Feb. 26, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:40:33
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one, boom. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Hey, did you trim your beard since I've seen you last? | ||
| No, I'm afraid not. | ||
| I feel like you have. | ||
| No, it may be a fraction shorter, but that's only because we're falling out more. | ||
| It falls out? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I stroke it all the time, you know. | ||
| It's compulsive. | ||
| Oh, and so then you get these weird hairs that you have to... | ||
| Well, actually, I don't notice it enough. | ||
| I mean, it falls out slowly, you know, but I guess there's a certain amount of attrition that... | ||
| So the beard's the same length. | ||
| Have you gotten any younger since I've seen you last? | ||
| Yeah, hard to say. | ||
| Hard to say, but that's your business. | ||
| That's my business, yes. | ||
| How many years has it been since I saw you? | ||
| Four? | ||
| Nearly five, I think. | ||
| It was April of 2015. And you have not gotten younger? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I have not gotten younger. | ||
| Have you maintained? | ||
| I think I've pretty much maintained, yes, but not through my own work. | ||
| So the work is still very much ongoing, though we have come an awfully long way in the past five years. | ||
| But, you know, this is a complicated thing to fix. | ||
| And we need to fix all of it in order to really make people start getting biologically younger. | ||
| So let's bring people up to speed. | ||
| What are the latest revelations? | ||
| What's the latest in terms of what we understand in terms of what could possibly be fixed about human aging? | ||
| Alright, so the fantastic answer to that question is there are no new revelations in terms of what we understand. | ||
| Our understanding seems to have been pretty much complete already like 20 years ago. | ||
| The fact that we haven't found out any fundamental new stuff that we didn't know before then is fantastic news because of course it means that we're unlikely to find anything out in the future either. | ||
| It means that we are pretty much on top of the description of the problem and therefore it's all about solving the problem. | ||
| Is it possible to summarize the problem? | ||
| What is the problem? | ||
| What causes human aging? | ||
| Sure, that's easy. | ||
| So aging is simply the same thing in a living organism like you or me as what it is in a car or an airplane or any other simple man-made machine. | ||
| It's a fact of physics, nothing to do with biology, that any machine that has moving parts is going to do itself damage in the course of its normal operation as an intrinsic consequence of its normal operations. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So in the same way that a car rusts... | ||
| Jamie's going to bring that microphone up to you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that good? | |
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, just try to keep it about a fist from your face. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So in the same way that a car rusts or, you know, accumulates junk in the oil or whatever, similarly the human body does damage to itself. | ||
| And again, just like a car or an airplane, The human body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage so that we can get through to the point where we have kids before we start going functionally downhill, whether mentally or physically. | ||
| But after that, evolution doesn't care about us anymore. | ||
| And therefore we are only equipped to tolerate that much and eventually the damage that's being done accumulates to a point beyond what the body set up to tolerate and that's when things start to go wrong and we start to function less well. | ||
| What is the difference physically between a younger person and older person in terms of their ability to recover from the damage of just regular everyday life and exercise and abuse and running around? | ||
| Yeah, all that. | ||
| So that's just one aspect of the difference between a younger person and an older person. | ||
| So let me answer that question by stepping back one step. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So the difference ultimately arises from what the body is made of at the molecular level and cellular level. | ||
| The body accumulates various changes that are chemical and biological consequences of what the body has to do to keep us alive from one day to the next, even starting before we're born. | ||
| And those changes, the reason I'm using the word damage to describe those changes is because eventually things don't work so well. | ||
| So you're quite right that recovery from injury is one thing that doesn't work so well, but so are plenty of other things. | ||
| So whether it's how fast you can run, how fast you can think, you know, how strongly you can grip something, how fast you can walk, you know, all of these things become progressively less good. | ||
| But the point is that the amount by which they become less good is pretty negligible until the age of 40 or 50. It's only then that the decline starts to accelerate. | ||
| So what do you do in your own life to try to mitigate that acceleration? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a really bad example of this. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| This is your business. | ||
| So there are two reasons why I'm bad at it. | ||
| The first reason is that I'm really well built. | ||
| I'm just lucky. | ||
| I'm just one of those hateful people who I can eat and drink exactly what I like and nothing seems to happen and I don't even need to exercise to speak of. | ||
| And, you know, I'm biologically far younger than I actually am chronologically. | ||
| How old are you chronologically? | ||
|
unidentified
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Chronologically, I'm 57. How old do you think you are biologically? | |
| Well, I'm told that I'm a good decade less than that. | ||
| And this is what I get told every time I do these tests, which I've been doing for the past, let me see, 18 years. | ||
| Yeah, so that's pretty good news. | ||
| So you're lucky, genetically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But the other thing is, you know, I'm working hard to hasten the defeat of aging. | ||
| And maybe it's a net win. | ||
| You know, maybe the amount that I'm hastening it is more than the damage I'm doing myself by, for example, not getting enough sleep. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And you still drink booze? | ||
| I still drink. | ||
| How often? | ||
| Oh, I drink probably more than the average American. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| A few beers a day. | ||
| A few beers a day. | ||
| What's a few? | ||
| Yeah, three or four. | ||
| Three or four? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Three or four beers every day? | ||
| Yeah, most days. | ||
| And a whiskey or two every day as well? | ||
| Yeah, most days. | ||
| So six days a week or six drinks a day? | ||
| Yeah, most days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Want to drink right now? | ||
| Only if you have one. | ||
| Do we have any beer? | ||
| Do we have any Heinekens or do we have the fake Heinekens? | ||
| We have whiskey. | ||
| I only drink actual beer, not Heineken. | ||
| Oh, you son of a bitch. | ||
| What is an actual beer? | ||
| Well, you know, IPAs, things like that. | ||
| Things that taste like beer. | ||
| Heineken doesn't taste like beer? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We had some weed-infused beer for a while, but I think it went bad. | ||
| Oh, that'll fuck this dude up. | ||
| He'll lose all of his gains in biological aging. | ||
| Actually, no. | ||
| I've never smoked pot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Never? | |
| I've experimented with it when I was younger, but it never did anything to me at all. | ||
| Just get some ice. | ||
| Get some ice. | ||
| We'll have some whiskey. | ||
| I don't put ice in my whiskey. | ||
| Oh, you're one of those guys. | ||
| Just get some glasses then, Jamie. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| You're very specific with your booze? | ||
| Well, not all that specific. | ||
| When it comes to whiskey, or beer for that matter, I'm not a snob at all. | ||
| You don't drink Heineken. | ||
| You've got to be a snob. | ||
| Heineken is a delicious beer. | ||
| Heineken is refreshing, which is, you know, it's like when you call someone's research descriptive. | ||
| It's a euphemism for not worth much. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Refreshing meaning it's a cold beverage, but it doesn't have the stout taste that you enjoy. | ||
| It has the function of water. | ||
| Ah, right, or lemonade or something along those lines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How frowned upon it is in the anti-aging community to be a person who drinks as much as you do? | ||
| Everyone in the aging community knows me, and they know that I don't drink to excess for myself. | ||
| They know that what I drink is what works for me. | ||
| Which one's really good? | ||
| Lagavulin, it's pronounced. | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| Lagavulin. | ||
| Lagavulin. | ||
| You fucked it up, Jamie. | ||
| Do you prefer this? | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| Do you have a buffalo trace? | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Lagavulin is better. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So says you. | ||
| Buffalo Trace is American. | ||
| That's what you don't like. | ||
| My PR people will get pissed off with me for this. | ||
| In the anti-aging community, I am not frowned upon at all. | ||
| People know that I do what I do. | ||
| But everyone says, you know, there will be donors out there who will frown on you. | ||
| But it's your own fault. | ||
| That tastes like smoke. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's one of those... | ||
| Is it smoky? | ||
| Is it a smoky whiskey? | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's one of those peaty whiskeys. | ||
| It's really nice. | ||
| It's very smoky. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They'll be popular in restaurants. | |
| That's why I know they're selling it. | ||
| I prefer the Buffalo Trace. | ||
| It tastes a little better. | ||
| It's weird though. | ||
| It tastes like it's made with smoke. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Is it peaty? | ||
| Is that what you say? | ||
| That's the word that's often used. | ||
| How bad is drinking for you? | ||
| Well, of course, it depends whether you drink too much. | ||
| And too much is a different amount for different people. | ||
| And so, you know, if you drink within your limits, you know, if you drink enough that you get a hangover in the morning, you know, once a week, then you're definitely drinking too much. | ||
| The last time I had a hangover must have been when I was a teenager. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You just keep it going and drink lots of water? | ||
| I don't actually drink all that much water. | ||
| Really? | ||
| God, you're defying all the rules. | ||
| That's confusing. | ||
| Are you still rowing for exercise? | ||
| Last time we spoke you were rowing. | ||
| You don't remember enough. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Paddling? | ||
| What do you call it? | ||
| So when I used to live in Cambridge in England, I used to be quite an expert at punting. | ||
| Punting? | ||
| Which is this thing that you do in Cambridge and Oxford with a stick. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That you push against the bottom of the river with. | ||
| It sounds, when you describe it like that, like a really clunky activity, but actually it's fantastically smooth and when you get it, it's really easy. | ||
| It's not even tiring and it's ridiculously romantic. | ||
| Romantic. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| It's definitely a babe magnet. | ||
| Ooh, there you go. | ||
| And good exercise as well. | ||
| Yeah, that thing, yeah. | ||
| Good for balance. | ||
| Is that basically what you do for exercise, or do you not do that anymore? | ||
| I don't live in Cambridge anymore. | ||
| I live in California now. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
| You live out here? | ||
| Yeah, I live in the Bay Area. | ||
| What are you doing out there? | ||
| Well, that's where the foundation is based. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, I've been over here for 10 years now. | ||
| So what is a day-to-day life? | ||
| What's a normal day for Aubrey de Grey? | ||
| Well, there isn't really a normal day. | ||
| I spend a ridiculous amount of time on the road because I view, you know, being a high-profile member of this community, I view the outreach side of things, just educating people on this as an enormously valuable and important part of my work. | ||
| And also, it's something you can't delegate, because, you know, conference organizers or interviewers, for that matter, they always want the front man, whereas on the science side, we've been able to hire extremely good people, and so I've been able to delegate that to a very large extent. | ||
| Now, in terms of progress, what has to happen for there to be a shift in the biological age of people where you could actually reverse it or where you could actually maintain the position they're at now for extended periods of time? | ||
| First of all, let me answer that last part. | ||
| So reversing aging is actually going to be pretty much the result of maintaining it. | ||
| There won't be a just you maintain it because that would mean that you are repairing the damage of aging just exactly at the same speed that the damage is being laid down, which is ridiculous. | ||
