[0:00]So I guess the place also to to go next is talking about disease generally and what disease is. So are these diseases a function of aging? Does this idea of reversing aging even matter if cancer's going to take most of us out anyway at some point? Is there a link between aging and disease? This might be the most important point that I make today. When you reverse aging, diseases of aging go away or are cured. And in our, in my lab, including many types of cancer as well. The diseases that we try to treat individually with different medicines today that we think are unrelated, Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, you name them. Fundamentally, what's driving a lot of those diseases is aging. If you never got old, would you ever get Alzheimer's even if you had the genes that predispose you? No. Right? And so what we see in my lab is when we give an animal a disease, and we can do that, we can put in the human genes for Alzheimer's into a mouse, it becomes, has dementia. When we reverse the age of the brain of that animal, we're not treating the disease. We're treating aging. The disease goes away. The body can heal itself when it's young. So it's the aging process that reveals the disease that can be cured by reversing. Why does the aging process reveal a disease? Why don't we get Alzheimer's at 15? Because the cells are so healthy, they can fix themselves. They can renew themselves. The disease processes that cause these problems for us don't exist when we're young. Why is it that a teenager rarely has a heart attack? Because their body prevents them. Why do young people typically not get cancer? Because the immune system finds cancer cells and clears them out. You and I have cancer cells in our body right now. Why are we probably not going to die in the next year? Because our immune system will find them and kill them. But as we get older, we're going to lose that ability and we'll have a greater chance of having cancer. So are you saying that if we cure aging, we're probably going to by way of that cure most of these diseases? 100%. You were talking about, um, menopause quite a lot on this podcast. And fertility, menopause, women's ovaries as, um, one of the first places that ages. And I've heard you explain that you think that evolution programmed women to stop having children during menopause because continuing reproduction would drain energy needed to raise existing children. So is infertility something that could theoretically be prevented? In mice, which is where we live in my lab, where we work, it can be prevented and it can be reversed. I thought we ran out of eggs. That's like the... That's the current theory. The evidence that we have from my lab and a lab that I worked with in Australia, caused me to question that idea that we run that that women run out of eggs. We have published and repeated many times that if you treat old female mice, 16 months of age, which is like a 65, 70 year old human that has long time since given up having offspring. We can treat the ovaries with a chemical that rejuvenates the eggs that are in the ovary, maybe even produces new ones, we don't know for sure. But those 16 month old mice that stopped having kids a a probably at least six months ago, now start producing healthy offspring again. Their eggs look young, pristine, compared to the terrible eggs that if you try harvest some eggs from a mouse that old, it's hard to find any that look normal. Their chromosomes are messed up, ripped apart. They're not going to produce healthy babies. But we can take those eggs or at least the ovaries with those eggs in them and cause them to be young again and make fresh eggs that can produce healthy offspring that live a normal lifespan. The real question is, will this work in women? And that's something that I'm keen on testing. It must be really hard to test a lot of these things in people, right? Because we you've mentioned the word mice quite a lot. It's harder than you can imagine actually, um, and I've spent a lot of my career since I was 35, um, aiming to develop a medicine to treat diseases and aging. And it can be it's it's there's money, there's business, there's laws, there's politics, there's business strategies, there's change of leaderships. Um, all sorts of human introduced variables that can get in the way. There's patents, and uh, and then there's there's competition and spite that also gets into it. Um, and I've had to deal with all of those things, um, including competing against some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world who really didn't want me to succeed. But yeah, it's extremely difficult to make a drug. But I do want to remind you, and everyone listening and watching, that we're beyond mice now for age reversal. We've done this in monkeys. Monkeys that are physically and almost genetically identical to us. So it's not a big leap from, it is a pretty big leap from mouse to human, but from a monkey to a human. It's we're essentially, you know, slightly smarter monkeys. I just had a thought about how other countries, other nations might be conducting their own sort of secret research, and they might not have the same bureaucratic, political, ethical considerations that you have to contend with. Do you think about this much, that some of the sort of your political adversaries might be doing secret testing in some research lab somewhere on humans? I think about it, um, and in fact, the United States government thinks about it too. A large investment into, uh, the company, one of the companies that I, uh, sit on the board of, was blocked because the US government claimed that the technology was too dangerous to be in the hands of foreign companies and governments.
