The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1432 - Aubrey de Grey

00:00:01.000 Three, two, one, boom. 0.99

00:00:03.000 Here we go.

00:00:04.000 What's up, man?

00:00:05.000 What's up?

00:00:05.000 Hey, did you trim your beard since I've seen you last?

00:00:07.000 No, I'm afraid not.

00:00:07.000 I feel like you have.

00:00:08.000 No, it may be a fraction shorter, but that's only because we're falling out more.

00:00:12.000 It falls out?

00:00:13.000 Oh, yeah.

00:00:13.000 I mean, I stroke it all the time, you know.

00:00:14.000 It's compulsive.

00:00:15.000 Oh, and so then you get these weird hairs that you have to...

00:00:18.000 Well, actually, I don't notice it enough.

00:00:20.000 I mean, it falls out slowly, you know, but I guess there's a certain amount of attrition that...

00:00:25.000 So the beard's the same length.

00:00:26.000 Have you gotten any younger since I've seen you last?

00:00:29.000 Yeah, hard to say.

00:00:30.000 Hard to say, but that's your business.

00:00:32.000 That's my business, yes.

00:00:33.000 How many years has it been since I saw you?

00:00:34.000 Four?

00:00:36.000 Nearly five, I think.

00:00:37.000 It was April of 2015. And you have not gotten younger?

00:00:42.000 No.

00:00:42.000 I have not gotten younger.

00:00:44.000 Have you maintained?

00:00:45.000 I think I've pretty much maintained, yes, but not through my own work.

00:00:49.000 So the work is still very much ongoing, though we have come an awfully long way in the past five years.

00:00:54.000 But, you know, this is a complicated thing to fix.

00:00:57.000 And we need to fix all of it in order to really make people start getting biologically younger.

00:01:02.000 So let's bring people up to speed.

00:01:05.000 What are the latest revelations?

00:01:08.000 What's the latest in terms of what we understand in terms of what could possibly be fixed about human aging?

00:01:17.000 Alright, so the fantastic answer to that question is there are no new revelations in terms of what we understand.

00:01:23.000 Our understanding seems to have been pretty much complete already like 20 years ago.

00:01:28.000 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.

00:01:38.000 It means that we are pretty much on top of the description of the problem and therefore it's all about solving the problem.

00:01:46.000 Is it possible to summarize the problem?

00:01:48.000 What is the problem?

00:01:48.000 What causes human aging?

00:01:49.000 Sure, that's easy.

00:01:51.000 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.

00:02:00.000 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.

00:02:13.000 Okay.

00:02:13.000 So in the same way that a car rusts...

00:02:15.000 Jamie's going to bring that microphone up to you.

00:02:17.000 Is that good?

00:02:17.000 Yep.

00:02:17.000 Yeah, just try to keep it about a fist from your face.

00:02:19.000 Sure.

00:02:19.000 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.

00:02:27.000 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.

00:02:43.000 But after that, evolution doesn't care about us anymore.

00:02:46.000 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.

00:03:01.000 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?

00:03:11.000 Yeah, all that.

00:03:12.000 So that's just one aspect of the difference between a younger person and an older person.

00:03:15.000 So let me answer that question by stepping back one step.

00:03:18.000 Okay.

00:03:19.000 So the difference ultimately arises from what the body is made of at the molecular level and cellular level.

00:03:26.000 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.

00:03:37.000 And those changes, the reason I'm using the word damage to describe those changes is because eventually things don't work so well.

00:03:45.000 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.

00:03:52.000 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.

00:04:03.000 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.

00:04:14.000 So what do you do in your own life to try to mitigate that acceleration?

00:04:19.000 Yeah, I'm a really bad example of this.

00:04:21.000 Really?

00:04:21.000 That's crazy.

00:04:22.000 This is your business.

00:04:24.000 So there are two reasons why I'm bad at it.

00:04:26.000 The first reason is that I'm really well built.

00:04:28.000 I'm just lucky.

00:04:29.000 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.

00:04:35.000 And, you know, I'm biologically far younger than I actually am chronologically.

00:04:39.000 How old are you chronologically?

00:04:40.000 Chronologically, I'm 57. How old do you think you are biologically?

00:04:44.000 Well, I'm told that I'm a good decade less than that.

00:04:48.000 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.

00:04:53.000 Yeah, so that's pretty good news.

00:04:55.000 So you're lucky, genetically.

00:04:57.000 Yeah.

00:04:57.000 But the other thing is, you know, I'm working hard to hasten the defeat of aging.

00:05:02.000 And maybe it's a net win.

00:05:04.000 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.

00:05:09.000 Yeah.

00:05:10.000 And you still drink booze?

00:05:12.000 I still drink.

00:05:13.000 How often?

00:05:14.000 Oh, I drink probably more than the average American.

00:05:17.000 What does that mean?

00:05:19.000 A few beers a day.

00:05:20.000 A few beers a day.

00:05:21.000 What's a few?

00:05:22.000 Yeah, three or four.

00:05:23.000 Three or four?

00:05:24.000 Yeah.

00:05:24.000 Three or four beers every day?

00:05:26.000 Yeah, most days.

00:05:26.000 And a whiskey or two every day as well?

00:05:28.000 Yeah, most days.

00:05:28.000 So six days a week or six drinks a day?

00:05:31.000 Yeah, most days.

00:05:32.000 Wow.

00:05:33.000 Want to drink right now?

00:05:34.000 Only if you have one.

00:05:36.000 Do we have any beer?

00:05:37.000 Do we have any Heinekens or do we have the fake Heinekens?

00:05:40.000 We have whiskey.

00:05:41.000 I only drink actual beer, not Heineken. 1.00

00:05:43.000 Oh, you son of a bitch. 1.00

00:05:45.000 What is an actual beer? 1.00

00:05:46.000 Well, you know, IPAs, things like that.

00:05:48.000 Things that taste like beer.

00:05:50.000 Heineken doesn't taste like beer?

00:05:51.000 Of course not.

00:05:52.000 I don't know.

00:05:53.000 We had some weed-infused beer for a while, but I think it went bad. 0.97

00:05:55.000 Oh, that'll fuck this dude up.

00:05:57.000 He'll lose all of his gains in biological aging. 0.98

00:06:00.000 Actually, no.

00:06:00.000 I've never smoked pot.

00:06:01.000 Never?

00:06:02.000 I've experimented with it when I was younger, but it never did anything to me at all.

00:06:07.000 Just get some ice.

00:06:08.000 Get some ice.

00:06:08.000 We'll have some whiskey.

00:06:10.000 I don't put ice in my whiskey.

00:06:13.000 Oh, you're one of those guys.

00:06:14.000 Just get some glasses then, Jamie.

00:06:16.000 That's hilarious.

00:06:17.000 You're very specific with your booze?

00:06:19.000 Well, not all that specific.

00:06:21.000 When it comes to whiskey, or beer for that matter, I'm not a snob at all.

00:06:25.000 You don't drink Heineken.

00:06:27.000 You've got to be a snob.

00:06:28.000 Heineken is a delicious beer.

00:06:29.000 Heineken is refreshing, which is, you know, it's like when you call someone's research descriptive.

00:06:37.000 It's a euphemism for not worth much.

00:06:40.000 I understand.

00:06:40.000 Refreshing meaning it's a cold beverage, but it doesn't have the stout taste that you enjoy.

00:06:45.000 It has the function of water.

00:06:48.000 Ah, right, or lemonade or something along those lines.

00:06:53.000 Yeah.

00:06:54.000 How frowned upon it is in the anti-aging community to be a person who drinks as much as you do?

00:06:59.000 Everyone in the aging community knows me, and they know that I don't drink to excess for myself.

00:07:05.000 They know that what I drink is what works for me.

00:07:12.000 Which one's really good?

00:07:14.000 Lagavulin, it's pronounced.

00:07:15.000 How do you say it?

00:07:16.000 Lagavulin.

00:07:18.000 Lagavulin. 1.00

00:07:18.000 You fucked it up, Jamie. 1.00

00:07:20.000 Do you prefer this? 0.99

00:07:21.000 It's very good.

00:07:22.000 Do you have a buffalo trace?

00:07:24.000 That's okay.

00:07:25.000 Lagavulin is better.

00:07:26.000 Okay.

00:07:27.000 So says you.

00:07:29.000 Buffalo Trace is American.

00:07:30.000 That's what you don't like.

00:07:31.000 My PR people will get pissed off with me for this.

00:07:35.000 In the anti-aging community, I am not frowned upon at all.

00:07:39.000 People know that I do what I do.

00:07:41.000 But everyone says, you know, there will be donors out there who will frown on you.

00:07:46.000 But it's your own fault.

00:07:49.000 That tastes like smoke.

00:07:51.000 That's right.

00:07:52.000 It's one of those...

00:07:53.000 Is it smoky?

00:07:53.000 Is it a smoky whiskey?

00:07:54.000 It is.

00:07:55.000 It's one of those peaty whiskeys.

00:07:56.000 It's really nice.

00:07:57.000 It's very smoky.

00:07:58.000 Yeah.

00:07:59.000 Interesting.

00:08:00.000 They'll be popular in restaurants.

00:08:01.000 That's why I know they're selling it.

00:08:03.000 I prefer the Buffalo Trace.

00:08:05.000 It tastes a little better.

00:08:07.000 It's weird though.

00:08:08.000 It tastes like it's made with smoke.

00:08:11.000 That's right.

00:08:12.000 Is it peaty?

00:08:13.000 Is that what you say?

