Aubrey de Grey, LEV Foundation: Longevity escape velocity, damage repair interventions, and the future of aging research

welcome to another edition of the longevity wisdom podcast today with us we have a legend Aubrey the gray president and CSO at Lev Foundation co-founder at sense Research Foundation which we all know and viento we're going to talk about longevity uh What uh Aubry is up to nowadays and everything in between the science and where longevity is going nowadays because lots of new breakthroughs um I've certainly

been following uh David Sinclair quite a lot nowadays really hopeful about everything that's happening in the field and obviously I've been following Aubry for quite quite a while he's probably 20 to 30 percent responsible for the obsession I have with longevity so thank you for that Aubry welcome to the Pod can you briefly introduce yourself tell us a bit more about Lev sure yes yes you say

I am Dr Robert de gray I a um I created this New Foundation LED Foundation quite recently it's for kind of my Next Step Beyond sense Research Foundation our main focus is to take the next step in terms of the science which is to um essentially to combine uh Rejuvenation interventions damage repair interventions that individually have some promise some benefits to see whether we can get Synergy

where we can get more than the sum of the parts so to speak and we do we do a bunch of other things but that's our main Flagship research program right tell us about where the science is nowadays I'm I mean I'm bold projection the other day you made also some bold projection but mine was that in less than 10 years I'm 80 confident that we'll crack the living forever code what do you think about that one well Michael my my prediction is only slightly less optimistic than yours I say that we have a 50 chance of getting to that point within 12 to 15 years and um of course I've defined that point rather precisely in the past I call it longevity escape velocity which is of course what um the name of Lev

Foundation comes from um the idea that we won't have fixed agent completely but we will for practical purposes have fixed energy completely because we will be improving the therapies that uh postpone aging and that rejuvenate Earth faster than time is passing right we've seen various ways or paths to probably get to immortality quote unquote I've seen various paths show way more promise nowadays namely AI or in

silico for example or RNA or stem cells for example while some others for example dietary rewinds I I feel they're a bit more limited um the blue zones and so forth I think we've uh thoroughly explored that we've also seen people taking it to an extreme to my pleasure by the way Brian Johnson investing millions of dollars uh into him on a yearly basis what do you

think is the most promising path and what do you think about what Mr Johnson's doing so in terms of what's much what's more and less promising um I think you have it broadly correct that at the end of the day we're only going to make really decisive breakthroughs against aging using these rather high-tech approaches Skin Therapy cell therapies you know things that the kind of things that

I'm working on of course that's why I'm working on them um the things that we already have um which are more at the level of diet and lifestyle and exercise and so on are definitely not to be discounted those are things that may be able to slightly postpone the health problems of late life in some people or perhaps in most um but they're definitely not the Holy

Grail as you say they more or less what they do is they slow down the process of Aging the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage in the body but they don't repair the damage that's already there or at least only to a very minor extent so that's essentially why their effects are rather Limited now um Coach Brown Johnson so obviously I know Brian quite well um uh

and I absolutely applaud what he's doing uh you know of course um in terms of what he's doing to himself uh you know privately that is very much a matter of personal Authority happens to be very wealthy and so he's able to put you know a seven digit amount of money into per year into his um Medical Care and his and his rate of aging and um you know Everyone's entitled to do what they want with their money uh but what I am most interested in in terms of Brian is the fact that he is very much in the process of putting out there the details of what he's doing what worked well didn't work one thing that I took with Brian about quite recently which he very much understands is that everybody's different for

example Brian's very very focused on sleep regularity you know he he makes absolutely sure that he gets the right amount of sleep every night and he has you know a particular schedule for sleeping and so on you know a lot of people would say that's probably Overkill that you don't really need to be so rigorous about that and a lot of people probably don't need to be

correct it doesn't really do them any good right so a huge amount of this comes down to the very simple idea that you just got to pay attention to your body and recognize that you are your best doctor uh the person who's going to be able to judge the best the most accurate the most reliably what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing but

of course what Brian's doing is spending a lot of money um pushing that envelope and the relevance to people who don't have his kind of resources is that he'll find things out that can be done without much money right that may you know optimize and modify the recommendations that we can give to the general to The Wider world so you know I um I think it's easy

