In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast – Aubrey de Grey and I talk about:

• 00:02:16 How Aubrey de Grey got into the ‘longevity research‘ in the first place?
• 00:07:01 How Aubrey got the confidence to put a precise year to the ‘end of aging’.
• 00:12:01 What were the biggest obstacles to overcome in persuading the public that ‘aging can be ended’
• 00:13:30 Was setting up a money price for the extension of the lifespan of mice a good idea?
• 00:21:10 Why the longevity industry is burgeoning at the seams suddenly?
• 00:25:09 Will the benefit of an extended lifespan be equally available to a large part of the population?
• 00:31:01 Once aging is solved will we see a population of 100 billion on earth?
• 00:34:50 How Aubrey envisions life ‘past the Singularity’?
• 00:38:30 How will our brains react to aging? Are there any drugs that we can use right now that may delay aging?
• 00:42:01 Is the the FDA to blame for the slow innovation in the healthcare industry? Has COVID changed the regulatory environment?

You may watch this episode on Youtube – The Judgment Call Podcast Episode #58 – Aubrey de Grey (Can we finally reverse aging ‘forever’?!).

Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation. He has been an evangelist of longevity research for decades. He is also the author of ‘Ending Aging‘.

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Torsten Jacobi: Aubrey, people know you as the face of the longevity anti aging movement for quite some time now. Are you being involved with the chief science officer there? You’ve been doing this for a long time for what I could trace back almost 20 years. What inspired you initially to go all in on anti aging and I know like 10 years ago it was you could lose your job but we’re just mentioning anti aging. I think it’s serious, right? Things have changed since then but people might not realize this. What happened to you 20 years ago that you thought that’s the future?

Aubrey De Grey: Yeah, let me give you a slightly more fine grained timeline. So really the big change for me happened 25 years ago or so, maybe 27 years ago now, when I began to realize that biologists generally were not interested in aging. I had known since my earliest age, I can’t say how long, since early childhood that aging was obviously the number one most serious problem for humanity in terms of the amount of suffering it causes and so on and that it was obviously a problem that could in principle be solved by progress in medicine. In fact, these things were so obvious to me that I never did the experiments of actually asking anybody whether they agreed. You know, you don’t do that, right? You don’t talk about it. So it was only by accident that I discovered this. I had originally decided to dedicate my life to working on a different problem that’s also rather bad. They’re not nearly so bad, which is the problem of work. The fact that people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they would not do unless they were being paid for it. But I always knew that that paled into insignificant compared to aging. It’s just that I had assumed that biologists were working on it and then I married one and I found out that actually not only through her but also through of course all the other ones I met, but it wasn’t true. And I got lucky about 26, 27 years. It was in a position where I was able to switch fields at much risk. Essentially, I just had a nice undemanding job that gave me a lot of spare time and I was working at the University of Cambridge, so I had a lot of access to resources and so on. So I was basically able to create a new career for myself in my spare time and the kind of the rest is history. So 20 years ago, I made the major breakthrough in the conceptual breakthrough that really underpins everything I’ve done since. The realization that damage repair is the way to go. That we should not be trying to slow down the rate at which the body damages itself, rather we should try to repair the damage that’s already been inflicted. And that has now become a very mainstream idea, but you’re quite right. Before I came along, the whole idea that we could ever do anything about aging with medicine had become so fanciful. So it had become, people had decided it was so incredibly difficult that it was a tactical purpose and equivalent to science fiction. And therefore, absolutely, you could not mention it and expect to get your next grant application funded. So that’s largely why I decided to go the direction of creating an independent foundation. Because there, all you have to do is convince donors, convince people who do not have to cover their arts, who do not have to the consequences of supporting an extreme idea. And of course, the people I would go to, I mean, I would go to the general public, I started doing a lot of media back in about 04, 05, and also on stage, you know, a lot of those people would be quite wealthy and quite sophisticated. They got wealthy by being smart. And so I only succeeded because I had a solid argument, right? But of course, it was an argument that, you know, in order to leave it, you had to not only be able to understand the solid argument, you also had to have enough. And it took a while. Certainly 15 years ago or so, I went through a period of quite acrimonious bulk of the expert community on the biology of aging. Because they, at that point, they really didn’t understand what I was saying. And it took a while to get through that period. Now, this past decade, you know, that’s completely over. And the whole concept of damage repair as a very promising way to go is completely mainstream. And that’s why we have seen over the past, let’s say, five years, the emergence of an actual industry defined in narrow terms, in other words, private sector investors getting involved, because they can see that this is going to work.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah, what I especially admire is that you early on, kind of like what we now know from records while you put numbers and years to that specific goal that you had in mind, you didn’t just say, well, it’s got some point where nobody knows when, but just give me some money, I’ll do something. You were very specific that in 2035, and that’s weirdly enough, pretty close to the singularity that has now been moved to 2038, records while the research, that we are able to, not just slow aging, but we basically can stop it because the incremental progress goes beyond the year. In one year, we can get more than a year of age back, so to speak. So eventually, we can live for at least much longer. And that’s pretty crazy that you have the guts to put a timestamp on this. Looking back now, and I think you’ve been using this for at least 15 years, do you feel we’re still within the parameters? We’re still going for 2035, but that’s when it’s going to happen.

