EventWeek(Day 2): Quad Squad!!! Ai, Leadership, Aging, and Quantum Computing. FOUR SPEECHES.
Disclaimer:
Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy!Topics Included: Ai, Careers, Layoffs, Resume, Motivation, Self-Adoration, Quantum Computing, Games, Great Speeches, Boring Speeches, Sunshine, Aging, DNA Markings,
Day two (for me) of this speech-packed week. Soakin’ up all of the knowledge Seattle’s ready to give me. What’s in store? Speeches galore!! First was two speeches I couldn’t pick between, then a speech I DEFINITELY wanted to check out (on aging, i’m cracking up that I’m becoming a casual ‘aging’ knowledgable person), and then some other stuff, too. It was a long day with each speech set to run over an hour - set for an hour and a half, each, to be specific. Oof!! That’s a lot of listening.
So, how were the speeches? How was our lovely attendee’s time there? Let’s reflect.
Why Attend: This is a special event week just for professional women in the industry looking to learn more. It’s cool and there are really dozens of speeches to see (or maybe a dozen total, probably double dozen). So, you can really take advantage of this opportunity and learn about emerging trends. Let’s do it!!
Overall Event Review: Venue (2.5/5), Food (3.75/5), Speaker Content (3/5), Networking (2.5/5), Likeliness to Return (4/5)… (more below)
Photo Collage and Commentary:'
Notes from the Event:
- Traveling there
(lol right as I go to write this the subway announces they’re experiencing a delay and please wait on board - hahah -a nd I’m writing this blog on the subway on my way back to my apartment after this event… now, read the first notes I’m about to copy down from my way TO the event hahahha)
- Okay, I love the subway!!!!! You get fresh air on your walk, then you get to work on your laptop while traveling downtown!!! You can NOT do that driving a car. For real. It’s awesome (if you like your work).
ARRIVAL:
I arrived and for a second thought we were going to be meeting in the amerzon balls/spheres, but it’s next door. The entrance was fine.
LOL and there is this couple having serious PDA on the train, but he’s leaning in a lot and she’s accepting the kiss. Do you guys know about the green line theory? idk if their relationship will last.
Now she’s even yawning hahah. Okay let’s continue. Back to the event.
So i arrived and head upstairs and got some food and sat down in the first meeting.
The room was huge and awkward shaped and it was like, no comfy chairs and nowhere to charge your computer and everyone was squished together.
I had to go sit in a weird place cause my computer wasn’t fully charged (at all) and the speech will be over an hour and a half long they said. OMG and these chairs are not comfy and the lights are too bright so I’m like, omg.
And they dont even have a stage for these ladies, just taller chairs. It works - but just hardly. You have to sit up straight.
Also they are thanking everyone for the army of volunteers and share any feedback to volunteers then volunteers will bring the feedback together.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of how earlier I was called “a straggler” behind my back as they were talking bout every to lead upstairs lol.
Up on stage the Emcee talks about the schedule through the rest of the day. She says thanks for having her here and she passes on the mic to a lady.
Their transition was a little weird cause there was no time for anyone to cheer. So that emcee just lead a great chat but now no one got to cheer for her
This audio in this room is so loud too, but I have really sensitive hearing. But it’s a bit ‘too much’ for this.
DUDE! I need to sell a headband for this moment, like the headband masks that you can put over your ears to wear, like fashion but actually, it’s for function/sleek earplugs. Hahha. I’m making it NOW. :). Then I’ll order the test - and if its awesome, I’ll put it on my merch store. The merch store is kinda a joke but also a way to support what I’m doing if you like it - ya knooooooow.
Cause I’m about to leave this place if it’s too loud. It’s not fun in here.
Now this next speaker is excusing herself to read a scripted speech about their sponsors, reading it off her phone. It’s super unprofessional cause even her phone turned off and locked mid-speech and then she said that aloud and apologized for it, then she switches to her notes in hand on paper.
She’s up on stage representing her company. Lol. What does this company do? I hope it’s nothing to do with presentation or organization.
She says they’re a leading ai company and they proactively recruited her. LOL they’re so famous.
Her career is based on never knowing what is coming next, it’s about adaptability, constant learning, and of course - relationships! Looking forward, a lot of uncertainty for all of us (dude!! She’s reading her speech off of paper. I just looked up as I heard it cause it sounds is scripted and fake. It is hahahahaha.)
Omg. Now she just asked a question to everyone.
What does future proofing look like to you?
The next lady asks if hte mic is working, it’s her first time - she is relieved.
No tech rehearsal? Kelly Tutors orange flag violation.
Then they said she works building ai that connects to workspace.
OHHH I know what company this is. Hahaha. Hm. Well, they let Ai do the organizing - and writing, so it makes sense why they aren’t organized I guess? What would it take to get hired and recruited by an Ai company? What are they lookin for?
They want for Ai to make you more effective
A thought partner. Maybe someone to do drafts with.
Even using Ai to organize thoughts on this speech.
Don’t compete with Ai, dance with it. Create a dance floor when the Ai understands more and tries to be in sync with who you are and dance the dance alongside it. It doesn’t replace you, it enhances you and shows how valuable human traits are.
The girl works on a nonprofit that builds something. Annual learning programs, mentorship, mostly globally at scale at huge social media companies we’ve all heard of.
She used to do a mentorship program keeping in mind 50k ppl
Traditional learning isn’t keeping up with today, so she’s started her own company ,it’s super new. ITs a space for founders to come together and make learning relevant, practical, engaging, and fun.
We can’t predict the future, we can focus on what we can control. Focus on your own curiosity and interest. Solve the problems you’re focusing on and interested about.
Self awareness. Focus on the skills you can develop and learn together.
The next lady is the VP of Tech for a big retail chain. She has three machine learning teams what work with her. SHe’s been at this company for a year and a half, was at a huge company a mega corp before that. Hmmm….. I’ve heard a lot of rumors about her company lately and think they may be involved in an upcoming merger idk.)
