Aging is a Disease | Joe Rogan & David Sinclair

What are your thoughts on, if you have any, about the startups that are actually taking the blood of young people and injecting it into the bodies of older folks? So, I don't think there's a scientific reason to say it won't work. And the scientists who are involved are some of my great colleagues, very smart people. Have you ever done it? No. It's a bit extreme for me, but I think it could work. It's just a little bit out there for me. But what they're going to do, what they're doing actually, is treating people with neurological disorders. A lot of these startups, I'm involved in probably 15 startups right now, what we're trying to do is to treat diseases of aging, and even rare childhood diseases, because you can't treat it aging as a business model. There is no disease called aging yet. Right. But anyway, getting back to the science, I think that it's based on sold science. But the future is, I think, a better way to go about this is to find what the actual molecules are in the blood and just make those. Don't give the whole kitten caboodle. Yeah. You've said this twice. You think aging is a disease, or maybe perhaps should be treated as a disease or classified? Oh, I absolutely think aging should be classified as a disease. We should think of it as a disease. Why shouldn't we? Everything else that goes on in the body over time that's bad for us is considered a disease. Do you know why aging isn't considered a disease? Because it happens to everybody? Exactly. That's the only reason. Well, it happens to most people, 90% of people in the developed world. But why is that a reason to say, oh, it's natural, we should just deal with it? We used to say that about cancer, and we used to say it about dying from an infection. When you say it happens to 90% of the people in the developed world, what happens to the other 10? They die? It'd be a boss, I guess. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. So they die young. Yeah. Okay. Just clarifying. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's a bit dis-ease. It's a problem, right? Aging's a problem. I saw an old gentleman yesterday, and it was painful just to watch this poor guy walk, hunched over and just struggling to move at an incredibly slow pace. That seems like a person with a disease. Well, it is. And imagine if we were on a planet now, or an island where everybody lives 300 years, and we'd show up. You and I in our midlife, we're starting to look old already, and they're going to look at us and say, what is wrong with you guys? We need to treat you urgently. We need to call this a new type of syndrome. Right. And it's only because we all tend to go through this that we think it's acceptable. But I would argue it's the biggest threat to the healthcare system. It's the biggest threat to the world's economy, actually, is the inability of us to treat people in their old age and keep them healthy. Now, some people look at it a different way, and their consideration is that there's an overpopulation problem as it is. And folks like you want to walk around living to be 300 years old, have a gang of kids, you could create a mess. All right. Well, I have three kids, but that's enough. That's more than I was going to have. But yeah, you have to do the math, though. How much would the population grow? I'm actually working with a number of people to try and calculate this. A couple of economists in London that we're working on. So this is really a problem. I agree with you that if this comes, and I would actually say when this comes. When this comes. I mean, it's coming. There's dozens of companies working on drugs. The science is here. So let's say it's coming anyway. So we have to deal with this. How are we going to deal with it? Well, let's first of all understand what the future looks like. We can't look backwards, all right, because no one's ever invented this stuff before. So we have to look forwards. What's the world look like? In terms of population, it's not as bad as you might think. If you stopped aging today, and everybody just went on forever, the population growth rate would be less than the rate of immigration. Now that's not, that can't go on forever, of course. But what we find is as people are healthier, especially in developing nations, they have fewer kids. So the calculation shows that it would eventually taper off. So the human population will taper off about nine to 10 billion people and then stay there. And that population will be the happiest, healthiest people in the world. Now, how do they predict that? Because I was having this conversation with someone the other day that as people become more affluent and society becomes more urban, people will have less and less children and the population will stabilize. Is that the theory behind this? Right. Well, actually education is a major part of that as well. Women's education is the main thing. But also just being healthier lifts the wealth of a nation. And by women's education, do you mean extended education so that they pursue careers? Is that the idea? Or is it, I mean, obviously most people understand how babies are made. Like where's the education contributing to a lower population? Well, so my understanding is that the first thing you do if you educate young women is that they can make choices for themselves and they're not just subjugated. Most men would like to have more. So right. So you're thinking of like third world and... Right. The real developing world. But that's where the population is a real problem. In Europe, they actually are struggling to keep up with their population. They've got an aging tsunami, so to speak. Same with Japan. The average farmer in Japan is 65 years old. They've got a real problem. China's about to head that way too. And that's going to drag the economy of the planet down. And it's going to be a real problem. We're going to waste so much money on keeping older people alive for the last 10, 20 years of their life with dementia, frailty. That could be trillions of dollars. Just $50 trillion just in this country alone that could be spent on figuring out how to solve global warming, better education, the environment, saving the one-third of species that are becoming threatened. That's why I think tackling aging isn't a selfish act. It's probably the most generous act that I could give the planet. That's an interesting way of looking at it.