#E28 To Defeat Aging, We Must First Acknowledge That It Can Be Cured With Aubrey de Grey
About Dr Aubrey De Grey
Dr. Aubrey De Gray is a true legend in the field of longevity. Dr. De Gray has been advocating for life extension for decades, and he's the founder of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, which is dedicated to overcoming obstacles to achieve effective age-related disease treatments. One of their key initiatives is the robust mouse rejuvenation study one, which aims to study the effective interventions on aging using mouse models. Dr. De Gray challenges the common assumption that aging is inevitable, and instead, he sees it as an engineering problem to be solved. We're excited to discuss his ground-breaking work and his vision for a future where aging no longer happens.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.
00:37) Briar: Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode of Hyperscale. I've got Dr. De Gray with me here on the show, and we are going to be talking about everything to do with aging, longevity and the future of humanity. And I'm about halfway through the second chapter of his book, so I'm very excited to be picking his brains. Welcome to the show, Aubrey.
(02:32) Aubrey: Well, thank you for having me.
(02:38) Briar: So, tell us a little bit about what got you into this space. I'm very curious and I'd love to hear about how you started researching aging. Like what got you so passionate about this.
(02:51) Aubrey: Yeah, it was about 30 years ago, so I started out as a computer scientist, not as a biologist at all, but the reason I went into computer science was essentially humanitarian. I felt that, even from a very early age, I felt that what I wanted to do with my life was to work on some of the big problems of humanity and to, improve the human condition one way or another. It seemed to me that the best way for me to do that would be to work on the problem of work, the problem that, people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they wouldn't do unless they were being paid for it. I reckoned that I was in a good position to do that because I was a good programmer, and so I could work on artificial intelligence, which would, help in that regard. So that's what I did.
But I always knew even from my earliest days, that by far the biggest problem for humanity was aging. That it clearly caused, the largest amount of suffering and death and such the like. The only reason I didn't go into that immediately was because I didn't have any particular reason to believe that I was particularly talented at it. I felt that, well, biologists are going to be able to do that. And so it was only in my late twenties that I discovered that biologists were not really trying. 'cause I met and married one and indeed she's a lot older than me, she was already a full professor at University of California, San Diego. And through her, I not only, accidentally learned a lot of biology that I had not learned during my formal education, but also discovered as I said that she wasn't interested in aging and nor were other biologists that I was meeting. So I thought, well, this won't do, and I happened around that time to be in a good position to switch fields without too much risk. So that's what I did.
(04:37) Briar: Amazing. Sounds like such an interesting way to dive deep into it. And was this ever something that you wanted to solve for yourself as an option for yourself to continue to live longer? Was that part of a driving force that you had?
(04:52) Aubrey: Well, I mean, I certainly wouldn't object to benefiting from progress that's being made against the health problems of late life, but honestly, no, it hasn't been my main driver, and that's really just for straightforward mathematical reasons. The words, that I'm thinking about is that my work is geared towards hastening the defeat of aging, but it's going to happen anyway. It’s just a question of how soon. And so I have to ask myself, what difference is my work making to the date at which that will happen? And, even though I've done, I'm very proud of the contributions I'm making, nevertheless there's only a few years of difference that I could possibly argue that I might be making relative to if I'd done something else with my life.
If we look at any one individual, like for example, me, myself, then, that means I'm only changing the probability that I'll like make the cut and be able to avoid the health problems of late life by a few percent. So actually the humanitarian motivation is far more profound if I think about, people in general, then, every single day that I bring forward that defeat aging is I'm saving it like 110,000 lives, which is quite easy to get outta bed for.
(06:11) Briar: Tell us a bit about your work. So you've been doing a lot on mice and mouse rejuvenation. So tell us about what specifically you are doing in the hopes to defeat aging.
