TrueLife - Dr. Aubrey de Grey: Why We Will Defeat Aging in Our Lifetime (and How You Can Help)

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USThe Lila Code: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4612-3942🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/In this explosive episode, Dr. Aubrey de Grey — the pioneer of “damage-repair” rejuvenation biotechnology and founder of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation — explains:•  Why his foundation is running the largest mouse combination studies ever attempted (2,000 mice, 8 interventions)•  How close we really are to Longevity Escape Velocity (his 50/50 estimate: 10–15 years)•  Why “immortality” headlines are deliberate misinformation and why he actually works on health, not lifespan•  The three ironclad reasons these therapies will NOT be only for billionaires•  Rapamycin, peptides, psychedelics, young blood, biohacking — what actually moves the needle•  Why raising $6 million for the next mouse study is scandalously difficult (and how you can change that)•  The one slogan he wants the movement to adopt: “Make aging the new COVID”Dr. de Grey also answers live audience questions on overpopulation fears, societal ossification, term limits for centenarians, and whether extreme life-extension is “cancer on a global scale.”If you care about adding decades of healthy life — for yourself, your parents, your kids — this is the one to share.Donate to the critical combination studies: https://www.levf.orgFollow LEV Foundation on X: @LEVFoundationAubrey on X: @aubreydegreyTimestamps00:00 – Epic intro02:20 – What LEV Foundation actually does08:40 – Results of the first big 4-intervention mouse study12:30 – The next 8-intervention, 2,000-mouse study ($6 M needed)17:10 – 50/50 chance of LEV in 10–15 years — what a 30-year-old should do today24:50 – Crushing every ethical objection (rich-only access, overpopulation, dictators, ossification)34:20 – Is extreme life extension “societal cancer”?41:00 – Rapamycin, metformin, peptides, NR/NMN, psilocybin — the real scorecard55:10 – Biohacking, citizen science & AI’s coming role1:03:00 – Regulatory workarounds (Montana, Prospera, Right-to-Try)1:12:00 – “Make aging the new COVID”1:15:00 – How to help right nowMahalo for listening — let’s end aging in our lifetime. 🚀 One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles, The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the true life podcast i hope you're all having a beautiful day i hope the sun is shining i hope the birds are singing i hope the wind is at your back it is an incredible pleasure of mine to have with me dr de gray so ladies and gentlemen strap in because we welcome the man who stared into the abyss stroked the mythic beard and gently informed death that its services were no longer needed to you Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge trained iconoclass, the architect of ending aging, the founder of

humanity's most audacious rebellion against biological time, the Longevity, Escape, Velocity Foundation. Dr. DeGray, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? Well, thank you very much for having me on the show. I'm very well. Thank you. I hope you are, too. I'm doing very well. Thank you very much. I have not read all of your body of work. You've been doing a tremendous amount to work for a tremendous amount of time. And I just wanted to say, first off, thank you for that. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about what's on your radar lately, like your Descends Institute or the Lev Institute. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what's on your radar right now. Sure. First of all, we don't call it Lev. We call it LV. Okay. Thank you.

So, well, I mean, the main thing that I've been doing all these years is propounding and promoting and developing a divide-and-conquer approach to keeping people healthy, however long ago they were born. And that means that I never have any one thing on my radar. I'm always looking for where the weak links are, where the things are that need to be, you know, to catch up, if you like, so that they can all be put together in due course. Now, the focus at LED Foundation is actually on that putting together part.

you know, any divide and conquer approach to anything in technology is, you know, it has these two phases. You develop the components and then you put them together. And in most engineering, the putting together part is the easy part. You can be pretty sure that if the bits are working, then the overall thing will work. But in medicine, it's not like that at all because we're seeking to manipulate a system that we have a really, really poor understanding of. and therefore we have to find ways around that and we have to expect to be surprised when we do the combining.

So I've been very eager to get to that stage of starting to combine things so that we can anticipate any bad surprises and work around them. And that's what LV Foundation is able to do now because we still have some way to go to develop some of the more different components, but the easier components, at least some of them, are now working pretty well in mice,

and therefore we can start putting them together and finding out which things synergize, which things unexpectedly cancel each other out, etc. And so that's what ELEV Foundation is doing. We performed our first experiment of this nature starting about three years ago, and that concluded maybe, well, earlier this year. this year and it was at least a proof of concept that this combinatorial approach does deliver additivity that we get more out of putting these things together than any one of these things on its own but the magnitude of the effect that we got in this first study was not you know earth-shattering and therefore we intend to go forward with bigger studies that put more things together.

That was actually not possible three years ago because there simply weren't enough things that were individually showing enough promise to be worth combining. But now there are. During those three years, quite a lot of studies have come out from various labs around the world. So now we have really quite a portfolio of very diverse kinds of ways that individually extend mouse lifespan a bit such that we are quite optimistic. when we put more of them together we will get a bigger effect it sounds like incredibly exciting work and especially for someone like yourself has been doing it for so long to get to get to the

culmination and see these new sort of abilities with AI or some of these new technologies coming out that allow you to really move those experiments forward but you had mentioned it's not spectacular or something along those lines is it is it is it not achieving the results that you thought it would achieve well I mean this is science right this is research So we can never go in with expectations. We are, you know, seeing what happens. And so, you know, I would not say that I was, you know, dramatically disappointed by the results of the first study.

