Health Longevity Secrets

The Future of Aging with Aubrey de Grey

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 202

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Dr. Aubrey de Grey reveals why reversing aging may be easier than slowing it down in this mind-expanding conversation that challenges conventional wisdom about human longevity. The renowned biomedical gerontologist outlines his damage repair approach that's gaining mainstream scientific acceptance after initial skepticism.

The financial landscape of longevity research has dramatically transformed, with billions flowing into the space. Dr. de Grey provides an insider's assessment of major players including HEvolution (Saudi-backed), Altos Labs (Bezos-funded), Calico (Google-funded) and Retro Biosciences (Sam Altman's venture), offering candid insights about which approaches show the most promise and why Google's Calico has struggled despite substantial resources.

Regulatory innovation emerges as a crucial accelerator for progress. Montana's groundbreaking expansion of Right to Try legislation now allows anyone to access treatments that have passed FDA safety trials, while special economic zones like Prospera in Honduras are creating regulatory environments specifically designed for biomedical innovation. These developments could create the competitive pressure needed to modernize traditional regulatory structures worldwide.

At the LEV Foundation, Dr. de Grey is conducting a thousand-mouse study combining four different damage repair interventions in middle-aged mice, aiming for a full year of life extension—far beyond the four months typically achieved. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on dietary modifications, this ambitious project incorporates advanced cell and gene therapies that target multiple forms of age-related damage simultaneously.

Looking forward, Dr. de Grey offers his characteristic probabilistic prediction: a 50-50 chance of reaching "longevity escape velocity" within 12-15 years. This would enable taking 60-year-olds and rejuvenating them enough that they wouldn't be biologically 60 again for another 20 years, during which time further advances would enable additional rejuvenation cycles—potentially creating open-ended healthy lifespans for many alive today.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the event. Our guest will be speaking on all things longevity. We're going to learn about what are some of the most significant advances in longevity in the last five years and what we have to look forward to in the next five years, when you stay to the end. Our presenter for this discussion is Dr Aubrey de Grey, an English biomedical gerontologist. He's the author of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging and co-author of Ending Aging. Dr de Grey is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today to not die from age-related causes. Let's go ahead and jump in. Hey, Aubrey, thanks for coming on the show. Well, thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:

Robert.

Speaker 1:

It's so great to talk with you. You know, as an expert in longevity, especially with all the early stage research you're doing, I love it. Well, maybe just start off. We're undergoing a revolution in longevity knowledge and things are moving faster than have ever occurred before in longevity. What are the most exciting things that you've seen, maybe in the last five years? You think that really surprised you.

Speaker 2:

Wow. I mean there are surprises coming along all the time and they're pretty much all good surprises. I guess the single biggest surprise in the entire industry was the arrival of evolution, In other words, the commitment by the Saudi royal family to put ideally a billion dollars per year for 20 years into longevity research and development. That has taken a little longer than we were hoping to actually bear fruit. They're certainly not spending anywhere near a billion dollars a year yet, but they have put the right kind of groundwork together. They've certainly got an extremely appropriate person running the show, Mehmood Khan, and they've hired extremely good top management as well, people that I know, who I really trust to get things right. So that's definitely even though it hasn't really borne full fruit yet, it's definitely a huge thing and it was a very big surprise.

Speaker 1:

Quick question on evolution. Just excuse me for interrupting you, but in Evolution it seems to follow along several other big companies in that space or big projects with Calico, initially with Google, and then Altos, with a number of funders, including Jeff Bezos, and now Evolution. How do these three companies differ and how are their approaches different?

Speaker 2:

Right. So actually, yeah, I was going to go to that because, as you say, these companies are, if not as big as Evolution, in terms of dollars, they are within range. In terms of dollars, they are within range. They were not quite such surprises to me because I was aware a long time earlier that both the Google twins in the case of Calico and Bezos, had considerable interest in this space and indeed it was highly frustrating to me that they hadn't actually helped philanthropically at all. But they're just the kinds of people who don't really believe in nonprofits doing good work in technology, I guess and eventually they decided to do something that was nominally for profit, though of course they don't actually need to make money out of these things.