Aubrey De Grey: So actually, back when I started making timeframe predictions, I think the first year that I did that was 2004. And I said 25 years. So that would be only 2029, which means that now maybe 2036. So it has slipped some years. But there’s a couple of pieces of good news. The first reason is that the slippage almost all happened during the first half of that period. Because basically, back then, the main cause of the slippage was that I had been over optimistic about the extent to which I could bring in money. So the science, the rate of progress was very, very limited by financial resources. Some of it is still limited by financial resources. But a lot of it is not precisely because of what I mentioned a moment ago about the private sector getting involved. Investors, they write bigger checks than donors do on average. So for a large part of what we need to do, the financial resources are no longer rate limited. And that’s why over the past, let’s say, six or eight years, we’ve probably only slipped one year. Which is not too bad at all really. But yes, you’re quite right. It took a lot of nerve, I think, to go out and actually put numbers on these time frames. But I realized very, very early on that that was essential, that I would just not be doing my job otherwise. Because if you don’t, you don’t have a case, right? If you go to people and you say, listen, a few billion dollars put into this research would save trillions and trillions of dollars if it only, even if it only pushed forward or pushed back the age at which people get sick from aging by five years. And that’s what people did say around that time. Okay. They refused to say how long it would take for that billion dollars to actually have that consequence. And of course, everyone who was listening to them would be terribly courteous, but they wouldn’t dream of actually writing a cheque. Could hear that there was no time frame on this. You know, the probability of having actual success, even of that modest magnitude in a meaningful time frame, was still, it still sounded like the probability was zero. And you know, it doesn’t matter what the benefit is, zero times any number is still zero. So I recognize that I had a duty to go out and say what my time frame estimates were, even though I always had to emphasize that they were extremely speculative. And I made this case to my to my colleagues in the community. I gave a talk at my very first conference, the first conference I organized back in 2003. And the title was something like bio durontologist duty to, to make time frame predictions publicly. And I got the most enormous amount of backlash from that. But I still believe this, that refusal to give time frame publicly, they are the irresponsible ones who are not giving the time frame.

Torsten Jacobi: Oh, I’m fully with you. And one of those big debates about public funding of research, which is a bit like the Soviet Union, you know, the money just comes raining down. And while this has its benefits, I’m not saying it’s all bad. It doesn’t really encourage competition. And it doesn’t really encourage, you know, squeezing the last little bit of possibilities out of it, people get kind of lazy at some point. Some people never get lazy.

Aubrey De Grey: So I want to break that apart a little bit. Because, you know, I certainly, you know, I have no problem with capitalism. I think competition is good. But I don’t think it’s the big thing here. I think that even if like, there is enough money provided, and you don’t have to compete, and you can just get on with following your, your gut scientifically in terms of what you pursue. That’s fine. Stuff will still get get done if the people who are being funded have the right intrinsic motivation. You know, if you give me, if you give me a trillion dollars, you know, I won’t have any competition problem. But I’ll still get plenty done, because I want to get plenty done. This is my point. You’re wrong about that. There are enough of me. When I went out to get this all going 20 years ago, I had three problems to solve. The first one was the one that I solved in kind of one instantaneous Eureka moment 21 years ago, the realization that damage repair is the right thing. And that was fleshed out very, very quickly into a pretty concrete crystallized research program. I knew what needed to be done. The third problem, which I’m still working on is the money problem, as I told you, but the second problem was actually surprisingly easy to solve. The second problem was to persuade my colleagues within the scientific community that if only I could pay them, they would do this cool thing. They would work on these cool projects that historically they were not working on, even though they were in their arena of expertise, just because they weren’t getting paid to do so. Top scientists, they want to work on really ambitious, difficult problems, especially if they have huge potential for humanitarian benefit. So yeah, there’s plenty of people like me.

Torsten Jacobi: That’s good to hear. One thing that you use as a tool, and I think it’s, correct me if that’s not the case anymore, what was really important for some time is you created a price money for whoever could bring evidence forward with the longest life span of mice. And I’m curious to what lifespan did we get from where did it start and did you feel that was a helpful tool?