(06:23) Aubrey: Sure. I'm very much a PhD rather than md, which means that I work on the stuff that's at a very early stage and not ready for prime time in human beings yet. And that starts out very often, not even in mice, but in cells in a dish. And so a lot of the work that I have overseen over the past decade or two has been of that nature. But yes, you're quite right. Much of this work has now got to the point of successfully showing success in mice in the laboratory. And of course that is a standard next step before going to eventual clinical trials. And the experiment that is kind of the flagship project of our work at L E V Foundation right now is a really big next step within the mouse research arena.
essentially that arises from the fact that the approach that we are pursuing that I pioneered 20 odd years ago to keeping people healthy as they get older is a divide and conquer approach. It's an approach that involves going in and repairing and eliminating various different types of molecular and cellular damage that the body accumulates throughout life. And because of the divide and conquer approach, the time has to come when you actually combine different treatments that repair different types of damage in the same mice at the same time. And that's a stage which has only just been reached even though people have been testing individual things in mice for quite a long time now. It's only now that enough of them are working well enough that it's actually makes sense to ask, how well do they work in combination. So we have a very expensive, very ambitious master lifespan experiment with a thousand mice happening right now in upstate New York that is looking for the first time at that. And this will be the first in a series of experiments of this nature.
(08:29) Briar: And regarding mice, like why, why mice tell our audience a little bit about how they are a good animal, I guess, before clinical trials.
(08:39) Aubrey: So well, I mean, one can argue that they're not actually a particularly good animal, but you have to start somewhere. Mice have a couple of things going for them. One thing is they don't live very long, which means you can actually ask the question and get an answer to the question, can you make them live longer in a reasonably short timeframe? And then if it works, then you build on that and if it doesn't work, you try something else and so on. So that's, reasonably important. Another thing that's really important is a boring technical thing. The fact that mice have been used in medical research for a very, very long time, like a century and indeed in aging research for pretty much that amount of time. And this is very handy because it means that we can take advantage of all the little boring technical details that you have to get right when you're doing any experiment with mice.
So we're working with extremely experienced people who are very familiar with how to keep mice happy and generally, look after them and make sure that they don't die of things that were avoidable, things like that. So this is another reason why mice is so popular within the research community, not just the aging research community, and then of course, the fact that they are mammals, so they are not too crazily different from human beings. Other people work on species that are considerably shorter lived than mice. So you have a bigger version of the advantage I mentioned a moment ago of getting results quickly. But these species are further removed from human beings in the evolutionary tree, which means that the translatability of results into humans is less certain.
(10:27) Briar: Tell us a bit about the, the, the progress that you've made within your, your research. Like how, how quickly do you think we can take this to clinical trials and I guess is funding or something holding us back from doing this right now?
(10:44) Aubrey: Okay, so let me answer that in bits. So first thing how close are we to clinical trials? Well, that's actually a complicated question because of this divide and conquer nature of what we're doing. In general the best way to get something into the clinic is not even if it's designed to address aging. It's not actually to use it for older people, because aging is really slow in human beings. And so determining whether something works is a really long process. But it turns out that almost everything in aging is replicated in a kind of sped up version in certain diseases. Certain diseases that happen in childhood or in early life. And these diseases are often congenital where you're missing some gene or some genetic pathway. And you end up having some aspect of damage that would accumulate in all of us at a slow rate and become pathogenic in late life. This happened, it accumulated a much more rapid rate on account of this congenital problem.
A typical approach that a company might take, especially a small company to move to the clinic is to identify such a disease and to use their thing on that disease first. And in a clinical trial that can get results reasonably fast. And if it works and it gets approved, then you can do what's called label expansion. You can start using it for things that are perhaps more tough in society, but therefore it's already been approved, the safety's been done, the efficacy has been done. So in other words, basically to answer your question about clinical trials, things are already moving into clinical trials. There are quite a few things that are already at that stage. But what we want to do, of course, in due course is to do the same thing in human beings that we're currently doing in mice.
In other words, take these things that have individually been shown to work and combine them and see what happens. And then you don't really have the option to work on these early life accelerated versions of individual types of damage accumulation because people only have one of them. And therefore you have to work with older people. But that's, that's for the future.
Then you mentioned funding. So this is a really very important thing. There's much, much more funding in longevity research now than there was even five years ago, and that is fantastic news, but it's very, very important to emphasize that that funding is extremely unevenly distributed. Overwhelming majority of it is going to a few fashionable, let's call them low hanging areas, areas where progress has been made rapidly and where therefore there's a good chance of making revenue fairly soon. Because this is coming from investors more than from donors, unfortunately. And of course that doesn't necessarily emphasize what you want to emphasize. The nature of a divide and conquer approach to any problem is you've gotta actually address all the bits. And if some of the bits are being neglected because they're a bit further away, they're a bit harder to make money out of anytime soon, then you've got a real problem.