[6:31]Which technology? The ability to reverse aging. So the US government blocked that technology because they were scared that it might fall into the wrong hands? Well, they blocked the, the very large, the investment over $100 million into the company from a foreigner because they would have more access to the information and the progress. Is it China? Um, I won't say more. It's sensitive. Most I can say is that governments are watching this technology very closely, not just the US, but around the world. Because the winner will make not not just a lot of economic benefit, but there there will be potential for radical change in the pharmaceutical industry, in health care. Um, the amount of change socially will be dramatic as well. But there are also uses that the government has identified, uh, so-called super soldier potential. Now, I I don't agree that that's a reason to slow down the research. Others claim that it was worth it. But I do believe that the technology is very powerful, and we should start to get ready for when this comes to society, because it's not an if as I said, it's a when. The technology to do what? To rejuvenate the human body. Why do we need to get ready? Well, because it'll be massive social change. If you can choose how old you want to be, and people don't die is at 80 anymore. Let's say they they can live to 120 or beyond. There's big changes. There's social security issues. There's employment. Though I will say that the the disaster scenario that often comes to mind when I talk about this, and which I covered in in the last part of my book, Lifespan, it's actually economically hugely advantageous to slow aging and prevent diseases. A lot of the US economy and most advanced economies goes to healthcare. And chronic disease, a lot of people are sick for five to 10 years. That's where most of people's savings and retirement and government money goes in. The most expensive years of your life are the last two years. If you can delay that, it's going to have massively positive economic benefits to a nation that adopts these medicines. I've got a question for you that actually came to mind yesterday when I was, I watched some, I don't know, some video on social media and they asked a question to a guy. Um, David, if you were a billionaire now, at age 56, would you give it all up to be my age again, 33? Um, I don't think you can put a price on being young. Another way of of putting it, I've I've seen this on social media, would you for a billion dollars, would you swap with Warren Buffett? No, absolutely not. Right. So there's no money in the world that you want to be old, right? Uh, it's not worth it. In other words, youth is more valuable than a billion dollars. It may be the most valuable thing you could ever have is your youth. It is it's such an an an interesting and illuminating analogy or metaphor or whatever, because suddenly you do realize that how much we value it. We value it more than anything. I would rather be 33 years old than be a 43 year old billionaire. Even the 10 years, I value as a billion dollars. Yeah, one year maybe, but not 10 years, right? 10 years is super. I I totally agree with you. Um, and the older you get, the more valuable it becomes. It's important to realize the a massive impact that this technology can have, not just economically, but on individual lives of human beings across the planet. The world, when this becomes a reality, again, I'm speaking like it's a certainty, because I'm pretty convinced it's going to happen. The that world is going to be so different from the world we live in, it's going to be as different as the pre-computer world and the pre-aeroplane world, as today is. I'm trying to imagine the world where we could pick our age. And maybe even, you know, you talked about earlier, being able to continue to reset to that age. I'm trying to imagine what the world would be like if I could be 33 forever. Or if you could be, you know, 33 forever. Or even for another 100 years or something. Yeah. I could stay 33 for 100 years. Do you think that's the plausible outcome, which is we can kind of pick an age and stay there for 100 years, like at that particular age, or is it just that I'm going to be 150 in my physical form? I'm going to be wrinkled and grey, but I'm just going to continue to live. Is it looking young, or is it just living longer? It's actually, it's both. It's it's the good news is, it's both. And we're doing a lot of work in my lab on skin and hair. Uh, hair loss, hair graying. Yeah, please help me like if I go. You don't have to worry just yet. Um, you know, we'll we'll help your brother first. Oh, no. Come on. Yeah, we will. Tell him to call me. Um, so we we've seen that we can rejuvenate the skin of, again, mice, but still, we also grow human skin in the lab from scratch. And we can put that human skin on mice, and the mice have human skin. So we can now test age reversal in that system. I'm very optimistic that we'll be able to rejuvenate, uh, the, the external part of the body as well as the internal. If we can cure blindness, reversing the age of the skin is is a piece of cake. What what does that world look like? I'm trying to understand all of the sort of unintended consequences of such a world where we're all kind of young and we all live longer. Is there problems of meaning and purpose? Is there What are the unintended consequences? I've thought a lot about this. There's this gut feeling that a lot of people have, maybe you're feeling it now, is that if I'm not worried about death, I'm not going to strive as hard, or I'm not going to have as much meaning. I'm not going to have agency. I totally reject that view. I believe that every moment is special. I don't believe I would be enjoying this conversation with you anymore if I could live 200 years. I'm loving the moment, right? And so I I believe that we get up with purpose, and that if I lived for a thousand years, I'd still enjoy every day that I lived. And even 1,000 