Honest Money LIVE — Episode 006

Welcome, Honest Money Live, here we go.

All right, well, we've got Dr.

Aubrey de Grey here, longevity expert, and we've got Bobby Grey of TEXITcoin and Honest Money Live.

I'm the producer of the show, Mati Allin, and welcoming everybody from all the different audiences tuning in.

Welcome indeed.

Mati, I'm on a terrible connection.

I'm going to keep trying to get it to improve.

Fingers crossed.

But welcome.

Doctor, do you prefer doctor, Dr.

Aubrey, Dr.

DeGray, Dr.

Gray?

Which way do you prefer to be addressed?

Dr.

DeGray is the only correct one out of all of those, but you're perfectly welcome to call me Aubrey.

Well, no, no, no.

We're going with Dr.

DeGray.

I am Bobby Gray, spelled either the right way or the wrong way, depending on who you're asking.

But thank you very much for being here.

We continue our all-star guest lineup here at Episode Six.

To have conversations with anyone and everyone about the thing that's really important to me, which is honest money, and hopefully how it pertains to the things that our guests are working on in the fields where they... lead the way in the work that they do.

And so, Matt, he's told us all about you.

He's told us all about the work that you've done.

He's told us about some of the people that you've interfaced with in the cryptocurrency space and the contributions that they've made to your work.

Why don't we start by a little bit more about your work, because you're probably bringing to many of our guests, many listeners.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you so much, Bobby, for having me on the show.

So, yes, I'm a biologist and my specific focus is the biology of aging.

I'm not in favor of aging.

I think it's a big shame that people have to get sick when they get old.

And I have been working for the past thirty years or so to try to change that.

I have been working exclusively in the nonprofit sector.

I've led a succession of five or one three three public charities based in the US, even though I'm originally from the UK, as you can tell.

And the reason I've done that is because a lot of the work that needs to be done to bring aging under genuine medical control is work that one can't in at least in the near term make money out of and also it kind of doesn't fit with the incentive structures of academia so i've chosen to work outside of both of those systems and i've been able to do that because of the generosity of various people who have trusted me over the years of course we have a large number of small donors but we also have a small number of large donors who've come in over the past Well, as I say, thirty years.

I've been running nonprofits for about three quarters of that time.

And yes, the result has been fairly effective.

We've definitely made a lot of progress that would not have been made otherwise.

But there is still quite a long way to go.

At the moment, you know, we're still getting sick when we get old, and I am still working as hard as I can to change that.

Thirty years is a long time.

And thank you very much for the work that you've done in those thirty years.

Is there any one thing that you've been able to put a finger on as being a lead contributor to aging or a lead possibility of how to slow it down completely?

No, but actually more than no.

The single thing that I guess I'm best known for scientifically is that about twenty-five years ago, I was the first person to start propounding the idea that we must not look for what you just asked for.

We must accept that aging consists of a bunch of processes of accumulating self-inflicted molecular and cellular damage, and that these processes, there's some crosstalk between them, but they are broadly going on independently of each other.

And I thought that if we really want to bring aging under comprehensive medical control, we have to develop a panel of treatments, a kind of divide and conquer strategy.

That is a way of thinking about the problem that was very, very new and heretical twenty-five years ago, but it's now pretty much mainstream, which is good.

But, of course, then we still have to develop these things, and some of them are harder to develop than others.

The easier ones, the more low-hanging fruit, so to speak, have now got to the point where they are being funded very well by large companies, including companies created by some of the wealthiest people in the world, and also there's plenty of work going on in academia in those regards.

But unfortunately, there are still some other areas that are just as vital components of this eventual panel that have not been so lucky yet.

And those are the things that I focus on in my various organizations.

Okay, so let me see if I can unpack that.

You're saying that there's a panel of things that there's a consensus of agreement that contribute towards the goal.

And those things are fairly well identified and dialed in now here in twenty twenty six.

Yes, they know where to look and we're working on those things.

Yeah.

So let me distinguish a little bit between the set of problems and the set of solutions.

So back in the year two thousand, I put forward a set of seven different types of types of damage that the body does to itself throughout life that eventually make us sick.

And the good news is that that set has not changed since that time.

Can we go through that list real quick?

What are the seven types of damage that we experience?

Yeah, we could do.

So one of them is cell loss.

So that means cells dying and not being automatically replaced by cell division.

One is cells dividing too much, so that's basically cancer.

It's not exclusively cancer but mostly that.

Then there's cells that don't die when they're supposed to.

So senescent cells are in the news a lot these days.

These are cells that get into a kind of aberrant state and they are supposed to basically commit suicide and they don't and they get in the way and they're toxic.

Then there are two types of waste products.

There's waste products that accumulate inside cells and there's waste products that accumulate outside cells in the spaces between cells.

And I have always listed them separately because the ways in which we might go about getting rid of that waste product are different in the two cases.

Then there is mutations in a special part of the cell called the mitochondria, which are basically the little parts of the cell that perform the chemistry of breathing.

So they're very important and they have their own DNA and that DNA mutates.

