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Works in Progress is an online magazine devoted to new and underrated ideas about economic growth, scientific progress, and technology. Subscribe to listen to the Works in Progress podcast, plus Hard Drugs by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.
Ben Southwood: Welcome to the
Works in Progress podcast.
My name is Ben Southwood.
I'm one of the editors
at Works in Progress.
I'm here with Aria Schrecker, another
one of the editors and Saloni Dattani,
who's another one of the editors,
and also runs the podcast Hard Drugs.
Today we're gonna talk about
some of the extremely long lived
animals that exist out there.
There are animals just out living
there like lobsters and axolotls
and naked mole-rats that can live
or regenerate in surprising ways.
And it might be possible for us as
humans to learn from these animals, learn
their secrets, and also live longer,
but possibly, hopefully without having
to be naked and bald, underground or
live with a heartbeat many times slower
than our own in extremely cold water.
Aria, what got you onto the
subject of longevous animals?
Aria Schrecker: I want to live forever
that's the starting point here.
And there are lots of people who are
spending lots of money on different
research labs that are trying to
figure out, what is a secret to
human longevity or aging, and can
we figure out a way to overcome it?
And I think if you have some biological
knowledge, I have an A-level, but if you
are trying to figure out, okay when you're
talking about all of these different
hormones and chemicals and genes which
of these actually, what do they do in the
real world and what can we - how could
they possibly be applied to human beings?
I think the most intuitive way to get
a grip with that is to see okay, there
are some animals with these adaptations.
There are things that are actually
happening in nature and if we understand
them, we know which of those things
might then apply in people as well.
So that's the logical
reason for being interested.
There's a fun reason, which is animals
are cool, and I like to know fun
facts about animals and this is another
reason to know fun facts about animals.
Saloni Dattani: Do you have
a favorite long-lived animal?
Or a fun fact about them?
Aria Schrecker: I am particularly
compelled by naked mole-rats.
I think naked mole-rats are maybe
the weirdest animal I've come across.
So they're eusocial
mammals, which is strange.
Saloni Dattani: What is eusociality?
Aria Schrecker: So they're basically
creatures where each one has a
really specialized role in its hive.
So in ants you'll have the breeding
queen, and then you'll have the
worker drones and all kinds of
that - have it with bees as well.
And you do have it with naked mole-rats.
So naked mole-rat colonies
usually have one breeding queen
and usually three breeding males.
And then all of the others they're
known as socially infertile as
opposed to actually infertile, but
they don't reproduce at all and you
get weird hive-bullying behaviors
where it'll be that more dominant
females will encourage more submissive
females to do work by shoving them
and also things that about them.
Other interesting things about
naked mole-rats, they don't really
regulate their temperature at all.
They will at very high temperatures,
they will start to have other
physiological normal things that
animals will do to cool themselves down.
But at low temperatures, they don't warm
themselves up, except again, socially,
they warm themselves up by huddling.
They don't seem to have any of the other-
Saloni Dattani: Does that mean their
body just works at any temperature
or do they just happen to be in
environments that are stable?
Aria Schrecker: They're largely
from very warm places in Africa,
so it doesn't come up that much.
But anything below 29 degrees Celsius,
they'll just keep getting colder
and they'll keep getting colder, and
they'll just change the amount of
activity they do in response to that.
Saloni Dattani: Do they hibernate?
Aria Schrecker: I don't know.
I don't think so.
I didn't read about them hibernating
on their Wikipedia page, so
I'm going to gently say no.
Ben Southwood: So they just
run at a lower clock speed when
they're at a lower temperature.
They just speed up when there
was a higher temperature?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
It seems to be.
Saloni Dattani: That's so fun!
A sloth.
Ben Southwood: So eusociality
means just very, very social.
They basically put the interests
of the overall group ahead of
their own personal interests.
I see.
Saloni Dattani: Got it.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, I feel eusocial
animals, the way I think of them
anyway, is they're one step closer
to each animal as a cell and the
entire hive or colony is the organism.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Aria Schrecker: And I think they make
more sense if you think about that.
Ben Southwood: In bees and ants,
that works because everyone
is a clone of each other.
They're effectively a clone.
If you're
a worker, you are basically a clone
of all the other workers and you've
also only got one chromosome-
Aria Schrecker: I know that there are
complicated genetic relationships there,
because I know that sisters, though this
is maybe a type of ant rather than a type
of bee, but it's another type of eusocial
creature where the sisters are, because I
think of their, they don't have complete
chromosomes are more related to each
other than they are to their own children.
Where they have only 50% of the
DNA, whether they're 75% each other.
And so the best reproductive strategy
for them is to farm their mother
for more siblings, through a selfish
gene way of thinking about this.
Ben Southwood: And what I was building
to with that is do naked mole-rats
also have the strange genetic
thing or are they more like us?
Aria Schrecker: I don't think so.
They're more like us.
Saloni Dattani: Do they live long?
Aria Schrecker: So
they live weirdly long for a rodent.
They're the longest lived
rodents but it seems their environment
is actually quite dangerous.
Saloni Dattani: What
eats a naked mole-rat?
Aria Schrecker: Snakes mostly.
Saloni Dattani: Oh, that's sad.
Aria Schrecker: But in captivity I don't
think - in captivity, a naked mole-rat
has never died of anything that is age.
They just seem to keep
going and keep going.
So I think the oldest one in
captivity is now in its forties,
and everything seems okay.
Saloni Dattani: I read a study that
contradicted the general trend even though
it seems some of them live really long,
and I think the disagreement was basically
that the people who studied how long
naked mole-rats live only looked at those
that had already survived to a given age.
Then after that they
didn't have that many.
They were like let's look at naked
mole-rats who have lived to this
age, or were born after that and
look at their mortality rates
Aria Schrecker: in that sample.
So the conventional opinion, I think,
is that naked mole-rats - for most
creatures, each year that they live,
their odds of dying go up and they go up.
So usually your safest age is
your first reproductive years.
So I don't know, it varies so much
from animal to animal - like one, it
would be about that for naked mole-rat.
And then each year your risk of dying goes
up and up and up and up and up and up.
So you have fewer and fewer older ones.
But I think the conventional opinion
is for naked mole-rats, they're odds
of dying are stable over each year.
You are saying that that is only
true for the naked mole-rats
that made it to a certain age.
Saloni Dattani: I'm saying that it's
not true, and that it seemed like
it was true because people were only
looking at a very selected sample.
Aria Schrecker: Okay.
But it's not that the very selected
sample is just the older naked mole-rats?
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: So naked mole-rats, we're
not sure if it's actually true that
they live very long, but they might do.
Saloni Dattani: But some of them do.
Yeah.
Ben Southwood: But some of them do, and
the potential to live very long is very
interesting to us anyway, because it
might just be that we can just get those
naked mole-rats and learn from them.
I think we need to categorize the
kinds of different long lived animals
because I think you've got quite a
lot of long lived animals that can
go through, and I think there are
multiple different categories right?
So naked mole-rats,
what category are they?
Aria Schrecker: I think
they basically standalone.
There is another eusocial rat that
I think has some of its features.
Ben Southwood: Another
long-lived eusocial rat.
Aria Schrecker: I'm not sure.
Ben Southwood: Okay.
Well, I'm thinking, of the long
lived creatures, some of which you're
gonna tell us about, I imagine they
fall into categories of why they're
long lived or maybe they're all long
lived for the same reason, but if
they fall into categories, I would
love you to give us those categories.
Aria Schrecker: So I think naked
mole-rats are probably a subset of
what I'm gonna call the group that
we are part of which is highly social
mammals with interesting cancer
adaptations and maybe slower metabolisms.
But that's not necessarily the massive
part of the reason for their longevity.
Ben Southwood: So we don't have a core
reason because I guess you're about
to tell me that some animals live long
because they have a very slow metabolism.
Aria Schrecker: Yes.
I'm about to tell you that.
That's a core category.
Ben Southwood: And then you might tell
me another category is that others just
don't get diseases for some reason.
Aria Schrecker: That's not a category,
but it would be a nice category to exist.
Ben Southwood: What are
the other categories?
Aria Schrecker: Other, I'll
tell you the other categories.
Okay.
So category number one, this is probably
just one kind of creature, but it
definitely is distinct from the others,
which is that it can go back to its
embryonic stage and then respawn again.
So that's it's a particular kind
of jellyfish, which I'm actually
not gonna attempt the pronunciation
of because I've never looked it
up it's a Latin word, you know?
And so basically them, and I think maybe
one of their cousins that is slightly
less common can, under extreme stress,
they can go back to their embryonic or
polyp stage, which is very, very durable.
And then it can wait out whatever the
whatever the problem is and come back.
The problem is usually that the water's
really polluted, it's too hot, it's
too cold, I think sometimes blunt force
trauma can also get it to do this.
But also that can also kill
them because they're tiny.
Saloni Dattani: Right,
that could go either way.
Aria Schrecker: But yeah, and then
basically after that point they
can then respawn again, so it's
unclear if they even have memories.
They can respond to electric
shocks and maybe learn that those
electric shocks are bad, but that
is even now a little bit suspect.
So maybe that's longevity and maybe
it's just a system spinning up and down.
There's another adaptation, which
lobsters are the core kind, but I think
axolotls are also maybe sort of like
this, which is they seem to have really,
really good regeneration properties,
and so with a lobster, you can cut off
bits of a lobster and it'll regrow you
can definitely do that with axolotls.
You can do that with some forms
of worm as well, lobsters are the
only ones that then use that to
have really, really long lifespans.
Lobsters are bizarrely long lived for
the kind of creature that they are.
Saloni Dattani: How long do they live?
Aria Schrecker: So the oldest known
lobsters are hundreds of years old.
Over 200 years old, probably.
Definitely late hundreds.
Saloni Dattani: How do we know that?
Do they have, I don't
know, markers or something?
Aria Schrecker: That is
a really good question.
Ben Southwood: We've
got a really good story.
I've heard this one, Aria
told me this one before.
We've got a really good story about how
we know the age of another creature.
Saloni Dattani: I think
I've read that one.
Ben Southwood: One.