to over simplify what Brian's doing and think of him as you know this selfish rich guy but that's not true at all right I think uh well listen to a Piers Morgan interview nowadays and there was this guy this very grumpy old man that was really harsh on Brian and was like dude the guy is trying to for Japan for the rest of humanity and gonna tell him that it's anyway it's up I I kind of canceled the piers Morgans after that just forgiving these people a platform think it's really sad um what'd you say to all these longevity haters people that you know don't want us to make some progress or that just don't love life enough uh to live it forever yeah well of course there's there's a lot of different ways to

be a longevity hater um but honestly I'm a lot more charitable about those people but that kind of person than most of my colleagues are my check is that you know this irrationality about aging trying to pretend that it's a blessing in disguise is simply a consequence of the fact that for the last you know a few Millennia we have known that aging exists but we haven't

had the faintest chance to do anything about it and therefore we've had to find some you know way to put it out of our minds uh it doesn't matter how irrational that is so long as it works as long as we can trick ourselves into believing that aging actually is a blessing in disguise which means that right now when we have rather recently um got to the

point of having some idea how to deal with aging we can't do it yet but in the foreseeable future you know it's only now that that attitude of you know denial has become a problem until then it was rational denial it was it actually made sense to be illogical about aging um so yeah I mean it's a big shift and I kind of I think it would be Overkill over overly utopian to to expect a high proportion of the general public to just switch gears just like that on the basis of new information right is it fair to say though that most people that are against longevity or do not like life enough to continue living it or foresee a disastrous future of AI just taking over and torturing us kind of so whether the

causality run in that I don't think it mostly a matter of um people are pessimistic about the future therefore they don't want to live a long time I think it's mostly the other way around the people have decided they want to pretend they don't want to live a long time because they don't want to get their hopes up and they ramify and justify that with these stupid

arguments right no that makes sense um I think maybe some of them are afraid as well that if there's this ultra wealthy person a la Brian Johnson which is why he has so many haters or Peter Thiel for example if these folks get to live forever and just compound the way they've been doing in business and their wealth and their power um so yeah I guess there's

a lot of folks that are afraid of that um my next question for you is so we discuss about many paths and we're seeing a real Revolution happening in AI right now obviously there's a lot of hype um but what are the the recent discoveries that have impressed you other than Alpha fold or you may talk about Alpha fold for example but how is AI gonna relieve

like Forge a bat for longevity moving forward right so I mean look well let's start with Alpha Falls that was a astounding breakthrough um and now the only reason it wasn't even more surprising than it was was because it followed alphago and and the um uh its various variants which were themselves so just an amazing breakthrough we're only at the cusp of learning what um machine learning

of the in the modern in its modern form can actually do um there are rumors out there that new versions of alpha file that exist right now are way way better than what we existed before it was very it's a big disappointment that a few months ago uh um deepmind did not participate in the face app competition the um the protein competition uh and of course you

know why they don't need to um but they're still definitely you know I would be astonished if I were not astonished you know by the by where Alpha fold is now at tiered after it was able to wipe the floor with the competition at csap lifetime um so that's important but yeah I feel quite right there are many other ways in which um in which Ai and machine learning can help there's another group also led by an old friend of mine Alex loveronkov the company is called in silica medicine um which is focused on using machine learning for drug Discovery and it's making great progress which is why it's um doing so well commercially um uh and of course beyond that we have to look at the possibility for AI to help us to walk

you know to shorten the path towards comprehensive damage repair here the issue is you know you gather data and you've got to try and see patterns in it and see what to do next and so on it's to my mind quite likely that scientific experimentation will be quite substantially accelerated when we start using machine learning to optimize the decisions we make about which experiments to do next

you know that's always the choice that scientists have to make right they have to say okay we've got these hypothesis we need to find a way to um distinguish between two hypotheses that are both fairly plausible based on existing data but which are incompatible with each other and so we have to come up with an experiment that shows that that's sometimes a lot easier said than done

so yeah that's the kind of thing that I would expect AI to be moving into fairly thin right and about in silico I'm about to have them on the pods um do you think we could actually I mean that's incredibly complex but building some kind of human body in silico so using computator computation and having ai's kind of lead its own experiments at scale 100 times faster

than we do in the lab what do you think about that well you have to take into account that when you're asking software to um draw conclusions from some input data the quality of the conclusions depends on the quality of the input data right and in the quantity of the input area that was really the probably the single biggest message that we got a decade ago when

