#086 - Aubrey de Grey - The Scientist Who Plans To End Aging Forever

Aubrey de Grey believes aging isn’t inevitable — it’s a solvable engineering problem. In this conversation, we explore why society treats aging as untouchable, how “longevity escape velocity” could allow us to live indefinitely, and why reversing damage—not slowing it—is the future of medicine. He breaks down how our medical system profits from sickness, and how progress is slowed by fear and outdated norms. The end of aging as we know it is coming and it’s happening faster than you think.

Timestamps:
00:00 How We Understand Aging 
06:34 How Aubrey Found His Work
11:15 Longevity Escape Velocity
13:18 Not Being Controlled 
16:29 Investor-Humanitarian Structure
18:10 Balancing Work With Publicity
18:44 Aubrey's Current Work
28:54 Getting Pushback & The Medical System
34:27 Shifting To Preventative Care
37:33 What Has & Hasn't Changed
43:10 Consciousness & Aging
47:18 How To Popularize Ideas
49:29 The Future Of Aubrey's Work
52:16 Connect With Aubrey de Grey

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Chapters

• 0:00 How We Understand Aging
• 6:34 How Aubrey Found His Work
• 11:15 Longevity Escape Velocity
• 13:18 Not Being Controlled
• 16:29 Investor-Humanitarian Structure
• 18:10 Balancing Work With Publicity
• 18:44 Aubrey's Current Work
• 28:54 Getting Pushback & The Medical System
• 34:27 Shifting To Preventative Care
• 37:33 What Has & Hasn't Changed
• 43:10 Consciousness & Aging
• 47:18 How To Popularize Ideas
• 49:29 The Future Of Aubrey's Work
• 52:16 Connect With Aubrey de Grey

Transcript

Aubrey de Grey believes aging isn’t inevitable — it’s a solvable engineering problem. In this conversation, we explore why society treats aging as untouchable, how “longevity escape velocity” could allow us to live indefinitely, and why reversing damage—not slowing it—is the future of medicine. He breaks down how our medical system profits from sickness, and how progress is slowed by fear and outdated norms. The end of aging as we know it is coming and it’s happening faster than you think.

Tim Doyle (00:05.428)

Why do we see aging as something that just is?

Aubrey De Grey (00:09.385)

That's a very good question. It's one that I have been struggling with for 30 years. Ever since I discovered that my first wife thought that way. You know, she was a biologist. She's the reason why I got into biology. And, you know, she was a lot older than me. She was a senior professor in California at the time.

It was a complete bombshell to me that she didn't regard aging as her problem. think the only way to explain it is that it's a psychological coping mechanism that we know that aging is absolutely ghastly. And we've known this since the beginning of civilization. And we've just had to find ways to put it out of our minds since we could not do anything about it. So we make up, you know, fairy stories that either aging is a

blessing in disguise for some reason, like, you know, where will we put all the people or how will we pay the pensions or wouldn't dictators live forever or doesn't death give meaning to life? Things like that. Or alternatively, as you say, we just view it as woven into the fabric of the universe and somehow intrinsically off limits to medicine.

Tim Doyle (01:26.186)

Yeah, I I think if you were to ask somebody what aging is, they would just assume or they would just say, okay, that's synonymous with getting older. But I mean, there's obviously a lot to unpack there to actually understand what aging is. How do you define what it means?

Aubrey De Grey (01:36.728)

Right.

Aubrey De Grey (01:45.484)

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, aging is actually not hard to define at all. And so that's another real paradox that, you know, we've not come up with an agreed definition that we all use because aging of the human body or of any living organism is actually just the same thing as aging of a simple manmade machine. The machine, any machine with moving parts, you know, does itself damage.

know, continuously as a consequence of its normal operation and the machine is set up to, to tolerate a certain amount of that damage without any significant decline in function, but only a certain amount. And eventually that amount is exceeded and function starts to decline and eventually cease entirely. So in a car, you know, rust accumulates, you know, contamination in the oil, whatever. And, you know, eventually the doors fall off. And of course we know.

how to stop that from happening. We know that if we do nicely comprehensive preventative maintenance, the car lasts longer. And indeed that if we do sufficiently comprehensive preventative maintenance, then the car lasts forever. That's why we have hundred year old cars now that are working every bit as well as the day they were built. You know, even though they were never built to last 100 years, they were built to last maybe 10 years, but preventative maintenance just...

transcends any kind of warranty period that machine has and it's exactly the same for the human body. Of course the human body is a really really really complicated machine and it is one that we did not design and therefore you know there are lots of things that we don't know don't understand about how the machine works but it's still a machine its function is determined by its structure and therefore preventative maintenance will also work. You just have to get good at it.

Tim Doyle (03:37.056)

Would you say that your view of aging and the human body, and I find that analogy with the 100 year old car really interesting. mean, would you say your view of aging in the human body is purely mechanistic or is there any type of intangible factor here that you think that, you know, science can't quite capture?