I'm not gonna spoiler that one,
but the lobster one I think we
Saloni Dattani: I think we carbon
date them or something like that.
Ben Southwood: And we've got a
good story about how the lobster,
the oldest lived lobster died.
Yes.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
The oldest lobster that we ever found.
So basically, I wouldn't be surprised
if it literally is just lobsters
grow and they never stop growing.
They get bigger and bigger
and bigger over their lives.
So you just find a really big one,
and then you can map roughly, which
might be why some of the oldest living
is a little bit of a suspect number.
Because it's okay, we can map that
assuming that this didn't grow
really, really quickly, it's this old.
Saloni Dattani: Yep.
Aria Schrecker: But yeah, so the
oldest lobster that we ever found was
caught just by a shipping people and
it wound up in a lobster restaurant.
And I guess the people at the
restaurant were like, this
is a bizarrely large lobster.
So they kept him on display as a mascot
but then PETA, the charity, PETA, did
a campaign that was like you've gotta
release him, you've gotta release the
oldest lobster back into the wild.
And probably he was just released
into the wild starved to death
because the problem with lobsters
is they don't die the normal way.
They don't get more and more
diseases as they get older.
They just at some point they need to
shed their shell and regrow it and
the bigger they get, the harder it
is for them to eat enough calories
in order to energetically do that.
So when lobsters die of old age,
they starve to death basically.
Saloni Dattani: That's really sad.
Aria Schrecker: So he's probably
starved to death because
this was 2006 or something.
Ben Southwood: So we have; category
one is that we can turn ourselves
back into an undifferentiated mass of
our stem cells, and then regenerate
ourselves, maybe isn't that good.
It would be quite cool, but you
would probably think of it as dying.
Aria Schrecker: Well, that's a glimmer
of hope in there, in that if you
can do that with individual tissues
that is actually very helpful.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: Segment two
is regenerative abilities.
So you can either regrow your arms,
or regrow a tissue or something.
That's category one-
Saloni Dattani: We can regrow our liver.
Ben Southwood: There we go.
So we've got a bit of that, we're like a
lizard, but not the tail, we got liver.
Aria Schrecker: And the benefit
of that would also be if you can
think about it in terms of your
cells, your DNA is incredibly robust
when you keep being able to do it.
So usually as you age, you have more
and more complications in your DNA.
Each time each cell is copying it
and makes some mistakes, lobsters
don't seem to have those mistakes.
So if we have that great cell regeneration
and everything is coming from fresh
stem cells or blastocysts, I think.
Ben Southwood: And we're not
growing inevitably anyway, so
that's not a big problem for us.
We're not gonna have an
issue with calories in there.
Aria Schrecker: Yes.
It's really obvious that if lobsters had
human's ability to control the world,
they just would stop dying, right?
Or we'd fight or we'd finally
find out another thing.
Ben Southwood: Or if they had automatic
hormones that kicked in saying, you're
adult now, you don't need to grow anymore.
Which is what we have, right?
So those category one polyp stage, go back
to stem cells, category two, regenerate.
Category three?
Aria Schrecker: Category three, and
this is a very, very big category.
Most of the creatures that you've
heard of that you hear have weirdly long
lifespans fit into this which is that they
just have really, really slow metabolisms.
They don't do anything.
I think of them as creatures that have
basically the same life in total that
you would expect a species of their
kind, but they just have it on slow.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
So they're on slow motion.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Yeah.
Basically.
Saloni Dattani: Like a sloth?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Like a sloth.
Ben Southwood: You're a bit
preoccupied about sloths.
Aria Schrecker: I actually,
I wish I knew how long sloths
live for, but I have no idea.
Saloni Dattani: Isn't that a risk?
Because what if some other animal just,
I don't know, quickly killed them and
they wouldn't be able to react fast?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
I think this probably is a
problem for creatures like this.
Ben Southwood: They're
mostly quite big, right?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah,
they're mostly quite big.
So we're thinking the Greenland
shark, the Bowhead whale the
Aldabra tortoise, and they're
basically the biggest of their kind.
So I think it's interesting that the
Greenland shark and the bowhead whale
both have this, the Greenland shark
lives for much longer, but it's quite
a bit smaller because it's a shark.
And then the bowhead whale is massive.
It's 70 tons, I think.
They eat one meal a year and
then they just sit in really,
really, really cold water.
They wait for their prey to come by them.
They don't do anything.
And the Greenland shark can
live for about 500 years-
Saloni Dattani: That's crazy.
Aria Schrecker: -doing this, and
probably it's the same number of
meals that we do in that time,
which is it's weird thought.
Maybe fewer.
Saloni Dattani: Wait, is this
the one that we have the story
about how we know how old it is?
Aria Schrecker: No.
So the bowhead whale is the one where
we didn't realize they were super long
lived, and then some people were, I
guess illegally trying to kill the
whale and I guess they succeeded;
they were hunting it, they found it,
again this is the early two thousands.
And then they realize- they find a
Victorian harpoon is embedded into
the whale or a little bit of it.
And they realize that someone had tried
to kill it about a hundred years before.
Saloni Dattani: Wow.
Aria Schrecker: And they'd failed and
they were like 'Wow, this creature's been
swimming around for ages.' And now we
think that they live for about 200 years.
But we actually know, because
they live in the coldest oceans
and quite deep, we actually know
surprisingly little about them.
Ben Southwood: They're not
exactly moving around through
our field of vision very often.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: You've gotta find them.
Aria Schrecker: We don't know, for
example what their litter sizes are, there
are really, really big ranges on this.
That's the thing that for animals
that don't live at the bottom
of the ocean we obviously just
immediately know this kind of thing.
So we know yeah, we don't
know very much really.
Ben Southwood: So categories one, two, and
three are; Undifferentiated polyp state,
regenerate bits, and move very slowly and
live in the cold, and be large enough that
people don't eat you during that time.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, basically.
And clams, which are technically the
longest living creature, are in that
category, they probably live for 500
years, but they literally do nothing,
and vegans will sometimes eat them.
Saloni Dattani: Okay.
And are there any more categories?
Is that it?
Aria Schrecker: There's the final
category, which I think is a bit
more complicated because it's
more- you can kind of imagine it
is the ecological niche that it is.
So this is the weird thing that we and
naked mole-rats share, and also elephants
share, which is that we seem to be very,
very social creatures that are very
helpful to others of our own species.
And so therefore
seem to live much longer than other
animals that are similar to us.
So humans live much longer than
other apes and chimps and stuff.
And apes and chimps also live much
longer than other categories of mammal.
Elephants are like this.
And it seems the ways in which we
biologically manage to do this are
because it's convergent evolution of
longevity it's not exactly the same,
but we have some genes that we call
that seem to protect us from cancer.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Aria Schrecker: And we get unusually
little cancer for animals of our
size but we have two of those genes,
elephants have 16 of those genes.
Naked mole-rats have some of those genes.
And actually some of the, obviously
these categories are fuzzy, some of
the animals with very slow metabolisms
also have some of these genes as well.
So it's things like that.
And if you look actually over the entire
animal kingdom, having a bigger brain
and having more neurons is pretty well
correlated with having a longer lifespan.
I suspect because being a social
creature probably means that you adapt
the bigger brain but also probably
means that you are better served
by living longer, and learning from
other animals and that kind of thing.
So the bigger brain is more useful only
if you have a social community and also
a long lifespan in which to exploit that.
So it's a complicated set of things
that all seem to go together.
Saloni Dattani: This is a question
that I have, which is that, some
of this longevity, especially
in humans, isn't that because
we've made lots of innovations
that have helped us live longer?
And I guess it's part of the
thing that you're describing.
Aria Schrecker: You will know
far more about that than I do.
I think It seems implausible to me
that it's only that on the basis that
even if you look at our natural hunter
gatherer times, I still think we live a
weird amount of time for how big we are.
Creatures usually live longer the
bigger they are, and there are - tigers
for example are the animal that I
think - tigers are bigger than us but
they're not that much bigger than us,
and a tiger life expectancy is 25 years.
And it seems once you'd made it
out of extreme childhood mortality,
humans even as hunter gatherers were
living longer than that.
Ben Southwood: There's obviously a
distinction as well between, when we're
talking about longevity, what actually
matters to us as people living in the
world is how long am I likely to live?
Which factors in a bunch
of social considerations.
Like, if I live in a country with lots of
disease and poor healthcare institutions,
I'm gonna live for a shorter period of
time, it doesn't really matter to me
that theoretical maximum limit of human
lives is X. But when we're thinking about
longevity, we're also often thinking
about how long can this animal live?
And even if you're trying really hard,
I gather in captivity, you can't keep
a tiger alive more than about 40 years.
Something will get it, even if
you're trying really, really hard.
Whereas with humans in captivity
you can keep 'em alive for
80 years quite reliably.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: That's our maximum now.
Yeah.
90.
Saloni Dattani: Well, in Hong Kong, the
life expectancy right now is 88 years.
Ben Southwood: Fair point.
Saloni Dattani: Pretty high,
but I guess I see these as, it's
part of a distribution, right?
People live different lengths of
their lives, some people live much
longer than others and we've been
able to move the entire distribution.
So on average, life expectancy has
risen, but also the people who live
the longest are living longer than
before and I think there's pretty
good evidence of both of those.
Ben Southwood: Here's a question I have
then, because I don't know the answer
to this, my impression could easily be
correct is that the actual longest ever
life hasn't really gone up that much over
the last thousand years as far as we know.
So they thought there were people who
had lived a hundred years, a thousand
years ago and maybe they were wrong,
these were all lies, and then you could
tell me, but they thought there were
some people who'd lived a hundred years
and now we can get to a hundred years.
Basically maybe we can get to 112 now?
It's the actual verified
maximum or whatever?.
Saloni Dattani: So I think that
it's hard to find the longest lived
people, and that's quite hard to
do historically as well because
they had poor records and stuff.
But if you look at people who live over
a hundred years old, that fraction has
increased over time, so there's pretty
good databases where they've actually
verified when was this person born?
When did they die?
And that fraction has been increasing
over time and it's also, it's mostly
women who live that long, which is
very similar to how women tend to have
longer lifespans on average than men.