And then finally there is stiffening, loss of elasticity in the extracellular matrix, which is a kind of lattice of proteins that holds our tissues together and gives them their biophysical properties.

Those are the seven things. and is that last one what we traditionally think of as aging i know that all of these combined give us that result but when we think of aging we're not thinking about some process inside of our body doing something wrong we're thinking about ourselves beginning to to lose their elasticity and Well, kind of.

I mean, really, they're all part of it.

So the best way to define aging is not as a set of processes going on in parallel, but rather as two sets of processes.

One set that goes on throughout life, and that's basically the accumulation of the types of damage that I've just described.

And that really literally starts before we're born, even.

And then the second set of processes is the functional decline that starts to kick in late in life when we have accumulated more damage than what the body is built to tolerate.

Because the body is, of course, just like a simple machine, like a car or whatever, the body is built to tolerate quite a lot of this damage without a significant decline in function.

But eventually there's more than that, and that's when we start to go downhill. and of course the when we start to go downhill it's gradual at first and we wouldn't say that we exactly have diseases we just have you know we can't run quite as fast as we could we can't think quite as fast as we could um but eventually uh that gets worse and worse and we have things like that we do call diseases like you know whether it's cancer or diabetes or heart disease or um alzheimer's disease you know all of the things that that make life really tough right Anyway, so I was saying that that's the list of problems.

And so our goal is to repair these various types of damage, to rejuvenate people by eliminating these damage and therefore putting the body back into something like the state that it was at in early adulthood.

And the good news is that even though the types of damage have not been an ever-lengthening list, they've stood the test of time, nevertheless, the types of approach that we might have for repairing these damage have extended.

So we've got these seven, and that's it.

We're not adding new problems on a regular basis.

We're stuck with the same ones, which gives you the ability to focus on seven specific areas.

Well, that's right.

I mean, the fact that the list has not increased is really good news because it's good circumstantial evidence that the list is not going to increase in the future.

Right.

But yes, the ways in which we might go about repairing these various types of damage have improved a lot over the years.

Back in the year two thousand, when I first started talking and thinking about this, I was only in a position to describe one potential way to repair each of the types of damage.

And now each of them has at least a couple.

And of course, the ones that have been worked on for the longest time have been progressing.

So that's why we now have some of these things being pursued by big companies.

Does your work focus on any one of those in particular, or are you evenly dividing your research and efforts across them fairly evenly, or do you prioritize?

So because there is this kind of hierarchy of difficulty, some of these things are just more difficult to develop than others, I have indeed had a preference.

So in my first two organizations, the Methuselah Foundation and then SENS Research Foundation, my main focus was on the most difficult types of damage because those were precisely the ones that other people were neglecting because they had their way to make money quickly or whatever.

Now, in LEV Foundation, which is my current organization, I'm actually kind of going the other way but in a different sense. so of course with any divide and conquer strategy for anything um there's two phases right you've got first of all you've got to develop the components and then you put them together and you get your overall result And medicine is a bit special in that regard.

In most engineering areas, the last step, putting things together, is the easy part.

You can be pretty sure that if the components all work, then you're going to get your overall result.

But in medicine, it's not like that at all, because we're trying to manipulate a system that we have a very poor understanding of, the human body.

And therefore you expect surprises at that point.

So I've been desperate to get to that point as soon as possible.

And in mice, we are now in a position where some of the easier things, the things that I would not have worked on in the past because other people were doing it, right?

Those things have progressed far enough that they do work individually fairly well to the point of actually being able to give a bit of life extension in mice.

So mice normally live about two and a half years.

So we take mice that are already in middle age, maybe they're one and a half years old, and we give them something or other and they may live a couple of months longer.

So then our work at LEV Foundation consists of taking these results from other people's work and putting them together, combining a whole bunch of different treatments in the same mice at the same time to see if we can get an additive effect.

And the idea is to try to get a dramatic additive effect so that these mice will live maybe a year longer than they otherwise would.

If we can do that, then I believe that the hard part of bringing edging under medical control will be done. because that will be enough to persuade society that aging is something that can be brought under comprehensive medical control.

Whereas at the moment, you know, people have been coming along since the dawn of civilization saying they had some idea how to fix aging, and they've always been wrong, right?

So there's a certain amount of skepticism, right?

Sure, of course.

Hey, I...

Aubrey, I'd like to build on that point and maybe we can play along with this set of questions I have for you.

What if we pretended that, oh my gosh, we found the eighth cause and it was public awareness and that that's another damage problem.

Okay.

Maybe you will or won't agree with that, but, um, uh, if I was to build some clips that could get the word out, uh, could you tell me, so I've got three parts to this, uh, who are the best influencers within longevity?

Uh, who's your top three and what's one reason each of those people rock?

To answer your question more generally first, and then to answer your question directly, I have been overseeing this research for a long time, but in parallel with that, I've spent probably more of my time over the past twenty-odd years in the areas of advocacy and enlightening people and generally educating people.

I do a huge number of podcasts and general audience lectures and so on, and that's precisely because it's so necessary to change public attitudes on this.