The last few years developing product tech, shopping experiences with LLM and the voice, that’s all her team.
Now, this is very different. Happy to talk about Ai and how we use it in this company versus how we used to use it in my old job.
Future-proofing means industry-specific skills, evolving all the time. The ability and curiosity to be flexible.
In addition, leadership skills, competency.
Those skills are adorable, so make sure you develop that and have time and curiosity to continue to learn on what is new and what is to come.
The elephant in the room: How has it changed your career and your path?
A lady says she can start since everyone is looking at her.
She asks how many people here are working at this big corporation who is in teh audience, only one girl raises her hand
WOW! I’m surprised. This is 100% on brand for them. And right around their campus. Why aren’t they here????? Too busy working?? Who are all these ladies here with time off, including myself hahaha.
Omg this speech is truly boring. I feel like it’s so vague. I wanna go hear the other speech. I may just go. I think I’ll go soon. This is so boring and I can tell they’re not going to provide any good content.
I don’t mean to judge so soon and I know this all the time, but from the start the emcee was awkward, there’s been no opportunity to clap, and it’s just super disorganized. No one is connected, and I think it’s just going to go so so slow.
There is one more speech going on at this time. I will go to that one. I’ll pretend I need to go use the restroom at a good time and then go to the other room. It sounded interesting too and probably is more intimate cause less people are there, so they’ll be glad someone new arrived. That’s my guess.
Let’s be real for a hot second, in times of fear, what really helps and can ground us is ‘trying to understand’. For me, I was overwhelmed, stop fr a second, choose one tool, pick one problem you’re wanting to solve, then play with it.
What makes us human? Curiosity.
Okay - I’m going to go. No way can I stay here. I jsut want a more focused speech and I think I can find it.
NEXT SPEECH, Alternate Speech, arriving late:
If you feel you don’t have the support you need, phone a friend
I just posted about this last week on linkedin hahaha. What ‘a sign’ that I shoudl be here? right?? “Phone a friend’s” value.
I have a friend that knows talent acquisition well, one that knows data well.
I will call her and say, “here’s what’s going on”
When you build your network and your brand people are going to be willing to help.
Yeah it was good to come here
The VC world is male dominated. In our first round, the first ever woman leading a fun of all the places we’d pitched. We were engaging, she was listening, we were going through the motions successfully.
Usually in an all-male VC, she paused the convo as it flowed past my comment and she said she agreed with me.
Just wanna throw that out there
Question: You have a deep background in equity and thinking about differentiated pathways to success. How are you spending time currently to advance women? What does that look liek structurally and interpersonally?
That’s a juicy question. There are a lot of things. One thing to call out is, I used to lead inclusion strategies in my own role. I don’t have an expertise, no one is - but I have that sense and I think if we’re really thinking all the way around.
Lol there is a girl who really wants to open up a bag of pretzels but they’re super loud. The chips bag. They picked such rood snacks - and now this girl is just slowly opening her bag for like over a minute now, and just doing it so long hahah. Just rip the bandaid, girl!! And then every time you reach your hand into the bag it’ll make noise too, and we all know it.
Anyway, okay - this speaker said she jsut assumes that everyone is always thinking about their next job. Even all of us in this room. LOL -omg. No. What a sad state of the world.
- What can I do right now? Meet people, the next contractor - when will I need their help? Think about that in your day to day and how you talk to your network and community.
It’s the 2025 equivalent of mutual weight in corporate, which is so so important.
QUESTION: Whose help do you call on when you’re pulling forward more junior talent?
I feel like she’s making up these questions as she goes.
Question: What expectations are you sharing with your more junior team members to help them come up with the career path tehy desire?
- Definitely a member of all of the internal group, well, the women groups at my company. I want to be one of the leaders on the board, but there are conditions when you work in HR. Definitely using those networks and encouraging the women to actively engage in those.
Sometimes I see people awarded for women’s leadership awards. All of them were nominated by teams, and upset it was for women only. But there were 9,000 women working for the organization, and I thought “its pretty cool my team thinks I’m awesome compare to these 8,000 other people” so its okay to want to participate and contirube and leverage and stand out and use those forums to develop kinds of skills. To support each other at different phases of our life and changes. We do experience unique challenges in some cases.
LOL this speech. IDK whats she’s saying
In the pharmaseutical I worked for, we were 45% women to me. They used lots of inclusive programs.
I don’t select my mentees, they tend to select me. We make sure we have a good relationship and they’re all women. They want to navigate and be effective.
OOf. Pharma lady. I’m a natural girl!! Boycotted makeup and try to take as little meds as possibleeeee.
The emcee makes a joke about how this lady must have done work a decade ago, then the speaker who just spoke (the Pharma lady) she said woah woah woah!!!
The emcee says what? Then she says: you’re younger than that???
Then the pharma lady says yeah hahaha.
Then the emcee says her husband turns 50 soon and she’s 45 so now she feels geriatric, trying to casually change the subject.
All I’m going to say is - woah. Hahah That was awkward - ANDDDD me, over here, raising my eyebrows at her past (and not leaning into natural remedies, instead chemically)
AND THEN BY MISTAKE THE EMCEE JUST CALLED HER OLD.
Omg her mood is so down and they’re so awkward ‘on stage’ now too. But there is no stage, again. Its sorta hard to see everyone hahahha. omg. oh yeah, there is no stage for them. The chairs are set up so funny too.
Women are raised differently now. It’s okay to be assertive, not aggressive, but assertive.
A lot of us come in more fearless
Willing to take more challenges.
Women don’t ask.
When you don’t ask for things, especially around money, and you see that compound over time, financial you’re at a disadvantage.
So you need to stick with it or you find pay gaps.
Now companies are doing audits around pay, you may not see that behind the curtain in HR, around crunching numbers.