But I think that makes me think
that it's just really rare to
see people right at the extremes.
And that means that it's hard
to tell if there's been a change
over time, even though I would
guess that there probably is.
If you can increase the number
of more than a hundred year old
people, then you probably are also
increasing the longest lived people.
Aria Schrecker: I have a question;
so I hear that people basically age
bimodally and that one subset of
the population, basically by the
time they're 60, they're starting to
accumulate lots and lots of different
diseases, and they'll get diabetes or
whatever, they'll stack and they'll
stack and they'll have several decades
of accumulating these problems until one
of their problems eventually kills them.
And that the other subset of people
basically live totally healthily until
they're in their nineties and then
suddenly something will kill them.
Is that accurate or is that
a massive oversimplification?
Saloni Dattani: I haven't
heard, I would guess that these
are just extremes of a range.
Because one thing that you do see and
I think this maybe goes to the point of
why this episode is even interesting,
is that when people live longer, they
tend to live healthier, and people
who live longer tend to be healthier.
They tend to get diseases later as well.
Aria Schrecker: If you die at 90.
Do you still spend 10 years before you
are 90 with loads of chronic problems?
If you die at 60, do you also
spend about 10 years like that?
Saloni Dattani: So you start
getting diseases later on.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Okay.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
The total amount of time you spend
with a disease might be different.
But the longest lived people, people
who live over a hundred years old,
and there's this big study in Sweden,
I think that looks at this, they tend
to have developed cancer much later
than other people who died earlier.
Ben Southwood: So would you say then,
so I've heard lots of times, lots
of people have made the case to me
that basically we're just dragging
the end of people's lives out, right?
So we hit the ability to get to 80
years for whatever reason at some
point in the past, and then now we
just add on extra years of being ill.
So health span doesn't go up much at all,
we just drag out people being demented
and having cancer in hospital, but
we just, we keep whacking the little
moles to keep them just about alive.
Saloni Dattani: I think this is the common
perception, and I think this is why people
are skeptical of attempts to live longer.
They just think I don't wanna live
longer because I'll just have more
unhealthy years at the end of my life.
But I don't think that's true.
So I think that as I said, people who
live longer tend to live healthier lives.
There are a few exceptions to that,
we haven't made that much progress
on Alzheimer's disease for example.
And that, you know, if you get at a
certain point, you're gonna live with that
for how many ever last years you have.
But that could change.
We could get a new drug that actually
treats or prevents Alzheimer's and
that would actually change the picture.
Aria Schrecker: How much of the improving
lifespans is tackling childhood mortality?
Diseases that people
get when they're young?
Maybe it's actually really
difficult to decompose that.
Saloni Dattani: No, it's actually not.
So what you would look at is, you would
look at mortality rates across different
age groups and how that has affected
the life expectancy metric that you get.
So in the past, most gains in
life expectancy were because of
reductions in child mortality.
Child mortality used to be
really high in the past.
So 200 years ago, it would be about 15%
of kids would in France or Western Europe
would die in infancy, that's really high.
And that makes up such a
- if you think of the life
expectancy metric, it's
basically a summary of your risks of dying
Saloni Dattani: across your lifespan.
And if your risks at infancy are so
high that massively reduces the average
life expectancy that people have.
And so if you're able to reduce
infant or child mortality, that
makes a massive difference.
And that has in the past
made a huge difference.
But at a certain point, those rates
are already so low that reducing
them doesn't get you very much, and
so from the 20th century onwards
in Western European countries and
North America, most of the gains in
life expectancy have actually been
improvements in middle age and old age.
So we've actually made quite a lot
of improvement in reducing, let's
say, cardiovascular disease, cancer
mortality, infectious diseases especially.
And those things have actually made a big
difference since the mid 20th century.
Aria Schrecker: No reason, you'd know
these numbers off the top of your
head, but to get an intuitive model
if I made it to 18 and I made it to
18 before the Industrial Revolution,
versus I made it to 18, in the early
20th century, right?
How much longer, how much more likely
would I expect to get into proper old age?
Saloni Dattani: I think the
gain is more than 10 years.
So you would have, so if you look at 60
year olds, for example, 60 year olds in
the early 20th century, I think had a
life expectancy of another 10 years, now
Saloni Dattani: they have a life
expectancy for another 20 years.
I think it's much bigger than that at
if you're 18 but yeah, there are still
big gains even after child mortality.
Ben Southwood: So I think that there's
a divide between - when people think
about aging, there's a divide between
people who think that maybe there is
an underlying cause for everything,
and the only valuable thing we can
do is tackle that underlying cause.
That's because you might think
there's an underlying cause and it's
still worth doing the other stuff.
But the most valuable thing is
to tackle this underlying cause.
And then other people who think that
there are just lots of different ways
that your body becomes unhealthy,
decrepit, and dies, and if we can
just tackle them individually,
we can have big benefits as well.
Would you say you're in the second camp?
Saloni Dattani: I would say so far, most
of the gains have come from the second.
I don't know if the first could also
be true, maybe there is some secret
thing that if we unlock, we can live
forever or we can live much longer.
And I can imagine that there are certain
things that would help with that.
So improving our DNA repair
mechanisms, or reducing our
metabolism or something like that.
I could see that having very broad
effects, but I don't think we've found
that and I also think there's still a lot
you could gain from just using the second
method of just whacking all the moles.
What about you, Aria?
Do you have..?
Aria Schrecker: Oh, I'm a total
centrist on this issue actually.
I think there will probably be
some massive gain that we can get
from one of the things that you can
hint at with longevity research.
Maybe cellular reprogramming or
DNA repair or something like that.
And you'll get a lot of gains on lots of
things, but there'll be some, a handful
of systems that are still held back.
So I suspect we did that,
but our skin would still age
a whole bunch or something.
Or our skin would age slightly more slowly
because part of it's caused by the DNA
repair, but some of it is just caused by
being subjected to light or something.
So I suspect there's a little bit of both.
The thing that I think, I wonder if I
could imagine being a problem is we
can do loads and loads of stuff for
our bodies, and lots of our brain is
our body and stuff like that, but there
is maybe a RAM problem that we hit up
that becomes a weird, we didn't know
that this would come up kind of issue.
Saloni Dattani: Wait, what do you mean?
So if you could increase
the RAM in your brain?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, I don't
really know how the brain works,
but I imagine the brain works a bit
like a computer and at some point
you just run out of memory storage space
Aria Schrecker: or something.
Ben Southwood: I think that my
memory's already going in the early
ones to make space for the new ones.
Aria Schrecker: I mean,
that must be how it works.
Ben Southwood: I'm not worried about that.
Aria Schrecker: That must
be how it works a bit.
Even if you were just a simple algorithm
that worked sensibly, it would obviously
be that you can withdraw the stuff.
It's why Anki decks work, right?
You withdraw the stuff that you
use repeatedly and that you know,
that you use more recently, right?
That is how you would program
it if we were a computer.
Ben Southwood: So you said maybe
our skin would continue aging.
But it seems to me one of the areas where
Ben Southwood: we have made the
most progress on aging, especially
in recent years, and especially if
you look at the extreme cases, so
celebrities and rich people, it seems
that we've made incredible progress.
Normal people, well, people on the
internet, people like me will see pictures
every day of 'This is what a 20-year-old
looked like in the 1980s.' They look
like a 50-year-old, and it's crazy
and so it seems to me,
that might not be one
Ben Southwood: of the areas where
we're - people's hair and skin seem
to be an area they care about a
lot and maybe they are tackle-able.
One way of looking at things is we're
all doomed to aging and death unless
we can find the secret formula.
Another way of looking at things is
we've tackled hair and skin, we've
tackled all the diseases that we know.
Each year we are coming up with
new ways to tackle disease.
But what else is there?
We all our organs are still
working individually sorted.
All our problems, our list of
problems that are caused by aging
are just a list of problems.
And if you can tackle all of them in
principle, then you've kind of got the...
Saloni Dattani: I think this is
there's this key, or the disagreement
is something about just how much
risk we accumulate with age.
So for most organisms as you age, you have
an exponentially increasing risk of death.
I think the question with longevity
is, is there a way to prevent that
from rising at all?
What we've seen so far
Saloni Dattani: is that it still
rises, but starts out at a lower level.
So at each age you're
kind of delaying death.
But is there a way to just
prevent death entirely?
And I think that's what people
who believe this first idea, that
there's some secret, would say.
Ben Southwood: I think an area that would
be interesting to think about is that yes,
most of the stuff we've done on longevity
is this second type we're talking about,
which is tackling specific problems.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: Making it much less likely
that you'll die of cancer, heart disease.
It's crazy how if
you watch any film, read any book, talk
to your family of people who were men
in their fifties in the 1960s and 1970s,
they just died all the time, randomly,
they'd be in the peak of life and
just suddenly die from a heart attack.
Saloni Dattani: They didn't have AEDs
(Automated External Defibrillators) back
then, they had just barely invented CPR.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
They were just constantly
dying of heart attacks.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: And now that
just doesn't seem to happen.
You would think it was really surprising
and horrifying if a man in their
fifties or sixties was killed with
a heart attack in a
normally healthy person
Ben Southwood: without comorbidities.
But there are some tidbits, some
tidbits towards these animal solutions,
these deeper potential solutions.
And if you follow academic research,
you'll see there are findings of
everything all the time; ranging from
green tea to any compound that exists,
finding that they increase longevity.
But followers of the replication crisis
will know that a lot of this stuff is
basically just dubious, and they didn't
pre-register their findings, they
p-hacked a result, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But there is an interesting set of
studies where they are using normal
mice, doing pre-registered studies
and then just going through all of the
standard compounds that people think
might extend life and trying them.
And by the way, green tea, no result.
No effect in their randomized control
trial on mice, but my reading is
that they have found four compounds.
Aspirin also did not extend life.
Four compounds that extend life in mice.
Obviously we're not mice, but
we're enough close to mice that
maybe they have some effects.
So I'd like to talk about these
four compounds, also because
I can't remember all of them.
Saloni Dattani: Well, just to give
the name of the thing that you
mentioned, it's the US's National
Institute of Aging's program called
the Interventions Testing Program,
ITP.