| You know, if you can do that, you can obviously do it a little bit faster than it's being laid down. | ||
| So you don't really need to think about the maintaining part. | ||
| However, what we need is we need to be able to repair all of the types of damage. | ||
| And because the human body is so very complicated, there are, of course, a lot of different types of damage. | ||
| So it's a divide-and-conquer strategy. | ||
| Any of these types of damage at the molecular level, cellular level, can perfectly well kill you, more or less on schedule, however well we fix all the others. | ||
| So since the beginning, Sensory Research Foundation, my organization, has focused on the most challenging, the most difficult types of damage. | ||
| Because basically the easiest ones are being worked on by other people. | ||
| We have, you see, we set ourselves up as an independent charity. | ||
| So we're a charity, we're a public 501c3, which means that if someone gives us money they get a tax break. | ||
| But we're independent, which means that we do not rely on peer-reviewed government grants or anything like that. | ||
| We just rely on philanthropy. | ||
| The enormous advantage of that is that we're not competing with a lot of other people who have their own ideas about what to do. | ||
| And in particular, the people who are deciding who wins that competition are not, you know, when you apply for government grants, it's terrible. | ||
| You know, you end up having to basically emphasize really boring, low-hanging fruit just in order to have a chance at getting funded because people want to... | ||
| Avoid funding things that don't lead to high-profile publications soon. | ||
| So really ambitious, high-risk, high-reward stuff just doesn't get done. | ||
| And so we focus on that because other people can't. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| And that's very unfortunate that that doesn't get done outside of what you're trying to do. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, of course, this is a recognized problem. | ||
| And the NIH, for example, have tried to address it with awards, with types of grants that are specifically focused on more cutting-edge visionary stuff. | ||
| But the magnitude there is time. | ||
| It's real tokenism. | ||
| You know, it's less than 1% of the NIH budget. | ||
| What's frustrating to you about the state of understanding repair and understanding the ability to fix things? | ||
| Well, I'm not the kind of guy who gets frustrated very much. | ||
| I'm always a glass half full kind of person. | ||
| So for me, what matters the most is the fact that the understanding that this is what aging is and this is how to deal with it has improved so much over the years. | ||
| So I started putting out the idea that this was the way to go after aging 20 years ago. | ||
| Up until then, the only game in town, really, was we've got to make the body run more cleanly and generate this damage more slowly than it naturally does. | ||
| And that's a very big conceptual difference, right? | ||
| So it's not surprising that it took me maybe 10 years to really get the damage repair approach taken properly seriously by my colleagues in the scientific community. | ||
| But by about 10 years ago, it was taken seriously. | ||
| And in fact, over the past decade, people have been periodically reinventing the idea. | ||
| And, you know, I don't necessarily always get as much of the credit as I probably ought to have, but I don't care about that. | ||
| The main thing is I don't have to persuade anyone anymore. | ||
| People get it that damage repair is at least, if not the way to go, at least a very promising way to go. | ||
| So really what happens next is convincing people outside of the community, right? | ||
| And there there's been enormous progress as well. | ||
| So when you and I spoke last, five years ago, really that was the end of the story. | ||
| I pretty much won the scientific argument, but still no one was really listening, right? | ||
| And then over the past five years, the huge thing that's happened is the private sector interest in this has taken off. | ||
| So investors have been coming along. | ||
| Typically, it's been led by the angel investor types, the seed investors, people who are willing to do really high-risk, high-reward stuff. | ||
| But they understand that we're getting close enough that this is the next big thing, that we will actually have bona fide, genuine rejuvenation medicine in the foreseeable future. | ||
| How foreseeable? | ||
| Well, you know, some of it's already in clinical trials. | ||
| Like what kind of stuff? | ||
| So, for example, the stem cell therapies now being used for aspects of aging with a really clear understanding of how they're going to work. | ||
| Parkinson's disease is a great example of this, where stem cell therapy is the right way to go, and it's in clinical trials. | ||
| Something that's been in the news a lot over the past couple of years is senolytics, which are drugs that selectively kill what are called senescent cells. | ||
| So these are cells that hang out in the body in a bad state where they're doing more harm than good. | ||
| Not only are they not doing what they're supposed to, they're also secreting nasty stuff that damages their neighborhood. | ||
| And so drugs have been developed that are seemingly pretty good at getting rid of those, and they're in clinical trials as well. | ||
| And so we used to work on that area. | ||
| We basically do no work on that area anymore, hardly any. | ||
| And we may end up doing none at all a couple of years from now just because other people are doing it. | ||
| And so our money is better spent doing the stuff that's still at an earlier stage. | ||
| And beyond that, you know, we are able, even for things that are a couple of years behind that, so won't be in clinical trials for another year or two, we've been able even then to get investors interested so that we can actually spin the project out as startup companies and focus on the things that remain. | ||
| And it's not just us, of course. | ||
| There's lots and lots of, I mean, literally way over 100 other companies now that I work with because they're not spin-outs from my foundation, but they are, you know, doing closely aligned work. | ||
| And so I'm literally spending probably a day a week on average just making introductions between, you know, entrepreneur founders, scientific founders with great science and investors who want to get involved. | ||
| The stem cell therapy is fascinating to me because I've had some personal experience with it. | ||
| I've had some injuries that I cured with, well, doctors cured with stem cells in a remarkable way. | ||
| We're at the point where I was told that I need shoulder surgery and I had a large rotator cuff tear and it's gone. | ||
| I know, it's incredible. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| But that's not really what I'm talking about. | ||
| That's gone really well. | ||
| You're talking about neurodegenerative diseases. | ||
| So, well, the big difference, it's not necessarily brain versus anything else. | ||
| What I'm saying is that what you got was using stem cells to treat an acute injury, right? | ||
| A tear. | ||
| And that's what stem cell therapies have been developed the most for so far. | ||
| And I've shown the most promise for. | ||
| But now we're getting to the point... | ||
| Where we're in a position to use stem cells to address certain aspects of aging. | ||
| In other words, certain aspects of slow, steady, progressive decline that happens throughout life. | ||
| Through intravenous use? | ||
| Well, not necessarily intravenous. | ||
| So let me talk about the Parkinson's disease case in a bit more detail. | ||
| So, what Parkinson's disease is driven by is the loss of a particular type of neuron. | ||
| So, of course, in the brain, there's lots of different types of neuron. | ||
| There's one type called a dopaminergic neuron, and they exist just in one specific very small part of the brain called the substantia nigra. | ||
| So, it turns out those neurons, well, because they do a lot of work, basically, they die at a much more rapid rate than other types of neuron. | ||
| So, we end up, all of this, with maybe... | ||
| A quarter of those neurons that we had when we were young adults having gone by old age. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| That amount of margin of error is tolerable in the system. | ||
| It just doesn't have a consequence. | ||
| But, of course, as with everything in aging, some people have the problem accumulate faster than others. | ||
| And so some people by old age will have lost maybe three quarters of their dopaminergic neurons. | ||
| And that is what gives you Parkinson's disease. | ||
| So what is stem cell therapy? | ||
| If you think about it, what it is, basically you put cells into the body that have been programmed, have been developed into the right state in the lab, So that they know what to do when you inject them. | ||
| They know, like, to divide and to then transform themselves to differentiate into the right kind of other cell. | ||
| So what has been developed is dopaminergic precursor cells, stem cells that know how to become dopaminergic neurons. | ||
| And those are injected into this one place, the substantia nigra, and they do that thing. | ||
| So they're injected right into the brain? | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So actually this was first tried more than 25 years ago. | ||
| There was a clinical trial in Sweden because people knew that this was driving Parkinson's disease, so they knew this ought to work. | ||
| But of course back then we knew almost nothing about how to manipulate stem cells in the laboratory. | ||
| So what they did was, these people, they took cells from the right part of the brain of aborted fetuses, right? | ||
| And they just injected them. | ||
| Now, this was enormously speculative because, you know, first of all, the brain of an aborted fetus has hardly developed at all, right? | ||
| And so just taking the right cells from kind of the right place was hit and miss. | ||
| And sure enough, almost all the time, there was no effect. | ||
| Because, you know, they just didn't get the right kind of stem cell. | ||
| But occasionally, it worked. | ||
| Occasionally, patients got lucky and got some of the right kind of stem cell. | ||
| How often? | ||
| Well, I think there was a single digit number in the clinical trial that was done, like maybe three or four. | ||
| But the question was, how good was the effect when there was any effect at all? | ||
| And the answer was astronomical. | ||
| So a couple of years ago, there was actually a retrospective written by the group that did this clinical trial, and it was written specifically about the first responder, the first person who really got lucky and responded well. | ||
| And it was written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of that person being treated. | ||
| What happened with that person was they were treated once, just got one injection, and the Parkinson's symptoms went away so well that the person was taken off their prior medication. | ||
| There's this standard medication for Parkinson's called L-Dopa, which is a precursor molecule for dopamine. | ||
| They were just taken off it. | ||
| Again, no symptoms. | ||
| Symptoms gradually started coming back. | ||
| After 15 years. | ||
| So 15 years with no symptoms at all, just from one injection. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's about as good as you can get. | ||
| So, of course, now that we know so much about how to manipulate stem cells before we inject them, and therefore how to inject the right kind of stem cell, you know, people are very optimistic, and that's why there are clinical trials already ongoing right now. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| So what's really interesting to me is that during the time this person had this one injection, the rate of progress, the amount of understanding of how to manipulate these cells and make them exactly what you want has increased. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| It probably shall still increase considerably. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so what I was saying about how Sense Research Foundation is moving increasingly away from bothering work on senolytics because other people are doing it, That was already true when we started the foundation in respect of stem cells. | ||
| We didn't need to. | ||
| All the important work was already being done by other people. | ||
| So where are they at right now? | ||
| Where are you at? | ||
| Where are you at in terms of like, let's just focus on Parkinson's disease. | ||
| So the clinical trials are in phase one, early stage. | ||
| So we won't know anything really good for another year, maybe two years. | ||
| But, you know, it's not just one trial. | ||
| There's several groups around the world that are focused on this. | ||
| Some of them haven't started the trial yet, but they're about to and so on. | ||
| So, you know, that gives you a sense of the level of optimism of the specialists in this area. | ||
| That's very exciting. | ||
| So when you look at your future at 57 years old and you think of yourself at 77, do you think you're going to be the same? | ||
| Well… Have you had a guess? | ||
| So in order to answer that, I have to come back to what I said about this being a divide-and-conquer problem and the fact that we need to fix all of these things in order to really give the proper result in terms of biological age. | ||
| Now, that means that any speculation that I may make about the timeframe for when we get there is a speculation about the most difficult parts of the problem. | ||
| And therefore, it's highly speculative because the most difficult parts are at the earliest stage and therefore there's more opportunity for things to go wrong between now and then, so to speak. | ||