My favorite slogan these days is, I want to make aging the new COVID.

Because of course, seven years ago, we had a new problem, right?

And humanity was not in favor of COVID.

And sure enough, we fixed it.

Now, of course, it's perfectly true that we did it in a hurry and cut a lot of corners, and some people have suffered from that, you know, in terms of non-COVID and so on.

But the number of lives that were saved is vastly greater than the number of people who suffered harm, and that's how medicine ought to be done.

And do you see the same type of problem occurring in your field?

Are there actively people working on that that are cutting corners and actually making it more dangerous for other people?

Not enough.

I mean, not sufficiently so.

At the moment, what happened with COVID?

Let me put numbers on this.

The vaccines for COVID were developed and globally distributed in less than one year.

Now, what a lot of people don't appreciate is that prior to COVID, the world record fastest that any vaccine for anything had ever been developed and globally distributed was ten years. so an entire digit was taken off their time and that happened because governments around the world just tore up all of the bureaucratic inertia and institutional um you know um uh rules the red tape They tore him up.

These were rules that they had written at the behest of their electorate, but they said, no, now is not the time to be shackled by these things.

That's what we need.

Of course, the difficulty with doing that with aging is that aging is not a new problem.

Aging is something that society has become very adept at putting out of its mind because it doesn't think anything can be done about it.

So, yes, we absolutely need to make aging the new COVID.

In medicine in general, you know, we are still shackled by the statement from two thousand years ago from Hippocrates, who said, you know, first do no harm.

Now, what does that mean?

What does that mean?

It means basically preventative medicine is a bad thing.

Right?

Because if you're not yet sick, then you can only do harm with medicine.

And we all know that preventative medicine is actually a good thing, but it never gets developed.

Virtually no preventative medicine gets developed.

And sometimes we get lucky, like with, for example, GFP ones, where these are definitely good preventative medicines against many aspects of aging, and that is being increasingly proven in clinical trials.

But the only reason they got so popular was because they treat something that we don't call a disease, but that people don't like to have, namely obesity, right?

So we got lucky there, but generally that just doesn't happen.

And we've got to change that.

So yes, coming back to your question, Matthew.

But are there, and just one question before we get on, because I'm intrigued.

Are those limitations in place preventing you from doing experiments on mice? oh no well i mean there are some rules about experiments on mice but that's not really the thing the main thing is that i i don't have anywhere near the financial resources that i need to do the experiments on mice that would really you know um get us to the point of being able to do proper experiments on humans as soon as possible At the moment, I could totally spend ten times more money than I've got, and we would save a couple of years on this, which is a hundred million lives we'd be talking about.

But that's not a bureaucratic or red tape issue.

That's a funding and financing issue.

If there was one bureaucratic thing you could undo that could accelerate your ability to do work, what would it be?

Well, COVID created a situation where governments came together to eliminate those, what, the trials and studies?

Well, this is kind of it.

You see, the financial side and the bureaucratic side are very closely intertwined.

Because, you know, people who are thinking of writing a check will look at the time it's going to take before they get their money back, before they start making money.

And if they know that clinical trials take forever, then they'll do something else with their money.

But if you could bring a product to market more quickly, you've got... a shorter timeline on the ROI.

That's right.

So I do want to come back to Marcy's original question about influencing and influencers, because this is kind of why I still work on mice.

So everybody knows that mice are a pretty poor model for humans from a medical point of view.

In other words, if you develop a drug or a treatment that works in mice to do whatever you want to do, like, for example, extend mouse lifespan, the chance of it actually working in humans is low.

People still do the experiments because the chance that it will work in humans is higher than if the thing doesn't even work in mice.

But still, it's a lot.

So most people say, well, why are we doing this?

And the answer is influence.

Mice have the advantage that they only live for two and a half years.

So you can find out whether a treatment or a set of treatments, you know, succeeds and substantially extends lifespan.

You can find that out pretty quickly.

And that's really all that people are convinced by, both scientists and the wider world.

You've got to, you know, you can't really just, you know, measure proxies of that, like types of health.

You know, people think you're cherry picking it or there's so many different ways.

It's too wishy-washy.

Whereas, you know, people can tell the difference between a live mouse and a dead mouse pretty quickly.

So we've really got to work on lifespan.

And the bad news is that despite all the progress that's been made over the past century in understanding aging better and manipulating various aspects of aging, still we can't do any better in terms of treatments that extend mass lifespan than we could literally a century ago.

If you take mice that are in middle age, like I was saying earlier, and you just starve them, you put them in a regime which we call calorie restriction, then you can get them to live maybe four months longer than they otherwise would.

And that's the best we can do.

There are no treatments that can get mice to live more than four months longer than they normally would. and that's appalling and of course scientists don't like to mention this very much because if you say that you've made no progress for a century people are not going to write you a check um but right but the thing is we are now within striking distance of demolishing that world record and going up to eight months or twelve months and i believe we can do it by throwing a bunch of things together that already exist that individually get a month or two and that's what you're saying in addition to calorie restriction we can go from four months to eight months.