00:08:13.000 That's the word that's often used.

00:08:17.000 How bad is drinking for you?

00:08:19.000 Well, of course, it depends whether you drink too much.

00:08:21.000 And too much is a different amount for different people.

00:08:24.000 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.

00:08:33.000 The last time I had a hangover must have been when I was a teenager.

00:08:36.000 Oh, okay.

00:08:36.000 You just keep it going and drink lots of water?

00:08:39.000 I don't actually drink all that much water.

00:08:41.000 Really?

00:08:42.000 God, you're defying all the rules.

00:08:44.000 That's confusing.

00:08:46.000 Are you still rowing for exercise?

00:08:48.000 Last time we spoke you were rowing.

00:08:51.000 You don't remember enough.

00:08:52.000 What is it called?

00:08:53.000 Paddling?

00:08:54.000 What do you call it?

00:08:55.000 So when I used to live in Cambridge in England, I used to be quite an expert at punting.

00:09:01.000 Punting?

00:09:01.000 Which is this thing that you do in Cambridge and Oxford with a stick.

00:09:05.000 That's right.

00:09:06.000 I'm sorry.

00:09:06.000 That you push against the bottom of the river with.

00:09:09.000 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.

00:09:18.000 It's not even tiring and it's ridiculously romantic.

00:09:22.000 Romantic.

00:09:23.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:09:24.000 It's definitely a babe magnet. 0.85

00:09:25.000 Ooh, there you go.

00:09:26.000 And good exercise as well.

00:09:27.000 Yeah, that thing, yeah.

00:09:28.000 Good for balance.

00:09:30.000 Is that basically what you do for exercise, or do you not do that anymore?

00:09:34.000 I don't live in Cambridge anymore.

00:09:35.000 I live in California now.

00:09:36.000 Oh, you do?

00:09:37.000 You live out here?

00:09:37.000 Yeah, I live in the Bay Area.

00:09:38.000 What are you doing out there?

00:09:40.000 Well, that's where the foundation is based.

00:09:41.000 Oh, okay.

00:09:43.000 Yeah, I've been over here for 10 years now.

00:09:44.000 So what is a day-to-day life?

00:09:48.000 What's a normal day for Aubrey de Grey?

00:09:51.000 Well, there isn't really a normal day.

00:09:52.000 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.

00:10:05.000 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.

00:10:19.000 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?

00:10:36.000 First of all, let me answer that last part.

00:10:38.000 So reversing aging is actually going to be pretty much the result of maintaining it.

00:10:45.000 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.

00:10:55.000 You know, if you can do that, you can obviously do it a little bit faster than it's being laid down.

00:10:58.000 So you don't really need to think about the maintaining part.

00:11:01.000 However, what we need is we need to be able to repair all of the types of damage.

00:11:05.000 And because the human body is so very complicated, there are, of course, a lot of different types of damage.

00:11:10.000 So it's a divide-and-conquer strategy.

00:11:12.000 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.

00:11:20.000 So since the beginning, Sensory Research Foundation, my organization, has focused on the most challenging, the most difficult types of damage.

00:11:30.000 Because basically the easiest ones are being worked on by other people.

00:11:33.000 We have, you see, we set ourselves up as an independent charity.

00:11:37.000 So we're a charity, we're a public 501c3, which means that if someone gives us money they get a tax break.

00:11:43.000 But we're independent, which means that we do not rely on peer-reviewed government grants or anything like that.

00:11:49.000 We just rely on philanthropy.

00:11:51.000 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.

00:11:59.000 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.

00:12:08.000 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...

00:12:19.000 Avoid funding things that don't lead to high-profile publications soon.

00:12:24.000 So really ambitious, high-risk, high-reward stuff just doesn't get done.

00:12:28.000 And so we focus on that because other people can't.

00:12:32.000 That makes sense.

00:12:33.000 And that's very unfortunate that that doesn't get done outside of what you're trying to do.

00:12:37.000 Yeah, I mean, of course, this is a recognized problem.

00:12:40.000 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.

00:12:51.000 But the magnitude there is time.

00:12:53.000 It's real tokenism.

00:12:54.000 You know, it's less than 1% of the NIH budget.

00:12:57.000 What's frustrating to you about the state of understanding repair and understanding the ability to fix things?

00:13:07.000 Well, I'm not the kind of guy who gets frustrated very much.

00:13:11.000 I'm always a glass half full kind of person.

00:13:14.000 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.

00:13:24.000 So I started putting out the idea that this was the way to go after aging 20 years ago.

00:13:31.000 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.

00:13:41.000 And that's a very big conceptual difference, right?

00:13:44.000 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.

00:13:54.000 But by about 10 years ago, it was taken seriously.

00:13:57.000 And in fact, over the past decade, people have been periodically reinventing the idea.

00:14:02.000 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.

00:14:06.000 The main thing is I don't have to persuade anyone anymore.

00:14:09.000 People get it that damage repair is at least, if not the way to go, at least a very promising way to go.

00:14:15.000 So really what happens next is convincing people outside of the community, right?

00:14:21.000 And there there's been enormous progress as well.

00:14:23.000 So when you and I spoke last, five years ago, really that was the end of the story.

00:14:27.000 I pretty much won the scientific argument, but still no one was really listening, right?

00:14:32.000 And then over the past five years, the huge thing that's happened is the private sector interest in this has taken off.

00:14:38.000 So investors have been coming along.

00:14:40.000 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.

00:14:47.000 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.

00:14:57.000 How foreseeable?

00:14:58.000 Well, you know, some of it's already in clinical trials.

00:15:01.000 Like what kind of stuff?

00:15:02.000 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.

00:15:11.000 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.

00:15:16.000 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.

00:15:23.000 So these are cells that hang out in the body in a bad state where they're doing more harm than good.

00:15:29.000 Not only are they not doing what they're supposed to, they're also secreting nasty stuff that damages their neighborhood.

00:15:36.000 And so drugs have been developed that are seemingly pretty good at getting rid of those, and they're in clinical trials as well.

00:15:43.000 And so we used to work on that area.

00:15:45.000 We basically do no work on that area anymore, hardly any.

00:15:48.000 And we may end up doing none at all a couple of years from now just because other people are doing it.

00:15:53.000 And so our money is better spent doing the stuff that's still at an earlier stage.

00:15:58.000 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.

00:16:15.000 And it's not just us, of course.

00:16:17.000 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.

00:16:28.000 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.

00:16:42.000 The stem cell therapy is fascinating to me because I've had some personal experience with it.

00:16:46.000 I've had some injuries that I cured with, well, doctors cured with stem cells in a remarkable way.

00:16:53.000 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.

00:17:01.000 I know, it's incredible.

00:17:02.000 It's amazing.

00:17:03.000 But that's not really what I'm talking about.

00:17:04.000 That's gone really well.

00:17:05.000 You're talking about neurodegenerative diseases.

00:17:08.000 So, well, the big difference, it's not necessarily brain versus anything else.

00:17:11.000 What I'm saying is that what you got was using stem cells to treat an acute injury, right?

00:17:18.000 A tear.

00:17:19.000 And that's what stem cell therapies have been developed the most for so far.

00:17:25.000 And I've shown the most promise for.

00:17:27.000 But now we're getting to the point...

00:17:29.000 Where we're in a position to use stem cells to address certain aspects of aging.

00:17:34.000 In other words, certain aspects of slow, steady, progressive decline that happens throughout life.

00:17:40.000 Through intravenous use?

00:17:42.000 Well, not necessarily intravenous.

00:17:43.000 So let me talk about the Parkinson's disease case in a bit more detail.

00:17:47.000 So, what Parkinson's disease is driven by is the loss of a particular type of neuron.

00:17:52.000 So, of course, in the brain, there's lots of different types of neuron.

00:17:55.000 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.

00:18:02.000 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.

00:18:11.000 So, we end up, all of this, with maybe...

00:18:14.000 A quarter of those neurons that we had when we were young adults having gone by old age.

00:18:19.000 That's okay.

00:18:20.000 That amount of margin of error is tolerable in the system.

00:18:23.000 It just doesn't have a consequence.

00:18:27.000 But, of course, as with everything in aging, some people have the problem accumulate faster than others.

00:18:33.000 And so some people by old age will have lost maybe three quarters of their dopaminergic neurons.

00:18:38.000 And that is what gives you Parkinson's disease.

00:18:40.000 So what is stem cell therapy?

00:18:42.000 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.

00:18:55.000 They know, like, to divide and to then transform themselves to differentiate into the right kind of other cell.

00:19:03.000 So what has been developed is dopaminergic precursor cells, stem cells that know how to become dopaminergic neurons.

00:19:09.000 And those are injected into this one place, the substantia nigra, and they do that thing.

00:19:16.000 So they're injected right into the brain?

00:19:19.000 That's right.

00:19:19.000 Wow.

00:19:20.000 So actually this was first tried more than 25 years ago.

00:19:24.000 There was a clinical trial in Sweden because people knew that this was driving Parkinson's disease, so they knew this ought to work.

00:19:33.000 But of course back then we knew almost nothing about how to manipulate stem cells in the laboratory.

00:19:38.000 So what they did was, these people, they took cells from the right part of the brain of aborted fetuses, right?

00:19:46.000 And they just injected them.

00:19:48.000 Now, this was enormously speculative because, you know, first of all, the brain of an aborted fetus has hardly developed at all, right?

00:19:58.000 And so just taking the right cells from kind of the right place was hit and miss.

00:20:01.000 And sure enough, almost all the time, there was no effect.

