Aubrey de Grey: I Do Not Work on Longevity, I Work on Health
The short version: Aging researcher Aubrey de Grey, founder of the LEV Foundation, told me there’s at least a 50-50 chance we reach longevity escape velocity in the next 12 to 15 years. That’s the point where repairing the body’s built-up damage adds healthy years faster than we lose them. He says he works on health, not longevity, and that longevity is a side effect. His number one advice for someone in their 70s is measurement: regular bloodwork, and having your genome sequenced once.
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.
Quick Clips From This Interview
Short on time? Start with these one-minute clips from my conversation with Aubrey de Grey. Tap one to watch.
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.
Live long and prosper,
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.
Full Interview Transcript
Read the full transcript of my conversation with Aubrey de Grey
Lightly edited from the video captions for readability.
Gary: Welcome to another episode of The 200 Year Life Project, the ultimate longevity journey. I’m your host, Gary Leland, and today we’re talking with Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the LEV Foundation. Aubrey, welcome to the show.
Aubrey de Grey: Thank you for having me.
Gary: I was telling you before the show that I’d watched The Immortalists, the documentary you did with Dr. Andrews. It gave a really good look at what a lot of people in longevity are up to. Was that fun to make? It looked like you had a good time.
Aubrey de Grey: Oh, sure. I’ve done a few of these things, some bigger than others, and I always enjoy them. First, it’s part of my job, getting the word out. And second, I’m hanging out with good friends like Bill. So yes, I had a great time.
Gary: One question I had after watching it: I noticed you drink beer, and most people I talk to in longevity act like you can’t have a sip.
Aubrey de Grey: I get asked this a lot. I like a beer. The main thing to emphasize is that I’m doing what works for me. Everyone is different when it comes to metabolism. Everyone has different weak links, different things they need to be careful to avoid or to have to optimize how their body works. And some people are just lucky. I am one of those repulsively lucky people. I can eat and drink exactly what I like and nothing happens. I don’t even need to exercise, and I have a biological age that’s considerably younger than my real age. So I’m definitely not recommending that everybody live the way I do. The right thing to do is to pay attention to your body, get things measured reasonably well so you know what your own weak links are, and act on that.
Gary: I asked because during the show you and Bill had a push-up contest, and I think he said maybe he needs to start drinking beer.
Aubrey de Grey: I have pretty good endurance. I was pretty happy I was able to do better than Bill.
Gary: When I was looking at your information on YouTube, I found a term I wasn’t familiar with. You’re listed as a gerontologist.
Aubrey de Grey: The field of gerontology covers a lot of different things. Some people are called clinical gerontologists, though the more common term for them is geriatricians, and they have MDs. I don’t have an MD; I have a PhD. People who do research are often called biogerontologists or biomedical gerontologists, because they’re focused on developing things that don’t yet exist and that will be more effective at keeping people healthy as they get old than anything that does exist. Then there are social gerontologists, who are interested in optimizing public policy to maximize the dignity of the elderly. They’re not medics at all. They work on managing the decline.
Gary: I also noticed you started with a degree in computer science and worked in AI as a younger man, and now you’re in longevity. How did you move from one to the other? That seems like a radical move.
Aubrey de Grey: I switched fields because of my first wife. While I was doing perfectly well in my AI research career, I met and married a biologist who was a lot older than me. She was already a full professor at UC San Diego and was in England on sabbatical. Through her, I accidentally learned a lot of biology over the dinner table. But I also began to realize that she wasn’t interested in aging, and the other biologists I was meeting through her weren’t either. That had never occurred to me. I had always assumed all biologists would be interested in aging, because it was clearly the major unsolved problem for humanity.
I was in AI research for humanitarian reasons too. I felt it was a problem that people have to spend so much of their time doing things they wouldn’t do unless they were paid, and automation is what AI is all about. But I always knew the problem of aging was a much bigger problem than the problem of work. It was only because I thought other people were working on it that I didn’t do it myself. When I found out I was wrong about that, it didn’t take me long to realize I had to switch fields.
Switching fields is not as hard as you might think. If you have research experience and you’ve established how to work on really hard problems, learning what’s already known about another hard problem isn’t all that hard. And you can dive into your new field with new eyes, unencumbered by the conventional wisdom of the people already in it. There are quite a few examples. The most conspicuous is from the 1950s, when much of molecular biology was invented by physicists who switched fields. Francis Crick, for example, was a physicist. So I thought maybe I had a chance of making a contribution, and here I am.
Gary: Do you think coming from computer science gave you a different perspective?
Aubrey de Grey: It doesn’t make much difference now, but early on it was enormously helpful that I came from a discipline that was more of an engineering discipline. When I switched, almost everybody in the field was a basic scientist. They were studying aging to understand it, not really with a mindset of doing something about it. My engineering mindset led me to make important contributions quite quickly.
