Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1432 - Aubrey de Grey
Uploaded: 2020-02-26T20:00:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1432 - Aubrey de Grey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-02-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1432 - Aubrey de Grey' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-02-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1432 - Aubrey de Grey

three two one boom here we go what's up man hey did you trim your beard since i've
seen you last
no i feel like you have no it may be a fraction shorter but that's only because
we're falling out
more it falls out oh yeah i mean i stroke it all the time you know it's compulsive
oh and so then
you get these weird hairs that you have to well actually i don't notice it
enough i mean it falls
out slowly you know but i just you know i guess there's a certain amount of attrition
that so the
beer is the same length have you gotten any younger since i've seen you last
yeah hard to say hard to
say but that is your that's your business that's my business yeah how many
years has it been since i
saw you four uh nearly five i think it was april of 2015. and you have not you
have not gotten younger
i have not gotten younger have you maintained i think i've pretty much
maintained yes but not
through my own work um so the work is still very much ongoing though we have
come an awfully long
way in the past five years uh but you know this is a complicated thing to fix
yes and we need to fix
all of it in order to really make people start getting biologically younger so
let's bring people
up to speed what what have the what are the latest revelations what's the the
latest in terms of uh
what we understand in terms of what could possibly be fixed about human aging
all right so the fantastic
answer to that question is there are no new revelations in terms of what we
understand
our understanding seems to have been pretty much complete already like 20 years
ago the fact that
we haven't found out any fundamental new stuff that we didn't know before then
is fantastic news because
of course it means that we're unlikely to find anything out in the future
either it means that we
are pretty much on top of the description of the problem and therefore it's all
about solving the problem
is it possible to summarize the problem what is the problem what causes human
aging sure that's easy
so aging is simply the same thing in a living organism like you or me as what
it is in a car
or an airplane or any other simple man-made machine it's a fact of physics
nothing to do with biology
that any machine that has moving parts is going to do itself damage in the
course of its normal
operation as an intrinsic consequence of its normal operation okay so in the
same way that a car rusts
jimmy's going to bring that microphone is that good yep yeah just try to keep
it about a fist from
your face yeah so in the same way that a car rusts uh or you know accumulates
junk in the oil or whatever
similarly the human body does damage to itself and again just like a car or an
airplane
the human body is set up to tolerate a certain amount of that damage so that we
can get through to
the point where we have kids before we start going functionally downhill
whether mentally or physically
but after that evolution doesn't care about us anymore and therefore we are
only equipped
to tolerate that much and eventually the damage that's being done accumulates
to a point beyond
what the body's set up to tolerate and that's when things start to go wrong and
we start to function
less well what is the difference physically between a younger person and older
person in terms of their
ability to recover from the damage of just regular everyday life and exercise
and abuse and running around yeah all that so
that's just one aspect of the difference between a younger person and an older
person so let me
answer that question by stepping back one step okay so the difference
ultimately arises from
what the body is made of at the molecular level and cellular level the body
accumulates various changes
changes that are chemical and biological consequences of what the body has to
do to keep us alive from
one day to the next even starting before we're born and those changes the
reason i'm using the word
damage to to describe those changes is because eventually things don't work so
well so you're quite right
that recovery from injury is one thing that doesn't work so well but so are
plenty of other things so
whether it's how fast you can run how fast you can think you know how strongly
you can grip something
how fast you can walk um you know all of these things become progressively less
good but the point
is that the amount by which they become less good is pretty negligible until
the age of 40 or 50.