00:20:06.000 Because, you know, they just didn't get the right kind of stem cell.

00:20:09.000 But occasionally, it worked.

00:20:11.000 Occasionally, patients got lucky and got some of the right kind of stem cell.

00:20:14.000 How often?

00:20:15.000 Well, I think there was a single digit number in the clinical trial that was done, like maybe three or four.

00:20:20.000 But the question was, how good was the effect when there was any effect at all?

00:20:24.000 And the answer was astronomical.

00:20:27.000 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.

00:20:37.000 And it was written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of that person being treated.

00:20:42.000 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.

00:20:53.000 There's this standard medication for Parkinson's called L-Dopa, which is a precursor molecule for dopamine.

00:20:59.000 They were just taken off it.

00:21:00.000 Again, no symptoms.

00:21:01.000 Symptoms gradually started coming back.

00:21:04.000 After 15 years.

00:21:06.000 So 15 years with no symptoms at all, just from one injection.

00:21:08.000 Wow.

00:21:09.000 That's about as good as you can get.

00:21:10.000 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.

00:21:22.000 That's fascinating.

00:21:23.000 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.

00:21:35.000 Well, that's right.

00:21:36.000 It probably shall still increase considerably.

00:21:38.000 That's right.

00:21:39.000 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.

00:21:52.000 We didn't need to.

00:21:52.000 All the important work was already being done by other people.

00:21:57.000 So where are they at right now?

00:21:59.000 Where are you at?

00:21:59.000 Where are you at in terms of like, let's just focus on Parkinson's disease.

00:22:03.000 So the clinical trials are in phase one, early stage.

00:22:06.000 So we won't know anything really good for another year, maybe two years.

00:22:10.000 But, you know, it's not just one trial.

00:22:13.000 There's several groups around the world that are focused on this.

00:22:17.000 Some of them haven't started the trial yet, but they're about to and so on.

00:22:20.000 So, you know, that gives you a sense of the level of optimism of the specialists in this area.

00:22:26.000 That's very exciting.

00:22:28.000 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?

00:22:38.000 Well… Have you had a guess?

00:22:40.000 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.

00:22:52.000 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.

00:23:02.000 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.

00:23:12.000 So when I am asked to give a timeframe estimate on this, I always make sure to emphasize that it's probabilistic.

00:23:19.000 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.

00:23:27.000 And at the moment, that number is 17 years.

00:23:31.000 That's very specific.

00:23:32.000 Well, yeah.

00:23:34.000 It is, yeah.

00:23:37.000 But the thing is, what matters is how that number has changed over time.

00:23:42.000 So I first started giving time frame predictions about 15-16 years ago.

00:23:47.000 And back then I said 25 years.

00:23:50.000 So it's only come down by 8 years in 16 years, which sounds like bad news, right?

00:23:54.000 But here are two pieces of good news.

00:23:56.000 The first piece of good news is that it hardly came down at all for the first 7 or 8 years.

00:24:02.000 I would say, yeah, 5 years ago I was still saying 22, 21 years.

00:24:08.000 So it hasn't been slipping any further for a little while.

00:24:14.000 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.

00:24:25.000 Beforehand, I was always saying, this is how fast the science allows the problem to be solved.

00:24:33.000 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.

00:24:46.000 That's interesting because it seems like that would be something that Most people would have a vested interest in funding.

00:25:09.000 Just because it's so much easier to get people to write a cheque if they think there's a chance, even a really small chance, that they'll get their money back in spades sometime later.

00:25:21.000 You know, I guess that's what you would expect.

00:25:24.000 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.

00:25:41.000 You know, what are you going to do?

00:25:42.000 You've got this terrible, ghastly thing that's going to happen to you in the distant future.

00:25:47.000 Yeah.

00:26:10.000 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 and natural, or alternatively saying, well, okay, maybe we could fix it if we tried to, but it would be a bad thing, that aging is some kind of blessing in disguise.

00:26:26.000 Yeah, I hate that nonsense.

00:26:28.000 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.

00:26:38.000 How do you get over the dictators living for everyone?

00:26:41.000 Well, you know, last time I looked, dictator was fairly high on the league table of risky jobs.

00:26:47.000 You know, I mean, not a lot of dictators die of aging in the first place.

00:26:50.000 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.

00:26:55.000 So, I mean, come on. 0.96

00:26:56.000 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. 0.98

00:27:07.000 Well, there you go. 0.90

00:27:08.000 I mean, but people really, you know, this is what people do, right?

00:27:12.000 They will come up with some reason why aging is a blessing in disguise.

00:27:16.000 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.

00:27:22.000 The romantic aspects of aging are the weird ones, right?

00:27:25.000 Yeah.

00:27:26.000 You know, the inevitable, like, oh, it's fine.

00:27:30.000 It's wonderful.

00:27:30.000 I'm looking forward to it.

00:27:33.000 It's essentially a disease that we all get.

00:27:35.000 Yeah, I mean, so I have to be very careful with the word disease.

00:27:38.000 Some people aren't.

00:27:39.000 So you've had David St. Carroll on the show.

00:27:41.000 He's been a great friend of mine for 20 years.

00:27:43.000 We have a very similar attitude to, you know, authority.

00:27:48.000 We don't think much of it.

00:27:49.000 And so we tend to push the boundaries a bit, both of us, in somewhat different ways.

00:27:54.000 So he actually, his view of calling aging a disease is a bit different from mine.

00:27:58.000 He's more comfortable with it.

00:27:59.000 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.

00:28:11.000 Which it isn't.

00:28:13.000 It's a side effect of being alive.

00:28:15.000 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.

00:28:26.000 And the reason why that's important is that it determines what kind of What kind of medicine we look for.

00:28:36.000 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.

00:28:53.000 And should be broadened to include aging.

00:28:56.000 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.

00:29:07.000 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.

00:29:20.000 Some of them, you know, they're both parts of aging.

00:29:22.000 Some of them are ones that we've chosen to give disease-like names to.

00:29:26.000 What would you call aging if you don't call it a disease?

00:29:30.000 Well, I call it a medical problem.

00:29:31.000 That's all I call it.

00:29:32.000 Okay.

00:29:33.000 That's pretty pure.

00:29:34.000 Yeah.

00:29:36.000 In terms of potential future treatments, Stem cells seem to be very promising.

00:29:45.000 Are there other competing treatments that you think are equally promising?

00:29:50.000 Sure, but they're not competing.

00:29:52.000 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.

00:30:04.000 So what stem cells are there to fix is cell loss.

00:30:08.000 Where cells are dying and they're not being automatically replaced in the body by cell division.

00:30:13.000 Have you personally experienced any stem cell therapy?

00:30:16.000 No.

00:30:17.000 I haven't done any therapies of any kind yet.

00:30:19.000 But, of course, you know, I'm paying attention.

00:30:23.000 Yeah.

00:30:23.000 I'll see.

00:30:24.000 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.

00:30:42.000 So, you know, if I take a stem cell therapy now...

00:31:02.000 So you're a cautious patient.

00:31:06.000 Oh, sure.

00:31:06.000 I mean, I don't think anybody wants to be the first patient.

00:31:09.000 I'm in.

00:31:09.000 I'll be the first guy.

00:31:11.000 I'm already doing a bunch of stem cell therapies.

00:31:13.000 I'll do intravenous stem cell therapies, too.

00:31:15.000 Well, sure.

00:31:16.000 But, I mean, the point is you weren't the first to do any of these things.

00:31:19.000 Oh, for sure.

00:31:19.000 Right.

00:31:21.000 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.

00:31:32.000 Right.

00:31:32.000 And then you've got to have cancer therapies.

00:31:34.000 You've got to have therapies that remove molecular waste products from inside cells.

00:31:38.000 A couple of our start-up companies are doing that.

00:31:42.000 You've got to remove waste products from outside the cells, for example.

00:31:45.000 So people have used the immune system to do that.

00:31:48.000 You've got to repair DNA in the mitochondria, these special parts of the cell that do the chemistry of breathing.

00:31:55.000 You know, there's a bunch of different things we have to do.

00:31:59.000 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.

00:32:06.000 It's better than that.

00:32:07.000 There's also been no real need to change our preferred approaches to each of the damage repair technologies.

00:32:15.000 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.

00:32:25.000 Therefore, we have to start again and think of a new one that hasn't happened either.

00:32:28.000 That's excellent.

00:32:29.000 So it's just essentially refining the procedures?

00:32:32.000 Yeah, grinding away and actually implementing them.

00:32:35.000 Is this something that you still truly enjoy doing?

00:32:40.000 I wouldn't say I ever enjoyed doing it.

00:32:43.000 No?

00:32:43.000 Really?

00:32:43.000 I mean, I enjoy life.

00:32:44.000 I enjoy just staring at the sky from my hot tub.

00:32:48.000 It's just that I want to carry on doing it rather than dying instead.

00:32:54.000 So, almost...

00:32:55.000 This is an investment.

00:32:56.000 It's an investment, but it's also, I mean, it's obviously some sort of an intellectual pursuit.

00:33:00.000 No, not really.

00:33:00.000 It's a humanitarian pursuit.

00:33:03.000 I mean, some people view it as an intellectual pursuit, but I don't.

00:33:06.000 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.

00:33:19.000 I'm just one of those incredibly lucky people.

00:33:21.000 I've been able to end up in this position of essentially leading the crusade to do that in the biggest possible way.

00:33:28.000 So this is something that you felt compelled to do from a really early age?

00:33:32.000 Not the specific thing.

00:33:33.000 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.