Aubrey De Grey (04:00.116)

well, there's definitely no intangible aspect of the human body. Now, I'm not talking about the human being, you know, I'm not making any claims as whether there is any kind of soul or, you know, non-physical aspect of being a person, but we're talking about the body. And we know that, you know, whatever intangible things might exist, they are, if you like,

Tim Doyle (04:09.514)

Yep.

Aubrey De Grey (04:26.924)

trapped within the body for as long as the body keeps working. So the body is what matters here.

Tim Doyle (04:34.656)

So your work.

like what I think could be really helpful for people here, because this is like very forward thinking in terms of aging, like within the medical system or the, you know, the health and wellness space, like looking to the past or the things that, you know, we see is very common and we just take as natural that used to be very taboo or seen as crazy. Like, is there like something there that could really, I guess, just

frame it better for people.

Aubrey De Grey (05:08.75)

Other kind of precedent? Well, yeah, I guess. mean, cancer is actually a pretty good one. People view cancer as a disease that it is appropriate to try to find cures for, you know, and so they should, you know, because it is actually, you know, something we don't like to have happen to us and medicine is capable of doing something about it. But 100 years ago, cancer was something that one didn't really talk about.

Um, you know, it wasn't, it was considered so, um, you know, uh, uh, beyond limit, beyond the reach of medicine that it was just scary and people just preferred to put it out of their minds. So I think, you know, the fact that we have. So we have, have, um, put, put that attitude aside and started to treat cancer like in a grownup way is a pretty good precedent.

Tim Doyle (06:06.72)

So within your personal experiences of getting within this work, I know this wasn't directly what you had set your life on. You started in artificial intelligence research and then transitioned more so into this scientific biological space. Can you just talk more about how that transition transpired?

Aubrey De Grey (06:26.072)

Sure, yeah. So, I mean, I went to do AI research as a youngster and did my undergraduate degree in computer science and all that, basically because I had realized at a very young age, like eight or nine years old, that what I wanted to do with my life was to make a difference to the world and that meant working on the most important problems for the world.

And when I was 15, I started programming, found I was good at it. So I thought, right, well, the best way for me to make a difference is to address the problem of work. The fact that, you know, people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they would not do unless they were being paid for it. In other words, we need more automation. So that's why I went into that area. But I always knew that aging was by far the biggest problem, because it's far bigger problem than the problem of work.

It's just that I didn't have any particular reason to believe that I would be an exceptionally good biologist. And so I thought, you know, I'll leave that to the people who are. And the thing is, I never did the experiment of actually raising the topic with anybody and discovering that actually almost everybody views aging, as you mentioned earlier on, you know, as this kind of thing that's not their problem. And so was only when I accidentally realized that after...

being married to a biologist for a couple of years. But I, you know, I, then took another couple of years actually until about 1995 for me to really come to terms with it. But yeah, eventually I decided, well, I've got no choice here. I've got to switch fields. And I had done pretty well in my several years of AI research. So I had convinced myself that I'm pretty good at working on really hard problems. So I thought, well, you know, maybe I've got a chance of making a contribution.

Tim Doyle (08:18.922)

So what did those first few years look like when you really sunk into this?

Aubrey De Grey (08:23.938)

Well, the first five years were nothing particularly extraordinary. They were basically me just learning the field, you know, doing a lot of reading, spending a lot of time in libraries, actually reading papers, and also, of course, going to conferences. I had a job that was paying the bills well enough so that I could pay my way to conferences. Of course, I wasn't being invited to speak back then. And so I was getting to know all the top people in the field and to know the field well.

And I did publish a few papers during that period that were quite well received, actually. So, you know, even though I had no formal training, you know, it's hard to work a pipette or run a gel or anything like that. Nevertheless, viewed me adequately. And so, yeah, the first five years was just pretty much me getting to grips with the question. And then, of course, in the year 2000, I had this eureka moment of what everybody was missing.

Tim Doyle (09:21.76)

Did you have any formal mentors or do you feel like you were really the one just leading the charge on your own?

Aubrey De Grey (09:27.406)

No, I didn't have any formal mentors. I had given up biology in terms of formal education at the age of 15. And I learned a lot of biology through my wife, as I mentioned, just over the table, asking, what did you do today, dear? And that worked pretty well. But there were large swathes of biology that my wife didn't know anything about. She was a geneticist. She didn't know any biochemistry.

But talking about biochemistry is actually a really easy thing to teach yourself from books. yeah, basically, you know, I was for the parts of biology that I didn't get over the dinner table, I got it in libraries. And that was how I got going. And I think that was quite important because, you know, there's a distinguished history of people making significant contributions in fields when they switch fields.

because they're not encumbered by the conventional wisdom. The most famous example is that the whole of molecular biology was invented by a bunch of physicists back in the 1950s.