They realize what they want to pay someone - and they person doesn’t even realize they need to ask for those numbers, but they pay them more money than they ask.
LOL who?
We are more family and wellness-friendly. Many times if a spouse or significant other relocated, you’re going to have to quit your job and find one in a new city. But now companies will transfer you, be hybrid, or support you.
Now you work till the work gets done. Pull all-nighters.
BTW the emcee seems to wear a lot of makeup and teh other lady doesn’t - the one who was called ‘old’ not as much. Just seeing them on stage and looking a bit awkward. And then the lady talking now is just talking talking and the 4th lady on stage is just sitting there too.
We want more outside of work and companies are willing to see people there.
Wellness rooms, all those types of things are really DEI.
They want to meet people and retain people
This emcee just says “yeah” - and then changes the subject. Dang!! I felt like her DEI comment was so true. Even lately my passion for treating ADHD like we do peanut allegories.
Emcees need to LISTEN - not only ask questions.
When you get into the heart of power, we’re right back into the 1940’s. Situations that sound like textbook exclusion (says the emcee). But I think we have seen progress around the middle tier of managers. But the closer you get to real power, set the clock and dial back
Can I add to that, one thing that has not changed is the power of network and nepotism. people don’t realize how prevalent nepotism is in corporations and business.
A lot of times if someone vouches for them, there’s a strong chance you’ll get a job over someone else who may be more competent.
And teh emcee is just rolling her eyes and agrees.
One place has 40% of the hires as referrals. It’s staggering!! It’s’ going to be harder to get someone in.
These are the times of nepo babies.
The emcee says: use your own nepotism
The lady follow up: go through your own doors.
What skills are necessary for 2025:
- ‘old lady’ - change management and adaptability. With rapid changes in tech geopolitical landscapes, etc, a big part of our role as any leader is helping teams be resilient, navigate uncertainty. It’s not just managing disruption anymore, it’s using it to accelerate. That’s something we really have to focus on even more as leaders to be successful and for our teams to be successful. More than ever before, because of the rapid pace of change.
Also Ai fluency and strategic alignment.
It’s not just about technical expertise like being able to code or understand technologies, it’s being able to spot opportunities related to Ai and generative Ai.
How to navigate the risks and build that into your strategic priorities.
Add value to the business or task or job at hand. That’s a new manifestation of what we mean by Ai fluency and strategic alignment.
The emcee says she took a picture, the lady replies: I hope I had my mouth closed.
The emcee says: we only post good picture of each other, right ladies!
She says, you said the most interesting thing at the beginning, can you unpack that more?
Okay, we’re an online travel agency, we want to apply machine learning in everything we do, as long as it doesnt’ put other travelers and stakeholders at risk.
It’s about spotting new tech and finding those opportunities.
How can we exploit this to have progress?
EXPLOIT - that word. Shouldn’t that make people raise red flags?
Let’s actively manage and accelerate the business programs using disruption.
Use business decisions to try to accelerate amongst that.
How do I use that landscape and how do I create an environment for my team and our leaders across the company to use the disruption…. Idk
Now the Emcee digs further into her question - and asks for an example
AGAIN! Lol, this emcee is asking questions in real time - but she’s not steady enough LISTENING to everyone for this technique to work. My opinion.
It’s like when a waitress comes to take your order without writing anything down. You make mistakes sometime.
OMG now she says, “ummm ___ waht is your perspective on, um, you know, two or three leadership skills that are very important now in 2025”
This lady boycotted her weird mini mic and wants the host’s mic, but it’s making a tiny echo when she talks lol but she’s doing it.
The courage of conviction is really important right now, from a people perspective we’re not just looking at numbers anymore. We’re looking at insights.
Be clear about the ‘why’ in commercial partnerships
We want to make better experiences for consumers? What are we actually try to fix? To solve?
True!! EXPLOT LADY!! What are you trying to solve? Your C-level boss’ credit card addiction???
For ai, decisions are being made where Ai can either relegate in or not. Add ontop of each other, we learn from these decisions.
With Gen Ai we want to be specific about what we want to be true and not to be true.
Things are changing so quickly, so there is a lot to be learned about reverse mentorship.
Be very open minded ESPECIALLY as you get more senior and live in a vacuum. It’s really important.
Now the EMCEE sneaks a peak at her phone, “can you, I want to ask a question about how you stay energized and focused with enough fuel, but first please tell us how to understand your scope - and the size of your responsibility. And when you feel overwhelmed, how do you stay focused?”
Hahahah and my role just got bigger to hahahah.
So I work in leveraging our organization to do good, for people and what we build and how people experience it. We think strategically about end-to-end the employee experience.
How do we attract folks?
Are we what we promised we would be when you get here?
Look at our process, assess our programs, make sure these things are true.
I try to keep up with regulatory changes globally and make sure we’re not caught on our back foot.
Let’s make sure we’re representing all of the folks from 21 different companies that all work here.
Okay - these speeches are really boring me. All of them. I think I’m just super excited for the next speeches today hahaha. I’m excited for the Quantum computing speech. (These speeches just feel like these women celebrating themselves so much).
She says she doesn’t do anything. No exercise, healthy eating - if you do that cause it’s your jam, it works. If you do it cause it’s supposed to be your jam you get tired . She says, “so I jsut do whatever” - I read books, I play with my kids, I don’t put perameters around it. What you do and say matters to others, so I look for places where there are no consequences . I need that balance and life is better than my screen.
- idk. I think you gotta keep yourself in shape and make it your thing.
Do things to fill your cup then give yourself to do ‘whatever’, do wahtever it takes to fill your cup.
Um hahahah okay. True but also, idk. Just a bit of a weird tone the way she said it. Felt like she was talking to a therapist 20% or something, looking for us to approve of her being sooo lazy as she said.
