The Joe Rogan Experience - #638 - Aubrey de Grey

Episode Date: April 22, 2015

Aubrey de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. http://sens.org/

All right, we're live. First of all, thank you very much for coming here. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it for a long time. I am as well. I enjoyed our conversation in New York City, like two years ago now, right? It was a fun time. And I've been a big fan of your work for a long time before that, and I find you a fascinating character. And I'm glad you, I mean, you got up early this morning, English time. It's 8 o'clock here in Los Angeles. So this is like, what are you, like eight hours ahead of us here? So we're talking 22 hours.

Yeah, you've been up for a while, fella. This is not good for life expectancy, right? This is certainly true. People have pointed this out. I think, you know, out of all the things I do that are probably not good for me, that's the one. I don't get enough sleep. Don't get enough sleep and you like the booze, things I do that are probably not good for me, that's the one. I don't get enough sleep. Don't get enough sleep and you like the booze, fella. Well, that may be good for me.

You never know. Really? Well, at least, you know, in moderation, like they say. In moderation, yeah. Well, we're drinking it right now. Got a little Jack Daniels. Is that supposed to be good for colds? Is that a myth?

It's working for me. Okay. It does work for you? Really? It helps you? It certainly does. Whatever makes you feel better. You're involved, for folks who don't know, Aubrey de Grey, you're a researcher at Cambridge.

You are involved very much so in the forefront of anti-aging life extension as far as medical science is concerned. You're at the forefront of this. So, first of all all correct one thing. I haven't been affiliated with the University of Cambridge for a very long time now. How long has it been? Since 2006. Fucking Wikipedia. Those assholes.

2006. That's quite a while. Yeah. I mean, basically, as soon as we were able to bring in enough funding to be able to pay me a full-time salary, it made more sense for me to not actually work doing something else to pay the bills. So, what is your organization now? Right. So, Sense Research Foundation, we're a 501c3 public charity based in Mountain View,

California, and we are at a level of roughly $5 million per year in terms of our research budget. So, we're still really pretty small, but I think we spend it pretty well. And for folks who say, what's wrong with his voice? He's suffering from a bit of a cold right now, ladies and gentlemen. That's why he's drinking the whiskey. I don't know how it works that way. What's exciting right now in terms of medical research when it comes to life extension? What are the exciting areas that you're pursuing?

Perhaps the most exciting thing is that there's no one exciting thing. The really important thing to understand about medical research into aging is to start out from remembering that aging is not just one phenomenon. It's a collection, a network of interacting phenomena. not just one phenomenon. It's a collection, a network of interacting phenomena. And the way that it's going to be effectively tackled by medicine in the fullness of time is by a divide-and-conquer strategy, a panel of interventions, all of which need to work reasonably well

in order for the whole edifice to actually work to an appreciable degree in terms of postponement of ill health. So from my point of view, working at the coalface, so to speak, it's a fantastic thing that, you know, there's always something. Every week there's something that's got a new breakthrough here and there. But, of course, the breakthroughs are often very technical. They're often things that only specialists would understand that they actually were breakthroughs.

They're not like, you know, we haven't doubled the lifespan of mice in the past week, for example. Nevertheless, that's fine. You know, I mean, that's how pioneering technology is always developed. And the people that do need to understand, in other words, the people who are doing the research and who need to know about each other's results in order to know what experiment to do next,

you know, that community obviously is sufficiently cohesive that these pieces of information are distributed. I obviously play a large part in doing that, as well as in actually overseeing the research that the foundation does. So, you know, coming back to my original statement, there's no one answer, but there you go. That's a very good point, because is there a lot of cooperation between the various different individuals all throughout the world that are working on these life extension technologies and life extension medical science? So that's actually a subtly different question to which the answer is depressingly different. to which the answer is depressingly different. The fields, the individual fields that I think all need to be developed to a reasonable degree of efficacy in order to actually give the overall

result, those individual fields are nicely cohesive and people talk to each other within those fields. But between the fields, it's a very different matter. One of the things that I've had to do ever since I started out in this area, and certainly over the past, let's say, 10 or 12 years, is I've had to actively bring these people together. There's far too much balkanization, building up of silos and of, you know, unnecessary barriers between fields that somehow don't think that they're relevant to each other. And this happens, you know, not in any way, I'm not blaming the scientists for this, because it happens really as a result of the vagaries of funding, the fact that nobody's got enough money. And therefore, in order to get whatever they can, they've got to focus on the things they're already known to be good at. It works extraordinarily strongly against the possibility of cross-disciplinary work, and also against high-risk, high-gain work. And it really massively slows science and technology down. So it's a tragedy. And

everyone kind of knows it, but nobody really knows what to do about it. It's not in any one person's interest to do anything about it. So the whole system is perpetuated. So is it one of those situations where you have various pharmaceutical companies or what have you standing on the outside looking and waiting for something to be, something that they can put their chips on, something where they can hedge their bets and say, okay, this is a promising little piece of research here.

Now we'll start to gamble on this being profitable down the line. Because for medication especially to be ultimately profitable, there's a huge period of testing and research. And ultimately can cost millions and millions of dollars before you could ever even find out the efficacy of a product. That's exactly right. And again, it's not quite the same thing as I was saying earlier, but it's related. What I was talking about earlier was really with respect to academia per se, with respect to people who rely on government funding to get their work done. Pharmaceutical industry, or more generally the medical industry, have a different perspective,

but it kind of has the same kind of problems. Medicine is tricky to do, and everyone wants to keep it as simple as possible which means that there's an inherent bias against cross-disciplinary work, against divide-and-conquer strategies that involve doing more than one thing at the same time to the same person. But ultimately we're going to have to bite that bullet. And there are smart people in the pharmaceutical and medical industry, just as there are in academia, and everyone's kind of getting used to this. It's just that it's a very difficult thing for anyone to be the first group,

the first company, the first research group to actually do. It's kind of got to be a collective shift of mindset, a kind of sea change in the culture of how all of this is done. So is this something that's being actively pursued all over the world? Are there pockets of intellectuals that are working on this? All over the world, but yes, only pockets, I'm afraid. At this point, there is still an enormous tendency, an enormously seductive tendency to retreat into doing what just makes money quickly and what gets papers published quickly, irrespective of whether it scales.

