This Man Thinks "AGI" Could Allow Humans To Live Forever, With Dr. Ben Goertzel

0:00My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. But how accurate do you think the current biological testing landscape is? Oh, not very. When I really looked at the data underlying any of these biological agents, I mean, it's a little dodgy. I mean, we've all met people in the longevity field who are like, well, I'm 75, but I have a biogeology of 43, but you're like, well, why do you look so big open and then get a heart attack the next year, right? The long live flies have several snips in a certain gene that the short live flies don't have and you can map that into humans. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. I remember kind of like, I heard this about bone broth, but then I also heard about this stuff

1:04that it brings back the dead or something to that effect. Bone broth brings back the dead. So I heard that also about this stuff called black seed oil and it's like this mystery in the whole supplements industry, but it goes way back and it has a ton of just like ancestral wisdom and modern research behind it. And what I didn't know about black seed oil that I recently found out is that it helps with cortisol management and stress based on recent research. So there's this little capsule that has black seed in it. Some people don't like the taste of black seed oil. You can swallow this capsule and I even taste it, but it's called a thymocwin. Thymocwin has been clinically studied for its ability to support healthy cortisol levels and help your body adapt to everyday stress. And then you just get the host of other benefits for the immune system or antioxidation, et cetera, that you get from black seed oil because that's what thymocwin has in it. Now what sets this apart from other black seed oils is it's the only black seed oil product on the market that meets US pharmacopia guidelines, which is a significant differentiator in a category

2:04where quality varies dramatically. This stuff has been proven to have the exact high quality, well-treated black seed oil that you're looking for to help out with sleep quality with mood, energy, mental clarity, recovery, overall well-being. I'm actually doing a podcast on black seed oil too. I just think it's so interesting. I made it my podcast with the same guy that makes this thymocwin stuff. Dr. Michael Murray, one of the most respected names in natural medicine, he spent four decades researching evidence-based approaches to health. He's written over 40 books and he's a fan of this thymocwin also. So if you want to check it out, you can go to his website drmeri.com. DoC T-O-R-M-U-R-R-A-Y.com slash Ben and use 25% off code Ben 25 at checkout. That's Dr. Murray M-U-R-R-R-A-Y.com slash Ben and used to Ben 25 at checkout and the product is called thymocwin. Let's talk aging, skin aging. It's more than what you see in the mirror,

3:09meaning that if your skin is or is not looking good, that reflects how you're doing in the departments of things like cellular energy and mitochondrial function and how well your cells repair and communicate. That's why I treat skin care pretty intensively because I take care of all my organ systems and the skin's a pretty darn big organ system that reflects the quality of all the organ systems underneath it. That's mouthful. So one of the brands that I use for this is called Young Goose. Let me tell you about these steps. So you start with their blue peptide spray. It supports cellular energy directly at the skin level and then you move on to the vampire exosome. So with this layer, you're supporting regenerative signaling, cellular communication and repair. I was not responsible for naming it vampire exosomes, but it's like millions and billions and dare I say, good, Jillians of exosomes in one single product that you smear on your face. And then you can finish with their youth daily moisturizer. So that brings in NAD support for your face,

4:13along with spermaidine, which is associated with autophagy, meaning you're not just reinforcing long-term cellular resilience. You are also reinforcing short-term appearance. So you layer these things. You target multiple biological pathways of aging at once, energy production, repair, renewal, instead of one single product. It's a super powerful stat and you can get that in any of their other really cool anti-aging stacks and packages for cutting edge skin care. If you go to younggoose.com, just like it sounds, younggoose.com, and use code bgf10 at checkout to get another 10% discount on your order. My guest on today's show is a cross disciplinary scientist on the nor author and musician. Stay tuned for the end of the podcast for a very interesting anecdote about his band. His name is Dr. Ben Gertzel. He's the founder and CEO of Singularity Nets, decentralized AI network. He's the chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society. He came up with the term