And they get a bunch of different
labs in different countries or
different places to run the same tests.
So they're testing the same compound,
different types of mice, different
labs, and they see if there are
replicable results and I think
there were four, I only remember
two - rapamycin, and acarbose, I think.
And there's something else.
I think maybe Metformin?
Ben Southwood: And then also
one of the flozins, I think.
Saloni Dattani: Oh yeah.
Ben Southwood: Extended life as well.
Saloni Dattani: One of
the SGLT2 inhibitors.
Yeah, we had a piece on SGLT2 inhibitors.
Ben Southwood: That's the
reason I know about it.
Saloni Dattani: It was initially a
kidney disease drug or maybe a diabetes-
Ben Southwood: No no diabetes
first, and then it got the kidney-
and then it got a heart disease
and the kidney disease indication.
Saloni Dattani: Basically it removes
excess blood sugar and something else from
your urine, from your blood, and it means
that you excrete more in your urine salt.
Yes.
Ben Southwood: So SGLT2 reuptakes
sugar from your urine so that you don't
waste calories by urinating them away.
And SGLT2 inhibitors
stop you from doing that.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
So you excrete more, that reduces
blood pressure, reduces the pressure
on your kidneys and heart and that
-
Ben Southwood: And reduces
blood sugar so that you don't
take as many diabetic problems.
It's a, turns out that reducing
your blood sugar has a - and it also
extends life by about 10% in mice.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: On the
one hand, that's great.
That's amazing; imagine we could extend
all of our lives by 10% on a drug that is
quite simple and easy to make and will be
out of patent in 10 years or something.
On the other hand, it'll be quite
disappointing if 10% is the max we can
get out of these metabolic improvements.
Maybe if you stack the
other metabolic drugs.
So acarbose, the other
one you mentioned, right?
It stops you from digesting
carbohydrates, but you don't make amylase.
Amylase is what digests most
carbohydrates, it effectively turns
every carbohydrate you eat into a fiber.
So, if you are eating
200 grams of rice every
day, you're getting 200 grams of fiber,
Ben Southwood: five times the really
high targets that people are going for.
So one third of people withdraw
from the drug for gastrointestinal
reasons straight away.
Saloni Dattani: Okay.
Ben Southwood: And the other two thirds
I suspect either develop machine-like
gut bacteria systems that can churn
through so much fiber so that it
doesn't become really troubling.
It'll be that.
Or they just stop eating carbs
altogether because you don't get any
gastrointestinal symptoms if you do it.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
And they might live
longer for that reason.
Ben Southwood: Exactly.
So I suspect that what this is finding,
the fact that all of these things go in
the same direction, is that there is a
metabolic effect, we know that animals
live longer with, when they have slow
metabolisms, we know that humans live
longer or we have reasonable evidence that
humans and other species will live longer
if you control the calories and then if
you give them drugs that mimic controlling
calories, they also live a bit longer.
So maybe we can get 10
to 20% out of these.
And the upside version of the drugs
would be, I can take a drug but
still eat all the food I like eating.
Aria Schrecker: There's another clue
on this as well, which is there's a
big study of Ashkenazi Jewish people
who lived to over the age of a hundred,
and they found that a lot of them had
a gene that imitated some diabetes
outcomes as well, basically controlling
their - they were just better at
controlling their blood sugar and insulin.
Saloni Dattani: Well also
GLP-1 agonists, right?
Yeah.
a lot of these are about some weight loss
or some diabetes you know, reduction.
And so that seems like.
It also just gets to the point where
some of the interventions that you
could have in your life to live longer
are fairly simple things that people
have recommended for ages and ages,
which are exercise, lose weight.
Ben Southwood: It's so distressing when
you discover those things are true..
You're oh, damn, there
aren't any secret methods.
I just have to do all the boring stuff.
But, and if you're already doing it,
then it's particularly distressing.
You can't improve things anymore.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Aria Schrecker: And I think there's
a study in, I think it's chimps which
shows that if you are already calorically
restricting the chimps, then the
extra, I think it's
one of the big diabetes
Aria Schrecker: drugs.
It doesn't really increase
their lifespan at all.
So we're just hitting the same thing.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
I would guess that you can't completely
just add them all up, you can't stack
them all up because some of them will
just tackle the same pathways and once
you've reduced that risk, it's gone.
You don't need to worry
about that anymore.
Ben Southwood: But.
We mentioned three drugs, all of
which tackled the one pathway.
Saloni Dattani: Yep.
Ben Southwood: But we've
got one other drug here.
Tell us about rapamycin.
Saloni Dattani: I don't know that much,
but I know that it somehow is involved in
DNA cell repair or something like that.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, so
basically it tackles a part of
your body that, as far as I can
tell the acronym, it's mTOR, but the
acronym is just target of rapamycin.
Ben Southwood: Mechanistic
target of rapamycin.
It's oh, what does rapamycin do?
Well, it targets the
mechanistic target of rapamycin.
It goes the mTOR pathway.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
And that seems to be involved with
signaling about cell growth, and so
rapamycin the drug - this is why I'm
starting to get confused, because it
seems there is some link between some
of the different categories of animal
that I've described that rapamycin
kind of sits in the middle of.
So it's a drug that deals with
immunity and deals with cell repair.
So if you take rapamycin, your
wounds don't heal very well.
And in large amounts, it's an
immunosuppressant in people, and
that's why we give it to people.
But in small amounts, it seems
to make your immune system
work better, especially in
older people, and is somehow also related
Aria Schrecker: to your metabolism.
And that's clearly basically we're just
getting to the limit of
how I understand that
Aria Schrecker: cells work but it
seems there is some relationship between
Aria Schrecker: cell
repair and your metabolism
that exists, which is why it may not be-
Ben Southwood: May also turn off too
much growth is what you were suggesting.
Aria Schrecker: And it
may also turn off growth.
Basically if you grow very quickly,
you probably won't live very
long, that seems to be
a general rule across
Aria Schrecker: the animal kingdom.
And also actually within humans
if you take growth hormone, it'll
probably also decrease your lifespan.
Saloni Dattani: Does that
mean short people are-?
Aria Schrecker: Short people live longer!
Short people do live longer.
Saloni Dattani: I didn't know.
I would've guessed that it's the
opposite because people who are
taller tend to have better nutrition.
Aria Schrecker: So I suspect
that in the modern west, if
everyone is well nourished, then
smaller people do live longer.
Saloni Dattani: So I'm gonna live longer?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, probably.
Saloni Dattani: Okay, that's good.
Aria Schrecker: And smaller dog
breeds also live longer than big
dogs as well, which is interesting.
Ben Southwood: That's definitely
observable if you know dogs.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: That reminds me.
I actually read this study
about how domestic pets are
living longer than in the past.
So there's this data set of millions
of domestic dogs and cats in the US,
and over the last 10 years, they've
gained one year of life expectancy.
Ben Southwood: Wow.
Aria Schrecker: Why?
Better nutrition?
Saloni Dattani: I would guess
better healthcare, better medicine.
Ben Southwood: If I had to guess, I
would've thought that it was just that
Americans have got much richer and
they're spending a lot more money on
keeping their dogs alive when they're
reaching the end of their lives.
Because usually we're a bit
more utilitarian about pets
than we are about other humans.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: And we decide is
it worth $10,000 for an extra
couple of years of dog life?
I could get another dog and people,
when they have enough money, they
have the choice, the freedom to say,
you know what, no, I want my dog.
This is my dog.
I love this particular dog.
Not just any dog in general.
Aria Schrecker: Also, having been a
cat owner for a long while now, they
are getting stricter about making
sure that you vaccinate your cats if
you want to do anything with them.
So it used to be that you would, you had
vaccinated once and then
fine, it could go to
Aria Schrecker: the kennel and it'd
be okay, and now you've gotta do an
UpToDate certificate all the time.
You can't be lax on your cat vaccines,
even if your cat doesn't go outdoors.
So I assume there are also lots
of structural reasons that people
Aria Schrecker: are getting
more risk averse across society
with their pets as well.
Saloni Dattani: That reminds me of
other things that help us live longer.
Flu vaccines actually very
effective at reducing the risks
of heart attacks and strokes.
People don't really know this,
but they reduce those by roughly
the same amount as statins do.
Statin's another great example.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: There are lots of things.
Ben Southwood: The preventative ones
I think appeal to people more than
the responsive, because the preventive
ones feel like you are healthier.
What people want
is not to age in the conception we have
- I guess it's hard to put a finger on
it because if you can not visually age,
and also survive , and also stay fit,
you know, what is it that's,
what is it that's different?
Aria Schrecker: I think you just
run life on slow, basically.
Or maybe you get more conscious moments
per unit age, or something like that?
Ben Southwood: I agree that that's
what people want, but I think it's
very hard to map our intuitions.
I think a lot of people have the
intuition that the things we have done
so far have not slowed down aging.
Which I think that it's very hard to
justify that if you compare it to any
possible yardstick you could have.
Aria Schrecker: I think
it's definitely slowed down
aging; there are so many ways in which
it just feels obviously true that
Aria Schrecker: we
are younger than other people were when
Aria Schrecker: they
were at our 'clock' age.
Ben Southwood: Yes.
So here's another thing people
say is that we're going through
life stages more slowly.
Now, do you think that's related
to the fact that we live longer?
Do you think that we-
Saloni Dattani: What exactly is the idea?
Ben Southwood: So the claim is that
people get their driving licenses
later, they lose their virginity later.
They spend longer in education.
Saloni Dattani: They hit
puberty later, apparently.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, it was going
down for a century and now people
are hitting puberty later as well.
So if that's the case, you're telling
me lots of things are happening later.
There are lots of people who, people used
to do their first job when they were 14
or they would oft be in the world of work.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: At 14, get married at 20.
Aria Schrecker: People are
definitely having children later.
Ben Southwood: All of those things.
I wonder if you think those things
are related by the fact we know
we've got longer to spread out into?
Saloni Dattani: Oh, I see.
So you're saying- Well,
I guess there's two ways.
There's one, we're living longer and
therefore we can delay these things
and we don't have to worry that much.
Or is it, we're delaying these
things, which helps us live longer.
