Dr. Aubrey de Grey on the ultimate human problem, why we age, and how we can stop it.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and author based in Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating the aging process. In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA in computer science and Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.
Alex: [00:00:00] Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and author based in mountain view, California and is the chief science officer of SENS research foundation, a California based 501(c)(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating the aging process.
In addition, he's editor in chief of rejuvenation research, the world's highest impact peer reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA in computer science and PhD in biology from the university of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterization of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair or obviate that damage.
Dr. de Grey is a fellow of both the gerontological society of America and the American aging association and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations. Today, we talked the ultimate human problem, why we age and how we can stop it.
You know, just to kick us off. Usually I like to ask people what they do, why they find meaning in their work. I, I don't feel like I have to do this with you. This one just makes sense off the bat to me. I think aging many of us can agree is sort of the ultimate human problem. So instead I might ask you, where did it all start for you? Have you always been interested in this?
Aubrey: [00:01:33] Yeah, so well, Been interested in it, but interested in the sense of actually doing something with that interest, that was a bit more complicated.
So actually of course, yeah. And I'm sure you appreciate, there is actually quite a large majority of humanity who does not regard the problem of aging as the world's most important problem. In fact, people who regard it as not a problem at all, but rather a kind of blessing in disguise, you know, because if we didn't have the aging, we'd have all these other problems that one can make up rather easily.
And of course just kind of a psychological crutch to, you know, to be, to allow people to put anything out of their minds and not get that. But so, you know, it's a very ubiquitous, psychological crutch. And of course, until I came along, basically, you know, certainly until pretty recently it was a completely rational thing to do.
You know, it took because you know, you can't do anything about this thing. You've got to find some way to get, on with your miserably short life and make the best of it. Right. So I have, I have a degree of sympathy. But there is still a question. Which is, you know, what's appealing about it to me.
So yes, I realized at a very early age that what I wanted to do with my life was to make a difference. And I had to work on the biggest, most important problems for humanity. And to do my best to make a contribution to solving those problems. The only reason it took me until I was about 30 to get into aging was because of a mistake that I made, basically not realizing that other people might not realize that aging is the number one problem.
I basically went through my first 30 years of life believing that everybody could see that it was so obvious and therefore people who are really talented biologists would be working on it in large numbers. And so what I did was I worked on something that I actually knew, I wastalented at, which was programming.
And so I went to work on another problem that's big, albeit not nearly so big. Namely the problem that people have to spend so much of their time doing stuff that they wouldn't do unless they were being paid for it.
In other words, you know, we need more automation. So I went into AI research and I did pretty well, actually over the six or seven years that I was working in that space I definitely had some important ideas and we wrote a few textbooks. But it was during that time that I met and married a biologist, and through that, I learned that I had been wrong about my assumption.
And so it was a pretty straightforward thing for me to realize that I had no choice, but to switch fields. And so, so here I am, but yeah, I mean, you could ask a more fundamental question, which I think comes back to the original question, which is why do I want to change the world in the first place?
I think it's quite interesting. I, I have no idea. It's just who I am. So the real question is, is that okay? Is it okay not to have an answer to that question? I say, yes, it is. I say, it's okay to have that kind of an Axiom, you know, mathematics, something that you just start assuming and you work from that.
So that's just who I am.
Alex: [00:04:51] So really it was, you know, in the same way that we're talking about aging as really the ultimate human issue, it's also the ultimate point of complacency in a way. It's just something that everybody treats as a given, but your point in talking about all of this is that, it really might not be. So in order to dive into all of this, I guess we have to, you know, pretty broadly: what causes aging? This is the fundamental question.
Aubrey: [00:05:20] Let me push back for a moment before I answer that question, let me push back a little bit on your use of the word complacency, because I would say the right word is fatalism.
But you know, they're kind of two sides of the same coin because both of them come down to. The conclusion that one has no particular motivation to do anything, you know, so actually, you know, to factor it into one's choices in life. And of course, complacency is a big deal too, right? It's like in climate change, for example, at the end of the day, humanity is just overwhelmingly ignoring this problem because of presuming that, you know, technology will come along and fix it just in time.
In the case of climate change, the fact that they're probably right, because we are actually already, you know, doing really well with development of renewable energy and artificial meat and all that kind of stuff. So you know, that's kind of okay, in that particular example, but being a little fatalistic is also not a good plan. Just assuming that nothing can be done, therefore not trying. So, yeah, absolutely. So I basically came to this and I said, well, hey look, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. The human body is this machine, right? It's a really, really complicated machine, but it's still just a machine and you don't need to go into all the question of, you know, whether there is a soul, you know, whether there are non-physical components, the human condition, because the fact that even if there are.