The results were enough to prove the concept, and I say that we can get additive effects. And honestly, we had no idea how many different things we would need to put together to get more dramatic, results than what we got. So, you know, this is just a learning process and I'm honestly pretty happy with how it's going. Yeah. I think a lot of people are happy with how it's going. I've been noticing a really large buzz around the idea of the longevity movement, which seems to be good for people in science or for people in general, the ability to live well longer. There seems to be a new

sort of renaissance of that happening, or at least in the view that I'm looking at. Have you noticed that as well or does it come in cycles or what are your thoughts on that? Oh, you're absolutely right. I mean, as you say, I've been doing this for quite a long time. And if I look back to how it was when I started out 20 or years ago, you know, one couldn't even talk in polite society about the idea of doing something about aging. You know, in academia, it was a kiss of death for a grant application to talk about actual intervention. You had to pretend to be like a seismologist, you know, You know, seismologists understand that earthquakes are bad for you, but they have no aspiration at all to stopping them from happening, right? It was exactly the same in gerontology back there, whereas now it's almost the opposite.

It's like the guess of death not to talk about intervention. And of course, there's still a spectrum of opinion, as there ought to be in science, with regard to how long it's going to take for this to come to real fruition. But that's fine, you know, the more optimistic people, such as myself, and the more pessimistic people really don't disagree about the priorities, about what the next things are to do. You know, everyone seems to be very much in agreement that these combination studies that we're doing are extremely valuable. The only reason they're not doing those studies themselves is because they have other professional priorities. For example, people who are working in academia need to be testing mechanistic hypotheses in order to get published in top journals. People in the private sector need to be generating revenue as soon as possible

in order to satisfy their investors. So I've been able to get myself into this pretty much unique position in the field where my funding comes entirely from philanthropy, and therefore I don't have these constraints of course I do have the constraints that people have to be persuaded to give me money that's actually not trivial to say the least so I'm personally struggling to bring in enough money to get these experiments done and certainly right now you know we have the next experiment's been planned for quite a long time but I need six

million dollars to kick it off and I don't have it nice let's see if we can get some attention to it. I already got some people lining up in the chat and I want to get to as many people as possible. I'm grateful for everybody being here. Robert Sean Davis to everybody. And we got our first one coming in from YouTube and they say, hello, Aubrey. I'm a huge fan and have been following your work for a long time. I understand your prediction is a 50-50 change we will reach Lev in the next 10 to 15 years. But what would you give to someone in their 30s? Okay, first of all, I think when he said change there, he meant chance, right? That's correct, that is what I say.

What would I get to one of the 30s today, I assume, the question of means? Well, honestly, when you're in your 30s today, your main priority is to maximize your probability of making the cut. And precisely because I can only say that there's a 50-50 chance, we don't know where the cut's going to be. We don't know who's going to make it and who's not. I would certainly say that there's at least a 5% chance that we won't get to LEV for another 100 years, right? So everyone's got to work to maximize their chances. And over and above simply living the way your mother told you to, you know, and not smoking and not getting seriously overweight and having a reasonably varied diet, there's basically nothing that people can do. I mean, of course,

I'm talking about most people, but there will be some people who, have drawn a particularly short straw here and there and so there may be particular things that they can do to significantly improve their chances. But if I'm talking about the typical 30-year-old, then, you know, the only thing that you can do is, by the way your mother told you to and get measured a lot. It's very important to know whether you do have any Achilles heel, any weak link, because certain things can be addressed with today's technology. But, you know, beyond all that, really the best thing to do is to do whatever you can to hasten the arrival of L.E.V. And how do you do that?

Well, of course, if you're a wealthy person, you can financially support the work. If you're a journalist or you have a podcast, you can interview me, right? If you're, you know, scientists, you can go into the most impactful areas. if you can get if you're in politics you can get involved in you know lobbying and and so on anyone can do advocacy anyone can go and talk to their you know their friends and their colleagues and their family and generally raise the quality of people's understanding of this whole crusade and it works you know I mean I have spent more of my time over the past 20 years doing advocacy and community building and so on than I have overseeing the science

And I think that is very much how I should have been spending my time, because the more people that are involved here, the more people are well informed and infused, the faster it's going to happen. Yeah, it's really well said. Thank you for that. You know, when I, I've been talking to a few people in my podcast about longevity, and one sort of wedge that comes up is this idea of the ethical and moral framework of it, and some of the people that I've been speaking with, and myself sometimes think, you know, what about the

idea of ideas ossifying. If someone gets to live for another 30 or 40 years in their life, doesn't that possibly mean that the gatekeepers, that the people that already have so much or that this technology becomes a subscription form and not people can't afford it? I'm sure you've heard multiple of these arguments throughout your career. Maybe you could speak to some of the ethical and moral issues that people bring up from time to time. Yeah, okay. So you're so right. I spend my entire life, answering questions like that. So, well, first of all, I like to, shall we say, partition the concerns that people have into ones that I would call bona fide philosophical or ethical objections as opposed to

sociological ones. So bona fide philosophical ones are things like death gives meaning to life. You know, I mean, what do you say to something like that? I think they're right. But the point is, how come what's the evidence for this? You know, what does it even mean? You know, what does one mean by meaning? You know, I mean, it's a completely vacuous statement.