So that is why I still focus just as I have for the past 20 years on the, let's call it the pre-investible sector of the research area. So I lead a non-profit, A501C3 as it's called in the US a charity. And so it's an attractive proposition in that anyone who pays taxes in the US can give us money and get a tax write off. But unfortunately, the people who write the biggest checks these days are people who are investors first and donor second. So I'm constantly struggling to bring in enough money to do these very audacious experiments such as the one I described a moment ago.
(14:49) Briar: I think it's very interesting and one of the big challenges I was reading about the longevity space is of course these, these trials that you need to do along right, compared to other trials in, in other industries and things. So, when you are doing the clinical trial, like you want to go in with enough money to last throughout all of that. But of course, it's such an important topic, it almost drives me insane, the fact that people aren't chucking more funding towards this topic. Like surely this would be number one, right? Like, as you pointed out, how many people die on a daily basis that you could help solve.
(15:26) Aubrey: Yeah, I mean, a large part of it is simply, like learned helplessness as in like, we've been terribly aware of aging since the beginning of civilization and we have been completely unable to do anything about it. So we have simply developed these ways to put it out of our minds and get on with our miserably short lives and made the best of it, rather than being preoccupied by this terrible thing that's going to happen to us. And that was actually pretty rational, pretty sensible until basically, until I came along, until we had a plan that allowed us to actually move forward towards the medical defeat of aging. It's only because of that plan that this kind of learned helplessness has become a bad thing, has become a problem. And it's obviously this is a large part of why I spend so much of my time on stage and on camera and not just at the bench or overseeing the people who are at the bench because in order to actually save lives and hasten the defeat of aging, I need to, lead the charge to change that helplessness and to get people to aim higher.
But it's a very, very slow process because that helplessness is extremely entrenched. However, every step works. I don't have to persuade everybody, just enough people to get the research done. And certainly, the successes that we've had over the past 20 years have resulted from occasional people coming in and, writing reasonable sized cheques and of course from an increasing number of people giving us grassroots funding. So, it's not all doom and gloom, but it certainly could be going quite a bit faster if we had a bit more funding.
(17:09) Briar: Would you say that the pandemic helped change any kind of funding? Because I know that during times of the pandemic people were locked in their houses and thinking like, oh, what's important to me? What do I want to go out there and do, did that have any kind of effect at all?
(17:26) Aubrey: Well, there's one isolated example of that effect. Yes. there's a very wealthy guy in crypto named James Fickle who started donating to this field in early 2021, and he told me that the reason he was doing so was because he read my book during the lockdown which is nice, but in general, I don't think, no, that has been all that much of an impact from Covid. I was hoping that there would be, because what we did see in Covid was the world basically, submitting to a lot of inconvenience in terms of the lockdown. And this was despite the fact that pretty much, most of the population, namely people who are not either elderly or suffering from the chronic conditions of late life we're not at very much risk. This kind of shows to policymakers and decision makers in the corridor of power that the elderly do actually matter.
There are votes in doing things that help the health of the elderly. And for sure, what I'd like to see, and what I very much still hope to see, is that there will be more money put into, especially rejuvenating the immune system of the elderly, restoring them to youthful function, because at the end of the day, this is not going to be the last pandemic. And the best way to minimize the impact of the next one is to ensure that the elderly can resist and fight off the next infection as well as younger people can do.
(18:59) Briar: I think the very interesting thing that I'm feeling when I'm reading your book is kind of feelings of excitement, I guess. And I think you touched on it before where you were talking about how we've been led to believe or conditioned to believe that aging is inevitable and therefore we are going to die and we potentially are going to spend the last years of our life in suffering, perhaps with dementia or some other disease like this. when I was reading it, I really did feel myself having to think from a, a different perspective and kind of un-train myself, and then I actually put up a post on social media about how I'm quite determined to be exploring these sorts of things with the idea that I would live longer. And it was actually amazing to see the mix of positive response and then some very negative people as well saying that I was like selfish and I'm trying to play with the world order, and why would I want to be doing that? Like, I'm just wasting my time. Like it was very interesting to see what's your sort of response, I guess to critics like this? What should I say?
(20:09) Aubrey: Yeah. It’s extremely frustrating and of course it's another exposition of what I was saying earlier about this, learned helplessness. People feel threatened when one suggests that one should be thinking and aiming high in this area. They feel that they're going to have to get somehow emotionally invested in the possibility that it might be in time for them, or it might not. And they ought to do something about that. And of course, there are all the things that people say like, oh dear, well, we put all the people, or isn't it selfish? Or doesn't death give meaning to life? All of these things are indeed completely idiotic and I've been giving specific answers to these things for 20 years, so there's no shortage of those answers out there, but people just do not want to hear the answers.