These speeches are so long. More people want to leave and lots of people seem bored.
Now this next lady is talking about how people got fired and she has new roles and will have some 1-on-1’s cause now all these staff are new entities or idk?
Lol okay. What’s the next speech? OH YEAH! Back to your younger self - a speech about aging. Okay I’ll go to the park for an hour then come back. I’ll fake bathroom.
I know it’s sorta rude, but, that’s speeches!! Value your time, and just leave politely if you wanna leave. That’s kinda my point of 2025, be alive in your intuition. You know? Being TOO polite sometimes makes you get stuck in things you aren’t happy with.
Instead, now I’ve left and I’m soaking up sunshine on a pink lawn chair in the middle of downtown. TOO ON BRAND!?!? Hahah, you know? And then next, I’m becoming an amateur+ at aging, since this will be my second speech of the month on ageing. Last time I had no clue what to expect, this time: Clue achieved.
Let’s see what the next speech has for us.
LUNCH
Now I’m having lunch and I can hear mentorships happening for one on one. She said she works as the assistant for a guy who is the VP of a huge company but he gets jealous when she networks without him. Like if another guy talks to her, she said he reached out to her - but her boss will say: NO! Don’t network with anyone without me. OMG So insecure and insane. So now this lady is so stressed for her upcoming performance review.
I think she’s the mentor sharing that story with a mentee????? Lol. Idk what I just overheard. But I do know that is a really tough situation. And I’m glad I don’t have a boss.
She said she wants a good relationship with him but also doing waht is right for the company and the team. But she said she ruminates around the conflict she feels. Oof. The stress.
She’s overly focused on facing authority and heiarchical power. She said a lot of signals are telling her that he is not 100% accurate in his perspective or feedback. So, how can she keep grounding herself? And as far as ‘technology’ is concerned, ‘next January’ is a long ways away.
So true hahah.
I’d tell her the elected official’s advice from yesterday: 90% of politics is getting everyone in the room to agree there is a problem.
OMG Now they’re talking about PHYSICAL PAIN!!!
She said she feels it in her neck and back, not getting enough exercise to process built up stress (see!!! Like me just stepping away).
She said she doesn’t do morning yoga, instead she jumps onto her phone
- That’s why I added my daughter to my workout routine each day. :). Legit. I did. We go to the gym in my apartment each morning before daycare. It’s so fun.
NEXT SPEECH:
You’re here to build connections, connections are hte most valuable resource you can have
She says we’re here to support you and give you an avenue to connect as people, apply for the different jobs.
This speaker has a presentation on screen and all of his social media handles are pop culture plays on science things lol. It’s funny-ish, maybe. But some stuff I don’t know.
He said this is his third time that he’s speaking to this group.
He said he has a teenager now who keeps saying she’s not young, she’s a teenager.
Omg this guy’s tone is a bit slow. IDK these 1.5 hour speeches are TOUGH. It’s like omg thats a lot of time hahah. Okay. But he’s mumbling so much and idk what he’s saying haha. Lemme focus.
He says some of his work is to help provide real science.
He says we’re not going to live forever, we’re not there yet. But we can live a healthy lifestyle. We’re going to talk about that
Omg his laptop is so far away and he has to walk behind a sign to get to his computer ahahaha. Omg, it’s going to be like this the entire time.
This guy is talking about a Netflix movie where some guy tried to figure out how to live forever.
This guy did blood infusions - even using his young son’s blood.
In turn, he also donated blood to his dad, to make his dad get younger. Okay? So they are trying crazy things.
We know these other guys and you must have heard of him (he’s the CEO of a ai company), then a founder of another company. They’re all taking repurposed diabetes medication. They’re all taking it to get younger.
They don’t want to live forever but add more life to their years
Some one takes a breath of relief in the audience, ‘okay’
The host says he’s like Voldemort splitting his soul. Breaking the rank and investing in startups and all kinds of things to live long
Then these women didnt have the money but they lived a long time. A woman is currently 115, another is 117, another is 122. One lady eats lots of sweet potatoes, one tweeted with her daughter and say stuff like (avoid toxic people), and then another lady was 122 - the longest human to live on earth I think at 122. The key seems to be, because of peer pressure she started smoking at age 112 but gave it up at 117.
Some of these jokes I dont get hahah.
She said she didnt have as many chores.
My plan was to live to be 140. I think that’s going to be possible over time. Healthy happy 140 making the world a better place for all and myself included hahah - okay?
Then lastly he lists animals that live a long time:
There is one species of jellyfish that is immortal.
Yeah, that’s the best you can get. When it does it decetegrates, and just like a pheonix, they come back teogehtr and recreate. Weird, creepy, I know
Then a tortoise that has lived to be 192.
If you’re really competitive and you love march madness, go look at this. It’s a leaderboard with tests and if you can spare some spit or urine or blood, with $200 to spare, and if you’re find with someone using your data, they can try to calculate your biological age.
But I thought aging was about frailty.
He said you need a lot of extra money and a giant sense of humor with that test.
I Want to tell him about this frailty thing and see if he knows about it ——
He said that this is kinda fake, not exactly, but it’s somewhere in between.
These aging tests aren’t FDA approved.
Most of these tests come with free supplements, then they will help you.
The funny thing is that good nights sleep and not too much sugar will make your age and body get younger.
Aging research has had many Chat GPT moments. In 2013, a researcher was at UCLA and he set out to look at blood. He wasn’t interested in aging, but trying to find molecular markers of sexual orientations. He was straight and his twin brother was gay. He took both of their samples and did this DNA comparison. He looked at chemical punctuation marks.
He wanted to see if patterns of the marks were different between peopel who are straight and gay.
Did he find any? Nah. He didn’t find anything
But that was his little study he was doing. 20-30 samples of blood, data from the blood. And he said, I’m not going to let the data sit, so he tried to see which other things correlated. Suddenly something came up - he was able to predict the age of people based on marks in the DNA. The Epigenome marks, they control which of your 20k genes in all of your body’s cells are active and at waht capacity.