Aria Schrecker: Oh I think what Ben's
saying is that we are
biologically at younger
Aria Schrecker: life stages.
So mentally we are choosing to not worry.
Ben Southwood: No.
That's the third possible-
Aria Schrecker: I thought
that's what you were saying.
Ben Southwood: Saloni's one is one route.
Yours is another, and
mine was the third one.
Aria Schrecker: Okay.
Okay.
Saloni Dattani: So which
one do you believe?
Ben Southwood: Um, I don't know.
I'd like to hear arguments
and I'll choose the best one.
Saloni Dattani: I don't have a view.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, it
feels you just wouldn't know.
Ben Southwood: They could
be unrelated as well.
So I could totally believe, I
think that the baseline view
would be that they're unrelated.
The baseline view would be, or the
view that a typical person might say
is that we have a coddling society now.
In a totally unrelated way to
how we have done lots of medical
interventions that make us live longer.
Saloni Dattani: So I think there's
one version of it that I actually do
believe that you know, coddling in
terms of reducing our risks of injury
or accidents and things like that
actually does make us live longer.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, so I've totally
changed my mind on this since having
children, now that I've had children; now
it may possibly be because my children are
more danger seeking than other children,
or they're a mixture of being extremely
malcoordinated like me, or extremely
brave and danger seeking like Eloise,
my wife, and when that crosses over, you
get children who go to hospital lots.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: But one of the things I- so
there's this view that people, it's in the
water, and also I've recited it to myself
of: billions of people have had children.
It's the most normal thing in the world.
Keeping children alive must be very easy,
you shouldn't worry about it too much.
Then I remember, no!
Loads of children just died in
horrible accidents all the time!
What's actually happening here is that
we have more free time, we have more
wealth, and to some extent, coddling
is just rationally 'I love my children.
I don't want any harm.' They could get
a traumatic brain injury and you could
get a disfigurement across their face
and people might treat them different.
All these things can just happen.
And it's just wrong to think that it
was all happening at the same rate.
No, it was happening much more often.
People were getting hit by buses and
cars and everything all the time.
Saloni Dattani: I take that view as well.
Ben Southwood: I've shifted so much.
Aria Schrecker: From my own
family story, my mum was one
of six in India in the sixties.
So you can just imagine you just crank,
crank the clock back basically the
Victorian era and okay, so she lost one
sibling to typhoid, but she did she lost
another to just a car accident in a way
that I just don't think people would let a
teenager ride a motorbike now, because we
know that 17-year-old boys can't - well I
guess actually we do let 17-year-old boys
ride motorcycles, but most parents don't
let 17-year-old boys ride motorcycles.
Whereas in India in 1970 something,
it was totally normal to do that.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
I think this is a, part of it is just
that, so part of it is that if you treat,
there are a lot of things, ways in which
you want to keep your children alive.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: And probably that's
just a social wide thing of, 'We are
coddling them collectively because we
are trying to keep 'em alive and trying
to keep 'em healthy and whatever, until
they hit enough majority that they
can be reasonably trusted to do it
themselves, or it'll be impossible to
exercise control over them anymore.'
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
I guess I intuitively agree with
your model, but I do think it is
true that even though the world is
so much safer, we still don't let
teenagers have the same freedom to
roam that clearly we did historically.
You see those little maps where it's
family that grew up in the same house
and it's grandfather was allowed
when he was seven years old to go all
the way down to the creek and fish.
Fine.
That's obviously, that
actually seems insane.
Ben Southwood: I had my first viral
tweet ever in 2012 by posting that map.
Aria Schrecker: Oh really?
Okay.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, that specific
map, that he goes to Rotherham,
he's allowed to go 11 miles.
Aria Schrecker: There you go.
Ben Southwood: And then the today
one is allowed to go to the end of
the street with slight supervision.
I think there are lots of
things going into that.
I actually don't necessarily think
that one is coddling related.
I mean, it is coddling related,
but I don't think it's just
an increase in coddling.
I think that although the world
is much safer in general, there
are certain features of the
world that are totally different.
So in 1911 there weren't motorways
between his house and Rotherham.
Right?
There's just a really dangerous thing
that younger, that people under the
age of 10 are not reliably to be
trusted to stay safe from perhaps.
So I think that's probably the
overwhelming thing, and I think if
you find places where that isn't
the case, even at high levels
of wealth Japan, for example.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Ben Southwood: They'll
let children go out.
Aria Schrecker: Yes.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
And roam relatively freely.
Aria Schrecker: And Japan
is actually very very safe.
Saloni Dattani: Have you seen
that show where they do that?
They're kids that are one or three years
old just going out doing groceries.
Ben Southwood: I haven't watched it.
I have watched clips from it.
Okay.
And it's very funny how easily they
get distracted from their mission.
They have no long term ability
to keep to the same plan.
They're just immediate stimulus and
then they keep going home because they
forget what they're supposed to be doing.
Aria Schrecker: Other coddling
related ways that we have definitely
increased lifespans - I'm endorsing
them here, which is there are lots of
interventions that can actually stop
people from committing suicide by,
making it harder for them to unscrew-
Saloni Dattani: Pesticide caps, or?
- Aria Schrecker: pesticide caps and
stuff, or even just the American way
of taking paracetamol just makes it
easier for them to commit suicide,
the British way of paracetamol,
you've gotta pop each individual one.
Saloni Dattani: I think there's also
this innovation where pesticides now
make you throw up or something like that?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah
that would make sense.
And it probably is
actually quite easy to do.
Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: They have nets
on the Golden Gate bridge.
Aria Schrecker: There we go, that's
I guess coddling, that has definitely
increased the lifespans, or at
least it's definitely stopped some
people from dying that is good.
I think banning drunk driving,
that's obviously one of those things.
Saloni Dattani: Seat belts.
Aria Schrecker: Seat belts.
Saloni Dattani: Vaccines.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
We definitely have social
infrastructure that is pro-longevity.
Ben Southwood: Okay.
So we've talked about every possible
way that we stop people from dying in
accidental ways; stop their organs from
failing or from them being overtaken
by disease that leaves scars and
makes them worse or that kills them
and all things that, we've talked
about every conceivable one of those.
Are there any promising
things for the other method?
The point, the first way,
the underlying aging thing.
Do we have any promising - you
go to bed at night thinking
they'll crack that in my lifetime?
Or do you go to bed at night
thinking, I probably won't die
of the same diseases that we have
now, but I will die of something?
Aria Schrecker: I think this belies
a whack-a-mole mentality, but there
are a couple of ways where I think
that we've fixed that, for the very
least, for the time when I get old,
I think I won't go through menopause.
That's one that I'm gonna say.
We've already started to give
lots of women HRT, who are
already of menopause age.
I just think between now, I'm almost
30 and when I'm 50, 60, I think
that is gonna get much, much better.
And I think that's a form of aging
that I'm gonna get to basically
skip out on so that's one thing.
I think I probably won't die of most of
the major cancers that people die of now.
I think that seems to be just
getting better and better and better.
I think I probably won't get diabetes.
Ben Southwood: And that might
get you to last long enough
until they find the magic cure.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: I'm somewhat optimistic
about Alzheimer's disease as well.
I think if we just try enough stuff,
maybe we'll find something, but also
we'll probably just get better at
measuring the brain and understanding
it and finding medicines that work.
Ben Southwood: What did you think about
that viral nature study where they
said that people rarely get cancer
and Alzheimer's at the same time?
Saloni Dattani: I didn't read
that, but I just assumed it
was some statistical artifact.
Sadly.
Ben Southwood: Skeptical Saloni,
we should have you on everything.
Sorry.
It's probably just statistical.
Aria Schrecker: Naked mole-rats
probably don't even age that badly.
I think there is other stuff that you
can do in your personal life that mean
that you are probably getting to at
least grab some of those pro-longevity
slowing your aging rate stuff.
So the biggest one is if you're not
fat, you're doing so much more than
I guess the average person in a
developed nation now, and probably if
you are especially conscious of it and
you are staying at one of the lowest
possible healthy weights for someone
of your size, you're doing even more.
I think that helps.
I think the probably rapamycin
will end up being - I would put
money on it being a drug that lots
of people take in a few decades.
Ben Southwood: So the sad problem
is that it was already an existing
compound when people realized
that it would be useful for this.
So it's gonna be hard for us to get the
investment into the hard evidence that
we would need without the ability to
offer the exclusive sale rights, no?
Aria Schrecker: So I don't think so.
I think we are also gonna get new drugs.
Let's cast back to a piece in
issue 21 of Works in Progress,
Nature's Laboratory about how genes
seem to be a source of new drugs.
I think we are gonna get much, much better
at measuring people's genomes and picking
up statistical signals that show that some
genes help you live longer, which will be
a source of novel compounds that we learn
about, that we'll be like, okay, we're
gonna imitate the effect of this gene
because in almost everyone who has this
gene, they live an extra while, and they
don't develop these age related disorders.
We will find some of those
genes and we will start to
make drugs that replicate that.
So I think we will actually get to having
novel compounds, basically if the course
of science continues as it seems to, I
think we probably will get some all-cause
mortality tackling drugs from genomes.
That's one guess.
Saloni Dattani: That has actually
happened in a few high profile examples
of drugs that have come from that, from
studying some population or some family
that either has a very high risk of
dying early or lives longer for some
reason, and then trying to understand
what gene is linked to that and
then developing drugs against that.
So I think the famous one is PCSK9
drugs, which reduce cholesterol levels,
but then there's also various other
cholesterol and other drugs that are
in the pipeline for things like that.
Aria Schrecker: Big thing I'm hoping for
is an ozempic style thing, but instead
of meaning that you eat less it just
burns all the energy without it
going into your body and coming
out as fat in you somehow.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Aria Schrecker: I know there's one
of those drugs that is meant to do
that, but it basically burns you from
the inside, so no one can take it.
Saloni Dattani: That was dangerous.
Aria Schrecker: I don't
want to take that one.
Saloni Dattani: There was previously
a weight loss drug that basically
made you just excrete all the
fat out, and it was dangerous.
Aria Schrecker: I had a crackpot idea
a while ago which is - so Vaseline
Petroleum, it's basically a fat.