machine learning took off um so at the end of the day it's going to be a interface AI is going to hasten the defeat of Aging it's going to be very much teamwork between the the the the the the intelligent um computers and the humans who are doing the work and using judgment to decide what to do next so let's say that because by the way these these are some of my ambitions and I'm thinking of how I would actually do it and I think the first step would obviously be Hardware which is my nightmare because Hardware is usually really hard to have some kind of mode right Apple if you want um and companies like levels um exist right now content uh blood glucose monitored obviously there's the Apple watch that um I think

they're gonna develop some technologies to track the blood and I think it was infrared that they're using and so forth so let's say that I come up with this device um that can constantly track many pieces of data on humans and I use this data to form models then I use AI to constantly improve that and finally I can make in Silicon test and instantly see if

I would release this bio chemical in this person I would see X results what do you think about that that path to well right I mean basically the only thing you have said you have not said there that you need to say is the closing of that Loop in other words you get to that point that you just got to but then you have to try it out and your confidence that the drug that comes out of that kind of um inference will actually work maybe a good deal higher than your confidence would be today when we're not using AI so much but still it's not 100 you still got to try and see what happens and of course to the extent that it's not 100 you know the case is where it doesn't succeed

where the drug doesn't work this is something that can fall back into the beginning of the the chain and you know iterate and and get a better result the next time so I don't think it's really going to you know qualitatively change the debug cycle of drug Discovery but it is going to quantitatively change it enormously it's going to split it up and make it you know

make it take fewer Cycles to get something that really works what would be the best non-invasive way to do that would it be tele Apple watch um through raised do you have any um ideas of how we could do that or would it be better to just pop a pill and have some kind of Nanobots uh going in my blood there's no one answer to that it depends on what you're trying to address you know remember aging is this very very very multifactorial phenomenon where lots of different processes are going on semi-independently as in this bunch of crosstalk between them but you know they essentially they all go anyway um and these processes generate different types of damage in the body which generate in turn different types of pathologies later on so um you know

there will be it's it's going to be very process specific very mechanism specific there will be some things where you can use wearables to get good information there will be some things where uh the um you know the way that you actually address the problem is by Oral administration of a pill or whatever but there will be certainly be other things which on the one hand in

terms of detection you need to do more than that you need to like take a blood draw or a biopsy of some kind to figure out what's going on and then in terms of also in um intervention one may simply have to do something that requires rejection rather than oral Administration so you know you can't generalize here a lot of your time is um spent on creating

conversations and kind of advancing the scientific state of longevity I call it mental sparing you know like sparing your ideas and getting Solutions out of problems and identifying problems which is the classic scientific method getting to hypothesis analysis conclusions and so forth I want to ask you um nowadays with uh with the Lev foundations what are you working on that you feel that will really Advance uh

the state of longevity wow I mean of course everything that we do is get to advancing the state of well hastening the defeat of Aging right um so uh probably 20 of our money over 20 of our money goes to advocacy of one sort or another which is a lot more than I was spending at sense Research Foundation five years ago and the reason it's a lot more is because the time is right that you know the audiences are more receptive including even you know government audiences which is of course where we have to get to in the due course um uh but then beyond that in terms of the research um the main thing we're doing is this Flagship project called the robust Mass Rejuvenation program which essentially involves taking interventions that repair this

or that type of damage and giving them to mice but not just giving them one at a time giving them all in combination the idea here is that damage repair is inherently a dividing conquer problem it's something where you have to address different types of damage that the body is doing to itself with different types of therapy so you'd expect that in order to bring that whole

process under whole collect collection of processes under control and thus keep people healthy for a lot longer than they otherwise would that you're going to have to apply a lot of different things to the same people at the same time so what we're doing at sense research I'm sorry Lev Foundation is we are combining the kinds of things that we were developing individually AdSense Research Foundation in

order to get more than some of the parts one of the surprising team or surprising way I've I've seen of creating massive breakthrough is how open Ai and Sam Altman uh reunited an elite team of scientists to get in one room which is well to me it seems really hard to do first there's Eagle second there's convincing them to leave Academia and so forth if we could

reproduce that in the longevity world to create breakthroughs how how could we do that yeah well so as you said some uh well actually not so much sound but more Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner have done more or less that without us Labs uh bringing a lot of science together all they needed to do is throw a really massive amounts of money at the people and it

