In this show, we learn that incredibly high-powered AI is now being used in human nutraceutical research, specially targeting the 9 hallmarks of aging. Our guest Greg Macpherson, CEO of SRW Labs in New Zealand, joins us this week to share all about how automated labs are making unprecedented progress in identifying and creating compounds that may solve human longevity. By automating many of the tedious testing and refinement processes, AI labs are able to work with extreme efficiency, which translates to bringing meaningful longevity products to the public with extraordinary speed. We are very excited to learn about this from Greg, and to hear that we could be expecting to see some new targeted products hitting the market by summer 2024.
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Key Moments
“So, we are going to get to a stage where we get to have a DNA test before we start taking medicine and you know there may be 10 drugs on the shelf that are appropriate for whatever condition that’s being treated and they’ll select the one that’s best for you. But also, they’ll be able to look at it and go, ‘Okay, look, there’s a high chance, given your genetic makeup, that these are going to be a problem.’ ”
“There are animals out there that live for 200 years, like the bowhead whale. They are mammals just like us, so there’s no reason that we can’t learn from whatever genetic hacks that they’ve got which mean that they live longer. And then, of course, the Greenland shark lives for 500 years. So these are animals. We can learn from them, and once we do, then all bets are off as to what kind of longevity we’re going to see.”
“Of course it’s not the longevity that we think of today. We’re going to be talking about bodies aged 30 to 40 and having those bodies for 200 years, which is a little outside our frame of reference right now. But future humans are going to go, ‘Golly, those poor people back then who only got to live for 80 years and only 40 years in good health.’ ”
“In 3-5 years, there will be a product to slow or stop the aging clock.”
“You know, unfortunately, sugar is cheap and it’s tasty and it’s nice and we all love it. So there’s just a huge industry around it, but it’s not serving us well, and now we understand that, just like we went through taxing tobacco, maybe we’ve got to do the same just to nudge the population away from it and educate people how bad it is for us.”
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Transcript
David: 7:40
Hey, greg, good to see you. How are you doing today? I’m doing great. Thanks, david, good to see you. Where does this podcast find you today?
Greg: 8:00
I’m in beautiful Auckland in New Zealand. That’s where our head offices are.
David: 8:04
Wonderful, Wonderful. That’s the North Island right.
Greg: 8:09
It is. It’s the biggest city in New Zealand, that’s the North Island, and it’s a beautiful city. It’s surrounded by water so we all get out to go fishing a bunch. It’s quite a mild climate, so we don’t get too much higher than 26, 27 degrees, usually 23 in the summer, but we never freeze either. So quite mild.
David: 8:29
Lovely. Maybe we can start. You can just tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the nutraceutical business.
Greg: 8:38
Yeah, thanks, david. I’m a pharmacist by trade and I’ve been doing that for a little over 30 years now, getting close to 35, and I’ve always really been interested in new technology. So, whether it was the internet or robotics or, as it turns out, biotechnology, that’s led me down various different places in my career. But around a decade ago I got involved in biotechnology and started working with a company that had invented a molecule that targeted mitochondria. From there it really got deep into how mitochondria affect our health, but also that led me to how mitochondria affect how we age. Then, about four years ago, left that company and started thinking through really what happens to ourselves as we age. And it’s not just about you mitochondria, it’s actually about a whole bunch of things that change in pathways that change as we age. I discovered a paper called the Nine Hallmarks of Aging, which is really a story or a paper around what’s actually causing aging and driving aging in ourselves. As a pharmacist, I also looked at it and went actually these are not just nine drivers of aging, these are nine targets that we can seek to modulate as we age. That’s really where I got into the nutraceuticals, because I could see that pharmaceutical companies were targeting these pathways, but these results of that work may not turn up for a decade Yet we understand those pathways really well and we also understand what nutraceuticals or ingredients interact with those pathways. I said about formulating products that use natural ingredients to that affect the pathways of aging.
David: 10:26
What’s the process there? You’re looking for a pathway of aging that you can possibly intersect with. Then how do you get from that to the actual product?