5:14AGI invented that. He's the chief scientist of robotics from Hansen Robotics and has a PhD in mathematics. We have a wide-ranging discussion, especially as it applies to AGI and longevity. So all the show notes are going to be of BenGrid for Life.com slash AGI podcast. Let's go talk to Ben. So Ben, I until like a month and a half ago hadn't heard that much about you and I was a dinner with one of my buddies and he's like, you got to check out Ben Gertzel and he's got all sorts of super fascinating work, particularly related to AGI, Artificial General Intelligence and Health, longevity, a lot of the things that we talk about on this show. So I left that dinner and I looked you up, including your interview with Lex Friedman with Joe Rogan, the other shows you've done and realized that I must be hiding under a rock because it's a very prolific guy out there with the same initials as me. But way smarter doing some pretty cool stuff.

6:19So welcome to the show, man. Yeah, yeah, good to be here. Yeah, in my stalking of you, I saw that your dad actually apparently spent years writing a biography of Linus Pauling. He's come up on the show before, like, Vitamin C. Was that kind of your dad's interest in that? What got you interested in nutrition in the first place? No, although that was an issue that was sort of around our family when I was a kid. In fact, that book on Pauling was my grandmother's passion, my father's mother. And she worked on that book for a long time because she and Pauling were involved together in the nuclear disarmament movement in the 1960s. And so then she got Alzheimer's and started to lose her mind and couldn't finish the book. So my dad stepped in to finish the book for her. I mean, he's a political sociologist. Pauling wasn't his main thing.

7:24Then my dad pulled me in to sort of rewrite the parts of the book about Pauling's chemistry because neither my grandmother nor my dad knew much about chemistry. The thing with Pauling's interest in orthomolecular medicine and the potential health impact of Vitamin C is my grandmother didn't believe it. She thought it was a bunch of quack nonsense. So she was disappointed like this great scientist, she admired and like gone down a foc to a path of promoting vitamins to cure everything. So she was like, Pauling says, he never gets it because vitamin C. But when I called his assistant yesterday, she said, no, he's a little bit under the weather today. And vitamin C, he never gets sick. He just gets on the way for God. He's vitamin C that day. It is interesting though because I think I think it's kind of nuanced. Like it's such a potent antioxidant. There's been some studies that have shown that it can blunt for example, the whorimetic effects of exercise. Like if you take high dose vitamin C.

8:28Yeah. So I did in that context, which was a long time ago. I mean, there would have been like the early 90s. I get in that context. I did look at the data about vitamin C. And what I saw was it was more positive than my grandma was thinking. Like it actually did have significant value. On the other hand, the dose is a vexed question. Like some of the dosing that Paul and others were suggesting may not always actually be beneficial to take that much. So it was interesting to look. And I think one of the one of the main habits or lessons I got from my dad over the decades, and we're still working together working. We're working now on a book about the social and economic implications of AGI actually. But you and your dad are? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. But one of one of my dad's characteristics is he's very willing to look at the data and

9:34revise his beliefs based on whatever whatever the data say. Like it's not it's not like he doesn't have emotions or biases. But he's he's just willing to look at the data tables. Look at what experiment was done. And you know, he was wrong. Then he was then he was wrong. So I said, Mark, it's the mark of a good scientist on a constant quest to prove yourself wrong. That's kind of what's my face. Yeah. It's very rare in the political sociology field, which is where he's from his career actually because that that's just very, very ideological because the data is scant and ambiguous. And in the vitamin C thing, my dad and I sort of took that perspective. And then we ended up when we wrote the biography, just not being super decisive about that because it sort of seemed like the jury was out like, yeah, taking a bit of vitamin C is good. Taking a huge dose is probably not always good, but could it be good for some people in some circumstances? Like maybe maybe maybe maybe it could be right. So but I think I got more into the alternative