Speaker 2:

Calico, to be perfectly honest, has been an absolute disaster. It has been put together in a very inferior way, such that it doesn't really have a pipeline. It doesn't really have any way to take proven concepts and turn them into products. Proven concepts and turn them into products. It's got the curiosity-driven basic science very well nailed down in terms of the quality of personnel, and it's also got the actual business end, the kind of Genentech Mark II run by, obviously, the person who used to run Genentech, but it doesn't have anything in the middle linking the two, and so it'll be complete luck if it ever does anything useful. It's an absolute tragedy. Altos I have considerably higher hopes for. Bezos started talking to me back in 2006 about aging Again, never gave us any money, but did eventually decide to put proper money into this area. The good news with Altos is that they hired a lot of the top people in the field, which means that no one school of thought is going to dominate what goes on there. The whole way it's being done is a little curious. Bezos never talks about it. It's only kind of.

Speaker 2:

Hoth announced that he is even the main funder, and they are not allowed to describe themselves as a longevity company. It's a little weird, but I do have faith that they're going to do good work. Then there are, of course, other ones. A lot of the people in crypto the big hitters in crypto have been getting into this, and some of them have been helpful philanthropically. Vitalik Buterin is well known as one of the people who have given me and my various organizations quite a lot of money over the years. Brian Armstrong, who created Coinbase, has created a company again New Limit, very heavily funded. And then of course there's Retro, which is probably the single most promising of these companies, because Sam Altman decided to throw proper money at this thing a couple of hundred million and he did it right. He actually found a proper longevity crusader to go and run the thing Joe Betz-Lacroix, who's a great friend of mine, and I have very high hopes that retro will achieve great things.

Speaker 1:

And the optimism for retro versus these other companies is based on the leadership of this individual, or is there some strategy they're using that's different or some particular approach to longevity that they're taking? It's mostly the leadership.

Speaker 2:

Essentially, you know, joe is the kind of person who actually understands the goal, thinks like an engineer. You know, is the kind of person who actually understands the goal, thinks like an engineer.

Speaker 1:

You know, thinks like me, so he's gonna get things right yeah, that makes sense and and well, on this topic of before we we can get back into the longevity things. But on this topic you mentioned metallic butyrin and we were talking off camera a little bit about your experience down in Prospera, that community in Honduras, which just had a wonderful conference. I think you were at there. Maybe you could tell our audience a little bit about this and why you're so excited about it.

Speaker 2:

So this all started several months ago with the creation of a remarkable event in Montenegro called Zoozaloo, and this was essentially conceived and bankrolled by Vitalik Buterin. Essentially, he was able to bring together a couple of hundred people for a couple of months. I only attended one week of it, but of course quite a lot of people attended most of the event and the idea of it was to essentially explore whether something that was longer than a conference but still had a couple of hundred people could do things that no classical format could do, essentially, if it could be more effective at community building, at bringing ideas together, mutual education and so on. And it was very successful mutual education and so on and it was very successful. So the whole idea has very much become a kind of you know, a program to do such events all over the world in various places and in various ways. And the second one, which is called Vitalia, happened. Well, it's happening right now. In fact, it started on, I think, january the 6th and it normally was going to go until March the 1st. They've actually extended it by another month. I was there for the first month. It's really going to make a difference.