Better than that, instead of calorie restriction.

So there's a lot of interest these days in drugs that are called calorie restriction mimetics.

What that means is drugs that trick the body into thinking that it's on calorie restriction when it isn't.

And the best of those works just about as well as calorie restriction itself does in mice.

But here's the bad news for humans.

Calorie restriction doesn't work very well in long-lived species.

And we know why as well.

So we don't expect calorie restriction mimetics to do very much in long-lived species either.

So we need something that's better than that.

And luckily, we do have now, as I mentioned, several treatments that individually extend lifespan in mice quite a bit and they don't have this problem they are genuine damage repair rejuvenation treatments so we expect that if we put enough of them together we will be able to break this record this four-month record um by a long way now so then the question is what happens after that suppose we achieve that well the first thing that's going to happen is that all of my colleagues in the field other research other prominent researchers in the biology of aging are going to know that we're in a different universe, that suddenly we've broken through this glass ceiling.

And they're going to be willing to say so.

One thing that I've always done and that my colleagues have been extremely reluctant to do is to make timeframe predictions of how soon we're going to be able to bring human aging under comprehensive medical control.

I currently think that we've got a fifty-fifty chance of getting there within the next twelve to fifteen years.

Let me pause you real quick if you don't mind.

You've said medical control a few times now and I'd like to understand more what you mean by medical control.

So this would be a specific therapy as opposed to lifestyle or dietary changes or exercise routines or know yeah this would be something specific that is a drug or a therapy that would affect a medical, biological change.

Is that?

That's right.

Of course, not one single therapy, because as I said, this is going to be a panel of interventions.

But absolutely, this will be medicine.

It will not be just lifestyle or diet.

Now, in general, these medicines will be delivered by injection into the bloodstream, though some of them may be oral, but most of them probably not, because we're going to need cell therapies and gene therapies and so on.

You can't deliver those orally.

But yes, so medical control basically means you don't get sick when you get old.

And some of these things would have to be done periodically.

In fact, most of them probably would.

But that's fine.

Just like preventative maintenance for a car or whatever.

Anyway, so yes, so I believe that once my colleagues in the field start doing what I've been doing for decades, namely actually putting timeframe estimates on how long this is going to take to get to be available for humans, then all hell is going to break loose.

And the first thing, the first audience that matters for the experts is the major influencers of the world.

Joe Rogan, you know, Kim Kardashian, people like that.

Why do they matter?

First of all, they matter because they're already interested in this field and they don't mind people knowing it.

I've been on Rogan twice.

David Sinclair's been on Rogan four times, I think.

And the Kardashians talk about this kind of thing a lot.

So the point is they are already interested, and once they start receiving the message that we are fairly close to human treatment of aging, they will start doing what Oprah Winfrey has always done.

Oprah gets on TV and she says, buy this book, and everyone goes out and does it.

I have no idea why, but it's an empirical fact. right and so when you see um when you see people like no today's major influencers you know mr beast whatever going out saying that saying now is the time to like save a few lives really by by speeding up this process then the public start to listen the public so aubrey if you could say something uh directly now to mr bees what would your pitch be I would simply say we are within striking distance of bringing aging under comprehensive medical control so that people do not get sick when they get old, and the more that the public are behind that goal, the sooner it will happen and the more lives we will save at the rate of a hundred and ten thousand lives per day, which is the number of people who die of aging worldwide.

So go for it.

That's what I would say. right so he can make a video like i saved a hundred and ten thousand lives a day that's right that's right exactly um yeah because i have been trying for the past twenty odd years since i've been a high profile member of this field i have been trying my absolute best to persuade the public that aging is quite a bad thing and we should have a war against it And I have been trying to do this with logic, because that's all I know, because I'm a scientist.

It doesn't work, right?

It doesn't work.

Whereas, you know, when the world's major influences say something, it does work.

And, you know, it doesn't need logic anymore.

And, of course, then we're done.

You know, once the public start clamoring for this, governments will do what they did seven years ago.

And, you know, my job will be over.

The challenge with the public, though, is that we've got competing strategies emerging for the idea of slowing down or eliminating aging.

Yes.

One school of thought that says, if I can just plug a chip into my brain or the USB or HDMI cable, then I can do a backup of myself, copy and grow a new human over there, upload it, and I don't have to worry about this aging process anymore. yeah i honestly do not think that that are there are there contrasting strategies to deal with this that that you may be up against in the you know form of public opinion realistically i don't think so not at all i think that everyone kind of knows that at the moment the things we already have lifestyle diet and so on just don't work i mean they may delay aging by a very small amount but um you know there's a quality versus quantity thing there because people don't like exercising and things like that um uh and then in terms of higher tech things like uploading like as you said you know they will believe that when they see it well you know you don't you don't see you don't see experts saying that that's going to happen next year or in the next ten ten or fifteen years but once you do see it no but hollywood has done a pretty good job of conditioning us that something like that is coming our way And they're not always right, but sometimes they at least give us a reasonable preview.