I reckon if you fried your food in it...
Saloni Dattani: Wait, if we
fried our food in it, what?
Aria Schrecker: It would basically, you
would get basically the maillard reaction.
It would taste like fatty food but
you can't digest it, and people
- I'm always digesting Vaseline.
Ben Southwood: So we were
talking about acarbose earlier.
Now, I'm gonna forget the name,
but there's an equivalent for fat.
So acarbose, it works by stopping
you from producing amylase, so
you can't digest carbohydrates.
They effectively become a fiber,
because fiber is just carbohydrates
you can't digest basically or
fiber that gets through to the gut.
This one stops you from
producing what is it called?
The enzyme that digests fat?
Saloni Dattani: Lipase.
Ben Southwood: Lipase.
Lipase.
Yeah and so all your fat just
goes through to your gut.
Now I'd say that I would rather have the
gastrointestinal symptoms of acarbose,
which is just lots of bloating and
gas than what they call greasy stools.
Yeah which is-
Saloni Dattani: Floating stools.
Aria Schrecker: I don't
mind if they float.
I feel neutrally about whether they float.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
Aria Schrecker: Well, it's
really hard to flush them.
I think I'll work at it.
I can figure that one out.
I'll be okay.
Ben Southwood: Obviously, I brought
this topic up, so it is inevitable that
it would be slightly unpleasant, but
point is that it's slightly unpleasant.
You can do that, but to the extent
that you, and this reduces your calorie
intake, but an enormous fraction.
All the fat you're eating
is just going through.
Right so you can do this.
That's an option that's open to
you right now it's a generic drug.
However-
Aria Schrecker: This is not diet advice.
Ben Southwood: The downside - well,
no, it's perfectly safe, again it was
approved through the normal process
then on very large studies and then
post-market, very large studies.
Everyone knows how it works.
So there's no health downsides,
it's just quite unpleasant to have
lots of actual oil in your stools.
So that would be a downside of
your petroleum jelly frying.
Aria Schrecker: Well, I was a little
as well bit worried that one of the
potential problems with it when I was
looking into it was that it might just
coat the inside of your intestine and then
-
Ben Southwood: I think it will
probably just go through when
you don't have any lipase.
Saloni Dattani: Well, I think the
better drugs that work on cardiovascular
- like cholesterol reducing drugs
and triglyceride reducing drugs are
better because they're not engulfing
- they're not leaving fat in your
digestive tracts, but they mean that
you mop up more LDL cholesterol or
whatever, and that's probably better.
Ben Southwood: A favorite fact of mine
- So I spend a lot of time on the internet.
I spend a lot of time on the internet
consuming research about - consuming on a
superficial level research about health,
diet, all those sorts of things, and one
of the things that I discovered in all
of this is that in a lot of studies, raw
correlation between cholesterol levels
and lifespan is positive, not negative.
Right?
In a lot of studies.
And I was confused by this because
there are loads of drugs that reduce
cholesterol and appear to be good for you.
Saloni Dattani: Yep.
Ben Southwood: And so I presented this
to Stefan Guyenet, who is a nutrition
expert and wrote for Works in Progress
back in the day, and he said, yes,
strangely enough, having genetically
higher cholesterol is good for you,
but also reducing it is good for you.
And so clearly having genetically high
cholesterol is a signal of overall
body health in some sort of way.
And cholesterol itself is probably bad
for you, but it's the mechanisms of
action of how these things actually
work is slightly more confusing
than when we started using them.
Saloni Dattani: So we're gonna talk
about this in an episode of Hard
Drugs, but the problem with cholesterol
is not the cholesterol itself,
it's the particles that carry it.
And if those particles are small enough,
they get into your blood vessels and just
stick there, and that you know, causes
atherosclerosis, and that can reduce your
ability to circulate blood efficiently.
Ben Southwood: Let's say
it ages your blood vessels.
Saloni Dattani: Essentially, and
so it's not about the total amount
of cholesterol in your body that
is a marker for poor health.
It's about the type of cholesterol
particles and how big they are and
how, where they stick, things that.
So I think there is a way
around this that makes it work.
Ben Southwood: You mean
makes easy intuitive sense.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
And is also true.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
So we talked about some drugs that seem
to extend the life of various different
groups of mice when we really test them.
There are some other things
that probably extend life.
I don't think that they've been tested
to the level where we can say with
really absolute certainty that in a
normal person they would extend life.
But I gather from the kinds of evidence
I've seen, they're pretty good.
So one coffee, right?
So I said before, green tea probably
doesn't extend life, or at least that
there's no compelling evidence that it
extends life, but coffee is pretty cool
in that, it seems like if you go in big
studies of a population, like Americans,
and then you look at how much coffee they
have per day from zero to say six cups,
it's pretty dose dependent on lots of
different diseases, especially kidney.
But on a range of different diseases,
it seems it's - then if you look at
again, they've never done a proper
randomized control trial on coffee,
because the cost of doing that would be
tens of millions or hundreds, millions
of dollars to get past all the stages.
And then everyone's already
allowed to sell coffee, so you
can't make any money from that.
So we've only got slightly less
good information than that.
But there are lots of small, randomized
control trials and they all, they
usually find the same results,
especially if you add them all together.
And
then there are bigger, cohort studies
where they're looking at people through
their life, how much coffee they have,
and they all find coffee extends life.
So maybe coffee is-
Saloni Dattani: I'm skeptical of this.
Ben Southwood: Okay.
I love, I love it.
Tell me why.
Saloni Dattani: Well, I would guess
that there is just a confounding
there, and that people who drink more
coffee are healthier and that if you
drink coffee, you wouldn't be able
to take various drugs and things that
you would need if you had a disease.
So I feel there are probably various
things that and I'd wanna look into
how they actually did those studies.
Ben Southwood: The reason why
I'm not convinced by you...
I'm open, I'm not gonna fall
down on the floor and be really
embarrassed if you prove me wrong.
You often do that in the past, but the
reason why I don't jump to confounding in
my own head, is that I just don't think
that the - the usual confounder that you
find is basically socioeconomic status.
So when you're doing these kinds of
big studies you usually just find
that anything good, so exercise,
for example; now I actually
think exercise does extend life.
But if you told me I can't trust any of
these studies because they're obviously
compounded, then I would say yes because
everyone I know in my own life, it clearly
correlates with socioeconomic status.
How much deliberate exercise people
do, and healthy eating, and there
are so many different things.
I just do not think coffee
has that correlation at all.
And if anything, I've lived a
life of people propagandizing
and intuitively believing that
having too much coffee is bad.
And so I would've guessed that in the US,
coffee drinking negatively, or is like
flat, or negatively correlates coffee.
Aria Schrecker: Conscientious
people are always giving up coffee.
Ben Southwood: Yeah, I just don't
believe that they will find that coffee
correlates with socioeconomic status.
Saloni Dattani: Well, it's also
expensive if you're having that many
drinks, I do think that, I would
guess that there is a correlation.
Ben Southwood: Interesting, well
we will have to look into this and
then I'll do an apology post on my,
'Saloni was right again, I was wrong.
Skepticism was the right answer.
It turned out that my wild
ability to believe..' Okay.
Let's try another one.
Saloni Dattani: Sure.
Ben Southwood: Having a walk
after you eat something.
I reckon having a walk after
you eat something might be good.
I think it might be you haven't got
acarbose, we did have a walk after you
ate something, in particular just after.
So one of the main hypotheses why all
these drugs metformin, acarbose, SGLT2
inhibitors, have a positive effect
on lifespan in the humans who take
them, which is obviously indirectly
through their diseases, and in the
healthy mice or rats or whatever
that we're giving them to, one of the
hypotheses is that it is not that they
slow down your metabolism overall,
they just reduce blood sugar spikes.
Saloni Dattani: Yep.
Ben Southwood: And walking, having
a walk after you eat reduces blood.
That's
like,
Ben Southwood: we know that it
does, it reduces blood sugar spikes.
Aria Schrecker: And a little extra plus
to that is that there's some evidence
that, and obviously most people do this
anyway, that if you eat the sugary things
after you have already started eating,
that has less of an extreme spike to
your blood sugar as well, because I
guess your insulin is already started
to run, and it's better to have ice
cream after your meal and not before.
Ben Southwood: Or have a salad before
you start eating, or whatever it is.
Or to have some fiber.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
I like to have dessert at the start
of the meal, because otherwise
I might get too full to eat it.
Ben Southwood: But
there's a second stomach.
Saloni Dattani: Now you've convinced
me that I shouldn't be doing that.
Ben Southwood: Well look
everything's a trade off.
What else do we have in this list of
potentially normal things you can do?
Aria Schrecker: Blood donation.
Ben Southwood: Ah blood donation.
Saloni Dattani: I don't
believe that one either.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
No, I know you don't believe that one.
So, so we, this is a long time open
sore, between Saloni and me, ruining
our relationship is blood donation.
So blood donation.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Fair cop governor, it obviously
correlates with socioeconomic status.
Saloni Dattani: But also a lot
of unhealthy people are ruled out
from donating blood for various
reasons, like too high BMI whatever.
Aria Schrecker: But I'm told that
once you control for all of that,
blood donors still live longer.
Saloni Dattani: I haven't
seen a study showing that.
Aria Schrecker: I've seen a little
text on a blog and a hyperlink
to a study, that I can click on.
Saloni Dattani: I'd be skeptical.
I just think that healthier
people are more likely to donate
thing is actually really strong.
Ben Southwood: I'm open-minded on this.
When I liked to talk about this a lot more
than I do now, still like to talk about
it, but when I was really into it, my
theory was that it reduced iron stores.
That iron stores above a certain
level, it is established that there
is such thing as iron overload, and
that you can have too much iron.
The authorities agree on this.
The Ben version was that that level
was lower in terms of not complete
overload, but that there were
numerous deleterious effects that you
could experience beyond that point.
For reasons that, the suspicious thing is
that there are multiple different reasons
you could give, for example, bacteria like
eating iron, so it might be you get more
infections, right or various other things.
Now what I liked is that there were some
weird potential ways of looking at this.