Greg: 10:38
It’s really interesting because a lot of the ingredients or natural products that we all know and love and are quite popular because they have really beneficial effects, it turns out they have impact on many of the pathways associated with aging. A really good example of that is a curcumin, which has been used forever. It’s been used majority of the time for inflammation and pain relief and so on. It turns out curcumin has a really interesting impact on our DNA and DNA repair mechanisms. Dna is actually the primary DNA decline. A function is actually a primary driver of aging. I could list off a whole bunch of ingredients that affect different pathways. Astaxanthin, which is an antioxidant involved in supporting membrane health, has a really significant impact on mitochondria, and mitochondria dysfunction is another key pathway associated with aging. The process really is to look at those pathways. How to look at what do a literature research to understand which of the compounds have impact on those pathways and then start to stitch together something which supports the different hallmarks of aging or different pathways that decline as we age. So DNA, for example, is something that you want to look after from your 20s and but you don’t need something to help with zombie cells or cellulose, in essence, until your 50s. So really, what we put together was formulations which kind of target the issues associated with aging so that you can take them at different periods of your life and because you don’t need fecetin, for example, in your 20s, but it’s a very useful molecule in your 50s.
David: 12:31
And you’re partnering with scientists out there. How do you identify the scientists? Are they the folks who are the authors of these papers, or how do you source them?
Greg: 12:42
Yeah, we definitely had a look at who are the thought leaders in the field around specific areas of the research that we were looking into and we work with them and support their research. But also these guys have spent 10, 20, 30 years in the lab unpacking how these ingredients work and what their functions are, and really we lean into that research and stand on the shoulders of giants essentially these very, very clever people who have been doing really interesting work and they’ve been toiling away before the hallmarks were even known, if you will. They’ve been toiling away unpacking how these ingredients work and it’s just really this nice timing thing where the world is waking up to the fact that we can modulate the aging process and it turns out these people have been working on these molecules for sometimes up to decades.
David: 13:42
And are you working in collaboration with them? As far as the actual ingredients, the quantity, you know, the dosage, I don’t know anything about this, so it’s even incredibly complicated to me.
Greg: 13:53
Yeah, look, it is complicated and yes, we do work with them to look at what are the optimal doses and also optimal combinations as well, because aging is super complex and it’s not just one pathway. You can’t just take an aspirin, for example, and it sort of fixes different pathways. So we look at how do we stitch together these formulations so that they are targeting each of the pathways, and sometimes in multiple different ways as well, so that we’re getting, I guess, a 360 degree. Look at how do we modulate this really interesting aging process, and the knowledge that these folk bring is just absolutely phenomenal, so it just accelerates what we can achieve in a really short amount of time.
David: 14:45
How do you the sourcing of the ingredients? So you know, one of the things around this whole sector is is it bird feathers or is it? You know, how do you do the quality control? How do you find these things?
Greg: 14:59
Yeah, that’s really really challenging and such a good question, because you can have different versions of the same ingredient and some will get absorbed and some will not. Some will be not particularly dense in the ingredient that you’re looking for. So we’ve actually had to go and out to the suppliers and say, look, this is the specification of what we’re after and get bespoke versions of what we’re looking for and then also look at it from a perspective of are we getting the absorption of the actual ingredients so it’s got beneficial effects? It’s a work in progress. We are always refining what we’ve got so that we improve the effect. But a great example is that we actually we went to India to look for the Vicetin ingredient and speak to the, the, the supplier, to make sure of all sorts of the sustainable, but also at a concentration that makes it useful and actually have an effect.
David: 16:03
And then is there a looping back to the scientist with the. So you say, okay, we think we’ve sourced these ingredients. Please test these in whatever manner you do.
Greg: 16:14
Yeah, so the scientists we work with have labs that they run, and so, yes, we do that. We’ve also worked with a company in New Zealand that tests the ingredients just to make sure that when we say something is a a senolytic, for example, that it’s actually having an effect on removing or reducing the level of senescent cells. So, yeah, these are. This is quite important. We’re just to validate, really, that the formulas are working. As a pharmacist, you want to be making sure that what we’re saying is actually what these products are doing, and so that’s been quite important for us.
David: 16:53
Yeah, absolutely, as I said, that’s you know, at least here in America you can sort of say anything about anything and you’re out of the guidance of the FDA. Yeah well, it’s I mean, that’s the.