In other words, whether it leads to significant progress in the longer term. significant progress in the longer term. So the biggest thing that I always point to is the absolutely biologically inaccurate and damaging idea that the diseases of old age are, in some sense, distinct from aging itself. It's complete nonsense. The diseases of old age, anything that causes people who were born a long time ago to be sick, but it doesn't tend to affect people who are in early adulthood, those things are that way because they are side effects of being alive. They are side effects of having been alive and accumulating damage for a long time in the body. And that is the only thing that affect the elderly in a manner that really works.

We will stop trying to be over-optimistic about these things that we choose to call diseases and over-pessimistic about the things that we don't, and we'll start to realize that all of them together can be tackled. So you're looking at aging itself as a type of a disease? I would actually go the other way. I would say that the right thing to do is not to look at the so-called diseases of old age as diseases. Because, of course, there is a huge distinction between things that are side effects of being alive in the first place, on the one hand, and infections. Infections are what the word disease should be restricted to.

Well, infections and congenital diseases, shall we say. Infections, you know, can be actually eliminated from the body. They can be cured by bashing away at the symptoms and eliminating the infectious agents. Now, if you try to do that with something that's a side effect of being alive, you're obviously not going to succeed, unless you, like, go as far as eliminating being alive, which you'd rather defeat the object, right? So, you know, that's the conceptual thing that people think that something like Alzheimer's or atherosclerosis or cancer is basically just not all that different from tuberculosis. Complete bullshit.

And that fundamental conceptual error causes enormous amounts of money to be spent in the wrong way against the diseases of old age in ways that will only ever make a very minimal impact on those diseases. So is that that there's sort of a resignation that Alzheimer's is just a side effect of old age that there's nothing they can do about? Well, no. My point is there's not a resignation. People say it's a disease, therefore we should cure it. Not on your part, but I mean, okay. And that's the problem.

People think they can cure it in isolation. They think, oh, people get old, but let's cure Alzheimer's. So what you're saying is what we have to cure is the getting old part. That's right. Okay. What do you're saying is what we have to cure is the getting old part. That's right. Okay. What do you think will be the method? I mean, obviously, there's a bunch of different ideas. What do you think will be the method, ultimately, that we move into that direction?

It's been very clear to me for at least 15 years now that the way to do this is damage repair, that we must develop a panel of interventions, a panel of therapies, that we must develop a panel of interventions, a panel of therapies, which go in and restore the molecular and cellular structure and composition of the body of an elderly person to how it was, more or less, in early adulthood. So that means things like putting cells back when the body is having cells dying and not being automatically replaced by cell division. It means taking cells away when cells are dividing when they're not supposed to, or when they're not dying when they are supposed to.

It means cleaning out molecular waste products if they're accumulating because the cell, the body, doesn't know how to get rid of them, doesn't know how to break them down or to excrete them. You know, pretty basic things, really. But it turns out that even thinking in that very, it sounds like a very simplistic way, it's a very robust framework for actually identifying what needs to be fixed and how to fix it. Do you think that diet at all plays a part in this? Do you recommend a specific diet to people to enhance their body's ability to repair itself? I don't really do that.

First, for two reasons. First of all, with regard to diet and indeed more generally, you know, lifestyle, anything that people can do today. I definitely take the view that there are plenty of other people who know more about it than me. I definitely take the view that there are plenty of other people who know more about it than me, and therefore, if I also became an expert in this area, I really wouldn't be making as much difference as I am making by spending my time in this other way. Second thing, however, is that, and this is rather depressing, but it's rather an important thing to mention,

that as far as we can tell, the overwhelming evidence is that none of these things make very much difference to most people. If you're an unlucky person, if you're someone who drew a short straw or two and you are aging unusually rapidly, then it's a bit different. Especially if you're aging unusually rapidly only in one particular way or one or two ways. usually rapidly only in one particular way or one or two ways. Then maybe there are supplements or dietary or lifestyle regimens that will substantially normalize your rate of aging, and that's obviously a good thing. But for those of us who are already average, especially for those of us who are already doing better than average,

that's not the case. The evidence seems to be that these interventions simply don't give you any more. The body is already as well-tuned as it can be, subject only to the development of much more sophisticated interventions of the sort that SANS Research Foundation is working on. So the things like getting good sleep, getting good diet, they're really essentially only going to go so far? They're only going to go a very small amount. That's right.

So you'll have a—we'll live an extra 10 years or something like that. Even 10 is I think an overstatement. I think we're talking like more like one or two, if you're lucky. Wow. One or two. So you booze it up folks. Here's a, here's a good, um, illustration of this. People often around the rest of the world, you know, people laugh at the USA a lot for the fact that even though it spends a huge amount on medical care, far more per head than any other country, nevertheless, if you look at longevity, the USA is way down the league table. It's like number 45 or something like that. It's ridiculously low. People say, well, this just shows, you know, that money doesn't buy health or something like that. It's ridiculously low. People say, well, this just shows that money doesn't buy health or something. But actually, a much more important message comes

if you look at the real numbers, not just the league table. Here's something I'd like to ask you, Josh, if you know this. What do you think the difference is between the life expectancy of people in the USA and the life expectancy of people in Japan, the longest-lived country in the world? I would say the life expectancy of the United States is probably a good average is probably in your 60s, where I would say Japan is probably in your 70s. So give me a number. What's the difference? 64, 78. How about that? You're going to say 14 years. Yes. So give me a number. What's the difference? 64, 78.

How about that? You're going to say 14 years. Yes. The answer is four years. Four. Four. That's it? Four.

It's not much. That's right. That's my point. And the last four, really, you can have them. Well, of course, the last four, it's the same in Japan. The way to live a long time is to stay healthy a long time first, and then the period of decline is typically about the same, however long the period of good health was beforehand.