Aubrey De Grey: So let me give us a two part answer to that. Let me give an answer relating to what we did back then in the mid 2000s, an answer relating to prizes today. So back in the mid 2000s, we didn’t make any progress. In other words, the prize was never claimed. The prize was to beat the preexisting world record and the amount of money you got would depend on how much you beat the record by. But the records that existed when we set up the prizes were never beaten. So we never gave out any money. Actually, that’s not completely true. We get one selection prize of $10,000 to a group that got fairly close. But the point is the goal of that was really PR. It was to get the word out, to raise the profile of longevity research among a broader audience who, you know, they don’t really want to understand about science, but the prizes excite them. Competition, you know, it’s like sport. And that worked really well, yes. We got quite a lot of money come in. And because we were not paying it out, we were able to start spending it on research. That was at the Methuselah Foundation. And that was what led to the Methuselah Foundation choosing to split in two with the creation of Sense Research Foundation, which is the thing that I lead. So, yeah, that all worked out really nicely. But today, we’re in a very different world. Today, we’re in a world in which the whole idea of damage repair leading to rejuvenation is widely accepted within the scientific community as a plausible goal. It really, the only spectrum of opinion is with regard to how soon we will make how much progress. And plenty of, most people are not as optimistic as me, but they’re within range. It’s not ridiculous. So, so now it makes sense to try to incentivize that. And prizes have a really good track record of incentivizing things. Now, of course, the most famous organization that runs prizes in the world is the X Prize Foundation, which started out about 20 years ago, about the same time as Methuselah, with the space tourism, well, sorry, space, what basically private space flight thing. And they’ve done massive prizes since lots of them have been very successful in promoting the development of really cool technologies across many wide range. Now, Peter Diamandis, the, you know, the Taosman of the X Prize Foundation, he and I have been great friends for nearly 20 years, actually. And he’s been really interested in doing a longevity prize. And for the longest time, we played with ideas and talked about it on and off, and we could never come up with something that we felt would really work. Because the prize has to be just right. You see, it has to be, you know, feasible, but yet very ambitious, ambitious but achievable. It has to really excite people. You have to get it just right. We’ve only now got to the point where we can really do that. So about two or three years ago, a very important investor in this field, then Sergey Yang, put down half a million dollars, a small amount, which is what the X Prize Foundation always asked for in order to do the preparatory stuff, to figure out what the prize would look like in real detail and all that kind of thing. Of course, then the job, the hard job comes of actually finding the real money, but it looks like we’re really close to having a longevity prize that will really be funded. And it will be an age reversal prize, while we’re talking about actual damage repair, actual rejuvenation. I’ve been very closely involved in the design and all the conversations. So I’m very excited about it.

Torsten Jacobi: That’s awesome. Maybe you can give us a little preview. And you didn’t really comment on the extension of the lifespan of mice, but I heard there’s been a lot of progress. I feel mice get to an age of three, four, is that correct? What do you think at what level of aging can you still reset the clock? Probably not like a day before they would die, would probably one and a half years. And do you think you can make that mice with their price once it’s claimed, right? Will it be a perpetual living mice?

Aubrey De Grey: So this is an interesting little nuance about longevity, escape velocity. So as you know, we have this concept where once you’re fairly good at damage repair at rejuvenation, you’re buying yourself time to figure out how to do it better. And maybe the same animal can have this can be re rejuvenated and all the way, even though the damage they have is intrinsically more difficult to repair. Because, you know, that’s because it was, if it were easy to repair, you could have repaired it in the first round. So a consequence of this thing is that it’s actually harder to get to longevity escape velocity for mice than it is for humans. Because, you know, if you postpone the health problems of late life in humans by 20%, right, that’s like, you know, 15 years, right? Whereas if you do it for mice, it’s like six months. And that’s not long enough to make the next piece of technological progress. So actually, I don’t think we’ll ever reach longevity escape velocity in mice. What I have suggested is the right milestone in mice, which I have for a long time called robust mouse rejuvenation, is that we simply take mice that are normal mice that would normally live on average maybe two and a half years. And as you say, we wait until they’re let’s say one and a half, we don’t wait until they’re almost dead, but we wait until they’re starting the more fragile ones may be getting sick. Okay. And then we throw the kitchen sink at them, we throw all manner of different damage repair therapies at them. And we postpone their health problems by a year or so. But basically, what we’re doing is we’re doubling or maybe troubling if we’re lucky, the remaining lifespan of these mice. I think that would be a sufficiently dramatic goal, but no expert on the biology of aging could continue to say, listen, this is science fiction. At the moment, we’re on that cusp, we’re really close to that cusp already. And in other words, I may be being overly conservative about my colleagues opinions here. It may be that my colleagues will be able to come out and say kind of the things that I’ve been saying for the past 15 years, with a less with a considerably less dramatic amount of progress than that. Like maybe only adding 50%. The key thing is the late onset intervention. You’re nothing whatsoever to your mice when you’re sick or pharmacological or dietary or anything until they’re already in middle age. That’s the key. And at the moment, we can only add maybe three or four months to mice if we start that late. That’s plenty, but it’s not enough to be exciting. If we get that a year, game over, I think my colleagues will all be happy to come out and say, listen, it’s only a matter of time before we can do this for humans. There may still be more cautious than me about putting actual numbers on that. But I think there will be sufficiently gung ho, optimistic, that it will be enough to shift public opinion to say, oh, shit, it’s really coming. Because there’s going to be this unbelievably sudden tipping point there where the herd mentality is going to kick in.

