Aubrey de Grey Interview at 71: 12 to 15 Years to LEV

I asked Aubrey de Grey whether anyone alive today will live to a thousand. He did not dodge it. He said there is at least a 50-50 chance we reach the threshold he calls longevity escape velocity within the next 12 to 15 years — and he was equally quick to say there is at least a 5% chance we do not get there for a century.

I am 71. Twelve to fifteen years is a number I can do arithmetic on.

The full conversation with Aubrey de Grey. Everything below is from this interview.

Who Is Aubrey de Grey?

Aubrey is the founder, president and chief science officer of the LEV Foundation, the third nonprofit he has led after the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation. He is a biogerontologist, which he had to explain to me on air — not a geriatrician who treats old people, but a researcher who studies why we get old in the first place.

His route in is the part I did not know. His undergraduate degree was in computer science and he spent about seven years in AI research back when that meant writing programs to prove mathematical theorems. He married a biologist who was a full professor at UC San Diego, absorbed a lot of biology over the dinner table, and then noticed something that stopped him cold: none of the biologists he was meeting were interested in aging. He had assumed everyone was working on it. Finding out nobody was, he switched fields.

He also thinks coming in from engineering rather than medicine was the advantage. Almost everyone in the field then was a basic scientist studying aging to understand it, not to do something about it.

Aging Is a Physics Problem, Not a Biology Problem

His framing is preventative maintenance. The body damages itself in the normal course of operating, starting before birth, exactly the way a car or an airplane does. That damage is harmless at first because the body is built to tolerate a certain amount of it. Eventually there is more damage than it can tolerate, function goes downhill, and we die.

So the job is to repair the damage on a schedule, the same way you take a car in every year. People push back that the body is not really a machine. His answer is that aging is not a feature of biology at all — any machine with moving parts will age, whether or not we think of it as alive.

That is a divide-and-conquer strategy by definition: many different types of damage, each needing its own therapy. And that is what LEV Foundation now works on — not inventing the individual repairs, several of which spun out into startups years ago, but the much harder problem of combining them in the same body at the same time. In ordinary engineering, assembling working components is the easy part. In biology, where we do not have the blueprint, that is where the surprises live.

The Soundbite He Wanted Everyone to Hear

Halfway through, he stopped and offered it deliberately. People call him the prophet of immortality because he talks about living to a thousand. But he does not work on immortality, and he does not even work on longevity. He works on health — keeping people healthy as they get old.

Longevity is just a side effect of health.

That single line reframes the whole field, and it is the reason the economics work.

How Living to a Thousand Actually Adds Up

The threshold is not a cure for aging. It is the point where we can repair enough types of damage that treated people get roughly 20 extra years of healthy life. The people who benefit first are not the sick — they are people around 60, not yet ill but not far from it, because you do not service a brand new car.

Then the compounding starts. Someone treated at 60 comes back at 80 biologically 60 again, by which time researchers have had 20 years to build version two — therapies that repair damage they could not touch before. So they are not biologically 60 for the third time until maybe 110. Keep that going and the only things that kill you are the things unrelated to when you were born. Run the numbers on accidents alone and you land at an average around a thousand years.

His advice for me in the meantime was blunt and cheerful: stay in good condition for the next 12 to 15 years until the first-generation portfolio arrives.

What Arrives First

Some of it is already in clinical trials.

Parkinson's disease. Stem cell therapies for it have been an idea for decades, but nobody could make them work until we learned how to prepare the right kind of cells. There are now roughly half a dozen trials running worldwide, and he thinks we could be a couple of years from Parkinson's being functionally cured.
Senescent cells. Zombie cells that arise spontaneously, still doing some of their old job while being actively toxic. The body clears most but not all. Drugs to help clear the rest have been in development for over a decade and some are in trials now.
The harder categories. Several are not yet working fully in mice. He still gives them a good chance in humans within 15 years.

On the Stem Cell Clinics People Fly To

I asked about the people I know flying to South America with their own fat cells. His answer was more useful than a yes or no.