So, I mean, if that's the, if one wants to base one's decisions in how to run one's life on the basis of vacuous statements, then, you know, I had no time for that. But the sociological ones are much more interesting. you know things like um you know where would we put all the people or you know wouldn't dictators live forever or you know uh wouldn't how will we pay the pensions things like that and of course i have perfectly good answers to these questions um but the thing is the answers are so damned easy to come up to realize that you know the impression i get and have been getting for the past as i say 20 odd years is that people just don't want to know

that these concerns are unjustified and, you know, nonsense. They want to believe that aging is some kind of blessing in disguise as a kind of psychological crutch to allow them to put aging out of their minds and get on with them miserably short lives without being preoccupied by this terrible thing that they know is going to happen to them in the future unless, I mean, some miracle happens, right? No, I mean, let's just take the one that you just mentioned, you know, cognitive ossification, societal ossification, right? Now, you know, there's a two-word answer to that, which is term limits, okay? There are plenty of other answers.

You know, I mean, it's trivial if such a problem were perceived to be arising for elected representatives to, you know, to impose term limits or to impose other things like, you know, tax incentives to change jobs or whatever. You know, one answer that I rather like is the geographical separation part. So, I mean, let's suppose that the elderly are getting in the way of the young and, you know, impeding the progress of ideas. Elon Musk is one person who has propounded this concern and have said that, you know, he's worried that if we didn't have aging, then this would happen. So I say, that's fine. Let's just ship all the old people to Mars, you know. Man, I, there's, I want to unpack a little bit of that there.

And maybe, maybe shift it to a different lens. I believe, and this is just my opinion, maybe it is vacuous. But I really think the idea that you're going to die allows you to live more fully and be in the present moment. And maybe that's the lens I've seen it through. Like, I've seen my son die. My wife has had cancer. And this is the point that really gets to. me. When my wife had cancer, I did some research on cancer as much as a layman can do. And I realized

that cells in the body decide they're no longer part of the whole and they want to live forever. And they take resources from the rest of the body. But ultimately, it's the host that dies. When a few small cells get together and realize that they take the resources of everything else to live forever, then that's the cancerous tumor. And I can't help but think on some level and the people that I've spoken with, that it seems like some of the longevity movement. When I look at maybe like Brian Johnson or I look at some of the people that are really trying to live forever, you know, Peter Thiel, where they take the plasma from youth and inject it into themselves. Like this sounds to me like cancer on a global scale. Am I way too far out there? Or what are your

thoughts? Yeah, you're way too far out there. Okay, tell me why. All right. So first of all, saying that this sounds like cancer on a global scale is you know, taking the concept of analogy to, you know, satirical proportions. So let's not have any of that. Okay. Fact is, yeah, you're quite right. Multicellular life only exists because evolution has generated very sophisticated mechanisms

to make cells cooperate with. each other as much as best as possible right and you know different cells do different things and they you know form essentially a society of cells in yeah that's a multi-todular organism um and absolutely uh the only reason this works is because it's written in the DNA and DNA suffers mutations and mutations sometimes cause cells to um escape from the the societal rules if you like um and absolutely if we want to live a nice long time in a healthy state, then we have to augment the body's natural ability

to stop that from happening. The body has a lot of ways to stop that from happening. We would die of cancer at an extremely young age and we wouldn't be here because we wouldn't have offspring, right? But those methods that the body already has are not 100% perfect, sometimes cells manage to evade evade those mechanisms, and that's why we actually do get cancer. So we have to augment those mechanisms.

And, of course, there's plenty of work going on trying to do that. There are certain approaches to it that I favor that I think are most plausible, and others that I think are less plausible. But the point of, yes, we've got to do it, as well as fixing all the other things. Yeah. Thank you for putting it in those terms. I guess another aspect. Like, if I, if I just stay with this just for a moment, it, I worry that as the science progresses,

it becomes something that moves into the pharmaceutical model. Like, if the money only comes from the people that are developing it as a drug, like it becomes a subscription service where it becomes something that maybe only the wealthiest people can get. And I don't think we can, can we really move forward as a whole, if only a small subset of people are going to be able to afford it? Yeah. Okay. So there are three answers to that question.

I'm going to give them in increasing order of un-arguability. Okay. So the most arguable one is the humanitarian imperative. Fact is, age and causing a huge amount of suffering, you know, we just have a moral obligation to fix that as best we can. That is a fairly weak argument because, fact is, you know, governments don't always do the humanitarian thing. Then there's the second argument, which is the electoral imperative.

Supposing you've got an election coming up. And one party says, yeah, we're going to use taxpayers' money to make sure that everybody who's old enough to need these treatments actually gets them. And the other party says, yeah, no, we're not going to bother with that. We're going to keep taxes low and we're going to let you all die, except for the rich people. Right. Who do you think's going to get elected? You know, wealthy people have the same number of votes as less wealthy people.

So that there's that. But we know that elections don't always go the way that people were expecting them to, you know. So maybe that's not a particularly ironclad argument either. But the third one really is completely ironclad. It is a sheer mercenary economic imperative. At the moment, when obviously we do not have treatments that stop people from getting sick when they get old, medicine is unbelievably expensive and the vast majority of the medical budget in the western world whichever country you look at whether it's public money private money doesn't matter

vast majority goes on keeping sick people alive and the vast majority of sick people are sick because they were born a long time ago so in other words if we did have preventative medicine that stopped people from getting sick when they get old, then the amount of money that would be saved would be astronomical. Even in the early stages when the treatments, these preventative treatments were new and fairly expensive to administer, they would still pay for themselves masses of times over very quickly. So any government that did not front-loaded a necessary investment

to make sure that access to such treatment was not limited by ability to pay, the country would go bankrupt in favour of countries that were doing that. Now, of course, in order for that to work, the government has to twiddle various knobs, you know, incorporate various, you know, tax incentives, various subsidies or whatever, to make sure that everybody benefits, whatever their vested interests are, that the private sector benefits, the public benefits, and so on. But that's what governments do, so that's not hard.