Torsten Jacobi: I’m super excited. And I know you’ve been spinning up a bunch of companies that took what you’ve been researching over the years, and they’re trying to make a commercially successful product. I also heard you say that you’re very optimistic that funding is not just coming in from a donation perspective. I mean, usually old people are rich. So there is a big incentive to harvest that amount of money, but also that a lot of VCs are discovering that space and investing in longevity companies. When you look at the seed stage and the early stage VCs, how many deals do you see? Are we talking about a handful? Are we talking about hundreds that are happening under our eyes? How big is this by now?

Aubrey De Grey: It’s growing insanely fast, exponentially. Five years ago, there was no industry at all. There was like the first one venture fund in longevity. And there were no angel investors to speak of. Now, there’s hundreds of companies, there’s dozens and dozens of investors that are quite active, not just angel investors, even institutional investors are coming in, companies are going public, everything’s happening. The companies that we’ve spun out, well, we’re very happy about it. We’ve spun out half a dozen projects as spin out companies, but we are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s huge now. And it’s just going to carry on growing, because everyone’s seeing that this is not a full storm. There’s such a huge amount of diversity in the technologies that are being pursued. Some people are going to win. Of course, it’s early stage investment is the same as it is in any sector. You would need to diversify and head your bets in order to take a lot of shots on goal in order to be sure that you will actually profit. But there are lots of people out there who not only understand the humanitarian value of this mission, but who also see that this is going to be a way to make the most insane amount of money down the road, maybe 10 years from now. Even the time frames are not very long. I’ve talked about 15 years from now or so as when we will actually have a good chance of reaching longevity escape velocity. But there’s going to be masses of money before then, way before then, in terms of treatments for, for example, congenital diseases that are because of an accelerated accumulation of one particular type of damage and therefore, you know, the medical treatments for them that can make money out of. On top of that, of course, the treatments don’t even have to have gone all the way through to regulatory approval before money can be made. Because, you know, IPOs and acquisitions and so on are already happening in those because they’re extremely happy exits for early investors. And that’s already happening. But yeah, it’s insane right now. It’s crazy for me because, of course, I’m the least entrepreneurial person you’ll ever meet. I have no, no relationship in making money myself. But yeah, I’m the nexus of all that just because I’ve been around for a long time in the top Google hit. So, you know, investors will come to me every week.

Torsten Jacobi: You certainly have the reality distortion field. I think that we all need as entrepreneurs. I think you’re your prime example of pulling this off, right? You’re the Elon Musk of that field. I kind of mean, no, I mean, that’s you that already speaks for itself your success. When you when you think about the the next 10 years, I mean, this all sounds like a Manhattan project. Like, it’s something that’s probably bigger than a Manhattan project. We don’t build bombs at the end. We don’t really needed them for anything. We could have used them for clean energy, but we kind of didn’t get yet. Maybe it’s going to happen one day. But this is something humanity has dreamed of since the beginning that we can live very long, not just necessarily forever. I mean, that would be great, but just much longer. So I think it doesn’t, it’s still, I can see the snowball is coming, but it isn’t yet in the public’s eye yet, at least maybe maybe we’re just a year or two away from that. Do you have suspicions that and I think we we also altered carbon, this wonderful science fiction show on Netflix now, where the problem seems to be this relatively small amount of people who have access to enough technology to live forever. And the rest is in trouble. Do you some do you think there’s something morally, and I think a lot of people think about that immediately. They’ve drawn to this more conclusion, something similar could happen in longevity, where we only see a small percentage of the population having access to this tech.

