March 22, 2023 • 52 mins
As constant breakthroughs in aging science make the news and some of the world's wealthiest individuals pour millions in anti-aging start-ups, it seems increasingly likely that humans in the near future may be able to greatly slow -- or even reverse -- the process of aging. In an episode replete with multiple strange conspiracies, Ben, Matt and Noel ask what would happen. Sure, it may be possible to reverse aging, but would it actually be good for humanity?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio, Welcome back to the show. My name
(00:25):
is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben.
We're joined as always with our superproducer Paul Mission controlled decond.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Now in the interest of full transparency, your fellow conspiracy
(00:45):
realist on this show are returning to you from a
little bit of time on the road, and I think
it's safe to say we are all maybe a bit punchy.
What do you all have going on after this episode?
Is it nap time? Is it chores cleaning? Catch up? Now,
it's podcasting time. Baby never sleeps. Let's go, let's go, well, hey,
(01:09):
we can do shoutouts, we can do shout outs. Let's
do some shout outs, man, I love that idea. Let's
do some shout outs. Let's definitely say hey to people
like Nick Thun and Brian Baumgardner that we got to
hang out with for a little bit Hopefullysenberg was a delight.
I got to I got to tell her how much
I missed asking me another and and tell her how
(01:30):
much I love the anagram for her name, which is
her ripe Bagunis, which anagrams are so fun. I'm not
smart enough to make them, but I remember that one.
Yeah you are, Oh that's really kind of ben. So
we went on some travels. We have more travels in line,
and I think for some of us not naming names, uh,
(01:50):
for some of us, uh, you're we experienced this point
that you might have experienced yourself. Folks, At some point
it hits everyone. You get a you'rd ache in a
body part, right, you wake up in the morning, you
slept too long in the wrong position, and you're thinking, wow,
did this elbow quit? You might have been drinking alcohol,
you have a hangover that lasts longer than it did
(02:12):
in your college days. Or maybe maybe you don't drink,
maybe you don't sleep, maybe you're just not as fast
on the court anymore, or you have trouble pulling all nighters,
and it leads to this frightening realization. The moment hits you,
am I getting old and one day to paraphrase the
Flaming Lips. You realize that everyone you know, including you,
(02:37):
will die. This is our episode that's a follow up
to modern vampires who follow up to immortality. The question
is should humans reverse aging? Here are the facts? Wait wait, wait, man, Ben,
are you saying I will I'm going to die? Yeah? Yeah, Sorry,
(03:01):
I wanted to tell you on air. This is a
big bummerential crisis in real time right now. One last thing,
we have personal experience of that feeling that Ben just described,
or you're like, oh man, something is not right anymore.
As part of this work thing, we hung out with
the Johnny Drinks folks, John Johnny and Steve and we
(03:24):
had to for work. We didn't have to, but as
a part of our work we drank Manhattan's and just
getting a little bit of alcohol in the system. Nowadays,
as we're getting older, I don't know about you guys,
not so great for me anymore in the morning. Definitely
causes you to flag a little bit the next day.
But I think we all kept our composure and exercise
(03:45):
some restraint. But exercise restraints as you may. The inevitability
of death is sure the study, is it, yeah? Yeah?
Or should we fight fight the tide like a salmon
swimming upstream. The study of death is called thanatology. There's
(04:06):
a book that we're gonna We're gonna save you some
time with. It's called The Denial of Death. Mentioned it
in past episodes. You do not have to read it.
And thesis is that every single piece of all human technology,
and all religion, and all of what we call society,
all all the things that the humans are doing is
(04:29):
to distract themselves from the fact that one day they
will no longer be around. Didn't want to start off
that nihilistic, So a little bit of solve here really quickly.
The thanatology like Thanos and he like the death God
kind of in the Marvel Universe in the comics. His
number one crush is the Marvel Universe embodiment of Death.
(04:51):
That's what I thought. I remember they didn't really play
with that in the movie. They do, remember, Yeah, but
like it was like really like a personification of like death.
You know. That's interesting. Well, let's add one important positive
philosophical note before we before we dive into the dark
waters of lethe or whatever. These days, most human beings
(05:16):
do not simply cease to exist at the point of
biological death. Back in the day, for most of your
human society, the vast majority of people died unremembered. But now,
as long as there is some idea or record of
you that exist, so long as you are remembered, you
will continue to affect the world. So, fellow conspiracy realist,
(05:41):
let's all do our collective best to leave a good impression.
You know what I mean? In some way, what we're
saying is humans do continue after their expiration date. But
biologically speaking, it's Valor Morgalus. You know what I mean?
Twenty four to seven, all humans will at some point
encounter a collapse in mission critical biological systems and die.
(06:05):
Did I get that right? Valor Mogulas? Is that correct? Morlas? Yea,
I think it's Goulas, but it's been a Mena since
I've watched that show. Yeah, So okay, So let's talk
about the average human being. You are listening, and you
are human. That's our first assumption. Uh, what's your average lifespan?
(06:29):
One hundred years? No, no, no, nope, right now it's
just under seventy four years, really close to the average
age of a sperm whale. Interestingly, enough, guys, not bad.
It's pretty good. Un till you get to seventy six
and you're thinking, is this all bonus credit? Uh for?
(06:49):
For comparison? What do we know about other animals? It's
like when they raise the level cap in video games
you now as part of like an update or a DLC.
You're just kind of like, yeah, you're on as you're
playing the extra content. Well, we're doing awesome compared to
like an octopus that's like four years five years back
pretty much, yeah, unless you unless you give them the lobotomy.
(07:12):
Why was that research stopped anyway? Different different question. So
other other mammals can live quite a long time. Other
life forms can live quite a long time, and they'd
be life forms that are called higher order. But shout
out to a frames excellent point from a week or
so back about the nature of intelligence and fungus. For comparison,
(07:36):
the average corvid lives fifteen to twenty two years if
things go well spoiler they don't. The world is brutal
and Matt, you were talking earlier as sperm whales, right, well, yeah,
I looked it up just for this episode. One of
the bigger, more intelligent creatures on the planet that swims
(07:58):
around in this case is a sperm whale, and they
have a life expectancy of about seventy years, and that
that was really puzzling to me, just because of our
stature the humans, you know, humans average height and weight
and everything, and then thinking that we live, you know,
seventy four to one hundred years, that kind of thing,
and then this huge creature also lives about that long.
(08:22):
For some reason, in my mind, I thought an octopus
would live a lot longer than a sperm whale, just
because of the massive size and how many cells are
in there and all that stuff. But it has nothing
to do with anything that I was thinking about. Well again,
somebody start doing more unethical research on the octopus. Please,
(08:44):
I'm very interested to see their opinions. If they make
it to even ten years, you know, it'll be cool.
You could probably only do it with biologically female octopus.
I know the research is being conducted. I gotta let
this go. Okay, humans, that's what we're talking about. Humans.
So the life expectancy, like I said, something like seventy
three point one six years. That statistic varies so widely
(09:10):
across the world, across demographics, across biological sex at birth. Like,
you know, it's a fact that the female of the
human species tends to live longer than the male. And
there are literally thousands of factors at play here, many
(09:30):
of which are human created factors. People are dying earlier
because of other humans, not because of their bodies. The
one thing about this it's so interesting is there's one
big commonality. It remains constant and it's frankly sinister since
the early days that people started getting up to the
(09:51):
business of people and the folks at the Yeah, the
folks at the top of whatever, of literally any culture,
the folks at the top would at some point get
desperate to stay alive for as long as possible, and
they had all gas, no breaks. They were super crappy
about it to anyone that they thought was getting in
(10:13):
their way. I guess so, I mean, but then we've
also seen you know, cautionary tales or like things like
Interview with the Vampire for example, where eventually you just
get to a point where you've had it all and
you just can't really, you know, just it's just not
fun anymore. You know, there's a certain malaise that sets
in and probably causes people to go a little bit
insane or vampire's brother. Today's episode is what if everybody
(10:38):
had that feeling right exactly? And it's not a it's
a scary proposition and we see it in history in
the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, where old Gilgamesh.
I always think of Gargamel, you know, from the Smurfs
whenever I hear Gilgamesh, but he spends a lot of
time trying to attain more immortality, much like we see
(10:59):
this story repeating. You know, there's a fountain of youth
and all of that stuff, and folks seeking some sort
of boon, you know, from a god or demigod or
whatever that would allow them to live forever because it's,
you know, a human thing. Once you realize that clock
is ticking, it's kind of natural to want to figure
out a way to stop it. M Yeah, and the
(11:21):
Epic of Gilgamesh is is pretty dope. Maybe we can,
maybe we could actually end today's episode with a clip
from our boy Guilgee or Gil. I guess you just
call them gill if your friends. But the story is
pretty good and it's an instructive lesson that in Samarian
(11:41):
culture at least, I pause. It was meant to help
people feel okay with time, as morbid as that sounds.
But then there are other folks like the ancient Chinese
emperor sin she Halden, who you know, we're not native speakers,
forgive us there it looks like and she hung Y're right?