00:33:43.000 And the reason that happened was because when I was a teenager, I tried my hand at programming.

00:33:47.000 I found I was pretty damn good at it.

00:33:48.000 And I thought, well, okay, one of the big problems in the world is the problem of work.

00:33:53.000 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.

00:33:58.000 And therefore, we need more automation.

00:33:59.000 So I'll work on that because I'm good at it.

00:34:02.000 And I had no reason at that time to believe that I was going to be any good at biology, but specifically, particularly.

00:34:07.000 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.

00:34:21.000 And of course you didn't hear much, but hey, it's a really hard problem, so that's not a surprise.

00:34:25.000 So it wasn't until my late 20s that I found out that I was wrong.

00:34:28.000 What happened was that I met and married a biologist.

00:34:32.000 Quite a senior one, actually, who was a full professor at that time at UC San Diego.

00:34:36.000 She was in England on sabbatical.

00:34:39.000 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.

00:34:49.000 I just kind of, it hadn't occurred to me, so it didn't come up in conversation.

00:34:52.000 I began to notice that it wasn't coming up in conversation.

00:34:56.000 I started asking questions, and she would say things like, you know, well, I mean, like, it's just decay, isn't it?

00:35:01.000 And I would say, well, yeah, but so what?

00:35:04.000 And she said, well, I mean, you're not going to learn any fundamental truths about the universe from studying decay.

00:35:10.000 And I would say, well, that's true, yes, but it's bad for you.

00:35:14.000 And she would say, but that's not my problem.

00:35:18.000 And I would say, well, it kind of is.

00:35:20.000 And that would be about as far as we would ever get.

00:35:23.000 So eventually I came to terms with it because it wasn't just her, of course.

00:35:25.000 It was all the other biologists I was meeting.

00:35:28.000 That's a strange closed-mindedness.

00:35:30.000 Well, you know, as I say, people have had to find ways not to think about aging.

00:35:35.000 And so eventually I thought, well, that's just what I want to do.

00:35:38.000 And I had to switch.

00:35:39.000 I better switch fields.

00:35:40.000 And I happened to have inveigled myself into a position where switching fields was something I was able to do.

00:35:47.000 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.

00:35:58.000 I was being paid well enough, and I had access to university facilities and all that.

00:36:03.000 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.

00:36:11.000 And it went pretty well.

00:36:14.000 I started doing quite well-received stuff.

00:36:16.000 And so I became quite well-respected in the field very quickly.

00:36:21.000 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.

00:36:41.000 So when you say that at an early age you felt compelled to try to help people, what was that?

00:36:48.000 So what actually happened was this.

00:36:49.000 It was all down to my mother's desire for me to practice the piano.

00:36:57.000 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.

00:37:05.000 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.

00:37:15.000 So I actually decided to think about why I didn't want to play the piano.

00:37:20.000 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.

00:37:36.000 You know, because there were already lots of other good pianists.

00:37:40.000 So I would not be, you know, contributing significantly to the quality of life of mankind by becoming just another one.

00:37:46.000 An additional great pianist.

00:37:48.000 That's right.

00:37:48.000 And so I thought, well, I might do.

00:37:50.000 And of course, this was...

00:37:52.000 I was young, so it was gradual after that.

00:37:54.000 How old were you at the time?

00:37:54.000 Probably eight or nine.

00:37:56.000 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.

00:38:10.000 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.

00:38:17.000 That's an interesting mapping out of your future.

00:38:19.000 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.

00:38:27.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:38:28.000 That's a really interesting way to look at the world when you're nine.

00:38:31.000 I have a nine-year-old daughter.

00:38:32.000 I can't imagine her thinking like that.

00:38:36.000 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.

00:38:48.000 And it turns out that there were fields that were just fashionable, right?

00:38:54.000 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.

00:39:04.000 And other areas would be just completely neglected.

00:39:07.000 And I thought, what is going on here?

00:39:10.000 Why are these smart people choosing to do something that minimizes the likelihood that they will have any impact?

00:39:18.000 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.

00:39:32.000 So they were making no difference.

00:39:34.000 I never understood.

00:39:35.000 I still don't understand it.

00:39:37.000 So you've always felt compelled to make a difference.

00:39:40.000 Is that something your mother instilled in you?

00:39:42.000 Is it something you just had as a child?

00:39:44.000 I don't really think my mother instilled in me.

00:39:45.000 I think the introspection was, and if you ask me how she did that, I have no idea.

00:39:50.000 But yeah, somehow or other...

00:39:53.000 No, I don't think so.

00:39:56.000 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.

00:40:07.000 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.

00:40:16.000 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.

00:40:30.000 It's a very interesting way to set up your life.

00:40:36.000 Well, I wouldn't say I set my life up.

00:40:39.000 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.

00:40:48.000 Right.

00:40:49.000 I mean, you know...

00:40:49.000 Like most people's lives.

00:40:50.000 Right, exactly.

00:40:51.000 So, I would say, you know, I had a hope.

00:40:54.000 I had a, you know, general, you know, aspiration.

00:40:58.000 But, you know, I would say that...

00:41:04.000 I'm just incredibly privileged to have, you know, been able to reach the pinnacle of my chosen field of endeavor.

00:41:10.000 You know, hardly anyone can say that.

00:41:12.000 Yes.

00:41:13.000 No, that is.

00:41:14.000 You're also...

00:41:15.000 Well, you fit the part, too. 1.00

00:41:18.000 You're a weirdo. 0.99

00:41:19.000 You know? 1.00

00:41:20.000 I mean, you know you're a weirdo. 0.76

00:41:21.000 Well, it certainly, you know... 0.82

00:41:23.000 I say that with all due respect.

00:41:25.000 Of course, yeah.

00:41:25.000 In a compliment as well.

00:41:26.000 Of course.

00:41:27.000 It definitely...

00:41:29.000 Yeah, it's definitely difficult to make a difference to the world if you're following the rules.

00:41:35.000 And so I'm always instinctively looking for ways to do things that other people might have overlooked.

00:41:44.000 I mean, even trivial things.

00:41:46.000 Is there anything that frustrates you about this pursuit?

00:41:50.000 I'm not an easily frustrated kind of guy.

00:41:53.000 I mean, of course, sometimes it gets to me how slowly things are going, how resistant people are, how irrational the resistance is.

00:42:02.000 But even there, you know, I've already, from some of the things I've already said, you understand that I'm really...

00:42:09.000 Sympathetic to humanity in this regard.

00:42:11.000 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.

00:42:24.000 They've got to put it out of their minds.

00:42:26.000 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.

00:42:37.000 But some people aren't, and that doesn't mean that they are less deserving of the benefits.

00:42:43.000 It's a very strange thing where people put on intellectual blinders and they're talking about aging and dying.

00:42:47.000 It is very weird.

00:42:49.000 Have you had heated discussions with other intellectuals about this?

00:42:52.000 Because I would imagine...

00:42:54.000 All the time.

00:42:55.000 Yeah.

00:42:56.000 I mean, the whole thing came to me first when I was at Cambridge, actually.

00:42:59.000 I was an undergrad.

00:43:00.000 This was sometime before, of course.

00:43:01.000 This was the early 1980s.

00:43:10.000 Yes.

00:43:21.000 And so the first step is, you know, do some stuff that gets some particularly amenable people into a light trance.

00:43:31.000 And he brings a few of them up on stage and starts to go further, right?

00:43:36.000 So there was this one particular part of the show that stuck in my mind.

00:43:39.000 What happened was that this one guy was brought up and got into a really, really deep trance.

00:43:43.000 And then the next step...

00:43:46.000 Was that the hypnotist says, okay, this is actually your right elbow and this is your left elbow.

00:43:50.000 So he switched the guy's elbows, right?

00:43:52.000 No elaboration of the implications of this, just saying, just getting the person to completely, completely implicitly believe this thing, right?

00:44:01.000 And then he said, right, I would like you please to touch your right elbow with your left forefinger.

00:44:08.000 And so, of course, there was all this wriggling and writhing and so on.

00:44:10.000 You know, couldn't do it, right?

00:44:12.000 And that was funny in and of itself.

00:44:15.000 But that wasn't the coup de grace.

00:44:17.000 What happened next was the key thing.

00:44:19.000 The hypnotist says, okay, you can stop now.

00:44:23.000 And the guy stops.

00:44:24.000 And the hypnotist then says, you couldn't do it, could you?

00:44:26.000 And the guy says, no.

00:44:28.000 And then the hypnotist says, why not?

00:44:32.000 Ask the guy to explain why he couldn't do it.

00:44:35.000 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.

00:44:45.000 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.

00:44:52.000 He'll just be sitting there...

00:44:54.000 With a straight face, just doing this.

00:44:57.000 And his friends are out in the...

00:44:58.000 And these are Cambridge undergraduates, right?

00:45:00.000 High IQ, highly respect for each other's intellect and for their own intellect and rationality.

00:45:05.000 And they're rolling in the aisles.

00:45:09.000 And the guy's just unaffected.

00:45:12.000 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...

00:45:24.000 You know, I call it the pro-aging trance, and it was based on that experience from my youth. 0.96

00:45:30.000 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. 0.99

00:45:43.000 You'd be a fool. 0.99

00:45:44.000 Do you want to suffer? 1.00

00:45:45.000 The idea that this romantic...

00:45:48.000 If it was a rare thing that people aged, a very rare thing, we would look at it with great sadness.

00:45:54.000 If someone was afflicted with this aging, we saw someone...

00:45:58.000 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.

