#1432 - Aubrey de Grey

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Three, two, one, boom, here we go. What's up, man?

Aubrey de Grey (0:04)

What's up?

Joe Rogan (0:05)

Hey, did you trim your beard since ive seen you last?

Aubrey de Grey (0:07)

No, I'm afraid not.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

I feel like you have.

Aubrey de Grey (0:08)

No, it may be a fraction shorter, but that's only because ive been falling out more.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

It falls out?

Aubrey de Grey (0:13)

Oh yeah, I mean, I stroke it all the time, you know, it's compulsive.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Oh, and so then you get these weird hairs that you have to...

Aubrey de Grey (0:18)

Well actually, I don't notice it enough. I mean, it falls out slowly, you know, but I guess there's a certain amount of attrition that...

Joe Rogan (0:25)

So the beard's the same length. Have you gotten any younger since ive seen you last?

Aubrey de Grey (0:29)

Yeah, hard to say.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Hard to say. But that is your business.

Aubrey de Grey (0:32)

That's my business, yes.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

How many years has it been since ive saw you? Four?

Aubrey de Grey (0:36)

Nearly five, I think. It was April of 2015

Joe Rogan (0:39)

And you have not gotten younger?

Aubrey de Grey (0:43)

I have not gotten younger.

Joe Rogan (0:44)

Have you maintained?

Aubrey de Grey (0:45)

I think ive pretty much maintained, yes, but not through my own work. So the work is still very much ongoing, though we have come an awfully long way in the past five years. But you know, this is a complicated thing to fix.

And we need to fix all of it in order to really make people start getting biologically younger.

Joe Rogan (1:02)

So let's bring people up to speed. What have the, what are the latest revelations? What's the latest in terms of what we understand in terms of what could possibly be fixed about human aging?

Aubrey de Grey (1:17)

All right. So the fantastic answer to that question is there are no new revelations in terms of what we understand.

Our understanding seems to have been pretty much complete already like 20 years ago. The fact that we haven't found out any fundamental new stuff that we didn't know before then is fantastic news because of course it means that we're unlikely to find anything out in the future either. It means that we are pretty much on top of the description of the problem, and therefore it's all about solving the problem.

Joe Rogan (1:46)

Is it possible to summarize the problem? What is the problem? What causes human aging?

Aubrey de Grey (1:49)

Sure, that's easy.

So aging is simply the same thing in a living organism like you or me as what it is in a car or an aeroplane or any other simple man-made machine.

It's a fact of physics, nothing to do with biology, that any machine that has moving parts is going to do itself damage in the course of its normal operation as an intrinsic consequence of its normal operation. So in the same way that a car rusts...

Joe Rogan (2:15)

Jim is going to bring that microphone up to you.

Yep. Yeah, just try to keep it about a fist from your face.

Aubrey de Grey (2:19)

So in the same way that a car rusts or accumulates junk in the oil or whatever, similarly the human body does damage to itself.

And again, just like a car or an aeroplane, the human body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage so that we can get through to the point where we have kids before we start going functionally downhill, whether mentally or physically. But after that, evolution doesn't care about us anymore, and therefore we are only equipped to tolerate that much. And eventually the damage that's being done accumulates to a point beyond what the body is set up to tolerate, and that's when things start to go wrong and we start to function less well.

Joe Rogan (3:01)

What is the difference physically between a younger person and older person in terms of their ability to recover from the damage of just regular everyday life and exercise and abuse and running around?

Aubrey de Grey (3:11)

Yeah, all that. So, that's just one aspect of the difference between a younger person and an older person. So let me answer that question by stepping back one step. So the difference ultimately arises from what the body is made of at the molecular level and cellular level.

The body accumulates various changes that are chemical and biological consequences of what the body has to do to keep us alive from one day to the next, even starting before we're born.