You know, so yeah, so there's no question. There's not the slightest chance that this will be available to wealthy people but nobody else for more than like 10 minutes. When you look at some of the studies you're doing it, like the Lev Institute, like you have a really big study going on right now with middle-aged mice and keeping them, you know, living longer. Can you tell me a little bit more about that study and some of the listeners? Sure, but let me remind you again, we call it. Yes, please. Do we call it? LEB.

I apologize. Got it. Okay, so what are we doing? Well, so as I said, we have in existence now at various treatments, not treatments developed by my institute, but by other people, that are reasonably effective, even when you initiate them in middle age, in allowing mice to stay healthy for longer and to live longer. years ago we selected four interventions one of them doesn't really count because we know it's not going to work in humans but it works well in mice so we included it as what um scientists often

call a positive control um that's that's a drug called rapamycin um the other three were damage repair interventions which is what i work on these are the things that have the potential in combination to give a very substantial increase in lifespan, not only in mice, but also in humans. And so the three things we looked at, which have all been demonstrated to extend life in mice, were number one, a synolytic, that's a drug that gets rid of what are called zombie cells, cells that have kind of got into a toxic state, but the body is not getting rid of them. Then secondly, we introduced gene therapy to increase the expression of a gene called telomerase. And again, that's been shown to extend life in mice when you do it, even when you do it in middle age.

And the third thing we did was what's called heterochronic bone marrow transplant. So that basically means we take a lot of young mice and kill them and then scrape out their bone marrow and purify the stem cells from the bone marrow. and then we inject those young stem cells into the older mice in such a way that they stick, that they engraft, as we say, and hang around and make young blood. So we did all these three things, and yes, it was reasonably effective. The, you know, there were wrinkles, you know, there's always unknown unknowns in whenever you do any experiment.

So, you know, looking back, there are one or two things that we would have done differently, we could probably have got somewhat better results, but one way or another, we did enough to demonstrate proof of concept, to demonstrate that these things can be additive. And that's why we're moving forward as soon as we can, as soon as I raise the money, to do a bigger experiment, the first experiment with 1,000 mice, because you have to test not only mice that get the combination of treatments against mice that don't, you also have to test, groups that get some but not some but not all of the treatments.

So again, we're going to do a much bigger study with 2,000 mice instead of 1,000, with eight interventions and we're really, because most of the interventions that we're going to include this time were only discovered or discovered to have benefits during the course of the previous experiment, you know, over the past three years. So science is moving really fast here, and it's absolutely appalling, absolutely scandalous, that it's so hard to raise money for an experiment like this, especially since the academic community has a strong consensus that these experiments are really valuable. Yeah, I wish it was easier to raise money for experiments that could benefit all of us.

Well, it's very simple to understand why it isn't. Why? The fact is, the sources of money have certain incentives. You know, if you're working in the private sector, then, you know, you're being paid by people who want money back. And anyone who wants money wants to make money, wants to make it tomorrow. So you are forced to work on the low-hanging fruit, on the stuff that has the shortest time frame. And, of course, on things that you own, whose intellectual property you own. That's a problem that we have because we are, you know, we're using things that have been developed by other people.

And some of those things are not even patentable at all. And the ones that are the patents around by other people. So we're not going to be generating, not significant any way, new intellectual property this way. And that means that investors are not interested. Similarly, you know, if I was doing this in academia, you know, the incentive structures are just completely, different because the whole way that you get published in top journals, which is how people get promoted and get their next job, get funded and so on, is by testing mechanistic hypotheses. And we're not doing that. So, you know, it's like we are not, we are not,

what, I've chosen to, you know, to pursue this particular path of being funded only by philanthropy, simply because I have to, simply because there is no other way to do this vital work. Have you noticed a difference in messaging and raising money? Do you think it's the message is, the message that I'm currently seeing for people, and this may not be your message, but is that you can live forever. I think that that sort of message seems to be off-putting to lots of people, and that might even be putting people off that could give money versus, like, let's all live together

longer. Is there a problem with messaging, maybe? Oh, certainly, but it's not our messaging. Totally, totally. I'm a fucking journalist. Because, you know, we don't say this. I say over and over again, add fucking nauseam. I say, I don't work on immortality.

I don't even work on longevity. I work on health. I love that. Longevity is a side effect of health. We all know that. You wouldn't know it to look at what people fucking write. You know, I mean, over and over again, journalists will use the word death when they mean aging.

You know, even the cover of Time magazine when Calico launched, when the Google twins created this company Calico, they said, can Google solve death? It didn't say can Google solve aging. And this is, I mean, what the hell is going on here? They don't do this because they're stupid. They do it because it sells units. It sells papers. So they have to ask, why does it sell papers?