| So when I am asked to give a timeframe estimate on this, I always make sure to emphasize that it's probabilistic. | ||
| That what I'm giving you is a time frame for when I think we have a 50-50 chance of getting a decisive level of comprehensiveness of these therapies. | ||
| And at the moment, that number is 17 years. | ||
| That's very specific. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| But the thing is, what matters is how that number has changed over time. | ||
| So I first started giving time frame predictions about 15-16 years ago. | ||
| And back then I said 25 years. | ||
| So it's only come down by 8 years in 16 years, which sounds like bad news, right? | ||
| But here are two pieces of good news. | ||
| The first piece of good news is that it hardly came down at all for the first 7 or 8 years. | ||
| I would say, yeah, 5 years ago I was still saying 22, 21 years. | ||
| So it hasn't been slipping any further for a little while. | ||
| And the reason why things have speeded up to parity is because the only thing that was slowing it down before was lack of funding. | ||
| Beforehand, I was always saying, this is how fast the science allows the problem to be solved. | ||
| But the science only allows the problem to be solved if the science can be done and ultimately biomedical research is inherently expensive and we are just not able to pull in as much money as we need for this. | ||
| That's interesting because it seems like that would be something that most people would have a vested interest in funding. | ||
| You don't say. | ||
| And sure, over the past five years, as I mentioned, as things have become investable, things have changed a lot. | ||
| Every time we end up being able to spin a project out from a lab into a private company, another digit gets put on its budget like overnight. | ||
| Just because it's so much easier to get people to write a check if they think there's a chance, even a really small chance, that they'll get their money back in spades sometime later. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, I guess that's what you would expect. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, of course, the other thing that we always are up against is the mindset that people have got into about aging, that they've needed to get into for all these millennia that we have been unable to do anything about it or have any prospect of doing anything about it anytime soon. | ||
| You know, what are you going to do? | ||
| You've got this terrible, ghastly thing that's going to happen to you in the distant future. | ||
| and you can't do anything about it. | ||
| So you've got to put it out of your mind. | ||
| You don't want to spend your life being preoccupied by it. | ||
| So you've got to find somewhere to not think about it and get on with your miserably short life and make the best of it, right? | ||
| And, of course, the only way that one can do that is by somehow denying, somehow tricking oneself into denying that this is such a big deal, you know, and thereby pretending, for example, that it's not really like a medical problem at all, you know, and that it's like inevitable and universal that it's not really like a medical problem at all, you know, and that it's like inevitable and universal and natural, or alternatively saying, well, okay, maybe we could fix it if we tried to, but it would be a bad thing, Yeah, I hate that nonsense. | ||
| Yeah, and that's where all this stuff comes from about, oh dear, where will we put all the people or how will we pay the pensions or won't dictate us forever or won't it be boring, you know, which I have to spend my whole life contending with. | ||
| How do you get over the dictators living for everyone? | ||
| Well, you know, last time I looked, dictator was fairly high on the league table of risky jobs. | ||
| You know, I mean, not a lot of dictators die of aging in the first place. | ||
| And furthermore, the ones that do die of aging, they tend to have organized their succession in advance anyway, so it's as if they were already immortal. | ||
| So, I mean, come on. | ||
| Well, not only the percentage of dictators versus the percentage of regular people is so incredibly small to not cure aging because of dictators seems like the dumbest idea ever. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| I mean, but people really, you know, this is what people do, right? | ||
| They will come up with some reason why aging is a blessing in disguise. | ||
| And then they will instantly switch off their brains for fear of actually coming up with a refutation of that reason or even listening to it. | ||
| The romantic aspects of aging are the weird ones, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the inevitable, like, oh, it's fine. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| It's essentially a disease that we all get. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so I have to be very careful with the word disease. | ||
| Some people aren't. | ||
| So you've had David St. Carroll on the show. | ||
| He's been a great friend of mine for 20 years. | ||
| We have a very similar attitude to, you know, authority. | ||
| We don't think much of it. | ||
| And so we tend to push the boundaries a bit, both of us, in somewhat different ways. | ||
| So he actually, his view of calling aging a disease is a bit different from mine. | ||
| He's more comfortable with it. | ||
| I tend to feel that there's a problem with calling aging a disease, which is that it makes it sound like it's something that could be cured with a one-off therapy, like, you know, an infection. | ||
| Which it isn't. | ||
| It's a side effect of being alive. | ||
| And as such, it's something that you can repair, you can stave off, but you have to do it periodically because the damage is going to continue to be created. | ||
| And the reason why that's important is that it determines what kind of What kind of medicine we look for. | ||
| A lot of Alzheimer's research, for example, in fact, I would say most of Alzheimer's research has been predicated on this kind of mistake, on the idea that if we can just cure Alzheimer's, then, you know, so I would say that actually, it's not that the word disease is used too narrowly. | ||
| And should be broadened to include aging. | ||
| Rather it's the other way around, that the word disease is used too broadly and should be narrowed so as not to include things like Alzheimer's that are actually parts of aging. | ||
| Because really the difference between the progressive chronic conditions like Alzheimer's that we call diseases and the ones that we don't, like, you know, loss of muscle or declining the immune system or whatever, You know, the only difference is semantic. | ||
| Some of them, you know, they're both parts of aging. | ||
| Some of them are ones that we've chosen to give disease-like names to. | ||
| What would you call aging if you don't call it a disease? | ||
| Well, I call it a medical problem. | ||
| That's all I call it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| That's pretty pure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In terms of potential future treatments, Stem cells seem to be very promising. | ||
| Are there other competing treatments that you think are equally promising? | ||
| Sure, but they're not competing. | ||
| So as I said, because this is a divide-and-conquer problem with a bunch of different types of damage, all of which we need to fix, then we need to look at what fixes are available for each individual type. | ||
| So what stem cells are there to fix is cell loss. | ||
| Where cells are dying and they're not being automatically replaced in the body by cell division. | ||
| Have you personally experienced any stem cell therapy? | ||
| No. | ||
| I haven't done any therapies of any kind yet. | ||
| But, of course, you know, I'm paying attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll see. | ||
| You know, of course, the nature of aging is that because it's progressive and because it only causes functional decline after a certain point, there's a tradeoff that one always has to keep in mind in terms of timing of a therapy between how badly one needs it and how rapidly the quality of the therapy is improving. | ||
| So, you know, if I take a stem cell therapy now, then there's a chance that it will be bad for me for whatever reason. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Whereas 10 years down the road, I will still – I won't have needed it for those 10 years. | ||
| 10 years down the road, I may start to need it a bit more. | ||
| But it will have benefited from 10 years more of research and refinement. | ||
|
unidentified
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So you're a cautious patient. | |
| Oh, sure. | ||
| I mean, I don't think anybody wants to be the first patient. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| I'll be the first guy. | ||
| I'm already doing a bunch of stem cell therapies. | ||
| I'll do intravenous stem cell therapies, too. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| But, I mean, the point is you weren't the first to do any of these things. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yes, in terms of other things, so senolytics do not compete with stem cells because senolytics are there to do a different thing, to fix a different type of damage, namely the accumulation of these bad cells. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you've got to have cancer therapies. | ||
| You've got to have therapies that remove molecular waste products from inside cells. | ||
| A couple of our start-up companies are doing that. | ||
| You've got to remove waste products from outside the cells, for example. | ||
| So people have used the immune system to do that. | ||
| You've got to repair DNA in the mitochondria, these special parts of the cell that do the chemistry of breathing. | ||
| You know, there's a bunch of different things we have to do. | ||
| Another piece of good news, I told you earlier on that there's been no real change over the past 20 years in our understanding of what the problem is. | ||
| It's better than that. | ||
| There's also been no real need to change our preferred approaches to each of the damage repair technologies. | ||
| We haven't found bad news that says, oh dear, this potential approach to fixing this particular type of damage isn't going to work for this new reason that we didn't know before. | ||
| Therefore, we have to start again and think of a new one that hasn't happened either. | ||
| That's excellent. | ||
| So it's just essentially refining the procedures? | ||
| Yeah, grinding away and actually implementing them. | ||
| Is this something that you still truly enjoy doing? | ||
| I wouldn't say I ever enjoyed doing it. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| I mean, I enjoy life. | ||
| I enjoy just staring at the sky from my hot tub. | ||
| It's just that I want to carry on doing it rather than dying instead. | ||
| So, almost... | ||
| This is an investment. | ||
| It's an investment, but it's also, I mean, it's obviously some sort of an intellectual pursuit. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| It's a humanitarian pursuit. | ||
| I mean, some people view it as an intellectual pursuit, but I don't. | ||
| I really feel, you know, ever since I was a young kid, I have wanted to spend my life making a difference to the world, improving the quality and, of course, in this case, quantity of life of humanity. | ||
| I'm just one of those incredibly lucky people. | ||
| I've been able to end up in this position of essentially leading the crusade to do that in the biggest possible way. | ||
| So this is something that you felt compelled to do from a really early age? | ||
| Not the specific thing. | ||
| So what actually happened was that as a teenager, having pretty much decided that this is what I wanted to do with my life, the first thing I did was I got into artificial intelligence research. | ||
| And the reason that happened was because when I was a teenager, I tried my hand at programming. | ||
| I found I was pretty damn good at it. | ||
| And I thought, well, okay, one of the big problems in the world is the problem of work. | ||
| The fact that people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they would not do unless they were being paid for it. | ||
| And therefore, we need more automation. | ||
| So I'll work on that because I'm good at it. | ||
| And I had no reason at that time to believe that I was going to be any good at biology, but specifically, particularly. | ||
| And there were other people who were particularly good at biology, and I had made the mistaken but absolute assumption that everybody realized that aging was by far the world's biggest problem, and therefore biologists would be working on it and grinding away. | ||
| And of course you didn't hear much, but hey, it's a really hard problem, so that's not a surprise. | ||
| So it wasn't until my late 20s that I found out that I was wrong. | ||
| What happened was that I met and married a biologist. | ||
| Quite a senior one, actually, who was a full professor at that time at UC San Diego. | ||
| She was in England on sabbatical. | ||
| And through her, I not only learned a lot of biology just by accident, you know, over the dinner table, but I also found out, gradually, that she wasn't interested in aging. | ||
| I just kind of, it hadn't occurred to me, so it didn't come up in conversation. | ||
| I began to notice that it wasn't coming up in conversation. | ||
| I started asking questions, and she would say things like, you know, well, I mean, like, it's just decay, isn't it? | ||
| And I would say, well, yeah, but so what? | ||
| And she said, well, I mean, you're not going to learn any fundamental truths about the universe from studying decay. | ||
| And I would say, well, that's true, yes, but it's bad for you. | ||
| And she would say, but that's not my problem. | ||
| And I would say, well, it kind of is. | ||