years, one day maybe seen as too short. You know, it's 20 times my age. A little bit less than 20. That's still not very much in the grand scheme of, you know, the the age of uh geology and the Earth. We still around like that. Uh, and so I think that we will still love life. Most of us will still love life and enjoy every moment. But we'll get more opportunities. We can try multiple careers. Maybe we we we will get divorced and find have a whole new life. So there will be opportunities, and it will be a a magnificent world. Not to mention the productivity that humans can provide with the the knowledge of a 58 or 80 year old but with the body of a 30 year old. Do you think people will make different decisions about having children? Well, I think we have a problem already with the decisions that a lot of couples are making, which is leaving it too late. Um, it's very clear with the fertility rate and the rate of childbirth that we're basically we're going off a cliff. And I I think that it's going to be important to be able to give couples and women, especially the choice to have children for longer. And that's one of the reasons that I work on this topic is that I think that the world with all of the the training that we need to do and the pressures on finding a mate and being happily married or or at least being partnered up, that can take decades to get the right person. You don't want to rush into it like people used to. And being able to have children in your 50s and 60s, I think, would be a great gift to humanity. That's my personal view. Some people may, you know, for whatever reason, disagree with that, but I think that the pressures to have children before 35, typically, are just extreme and and unfair. But also that it'll help us maintain the human population, because by 2050, we're going to start going in a bad decline and earlier in many Western countries. And without humans, you know, absent Android robots everywhere, we're going to have a deficiency of human capital and human productivity. And this is I would argue with Elon that this is the best solution to that, uh, lack of humans, is just keep people healthy and alive and productive for longer. Oh, what's on your face? This is my Bond Charge face mask. I've been wearing this for some time now. They're a sponsor of the podcast. They put this on for 15, 20 minutes a day. 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I promise you, you don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. You mentioned uh, cancer earlier on is something that you're working on in your laboratory. What progress have you made in your laboratory and what has that taught you about what the nature of cancer, but also how we might prevent and cure it someday, because I, I was reading that in your laboratory you have been able to slow the growth of certain cancer cells and kill those cancer cells completely. Yeah, uh, so my my wonderful student Nala, uh, is a is a doing a PhD on this. And what we've hypothesized and now tested is the idea, again, based on the information theory of aging, is that cancer is expressing those genes differently. In the same way that aging is a cellular identity crisis, cancer is a cellular identity crisis. And that if we can rejuvenate an old cell to be normal and turn on the right genes again, we should be able to do that for a cancer cell. And either make it normal, or if it tries to be normal and wakes up from its zombie-like state, it might even kill itself. And that's what we're finding in my lab. Nala's work has shown that a majority of cancers that we've grown in the lab will die and shrink in an animal if you try to reverse their age. Through the injection that you were referring to earlier on. Yeah, we can do it a couple of ways. One is using those three genes that rejuvenate the epigenome and make cells young again, the one for the eye. The same technology for the eye we're using in cancer cells, but we also have this chemical drink that we can give to animals or to put on the cells, and that also wakes the cancer cells up, tries to they try to become more normal. They turn on the original set of genes that they might have had on 30, 40 years ago. Some of these cancer cells that we grow in the lab were from the 20th century. We rejuvenate them, we turn on those those genes that were originally in the normal tissue, and the cells kill themselves. And so I believe that we may not be able to cure all cancer using this, that would be crazy to even say that. But I do believe that if we're successful rejuvenating the human body, cancer is not going to be a risk. And that's just a nice side effect of what our original mission was, which was to treat aging. So from this we can start to try and understand what we think is causing cancer. And I guess this goes back to the a lot of the carcinogenic behavior that you described earlier, things like smoking, anything that's applying stress on the DNA, is that like a Yeah, you have to break the DNA. Um, that's the a catastrophe is really broken DNA, but you can do other things that catastrophes like overheat the cells, um, even mechanical stress. Too many hits on the brain in football will will do that. So yes, uh, that's exactly right, and that drives aging, and aging drives cancer, by the way. One of my theories called the Genesis hypothesis, terrible name, but nevertheless, Genesis that it is. It's the idea that as we age, we're becoming more cancer-like as as a as a human. Our metabolism when we're old is closer to heading towards what a cancer cell's metabolism is like. So that when we actually do get cancer, the cancer cells grow better in an old person than when you're young. And so by rejuvenating those cancer cells, giving them the the ability to be young again, they actually either slow down in their growth or as I said, kill themselves in response.