So in all these factors that people look to to enhance, like surround yourself with loved ones, have a good community, do something that you enjoy doing, when they're talking, they're really only talking about a very small amount of time anyway. I'm afraid so. And the reason I spend so much time emphasizing this and making sure that people understand it is because if people don't understand it, if people think, well, they can do a great

deal to postpone their ill health just by doing things that they can do already, then they're going to be correspondingly less enthusiastic, less committed to figuring out and helping and hastening the development of things that we can't do already. Of course, the sort of stuff that I'm working on. It's really because the impact of things that we can do today is so small that it becomes so urgent to develop new things. What do you think will be the method for repairing damage? I mean, how will that find itself in our lives? So there are many different types of damage. And the only reason why it was

possible for me to come up with a really solid, robust, clear research program was because 15 years ago, I was able to identify a way to classify these many types of damage into a much more manageable number of categories, just seven categories. Within each category, there is just one generic intervention, which may differ in detail from one example within the category to another, but only in detail. So basically, we're talking about only seven different types of repair. So for illustration, let me just talk about one or two of them. One type of damage is loss of cells, cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. That's basically the reason why we get Parkinson's disease. That's probably the best example, the most obvious example. Now, in Parkinson's disease, what happens is there's just this one part of the brain called

the substantia nigra, in which there are a special type of neuron called a dopaminergic neuron. These neurons die much more rapidly than neurons in most parts of the brain. And sure enough, eventually, you don't have enough of them. Now, in most of us, you've only lost about 20% of those neurons by old age. But some people lose them a bit faster and they maybe have lost 70% or 80% in old age and those are the people that get Parkinson's disease. So then they ask, what is the damage repair approach? The answer is actually really clear and well known in this case, namely stem cell therapy. That's what stem cell therapy is.

You put cells into the body that are prepared in advance, so to speak. They're set up so that they will have the tendency to divide and transform into replacements for the cells that the body was not replacing on its own. So you restore the number of cells in the tissue, tissue starts working again, you fix the disease. And about 20 years ago, people started trying this, because people realized this. It didn't really work too well back then.

It worked occasionally. But the basic problem was we didn't know enough about how to manipulate stem cells before injecting them into the body. Now we know a lot, lot more. There are new stem cell trials for Parkinson's disease starting up now, which people are really optimistic about. I think there's a very good chance, I would say even a 50-50 chance, that we will be able to say in as little as 10 years from now that Parkinson's disease has genuinely been cured

with stem cell therapy. Wow, that is very promising. That's incredible. Ten years. That's a relatively short amount of time. It is. Unless you're 64. Right?

It is a short amount of time. A lot of the therapies that we think also need to be developed to address other parts of aging, I think, are harder than that. And I think we could be talking about 20 or 25 years. And even then, we're only talking about, let's say, a 50-50 probability of getting there. For anything that's more than a few years away, it's obviously extremely speculative if we're talking about timeframes. I think we have a responsibility to give our best guess to the general public,

because the general public's best guess is going to be a lot worse, right? And you've got to know, you've got to have some kind of idea of how close something is in order to understand how much to agitate to make it happen faster. You know, if you think something's a thousand years away, it's not going to be a priority to make it only 990 years away, right? So that's a big part of why it's important to talk about these time frames. But yes, I mean, I think there's at least a 10% chance that we won't get there for 100 years. Wow. No big deal, right?

Because a 50% chance is quite enough to be worth fighting for. Most certainly. You and I met at the global 2000, what is it, 2045 initiative event in New York City, which is sort of a group of two different groups of people. There's people that are concerned with biological aging, which is your group, medical biological aging. And there's people that some folks classify as sci-fi dreamers that believe you're going to be able to download your consciousness into a robot and bypass the whole biological process in the first place.

And that all this work about repair, it's going to be a moot point because we're going to get to a point where we're going to develop a body that's far superior to the biological body that we're born with and we'll simply impart our consciousness into that do you give any credence to that do you do dabble in that or do you just concentrate on what you're doing i tend to have a very open mind about these things i'm not at all fond of people talking about things that are clearly impossible but very often when something initially looks clearly impossible, the closer you look, the more you understand that it might actually only just be really difficult. And this could be an example. Uploading is the idea of moving one's consciousness to a different hardware.

You know, it's not completely clear that it can't be done. There may, in the end, be completely clear that it can't be done. There may, in the end, be reasons why it totally can't be done. But I think all that really matters now is that we can say that it's very difficult. I think that, yeah, I would certainly say, in fact, that I bet serious money that the problem of aging will be decisively solved by a biomedical approach of the sort that we're pursuing well before it gets solved by an uploading approach. But here's the thing. Like any sensible technologist, I know I might be wrong.

And therefore, I'm delighted that there are people working in these other areas so that if their work turns out to be easier than I think it is, and my work turns out to be harder, and they get there first, then they'll be saving lives that I couldn't save. That works for me. Now, there's a philosophical debate here, a philosophical conversation. That conversation is, why would you want to continue? How long do you truly want to live? Do you want to live to be a thousand?

Do you want to live to be a hundred thousand years and will that be an issue as? Far as national or national natural resources go me are we already? Overpopulated are we already putting a tremendous burden on the natural resources of this planet that will be accentuated by a thousand year old people burden on the natural resources of this planet that will be accentuated by 1,000-year-old people just running around having babies when they're 900 years old. So I'm going to answer that question in two very separate parts. First, I'm going to talk about the so-called philosophical issue of how long one would want to live. I find it quite remarkable that people worry about this simply because it's not the way

that people actually think about anything else. simply because it's not the way that people actually think about anything else. Let's remember that the longevity aspect of all of this work is a side effect. I don't work on longevity. I certainly don't work on immortality the way you might think if you read the papers. I just work on health. I'm just interested in stopping people from getting sick when they get older. Now, if you think about it, all medicine is like that.

All medicine involves stopping people from getting sick or fixing them up if they are sick. And all medicine has a side effect, that people live longer than they otherwise would have done. So the only real difference between the work that Sensory Research Foundation does and the work that everything, everyone else in medical research does, is a difference of degree. The fact that the longevity side effect of our work may be substantially greater than the longevity side effect that we're familiar with. It's still a side effect. So if we come to the question of how long one might want to live, you know, is that even a meaningful question? To me, it's like saying, what time would you like to go to the toilet next Sunday?

You know, we know that that's a dumb thing to have an opinion about. It's a dumb thing to have an opinion about because we know we're going to have more information on the topic nearer the time and we're going to be able to act on the information. And it's the same deal. You know, nobody makes decisions on the basis of how long ago they were born.