(12:03):
So Hinchi Huang literally drank mercury. It was buried with
a bunch of it, with the idea that it would
make him immortal. And not only did it not make
him immortal, not only did he die, but it probably
ruined the natural world for people who lived around the
(12:26):
area for a while. I mean, we hear about, you know,
being mad as a hatter or whatever from the mercury
they used to treat the felt. I mean that stuff
literally does make you kind of go insane. Do you
think it was as simple as like, oh, what's the
shiny stuff? This must be magical juice from the gods.
Humans love it when someone authoritatively tells them something right,
(12:49):
like mercury this is neat Huh. You know what else
you can do? Maybe make you live forever. I'm just
asking questions. But also the story of that emperor less
less we be unfair to him. The story about that
emperor has a lot more to it. These are we're
just giving you a couple things that might sound like
(13:10):
weird historical footnotes, But humanity has been obsessed with this,
and rightly so, and they have an increasingly sophisticated understanding
of age in the modern day. Like in the modern
day right now, most people don't believe in biological immortality.
The big debate is can we replicate someone's brain to
(13:33):
a level of fidelity such that we could upload a
version of them that exists beyond the body, right That's
what most people think of when they think of plausible
immortality now. But despite the fact that most people don't
believe in bioimmortality, humans are still desperately doing whatever they
(13:54):
can to look younger than they are. I was looking
up plastic surgery statistics. You guys saw that a lot
of people are get plastic surgery. It's like it's a
big deal. Yeah, it's a massive industry. Well, and there
are a lot of different procedures. I mean, they're they're
always having a lot of different plastic surgery procedures. Some
(14:14):
are way more invasive than others. Some would still be
considered plastic surgery, but are more of like a thing
you'd go and do at the dermatologist on a Tuesday,
like some of the fillers and other things they get
injected to people that I would still consider that, you know,
way plastic surgery. I don't think it is the same thing,
(14:35):
though it's adjacent. I mean any kind of implant or
things that go I mean, yeah, yeah, A lot of
plastic surgery too is implant based. So whether you're getting
something injected or inserted, I think it's definitely, you know,
in the same vein. In January of twenty twenty three,
the International Society of Esthetic Plastic Surgeons or SAPPS is
(14:56):
APS release the results of an annual global their annual
Global Survey on esthetic cosmetic procedures today, and it showed
an overall nineteen point three percent increase and these kinds
of procedures in twenty twenty one with more than you're
close to thirteen million surgical and then seventeen point five
million non surgical, like you were talking about MATT procedures
(15:17):
performed worldwide. That's nuts. Well, it makes sense when you
think about what Ben You're saying earlier that there is
kind of a weird way to live forever now, and
that's just to exist digitally, not as an actual avatar
of yourself right and a version of yourself that's in
the machine, but just the representations of us that are
(15:39):
going to be around forever until they turn the servers off.
So I think that what we're seeing here is just
an attempt to appear as young as you possibly can
for as long as you can within that space, within
that medium. Look upon my Instagram you mighty oh no
and despair yeah, and as servers closed. Yeah, I mean,
(16:03):
it's a it's a wild, inherently conspiratorial thing, especially to
the point about appearance. Yeah, it's like, I mean, Alexa
play forever young. Shout out to anybody who's it's happening.
But while people are tucking their tummies and lifting their
faces and rubbing strange expensive creams across their wrinkles, scientists
(16:26):
around the world, funded by tycoons, funded by people you
might not like, are locked in labs conducting strange experiments.
We may not be able to stop the clock, they
seem to conclude, but what if we can turn it back.
We're gonna pause for word from our sponsors. Here's where
(16:55):
it gets crazy. Wait before we do that, I do
think we should say, um, there's nothing wrong with getting
plastic surgery. We're not body shaming anyone. You know, your
life is your own. But also I mean, like you know,
whether you're even people who aren't like vain at all
are like conceded there there's a real psychological effect on
changing the way you look and feeling good about yourself,
(17:17):
even if it's not because you know, want to just
feel like I'm so hot, you know. But it's it's
simple things. It's the same reason people go to gems
and all of that stuff, and there are some things
they go into the gym just won't fix. And we
are in a sis. We live in a society, as
it turns out, that does judge these kinds of things
and can make people feel very uncomfortable or lesson. So
(17:37):
I think there's an absolute benefit to maybe what I
would consider you know, moderate procedures like this. It's sure,
we do know that people can get like addicted to it, though,
and it becomes a real problem that's in of itself
a phenomenon that's very modern and very unusual. Like I
donate to charities that help kids would cleft palates, you know,
(18:00):
and that would that be plastic surgery. Anyway, The point
is not plastic surgery necessarily. The point is that people
want to slow or reverse aging, and for millennia this
has been the dream. But this part, the twist of
this episode, or the first twist, is that yes, according
(18:22):
to recent, ongoing, groundbreaking research, it is in fact possible
to reverse the effects of biological age. Somewhat caveat asteris
fine print. First, we have to understand what aging actually is.
Is it just sleeping wrong? Is it just that you
(18:44):
get to the point in your life where you feel like,
subconsciously you have to make sound effects when you get up,
you know, Oh, it's not an act. My friend, I
just saw a meme featuring our pal George Costanza from
Seinfeld where he's sort of pensively leaning again. It's like
a bridge, you know, an overpasser by a lake, and
it says, remembering the time before I had to grunt
(19:07):
anytime I sat down or stood up, and there is
some truth to that. It's weird. I'm feeling it, you know.
I mean, I'm a little heavier than to you guys,
but it's something that you see in everybody that gets
to our age. Lucky enough, but there are things you
gotta make adjustments, you know, or get adjustments. So what
is aging? How should we think about it? Ah? It
(19:29):
is your cells getting older, running the same processes over
and over and over and over, and then those cells
dying and being replaced by new cells and it continues happening.
So really, well, it's so much more complicated than that.
That's the way I think about it. Your body as
a system has been functioning for a long time, and
(19:52):
as it continues to function, your body then becomes more vulnerable.
All those cells, all those systems become more vulnerable to
breaking down a little bit, something going wrong, either from
a genetic standpoint, you know, within a couple of cells,
a cluster of cells, as they encounter some environmental factor,
a lot of times you can have some real problems.
(20:14):
So you're looking at things like dementia, stroke, cancer, so
freaking common, especially now that we know that we've been
wiping our butts with forever chemicals. All A true story.
Yeah yeah, unless you only use a day uh yeah yeah,
true story. And that's that's something you should clock, folks.
(20:35):
I can't remember when this is going to come out.
But Matt, you would you would hipped us to that
on a group chat and I had never heard of that,
But nice teaser. Uh. The the process of aging is
a series of processes. Honestly, aging is an umbrella's term,
and there are certain things that can accelerate unevenly. I
(20:58):
would add maculate or degeneration to the list of age
related ailments that people encounter. And so for a while,
doctors and scientists in what we can call the longevity field,
we're trying to figure out which of these processes is
the either the easiest to fix or the biggest bad
(21:25):
guy in the room. And then from there they said, well,
how do we target these processes? Is there a substance
that we can use to hit at these things to
halt them or reverse that trend of aging cells the
way that you can use other drugs to target specific diseases.
(21:49):
This is where we have to introduce folks like near Barzilia,
who is I think he's used to hearing this looks
great for his age. Also, I hate when people say
you look great for your age. That's such a strange
thing to say to someone. But but he had a
quote that really stands out about it, like treating age
(22:13):
like like a more understandable condition, the way that someone
would treat diabetes, for instance. Yeah. And to that end,
folks like doctor near bar ZELI, I believe him saying
that correctly phonetically at the very least, um, he argues, quote,
we can target aging, we can delay it, and in
(22:34):
several instances we can stop and reverse it. At one
point we had hope, then we moved to promise. Now
we need to move to realize that promise. Um. And
that's where we are. And this sounds a bit like
a sales pitch to me, doesn't It is this person
bit Yeah, okay, just make it sure right. But he
(22:55):
is a medical doctor, yes, and there is there is
fascinating research going to this and coming out of multiple universities,
multiple hospitals, multiple you know, parts of the world. It's
just as we're moving through this stuff. I do share
your feeling, Noll, that's it feels too good to be
true right now, because it it does feel too good
(23:18):
to be true. Yeah, it depends on what people are
maintaining is the truth. And we'll keep in mind, folks,
we're not talking about some sort of consensual Benjamin Button situation.
No one has a switch they can flip, no human
at least where they can instantly return to a juvenile
or infant stage. That superpower does belong to one living organism.
(23:42):
It's a type of jellyfish that we discuss in depth
in a previous episode in depth Ocean jokes. Anyway, so
far as we know, people have also not been able
to successfully replace themselves with clones. And that's good because
that wouldn't really be you anyway. Genetic makeup is a
surprisingly small part of what makes the you the actual you.
(24:07):
So if you made a clone of yourself, you grew
it up in a vat or whatever. Even if you
try to replicate all your formative life experiences, it would
be a very different person from the person that you are.
So that's kind of like a high right sort of
fools gold bargain. Anyway, So what are what are we
(24:29):
talking about when we say reverse aging? Well, Matt, you
brought up all the excellent work by many doctors, scientists,
many nonprofit institutions, but a lot of folks leading the
charge are private entities. They are biotech startups, and several
of them are entirely focused on reversing biological age. Dozens
(24:53):
of these groups, more than dozens probably actually, by the
time this podcast comes out. They want to be the
first the post to realize that promise that old doctor
B is talking about through drugs that would be loosely
called senolytics, as in, you know, fighting against sin essence.