And of course, we come back to exactly what I was telling you earlier. People want to put aging out of their minds and pretend that it's some kind of blessing in disguise. And this helps them. If you conflate and confuse the difference between aging and death, then you allow people to say, well, obviously death is not technologically avoidable because there's a lot of ways to die, right? And therefore, you know, by confusion, by confused analogy, aging is also not technologically. avoidable. Therefore, this is all kind of science fiction and I don't really need to emotionally engage in it or, you know, get involved. You know, it's on purpose, but it's not our messaging.

We never say, I mean, Brian, in fairness, some people, you know, Brian Johnson in particular does talk about death, a good deal too much. I mean, he's great, you know, I love Brian, I know him well, but, you know, and I definitely view him as a net positive, but there are some things I would do differently, put it like that. Brian Johnson, if you're listening, why don't you donate some money to Aubrey de Grey's L.E.V. Institute over there. And work as a partnership.

Yeah, why don't you, Brian? I've asked you a few times. Yes, Brian has said on various occasions that he would put money in if his next funding round went well. You know, this is the kind of excuse that I have come across rather too often.

Imagine that. Imagine that. You know, we talk about, you spoke about rapamycin, and I know metformin is another one. Like, I've used metformin in my life, and I've seen my own anecdotal results. But what about some of these peptides, like some of this MOTC and some of these like tripeptides coming out? They seem like they hold some pretty good promise. All right. So, first of all, first of all, reprimicin and metformin and in various other things of that nature, including things like NR and NMA.

these are all in one way or another drugs that trick the body into thinking it's not getting enough food they're called calorie restriction mimetics that's the technical term and the thing about this is that they work to cause the body to do things differently if you're in the wild and you're in a famine there is no point in having offspring because those offspring are going to die of starvation before they have their own offspring. So from an evolutionary perspective, it's a waste of time and energy. Therefore, the response that evolution has created is that organisms switch their, if you like, their metabolic priorities into a mode where they hunker down and they keep things that they slow aging down

by using more effort, shall we say, to do so, the effort that they're not using to reproduce. This is great, up to a point, but it's only really great if you're a short-lived species, because long famines just don't happen very often. And of course, the frequency with which something happens in the environment determines the level of selection, the level of pressure, if you like, to evolve and or maintain the genetic where we're able to, you know, to respond to that thing, right? So all organisms have the ability to respond in this kind of way to short famines, but not to long ones.

And similarly, they have the ability to, you know, respond in the same way to drugs that, as I say, trick the body into thinking it's in a family. These drugs work by different molecular mechanisms, but they all really amount to the same thing in the long run. So this means that, yes, you can take a nematode worm and make it live literally five or ten times longer by tricks like that. You can take a mouse, you can't make it live five or ten times longer. You can make it live maybe one and a half times longer, which is not nothing, but it's not five or ten. And sure enough, you do it with dogs, It's been done. You know, you can get like 10% increasing lifespan. People have done it with monkeys. You can get a couple of percent if you're lucky. You know,

you get the idea. Now, this is not to say that these drugs are useless. They probably do, well, they do definitely improve various aspects of health, somewhat, but they are just not the Holy Grail. They are just not what we need to be focusing on if we want to bring aging under proper medical control. And that's a fine example of what I was talking about with regard to the private sector. You know, there's a lot of money being thrown into these things that are not the Holy Grail. And, you know, as I say, I don't object, but I do object to the fact that all the money is going into those kinds of things. Yeah, it's fascinating to me.

I sometimes I run with a crew of biohackers, you know, a bunch of these people that live and die in the CrossFit gym and they're doing the cold plunges and they're doing you know, the red light therapy, sometimes I, and I know so many of them are receptive to, a lot of them are looking at the different peptides and stuff like that. And I wouldn't want to propose anything that's unethical, but are there some people or groups you're aware of that may be using things that you have seen as interesting? Like some of these biohacker communities using some of these peptides and stuff like that. Maybe you could speak to that. Okay, yeah, you mentioned peptides earlier.

So let's, first of all be clear that, you know, The term peptide covers a vast number of things. Anything that consists of a string of amino acids that's not very long, it's called a peptide. And naturally different peptides have different properties and different effects. Now, it is by no means clear that any peptide has big effects, but I wouldn't completely bet against it. So, black hacking is quite important.

Now, biohacking has been going on a long time, but it's getting more useful. Essentially, in the longevity field, you have a lot of people who are, just temperamentally, they are early adoptive. And they want to do what they can with things that they think are promising. Now, it may be that other people don't think those things are promising, and it may certainly be that the FDA doesn't think they're promising enough. But that's, you know, the FDA is very slow. Now, that's not the FDA's fault. The FDA is just implementing the law. So it's really the government's fault,

except that it's not their fault either, because the government is well known to have exactly one priority, namely to get re-elected. And therefore, it's the public's fault. You know, and it really is the public's fault. The fact is the general public, by and large, are excessively, I mean, just pathologically risk-averse. And therefore, you know, anything that has the faintest risk of doing harm is not going to get through, even if it has a much higher probability of doing good.

You know, it's just like people are not very good at uncertainty. Yes. You know, bad news makes much more headlines than good news. So, yes, biohacking is a thing. And it's getting better because of basically the Internet, the fact that it's so much easier for individual biohackers to communicate with each other and to communicate with experts. So now what we are increasingly seeing

is people not only doing what springs to mind, but also doing it in a manner that provides actual information. you know, just gathering baseline data, having a blood test, you know, a quest or whatever, before you start whatever thing you're thinking of doing so that you know what state you were in at the beginning and you can look, you can compare it with what state you're in after a while. You know, this is just so important. But, you know, it was hardly anyone was doing this until fairly recently. The other thing is AI.