Speaker 2:

The thing that distinguishes Vitalia from Zulu. The main thing is that Vitalia is happening in Prospera. Prospera is a special economic zone in Honduras, not actually on the mainland, it's on an island called Roatan so it's been set up to have everything that you might want in a special economic zone. It's very safe, it's Western really in most ways and in particular, what they want to do is to emphasize biomedical innovation. So they've set themselves up legally in such a way as to really make it well, to really maximize the incentives for clinics and companies to incorporate or relocate there and to get stuff done that they would not be able to do in more traditional jurisdictions, in particular the regulatory structure, because they have very wide legal autonomy, not over kind of criminal law or the military or anything, but they have basically everything else. They can put together their own regulatory structures and they are showing very clearly that the safety that people need in the testing of new medical interventions can be achieved without any compromises in a tiny fraction of the time that it takes in the US, for example, and so of course this is rather attractive to rather a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

I cannot speak too highly of these people. They are very, very competent, they have enormous energy. There's a lot of representation from the younger generation, shall we say and they're getting things right. So I will go so far as to say that I think it's quite likely that within even a couple of years from now, prospera will be the global hub for medical tourism, and it won't just be because of these events, like Vitalia, but that's certainly giving the thing its original impetus, and the more this happens, the better, of course. So there are other similar events happening around the world that are planned for later this year, for next year.

Speaker 2:

Actually, vitalik himself is taking a bit of a back seat. I understand that he did not provide financing for Vital Talia and he didn't turn up either, whereas he very much did that for Zuzulu. But plenty of other luminaries did turn up, so I wasn't the only one. There's a huge emphasis on the concept of network states, decentralized, legally autonomous entities, and the guru of that whole field, balaji Srinivasan, also came along in person. Various other people have got involved, people who will raise the credibility and reputation of this whole enterprise. So I believe it's got what it needs to make a huge difference.

Speaker 1:

And so Vitalia then will be an ongoing uh, ongoing, uh organization. There we'll continue on. It's just not a one-time conference, but it's sort of long-term so so what?

Speaker 2:

so? Prospera is the name of the special economic zone, and that is absolutely the time, I think is a kind of uh kind of flexible concept. It was originally supposed to be this two-month thing ending on March 1st. They've already extended it. The companies, the entities that are either coming out of Vitalia or are being attracted to Prospera by Vitalia, these things will obviously in many cases be permanent as well. So it's kind of a little bit of a gray area whether you call Vitalia permanent or not.

Speaker 1:

I see, yeah and well, you mentioned several other conferences, upcoming conferences around the world that you're excited about. Could you share some of those?

Speaker 2:

Well, so let's not call them conferences, because I mean it's a bit difficult to call something that's two months long a conference. What they're actually calling them is pop-up cities, but yeah, I mean there are ones planned elsewhere in the world. There's one I know being planned in Africa, I think in Zanzibar. There's a couple of ideas for South America. Uruguay apparently has particularly friendly legislation when it comes to special economic zones, so there's a bunch of thought going on there. I'm not the expert there. You should really talk to the people who are running this show in order to understand that yeah, yeah, we'll get some of them on here.

Speaker 1:

It's, it's such an exciting area. So so you, it sounds like you see, um, development of biotech, um, uh, in in this case sort of without the bureaucratic over, uh, scrutiny or the the weight of the FTA on it. That slows things down and many people think unnecessary in some, in many cases.

Speaker 2:

So and I think I want to emphasize that this is really the most important thing is in the near term, in a small number of years, because to the extent that this succeeds, it will create a huge amount of FOMO.

Speaker 2:

You know, there will be enormous incentives for traditional jurisdictions, whether the US or elsewhere, to actually get on with modernizing their regulatory structures so as to compete with structures that are not doing this. That is already happening to a small extent. So I do want to highlight something that happened last year in Montana, where the state legislature passed a law that very meaningfully extends the concept of right to try. So I'm sure you know that at a federal level there's this law that's saying if you're terminally ill and you've been through everything that's been approved, you can access things that have not been approved. You don't get, you know, reimbursed for it, you don't get insurance, but it's legal as long as someone has to prescribe it, of course. What they've done in Montana last year is they've said that if a treatment has got through phase one, so the safety part and of course you know hundreds of like 98% of treatments that get through phase one never get to phase three, right, and the ones that do don't get there for a very long time.