They are trapped within the machine, within the physical part. Right? So at the end of the day, the physical part you need to work with. And we're not too happy about the physical part breaking down late in life after we'd been alive a long time. So, you know, how is this different from a car breaking down or an airplane?
And I couldn't find an answer to that question. You know, once I met and married a biologist, you know, I had access to the right information and she didn't help at all. In fact, it was worse than not helping. She made very clear to me that you'd never thought about it because it was boring.
She didn't view it as her problem. And I was horrified, by this, I mean horrified by this cause you know, I come at the limitations of humanity as a technologist. One thing that I didn't understand at all, and I think most people don't understand is that technologists have a completely different mindset from basic scientists.
Basic scientists like my ex-wife, these are people who are motivated by the desire to understand nature, right? It doesn't have to be biology. . They want to just ask questions we want to improve our understanding of nature. And they do appreciate that very occasionally there will be examples where the understanding has humanitarian value.
It could be exploited. But they don't regard that as their problem. They regard that as you know, just to kind of bonus that, you know, other people problem, right. I'm not that kind of person, I never have been. I'm very much a technologist I'm interested in figuring out how to take advantage of what we've already understood about nature in order to manipulate nature for humanitarian benefit.
And, you know, until I was maybe 30, 32, I really did not appreciate how profound that difference of mindset really is. It requires completely different ways of thinking ways of using knowledge when deciding what experiments to do next. So, yeah, that's been, that's been a large part of my journey.
Alex: [00:09:00] You know, it's interesting. There's sort of two halves to this in my own mind, and you're talking about. You know, aging from the perspective of a pure scientist. And I think that sort of ties back in with what we were talking about earlier, when it comes to complacency versus fatalism. It's probably an important thing to note that, you know, there've been entire human institutions and-- yeah, religion, for example, you could argue has been built entirely around the concept of, of death, right. It's just means to cope with life. Exactly. Exactly. So in, in many ways it's probably not so surprising it's a given for most people.
I was talking with an oncologist, like a father of a friend, I think a couple of years ago and the way he sort of put aging and death to me was that you know, fundamentally evolution prioritizes reproduction. And after that point, it stops really caring. Is that why we age? Is that sort of the, the main reason?
Aubrey: [00:10:00] Yes it is.
Alex: [00:10:01] Okay. So how would you break that down?
Aubrey: [00:10:03] Well, okay. The first thing I want to make sure you understand about that is that it means we do not have any reason to suppose that evolution has deliberately designed us to age. Okay. Anything is one of my colleagues, Glenn Hayflick put it many years ago in a great way.
He said aging is a consequence of evolutionary neglect, not evolutionary intent.. Now this is actually something that it took a long time for biologists to realize very shortly after Darwin. People started to think about, okay, why does aging exist given we've got evolution. Evolution is why, why we are what we are why did evolution give us aging?
And they come up with reasons that actually are wrong, that don't make sense if you look at them closely. But it took until the 1950s for anyone to actually realize that. Actually it was a British biologist and I mean obviously then Peter Medawar who first really put forward very explicitly that this couldn't possibly make sense.
Actually in the 1930s another famous British biologist J. B. S. Haldane kind of laid the seeds of that. And then after that, you know, it was quite quick. In 1957, the American evolutionary biologist George Williams had another very important idea. That essentially said that later in life, it's going to look like our biology is killing us on purpose, but that's because of essentially side-effects of what is good for us early in life?
So that all makes total sense, and since like at latest the 1960s there's been no real dispute about this. Aging happens because evolution doesn't care. So your friend's father was absolutely correct.
Alex: [00:12:05] So how would you break that down for a regular person to understand like what's actually going on in our bodies past the age of, you know, 50 or so.
Aubrey: [00:12:15] Yeah, that's actually much easier than you might think to break down for a non biologist because the fact is that it's really, just a phenomenon of physics.
It's not a phenomenon of biology at all. What's happening is that the body is a machine. It's a really, really complicated machine, but it's still a machine and therefore it's got moving parts and you know, it, it does itself damage as a consequence of its normal operation.