I don't think that we're seeing too many examples from pop culture about, you know, some sort of injection based therapy leading us towards that longevity future that we imagine.

Yeah, I agree.

The media and science fiction are quite influential.

But honestly, we all know that they are fiction.

So I really don't see this as a barrier once my expert colleagues are out there alongside me giving timeframe estimates for how soon we can get injection-based approaches to work.

At the end of the day, people like to be made out of it.

And that's obviously going to be very true.

People have an idea in their mind as to how we could get there.

You start showing them plausible and tangible results, they're probably going to be very willing to consider alternatives that are more realistic.

There's no doubt about that.

Right.

Aubrey, do you think...

I'm sorry, go ahead, Matty.

Aubrey, do you think the economics of the world right now where inflation is real high and people can't afford housing and groceries are more expensive, do you think that part of what makes somebody believe or not believe in longevity has to do with whether people are hopeful about the future or not? and how kind of economics plays into that?

I do think that that affects things right now, whether it's economics, whether it's one's quality of life in a more general sense.

But still, nobody wants to get sick, period.

Okay.

However long ago they were born.

So if there's this side effect that they also don't die, you know, that's...

Yeah, that's fine.

I use the word side effects a lot because I have to emphasize to people that I am not trying to extend the time at the end of life when people are sick.

I'm trying to extend the rest of life when people are not sick and indeed extend it so rapidly that we never get to be sick however old we are.

So, yeah, I mean, so I always emphasize that I don't really work on longevity.

I work on health and longevity is a side effect.

And the benefit of that paradigm shift as well is that not getting sick is a result that I can experience this year.

If you tell me I'm going to live longer, well, I'm not going to get to experience that for like, thirty or forty years.

That's a benefit I won't get to enjoy till way later.

I can't imagine what that life will be like because I don't know what it feels like right now to be old and, you know, reduced mobility or reduced performance.

Today, I feel fine.

So if you're trying to sell me on a benefit that I won't get until I'm eighty, then it's much more difficult for me to grasp the importance of it now.

But you tell me I can go another year without coming down with a cold or the flu.

All of a sudden, I have my attention.

Absolutely.

And of course, it's also to do with overall function.

We define being sick in terms of specific diseases, which really are things that don't happen to most people until pretty late in life.

But prior to that, for the previous decade or two or three decades, there's definitely a slow but steady decline in function.

So, you know, a fifty-year-old can't run as fast as thirty-year-olds.

They can't keep up with their granddaughters on the dance floor, things like that, right?

So, you know, these are things that do matter to people, and actually the field is moving in that direction, measuring things that are the precursors of disease.

There's a technical term, intrinsic capacity, which is very popular within scientific circles these days, and it basically means, you know, How fast can you run?

How fast can you think?

There's various standardized measures of these things that are now becoming very popular.

The other question as well is about in regards to why this is something that's important to focus on now.

What about the possibility of reversing damage that's already done by aging?

Is that inside of the realm of what you're working on or is that a different thing?

It's the whole of what I'm working on. paradigm that existed before I came along, the twentieth century paradigm, was all about slowing aging down.

That's all very well, but if you're already in middle age, there's not much benefit that you'll get from slowing the rest of aging down, because you're not very far away from becoming sick already. um so reversing aging actual rejuvenation is far more interesting and far more effective and that's exactly what i'm trying to do so when i talk about damage repair and eliminating various types of molecular and cellular damage from the body that is exactly um um repairing the damage that has already accumulated through through the whole of life beforehand Aubrey is like the grandfather of the idea of reversing aging.

Nobody believed it could be done scientifically until he came along and argued for it.

Is that right?

That is right, yes.

I wonder, Aubrey, are there any conspiracy theories that are actually true in longevity?

Are there any forces working against it, or do you have any comments on that topic?

No, there certainly are no conspiracy theories that have any validity.

Like, I mean, in the context of, like, a conspiracy theory to me is, like, not everybody would believe it because there's been so much of a media influence to, like, change what people think.

Really, the media influence, the overwhelming media influence for the status quo is basically just because it sells.

At this point, we have this, I often use the term pro-aging trance.

People clinging to completely irrational rationalizations of aging, reasons why aging might be some kind of blessing in disguise.

And they do this basically in order that they don't have to think about the problem.

Because if you start to really get invested emotionally in the idea that aging is quite a bad thing and it's going to happen to you fairly soon unless we do something, then you're going to be terribly anxious about it.

Or some people are anyway.

Most people are.

Because everyone knows that we can only estimate how soon we're going to be able to develop medicines that actually work against aging.

So, you know, the reason why there's this constant stream of blockbuster movies about a post-aging world that all make it sound like a bad thing, sound dystopic in one way or another, like, you know, you have to kill everybody when they reach the age of thirty or, you know, you have to buy your extra years.

You know, these are complete nonsense, but they sell.

And the reason they sell is because they reassure people that they don't need to think about aging, you know.

It's not good, but it's the way we are.

I really enjoyed that one movie where the people had the number of years left to live on their wrists.