People increasingly make decisions as they get older on the basis of how long they think they've got to live, but that's because the amount of time they think they've got to live is going down, which it won't be going down anymore. If you've got an arbitrary amount of time behind you and another arbitrary amount of time ahead of you, your decision-making is going to be based on more short-term considerations, you know, like peer pressure and so on. You know, I sometimes point out, when people ask me these things, I'll sometimes say, okay, take yourself back to the first time you got laid.

Oh, yeah. All right. Now, think about what you were thinking at the time. Were you thinking, oh, my God, oh, my God, I have to get this person into bed right now because I've only got another 60 years to live? Right. See what I mean?

It's just ridiculous. Okay, so then I want to come to the second half of your question, which was a bit about overpopulation and such like. This is, again, I recoil somewhat at the idea that this is in any sense a philosophical question. To me, it's a psychological question. And that's not the same at all. But without getting into semantics, what is the answer? I have a kind of three-level answer.

a kind of three-level answer. And this applies to all of the questions one might raise with regard to the problems that might hypothetically be created as a consequence of solving the problem we've got today, the problem of aging. Right? So, first thing is specific answers. Just let's look at the actual scenario closely rather than a knee-jerk reaction and say, is the problem actually likely to occur at all? Now, in the case of overpopulation, what we have to ask ourselves is, okay, how rapidly would the population actually increase in the context of eliminating death from aging? And how badly would that matter? At the moment, we've already got an overpopulation problem.

We've got too many people on the planet. We've got global warming and stuff. But hang on, why do we have global warming? It's not because we have 7 billion people. It's because we have 7 billion people, all of whom are burning a lot of carbon. And that's not going to be true for very long as we ramp up solar energy and we invent nuclear fusion and so on. You know, there is going to be in the relatively near future a situation where we increase the carrying capacity of the planet a lot by these technologies that mean that we can have more people with less environmental impact. It's very likely that that kind of trajectory, and of course I'm not only talking about global warming here, I'm talking about all other types of pollution that we engage in,

that kind of technology will outrun any changes that may happen in terms of demography. So that's the first level of answer. The second level of answer is perhaps more important. It's a kind of general one. It applies across the board, whether it's overpopulation you're worried about, or boredom, or dictators living forever, or how will we pay the pensions, or any of these standard knee-jerk reactions. The answer is, how bad could it be? Let's have a sense of proportion about this. How bad could these problems be relative to the severity of the problem we have today?

In order to answer that question, we have to remind ourselves exactly what is the severity of the problem we have today. In order to answer that question, we have to remind ourselves exactly what is the severity of the problem we have today. How many people die of aging every day? The answer is 100,000. And, of course, most of them don't just die. They die after a long period of disease and debilitation and decrepitude and decline and dependency and general misery. So there is no question that aging is responsible for the vast majority of human suffering in the world today.

We don't even have to restrict ourselves to the industrialized world. Overall, I was asking you about life expectancy earlier. So I was saying, like, you know, there's only four years difference between the US and Japan. Turns out there's only 10 years difference between the world as a whole and Japan. Is that amazing or what? That's pretty amazing. So worst case scenario and best case scenario is only 10 years difference. Well, not worst case, average case, right? Average case. Yeah. If you take the real worst, then they're down in the 40s or 50s.

Well, worst case as far as global mean, right? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, what we're saying here is aging is undoubtedly the world's worst problem right now, has been for a long time. And we have to ask, you know, even supposing that we ended up in a situation where population was going to be a problem because we hadn't invented technologies to fix that,

to increase the carrying capacity of the planet quite as rapidly as we needed to. So we were faced with this, you know, rather irritating feature of having to have fewer children than we would like in order to make room for all these elderly who are still healthy and not dying. How bad is that? It seems to me to be, it's hard to make a case that the right thing to do would be to let the people age and die rather than to have fewer kids. And the third level of answer is perhaps the most decisive of all. The third level of answer says, well, even if you've convinced yourself that these problems are going to happen, and even if you've also convinced yourself that these problems are going to be so bad that they might outweigh the problem that we're solving,

the question is, who are you to say? that they might outweigh the problem that we're solving. The question is, who are you to say? Who should actually be making the decision as to whether these therapies are used? The answer clearly is humanity of the future rather than humanity of the present. If we say to ourselves, oh dear, oh dear, you know, overpopulation, whatever, let's not go there,

and we thereby, you know, delay the development of these therapies. Then what we would be doing is denying humanity of the future the option whether to use these therapies based on the information that it had available to it about, you know, available technologies or whatever. Whereas if we develop these things as fast as possible, then humanity of the future does get the choice. Now, I do not want to be someone who is helping to condemn a whole cohort of the future to an unnecessarily painful and unnecessarily early death

just because I thought I knew better than them. Well, innovation and advancement seems to be a fundamental part of human society and civilization. It just seems to be something that we do no matter where you go. There's someone who's always trying to improve upon everything. When you have medical science, it only stands to reason that that too would try to improve and advance and life expectancy. Of course, the way you describe it, the way you did with that being the number one problem physically health-wise in our world, that's going to be a huge issue. It's going to be a huge issue that we're going to try to solve. It's a fundamental part of being a human being. I very much like

the way you said that. I think that's the right way to explain the fallacy of we should leave aging alone because it's natural, which some people say. Some people say, well, you know, aging is not like a disease. It happens to everything. It's basically natural. We shouldn't touch it. And you're absolutely right. You said it perfectly. The way I would say it is like it would be unnatural for us to say,

oh, dear, let's leave it alone, even though it's horrible. What's natural for humanity is to see what's natural and we don't like and to fix it. But there's that existential angst that people tend to wallow in. And what's the point? It's all going to end someday. What's the big deal? And there's many groups, many different schools of thought when it comes to that. Some people just think that's nonsense.

