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.
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.