What you do right now, your behavior, waht you eat, the stress you’re going through - they all affect those epigonomic marks.
We have evidence to show that when mothers are stressed, it changes the genomes of the DNA of hte unborn kid.
A small shrill of evidence can link why peopel who are born to kids who are stressed may have behavioral issues. Nothing is conclusive, but there is a mechanism on how stress can activate genes.
Think of them as editors marks on your genes.
He was able to predict the age of people pretty accurately jsut based on the marks.
That’s not too fantastic, you don’t need to do a test on someone to see how old they are, just ask when they were born! Hahahah. Geeze.
This 2013 data has been cited over thousands of times.
People are doing better physiologically and doing better in health than others their same age, with more diseases and cancer.
Biological age doesn’t really tell their risk of developing all of these age-related diseases.
The four horsemen of aging/death
Hear disease
Diabetes
Demensia
Cancer
These are the primary four age-related diseases.
Different tissues in your body age at different rates. Your breasts age faster (makes sense, breast cancer is common).
This is waht the mouse lady said the other day too! About aging.
Epigenomic punctuation marks that sit on your DNA Arne’t he only thing that matter for aging. We have other hallmarks.
Bad things happen in so many other points.
Hallmarks of aging include:
Genoic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, deregulated nutrient sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, altered intercellular communication.
Is grey hair an outcome of aging? Well, if you reverse the grey hair, it’s not going to make you live longer.
You can not do tests in in humans so they do other organisms that the scientists study.
Yeah!! The freaking clone mice.
Some of your aging is because of hte UV rays, but even if you went into a dark cellar you’d still have mistake happening. Cuaes the same mechanism that makes us all different is also responsible for giving us cancer. Becuase every time a cell in your body divides it’s not a perfect copy. There are changes. A lot of mechanics do go around cells and fix things. But not everything gets fixed and as you get older, the amount of DNA damage you have slowly accumulates.
At the end of our chromosomes we have these caps to protect them. The name isn’t important, they are special.
For your chromosomes, DNA is wrapped in the chromosomes and we have 23 pairs of chromosomes, 1 pair from your mom, 1 from your dad. As you age, the caps erode. If you look, the people get shorter as they get older.
When you get old you feel you are losing energy. You don’t have the energy you had when you were younger. It’s cause your mitochondrial dysfunction. You lose ability to process energy. In the process of generating energy, taking it from food and giving you use of energy currency (ATP) it also produces highly toxic bad chemicals. They go hit other molecules and splinter them. So, it’s good and bad. Oof. Oof....... Hahah.
Omg this guy sounds like he’s reading dr Seuss talking about cellular senescence cell split cellular hahah idk. Omg.
They start oozing information molecules and that influences other cells to do bad things. Ahhh!! Haha. Ah.
Medicines or drugs that burst cells or cell id (idk what he’s saying. His accent and talking fast is hard to figure out)
Slowly increases with time (idk what)
But if you get all of the zombie cells that is a prevention against cancer.
People say curing aging by doing one thing, it’s not that easy. Anything that’s going wrong, any normal function you need to survive, its why its so hard to find how to cure aging.
Cancer cells have long tenures.
Again - this guy is hard to hear.
Cancer will be cured in 10 years? NO way. We don’t even know all the pieces. We are still struggling
I don’t believe it. I think it’s an extremely secret locked up and currently we’re being used to test out other medical things or something. I know I’m not a scientist, but. Thats just my belief.
You can not build a LLM eco… idk what he’s saying
You can not simply ask it, hey - tell me what’s going on with aging. It’s way more complex than that, although we’re making progress. We still don’t have enough data.
OMG okay I’m getting bored in this meeting 100%. I just think cause these speeches are an hour and a half the energy of these speakers is so off. And maybe I’m tired? But idk - just this room and building is draining me. I wanna go back outside. When is the next speech? The next speech is about quantum computing, and I’m curious about that!! I’m curious about aging too, but even now he’s talking about like — IGF-1, mTOR, FOXO, MPK, FGF, Sirloins -> what is any of this??? Hahahah. What ?? Haha. It’s so niche. But probably lots of people agree with me.
His outfit looks like he’s about to go jump on a skateboard to then go repair something, like a tractor or truck hahah. Thats what I feel about his outfit. It looks fine, but that just what I can imagine he’d do in that outfit if I saw it for 1 second.
Go for 2 or 3 days without eating anything and your recycling is increased.
So is that good?
Well, if you fast too much you lose muscle mass. So, do you wanna have a bad fall and die? It ain’t easy. That’s the point.
Then you have these other molecules.
Your parents or grandparents may have a drug for diabetes. IT get the molecules, what they do, all the molecules, they control how the cell responds when no nutrients are available. That is one big giant pathway peopel discovered when they were doing the research for the path to 100 years.
What’s the best way to achieve longevity? That’s where we are.
SO in the news, you’ll find this. The influencers, tweets, tehy say stuff like how much you eat - waht time you eat, if you’re vegetarian, mediterranean.
- keto dieting is great for shot term, to lose weight. But longterm it loses efficiency.
Restrictions are not okay for humans. We can not sustain it, to go on any dietary restriction forever.
Once in a while, why not?
Then intermittently fasting. Time restricted eating. It may be a little effective. All of those diets, you know you can not go on a fast for three days
You try to trick the body to think it is actually fasting.
Some of these drugs are also trying to fool the body, to fool your body to go into survival mode. So they go and use the stuff that is not working. Intuitively, it makes sense. Self-eating.
If this worked, we woudl all take the drug and be a fountain of youth - but nothing has worked. The reason why is because these things that work in mice, making mice live twice as long, it doesn’t work with humans. Human lifespan is optimized through tons of genes.
