#437 The Ambitious 3 Step Plan to Solving Aging and Death - Nathan Cheng

Nathan Cheng (0:00)

What is it exactly that people should be working on if they want to actually solve the problem of aging? Perhaps the best way to repair something that doesn't work, whether it's from like a disease or injury, or even aging, right, is to just swap out that part.

Siim Land (0:19)

Nathan, welcome to the show.

Nathan Cheng (0:22)

Hey, yeah, thanks for having me, Siim.

Siim Land (0:24)

Yeah, you're one of those people I kind of knew I had to have on my podcast when I found your profile on Twitter or X. And it was kind of very interesting thing that you were involved with, which is, I guess, like whole body replacement and actual, you know, how do we actually extend human lifespan beyond what is just achievable with regular diet, exercise and supplements, etc. So I'm kind of very curious to delve into like, OK, how would it theoretically actually look like? Because, you know, a lot of people throw around the idea of, you know, we're in this age where humans are going to live hundreds of years with the advancements in AI and medicine, but no one actually is able to tell you, OK, how does it actually look like or how are we actually achieve it? So I guess maybe we can discuss, bounce back some ideas of how to, you know, what would a longevity look like in the next few decades. So, yeah, I'm happy to have you on the show. Yeah, I guess we can start with your own backstory, because as I understand correctly from my research about your backstory, that you fell out of a PhD in physics to pursue longevity. So, yeah, what made you decide that?

Nathan Cheng (1:40)

Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a long story, but I guess it goes back to when I was doing my PhD, I was at University of Toronto doing a PhD in physics. It was in something not related to biology at all. It was like quantum optics, ultra-cold atoms research. And I got two years into my PhD, and I had this just sudden realization that I was actually going to die, right? Like that this is no longer just like a theoretical concept, that, you know, it's going to happen to other people. But no, it's actually going to happen to me and to everyone I love as well. Right? So and I thought that this was just horrible, right? Like that this is actually going to happen. Most people just put it out of their minds, right? They don't like to think about these things day to day, right? But for me, it just like, it was just like a very, I guess, visceral realization.

And the worst part about it was just like nobody, I didn't know anybody else who thought about it this way either. It was just like, oh yeah, you know, everything is fine. Like everybody's just pretending that it's fine. Whereas now that, you know, we're coming to this age where, you know, technology is advancing, science is advancing, maybe we can do something about it, right? But at the time, I didn't know anything about biology. I was just like in a physics program and just really bummed out, I guess, depressed about this idea that we all just have to die, right? And there's no choice. So I ended up dropping out of my PhD.

I just couldn't understand working on physics in light of this much bigger problem, right? So the order of operations in which you tackle certain problems really matters. And for me, it made sense to try and do something about aging. So eventually, fast forward many years of just stumbling around and finding stuff and just going down many different rabbit holes, I discovered Aubrey DeGray on YouTube. He has this famous TED talk where he just lays out this idea that we can actually try to solve aging with science and so forth and develop therapies against aging. So eventually, I ended up deciding that I wanted to get involved in some sort of way. I didn't have a background in biology, so I needed to take some online courses. And then, in about, when was this? And then in July 2020, so around the time of the pandemic, I decided that I would start a newsletter, which was just basically, first and foremost, just a way for myself to learn about the space, right? So I just forced myself to learn, write about it every week. That's kind of like, so I always recommend to people to if they want to get involved in the space to learn and start like a newsletter or something or write about it. So, yeah, I started a newsletter about longevity and investing, kind of like combining two things that I thought were interesting and like a unique angle. And I wrote about it on like the sub stack for every week, for several months, you know, just to teach myself about the space. And eventually, it got kind of semi-popular. Some people started picking it up and retweeting it and promoting it like Balaji Srinivasan, who eventually, he introduced me to Eric Tornberg, who at the time was running the startup called OnDeck. And they were building different communities in different verticals for founders, basically were building stuff. And they wanted to expand into this longevity space. So yeah, I joined the team there at OnDeck, building the first like longevity biotech fellowship program for them. And yeah, I was there for about a year and a half, and we did two cohorts of that program. And then eventually I spun it out as a non-profit called Longevity Biotech Fellowship, LBF. So I teamed up with Mark Hamillainen, who was doing these kind of like more in-person intensive workshop retreats. We called them basically Longevity Camps, basically tried to get more people like smart, talented, engineers, entrepreneurs, whatever. They decided to as AI researchers to actually make a career transition or whatever, get involved basically in this technical problem of trying to solve aging. So that was kind of my path. But I also did a bunch of other things in tandem with that, which I started a fund with a couple of other founders, so it's Healthspan Capital, it's a VC firm. We've been operational for three years, made investments in 30 early stage longevity biotech companies, startups, and then also getting more involved in not just the technical and the VC side, but also the political side, which just highlighting this idea that this is an important problem, so we need to advocate for it politically. So I also co-founded a nonprofit called Vitalism Foundation, which is basically trying to put forward this idea that we need to do something drastic, right? We need to make this humanities number one priority. What else could be more important than trying to save people from the thing that's basically killing like 80% of people today, which is aging and age-related diseases. So yeah, so that's kind of my backstory, kind of long.