(25:14):
These pharmaceuticals can clear out those old dysfunctional cells and
not damage the young functioning ones. They can clean the
house of time. You know, so weird, that's so weird.
And they're again there are a bunch of groups working
on things that like this. A couple of small shoutouts
(25:35):
before we get to the big one, because there's there's
a there's a big dog in the game here. We
just learned about the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of
Yeshiva University. There's a group of people they're working on
this stuff. There were several others. I think it's an
author been that I heard about, David Sinclair who is
(25:56):
also a He writes a lot about this and is
doing a lot of research on this. The way these
people talk about these things, y'all, it's it's just like before.
It feels like it's happening right now. It's like it's
already here, It's already happening. It's it's really impressive. But
when you think about this huge place that we're going
(26:17):
to introduce you to now, it feels like, at least
in the minds of the billionaires, the member we were
talking about, the really powerful people they want to live forever.
It feels like they see it. That class of powerful
people that want to live forever, they already see this thing.
It's in their sights. Yeah, and it should spook you. Uh,
(26:38):
Mission Control, could we get some spooky music, some scary music,
something ominous there. It is one of the new biggest
dogs in the game now, place called Altos Labs. Altos
launched in twenty twenty one. This group has four Nobel
(27:00):
winners on the board and they have funding of three
billion dollars. Yes that's with a B. And they also
caught the interests of folks like the modern Mansa Musa,
Jeff Bezos. To them, aging is just a series of processes,
which means they can not only be manipulated and tweaked,
(27:23):
but they can be hacked. One of the big one
of the big boffins working for Altos said quote, In
certain ways, I interpret aging as a software error. And
what surprises me about this more to think about it,
it's actually really valid way to look at it, right, agree,
(27:44):
It's just the data is compiling in erroneous ways as
you make copies of copies of copies of copies, and
you can't shut your system down to just reboot that
program so that it'll just start running correctly again and
just fix that error. Um, we have to sleep. Maybe
(28:04):
that really is why we have to sleep. It's compiling errors. Well,
the sleep is I think a good analogy would be
old school defragging a hard drive right of your mind, Yeah,
cleaning up the leftover detritus, you know, of of of
memory and all of that stuff. Yeah, there's a there's
another thing we found and you know, again, this is
(28:26):
not a ding on these people, but just in the
interest of transparency supporting a note that a lot of
the quotes were pulling from are people who are very
excited about their research, and in some cases people who
are trying to sell their research, such as Kristen Fortney,
the CEO of a place called Bioage Labs based in
(28:47):
San Francisco. The CEO says the following quote. There are
no hard limits imposed by biology or by physics that
say we can't live better longer. Her company uses vast
amounts of biobank, blood and tissue samples to try to
target markers of aging. That's the big thing. You got
(29:11):
to find what is creating this problem. Why does that
eighty year old person function less well than that fifty
year old person, right? And is there a way to
change that? Well? And also, I mean there are I
guess markers that are associated with aging less right, Like
(29:32):
certain people lose their hair, you know, certain people go gray,
some people don't. You know, people experience aging differently. Some
folks would maybe more elastic skin, they don't show cracks
or wrinkles as much, you know. I mean, there's definitely
desirable genetic traits while not you know, the equivalent of
life extension that would be good, you know for folks
(29:56):
to have. Yeah, And I mean the hair stuff is
maybe more cosmetic, I guess, but if it does have
association with something else, that's what those folks are looking at.
They're getting under the hood in a real way. They're
looking at the nervous system, the brain, the circulatory system,
(30:19):
and this bioage lab in particular, those folks are working
on drugs that will slow age related muscle loss in mice.
Let's go back to the CEO. Let's get in the
weeds just a little bit for this quote because it's
it's kind of creepy and we're going to hang out
with mice for a minute here. Quote. There is a
(30:39):
protein called appolin circulates in the blood, and we saw
that middle aged people with higher levels of applin in
their blood, we're living longer, with better muscle function and
better cognitive function as they age. So we gave this
drug to really old mice and we showed that it
could improve their muscle function. It helps them run faster
(30:59):
in their wheels, It increased their muscle size, it improved
their grip strength. M I know, everybody, everybody listening, just
go inject that apple. And we're kidding. This is not
medical advice. To be careful the apple and Olympics. Olympics, Yes,
what was that? Our buddy Dan Harman said we were
(31:20):
pitching in Olympics with no rules to him and he
was like, yeah, make them part truck, part man, all American, whatever,
all Russian. I think all Russian. That's right, that's it. Yeah, sorry, Dan.
But the thing is virtually every tech giant that you
know of as an individual, every one of them, through
(31:44):
one proxy or another, is probably investing in stuff like this.
Uh like chat gpt created by open Ai. The CEO
of open Ai, a guy named Sam Altman. It came
out recently. This one guy ponied up one hundred eighty
million dollars to start to invest in a biotech startup
(32:06):
called retro Biosciences. Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg. We mentioned our
buddy Jeff all the hits. They are paying big money
into this because these are no longer quite high in
the sky projects. This is not a in the pan
like an NFT. These drugs, some of them are already
(32:29):
out there. Welcome to our weird not quite advertisement for
a diabetes drug called met Foreman. So met Foreman. It's
used to treat diabetes, as he said, and it seems
to create thirty percent lower rates of almost every kind
of cancer. That's cool. It also appears to delay cognitive decline, and,
(32:53):
as doctor Barzillai says, quote even people with diabetes who
are OBEs and have more disease to start with, but
are on met foreman have lower mortality rates than people
without diabetes who aren't on the drug. Interesting if you
start seeing something like that in drug trials. Right, Okay,
(33:13):
we're trying to treat this one very specific thing, diabetes
with this drug, but there's all these other positive effects.
You're you know, brain starts going, what else could we
use this for? There's lots of money here. Sorry, that's
are thinking. That's not what the scientists are thinking. But
the folks who give the lights on probably are right.
(33:36):
And that's the issue. Like so many technological breakthroughs, we
can see precedence at play. The money is there, the need,
the desire is there, and those are the two factors
that push the science forward, which means it's quite likely
that within a decade or so, maybe sooner, some people
(33:56):
will be able to turn back parts of their biological clocks.
But we have to remember, folks, this is a critical
thinking show. We ask questions people don't always want answered,
So in our continuing mission to be fun at parties,
we have to pose a question for you, should human
(34:16):
society reverse aging? I can, but should will pause for
a word from our sponsors, and we'll be back as
time takes by. All right, we're back. What do we
think should human society reverse aging? Well, I mean we've
(34:41):
talked about how our natural resources are pretty taxed by
the population as it is. I mean, if we can
no longer depend on rates of attrition as far as
existing you know, human lives, seems like a pretty bad idea,
a recipe for disaster. And of course, see now the
(35:01):
part of the conversation your mind immediately jumps to is
would this be something that only the upper upper of
the upper class could afford and they would sort of collude,
you know, to be able to do that, even if
it was a detriment to the rest of the world. Yeah,
I imagine how expensive this drug is going to get. Seriously,
I mean within years, not decades, within years, this drug
(35:25):
is going to be so sought after and it's only Yeah,
there's no way this drugs can be so expensive. Yeah,
it would likely be a cocktail of drugs, right, a
regiment of treatments. I mean, of course, I always think
of my old argument with Scott Benjamin about flying cars.
Scott's right, flying cars are a terrible idea because humans
(35:48):
are terrible drivers. On the ground, that's the reason most
people are not pilots. But for a lot of people,
when you ask about reverse aging, most folks would say, well, yeah,
at least for me, just like flying cars would be great.
If I was the only one with a flying car.
If I the only one who can reverse aging, that's awesome.
(36:09):
I don't want to die. I'm not done yet. It's
still my turn. You jerks, that kind of thing. But
if you think about the world overall, then we see
that humanity, going back to the study of death amatology,
humanity has created these millennia old systems based entirely on
(36:31):
the fact that people have predictable mortality. Every single culture
you meet, and I know this sounds like a broad brush,
every single culture you meet is based on and exists
upon the founding thought that people in it will die.
That's the heart of the thing. Spoiler alert. And what
(36:53):
happens if a system like that gets confronted with a
population that sticks around, that elongates their most productive years,
it totally upends the system. Everything that's in place is
like irrelevant now, things like pensions and you know what
I mean, like or what I'm being silly? Not really, no, really,
that's absolutely something that is codified within our system of living.
(37:18):
And if all of a sudden we throw the wrench
in the works of immortality, you know, and again this
is only if it's more available than I think. You know,
we think it will be definitely upends a lot of stuff.
But why don't we operate under the assumption that it
is only the upper of the upper echelon. They have
access to so much stuff anyway, and they have wealth
that is legacy, wealth that could sustain them, you know,
(37:41):
it sustains generations of their family members. You know, why
would that be a hit on the rest of us?