Enjoy the moment. Live in the moment. Live today. Don't worry about the future. But there's a lot of people who don't subscribe to that, who really do get depressed when they're worried about their inevitable demise. When you come around and say, hey, we are developing new technologies that are going to allow you to live within this lifetime. We're going to meet the first person who lives to be 1,000 years. They're like, well, great, 1,000 years of suffering and existential angst. They don't want in. And that's where

it's a philosophical question, really, because it's a matter of how do you approach every day? How do you approach this experience? Do you look at this experience like you said, the moment you got laid, go, geez, I got to get her into bed because I only have 60 years left? Or do you look at this experience saying, while this is going on, there are a million wonderful things to enjoy about this life. And on top of that, it seems to me that as time goes on, we're getting far better at this whole civilization thing. And one of the things that I think would benefit us more than anything possible would be if we could have people that could be alive and healthy and live 400 or 500 years, imagine the type of wisdom that they could impart on the rest of us. Imagine the life lessons that you would get from a few centuries of mistakes and corrections and lessons and information that you've absorbed. that you've absorbed, we could transform society and culture, world society, not national society,

not local society, but world society in a radical way, just with the wisdom that we would all be able to share. I think there is a lot of truth in that. Absolutely. I think, you know, maybe you could argue that the fact that we have culture, you know, the fact that we can write things down and so on means that it doesn't matter so much that individuals should be around the way it does for elephants or whatever. But in practical terms, it does matter. Things get forgotten when the people

who came up with them are not around anymore. And things get rediscovered 20 or 30 years later. It's rather ridiculous. There is, however, a related point, which I think it's worth bringing up at this stage, with regard to the value of living a long time, and the perceived value of living a long time, living a long time, which is that at the moment, the people who feel, well, life's not worth living 500 years or whatever, are actually the same people who have a lot of trouble understanding

whether life's worth living for 50 years. You know, the people that spend their time essentially living their life in front of the television. The difficulty here is simply a lack of education. The fact that most people in today's world do not have the training to be able to understand how to get the most out of life. Those of us who do, those of us who have good education, good understanding of how to get the most out of life, we always have a massive backlog.

I've probably got a thousand years of backlog already of things I'd like to have done, you know, films I'd like to have seen, books I'd like to have read, places I'd like to have gone, people I'd like to have met. And by the time I'm through that, I'm certain I'm going to have at least another 10,000 years of backlog. So, you know, I mean, all we need really is to educate people better. That's an interesting way to put it, educate. I tend to agree with you, but I think that for a lot of people it tends to be an issue of mental health. There's certain people that suffer from depression or struggle with depression,

and life itself becomes very difficult for them to endure. life itself becomes very difficult for them to endure. Well, okay, I want to stop you there for a second, because I think we need to understand, we need to account that there's a spectrum here. There are obviously some people who are extremely depressed. I have a friend actually in the UK who is clinically depressed right now about the problem of aging.

Her parents are in a bad way, they're a lot of them actually, obviously, and it's really getting to her. And, you know, that's an extreme example. If we talk about the just malaise, you know, the ennui that I think is a much milder version of the same thing, then I would accept what you say, that this is quite common. But I would also say that it's part of what I was talking about, lack of training, lack of exposure to the opportunities that life has to offer, lack of understanding of how to actually seek out those opportunities. So I don't think it's such a hard thing to eliminate. I don't agree with you that it's education,

because I know some very educated people that struggle with depression, and I think a lot of it has to do with physical health, the meat wagon that you're carrying around, that you're trudging through life with, if it's burdensome, if it's causing you issues, if you don't take care of it, if you eat poorly, if you smoke cigarettes, if you tend to overindulge in alcohol, and it leaves your liver in a constantly

processing state and you're just a mess. Like those people tend to have a duller experience and perhaps a more burdensome experience. Sure. I just was saying, you know, it's like there's a tail of the curve. There are people who are badly like that and there aren't very many such people. And if we're talking about the larger end of the population, let's say the thick end of the wedge, then we're talking about a milder phenomenon. But actually, you remind me of another thing there. You know, there is at the moment a very

strong tendency in society when they're exposed to these ideas about the possibility of bringing aging under control and consequently living a lot longer. There's a very strong tendency to think, oh my God, the quality of that life will be poor. And that's because people have this sense in their heads that quality and quantity are inherently opposed to each other. That the more quantity you have, the less quality you're bound to have. And of course, that makes sense in today's world in a way because, by and large, today there are a lot of things we like to do that are bad for us.

And so we'll shorten our lives by, you know, whether it's smoking or whatever. But that's not going to be true in a scenario, in a world in which we have therapies that can actually address these various types of damage and repair them. In those situations These two things are going to be on the same side of the fence Quality is going to be the thing that confers quantity So you imagine a world where cigarettes are being consequentially be smoking cigarettes just pop in some sort of repair pill and bam no more Marlboro

Cancer well basically yeah, I mean I don't like to point that out too heavily because, of course, it's not true yet. So you don't have people banking on it. Well, right. That's right. I mean, we don't know how long these therapies are going to take to come along. And the best bet in order to maintain your chances of and to maximize your chances of actually being around in time to benefit from these therapies is to actually live as healthy a lifestyle as you can at the moment. I mean, I was talking earlier about maybe you'll only get a year or two, but that might be the key year or two. It might be the key year or two that brings you to the

next thousand. Exactly. You said that stem cells within a decade, you believe there's a large possibility that it could cure Parkinson's. These other things that may be 50-50 in 25 years, like what are they? Like what are the big ones that you're excited about? Well, so most of what we work on at SENS Research Foundation is these hard things. We actually do basically no stem cell therapy work. And that's simply because so many other people are doing it. It's understood as a very plausible and very exciting approach to treating a number of different disease conditions, not restricted, of course, to age-related ones. And, you know, it would be a poor use of our

limited funds to add a drop to that bucket. But most of the other things that we feel need to be done are far more neglected. So let me think where I would even start. Well, okay, one great example that we've been working on is heart disease. So atherosclerosis is, of course, the number one killer in the Western world. It's the cause of heart attacks and strokes.