00:46:09.000 That's right.

00:46:10.000 But instead we think of it as like, well, he's 90, he had a good life.

00:46:13.000 That's exactly right.

00:46:14.000 It's not just the fact that everyone gets it.

00:46:16.000 It's the fact that everyone gets it at more or less the same age, chronological age.

00:46:21.000 You know, so it's considered to be this leveler.

00:46:23.000 And just, yes, absolutely.

00:46:24.000 People do a little bit better, you know, 20% better than average.

00:46:28.000 And we're really, you know, happy.

00:46:31.000 Is there any concern or any thought whatsoever to the idea of...

00:46:38.000 Of course this is a legitimate question.

00:46:41.000 The thing that's frustrating to me is that I've been answering it for 20 years and people still don't listen. 0.98

00:46:48.000 Kill dummies? 0.99

00:46:50.000 That's a good move, right? 0.96

00:46:52.000 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,

00:47:07.000 whether it's Blade Runner or In Time or any of these movies.

00:47:12.000 Yeah, they all get it wrong, right?

00:47:13.000 They all make it as if it's actually...

00:47:16.000 They kind of reinforce the pro-aging trance, right?

00:47:18.000 They make it as if life would be even worse if we had no aging.

00:47:21.000 Okay, so what's the real answer?

00:47:23.000 The real answer is very straightforward.

00:47:24.000 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.

00:47:40.000 Remember that the reason why we have too many people today and we've got environmental consequences is not because of lack of space.

00:47:48.000 It's because of the amount of pollution that the average person generates.

00:47:51.000 Specifically, of course, the biggest thing being pumping carbon into the atmosphere.

00:47:57.000 But, of course, whether it's plastics or whatever.

00:48:01.000 And we're fixing that.

00:48:02.000 You know, we've got solar energy and wind energy now that are completely exploding and they're going to completely replace fossil fuels.

00:48:11.000 And we got there without people even having to wake up and realize that climate change is actually quite an urgent problem.

00:48:18.000 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.

00:48:29.000 And of course it's not just that.

00:48:30.000 It's also agriculture.

00:48:31.000 So artificial meat, you know, within not very long is going to be both tastier and far cheaper than regular meat.

00:48:38.000 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...

00:48:45.000 I haven't heard anything saying it's going to be tastier.

00:48:47.000 Have you?

00:48:48.000 Of course it's got to be tastier.

00:48:49.000 How so?

00:48:50.000 Well, how would it be popular if it were not tastier?

00:48:53.000 Tastier? 0.63

00:48:53.000 I don't think it necessarily would have to be tastier. 0.63

00:48:56.000 Well, as tasty would be good, but tastier would be better.

00:48:59.000 I guess.

00:49:00.000 And of course it's not just that.

00:49:02.000 There's cheap desalination, there's plastic-eating bacteria.

00:49:08.000 All of these things are coming.

00:49:10.000 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.

00:49:24.000 I agree with you too.

00:49:25.000 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.

00:49:44.000 Right?

00:49:45.000 Jesus.

00:49:47.000 Do you have that same optimistic perception about the ocean?

00:49:50.000 Well, first of all, let me say what I think about the word optimism.

00:49:55.000 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.

00:50:04.000 And when they call themselves a realist, they mean that they're a pessimist.

00:50:08.000 But anyway, about the ocean, of course.

00:50:10.000 I mean, what's the difference?

00:50:12.000 You know, certainly there's a lot to do.

00:50:15.000 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.

00:50:21.000 So we definitely have to fix that as well, but it's part of the same problem.

00:50:24.000 You know, the less carbon there is in the atmosphere, the less of a problem that is.

00:50:28.000 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.

00:50:44.000 I'm optimistic in terms of the ability to clean up the ocean.

00:50:47.000 I've had Boyan Slott a couple times.

00:50:50.000 Are you aware of him, his devices that he's created to remove plastics and other garbage from the ocean?

00:50:58.000 My concern is wild fish.

00:51:01.000 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.

00:51:13.000 Well, right.

00:51:13.000 And, of course, this is, again, a problem that can be fixed by technology.

00:51:17.000 You know, if you can make artificial red meat, why not make artificial fish?

00:51:21.000 Well, that would be good, that we can have artificial fish, but that wouldn't necessarily make that population rebound.

00:51:29.000 We would have to make large steps to try to bring back the equilibrium of the ocean.

00:51:35.000 That's not clear.

00:51:36.000 I mean… It's not clear?

00:51:37.000 It's not clear, no.

00:51:38.000 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.

00:51:54.000 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,

00:52:13.000 or at least in the time period that it's going to take before these fisheries rebound.

00:52:19.000 When I talk to people that have an understanding of wildlife in the ocean, they say it's a desperate time.

00:52:24.000 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.

00:52:33.000 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.

00:52:42.000 Yeah, I wouldn't dispute that.

00:52:44.000 I think it's urgent.

00:52:45.000 But all that really says is we should be investing more in the development of these new technologies that will hasten the...

00:52:55.000 I wonder if they even bother with wild fish.

00:52:58.000 I mean, if they can make artificial meat, I wonder if people really get into artificial fish as well.

00:53:04.000 Actually, why not?

00:53:05.000 I guess so, but some of them are not going to make the cut.

00:53:07.000 Like, no one's getting artificial tilapia.

00:53:09.000 Why not?

00:53:10.000 It's not that good.

00:53:11.000 Not yet.

00:53:12.000 So they make it better.

00:53:14.000 Sure.

00:53:14.000 Why do you even call it tilapia then?

00:53:17.000 Because people like the name.

00:53:18.000 I guess.

00:53:21.000 I'm really optimistic about artificial meat.

00:53:24.000 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.

00:53:38.000 That's right.

00:53:38.000 They're very close to being able to make this in a mass-marketed way.

00:53:43.000 That's right.

00:53:43.000 That's interesting.

00:53:45.000 I'm excited about that.

00:53:46.000 I think that's very interesting.

00:53:48.000 And I'm excited about what you're saying that I think people think about overpopulation.

00:53:54.000 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.

00:54:09.000 And of course, it is driven by prosperity, you know, female education and emancipation and so on.

00:54:14.000 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.

00:54:25.000 You know, if you exclude sub-Saharan Africa, it's basically a completely solved problem.

00:54:32.000 Really?

00:54:32.000 Nigeria is the only one?

00:54:33.000 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.

00:54:40.000 Really?

00:54:41.000 Yeah.

00:54:41.000 That's interesting.

00:54:42.000 So their population will level out over the next few decades?

00:54:46.000 Well, yeah.

00:54:46.000 It's getting close.

00:54:47.000 As people start to die.

00:54:47.000 It's still declining.

00:54:48.000 It's plummeting.

00:54:49.000 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.

00:55:00.000 Mm-hmm.

00:55:01.000 But it's not true.

00:55:02.000 I mean, other countries were a little bit behind.

00:55:03.000 The one-child policy did certainly accelerate the process.

00:55:06.000 But if you look at Brazil or Indonesia or any of these countries, you'll see exactly the same phenomenon plummeting.

00:55:12.000 Have you thought about what the future looks like when people lived before 500 years old?

00:55:18.000 Like, how, first of all, how wise will people be?

00:55:21.000 That's actually interesting because...

00:55:23.000 So, okay, so here's a really important thing that I want to get across.

00:55:28.000 When we think about longevity, well, actually three things I want to say.

00:55:35.000 First of all, longevity is a side effect of health, right?

00:55:38.000 Right.

00:55:39.000 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.

00:55:49.000 But in terms of how the world will be, which is a question you asked, there's two questions here.

00:55:54.000 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?

00:56:01.000 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.

00:56:13.000 I mean, if you look 50 years ago, right, how much of what we have today would have been predicted, right?

00:56:17.000 The world is completely different.

00:56:20.000 And certainly in terms of longevity, you know, we're only going to be getting older at one year per year.

00:56:24.000 There won't actually be any 500-year-old people for another 400 years, right?

00:56:29.000 Oh, really?

00:56:30.000 Well, yeah, I mean...

00:56:31.000 I don't know.

00:56:32.000 I don't know what you're going to be able to do.

00:56:36.000 We're not going to be able to change the rate of the passage of time, is my point.

00:56:42.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:56:43.000 Right.

00:56:43.000 But expectation is a completely different thing.

00:56:46.000 And here's why that matters.

00:56:48.000 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.

00:57:05.000 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.

00:57:14.000 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.

00:57:24.000 They're going to want very different pension plans, very different life insurance, health insurance, very different inheritance arrangements.

00:57:31.000 And these are huge, big ticket items, right?

00:57:34.000 They basically drive the global economy.

00:57:37.000 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.

00:57:48.000 Right?

00:57:49.000 Yes.

00:57:49.000 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,

00:58:05.000 which means what events have to happen, how much progress needs to happen in order to cause that shift.

00:58:15.000 Now, this is where I am terrified of Because I think it's going to happen really soon.

00:58:22.000 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.

00:58:32.000 Here's the sequence of events that I think is going to happen.

00:58:35.000 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,

00:58:51.000 yeah, Aubrey de Grey was right all along.

00:58:53.000 They're going to say, yeah, you know.

00:58:54.000 You're very excited about that.

00:58:56.000 No, I'm terrified and I'm going to tell you why.

00:58:58.000 I mean, I know I have been.

00:59:02.000 Recognition is never something that's driven me.

00:59:06.000 But yeah, they're going to come out and say, yeah, it's only a matter of time before we lick this aging thing.

00:59:12.000 Now, what do you think is going to happen next?