Aubrey De Grey: So I have the popular dramatization of a postaging world causes me the most enormous amount of trouble, because it’s always written, not surprisingly, for the purpose of being popular, you know, selling books, selling seats and cinemas. And, you know, inevitably, the way you do that is you pander to people’s prejudices, you try to make them come out of the theater feeling good. Now, unfortunately, when it comes to aging, the way to do that is to tell people that aging is a blessing in disguise, because that helps them to put it out of their mind and get on with them miserably short lives and, you know, not think about it. And in particular, it helps them not to spend their time being preoccupied and being in danger of getting their hopes up, and then things go a bit more slowly than they had hoped and their hopes had dashed. You know, people are just terrified of that. And of course, it’s not surprising that they’re terrified of it, because aging is terrifying. And also, because, as you say, since the dawn of civilization, we have known that aging is terrifying, and people have been coming along, a steady stream of people have been coming along saying they know what to do about it, and they’ve always been wrong. So it’s reasonable to have a certain amount of skepticism when the next person comes along and says, you know how to fix it, right? So, yeah, I mean, I kind of, I’m not blaming anyone for this, but it’s an enormous obstacle for me when people, you know, people feel you get entrenched in this way, whether it’s to do with other population, or whether it’s to do with dictators living forever, or the life being boring or whatever. So to answer the specific question you asked about inequality of access, you know, there’s a trivial rebuttal of that fear, which is, hello, aging is really expensive. At the moment, the vast majority of the medical budget of the Western world, and indeed, you know, a very rapidly increasing proportion of the budget of the developing world, is spent on the health problems of late life, which we’re not going to have anymore. Prevention is rather better than cure. So even if these therapies are initially quite expensive to deliver, there’s no way that that expense is going to be passed on to the general public. Because, and this is even true in a really tax averse society like the US, for example, because it will be economically suicidal. I mean, even forgetting about the humanitarian imperative to make this university available, or for that matter, the electoral imperative, because we know those two things don’t necessarily pan out. The economic imperative always pans out, and it is unequivocal. Countries that do not, any country made the choice of actually restricting access by ability to pay, would be bankrupt really quickly, because these therapies will simply pay for themselves incredibly many times over, incredibly quickly, just by keeping the elderly able bodied, and then in a position to continue contributing wealth to society rather than just consuming huge amounts of wealth.

Torsten Jacobi: Yeah. I think it’s so mesmerizing. A lot of people just haven’t thought about that impact, and this is one of those fears that comes up, right?

Aubrey De Grey: And that’s the thing. I’ve been giving this exact same answer on stage and on camera in high profile places, national media and everything, for like 15 years. And yet, it just goes in one ear and out the other. I mean, if you had seen this answer, right, before. Yes, I probably have. Yes, I probably have. Yeah. No, you haven’t seen it very often, or you wouldn’t have asked the question, because you presume that your audience doesn’t know the answer. Everyone should have known the answer for a decade, but they’ve not wanted to remember it. This is the thing.

Torsten Jacobi: Do you feel personally a bit of a burnout, because you’ve been on this mission for 25 years, and now you’re definitely successful, but obviously you’re not as successful as probably in your wildest dreams. Your wildest dreams, you’re already done with it, right? So it’s solved, and you go on to the next thing. And you, well, I don’t know what, if there is a next thing for you. Is that something you started with? That is, it’s just, for me personally, when I started, the hardest problem probably was to just wait. I was like five years ahead or 10 years ahead, and you were 25, 30 years ahead. It’s just until that day, right? It’s just incredibly, it’s just difficult. It’s frustrating, and it’s disappointing, but you’re never right there.

Aubrey De Grey: I haven’t had a burnout problem at all, no. And I don’t expect to have one. And here’s what, I get a lot of positive feedback. I get people coming up to me in the street all the time congratulating me and thanking me for my work and everything. It’s pretty hard to get disillusioned when that happens. So the people that I really look up to are the foot soldiers, the people who are just as dedicated as me, and they work just as hard, and nobody knows them, and they don’t get any of that. Those are the people I really look up to. I’ve never, you know, I’m really privileged.