And it's age-related because it's caused by the lifelong accumulation of a particular type of damage. In this case, the type of damage is the accumulation of waste products in the artery wall. The waste that matters him the most is oxidized cholesterol. Cholesterol itself is not a bad molecule. People get this wrong a lot. But cholesterol is a vital molecule. You don't want to remove your cholesterol. You do want to, however, remove the contaminated cholesterol that accumulates at low but significant levels in the body, oxidized cholesterol in

particular. This is what poisons white blood cells that are in the artery wall and makes them into what are called foam cells, which are the first step in the creation of an atherosclerotic plaque. And we'd like to stop that happening, and we'd like to prevent atherosclerosis from emerging. So the way we've done this is we've identified bacteria in the soil, actually, that had genes and enzymes that allow them to break down oxidized cholesterol. And we've identified these bacteria and the genes and enzymes, and we've introduced those genes into human cells in cell culture. And it works. We have shown that these cells that have our

engineered gene are much more protected. They're much more robust in the presence of a certain amount of this toxic oxidized cholesterol than cells that don't have it. And, of course, we're moving forward to take that to other types of cell and to mice before we go into clinical trials. That's the kind of thing that we're doing that's earlier stage, so it might take a bit longer. This oxidized cholesterol, can this be eliminated with diet? Absolutely not. The fundamental problem is that these molecules, these oxidized cholesterol species, they get into our white blood cells. They get into a part of the cell called the lysosome. They poison the cell. They inactivate the lysosome. And that means that these white blood cells can no longer do what they used to be able to do.

They can no longer process normal cholesterol. No, you can't do anything to the diet. The stuff is just there because the cells don't have any machinery to get rid of it. But are they a product of what we eat? A product, but an accidental product. So they happen just because they're bound to happen. But cholesterol comes from animal protein, is that mostly? Kind of. We bring in cholesterol in our diet and we also synthesize

our own cholesterol in the liver. And that's how it should be. That cholesterol is doing a good job. The problem is that oxidation is a chemical reaction that is going to happen in the body, whether you like it or not. The fact is we are aerobic organisms. We need to breathe. We need to inhale oxygen in order to keep going. And breathing is really bad for you. Breathing is bad for you? Oh, yeah. Breathing is why we get free radicals. But it's a bit non-negotiable. This is the thing. So we've got to intervene in this process one step down the chain of events to get rid of the toxic products of breathing rather than to get rid of breathing itself. Breathing is bad for you. That's a pretty straightforward statement, and it's unequivocal.

Wow. So when they use hyperbaric chambers, oxygen-rich environments to enhance healing, is that extra bad for you? Not necessarily. So, of course, is that extra bad for you not necessarily So of course breathing is also good for you if you don't breathe then you're totally screwed right so it's a trade-off It's just there are some aspects of breathing that about for you And we need to fix those aspects and those aspects have zero to do with diet so this this Well one type of cholesterol zero so if you're really low on for example vitamin C or vitamin E then you are depleting your own body's ability to limit the toxicity of breathing and therefore that breathing

will be even more bad for you than it otherwise would be so antioxidants are crucial if you're going to bother breathing. Up to a point. But it turns out that because breathing has been around a long time, breathing was invented about 2 billion years ago. Evolution has done what evolution tends to do. It's made the best of a bad job. And therefore, at this point, some of the toxic byproducts of breathing, free radicals,

are actually not just bad molecules, they're also good. They're used by the body as signaling molecules. So if we were to have some magic wand that we could wave and just get rid of all the free radicals in the body, that would be extremely bad. You'd die at once. We have, therefore, a rather interesting balance that the body takes. If you have too few antioxidants, then that's bad news. But if you have an abundance of antioxidants, if you take mega doses of vitamin C or vitamin E, for example, it doesn't really do much. The reason it doesn't is because the body wants a certain amount of free radicals around. So it dials down the inherent, the inbuilt antioxidant machinery, and you end up basically where you started. So this bacteria that you're introducing to skin cultures...

We're not introducing the bacteria themselves. We're introducing one gene from the bacteria. One gene from... We're not introducing it into skin. Skin. We're introducing it into the artery. Artery tissue. We are in culture so far, yes.

And how far away do you believe you are to implementing this in an actual human being? Well, clinical trials, I think, could be 10 years away. I think we're probably talking... We're probably talking... This is an intermediate one. I would expect that we've got a 50-50 chance of bringing this to the point of being an approved therapy within maybe 15 years. Now, me as a layperson standing on the outside looking at all this stuff, I'm always very optimistic. Oh, yeah, this is going to be great.

Within my lifetime, I'm going to see some huge changes. Talking to you, though, it's not that I get less optimistic, but I get more aware of the actual landscape itself. And I start realizing, well, this thing that we have that we're carrying around, this body has an indescribable number of operations that are going on simultaneously. And there's reactions and counter-reactions, and all of these are not completely, totally understood. So when you're talking about anti-aging or life extension or any of these things, you're talking about just a stupendous number of different processes that are going on in the body that we're going to have to figure out, and that is going to take a very, very long time.

And not one person is going to ever understand all of the processes. You have perfectly articulated why people who studied the biology of aging had, by about the mid-1980s, got to the point of absolute rejection of the idea that what they even were working on was doing anything about aging. Basically, it had become very frowned upon even to talk about intervention in a grant application, for example. Essentially because everyone understood, oh my God, the body is so complicated. We understand it so poorly. It's never going to happen. So here's the thing that changed in two steps.

First of all, a step that didn't work out, and then the step that did. The first thing that happened, late 1980s, early 1990s, was people started to discover simple ways to extend the longevity of a certain laboratory organism. Initially worms and eventually mice. This was enormously exciting, and those discoveries and the fallout from them still dominate the field in most people's eyes. The problem is it doesn't work for long-lived organisms, essentially because it's all about the ability of the organism to respond to famine,

and short-lived organisms need to be able to organism to respond to famine. And short-lived organisms need to be able to respond more dramatically to famine than long-lived ones do. So I'll go into more detail if you really want, but that's the basics of it. The one that did work was when I came along 15 years ago and talked about damage repair. Here's the reason why damage repair is so important. Its sidestepseps all of that complexity

that you were talking about and all of our ignorance about that complexity. Why does it sidestep it? Because the damage that the body does to itself throughout life as a side effect of its normal operation is only harmful late in life. The body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage, and the problem only starts when the amount of damage exceeds the amount that it's set up to tolerate. So that means that until that point, the damage is not participating in this massively complex network of processes that we call metabolism. It's just accumulating as an inert byproduct. It's only by mass action after it becomes so enormously abundant in late life that it

becomes part of metabolism again. And that's hugely important. It means that if we go in and target this damage while it is not participating in metabolism, we have a much better chance of doing so without appreciable side effects than we would if we were going in and trying to manipulate metabolism itself. Metabolism itself, yeah, it's a crazy, insane network of spaghetti code that's not getting any comments, so to speak, and you try to do anything to it to stop it doing the thing you don't want it to do, the creation of damage, you're going to have unintended consequences that do more