Would that necessarily be a bad thing other than just
maybe not the best people in the whole world living
forever or living for a while, even one hundred and
twenty years is enough to rock foundations of the death
(38:02):
systems we call civilization. I mean, look, you raise a
great point, right. The world already has skyrocketing inequality, and
it's been skyrocketing for a while, but there's a new
level of disparity. What if you can tell somebody's income
by how old they are, right? What if sometimes you
(38:24):
can outside of blue zones? But nothing in history will
prepare humans for this potential acceleration. I was reading this
book by a guy named Matthew Desmond, author of a
poverty Comma by America. Right now, in the United States,
about one in nine people live in poverty. If that
(38:47):
population alone started its own country, it would be a
bigger country than Australia or Venezuela. There were there were
a lot of people who in the current system would
likely not have access to the ability, the means to
reverse their biological age. And then you start to imagine
(39:08):
these are all thought experiments. This hasn't happened yet as
we record, But imagine a world in which some tiny
percent of the global population becomes increasingly less like your
average Jane or Joe and increasingly more like some sort
of perpetual institution. You walk into the mansion, you look
(39:30):
just like your great grandfather, remember him fondly love for
caramel apples you had when napples was still abound. For sure,
I think, I think there were some things like that
in that show Carbon, what is it called Carbon? There
(39:50):
were some things like that exactly. It was very smart
sci fi. I love that because you know, we always
talk about smart sci fi. Oftentimes mimics reality eventually, you
know down the line, someone kind of figured it out.
Um they blew his stack the stack, Yeah exactly. Um,
But I still stand by though this idea that like,
(40:12):
you know, is it that different you know, passing down
that that that obscene wealth to an air you know,
I mean we know if we watch shows like a Succession,
they're just waiting for Daddy to die so they can
get the money. Like it's probably bad for the airs
if but is it bad for us, you know, the regulars?
(40:33):
Like is it going to change anything fundamentally about these
legacy families or whatever? That already our institutions for all
we care. It's just about who's in charge. You know,
it can because if you if your time horizon of
decisions right, if that, if that elongates, then your perspective changes,
(40:55):
you know. That's why that's a good point. That's why
the Catholic Church is so awesome at real estate because
they can lose money on a location. And the British crowd,
you know, and a lot of a lot of institutions,
they are better than you at real estate if you're listening,
because they can lose money on for a hundred years
(41:16):
and it doesn't matter they know they'll make a couple
hundred million on the back end, Right, every branch of
the US military, every branch of the US military, throwing
McDonald's as well. What we're saying is the playing ground
is unfair, right McDonald's. You could argue, is a real
estate holding company or hold go that happens to sell
(41:37):
French fries. So like, all right, okay, let me get
off this precarious soapbox. This okay, this same thing though,
what I love about your point, Noel, The same thing
could occur if someone is fully replicated as AI and
upload into a cloud with full legal rights, given the
(41:57):
power of attorney over whatever like whatever that looks like
they are for all intents of purposes that individual. That
could happen, That could happen, That could happen, And there
is a world in which humanity could, like the vast
majority of humanity could be controlled by something very close
to the gods of old religions run by mad ghosts
(42:20):
in the machines. Because you don't know what happened, like
no one's done it yet. We don't know what happens
when there's a real arnhem Zola, right, Marvel Universe anyway,
so I assumed as much. So then what happens to
the world's resource struggles? Well, they, yeah, that's so we've
been hitting out all along, and then why I'm yeah,
(42:41):
I'm asking what does it really look like? How does
it trickle down to the rest of us? And I
think your idea of perspective is super interesting, But I
think it only really takes a hit on the world's
resources if everybody gets this and then all of a sudden,
you know, the population in general just isn't dying off
like it used to. And while that sounds great, we're
(43:01):
not set up for that. We're barely set up for
what's already here. You know, someone's like, hey, we barely
have enough food for all eight billion of you to
reach the age of seventy three point one six years,
and now you can die a little earlier. That'd be
super dope if it's in your schedule. If it's your schedule.
(43:25):
But but yeah, there are these there are these huge
concerns that are happening, and there are a lot of
great ethicists talking about this, And yes, being an ethicist
is a real job, and it's an increasingly difficult one.
It's one that's often ignored. But where are we now?
In January of this year, Cell, which is a fantastic journal,
(43:48):
published an article by a guy that you mentioned earlier,
Matt David Sinclair, Professor of genetics at the blavat Nick
Institute of Harvard Medical School and co director of the
Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research.
And this guy brought a whole team with him. They
started messing with aging in yeast. Yeah, yeast, you'll recognize
(44:13):
it's earlier work from bread. They started aging experiments with bread.
They moved up to mice. They've done some amazing things. Well. Yeah,
back in twenty twenty, David Sinclair and his teams published
the whole thing about how they could reverse the aging
of eyes in mice. They could make blind mice no
(44:35):
longer blind, which three of them, all three, all three
behind mice now have side again. No, but but for real,
that was in twenty twenty and now we're talking about
a study this year in twenty twenty three, that's three years.
Where did this this person, David Sinclair and the teams
have been working on this stuff, yes, and they've already
(44:56):
made huge steps forward. So creepy Okay. Sinclair was a
graduate student at MIT when they said, hey, there are
these genes they control aging in yeast, and they said, also,
holy smokes, holy chibbada, these genes exist in all creatures.
(45:18):
So is there a way to do this in people?
And you know, there's a lot of ethics around human experimentation.
You gotta jump through hoops. So they said, let's do
some stuff with mice first. And this has been away Ben.
They were really upset that we can't just jove right
to experimenting on humans. You know, it's a real missedommortuity.
(45:44):
They're just like us. There's a paperwork, Okay, there should be. Um,
I get it, is what I'm saying. I get it
still anyway. So uh yeah. So they did something that
might be very uncool to some people, especially our animal
(46:07):
rights activists and our vegans, vegetarians ethicist in the crowd.
They had to do real science and speak of not
real science. I want to shout out fringe been rewatching
that it's basically law and order as science fiction. But
there's a dark side to this science because, in addition
(46:31):
to the fantastic stuff you mentioned, Matt restoring site maculability
right and restoring muscle mass and brain and kidney function
to these older mice. They had to test the other side,
and they found that if they could flip some of
(46:52):
their processes, they could fast forward aging in mice, and
they could do it without necessarily causing cancer, like they
could do it without necessarily killing the thing. They could
just make it older. And this is tremendous research because
(47:13):
that proves an important thing, that proves there is a
process at play, right. And so if you wanted to
be a real super villain, you could make it such
that you are, you know, eternally thirty or forty or whatever. Theoretically,
if we're writing sci fi, and then you could just
hit a group. You could target a group and make
(47:37):
them age at a precarious, much faster rate. And that
hasn't happened yet. That has not happened yet. Maybe it
won't because again, you know, there's a lot of paperwork,
but this gives us a lot of questions, and there
are questions that are not being addressed. Should people live longer, honestly, yeah,
(48:00):
that'd be amazing, But the systems that humanity has built
since the day people started humaning, they're not built for that.
They're built on the assumption that mortality is predictable, right,
that usefulness and productiveness in any society is predictable, everything
from free market to theocracies, to communism or whatever flavor
(48:25):
you want at the ice cream store of ideology, the
ideas that we know people will die probably in their seventies.
What do you do. You got to change the system, right,
you have to make a new system. And if that
doesn't happen, then reversing aging is I hate to say,
(48:46):
it might be a bad thing more than a good thing.
On the retirement age is now ninety five, the time
in age is ninety five. The beatings will continue until
morale improves, right, I don't know. This always makes We
were talking about sci fi, but it's like, you want
to live in a world like Elysium where there's a
(49:08):
small population orbiting Earth and everybody works for them. You
have no access to all the stuff they I don't know.
I don't know, and I know that's kind of a
third rail, But what do you guys think? Do you think, well,
we should reverse it? I don't know. I think I
think we should check it out and see if we can.
Because there's gonna be a mass die off of humans
(49:32):
at some point if we can figure this out now
and lock it away somewhere right, like to put it
in the seed vault somewhere in Scandinavia, and we've got
the stuff ready to go after that asteroid hits or
you know that huge cme chrono mass egectu or whatever
it is and takes out a whole bunch of humans,
(49:54):
the ones that are left over, then we start them
on the met Foreman and the what was the other one?
There's another one, rep them Iyasin. Did you guys, did
you guys read about Rappa Mayasin? Yeah? Sounds cool. Does
it give you bars instantly? Yes, it does. It's from
Easter Island, specifically from the soil and Easter Island, and
(50:14):
there's a bacterium uh that's that's in there that can
end up doing some of the same things when you
apply like you turn it into a drug. Essentially, it's nuts.
It's nuts. There's so there are more of these things happening,
or there's more of these substances that are being discovered
that have these effects on the cell's biological clock. So
(50:35):
it does feel like it could be amazing if there
were a way fewer humans. But as we stand now,
you know, around the eight billion mark, it's probably a
scary thing to try. So what do you think, folks, Uh,
let us know. We can't we can't wait to hear
from all eight billion people in the crowd today. Uh,
(50:57):
just drop us a line on the internet. While that's
a thing we should be pretty easy to find. We're
talking facebooks, we're talking instagrams, We're talking YouTube's and TikTok's
and Twitter's conspiracy stuff on a lot of those conspiracy
stuff show on TikTok and Instagram. And if you don't
(51:19):
sip those social meads, have not a worry in your mind.