00:59:13.000 You're a media guy, right?

00:59:15.000 Here's what I think is going to happen, but I want to know whether you think I'm right.

00:59:18.000 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. 0.98

00:59:29.000 And they're going to say, oh shit, this is actually going to happen. 0.98

00:59:35.000 And they're going to say so on air. 0.99

00:59:37.000 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.

00:59:43.000 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.

01:00:00.000 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.

01:00:12.000 I mean, I really mean a proper war on aging, not just like the war on cancer was.

01:00:16.000 Lots of money.

01:00:17.000 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.

01:00:23.000 Okay?

01:00:26.000 And everyone's going to know it.

01:00:28.000 Like, the public is going to make that switch I just mentioned of expectation, like, at once.

01:00:33.000 So it's going to be ridiculously sudden once it happens.

01:00:37.000 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.

01:00:50.000 Now, therefore, the question is, what amount of progress is going to be required for that to occur?

01:00:58.000 Now, here's the thing.

01:00:59.000 There aren't very many of us.

01:01:00.000 It's a small field.

01:01:01.000 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.

01:01:07.000 There's me, there's David that you've had on the show, there's, you know, very few others.

01:01:12.000 And we all know each other.

01:01:13.000 We're all good mates, right?

01:01:14.000 So we know exactly where our heads are, what the drivers are.

01:01:21.000 The number one reason why my colleagues don't already say what I say...

01:01:28.000 Is funding.

01:01:30.000 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.

01:01:45.000 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.

01:01:58.000 Remember, there's nowhere near enough money.

01:02:01.000 There's less than 10% of the necessary money to fund research at the moment.

01:02:05.000 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.

01:02:15.000 And saying, oh, this guy says irresponsible things to the media is a totally safe way to say no, right?

01:02:23.000 So anyway, so this is the problem.

01:02:25.000 This is why my colleagues have to be really pretty curmudgeonly.

01:02:28.000 Even David.

01:02:29.000 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.

01:02:38.000 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.

01:02:45.000 He could not have written that book with that title five years ago and kept his job.

01:02:51.000 Wow.

01:02:52.000 So, you know, the question is how much has to change?

01:02:55.000 And actually, it's not very much.

01:02:58.000 There's a balance here.

01:03:00.000 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.

01:03:11.000 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.

01:03:25.000 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.

01:03:36.000 So there's almost a forced pessimism that's created by the establishment.

01:03:40.000 Correct.

01:03:40.000 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...

01:03:57.000 At scale, distributed worldwide, yeah, things are going to get real weird.

01:04:01.000 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.

01:04:17.000 But what matters is what the center of gravity of expertly – stated expert opinion is.

01:04:24.000 It is a really, really polarizing subject.

01:04:28.000 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,

01:04:52.000 really spectacular, rather, changes.

01:04:54.000 Yeah, and I mean, I'm not saying that all of us absolutely agree on 100% on everything in the science.

01:04:59.000 Certainly, I would say that I'm slightly on the optimistic end of the spectrum of expert opinion.

01:05:05.000 But yeah, my colleagues are not all that far behind me in terms of what they would say the timeframes are.

01:05:10.000 What you're saying in terms of people discussing it in the media makes absolute sense to me.

01:05:14.000 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.

01:05:24.000 Well, even if a lot of these things are not yet available for clinical use, even if some of them are still...

01:05:31.000 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.

01:05:40.000 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.

01:05:51.000 They need to have already...

01:05:54.000 Thought through and prepared for this change in public expectation of how long they're going to live.

01:06:00.000 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.

01:06:12.000 That's right.

01:06:12.000 And the switch from essentially situation normal, business as usual, to this completely new world will be ridiculously sudden.

01:06:21.000 It will happen in a week.

01:06:22.000 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.

01:06:39.000 We could eliminate that.

01:06:52.000 Then their immediate knee-jerk reaction is always, oh God, we definitely don't want to fix that.

01:06:58.000 How would we pay the pensions? 1.00

01:07:00.000 Because obviously they know it's the economy, stupid. 1.00

01:07:03.000 It still is. 1.00

01:07:05.000 And so that's the first thing they think.

01:07:07.000 And the fact is you're not going to be able to get away with that kind of thinking anymore.

01:07:10.000 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.

01:07:18.000 Well, especially places like where you live in England, or where you're from, rather, in England, where they have socialized medicine.

01:07:24.000 The enormous cost of that would be decreased radically if people were healthier.

01:07:29.000 It's got nothing to do with private versus socialized medicine.

01:07:32.000 It's just medicine.

01:07:34.000 Yeah.

01:07:34.000 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.

01:07:43.000 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.

01:07:54.000 But that, actually, is only a minority of the economic benefit.

01:07:58.000 The real economic benefit comes from the indirect costs.

01:08:02.000 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.

01:08:07.000 Right.

01:08:15.000 Right.

01:08:16.000 Right.

01:08:20.000 Right.

01:08:22.000 Anything to do with the retirement age.

01:08:24.000 This comes back to another aspect of the interaction between emerging technologies.

01:08:29.000 So, of course, we've got automation coming.

01:08:31.000 I don't work on it anymore, but lots of people do, right?

01:08:33.000 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.

01:08:45.000 Because machines will be doing things perfectly well.

01:08:47.000 So, you know, we're going to be completely unable to continue this system of an economy based on full employment.

01:08:55.000 You know, last time this happened with the Industrial Revolution, we got away with it by inventing an entire new sector.

01:09:01.000 You know, the service sector that replaced all the jobs that people didn't have anymore in manufacturing and agriculture.

01:09:06.000 You know, it's not going to happen this time.

01:09:08.000 It's just not going to happen.

01:09:09.000 You know, how many people do you need in the entertainment industry?

01:09:11.000 You know, we've got you.

01:09:12.000 Come on.

01:09:14.000 So, you know, we're going to have a different...

01:09:16.000 Of course, people are still already thinking about that with things like, you know, universal basic income.

01:09:20.000 Yes.

01:09:21.000 Which is an extraordinarily blunt instrument.

01:09:23.000 It's just a starting point.

01:09:25.000 But, you know, that kind of thing is going to happen.

01:09:29.000 I can totally imagine a situation in which, you know, 30, 40 years from now, work is something like national service used to be.

01:09:40.000 When you're young and insignificant, you do a few years of actual work and then you...

01:09:50.000 Yeah, but that means that the whole concept of pensions, it's ridiculous to think about that.

01:09:53.000 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.

01:10:03.000 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.

01:10:11.000 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.

01:10:19.000 Well, right.

01:10:20.000 Exactly.

01:10:21.000 Exactly.

01:10:22.000 Yeah.

01:10:22.000 I mean, of course, you do have to have something that makes something that fulfills something to do that you find fulfilling.

01:10:29.000 That's the argument for universal basic income, right?

01:10:32.000 The argument against it is human nature, that people need to be motivated and they need something to sort of guide them towards excellence.

01:10:40.000 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...

01:10:48.000 You are a glass half full guy.

01:10:49.000 Well, I don't know anybody well educated who gets bored, you know?

01:10:53.000 Yeah, I agree with you.

01:10:55.000 Or anybody who's been exposed to interesting things.

01:10:57.000 There are so many things in this world.

01:10:59.000 I mean, if I had...

01:11:00.000 I would love to live five different lives concurrently.

01:11:04.000 I would love to.

01:11:04.000 That's the plan.

01:11:05.000 I would love to.

01:11:06.000 But they don't have to be concurrent.

01:11:07.000 They can be sequential.

01:11:08.000 But I want to just dive into...

01:11:10.000 I would love to live different lives.

01:11:12.000 Because there's so many different things that I would have loved to pursue.

01:11:15.000 Right.

01:11:15.000 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.

01:11:21.000 Yeah, well, sequentially would be fun.

01:11:22.000 I mean, it would be really interesting to take up a whole new career at 70, you know?

01:11:27.000 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?

01:11:35.000 Well, of course, it's subjective.

01:11:36.000 It's based on aggregating a whole bunch of different areas of research.

01:11:42.000 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.

01:11:48.000 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,

01:12:05.000 right?

01:12:06.000 And, of course, those extra years would be healthy years because we would be rejuvenating the mice, right?

01:12:12.000 So, I believe that that would be sufficient.

01:12:15.000 And that's actually a little bit conservative.

01:12:17.000 I think a less dramatic breakthrough than that might be enough to switch most of my colleagues over, get them over the fence.

01:12:25.000 But I think that would definitely be enough.

01:12:28.000 And I think that that is close.

01:12:31.000 What was the research done with mice with myostatin inhibitors?

01:12:35.000 Did that not increase lifespan as well?

01:12:37.000 Yeah, sure.

01:12:37.000 I mean, a lot of things have extended lifespan a fair bit.

01:12:43.000 But what we have at the moment is not all the components of what I just said.

01:12:49.000 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.

01:12:59.000 Certainly a year.

01:13:00.000 But not if you start at 18 months.

01:13:03.000 If you start at 18 months, the best we can do is maybe four months.

01:13:07.000 So that's the difference.

01:13:08.000 You've got to be able to start late and get the big extension.

01:13:11.000 And you're not going to get that without bona fide rejuvenation.

01:13:15.000 So that's not going to come by way of genetics?

01:13:17.000 Well, even if it did come by way of genetics, it wouldn't matter.

01:13:21.000 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.

01:13:29.000 So the rejuvenation is going to come through some sort of biologics?

01:13:34.000 Well, yes, through the kinds of things we're working on that I mentioned earlier.