Greg: 17:06
I guess the difference between, perhaps, a pharmaceutical company and a supplement company is that there is less rigor around those products. So what we’ve sought to do is, I guess, sort of be the, the intercept of that, so that we have got. You know, obviously we can’t make any claims because we’re not a pharmaceutical company but just making sure that we’ve got the best quality ingredients that we do people do to get have evidence of effect just by taking the product.
David: 17:38
Absolutely, and we discussed a couple of weeks ago about something very interesting this AI initiative. Tell us a little bit about this and what you’re planning to do with it.
Greg: 17:50
Yeah, we’re incredibly excited about this initiative. It started with a conversation with the founder of a company called in Silicone Medicine, these. This is a world’s, I guess, leading longevity company even, I guess, by stealth. But what they’re doing is that they’re applying artificial intelligence for drug discovery and they’re making incredible gains in this area. They’re developing new pharmaceuticals at a rate that’s almost unheard of and with an efficiency that’s almost unheard of. They work with 10 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies globally to help them develop new drug candidates and even potentially new targets as well, and I’ve seen what they’ve been able to achieve with such a small amount of time. So I had a conversation with the founder I called Dr Alex Savronkov, who’s the leader in artificial intelligence in the drug discovery area, and I said to him you know, we have what about pointing your resource and machines towards nutraceutical discovery so that we can develop next generation supplements that have, I guess, even bigger effect than what we’ve got with our first generation products? So we’ve just embarked on an exclusive partnership within Silicone Medicine to start to look at again the hallmarks of aging and the pathways associated with it, to look to identify new molecules that come from nature that target the aging pathways. So this is something which will see us bring next generation products coming to market mid next year, and so far, what I’m seeing is just mind blowing in terms of what they’ve been able to achieve in such a short amount of time.
David: 19:46
So walk me through how that process is different than the current process is reviewing scientific literature, speaking to the scientists and going down that way. How does it work with machine learning? What’s the process on that?
Greg: 19:59
Yeah. So it’s not too similar, I guess, to how we started, which was the process of looking at the pathways associated with aging and then looking at identifying molecules that can modulate those pathways. So they’re just doing it with 100,000 brains or a million brains rather than one or a handful. So that’s just going to accelerate our opportunity to identify molecules that have perhaps wider impact on those pathways associated with aging. And then, in Silicone Medicine, have a lab based in China which is a high throughput lab. There’s not many humans involved in this lab. It’s a robotic lab which runs 24 seven, and their ability to identify these molecules and then test them for effect and then also test the combinations and the different ratios, means that we can perhaps compress five years with the research into three months. So this is really going to accelerate our ability to identify a step change in efficacy of our formula.
David: 21:13
You mentioned the testing. So machine learning is identifying novel molecules found in nature and combinations thereof. How is the testing for efficacy done there?
Greg: 21:25
Yeah, so there’s just a huge. They’re cell models, david. So they’re essentially a whole bunch of like hundreds of thousands of wells full of cells and they test the combinations and then they have assays that test the result of those. So we can see what its impact is, perhaps on cellulose in essence, for example, and what the efficacy of those molecules are, or the effect on mitochondrial function or the effect on the DNA repair processes. So we’re going to be able to test all of these molecules, even down to their effect, potentially, on the cell cellular clocks that we have on our DNA, and how we perhaps can measure the slowing of aging in these particular models. So, and then from there we will start to look at the lead candidates and lead candidate combinations and from there we’ll go back to the researchers that we work with in the labs who have mouse models, to start to look at what the impact is on aging in those animals. And of course, because we share so much biology with mammals and mice and mice of men, if you will we’ll get some really clear clues on what’s working and what’s not, and then from there we’ll take it through to human trials.
David: 22:58
You mentioned something very interesting there about the clock. Are you seeing development of some products out there where that’s possible?
Greg: 23:08
Yeah, we are and it’s early days, but definitely we can see an imprint with some of the interventions on slowing that age clock. So some of the interventions that we know work, like calorie restriction, taking things like vitamin D, exercise, mimetics these are all having an impact. So it’s really only a matter of time now before we validate the effect in human clinical trials and we’ll start to see the first validated protocols that will help slow aging.
David: 23:51
Wow, that’ll be a big day.