You can always give us a call directly. That's right.
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(51:41):
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(52:03):
want to do any of that stuff, why not instead
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(52:30):
to know. Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio, Welcome back to the show. My name
(00:25):
is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben.
We're joined as always with our superproducer Paul Mission controlled decond.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Now in the interest of full transparency, your fellow conspiracy
(00:45):
realist on this show are returning to you from a
little bit of time on the road, and I think
it's safe to say we are all maybe a bit punchy.
What do you all have going on after this episode?
Is it nap time? Is it chores cleaning? Catch up? Now,
it's podcasting time. Baby never sleeps. Let's go, let's go, well, hey,
(01:09):
we can do shoutouts, we can do shout outs. Let's
do some shout outs, man, I love that idea. Let's
do some shout outs. Let's definitely say hey to people
like Nick Thun and Brian Baumgardner that we got to
hang out with for a little bit Hopefullysenberg was a delight.
I got to I got to tell her how much
I missed asking me another and and tell her how
(01:30):
much I love the anagram for her name, which is
her ripe Bagunis, which anagrams are so fun. I'm not
smart enough to make them, but I remember that one.
Yeah you are, Oh that's really kind of ben. So
we went on some travels. We have more travels in line,
and I think for some of us not naming names, uh,
(01:50):
for some of us, uh, you're we experienced this point
that you might have experienced yourself. Folks, At some point
it hits everyone. You get a you'rd ache in a
body part, right, you wake up in the morning, you
slept too long in the wrong position, and you're thinking, wow,
did this elbow quit? You might have been drinking alcohol,
you have a hangover that lasts longer than it did
(02:12):
in your college days. Or maybe maybe you don't drink,
maybe you don't sleep, maybe you're just not as fast
on the court anymore, or you have trouble pulling all nighters,
and it leads to this frightening realization. The moment hits you,
am I getting old and one day to paraphrase the
Flaming Lips. You realize that everyone you know, including you,
(02:37):
will die. This is our episode that's a follow up
to modern vampires who follow up to immortality. The question
is should humans reverse aging? Here are the facts? Wait wait, wait, man, Ben,
are you saying I will I'm going to die? Yeah? Yeah, Sorry,
(03:01):
I wanted to tell you on air. This is a
big bummerential crisis in real time right now. One last thing,
we have personal experience of that feeling that Ben just described,
or you're like, oh man, something is not right anymore.
As part of this work thing, we hung out with
the Johnny Drinks folks, John Johnny and Steve and we
(03:24):
had to for work. We didn't have to, but as
a part of our work we drank Manhattan's and just
getting a little bit of alcohol in the system. Nowadays,
as we're getting older, I don't know about you guys,
not so great for me anymore in the morning. Definitely
causes you to flag a little bit the next day.
But I think we all kept our composure and exercise
(03:45):
some restraint. But exercise restraints as you may. The inevitability
of death is sure the study, is it, yeah? Yeah?
Or should we fight fight the tide like a salmon
swimming upstream. The study of death is called thanatology. There's
(04:06):
a book that we're gonna We're gonna save you some
time with. It's called The Denial of Death. Mentioned it
in past episodes. You do not have to read it.
And thesis is that every single piece of all human technology,
and all religion, and all of what we call society,
all all the things that the humans are doing is
(04:29):
to distract themselves from the fact that one day they
will no longer be around. Didn't want to start off
that nihilistic, So a little bit of solve here really quickly.
The thanatology like Thanos and he like the death God
kind of in the Marvel Universe in the comics. His
number one crush is the Marvel Universe embodiment of Death.
(04:51):
That's what I thought. I remember they didn't really play
with that in the movie. They do, remember, Yeah, but
like it was like really like a personification of like death.
You know. That's interesting. Well, let's add one important positive
philosophical note before we before we dive into the dark
waters of lethe or whatever. These days, most human beings
(05:16):
do not simply cease to exist at the point of
biological death. Back in the day, for most of your
human society, the vast majority of people died unremembered. But now,
as long as there is some idea or record of
you that exist, so long as you are remembered, you
will continue to affect the world. So, fellow conspiracy realist,
(05:41):
let's all do our collective best to leave a good impression.
You know what I mean? In some way, what we're
saying is humans do continue after their expiration date. But
biologically speaking, it's Valor Morgalus. You know what I mean?
Twenty four to seven, all humans will at some point
encounter a collapse in mission critical biological systems and die.
(06:05):
Did I get that right? Valor Mogulas? Is that correct? Morlas? Yea,
I think it's Goulas, but it's been a Mena since
I've watched that show. Yeah, So okay, So let's talk
about the average human being. You are listening, and you
are human. That's our first assumption. Uh, what's your average lifespan?
(06:29):
One hundred years? No, no, no, nope, right now it's
just under seventy four years, really close to the average
age of a sperm whale. Interestingly, enough, guys, not bad.
It's pretty good. Un till you get to seventy six
and you're thinking, is this all bonus credit? Uh for?
(06:49):
For comparison? What do we know about other animals? It's
like when they raise the level cap in video games
you now as part of like an update or a DLC.
You're just kind of like, yeah, you're on as you're
playing the extra content. Well, we're doing awesome compared to
like an octopus that's like four years five years back
pretty much, yeah, unless you unless you give them the lobotomy.
(07:12):
Why was that research stopped anyway? Different different question. So
other other mammals can live quite a long time. Other
life forms can live quite a long time, and they'd
be life forms that are called higher order. But shout
out to a frames excellent point from a week or
so back about the nature of intelligence and fungus. For comparison,
(07:36):
the average corvid lives fifteen to twenty two years if
things go well spoiler they don't. The world is brutal
and Matt, you were talking earlier as sperm whales, right, well, yeah,
I looked it up just for this episode. One of
the bigger, more intelligent creatures on the planet that swims
(07:58):
around in this case is a sperm whale, and they
have a life expectancy of about seventy years, and that
that was really puzzling to me, just because of our
stature the humans, you know, humans average height and weight
and everything, and then thinking that we live, you know,
seventy four to one hundred years, that kind of thing,
and then this huge creature also lives about that long.
(08:22):
For some reason, in my mind, I thought an octopus
would live a lot longer than a sperm whale, just
because of the massive size and how many cells are
in there and all that stuff. But it has nothing
to do with anything that I was thinking about. Well again,
somebody start doing more unethical research on the octopus. Please,
(08:44):
I'm very interested to see their opinions. If they make
it to even ten years, you know, it'll be cool.
You could probably only do it with biologically female octopus.
I know the research is being conducted. I gotta let
this go. Okay, humans, that's what we're talking about. Humans.
So the life expectancy, like I said, something like seventy
three point one six years. That statistic varies so widely
(09:10):
across the world, across demographics, across biological sex at birth. Like,
you know, it's a fact that the female of the
human species tends to live longer than the male. And
there are literally thousands of factors at play here, many
(09:30):
of which are human created factors. People are dying earlier
because of other humans, not because of their bodies. The
one thing about this it's so interesting is there's one
big commonality. It remains constant and it's frankly sinister since
the early days that people started getting up to the
(09:51):
business of people and the folks at the Yeah, the
folks at the top of whatever, of literally any culture,
the folks at the top would at some point get
desperate to stay alive for as long as possible, and
they had all gas, no breaks. They were super crappy
about it to anyone that they thought was getting in
(10:13):
their way. I guess so, I mean, but then we've
also seen you know, cautionary tales or like things like
Interview with the Vampire for example, where eventually you just
get to a point where you've had it all and
you just can't really, you know, just it's just not
fun anymore. You know, there's a certain malaise that sets
in and probably causes people to go a little bit
insane or vampire's brother. Today's episode is what if everybody
(10:38):
had that feeling right exactly? And it's not a it's
a scary proposition and we see it in history in
the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, where old Gilgamesh.
I always think of Gargamel, you know, from the Smurfs
whenever I hear Gilgamesh, but he spends a lot of
time trying to attain more immortality, much like we see
(10:59):
this story repeating. You know, there's a fountain of youth
and all of that stuff, and folks seeking some sort
of boon, you know, from a god or demigod or
whatever that would allow them to live forever because it's,
you know, a human thing. Once you realize that clock
is ticking, it's kind of natural to want to figure
out a way to stop it. M Yeah, and the
(11:21):
Epic of Gilgamesh is is pretty dope. Maybe we can,
maybe we could actually end today's episode with a clip
from our boy Guilgee or Gil. I guess you just
call them gill if your friends. But the story is
pretty good and it's an instructive lesson that in Samarian
(11:41):
culture at least, I pause. It was meant to help
people feel okay with time, as morbid as that sounds.
But then there are other folks like the ancient Chinese
emperor sin she Halden, who you know, we're not native speakers,
forgive us there it looks like and she hung Y're right?
(12:03):
So Hinchi Huang literally drank mercury. It was buried with
a bunch of it, with the idea that it would
make him immortal. And not only did it not make
him immortal, not only did he die, but it probably
ruined the natural world for people who lived around the
(12:26):
area for a while. I mean, we hear about, you know,
being mad as a hatter or whatever from the mercury
they used to treat the felt. I mean that stuff
literally does make you kind of go insane. Do you
think it was as simple as like, oh, what's the
shiny stuff? This must be magical juice from the gods.
