Nvidia's 'Superbowl of AI' event, and a Silicon Valley dog longevity start up
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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Should we just jump in and then we can kind of get it straight into kind of GTC and kind of the whole... Yeah, I can't wait to hear about that. I can paint the picture. That's hilarious. I'm so glad you went. It's one of these things that comes around year after year, you think, you know, geeky way. That looks really fun. Anyway, let's start. Let's start.

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Danny Fortson, Danny in the Valley. And me, Katie Prescott, Katie in the city, the city of London that is. And Danny, I am quite jealous of you this week because you've been... Please explain why.

You've been at a massive event in our world anyway. And it's not Glastonbury. It's not Burning Man. It's not the Super Bowl. None of those things. You've been at GTC, the NVIDIA Developers Conference. NVIDIA, of course, the makers of AI graphics processing units, GPUs, the power behind the AI revolution, the company that's really boomed throughout all of this.

Yeah. Which is maybe as close to the Super Bowl in the tech world as you can get. Oh, God. Yeah. Every time I go to one of these things, I'm like, why am I here? You know? And maybe that's just me being like a salty, skeptical journalist. Well, I'd rather be at Glastonbury. Yeah, exactly. But I'll paint a picture for you because I feel like yesterday was just a very Silicon Valley day for me because –

I get up early. I drive down to San Jose. There's tons of traffic, so it takes me almost two hours to get there. And my destination is the SAP Center, which is where the San Jose Sharks play. So like, it's, I don't know, like a 25,000 seat stadium in San Jose. And you get there and there's just like, it's a total zoo. Everybody's walking around with their bright green lanyards and these things are like...

This shows that you are part of this NVIDIA annual kind of powwow. And everybody's running around. There's a brass band playing outside. I finally find parking. I pull in next to the only open spot I can find next to a giant cyber truck. Excellent. Because, yeah. And then I run in. Someone's buying them. They're everywhere out here, by the way.

So then I run in, I get, obviously press, you get floor seats. Very exciting. And then Jensen Wong, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, obviously. He comes out in his kind of trademark black leather jacket. Welcome to the stage, NVIDIA founder and CEO, Jensen Wong. With a t-shirt cannon. And everybody's like, whoo, yeah.

Sorry, what's a t-shirt cannon? Literally, it fires t-shirts at the audience. Yes, it looks like a bazooka that you hold at your waist and then you press fire and the t-shirts are rolled up into a ball. And so it's like cannonballs, but made of t-shirt. So everyone's got Nvidia stash?

Yeah, because everybody's like ready to like hoping that they catch a t-shirt from Jensen's. I did not. I did not. I was not, you know, I already had my swag bag. Fine. Let me at it. Yeah. And he's up on stage and he's like, no notes, two plus hours of a keynote. There's not a vacant seat in the house. This place is empty.

full and behind him is like i would guess like a 250 foot wide screen showing all the different things that he's excited to talk about in terms of like the latest ai chips and what this all means for the future and all this stuff so there's a mix of like pretty jargony stuff around the newest chip and also just like how it's all going to change the world and everybody's like whooping and cheering as if they're like you know

Whatever. Pick your pop star. Who are they? Who's there? I mean, the 25,000 people who are fighting for a t-shirt and occupying every seat. So it's basically a giant trade show. So the main event is at the convention center next door or right around the corner. And there's booths set up. So there's...

Every robotics AI thing that you can possibly imagine is on this kind of on this floor and everybody has their booths and they're trying to like do demos and blah, blah, blah. So it's like a trade show. So yeah.

It's people who use NVIDIA's stuff and a lot of people trying to sell NVIDIA's stuff. So a lot of salespeople, a lot of founders and CEOs and kind of, and their underlings trying to kind of basically do business. And then you have like lots of media there.

Lots of people from Asia, China in particular. Lots of a big Chinese contingent, which I thought was interesting. Very interesting. It's a total zoo. I'm picturing 25,000 sort of men of a certain age. Like maybe between 25 and 35. Is that quite a lot? There's a lot of guys in, you know...

jeans, it's like jeans, blazer, collared shirt, lanyard, talking business. You know what I mean? Okay. Not geeks. Yeah. So there's a lot of, there's a big sales contingent. There's a big geek contingent. There's actually a fair amount of women, but it's just like such an event. They take over a large part of downtown San Jose and to like, just to give you a picture of lunch, lunch, you are corralled with

into this what they call GTC Park, which you have to go outside across the street. And this is all kind of cordoned off. And you're kind of funneled through this giant, like, white tent where you can pick up your kind of sandwich. And in the background, I hear a cover band playing Amy Winehouse. And I was like, I've got to go see this. And there they were. NLX. No Latency Experience. Yes.