The fact is each of these things that people are doing there are N of one experiments. Every single biohacker has their own individual constellation of things that they're doing, ways that they're living and so on. And so from the point of view of standard clinical practice, this is completely useless. You have to have standardization across the population that you're studying in order to be able to understand the results. But with AI, that's no longer nearly so true because basically AI is really good at discerning subtle patterns in large data sets that humans would just not even be able to detect. And, you know, expecting actual insights from this.

So these n-of-one experiments, when you put them all together, if there are plenty of them, so long as there's plenty of good measurement, as I say, things like baseline data, you know, genuinely useful. And that is increasingly the way it is. Yeah. Thank you for that. One of the crowds I run pretty deep in is like the psychedelic crowd and my own relationship with, you know, LSD or mushrooms or some of these analogs. And I don't, I have not, I don't have a blood test to show anything.

I only have anecdotal evidence. But you can look at some of the results of like the neuroplasticity that's happening inside the brain, some of the work they're doing with stroke victims or some of the work they're doing with PTSD. And I'm wondering, how does, in your opinion, how does do psychedelics fit into the longevity movement? They definitely fit in. But they are actually a great example of something that I am in a constant running battle with my colleagues in the field about. Just this year, there was a study of mouse lifespan using psilocybin as the intervention. And it worked. psilocybin made mice live longer.

And that's the acid test, right? Even though, yes, I know, that's a little bit of... Beautiful. I'd expect nothing less. Yeah, right. So, even though I work on health, not longevity, and longevity is simply a side effect of health, nevertheless, fact is that in the lab,

when we're studying relatively short-lived organisms like mice, you have to measure lifespan. Because if you measure health, you can cherry-pick what you mean by health, right? And the only thing that really tells you unequivocally that you have fixed all aspects of health is that you have actually extended lifespan. Now, that's what this experiment did. It's one of the many things that I've happened over the past three years that I mentioned earlier, you know, where we now know.

But we don't know fuck all about how it does it. The paper itself was perfectly clear. It said, we don't know, we don't have any idea how this is working. You know, the mechanism is obscure. Now, scientists, academics, are fixated on testing hypotheses, on coming up with understanding of things, of like, you know, the best questions for a typical academic. a typical scientist are the ones whose answers create new questions. You know, and the actual utility to the world, the humanitarian utility of the answers to these

questions, basic scientists just regard that as not their problem. I mean, literally, that's what my first wife said. My first wife was very much a basic scientist. And the reason I, one of the big reasons why I switched fields from being a computer scientist until the mid-90s to be being a biologist with despair that she and the other people I was meeting who were of the same flavor, just like couldn't get the idea that we might know enough to be able to actually help humanity just didn't compute, right? So it's kind of the same thing, right? I have, as I mentioned, a great deal of support in the academic community for these combinations treatments. But that support is tempered by the concern that these people have, that it's not

going to test any mechanistic hypotheses. You know, that it's kind of, people will even go to far as to say it's trial and error, which it certainly isn't. You know, it's just like people say, oh, no, no, no, this won't do. We need a better theoretical framework. What the Fuck, do you think you're going to achieve by gazing at your navel and looking for a better theoretical framework until you die, you know, when we know what we should be able to do with things that individually are already fairly promising, you know, I don't give a damn how psilocybin works and nobody else should give a damn either. I mean, I'm not saying I wouldn't like to know, but the idea that I should wait until I do know before doing anything else is fucked up. Yep. It works. How much more do you need to know?

It works. It's worked for a fucking long time. Well, well, let's be clear. Let's be clear. It's only this year that we know that it really works, as in extends life. We've known a whole bunch of other things and things, you know, how it's then subjective things and so on. But, fact, is, we know. works to extend lifespan in mice. That is a phase change. That means that it's a first-class

intervention as opposed to just a, you know, in kind of the purgatory of the waiting room of maybe it all work, maybe it weren't, right? In my mind, in my monkey mind, I think neuroplasticity should be the same as physioplasticity. And maybe some of these, some of these maybe some of these drugs, be it rapamycin, or maybe even some of these, I know peptides is a large umbrella, but something like MOTC or some of these other novel peptides people are exploring. Is there such a thing as physioplasty? Is it the same way there's neuroplasticity? Well, okay, so it's really important when thinking about these things. It's extinguish sharply between structure and functions. So structure is what we're actually

made of, the composition of the body, right? Function is, what the body does right okay and indeed a lot of the confusion in the academic field comes from forgetting that um so 25 years ago i put forward this classification of the kinds of things that change in the structure and composition of the body that are eventually bad for us they change as inherent side effects of the body's normal operation so they change throughout life they're harmless for a long time because the body is built to tolerate rate a certain amount of that change, but eventually you've got too much change, and you end up with, you know, things going wrong, function declining. But what happened was, you know, initially this was a, this divide and conquer approach that I was putting forward was viewed as actually pretty much unscientific by a lot of people.

And it took me quite a while to persuade people that actually this made sense, but I did so, eventually after several years. And sure enough, a decade or so later in 2013, a bunch of very prestigious colleagues came out and published in a top journal a kind of restatement of what I had said a decade earlier. But the restatement had some problems. Not only did it leave one or two things out, but also it kind of couched all of this in the language of processes rather than the language of structural changes.