Humans love it when someone authoritatively tells them something right,
(12:49):
like mercury this is neat Huh. You know what else
you can do? Maybe make you live forever. I'm just
asking questions. But also the story of that emperor less
less we be unfair to him. The story about that
emperor has a lot more to it. These are we're
just giving you a couple things that might sound like
(13:10):
weird historical footnotes, But humanity has been obsessed with this,
and rightly so, and they have an increasingly sophisticated understanding
of age in the modern day. Like in the modern
day right now, most people don't believe in biological immortality.
The big debate is can we replicate someone's brain to
(13:33):
a level of fidelity such that we could upload a
version of them that exists beyond the body, right That's
what most people think of when they think of plausible
immortality now. But despite the fact that most people don't
believe in bioimmortality, humans are still desperately doing whatever they
(13:54):
can to look younger than they are. I was looking
up plastic surgery statistics. You guys saw that a lot
of people are get plastic surgery. It's like it's a
big deal. Yeah, it's a massive industry. Well, and there
are a lot of different procedures. I mean, they're they're
always having a lot of different plastic surgery procedures. Some
(14:14):
are way more invasive than others. Some would still be
considered plastic surgery, but are more of like a thing
you'd go and do at the dermatologist on a Tuesday,
like some of the fillers and other things they get
injected to people that I would still consider that, you know,
way plastic surgery. I don't think it is the same thing,
(14:35):
though it's adjacent. I mean any kind of implant or
things that go I mean, yeah, yeah, A lot of
plastic surgery too is implant based. So whether you're getting
something injected or inserted, I think it's definitely, you know,
in the same vein. In January of twenty twenty three,
the International Society of Esthetic Plastic Surgeons or SAPPS is
(14:56):
APS release the results of an annual global their annual
Global Survey on esthetic cosmetic procedures today, and it showed
an overall nineteen point three percent increase and these kinds
of procedures in twenty twenty one with more than you're
close to thirteen million surgical and then seventeen point five
million non surgical, like you were talking about MATT procedures
(15:17):
performed worldwide. That's nuts. Well, it makes sense when you
think about what Ben You're saying earlier that there is
kind of a weird way to live forever now, and
that's just to exist digitally, not as an actual avatar
of yourself right and a version of yourself that's in
the machine, but just the representations of us that are
(15:39):
going to be around forever until they turn the servers off.
So I think that what we're seeing here is just
an attempt to appear as young as you possibly can
for as long as you can within that space, within
that medium. Look upon my Instagram you mighty oh no
and despair yeah, and as servers closed. Yeah, I mean,
(16:03):
it's a it's a wild, inherently conspiratorial thing, especially to
the point about appearance. Yeah, it's like, I mean, Alexa
play forever young. Shout out to anybody who's it's happening.
But while people are tucking their tummies and lifting their
faces and rubbing strange expensive creams across their wrinkles, scientists
(16:26):
around the world, funded by tycoons, funded by people you
might not like, are locked in labs conducting strange experiments.
We may not be able to stop the clock, they
seem to conclude, but what if we can turn it back.
We're gonna pause for word from our sponsors. Here's where
(16:55):
it gets crazy. Wait before we do that, I do
think we should say, um, there's nothing wrong with getting
plastic surgery. We're not body shaming anyone. You know, your
life is your own. But also I mean, like you know,
whether you're even people who aren't like vain at all
are like conceded there there's a real psychological effect on
changing the way you look and feeling good about yourself,
(17:17):
even if it's not because you know, want to just
feel like I'm so hot, you know. But it's it's
simple things. It's the same reason people go to gems
and all of that stuff, and there are some things
they go into the gym just won't fix. And we
are in a sis. We live in a society, as
it turns out, that does judge these kinds of things
and can make people feel very uncomfortable or lesson. So
(17:37):
I think there's an absolute benefit to maybe what I
would consider you know, moderate procedures like this. It's sure,
we do know that people can get like addicted to it, though,
and it becomes a real problem that's in of itself
a phenomenon that's very modern and very unusual. Like I
donate to charities that help kids would cleft palates, you know,
(18:00):
and that would that be plastic surgery. Anyway, The point
is not plastic surgery necessarily. The point is that people
want to slow or reverse aging, and for millennia this
has been the dream. But this part, the twist of
this episode, or the first twist, is that yes, according
(18:22):
to recent, ongoing, groundbreaking research, it is in fact possible
to reverse the effects of biological age. Somewhat caveat asteris
fine print. First, we have to understand what aging actually is.
Is it just sleeping wrong? Is it just that you
(18:44):
get to the point in your life where you feel like,
subconsciously you have to make sound effects when you get up,
you know, Oh, it's not an act. My friend, I
just saw a meme featuring our pal George Costanza from
Seinfeld where he's sort of pensively leaning again. It's like
a bridge, you know, an overpasser by a lake, and
it says, remembering the time before I had to grunt
(19:07):
anytime I sat down or stood up, and there is
some truth to that. It's weird. I'm feeling it, you know.
I mean, I'm a little heavier than to you guys,
but it's something that you see in everybody that gets
to our age. Lucky enough, but there are things you
gotta make adjustments, you know, or get adjustments. So what
is aging? How should we think about it? Ah? It
(19:29):
is your cells getting older, running the same processes over
and over and over and over, and then those cells
dying and being replaced by new cells and it continues happening.
So really, well, it's so much more complicated than that.
That's the way I think about it. Your body as
a system has been functioning for a long time, and
(19:52):
as it continues to function, your body then becomes more vulnerable.
All those cells, all those systems become more vulnerable to
breaking down a little bit, something going wrong, either from
a genetic standpoint, you know, within a couple of cells,
a cluster of cells, as they encounter some environmental factor,
a lot of times you can have some real problems.
(20:14):
So you're looking at things like dementia, stroke, cancer, so
freaking common, especially now that we know that we've been
wiping our butts with forever chemicals. All A true story.
Yeah yeah, unless you only use a day uh yeah yeah,
true story. And that's that's something you should clock, folks.
(20:35):
I can't remember when this is going to come out.
But Matt, you would you would hipped us to that
on a group chat and I had never heard of that,
But nice teaser. Uh. The the process of aging is
a series of processes. Honestly, aging is an umbrella's term,
and there are certain things that can accelerate unevenly. I
(20:58):
would add maculate or degeneration to the list of age
related ailments that people encounter. And so for a while,
doctors and scientists in what we can call the longevity field,
we're trying to figure out which of these processes is
the either the easiest to fix or the biggest bad
(21:25):
guy in the room. And then from there they said, well,
how do we target these processes? Is there a substance
that we can use to hit at these things to
halt them or reverse that trend of aging cells the
way that you can use other drugs to target specific diseases.
(21:49):
This is where we have to introduce folks like near Barzilia,
who is I think he's used to hearing this looks
great for his age. Also, I hate when people say
you look great for your age. That's such a strange
thing to say to someone. But but he had a
quote that really stands out about it, like treating age
(22:13):
like like a more understandable condition, the way that someone
would treat diabetes, for instance. Yeah. And to that end,
folks like doctor near bar ZELI, I believe him saying
that correctly phonetically at the very least, um, he argues, quote,
we can target aging, we can delay it, and in
(22:34):
several instances we can stop and reverse it. At one
point we had hope, then we moved to promise. Now
we need to move to realize that promise. Um. And
that's where we are. And this sounds a bit like
a sales pitch to me, doesn't It is this person
bit Yeah, okay, just make it sure right. But he
(22:55):
is a medical doctor, yes, and there is there is
fascinating research going to this and coming out of multiple universities,
multiple hospitals, multiple you know, parts of the world. It's
just as we're moving through this stuff. I do share
your feeling, Noll, that's it feels too good to be
true right now, because it it does feel too good
(23:18):
to be true. Yeah, it depends on what people are
maintaining is the truth. And we'll keep in mind, folks,
we're not talking about some sort of consensual Benjamin Button situation.
No one has a switch they can flip, no human
at least where they can instantly return to a juvenile
or infant stage. That superpower does belong to one living organism.
(23:42):
It's a type of jellyfish that we discuss in depth
in a previous episode in depth Ocean jokes. Anyway, so
far as we know, people have also not been able
to successfully replace themselves with clones. And that's good because
that wouldn't really be you anyway. Genetic makeup is a
surprisingly small part of what makes the you the actual you.
(24:07):
So if you made a clone of yourself, you grew
it up in a vat or whatever. Even if you
try to replicate all your formative life experiences, it would
be a very different person from the person that you are.
So that's kind of like a high right sort of
fools gold bargain. Anyway, So what are what are we
(24:29):
talking about when we say reverse aging? Well, Matt, you
brought up all the excellent work by many doctors, scientists,
many nonprofit institutions, but a lot of folks leading the
charge are private entities. They are biotech startups, and several
of them are entirely focused on reversing biological age. Dozens
(24:53):
of these groups, more than dozens probably actually, by the
time this podcast comes out. They want to be the
first the post to realize that promise that old doctor
B is talking about through drugs that would be loosely
called senolytics, as in, you know, fighting against sin essence.