Stop. I swear to you. It's like you couldn't, you're just like, am I, this is all so, it's all too on the nose. You know what I mean? Where you're like, oh my God. Oh dear. Fodder for the book. I love it. Yeah. So no latency experience, you know, like the kind of the tech jam band. We use Daita Santa words. Was there a lot of hero worshipping when he was on stage? Were people just wrapped by him?

Yeah, I mean, it is crazy. He started this company in, I think, 93 at a Denny's, you know, the classic idea on a napkin. Denny's serving food, so this is like an American diner. Denny's is like a very, like... I know the Denny's where this was started because I grew up in San Jose, so I frequented many... Like a fancier McDonald's? Yeah, just. Their famous dish is moons over my hammy. What are the moons?

I think there are two fried eggs. Of course. But this dude started this company. He's worth $100 billion. You know, you're kind of like, wow. And his company is like the beating heart of this whole kind of AI craze.

So, yeah, so it's kind of like a whole experience and like there's a lot to kind of see and take in, but ultimately it's just like a total zoo. You know, it's just crazy. The interesting bits are the kind of the panels around kind of climate and AI and the future of robotics and all that kind of stuff, but...

Most people go for just like the trade show, basically, and hear what Jensen has to say. And did he say anything particularly striking this year? Were there any major announcements? They announced a deal with GM to kind of be the brains for that company's new self-driving unit. But again, a lot of these announcements are not that interesting because you're like, okay, well, GM just shut down its previous self-driving unit, Cruise,

And you're like, well, what does this mean that they're going to be the brand? You know, it's a lot of it. A lot of it's like, let's get a big bunch of big names together and announce a big thing. But like, how interesting is that? The thing I found interesting was that, you know, inference, which is the kind of basically the thought process of these AIs when you ask it a question and it comes back and gives you an answer. He's like these new models that are getting much, much better at kind of thinking and reasoning things.

He's like, the data required to kind of like that is processed is a hundred times what we thought we needed a year ago. So that just gives you a sense of that kind of relates directly to how much, how many chips you need, what processing power, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of interesting is that he's like with the evolution of these smarter and smarter models, these reasoning models.

there's like an exponential increase in what you need in terms of data processing and power, which is obviously all very good for NVIDIA's business. Our brand new GeForce RTX 50 series Blackwell architecture.

The GPU is just a beast. Because they always announce these advances in chips, don't they? They're sometimes very hard to follow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like they're speaking Greek. Which all have quite obscure names. Yeah. You know, I was there for a couple of days. I may go back for one more to see some panels and whatnot, but it's just a whole, it's a thing. You know, it's a whole thing.

super bowl of ai of all the events like this you go to and all of the big companies do an annual event don't they yeah dreamforce for salesforce and all that stuff yeah who does the best one like what's the danny fordson ranking of silicon valley company events i would say i don't know if best would be the ranking ideas but i would definitely say dreamforce dreamforce is the weirdest

Because Mark Benioff flies in monks and has a meditation tent and kind of has a blessing before a guy like blowing into a conch wearing a Hawaiian shirt who's been flown in from Hawaii. And then you'll have like, oh, and now we have President Barack Obama walking in for a fireside chat. And tonight, Metallica, free concert. He really blows it out.

That's fun. I can see why that's number one. But all of them are just, they're basically glorified trade shows. You know, I mean, they're just, let us tell you about all the wonderful things we're doing and how we're going to change the world. It makes GTC sound a bit tame. Oh, yeah. Not having Metallica there. No, exactly. Exactly. It was very striking that...

And NVIDIA's share price fell. Did you see that? By over 3% after Jensen spoke, which is quite surprising because you think with the various announcements about the chip advances and all the hype around NVIDIA that things could only get better. But actually, it just follows a pattern, doesn't it, of what we've been seeing with tech stocks in the last six months or so.

Well, I do think, yeah, I just think there's this massive sell because I think the Magnificent Sevenes are called Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, and Tesla. Ran up so much that they were, of course, they were going to correct. But they're still up if you step back and look at their share price charts like over the last two, three years. They're still up dramatically. I think the gain...