Makes me think of how they said the mice are clones and they all die different times. Even with he same genes.
Should you be eating less to live longer? Healthier?
Just like how companies use algos to make you buy more and make you shop more.
Try to use Ai to figure out the best life for you. Every person is giantly different. What works for me doesn’t work for you and it makes it ever so challenging. No one size fits all when it comes to diet, drugs, I hope you know that.
It says that if you are a mouse, you can do different fasting.
I interjeted. With clones and pre-aged mice questions.
I asked about the mice clones and birthing mice pre-aged. Please elaborate (he wasn’t bringing it up but he was bringing up mice so I HAD TO ASK!!!)
Turns out i remembered the exact strain of the mice clone correcly hahahah . And he knew it. omg.
The same mice, teh same clone colony of mice, this C57 mice can usually live 3 years. Even with the same genetic makeup, they said it may be cause of different chemical concentrations sitting in the DNA.
There are humans born and age faster than others. There are progeriatc. Progeriatc syndromes, tehy age much faster than other people.
Down syndrome patients,peopel with their copies of chromes 21 age faster than others. Their life expectancy is around 60, versus a normal one is about 80.
Down syndrome is like a side effect, they age much faster. You can see the webbing in their eyes, their immune system ages much fasters.
Hahahah I threw him off a bit with that.
He says, “what are the apes in us? We dont’ care about mice”
He said by age 30, his lifestyle, teh way he ate -the alcohol he drank, he came to the brink of death.
He said, I shouldn’t be eating this much. Let me cut down my food, my drinks.
It worked, and he lived to 100 years. He wanted to be the first influencer in aging, so he managed to write this 15th century best seller.
“The Art of Living Long”, according to him, simply eat less. Do not indulge yourself. Easy to say, I indulge myself all the time
THATS TRUE - its what she said - eat 20-30% less and live that much longer, thats what the aging lady said hahaha
His daughter says all the time that he looks like an ape, but that’s okay cause we re descendants of apes.
Big headlines say that eating less helps our evolutionary cousins live longer. SO, does giving up food to add two years to our life, is that worth it?
Then more tests came out and said there is no difference.
Well, later on, it turns out that the control animals that didn’t fast or do anything - versus the animals that fasted, the were fed really a bad diet. An artificial diet. About five cans of coke at ever meal. DO you expect to die after five cans of coke after every meal? Of course.
Then they started looking into salaries. The studies, phase one trial, get a bunch of people who actually need calorie restriction - overweight and obese individuals - then figure out the dosage that can be sustained.
At first they thought 1/4 calorie deduction was sustainable, but that was too big. Instead 15-16% was sustainable.
Then they had another study, with peopel from three different sides, one group just saying, “eat whatever you want” - the other group was advised to eat less. At the end of the study, they found that peopel who were already overweight (BMI over 25) and the people who were more overweight had more to gain from reducing calories.
But for some people, it was decreasing their bone density and muscle mass.
The found the same thing for apes. Eating less and stripping calories seemed to be of benefit, but there was some evidence to show that restricting calories may reduce your blood pressure, your glucose balance, it might throw things off. All of these things are together.
So, you are less likely to die of a heart attack
But again, they didn’t look at the genetic differences. There aren’t people who are not in the healthy weight range, but they are fine, so you can not say that for every person who is not in the healthy weight range you have to do weight loss. Though some of them are showing anti-aging effects and we have more trails over these years. They seem to be not just making peopel lose weight but beneficial for a whole other host of health metrics. He says a certain type of drug is all good stuff.
A natural human experiment happened in Japan. It is an island removed from the mainland, they ate lots of sweet potatoes, and they had no fast food for al long time. As soon as it was introduced to them, their life expectancy benefits have vanished.
- they lost their lifespan advantage by adding fast food and sodas. They used to not even know what it was. They used to have tons of sweet potatoes, veggies.
Insane. They stole 20 years of life from us. Fast food and big corp food. Insane.
Audience: calorie restricted diet are both eating less but eating different?
He says; how much you eat, its what you eat, its when you eat. So all of these three different factors factor.
The best answer is that right now we are still finding out. It looks like a more balanced diet, same calories.
Compared to a diet that is enriched in just fat or just sugar or just protein.
I asked if he can give this speech BEFORE lunch next year.
Hahah, we all laughed.
He said he doesn’t practice what he preaches, the dessert comes with its own spoon!
It’s so true hahahah. Its true. I had two. They were small - but I had two. Hahah
I realize I really like when presenters let you interrupt them and turn the speech into a group comedy show. Why does this happen so often with aging? Hahah a- probably cause it’s a stressful conversation we can all relate to and can’t hide from so we all want to make jokes with it. Hahah.
Now he says there were people in the 80’s who got so obsessed with mice eating less and living longer, so they got together and recreated how it was to live in space. 8 people signed up and did this starvation calorie restriction experiment. He said a wonky scientist signed up for these experiments.
They were unable to make enough food to feed enough of them. They were forced to be calorie-restricted.
By the end he looked like a skeleton, amazing blood markers.
He came off and was done ,he wrote a book with his daughter called how to live to be 120, but then he passed away at 79.
He was diagnosed with ALS.
What is this story!?!?!? Hahah omg. So dramatic.
So this society of group to middle age peopel really wanted to eat less to live longer and healthier. It became something of a cult. They engaged in eating less for 10-15 years. They had great blood markers. But The problem is even of rate people who had decided to eat less to live longer and healthier, they could not sustain it. The song chest believes of the cult, the didn’t have energy to exercise. Their muscle mass dropped. Their bone density dropped. Which means, if you fall down, you are done. When you are old if you fracture your hip, it’s tough to get it back. And they had no sex drive. The people looked like they were in teh Walking Dead, tehy had no interest in anything.
Hahahah omg I am cracking up at this guyyyy. This speech. This CULT!?
