To Conquer Aging We Have to Change the Way We Think About It

Of course the other thing that we always are up against is the mindset that people have got into about aging. That they've needed to get into for all these millennia that we have been unable to do anything about it or have any prospect of doing anything about it any time soon. You know, what are you going to do? You've got this terrible ghastly thing that's going to happen to you in the distant future and you can't do anything about it. So you've got to put it out of your mind. You don't want to spend your life being preoccupied by it. So you've got to find somewhere to not think about it and get on with your miserably short life and make the best of it. And of course the only way that one can do that is by somehow tricking oneself into denying that this is such a big deal. And thereby pretending for example that it's not really like a medical problem at all. You know, it's like inevitable and universal and natural. Or alternatively saying well okay maybe we could fix it if we tried to but it would be a bad thing. That aging is some kind of blessing in disguise. I hate that nonsense. Yeah and that's where all this stuff comes from about oh dear will we put all the people or how will we pay the pensions or won't dictators live forever or won't it be boring. You know, which I have to spend my whole life contending with. How do you say, well how do you get over the dictators living forever one? Well you know last time I looked dictator was fairly high on the league table of risky jobs. You know, I mean not a lot of dictators die of aging in the first place. And furthermore the ones that do die of aging they tend to have organized their succession in advance anyway. So it's as if they were already immortal. So I mean come on. Well not only the percentage of dictators versus the percentage of regular people is so incredibly small to not cure aging because of dictators. Seems like the dumbest idea ever. Well there you go. I mean but people are so people really you know, this is what people do right. They will come up with some reason why aging is a blessing in disguise and then they will instantly switch off their brains for fear of actually coming up with a refutation of that reason or even this. Yeah because romantic aspects of aging are the weird ones right. You know the inevitable like oh it's fine. It's wonderful. I'm looking forward to it. It's essentially a disease that we all get. Yeah. I mean so I have to be very careful with the word disease. Some people are. So you've had David St. Carol. Yes. I'm going to show. He's been a great friend of mine for 20 years. We've yeah we have a very similar attitude to you know authority. We don't think much of it. And so we tend to push the boundaries a bit both of us in somewhat different ways. So he actually his view of calling aging a disease is a bit different from mine. He's more comfortable with it. I tend to feel that the problem there's a problem with calling aging a disease which is that it makes it sound like it's something that could be cured with a one-off therapy. Like you know an infection which isn't which it isn't. It's a side effect of being alive and as such it's something that you know you can repair. You could save off but you have to do it periodically because the damage is going to continue to be created. And you know the reason why that's important is that it determines what kind of what kind of medicine we look for. A lot of Alzheimer's research for example in fact I would say most of Alzheimer's research has been predicated on this kind of mistake on the idea that if we can just cure Alzheimer's they you know. So I would say that actually it's not that the word disease is used too narrowly and should be broadened to include aging. Rather it's the other way around that the word disease is used too broadly and should be narrowed so as not to include things like Alzheimer's that are actually parts of aging. Because really the difference between the progressive chronic conditions like Alzheimer's that we call diseases and the ones that we don't like you know loss of muscle or decline in the immune system or whatever. You know the only difference is semantics. Some of them you know they're both parts of aging. Just some of them are ones that we've chosen to give disease like names to. What would you call aging if you don't call it a disease? Well I call it a medical problem. That's all I call it. That's pretty pure. In terms of potential future treatments stem cells seem to be very promising. Are there other competing treatments that you think are equally promising? Yeah sure but they're not competing. So as I said because this is a divide and conquer problem with a bunch of different types of damage all of which we need to fix then we need to look at what fixes are available for each individual type. So what stem cells are there to fix is cell loss where cells are dying and they're not being automatically replaced in the body by cell division. Have you personally experienced any stem cell therapy? No. I haven't done any therapies for any kind yet but of course you know I'm paying attention. Yeah. I'll see. You know of course the way the nature of aging is that because it's progressive and because it's only it only causes functional decline after a certain point there's a trade off that one always has to keep in mind in terms of timing of a therapy between how badly one needs it and how rapidly the quality of the therapy is improving. So you know if I take a stem cell therapy now then there's a chance that it'll be bad for me for whatever reason. Whereas 10 years down the road I will still I won't have needed it for those 10 years. Today's either I may start to need it a bit more but that it will have benefited from 10 years more of research and refinement. You're a cautious patient. Oh sure. I mean I don't think anybody wants to be the first patient. I'm in. I'll be the first guy. I'm already doing a bunch of stem cell therapies. Well intravenous stem cell therapies too. Well sure. But I mean the point is you weren't the first to do any of these things. Oh for sure. So yes in terms of other things so Cialytics do not compete with stem cells because Cialytics are there to do a different thing to fix a different type of damage namely the accumulation of these bad cells. And then you've got to have you know cancer therapies you've got to have therapies that remove molecular waste products from inside cells. A couple of our startup companies have done are doing that. You've got to remove waste products from outside the cells for example. So people have used the immune system to do that. You've got a repair DNA in in the mitochondria these special parts of the cell that do the chemistry of breathing. You know there's a bunch of different things we have to do and another piece of good news. I told you earlier on that there's been no real change over the past 20 years in our understanding of what the problem is. It's better than that. There's also been no real need to change our preferred approaches to each of the damage repair technologies. We haven't had we haven't found bad news that says oh dear this potential approach to fixing this particular type of damage isn't going to work for this new reason that we didn't know before. Therefore we have to start again and think of a new one that hasn't happened either. That's excellent. So it's just essentially refining the procedures or grinding away and actually implementing them. So that's it for this video. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Bye. Bye.