That’s what has to be overcome.
We have to be basically embarrassed people into just getting with the program and understanding that aging is a medical problem, just like all the things that they're already upset about, like Alzheimer's or cancer or whatever almost all cancers are age related. They have predominantly affect older people, obviously Alzheimer's the same atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, all of these things. People are completely comfortable saying this is a very bad thing that stopped them from happening, but they're aspects of aging. They're just the aspects of aging that we've chosen to give disease like names to. And we're not going to address these things properly without addressing everything else that goes wrong in aging that some people prefer to put in this bucket called aging itself and to not get upset about it.
(21:47) Briar: It's interesting you brought it up because you said, does death give life meaning? And that was certainly something that has been chucked at me saying, yes, death does give life meaning. And I actually made a Reddit post about it, and it was just amazing how crazy the narratives people for and against and in the bottom. Obviously you don't think death gives life, meaning you think that this is perhaps an excuse that people give to themselves. Like, what do you think maybe is then the purpose of our life?
(22:18) Aubrey: I'm not really into questions about the purpose of life, because at the end of the day, they're unanswerable unfalsifiable, they're not actually questions about reality. They're just like naval gazing as far as I'm concerned. That distinct from questions like, well, we put all the people or won't dictators live forever and so on. Those questions are not so much philosophical, they're sociological and, there are reasonable questions that deserve answers. It just happens, so happens that the answers are extremely easy and it's very dispiriting sometimes that the answers are so irrationally ignored and rejected.
(22:58) Briar: So what that was going to be one of my questions actually, like, what will we do with all the people once we're all living for longer
(23:08) Aubrey: About, 150,000 people die every day, of which about 110,000 die of aging, but about 350,000 are born every day. So, if we even halved the birth rate, then we'd already have a declining in global population. And a lot of people are worried about under-population these days, which, you would solve by not having people dying so much because they were not getting sick. That's something to take into account. But also we have to take into account that when we consider that we have an overpopulation problem today, we do not mean that there's not enough space. There are 8 billion people on the planet, but there's a great deal, more than 8 billion acres of land, even ignoring the places where it's not fun to live, right? So that's a lot of space.
So the only actual problem we have today is pollution. The fact that your average person is making too much greenhouse gases in such a, like, and of course those problems are in the process of being solved by other means. Whether it's carbon capture or bacteria that eat plastic or cheap desalination or artificial meat that actually tastes good, things like that. All of these things are addressing the pollution problems that humanity has, and they're doing so much more rapidly than any demographic change that would happen. Let's remember that, even if we completely eliminated aging or indeed all death today, we still wouldn't have any 200 year old people for at least another a hundred years, whatever happens. It’s like people just don't want to think through these completely obvious answers.
(24:49) Briar: I think sometimes we forget that, as you say, like things evolve. Like I was reading about how we used to die of cavities, like tooth cavities when back in the olden days, and of course we used to live to what, like 37 years old. So I'm a little bit like you. The more I explore this, the more I'm like, well, why is it so crazy almost for us to be suggesting that the human lifespan can be extended when we're already living to what, like, my great-grandmother lived to 105, and then we used to have people dying when they were 37, and that was common and normal and the norm.
(25:26) Aubrey: Yeah. I mean, it was normal for more than one third of babies to die before the age of 1 and 200 years ago. And that was even in any country you look at, even in the wealthiest countries. So, we look back and we say, are we pleased that we have come this far? Of course we are, even though we have created a new problem, namely kind of the epidemic of age-related chronic conditions that were much less common back then, because getting to old age in the first place was much less common. Another thing that people often say is, oh, it's not natural. It’s playing God to try to do anything about aging. But hello, tuberculosis is natural too. And nobody seems to complain that we hardly have any of that anymore.
(26:10) Aubrey:1 No, it's very true. And I was reading about sperm count being reduced, and of course China's got an issue at the moment with their aging population and they don't have enough kids or children that will turn into adults to keep looking after them. So I think we do need to be looking ahead and are thinking of different things in the future that could change. Because it just doesn't make sense to keep stagnant. Jumping back to the research that you've been doing on a more cellular level, can you tell me a little bit more like about how this works? Just, the science behind it?