Speaker 1:

This is FDA phase one, just for our audience, so they know yeah.

Speaker 2:

If something's got through phase one, then you can access it in Montana now, even if you're not terminally ill or ill at all. Again, you don't get, you know, insurance. It doesn't have to be prescribed. But it's a vast change. It means that we've got access to very many huge numbers of treatments that otherwise would not be available and, of course, the goal is to spread FOMO across the US and get other states to adopt the same legislation. The state senator, ken Bogner, who spearheaded this in Montana, is now running for Congress and obviously that will be a big part of his platform. We were somewhat involved in this. Seed funded an organization called A4LI, the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, which drafted the legislation and worked closely with Ken to make all of this happen. So I've been following this very closely. But yeah, coming back to the ProHUB cities, I honestly don't believe that that kind of initiative will move nearly fast enough without the incentive from elsewhere in the world to, you know, to compete.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, wow, so many things happening. That's wonderful about Montana getting access to these early stage drugs that have been proven to be safe, but they haven't made it all the way through the system. Now I guess all we need to do is get the definition of terminal illness modified to include aging and longevity, which is the terminal illness we all have.

Speaker 2:

Let's talk about that for a moment, because terminology is always an enormous barrier to progress.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Language matters.

Speaker 2:

So so that may actually be the way to go. The problem that I've encountered throughout the time that I've been engaged in public outreach in this space and so more than 20 years now is fundamentally that the public are deeply suspicious of preventative medicine in general. They are suspicious of new medicines. With some degree of justifications, new medicines sometimes don't work, but in particular for a preventative medicine, the person's not yet sick and they are therefore scared that some new medicine might make them sick and they don't see any real, you know, risk-benefit ratio attraction there. So educating the public that actually prevention is a rather good thing is, you know, really important and really really, really difficult. And you know, framing of that perhaps as simply saying you're already sick, you've already got aging, is something that may make a difference.

Speaker 2:

I'm definitely not a natural marketer. I feel the way I put things out there to the world it resonates with some audiences but not with others. So I'm not the person to trust in terms of my judgment on that, but I do certainly think that it's an option and it's a vital thing to achieve, to get the public more comfortable with preventative medicine for the chronic conditions of late life. Conditions of late life Of course, my work, this work on damage repair that I focused on for all these years, is kind of treatment or prevention, depending on how you look at it. It's kind of the sweet spot between the two, because it's designed to be applied to people who are not yet going downhill functionally, but equally it does actually turn back the clock in terms of removing damage and putting the body back into a state that approximates height when at a younger age, and perhaps that can also be leveraged, you know rhetorically, but again, you know it takes marketers to figure that out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, maybe you could talk a little bit about your work, that you're doing some of these interesting projects. We talked a little bit again before off camera, but I'm sure the audience would love to hear about that.

Speaker 2:

