Aubrey De Grey: Accelerating the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV), mouse Trials, Yamanaka Factor -148 – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHvoPlcWwg4
Episode summary
The video features Aubrey De Grey, a scientist working on developing medical innovations that can postpone age-related illnesses. The interview discusses the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation and their work on mouse studies, Yamanaka factors, and more. The video also talks about the challenges faced by scientists working on anti-aging medicine and how these challenges have been overcome over the years through increased funding and investor interest. The video also covers De Grey’s prediction that within 15 years, there is a 50% chance that we would be out of the “death spiral” of longevity.
Transcription of episode with timestamps
Transcript:
(00:00) welcome and happy New Year longevity and Aubrey gray Aubrey gray works on developing medical innovations that can postpone age-related illnesses focusing on Rejuvenation or repair of molecular and cellular damage co-author and author of several books co-founder and founder of several organizations and nonprofits such as sends now focusing on the Lev foundation in this episode we do a deep dive on the left Foundation what they’re working on the mouse studies and more yamanaka factors you name it we get into
(00:28) it if you like this type of content Please Subscribe and like because every bit helps and we will be putting out new episodes two to three times a week and at 10 000 new subscribers we will be doing a monthly live stream and other really cool things that I have planned as well so let’s stay curious learn about obado gray and the present and future of longevity in this episode of the learn of lull show I wish to talk with Mark hamillin who uh I believe you know uh for our episode that just went live today and I was like oh I’m gonna
(00:53) be talking Aubry today so uh he uh funny enough had a good question I thought I’d be the first one to go with he asked um uh I’m just gonna quote it directly because that seems a little uh easier why we still don’t have any therapies based on his ideas published 20 years ago in his breakout paper an engineer’s approach to anti-aging medicine and what could be done to accelerate the progress you know what were the bottlenecks that type of thing so I um as Mark of course knows um progress has been pretty good but the
(01:24) fact is really difficult technological uh challenges usually take a long time to come to fruition now over most of that period are we going to say over the first 15 of those 20 years uh the main problem was money the the science was very much held back by budgetary constraints I would say for the first decade um and for the for the 2000s probably by a factor of maybe three you know it was really really being held back I was doing my absolute level best to bring money in and so were other people of course but it would only very inadequate
(02:03) but it was a little better than nothing which means progress was made um and of course progress was made by other people as well not necessarily for the purpose of um postponing aging but rather in regenerative medicine and other medical approaches generally and long short of it it’s that eventually it kind of added up to a sufficient critical mass that first of all academics started becoming a good deal more positive about this whole damage repair approach than they had been initially and then around the same time very shortly afterwards
(02:39) one or two and then a few more and then a few more of the more courageous um early stage investors Angel Investors you know I’ve seen investors were decided to come out of the woodwork and think to themselves you know some of this looks like it might be close enough to fruition to actually make some money um so we started getting interest from such people and the thing about Investors is they tend to write bigger checks than donors do so um we Embrace this very much we ran with it and so my Foundation spun out in the
(03:10) end about half a dozen companies um but basically the projects had been gestated within the foundation purely funded philanthropically for however long it was taking and we spend them out as uh startups and it was very very effective um and of course things have moved on at an accelerating Pace over the past few years with more and more investors getting involved in writing bigger and bigger checks and companies like Altos coming along and um and you know retro and new limits and other people but companies that are
(03:44) really quite big including ones that are run by real long-term Crusaders in the field so a good examples there would be in silica medicine and also bio age big companies now um and so yeah I mean honestly you know it’s a very hard challenge so the short answer to the question is you know I’m not complaining about how fast it’s gone yeah we’ve we’ve gone as fast as I I think it would have been reasonable to expect but also I think that at this point we can really have pretty good confidence
(04:16) that we’re getting close awesome I think um a quick follow-up to that is uh one of our listeners acute everyone and it got like there’s so many there’s probably my number one response like oh you’re talking here’s a bunch of questions but uh one person there’s a couple of them they were asking that you made this prediction that within like 15 years you were like 50 uh chance that we would uh be out of the death spiral that is longevity how do you see how do you see where we are today and
(04:43) how do you see love fitting into accelerating that timeline so yeah 15 years is my current prediction I didn’t go as low as 15 years until a year or two ago um uh but yeah 20 years ago I was saying 25 years which means that we’ve only gone half as fast as I would have liked however the good news is if you divide those 20 years into two parts then for very much the reasons I was giving a moment ago the financial constraints there was a lot of slippage in the first 10 years and there’s been almost no slippage in the next 10 in the
(05:16) last ten so um I I’m feeling pretty good about my predictions now and it’s not just the longevity escape velocity Milestone um I’ve also for a long time been talking about this other milestone in laboratory work which is for mice you know talking this thing called robust Mouse rejuvenation which is not defined as you know living long enough to live forever because that’s much harder in a short-lived organism than it Aid in a long-lived organism like humans in fact I very much doubt that we’ll ever reach longevity
(05:48) escape velocity for mice um but so it’s I set the numbers in terms of how much postponement of Aging we would need starting in middle age um so as to be like enough to impress my colleagues in Academia you know because that’s really what matters at the end of the day the public don’t listen to me they listen to Oprah Winfrey and her ilk and she got where she is today by keeping a finger on the pulse and getting a good sense of the expert consensus in a particular area so of course I’m just one person if the
(06:27) bulk of my more vocal colleagues you know people like Davidson Clarence George church and and nobody has a lion Brad Kennedy and so on if they were coming out and saying the same thing as me basically maybe not requires optimistically but saying at least you know yes we’re in Striking Distance then it’s going to change the whole um structure of um how this is on how we go about this this thing overnight it’s going to become a proper war on Aging uh you know with with really really big government money and you know everyone
(07:03) being focused on it same as um you know saying the real war really um and uh so that’s what I want to bring about and that again like the time frame has slept of course I originally I said 10 years and it’s obviously more than 10 years already um but now I think it’s only three or four years and a large part of why I think that is because a lot of the components are in place we’ve got a lot of therapies that have been applied to mice in middle age and individually have postponed aging a bit and so our Flagship project at my new
(07:39) Foundation elliev Foundation is to put a bunch of those things together and you know that’s why three weeks ago I bought a thousand mice and um uh in a month and a half or so we’ll be starting the experiment for uh um four different interventions diverse different types of damage repair um in various combinations and of course we shall see what happens and this will be the first round of a rolling research program in which we you know take another 30 minutes into a bunch of different things to them and so on until