Human behavior is the hardest to change.
Right now, where we are at is focusing on protein, fat, amino acids that make up the proteins.
It looks like amino acids may be beneficial? (Idk what he’s talking about)
He goes behind the screen to change the slide again, goodbye to the pic of the cult hahahah omg.
When you don’t have enough sugar, your body switches into ketosis.
Okay - this speech is kinda taking too long. I want to step away soon almost. I jsut want some sunshine hahahah. Omg. Really! Maybe I’ll show up late to the quantum computing one. Or just go to the sunshine hahaha. I want sunshineeeee.
Try to trick your body and do a hack, I don’t want to fast but I want the body to think it is fasting.
Some evidence says this might be affecting the same pathways as the mouse, but the mouse is not the human being, okay? Period. It’s not.
Is fasting good for you? Can we find drugs that do the same trick?
Asking people to fast. A drug called “Rapamycin” named after islands. It helps treat cancer and transplant patients take it. In high doses it dampens down the immune system by turingin down the chemical
He said there is lots of differences in the female and male mice.
People are asking for this medicine at low doses, then we will have the data from these peopel and so far there are no red flags. It’s good, it’s an approved drug. It’s been through a lot of studies.
What if we put all that money into just improving everyone life, you know? Hahah. Geez. I just wish we’d take moeny out of big Pharma and put it into daily life. I’m too much of a dreamer.
They’re trying to find proxy markers of aging.
Okay - I want to go soon.
If a drug is slowing down aging and we know that aging increases your risk of all of these diseases, then you’re reducing your chances of developing any of these age-related diseases. Right now we don’t have enough data, but this is a drug to look out for Maybe at low doses it isn’t harmful.
The dog aging process, signing up 100 dogs, studying them with owners consent. Giving the dogs that medicine, the dogs look healthier. Do a proper trial taking the placebo and non-placebo and make sure they’re well matched with terms of age, sex, race, genetics, blah blah. Clinical trials are what determines if something works or not.
The second most popular drug in the USA may have weak anti-aging effects.
- lol. How convenient for that company. Now the entire country can take it - yay!! Good job, you did it assholes. Lol. Drugged us all.
Taking a drug is less weird than infusing blood from the young ones or taking an ice bath every day.
If you fuse together a young mouse with an old mouse- the young mouse becomes older and the old mouse becomes younger. So there seems to be something in the blood of young animals that turns to slow aging of humans.
And if everything that worked in mice that worked in humans we’d have tons of anti-cancer drugs.
But for every 100 things that work in mice, less than 1 work in humans.
Oof. Idk. Just go on twitter and look into this stuff.
Curing cancer or heart disease, okay you get an extra 10 years… but aging is the root cause of all death.
I wanna ask him about hte mushroom chemical. Also I can’t believe I remembered the exact strain of that mouse hahahahaha omg. Kelly. Aging expert wannabe Uugh hahaha. Gotta be.
If you live to 100, you wanna be active and happy till the last day of your life. Look at health span, not lifespan.
Dont’ live forever, just live it up (that’s my quote hahah)
So aging raises risk of age-related diseases. Slow aging -> starve off diseases of old age.
Okay - his speech ends soon. But he didnt’ leave time for Q&A - in a 90 minute speech!??!?!?!??!?!?!??!?! Hahahah geez. Good thing I interrupted.
So how can we optimize our health span?
Exercise
Cardio and weights really make a difference. There is tons and tons of evidence, its the best thing you can do.
Sleep
Vitamins
Being Social
Long standing study said if you have a partner you’ve been living together a long time, married or lot, you will live longer than single people. Cause they keep check of each others help.
Eating a balanced diet
Not heavily shifting to anything. Just don’t eat after 6pm, then eat the next day at 7 or 8, that’s good. That’s a long span.
Some people eat two times a day. If you can manage, go for it.
Vitamins and supplements. No supplement has been shown to increase lifespan, it’s all a fad. Unless you have a deficiency. Then this can help.
But we don’t know the optimum.
Don’t load on vitamins, it increases the chances of cancer. Don’t take them at random.
Multivitamin cocktail makes us feel like we’re doing something, but hte way to do that is the hard way.
I feel like this speech was so vague and so long for 90 min and not so much facts and data. It was interesting, but I didn’t walk away much smarter.
Calories at night is so different than eating at day.
If you stay up at night, your brain and body become desynchronized. Late shift workers are more likely to suffer from heart attacks.
FInally I left and went outside and found a stone to lay on right in the center of the park outside. Just had to get some sunshine and even got almost a sunburn. It was so nice to lay there peacefully in the middle of the city. Feeling safe and warm in the city, right in the middle of it all. Incredible.
Then I returned to hear the final speech, teh one I was most excited for on quantum computing. But, spoiler alert - everyone was complaining after the speech cause he spent 1 hour of the speech having everyone play a game he likes a lot and then 20 minutes talkign about quantum computing so quickly (in a way no one understood and so many were grumbling about that after as a result). And then he ended 10 minutes early hahahaha.
So here are the notes from that:
This game - in the physical version of this game, the cards are already known. It’s a 50/50 change. But actual super position, tehy’re not predetermined - you really don’t know what it’ll be. It’s kinda magic superposition.
As far as other termanology, he says that there’s a movie where he says “did you just put quantum infront of everything?”
Quantum physics, quantum biology, quantum gravity (maybe real, maybe not), quantum metrology, quantum tunneling, quantum, beats, quantum information, quantum entanglement, Quantium cryptography, quantum computing, quantum mechanics.
- he has a huge list of quantum things and he asks every to guess what is real and waht is fake
This is a good activity for an audience.
When we’re presenting info in the quantum realm. Rather than normal bits on and off, quantum bits are qbits. We can do operations on the qbits.
What happens when you make things really small and its gets a bit awkward. Omg he makes an amazing pic with less info and it’s a pic of a wolf that literally turns into zeros a does and its a zero.