10:44medicine side many years later, many years later than that actually. And it was partly due to personal life stuff for like my first wife had Lyme disease and none of the standard things got rid of all the like long tail of Lyme disease and some, some, you know, out of the mainstream therapies are helpful. But then from looking at the long live fruit flies that a company called Genescent evolved, these are fruit flies that live like at that time two or three times as long as normal flies. Now we have ones like five or six times as long, but you can you can see like feeding different combinations of traditional Chinese herbs to these flies could make them live a long time, could improve their hearts, improve their brains, can can totally overhaul them, right? So I mean, you can see that a lot of these sort of holistic medications in an animal model, where you can test everything really rigorously. You can see they're doing just

11:45right. You can test everything really rigorously in the case of fruit flies over multi-generations pretty rapidly. Yeah, yeah. I mean tens of thousands of generations. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So when it comes to AI, which I know is something you've done quite a bit of working in AI and AGI, like how do you how do you go from from from generating ideas about a certain nutraceutical or compounds to applying that in a laboratory setting or do you can you replicate a fruit fly or use to a human model? We don't have that simulation model yet. And that's that's really the sore point in terms of applying AI to longevity overall, right? So I mean, what we can do, we can crunch all sorts of biological data about flies or mice or humans. And so you can you can look at genomics data, proteomics data, metabolism data. I mean, you can look at tissue

12:48specific data flies at different points of their life cycle and so on for people or whatever, right? So I mean, you can you can do super interesting data analytics and then you can feed in chemical information about different compounds. But then at some point, once you have the idea, like, okay, the way to, you know, improve the flies lifespan or the way to get rid of all time remodeling the fly or something, right? What once once you once you think the way to do that is to carry out a certain gene therapy or certain combination of nutraceuticals or certain small molecule, then pretty much yourself to try it out on the real organism. So when people talk about like a digital twin, is that just who we or is it just in it and it's really like embryonic stages of development? It just don't work well enough yet for this thing, no, because I mean, you can,

13:54I mean, we don't have a digital twin, even of a nematode worm fully yet, let a lot of the fly amouse or human. I mean, there are simulation models of specific like biochemical pathways and specific subsystems, but I mean, in the end, you still have to try on the on the real organism. And that's that's what I like about the fly model for longevity, of course, is I mean, if a control fly lives a few days and one of our long live flies lives a few weeks, I mean, I mean, that then you can actually test longevity, like did it double it? Did these herbs, double it's lifespan, did these herbs make it, you know, run nases better when it got old or something, right? And with it, yeah, but talk to me, talk to me about a applicability of that to say, you know, then a rodent or a primate or a human model, like how closely does

14:57so this genetics or biological systems or something like the fly model replicate that? All right, so olive oil, you may have heard about it, tell benefits, unless you've been hiding under a rock, and you might think of it as something that you cook with or you drizzle over a salad. This stuff called alia, Alia is a little bit different, it's a high polyphenol, that's a good stuff, olive oil, that's specifically made to take as a daily shot before a meal. So I got my hands on this stuff, I've been taking a shot right before lunch, occasionally I double dose and also put some on my lunchtime salad. It's pretty crazy, the list of benefits that a good shot of a high polyphenol olive oil can deliver, less bloating, less sugar cravings, clearer skin, less brain fog, more energy, the confidence that your cells are getting the building blocks they need, and alia is made from a rare Tunisian variety of olives called Shetue, grown in a single grove in Tastore Tunisia. So they're latest harvest, which is in this shot that I'm using, and I'm going to

16:01tell you how to get it too, it has 1400 milligrams per kilogram of polyphenols, that's like seven times what you get in other olive oils. You can taste them, it has this pronounced peppery catch at the back of your throat when you take it, that's actually what you're looking for in a high polyphenol olive oil, it's the test. And this is not something you want to heat up and cook with, right? Alia is organic, it's unfiltered, it's single origin olive oil, it's designed to be taken raw, so you get the full benefit of the naturally occurring compounds, and it comes in these little bottles, you don't have to measure it out or anything, you just open a bottle and take a shot, so easy. Go to aliahealth.com, slash S slash Ben for the discount code directly, apply it, check out, or if you just wind up on the website otherwise use code Ben for 20% off your order, that's 20% off on top of the already discounted subscriber discount that you get when you subscribe in cash the only time, so it's aliahealth.com slash S slash Ben, aliahealth.com slash S slash Ben, or just use code Ben. Let's talk