Yeah. That’s, I mean, that’s great to hear that this is, I mean, we want you to be in that position for as long as possible, hopefully forever. But I’ve been talking with my son in the preparation for the show, and he was basically saying, so why don’t we live forever? So why is that even a problem? Why wasn’t it solved before? And you know, my immediate answer was, well, you know what, most likely the population would have been so much smaller. So we would have invented this tech in the 17th century, right? Would we still have that amount of people? So the question would be, are we still growing the population if we can all live forever, the old people never go away? And will we go to 100 billion on earth? This is, of course, another question that I’ve been answering for about 15 years. And going to other planets to keep the population problem under control is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous for a bunch of reasons. First of all, there’s only so many planets we can get to, or even so many spaceships we can build in a certain amount of time. And, you know, so the pop any exponential growth of the population will outrun that. And it turned out it will outrun it pretty quickly. You don’t even have to worry about the speed of light. You just have to worry about the availability of enough matter. You know, so that’s a complete nonstarter. But it’s a nonstarter for a rather more fundamental reason. People mostly don’t want to go into space at all. Like they like it down here. So if you tell them that’s your solution, they’re not going to think very much of you, and they’re not going to listen to anything else you say. That’s a nonsense answer. A good answer, but not the best answer is, well, actually, look what’s happening, you know, whenever any society reaches a certain amount of female education and emancipation and prosperity, you know, for 30 rates plummet. And that’s quite important. Another thing that’s actually quite important is that when that happens in any given society, it’s not just that women have fewer children, they also have them later. And when they don’t have menopause anymore, one would therefore conclude that they would that we would expect that they would have their first children a lot later. So actually, we might have an attenuation of population growth from that reason. But the biggest answer, the best answer is much different from that. It is the fact that other technologies are coming that are solving today’s overpopulation problem in the form of climate change, and that’s right already, you know, and they don’t even need the population to wake up and actually care about climate change. All that’s happening is, you know, technologies making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels. And of course, it’s not just that, it’s also artificial meat that’s coming really fast and, you know, it’s going to be cheaper and tastier than real meat. And, you know, whether it’s desalination or, you know, bacteria that eat plastics, all of these things, because overpopulation has never been and will not for hundreds and hundreds of years be a problem of having enough space, purely a problem of pollution. I’m following with you. So a lot of people make that argument that human ingenuity just came to an end and now we need to bring in big government action. Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary. Yes, we should think about it. But if we run into these problems, even if they’re global and they’re more scary than they used to be, I think there’s a lot of solutions that come out of human ingenuity and need, right? So once we feel the need, we can react. Now we might be a little late. Who knows? But what I’m saying is that this is the case where we don’t even need to feel the need. We don’t even need to feel, oh, God, climate change is actually a really bad thing. Let’s try and fix it. All we have to do is rely on technology to produce solutions because we don’t like spending more money than necessary on our electricity bill, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is really, in the end, really easy. But a lot of people are really worried about that. And then it goes into, oh, let’s not never have kids again. And then we can just not afford it. And the planet will suffer from it. I’m like, really, this is, this is a mathu, but a really mathusian argument from the 17th century has been proven wrong so many times. Why would it just now be the exception? And, you know, the time series is kind of on our side, so to speak. When you, when you look into what the word looks like, path singularity, you know, that’s right. Kurzweil’s theme is not necessarily related to aging. But I think it is because we bet if you get this, this confidence that we can live forever, right? At least from a health perspective, if we have an accident, well, we still have problems. But he makes a lot of more predictions that nanobots will take over and they will be able to heal things that even in an accident have been damaged. So, we can live a very long time and there’s so much technology around, so much AI around it will take care of most of the, as you say, work, right? We can get rid of more the repetitive work. What is your personal prediction of how life looks like in 30 to 40 years, just past the singularity? Well, first of all, if we talk about the singularity, you know, different people have different views about what that really is, you know, in terms of the, the, the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. I’m actually fairly conservative about that. I used to work in artificial intelligence research before I was a gerontologist, but I’m not saying that means I’m necessarily right. There’s definitely a spectrum of opinion here. I think it’s probably not going to be possible to create what’s called a hard takeoff. In other words, machines that understand their own thinking well enough to be able to improve their own thinking autonomously and exponentially. There are various reasons why I think that’s kind of not going to happen. So, for sure, automation as a result of advances in artificial intelligence is going to be very ubiquitous and work as we know it today is just not going to exist hardly at all. So, anyway, that’s, that’s kind of why I got into that field in the first place, of course. Other than that, you know, I really don’t know. I mean, if we look back 40 years in the past, you know, no one would have predicted anything like what we see today with the internet. So, you know, I think it’s just a fool’s errand to try to predict how life’s going to be in any respect that could be dependent on the emergence or the adoption of future technologies. All we can really say is, you know, we will have plenty of people who are chronologically older than