Sure, so yeah, of course. So to flesh out what I said a moment ago a little bit, my work for the past 20 or more years has been focused on implementing a really dramatic paradigm shift that I introduced in the year 2000, which was the idea that if we want to actually treat aging, then it may be easier to reverse it than to slow it down. This sounds very counterintuitive and it sure as hell was very counterintuitive to my colleagues. It took me several years to persuade anybody that I was not talking complete nonsense. But it's now a very widely accepted concept and essentially it comes down to the fact that if you want to slow aging down, essentially what you're doing is you're thinking of the body as a machine. You're making it run more cleanly, and that's really hard. You have to really understand how it runs in order to do that without having unintended consequences, and we just don't understand the body anywhere near well enough to be able to do that significantly. So people have basically got nowhere with that. But reversing aging is more a case of preventative maintenance. It's a case of, you know, simply restore somebody, getting rid of the damage that the body does to itself throughout life in the course of its normal operation and restoring the structure and composition of the body at the molecular and cellular level to something like how it was at a younger age, like in young adulthood. And you can do that in principle, without understanding anything about how the body created the damage in the first place, and yet you achieve the goal of ensuring that the damage does not become abundant enough to exceed what the body is set up to tolerate and thus to make us sick and to make us suffer the chronic conditions of late life. So, as I say, this concept has now been broadly embraced by the field, but you've still got to implement it. And implementing it comes fundamentally into two stages, and the reason it does is because it's a divide and conquer approach.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, the body damages itself in many, many, many different ways. First step to understand how to actually get one's head around that and one's arms around it is to classify those many different types of damage into a manageable number of categories, and that's what I did back in 2000. I defined seven categories and then to align each of those categories with a generic approach to actually doing the damage repair. Okay, so that's what I did, and some of those damage categories are much easier to address than others. So in my previous organization, sense Research Foundation, we focused on the most difficult ones, the ones that other people were neglecting, simply because other people had different incentive structures, they needed publications every 10 minutes, they needed to satisfy shareholders or whatever. We, being entirely funded by philanthropy, were able to avoid those constraints and that's why we were able to work on really difficult things, and that was very successful.

Speaker 2:

We progressed a number of projects over the years to the point where we could spend them out of startup companies. We did that half a dozen times. So that's all great, but it's only stage one, because once you have implemented the various methods to repair this or that type of damage and once you've got them reasonably working, at least in mice, you've still got to put them all together, because each one individually is not going to make much of a difference to how long someone stays healthy. So the putting them together part is something that's only really become a thing in the past few years, because it's only in the past few years that there's been enough progress on the individual things, even in mice, to have something to put together. And so now my new organization, lev Foundation, that's what we're doing as soon as we kicked off the new foundation, we kicked off our first really big project a thousand mice being given four different treatments in various subsets of those four treatments that address different types of damage in aging and saying. You know how well they synergize. So that project began a year ago.

Speaker 2:

A key point to recognize is that we don't start when the mice are young, we start when they're already in middle age. So typical mice healthy, normal, non-mutant mice they typically live about two and a half years and so we start when they're already one and a half years old, so they've got one year to go. Historically, the best that people have ever been able to achieve by doing anything to my starting when they're already one and a half years old is about four months of extension of subsequent life, and of course, the extra months are healthy months, which is good. We want that, but four is not very many. So we want to treble that. We want to get an entire year of extension of healthy life in terms of both the average lifespan and the maximum, and we don't know whether we're going to be able to achieve that with the current experiment, but we've got plenty of other interventions and combinations of interventions lined up to test in this same way, and the only thing that's holding us back is funding.

Speaker 2:

These experiments are very expensive. They are well. The first one cost more than three and a half million dollars and that's what each of them is going to cost, but in terms of, you know, information gained per dollar, we believe I'm very confident of information gains per dollar, we believe I'm very confident, I'm very sure that this is the most value for money experiment that's being done in the entire field right now. So anyone who feels like helping or wants to know more about this, look at our website. I'm sure you'll put it in the show notes avforg. There's a link at the top to the next study and, of course, I'm always available by email and by Zoom or whatever, to discuss anything like this with anyone who wants to help.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's so exciting. I mean, it's sort of like the interventions testing program with mice, except you've expanded it to. You have more freedom of things you can test and you're starting at the older age, which is a much more realistic model, for you know what, what a human interaction would be.

Speaker 2:

Intervention would be. The intervention testing program has been going on for about 15 years now and I don't want to disparage it. It's definitely done a lot. But yes, first of all, most of the interventions that they test, they start early in life. In fact, the reason that rapamycin is such a big deal these days, it all started with the interventions testing program accidentally starting their study rather late in life because they had real difficulty formulating the chow. So that's one problem, that most of their interventions start early.