(25:14):
These pharmaceuticals can clear out those old dysfunctional cells and
not damage the young functioning ones. They can clean the
house of time. You know, so weird, that's so weird.
And they're again there are a bunch of groups working
on things that like this. A couple of small shoutouts
(25:35):
before we get to the big one, because there's there's
a there's a big dog in the game here. We
just learned about the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of
Yeshiva University. There's a group of people they're working on
this stuff. There were several others. I think it's an
author been that I heard about, David Sinclair who is
(25:56):
also a He writes a lot about this and is
doing a lot of research on this. The way these
people talk about these things, y'all, it's it's just like before.
It feels like it's happening right now. It's like it's
already here, It's already happening. It's it's really impressive. But
when you think about this huge place that we're going
(26:17):
to introduce you to now, it feels like, at least
in the minds of the billionaires, the member we were
talking about, the really powerful people they want to live forever.
It feels like they see it. That class of powerful
people that want to live forever, they already see this thing.
It's in their sights. Yeah, and it should spook you. Uh,
(26:38):
Mission Control, could we get some spooky music, some scary music,
something ominous there. It is one of the new biggest
dogs in the game now, place called Altos Labs. Altos
launched in twenty twenty one. This group has four Nobel
(27:00):
winners on the board and they have funding of three
billion dollars. Yes that's with a B. And they also
caught the interests of folks like the modern Mansa Musa,
Jeff Bezos. To them, aging is just a series of processes,
which means they can not only be manipulated and tweaked,
(27:23):
but they can be hacked. One of the big one
of the big boffins working for Altos said quote, In
certain ways, I interpret aging as a software error. And
what surprises me about this more to think about it,
it's actually really valid way to look at it, right, agree,
(27:44):
It's just the data is compiling in erroneous ways as
you make copies of copies of copies of copies, and
you can't shut your system down to just reboot that
program so that it'll just start running correctly again and
just fix that error. Um, we have to sleep. Maybe
(28:04):
that really is why we have to sleep. It's compiling errors. Well,
the sleep is I think a good analogy would be
old school defragging a hard drive right of your mind, Yeah,
cleaning up the leftover detritus, you know, of of of
memory and all of that stuff. Yeah, there's a there's
another thing we found and you know, again, this is
(28:26):
not a ding on these people, but just in the
interest of transparency supporting a note that a lot of
the quotes were pulling from are people who are very
excited about their research, and in some cases people who
are trying to sell their research, such as Kristen Fortney,
the CEO of a place called Bioage Labs based in
(28:47):
San Francisco. The CEO says the following quote. There are
no hard limits imposed by biology or by physics that
say we can't live better longer. Her company uses vast
amounts of biobank, blood and tissue samples to try to
target markers of aging. That's the big thing. You got
(29:11):
to find what is creating this problem. Why does that
eighty year old person function less well than that fifty
year old person, right? And is there a way to
change that? Well? And also, I mean there are I
guess markers that are associated with aging less right, Like
(29:32):
certain people lose their hair, you know, certain people go gray,
some people don't. You know, people experience aging differently. Some
folks would maybe more elastic skin, they don't show cracks
or wrinkles as much, you know. I mean, there's definitely
desirable genetic traits while not you know, the equivalent of
life extension that would be good, you know for folks
(29:56):
to have. Yeah, And I mean the hair stuff is
maybe more cosmetic, I guess, but if it does have
association with something else, that's what those folks are looking at.
They're getting under the hood in a real way. They're
looking at the nervous system, the brain, the circulatory system,
(30:19):
and this bioage lab in particular, those folks are working
on drugs that will slow age related muscle loss in mice.
Let's go back to the CEO. Let's get in the
weeds just a little bit for this quote because it's
it's kind of creepy and we're going to hang out
with mice for a minute here. Quote. There is a
(30:39):
protein called appolin circulates in the blood, and we saw
that middle aged people with higher levels of applin in
their blood, we're living longer, with better muscle function and
better cognitive function as they age. So we gave this
drug to really old mice and we showed that it
could improve their muscle function. It helps them run faster
(30:59):
in their wheels, It increased their muscle size, it improved
their grip strength. M I know, everybody, everybody listening, just
go inject that apple. And we're kidding. This is not
medical advice. To be careful the apple and Olympics. Olympics, Yes,
what was that? Our buddy Dan Harman said we were
(31:20):
pitching in Olympics with no rules to him and he
was like, yeah, make them part truck, part man, all American, whatever,
all Russian. I think all Russian. That's right, that's it. Yeah, sorry, Dan.
But the thing is virtually every tech giant that you
know of as an individual, every one of them, through
(31:44):
one proxy or another, is probably investing in stuff like this.
Uh like chat gpt created by open Ai. The CEO
of open Ai, a guy named Sam Altman. It came
out recently. This one guy ponied up one hundred eighty
million dollars to start to invest in a biotech startup
(32:06):
called retro Biosciences. Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg. We mentioned our
buddy Jeff all the hits. They are paying big money
into this because these are no longer quite high in
the sky projects. This is not a in the pan
like an NFT. These drugs, some of them are already
(32:29):
out there. Welcome to our weird not quite advertisement for
a diabetes drug called met Foreman. So met Foreman. It's
used to treat diabetes, as he said, and it seems
to create thirty percent lower rates of almost every kind
of cancer. That's cool. It also appears to delay cognitive decline, and,
(32:53):
as doctor Barzillai says, quote even people with diabetes who
are OBEs and have more disease to start with, but
are on met foreman have lower mortality rates than people
without diabetes who aren't on the drug. Interesting if you
start seeing something like that in drug trials. Right, Okay,
(33:13):
we're trying to treat this one very specific thing, diabetes
with this drug, but there's all these other positive effects.
You're you know, brain starts going, what else could we
use this for? There's lots of money here. Sorry, that's
are thinking. That's not what the scientists are thinking. But
the folks who give the lights on probably are right.
(33:36):
And that's the issue. Like so many technological breakthroughs, we
can see precedence at play. The money is there, the need,
the desire is there, and those are the two factors
that push the science forward, which means it's quite likely
that within a decade or so, maybe sooner, some people
(33:56):
will be able to turn back parts of their biological clocks.
But we have to remember, folks, this is a critical
thinking show. We ask questions people don't always want answered,
So in our continuing mission to be fun at parties,
we have to pose a question for you, should human
(34:16):
society reverse aging? I can, but should will pause for
a word from our sponsors, and we'll be back as
time takes by. All right, we're back. What do we
think should human society reverse aging? Well, I mean we've
(34:41):
talked about how our natural resources are pretty taxed by
the population as it is. I mean, if we can
no longer depend on rates of attrition as far as
existing you know, human lives, seems like a pretty bad idea,
a recipe for disaster. And of course, see now the
(35:01):
part of the conversation your mind immediately jumps to is
would this be something that only the upper upper of
the upper class could afford and they would sort of collude,
you know, to be able to do that, even if
it was a detriment to the rest of the world. Yeah,
I imagine how expensive this drug is going to get. Seriously,
I mean within years, not decades, within years, this drug
(35:25):
is going to be so sought after and it's only Yeah,
there's no way this drugs can be so expensive. Yeah,
it would likely be a cocktail of drugs, right, a
regiment of treatments. I mean, of course, I always think
of my old argument with Scott Benjamin about flying cars.
Scott's right, flying cars are a terrible idea because humans
(35:48):
are terrible drivers. On the ground, that's the reason most
people are not pilots. But for a lot of people,
when you ask about reverse aging, most folks would say, well, yeah,
at least for me, just like flying cars would be great.
If I was the only one with a flying car.
If I the only one who can reverse aging, that's awesome.
(36:09):
I don't want to die. I'm not done yet. It's
still my turn. You jerks, that kind of thing. But
if you think about the world overall, then we see
that humanity, going back to the study of death amatology,
humanity has created these millennia old systems based entirely on
(36:31):
the fact that people have predictable mortality. Every single culture
you meet, and I know this sounds like a broad brush,
every single culture you meet is based on and exists
upon the founding thought that people in it will die.
That's the heart of the thing. Spoiler alert. And what
(36:53):
happens if a system like that gets confronted with a
population that sticks around, that elongates their most productive years,
it totally upends the system. Everything that's in place is
like irrelevant now, things like pensions and you know what
I mean, like or what I'm being silly? Not really, no, really,
that's absolutely something that is codified within our system of living.
(37:18):
And if all of a sudden we throw the wrench
in the works of immortality, you know, and again this
is only if it's more available than I think. You know,
we think it will be definitely upends a lot of stuff.
But why don't we operate under the assumption that it
is only the upper of the upper echelon. They have
access to so much stuff anyway, and they have wealth
that is legacy, wealth that could sustain them, you know,
(37:41):
it sustains generations of their family members. You know, why
would that be a hit on the rest of us?