Just the gain of the Magnificent Seven over the last two years is $9 trillion. To put that into kind of context, that's like inventing the entire listed universe of 2,000 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange twice, and you still have money left over. That's just the gain. You know what I mean? So that's like two LSEs full of companies, and you still have something left over. So there's still like, it is...

they're rebasing. But again, I think that was kind of inevitable just given how much they'd run out. It is really interesting context to look at it over those past two years. But also strange maybe if

You know, given NVIDIA's down 16% since the start of the year in the context of Trump taking power and all of the people in Silicon Valley who've said to us on this podcast, hey, that's a fantastic thing for tech. We're expecting a very pro-tech environment. It's going to be very different to how things were under Biden. And yet the markets are still following that corrective course and don't seem to buy that narrative. Yeah.

Yeah, well, because I also think, you know, markets, what they don't like is unpredictability and chaos. And that's exactly, that's all we've had. It feels like, you know, with the kind of, we're tariffing this. Oh, we're not. We're going to do this. We're not. You know, so I just think it's also, there's genuine concern about what this, what these policies are going to do to the economy. You know, you have a lot of economists like now predicting recession or saying the chances of recession have gone up dramatically. So you're kind of like, in that sense, it's not that surprising. Yeah.

You can say that again. There's a lot of concern over here in Europe, as you can imagine, about tariffs and what's happening. It's interesting to see Tesla is obviously one of those that has suffered, despite maybe because of Musk's relationship with Trump. I don't know, but it seems like really...

He's isolating people with his political affiliation with Trump. He's isolating a lot of people who would buy Tesla cars, certainly here. And I don't know if it's happening over there, but like people are vandalizing cars and kind of like setting Teslas on fire. And you have Pam Bondi, the attorney general of the United States of America.

Talking about this publicly, saying people who are attacking Tesla assets, properties, cars, whatever, that is terrorism and will be dealt with in the most severest way possible. Terrorism? Yeah, because this is, of course, the best buddy of the president, and they don't like that very much. So it's just a very strange time. But it does feel like Tesla is really suffering from the kind of Elon effect in terms of sales. In certain countries, they've come down dramatically. Yeah.

And they also haven't had like a new mass market like product in a long time, which is just basic business as well. While others have rolled out, you know, alternatives, which are actually quite good. That's quite a step up from what you were telling us a few months ago about the bumper stickers. They said the bumper stickers. I bought this before I knew. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it's a strange, strange old time. And it's not just...

Tesla getting some bad press, obviously. Meta also. Oh, yes. Yeah. This book that's come out from a former global public policy director, a lady called Sarah Wynne-Williams. I have not read it yet because I've been running around like a crazy person, but I am absolutely going to read it. Yeah.

Oh, I downloaded it this morning and I've just read through the prologue. It's absolutely brilliant. It's really gripping and also incredibly funny. So she was at Facebook, well, Meta between 2011 and 2017. Yeah. And yeah, working on public policy. And it's just incredibly critical of what it was like working there. I should try and dig out an extract. But there's just, here we go.

Most days working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of 14-year-olds who've been given superpowers and ungodly amount of money as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them. And that's the story I'm here to tell. Yeah, that feels right. That feels right. So the book is called Careless People. It's basically a memoir of her time there, right? Yeah. And Meta...

It's so cross about it that they've taken out a temporary injunction from a US arbitrator preventing Sarah Wynne-Williams from doing any further promotion of the book. I know she did an interview with Rosamund Irwin at the Sunday Times about it. So I think they're fighting a bit of a losing battle in terms of trying to stop her promoting it and getting out. Yeah.

Meta also said the book includes, quote, defamatory and untrue allegations about its executives. And then called it a mix of, quote, out of date and previously reported claims about the company and described Sarah Wynn Williams as a disgruntled former employer who was fired for poor performance and toxic behavior. So, you know, what's really I find really interesting about all this is like there was a time when

when a book like this would be all anyone was talking about out here on the West Coast. It's not like it's not a thing, but it's also kind of like, meh. It's kind of like, okay, another day, another book about Facebook, another thing that kind of uncovers the inner workings of this gigantic machine. But there's a kind of a lack of surprise and almost a lack of interest in it in terms of the conversations it's generating out here.

And I don't know if that's just like fatigue because there's been a lot of books written about meta. But it was just like, yeah, the thing that struck me is especially in this like we're talking about NVIDIA, GTC and everybody, you know.

The AI hype machine that's sucking up all the oxygen in the room. And you have this book about meta, which is, parts of it seem pretty damning, even though meta disagrees and says it's all untrue, etc. But you're kind of like, it's just not, it's not kind of, there's not like this massive shockwave from it. It's just kind of like, all right, let's move on.