| And that would be about as far as we would ever get. | ||
| So eventually I came to terms with it because it wasn't just her, of course. | ||
| It was all the other biologists I was meeting. | ||
| That's a strange closed-mindedness. | ||
| Well, you know, as I say, people have had to find ways not to think about aging. | ||
| And so eventually I thought, well, that's just what I want to do. | ||
| And I had to switch. | ||
| I better switch fields. | ||
| And I happened to have inveigled myself into a position where switching fields was something I was able to do. | ||
| I had a very undemanding job at the University of Cambridge doing bioinformatics, which allowed me to do my artificial intelligence research in my spare time. | ||
| I was being paid well enough, and I had access to university facilities and all that. | ||
| So all I needed to do was repurpose my spare time and, you know, start paying my way to go to conferences because, of course, back then nobody knew me and I wasn't being invited. | ||
| And it went pretty well. | ||
| I started doing quite well-received stuff. | ||
| And so I became quite well-respected in the field very quickly. | ||
| And for the first five years that was all that was happening because I was basically harmless and it was then five years in, in the year 2000, that I had this kind of eureka moment that damage repair was the way to go and started talking about what the impact could be and people started to think I had gone completely crazy and it took a little while for people to come around. | ||
| So when you say that at an early age you felt compelled to try to help people, what was that? | ||
| So what actually happened was this. | ||
| It was all down to my mother's desire for me to practice the piano. | ||
| She wasn't a particularly good pianist herself, but she wanted me to learn how to play piano, and so she put pressure on me to practice all the time, and I was resistant. | ||
| But somehow or other, My mother had already instilled in me a sense of introspection, you know, a desire to understand why I thought what I thought. | ||
| So I actually decided to think about why I didn't want to play the piano. | ||
| And it took very little time for me to realize that the fundamental reason I didn't want to spend so much time tapping away on this thing was that the best case outcome of this would be that I would become a good pianist And that was just not good enough. | ||
| You know, because there were already lots of other good pianists. | ||
| So I would not be, you know, contributing significantly to the quality of life of mankind by becoming just another one. | ||
| An additional great pianist. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so I thought, well, I might do. | ||
| And of course, this was... | ||
| I was young, so it was gradual after that. | ||
| How old were you at the time? | ||
| Probably eight or nine. | ||
| So over the next few years, I'm going to say, this general idea that playing the piano was a waste of time crystallized into the understanding that I could actually articulate that I wanted to make a difference to the world. | ||
| And so that's how I, you know, by the time I was 15 was when I started programming and I've just told you the rest. | ||
| That's an interesting mapping out of your future. | ||
| You know, at nine years old, recognizing you're not going to make a significant contribution to the world by doing something that other people have already done. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| That's a really interesting way to look at the world when you're nine. | ||
| I have a nine-year-old daughter. | ||
| I can't imagine her thinking like that. | ||
| I mean, when I started working, actually, at this bioinformatics project that I mentioned, I had a lot of exposure to a lot of Top flight biologists. | ||
| And it turns out that there were fields that were just fashionable, right? | ||
| And lots of top biologists would be competing vociferously with each other to make the next advance in one particular narrow area that was just really fashionable. | ||
| And other areas would be just completely neglected. | ||
| And I thought, what is going on here? | ||
| Why are these smart people choosing to do something that minimizes the likelihood that they will have any impact? | ||
| In other words, basically, whatever they find out, they themselves didn't matter at all because they could have been hit by a truck or done something completely different and someone else would have found out the exact same thing ten minutes later. | ||
| So they were making no difference. | ||
| I never understood. | ||
| I still don't understand it. | ||
| So you've always felt compelled to make a difference. | ||
| Is that something your mother instilled in you? | ||
| Is it something you just had as a child? | ||
| I don't really think my mother instilled in me. | ||
| I think the introspection was, and if you ask me how she did that, I have no idea. | ||
| But yeah, somehow or other... | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| But no, I think the one thing to make a difference is just intrinsic in me, and it's just something that I just realized as a result of the introspection. | ||
| When you look back at that now, that's got to be an interesting course where you've recognized at a very young age that you wanted to make some sort of a difference. | ||
| But knowing that you had had that epiphany at a young age when it comes to being a pianist or doing something that's going to significantly impact people that is not a standard path that many people are going on. | ||
| It's a very interesting way to set up your life. | ||
| Well, I wouldn't say I set my life up. | ||
| I'd say I had intentions, but if we look at how I got from there to here, an enormous, enormous amount of it was just sheer luck. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you know... | ||
| Like most people's lives. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| So, I would say, you know, I had a hope. | ||
| I had a, you know, general, you know, aspiration. | ||
| But, you know, I would say that... | ||
| I'm just incredibly privileged to have, you know, been able to reach the pinnacle of my chosen field of endeavor. | ||
| You know, hardly anyone can say that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, that is. | ||
| You're also... | ||
| Well, you fit the part, too. | ||
| You're a weirdo. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, you know you're a weirdo. | ||
| Well, it certainly, you know... | ||
| I say that with all due respect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, yeah. | |
| In a compliment as well. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It definitely... | ||
| Yeah, it's definitely difficult to make a difference to the world if you're following the rules. | ||
| And so I'm always instinctively looking for ways to do things that other people might have overlooked. | ||
| I mean, even trivial things. | ||
| Is there anything that frustrates you about this pursuit? | ||
| I'm not an easily frustrated kind of guy. | ||
| I mean, of course, sometimes it gets to me how slowly things are going, how resistant people are, how irrational the resistance is. | ||
| But even there, you know, I've already, from some of the things I've already said, you understand that I'm really... | ||
| Sympathetic to humanity in this regard. | ||
| I understand that most people just, you know, the psychological burden of the prospect of physiological decline is so enormous that they've got no choice. | ||
| They've got to put it out of their minds. | ||
| And, you know, some people feel, I don't know, psychologically stronger or whatever, and they can bite the bullet and actually work on this, even though it's a very, very long haul. | ||
| But some people aren't, and that doesn't mean that they are less deserving of the benefits. | ||
| It's a very strange thing where people put on intellectual blinders and they're talking about aging and dying. | ||
| It is very weird. | ||
| Have you had heated discussions with other intellectuals about this? | ||
| Because I would imagine... | ||
| All the time. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing came to me first when I was at Cambridge, actually. | ||
| I was an undergrad. | ||
| This was sometime before, of course. | ||
| was early 1980s. | ||
| So when I was in my first year, probably 1982, they brought in a stage hypnotist to do a show. | ||
| You ever seen a stage hypnotist show? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this guy, you know, he's got an audience of a few hundred people, all of us, you know, Cambridge undergraduates. | ||
| And so the first step is, you know, do some stuff that gets some particularly amenable people into a light trance. | ||
| And he brings a few of them up on stage and starts to go further, right? | ||
| So there was this one particular part of the show that stuck in my mind. | ||
| What happened was that this one guy was brought up and got into a really, really deep trance. | ||
| And then the next step... | ||
| Was that the hypnotist says, okay, this is actually your right elbow and this is your left elbow. | ||
| So he switched the guy's elbows, right? | ||
| No elaboration of the implications of this, just saying, just getting the person to completely, completely implicitly believe this thing, right? | ||
| And then he said, right, I would like you please to touch your right elbow with your left forefinger. | ||
| And so, of course, there was all this wriggling and writhing and so on. | ||
| You know, couldn't do it, right? | ||
| And that was funny in and of itself. | ||
| But that wasn't the coup de grace. | ||
| What happened next was the key thing. | ||
| The hypnotist says, okay, you can stop now. | ||
| And the guy stops. | ||
| And the hypnotist then says, you couldn't do it, could you? | ||
| And the guy says, no. | ||
| And then the hypnotist says, why not? | ||
| Ask the guy to explain why he couldn't do it. | ||
| And here is the coup de grace, because what happens is the guy gives a completely unhesitating, lucid, grammatically correct explanation for why he couldn't do it. | ||
| And the explanation, of course, will have a hole in it the size of Canada, but the fact is, the guy won't see it. | ||
| He'll just be sitting there... | ||
| With a straight face, just doing this. | ||
| And his friends are out in the... | ||
| And these are Cambridge undergraduates, right? | ||
| High IQ, highly respect for each other's intellect and for their own intellect and rationality. | ||
| And they're rolling in the aisles. | ||
| And the guy's just unaffected. | ||
| So when I started to have these discussions with people about aging and started to find out that people make these unbelievable arguments in favor of it... | ||
| You know, I call it the pro-aging trance, and it was based on that experience from my youth. | ||
| Yeah, I've always said to people, if there was a pill that you can take that would stop all aging, all deterioration, and all diseases, You'd be a fool not to take it. | ||
| You'd be a fool. | ||
| Do you want to suffer? | ||
| The idea that this romantic... | ||
| If it was a rare thing that people aged, a very rare thing, we would look at it with great sadness. | ||
| If someone was afflicted with this aging, we saw someone... | ||
| Hunched over with severe arthritis and osteoporosis and deterioration of the joints and decaying of the cognitive function and they don't know where they are, who they are, we'd be so sad. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But instead we think of it as like, well, he's 90, he had a good life. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| It's not just the fact that everyone gets it. | ||
| It's the fact that everyone gets it at more or less the same age, chronological age. | ||
| You know, so it's considered to be this leveler. | ||
| And just, yes, absolutely. | ||
| People do a little bit better, you know, 20% better than average. | ||
| And we're really, you know, happy. | ||
| Is there any concern or any thought whatsoever to the idea of... | ||
| Of course this is a legitimate question. | ||
| The thing that's frustrating to me is that I've been answering it for 20 years and people still don't listen. | ||
| Kill dummies? | ||
| That's a good move, right? | ||
| Well, of course, a large part of the reason why it's difficult to get the real answers across is because so much fiction, science fiction, has been written, and of course movies, giving wrong answers and making a dramatic element out of it, whether it's Blade Runner or In Time or any of these movies. | ||
| Yeah, they all get it wrong, right? | ||
| They all make it as if it's actually... | ||
| They kind of reinforce the pro-aging trance, right? | ||
| They make it as if life would be even worse if we had no aging. | ||
| Okay, so what's the real answer? | ||
| The real answer is very straightforward. | ||
| It's simply that other technologies that are coming along already and will be established, well established and ubiquitous before we get this to happen, are going to solve the problem because they will increase the carrying capacity of the planet. | ||
| Remember that the reason why we have too many people today and we've got environmental consequences is not because of lack of space. | ||
| It's because of the amount of pollution that the average person generates. | ||
| Specifically, of course, the biggest thing being pumping carbon into the atmosphere. | ||
| But, of course, whether it's plastics or whatever. | ||
| And we're fixing that. | ||
| You know, we've got solar energy and wind energy now that are completely exploding and they're going to completely replace fossil fuels. | ||
| And we got there without people even having to wake up and realize that climate change is actually quite an urgent problem. | ||
| We got there simply because the technology got to be good enough that the production of a kilowatt hour of energy is actually cheaper with the renewable energy mechanisms than it is from fossil fuel. | ||