Greg: 23:53
Yeah, I was talking with a. Do you know what I’m going to call professor Eric Verdon? He’s the head of the Buck Institute and his view is that three to five years will be when we have the first pharmaceutical compounds that are validated to slow aging. This is all happening and it’s happening within our lifetime, in fact, within the next three to five years. It’s quite an exciting space.
David: 24:20
I’ve heard that before from others who are more informed than I am, and I think it’s very exciting when I tell other people outside of this world that they, you know it’s that. It’s that thing, greg. When I was younger, I was promised a flying car. I still don’t have a flying car. Where’s? My flying car and so everything that’s sort of like. My brain tends to put everything into flying car territory.
Greg: 24:44
Yeah, yeah, look, it’s really interesting. And when people sort of say that to me, because it’s a really common reaction, I say, look, we’ve actually been doing longevity for the last 200 years, like we’re doing it, we’re doing it really well, like, for, you know, pre 200 years ago, you know, the average life expectancy was anything from 25 to 35. And it’s been like that for all of human history. So when you, when you consider the breakthroughs that we’ve made, that we just all take for granted now, like antibiotics, like hygiene, like surgery, medicine, whatever they’ve they’ve all had a radical impact on our longevity. And really, if you think about like 100 years ago, people thought that infections and getting sick was based on bad air and bad luck and low morals and things like that. And then we discovered bacteria and we we, we had a target. We started to understand what the enemy was and through that we shifted our behavior and we introduced hygiene. So doctors washed their hands between patients and between childbirth and we washed our hands between food and the bathroom and we stopped checking excrement out at the top window onto the street. All these things changed and it had a radical impact on on on our longevity. And then we then developed antibiotics. So what’s exciting is that we now understand the hallmarks of aging, the drivers of aging in ourselves. That’s driving behavioral changes. We all know, now that we get out and do some exercise, we’re building longevity. We know that if we get good sleep, if we have good diet, if we manage our stress, if we get out and be social, these are like the five behavioral things that we can do to can add a decade to our life. And the next step is okay, what interventions, from a pharmaceutical perspective or a natural perspective, can modulate the aging process? And that is ultimately the path that we’re going down and at some point, three to five years, we’re going to get our first penicillin, the first longevity gyro protector, if you will, and then we’re just going to get better at it, because that’s what we do as humans we we figure it out and we refine it, and it’s going to add decades to our life. And then, of course, we’re going to tweak things and there are animals out there that live for 200 years the bowhead whale. So they are mammals just like us, so there’s no reason that we can’t learn from whatever genetic hacks that they’ve got which mean that they live longer. And then, of course, the Greenland shark lives for 500 years. So these are animals. We can learn from them, and once we do, then all bets are off as to what kind of longevity we’re going to see. And of course it’s not longevity that we think of in terms of geriatric longevity. We’re going to be talking about bodies that can be aged 30 to 40 and have those bodies for 200 years, which is a little outside a frame of reference right now. But future humans are going to go gully, those poor people back then that in the early 2000s that only got to live for 80 years and only 40 years in good health. I mean that’s you know, as an adult hood it’s going to be. It’s going to be as crazy to them as living to 35 or 45 is for us.
David: 28:16
I want to circle back to the AI, and you mentioned that, this current AI. It specializes in identifying molecules for pharmaceutical use and I’m wondering about the intersection. So a number of pharmaceutical well, I won’t say most, a lot of pharmaceuticals have certain negative effects. Is there a way to go in and say, okay, like here’s existing pharmaceutical very widely used, but there are these other off target effects that are happening? Is there a nutraceutical that we can find that can target here, so that we can mitigate these, the negative aspects?