For example, one study looked at
coal miners and compared coal miners
in ferrous deposits I coal that has
iron, and non ferrous deposits, and
found that black lung rates were
dramatically higher in the ferrous
- black lung being a standard disease
of coal miners - in the ferrous ones.
And I thought hmm, maybe this person
came into this with my view and
they were trying to substantiate it.
But if not, that's interesting.
A second interesting one is that cigarette
smokers seem to have much higher rates
of lung cancer than cannabis smokers,
and now there are lots of other things
going on there, but one interesting factor
is that cigarette smoke has a lot more
iron in it than Cannabis smoke does.
And it's possible that there are some
- obviously burning anything and inhaling
it, it's basically one of the canonical
bad things to do, but it's possible that,
I was wondering if that might be related.
And there were a number, but these days I
think that when you have lots and lots of
small interlocking reasons to belief that
something rather than one big reason?
That's a reason for suspicion
because it might be that you
want to find the conclusion.
And then you are joining onto
things that individually are not
that convincing, but that join up.
But I'm still interested
in it as a hypothesis.
Saloni Dattani: I think
people should donate blood for
other people to live longer.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: Probably
not for themselves.
Aria Schrecker: I thought the other
mechanism by which blood donation
might work is, so big fish have
lots of heavy metals in them.
And basically that's because if you eat a
smaller fish, it's got heavy metals in it.
Your body has no way of disposing of
it, so if you are higher up the food
chain, you'll accumulate more of them.
And we're reasonably
high up the food chain.
We eat things with heavy metals in
them, and we don't really have a way of
disposing it except for literally just
getting rid of that part of your body.
Saloni Dattani: The thing that I don't
get though is how exactly it works,
because I would suspect that higher
concentrations of things are bad for
you, but if you're donating blood,
you're just reducing the volume.
You're not necessarily
reducing concentrations.
Ben Southwood: No, it reduces your iron
rate very significantly afterwards.
Losing that iron then your iron
gets spread out across your total
blood, and so your ferritin levels
go down significantly after.
Saloni Dattani: So there's no homeostasis?
Ben Southwood: No, you can't, you
don't replenish the iron straight away.
And so this is one of the underlying
reasons why people believe in it, right?
So, the hypothesis is something like
'We were made to just lose a lot more
blood' and so, for one thing is that
all the things I'm talking about, women
don't have these problems in the same
way that men do, premenopausal women.
And obviously they're losing a lot
of blood, and the hypothesis would
be that in the past people lost a lot
more blood, and they sweat a lot more.
So when you sweat, you lose
iron through the sweat as well.
And so then the people who believe in
these things, they'll attach in saunas
-
Saloni Dattani: Got it.
Ben Southwood: Now we might be
skeptical that saunas extend life, but
if you already believe that reducing
iron extends life, then you're very
susceptible to believing that saunas
[extend] life, because you sweat out iron
when you're sa when you're in a sauna.
I wanted to ask about another thing
which is, so this, I'm interested
in this heavy metals theory.
So this heavy metal theory gets at one of
the core underlying questions that - the
animal's question is very interesting;
the animal's information that you
bring in is a very interesting answer.
Is there an inherent trade
off between lifespan and other
variables that we care about?
Is that just an inherent trade off?
Or can you have more of everything?
And the case in favor of the inherent
trade off thing would be obviously you
have to slow it down, your metabolism,
that's bad, fast growth is a trade off.
And also that, but then you go even
deeper and say what were we evolving for?
What was the goal here?
Because in principle, you would
expect that living as long as possible
is good for us, for a creature.
But most creatures don't try and
live as long as possible, which
suggests that after a certain point
it's a trade off against other goods.
Now, are those goods, those other
goods only relevant to humans in the
state of nature and not to us now?
Or are they trade offs?
Are they genuine trade offs?
The reason I ask this question is
that, one hypothesis about what might
be going wrong is that we've got
things in our cells called lysosomes.
They're storing up all the - if
you can't really process
something, it's going in there.
Sometimes you've got really
slow rates that you can process
it, sometimes you don't.
Now.
One hypothesis you could build from
this is that we've got basically a
max lifespan limited by our intakes
of all of these different things.
But that's a good answer because if we
could just find some way of clearing them
out with the drug or something, then we
can just solve all our problems like that.
If that was the main, if the overload
of various different stuff we're
getting into us with the problem,
then that would be really solvable.
Aria Schrecker: So I guess what you say
actually prompts a slightly difficult
for me to reason about question here,
which is that clearly if- you can
understand why aging is sort of adaptive.
If you think about us as this human
species is together, we're all
coordinating together here, whereby
if we didn't age and die and pass
on our genes to the next generation,
we wouldn't be able to evolve.
We wouldn't be able to keep adapting and
so we should, from the perspective of
our genes value having two children, four
grandchildren, et cetera, et cetera as
much, and those genes also get to be a bit
extra selected and each time it goes on.
But it doesn't make sense to me at
least why then you wouldn't defect
against the rest of your species almost
by living much longer and taking up
a much larger proportion of humanity.
Ben Southwood: I mean yeah.
So when you were giving your,
this is intuitive to me.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: I was well that would
be intuitive for me if I believe
that natural selection operated
at the level of a whole species.
But given that I believe it happens at the
level of an individual gene or something
like that, that's the best way of thinking
about it, then I can't see that at all.
Your intuitive thing should be,
they wanna live as long as possible.
So there must be a trade off.
Aria Schrecker: There might be a little
sign here with the jellyfish that
I was talking about, where it seems
its population in the ocean seems to
be increasing quite, quite rapidly.
To the point that it is causing
problems to a bunch of - basically
to its own ecological niche.
It's flooding it, I guess at some
point it'll hit some Malthusian
point, but it might only hit that
point after the things that that
jellyfish eats is totally gone,
and it's habitat's totally overrun.
So it might cause its own extinction.
Saloni Dattani: We used to face
this trade off and now we don't.
Aria Schrecker: So maybe there's
something like that that happens, where
this animal might actually just die out.
It's gonna take up a massive
proportion of it's niche and then
it's gonna kill its niche off.
And that maybe has happened before
with other animals that have slightly
outdone their lifespan that they
were ought to have or something.
I feel if that were the case, we would
see it happen more often, which is
why I propose this and walk it back.
But this is why I find it difficult to
reason about, because you can make up
cases for why some things are adaptive and
why some things aren't adaptive, that I
find a little bit confusing to deal with.
Ben Southwood: At a certain point,
you could have an interest, I imagine
as an individual you could have an
interest in dying so that your personal
descendants were able to survive.
But they would have to be-
for each tier you go down,
there have to be more of them.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: At each tier for it to
be worth it on a pure genetic basis.
Right?
So you need to have more than two
children for it to be worth it
to die in favor of your children.
Aria Schrecker: Well, maybe just
spreading the risk itself means that
your genes have a better chance.
They're in more different
possible carriers.
So therefore it's more of us.
Saloni Dattani: But only half
of your genes are in the-
Aria Schrecker: That's true.
That's true.
So actually yeah.
You do need the I guess,
expected value for your genes.
Yeah yeah yeah.
You're right.
Yeah.
Ben Southwood: Yeah which, so but that
does seem, I can kind of imagine that.
That's the hopeful one.
If it's a competition of resources
one, then that makes complete sense
given what we've experienced where we
can actually have more of everything.
We get longer lived, healthier,
but we also are stronger.
We're also taller.
We're also smarter.
We seem to be getting all of the
variables we care about at the same
time over the last hundred years.
Saloni Dattani: Did you know
that we also have lower body
temperatures than in the past?
So the theory is that it's because of
less infection and less inflammation.
But if you look at, there's a
sample I think of spanning 50
years or so where our temperature
has dropped, our body temperature
has dropped by a degree Celsius.
Aria Schrecker: How do we know that?
Saloni Dattani: From the measurements
of body temperatures from decades ago.
Aria Schrecker: Really?
Saloni Dattani: Of people the same age.
Aria Schrecker: It's that recent?
Ben Southwood: That's pretty cool.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: I mean this, I do that
inflammation, which to me is just a blob.
I don't really understand what's going on.
Saloni Dattani: It is kind of a blob.
Ben Southwood: Inflammation is, that's
one of the most push upon things that
could generally deliver benefits.
Although as with all these things, it's
great to - a lot of the stuff we talk
about, 80 or 90% of its benefits are on
improving the worst off right now, and
if you are already in the healthiest
10%, then sometimes there are benefits,
but they're often not that large.
Like for GLP-1s, there might be upsides
to already slim people, but I'm not sure,
I'm not sure they have any proven yet.
And I think a lot of things are like that.
One thing I wanted to talk about
is are there groups of people
around the world who live a really
long time that we can learn from?
So, I've heard of this
concept, 'Blue Zones'.
Saloni Dattani: Oh yeah.
Ben Southwood: Tell me about Blue Zones.
Does anyone know about Blue Zones?
Saloni Dattani: So, Blue Zones
are the idea that certain groups
of people in very specific places
live extremely healthy lives.
And I think that the examples that
people give are Japanese people
in Okinawa, people in Sardinia in
Italy, and then there are a few more
that I don't remember the names of.
I have heard a lot of debunking
of this idea that - there are
probably people who live longer,
but those aren't examples of them.
And the ones that have been given as
examples also happen to be places where
deaths or birth registration is very poor.
They just have bad administrative data,
they're also poor, they correlate with
things that you wouldn't expect to
be correlated with longer lifespans.
But instead they're correlated with
things that imply that we don't
actually know how long those people
have lived and that their ages are
inflated because of that reason.
Ben Southwood: So I shouldn't start
eating the diet of a Sardinian.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah,
the Mediterranean diet.
Fake.
Fake.
Ben Southwood: The Mediterranean
diet might be fine, they
eat that in lots of places.
But if you are in Sardinia,
they have a kind of cheese
that has maggots coming out.
Aria Schrecker: Yum.
Ben Southwood: Live maggots.
Saloni Dattani: That's horrible..
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: So I wouldn't
take that recommendation.
The funniest one of this that I
saw was, so there are a bunch of
historical centenarians, people
who've lived over a hundred years old.