(08:10) we get there but we are pretty hopeful our mesh will be 18 months old when we start treating them and these will be a nice strain of mice that would normally live about another year you’re in a bit after that um we want to extend that by a further year and I’m optimistic yeah it sounds really exciting and um I don’t know if you’re a fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide of the Galaxy but I’ve uh I always felt that with all the research we’re doing on mice that they’re like slowly becoming our
(08:37) overlords and stuff like that but um I was curious of the interventions that you’re doing on mice could you talk more about the the different strategies that are going to be the different therapies and they’re going to be um trying out with them certainly but yes um you know I grew up in the UK in the 70s and 50s I um I went to Cambridge same as Douglas Adams I um I’m a very big fan of the HX Guide to the Galaxy um uh yeah so um well uh so I can only go into rather superficial um uh description of this at the moment
(09:07) because we are still um finalizing some of the details um but rolling speaking is going to be thought therapies that we’re going to be looking at and as I say all of them will be applied starting at 18 months of age one of them is the um gold standard at this point in terms of slowing aging down rather than damage repair so this is a kind of control really and that’s rapamycin which has been used in a number of studies now um and definitely has um you know very reproducible positive effects even if you start late in life
(09:40) then the second one is the stem cell therapy um here we’re going to be using blood stem cells uh which again you know have um Stone if you take young if you if you basically uh replace some of the young and some of the blood stem cells in the old mice with young ones then they live longer then the telomerase which has been used in a few studies over the years especially around the high profile recent one led by Lewis parish and George Church um in which telomerase were supplied and um caused a good life extension effect
(10:15) and the last one will be a symmetic and that’s actually the um one where we’re still in the final stage of deciding which analytics is but basically a drug that or an intervention that selectively curls senescent cells and again you know we’ve had some lifespan lifespan data there so we believe that given we’re taking four things all of which individually can um extend last time nice a little bit even if you started middle age then put them together we’ve got a good chance of getting something of course
(10:49) we’ve got different groups with different subsets of these four interventions we’ve got one group that gets nothing one group that gets all four and eight other groups that get various combinations so um uh yeah we’re quite excited all right sounds very exciting to um say a little bit more about the study so we were measuring longevity that’ll be the the yeah the the the main readout but of course we also very much want to know about function we want to know about health span so we’ll be doing all the
(11:19) standard measures there’ll be some measures that we’re doing which involve killing a small number of the mice at various time points to um see how they were getting on you know in various ways and there’s some other uh measures that are to do with you know behavioral stuff or whatever that um that are not invasive don’t require killing mice so we’ve got a whole panel of those that we’ll be doing at the same time and my current intention is that we’re going to be putting everything out on the web
(11:41) like updated every week you know telling everybody how things are going because we’re not constrained in the same way that most researchers are either in Academia where they have to have you know terrible secrecy in order to be able to publish before anyone else does alternatively in an industry where they need secrecy for you know IP reasons we don’t have those problems it makes sense and um I would there’s a great author Brandon Sanderson which you may enjoy if you like uh um Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy it’s
(12:12) uh but on his website he has like a percentage bar and stuff like he’s like the most odd guy I’ll send you his stuff because like how he updates the his audience is just I don’t know anyone who does it as well as him and it sounds like you’re gonna do very similar things to that the uh for for the mice and for Rejuvenation that was talked about on your website was there any plans or thought into using yamanaka factors or anything or how do you see if there if it’s not now like do you see something
(12:35) like that happening in the future sure so yes password reprogramming is undoubtedly one of the most exciting areas in Rejuvenation right now and of course vast amounts of money are going into um uh taking it forward and um you know I had some reservations about during partial reprogramming using Yemen archifact that I don’t really believe that there is sufficiently persuasive evidence yet to say that in humans anyway it will be safe I believe that the cancer risk is real and that’s why I’m very interested
(13:10) in other approaches to doing partial reprogramming that have been um uh conceived by especially by Mike West at I at age X um but uh yes um yeah battery programming in one form or another is quite likely to be one of the interventions that we test in the second round of of a thousand mice that we will plan to um start doing things too in probably um at the third or fourth quarter of 2023.
(13:41) um we’ve got other things on our list of course um neutral blood exchange which I’m I guess a lot of people will have heard of where um the plasma is um partially removed from a mass and replaced but with basically a saline that has um albumin in it you know this has have shown quite interesting results uh in terms of Rejuvenation we may want to continue reflecting ourselves for things that have shown actual lifespan results but we don’t know for sure that’s what we’re going to do so there’s
(14:15) a lot of planning going going going on at the moment yeah I was um oh God no not that okay um I was curious uh what so I was reading through your website I was doing as much as I can to read it so it was a great interview because there’s so much we can color in in terms of the the drawing here but I I saw a lot of Partnerships happening I saw a thing I’m hearing you know you’re doing stuff in-house how how is Lev situated is it gonna like how do you see it as a as a structure like what’s what what is it
(14:45) the unique stuff that you’re gonna do in-house what are you going to partner with like how do you how are you gonna set it up so you can do the Maximum Impact so first of all initially we’re actually not going to have a central facility of our own we’re going to do everything extramurally in one way or another so the work I’ve been talking about so far will be done in Syracuse update in New York um at the headquarters of one of our well yeah unequivocally our most successful spin-out company from Central
(15:14) Research Foundation I call uh they do a lot of different things now but one of their divisions is uh the contract research organization doing this kind of study they are the go-to people in the world for this and they have been for a little while now very very well respected they really know what they’re doing so um we’re delighted that we’ve been able to partner with them on that project then we’re also doing a couple of projects related to cry preservation and cryonics of whether organs are of brains
(15:42) or whatever um uh those are going to for-profit companies but um led by people who used to work for me um and uh so you know very excited to be pushing that forward I believe that cryonics research is something that is still tragically and scandalously neglected and of course the people that it can potentially save the life that completely save are mostly people who won’t live a long long enough to benefit from the Rejuvenation therapies that we’re also working on so you know it’s not as if one is more important than the
(16:17) other makes sense and um I guess we kind of dived our neighbor I just want to give people a quick Snapchat what is Lev’s thesis compared to the other thesis out there in terms of like damage repair obviously we’re like we’re in a number of different angles so I’m just um you seem like I I mean you like reading your Wikipedia yeah and you’ve got like mathematics you got so much you’re up into so the best way to answer the question that is to go back 20 years 22 years um back then you know people knew that I
(16:47) think was bad for you but they’d more or less given up on figuring out how to do anything about it it was a bit you know gerontologists were a bit like seismologists you know they like they don’t have any actual aspiration to stop earthquakes from happening so um um basically this was because everyone had decided that the only way we would ever be able to postpone the health problems of late life would be to make the body run more cleanly in other words damage itself more slowly than it naturally does those are the consequence of its