it worked um and you know that can be done again um but really you know um you don't necessarily need consensus this is not like the Manhattan Project where everybody had to work together together as quickly as possible here the way to get a result as quickly as possible may actually be to celebrate and embrace diversity of thinking and get people to work independently just as long

as they can be they can actually work rather than spend their time writing ground applications I want to first ask you about your your supplement stack nowadays or your current routine and then we'll we'll be very quick because right um You Used To no or did I hallucinated that right yeah that's probably Ray Kurzweil that I my brain um okay so what's your your regimen um nowadays

let's call it that way so so there's a comparisons are often made between Ryan myself because of course we're both prominent longevity enthusiastic and yet we are opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to supplements and the question is why right and it's not because we have a sharp disagreement about what's appropriate and what isn't this is something that people often Overlook the difference is that

we are just different people metabolically I'm at the ridiculously lucky end of the spectrum where you know I could eat and drink exactly what I like and I don't even need to do any exercise and nothing happens uh you know I I I I like just nothing happens whereas Ray is really very much at the opposite end he had a lot of cardiovascular disease in his family

and in particular he came down with type 2 diabetes in his 30s which is you know it's not unheard of but it's pretty rare so his supplement regime arose from that he decided Well I've got to fix this really and he tried the standard of Care at the time and it didn't really work in fact I I think I remember him saying at some point that it made it worse so he figured it out you know he's an inventor he figured out for himself what was going to work and it has worked he's I've never tried 1870s now of course and he doesn't have a trace of type 2 diabetes um so you know it's it's a very personalized thing every different people's metabolism are very different so the only General advice that one can

give is pay attention to your body right and you also monitored um these some of these bio signals in you like do you monitor blood glucose after you've ate so did you obviously made some tests on on yourself uh with these findings right that you don't need supplement well right so I mean it's not just self an analysis it's not just saying okay I seem to be

doing okay therefore I am doing okay I have also had the Good Fortune over the last 20 years to have been tested the total of I'm going to say seven times now um really high-end tests um that you know measure 150 different things in your blood and they measure all sorts of physiological and cognitive and and other tests and yet I always come out way younger than

I chronologically am which is happening it means I must be doing something right and of course it means that the rational thing to do even if it doesn't seem like the right thing to do the rational thing to do is to be very conservative and just to if it ain't broke don't fix it as they say right you also seem to be a pretty chill dude I'm not sure if this is genetically but do you have a routine every day in which you go chill out walk at the beach like what's your what's your trick there close device I have a hot tub in my yard and I do spend a lot of time in it looking at the sky right which is which is cool um but in the last few years I mean

you've occupied like various roles um some people have pretty much hated on you how you've how have you kept your stress levels to a reasonable level what do you think there's a couple of things about that first of all intrinsically I've got a thick skin you know I went to the same school as Churchill you know it's like you know I don't have much difficulty facing down

opposition I've been doing it for a long long time 15 or 17 years ago um you know when the ideas that I have put forward were new um most people didn't understand them most people in the academic Community I faced a lot of acrimony you know people who thought that what I was saying was unscientific it took me quite a few years to let's just say explain

myself to the world um so now the things that I was saying 20 years ago are completely mainstream but it took a while so I've it's not you know I've I've kind of chosen that life you know I've I've I've chosen the Heretics path in life with my eyes totally open if you like um then you know there's also the fact that I've got a lot of fans you know I've um I'm a bit of a polarizing character I guess you know I'm I'm at the quite aggressively saying what I say and telling it like it is and pissing a lot of people off but that is something that appeals to a lot of people who know that if nobody is has the guts to piss people off then things don't happen as rapidly as

they could and so you know I I I I'm not short of of you know people who um confirm my high opinion of myself right and one thought that came to my mind you're not really doing the controversy on on purpose I would guess or you don't mention stuff that is innocent Dairy like a lot of people that we see like always front front page do nowadays it's just that you did the research and you just communicate what you found I don't think you're the type to to kind of try to frustrate people which is um something that needs to be mentioned here for folks that do not know about you um my next question is related to age obviously and uh in your case like how let me stop and respond to what you

just said because it was an important point that I I didn't get to um I mostly the things that I'm controversial for is not what research I've done or overseen and the way I talk about it rather it's how I predict what's going to happen in the future in particularly how soon it's going to happen that's what a lot of my colleagues run away very fast from