And you know, just like a car, you know, you can get rust and, contaminants in the oil. It's exactly the same thing. The big difference between living organisms and cars in this regard is that living organisms need to live a reasonably long time in order to reproduce and pass on their genetic information.
And in order to do that, they need to, well, really the simplest way of putting it is they need to export their entropy. They need to maintain their composition and structure in a reasonably healthy manner that works for long enough to reproduce. Beyond that, they don't, that's what your friend's father was telling you, right?
But before they reproduce they absolutely need to do that, that will not happen unless they have built in automatic. If you like damage repair machinery, that has both, it has to be really sophisticated in minimizing the rate at which damage accumulates in the body.
So that's what we suffer from in civilization and what other animals suffer from in captivity. In the wild, the reason why evolutions ain't done as much as gets done to minimize the rate of accumulation of damage is because of starvation, predation, and hypothermia and all the things that don't have to do with how long it got you were born.
Alex: [00:14:09] So moving on to, solutions and how you're sort of going about tackling this. Again, just to describe what I understand as far as I understand it, it seems like solving aging is a bit like curing cancer, right? And like, it's, it's such a broad topic and such a broad category that you really need to take a divide and conquer approach.
Aubrey: [00:14:32] So you're right about aging, but wrong about cancer. So cancer is part of aging that's for sure. Cancer arises from the accumulation of mutations, which happen randomly because of damage because of, you know, whether it's free radicals attacking the DNA or whatever it might be, and particularly have the occasional very, very, very occasional cell that suffers a particularly, you know problematic constellation of different types of DNA damage that kind of disables all of the anticancer defenses. So the thing becomes a cancer. But actually in the case of cancer, it's not completely crazy to . Imagine created as one thing, not a divide and conquer approach, but actually to attack it in a universal way.
I've been interested in this for at least 20 years. I've been looking at ways to do this, and essentially the ways that I've been focusing on revolve around the end of the chromosomes, these things called the telomeres which in normal cells will get shorter every time the cell divides. And eventually when they get short enough so I can't divide and can't even survive it kills itself. This definitely is, you know, something that cancers need to sidestep in order to be, you know, big enough to kill you. And we understand pretty well how they sidestep it. For 90% of our Kansas, we understand extremely well there's a particular enzyme that they activate.
And so, you know, there are ways to inactivate that enzyme. In fact right now there's something even better than that. A gro up in Texas that we work closely with developed a few years ago. That will actually kill cells that are maintaining their chromosomes in this normal way. That's using this enzyme telomerase and that's been commercialized right now by a company Maya biotechnology.
I should say, I do not have any commercial financial interest in this company, but I am a massive fan. I think this is the single most exciting thing that's going on in cancer research right now. And a large part of why I said that was because it's so almost universal. Yeah, it really is a way of essentially grinding up pretty much all cancers and with one type of treatment.
Alex: [00:16:48] That's incredible.
Aubrey: [00:16:49] But going back to your comparison of aging with cancer, aging is a divide and conquer problem because aging consists of the accumulation of a lot of different types of damage. The only reason why the approach that I've been pursuing and promoting for the past 20 odd years makes sense is because those many, many, many types of damage, hundreds of types of damage can be classified into a relatively manageable number of categories. I usually talk about just seven categories. What this classification is all about is the therapies. In other words, within each category, there are many, many types of damage, but all of them are amenable to essentially the same kind of damage repair.
So for example, cell loss. Cells die that not automatically replaced by division of other cells. In most of you, of course, they are replaced by the division of the cells in some tissues they're not. And in each of those tissues, we need to replace those cells, in order to maintain the cell, the cell lumber so that the tissue can do its job.
Now of course that's a bit different for each tissue because each tissue is made of different types of cell, but it's only a bit different, you know, that all stem cell therapies have a law in common and they only differ in their details. So that's why the whole thing is practical. We can kind of, once you've got a couple of stem cell therapies working for a couple of different tissues, Okay.
The next one, working is a hell of a lot easier and quicker simply because you can leverage the knowledge that you acquired in developing the first one or two.
Alex: [00:18:27] Got it. So, I mean, all in all, it sounds like there's quite a bit of incredible progress . Going on. What ensures that this continues? Is it a funding problem? Is it an awareness problem? What's the main driver here?
Aubrey: [00:18:40] So it's definitely going to happen. There's no question about that. But of course, what I'm all about is making it happen as soon as possible. The thing that gets me up every morning is the fact that every single day I bring forward, the defeat of aging by my work is literally the saving of 110,000 lives.