(17:17) normal operation and they basically figured out well the body’s just too complicated and the um you know the creation of this damage that’s eventually pathogenic is just so inextricably intertwined with the things the body needs to do to Keep Us Alive that you know it’s basically a non-starter it had become pretty much entirely like unacceptable even to mention intervention and actually doing anything about aging in a Grant application for example so my big idea my big Eureka moment was to realize that actually damage repair
(17:50) maybe easier than damage retardation so to speak and um that you know that’s obviously it took about a decade to become a mainstream concept but it definitely has been mainstream over the past 10 years um however what it leads to is this concept that I called Longevity escape velocity Lev which is simply that if you’re actually turning back biological time you’re actually repairing damage and making someone biologically younger then you can do it repeatedly you can do it as often as you like and in
(18:25) particular uh you don’t have to do it perfectly from the beginning but it’ll be as if you did in other words if you have damage repair therapies that are fairly good right and you um you apply them and you maybe get 20 years of extra life then great but then you know however often you apply those therapies that repair let’s call it the easy damage right um if they don’t repair the difficult damage the difficult damage on its own is going to be able to kill you um so we have to improve the therapy but
(19:01) we’ve got those 20 years in which to improve the therapy we’ve bought ourselves that time so the idea then is that we will be able to re-rejuvenate the same people 20 years later with you know damage repair 2.0 and so on and so the um definition I gave that I called Longevity escape velocity with simply it’s the minimum rate at which scientists will need to be improving these therapies over time in order that people who are receiving the most recent therapy at any given time will stay one step ahead of the problem
(19:32) and we’ll not get biologically older as they’re getting chronologically older and that’s the thing that I believe we are now with 50 probability only about 15 years away from achieving and it’s also the name of the new Foundation because basically um you know the concept of Rejuvenation has very much become mainstream that’s what my journal was named after starting in 2004 you know that’s been the focus and you know that’s kind of sold now but still most mainstream people run away very fast
(20:08) when you talk about longevity escape velocity even though to my mind it’s uh inescapable um corollary of being able to do significant damage repair I have um it’s something I’ve I I agree and I think it’s something that makes a lot of sense because yep we have all these horrible illnesses like Alzheimer’s but with the right interventions it’s like we won’t care the illness but we’ll just keep staving it off like we’ll repair it enough and we’ll just keep like kind of rolling the
(20:35) ball and eventually we’ll get to the point where we’ll carry the illness but I see like what you’re saying like just keep rejuvenating um there’s a great book series I think it’s called um the Commonwealth Series where they just like get into these states where they get like a machine like they slowly like rejuvenate the different cells so they’re like functionally Immortal even though like technically they have to do something every like 20 or so years so I think that makes a lot of sense and I know
(20:56) having a big Vision it helps align people with you and what you’re doing if you say like oh our goal is to make it two percent better over the next five years like I don’t know it doesn’t catch the headlines but I think what you’re saying is like really exciting for a lot of people um but at the same time you’re going through all this like turmoil like when you’re younger um you know 20 years ago you can’t even put up a grad application without people being you know like oh you know not
(21:18) giving you funding and which you know it’s your whole future how do you how did you survive that frustration and I imagine like it’s still going on now a little bit it’s been getting easier over time but like how do you just personally weather that it’s always easier to get money for something that is already mainstream that basically a lot of people already think it’s sensible and I don’t do that I’m you know very much the I focus on being the tip of the spare and and being the heretic who opens doors that other
(21:49) people can then walk through so you’re quite right that fundraising has always been a real challenge uh for the stuff that I want to do and um for now uh you know that’s still true the um LED Foundation has stayed up with a significant Corpus that allowed us to get these projects up and running uh you know right at the beginning but we definitely need to raise more money going forward I mean um you know I guess since it’s the end of the year this is something that should specifically be saying because everyone’s thinking about
(22:21) you know attacks and so on um absolutely you know we have a nice big friendly donate page we have um you know anyone can anyone can send us send us money and every every dollar helps um we’ve got very big plans and those plans are definitely limited by resources uh but yeah in terms of whether it’s got easier I mean it’s got easier for the film as a whole because more more and more of the field has become generally in streamed and you know accepted but they haven’t got easier for me and the reason it hasn’t is my own choice to
(22:54) continue to be at the Spirit is it um is there anything that I encourage you to do that you know like there’s so many different you know like sometimes people pick the user path you know like that’s a it’s a conscious effort to keep doing the hard thing for the benefit of everybody yes um I I guess I’m just that kind of guy you know but I I you know I I I guess inherently I feel I want to make a difference to the world and the way you make a difference by doing stuff that other people are not doing
(23:23) and secondly um you know I seem to have a thick skin you know I’m you know so on uh but also obviously I’ve been quite successful in doing this and you know the more one succeeds in doing what one wants to do the more encouraged one is to carry on doing it makes sense um an idea I’ve been wondering about especially with non-profits is the like the scalability the sustainability of what they’re doing when you have to keep going out and asking for things and um so I’ve wondered is it possible to do like an
(23:54) open source licensing where you develop technology you open source it to a great extent so it’s easier for other people to build off of it and then you just license it kind of like what the vist does or what other uh research organizations do so that you have like somewhat of a like a a repeating funnel to make it easier for you to keep growing sure yeah so I mean this is more of a question about the whole ecosystem rather than about any individual organization and I completely think that it makes a lot of sense to have
(24:22) um you know A diversity of structures within the movement so as to be able to suit all tastes so to speak you know everyone’s constraints everyone’s preferences and that means people um who uh figuring out how to get promoted or how to get rich or whatever and also um focuses on you know what when someone’s already wealthy and they want to help you know what kind of um organizations they think they’d like to help some people who made their money in the private sector you know just don’t believe in philanthropy and they
(25:00) just think it’s you know in in an inefficient way to um to pursue technological progress and some some other people think that’s that they think the opposite so yeah I mean I think we’ve seen this we’ve seen like you know uh Dows uh uh uh distributed um organizations uh springing up in this space over the past couple of years we’ve seen uh a whole new granting structure a very um a very important entity uh was created a couple years ago named impetus which has completely Rewritten the idea of how decision make
(25:37) decisions are made in relation to Grant applications basically that the decisions are made almost instantaneously like over a period of a couple of weeks rather than like a year um and this is very very important if you want to stabilize and make sure that money goes to the right place you don’t want it sitting in the back um so uh yeah lots of different diverse diverse ways of doing things have come up and I think that’s really excellent um so uh I think it’s Picasso who said that a great artist steel or and some