uh because you know there's a very strong entrenched culture in science to avoid over-promising and under delivering and I believe that in basic science where your goal is to understand nature that's fine but we're not doing basic science we're doing medical research our work is humanitarian we are in the in the business of saving lives and alleviating suffering and to me that means that it is absolutely

essential to take risks whether you know to take the risk of being wrong in order to help people to understand that what we're talking about actually is real you know real technical pioneering technology that has a good chance of coming to fruition in the foreseeable future right and this is quite rare in the scientific Community you have that CEO Nest to you that founderness of you you

not like super business oriented but like 20 most then then most uh signed scientists out there and risk taking is is like part of that that's the DNA and I believe that if you try to make some predictions at least and I mean scientists do it all the time with hypothesis but on on the level you're doing I think you get better at it uh because you can quantify if you're right or wrong how many percent of the time and so forth um so I believe it's it's a bold step it's an essential step also for design so thank you for doing that regarding my last question how old do you think you're gonna live and do you think you're gonna live old enough to see singularity well um that depends on two things right

it depends on how long I live and it depends on how soon The Singularity happens but I don't really think about the singularity very much I mean the technological singularity it was defined decades ago um you know a lot of people still take the view that it won't happen at all that the idea of a point at which um machine intelligence becomes autonomous enough to um to

essentially direct its own self-improvement you know that now a lot of people say that's just not going to happen that there's just like there are inherent limitations on based on how much information the intelligence has I'm I have an open mind it's not something I feel where I can remotely call myself an expert on so we'll see however if we ask the other question how long do

I think I'm going to live then actually you know it's something I just don't think about even though I am an expert in that area and the reason I don't think about it is because it doesn't bother me what bothers me is anyway what gets me out of bed in the morning is the humanitarian imperative of this the fact that every day that I succeed in bringing

forward the defeat of aging and I'm hoping that I'm doing that about once a month um you know every single day I save 110 000 lives which is how many people die of Aging every day right worldwide you know it's very easy to get out of bed for that you just want to show one dot um and I was with the AI letter calling for buzz on AI and I was a bit drastic on that I wrote on my Twitter that sure you can go ahead and kill 20 million people because that was the math of 110 K people dying per day something around these lines what what is your your stance on that AI so I saw the letter and of course I've seen a lot of stuff around it um you know I

I was friends with Elias yodkowsky 20 years ago and he obviously takes an even more extreme stance he says we shouldn't just have a six month moratorium we should just stop this whole thing completely other people are saying the exact opposite they're saying you know the safest thing to do is to go full speed ahead and have as much you know diversity of developments as possible honestly

you know as I say I'm not I can't remotely consider myself entitled to have an opinion on this there are people who thought very smart people who've thought about a lot more than I have and who know a lot more than I do about where the technology currently is as well as where it's likely to go you know it's like those people having an opinion about how

rapidly we're going to defeat aging I wouldn't I wouldn't pay any attention to their opinions because they just don't know as much as I do um so you know I mean I I I I I think you know it's not something I ought to have an opinion about right last question if people want to have you as an advisor or a co-founder what does it does it take and do you do these types of deals like we've seen David Sinclair um start his own supplement which I thought was quite interesting do you do any of these types of deals no so yeah David and I are good friends and we're very similar in some ways we're both very you know courageous and they're kind of classic and so on but we are chalk and cheat

in other ways one of those ways certainly is that he's very entrepreneurial and I don't have an entrepreneurial burning my body so no I don't co-found things I don't invest in things I don't do any of that I do however advise everybody um you know for free I I I I I choose to you know pay my bills in other ways because um if I take compensation of any kind from a group that I advise then that creates a conflict of interest situation it diminishes the extent to which I can invite other people I mean obviously I'm not talking about confidentiality here obviously there's still that but it's very different from conflict of interest uh so no I maximize my ability to help by doing all my advising for free thank you for your service

Aubrey where can people find out more about you about Lev and how can people help the Aging cause well so of course we have a website Lev foundation levf.org and I'm sure you'll put that in the show notes um I I might I only have one email address I don't do that thing of having you know a public one a private one only looking at the private one um so Aubry avf.org you can find me there you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter and everything like that um I you know I I have for many many years taking the policy of being very much a man of the people and being very approachable and it seems to have worked in terms of my ability to um you know to to create a community and

to help the growth of this community so yeah I'm easy to get to