In this conversation, Navin shares why $1 trillion in infrastructure spending is fueling a new hardware renaissance, how stealth startups are going from zero to billions in a year, and what it means for the future of innovation.

We explore:

How “vibe coding” is democratizing technology creation through conversational, collaborative, and cognitive interfaces
Why Navin believes the “vibe economy” will transform how we work, live, and play
How Mayfield’s 56-year focus on “backing the jockey, not the racetrack” shapes its investment approach
The massive opportunity in AI hardware infrastructure
How stealth AI hardware startups are going from zero to billions in under a year
How India’s tech ecosystem has evolved and where the real opportunities are today
How cricket taught Navin crucial lessons about company building

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(04:52) Cricket and its parallels to venture capital

(08:13) Navin’s journey to Silicon Valley

(10:28) Growing up in an entrepreneurial family

(12:00) Early mentors and becoming an “accidental entrepreneur”

(13:46) Navin’s first company and unconventional fundraising approach

(17:35) How Navin moved from founder to venture capitalist

(20:11) What has worked in India’s tech market and what hasn’t yet taken off

(23:31) The future of outsourcing in the AI era

(27:14) How Navin landed at Mayfield

(30:36) How Mayfield’s people-first approach works in practice

(34:50) Why Navin sees AI and vibe coding as the next great wave of innovation

(38:13) Why Navin believes AI will push humans to level up their skills rather than lose them

(44:50) The hardware opportunities that excite Navin and where Mayfield is investing

(48:49) An overview of photonics and why it matters now

(50:06) How Mayfield balances market insight, big ideas, and the people behind them

(52:50) The surprising pace of growth in AI hardware

(54:54) The timeline from idea to product and scale in hardware startups

(56:26) Final meditations

Follow Navin Chaddha

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinchaddha/

X: https://x.com/navinchaddha

Resources and episode mentions

Books

Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: https://www.amazon.com/Outlive-Longevity-Peter-Attia-MD/dp/0593236599
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Essentials/dp/0060516402

People

Vinod Khosla on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-khosla-65387416/
Anoop Gupta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptaanoop/
John Hennessy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy
Yogen Dalal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yogendalal/
Tommy Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Davis_Jr.#

Other resources

Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/
Qualcomm: https://www.qualcomm.com/
Matrimony: https://www.matrimony.com/
Tejas Networks: https://www.tejasnetworks.com/
Mayfield: https://www.mayfield.com/
HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/
Gigya: https://www.sap.com/products/acquired-brands/what-is-gigya.html
Moore’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/
Apple: https://www.apple.com/
Tesla: https://www.tesla.com/
Broadcom: https://www.broadcom.com/
Mayfield AI Garage: https://www.mayfield.com/ai/

Subscribe to the show

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Lesser Apes

2025-10-16 20:05:47

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A species’ intelligence does not always increase. Many parasites have evolved to become simpler than their ancestors, shedding neural …

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

2025-10-14 20:03:49

“Reversible cryo is what it sounds like. You take an organism down to a very low temperature, like minus 130 degrees Celsius, [and then bring] it back up to normal temperature. But what really captured my imagination around it was the idea of time traveling to the future.”

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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

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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

Books

The Three-Body Problem: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032
The Dark Forest: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Remembrance-Earths-Past/dp/0765386690/
Cell Biology by the Numbers: https://www.amazon.com/Cell-Biology-Numbers-Ron-Milo/dp/0815345372/
Free version of Cell Biology by the Numbers: https://book.bionumbers.org/

People

Cynthia Kenyon: https://www.calicolabs.com/people/cynthia-kenyon/
James Bedford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bedford
Peter Thiel on X: https://x.com/peterthiel
Hunter Davis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunter-davis-b7ba1423/
Rob Phillips on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-phillips-a223341a/
Bryan Johnson on X: https://x.com/bryan_johnson

Other resources

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading | Nadia Asparouhova (Writer and Researcher): https://www.generalist.com/p/antimemetics-nadia-asparouhova
The Longevity Fund: https://longevity.vc/
Loyal: https://loyal.com/
H1: https://h1.co/
Until: https://www.untillabs.com/
Alcor: https://www.alcor.org/
My mental models: https://barnacles.substack.com/p/my-mental-models-2020

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