#99 - Laura Deming

Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Laura Deming is a partner at The Longevity Fund. They invest in companies that will allow us to live longer and healthier lives.
You can learn more about them at Longevity.vc.
Laura’s on Twitter @LauraDeming.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
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Topics
00:22 - Why focus on longevity now?
2:12 - How did Laura get started in longevity?
3:22 - Why raise a fund?
5:52 - What does Laura do personally for longevity?
9:07 - Worm and mouse studies
10:44 - Craig's personal habits
12:37 - Human studies
15:22 - Mica asks - Do you think immortality is going to be achieved by: 1. Curing all disease and stop aging so we could live with our own bodies forever 2. OR is going to be something like porting our brain, "mind" to a computer/robot?
17:37 - Most likely strategies to increase lifespan
19:47 - Ryan Hoover asks - Ask about the ethics of longevity. Jack J. Fernandes asks - Do people actually want to live longer?
21:44 - Mica asks - How would immortality change society? Wouldn't we become more complacent? Since we have "forever" to do things wouldn't that diminish our rate of innovation? And since less new individuals are being created we would have access to less new ideas. We would just stop creating new Newtons, Einsteins, Mozarts…
24:52 - Cognitive enhancement
25:52 - Daily habits
34:12 - Tech environment changes in the past 5-10 years
39:22 - What percentage of people in labs want to start companies?
41:37 - Pioneer
43:57 - Confidence
45:52 - Podcasting
49:12 - Choosing media to consume
52:17 - Sam Betesh asks - The last thing that led to a step function change in average life span was germ theory. What new areas of research might provide the next step function change?
55:07 - Extending fertility windows
57:22 - Jason Choi asks - What % of longevity is attributable to lifestyle choices vs genetics and the progress of technology in influencing both.
58:37 - Fatih asks - is blood transfusion a thing or just a hoax
1:00:42 - Rapamycin
1:02:27 - Testosterone
1:04:37 - Chris asks - Aubrey De Grey, IIRC, mentioned a number of times that we might, in the future, replace organs and tissues with new organic ones before they fail. Is this actually a reasonable idea, or is it more likely that we'll replace them with synthetic ones, if we replace them at all?
1:06:07 - Mica asks - Laura did a "cookie diet" for one month. Why did you do it? How did you feel? Doesn't it go against all the research on longevity? ;-)
1:08:07 - Is Laura actually not doing anything strange in her diet?