today, but we will have almost nobody who is biologically old, and that will definitely be viewed as a very good thing. Yeah. I’m just such a sucker for science fiction. I always try to find out what could be these possibilities. Obviously, we can talk forever about the possibilities that that’s, that’s not what this is about. We need to actually zone in on a specific protection. I fully understand your point of view. From what I understand from aging, we will never say we want to all be at the level where we were when we were 28, even if we age until 2035 beyond that, we can just come back to 28 in terms of biological or like outside age, so to speak, not chronological age. Yeah, that’s basically right. I mean, of course, we can’t be too hard and fast about this. People will have choices about how thoroughly and how frequently to rejuvenate themselves so, you know, they can oscillate in terms of their biological age. There may also be some aspects in which these technologies will allow us to recover functionality that we lose during childhood. Like, for example, the ability to learn new things like how to swim well or how to ride a bicycle or whatever. These things get a lot harder after the age of, I don’t know, five or ten. And we may be able to restore that kind of plasticity. You know, we just don’t know yet. Do you think when we talk about that we’re not aging anymore, we will keep everything that’s, you said that there’s a bunch of abilities that we can maybe bring back from childhood, but we keep all our memories, right? So memory won’t be affected and our personality is obviously not affected. It’s literally just, you know, the bones and the skin around us and the organs inside. Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean, certainly the brain itself undergoes aging. There is, you know, molecular waste products that accumulate and cells die and so on. And so in that sense, the brain is just the same as the rest of the body. But memories and personality, of course, are not stored in individual neurons. They’re stored holographically, if you like, in a distributed way. So yeah, the idea is to restore and maintain that. It sounds incredible as much as I learned about it. I listened to David Sinclair a while ago and put myself on a metformin regimen. Do you think there is some music in these, you know, metformin comes out of diabetic research? There is some music into these medications that we’ve already, these drugs we’ve already developed that we never thought about, that they would extend our lifespan? Or that’s just something that’s not interesting enough? Well, I mean, it’s definitely interesting. There are certainly examples and metformin arguably is a good one of drugs that do more than they were originally expected to do. And so they end up being used, what’s called off label, and we’d find out more. And certainly the interesting metformin right now arises very largely from the discovery, from the realization that people who were taking metformin because they were diabetic actually had a longer average lifespan, in other words, a lower or cause mortality than people, than the average population. In other words, people who did not have diabetes in the first place, which is a big deal. So yeah, I mean, for a typical person, the evidence is piling up that metformin is probably quite good for you. You know, like we’ve talked about low dose aspirin for a decade or more now. And there are various things like this. I myself don’t take anything. But that’s not in conflict with what I just said, because I am unusually young for my age. I’ve been tested for my biological age in various ways, maybe half a dozen times over the past 20 years. And I always come out ridiculously younger than normal. So I have the rational thing for me to do is to take an unusually conservative strategy. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it kind of thing. That doesn’t mean that I think that it’s wrong for other people to do these things. So I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a PhD, not an MD. So I don’t make medical recommendations. But I think it’s definitely not obviously dumb to be. Yeah, it depends on your risk level. That’s one thing I find so difficult in the healthcare industry, that it’s so regulated. And it’s seemingly so hard to get any kind of innovation actually rolled out to the masses, right? So it’s relatively easy to hack your own body, and maybe a couple of your friends too, that does need a lot of regulatory approval. Well, once you go beyond that, this is often an extremely stretched out task. It’s gotten better with COVID and all the fast tracking routes. So maybe this is something we can use. If you feel we have these technologies available in 10, 12, 13 years, do you think we can roll this out relatively quickly? There will be some fast tracking because it’s such an immense change. Yes, I do. And here’s why. People give the FDA food and drug administration and its counterparts around the world. They give these organizations a very hard time. But really, they are not to blame for the regulatory conservatism that you’re describing there. So they are simply reflecting public policy. And public policy is really reflecting public opinion. Fact is, when one person dies on a clinical trial, it is major news. And bad shit happens. Lots of stuff gets closed down. Whereas when people don’t get drugs because they haven’t been approved yet when they could have been, that doesn’t make the headlines. So it’s really just because bad news sells that we have this risk aversion in society. And as you say, events unfold that are capable of shifting public opinion and thus public policy. And that I believe is exactly what’s going to happen. COVID has definitely helped. I have written an editorial recently in my journal that was describing COVID as the biggest life saver of all time in the long run. Well, that’s what I did. But the point is, it’s not just COVID here, that there will be a period, I’m going to say it’s going to be probably about 10 years long, could be longer, when these therapies have not yet arrived, but everybody realizes they are coming. That tipping point we talked about earlier, where they were my colleagues in the scientific community are starting to say the same things that I’ve been saying for a long time. So that is the period when there’s going to be real turbulence. But it’s also the period when all of this is going to shake down, when public opinion and public policy are going to be optimized to a far greater extent to lubricate and expedite the developmental pathway of these drugs through clinical trials and regulatory approval. I think the fact that COVID vaccines took a year to develop when the previous world record was like 10 years, that’s just