Greg: 28:54
Yeah, 100%, david. I think you’re speaking straight into your personalized nutrition and specialized medicine. So we are going to get to a stage where we get to have a DNA test before we start taking medicine and you know there may be 10 drugs on the shelf that are appropriate for whatever condition that’s being treated and they’ll select the one that’s best for you. But also they’ll be able to look at it and go, okay, look, there’s a highly high chance, given your genetic makeup, that these are going to be a problem. So, yeah, less supplement with some whatever insert nutraceuticals here as well. So, excuse me, so there’s, this will be the future of medicine. But I think even more than that, we’re going to get to a point where we’ve got preventative medicine. So that’ll be understanding what our genetic makeup is, understanding exactly what’s happening with our health challenges right now, and perhaps everything will be graded, just like we have cancer, from stage zero to stage five. You know you don’t turn up at the doctors with a heart condition. It’s been brewing for decades, and so we’ll start to understand where you are on a perhaps heart disease or liver disease, or and start perhaps when you get to stage one or stage zero and start to actually stage an intervention well before you even get disease, and so we’re in that transition. Now I think we’re learning, where ourselves is certain, what trajectory our diseases are on and, hopefully, beyond taking a drug, and learning what other things we can do to neutralize their side effects, we actually will be able to take pre pre drugs, if you will, or pre disease interventions. So I think that’s in the not too distant future as well, but it’s going to need some work because but I will get us there, purely because that’s really that we need that level of bandwidth in terms of discovery to get to that point.
David: 31:10
It’s an enormous challenge I mean, it’s sort of the the holy grail that I hear from a lot of people with genetics and your blood biomarkers and put all these things together and therefore, to optimize your, you need X, but that’s just a massive computational problem at the moment.
Greg: 31:29
Yeah, but but so worth solving right. Because if we can, in our 30s, start to hit off these conditions that we inevitably encounter as we age, if we can start to do regular health checks and get ahead of that, then, you know, maybe we don’t need to be dealing with some of the diseases that we deal with right now. We accept them as inevitable. But I think the future generations will be proactively dealing with this and the you know, I think it’s actually going to be bigger than the pharmaceutical industry will. In fact, the pharmaceutical industry will will adopt this once we understand how to do it, simply because you know it’s probably better to have 40 years worth of product that’s stopping people getting unwell versus five years of product saving off the inevitable decline that we enjoy as we get older.
David: 32:25
One of the gripes that I have with. I have a lot of doctors in my life and my personal physician tends to be quite conservative and he’s sort of of the disease model. For instance, I went in like last year and I had a calcium CT scan and so I’m going to be 65 next week and it was like I think it was like a two or three or something and he’s like, oh, this is very good. And I said, no, it’s not. Zero is very good, three is not good, because I can’t take three back to zero. Right, it’s just compounding. So let’s look at this. And I was good doctor but I think that so much of where we’re at now is symptom treatment. But it makes sense because symptoms is all we see. So if that’s what we see, that’s what we treat. But if we can sort of pre see what where the trajectory of things, I mean that makes a lot more sense to me.
Greg: 33:21
Yeah, I mean, we’re dealing with and it’s no fault of anybody, because it’s just where we’re at in terms of our evolution and medical care, but we’re in sick care right now in terms of dealing with problems as they arise. So, really, we want to preventative maintenance model where we’re going in an understanding things and if we look at how diseases develop, it’s not, it’s not just doesn’t happen overnight. Right, we have something goes wrong. We get some oxidative stress that persists, which turns into inflammation, inflammation persists and then, all of a sudden, we get disease. So, let’s, you know, let’s walk it back to first principles is Mr Elon Musk looks at things and say, right, how do we get ahead of it? How do we identify these issues as they’re starting to emerge? And then we, we, we stamp, stamp it out, we deal with it. And it’s, it’s lifestyle, because, you know, 80% of it is a lot of people are going to be sick. 80% of conditions we deal with are actually to do with what’s happening in our world. Let’s start to cause the disease. So, look, let’s, let’s look at how we, we live healthy. And one of my pet issues is just, you know, and 200 years, they’re going to be looking back at us as being in the dark ages because we we don’t live lives which optimize our biology. It’s crazy. We don’t exercise as much as we should. We don’t eat like we should. Western diet is not fantastic. There’s too much sugar in our lives. These are things which will be. I don’t know if it’s outlawed, but certainly will be educated to understand their impact, and I think even just minimizing sugar is going to have it’s almost going to be as big as stamping out tobacco.
David: 35:02
So these are really basic things we know, but we just need to do my favorite sort of bug bear with sugar is there’s a beverage here called Mountain Dew. 60 ounces of Mountain Dew is going to hit you with maybe 50 grams of fruit dose. To me, this should be a controlled substance. You should eat a first Like if, for some reason, you have to have this. You need a prescription like that. The people are allowed to that. This is out there and it’s advertised. I just this is insanity.