I'm sure that you've seen that one.

They stop aging at twenty five.

They get one year to go from there.

All right.

So, Bobby, what did you enjoy about that movie?

I like that it really helped you to think about time as money or money as time.

You know, the guy goes to the coffee shop to buy a cup of coffee and the time that it costs is now five instead of the four or three that it was yesterday.

And this is what we experience in life.

Prices continue to go up, but we don't get any more hours in the week.

We still have to use the time that we have to earn an income and that we use to pay for goods and services.

And when the price of those goods and services go up and we're still dealing with that finite amount of time each week, it gets more and more difficult to either maintain the same quality of life or to stretch the the dollar as far as you can go it's yeah i suppose that's true an exact relationship between time and money but to me that is substantially you know outweighed by the fact that the whole movie is predicated on something that's nonsense namely that we're going to need to limit the number of people um and it's the same as truth i mean people often say things like oh this is only going to be for the rich it's complete nonsense and the reason it's nonsense is very straightforward at the moment we spend the vast majority of the medical budget of the western world on keeping sick people alive and of course the overwhelming majority of that is on sick people who are sick because they were born a long time ago um and if we develop preventative medicine that actually works it's going to be far far cheaper so these medicines are going to um pay for themselves many times over really quickly and that means that they will be made available irrespective of ability to pay to anyone who's old enough to need them um even in countries that really don't like taxation like the us then how does it deal with the fact that somebody that's living on a fixed income that's looking at, okay, I've got to make it to seventy-five or eighty-five or ninety-five years old.

If I budget accordingly, my money will get me this far.

Now, all of a sudden, I'm looking forward to living twice as long.

I got to reenter the workforce. and develop a new skill.

I'm sure you wrestle with the philosophical side of this from time to time.

I'm not here to challenge you on that, but our perspective is money-based.

So of course, we're going to be very interested in the financial ramifications of living longer.

And like Matty pointed out a few minutes ago, one of the first challenges there is getting people to look forward to the future.

When you tell me I can live for and I'm doing well, that's an exciting thing.

When you tell me that I'm going to live for five hundred years and I don't know how I'm going to make it to paycheck Friday, that's a scary thing.

You just you just increased the potential length of time that I've got to wrestle with the financial limitations that I have by ten X.

Yeah.

OK, so no, I do not wrestle with the philosophical implications of this.

I just wrestle with the way that people pretend that there are philosophical implications um uh so uh perhaps you've heard of this thing called ai um i used to work in ai uh before i was a biologist and the reason i did was because i thought that work was quite a bad thing and that it was a problem for humanity that people had to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they would not do unless they were being paid for it so we needed more automation And in case you hadn't noticed, automation is coming.

Even the more conservative organizations around the world, like the United Nations, now say that most of the jobs that exist today will not exist by twenty fifty.

So the whole idea that we should be thinking about paying for our long life is just going out the window.

The whole idea that the global economy is predicated on essentially full employment is going out the window.

Exactly how it goes out the window, of course, is still unclear.

We have a few initial ideas like universal basic income, but these are very blunt instruments that need a lot of development and sophistication that doesn't exist yet, but that's coming, and it's coming really soon, before anything that I work on will have any kind of real consequences for things like this.

So that's the way one needs to think about money.

One needs to think outside of the current box of how the economy currently works, how individual people's finances currently work.

Certainly a lot of the... reason why the field of gerontology has spent so long being so focused on political correctness is precisely because governments have the same, you know, idiotic problem.

They say, oh dear, we don't want people living any longer.

We'll have to pay more pensions.

You know, I mean, it's just nonsense because, you know, either people, first of all, as you say, people can certainly work longer if they're healthy for longer, but also people won't need to work longer because of automation.

So, you know, it's just like, just, but automation isn't a part of the work that you're doing so so you're operating with the the hope or the assumption that something is going to pan out better on in a different realm that's going to eliminate the economic consequence of your work being successful I certainly wouldn't call it a hope or an assumption.

It's an expectation built on what experts in those fields are doing and are saying about the timeframes for success.

And of course, on what we are seeing in terms of the rate of progress of AI that we're seeing today.

Have you seen any impact in the work that you're doing from some of these models?

Oh, sure.

Has it dramatically changed any of the work that you're doing?

Sure.

AI is helping enormously in medical research in general.

A famous example is a program called AlphaFold, which was developed a few years ago now.

It solves a problem that has slowed biology down and biomedical research until then, for all the time that medical research has existed, namely understanding the three-dimensional shape of a protein.

We can now pretty much always take a protein as an amino acid sequence and say, okay, it's going to fold into this shape.

And that helps us to design drugs that will affect the activity of the protein if we want to.

So it's enormously accelerated medical research.

And that's just one example.

There are many other areas where, including in longevity specifically, where AI is helping enormously.

And that's going to carry on just becoming more and more significant.

So Aubrey, are you predicting that not only could humans live longer, healthier lives, but also that we're all gonna be rich in the future?

Absolutely, yeah.

I mean, and I'm not exactly the only person predicting that.