Gary: You’re the founder, president and chief science officer of the LEV Foundation. Can you give us a summary of what it’s about?
Aubrey de Grey: LEV Foundation is the third nonprofit I’ve led. The other two were the Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation, and it all began more than 20 years ago. In the previous two, I was working on developing new technologies to repair one or another type of molecular or cellular damage that accumulates in the body, with a set of projects running in parallel. That work was quite successful, and a number of those projects were spun out into startup companies that have taken the work forward.
What’s missing right now is the combination of these things. The whole philosophy I pioneered is a divide-and-conquer approach to aging. You identify the different types of damage the body does to itself throughout life, and you fix them, essentially performing preventative maintenance on the body to keep it from getting sick. By definition, you have to fix a lot of different types of damage, each with its own therapy, and you have to put those therapies together in the same individual at the same time. In regular engineering, that’s the easy part. Getting the components working is the hard part, and once they work, you can be pretty sure the assembly will do the job. Biology isn’t like that, because we’re manipulating a system we understand poorly. The body is far more complicated than a man-made machine, and we don’t have the blueprint, because we didn’t build it from scratch. So you have to expect surprises at the stage where you put the components together, and that’s what LEV Foundation is focused on now. Some of the components don’t exist yet, but some do, and we can start putting them together and finding out what works.
Gary: So basically you’re repairing things before they break, instead of letting them break.
Aubrey de Grey: Yes, it’s preventative maintenance. The body does damage to itself in the course of its normal operation throughout life, even starting before we’re born, just the same as a car or an airplane. That damage is initially harmless, because like a man-made machine, the body is built to tolerate a certain amount of it without any significant decline in physical or mental function. But eventually there’s more damage than the body is built to tolerate, function starts to go downhill, and eventually we die. So the idea is to do exactly what we do for a car: take it into the shop every year and have some of the rust removed, so it keeps going without the doors falling off. People often feel that’s an oversimplified analogy, that the body isn’t really a machine. But it’s a very valid analogy. Aging is not a feature of biology at all. It’s a feature of physics. Any machine with moving parts will age, regardless of whether we think of it as alive.
Gary: With everything LEV Foundation is doing, is someone alive already who’s going to live to a thousand?
Aubrey de Grey: We can’t know for sure, but I think we have at least a 50% chance of reaching a threshold I call longevity escape velocity within the next 12 to 15 years. To explain what that means: it’s not that we’ve figured out how to repair every single type of damage the body does to itself, but we’ve figured out a sufficient proportion that people who get these treatments will live maybe 20 years longer than they otherwise would have, and in particular will stay healthy for 20 years longer.
The first question is which people. Again, think about cars. When you buy a brand-new car, you don’t take it into the shop after one year, because it takes about five years before there’s enough damage worth repairing. It’s the same for the human body. The people who benefit from these damage-repair treatments will be people already in middle age, say 60, who aren’t sick yet but aren’t far from it. If you give them another 20 years of healthy life, then by the time they’re 80 and biologically 60 for the second time, researchers like me will have used those 20 years to develop version two of the therapies, which can repair types of damage we couldn’t repair 20 years earlier. So we can re-rejuvenate the same people and give them another 20 or 30 years, and they won’t be biologically 60 for the third time until maybe 110. That’s why it’s reasonable to suppose that a lot of people alive today will probably live indefinitely, and the only things that will kill them are things unrelated to how long ago they were born, like road accidents. If you calculate what that means, if people no longer have an increased risk of death from aging, they’ll live on average to at least a thousand. That’s where the number comes from.
But this is all probabilistic. We’re talking about pioneering technology. Even though I think we have a 50/50 chance of reaching longevity escape velocity within 12 to 15 years, I completely accept there’s at least a 5% chance we won’t get there for 100 years if we hit a lot of obstacles we didn’t anticipate.
Gary: Well, I’m 71, so you’re saying I have a chance.
Aubrey de Grey: That’s right.
Gary: That’s what I tell people when they say living to 200 is crazy. I think it will come in waves. First, life gets extended maybe 15 years. During those 15 years, they figure out how to extend it another 15. Most people think it’s all going to happen one day.
Aubrey de Grey: That’s exactly right. Of course, you have to keep in pretty good condition for the next 12 to 15 years until the first-generation rejuvenation portfolio comes along. But you seem to be doing all right for the moment, so good luck to you.
Gary: So can I be 35 if I want?
Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely. That’s the meaning of the word rejuvenation: reducing biological age. Go back to the car. If it hasn’t had any maintenance for a long time, it can be in danger of becoming impossible to fix. But if it’s just fairly bad, a thorough job of preventative maintenance and damage repair all over the car will restore it to as good as new. It’s exactly the same. We have no reason to suppose there will be any difficulty taking someone who’s in middle age or older and restoring them to exactly how a young adult is, in how they look, how they feel and how they function.
Gary: What’s the first thing that will arrive in what I’d call the longevity toolkit?
Aubrey de Grey: The things that really count as bona fide rejuvenation are already in clinical trials, some of them. An example I often talk about is Parkinson’s disease, the second most common type of neurodegeneration. Stem cell therapies for Parkinson’s have been an idea for decades, but for a long time nobody could make them work, because we didn’t know enough about how to manipulate the cells before injecting them so they’d be the right kind of stem cells. Now we can do all of that, and there are literally half a dozen clinical trials going on around the world where people are being injected with stem cells that will hopefully cure their Parkinson’s. It’s an experiment, so we don’t know for certain it will work, but everyone is very optimistic. We could be only a couple of years away from Parkinson’s being functionally cured.
There are other examples. Stem cell therapy is probably in the lead in terms of application to humans, but there are others. Senescent cells get a lot of publicity these days. These are cells that spontaneously arise in the body. They’re zombie cells. Maybe they’re still doing some of what they were supposed to do, but they’re also actively toxic, so the body has to get rid of them. It gets rid of most, but not all. So you need drugs that augment what the body naturally does. Over the past decade or more, a bunch of such drugs have been developed, and some are now in clinical trials, so we’re only a few years away from treatments available to the general public. Some of the other types of damage are a good deal harder and may not even be working completely in mice yet. But progress is being made every year, and even for the most difficult ones, I think we have a good chance of getting them working in humans within the next 15 years.
Gary: I already know people who have had their belly fat removed and then gone to South America for stem cells.
Aubrey de Grey: Most clinic stem cells are allogeneic, which means they come from somebody else, so they don’t last long. The immune system recognizes them as foreign, the same way it attacks an organ transplant. They survive for a while, a few weeks or months, and while they’re there they make chemicals that rejuvenate other cells. That’s beneficial, and the benefits persist a fair bit longer even after the injected cells are removed by the immune system, so you might only need these treatments fairly infrequently.
The other type is autologous, which means the cells come from the same person. You take them out and put them back, so how does that make a difference? There are two reasons. You may put them back in a different place, though that’s not very helpful in general, because the body already knows where it needs its stem cells. It is somewhat beneficial because you can put more of them in. The other reason is that you can do things to the cells in the laboratory before you reinject them, and those manipulations can make the cells more potent in their rejuvenation function. That kind of manipulation is what’s not approved in the US, which is why people go to South America.
Gary: As these things come out, will only the super-rich get them? Will they ever be priced so the average person can afford them, or will Medicare pay for them someday?
Aubrey de Grey: It’s a very important question, so I want to go through the answer in some detail. Right now you’re right: these treatments are only really available if you have the money to fly somewhere. They’re essentially the province of medical tourism. But that’s kind of okay, because they don’t give all that much benefit. They’re beneficial if you do them right, but not enormously so, so most people are okay with not being able to access them.
Now consider a treatment that really worked, maybe much more complicated, with lots of components, but that gave you 20 years of extra life. People would want it badly, and they would vote for it, even in the US, which doesn’t like taxation. But it’s much more than the electoral imperative. It’s the sheer economic imperative. The vast majority of the US medical budget is spent on the health problems of late life, the diseases and disabilities of people who were born a long time ago. These will be preventative medicines that stop people from getting sick when they get old. They’ll be fairly expensive to deliver at first, but far less expensive than what we currently spend keeping sick people alive for as long as we can. In other words, these medicines will pay for themselves many times over, really quickly. So any government, the US, the UK, anywhere, will know it’s economically beneficial to make them available to everybody old enough to need them, irrespective of ability to pay.
That sounds alien to Americans used to private healthcare, but it doesn’t matter what your mechanism of providing health care is. It’s straightforward mathematical economics, so much so that it would be economically suicidal for any country not to do this once the treatments are developed. Lots of things would have to change so the incentives are right for everyone, so the manufacturers and the insurance companies still make a profit, but that’s what governments do all the time.
Gary: So not only will people live a long time, they won’t really get sick anymore, and because of that the country saves a ton of money that can be put into this.
Aubrey de Grey: Exactly right. Here’s a soundbite I like to make sure everybody hears. People call me things like the prophet of immortality, because I talk about people living to a thousand. But I don’t work on immortality. What’s more important is I don’t even work on longevity. I work on health. I work on keeping people healthy when they get older. Longevity is just a side effect of health.
Gary: So say this happens. We reach longevity escape velocity, governments pay for it because they’re saving money, people are living longer, and everybody’s happy. What happens to the way the world is set up now, with retirement and inheritance? This is going to change everything.