| And of course it's not just that. | ||
| It's also agriculture. | ||
| So artificial meat, you know, within not very long is going to be both tastier and far cheaper than regular meat. | ||
| And the amount of space we're going to save, let alone the amount of methane that we're not going to be generating, is going to, you know... | ||
| I haven't heard anything saying it's going to be tastier. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| Of course it's got to be tastier. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, how would it be popular if it were not tastier? | ||
| Tastier? | ||
| I don't think it necessarily would have to be tastier. | ||
| Well, as tasty would be good, but tastier would be better. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| And of course it's not just that. | ||
| There's cheap desalination, there's plastic-eating bacteria. | ||
| All of these things are coming. | ||
| And so there is no way that one can make a realistic, plausible argument that denies that the carrying capacity of the planet will rise far faster than the population. | ||
| I agree with you too. | ||
| We don't even need to take into account other things like the fact that fertility rates are coming down everywhere and that once you can live a very long time, they're probably going to come down even further because people who are now choosing to delay having their kids by five years will be able to delay having them by 50 years. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Do you have that same optimistic perception about the ocean? | ||
| Well, first of all, let me say what I think about the word optimism. | ||
| Because I know that you're not doing this, but a lot of people, when they talk to me and call me an optimist, they actually mean that I'm an over-optimist. | ||
| And when they call themselves a realist, they mean that they're a pessimist. | ||
| But anyway, about the ocean, of course. | ||
| I mean, what's the difference? | ||
| You know, certainly there's a lot to do. | ||
| One big problem right now, of course, is the ocean is storing a lot of carbon and releasing a lot as it's warming up. | ||
| So we definitely have to fix that as well, but it's part of the same problem. | ||
| You know, the less carbon there is in the atmosphere, the less of a problem that is. | ||
| Direct carbon removal from the atmosphere is a technology that's absolutely burgeoning now, and direct carbon capture from the ocean seems to be something that's equally plausible, though it's obviously different. | ||
| I'm optimistic in terms of the ability to clean up the ocean. | ||
| I've had Boyan Slott a couple times. | ||
| Are you aware of him, his devices that he's created to remove plastics and other garbage from the ocean? | ||
| My concern is wild fish. | ||
| The depletion of the fish populations is at an unprecedented rate, and it seems to be we're somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 years away from a catastrophic, complete collapse of wild fisheries. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| And, of course, this is, again, a problem that can be fixed by technology. | ||
| You know, if you can make artificial red meat, why not make artificial fish? | ||
| Well, that would be good, that we can have artificial fish, but that wouldn't necessarily make that population rebound. | ||
| We would have to make large steps to try to bring back the equilibrium of the ocean. | ||
| That's not clear. | ||
| I mean… It's not clear? | ||
| It's not clear, no. | ||
| I mean, most of, as I understand it anyway, this is not an area I'm expert on, of course, so I may be wrong, but… Most of the severe depletions of populations of specific fish species are because of fishing, because of overfishing. | ||
| So if we're not doing the overfishing because we're making the same fish elsewhere on land, Well, I'm sure a lot of it is being done by the United States and Great Britain and a lot of first world countries, but I'm sure a lot of it is also being done by countries that can't afford to make this artificial fish or don't have the access to it, or at least in the time period that it's going to take before these fisheries rebound. | ||
| When I talk to people that have an understanding of wildlife in the ocean, they say it's a desperate time. | ||
| And it's a desperate time that is not really being recognized by the general population because they can still get sushi, they can still get halibut at the local market. | ||
| But if you talk to the fishermen, if you talk to the wildlife biologists that are really studying the levels, they're like, this is nearing a point of no return. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't dispute that. | ||
| I think it's urgent. | ||
| But all that really says is we should be investing more in the development of these new technologies that will hasten the... | ||
| I wonder if they even bother with wild fish. | ||
| I mean, if they can make artificial meat, I wonder if people really get into artificial fish as well. | ||
| Actually, why not? | ||
| I guess so, but some of them are not going to make the cut. | ||
| Like, no one's getting artificial tilapia. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| It's not that good. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| So they make it better. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Why do you even call it tilapia then? | ||
| Because people like the name. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I'm really optimistic about artificial meat. | ||
| I mean, it seems that at one point in time it was like a quarter million dollars for a hamburger, and now they've got it down to a point where you can actually make an animal meat product that does not come from an animal dying. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They're very close to being able to make this in a mass-marketed way. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I'm excited about that. | ||
| I think that's very interesting. | ||
| And I'm excited about what you're saying that I think people think about overpopulation. | ||
| One of the things that you should take into consideration is that as populations increase in places urbanized, the actual birth rate goes down to the point where places like Japan, there's actually a concern that they're not having enough children. | ||
| And of course, it is driven by prosperity, you know, female education and emancipation and so on. | ||
| So at this point, if you look at the largest countries in the world, the largest dozen countries in the world, the only one that has a really high fertility rate still is Nigeria. | ||
| You know, if you exclude sub-Saharan Africa, it's basically a completely solved problem. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Nigeria is the only one? | ||
| Yeah, if you look at the big countries you would not expect, like Bangladesh or Pakistan or India, you know, their fertility rate is down below three now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So their population will level out over the next few decades? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| It's getting close. | ||
| As people start to die. | ||
| It's still declining. | ||
| It's plummeting. | ||
| People often used to say that the only reason why China's fertility rate is low is because of the one-child policy, which of course they have now discontinued precisely because of problems like this. | ||
|
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Mm-hmm. | |
| But it's not true. | ||
| I mean, other countries were a little bit behind. | ||
| The one-child policy did certainly accelerate the process. | ||
| But if you look at Brazil or Indonesia or any of these countries, you'll see exactly the same phenomenon plummeting. | ||
| Have you thought about what the future looks like when people lived before 500 years old? | ||
| Like, how, first of all, how wise will people be? | ||
| That's actually interesting because... | ||
| So, okay, so here's a really important thing that I want to get across. | ||
| When we think about longevity, well, actually three things I want to say. | ||
| First of all, longevity is a side effect of health, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, a huge amount of the so-called debate that goes on about the desirability of all of this just goes away when you remember that people actually quite like being healthy. | ||
| But in terms of how the world will be, which is a question you asked, there's two questions here. | ||
| One question is how will the world actually be, and the second question is how will people in the near term expect the world to be? | ||
| And the reason why those two questions are important to distinguish is because the question of how the world will actually be is very obviously completely unanswerable, even if we look 50 years in the future. | ||
| I mean, if you look 50 years ago, right, how much of what we have today would have been predicted, right? | ||
| The world is completely different. | ||
| And certainly in terms of longevity, you know, we're only going to be getting older at one year per year. | ||
| There won't actually be any 500-year-old people for another 400 years, right? | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what you're going to be able to do. | ||
| We're not going to be able to change the rate of the passage of time, is my point. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But expectation is a completely different thing. | ||
| And here's why that matters. | ||
| There's going to become a point where people in general, the general man in the street, starts to realize that they're probably going to live an awfully long time because they're not going to just get progressively thicker as they get older. | ||
| And, you know, lots of other reasons are going to exist why they're going to live a long time, like we're going to have self-driving cars that pretty much eliminate, you know, road accidents and so on. | ||
| So, they're going to want a lot of different things than what they wanted when they thought they were going to live only slightly longer than their parents. | ||
| They're going to want very different pension plans, very different life insurance, health insurance, very different inheritance arrangements. | ||
| And these are huge, big ticket items, right? | ||
| They basically drive the global economy. | ||
| So policy makers and decision makers around the world had damn well better be ready for that shift in public expectation of how long they're going to live. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, therefore, it is absolutely critical to estimate and to communicate the estimate of how soon that shift in public expectation is going to occur, which means what events have to happen, how much progress needs to happen in order to cause that shift. | ||
| Now, this is where I am terrified of Because I think it's going to happen really soon. | ||
| I think it could easily happen in the next three to five years, and that when it does happen, it's going to happen incredibly suddenly. | ||
| Here's the sequence of events that I think is going to happen. | ||
| Step one, we're going to have sufficient progress in the laboratory or the clinic that most of my scientific colleagues are going to be willing to come out and say, more or less, yeah, Aubrey de Grey was right all along. | ||
| They're going to say, yeah, you know. | ||
| You're very excited about that. | ||
| No, I'm terrified and I'm going to tell you why. | ||
|
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I mean, I know I have been. | |
| Recognition is never something that's driven me. | ||
| But yeah, they're going to come out and say, yeah, it's only a matter of time before we lick this aging thing. | ||
| Now, what do you think is going to happen next? | ||
| You're a media guy, right? | ||
| Here's what I think is going to happen, but I want to know whether you think I'm right. | ||
| I think the next thing that's going to happen is that real opinion formers, people like you, people like Oprah Winfrey, are going to hear that being said. | ||
| And they're going to say, oh shit, this is actually going to happen. | ||
| And they're going to say so on air. | ||
| And they're going not only to say what their opinion is, but they're going to say what they think people ought to do. | ||
| In particular, they're going to say, well, look, you know, let's actually, if it's only a matter of time, if we're losing 110,000 people every day worldwide to this phenomenon, then we do kind of have a bit of a moral obligation to make it less time if we can. | ||
| So my sense is that once that happens, the following day, it's going to become impossible to get elected unless you have a manifesto commitment to, you know, have a war on aging, you know, throw proper money at this. | ||
| I mean, I really mean a proper war on aging, not just like the war on cancer was. | ||
| Lots of money. | ||
| Not just to do the research, but also to front load all of the investment in infrastructure and, you know, training of medical personnel and so on. | ||
|
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Okay? | |
| And everyone's going to know it. | ||
| Like, the public is going to make that switch I just mentioned of expectation, like, at once. | ||
| So it's going to be ridiculously sudden once it happens. | ||
| And the first step is going to be that shift in what my colleagues in the biogerontology community feel able to say on camera and on stage. | ||
| Now, therefore, the question is, what amount of progress is going to be required for that to occur? | ||
| Now, here's the thing. | ||
| There aren't very many of us. | ||
| It's a small field. | ||
| The number of people at the top of the field who actually talk to the media quite a bit is, you know, a dozen maximum. | ||