You know, one of my favorite futurists is Peter Diamandis.

He's also a great friend of mine.

You know, if you read his books, Abundance and Bold, you know, this is, it's all there.

You know, these technologies, you don't have to even be optimistic about the rate at which these technologies are coming.

There's just no other future than a future of abundance.

Come on.

If we're planning on living longer, we need to do so more abundantly.

I would say the other way around.

We should be more optimistic about how living longer is going to be because we will be more abundant.

Was there ever a time, you mentioned that the name of one of your earlier foundations was Methuselah.

Was there ever a time that we did live longer?

I mean, thousands or millions of years ago, did we live to age nine hundred and forty nine?

No.

So the work that you're doing isn't being done to get us back to where we were before.

This is something that would be a breakthrough that would unlock something that we've never had as a species.

That's right. don't wrestle with the philosophical implications of that at all well no of course not i mean because it's not like enhancement it's not like giving us wings or something it's keeping us in the state that is a natural state to be if you were only born twenty or thirty years ago right except it's never happened before If we lived in a couple of thousand years ago, I could entertain an argument like we're getting back to a more natural state.

But if we've never, I mean, what is it?

The whole of technology is the same as what you just said.

You know, vaccines didn't exist two hundred years ago.

Do we have a philosophical problem with vaccines?

Not as such.

Well, I mean, if they work, right?

You know, polio.

No, no, no.

Way deeper than that.

I think that the majority of the medical therapies and vaccines that we have today are band-aids that have been developed to fix or undo other problems that we've created as a civilization.

Yeah, that's ultimately the question.

How do we get to a board?

What about polio?

Do you approve of the polio vaccine?

You know, it's actually funny you mentioned that because the train of thought was from a conversation about the polio vaccine and how it's likely that that may be linked to industrial contaminants at the end of the the nineteenth century in the early twentieth century.

So polio existed well before the Industrial Revolution.

You know that, right?

I'm not familiar with the topic.

Polio has existed since the beginning of civilization.

So has smallpox.

So have rather a lot of other diseases that are now under medical control thanks to vaccines.

However, the point is, it's not just medicine I'm talking about.

You know, fire, the wheel, you know, these are not natural.

These are things that were invented and we don't seem to have a philosophical problem with them.

Sure.

Crypto isn't natural, but we like that too. we uh you know look anytime somebody comes up with something there's going to be one group of people that are arguing for and one group of people that are arguing against it we we like it better the old way or we need it the new way so there's there's always going to be that the the question that i would start with is you know what does it change what does it improve is this going back to a better place or is this you know taking us further as a species Well, that's right, yes.

And since nobody seems to want to get sick, however long ago they were born, we therefore must look at the idea of medicines that stop us from getting sick when we get old as a good thing.

Now, there is this side effect that we also wake up tomorrow morning, which we might not otherwise have done so, you know, Is that side effect acceptable?

Is it a side effect that we should be sorry about?

Or is it a side effect that we should celebrate?

It's obvious to me that we should celebrate it because being alive and healthy seems to be something we rather like.

The very question of asking those questions or the very idea of asking those questions means that we're at least considering the ecological consequences of these decisions or advancements.

And that's, I think, a healthy part of the process.

It comes back to doing no harm.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not philosophy.

That's sociology.

The fact is, for example, right now, yes, we have too many people on the planet, and that's why we have climate change and so on.

But that's not because we don't have enough space for the people.

If you think about how much space we have, right, everybody on the planet could have their own acre right now.

The number of acres on the planet, even if you exclude places that are not very nice to live, is more than eight billion. right so it's fun it's fun to do that that research you go on you figure out how big of a area you would need if you put all eight billion people inside of one little uh little spot of land Right.

So the problem we actually have is a problem of pollution, not a problem of space.

And of course, these problems of pollution are being worked on and progress is being made rather rapidly in removing carbon from the atmosphere and developing bacteria that eat plastics and developing cheap desalination and all these other things.

So we can be absolutely guaranteed that the ecological footprint of humanity will diminish over time. even as the overall number of people on the planet increases even though we haven't seen that over the last hundred years we're projecting into the future that somebody somewhere else is working on that challenge in parallel not at all there are so that we can Sure, of course.

Yeah, we don't have to imagine it.

I mean, of course, we have seen success stories like fixing the ozone hole, restoring ozone to the stratosphere, things like that.

Well, like you were saying, we come at it from that money perspective.

So we're always looking for what that impact is going to be from a financial standpoint.

We live longer.

We're going to consume more, spend more, work more.

How does the money hold up over time?

Yeah, and I'm telling you that's a very short-sighted way to be looking at it because money is going to mean a very different thing rather soon.

There's a pattern that I've recognized in crypto and longevity that I think is a really good thing.

In longevity, there's this need for people to donate and to popularize the cause.

And the people that I've seen that have really helped Aubrey and helped the cause are these long-term minded people.

And I've seen that with Hex being a crypto that helped donate over, well, maybe twenty seven and a half million dollars to Aubrey's cause.