Tim Doyle (10:26.509)

Hmm.

Tim Doyle (10:34.462)

Yeah, that's that's fascinating. Yeah, it takes in outsiders perspective to truly create innovation because you don't have that framing of an industry. Yeah, that's yeah, that's really, really cool. So you've you've created a few foundations and your most recent one you created a few years back. Longevity escape velocity. What exactly does that mean?

Aubrey De Grey (10:42.552)

Yeah.

Aubrey De Grey (11:04.281)

Yeah, so the term longevity escape velocity is one that I coined about 28 years ago. And it's a term that's based on the essence of how I believe we are going to bring aging under comprehensive medical control. Specifically, that we're going to do it by not slowing aging down, but by actually reversing it, turning the clock back and making people biologically younger again. Now, the reason that matters

is of course, it's much better in terms of its impact because you can take people who are already in middle age or older and actually do something good. Where if you're only slowing aging down, then they're going to just stay old. But also it means we buy time. If you take somebody who's let's say 60 and you rejuvenate them so that they're biologically 40, then you've got 20 years before they become biologically 60 again.

Now, when they do become biologically sick again, in terms of the amount of damage in their body, it'll actually be harder because the damage will be kind of enriched for the difficult damage that your treatments from 20 years ago didn't work on. those 20 years will have been enough time for biologists to figure out what to do next so that we will be able to rejuvenate the same people, even though the damage that's in their body is more difficult intrinsically. And we'll carry on doing that over and over again.

So idea is that longevity escape velocity is the minimum rate at which scientists will need to improve the comprehensiveness of these rejuvenation treatments so as to stay one step ahead of the problem. In other words, that the same people, so long as they're receiving state-of-the-art treatments at any time, will not be getting biologically older, even though they are, of course, getting chronologically older.

Tim Doyle (12:54.432)

want to get more so into the specifics of that work and how that actually plays out. But before that, I want to talk about the structure of your foundation, because I think it's really, really important for the conversation here, and especially going from what you were saying earlier about, you know, kind of being an outsider coming into the space. So I read your bio, and it said that you consider yourself to be a born heretic. And I found that really fascinating. Can you talk about

I guess your personal makeup as a person and how that aligns with the structure of the foundation and why that's so important for the work that you do.

Aubrey De Grey (13:36.0)

Yeah, so I guess that's true. I do consider myself a professional heretic. I guess I've always recognized that if you're not pissing anybody off, then you're probably not making much of a difference. And I have, I guess, a healthy disrespect for authority. I don't have much trouble thinking.

in an unorthodox way, which as you say, is completely necessary for making pioneering technological progress or indeed scientific progress. I guess there is a linkage with the structure of my organization and indeed the structure of the previous two organizations that I led, the Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation. In all three cases, these are nonprofits, so they're not beholden to people who want to make money.

And they're also funded entirely or almost entirely by philanthropy as opposed to government grants or anything. So that means that they are not subject to the strictures that come with trying to get money from the government, which essentially revolves around peer review. In other words, you basically only get money if you can convince your colleagues in advance that what you want to do with that money is sensible. that's kind of as far as I'm concerned, that's the

by far the biggest catastrophe that has happened in science this millennium. It's completely antithetical to the way that science ought to be done. But it's the way that science is done. And so I had to work outside of that framework in order to do things that were ahead of their time.

Tim Doyle (15:22.794)

From a money perspective, you've talked about that breakdown exactly between investors versus donors. Do you think there more people inserting themselves into this space strictly from an ROI perspective compared to a humanitarian perspective?

Aubrey De Grey (15:39.928)

for sure. And I don't see anything wrong with that either. think, know, well, I mean, putting it bluntly, investors tend to write bigger checks than journalists do. So the work goes faster. And, you know, until maybe 10 years ago, there was basically no private sector at all in this field. You know, everything was being done in either academia or a few people like me doing the philanthropic approach. But

Now that there is a private sector, because some of the components of what we need to do to bring aging under control have moved along far enough that people can see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of revenue, then a lot of things are moving very fast. But the whole approach of damage repair, which I've been pursuing all this time, is intrinsically, by definition, a divide and conquer approach.

and some of the components of that approach are considerably more difficult to implement than others. So the money that's coming in in the private sector is very unevenly distributed. Basically, the hard parts are not viewed as investable yet. And therefore, the nonprofit sector is still playing an absolutely indispensable role.

Tim Doyle (17:02.954)

So how do you balance being a fundraiser and a public figure with also being the one responsible for driving the science and the work forward?

Aubrey De Grey (17:12.066)

I wouldn't really consider it a question of balance. I think they go together. I think the way that I succeed when I do, which is not often enough in getting people to write me checks is by getting them to trust me. And of course that means they have to trust my integrity, but they also have to trust my expertise. So I think, you know, the two things actually synergize rather well.