(26:07) artists borrow a great artist steal or something like that and so I was wondering with other organizations you’ve been a part of and uh where are you at now what what have you taken from the past to implement it Lev what are you experimenting with just like structurally because there’s just so much to go on there’s so much to do uh and I’m always wondering like you know what are people taking as they go along in the life um well a lot of it is to be lean and mean and make sure that um potential donors like the look of you
(26:34) because you are not wasting their money on um overheads um a lot of it is to just you know be doing something inspiring you know a lot of the reason why I do so much media and I travel and so many talks is because that’s the way to get people to understand that this really is the world’s most important problem um a lot of these have the right team around you of course you know I’ve definitely learned a few things over the years about that and I um just Overjoyed the team I’ve got right now whether it’s the staff whether
(27:09) it’s the board of directors you know people who are as committed as I am to this mission it makes sense and um when you when you find Partners to work with like icore um what are the criteria you’re roughly looking for like how do you assess them there are so many things to look for when we’re looking for yeah it’s it’s really like I’m making the same kinds of decisions in dispersing money that’s been given to me in LED Foundation that the people who give the money to me are making it’s the question of you know
(27:39) skills trust all the usual things so I core you know they are Head and Shoulders ahead of everybody else in terms of the suitability for this in terms of all of the all of those boxes they take all of them right they’ve got the experience and The credibility and the staff and the um you know the expertise to do these things really well they’ve also got absolutely you know cast iron commitment to the longevity Mission you know they want they want to succeed they are their hearts are in the same place as ours
(28:13) makes sense um how would other people that are you know either in a research lab or out there building something how do they go about you know pitching themselves to be a part of uh Lev’s ecosystem so um I do a lot of work outside of Lev Foundation right I because I’ve been around a long time and I have the biggest Network and I’m the top Google hit you know people come to me all the time asking how uh you know asking for help of one sort of another advice and so on and of course I can give help and
(28:45) advice um Way Beyond what Adobe Foundation itself can do um uh not just because we have a certain only a certain limited budget but also because uh there are people who are just better suited you know for example people will come to me wanting to know how they personally can help and they may have an entrepreneurial background I may partner them with uh someone with an academic background who doesn’t know how to run a company to make a team that um is attractive to investors uh you know that’s just one example
(29:17) um and when um when any idea comes along of course I’m interested in getting feedback and so on I started to go there and uh you know again it’s like a lot of it is networking okay tell me how much of your time do you think is dedicated to just raising up the next generation of people making sure that there’s another crop of scientists ready to to hit these hard topics I feel very strongly that helping to educate the world on this is a huge part of my job my virtue of having become you know high profile
(29:51) person in this field and stayed there for a while I’ve been able to have a lot of influence and this applies not only to youngsters but certainly the other bloody youngsters um uh it also applies you know to people with their own skill sets wondering you know maybe they’ve been successful in their chosen area and they’re looking for a new challenge um you know so and of course the general public you know getting people out of what I’ve often called the pro-aging trance the um you know tendency to make
(30:19) excuses for aging and and convinced oneself that it’s a blessing in disguise we need a lot less of that and so I go about um ridiculing that quite a lot is there um so one one person who wrote in was asking if you guys are going to do something like a summer internship program I suspect based on how they ask the question that they’re in college is that something that you guys do or will be willing to do it sounds pretty safe Foundation we have a certain a summer internship program which started quite a
(30:46) long time ago in which I was able to expand a couple of years ago by essentially relocating my director of Education Greg chin to the buck Institute uh where he’s been able to pay a bit of money for him to be able to grow that thing um so there’s a yeah very thriving internship program at the bar can also still a new one well not well the same one but run by a new person that sends Research Foundation uh elliev Foundation we currently aren’t doing that we don’t really have the resources but I did seed
(31:18) fund something that with a kind of a branching out from there another kind of education thing which started out in its first instantiation as a retreat a three-day Retreat it was called less death happened over the summer and it was just the most blowout success you’ve got 50 people that came along and got taught a bunch and got connected with each other and generally got integrated into the community um Mark hamillin who uh um ran with that when he and I um inspired it uh he uh is taking it forward in an expanded manner
(31:53) this year probably going to be four of these and this and from now on it’s going to be uh joining the hip so it’s big with a fellowship program which is kind of online education course so yes absolutely we’re very interested in making this kind of thing happen whether it’s summer internships or you know lots of variations on that theme excellent um the and his episode just went live today it was actually uh it’s really cool to hear all the the Democrat uh democratizing of Education like we have
(32:25) the internet so it’s really cool that these uh type of resources exist um I have one uh writing question I’m just gonna quote it because I I still like a paraphrasing it apparently um is he is he you uh privy to any knowledge the general public is not in uh that’s where we’re really worth the question basically how would are you aware of any information that makes you feel like you should be bullish at Lev and bullish in this context basically means um it’s gonna go much much well uh much much better than
(32:55) um anyone outside would know about I mean you’re in it you’re putting a lot of time into it so I think that’s kind of like advice I I have always felt that the is no value in saying anything other than what I think about time frames about you know how well things are going and so on um so even though some people think I must be giving these time frames uh you know for show you know and I can’t possibly think that way it’s not true I I’m giving an accurate you know neither pessimistic nor optimistic
(33:25) um rendition of what conclusions I have come to by looking at all of the research that has been done is being done needs to be done to get us to longer to escape velocity is AI impacting the roadmap at all for you in terms of how you plan artificial intelligence is undoubtedly playing a really big role in all of this um much of the role that it’s playing is not specific to longevity though um so I guess the most conspicuous example is Alpha sold the um program from deepmind that has essentially solved the very long-standing problem of
(34:03) how to determine a protein’s three-dimensional structure from its amino acid sequence um and of course this has enormous value across the whole of medical research not just in longevity but certainly longevity as well um then there are there’s other organizations using AI to um develop drugs and again you know this has utility Beyond longevity but some of these companies are very focused on longevity um I like I already mentioned in silica medicine definitely does this use very state-of-the-art AI technologies that
(34:35) the company in the UK that I’m very fond of called nuccido which does the same thing um there’s uh bio age which is uh now quite a large company in the Bay Area um has done its own drug development as well now but it started out uh basically focusing on AI That’s a little bunch of that so yeah it’s very very important area and that will that will only grow and broaden as AI progresses are you um I think the surprising thing when you learn more just take time to dig into someone is like when you learn