Well, there have been allegations in the past that the company has behaved in a certain way. Mark Zuckerberg has been up in front of politicians on your side of the Atlantic about it. Yeah. Yeah, there have been other books. So maybe it's not that much of a surprise. Yeah, I think if it had come out like five years ago when it was like kind of the first of its kind or one of the first of its kind and also everybody was actively hating Meta.

And Mark Zuckerberg was, you know, on that kind of every six weeks it felt like he was testifying in front of Congress. Like that's none of that's happening anymore. You know, it's just it's very strange in that like meta hasn't changed. Its influence has not diminished. Arguably, it's increased, especially with his kind of newfound bromance with Trump. But people are just kind of like, yeah, OK. It's a reflection of Trump.

the kind of time that has passed, the number of these type of books that have come through, just the time in the market where everybody's most interested in AI. And just, yeah, we're 20 plus years into the meta experience. And revelations about how allegedly feckless and kind of careless this company is aren't really shocking people. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.

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I'm really excited about the interview that you are going to play to me today, because I feel like we spent a lot of time talking about all of the money, all of the many, many billions of dollars that investors are putting into AI. But it seems that we can put aside this human world and all of the stuff that we've just been talking about with Meta. And you've been looking at dogs and people spending money on trying to increase the life of dogs.

Who let the dogs out? Yes, I have. So you're welcome. I spoke to the boss or the founder of a company called Loyal. And what they're doing is they're developing products or drugs to extend the life

So one could say, get ready for it, that it's a perfect Silicon Valley dream. Do you see what I did there? I did. I mean, I don't want to bring the tone down, but my parents' dog died. Oh, no. Yeah, he did. They're half a spaniel. And, oh, they would have loved something like this. I mean, my dad said to me the other day, he said when he finishes his dinner and there's some left on his plate, he's looking around for the dog to give it to. Ah.

They even called me for a chat the other day. Basically, this is a way of saying I understand this. Yeah. I understand this a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an interesting company. It's founded by a woman called Celine Haliwa. She's annoyingly young, very smart. And she's been at this for six, seven years now.

She got the idea in 2018. She started it in 2020. And the company's raised a lot of money, like up to almost like $150 million. And their plan is, the broad idea is like, come up with a way, like a pill that you would give your dog every day.

And that could extend healthy lifespan, not like, you know, your crickety dog who can barely walk another year, but extend healthy lifespan of big dogs. And we can get into why that's why it's focused on big dogs initially for at least a year and then longer term growth.

because there's a lot of genetic similarities in the aging process between dogs and humans, then this makes the pathway to creating a similar drug for humans, for human longevity, and that is the longer-term goal. But goal one is to become the first company to get a drug approved that is not for cancer, not for diabetes, not for anything related to aging, but aging itself.

which is interesting. Yeah, I can't wait to hear more about it. And I would just say that like the framing of it for me is interesting because it's just, there's a great obsession out here with longevity. There's billions and billions of dollars being just pumped into a whole bunch of startups, often by some of the richest people in the world to try to kind of really, you know, hack biology and figure out a way to kind of stop or reverse aging, live forever, all that stuff. There's a lot of crazy stuff.

But Celine has taken a totally different approach and she's actually making progress, which we'll get into. I started by asking her the million dollar question, of course, which is that I'm sure all our listeners have and want to know, which is why dog longevity? Well, we're working on dog longevity for a few reasons. One, I'm a huge dog person. Dogs don't live long enough. Everybody knows the pain.

of losing a dog and watching them decline with age. It's extremely painful, especially as we started to think about dogs as more of family members versus as, you know, kind of more like farm animals as they were thought about, you know, decades ago.

And we're also doing it because dogs are a really strong model of human aging. So if we can figure out how to extend a dog's lifespan, we can do that a lot more quickly than we could do that on humans. And it's not one-to-one, but they give us a lot of good insight and data on what might also extend a human's healthy lifespan eventually too. So it's kind of a

A two for one, positive sum game, so to speak. I believe this is accurate, but I feel like when, well, last we spoke, one of the kind of the big kind of changes or potential changes that was going to help unlock what you're trying to do is this idea of developing a drug specifically for longevity. In other words, not for cancer, not for diabetes, not for arthritis, but like something that is, the indication is positive.

aging. Can you just update on like, what actually, where is that? And have we got to that point where the FDA, if it is the FDA saying like, yes, actually you can, you can create a treatment for getting old. Yeah, we've done it. We've done it twice now. Actually, all of our drugs are being developed to extend lifespan and

and quality of life, specifically around aging and age-related diseases. There's no other, you know, kind of classical, you know, you don't need to have cancer or sarcopenia or be overweight or anything like that. It's just for dogs, there are certain wage and age criteria who are generally healthy to keep them generally healthy longer. That was one of the absolutely...