the beginning. Well, I’m a big subscriber to Peter Thiel’s lamentation. He says, well, nothing really happened outside of semiconductor field for the last 50 years. The productivity growth is just crap. We are children of science fiction. We have very different expectations. There is definitely a couple more exceptions. But I was thinking, well, maybe we are reversing to the mean now. We haven’t seen much in the last 50 years. That’s why we see the next 10, 20, 30 years. We see a ton of those because we just go back to the normal rate of progress. That’s been very stable over the last couple of centuries. Right. Yeah. I mean, it depends on, it’s in the eye of the of course, it depends what you’re looking at. And very often the headline rate of progress, in other words, what you see in terms of actual, you know, breakthroughs that reach the public. That is just the tip of the iceberg that occurs when a whole bunch of actual progress has been occurring under the radar that just needs to reach a critical mass in order to be all put together and actually work. So, yeah, I’m not really in agreement with Peter in this, in that sense. I’m not entirely sure that he meant it in the sense that I’m described. I don’t want to put words in his mouth here. I think, you know, the Silicon Valley, especially in, especially in biotech, the Silicon Valley mentality has definitely gone outside of the semiconductor world. You know, I, the reason I love living in Silicon Valley is because within biotech, it’s just the same as within IT that there is a, let’s call it a permissive attitude to failure, that in any other part of the world, if you, if you try something and you fail, then pretty much everybody concludes that you’re not very good. Whereas in Silicon Valley, if you try something and you fail, most people’s attitudes, I’m going to say most people, I mean the attitude of most people who write checks is that, you know, you were courageous enough to try something that was really difficult and therefore you deserve another chance. Unless it’s Theranos. People didn’t like that story so much. I don’t know what comes out of it. It sounded like a wonderful, wonderful thing, right? And nobody really expected it’s going to be a fault or like a mostly fraud. I don’t actually know how much of it was, was not true. There will always be exceptions, but Theranos did not change the overall sentiment in Silicon Valley. I can tell you I agree. Fortunately, yeah, yeah. I mean, this, this degree of restaking is something that makes me so, so positive. It has really caught on around the world. There is certainly pockets of exception and South Korea, I learned about that. It’s on the same trajectory right now. It, there was a lot of euphoria in Europe in the early 2000s. This is kind of gone away. And I, what was, what was really interesting, I was involved with a publicly funded BC in Germany for quite some time. And they were really, they were making a ton of investments according to their plan, but they had never had an exit for a long time, like five years, and they had a few hundred investments. So it was really statistically an anomaly. And they were cutting back on their investments, new investments would also be existing investments. And they’ll be just with COVID, I think they had a $3 billion invest exit. And of course, all the money is back in their pocket. And they were really happy about that. So risk taking in the long term pays off, but you’ve got to stay in the game route until it’s actually a payoff comes around that might take a long time. And the time is going to be right. I mean, you know, people often point to the example of tissue engineering 20 years ago, which where investors started to pile in ahead of the ahead of the right time when the science was not ready, and sure enough, almost all of them lost their money. Tissue engineering is now, you know, been reborn and it’s a proper industry that’s people are not going to be losing money. But, you know, you can you can get it wrong. But for sure, in certain now, the rejuvenation sector, that’s not going to happen. This is not a full storm. This is for real, because there’s so much diversity, so many different technologies. Some of them are going to fail, obviously, but that’s why diversification matters. How much of a role plays pure computing power? So the ability to have a super vast computer is a very low rate role in longevity. Is that something that’s needed for research and then rollout? Or it’s just it doesn’t matter. There are areas of biomedical research in which seriously heavy duty computing power is beneficial or even necessary, but they are quite limited. So molecular modeling, molecular dynamics modeling of how drugs will interact with targets or with proteins, wherever this is an area that’s still, you know, pretty unsophisticated computationally, and really only find things out by throwing enormous amount of computing power. But even that is changing. So of course, last year, there was this enormous breakthrough from DeepMind when they produced this thing called AlphaFold. I don’t think it’s really much of an exaggeration to say that they have solved the protein folding problem, the problem of figuring out how to determine the three dimensional structure of a protein, from it to be a nice sequence. And, you know, yes, they threw in enormous amounts of CPU power at it. But the point about machine learning is you end up with a system where that computing power has more or less done its work. And the amount of computing power that’s needed thereafter to actually apply what the machine has learned is relatively modest. So, you know, it’s relatively limited. Yeah, I was really excited when GPT3 came out last year and even the founders, the originators, the developers were really surprised about their wide reaching usefulness of GPT3. Everyone knew it’s a language model and you can use it for translations, but it suddenly wrote some decent poetry. So suddenly it wrote HTML code, suddenly it wrote Python code. People were like, well, we didn’t see that coming. And it’s not perfect, of course not. And it doesn’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, right? That’s a real problem. Maybe we can help the AI. But I thought that’s that’s a major step in that. I felt like the future is here. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, when AI is not going away, we can totally say that it’s going to change a lot of different things. Yeah. Well, Aubrey, that’s kind of all I had. Thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for taking the time and know you’re super busy. I know your time is extremely valuable. It’s my pleasure. Thank you. I mean, I really appreciate that. I hope we get to do this again. Thanks very much. Take it easy. Bye bye.