harm than good. But if you don't do that, if you instead attack the damage itself while it is outside of that network of metabolism, then you don't have that problem in the same way. Is there any focus on concentrating on the potential of, you were saying that the body has a very good ability to deal with all this damage at a young age. And as you get older, it becomes less and less able to. Would the real solution be catching it early, finding people that are very young and implementing these strategies on them? early finding people that are very young and implementing these strategies on them not really because the only reason why an older person is less able to cope with the damage is because the

older person has more damage they're carrying more of it around and why is that because it's had longer to accumulate it hasn't been going away so a young person doesn't have much damage it doesn't really make sense for someone in their 20s even if's look 20, 30, 40 years from now when these therapies actually exist. Would it make sense for a 20-year-old to actually partake of these therapies? Probably not. 20 or 30 years before they're going to suffer any actual serious functional decline as a result of this damage. And during that time, the therapies are going to get better, both safer and more convenient and more comprehensive and so on. So the trade-off is better to wait for the therapies to be improved. That's not necessarily what I was getting at. What I was getting at, you were saying that over time, the damage accumulates to the point where your body can no longer process the damage anymore. Would it be more advantageous to catch it before it accumulates to deal with the issues before they become substantial?

Well, that's what sense is. We're going and saying let's not take 20-year-olds, but let's, yes, take 40- or 50-year-olds, not 80-year-olds. Not 80-year-olds. You're fucked if you're 80. You're not necessarily fucked. You're just fucked for now. But it's harder. It's harder.

Let me go into that in a little bit more detail. Okay. If you take someone who's, let's say, 50, then all they're going to need is the sense therapies, the damage repair therapies that reduce their level of damage to how it was back when they were 20 or 30 again. And, of course, one does it periodically. Now, if the damage has already got to the point where it's caused disease and disability to emerge,

let's say someone who's typically 80, they've gone downhill quite a lot, then these therapies are still going to be very useful, but they're going to be useful in a slightly different way. They're going to be useful when used in combination with traditional geriatric therapies, the kind that currently we have today. Remember what I said earlier, that the geriatric therapies today don't work, and they never will

work, basically because they're attacking the symptoms. They are kind of laboring under the misapprehension that the diseases of old age are like infections. What that means is that basically they're hacking away at something that is becoming harder and harder to hack away at because its cause, namely the damage from throughout life, is continuing to accumulate. So if you think about what that means, if we were able to go in and actually repair the damage, then we would be in, if you like, potentiating the geriatric therapies. We would allow the geriatric therapies to actually work. And it may end up being that we need to do that, that if someone's in their 80s, they're

going downhill, and we only fix the damage that got them that way, that won't be enough because the pathologies will have a life of their own at that point. We may need to go in at two levels at the same time. What are these geriatric therapies that are... I just mean like, you know, injecting dopamine for Parkinson's disease, for example. Basically, you know, short-term benefit, mild benefit. Reason is, basically, the problem's getting worse. The cells are continuing to die. You need more and more dopamine.

You become more and more resistant to dopamine. It's being supplied in the wrong schedule anywhere at the wrong times because of the nature of delivery. You can only deliver it in a bolus. You know, these things are all ways in which such therapies cannot be perfect. Whereas if we were to put the cells back to repair the originating damage,

then any other things downstream that had gone wrong in the rest of the brain would be treatable by other therapies, by more traditional therapies, in a much more effective way than they can now. What other methods are you looking into for repairing damage other than introducing this bacteria to... Okay, so that's the second one I mentioned. The first one I remember was just stem cell therapy, right? Let's take another one.

Let's take the immune system. So the immune system is a classic example of the problem of what I call death-resistant cells. That means cells that, rather than having too few of them, as in Parkinson's disease, you have too many of them. And in particular, you have too many because they're not dying when they're supposed to. People don't often think in terms of the idea that there could be any cells that should die. But the immune system is a great example of that, where when you get an infection, very much as I have now, in fact, you have a very small population of white blood cells that divide like crazy to get to a big enough population to attack and eliminate the infection.

And after that's happened, then almost all of them die again, to leave room, basically, for a completely different subset to divide like crazy next time you get a different infection. Turns out that in old age, that whole cycle of division and death basically goes wrong. And you end up with a lot of cells that divide like crazy to attack an infection. And when the infection's gone away, they don't die again. And they're going away. They inhibit the proliferation of other cells. So what do we want to do about that? Well, there are various options out there, but we think that we need to go for the jugular of this. We need to do something that's very decisive. And so we're looking at a method that's called suicide gene therapy. Whoa. Now, that sounds pretty crazy, doesn't it? But it turns out that it's actually much less crazy than the name implies. Suicide gene therapy has been a

routine technique in the lab, used in mice, for example, for quite a long time. Essentially, what it is, is you introduce a gene into cells that produces a toxic protein. When the protein is produced, the cell dies. But you arrange this so that the protein is only produced when the cell gets into a particular state that you don't want. So you want the cell to die at that point. Relatively routine idea. What we would like to do is to make it work for humans. And the problem there is you've got to make it work for humans. And the problem there

is you've got to make it safe, of course. Now, gene therapy in general is a very tricky concept to make safe, and it's had some ups and downs over the past 20 years at least. But the concept of suicide gene therapy has additional difficulties. You really don't want this gene that produces a toxic protein just killing cells randomly when it shouldn't be. So we're working on new, more elaborate ways to put multiple lines of defense against that problem. How many different people do you guys employ that you have working on all these various methods? It kind of depends what you mean by employ, because we have some people that we fund through university labs,

but taking the broader definition of everyone who relied on us for their salary, I think it's around 30 at this point. And do you personally oversee all these various projects, or do you... I'm the chief science officer, so I oversee the projects in the sense of, yes, I oversee the decision-making process of prioritizing projects, deciding which new projects to do, deciding how a project is going. I talk regularly with the professors and other lab heads that are responsible for the project. So, yeah, that's what I do. In addition to, of course, also being the chief outreach resource.