And those are people, the first people in crypto that were time-locking for fifteen years.

You have to be a pretty, you know, I don't want to say special person, but you have to be a very committed long-term group of people to do that.

We see people who were in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has built something that can be mined for a hundred and ten years.

Texacoin is something that could be mined for a hundred and thirty years.

And Ethereum, Vitalik donated many millions of dollars to Aubrey and he has built something that could be this technology that helps the world for many years.

And so I think it's really cool that there's these niche groups of people that really care and want to make a difference in this intersection.

Yeah, Matthew, I think you're absolutely right.

However, also, it's very important to understand that the long-term thinking really only matters for thinking about one's own prospects.

I don't think about my own prospects so much as all that.

I am mainly driven by humanitarian motives.

I want to save everybody's lives and keep everybody healthy.

And so, you know, tomorrow is just as important to me as a hundred years from now, because it's still a hundred and ten thousand people that are going to be dying of aging.

And so I'm in a hurry.

Right.

You've got have you seen a disproportionate number of donors to your foundation from the crypto space or is this just a small part of of the budget that comes in or the money that comes in?

It's been very large.

It started really as soon as crypto became a big thing.

As soon as the crypto community started having conferences, I would start getting invited to speak at them.

And I would always be the only non-crypto speaker.

I mean, I think it's not so surprising because people in crypto, especially early on, these are people who, first of all, they're geeks.

They understand that what is not an engineering problem, and this is an engineering problem.

And they understand how to, I mean, I speak like an engineer, so they understand what I'm saying about why and how this is feasible.

And, of course, they're happy to think outside of the box.

These are people who are comfortable thinking things that are unconventional.

So I guess I'm not surprised that this has happened.

But yes, I mean, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, started giving me money to my foundation pretty much as soon as he was in a position to start doing so.

So back in, like, twenty eighteen, something like that.

And of course, the most conspicuous example was one that Matty just mentioned, where Richard Hart essentially encouraged a large number, more than two thousand people in the Hex community to donate a total of twenty seven and a half million dollars to my foundation back in twenty twenty one.

You know, so there's been a huge support from the crypto community and I very much hope it will continue.

And to do that, I've got your website pulled up here.

Thank you so much.

I'm clicking the wrong buttons.

This is the right site, is that correct?

It certainly is.

You can see the donate button at the top right.

That's right.

I clicked on that a moment ago.

I got to this page. because I see that you accept donations in here from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, which of course we are.

Can you help me understand the difference between the under a hundred thousand dollar and over a hundred thousand dollar donation buttons?

Do they go through different channels? slightly different.

So we partner with a wonderful company called every.org, which handles all of our donations and does all of the, you know, the conversions of things, both crypto and fiat and everything else like stocks and so on.

And they have a slightly different procedure for large donations that involves more, you know, manual checks that they, things like that.

But that's all.

Well, i don't have uh hex money or ethereum money just yet i've got uh texted coin money and so i clicked on this usdc button and i put in a three thousand dollar donation here just a moment ago great and it gave me a deposit address i don't know what this was so i skipped over that it gave me a deposit address And then I went over to the Texas Stable Dollar Swap site, put that address in, sent it three thousand Texas Stable Dollars.

They converted it and paid it out to the address that I was provided just a few moments ago on the screen.

So I did that twenty four minutes ago.

So that's our small but hopefully meaningful contribution to the work that you're doing.

I'll be honest with you that I'm probably not going to get an injection therapy to add some years onto my life.

I'm not a big fan of vaccines.

I wasn't a big fan of the COVID vaccine.

But I'm sure there are lots of people out there that are rooting for you and the work that you're doing to have a positive impact. on the world and that's what we're hoping for as well well thank you we'll see whether you change your mind when you start feeling that you need these treatments and also of course well hopefully by then you're going to be well on your way to having the seven aging factors figured out completely eliminated and i'll be able to have a flintstones gummy vitamin of it that will give me everything that I need to join you for the next couple of decades.

In the meantime, thank you very much for joining us.

And I should mention before you go, Bobby, that your donation has already come through to our site, and only ninety cents was removed as administration fees, so that's a measure of how good this organization every.org is.

So, yeah, don't think for anyone who's listening, don't think about, you know, having to worry about money being siphoned off.

Well, we like to think about it as a measure of how good cryptocurrency is.

It's unstoppable, goes right from my wallet to your wallet, and you get the big chunk of it right there with minimal fees.

That's very good to hear.

Well, put it to good use, and thanks so much for joining us on the program today.

Matty, take us away.

I just want to mention real quick for people watching, if you want to donate to Aubrey, you can go to L-E-V-F... dot org slash donate and i i put that on the screen here a moment ago and then also for the audience watching if you want a free physical cold storage coin that uh you can use to hold as a wallet you can hold bitcoin ethereum Texas coin and a whole lot more You can go to the website honest dot money slash join and we will ship that out to you in the United States for free and We will welcome you to the cryptocurrency world.

So Thanks again, Aubrey and Bobby and Till next time.

We'll see you guys later Thank you so much