17:07recovery, it isn't just about what you're doing the gym, it's also about how your body repairs itself day to day, including your skin, that's why I use this stuff called active skin repair. It uses hypochlorous acid, which is a molecule your body naturally produces as a part of its inate immune response, so instead of introducing something foreign on or in your body, you're supporting a system your body already relies on for defense and repair, this is the same type of formulation that has been used in clinical settings like hospitals and beds as offices, but now you can use it daily, post workouts, skin irritation, time in the sun, cuts, scrapes, my 18 year old son's blister that he had the other day that I slathered this stuff on and then I just gave him the bottle to keep, and he just put that on before he pulled his socks on, fixed up the blister and kept it from infecting super fast, this stuff is non toxic, no harsh chemicals, nothing unnecessary, I also keep one in my bag for when I'm on an airplane, because it's way better and way less drying for

18:07cleaning your hands compared to the cheapo alcohol swabs that they give you sometimes when you get on the plane. Active skin repairs also expanding into a broader lineup, they have hydrating serum, they have a mineral sunscreen, both EWG approved, meaning it's not going to poison you or her skin, and if you're already focused on training, recovery and optimizing your environment, this is a natural extension of that, so if you want to learn more about the science behind it, go check out my podcast episode with the founder Justin Gardner, where he breaks all this down, and to learn more and to get 20% off your order, go to activeskinrepair.com and use code bent. You can also find active skin repair conveniently on Amazon and at your local CVS, but the biggest count is at activeskinrepair.com, use code, Ben, see you there. This is one of my favorite AI applications in the domain, because there's something in the field of AI called transfer learning, which is how do you take a model

19:10of one thing and transfer it so it tells you something about the model of something else, so if you're a champion at a fellow, does it help you at all like go? Can you transfer a little bit of your strategic knowledge? As a human, you can transfer a little bit, if you're a human who's a master in a fellow, that doesn't make you a great go player, but some of what you learn transfers over as opposed to if you were starting from absolutely nothing, there's some high level lessons, you know, increase the mobility you have in the mid game or something, right? Similarly, I mean, take another example, if an AI can drive a car, does they give it a head start and learn to drive a truck? For a human, it obviously gives a head start, there's more learning you have to do to drive the truck, but your car driving ability can transfer over to some degree, so in the same way, taking therapeutics that extend the lifespan of a fly,

20:16and trying to transfer them over to a mouse or a human, I mean, it's not just straightforward, but it is a definable transfer learning problem, and this is something that modern AI algorithms, you know, can be reasonably good at, and you can see some of the specific biological dimensions of that very easily, because flies, for example, very rarely die of cancer, and they can't, but it's just not a major thing, so a lot of things you would do to prolong life in a fly, they might give cancer to a mouse or a human, because they, and this ties in with the multifunctionality of many genes, like P53 and humans, which are tumor suppressor cells, but they also serve other functions, right? So like if you, if you mess with how that gene functions in a fly, it may just be fine,

21:18it may prolong the life in a human, it may mock with the other stuff that gene was doing, suppressing tumors, right? And then, yeah, but the thing is, so, so is the absence, or the, at least lower incidence of cancer in flies due to their shorter lifespan, or is it something else? It doesn't seem to be just a shorter lifespan, because our long live flies don't die of cancer either, and we've increased a lot, right? So I mean, that flies body is just quite different, and I'm not a dress, I'm not a dressophila biologist, so I'm not the best person to answer that, and you can, like actually, you should interview Kennedy Schall, who is the CEO of the company, Raju, bio that we spun off from AI Projects Singularity, and they're doing all the therapeutics development of bioinformatics on the long live flies using our AI tools, right? Right, right, right.