01:13:37.000 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.

01:13:48.000 What about the use of CRISPR? Sure.

01:13:50.000 Well, CRISPR is a very important part of this.

01:13:54.000 Can you please explain what CRISPR means when people don't know what we're talking about?

01:13:57.000 Sure, yes.

01:13:58.000 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.

01:14:12.000 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.

01:14:24.000 It's often called gene editing.

01:14:26.000 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.

01:14:37.000 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.

01:14:52.000 Now, doing that in the laboratory in a Petri dish is fair enough.

01:14:57.000 The question is, can we do it in the body?

01:15:00.000 And initially, no. 0.64

01:15:02.000 Initially, this technology was too error-prone.

01:15:05.000 It was prone to do what George Church has called genetic vandalism and have what's called off-target effects.

01:15:15.000 In other words, basically do other changes to the genome elsewhere that you didn't want.

01:15:20.000 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.

01:15:31.000 You know, it's getting there.

01:15:34.000 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.

01:15:44.000 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.

01:15:56.000 So, yeah, so CRISPR is huge.

01:15:58.000 And it's huge not only in aging research, but across the whole board of biomedical work.

01:16:03.000 They have done some work in China apparently on live human beings.

01:16:08.000 So this was very controversial.

01:16:10.000 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.

01:16:22.000 And the change that was made was itself quite a curious one.

01:16:28.000 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,

01:16:46.000 and maybe 1% of people have this genotype, and so this was introduced.

01:16:54.000 Unfortunately, first of all, it probably wasn't done very well, but also...

01:16:58.000 Why did you say that?

01:16:58.000 Well, people have looked at the process, and they probably didn't make the correct modification.

01:17:08.000 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?

01:17:23.000 That is complete speculation.

01:17:25.000 Is it?

01:17:25.000 Yes.

01:17:26.000 What would cause them to speculate that?

01:17:28.000 People speculate all the time.

01:17:29.000 Do you think that's just like clickbait stuff that gets people excited about it?

01:17:33.000 Yeah.

01:17:33.000 Yeah, okay.

01:17:34.000 That makes sense.

01:17:35.000 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.

01:17:49.000 And secondly, we've got drugs that work pretty well to control HIV, antiretrovirals.

01:17:54.000 Protease inhibitors.

01:17:54.000 Yeah.

01:17:55.000 So it's not obvious why this was a sensible thing to do in the first place.

01:17:59.000 However, it's certainly got a whole bunch of debate going.

01:18:02.000 So, yeah.

01:18:03.000 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?

01:18:11.000 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.

01:18:20.000 Or since CRISPR was initiated eight years ago.

01:18:23.000 You never know.

01:18:24.000 Yeah, you never know.

01:18:25.000 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.

01:18:33.000 Well, that's right.

01:18:34.000 I mean, that's the attitude that I have, and a lot of people have, to medical tourism in general.

01:18:40.000 Yes.

01:18:40.000 That these are not adequately regulated treatments, and they are certainly not adequately characterized.

01:18:50.000 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.

01:18:59.000 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.

01:19:08.000 The more that exists, the better.

01:19:10.000 The more that people who are administering these treatments can be induced to reveal their data, the better, even if it's anonymized.

01:19:20.000 But, you know, some scientists, quite a lot of scientists...

01:19:25.000 Take a much stronger view that, you know, we just should oppose all of this, period.

01:19:30.000 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.

01:19:40.000 And I don't really think that's true.

01:19:42.000 I think there's a halfway house. 1.00

01:19:45.000 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.

01:19:55.000 Yeah, I bet she went to Neil Reardon's clinic.

01:19:58.000 Yeah, I mean there are a lot of people who have very good stories out of Neil's group.

01:20:05.000 Of course, the thing is, you don't know, unless someone has a really bad story, whether things are going wrong.

01:20:12.000 So, I mean, I don't know whether Neil releases the total number of patients per year that he treats.

01:20:19.000 So, we don't know his hit rate.

01:20:21.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:20:22.000 I just do know that I have spoken to several fighters from the UFC that have gone down there.

01:20:29.000 And again, my mother was, I mean, she didn't want to get a knee replacement. 1.00

01:20:32.000 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.

01:20:45.000 She was really worried that it wasn't going to work.

01:20:47.000 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.

01:20:55.000 It's had a pretty profound effect.

01:20:56.000 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.

01:21:07.000 She looks more vibrant.

01:21:10.000 When I saw her, she came to my house for Christmas, and she looked better.

01:21:14.000 She looked a year younger than she did the last time I saw her.

01:21:18.000 Yeah.

01:21:18.000 I mean, you know, this is what we would hope that stem cell therapy would do.

01:21:24.000 But I remind you of what I said about that original Parkinson's trial from more than 25 years ago.

01:21:29.000 Right.

01:21:29.000 For 15 years it worked.

01:21:30.000 We really didn't.

01:21:31.000 I mean, no, that was fantastic.

01:21:32.000 The one that was effective.

01:21:33.000 Right.

01:21:34.000 Exactly.

01:21:34.000 So only a few people benefited.

01:21:36.000 The people who did benefit benefited enormously, but a huge number of people had no benefit.

01:21:41.000 Yeah.

01:21:41.000 Now, that is the kind of stage that we're in for a lot of stem cell therapies right now.

01:21:49.000 Parkinson's disease is a kind of outlier in the sense that the desired function of the stem cell is really well understood.

01:21:56.000 So what kind of stem cells to introduce into the body and where to introduce them is, you know, not in doubt.

01:22:04.000 Most stem cell therapies are not that far along.

01:22:06.000 So every time anyone gets treated right now, it's still an experiment.

01:22:10.000 And that's okay, up to a point.

01:22:13.000 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.

01:22:35.000 Release the data.

01:22:37.000 Release the full data, unexplicated, including any negative stuff and including follow-up.

01:22:43.000 That's the key thing.

01:22:45.000 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.

01:22:58.000 What have you heard that are detrimental side effects?

01:23:01.000 So, well, of course, the biggest thing that we always have to worry about is cancer.

01:23:06.000 Because, and this is true for a whole bunch of things, you know, telomerase activators and so on.

01:23:12.000 The thing is that aging can in some senses be characterized as a trade-off between cancer and everything else.

01:23:20.000 In other words, a huge amount of what...

01:23:24.000 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.

01:23:40.000 And so, of course, we have to ask, why are they less active?

01:23:43.000 And a lot of biologists, including myself, believe that a huge part of that is adaptive.

01:23:49.000 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.

01:24:05.000 Because, of course, cancer is the result of a gradual accumulation of mutations and so on in the cells, right?

01:24:11.000 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.

01:24:31.000 What is your opinion on the benefits of fasting in that regard?

01:24:36.000 Okay.

01:24:38.000 First of all, we'll talk about fasting in relation to cancer because that's important.

01:24:41.000 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.

01:24:54.000 But earlier on, it seems that we can slow things down.

01:24:57.000 I mean, cancers are greedy metabolically.

01:25:00.000 They consume a lot of energy.

01:25:02.000 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.

01:25:11.000 So that's certainly been found.

01:25:14.000 Let me talk about fasting more generally, though.

01:25:18.000 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.

01:25:30.000 And this is certainly the most reproducible and best-studied phenomenon in the whole of the biology of aging.

01:25:36.000 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.

01:25:51.000 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.

01:26:02.000 They're called calorie restriction mimetics.

01:26:06.000 And, you know, that's good.

01:26:08.000 That's also a worthwhile thing because, of course, people like eating, and so, you know, it would be useful.

01:26:14.000 Then there are variations on the theme.

01:26:16.000 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.

01:26:30.000 You know, different people have tried different schedules.

01:26:33.000 And all of these things are pretty interesting in terms of being good for your health.

01:26:39.000 But in terms of increasing your longevity by 30 or 40%, the way they do in mice and rats, no way.

01:26:46.000 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.

01:27:05.000 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.

01:27:16.000 Right?

01:27:16.000 You sure as hell can't do that with a mask, however you do it.

01:27:19.000 You can get up to maybe 50%, maybe 60% if you really, really work at it.

01:27:22.000 So with a person, you might be able to eat out a year or two.

01:27:24.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:27:25.000 With dogs, it's been tried.

01:27:27.000 You get maybe 10%.

01:27:27.000 With monkeys, you get a few percent if you're lucky.

01:27:29.000 That's a bit controversial right now.

01:27:32.000 Why is it a bit controversial?

01:27:33.000 Because there were two studies done, really long, extensive studies, obviously, because monkeys live a long time, and they got different results.

01:27:39.000 And so the question is why they get different results.

01:27:43.000 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.

01:27:53.000 So yeah.

01:27:54.000 And with dogs, you said you'd get 10%?

01:27:57.000 About that.

01:27:57.000 Yeah, this was done with Labradors that live 11 years.

01:28:00.000 11 years.

01:28:01.000 But isn't that normal for a Labrador?

01:28:04.000 That's right.

01:28:05.000 What I'm saying is they got about another year.

01:28:07.000 So they got 10% of 11 years.

01:28:08.000 Oh, I understand.

01:28:11.000 So fasting with human beings, you think, is interesting.

01:28:16.000 It's something.

01:28:17.000 But it's not going to mimic these biologics and what you believe is on the horizon.

01:28:23.000 Right.

01:28:23.000 I mean, I'm not against it at all.

01:28:25.000 First of all, as I say, it is generally good for health.

01:28:28.000 You know, you definitely see people getting sick less, you know, regular sickness like infections and so on.