Tim Doyle (17:37.472)

So getting into the specifics of the work more now, like what are the most important projects and the work that you're doing right

Aubrey De Grey (17:46.894)

Right. So I mentioned already that the more difficult components of this divide and conquer damage repair approach are still very much in need of further progress before they really become investable. That's not 100 % true. There are some courageous investors who have, you know, got into this, but there's not nearly enough of that going on. Like there are whole swathes that have like one company working on them. But

Yeah, so that's got to happen. So for example, the accumulation of mutant mitochondrial DNA is something that hardly anyone's working on. There are definite, you know, promising approaches, but they're not being pursued. And that needs to happen. They're not being pursued nearly well enough anyway. However, the biggest thing which is missing from the private sector, which I am focusing on,

is the second phase that any divide and conquer approach has in anything, not just medicine. The two phases, of course, are first you build the components and then you put them together. Now, in typical engineering applications, the second part, the putting together is the easy part. know, once the bits are working, you can be pretty confident that the whole thing will work. But in medicine, it's not like that because we are seeking to manipulate this machine that we have a very, very poor understanding of.

And therefore you can get plenty of surprises in phase two. So I've always been really eager to get into phase two as soon as possible. And I was finally able to start doing that about three years ago with the LEV Foundation. Because, you know, what you need is some of the components to be actually working well enough that you can hypothesize at least that when you put them together, they will have an additive benefit. And a few things had been made to work reasonably well.

What I mean there is you take mice, which normally live two and a half years and you do nothing to them until they're in middle age. So until they're about one and half years old, and then you do something to them and you try to them live longer. And if they do, then that's promising. So we took four things that have that property and we put them together and it was reasonably effective. We did get an additive effect, but

Aubrey De Grey (20:11.246)

What we didn't get was a really big effect. The amount that you can get in terms of life extension of mice doing an experiment like that, where you start in middle age already is like four months. You can turn the two and a half lifespan into two years and 10 months. And the thing is, we've been able to do that for half a century. People could just feed mice less than they would like. That's called calorie restriction.

And they live longer. And we understand why that is, because it's an evolutionary adaptation. It's evolutionarily desirable or profitable to have offspring when there's a famine, because your offspring will die before they have their own offspring. therefore, basically the metabolic prioritization needs to shift.

into essentially hunkering down rather than growing quickly before you get eaten. And, you know, this happens in all species, pretty much. But the bad news is that it does not happen very significantly in long lived species, simply because long famines don't happen often enough for evolution to really care about them. So it's a non-starter for humans. so and similarly,

We have these drugs now which essentially trick the body into thinking it's in a family when it isn't. And those are called CR mimetics. Very cool, you know, I people like eating. So if carotid restriction is going to have any benefit, then that's the way you want to try to do it. And that's all very well. It probably does marginally extend life and certainly marginally extends healthy life. So I don't have any problem with these things, but they are not the holy grail. So we, in our experiment,

starting three years ago, we took one such drug, chiropractic somimetic called rapamycin, as a kind of positive control. And that got us the same as it has got everyone else, three or four months of extra life. And then the other three interventions were damage repair of different types. And we put them together and we got this additive effect. But as I say, we did not get through that four month glass ceiling. So what did we learn from this?

Aubrey De Grey (22:34.636)

Well, I think what we learn is that we need to throw more things together at these mice. Now, as I mentioned, three years ago, we only had a few things that had been shown individually to have benefits. But the fantastic news is that during those three years, lots and lots of other things have come out. There's been a cascade of publications from various research groups showing life extension benefits starting late in life, as I mentioned.

you know in other ways so now we have a a new study planned which will involve eight interventions and in fact we could do more than that if we really wanted to but i think we can stop at eight for the moment a problem of course is that these experiments are large you can't just have a bunch of mice you give a bunch of things to and then a bunch that you give nothing to because you know if something doesn't work you don't know why

So what you have to have is a lot of other treatment groups that get some, but not all of the treatments. You don't need every single subset, every single combination, but you definitely need a treatment group that gets each of the things individually just to kind of validate that we are recapitulating what other groups have done in the past. And you need groups that get all but one of the treatments, basically so as to identify...

antagonistic interactions where things cancel out in surprising ways. So yeah, it's basically gonna be 2000 mice. The first experiment was 1000 mice and that cost three and half million dollars. And the next one's gonna cost like six million dollars. We found a few cost savings, but it's still, you know, so we've got to find that money somehow.

Tim Doyle (24:21.632)

So when it comes to that framework like you were talking about earlier of, okay, we're not trying to slow down. We're actually trying to reverse damage here. What does a timeline look like? Cause you use the example of like, okay, you're a 60 year old and you reverse to, you know, 40 years old biological. Like what is the timeline to get those 20 years back basically?