(26:50) Aubrey: Sure. Yeah. I mean, actually the science of longevity research in cell culture or in mice for that matter, is no different in its actual technical specifics than research in any other area of medicine. Really, you do the same things. You work with the same kind of equipment, you use the same techniques. It's just that what you're trying to find out is different. So, we have laboratories with test tubes and petri dishes and agarose gels and other fancier equipment like PCR machines and so on. But it's all really, just like any medical research. The body has hundreds of different types of cell, and some of those cells are very long lived, what are often called post mitotic because they never divide and they've lost the ability to divide.
So for example neurons are like that, and so are the cells that make up the heart, and those cells accumulate internal damage, and they just kind of withstand it until they can't. And eventually those cells may die. And sometimes those cells are replaced by the division and differentiation as it's called, of stem cells, and sometimes they're not. So sometimes we need to figure out how to augment that replacement process by using stem cell therapy. So that's one of the things that gets studied in the lab, is how to create stem cells of the right type. 'cause there are different types of stem cells as well, right? And then there are other cells that get into a bad state, an actively poisonous state, and this could be just because they're dividing when they shouldn't. So of course, that's more or less the definition of cancer, right?
It could also be when they get into just they're sitting there, they're not dividing, but they're still spewing out bad stuff. There's a type of cell called a senescent cell, which is like that. And so we have to get rid of these things, and there's quite a lot of progress being made in the past decade or so in developing drugs that selectively kill senescent cells. Similarly of course there's been a good deal of progress against cancer. There's been especially great progress in cancer immunotherapy, which involves creating different types of white blood cell that can attack the cancer more powerfully than the body naturally does. Those are the kinds of things we do.
(29:10) Briar: So thinking a little bit about like cancer, and I guess the way that society is constructed. I sometimes think that society is made to be a sick care system rather than a healthcare system. We’re not thinking ahead. We're not solving these problems. Well, you are before they actually become a problem. And I was doing a little bit of research about, cancer and, and things like this, and I kind of put it out there to, to some people on Reddit. And granted, I know Reddit, it's not like the holy grail of information there. It's a lot of hearsay and probably a lot of rubbish as well. So I do take it all with a pinch of salt. But, I was, I was just wondering like, are there any kind of treatments out there, not even just with cancer, with perhaps some other things that have been a great option, have been able to solve people that, but then maybe have been, I don't know, hidden by big pharma or something like this?
(30:09) Aubrey: I'm sure there are, yes, certainly. The whole process of drug discovery and development and promotion is entirely driven by financial motive. And so drugs that for whatever reason, don't fit the financial model, the business model of the company that developed them will often get somehow mothballed and you never find out about 'em. And it's appalling. But I think actually there's a more general and perhaps deeper issue here, which more directly addresses the point you made a moment ago about sick care versus healthcare. The issue here is that preventative medicine is a really hard sell. Forget about aging, just preventative medicine in general. Essentially there is a kind of mind-set in society, which is somewhat justified that medicine is essentially risky. Especially new medicines are inherently, experimental and they might do you harm.
If you are not yet sick, which is kind of the definition of, healthcare rather than sick care, right? If you're not yet sick, then your evaluation of the risk benefit ratio may be negative. You may feel like, I'll wait until I am sick before I take the risk of having a go with this medicine that may or may not be a good thing. And we have to break that down somehow. If we look at society now and the kind of drugs that exist that are preventative, there's very, very few, there's really only two big families of drugs of that nature. The statins, which are of course there to reduce your cholesterol. And there are ace inhibitors, which are there to reduce your blood pressure. And we can call these preventative because having high cholesterol or having high blood pressure is not actually a problem in terms of function, in terms of your, physical or mental function.
It's just that it's a good predictor of how soon you will have such problems. And people had to, first of all, become really comfortable with the fact that it really, really is a very good predictor. That if you can reduce your cholesterol, then you really will postpone the likely time at which you'll have a heart attack or a stroke. And similarly, if you can reduce your blood pressure, you'll postpone things like, you know kidney failure. And secondly, one had to have an extraordinarily powerful and large safety profile. One had to actually be able to say, listen, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking this kind of drug, and they're all right. There have been no side effects to speak of. Now these two drug families have managed to cross that hurdle. But it took a long time. And even then, it really only happened kind of by accident. These came, kind of got to that point sideways by starting out more treatment centric and just gradually edging into the more preventative world. We've gotta do it faster than that in order to be able to bring preventative medicine, in other words, actual healthcare rather than sick care to the wider world in a more comprehensive manner.