That's the number of people that die of age related causes every day. So, you know, that's a very big deal-- it's easy to get out of bed for that. And you know, so what are the barriers? Well, I mean, of course it's a really complicated process going from a concept to the clinic. Right. There's lots of bits to it and I'm not that yeah, because I've been around a long time and I have a bit of influence there and there I'm able to You know, think about this all the time.
Then prioritize the areas, which seem to be the current bottlenecks, but what are the current bottlenecks changes from year to year and it's changing fast right now. So at the moment, the really early stage stuff, you know, the stuff that SENS research foundation, my organization works on is still a bit of a bottleneck.
We don't have enough money, but we've got more than we used to. So that's good. And still money is the right limits. We could be going faster just with more personnel and more machinery. Later stage is really important now that we've got an industry, now that for the past five or so years, there's been this private sector involvement with investors coming in an exponentially increasing rate. That's fantastic, but it's not the whole solution because inevitably investors will focus on the lowest hanging fruit.
And the fact that this is a divide and conquer problem because it it'll be an over simplification because investors can make money without solving aging. They can identify a rare disease, perhaps not so rare but anyway, a disease that is that relatively early onset in terms of the age at which people suffer from it, but which results . From the person somehow for whatever is accumulating one type of damage, just really fast, really, really fast. Often it's a congenital disease, you know, they've got something done. It's nothing that would normally limit the rate at which that particular type of damage would accumulate. And then those people could be greatly benefited just by fixing that one type of damage because the other one that came in already accumulating natural rates.
So that's what companies tend to focus on, but of course, you've got to develop your technology, right? So at this point even though the industry is exploding, the nonprofits side, the pre investible work is still struggling a little bit. Now, beyond that, there's the question of regulation.
So, you know, even once something has gone through and been really shown to work in laboratory animals, you want to try it on people. And of course there's an established process for that, but it's a very risk averse process. So it takes, you know, a painful amount of time.
And that's not what I work on. The SENS research foundation is very much focused on the earliest stage. And I don't have much influence on the later stages, but of course I talk to people.
Alex: [00:21:47] Right. So, you know, in the meantime, while all of this is going on for any of us who maybe aren't quite smart enough to be working on all of this, what are some things that just regular people can be doing to help extend their own lifespans.
Aubrey: [00:22:03] Unfortunately there's basically nothing. I mean, for most. So, like I said there are some people who, for whatever reason are accumulating this or that type of damage unusually rapidly. And you know, there's plenty of stuff that seems to work pretty well. So the, the classical example that's always used is Ray Kurzweil, who you know, he takes this insane number of supplements every day.
Now he's probably right to be doing that. Because it all started when he was in his thirties and he started coming down with type two diabetes. That's pretty damn rare in your thirties. Plus also you have a bunch of cardiovascular disease in his family. So he basically, you know, he's a smart guy and obviously very much an engineer.
And so he thought, well, what should I do? He tried the standard treatments and they actually, if anything made it worse. So he told me so I thought, screw this. I'm going to figure it out myself. And he developed his own regimen that works for him. And so he's in his seventies now. As far as I know, he's still got not a hint of diabetic phenotype, amazing all power to him, but that says exactly nothing about whether his regime would be good for most people.
People who wouldn't have got type two diabetes until they were 70 anyway. Right. So you know, you can't generalize and most people to be perfectly honest, most people, there's nothing you can do that will get you very much because you're developing all of these various types of damage it more or less the same rate.
In other words, each of them is going to get to a point as bad for you that makes you sick at about the same age. So if you fix half of them, the other half, we're going to get you. Yeah. You know, so I'm not saying it's useless. I'm not saying that the stuff we have today is useless, but what I'm saying is it's only very mildly beneficial and the things that are beneficial are different for different people because of differences in people's metabolism.
So at the end of the day, for nearly everybody who's listening to this broadcast. I have the bad news, that the best thing that you can do to postpone the age at which you start to exhibit the chronic conditions of late life is to give me a large check because that will increase the probability, that therapies that will stop this from happening will be available in time for you.
Alex: [00:24:29] Where do things like diet and exercise and limiting stress, things like that. Where do those play in? Is that purely quality of life or is that actual life extension?
Aubrey: [00:24:41] It's basically the same as what I just said about supplements in relation to Ray. All of these things have some potential benefit, but exactly what to do, depends on who you are.