(35:07) about all the other things that they’re really good at and I was surprised uh I don’t know surprised like there’s no reason to be surprised by this but like the fact that you really are good and and love math and so are you are you like personally like keeping up with machine learning and that type of technology or yeah I know I I do Maths for a hobby I spend too much time on it but no it’s just Recreation and so it’s really got nothing to do with um I I don’t connect that with the artificial intelligence
(35:36) makes sense um yeah Matt’s fine it’s like one of the it’s like one of the rare areas where it’s like this the problem is in the like the solution the problem is usually in the problem somewhere if you just work it hard enough where like life is like there’s so many multi-variable things going on right um uh one of the one of the uh listeners was asking and this was uh my slated question for you as well um is there anything fundamental to the development of longevity about technology that would
(35:58) keep it um not being readily available for the average person so basically concerns like rich people are going to get it or not yeah very important question it’s absolutely clear to me 100 certain that these technologies that will keep people biologically on will be made available to absolutely everybody without any restriction on ability to pay just as long as those people are old enough to need the therapies um almost as soon as it’s available to anybody in other words have been developed and the reason I say that is
(36:30) not because I have some kind of utopian you know view that you know that governments will be humanitarian or anything um it’s not even really that there will be an electoral imperative you know that in other words it’ll be impossible to get reelected unless you um have a Manifesto commitment to do such a thing um no the main one is a purely mercenary economic argument at the moment when we don’t have these therapies aging is just unbelievably astronomically expensive the vast majority of the medical budgets
(37:00) of the um industrialized work goes on the health problems of late life so the idea is to prevent those problems and of course these therapies may very well be quite expensive to administer at the beginning though there will be as usual pressure on that to reduce it um but it will be far less expensive even then even at the beginning than the money saved by not letting people get sick in the first place and not having to keep them alive in the first state of health where they’re just sucking up um resource Financial Resources
(37:33) um so yes so I am completely certain that it will be in the economic you know mercenary interests of any government and this applies across the world it doesn’t even justify democracies right um to make sure that if that they do the front loading of Investments you know of infrastructure and training and medical personnel and so on I spent a lot of my time these days making sure that governments are starting to get to understand that to actually think that through um so they don’t get caught by surprise
(38:00) when the therapies come along but yeah I think it’s going to be all right so uh sweet I I think it’s um one thing I always like to think about is like if the billionaires wanted it they’d want a guinea pig the rest of us so it’s like it’s got to work for them to want to use it too though I think um Mark hamillin um said like the actual technology itself like it’s not expensive stuff it’s not like it’s like a some rare earth metal you know like it’s not like really expensive to develop
(38:25) after the development like the actual implementation of the technology which I think is really encouraging yeah we I mean we shall see it may be that initially some of it has to be administered surgically which is inherently more expensive than injections or whatever which we’ll see is there anything on the docket to be administered surgically oh well I mean maybe um for example in general solid organs right you know there’s a lot going on in an organ uh if we rejuvenate it we have to fix a lot of different types of
(38:54) damage it might be more straightforward to grow a new one in the laboratory and to surgically transplant it um and uh even though but that would of course be inferior it would be undesirable in the sense that it would be more invasive you know uh probably couldn’t use it on people who are quite so frail for example um and so there will be enormous pressure to supplant that approach with approaches that can just be done in situ using stem cells and so on it makes sense and then um taking a step back I always like to ask people like
(39:28) you know advice for we’ve kind of touched on this a little bit but there’s so many different people talk listening right now so for people who want to get more involved in longevity space is there generally advice you’d give them so no I would not say this general advice simply because some people have such different skill sets they can apply them in different ways so Mark Hamill Island’s initiative less death is becoming this Fellowship um you know this is the only single answer I can give to this question
(39:55) because it’s deliberately designed to bring very diverse people together and to find out to understand how they can best contribute beyond that I would say that the um the main thing is to look at what you’re good at and in particular is look at what you’re good at that other people are not not many other people are good at and ask how you can apply that so it may be that you’re wealthy maybe you’re a journalist and you can do something like interviewing me or it may be that you’re a biologist and you can
(40:23) choose what field to go into and so maybe you’re a you know a politician and you can influence decision making in Congress things like that is there so you have like this really great view of the whole field is there a type of expertise that’s just in short supply is there like a most types of exploitation Insurance Supply to be honest okay um if you ask me what’s really changed in terms of the bottleneck for this whole Crusade uh in the past few years I would say that as the uh financing of the field has risen over time that has
(40:58) receded as a problem the problem there’s still areas especially the more um challenging ones uh that I focus on which still need to be funded but um really what’s come to the fore is the shortage of talent and so again we’re coming back to you know different people with different skills coming together finding out how they can best contribute so biologists machine learning people like the whole gamut there’s no like one type there’s just like anyone who would be anyone related to this topic should
(41:32) be really getting into it I think that’s correct I think that basically you know the you have to a large part of why we want to bring people together is first of all so they can learn the things they don’t know anything about just to a baseline level and uh you know they have a broad enough understanding of of what’s going on across the board so that they can apply their particular skills to each other in a more synergistic manner are there books like if you were thinking about it from like a person
(41:59) getting into it versus someone’s been it for a while or someone who’s like maybe like 10 15 years below you in an experience are there books resources you recommend to help them just push their talents the books that have been coming out recently are really nice actually so my book came out 15 years ago ending aging and it’s still pretty pretty relevant you know it’s basically because even though there’s been huge amounts of progress since then nevertheless the progress has been broadly speaking in
(42:23) the direction that we discussed in that book um but the books have been coming out recently you know we can name a lot of them so David Sinclair brought out this book uh called lifespan whose subtitle was why we age and why we don’t have to it’s a damn good book um came out with one I think it’s called age later uh Andrew Steele who’s a great writer came up with something called ageless uh so get young who’s an investor in the space going up with one uh another investor then Jim Mellon came
(42:52) out with one called juven Essence all of these books are damn good and good places to start if you are really at the beginning of the journey sweet and then um so as you can guess by the name of my show I really love learning uh and I’m curious how do you stay on the top how what are you just reading your own Publications I imagine there’s a big component of just listening to smart people but for the longest time I’ve actually employed someone full time to read the literature publish literature and I got a a nightly feed from the main
(43:21) um biology literature database and um you know they filter it and send they send me in a few other people they they output um I also have you know basically the the the most important people in my team are the scientific generalists who well have these discussions with me and make it possible for someone to actually make good decisions about what projects to fund You know despite only having a certain number of hours in the day uh yeah very very important yeah once uh another British person had a similar strategy Winston Churchill he