Would that necessarily be a bad thing other than just
maybe not the best people in the whole world living
forever or living for a while, even one hundred and
twenty years is enough to rock foundations of the death
(38:02):
systems we call civilization. I mean, look, you raise a
great point, right. The world already has skyrocketing inequality, and
it's been skyrocketing for a while, but there's a new
level of disparity. What if you can tell somebody's income
by how old they are, right? What if sometimes you
(38:24):
can outside of blue zones? But nothing in history will
prepare humans for this potential acceleration. I was reading this
book by a guy named Matthew Desmond, author of a
poverty Comma by America. Right now, in the United States,
about one in nine people live in poverty. If that
(38:47):
population alone started its own country, it would be a
bigger country than Australia or Venezuela. There were there were
a lot of people who in the current system would
likely not have access to the ability, the means to
reverse their biological age. And then you start to imagine
(39:08):
these are all thought experiments. This hasn't happened yet as
we record, But imagine a world in which some tiny
percent of the global population becomes increasingly less like your
average Jane or Joe and increasingly more like some sort
of perpetual institution. You walk into the mansion, you look
(39:30):
just like your great grandfather, remember him fondly love for
caramel apples you had when napples was still abound. For sure,
I think, I think there were some things like that
in that show Carbon, what is it called Carbon? There
(39:50):
were some things like that exactly. It was very smart
sci fi. I love that because you know, we always
talk about smart sci fi. Oftentimes mimics reality eventually, you
know down the line, someone kind of figured it out.
Um they blew his stack the stack, Yeah exactly. Um,
But I still stand by though this idea that like,
(40:12):
you know, is it that different you know, passing down
that that that obscene wealth to an air you know,
I mean we know if we watch shows like a Succession,
they're just waiting for Daddy to die so they can
get the money. Like it's probably bad for the airs
if but is it bad for us, you know, the regulars?
(40:33):
Like is it going to change anything fundamentally about these
legacy families or whatever? That already our institutions for all
we care. It's just about who's in charge. You know,
it can because if you if your time horizon of
decisions right, if that, if that elongates, then your perspective changes,
(40:55):
you know. That's why that's a good point. That's why
the Catholic Church is so awesome at real estate because
they can lose money on a location. And the British crowd,
you know, and a lot of a lot of institutions,
they are better than you at real estate if you're listening,
because they can lose money on for a hundred years
(41:16):
and it doesn't matter they know they'll make a couple
hundred million on the back end, Right, every branch of
the US military, every branch of the US military, throwing
McDonald's as well. What we're saying is the playing ground
is unfair, right McDonald's. You could argue, is a real
estate holding company or hold go that happens to sell
(41:37):
French fries. So like, all right, okay, let me get
off this precarious soapbox. This okay, this same thing though,
what I love about your point, Noel, The same thing
could occur if someone is fully replicated as AI and
upload into a cloud with full legal rights, given the
(41:57):
power of attorney over whatever like whatever that looks like
they are for all intents of purposes that individual. That
could happen, That could happen, That could happen, And there
is a world in which humanity could, like the vast
majority of humanity could be controlled by something very close
to the gods of old religions run by mad ghosts
(42:20):
in the machines. Because you don't know what happened, like
no one's done it yet. We don't know what happens
when there's a real arnhem Zola, right, Marvel Universe anyway,
so I assumed as much. So then what happens to
the world's resource struggles? Well, they, yeah, that's so we've
been hitting out all along, and then why I'm yeah,
(42:41):
I'm asking what does it really look like? How does
it trickle down to the rest of us? And I
think your idea of perspective is super interesting, But I
think it only really takes a hit on the world's
resources if everybody gets this and then all of a sudden,
you know, the population in general just isn't dying off
like it used to. And while that sounds great, we're
(43:01):
not set up for that. We're barely set up for
what's already here. You know, someone's like, hey, we barely
have enough food for all eight billion of you to
reach the age of seventy three point one six years,
and now you can die a little earlier. That'd be
super dope if it's in your schedule. If it's your schedule.
(43:25):
But but yeah, there are these there are these huge
concerns that are happening, and there are a lot of
great ethicists talking about this, And yes, being an ethicist
is a real job, and it's an increasingly difficult one.
It's one that's often ignored. But where are we now?
In January of this year, Cell, which is a fantastic journal,
(43:48):
published an article by a guy that you mentioned earlier,
Matt David Sinclair, Professor of genetics at the blavat Nick
Institute of Harvard Medical School and co director of the
Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research.
And this guy brought a whole team with him. They
started messing with aging in yeast. Yeah, yeast, you'll recognize
(44:13):
it's earlier work from bread. They started aging experiments with bread.
They moved up to mice. They've done some amazing things. Well. Yeah,
back in twenty twenty, David Sinclair and his teams published
the whole thing about how they could reverse the aging
of eyes in mice. They could make blind mice no
(44:35):
longer blind, which three of them, all three, all three
behind mice now have side again. No, but but for real,
that was in twenty twenty and now we're talking about
a study this year in twenty twenty three, that's three years.
Where did this this person, David Sinclair and the teams
have been working on this stuff, yes, and they've already
(44:56):
made huge steps forward. So creepy Okay. Sinclair was a
graduate student at MIT when they said, hey, there are
these genes they control aging in yeast, and they said, also,
holy smokes, holy chibbada, these genes exist in all creatures.
(45:18):
So is there a way to do this in people?
And you know, there's a lot of ethics around human experimentation.
You gotta jump through hoops. So they said, let's do
some stuff with mice first. And this has been away Ben.
They were really upset that we can't just jove right
to experimenting on humans. You know, it's a real missedommortuity.
(45:44):
They're just like us. There's a paperwork, Okay, there should be. Um,
I get it, is what I'm saying. I get it
still anyway. So uh yeah. So they did something that
might be very uncool to some people, especially our animal
(46:07):
rights activists and our vegans, vegetarians ethicist in the crowd.
They had to do real science and speak of not
real science. I want to shout out fringe been rewatching
that it's basically law and order as science fiction. But
there's a dark side to this science because, in addition
(46:31):
to the fantastic stuff you mentioned, Matt restoring site maculability
right and restoring muscle mass and brain and kidney function
to these older mice. They had to test the other side,
and they found that if they could flip some of
(46:52):
their processes, they could fast forward aging in mice, and
they could do it without necessarily causing cancer, like they
could do it without necessarily killing the thing. They could
just make it older. And this is tremendous research because
(47:13):
that proves an important thing, that proves there is a
process at play, right. And so if you wanted to
be a real super villain, you could make it such
that you are, you know, eternally thirty or forty or whatever. Theoretically,
if we're writing sci fi, and then you could just
hit a group. You could target a group and make
(47:37):
them age at a precarious, much faster rate. And that
hasn't happened yet. That has not happened yet. Maybe it
won't because again, you know, there's a lot of paperwork,
but this gives us a lot of questions, and there
are questions that are not being addressed. Should people live longer, honestly, yeah,
(48:00):
that'd be amazing, But the systems that humanity has built
since the day people started humaning, they're not built for that.
They're built on the assumption that mortality is predictable, right,
that usefulness and productiveness in any society is predictable, everything
from free market to theocracies, to communism or whatever flavor
(48:25):
you want at the ice cream store of ideology, the
ideas that we know people will die probably in their seventies.
What do you do. You got to change the system, right,
you have to make a new system. And if that
doesn't happen, then reversing aging is I hate to say,
(48:46):
it might be a bad thing more than a good thing.
On the retirement age is now ninety five, the time
in age is ninety five. The beatings will continue until
morale improves, right, I don't know. This always makes We
were talking about sci fi, but it's like, you want
to live in a world like Elysium where there's a
(49:08):
small population orbiting Earth and everybody works for them. You
have no access to all the stuff they I don't know.
I don't know, and I know that's kind of a
third rail, But what do you guys think? Do you think, well,
we should reverse it? I don't know. I think I
think we should check it out and see if we can.
Because there's gonna be a mass die off of humans
(49:32):
at some point if we can figure this out now
and lock it away somewhere right, like to put it
in the seed vault somewhere in Scandinavia, and we've got
the stuff ready to go after that asteroid hits or
you know that huge cme chrono mass egectu or whatever
it is and takes out a whole bunch of humans,
(49:54):
the ones that are left over, then we start them
on the met Foreman and the what was the other one?
There's another one, rep them Iyasin. Did you guys, did
you guys read about Rappa Mayasin? Yeah? Sounds cool. Does
it give you bars instantly? Yes, it does. It's from
Easter Island, specifically from the soil and Easter Island, and
(50:14):
there's a bacterium uh that's that's in there that can
end up doing some of the same things when you
apply like you turn it into a drug. Essentially, it's nuts.
It's nuts. There's so there are more of these things happening,
or there's more of these substances that are being discovered
that have these effects on the cell's biological clock. So
(50:35):
it does feel like it could be amazing if there
were a way fewer humans. But as we stand now,
you know, around the eight billion mark, it's probably a
scary thing to try. So what do you think, folks, Uh,
let us know. We can't we can't wait to hear
from all eight billion people in the crowd today. Uh,
(50:57):
just drop us a line on the internet. While that's
a thing we should be pretty easy to find. We're
talking facebooks, we're talking instagrams, We're talking YouTube's and TikTok's
and Twitter's conspiracy stuff on a lot of those conspiracy
stuff show on TikTok and Instagram. And if you don't
(51:19):
sip those social meads, have not a worry in your mind.
You can always give us a call directly. That's right.
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We just feel really bad for everybody involved there. But
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(52:03):
want to do any of that stuff, why not instead
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(52:30):
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