Greg: 35:31
It is insanity, especially when you think about what the what the cost of that is ultimately In terms of shortening lives, in terms of morbidity of it’s. It’s just ridiculous. So, you know, I couldn’t agree more. These things need to be removed from this, this planet, and in the quicker that it’s done the better. You know, unfortunately, sugar is cheap and it’s tasty and it’s nice and we all love it generally, and so there’s just a huge industry around it, but it’s not, it’s not serving us well, and now we understand that, just like we went through the I guess, taxing tobacco, maybe we’ve got to do the same just to to just nudge the population away from it and educate people how bad it is for us.
David: 36:23
I read a thing the other day that people who’ve been diagnosed with type two diabetes there’s some crazy statistic, there’s like 10 or 15% of them actually modify their behavior in some way. Just telling somebody they’re going to die or have a leg amputate or something doesn’t seem to be enough.
Greg: 36:44
Yeah, it’s incredible Human behavior is is such an interesting study and really we need to start as education right at the start and power kids and go into schools and talk about how we can optimize our biology. I mean, we’re ancient humans in a modern world. We’ve got, for whatever reason, I guess, a food complex which is not serving us and really I guess by the time we get to our 20s or through our teenage, those behaviors are kind of embedded and it’s really difficult to unwind them. So we need to start early and get educating.
David: 37:26
I want to go back because I find this whole, like AI discovery and targeting of novel molecules, fascinating. It just seems like it’s such a different path of discovery that hasn’t been done in the past. I mean, you’re seeing, since my guess is very started to work with these folks Are you already seeing things that are surprising to you?
Greg: 37:45
Yeah, absolutely yeah. I think, if for most people, it’s like, you know, chat beat GPT is a game changer you can type in a question and get an answer straight back, which is almost like having a chat with a learner professional that understands the entire world, if you will. So the breakthroughs that we’re seeing and understanding and the insights that we’re getting, that just wouldn’t have made the connection without this, this, this super brain is, is is humbling, really. So you know, we are going to see rapid advances in our understanding of how we interact with the pathways associated with aging, and I think what’s really interesting is this is stage one, right, what we’re doing is around nutraceutical discovery. I would say that the work that’s been done, what we’re doing is very easy way pathways towards pharmaceutical discovery as well, because through this work, we’ll understand where the targets are. Natural ingredients are fantastic, but we can improve on them, and so, as we understand these targets, as we understand more about what’s happening, then I think, from a silicone medicines perspective, here’s an opportunity to, to to look at, okay, how do we improve on nature and and actually start to solve aging? And their stated purpose is is our anti aging company, that’s, that’s using AI, and so I’m really excited for that particular company in terms of what they’re doing and excited to be on the journey with them so that we can develop products that are just just have a high chance of having a very interesting effect on the aging process.
David: 39:39
And did I understand products coming to market next summer?
Greg: 39:42
Yeah, that’s right. So we’re. We’re like it’s incredible to speak to these. These guys operate at and so we’ll have candidates and molecules and ingredients and testing before before Christmas. So yeah, it’s. You know, when I first engaged with them I my timeline was somewhat expanded. They said so we’ll get back to you in a fortnight with what we think is is good, because really once you put queries in right, it’s, it can happen in a flash and it’s really a matter of the right questions gives you great answers.
David: 40:21
Wow, I was somebody. I was invited to speak at a. One of the luxury car manufacturers from Europe invited me to come and speak to some of their design people about the future and one of the things he came up is we’re all Luda.
Greg: 40:40
It’s now like yeah, we’re so fortunate to be alive at the at this time we’re we’re experiencing the birth of AI and it’s going to turn into a GI, which is going to just be the most incredible time. So we’re. It’s going to be challenging, of course, because we don’t know what the impact on society will be, but I’m an optimist. I think that it’s going to essentially augment what it means to be human, not just in terms of how we work but how our health is, what opportunities we have. It’s incredible. So we’ve got to kind of strap, strap in and see where it’s going to take us. But there, what I’m seeing is it’s, you know, we’re going to be hitting into an age of abundance. We’re going to solve, you know, energy we’re going to that’s going to just liberate All sorts of opportunities for us, so watch this space.