And there was one example of this
guy, Pierre Joubert or something,
some French guy who supposedly lived
113 years in the early 20th century.
And it turned out it was two people.
It was a man and his son who
both had the same name and people
just assumed it was the same guy.
Ben Southwood: There must have been
a bunch of people in the middle who
were like 'no, this one's a child'.
But by the end, you know,
a 60-year-old in 1904.
Saloni Dattani: I think it was
that they found his birth certificate,
it was actually his dad's birth
certificate, and then they found his death
certificate and that was the son's death.
And then they were oh, it's-
Ben Southwood: I feel quite bad for him
now because at significantly younger
than 113, everyone thought he was 113.
'Wow, you are really decrepit, man.'
Saloni Dattani: This goes to
your point where people seem much
older than they were in the past.
And that I can imagine would also
cause this confusion where people
are like 'Oh wow, this person
must be over a hundred years old'.
And it's no, they're 80.
Ben Southwood: I'm 25.
I just smoked a thousand
cigarettes every day.
Aria Schrecker: I once watched a
video of I think it was teenagers
answering some - it was school students
and it was maybe 1940 - something.
And I was surprised at how much like
adults all the teenagers looked as well.
So I do really think that those
teenagers were experiencing being
in their twenties, biologically.
Ben Southwood: It was a more people
had to go and work at such a young age.
And even if they didn't have children
super early, they got married early.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
They also smoked more, did more drugs.
Ben Southwood: Drugs.
Yes.
Yeah.
Did more drugs.
Now here's an interesting one, it
seems to me drugs were basically
all invented in the 1960s.
There weren't people doing-
Saloni Dattani: Didn't people
do drugs during World War II?
Aria Schrecker: Didn't Victorians
hang out in opium dens?
Saloni Dattani: That's true.
Ben Southwood: So the drugs thing is
interesting because it's definitely
true from all the information I've ever
seen, we all know everyone smoked a lot.
But also people drank a lot more, people
can't internalize this, that people in
the 1970s were just constantly drinking,
and earlier you get earlier than that.
Saloni Dattani: Medieval people
would only drink beer basically.
Ben Southwood: People drank, but
people drank on the way to work.
A lot of the pubs would open
in the morning and they went
into a pint on the way to work.
Saloni Dattani: I will take
a contrarian take on this.
That might have been good, because
their water might have been so unclean.
Ben Southwood: You far enough, I'm
thinking of Victorians or something.
Saloni Dattani: Even then.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
Okay early twenties
-
Aria Schrecker: They could
boil water and drink tea.
Saloni Dattani: Could they?
Aria Schrecker: Well, I assume so.
Ben Southwood: They did, sometimes.
Saloni Dattani: They had coal.
Ben Southwood: Tea and beer
were considered to be safer,
because they were both boiled.
Saloni Dattani: There are a
bunch of bacteria that still,
or viruses that still survive.
Ben Southwood: But the beer was
safer because it was boiled as well,
so it's gonna be the same as tea.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: But be, we
used to drink a lot more.
I think the drugs question is interesting
because I just don't know, I'm always
surprised when I discover people in
the past were abusing drugs heavily.
And so I do know, you know,
everyone knows that Blitzkrieg, the
Nazis, they were all using speed
as they invaded Eastern Europe.
Think in the sixties the Beatles
were using speed when they were going
and playing concerts in Hamburg.
I don't have a sense of how
much drug use there was.
But it does seem maybe, all the people
talking about drugs, like cocaine,
that definitely wasn't a big thing.
Saloni Dattani: Wasn't there that
thing, what was the treatment
for depression back then?
Wasn't there something?
Ben Southwood: There definitely
were people using heroin and
cocaine in medical contexts, right?
In the 1900s, there were certain
rich people getting obsessed.
Aria Schrecker: If the Bell Jar is
anything to go on, I guess historical
treatments for depression were insulin.
Saloni Dattani: Oh yeah.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: Insulin shock therapy.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Which seemed a very strange,
it was a really strange-
Saloni Dattani: put someone into a coma.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Saloni Dattani: So people didn't
really know what caused it.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
We're still not that good on that one.
That's one.
It would be nice to get people
to get some improvements on.
Saloni Dattani: So I have a question
for Aria and you, what is the long-lived
strategy by animals that you would
take if you wanted to live longer?
Out of the ones that we talked about?
Ben Southwood: I'm
obviously a lobster guy.
Aria Schrecker: You're a lobster guy?
Ben Southwood: I'm a lobster guy.
Aria Schrecker: You wanna get bigger
and bigger, and bigger, and bigger?
Ben Southwood: Bigger and bigger.
I come back here in a hundred years and
I'm taking up almost the entire room.
I have to keep working really
hard to get good money for food.
My food consumption is so high.
That's what I would like to do.
Aria Schrecker: You have to
have an IV drip of just straight
glucose so you can keep growing.
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
I would have to be eating extremely
nutritionally valuable foods
constantly, like a big dinosaur.
Saloni Dattani: Aria?
Aria Schrecker: I think, I feel a
big kinship with the naked mole-rats.
I feel like we're basically already
eusocial creatures as humans.
I go into the office and I guess I'm
working on my computer doing the very
important magazine making part of
the social order and everyone else
is doing all the other parts of the
social order that come together.
And I guess there isn't a queen naked
mole-rat that's shoving me to get
me to do work, but you know I feel
I'm basically already like them.
I also feel like I have no personal
temperature control already anyway.
Saloni Dattani: Okay.
Aria Schrecker: I'm just
most of the way there.
Saloni Dattani: I would take the last one,
which is turn myself back into a fetus.
Start life again.
Ben Southwood: How many
times would you do it?
You could just keep, do it forever?
Saloni Dattani: Why not?
Ben Southwood: Yeah.
I suppose if you could do that then
when you were feeling like 'hmm.
I think it's, I think it's time guys',
you're on your deathbed and your death
bed is actually your regeneration bed,
and then a little baby comes and family.
Saloni Dattani: That would be great.
Ben Southwood: That would be fantastic.
Aria Schrecker: Would you consider
that to be like you continuing
to live if you just respawned?
Saloni Dattani: I think I would
see it as another chance at a
different experience at life.
Aria Schrecker: I would take
it over what we currently have.
Saloni Dattani: Right.
Aria Schrecker: But I'm not sure
I would really consider- I think I
consider that just a cheap way of
last minute creating one more child.
Saloni Dattani: Got it.
Well, so I don't necessarily
want to live longer.
I just don't wanna die.
So this feels like it
addresses that problem.
Ben Southwood: Do you think that getting
into a teleporter and then you come out
the other side is death or teleportation?
Saloni Dattani: I think it's
teleportation, because I've watched
enough Harry Potter movies where they
do that and they don't, philosophically
-
Ben Southwood: But you wouldn't know
from the outside because they've
got copies of all the memories.
Saloni Dattani: They seem fine.
Aria Schrecker: I think copying all
the memories is getting - I genuinely
think the only people who think the
teleporter thing is death are people
who have thought about philosophy,
they've done the architecture thing
with philosophy basically, where they've
looked at too many buildings and now
they can only make ugly buildings.
They've thought about philosophy
too much and they can only
have clearly false opinions.
You're gonna announce yourself
as a 'It's death; continuity of
consciousness is very important thing'.
Ben Southwood: I don't have a theory
about it just on the pure intuition,
I think that it's easy to see that
if you put me to a teleporter, but
for some reason it delayed for a
month, or, the two person where I
actually come out of the first one.
There's another one there,
the other one there isn't me.
And it's independence of irrelevant
alternatives according to normal
standards of what is me and what isn't.
Aria Schrecker: The
other one there is you.
Ben Southwood: I think that, my personal
view is that if you think about it
enough, then you're committed to, I die
every time I go to bed in the evening,
and since I'm not committed to that.
Aria Schrecker: Or like, I've died
during the creation of this podcast.
Ben Southwood: Well, yeah.
every second I die.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: Given that it doesn't,
I think that it would be silly to
go to that conclusion, but anyway, I
don't know that, I'm not a philosopher,
so my opinion's probably very bad.
Saloni Dattani: I wonder if there's a
final way to live longer, which is, it
sort of reminded me of how astronauts
have, they age very quickly, right?
When they're out in outer space.
Ben Southwood: I didn't know that.
Aria Schrecker: I thought
it was the other way around.
I thought general relativity
meant they were zooming around so
fast that they age much slower.
Ben Southwood: That would only get,
that would only give them a few seconds-
Aria Schrecker: Oh yeah,
it doesn't give much.
Ben Southwood: Saloni's talking
about normal aging, aren't you?
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
Yeah.
it does something.
And it just means their muscles,
their organs are weaker, et
cetera, because of gravity.
Ben Southwood: Well that's why we need to
have our inflatable space station Saloni.
So that we can have artificial
gravity so they can live longer.
Saloni Dattani: Yeah.
So is there a way to do the opposite?
Ben Southwood: Or put
us under more gravity?
Aria Schrecker: More
gravity means more life?
I guess we've never tried it.
Ben Southwood: My intuition is that
well, have we not ever tried it?
Aria Schrecker: There are parts
of the world where gravity,
because the shape of the earth.
Yeah, so you experience less gravity
if you are at the top of the Himalayas.
Saloni Dattani: Is that true?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
because you're
-
Ben Southwood: It's like an orange, the
earth and the middle is the furthest
down, so you get the most at the poles.
Saloni Dattani: Does it, do we speed up?
Aria Schrecker: Yes.
Yeah.
You will speed up.
Ben Southwood: You'll be
spinning much quicker, because
we're going around our axis.
Saloni Dattani: Oh.
Ben Southwood: But to be honest,
you're way past my physics here.
I'll sound like a total idiot
when someone watches the podcast.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Ben Southwood: Okay.
I think that we have tackled all of
the animal longevity based topics
that we're ever going to tackle.
Aria Schrecker: I think so, yeah.
Ben Southwood: Thank
you very much, Saloni.
Thank you very much, Aria, by the time
this podcast comes out, there will be
an article by Aria in Works in Progress
issue 22, telling you in much more detail
and with all the facts sourced and all
the numbers accurate and remembered
because they're written down about
longevous animals and their traits.