massive, massive bets we took when we started the company. And by we, I mean me when I started the company. The royal we? The royal we. It's very much a team effort, but it was just me when Loyal started. And we were correct that there was a path to do this. If we could just step back for a second, because you talked about human longevity, obviously out here on the West Coast, it's a very big subject. Some companies are raising billions and billions to kind of

go after this, but it does feel like there has been that big shift. And I think it sounds like you guys are the first to actually get it over the line of just kind of

reframing aging as a thing in and of itself that we should target. Yeah, as far as I'm aware, there's no one else working on aging drugs just for healthy lifespan extension in dogs or in humans. Although there was actually an animal pharma company who announced that they want to work on pet lifespan also. But

As far as I'm aware, we're the only company explicitly working on that. All the human companies that are working on human longevity drugs are taking mechanisms that have been shown to extend lifespan, usually in mice or worms or some have primate data.

and then applying that to a human disease as a proof of concept. Some of them are closer to aging. There's one very cool company that was using a drug similar to rapamycin. Rapamycin is kind of a well-known longevity drug that's a little controversial. And they use a kind of rapamycin-like drug to show an increased resilience in elderly patients from getting the seasonal flu, right? The idea being that it's rejuvenating their immune aging. I would say that's probably the most

aging-esque study that I'm aware of having been run in humans, but a lot more a lot further away. And the relationship can be roughly skewed to how

risky or complicated as the drug so we see a lot of these like epigenetic reprogramming companies or gene therapy longevity companies they're all doing really kind of niche or severe diseases or things where you can take stuff out of the body change it and then put it back like blood because safety is safety risk is basically intolerable if you're trying to extend someone's lifespan versus the things that are a little bit safer maybe they're going for um like bioh

was looking at more like generalized or is looking at more generalized indications associated with obesity. Cambrian Bio is doing the same thing, but none of them are doing actual human lifespan extension. Not even the ones that have a billion dollars. Can we just talk about, because you have three...

different drugs you're developing. Is that correct? I'm going to kind of two different categories. One category is for large dog lifespan extension. So if you've ever loved a large dog, you are probably very well aware that they live pretty short lives. So, you know, a great Dane will live seven or eight.

My Roddy has an expected lifespan of 10 to 12. A Chihuahua can live 16 to 18 or even longer. And it's actually a very strong inverse correlation between dog size and lifespan. And so long story short, the thesis behind that drug is when we selectively bred dogs

to be these different sizes, we inadvertently selected for a genetic pathway that causes the dog to grow very fast in puberty, but also post-skeletal maturity causes them to age faster and die sooner. Basically, big dogs have an accelerated aging disorder due to historical inbreeding for size. And so we're just shunting that down in those dogs once they're fully grown. So we have two drugs we're working on with that.

And then we have our drug that will hopefully, fingers crossed, get on market first, which is for senior dog lifespan extension. So it's taking the biology of caloric restriction, caloric restriction being the most well-validated way to extend lifespan in basically anything. Fasting, basically. Yeah, fasting, intermittent fasting, you know.

All of these things, eating not a lot. These are the most well-validated ways to extend lifespan and everything from a worm to a primate. It's actually been shown in dogs too, to extend a Labrador's lifespan two years and delay onset. But nobody wants to calorically restrict their dog. If you've ever tried to like even delay giving your dog dinner for 30 minutes, it's like very traumatic with like the big, you know, puppy dog eyes. And so we have just...

interject with a quick story about our cat, Lex Lightning, not named by me, named by our kids. That's adorable. Lex Lightning is, you know, we have one of those automated feeders and he has four feedings a day. And now we've just, we have daylight savings. So we're kind of up earlier. And so, and I think that kind of triggers his like, all right, I'm going to get fed now, but I haven't changed the hour on the automatic feeder yet.

So while I'm like up making breakfast for the kids and kind of getting their lunches ready, he's like fully attacking me and my wife, like biting our legs, being like, what is going on? I need my food.

And just the idea of caloric restriction. The caloric restriction is a thing. Like I, and also just in humans, I, I did a big series on longevity and spoke to a guy who's very into caloric restriction. I think eating like 1200 calories a day or something. And he's very,

He is biologically much younger than he actually is. But also he's like, I eat bean pasta and this and that, and I don't eat very much. And it's the first two years of this are terrible, but it does kind of do something biologically. Yeah. Is the drug that you have developed basically mimicking is like kind of all gain, no pain, basically mimicking that kind of process.