David: 41:42
I’ve had Dr Mike Royzen on this podcast a couple of times. Mike said head of wellness at the Cleveland Clinic and what he’s told me and others is that you want to keep your organ systems in good shape. He says five to 10 years because there’s all this amazing things, that and this was sort of pre I haven’t spoken to Mike in about a year since the whole, since AI entered all this development, so he probably has a faster timeline. But he says it’s critically important that you keep yourself in reasonably good self, in health and your organ systems working well so that you can take advantage of all of these things.
Greg: 42:21
Yeah, 100%. The Aubrey de Grey, who’s a, I guess, a futurist when it comes to longevity, believes that perhaps the first person who’s going to live to 150 is walking on the planet now and that the difference between living to 150 and 1500 years is probably only 10 years. So it’s so worthwhile putting in the effort right now to be as healthy as possible, doing all those lifestyle things that we talked about in terms of exercise and diet and sleep and stress management and being social, if we can do those and take various supplements that are here now that we’ve got a really good chance of being in pretty good shape to enjoy the benefits of what’s ahead. And there are tens of billions of dollars of research going into this right now, because what the boffins have worked out and it’s again you’ve got to look backwards to look forward, but the amount of GDP on the planet that has grown over the last 200 years exponentially, that’s going to carry on, and so you know we are going to the. I believe the return on investment for just one extra year of good health or good health span extension is in the trillions of dollars, tens of trillions, right. So the it’s worthwhile pursuing this because it’s going to unleash a massive societal dividend and it’s really weird and why so many researchers and experts are focusing on slowing the aging process.
David: 44:09
We’ve had Dr Andrew Scott on this podcast, Professor of Economics in Oxford, and what he told me was for every year of working life that’s extended and in the US alone it’s an increase of in GDP of four to 5%, which is in the trillions of dollars. Yeah, and that’s one year. Yeah, that’s right, that’s quite something.
Greg: 44:33
And we’re actually going to need to solve this problem now because we are dealing with issues of population decline, we’re dealing with issues of healthcare costs, where it’s just not sustainable to keep going the way we’re going. So we’ve really got to deal with that, and being a young human is going to be relatively scarce going forward. So, you know, these are actually making sure that we’re all productive and healthy into our hundreds and beyond from an economic perspective is actually incredibly important and it’s probably an issue that we’re going to solve just in time because, yeah, and we need to solve it, and somewhat urgently, I think. What is it? Two billion of us are going to be over the age of 60 in about a little over two decades or 25 years, so this is a big issue that’s coming at us. It’s, I guess, a slow emergency, but around 50% of people over the age of 60 are dealing with chronic health concerns. I think 17% of GDP in the States is goes to healthcare right now.
David: 45:52
More.
Greg: 45:52
I believe, yeah, more so if we push that forward, it could be 30%. We can’t afford it, so this shift is really important, absolutely, greg.
David: 46:04
Is there anything you want to leave the audience with today?
Greg: 46:07
Just I think, really repeating what you’ve just talked about in terms of really focusing on your health for the next five, ten years, because kicking that can along the road, staying well and staying in good shape as possible is going to potentially deliver you with decades more life. So focus on that and make the changes. Build movement into your life. Build decisions around diet. Learn about the benefits of fasting, because that appears to be a really significant way that we can extend healthspan. Edit sugar out of your life, and that doesn’t mean just plain sugar. It also means some of the things like bread and carbohydrates, which the body shifts into sugar as soon as you eat them. So do that. And learn about supplements which are changing and having a reduvenated effect on cells. That’s a simple chat. Gpt search or a Google search will tell you what molecules those are. And and just stay curious and stay aware of what’s happening out there, because whilst perhaps ten years ago, supplements were considered just perhaps something that is a nice to take, now we’re learning that they’re a should take.
David: 47:24
Greg is the CEO of SRW and you can find SRW at SRWco. Great to have you on, as always, love our conversations. I know you’re doing some trials here in Utah and hopefully we’ll get you back here and have another adventure up in the snowy mountains.
Greg: 47:40
That would be amazing. Thanks, david, appreciate the opportunity to talk.
David: 47:44
Great to see you today.
