Joe Rogan Experience #638 — Aubrey de Grey Transcript

Transcript

0:00 All right, we're live. First of all, thank you very much for coming here. I really appreciate it. Yeah, you've been up for a while, fella. You never know. It's working for me. You are involved very much so in the forefront of anti-aging life extension as far as medical science is concerned. 2006. California, and we are at a level of roughly $5 million per year in terms of our research

2:26 Perhaps the most exciting thing is that there's no one exciting thing. in order for the whole edifice to actually work to an appreciable degree They're not like, you know, we haven't doubled the lifespan of mice you know, that community obviously is sufficiently cohesive that these pieces of information result, those individual fields are nicely cohesive and people talk to each other within

5:38 everyone kind of knows it, but nobody really knows what to do about it. It's not in any Now we'll start to gamble on this being profitable down the line. but it kind of has the same kind of problems. the first company, the first research group to actually do. It's kind of got to be a collective shift of mindset, In other words, whether it leads to significant progress in the longer term.

9:08 We will stop trying to be over-optimistic about these things that we choose to call Well, infections and congenital diseases, shall we say. And that fundamental conceptual error causes enormous amounts of money to be spent in the wrong way People think they can cure it in isolation. It's been very clear to me for at least 15 years now that the way to do this is damage repair,

11:53 It means cleaning out molecular waste products if they're accumulating First, for two reasons. that as far as we can tell, the overwhelming evidence is that none of these things make very much difference to most people. that's not the case. So you'll have a—we'll live an extra 10 years or something like that. Even 10 is I think an overstatement. if you look at the real numbers, not just the league table. Here's something I'd like to ask

15:25 How about that? It's not much. So in all these factors that people look to to enhance, deal to postpone their ill health just by doing things that they can do already, then possible for me to come up with a really solid, robust, clear research program was because 15 the substantia nigra, in which there are a special type of neuron called a dopaminergic neuron.

18:27 You put cells into the body that are prepared in advance, so to speak. It worked occasionally. with stem cell therapy. It is a short amount of time. because the general public's best guess is going to be a lot worse, right? And you've got to know, Because a 50% chance is quite enough to be worth fighting for. And that all this work about repair, it's going to be a moot point because we're going

22:01 You know, it's not completely clear that it can't be done. And therefore, I'm delighted that there are people working in these other areas so that Do you want to live to be a hundred thousand years and will that be an issue as? that people actually think about anything else. All medicine involves stopping people from getting sick or fixing them up if they are sick.

24:51 You know, we know that that's a dumb thing People increasingly make decisions as they get older on the basis of how long they think they've got to live, Oh, yeah. It's just ridiculous. a kind of three-level answer. And this applies to all of the questions one might raise with regard to the problems that might hypothetically be created as We've got too many people on the planet. We've got global warming and stuff. But hang on, why do we have global warming? It's

27:47 that kind of technology will outrun any changes that may happen in terms of demography. In order to answer that question, we have to remind ourselves exactly what is the severity of the problem we have today. In order to answer that question, we have to remind ourselves We don't even have to restrict ourselves to the industrialized world. Well, worst case as far as global mean, right?

29:41 to increase the carrying capacity of the planet the question is, who are you to say? and we thereby, you know, delay the development of these therapies. just because I thought I knew better than them. the way you said that. I think that's the right way to explain the fallacy of we should leave oh, dear, let's leave it alone, even though it's horrible.

32:41 Enjoy the moment. it's a philosophical question, really, because it's a matter of how do you approach every day? not local society, but world society in a radical way, just with the wisdom that we would all be able to share. I think there is a lot of truth in that. Absolutely. I think, you know, maybe you who came up with them whether life's worth living for 50 years. You know, the people that spend their time essentially

35:44 I've probably got a thousand years of backlog already of things I'd like to have done, and life itself becomes very difficult for them to endure. Her parents are in a bad way, because I know some very educated people that struggle with depression, processing state and you're just a mess. strong tendency in society when they're exposed to these ideas about the possibility of bringing

38:50 And so we'll shorten our lives by, you know, whether it's smoking or whatever. Cancer well basically yeah, I mean I don't like to point that out too heavily because, of course, it's not true yet. next thousand. Exactly. You said that stem cells within a decade, you believe there's a large limited funds to add a drop to that bucket. But most of the other things that we feel need to be done

41:03 And it's age-related because it's caused by the lifelong accumulation of a particular type of damage. particular. This is what poisons white blood cells that are in the artery wall and makes them into engineered gene are much more protected. They're much more robust in the presence of a certain amount of this toxic oxidized cholesterol than cells that don't have it.

43:06 They can no longer process normal cholesterol. our own cholesterol in the liver. And that's how it should be. That cholesterol is doing a good job. Wow. So when they use hyperbaric chambers, oxygen-rich environments to enhance healing, is that extra bad for you? will be even more bad for you than it otherwise would be so antioxidants are are actually not just bad molecules, they're also good. They're used by the body as signaling molecules. So if we were to

46:15 We're not introducing the bacteria themselves. And how far away do you believe you are to implementing this in an actual human being? Within my lifetime, I'm going to see some huge changes. And not one person is going to ever understand all of the processes. First of all, a step that didn't work out, and then the step that did. and short-lived organisms need to be able to organism to respond to famine.

49:27 that you were talking about and all of our ignorance about that complexity. Why does it becomes part of metabolism again. harm than good. older person has more damage they're carrying more of it around and why is that because it's had Well, that's what sense is. Let me go into that in a little bit more detail. let's say someone who's typically 80, work, basically because they're attacking the symptoms. They are kind of laboring under the

54:13 going downhill, and we only fix the damage that got them that way, that won't be enough You become more and more resistant to dopamine. then any other things downstream that had gone wrong in the rest of the brain Let's take the immune system. And after that's happened, then almost all of them die again, to leave room, basically, for a completely different subset to divide like crazy next time

57:13 routine technique in the lab, used in mice, for example, for quite a long time. Essentially, is you've got to make it safe, of course. Now, gene therapy in general is a very tricky but taking the broader definition of everyone who relied on us for their salary, And the chief wizard. I mean, it's not, I mean, everyone notices you, you're talking Are you satisfied by this research? Is this stimulating to you?

1:00:08 I said, like, you know, we have about $5 million a year that we spend. Well, that's right. that would listen to you and perhaps allocate more money your way? and try to educate people and raise the quality of debate. Do you have Kickstarter, GoFundMe, any of those accounts? in terms that really grip people. Obviously because I have zero research background no medical science background

1:03:27 you have the potential to be a better person. I think I'm a better person now than I was 10 years I said basically you know you guys you're all visionaries like aiming high. This could be the critical feature of this. Even independently of the inherent humanitarian answer to this question, are they supportive of the biological ideas as well? I know you're tired, and I know you're way past your bedtime now when it comes to the U.K.,

1:05:32 Yeah. It's got, obviously, a nice way to contact us and send us any messages you like. I'm absolutely sure that being on the show will make a difference in and of itself, Oh, yeah. Do you look at it a little bit? Check it out?