And even if you get it exactly right for yourself, the magnitude of benefit will be very underwhelming.
Alex: [00:25:00] Okay. So let's pretend we you know, we're some years in the future now, and this has all gone very, very well. Obviously there's more problems that arise. Not that aren't solvable, obviously, but things like overpopulation maybe. Is that something that crosses your mind?
Aubrey: [00:25:15] No, it's not remotely obvious that there would be serious problems arising from solving the problem we have today, the problem of aging overpopulation is the way you chose to mention and it is certainly the one that is mentioned more often than any other. People say, oh, you know, if we don't, if people don't get sick they won't die and if people don't die, we've got a lot of people and therefore,where will we put them.
And of course everybody's well aware that we've got a problem today, this thing called climate change, that appears to be right according to the fact that we have so many people.
Well, if you look even a little bit under the hood you see that's complete nonsense, because real problem is that we have a lot of pollution. You know, there's plenty of space, right? Problem is that we're burning all these fossil fuels and we're doing all this agriculture and so on. This is creating the greenhouse gases and that's where the problem comes from.
And that problem is already being solved by solar energy and wind energy that are already comparable in price. To fossil fuels. And for that matter, artificial meat is only a few years behind, that does all the job of avoiding all the greenhouse gas and it's tastier and cheaper than real meat.
Now, you know, how can one just like, forget that when one thinks about these other things. It's like, like blows my mind that people can do this. But of course it doesn't quite blow my mind because I do know why people do it. They want to believe that this, the age thing is a blessing in disguise because they know that we don't know how soon aging going to be solved.
And therefore they don't know whether they can get away with getting their hopes up. Right. Well, when they themselves will benefit, it's, it's a catch 22 there psychologically, but only psychologically.
Alex: [00:27:08] Definitely. And you know, I guess we don't have the time to delve into all of these topics solving aging might might affect--
Aubrey: [00:27:18] I mean, just don't bother because I mean, it's not a matter of having the time. In fact, there is nothing wrong with solving aging any more than that, anything wrong with solving Alzheimer's disease. Find me somebody who thinks that Alzheimer's disease is a blessing in disguise and we can have a debate, but I have a feeling you won't find them.
Alex: [00:27:35] And it ties again to what we were talking about at the beginning with, you know, social institutions sort of being built around this idea that it's inevitable. Right? So you can't put it past people, I guess, most of the time.
Aubrey: [00:27:46] Let me actually say one more thing about that. So people often ask me, you know, eventually you'll get to the question. Okay, how soon is this going to happen? But the point is, is my answer is going to be maybe 15 years from now. And that's a maybe. I think that we have about a 50% chance of getting to what I've called longevity escape velocity, where we have essentially decisive level of comprehensiveness of a rejuvenation therapy within about 15 years, but I equally know that it could be at least a hundred years if we're unlucky, you know, there's at least a 10% chance of that. I'm fine with that. You know, such a percent chance is perfectly well worth fighting for, but it's definitely not going to happen in five years. Definitely not.
So, most people will say, okay, well, okay. I'll worry about it when it happens, right? Or, I won't think about it yet. I'll just let Aubrey get on with it. That would be a very unwise thing to do and here's why. What is going to happen as we incrementally improve and make our way towards the development of these therapies when I say we I don't just mean SENS research foundation, obviously, I mean the entire research community in this space.
What's going to happen is that incrementally. The thought leaders in this field are going to be saying more optimistic things to people like you, people with microphones and cameras, right. That's very, very important. People don't realize this but you know, for the past 15 years or so, I've been out there on the, you know, at the battlements, you know, telling people what's going to happen.
And I've been the only thought leader doing that. People don't know why the other thought leaders have not been doing it. People think okay, they're not doing it. Therefore, they must disagree with Aubrey, therefore Aubrey's wrong therefore, let's not worry. What they don't factor in is academia. The fact that the other thought leaders are all professors at this or that prestigious institution and therefore they rely for their research on getting money through grant applications to the government, which is elected, which is a problem.
Because that means that if they say anything like the kind of thing I've been saying for the past 15 years, then people are gonna use it as a way not to give them money. You see the people who decide who gets money and who doesn't have a hugely difficult job because they get far more good applications for money than what they've got the money to fund.
And so they have to, they're constantly desperate looking for reasons to say no. And they've got to be ass-covering reasons. They've got to be reasons that don't make the judge look bad. Right. So They've got it. So the reason, oh, there, this guy said something irresponsible to some journalists, that is actually a really ass-covering reason, which means that all of my colleagues have to be incredibly careful and conservative and calm curmudgeonly, but here's the key thing.