Aubrey De Grey (24:44.046)

I think that we, of course you can't say precisely because it's pioneering technology, but I think people like myself, the subject matter experts in this field do have an obligation to make some kind of prediction. So the prediction that I always make is a probabilistic one. I say simply that I believe we have a 50 % chance of reaching longevity escape velocity, getting those first 20 years within the next 12 to 15 years from now. So in the latter part of the 2030s.

A lot of people would say that that's a ridiculously unrealistic timeline simply because, you know, it takes 15 years to get one drug all the way through from discovery to approval. And it does. But I have a one word answer to that objection. And that one word is COVID. I absolutely claim that COVID is the single best thing.

that has happened to the longevity crusade this century. Essentially, what it did was it showed that when humanity actually puts its mind to it, it can get things done fast. In particular, vaccines. The COVID vaccine was developed and distributed globally in less than a year. And previously, the fastest that that had ever happened was

10 years, more than 10 years. So it's literally a factor of 10 improvement, essentially because, you know, humanity was not terribly keen on COVID and wanted it to be fixed and believed it could be fixed. so governments around the world just threw away the entire rule book that they themselves had written at the public's behest, you know, with regard to all the, you know, bureaucratic regulatory obstacles and

you know, institutional inertia, they just said, get on with it. And, you know, if we look back, we can probably say, in fact, I think we can definitely say at this point that corners were cut and some people died and some people got sick as a result of that corner cutting. But the number of people who suffered as a result of that was a teeny, teeny tiny fraction of the number of lives that were saved. And that's how we ought to be thinking in terms of medical progress.

Aubrey De Grey (27:10.19)

But it isn't how the medical profession normally works. The medical profession normally works based on this 3000 year old idea that first do no harm. In other words, you know, it doesn't matter how many lives you lose by doing nothing, you know, which is completely crazy. And, you know, at last we have a precedent where that rule book, that dictum was discarded and masses of lives were saved as a result.

So my current slogan is, we need to make aging the new COVID.

Tim Doyle (27:46.912)

That's a great slogan that'll definitely get a lot of eyes. Do you get a lot of pushback on your work? I don't like to use the word enemies, like, do you think there are people out there who like, don't like the work that you're doing?

Aubrey De Grey (28:06.828)

Well, not really. I it appears that way sometimes. Certainly when I first put forward the idea that multi-pronged damage repair was the way to go in the year 2000, virtually nobody in the field understood a word that I was saying. It was a really big paradigm shift. And it took a long time for me to, you know, bang away and chip away at that skepticism. You know, some of it was quite acrimonious in the mid 2000s.

But by the early 2010s, that was basically all over. had completely won the argument. And sure enough, a few of my colleagues in 2013 put together a paper that was fundamentally a restatement of what I had said a decade earlier. And it's time had come. So this paper was called the Hallmarks of Aging. It was published in one of the most prominent journals in the world, And it became very rapidly the

most highly cited paper in the whole of the biology of ageing this century by far and it's definitely going to stay that way. kind of nobody dislikes the way the science anymore. So what remains of course is that people do dislike the idea of tampering with ageing. know people, as I say, they tell themselves these fairy stories and

Some of that comes down to being genuinely opposed to what they would call the medicalization of aging, which is unspeakable. It's ridiculous. But I'm just getting on with my job.

Tim Doyle (29:51.018)

Yeah, I mean, part of the reason why I asked that is from a healthcare medical system perspective, like we've built an entire medical system, it seems like, off of treating the effects of aging rather than simply aging itself. And I know you've talked about how, you know, people see this as, okay, this is very complex work. This is hard to the point of maybe even saying this is impossible or you shouldn't concern themselves or you shouldn't concern yourself with this.

Like, so like I see that on one end, but on the other end, I kind of frankly just see it as like, if we're talking about the medical system as a whole, just like, well, we just really don't care. And the reason why there's that lack of care is because, Hey, we're making a lot of money built off of the system the way that it is now. What are your thoughts on that?

Aubrey De Grey (30:43.938)

Yeah, so this is something which, again, is the wrong people get the blame for this. So when I mentioned earlier on about COVID, people will often say it's appalling how long it takes to get a drug through the FDA. And it is, but it's not the FDA's fault. The FDA is just implementing the law. So it's really the...

Legislators fault except that it's not their fault either because they were elected. So it's the public's fault. You know, the public are very risk averse and That's why the whole first do no harm thing has stuck around for so much longer than it should have done You know people just you know when one person died in a clinical trial There's uproar and you know whole swathes of medical research get closed down for a long time It happened this happened in 1999 with gene therapy

appalling how many lives have been lost, will have been lost as a result of that. But that's what happened. Whereas if, you know, lots and lots of people die as a result of the slow approval of this or that drug, then, you know, it doesn't make headlines. you know, fundamentally preventative medicine is the same thing. It's like people are very, very bad at reasoning with uncertainty. And when

they're presented with the possibility of taking some medicine, some new medicine that's preventative, they're thinking will be, well, you know, there's a chance that this will make me sick, you know, that it will not act as intended. And even though the actual chance of it making them sick is infinitesimal and the chance that it will postpone the time when they do get sick is large, nevertheless, no, those numbers are not just

They don't factor into people's thinking. So what we end up with here is the pharmaceutical industry, big, well, the medical industry in general, get a lot of flack from people in the longevity field, especially for basically peddling sick care rather than healthcare. In other words, trying to keep people alive in a sick state of health because that's what makes them money rather than stopping them from getting sick in the first place.