Yeah, basically. I wouldn't say it's all gain because I think there's probably things that are happening with chloroprestriction. Like there's theories that having less amounts of certain amino acids, at least in humans, might be relevant to the longevity benefits. So everyone asks me, is this just GLP-1 for dogs? And the answer is no. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not a Zimpecker or a Wegovy. No, because people want that relationship with their pet. Like when Della, my dog, comes running up to me, I'm like, oh, it's because she loves me so much. And she does love me. But she also wants a snack. And if you take that away, it actually can be pretty sad to dog owners. What was the reception when you were like, amidst all of the...

yes we want we think we can kind of crack this whole biology of aging thing and really start to add meaningfully add years onto people's healthy lifespans and there's all this momentum and all this excitement and all this kind of interesting new science what was the reception for you being like yeah i'm gonna focus on dogs people definitely laugh in my face

laughed in your face oh yeah oh yeah many many people honestly i would snicker when i said dog longevity because it's such a ridiculous phrase it's such a silicon valley phrase right like it feels like something that would be in the show and i'm running around like this 25 year old like straight from university dropping out being like i'm gonna work on dog longevity drugs and longevity was certainly not as hot then as it is now

You know, it's funny. Most people, vast majority of people, especially wealthy people, want to live longer. And I think they put money towards things that they feel like will increase that probability of it happening in their lifetime. I'd say probably my contrarian take is going dogs first is the fastest way to develop lifespan extension drugs. Do tell. Because I don't think developing drugs not for aging...

is actually going to teach us that much and facilitate us developing drugs for aging right like your your argument being that a lot of these kind of uh let's call them human focused companies are developed because again around this this complication of like there's not really an indication that the fda has said yeah this is aging is an indication you can try to treat for most companies are kind of

going through a side door and being like, well, lots of old people suffer from arthritis or diabetes or heart disease. And we're going to try to focus on that. And that is in itself improving lifespan. Yeah. And we're proving the validity of their pathway. And again, valuable work, you know, very important. But if you're developing an arthritis drug, let's stick with that metaphor.

You are going to become an arthritis company. It doesn't matter where you found your compound from. It doesn't matter if their compound was discovered in mice because it made them immortal, right? Like you are now an arthritis company 10 plus years later, and you're probably getting acquired for that arthritis asset. And Lord knows the big pharmas are not going to be like, let's take this arthritis drug and develop it for longevity. Now, I think they will eventually. Yeah.

I think actually every major pharmaceutical company will have an aging division, just like how they have a cardiovascular division and a neurodegenerative division and all the other divisions as they do today. But you need to have one that breaks through, right? You need to have kind of that one normalization and kind of validity of the space. And then everyone else is going to come rushing in, right? Like weight loss being a classic example. Glyps are like probably a longevity drug. At least they're a longevity drug for obese people.

And that the validation of the new market that people wanted and that you could develop a drug for this has then facilitated a huge wave of resources. I think vastly increasing the probability of having efficacious drugs in that space and better next, next, next generation. I don't think that occurs if you do these one-off efforts. And then, but that leads to the question of like, you're saying, well, you know, if you're developing an arthritis drug, you're going to be an arthritis company.

You're doing dog longevity. How do you not just end up being a dog longevity company? It's super risky. Actually, it's something we think about a lot. I think the big difference between doing dogs versus doing human arthritis drugs is to get a dog drug approved is...

four-ish years, five-ish years, and maybe 20 to $40 million versus a human drug is seven to 10 years if you're lucky and a billion dollars or something within that range. And so

I mean, bluntly, I'm able to do it raising from non, you know, East Coast super trad biotech firms whose whole model is build for purchase, build for a big farm at a purchase. And I'm able to, it's able to be a founder led company because, yeah, it's going to be like probably pretty traumatic for when I'm like, cool, we have like

You know, hopefully have this like money cow or whatever of like these dog longevity drugs. And we have a multiple year head start. We're always going to do dog drugs. We're always going to do dog drugs. And we're going to not do dog drugs. But instead of taking this 100 million or 200 million or 500 million dollars and funneling it into more dog drugs where we know the ROI is 3x and the likelihood is 80%.

let's take that half a billion dollars and light it on fire and get like halfway through a human program. You can only do that if you are a founder led company. And you can only do that if you're a longevity company at the core constitution, everybody at loyal all day, every day thinks about longevity. And the biology is very, very similar, right? Dogs have all the environmental impact that we do. They have a lot of the same diet that we do. They'll eat, you know, food off our dinner table, right?