Speaker 2:

Second one is that by and large they're testing interventions individually. Again, they do sometimes combine things, but not often. But the biggest thing, the biggest limitation for the ITP, is that they only do orally available things, they only put stuff in the chat. So that completely excludes cell therapies and gene therapies, which we are completely sure are going to be absolutely unavoidable if we want to get big results. So we are taking that on, we are biting that bullet, and that's a large part of why the therapies are, why the experiments are expensive, but it's also absolutely essential yeah, yeah, um, all right, back to back to language.

Speaker 1:

Just a couple things. I want to be respectful of your time here, but just a couple of last things. Talking about language, uh, misha blaglosconi and Leonard Hayflick have this idea of you know. They propose an idea that aging is due to damage, cell damage and wear down, but longevity is due to hyperfunction. In other words, with you know, mtor and those sort of things. Is that all semantics or what's your take on that?

Speaker 2:

Well. So calling one of these things aging and the other one longevity is unhelpful, I think, uh, it kind of already obfuscates it because these words have already got so much baggage, you know, from other causes. But uh, michelle blagoscoloni's um concept of hyperfunction is absolutely fine. It's completely, completely valid and it's not actually new either. It's really just the kind of modern expression, articulation of something that was first put forward in the 1950s called antagonistic pleiotropy. Essentially, it just says that, in the same way that we don't have genes that would be useful, you know, late in life, because evolution doesn't care about old individuals, because they've already passed on their genetic information, similarly we don't develop genes that turn off other genes late in life, unless that's also useful early in life. And so some genes will continue to do things that used to be good early in life and become bad, and various examples of this have been concrete examples have been researched, especially in nematode worms. There's things that go on that are very overt in that regard. But it's a reasonable concept as applied to any species. The only real question is how much of a contribution does that kind of thing make to aging? At this point we cannot reasonably argue that it contributes all that much. But of course, again, it depends on your definition.

Speaker 2:

So some people would say, for example, that cancer is an example, that all of cancer is a result of antagonistic pleiotropy, because essentially off between um, how um, how well you um regenerate tissues and how close to the wire you are in terms of letting cells go, uh awol, um, so to speak.

Speaker 2:

Uh like, let's just look at telomerase. You know telomerase is a gene that if you absolutely blitz it and you do not have any expression and you can't turn it on, then you know it's very difficult for cancers in large animals like humans to grow large enough to kill you. But the fact is, unfortunately we need a trace of telomerase in our regularly renewing tissues, like the blood or the gut lining, for example, and so it's not quite turned off and that means that it can be epigenetically reactivated to an extent that will support cancer, and that's why 90% of human cancers have telomerase turned on at high level. You know things like that. So there's trade-offs all over evolution, and some of these trade-offs evolution has taken the trouble to optimize and some of them it hasn't. So, yeah, so the concept of life function is fine but, yes, oversimplifying the language with which it is described is a bad idea.

Speaker 1:

Well, you've talked about so many exciting things that are coming down the road in longevity and the future. Maybe we'll just end up right now. What do we do today, like right now, with what's available? Is it lifestyle? Is it going to be supplements? Is it rapamycin and A-carbos? Is it plasmapheresis? What should we be doing now for our longevity today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I have to be honest and say that my answer to that question has not changed over the years, and it still is. Write me a large check. What matters is how much we can hasten the arrival of things that don't yet exist. Things that do already exist, you know, there really isn't much. One thing that we always have to remember is that nearly everything that works well in laboratory organisms is certain not to work well in humans, simply because it relies on emulating the metabolic response to calorie restriction.

Speaker 2:

One thing that evolution has optimized is the metabolic response to famine, and it works pretty well to adjust metabolic priorities away from reproduction and in favor of maintenance, so as to improve one's chances of out of outlasting the famine, so that one can have offspring that won't just immediately die before having their own offspring on account of starving, right, um, and that will.