Aubrey De Grey (33:02.166)

And that is certainly what happens at the moment. But it's not because the pharmaceutical industry want it that way. It's because that's where the money is. That's where the demand is. If the public grew the fuck up and actually started to take preventative medicine seriously, then the medical industry would totally follow the money. You know, it's not their fault.

Tim Doyle (33:26.324)

Hmm. It's a fascinating perspective. I like that. So where do you see those shifts? Like if we're saying like on a micro level of people like, okay, I want to shift into that sort of preventative care type model. Where do you see people like today taking that action?

Aubrey De Grey (33:40.972)

Well, I mean, things are improving. Let's be clear. You've got a number of people in this field who are really pushing the preventative side of things. The flavor of the month right now is a guy named Brian Johnson, who is quite controversial and a lot of people think he's crazy. you know, maybe he is a bit crazy, but hey, maybe I'm a bit crazy. That's fine. The fact is, you know, he's very, very sincere about what he does and he's completely fearless about being laughed at.

and you're being criticized. you know, he was a very wealthy guy. He made a lot of money with a company that created Venmo. And he, you know, he spends a lot of money on his health, but he talks about it a lot as well. And he, you know, he's very passionate that prevention is the way to go. One thing that he's particularly passionate about is measurement. You can't prevent something that you might get unless you know what you might get.

And, you know, so he has an MRI machine in his house, you know, he does a lot of measurement and he emphasizes that everybody should spend a significant amount of their time and money measuring themselves as much as possible. You know, blood work, everything like that, functioning functional measures so that you know where your weak links are and you can.

to determine what to prioritize. So, you know, that's the kind of thing that is becoming more and more understood. You've got a number of other influences saying the same kind of thing. Some of those influences kind of make a bit of a mess of it by essentially emphasizing what we can already do today at the expense of emphasizing what we might be able to do in the near future.

And that's a problem because there isn't honestly all that much we can do today. And it's very, very critical to, you know, put the pedal to the metal in terms of research to develop things that we don't have today. But by and large, you know, things are improving in terms of the conversation, the, you know, the general acceptability and legitimacy of prevention.

Tim Doyle (36:02.804)

That's fascinating. are you saying that we have or those influencers are put too much of an emphasis within this space on the present moment? Is that what you're saying?

Aubrey De Grey (36:14.934)

Yeah, I mean, think we do that, know, humanity does that across the board, know, short termism is kind of what we were evolved to prioritise and thinking in the long term is hard.

Tim Doyle (36:28.36)

Yeah, that's fascinating. mean...

So if we had this conversation like 10 or 15 years ago, how would it differ compared to like what we're talking about today? Like what were your main, I guess, philosophies and understandings and talking points back then?

Aubrey De Grey (36:45.134)

It wouldn't differ all that much, to be honest. I mean, you can go and check. You can look at my TED Talk, which was, let me say, 19 years ago. You know, it's terrifyingly similar to what I say now. Of course, as I say, there are a few things that have changed. The emergence of the private sector with a lot more money does help. But these things do take time. I'm afraid, you know, it takes time to change people's minds.

Actually, let me give one example. So one of the many people I met at TED who had the potential to make a difference to this world and who seemed to be pretty interested was a guy named Jeff Bezos, who was not nearly as wealthy back then as he is now, but he was wealthy enough and he was really interested and he would come up to me on his own initiative every year at TED for the next few years and ask me, you know, what's new, how's everything going? And he wanted to know details.

it took him 15 years to actually start and finally decide to pull his finger out and throw proper money at this problem in the form of $3 billion, given to this company, Altos. you know, I do not know why it took him 15 years, but at least he did it eventually.

Tim Doyle (38:00.128)

So you think, so like you were saying, there's not much to do right now in the present moment and going back to that timeline that you were talking about earlier with like late 30s, so you really think, or I guess like 50, 50 chance you think late 30s, this really becomes like a present moment conversation.

Aubrey De Grey (38:21.228)

Yes. In fact, actually it will become a present moment conversation quite a lot sooner than that, I believe. What I think is likely to happen is that within the next five years, maybe less, there will be a sufficiently dramatic amount of progress in the laboratory in mice, very possibly with the kind of experiments that we're doing at L.A.V. that the world will feel that it has permission to get its hopes up.

and not to engage in these fairy stories I was talking about. That will start with the subject matter experts basically seeing what's happened and say, and starting to actually say the kind of things that I've been saying forever, namely to talk about time frame predictions. At the moment, as I say, I only give probabilistic time frame predictions, but at least I do that. Almost all of my colleagues refuse to do that. They say, you know, we don't want to over promise and under deliver.