And that was a huge problem, or it has become a huge problem. You know, the good news was that it was divide and conquer, and therefore I never had to justify divide and conquer ever again. This paper I'm talking about became very rapidly by far the most highly cited paper in the whole of the biology of aging this century. It will definitely say that way. But it's the Bible of the field now. But because it was couched in the language of processes,

it's led people down a few wrong paths in terms of what to do. And so when you talk about plasticity, this is a property of function. It says, you know, how much can things change? I mean, you can talk about plasticity in terms of structure, in terms of like rate of change of strength of synaptic connections in the brain, things like that. But this is not something that we can measure directly. it kind of doesn't count. So plasticity is a readout.

What we need to focus on is the things that generate that readout. I like that. Thank you for clarifying that there. Maybe this is part of it too. When you have a bunch of individuals like me who enjoy reading it, but maybe you don't thoroughly understand

the differences between those two things, things can get kind of blurry. Well, precisely. I mean, you know, if I think back to my first conversation with my first wife 30 years ago, right, which I was mentioning earlier, really what this led me to, because I would have called myself a scientist until then I realized I shouldn't be calling myself a scientist. I should be calling myself a technologist because that's a difference, right? Scientists seek to understand things, but understand nature for the sake of understanding nature. Technology has to seek to understand nature enough to be able to manipulate nature in the interest of humanity. And I'm definitely that second thing. I got some people chime in over chat that would love to get your attention. My first one comes from Robert Sean Davis.

Thank you. Everybody check out Robert Sean Davis, an incredible individual. He says, what do you find are the most exciting emerging fields for longevity advancement? Right. So I kind of answered that already. I deliberately don't have an answer to that. question because I believe that the way in which we're going to make progress is by divide and conquer, which all about making sure that the things that are least exciting in terms

of the results that they have so far shown are getting the most attention so that they catch up. Well, said, next coming up, my friend Mark Young at the Lewis Foundation, he says what this conversation really highlights is the hemostasis isn't just clotting, it's the body's entire stability architecture. From a Lewis Foundation perspective, aging is the gradual collapse of fluid coherence, voltage regulation, fascia tensioning, and cellular communication. Lewis isn't trying to stop hemostasis. We're restoring it.

When stability returns across these systems, regeneration becomes possible again. Coherence is the medicine. Great discussion. Thank you for being here. Any thoughts on that? Well, I mean, it's kind of true, but it's incomplete. I mean, essentially, what I would condense that into, and I say condensed because I would say in fewer words,

but I would cover more ground with those words, is that we have to restore the structure and composition of the body at every level, whether it's the blood, whether it's the intercession, whatever it is. And by restoring the structure, we will restore the function and increase the longevity, the healthy longevity and the total longevity, and we'll do so simply because the body is a machine. When I say the body of the machine, all I mean is that its function is determined by its structure. Clearly, it's a really, really complicated machine.

Clearly, it has a whole bunch of inbuilt self-repair mechanisms that work automatically. And the only reason we age is because those self-repair mechanisms are not 100% comprehensive. There are gaps. And our job as medical researchers is to fill those gaps. There's another point that comes to mind for me. just the sheer cost of a clinical trial is incredible. But I've noticed James Fademan came out with sort of like this citizen science protocol. Is there room for some citizen science in some of the research you're doing?

Or do you see a way to maybe move past the extreme expense of clinical trials and maybe put it out to people to maybe surveys or maybe some way to put it out to citizen scientists? So, well, I mean, that largely comes back to what you were talking about earlier. with regard to biohacker. Right, exactly. That kind of is citizen science. And so yes, absolutely, we can get a lot of information, especially because of better education and communication between biohackers

and also because of AI. We can get much more information from citizen science than we used to be able to. So that's great. However, if we ask about the expensive clinical trials, we must remember a few things. The big one is that clinical trials are expensive, mostly because of the system right you know big farmer like clinical trials to be because it shuts out newcomers yeah in the market now that shouldn't be allowed but governments do

allow it you know governments are high bound by you know the more questionable features of capitalism sometimes um and uh you know that's just how it is It couldn't be that way. Now it is changing, but mainly it's changing because of people working around the system. So there's one way that has happened, which is going elsewhere in the world to special economic zones that can develop their own regulatory regimes and so on. Probably the most prominent one right now in this context of what we're talking about today is a place called Prospera, which is in Honduras. Or more specifically, it's on an island of Honduras named Roatan. And it's doing some very cool stuff, but it's very small.

It's growing, but it's got a long way to go. And of course, you have to get there. So it's really only for medical tourists, right? The only real general benefit that comes from places like that is phymo. It's that, you know, you get success. get people going there and reporting that they're getting better, that they're getting positive benefits from things that they couldn't get at home. And eventually this feeds back into established jurisdictions and changes regulatory regimes.

But that takes forever. So that's not good. The other thing that I should probably point out is what's happening within the US. So, you know, say what you like about the medical system in the US. I mean, it is unequivocally a cluster fuck of massive proportions. You know, it's just massively inefficient, largely because of the absurd American addiction to litigation. But the fact is that by virtue of being a federation

of states, it does allow things to happen sometimes. And in particular in Montana, over the past few years, there's been a good deal of progress in facilitating access to drugs that have not been approved. This goes under the heading of right to try. There is a federal right to try law, but it's only relevant to people who are terminally ill, by which I mean they have tried and not responded to everything that is approved for the condition they have. In Montana, as of now, you don't need to be sick. In other words, the law is, you know, it encompasses preventative medicines.