(43:55) had a like a team of people who just go out and like research all these things and synthesize it then he’d make it accessible to everyone else which is it’s just interesting to uh I know you brush people like doing that yeah you’ve got to have that approach really yeah but Winston Churchill and I went to the same school yeah um well I think sometimes people feel like when they look at someone it’s just all them or that uh they just think like they were just born that way and so I think when you hear about that structure
(44:19) that you have in place it helps you do what you you need to do I think that helps um make it a little easier for everybody else are there particular sectors or areas um that you’re looking to learn more about I don’t think in terms of particular areas that I want to focus on because the thing about damage repair is by definition it’s a Divine conquer strategy so I mean I guess I prioritize in the sense of looking at the things that are being most neglected by other people um but that comes in many flavors so it
(44:56) may be that there’s an area where we genuinely don’t know what the hell’s going on at all uh in terms of the the mechanisms of accumulation of damage or how we might repair it um there may be areas where we know polenti and we’ve already got good successes and we want to take those exactly to the next stage so for example the project that I core I certainly live that nature so no I would say I kind of almost got out of my way not to have one or two things that I’m focusing on okay you never really know how you’re gonna
(45:24) apply it or how something you’re reading is going to be applicable tomorrow um in that vein has anything surprised you or just taking you like Christmas trip to a large extent was uh found on accident um but if I remembering it right so has there been other things like that that’s just surprising it could be a little small things like I think there’s Beauty in every day the uh constant surprises in biology and biomedical research some of them are really um broadly applicable like crisper or induced player button stem cells some of
(45:55) them are much narrower like um you know the whole uh business of transfer of putting copies of the mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus became a whole bunch easier as a result of a completely uh uh unexpected discovery about the way that messenger RNA has moved around in cells um you know that’s just one example that immediately Springs to mind but we we’re constantly having examples of this nature there was a new project at sensory search Foundation which is focused on a bizarre discovery that we could get antibodies to and to be taken
(46:29) up by cells inside to be taken up inside the cell which is what antibodies don’t normally do um by attaching nucleic acids to them you know what um yeah this kind of thing happens a lot in fact it’s kind of the meet and drink of biology I think um I think everyone’s born a scientist then like unfortunately like K-12 makes it uh not as much fun um because like there’s very few passionate people who talk about this type of stuff but um so I focus on you for a little bit uh there’s a question I’ve been asking
(47:00) everybody and I just been enjoying the different way people answer it but what is what does happiness means to you what what does happiness mean to you I’m sorry fulfillment really you know just feeling that you know going to bed at night failing and I’ve spent the day well um you know from moment to moment there’s things like the specific things I do to relax like I spend a lot of time in my hot tub thinking you know things like that but um yeah fulfillment yeah I once uh was at a hotel reading a book in a hot tub and everyone was
(47:32) staring at me like I was weird it’s like you get the greatest ideas when you sit in a hot tub just relax like it just gets everything moving it’s like going for a walk um do you do anything outside of a hot tub to optimize for happiness or uh self-actualization in that way hi surround myself with people who inspire me [Music] makes sense and then um so I think you just had such a long career and I’m just generally uh Curious how do you how do you take care of yourself you know like you got you know all these Grand things
(48:03) like the I think even like uh the stress for people with trying to get a PhD is just ridiculous so um what do you do to just keep yourself uh you know healthy happy keeping going well I mean it’s much easier for someone who’s successful and who is widely you know admired and respected so I I really you know I I the people I look up to are the foot soldiers the people who everyone has committed as me but you know people don’t come up to them in the street and ask their autograph or whatever right so
(48:36) um you know that um you know they’re much more self um motivated because they have to be I mean I motivate them to the extent that I see them of course even though that’s part of being a leader is you you know you give it back so to speak um but yeah I mean I had it easy that way um I thought you were going to ask about how I stay healthy in terms of like supplements or exercise or whatever oh that’s on my uh bonus if we have time because that’s it it’s I can give a nice short answer to that question
(49:07) um because you know I actually don’t do anything I am one of those repulsively lucky people who you know I can eat and drink what I like and nothing ever happens and I don’t need to exercise and you know I’m always whenever my biological age is measured in any way um I would come out at least a decade younger than I really am so you know uh for me it’s the right thing to do the sensible thing to do is to be conservative and pick her and if you don’t fix it attitude of course I throw back close attention to my body and I
(49:36) I’m you know looking up for any things I do need to address but right now it’s going okay is there um do you do any like mindfulness stuff like meditation or anything like that no I’m already calm yeah I can tell um are there uh is there any like I don’t know how much time you have for this type of thing but do you watch movies or or into anything um like that like uh the Avatar movie or anything no that much yeah um and then uh okay so I have a couple of fan write-ins that I thought would be good at this
(50:10) point which is a less personal but back to longevity um uh what are your thoughts on the recent research uh regarding long jeans and short chains this was a remarkable result that came out only a week or so ago uh essentially that a number of diverse species appear to have a shift during their life into having a lower level of transcription of Longines so long transcripts are just less abundance whether it’s actually low level of transcription or whether the transcripts are destroyed more quickly or whatever is not completely clear yet
(50:47) but the fact that this was a general result that was seen across very diverse species was pretty you know um intriguing now I don’t really know what it means because they certainly the the study certainly did not show any um causality in the interesting Direction it didn’t show that for example you could somehow simulate the um transcription of Longines in older animals and they would be rejuvenated or anything it did show the opposite causality that if you did the typical kind of thing that we already knew would
(51:19) rejuvenating you know whether it’s calorie restriction or whatever then um then they um this this this this bias with age went away so we know that it’s caused by aging we just don’t know whether there’s a reverse causality as well I’m inclined to Guess that the probably isn’t um is um if you if you could I mean I guess like if you had unlimited funds like that’s kind of cheating but how much money do you need like for the next like five years to do everything like you just like were maximum uh capacity at all
(51:52) times like how much would you need so there’s two answers to a question about money because how much do I need for my own organization and that’s how much does the movement in general need um so because I tend to focus my efforts at the tip of the spare and to do stuff that hardly anyone you know really understands the value of um I don’t actually need all that much money it tends to be early stage staff and you know so if I had like 50 million dollars a year which is an order of magnitude more than what I currently
(52:23) have but it’s only one order of negative right that would probably do the job um whereas the field in general if well you know it’s now getting to the stage of doing clinical trials even late stage clinical trials each one of which costs one hell of a lot of money so um uh yeah we’re definitely thinking we definitely could spend tens of billions per year in the um in the community overall thanks um is there that you recently were on a YouTube uh interview and uh you were saying something along the lines that uh