Speaker 2:

That will make perfectly good evolutionary sense. But unfortunately, if you look at that logic even a little bit, you can see that long-lived species are not going to benefit very much, because long famines don't happen very often and something has to happen reasonably often in order for evolution to care about it. So that means yeah. That completely explains the very clear observation that's been around for 20 years at least, that there is this inverse correlation between how long a species lifespan is and how much benefit it gets from calorie restriction. You can multiply the lifespan of a nematode worm by five by doing the right kind of little tricks to it.

Speaker 2:

Of course, I'm not talking about calorie restriction itself on its own. I'm talking also about genetic and pharmacological tricks to trick the organism into thinking it's on calorie restriction, and that's what nearly everything we have today rapamycin, metformin, resveratrol that's what these things do in different ways, but still that's what they do. So, yeah, I don't really expect to see anything significant in terms of extension of healthy lifespan in humans until we are ready for prime time with proper damage repair in the form of cell therapies and gene therapies of the sort that we're working on.

Speaker 1:

What's the horizon timeframe for that? Do you think? How long do we have to wait?

Speaker 2:

Well, people have been asking me that question for a while.

Speaker 2:

And yeah, I mean I do not shy away from giving timeframe predictions, but I always make sure to emphasize that they are probabilistic.

Speaker 2:

So I say we have a 50-50 chance of getting to what I've called longevity escape velocity within 12 to 15 years from now, so the late 2030s. And that's a point where we can take people who are, let's say, 60, biologically 60, average 60-year-olds, can take people who are, let's say, 60, biologically 60, average 60-year-olds and rejuvenate them, not completely, but well enough that they won't be biologically 60 again for another 20 years or so, during which time people like myself will have improved the therapies so that we can rejuvenate the same people so they won't be biologically 60 for a third time until they're 100 or 120 or whatever.

Speaker 2:

This is what we call longevity escape velocity, and you have to get those first 20 years in order to activate this kind of positive feedback loop, this kind of thing. You know, the term escape velocity is actually quite a good analogy with gravitational escape velocity. So, yeah, 12 to 15 years, but there's at least a 10% chance that we won't get there for 100 years because of any you know unanticipated obstacles that we may encounter. So I always emphasize the probabilities.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's such an exciting idea, and thanks so much, aubrey, for taking the time and spending with us today. You mentioned your website. Maybe you could mention it again and how people can follow you on social media.

Speaker 2:

Oh, absolutely. Please go to levforg L for longevity, e for escape, v for velocity, f for foundation right. Everything is linked from there, including the conference. We run an annual conference. Of course, conferences have been a very big part of my work over the years in community building and they still are, so our conference series now happens in Dublin in Ireland, and the next one is in mid-June June the 13th to 16th. They are fantastic events scientifically and socially, and so I encourage everyone to go. The link to the conference website is right at the top of the LEV Foundation website homepage, and also there is a link to our next study that we want to do that I was talking about earlier, to be a sequel to the study we're currently doing with a thousand mice. We want to do another one. Of course, everything else about our activities is there. You can email me at aubreylevforg. You can find me on Twitter at Aubrey de Grey, everywhere you would expect.

Speaker 1:

Great Well. Thanks so much for spending time with us today, Aubrey, and thanks also for the great work that you do.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you for having me and I look forward to next time. Bye for now.

Speaker 1:

Wow. We covered a lot of interesting material, all the way from Honduras and Prospera and Vitalia and pop-up cities that focus on longevity and medical tourism dedicated to longevity, all the way to cutting-edge breakthrough technologies that we can look forward to in, hopefully, a short time. In this wide-ranging conversation, I want to thank Dr Aubrey de Grey for joining us today and sharing his amazing knowledge. Remember, dr de Grey is giving us a bonus also to our VIP Pass members, so if you still haven't claimed your VIP Pass to access the recordings, the transcripts, mp3s and our must-have bonus package, you can get it now by clicking the button on this page to upgrade before it's too late. Remember that when the event's over, the recordings and all the bonuses go away. So make sure you claim your VIP pass before it's too late.