| There's me, there's David that you've had on the show, there's, you know, very few others. | ||
| And we all know each other. | ||
| We're all good mates, right? | ||
| So we know exactly where our heads are, what the drivers are. | ||
| The number one reason why my colleagues don't already say what I say... | ||
| Is funding. | ||
| The fact that unlike me, those people are reliant for most of the money that drives their research on peer-reviewed government money, government grants. | ||
| And they just won't get them if it's possible to accuse them of saying irresponsible things to the media, things that get people's hopes up unduly. | ||
| Remember, there's nowhere near enough money. | ||
| There's less than 10% of the necessary money to fund research at the moment. | ||
| So the committees that decide who gets money and who doesn't are always desperately scouting around for reasons to say no that can be justified. | ||
| And saying, oh, this guy says irresponsible things to the media is a totally safe way to say no, right? | ||
| So anyway, so this is the problem. | ||
| This is why my colleagues have to be really pretty curmudgeonly. | ||
| Even David. | ||
| David is probably the person out of my colleagues who pushes the envelope as much as possible out of people who have regular faculty positions. | ||
| But, you know, he's just written a book, which I see you have on your shelf, called, you know, Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To. | ||
| He could not have written that book with that title five years ago and kept his job. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, you know, the question is how much has to change? | ||
| And actually, it's not very much. | ||
| There's a balance here. | ||
| There's a tension here between, on the one hand, not saying things that can be characterized as irresponsible, but on the other hand, not saying things that can be characterized as simply untrue. | ||
| So the more progress is made in the laboratory, not even in the clinic, just with mice, in terms of actually rejuvenating them, making them live longer with treatments that were given to those mice when they were already in middle age. | ||
| The more progress is made, you know, the more impossible it's going to be to carry on being pessimistic and refusing to make time frame predictions or anything like that. | ||
| So there's almost a forced pessimism that's created by the establishment. | ||
|
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Correct. | |
| Well, I think what you're saying makes a ton of sense in that once it does get to the point where this is undeniable, this is peer-reviewed, proven, established science, and also implementable, this is something that can be... | ||
| At scale, distributed worldwide, yeah, things are going to get real weird. | ||
| So people are already – people are obviously still going to be saying it can't be done in humans, you know, it can't really be done, you know, until the cows come home, you know, just in the same way as has happened for any other pioneering technology throughout history. | ||
| But what matters is what the center of gravity of expertly – stated expert opinion is. | ||
| It is a really, really polarizing subject. | ||
| I mean, it is funny how what you're saying rings so true that academics and intellectuals have to be cautious about talking about even what is potentially possible, even though in private they probably are more than aware that there's just a few steps to go before this stuff gets implemented and we see really I mean, really spectacular, rather, changes. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, I'm not saying that all of us absolutely agree on 100% on everything in the science. | ||
| Certainly, I would say that I'm slightly on the optimistic end of the spectrum of expert opinion. | ||
| But yeah, my colleagues are not all that far behind me in terms of what they would say the timeframes are. | ||
| What you're saying in terms of people discussing it in the media makes absolute sense to me. | ||
| That as soon as that Pandora's box gets opened, then people are going to be looking to establish clinics everywhere, and it could be very strange. | ||
| Well, even if a lot of these things are not yet available for clinical use, even if some of them are still... | ||
| At the beginning of the clinical trial process, and we're still maybe 10 or 15 years away from the real Mackay, you know, that will still be enough to trigger this pandemonium. | ||
| And that's why policymakers, decision makers in every way, both in government and in key aspect of industry, need to, I call it, anticipate the anticipation. | ||
| They need to have already... | ||
| Thought through and prepared for this change in public expectation of how long they're going to live. | ||
| So you think that this One day will be a gigantic public issue in terms of elected representatives that they're going to need to have some sort of an anti-aging policy. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And the switch from essentially situation normal, business as usual, to this completely new world will be ridiculously sudden. | ||
| It will happen in a week. | ||
| And do you think one of the motivating factors would be the price of healthcare, that the argument would be part of our issue with healthcare and the An incredible amount of money that needs to be spent on hospitalizing people and treating them with diseases. | ||
| we could eliminate that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's a huge part of it. | ||
| So at the moment, when you talk to any people, any elected representatives anyway, of any persuasion about the aging question, then their immediate knee-jerk reaction is always, oh, God, we definitely don't want to fix that. | ||
| How would we pay the pensions? | ||
| Because obviously they know it's the economy, stupid. | ||
| It still is. | ||
| And so that's the first thing they think. | ||
| And the fact is you're not going to be able to get away with that kind of thinking anymore. | ||
| It's going to have to be a case of redesigning a large number of really big parts of the economy from the ground up. | ||
| Well, especially places like where you live in England, or where you're from, rather, in England, where they have socialized medicine. | ||
| The enormous cost of that would be decreased radically if people were healthier. | ||
| It's got nothing to do with private versus socialized medicine. | ||
| It's just medicine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the US and the UK and everywhere else, the overwhelming majority of medical expenditure is on the health problems of the elderly, which will go away. | ||
| Now, of course, the medicine that makes those problems go away is not going to be free, I mean, to produce and to deliver, but prevention is always better than cure. | ||
| But that, actually, is only a minority of the economic benefit. | ||
| The real economic benefit comes from the indirect costs. | ||
| First of all, the fact that the kids of the elderly are going to be more productive because they're not having to spend time looking after their sick parents. | ||
| and related things like that. | ||
| But also the huge thing that the elderly themselves are still going to be able-bodied and therefore in a position to continue to contribute wealth to society. | ||
| Now, that doesn't necessarily mean Anything to do with the retirement age. | ||
| This comes back to another aspect of the interaction between emerging technologies. | ||
| So, of course, we've got automation coming. | ||
| I don't work on it anymore, but lots of people do, right? | ||
| We're making huge progress in artificial intelligence and most people, even conservative commentators, say that most of the jobs that exist today are going to be gone 20 years from now. | ||
| Because machines will be doing things perfectly well. | ||
| So, you know, we're going to be completely unable to continue this system of an economy based on full employment. | ||
| You know, last time this happened with the Industrial Revolution, we got away with it by inventing an entire new sector. | ||
| You know, the service sector that replaced all the jobs that people didn't have anymore in manufacturing and agriculture. | ||
| You know, it's not going to happen this time. | ||
| It's just not going to happen. | ||
| You know, how many people do you need in the entertainment industry? | ||
| You know, we've got you. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| So, you know, we're going to have a different... | ||
| Of course, people are still already thinking about that with things like, you know, universal basic income. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which is an extraordinarily blunt instrument. | ||
| It's just a starting point. | ||
| But, you know, that kind of thing is going to happen. | ||
| I can totally imagine a situation in which, you know, 30, 40 years from now, work is something like national service used to be. | ||
| When you're young and insignificant, you do a few years of actual work and then you... | ||
| Yeah, but that means that the whole concept of pensions, it's ridiculous to think about that. | ||
| So we've got to get policymakers out of that mindset and to get them to think in more global terms about the health benefits and the benefits to quality of life of everybody and so on. | ||
| It is funny that work or the concept of work is sort of inexorably connected to society to the point where you think you have to work. | ||
| But, you know, meanwhile, people lived for hundreds of thousands of years without even the concept of that, you know, like a place where you go where they give you gold coins. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, of course, you do have to have something that makes something that fulfills something to do that you find fulfilling. | ||
| That's the argument for universal basic income, right? | ||
| The argument against it is human nature, that people need to be motivated and they need something to sort of guide them towards excellence. | ||
| Yeah, my take is the only thing that needs is better education, which of course is something that we could spend the money on that we save from not having to... | ||
| You are a glass half full guy. | ||
| Well, I don't know anybody well educated who gets bored, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I agree with you. | ||
| Or anybody who's been exposed to interesting things. | ||
| There are so many things in this world. | ||
| I mean, if I had... | ||
| I would love to live five different lives concurrently. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| That's the plan. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| But they don't have to be concurrent. | ||
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They can be sequential. | |
| But I want to just dive into... | ||
| I would love to live different lives. | ||
| Because there's so many different things that I would have loved to pursue. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Well, you can't live them concurrently because you've only got one brain, but let's try and make you live them sequentially instead. | ||
| Yeah, well, sequentially would be fun. | ||
| I mean, it would be really interesting to take up a whole new career at 70, you know? | ||
| And so this three to five year timeline, what makes you think that three to five years from now is when all this stuff will take place? | ||
| Well, of course, it's subjective. | ||
| It's based on aggregating a whole bunch of different areas of research. | ||
| But, of course, I'm fairly well informed about where research currently is and how rapidly it's moving in a variety of different areas. | ||
| And so just, you know, I'm putting all that together in my head and I'm saying, how soon are we going to be able to take mice that normally live, let's say, two and a half years and do nothing whatsoever to them until they are one and a half and get them to, on average, live to four instead of two and a half, right? | ||
| And, of course, those extra years would be healthy years because we would be rejuvenating the mice, right? | ||
| So, I believe that that would be sufficient. | ||
| And that's actually a little bit conservative. | ||
| I think a less dramatic breakthrough than that might be enough to switch most of my colleagues over, get them over the fence. | ||
| But I think that would definitely be enough. | ||
| And I think that that is close. | ||
| What was the research done with mice with myostatin inhibitors? | ||
| Did that not increase lifespan as well? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I mean, a lot of things have extended lifespan a fair bit. | ||
| But what we have at the moment is not all the components of what I just said. | ||
| If you do something genetic to mice, or if you do it to them throughout their lives, then we can already get that year, year and a half out of mice. | ||
| Certainly a year. | ||
| But not if you start at 18 months. | ||
| If you start at 18 months, the best we can do is maybe four months. | ||
| So that's the difference. | ||
| You've got to be able to start late and get the big extension. | ||
| And you're not going to get that without bona fide rejuvenation. | ||
| So that's not going to come by way of genetics? | ||
| Well, even if it did come by way of genetics, it wouldn't matter. | ||
| It wouldn't persuade my colleague or me that we were on the brink of doing it for humans who have the misfortune of being already alive. | ||
| So the rejuvenation is going to come through some sort of biologics? | ||
| Well, yes, through the kinds of things we're working on that I mentioned earlier. | ||
| Stem cells, gene therapy to do various things to introduce, for example, bacterial enzymes that can break down waste products, senolytics that I talked about, pharmaceuticals to do other things. | ||
| What about the use of CRISPR? Sure. | ||
| Well, CRISPR is a very important part of this. | ||
