Joe Betts LaCroix on Longevity and Building and Destroying Things

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (0:02)
If someone's dying of Alzheimer's, no, we're just dumb. We don't know what to do about it.
There's just no solution. In no where in humanity, it's not poorly distributed or anything. It's just, we just don't know what to do. And turns out, that's true for a huge range of different horrific, slowly killing you, miserably degenerative age-related diseases. We don't know what to do. So like, there's a technological realm that I can dive into and make a huge difference for people.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:44)
Hello, everyone. This is Ashlee Vance, and welcome to the very first episode of the Core Memory Podcast. Have a treat for you today. Our first guest is Joe Betts-LaCroix, the CEO and founder of Retro Bio. He is a longevity guru, a polymath, and just an interesting, thoughtful guy that I've gotten to know over the last couple of years. I think you'll enjoy our chat. And with that, let's go talk to Joe.

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (1:23)
Hey, Ashlee.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:24)
Hello, Joe. Thank you for being the first victim of my Core Memory Podcast. I used to be a podcaster, took a break for many years, and we're back.

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (1:33)
It's nice to be here.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:34)
Well, we are here at Retro Bio's headquarters in Redwood City, California, and I'm with Joe Betts-LaCroix, the CEO and co-founder of the company. I have all kinds of things I want to ask you about, but maybe for people who haven't heard of Retro, we should start there and give them an idea of what you guys do.

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (1:55)
We're a pharma company, an aspiring pharma company working to extend healthy human lifespan by 10 years.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:04)
You've been at it, what is it, like four years?

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (2:07)
Is that right?

**Ashlee Vance** (2:07)
Off the top of my head?

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (2:09)
Yeah, we've been operating for about three.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:11)
Quite famously, one of the biggest names in the longevity world in this new wave of longevity startups, and wrote a big story about you guys in Bloomberg Business Magazine. A little while ago, Sam Altman was the original backer of the company, and you guys have been looking at a variety of different areas. One that I want to get into in particular a little bit later is this partial cell reprogramming. This idea of taking ourselves back to a healthier, younger state throughout the body. But we'll get into that in a little second. I've known you for a long time. You got this very interesting, slightly unusual career path, although nothing's normal really, I guess, in Silicon Valley. But you know, you've worked in a variety of different areas. You've got a super interesting story growing up. Take me back a little bit to where young Joe comes from.

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (3:04)
Do I start at birth?
I don't remember that, but the birth is a little fuzzy still. What do I start remembering? Yeah, I grew up in a community of people who were starting over with society, but that's what they thought. They were like, we're going to make a great new world. We don't have to be constrained by, basically, the 50s was a counterpart in their head. The thing that they didn't want to emulate is the so-called hippies, and let's create a better world.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:32)
This is up in Oregon, if I remember right? Yeah. What did your parents ostensibly do?

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (3:37)
I guess various things. My dad has done a number of professions, starting off English professor at various colleges around Oregon, and then from there moved to concrete construction, so building foundations for houses, concrete stairways, sidewalks, that kind of thing. And then for a pretty good stint, ran a software development group. Also for a while ran a robotics startup. Also like a fine glass bead importing business from Eastern Europe, especially the Czech Republic.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:09)
I lived in the Czech Republic there, into their glass there, it's an eclectic range of jobs that your dad was doing.

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (4:15)
Yeah, you might call it dilettante-ish.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:19)
And your mom?

**Joe Betts-LaCroix** (4:21)
I think mostly keeping me sane and my sister during that period, at least the earliest parts. I don't remember her professionally engaged. And then after that, she worked in a plant nursery for a while, and then started on the administrative side in various organizations, like Nature Conservancy, some other natural resources advocacy groups, and for quite a while in the editorial department of the Oregonian newspaper.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:44)
Not that it breaks this way every time, but in technology land, I usually find people that were quite driven and possessed academically or were more in the camp of, I'm only interested in what I'm interested in, and the rest can be damned. I don't know, did you fall into either one of those camps, or what was interesting to you when you were growing up?