(52:58) Jeff Bezos and people should be funding these types of research um is there anything stopping you I mean I I imagine it’s kind of hard to get a hold of people you’re also kind of a big name um is it is it harder hard to get those people to you were saying earlier like investors give more money than donations but um I think even Jeff Bezos is like saying hey I’m gonna donate like a billion dollars whatever so how hard is it to actually get people like that to do that that type of thing so um a couple of things so first of all
(53:24) the most wealthy people in the world do tend to give quite a lot of money uh philanthropically they just don’t tend to give it to technology they tend to give it to you know Noble causes and um and that’s fine you know they just have money too uh but uh it’s used for that a large proportion of the wealthiest people in the world these days got that way through Tech because tech people Geeks understand my approach to combating aging quite easily and in particular I was very fortunate quite early on only
(54:01) shortly after I started becoming well known that I was asked to speak at Ted that was more than 15 years ago now and that certainly led to quite a lot of um useful interest including money uh some of it led to money immediately though small you know like five digit checks um but some of it led to like six and seven digit checks and um some of it was a bit delayed so Jeff Bezos is probably the best example what is the best example of this he um about the Italian effects and every year after that for a few years and was very
(54:32) interested in everything and didn’t put any money into the field at all until I think 2018 uh gave a relatively small amount in an investment into one of the leading companies Unity um and then suddenly he depends out of nowhere and give a few billion dollars to ultra slabs so um you know that was a long time coming but it’s better late than another what do you um think about the labs uh one of the writers in we’re talking about how is just such a density of talent there Alto slabs has started out making good decisions suddenly if we
(55:14) compare it to Calico for example which might a bunch of really bad decisions when it got going about eight years ago um one of the big things that Altos has done is it as hard as you say a lot of good scientists the reason that’s really important is because this means that um there’s unlikely to end up being a single school of thought that dominates the strategy is taken within that company um I mean starting out with an emphasis on two areas partial reprogramming and epigenetic clocks which are of course
(55:48) closely related to each other um but the point is within those areas there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know a lot of stuff that needs to be found out and of course there’s a lot of diversity of opinion among the top people in the field so the fact that out of labs have hired a bunch of the top people in both of those fields um is a good sign I think there is unlikely to be stagnation there and I have a feeling that I mean certainly quite a few of the people who they’ve hired are very strongly you know uh they
(56:19) definitely want progress they don’t just want to do science for the sake of finding things out um so they want they want to help humanity and that means that I think there’s going to be a good deal of collaboration between Altos and the rest of the ecosystem which again is something that Calico have been decidedly poorer and I was just speaking of talent I remember this question we were talking earlier um are there up and coming people that inspire you um they don’t normally get the Limelight so if if we get some shout outs I know a
(56:50) bunch of people who check them out they’re always up and coming people who uh inspiring um I mean some of those people are not dressed in the science so um you know the crypto Community has started putting really proper money into um into longevity and that all began with the television the creator of ethereum who read my book when he was 14.
(57:16) and he started putting proper money into Hisense Research Foundation as soon as he was able to um and uh since then other people have done the same thing James fickle who is another guy who’s not so well known but he made a bunch of money out of ethereum a few years ago he was uh he read my book over the lockdown in 2020 and um decided he was hooked and so he got in touch and he started putting um quite significant amounts of money into into the field and inspiring other people to do the same so um yeah and of course I have to mention Richard Hart
(57:49) who is another big hitter in the crypto Community created the coin hacks and he’s very much a larger than life character he has a very large and devoted following and he um encouraged them to donate to the longevity calls a year in a bit ago and that resulted in a very healthy amount of money so um so so that’s that’s one area but I guess your question was mainly about the scientists the scientists yeah yeah the science is coming out of the woodwork all the time people that we’ve never heard of there’s
(58:20) a guy um who’s really high profile right now and I get asked about this guy all the time his name is Michael Levin he’s at Harvard and he’s really um um high profile right now because the way that he is exploring regeneration is completely different from what anyone else has done before essentially using electrical currents electrical fields to um to cause to stimulate regeneration very interesting area that was completely unknown until a couple of years ago so applies in cryobiology which as I mentioned is another area I’m
(58:54) really interested in you know again people just out of the blue coming along um and becoming really prominent in that area is there um for people who are I think there’s some really good advice about like finding someone who’s five years ahead of you for people who are in college how would they go about uh finding people like that it’s just reading papers is it just you know I think Twitter’s a good networking tool but um what would be your advice there so um with a couple of things to avoid and
(59:23) first and most important thing is not to look for places to study or people study with who call themselves gerontologists or at least not to restrict oneself to such people because certainly the majority I would say the large majority of work that is relevant to damage repair is done by people who are doing it for other reasons or at least who has started out doing it for mostly other reasons um so one needs to understand the field at an introductory level reasonably well like you know having read my book for
(59:58) example in order to understand what is relevant and what’s not over and above the labels that people put on it on these things um and then of course one can always you know write to me my Foundation um or other people and get advice I am um you know because of my because I found a very high um importance to educating the world and bringing in and building the community uh you know I I make sure that such questions get answered is there a topic that you see people getting wrong often or that they come to you often looking to learn more about so
(1:00:36) like kind of two different questions but you know I think I understand it’s not just different questions in fact I would say that they are actually opposite questions because they think people get wrong of the things they think they know already and they don’t ask that um uh but of course yeah I mean a huge amount of that revolves around the desirability of bringing aging under control or indeed the feasibility in general as opposed to the nuts and bolts of how um and um uh so yeah I mean I I so I have to spend
(1:01:06) a very frustrating amount of my time explaining things like you know uh we don’t have to worry about overpopulation we don’t have to worry about it only being for the rich we don’t have to worry about dictators living forever and so um or you know death does not actually give meaning to life things like that um uh so I guess those are the things that people mostly get wrong um but yes people come to us all the time with um with questions of every kind have you thought about having like a monthly Aubry fax you just like make a
(1:01:37) post and then everyone they would be able to just look at that versus uh email you about them the thing is that I used to well when I ran my journal Rejuvenation research I had you know right editorial every two months which kind of um fulfilled the role that you’re describing but of course I would only get to be talking about uh one particular thing that was you know on my mind that month uh perhaps because um development or other um I think that first of all there are now really good news outlets for a long