| Can you please explain what CRISPR means when people don't know what we're talking about? | ||
| Sure, yes. | ||
| So CRISPR is a technology that was first developed about eight years ago now and it is the exploitation of a bacterial mechanism that allows bacteria to defend themselves against viruses. | ||
| Essentially how it works is that it allows us to change the sequence of our genome in a particular cell in a very specific way. | ||
| It's often called gene editing. | ||
| And there are other technologies for gene editing that already existed before CRISPR that are very laborious, very expensive and very clunky that is far, far cheaper and easier to use. | ||
| So what that does is it allows us, for example, to inactivate a gene, or for that matter to change the sequence of a gene from a mutant form into a normal form so that it works when it was previously not working. | ||
| Now, doing that in the laboratory in a Petri dish is fair enough. | ||
| The question is, can we do it in the body? | ||
| And initially, no. | ||
| Initially, this technology was too error-prone. | ||
| It was prone to do what George Church has called genetic vandalism and have what's called off-target effects. | ||
| In other words, basically do other changes to the genome elsewhere that you didn't want. | ||
| But, of course, people have known this, and people have been working really hard to improve the technology, and it's getting to the point now where it's possible to actually use it on humans, maybe. | ||
| You know, it's getting there. | ||
| Now, you can't do everything with CRISPR. One thing you definitely can't do with CRISPR is insert new genes into the genome, and that's something we really need to be able to do. | ||
| But actually, one of our big projects is a kind of two-step thing where we use CRISPR to make a small change to the genome that allows us to insert large genes where we couldn't previously. | ||
| So, yeah, so CRISPR is huge. | ||
| And it's huge not only in aging research, but across the whole board of biomedical work. | ||
| They have done some work in China apparently on live human beings. | ||
| So this was very controversial. | ||
| What happened was that a group in China used CRISPR to alter the DNA of embryos that were going to be used for IVF, for embryo fertilization. | ||
| And the change that was made was itself quite a curious one. | ||
| Essentially what they did was they tried to change a gene called CCR5 into a mutant form that doesn't work, but that in its inactive form protects the body from infection by HIV. This is something that was discovered a long time ago, and maybe 1% of people have this genotype, and so this was introduced. | ||
| Unfortunately, first of all, it probably wasn't done very well, but also... | ||
|
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Why did you say that? | |
| Well, people have looked at the process, and they probably didn't make the correct modification. | ||
| But also it's not clear whether doing it for someone lifelong is actually a good thing because, as I say, it's an inactivation of a gene that must exist for a reason or it wouldn't exist at all, right? | ||
| But didn't it also have a side effect of increased intelligence? | ||
| That is complete speculation. | ||
|
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Is it? | |
| Yes. | ||
| What would cause them to speculate that? | ||
| People speculate all the time. | ||
| Do you think that's just like clickbait stuff that gets people excited about it? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| But yeah, so anyway, the other thing was that it's not obvious why it's even worthwhile to make An embryo genetically resistant to HIV. First of all, they don't have HIV yet in the first place, and they may never get it. | ||
| And secondly, we've got drugs that work pretty well to control HIV, antiretrovirals. | ||
| Protease inhibitors. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's not obvious why this was a sensible thing to do in the first place. | ||
| However, it's certainly got a whole bunch of debate going. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Well, when I hear about something like that, I always assume, first of all, I mean, this American prejudice, you assume that it's in China, they're doing something crazy, right? | ||
| And you also assume that if they're telling you about someone who's been altered, that means that they've probably been doing this for a decade. | ||
| Or since CRISPR was initiated eight years ago. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Yeah, you never know. | ||
| It's interesting to me, and I don't want them to do it on people, but when they do do it on people, I'm fascinated. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| I mean, that's the attitude that I have, and a lot of people have, to medical tourism in general. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That these are not adequately regulated treatments, and they are certainly not adequately characterized. | ||
| In other words, the people who get the treatments are people who pay for them rather than people who have been chosen to be in a standardized group of any kind, and there tends to be very little follow-up. | ||
| But still, it's better than nothing in the sense that some information exists about the efficacy and safety of these treatments as a result. | ||
| The more that exists, the better. | ||
| The more that people who are administering these treatments can be induced to reveal their data, the better, even if it's anonymized. | ||
| But, you know, some scientists, quite a lot of scientists... | ||
| Take a much stronger view that, you know, we just should oppose all of this, period. | ||
| And we should just say, you know, everyone who indulges, who gives treatments to people in offshore places should be shut down as best as we can and should be demonized. | ||
| And I don't really think that's true. | ||
|
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I think there's a halfway house. | |
| Personally, I've had my family, my mother has gone to Panama twice and she was on the verge of a knee replacement and now she walks without pain. | ||
| Yeah, I bet she went to Neil Reardon's clinic. | ||
| Yeah, I mean there are a lot of people who have very good stories out of Neil's group. | ||
| Of course, the thing is, you don't know, unless someone has a really bad story, whether things are going wrong. | ||
| So, I mean, I don't know whether Neil releases the total number of patients per year that he treats. | ||
| So, we don't know his hit rate. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I just do know that I have spoken to several fighters from the UFC that have gone down there. | ||
| And again, my mother was, I mean, she didn't want to get a knee replacement. | ||
| So when I sent her down there, and it took, because she's, I'm 52, she's 73. So it took her somewhere around six to eight months before she started feeling anything. | ||
| She was really worried that it wasn't going to work. | ||
| But then at eight months in, the pain just went away, and it's continued to get better, and then I sent her down a second time, and I'm going to keep sending her down there. | ||
| It's had a pretty profound effect. | ||
| What's fascinating to me is they do three days of intravenous therapy, and the intravenous therapy has, I don't know if it's just my imagination, but she looks younger. | ||
| She looks more vibrant. | ||
| When I saw her, she came to my house for Christmas, and she looked better. | ||
| She looked a year younger than she did the last time I saw her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, this is what we would hope that stem cell therapy would do. | ||
| But I remind you of what I said about that original Parkinson's trial from more than 25 years ago. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| For 15 years it worked. | ||
| We really didn't. | ||
| I mean, no, that was fantastic. | ||
| The one that was effective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So only a few people benefited. | ||
| The people who did benefit benefited enormously, but a huge number of people had no benefit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, that is the kind of stage that we're in for a lot of stem cell therapies right now. | ||
| Parkinson's disease is a kind of outlier in the sense that the desired function of the stem cell is really well understood. | ||
| So what kind of stem cells to introduce into the body and where to introduce them is, you know, not in doubt. | ||
| Most stem cell therapies are not that far along. | ||
| So every time anyone gets treated right now, it's still an experiment. | ||
| And that's okay, up to a point. | ||
| But it does mean that we're on a learning curve and it's vital to have the people like Neil, who are administering this therapy to quite a lot of people, to actually not just, you know, live off the stories of high profile people who get good benefits and talk them up. | ||
| Release the data. | ||
| Release the full data, unexplicated, including any negative stuff and including follow-up. | ||
| That's the key thing. | ||
| So many therapies in regenerative medicine in general have the potential to be beneficial over the first few months to a year or whatever and then to start having side effects that are detrimental. | ||
| What have you heard that are detrimental side effects? | ||
| So, well, of course, the biggest thing that we always have to worry about is cancer. | ||
| Because, and this is true for a whole bunch of things, you know, telomerase activators and so on. | ||
| The thing is that aging can in some senses be characterized as a trade-off between cancer and everything else. | ||
| In other words, a huge amount of what... | ||
| What goes wrong with the body late in life is as a result of a kind of dialing down of regenerative functions that we actually do naturally have in the body, but which are not as active in older people as they are in younger people. | ||
| And so, of course, we have to ask, why are they less active? | ||
| And a lot of biologists, including myself, believe that a huge part of that is adaptive. | ||
| In other words, it is Kind of the body recognizing that there is, as time goes on, a progressively higher number of cells in the body that are almost cancerous and that have to be kind of kept in check in order not to become properly cancerous. | ||
| Because, of course, cancer is the result of a gradual accumulation of mutations and so on in the cells, right? | ||
| And so yes, every time that you are improving regenerative capacity, whether of the cells that you put in or more importantly of the cells that are nearby the cells you put in, you are potentially taking a risk of hastening the onset of actual cancer. | ||
| What is your opinion on the benefits of fasting in that regard? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| First of all, we'll talk about fasting in relation to cancer because that's important. | ||
| People have certainly found that it's a good thing to do, which is somewhat counterintuitive because in the later stages of cancer, there's, of course, cacaxia, you know, a lot of loss of muscle and so on. | ||
| But earlier on, it seems that we can slow things down. | ||
| I mean, cancers are greedy metabolically. | ||
| They consume a lot of energy. | ||
| So if you're minimizing how many calories you put in, then you have a chance of slowing the cancer down so that therapies may have a better chance. | ||
| So that's certainly been found. | ||
| Let me talk about fasting more generally, though. | ||
| So, for sure, I mean, it's been known for nearly 100 years that if you give mice or rats less food than they would like, then they live longer than they otherwise do. | ||
| And this is certainly the most reproducible and best-studied phenomenon in the whole of the biology of aging. | ||
| Still, there are mysteries about how it works, but a lot of stuff has been found out, and many of my colleagues, including David, have made their careers by making progress, by discovering insights in that area. | ||
| The result of that is that we now have something that people have always recognized to be rather important, namely drugs that trick the body into thinking it's fasting when it isn't. | ||
| They're called calorie restriction mimetics. | ||
| And, you know, that's good. | ||
| That's also a worthwhile thing because, of course, people like eating, and so, you know, it would be useful. | ||
| Then there are variations on the theme. | ||
| So a guy from close to here at UCLA named Volta Longo, sorry, USC named Volta Longo, has been really the pioneer of intermittent fasting, which is basically properly starving 100%, but only for two days a week or something like that. | ||
| You know, different people have tried different schedules. | ||
| And all of these things are pretty interesting in terms of being good for your health. | ||
| But in terms of increasing your longevity by 30 or 40%, the way they do in mice and rats, no way. | ||
| It turns out, and this is a prediction of evolutionary theory, but it's also been found absolutely clearly in data, that different species react differently to starvation, to fasting, in particular that longer-lived species get less benefit from fasting than shorter-lived species. | ||
| So if you do it just right in nematode worms that normally live like three weeks, then you can multiply their lifespan by a factor of five or more. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| You sure as hell can't do that with a mask, however you do it. | ||
| You can get up to maybe 50%, maybe 60% if you really, really work at it. | ||
| So with a person, you might be able to eat out a year or two. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| With dogs, it's been tried. | ||
| You get maybe 10%. | ||
| With monkeys, you get a few percent if you're lucky. | ||
| That's a bit controversial right now. | ||
| Why is it a bit controversial? | ||