it's only then that the decline starts to accelerate so what do you do in your
own life to try to
mitigate that acceleration yeah i'm a really bad example of this for two that's
crazy but you're
this is your business so there are two reasons why i'm bad at it okay the first
reason is that
i'm really well built i'm just lucky i'm just one of those hateful people who i
can eat and drink
exactly what i like and nothing seems to happen and i don't even need to
exercise to speak of
and you know i'm far biologically far younger than i actually am chronologically
how old
are you chronologically chronologically i'm 57. how old do you think you are biologically
well
i'm told that i'm a good decade less than that and this is what i get told
every time i do these tests
which i've been doing for the past let me see 18 years um yeah so that's pretty
good news um so you're
lucky yeah yeah but the other thing is you know i'm working hard to hasten the
defeat of aging and um
maybe it's a net win you know maybe the amount that i'm hastening it is more
than the damage i'm doing
myself by for example not getting enough sleep and you still drink booze i
still drink how often
oh i drink probably more than the average american what does that mean a few
beers a day a few beers a
day maybe a whiskey or two yeah three or four three or four yeah three or four
beers every day yeah most
days and a whiskey or two every day as well yeah most days so six days a week
or six drinks a day
yeah most days wow you want to drink right now only if you have one we have do
we have any beer
do we have any heinekens or we have the fake we have whiskey i only drink
actual beer not heineken
you son of a bitch what is the actual beer well you know ipas things like that
taste like beer
heineken doesn't taste like beer of course not i don't know i mean weed infused
beer for a while but i
think oh that'll that'll this dude up he'll lose all of his gains and
biological actually no i've never
smoked pot i i mean i've i've experimented with it when i was younger but it
never did anything to me
at all just get some ice get some ice we'll have some whiskey um i don't put
ice in my whiskey but
just get some glasses then jamie that's hilarious you're very specific with
your booze well not all that
specific uh when it comes to whiskey i mean or beer for that matter i'm not a
snob at all i mean you're
not you don't drink heineken you gotta be a snob heineken's a delicious beer heineken
is refreshing
which is you know it's like when you call uh someone's research descriptive it's
a euphemism for
not worth much i understand refreshing meaning it's a cold beverage but it's
not it doesn't have the stout
taste that you enjoy it it has the function of water uh right or lemonade or
something along those lines
yeah um how frowned upon it is in the anti-aging community to be a person who
drinks as much as you
do everyone in the in the aging community knows me and they know that i don't
drink to excess for myself
right they know that what i drink is um you know what works for me
this which one's really yeah legavulin it's pronounced how you say it legavulin
you've it up jamie just do you prefer this it's very good have you ever a
buffalo trace that's okay
okay legavulin is better okay so says you buffalo trace is american that's what
you don't like my pr people
will will will will get pissed off with me for this yeah in the anti-aging
community i am not frowned
upon at all and people know that i do what i do but everyone says you know
there will be donors out
there who will frown on you for but it's your own fault oh that's that tastes
like smoke yeah that's
right it's one of those um is it smoky is it a smoky it is one of those peaty
whiskey it's really nice
it's it's very smoky yeah interesting they'll be popular in restaurants i know
that's right that's
why i know i'm selling it yeah i prefer the buffalo trees it's a little better
it's weird though it
tastes like uh like it's made with smoke like somehow that's right you say is
it peaty is that
what you say that's what that's the word that's often used yeah that's the word
that's often used
um how bad is drinking for you well of course it depends whether you drink too
much and different
and too much is a different amount for different people yeah and so you know if
you drink within
your limits you know if you drink enough that you get a hangover in the morning
you know once a week
then you're definitely drinking too much the last time i had a hangover must
have been when i was a
teenager oh okay you just keep it going and drink lots of water i don't
actually drink all that much
water really god you're defying all the rules that's confusing are you still uh
rowing for exercise
last time we spoke you were rowing you don't remember enough so what is it paddling
what do
you call it so when i used to live in cambridge in england i used to be quite
an expert at punting
punting which is this thing that you do in cambridge and oxford with a stick
that's right i'm sorry
that you push against the bottom of the river with uh it sounds when you
describe it like that like a
really clunky uh you know activity but actually it's fantastically smooth and
when you get it it's really
easy it doesn't it's not even tiring and it's ridiculously romantic romantic
yes yes and it's
definitely a babe magnet oh there you go and good exercise yeah that thing yeah
yeah good for balance
and that is that basically what you do for exercise or do you not do that
anymore i used to i don't live
in cambridge anymore i live in california now oh you do you live out here yeah
i live in the bay area
what are you doing out there well that's where the foundation is based oh okay
yeah i've been over here
for 10 years now so what is a day-to-day life what's a normal day for auburn de
gray well there
isn't really a normal day i spend a ridiculous amount of time on the road
because i view you know
being a high profile member of this community i view the outreach side of
things just educating
people on this as an enormously valuable and important part of my work and also
it's something
you can't delegate because you know conference organizers or interviewers for
that matter they
always want the front man whereas on the science side where we've been able to
hire extremely good
people and so i've been able to delegate that to a very large extent now in
terms of progress like
what what has to happen for there to be a shift in the the biological age of
people where you could
actually reverse it or we could actually maintain the position they're at now
for extended periods of
time first of all let me answer that last part so reversing aging is actually
going to be pretty much
the result of maintaining it there won't be a just you maintain it because that
would mean that you are
repairing the damage of aging just exactly at the same speed that the damage is
being laid down which
is ridiculous you know you know this if you can do that you can obviously do it
a little bit faster
that it's being laid down right so you don't really need to think about the
maintaining part
however what we need is we need to be able to repair all of the types of damage
and because the
human body is so very complicated there are of course a lot of different types
of damage so it's
a divide and conquer strategy any of these types of damage at the molecular
level cellular level
can perfectly well kill you more or less on schedule however well we fix all
the others
so since the beginning sense research foundation my organization has focused on
the most c