(1:02:10) time there weren’t very many it wasn’t very much of this there was this wonderful website that so is wonderful called fight aging run by um a very important person in the community named reason uh but more recently we’ve had this excellent organization lifespan.io which is a um well it doesn’t just do journalism it also has uh uh Community Building um activities of various types it does a lot of different things and I and it’s a by the Wednesday three year non-profit I um I I I I think very highly of of
(1:02:47) lifespan I uh and also on the for-profit side like there’s a um uh uh media Outlet called Longevity Technology based in the UK which is um does does a bunch of you know advertorials as well as um other other news um uh dissemination but you know very thorough very high quality so there’s a lot of this now which means that there’s not so much need for someone in my possession to go out and try and you know duplicate that it probably makes more sense for people to come from me if they want to makes sense and um so I think it’s
(1:03:23) always fun when we spend so much time uh asking questions of someone for you to ask the question as well which is uh what’s a question you have that you don’t have the answer to that you wonder about sometimes I don’t have the answer today I don’t really have uh well of course I have questions like you know how do I get better at persuading people to uh to to donate to the foundation things like that but no nothing specific there’s a book called Never split the difference which talks about uh negotiation
(1:03:50) strategies I recommend it every scientist I’ve met that I’ve recommended it to they say it’s a huge deal for especially the Sciences I don’t know why but the science people really love it um internally in your mind how old do you feel you are oh I certainly never think about how old I am yeah in my mind you know I just get on with my life okay um and then I just I have two last questions then um what how do you maximize your day like how do you get the most out of your day I get enough sleep I um
(1:04:23) I try to be organized you know I I I’m very much not a fan of cell phones I like to run my entire non face-to-face life through my inbox which I find is an efficient way to do so uh you know I just you know um I just have a variety of tricks to make sure I get plenty done yeah is there uh anything you recommend people try out or is it just you have to like kind of experiment to find your own you’ve totally got to experiment everyone’s so different different people have such different psychology is such a different
(1:04:55) temperamental um reactions to different ways of doing things so there’s no generalization there makes sense um all right uh last uh write-in question then is uh if you’ve mentioned Maya m-a-i-a biotechnology and conducting promising research and clinical trials to Target cancerous cells Express telomerase to lengthen the telomeres but how much how might Humanity address the minority of cancers that don’t you use telomerase to lengthen the telomeres well that’s a very nice technical question so yeah
(1:05:26) first of all Let me give a little background so yes so um cancers are only able to get big enough to metastasize and to kill a large animal like a human being if they can solve what Jim Watson in 1972 called the um end replication problem which is that the end of chromosomes the telomeres get shorter when they um um when the cell divides when the DNA is replicated and this is something that’s really intrinsically built into the um the nature of um so the only way that cells avoid this in the germline the lineage of cells that
(1:06:12) goes through to you know sperm and eggs in the Next Generation is by use of an enzyme called telomerase which essentially compensates for the shortening at the end of the chromosomes and sticks kind of meaningless but nevertheless you know useful DNA on the end to make sure that the to keep up with the loss and um uh I think it’s in order to do that of course the genome has to contain the gene that encodes this enzyme telomerase and uh this Gene is robustly Switched Off suppressed in nearly all of our cells because it’s not needed because
(1:06:49) our cells don’t normally divide often enough to need it um but occasionally but but cancers are able sometimes to mutate it on in fact 90 of cancers do that so the question is can we use this fact as a way to attack answers and I thought it was very elaborate and ambitious way to do this about 20 years ago which I talked about and I gave the name Wilt uh but it was very very ambitious and um honestly I’m not sure if it would ever have been um implementable however much more recently maybe five or six years ago a group in Texas came up with
(1:07:25) a brilliant Improvement on this that essentially caused itself to um essentially a drug that poisons um cells that are expressing this enzyme and it poisons them really effectively really quickly and that drug is called thio and it’s being taken forward by this company that your questioner mentioned my biotechnology I I believe the single most exciting thing in cancer right now so I very much encourage people to check it out they are I believe currently recruiting for a phase two clinical trial so yeah totally this
(1:07:56) is one of my favorite companies however that wasn’t the question the question was what about the other 10 of cancers that don’t express telomerase now these cancers they still have the same problem they still need to extend their telomeres um because otherwise the cell will just have well essentially bad things go wrong when telomeres are completely eroded chromosomes get joined together end to end stuff like that the cell basically divides itself into Oblivion pretty quickly so um the name for this other mechanism is
(1:08:26) called alt which just stands for alternative lengthening of telomeres and uh that name probably suggests that we don’t know much about it which is true um we’ll be selling it like I mean people have been selling it for more than 25 years but it’s still a bit of a mystery uh but we’re not nearly so much of a mystery as it used to be 10 years ago we actually had a project at Sands looking at this which didn’t really get anywhere and others weren’t getting anywhere either but lately there’s been a bit more
(1:08:53) progress people are beginning to understand it better so I can’t point it point the questioner or the audience to any specific you know fantastic new intervention along the lines of this thing fire I just mentioned for telomerase uh but we may not be very far off and certainly this is one area which I may very much want us uh elliev Foundation to start working on if we can bring in enough resources to to be able to sweet so anyone especially the person who wrote This should donate and if they have some ideas on how to address it
(1:09:25) like they definitely uh should reach out so is for so we talked about a variety of topics is there anything going on at Lev or are your other projects that we haven’t got a chance to talk about that we can talk about real quickly and if not you know what’s the best way to stay up to date um well there’s a couple of things uh we don’t just do research we also do advocacy we’re supporting uh lobbying organization in the U.
(1:09:49) S uh called a4li The Alliance for longevity initiatives which is focused on trying to um improve the um quality of debate within Congress around longevity and to obviously encourage Congress people to uh put put more money into this research from the tech from the public purse uh we’re also funding another organization in the um longevity space named um the health span Action Coalition who which is again an advocacy organization but this time its audience is the general public especially the older generation uh so I like to call it the
(1:10:29) antidote to the AARP it’s much more focused on getting the elderly to understand that there is hope um in relation to Bringing aging under medical control um and so yeah I mean these organizations both have their own websites but you can get to them linked from levf.org from from Led foundation’s website and um uh so yeah that’s that’s pretty much the spectrum of what we’re doing at the moment um so yeah I mean that’s really what I want to say just go to our website and read more thank you for joining us today
(1:11:00) with the learn with little show check us out learnwithall.com anywhere podcast can be found subscribe tell me what you thought of this episode check us out on YouTube in particular it’s a new thing I’m doing uh timestamps and links are in the show notes thank you for coming and I hope everyone every one of you found some today that you’re curious about to learn more about and you’ll go out and be curious and learn something new thank you and have a great rest your day