It's nonsense. It's just what they really don't want is to be accused of saying irresponsible things on camera because that will be prejudicial to their next grant application. And, you know, that's a terrible reason. But yes, that's going to change. And when it does, there will be a domino effect very rapidly. Essentially, influencers will start demanding a proper war on aging, demanding that we actually start treating aging like the new COVID.

And as soon as people like Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast and Oprah Winfrey start doing that, and they're already interested. I mean, I've been on Rogan twice. David Sinclair has been on Rogan a few times. George Church has, I think. As soon as that starts happening, the public will demand it too. And then it will happen. so that's going to be another 10 years, I reckon, from that point, before aging is properly brought under medical control.

in humans. The same things are not going to work, know, the same things that working mice will not translate completely. There'll be a lot of work to be done, but it will be done and it'll be done much faster than what's being done in standard medical research these days. During that time, people are, there's going to be a lot of turbulence. Here's why. The main reason is that the global economy is built.

Aubrey De Grey (40:50.553)

on

people's expectation of how long they're going to live. The big ticket items that most people spend money on are things like health insurance, life insurance, inheritance arrangements, pensions. And these things will have to be completely redesigned from the ground up when people transition from thinking they're going to live only a few years longer than their parents did into thinking they're going to live essentially indefinitely. And that will happen ridiculously suddenly.

Because the whole concept of longevity escape velocity is really not very hard to grasp when you try and and and people will just get it. And, you know, people better be ready. So when I get the chance to give talks to, you know, pension funds or banks or whatever, the talk I give is typically entitled Anticipate the Anticipation. In other words, the jobs of companies like that right now is to be preparing to be

to be developing new product lines, which they won't roll out until those product lines are ready, but they'll have them ready to go the moment this extraordinarily abrupt transition in human expectation actually occurs.

Tim Doyle (42:09.44)

So how does consciousness play into this? Because the way that I see it is like,

Okay, when we get to that point where we, the public and society really latches onto this and, from a consciousness perspective, you know, we believe, okay, we're going to live much longer and that happens on a mass scale. So it's like, you know, the type of consciousness that we have right now just about how aging is inevitable and we just don't even think about it, honestly.

Like it just kind of, you know, mindlessly believe we just take it as a natural perspective. Like when the shift occurs into like what we're talking about today, like how big of an impact is that on aging?

Aubrey De Grey (42:59.18)

Well, I mean, that's a bit of a circular question. what you're saying is, you know, when we think we're not going to age, what impact will that have on whether we do age? It kind of won't. I mean, you know, these things will go together. We will have a change in expectations as a result of progress that's being made. But maybe I'm not understanding the question right. the I mean, the main thing is

Tim Doyle (43:26.004)

I guess just like the public buy-in, guess on a mass level. And I guess using the COVID, like you were saying as an example of like, there was mass buy-in of like, hey, this is what we want and this is like what we believe in. And then just like using that same example for here.

Aubrey De Grey (43:39.566)

Yeah, so I mean, I mean, a simple way to say it is, you know, I don't work on longevity, I work on health, right? Longevity is a side effect of health. And nobody wants to be sick. Nobody, nobody thinks to themselves, okay, I don't want to be sick today, but it'll be fine to get sick when I'm 80. You know, people don't think that either, right? Especially when they're 79. So, you know,

It's not, it's the buying will be essentially universal. Absolutely. And of course that means that the buying at the level of implementation, you know, government investments in infrastructure and medical personnel and so on will also be, you know, universal. So, you know, we'll end up rather rapidly with a population that doesn't have any sick people to speak of. And that population will get progressively older.

It will get older, mean chronologically older, right? Even though not biologically older. But that's fine. First of all, it will only happen at one year per year. So the problems that we often hear about today of dependency ratios, people having to work longer in order to support the elderly, that won't be true anymore because the elderly will not need support.

And, you know, if you factor in also the rise of automation, then we will have without doubt a very, different kind of global economy and career structure. know, retirement ages are obviously under enormous pressure right now to go up because of what I just said, but that will go into reverse when automation eliminates half the jobs we have, you know.

And that's fine. You know, at the moment, there hasn't been enough thought about how to rebuild an economy around that, around something that is not based on full employment. know, there's universal basic income, which is a very blunt instrument. You know, there's going to be a lot of work to do to refine that. But that's how it's going to be. You know, people are not going to be working all their lives.

Aubrey De Grey (45:58.666)

There are many questions there about how one gets one's self-esteem when it's not being obtained through a paycheck. But the time to actually start addressing and anticipating those changes is now.