Most clinic stem cells are allogeneic — from someone else — so the immune system clears them within weeks or months. While they are there they secrete chemicals that rejuvenate your existing cells, and that benefit outlasts the cells themselves. Autologous cells, your own, help partly because you can add volume, but mostly because of what can be done to them in the lab to make them more potent. That laboratory manipulation is the part not approved in the US, which is the actual reason for the plane ticket.

His verdict: real, beneficial, and nowhere near as powerful as therapies that put in cells which stay and replace what you have lost.

The Part Nobody Is Ready For

This is where he caught me completely off guard.

I asked what happens to retirement and inheritance if people start living to 500. He said that question focuses on the wrong variable. What restructures pensions, life insurance, health insurance and inheritance is not how long people live — it is how long people expect to live. Nobody will be 200 for at least another century. But the expectation flips long before the treatments arrive.

Today almost everyone assumes they will live a few years longer than their parents. He thinks that within about five years, progress will be visible enough that people start assuming they will benefit — and the moment that belief flips, they want different insurance, different premiums, different pension arrangements. He tells pension funds and insurers to anticipate the anticipation. He does not think they are anywhere close to ready.

He also pointed out that most of this upheaval arrives via AI first. Even conservative bodies like the UN are now saying in print that most jobs existing today will be gone by 2050; he would guess 2035. The economy gets rebuilt before any of his treatments land.

His One Piece of Advice for Someone My Age

I asked him directly: if you are 70 and trying to make it fifteen more years, what is the number one thing to start doing?

One word. Measurement.

He gave Brian Johnson credit here — controversial, but a net positive who has inspired people Aubrey never could — for saying forcefully that you have to know what state your body is in before you can know what to do about it. And you do not need Johnson's budget for it. Bloodwork every year or two. A genome sequenced once in your life for under a thousand dollars, because you only need it once.

The reason measurement matters so much is the thing he kept returning to: everyone is different. Nothing available today gives most people twenty extra years. Some things give some people a couple of years — and which things, for which person, depends on their own metabolism, genes and weak links. Without measurement you are guessing.

He extends that to subjective measurement too. Pay attention to what makes you feel healthy and energetic and what does not. That, he said, is the number one rule.

And Yes, He Drinks Beer

I had to ask, because I watched him drink one in The Immortalists, the documentary he made with Dr. Bill Andrews, and most people in this field act like a sip is fatal.

His answer was disarming. He is doing what works for him, and he describes himself as one of the repulsively lucky people — he can eat and drink what he likes, does not need to exercise, and still tests considerably younger biologically than his real age. He is explicitly not recommending anyone live the way he does. He also never drinks enough to feel bad the next day, and he was clear that binge drinking is bad for very nearly everybody.

That luck is also why he does nothing extreme. When I asked what crazy thing he has tried in pursuit of longevity, the answer was nothing. He is conservative on purpose: if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and don't do anything that might make you less lucky. He also deliberately minimises his risk of dying from something stupid, right down to declining speaking invitations to dangerous places.

Where to Find Him

LEV Foundation is at levf.org, and Aubrey makes himself deliberately accessible — there is a contact button on the site, and he is active on X. The foundation is a nonprofit that runs entirely on philanthropy, and that is a choice: investors want returns quickly and government grants push you toward low-hanging fruit, so being donation-funded is what lets them work on problems nobody else will touch. There is a donate button on the site. I have used it.

Go Deeper

If longevity escape velocity is a new idea to you, I wrote a plain-English explainer: what longevity escape velocity actually means. This interview grew out of the questions you sent me before we recorded — thank you for those.

Two other guests connect to this one. Dr. Bill Andrews, Aubrey's co-star in The Immortalists, on telomeres. And Richard Rossi of DaVinci 50, who I asked the same crazy-things question a week earlier and got a very different answer.

On the measurement point, I am already doing what Aubrey recommends: bloodwork twice a year and my whole genome, sequenced once.

Want to see the rest of what I do? Here is my full protocol list, my fitness routine, and every biomarker I track.

Stay sovereign, stay healthy,

Gary

A note from Gary: I am not a doctor, and I am definitely not your doctor. I am a 71-year-old running a 129-year experiment on myself and publishing the results as they come. Talk to your physician before changing anything about your own health.

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