And they're actually, they're phylogenetically like on the evolutionary tree further away from us than mice are. Mice being kind of the canonical animal that all these studies are run in. But because of mice's turnover rate, they're actually closer to us genetically. So dogs are closer to humans genetically than mice are. So last year you guys raised $45 million, which brings the total to $120, is that right? $120, $150, something like that. Yeah, we're not ranged.

So where are you along the arc of spot is going to live till he's 50? On the arc of spot living to 50, still pretty far away. It's just the beginning of the curve. Sorry for spot. But we are hopefully knock on wood on track to get our first drug approved in about the next year or so. So you're doing it in your butt just to kind of put some meat on the bones of that. You're actually doing a clinical study right now, correct?

Yes, yes. But one of the other kind of facilitating aspects of Loyal was that there was this new regulatory pathway. It's an accelerated approval pathway. So we'll be able to go to market with full safety, full manufacturing, and reasonable expectation of efficacy, which is basically showing the positive slope increase, but in a shorter time period without the mortality. It's a lot more goes into it too, but that's like kind of the short and dirty of it. And then in parallel, we're running this massive thousand plus dog market

lifespan extension study for the five years that a drug's on market conditionally. So that study will continue running. And we're able to do that because it's such a damn, it's like the largest and longest animal health study ever run. So you don't actually have to wait for the results of that because of this new regulatory pathway? Yes. Assuming the drug is safe. Very, very safe. Yeah. What is the potential effect in terms of like, we're talking about longevity, like are we talking about

Six months? Five years? Like, what do we know? We don't know. This is a short answer. The longer answer is we kind of drew the line at approximately one year of lifespan extension, mostly because you have to draw the line somewhere one year of healthier life. You have to draw the line somewhere that you feel confident that biology supports you meeting or exceeding. Because if I said three years and we only showed one year, the drugs would make it on market, even though we showed a year of lifespan extension.

So about a year and we'll see what the data is. I think the quality of life improvement will actually be even more striking to dog owners, but it's harder to quantify. Right, right, right. Versus mortality is unfortunately quite simple. Stepping back, like talking again more broadly about the longevity space, if you had to kind of play it forward, I don't know, 10 years from now, I mean, you're...

I have a particular take on it, but I'm sure you're talking to people day in, day out, and you're seeing the science. Do you think we're at the start of something new and different from what has come before in terms of how we view and treat aging? 100%. I think there's a couple of different things that are going to occur. I think people being able to go to their veterinarian and buy a drug...

to extend their dog's lifespan, they're inevitably going to ask the question, why is this for my dog and not my grandma? Right? It's that cultural normalization. Right now, longevity is in the sphere of billionaires spending millions a year to live longer and snake oil and the fountain of youth that, you know, makes people think it's not real. And so that was one of the reasons that

that I was so insistent that we go down this FDA approval pathway, even though I think there's quite a lot of supplements that would extend a dog's lifespan, was because that legitimacy, I think, is the thing the field needs perhaps more than anything. So I think that's going to be huge. In the minute it becomes trendy, or even just like slightly de-risked,

Pharma will pile in. And that's what we want, right? Because this is not like longevity is a space bigger than cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, cognitive function. Like it's not one drug, it's a class, right? It's an entire category, right? And there are God knows how many cancer companies. There should be that many longevity companies too. And so I think, I don't know how long it'll take to get there, but I think it will be

vastly more normal in the next five years. Well, that was amazing. And I think you've made the subject vastly more normal than I've ever, ever expected to be like by the end, I was kind of listening going, yeah, sure. Why does it exist for my dog and not my grandma? I mean, yeah, you need to the mortality. That's the line. That's the bar. Yeah, exactly. Mortality is more simple than the quality of life. Yeah.

How do you feel about this idea of, you know, taking a pill, popping a pill? Well, I asked her, I was like, which didn't make it into the cut, but I was like, you know, are you ready for the backlash? Because you can see it coming, right? Like say everything, because, and I will say this is a very like serious grownup company. She has like teams of PhDs designing these drugs, running clinical trials. Like this is a very serious effort. But the moment that

You go out into the world and you say, we have figured out a way to extend the life of dogs. And I asked her, I was like, you know, she was saying she wants this to be cheap. And this is like a one-a-day pill, like beef-flavored pill you give your dog. But she wants it to be cheap and widely available and kind of sold through veterinarians, etc. They're going to try to create a whole consumer brand around it, etc. But you can see the backlash. Yeah.