(33:25) Briar: I heard of some people I heard through the grapevine yet to speak to them that were taking medicines for typically used for diabetics in the hopes that perhaps it would help extend their, their lifespan.
(33:39) Aubrey: Yeah, certainly. Yes. You’re probably talking about a drug called Metformin, which has been used for diabetes for a long, long time. And fairly recently, like in the past decade or so, the evidence started to emerge that it might actually be beneficial against aging in general against a wide variety of the health problems of late life. So there is a clinical trial that's not started yet, but it is planned, called the TAME trial, which is to look at exactly this question, and it's going to be a very expensive study lots and lots of people because you want to get an answer quickly. And so we were talking earlier about how aging is so slow and the trials have to be really long. You can somewhat mitigate that by having the trials be really large and getting a statistical significance relatively quickly.
But still the trial will be five years long, maybe seven years. So hasn't even begun yet, but people are reasonably hopeful about that. However, what we can certainly say is that even if there is some benefit for metformin, we have two problems still. Number one is that Metformin was off patent since before I was born. It’s like no one's going to make any money out of it. And number two, it doesn't really solve the problem I just described because metformin has been around all this time. And so the safety profile is completely solved. But it doesn't help us with any kind of analog metformin that might be developed, under patent. In other words, something that people can make money out of that might be, motivated by any success in the TAME trial.
(35:13) Briar: Is there anything that I should be taking like tomorrow that I could take if I wanted to start extending my lifespan?
(35:21) Aubrey: I would say no. I would say really that at the moment for people who are young adults and who are generally healthy at the kind of health level that people of their age normally would be, that at the moment, the benefits that that one can achieve over and above what one's at, if one just behaved the way one's mother told one to, and don't get seriously overweight.
(35:47) Briar: Sleep, eat your vegetables.
(35:49) Aubrey: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Over and above that it's basically nothing. And even going beyond that, you might be able to get a very marginal benefit, but different people will need to do different things to get that marginal benefit. So there's no way to generalize different people's metabolism are a bit different from each other. So no, I can't make any generalizations about that nature quite apart from the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a PhD and not an MD, and so I'm actually not allowed to make any such recommendations in the first place.
(36:17) Briar: I know. I was just trying my luck just to see if you had some ideas for me. What are your thoughts about some of these futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Jose Cordello? They're all saying that come the year 2045 will, be living forever.
(36:35) Aubrey: Well, I mean, we have to remember that this research is medical research. It's all about health. Lifespan is not what we work on. We don't work on longevity. We work on health. Longevity is a side effect of health, and it's a big side effect because, let's face it, most people die these days from being sick rather than being, eaten by a tiger or being hit by a truck. And most people get sick from having been born a long time ago because we've done rather well against the diseases of early life, as we were saying earlier. So for sure, there is this definite big side effect that will happen. We will live longer if we bring aging under medical control.
And it's also correct that there's no limit to how long we should be able to do that. In the same way that we can keep a vintage car going absolutely indefinitely just by doing comprehensive preventative maintenance on it. Similarly, we have every reason to believe that we will be able to do the same thing for the human body. So what people like Jose or Ray are saying is completely correct at that level. And I say it too, I am notorious for having said that, I think it's likely like more than 50% probability that most people alive today will live to a thousand unless we get hit by an asteroid or whatever. But that's not what we work on. It's just giving a straight answer to a straight question. Some people like to emphasize longevity for longevity's sake, and that is a bit of a turnoff to a lot of people. And I'm fine with it being a turnoff to a lot of people because that's not what we do. We work on health for health's sake, and longevity is a side effect. I use the word side effect, like almost like mantra these days. Like repeat it, ad nauseam because it's something that absolutely has to be got into everybody's head.
(38:30) Briar: Makes sense. I love all the conversations that you have about suffering. Like why should we have to suffer?
(38:35) Aubrey: It's what it's all about.
(38:40) Briar: So in regards to your research, how can people help you? Like how can people like me help you? How can businesses help you? How can governments help you? Anybody who's listening to this, how can we be part of your story with you?