The only quid pro quo, really, is that the drug or the treatment in question has to have got through phase one of clinical trial. But phase one, of course, is just about safety, not about efficacy. And it's much cheaper than phase two and three, especially phase three, because you need far fewer people. So, I mean, huge numbers of drugs get through phase one and then stop. Not because phase one failed, just because there was no money or there were higher commercial priorities or whatever. So, yeah.

So there's enormous potential from that. And of course, a lot of other states are looking at this. Rhode Island put through something not long ago that, sorry, not Rhode Island, New Hampshire, put through something last year that has some similarities. You know, there are lots of initiatives going on right now through, in bigger states, especially Texas and Florida. A lot of this is being spearheaded by someone quite young,

named Dylan Livingston, who got into the field a few years ago and, you know, has become a great friend and ally of myself and who, in fact, just a couple of days ago was awarded Forbes magazine 30 under 30 thing, you know. So that's pretty good recognition of what this guy is achieving. and you know very well deserved yeah it's exciting to see the youth rising up and trying to take health into their own hands and pushing through some ideas which kind of in a weird go ahead let me emphasize that a little bit more because i have been absolutely astonished and appalled by the extent to which people only think about themselves in relation to aging people only get interested in aging when they start feeling it. You know, last I checked, it was supposed to be fashionable to care about your kids or your parents. Apparently not. You know, I mean, but, but there are a few of us out there who actually, irrespective of how we ourselves are, you know, we actually do care about

the rest of the world, including people who are older than us. And so we have a sense of urgency to get this done, even if we're young. I rather wish that were a little bit more ubiquitous. I think it's happening. I think that people are beginning to see that they're not an individual unit but part of a whole system and the whole system needs itself in order to flourish. So I don't have much longer. So let's get back to some of the questions that you're getting in your chat. Okay. The next one comes to us from Desiree. She says if we beat aging but stay divided, greedy, afraid. What have we actually won? So this is the kind of comment that I can only respond to by saying, well, I feel particularly misanthropic, I say well-volunteered, but if I

am slightly more charitable, I say, listen, when you decide that you'd like to get sick, come back to me. The fact is, nobody wants to get sick, however long ago they were born. It's well said. I have one last one for you right here, and it says, Aubrey, when the history books write that aging was defeated? What sentence do you hope they put right next to your name? I never think about that. You know, I don't want a legacy because legacies are for people who are dead, right? Right. But obviously, you know, when those history books get written, they're going to be pretty interesting. One thing that they're definitely going to say is how shameful it was that humanity took so long to pull its finger out and actually do this.

My favourite slogan these days is that the goal of this movement must be to make aging the new COVID. Now, COVID is by far the single best thing that has happened to the longevity movement this decade because what it did was it showed us all how much humanity can do when it tries. You know, huge numbers of people will come to me and say my timeframes for the achievement of LV are totally unrealistic because it takes 15 years just to get one drug through regulatory approval. And of course, it does.

But look what happened five years ago. What happened was that humanity had this new problem and it was not in favor of COVID and it said so. And the result was that governments across the world just tore up all of the rules that they themselves had written. And the result was that vaccines got developed and globally distributed and saved unbelievable numbers of lives in less than a year. The previous world record for how quickly a vaccine was developed and distributed was 10 years. That's huge. And the fact that it's happened once means it can much more easily happen again. The difficulty, of course, is that COVID was a new problem and aging is not a new problem. And it's a problem that humanity has become very good at putting out of its mind and getting on with its miserably short lives, as I mentioned earlier. If people are listening to this and they want to reach out to you, if they want to donate some money to LEV, where can they find you? What do you

What do you got coming up? What are you excited about? Well, I'm delighted that you have atlevf.org on the screen right now. And I don't know what QR code that is, but it might very well be the QR code for the donate page. If not, then you can obviously go straight to the donate page very easily. Yeah, I mean, you know, everything we get into, every dollar that we get in the door is a dollar well spent. If you do the calculation of how many lives one can conservatively expect to save,

it's at least one life per dollar you know which is which compares very favorably with absolutely every other charitable enterprise in the world ladies and gentlemen go down to levf.org reach out to Aubrey yourself

thank you so much for your time today ladies and gentlemen thanks for joining us that's all we got Aloha rock and roll You come on the way, wow, you're going to go away, way, way, blah, blah, way. You're just me a heart. Yeah, yeah, that's all no, me, you can go. Better

love your life I'm la la la la la la no I'm away I'm

I'm la la la la la la la la la I'm I'm going to get I'm like you a man I'm down

I'm down the sea but I'm going to see I'm going I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to love this. You never never trust. I'm going to go.

I'm going to be. I know what you want to death. You can't do. It's no. Oh Oh Oh Oh

Derry My way Oh Yeah Go away I'm going away I'm turn away I don't know.

I'm not one of what you never trust. I'm not sure I'm going to pay. I'm the one you are going to say. I'm not going to forgive me. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I'm going to go. I just think you can say.

But then you've got to die. Oh, oh. So, and so, oh. So, yeah, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.