That's only up to a point, you know, they have to be behind the curve, but they don't have to be ridiculously behind the curve. They have to be just the right amount behind the curve to be getting away with it. Not being allowed to be said to be irresponsible and therefore the curve changes, right. You know, as progress gets made, people like that can say more optimistic things, and that is now happening.
So I, for the past 18 months or so. I've been really highlighting something that David Sinclair did. So he's very much another thought leader in this field, right. He wrote a book which has a subtitle that says why we age and why we don't have to, which is pretty much synonymous with what I said in 2007, I said like ending aging, right?
If he'd written a book called why we age and why we don't have to, in 2007, he had been fucking fired. No question. He would have lost his job. But now he can. And he's gone further these days, you know, the other day, he he was asked about one of the tedious papers that come out every so often saying, oh dear, there's some natural limit on lifespan, which are all based on statistics.
And therefore are based obviously by definition on people who are not benefiting from medicines that don't yet exist. Right. Right. Then he just came up and said exactly what I say. He said, these people are full of shit, these people. Yeah. And it wasn't really talking about the research of course, because he knows same as I do that researchers have got to get the next grant application funded. And so they're going to go with the journalist if the journalists want to give that message, but the journalists are definitely full of shit. Of course he's not really criticizing them because their job is to sell papers. So at the end of the day, it's the public who's full of shit.
And you can't blame them either because they just, you know, they have this problem of not wanting to get their hopes up. So, you know, it's all nobody's really to blame here, but still it's the system, but it's people like David and myself and a small number, like literally half a dozen other people. It really the thought leaders in this field, once we are telling the same story, game over. Oprah Winfrey's gonna be saying it. And, you know, the following day, most of the world is going to switch from an expectation that they will live, you know, only a few years longer than their parents did into an expectation that they're going to vastly longer and healthily of course, right. Now that is a little bit important, really.
You know, it's going to have a little bit of an impact on little big ticket items like you know, what kind of insurance policy you want and what kind of health, what kind of health care you want? What kind of inheritance arrangements, you know, it's going to fucking, blow the world to smithereens economically. So when I get the chance quite often to speak to people in the financial services sector, people who run, you know, pension funds and insurance companies and so on, I give them talks whose title is typically, you know, anticipating the anticipation. I'll say you better be ready for this.
Totally, you know, black and white instantaneous change in what people expect their future to look like, because what people expect their future to look like determines how they spend their money.
Alex: [00:34:13] So it's, it's really from what you're describing. Less of what you'd expect in the sense that, you know, with any sort of scientific advancement, a lot of us just sort of like to sit back and watch it happen over the course of 20 or 50 years. What you're saying is that it's, it's going to happen quite quickly.
Not necessarily as a result of the technology, just blowing up all of a sudden, but in the sense that people are actually going to start to believe it.
Aubrey: [00:34:41] That's basically right. I mean, at the end of the day, at the bottom level, what goes on in the laboratories with people, you know, with white coats, you know, with their test and Petri dishes, that's a very smooth, continuous process of, you know, step by step knocking off this little problem with the next little problem and so on, but the bigger problems that are sold by putting the solutions to the full problems together.
Those tend to be more stochastic, more kind of step function things, right. And the ultimate biggest one of all is have I say people's expectations and I'd be, you know, black and white, it's going to be just insane and it's going to happen. I think it's got at least a 50% chance of happening in the next three or four years.
That's how fast things are moving right now.
Alex: [00:35:27] Wow.
Aubrey: [00:35:28] Putting a personal perspective on this for a moment now, it almost makes me believe that I'm beginning to reach that point where I can retreat into glorious obscurity and like just spend my rest of my life in my hot tub. I am, you know, I've, I've worked very hard over the past 20 years and, you know, and in a sense, I believe I deserve a little bit of a holiday but I'm not stopping yet. I'm not counting my chickensas they say.
Alex: [00:35:55] Aubrey I know I've kept you longer than I even said I would. I really, I appreciate the time. This has been wonderful.
Aubrey: [00:36:02] Well, you're most welcome. Thank you for asking me along.
Alex: [00:36:05] Lovely. Thank you so much for the time. Great speaking.
Aubrey: [00:36:08] Okay. Bye.
Alex: [00:36:09] Bye.