01:28:34.000 People seem to stay healthier for a bit longer.

01:28:37.000 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.

01:28:46.000 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.

01:29:02.000 How do you take those into consideration and what do you think is going on with those?

01:29:06.000 Yeah, these things are definitely big.

01:29:08.000 So all of these things, and it goes further than that.

01:29:11.000 It extends to like meditation and yoga and so on.

01:29:15.000 Everything that relates to stress is very important in aging.

01:29:21.000 It...

01:29:24.000 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.

01:29:40.000 So it's no surprise that there's a mind-body relationship there.

01:29:44.000 And in fact, if we...

01:29:45.000 So people often study centenarians, people who live an exceptionally long time, right?

01:29:50.000 And why do they study them?

01:29:51.000 Because they want to find out what the tricks are.

01:29:54.000 Unfortunately, it's quite frustrating because there's not a lot in common.

01:29:57.000 You know, some centenarians are a little bit overweight.

01:30:00.000 Some centenarians smoke.

01:30:01.000 You know, it's not easy to actually figure out what they've got in common.

01:30:05.000 But there's one thing that almost all centenarians have in common, which is nothing bothers them.

01:30:10.000 It's not necessarily that they have had particularly stress-free lives.

01:30:14.000 The thing is that when they encounter a stressful situation, they cope with it really well.

01:30:19.000 And so the hormone levels, as I say, don't get elevated.

01:30:25.000 Interesting.

01:30:26.000 So, cortisol doesn't rise, adrenaline doesn't spike, they don't freak out, they don't lose sleep.

01:30:31.000 Or at least the spikes are more modest.

01:30:32.000 Yes, they don't lose sleep, they can handle it.

01:30:35.000 That's interesting.

01:30:36.000 So, it really boils down to the effect that's going on inside the mind and the body.

01:30:42.000 That's how the body's reacting to the stress.

01:30:45.000 Do you meditate yourself?

01:30:46.000 No, I'm just chill anyway.

01:30:50.000 Well, you're also satisfied.

01:30:52.000 Well, that's certainly true, as I say.

01:30:53.000 Yeah, so you don't feel the need to...

01:30:55.000 Yeah, at a physical level, I have a very stressful life.

01:30:58.000 I spend my life running around airports and so on, but at a mental level, not at all.

01:31:03.000 Do you take any...

01:31:05.000 Are you doing any exercise?

01:31:07.000 Do you take supplements?

01:31:08.000 Honestly, hauling my way through airports is my exercise.

01:31:10.000 Hauling your way through airports.

01:31:12.000 How often are you flying?

01:31:13.000 10% of the time.

01:31:15.000 Do you just take one of the bags you have to carry rather than a roller bag?

01:31:18.000 I do.

01:31:18.000 Do you?

01:31:18.000 On purpose?

01:31:19.000 Yep.

01:31:20.000 For extra work?

01:31:21.000 Actually, not for extra work.

01:31:22.000 No, it's just because I can move faster that way without...

01:31:25.000 Okay.

01:31:27.000 But yeah, I mean, certainly the fact that I've actually got some weight on my shoulders is probably good in itself.

01:31:33.000 Yeah, I started carrying a backpack instead of a roller bag.

01:31:40.000 It's just easier to move than holding on to something and dragging it behind me.

01:31:44.000 And I found that there's something – I have a bag that I can stick a laptop in.

01:31:47.000 And I can stick all my clothes in.

01:31:49.000 It's just a larger bag.

01:31:50.000 Yeah, I carry two generally.

01:31:52.000 When I'm doing a day trip like today, I'll only carry my laptop bag.

01:31:56.000 But it's a really cavernous one.

01:31:58.000 So it's pretty heavy.

01:31:59.000 It's got everything in it that I need for a day or could need.

01:32:03.000 And then when I'm traveling a longer trip, I just have one other bag, a sports bag that I'm carrying.

01:32:08.000 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?

01:32:15.000 It's hard to say because, I mean, I do have a lot of freedom about exactly how I spend any particular day.

01:32:22.000 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.

01:32:29.000 Yeah.

01:32:30.000 Have you ever used a sensory deprivation tank?

01:32:33.000 No.

01:32:33.000 No?

01:32:34.000 I'd like you to use that.

01:32:35.000 I'd like to hear your feedback.

01:32:37.000 I have one here.

01:32:39.000 And what would you like?

01:32:40.000 I just want to know because it was very relaxing.

01:32:43.000 I'm relaxed already?

01:32:45.000 You say.

01:32:46.000 Getting there.

01:32:47.000 See.

01:32:48.000 You know what it is, right?

01:32:49.000 You float.

01:32:50.000 It's beautiful.

01:32:51.000 It feels amazing.

01:32:52.000 Yeah.

01:32:52.000 No, I'm into sensory deprivation in general.

01:32:55.000 You know, when I'm asleep, I don't like to have any kind of noise or light.

01:33:00.000 You know, one of my banes is staying in hotels which don't have proper blackout curtains.

01:33:06.000 Typically when I'm in a hotel room, I'll unplug the refrigerator.

01:33:13.000 So you basically got it dialed in.

01:33:16.000 I think so.

01:33:18.000 Well, I'm optimistic because you're optimistic.

01:33:20.000 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.

01:33:39.000 Well, right.

01:33:40.000 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.

01:33:51.000 So that's why I make...

01:33:52.000 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.

01:34:02.000 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?

01:34:16.000 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.

01:34:24.000 And of course, that's bound to throw up unanticipated interactions.

01:34:28.000 So that's why I put this time frame as far out as 17 years, and even then with only 50% probability, right? 0.78

01:34:35.000 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. 0.77

01:34:45.000 I, for one, am very excited about living in V500. I think I can get a lot of shit done. 0.99

01:34:52.000 I learn about myself. 0.98

01:34:54.000 I think it makes no sense to think about what one's going to be doing in the distant future.

01:35:03.000 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?

01:35:12.000 And I just lost it slightly.

01:35:16.000 Because sometimes I've heard questions just one more time too often.

01:35:20.000 And so I said, look, look here, I've got a question for you, I said.

01:35:25.000 I said, right, what time do you want to go to the toilet next Sunday?

01:35:30.000 I said, right.

01:35:31.000 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?

01:35:38.000 But it's exactly the same kind of question.

01:35:40.000 You know, you may have an opinion about what time you expect to go to the toilet next Sunday because of habit.

01:35:45.000 But having an opinion about what time you want to go to the toilet...

01:35:49.000 Is completely crazy.

01:35:51.000 Because you're going to have better information on the topic nearer the time.

01:35:54.000 And you're going to be able to act on that information.

01:35:57.000 It's exactly the same.

01:35:58.000 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.

01:36:04.000 It's just going to be the quality of life.

01:36:06.000 Precisely.

01:36:06.000 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.

01:36:19.000 Yes.

01:36:20.000 Well, I'm fascinated by the future in every aspect, technologically, with artificial intelligence, with automation, just the way society is shifting.

01:36:32.000 I mean, I'm a very optimistic person in that regard.

01:36:35.000 And I think even some of the problems that we have socially, I think those are just...

01:36:42.000 A result of this shift towards a more aware, more conscious society.

01:36:49.000 I'm very optimistic.

01:36:50.000 I think all those things are good.

01:36:52.000 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.

01:37:05.000 I think it's one of the most intriguing things about being a person is to see how things have shifted.

01:37:12.000 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.

01:37:22.000 200 years later, things are impossibly different.

01:37:27.000 Unimaginably different at the time.

01:37:29.000 If you could talk to them about what life was like 200 years ago, it'd be fairly similar.

01:37:34.000 1620 to 1820, not a lot of difference.

01:37:38.000 But 1820 to 2020, good lord!

01:37:43.000 What is 2220 going to be like?

01:37:47.000 I mean, I just think that we are at the cusp of one of the most spectacular eras in human history.

01:37:55.000 Things are changing so rapidly and so amazingly.

01:38:00.000 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.

01:38:07.000 So you can't really call this one of the cusps.

01:38:10.000 It's just we're in an exponential scenario and we happen to be noticing it more.

01:38:15.000 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.

01:38:23.000 Are you worried at all about artificial intelligence?

01:38:27.000 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.

01:38:36.000 Don't turn this on.

01:38:37.000 I think it's a legitimate question, definitely, whether the...

01:38:42.000 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.

01:38:56.000 However, I do think it's very unlikely.

01:38:59.000 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.

01:39:14.000 In other words, the machines get their information from us and from the world without which they can't make progress.

01:39:23.000 I don't see that changing really anytime soon.

01:39:25.000 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.

01:39:41.000 I'm definitely excited about what's happening, but no, I'm not particularly apprehensive.

01:39:46.000 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.

01:40:03.000 Well, Aubrey, the next time I see you, if it's five years from now, I hope you look younger.

01:40:07.000 I hope the world has changed and everything's groovy.

01:40:10.000 And I appreciate you and I appreciate everything you're doing.

01:40:13.000 Well, thank you so much.

01:40:14.000 Please tell people if they're more interested in finding out about what you're doing.

01:40:19.000 What is the website of your organization?

01:40:20.000 Yep, Sense.org.

01:40:21.000 That's S for Sugar, E for Elephant, N for November, S for Sugar.org.

01:40:25.000 All right.

01:40:26.000 Thank you.

01:40:26.000 Thank you very much.

01:40:27.000 Thank you.

01:40:27.000 Bye, everybody.

01:40:32.000 Off and roll!

01:40:33.000 That was fun!

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 26, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1432 - Aubrey de Grey

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