Silicon Valley startup extends life of dogs while humans are dropping dead of all kinds of various terrible things and deprivations. Yes, you can completely see how it feels a bit decadent when you put it like that. But I can also see the demand. Because people here in Britain absolutely love, love, love their dogs. And same here. Yeah.

Same here. And so in a year, as she said, in a dog's life makes a massive difference. It's a big deal. I know. And a good friend of mine, he had a very big dog, Bear, who he had to put down week before last. And it was very traumatic for the family because he's got two young kids and they've like their whole life they had this dog. And so it is in like, you know, people's attachment to these dogs, like in San Francisco in particular, there are more dogs than children.

How's that for a fact? Well, it's a very good fact. And no offense, a lot of the stuff that happens in Silicon Valley seems completely ridiculous to the outside world. When you hear about all of the money that's being spent on generative AI, you could probably do an awful lot in the global south with that money.

where people are using it to develop chatbots. Yeah. The other thing is, like, you know, there's a line that a lot of people use out here. It's like, you know, all these new technologies, they start out as, like, you know, toys of the rich.

Or even like, you know, transatlantic flight used to cost something like, I can't remember the number. It was like $50,000 in today's money. Wasn't for the likes of you and I. Correct. But you start with this thing. It seems completely out there or ridiculous or not useful. And then like, but if there is, if what she is saying is true is that they can do kind of prove this in dogs and, and, and kind of that eases the pathway into humans, then,

There's a ton of companies, as we discussed, who are working on even crazier ideas for humans. Something that can actually reverse your aging and stuff like that. So if this creates a pathway to doing something similar in humans and you can add a year or two of meaningful, healthy life for humans, then it will all be seen as the most genius thing ever. But you just know how these things go. The headlines write themselves when you have a...

Silicon Valley startup extending the life of dogs and all the sneering that will come with that. But Celine said she was ready for it. She's prepared, but that will come. But I do think it's interesting. And the only thing I would say is around dogs is that like, you know, and we've talked about it before.

When you talk about AI and all the things like one of those, like a killer app would be able to talk to your dog. If a company figures out how to speak to your animal, that is a multi-billion dollar company. If we could talk to the animals. Exactly. Just imagine it. No, it's true. And I don't think it's that far away, right? If you look at what generative AI does and sucking up patterns with, I think we talked about bats, didn't we? Last time we spoke about this. The company that was kind of looking at bat sounds and translating them.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Talking to your dog, who's going to be a year older than he should be or she. Yes, exactly. So that was it. So I just felt like, you know, I had the most Silicon Valley day. It was like run down to San Jose.

Watch one of the richest men on the planet fire a cannon of T-shirts of like company swag onto a crowd of adoring fans in a stadium. And announce some AI chips. Announce some AI chips. Go see a bunch of like robot dogs and humanoid robots and self-driving cars on this like big kind of trade show floor. Then run out and do a podcast about dog life extension parked next to a Tesla Cybertruck.

Yeah, you couldn't make it up. I feel like I'm having a complete opposite moment here right now in my house because we're doing something that's very non-techie and we're growing tadpoles or frogs. So we found some frog spawn the other weekend in a pond and we borrowed a fish tank from a neighbour and filled it up with rainwater because you can't use water from the tap because tadpoles die if they get in the door rain.

And they've hatched. And I thought I'd killed them initially. It was a hairy moment because they sort of grow in their eggs into little commas. And then they flopped on the bottom of the tank. But they revived.

And now they're swimming around. We've got a tank of about 40 tadpoles in the kitchen, which are on their way to becoming frogs. Are you going to fry those up or what are you going to do with them? Well, the girls are just completely obsessed with them. So we're watching them grow. And you can see like a tiny leg growing at the back. And then when they emerge, we'll put them in the pond in the garden. Maybe take them out to a local London park.

I love it. Try feeding them some dog longevity tablets. Exactly. Who knows? That's like the next, like, you know, science fiction movie. Half dog, half tadpole. Terrorizes London.

Taking over South London Parks. Anyway, so yeah, that's what's going on here. Enjoy if you go again to GTC. Enjoy the party. Oh yeah, very exciting. I hope you catch a t-shirt.

And we live in hope. I'll come back next week with my t-shirt and I hope in the meantime, your tadpoles don't mutate and take over your house. I'll send you a video. They're very funny. Anyway. All right. Well. Toodaloo. Toodaloo. See you next week. This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Vanta.

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