| Because there were two studies done, really long, extensive studies, obviously, because monkeys live a long time, and they got different results. | ||
| And so the question is why they get different results. | ||
| If you look closely at exactly how the experiments were done, then it's pretty easy to see that they got different results because of different methodologies, slightly different methodologies, and that the real answer is somewhere between the two. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| And with dogs, you said you'd get 10%? | ||
| About that. | ||
| Yeah, this was done with Labradors that live 11 years. | ||
| 11 years. | ||
| But isn't that normal for a Labrador? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| What I'm saying is they got about another year. | ||
| So they got 10% of 11 years. | ||
| Oh, I understand. | ||
| So fasting with human beings, you think, is interesting. | ||
| It's something. | ||
| But it's not going to mimic these biologics and what you believe is on the horizon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, I'm not against it at all. | ||
| First of all, as I say, it is generally good for health. | ||
| You know, you definitely see people getting sick less, you know, regular sickness like infections and so on. | ||
| People seem to stay healthier for a bit longer. | ||
| But in terms of really pushing out the boundaries of these age-related progressive chronic conditions, you know, it's maybe a year or two. | ||
| There's a few other factors that are taken into consideration when people talk about longevity and health, and those are community, enjoyment, friends, loved ones, satisfaction with what you do for a living. | ||
| How do you take those into consideration and what do you think is going on with those? | ||
| Yeah, these things are definitely big. | ||
| So all of these things, and it goes further than that. | ||
| It extends to like meditation and yoga and so on. | ||
| Everything that relates to stress is very important in aging. | ||
| It... | ||
| It's reasonably well understood that when you're in a stressed out state, you synthesize elevated amounts of certain hormones that interact throughout the body and in various ways accelerate the accumulation of these various types of damage I was talking about earlier. | ||
| So it's no surprise that there's a mind-body relationship there. | ||
| And in fact, if we... | ||
| So people often study centenarians, people who live an exceptionally long time, right? | ||
| And why do they study them? | ||
| Because they want to find out what the tricks are. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's quite frustrating because there's not a lot in common. | ||
| You know, some centenarians are a little bit overweight. | ||
| Some centenarians smoke. | ||
| You know, it's not easy to actually figure out what they've got in common. | ||
| But there's one thing that almost all centenarians have in common, which is nothing bothers them. | ||
| It's not necessarily that they have had particularly stress-free lives. | ||
| The thing is that when they encounter a stressful situation, they cope with it really well. | ||
| And so the hormone levels, as I say, don't get elevated. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So, cortisol doesn't rise, adrenaline doesn't spike, they don't freak out, they don't lose sleep. | ||
| Or at least the spikes are more modest. | ||
| Yes, they don't lose sleep, they can handle it. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So, it really boils down to the effect that's going on inside the mind and the body. | ||
| That's how the body's reacting to the stress. | ||
| Do you meditate yourself? | ||
| No, I'm just chill anyway. | ||
| Well, you're also satisfied. | ||
| Well, that's certainly true, as I say. | ||
| Yeah, so you don't feel the need to... | ||
| Yeah, at a physical level, I have a very stressful life. | ||
| I spend my life running around airports and so on, but at a mental level, not at all. | ||
| Do you take any... | ||
| Are you doing any exercise? | ||
| Do you take supplements? | ||
| Honestly, hauling my way through airports is my exercise. | ||
| Hauling your way through airports. | ||
| How often are you flying? | ||
| 10% of the time. | ||
| Do you just take one of the bags you have to carry rather than a roller bag? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| On purpose? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| For extra work? | ||
| Actually, not for extra work. | ||
| No, it's just because I can move faster that way without... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, certainly the fact that I've actually got some weight on my shoulders is probably good in itself. | ||
| Yeah, I started carrying a backpack instead of a roller bag. | ||
| It's just easier to move than holding on to something and dragging it behind me. | ||
| And I found that there's something – I have a bag that I can stick a laptop in. | ||
| And I can stick all my clothes in. | ||
| It's just a larger bag. | ||
| Yeah, I carry two generally. | ||
| When I'm doing a day trip like today, I'll only carry my laptop bag. | ||
| But it's a really cavernous one. | ||
| So it's pretty heavy. | ||
| It's got everything in it that I need for a day or could need. | ||
| And then when I'm traveling a longer trip, I just have one other bag, a sports bag that I'm carrying. | ||
| Is there anything that you think you should be doing that you're not doing that you maybe would like to plan for in the future? | ||
| It's hard to say because, I mean, I do have a lot of freedom about exactly how I spend any particular day. | ||
| I mean, it's more a case of what I would be doing if I didn't have to do the things I'm doing now, which is obviously doing all this advocacy and so on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever used a sensory deprivation tank? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| I'd like you to use that. | ||
| I'd like to hear your feedback. | ||
| I have one here. | ||
| And what would you like? | ||
| I just want to know because it was very relaxing. | ||
| I'm relaxed already? | ||
| You say. | ||
| Getting there. | ||
| See. | ||
| You know what it is, right? | ||
| You float. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It feels amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| No, I'm into sensory deprivation in general. | ||
| You know, when I'm asleep, I don't like to have any kind of noise or light. | ||
| You know, one of my banes is staying in hotels which don't have proper blackout curtains. | ||
| Typically when I'm in a hotel room, I'll unplug the refrigerator. | ||
| So you basically got it dialed in. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Well, I'm optimistic because you're optimistic. | ||
| When you tell me three to five years from now, we're possibly looking at some sort of a breakthrough where things start moving into the public eye, where people are really taking into consideration, like, this is real technology that we should all start implementing, particularly on people that are older and ailing. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| I mean, at the moment, even though there are some things in clinical trials, We always have to remember that the most challenging areas are still at an early stage. | ||
| So that's why I make... | ||
| And not only do they have to individually get, you know, all the way through clinical trials so that they're safe, but also they have to be combined. | ||
| You know, each of these things individually can be applied to a small subset of the population that happen to have, you know, early onset diseases arising from maybe congenital acceleration of one particular type of damage, right? | ||
| But then to be useful for people who don't have any congenital problems, who are aging at a normal rate, We've got to actually combine them all. | ||
| And of course, that's bound to throw up unanticipated interactions. | ||
| So that's why I put this time frame as far out as 17 years, and even then with only 50% probability, right? | ||
| But the anticipation is the thing that's where the shit's going to really hit the fan, you know, where there's going to be this enormous turbulence in society arising from the knowledge that this is coming. | ||
| I, for one, am very excited about living in V500. I think I can get a lot of shit done. | ||
| I learn about myself. | ||
| I think it makes no sense to think about what one's going to be doing in the distant future. | ||
| There was one time I was on stage about, I'm going to say five or six years ago, and somebody from the audience for about the thousandth time asked me, you know, how long do you want to live? | ||
| And I just lost it slightly. | ||
| Because sometimes I've heard questions just one more time too often. | ||
| And so I said, look, look here, I've got a question for you, I said. | ||
| I said, right, what time do you want to go to the toilet next Sunday? | ||
| I said, right. | ||
| And he looked at me like incredulity and I said, yeah, you haven't the face idea why I asked you that question, do you? | ||
| But it's exactly the same kind of question. | ||
| You know, you may have an opinion about what time you expect to go to the toilet next Sunday because of habit. | ||
| But having an opinion about what time you want to go to the toilet... | ||
| Is completely crazy. | ||
| Because you're going to have better information on the topic nearer the time. | ||
| And you're going to be able to act on that information. | ||
| It's exactly the same. | ||
| And also the idea of how long you want to live is going to be irrelevant if they can repair disease and fix all these issues. | ||
| It's just going to be the quality of life. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| I mean, having an idea of how long you want to live, even stating that the quality of life is going to be like a young adult physically and mentally, you know, it's crazy to have an opinion because it's going to be determined by other stuff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I'm fascinated by the future in every aspect, technologically, with artificial intelligence, with automation, just the way society is shifting. | ||
| I mean, I'm a very optimistic person in that regard. | ||
| And I think even some of the problems that we have socially, I think those are just... | ||
| A result of this shift towards a more aware, more conscious society. | ||
| I'm very optimistic. | ||
| I think all those things are good. | ||
| So I think that the extending lifespan and getting to see these real exponential changes in our culture and in our society and just our way of life, I'm very excited about it. | ||
| I think it's one of the most intriguing things about being a person is to see how things have shifted. | ||
| I mean, I've been reading a lot of books lately about Native Americans and how they shifted from the early 1800s to the 21st century, the early 21st century. | ||
| 200 years later, things are impossibly different. | ||
| Unimaginably different at the time. | ||
| If you could talk to them about what life was like 200 years ago, it'd be fairly similar. | ||
| 1620 to 1820, not a lot of difference. | ||
| But 1820 to 2020, good lord! | ||
| What is 2220 going to be like? | ||
| I mean, I just think that we are at the cusp of one of the most spectacular eras in human history. | ||
| Things are changing so rapidly and so amazingly. | ||
| Well, of course, the thing that one has to recognize is that we have no particular reason to suppose that they will ever slow down. | ||
| So you can't really call this one of the cusps. | ||
| It's just we're in an exponential scenario and we happen to be noticing it more. | ||
| Since you started off as a coder, we'll wrap this up soon, but I'm going to leave you with this, because I'm really fascinated by artificial intelligence. | ||
| Are you worried at all about artificial intelligence? | ||
| Do you hear the Elon Musks and the Sam Harrises of the world that are sounding the alarm, like, hey, don't hit that switch. | ||
| Don't turn this on. | ||
| I think it's a legitimate question, definitely, whether the... | ||
| The progress that we're making might lead to development, perhaps accidental development, of technology that is so autonomous that it gets out of our control. | ||
| However, I do think it's very unlikely. | ||
| I think that the ways in which we have succeeded in making the progress that we have made so far in AI, over the past decade especially, It relies enormously on human-computer interaction. | ||
| In other words, the machines get their information from us and from the world without which they can't make progress. | ||
| I don't see that changing really anytime soon. | ||
| I do still pay some attention to the progress of AI. One of my other good friends, a guy that I knew from way back in my Cambridge days, is the guy who runs DeepMind, which is one of the most high-profile AI companies. | ||
| I'm definitely excited about what's happening, but no, I'm not particularly apprehensive. | ||
| However, I do think that it's better to be safe than sorry and therefore that what's being done to look at the possibilities of things getting out of control or indeed of things just being misused by humans is a very legitimate and valuable area of work. | ||
| Well, Aubrey, the next time I see you, if it's five years from now, I hope you look younger. | ||
| I hope the world has changed and everything's groovy. | ||
| And I appreciate you and I appreciate everything you're doing. | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| Please tell people if they're more interested in finding out about what you're doing. | ||
| What is the website of your organization? | ||
| Yep, Sense.org. | ||
| That's S for Sugar, E for Elephant, N for November, S for Sugar.org. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Bye, everybody. | ||
| Off and roll! |
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