Aubrey de Grey: This comes up all the time, and there are two major features of it that are almost always overlooked. The first is that the changes to the global economy will already have happened before then, because of other technologies, AI in particular. Even quite conservative organizations like the United Nations are predicting in print that most of the jobs that exist today won’t exist in 2050. I think it’s more likely 2035. The global economy is going to be completely restructured well before we have the treatments I’m helping to develop. The whole idea of full employment will have gone away. There are already ideas for how to restructure society in that context, like universal basic income, but as it currently stands it’s a spectacularly blunt instrument, and an enormous amount of refinement is needed to understand how to put the economy together when most people aren’t being paid for what they spend most of their time doing. But that has nothing to do with longevity, because it will already have happened.
The second thing, which is criminally overlooked, is that everything you’re referring to, pensions, life insurance, health insurance, inheritance, revolves not around how long people live, but around how long people expect to live. That’s a critical distinction. We’ll probably start having these treatments within 12 to 15 years, but people still only get older at one year per year. We’re not going to have any 200-year-olds for at least a hundred years, so we shouldn’t be worrying about that. What we should be worrying about is what’s probably going to happen in the next five years: progress in developing rejuvenation medicines will be impressive enough that people start believing they’ll benefit, even though the medicines aren’t available yet. Today almost everybody believes they’ll live only a few years longer than their parents did. That will change almost overnight to most people expecting to live centuries longer than their parents. When that happens, they’ll want different life insurance and health insurance, they won’t want to pay the same premiums, and they’ll have completely different ideas about inheritance and pensions. Nobody is ready. When I talk to pension funds and insurance companies, I tell them to anticipate the anticipation. That change in expectations is going to be seismic for those industries, and these are the big-ticket items people spend most of their money on. It’s going to be chaos, and it’s only five years away.
Gary: A lot of people are jumping on the longevity bandwagon now. There are TV commercials for longevity products on regular TV. What do you think is the most overhyped thing people are buying into that isn’t really doing anything?
Aubrey de Grey: I don’t pay much attention to that, because there has been hype about things that don’t really work in longevity since before you and I were born. Everybody knows you can’t believe everything you hear. A large part of why it’s hard for researchers like me to persuade the public that this is coming is that a lot of people have said what I’m saying over the past several thousand years, and they’ve all been wrong. So why should I be right? I can understand that. Of course lots of things are overhyped. That’s what the private sector does: it tries to sell you things, gives you encouraging information and downplays the discouraging information. The phrase caveat emptor is Latin because it was invented 2,000 years ago.
Gary: If someone is 70 years old, what’s the number one thing they should start doing?
Aubrey de Grey: Let me talk about Bryan Johnson for a second, because he’s the advocate of the moment, with a massive audience. I know Bryan very well. He’s quite controversial, but I believe he’s very much a net positive for the movement, because he has inspired people I was never able to inspire. And one thing he says really forcefully, and he’s 100% right, is that you need to know what state your body is in to know what to do to improve it. He spends a lot of money because he has a lot of money. But even if you don’t, measuring basic things, getting blood work done once every year or two, getting your genome sequenced once in your life, which costs less than $1,000 and you only need to do once, can tell you what to do.
And I want to come back to something I said earlier: everybody is different, so different things work for different people. Nothing today works really well. Nothing will give most people 20 extra years of life. But some things will give some people a couple of extra years, and different things for different people, because people have different metabolisms, different genes, different everything. Understanding your body is key. You can also understand it subjectively, by paying attention to what makes you feel healthy and energetic and what doesn’t. I drink beer, but never enough to give me a hangover or make me feel bad. Binge drinking is definitely bad for very nearly everybody, but moderate drinking doesn’t matter much. Pay attention to your body: that’s the number one rule. I also minimize my risk of dying from anything stupid anytime soon. I don’t accept seminar invitations to dangerous countries, things like that.
Gary: Is there somewhere people can follow you?
Aubrey de Grey: The work we do is research, and it costs money, so our website has a nice big friendly donate button. We’re a nonprofit and rely entirely on philanthropy, on purpose. If we were for-profit, we’d have investors, and anyone who wants to make money wants to make it tomorrow, so we couldn’t work on very difficult problems that take longer to come to fruition. The same applies to government grants, which push you toward low-hanging fruit. We work on things nobody else works on, and we can do that because of donations. My website is levf.org, the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation, and my handle on X is just aubreydegrey, no spaces.
Gary: I’m glad you came on the show. It made me do more research into you, and I learn as much researching guests as I do from the guests. I really appreciate it, and I’ll be going to the site myself.
Aubrey de Grey: Thank you so much for having me.
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