And the chief wizard. I mean, it's not, I mean, everyone notices you, you're talking about life extension and you have a sorcerer's beard. That's about it, yeah. It's all my wife's fault. My wife is a beard fanatic. Oh, really? It's your wife's fault? That's right. Many years ago, my wife campaigned after we met for a long time. We met 25-odd years ago now, and it took her five years to persuade me to grow this, but eventually I decided to give it a go, and I was as surprised as anybody when it came out like this. That's interesting, because that's kind of your calling card. I suppose it has become so.

Are you satisfied by this research? Is this stimulating to you? Is this something that you're truly enjoying, this process? Well, I always have an ambivalence there. On the one hand, yes, I'm extremely gratified that it's going so well. From a personal perspective, obviously, I'm proud that I've been able to make a significant difference. But at the same time, all of that is always enormously tinged by the knowledge that there's still a lot of people dying out there, that this is not going as fast as it could. So I talked about our budget before.

I said, like, you know, we have about $5 million a year that we spend. That's an incredibly small amount for the thing that produces most of the world's suffering, right? What the hell? What the hell's going on there? And that's why I spend more of my time trying to raise money than I do actually overseeing the science. I have to. The politician's dilemma, right?

Well, that's right. I mean, even if we just had one more zero to that budget, if we had like $50 million or $100 million a year to spend, we'd probably be going three times faster. Three times faster. And that would save the most insane number of lives. That's the thing that really gets me out of bed in the morning. Do you have the ear of politicians? Do you have the ear of people that are in charge of universities

that would listen to you and perhaps allocate more money your way? It's a very complicated network of conversations that needs to happen. The difficulty with politicians, of course, is that politicians ultimately have one single goal in life, which is to get re-elected. And as such, their public policy tends to follow public opinion rather than leading it. So it's more important to me to appeal to public opinion

and try to educate people and raise the quality of debate. That's why I do so many interviews like this, apart from anything else. appeal to public opinion and try to educate people and raise the quality of debate. That's why I do so many interviews like this, apart from anything else. Then of course, there's other people, there's wealthy individuals. I try to meet as many of those as I can and generally get them to understand what's going on. The fact that we're a 501 of public charity obviously does help. It means that anyone can give us money in a tax-efficient manner, But still, we've just got to get more of that money in the door.

Do you have Kickstarter, GoFundMe, any of those accounts? We have done a certain amount of crowdfunding, but ultimately, pretty much all of the crowdfunding approaches that can be taken are really difficult to reconcile with what we do. Essentially, because if you're looking for small amounts, fine, but we're looking for relatively large amounts, you know, six-, seven-digit projects. For those things, it's really got to appeal to the imagination what the specific achievement is going to be. And with early-stage research, it's really hard to explain that

in terms that really grip people. So it's not really worked all that well for us. Well, we were describing before that pharmaceutical companies sort of hedging their bets, waiting on the sidelines for something to be worth betting on. Boy, I'd like to change that if we can. Whatever impact we can have on it, and this podcast gets millions and millions of downloads, and I'm sure we'll have some effect on it. But I would like to, you know, whatever you need Do you need things tweeted for you and posted on the more the better the matter? This is fascinating stuff to me

Obviously because I have zero research background no medical science background So to me, it's like when I get a chance to talk to someone like you It's like a window into this world that I only Ordinarily get through articles and you know papers. I, it's like a window into this world that I only ordinarily get through articles and, you know, papers. I think it's, um, it's, it's massively important. It's, it's also, as I discussed before, as I said before, I think it's, it's a fundamental part of human nature. We want to improve everything and your health and your, your ability to enjoy this time is huge. And if you could extend that,

you have the potential to be a better person. I think I'm a better person now than I was 10 years ago. I think I'd be even better if I could get another hundred in. I think we could do some real change. And I think a lot of that real change could, there's that issue like, why worry about this? Our fundamental problems are the toxification of the environment bubble I think we could put more Emphasis on that if we could have some of the brilliant people that we have alive today live longer I think that's true Back in 2006 when I spoke at TED actually I made that whole concept the centerpiece of my talk

I said basically you know you guys you're all visionaries like aiming high. This could be the critical feature of this. Even independently of the inherent humanitarian value of defeating aging, aging is the thing that has ground us down over the history of civilization, the thing that has made us know that we are at the mercy of nature. If we can bring that truly under control, then this will empower us. It will make us feel really much more confident that we can address the other really hard problems, whether it's climate change, world peace, whatever it might be. The guys who run the Global 2045 Initiative, the idea that there'll be some sort of technological

answer to this question, are they supportive of the biological ideas as well? Is there a cooperation between these two groups? Sure, sure, there are. Yeah, there's always a spectrum of opinion with regard to desirability and feasibility of these things. But absolutely, everyone knows that we're on the same side. We're not in favor of getting sick. You are truly a mad scientist.

I know you're tired, and I know you're way past your bedtime now when it comes to the U.K., so I really appreciate you being here. And for folks at home, what's the best way to contact you? What's the best way to send money? What's the best way to send money? What's the best way to reach out? Best way is to go to sense.org. S for sugar. Sense.org.

Yeah. S for sugar. E for elephant. M for November. S for sugar.org. Just go there. It has all the information about what we do, about what we like to do, about what we have done. It's got all the information you can imagine about why this is important.

It's got, obviously, a nice way to contact us and send us any messages you like. And, of course, there's a nice big friendly donate button. Anytime you're in town, please, I'd be more than happy to promote anything you've got going on, any speeches you're doing, anything you're promoting. Please don't hesitate to ask. I'd be more than happy to help. Well, you're extremely kind, Jeff. promoting, please don't hesitate to ask. I'd be more than happy to help. Well, you're extremely kind, Joe. Thank you for having me on the show.

I'm absolutely sure that being on the show will make a difference in and of itself, and the more that you can do to help, the better it'll be, and the more lives you will save. Wow, I hope you're right. You're a really impressive individual. I really, really appreciate you taking your time. Aubrey de Grey, ladies and gentlemen, do you respond to your Twitter? Do you ever go there?

Oh, yeah. Do you look at it a little bit? Check it out? Don't send him anything rude. Fucking freaks. Alright, thank you very much, brother. I really, really appreciate it. Aubrey de Grey, ladies and gentlemen. Rock and roll. Oh, that was fun.