Tim Doyle (46:17.396)

I had Steven Kotler on my show a few months back. He's the co-founder of Flow Research Collective and he does a lot of speaking on obviously FlowState and he said something really interesting. He said, you want to be a popularizer of ideas, it's a very repetitive process where you're the same thing over and over because you're speaking to new audiences who are on a very base consumer level.

Do you feel that to a certain degree when you speak and through your public work, does it feel like, okay, I need to repeat myself all the time?

Aubrey De Grey (46:53.404)

yes. In fact, it's even worse than what you just said. Absolutely. The name of the game is repeat advertising. And, you know, I, I always get the same questions and the same concerns. And so I'm always giving the same answers, but it's even worse simply because people don't want to hear the answers. People want to continue believing these fairy stories. And so

Even when I give an answer, it'll go in one ear and out the other, they'll change the subject. They won't come back with a rebuttal because there isn't one, but they'll just forget what I said. so even though, even if it's not a new audience, even if it's an old audience, they'll still have the same stupid.

Tim Doyle (47:38.708)

What are those typical questions and what are the typical fairy tales you're saying they're believing?

Aubrey De Grey (47:44.302)

Oh, well, know, things like, oh dear, there will be an unacceptable number of people, you know, because people will carry on being born and when they're not dying, we'll run out of space. Or, you know, how we pay the pensions. just addressed that, you know, with regard to or, you know, what dictators live forever. mean, last I checked, you know, dictator was fairly high on the league table of risky jobs. You know, lot of dictators die of aging in the first place and the ones that do have organized their succession already. So, you know, they're effectively immortal. And, know.

doesn't death give meaning to life? mean, what can you say to that? Right? You know, I mean, it's just a completely content free statement, but it's something that people will cling to in order to not listen to the idea that aging might actually be a bad thing.

Tim Doyle (48:28.404)

I know another common question that I've heard you say you get a lot about is like, okay, what do you think your life is going to look like, you know, down the line in the future? And it's kind of a rhetorical question or just a, it's a impossible question to answer because you have zero idea, but I am interested to know because you've said aging of the human body is very complicated and fixing it isn't going to happen overnight. As time goes on, we will get there. But the question is how soon?

being future focused, like, do you believe like you yourself will be the one who see this sees this through for a very, very long time? Or do you view yourself as like, I'm the one who's carrying the torch right now, so to speak, and it will be passed on.

Aubrey De Grey (49:20.718)

Well, I mean, have spent a lot of I mean, a lot of the reason why I do so much public speaking and so on is not just to educate the public, but to grow this community, to inspire people to get involved. And I am I've been pretty successful at that. I must say I'm just as proud of my community building successes as I am of my scientific successes. So on the one hand,

You know, I wouldn't say it's a matter of passing the torch so much as letting a lot more torches. So that's good. But in terms of what you were originally saying, I don't actually think very much about how soon this is going to happen. Let's say, you know, I give these predictions, but I don't get emotionally invested in this because to me, you know, I'm doing my best to hasten the defeat of aging, but

If I ask myself, how much difference am I making? You know, how much sooner is aging likely to be defeated than it would have been if I had not gone into this field in the first place? You know, it's hard to persuade myself that it's more than 10 years, right? And even if I regard myself as somewhere near the cusp of, either I will make it to longevity, escape velocity, or I won't. So, you know, that may be a 10 % difference either way, you know. You know, it's not very, it's not very exciting 10%.

Whereas if I think in terms of humanity in general, I don't know whose lives I'm saving. I don't know whether I've brought forward the defeat of aging from, you know, 2040 to 2030 or from 2140 to 2130. But either way, it's, you know, a lot of lives. That's like 400 million lives. Right. And I don't really need to care about which 400 million, you know, even one day, 100,000 lives, you know, that's

quite easy to get out of bed for.

Tim Doyle (51:15.648)

Aubrey, it's been incredible talking with you today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Where can people go to learn more about you, the work that you do, anything else you'd want to plug?

Aubrey De Grey (51:26.422)

Well, naturally, we have a website, levf.org. I'm sure you will put it in the show notes. And everything's there, including a nice friendly donate button. And of course, you can contact me directly. My email address is there, you know. So, yeah, that's how to find out more.

Tim Doyle (51:42.11)

Awesome. And I'm curious to know like, are you the type of guy where like you just work all day and this like consumes you or like, are you able to turn off and on? Like, is there stuff like outside of this work that you really enjoy doing that gives you purpose?

Aubrey De Grey (51:56.694)

I'm pretty good at turning off and on. I wouldn't say the stuff outside of this that gives me purpose, but you know, everyone needs a hobby, you know, or to relax. I have a hot tub. I spend a lot of my time.

Tim Doyle (52:07.093)

Haha.

Awesome. Yeah, it's been great talking with you today.

Aubrey De Grey (52:13.368)

Thank you so much. Likewise.