(38:54) Aubrey: Sure. Well, I mean, you are helping me just by interviewing me. Let's be clear. It’s not an accident though I do my best to make myself available to interviewers, especially ones with large audiences. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, this work will save lives faster if two things happen. One, if the research itself happens faster and gets to the point of telling us what we need to do to repair the damage of aging comprehensively enough to keep people healthy for a lot longer than they currently are. And number two, if society responds to that and takes advantage of it as quickly as possible. We can be very sure that everybody wants to stay healthy and everybody will always want to stay healthy. Therefore, that once these medicines get to the point of having been developed and having been shown in actual people to work, then absolutely everybody's going to want them.
But for the reasons that you and I have discussed today, that could end up being a rather slow process. And therefore all the parts of it need to be hastened by people who are in a position to hasten them, whether it's people funding the research, which is absolutely vital. Without that, nothing else matters. Or whether it's people changing policy, regulatory policy example to improve early adopters and, biohackers to access experimental medicines that haven't been all the way through the regulatory process yet. And to share the information on how safe and effective those experimental medicines were. Also of course, putting serious money into infrastructure, into like, training of enough medical personnel to be able to deliver these therapies better. At every level there's plenty that needs to be done, but the research comes first.
As I said earlier, the funding for the research right now is very unevenly distributed. And the earliest stage work, the things that are most difficult and most in danger of being neglected are the things that are least funded, which is really quite counterintuitive and paradoxical because the early stage work is the least expensive. I think the foundation, my organization, we could do everything we need to do if we had even five times as much money as we currently have, let's say 20, 30, 40 million dollars a year would be enough to do pretty much all that I want to do stuff that's more expensive later stage is stuff that's already being rather well-funded by other groups and being pursued very effectively by those groups, but they can't get going until the early stage stuff has also been done.
(41:44) Briar: Makes sense. I, something that that grinds my gears so much is the fact that governments just seem to, like, they're just chaotic a little bit. Let's be real here. And are you getting enough support from the government and regulatories and stuff like this? Like, to me, it just seems so backwards that we're constantly spending money on weird things and, and rubbish and sort of thing. And I'm saying this from Dubai. I think our government in Dubai is really great. So, but I'm talking about other governments around the world.
(42:14) Aubrey: Well, I mean, governments in general, especially in democracies, they have this one problem that ultimately the people who make the decisions have one priority in life, which is to get re-elected. So you never really see politicians going against the grain of public opinion. They will follow public opinion. And that's why my first priority has always been to try to alter public opinion. And it's only now that we're getting to the point where at least governments are starting to have the conversations because they understand that there is rapid and accelerating progress in the science, and therefore, stuff is actually coming. But it'd be rather good to have a bit of anticipation of this. We’re seeing in AI right now, for example, we're seeing, progress being made more rapidly than people were expecting, and suddenly everyone's terribly worried about the dangers and so on. And, and they're just kind of wringing their hands and they've got no idea what to do. And, that's not the way to go about things. So, a little bit of forward thinking within the corridor of power around the world would go a very long way.
(43:19) Briar:, I think you're totally right. I often think that, that people in government, they, they just kind of keep blindsided to anything that's not going to help them get re-elected. As you said now that the people are worried about AI, finally they brought it up in, the government. I actually wrote a letter to the White House, and I joke that they obviously got my letter because a week later they all met. But I think I'm sure it's not because of that, but anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show, Aubrey. Is there anything that you feel that we didn't cover in this interview that you want the people to know?
(43:58) Aubrey: Well, I guess important thing to know is that the work that we're doing at L E V Foundation is very mainstream work. I get a lot of media attention for saying things that other people say are science fiction. But honestly it's not true. Maybe 20 years ago, most of the people in the field didn't really understand the way that I was thinking about how to bring aging under medical control or the way I was promoting. But that changed over the subsequent decade and for the past decade, everything that I've been saying all this time about damage repair, being the way to go is completely mainstream. And in particular, the great deal of support and interest in the work that we're doing on this huge mass experiment that I mentioned and other work of similar nature is being done by other people. So I think it's absolutely critical for your audience to understand that the idea of bringing aging under comprehensive medical control is very much science foreseeable now, not science fiction.
(45:05) Briar: I love that. So everybody check out Dr. Aubrey's book. I love it. I've been getting great reads out of it. And like I said at the start the book's really making me think it's making me think of everything that I was taught up to believe is this is yes, and this is no, I was brought up to believe that one day I would die and it would probably be at, I don't know, 105 if I was lucky, like my great grandma. So now, it's really opened my sort of perspectives to things. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
(45:37) Aubrey: Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