Now we’re getting to the point that all the cells and chips are so tiny, narrow than a strand human DNA.
Can we take advantage of the noise? IBM has a Watson research lab. It’s all done up and nicely lit. The actual quantum computer is the little guy in the middle of it - everything else is to keep it cold and shielded.
What can you do with a quantum computer? They are only really good at certain kinds of problems. Optimization problems. Where you have a system you’re tryin gto minimize, 9/10 times that is what they’re good for. Not to build a web browser game system or website.
When I was first playing around with these devices, IBM charge about $2 for every second on their systems. DANGG
So you wanna minimize your routes. Minimize costs .Figure out better schedules and how to capture the most.
Apply this as a quantum computer to learn and create LLM’s. Idk what he’s talking about exactly.
He is not clear with what he’s saying. He’s asking if anyone has questions or concerns.
AUDIENCE: I’m trying to wrap my head around what a qbit is? It’s a bit that is in an undetermined state.
I have a slide on it. Here’s the hardware, this is each a qbit. Each little circus. They are triplets, redundant qbits. I say I have 5 qbits but in reality I have 15 . SO when the command comes in for at least 2/3 we know to do it cause the noise is loud, it’s clouded.
You can use electrons for building the qubit, superconducting circuits, trapped ions, photons, nuclear spins.
All of those can be building a qubit. Lol idk
Lol this guy is making jokes but no one gets them, they’re too niche.
Omg this is really confusing.
1-bit
2states
0,1
2-bits
4 states
00, 01, 10, 11
QUBITS
1 qubit
1 superposition
|0> + |1>
Lol okay this formula is beyond me right now.
Omg now he’s using formulas with variables and greek letters or something.
Yeah this is really probably what I should have expected from a talk about quantum whatever.
Audience Question: in a super position, ever value is present but when you measure it, you get one value?
The wave will collapse. If you have done experiments of lights going through ___ but its only visible where it bounces (his reply was a little confusing)
You don’t know what it’s going to be.
Its collapsing part of the process in computing? An audience member asks
He smiles and says it is.
We want it to happen when we measure. We measure and get results, but if there is ever interference or if something interacts with our wave form in any capacity, it will collapse it
Audience: sorry, I’m just trying to understand it from a cyber security part
- ah we haven’t gotten to the algos yet. Think about (idk what he said)
Lol idk.
This is so niche
- I could talk about entanglement but I’m running out of time. But, the short version is that it takes a lot to happen, but we have the ability to entangle qubits to put them in a state where we dont’ know where they are - to put two qubits together. You can entangle multiple together in long chains and then they’re all entangled and when you measure one you know them all measured.
Einstein said you only need to measure one of them to know the states of the others
The actual way it works, he thought there was something spooky
Fast light travel, etc. Turns out it’s not
Someone yells out: that prevents randomness?
Him: no we want it random. The random would be the shielding. We want it to happening our gates.
I’m throwing in gates, I know they look crazy. But these are ones you can apply on quantum bits
He says one way you can measure qubits is - if you had a particle in spin up call it at 0, spin down call it at 1, if its between measure what it’s at closer. If it’s exactly on the equator it’s half the time in zero half the time in one.
Lollll this sounds like something you can almost understand hahahah.
When applying gates there changing the state of your qubit. But once you start applying gates on multiple of them then the math starts to be tones of fun.
- if you’re not understanding this, don’t worry, you can program in many languages - qiskit, cirque, twist. Lolll hahah
He’s like, don’t worry, use these languages - hahaha. That makes you worry when you dont know these languages. But I bet a lot of peopel in here do hahah. Omg hahahah geez so funny.
Audience Question: how do you get a quantum computer?
Alabama university just bought one from IBM and you can run them on their devices for a bit of money, then its expensive ever second. But the nice thing of theirs is that the simulator is free.
Okay - he’s done with his speech haha. Okay. He said he asked chat GPT to make him an image and the code is nonsense, so now he wants to show us some of his code hahaha. Okay? Interesting to people who like coding. Not me.
Up next soon is the happy hour. That will be good - I want some snacks then I will head home I guess.. Maybe get some local eggs hahaha. Let’s see tomorrows schedule
A woman who works at the terrible bank speaks up. She says they’re having to fight crime in quantum computing. That’s the level it’s at. SHe’s solving a problem that have so many bad things coming.
He says he has no response
What happens when the bad guys use quantum computers?
Dude thats what she’s helping with - hahah. And she has no clue. Yeesh.
Alright- with that, I head bcak home. Actually, I stopped by AMC first but the trailers before a movie I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see were annoying me, so I just left & headed home to wrap this up and keep rockin’ the KT magic!! Until next timeeee :)
Overall Event Further Elaborations:
Venue (2.5/5): The vibe was so weird, there are a million billion security guards everywhere and the lights are so bright and the audio sucked and there was no stage. Its like, what is this place and why are we here? Lol. It was alright, but not the best venue today. But still a super fun part of town, so not terrible at all either.
Food (3.75/5): They ran out of food often - which, its like… guys, we are in the HQ of a mega corp and you can’t get enough food for some ladies? Come on now.
Speaker Content (3/5): So much was dull cause it was 90 minutes speeches for EVERYONE. Oof. That is not a peak amount of time for a human to talk, no. Nor a panel.
Networking (2.5/5): It was easy to talk to no one. But idk, I did talk to one or two people.
Likeliness to Return (4/5): Eh, usually I give things like this 5/5 but it was just really draining and the speeches were SO long. So, yeah, I’ll go again - but I’ll probably also keep bailing early and arriving late, just cause I need my ‘me’ time, too, in the sunshine, to take care of myself and my family - my work. Etc. I mean, 90 minute speeches, and like 3-4 a day, oof. OOF. hahha.
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time.
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