22:21Interesting, because I, I'm, I'm, I'm just enough to be dangerous about dressophila biology, but I'm not a real fly guy. Yeah, yeah, you know, you brought up the disease line as well as a treatment like vitamin C, when it comes to AI or a GI and feel free to differentiate between the two, because we really haven't contrasted them before on this show, where, where do those fit in, beyond just say, testing something in flies, when it comes to, to assessing how we might treat a certain disease, or how we might like, like test a certain nutrient, like what's the actual process? So yeah, I think there's the current state of things, and then there's how I think things will be in a few years when we've made more progress toward actual AGI. So yeah, but let me start by saying a little bit about AGI versus narrow application specific AI, and then we can see

23:29how that manifests itself in the longevity therapeutics domain, right. So like what, when the, when the AI field started formerly in the 1950s, I mean, in formerly a couple of decades before that, they were trying to make machines that would think, you know, with a grant here in generality of human beings, and then even beyond that, like you see in science fiction. And this includes the ability to generalize wildly beyond ones training in programming, like to deal with the great unknown, right. Like in Star Trek, every week they go to a different plan, they deal with a different kind of alien civilization. You've got to be imaginative and go beyond everything you've learned. As, as the AI field evolved during the 70s, 80s, 90s, people realized that was harder than they thought. So AI became more a collection of specialized applications, like one AI for driving a vehicle, one AI for playing chess, one AI for predicting the market, one AI for diagnosing diseases. And

24:36even in that area, in that era, rather, you had specialized AI's that could do, you know, disease diagnosis better than human doctors and so forth, right. So I mean, there already was significant successes. But I spent a lot of time in the early offs and onward trying to reorient the AI field back toward the big picture problem, which I call the AGI artificial general intelligence, which is a term I launched in a book in 2005, which now has become very popular, right? Like open AI is a panel of the spin. In 2005, when I wrote the book titled AGI, it was a very obscure topic. These most of the AI field didn't believe it was real, right. And the manifestation for longevity medicine or medicine in general is,

25:39like once you're into the full on AGI era, you should have AI as just act as autonomous creative research scientists, right. Well, where the AI can, you know, come up with a theory, flesh out the theory by looking at the literature, designing an experiment, run an experiment, analyze the results, you know, let leather rinse repeat, right. And continuously self-improve and self-evolve all the way, right. Yeah. Yeah. And when I think we're not far from that, but we're not there yet, right. So I mean, in the exact current practice today, it's more like as a longevity researcher, you're using an assemblage of different AI tools, along with non-AI tools for bioinformatics, data visualization, whatever. And the AI tools are valuable parts of your toolkit for designing therapeutics. And then there's a number of different

26:47AI tools you can use, right. And so I mean, there's neural nets to do machine learning where you can crunch a data set that came out of an experiment and try to find whether the patterns in that data set, what's that data set telling you about what causal pathways were revealed in the experiment. But one other thing that we've been experimenting with a lot in our work at Rajuve Bio and then SingularityNet is using machine reasoning for discovery. So it's target discovery and it's discovering new sort of combinations, combinations of therapies. And so this is not so much running experiment and crunching the output using machine learning, although you can do that too. This is like, okay, we have some vague idea as to maybe these pathways play a role

27:52in longevity. Can you dig through all the literature and think about it and come up with some new ideas about what might be some causes of longevity related to these data sets we loaded in, related to these papers we loaded in. And then I was like doing the creative thinking, trying to come up with some new high-possibility. A lot of people would say, well, I could do that right now with any of the latest cloud or GPT models. You can do that. They're just not as good at it as our as our when you when you say it's good, do you mean as fast as thorough or something else? No, what I mean is that these models like chat GPT or cloud and I mean they're amazing and you know open eyes right? I think the astro model is even more amazing like these are super brilliant things, but they do they do stick relatively close to their training data. I mean all of these large

28:58transformer neural net models, which is the kind of AI underlying at alums. I mean these are all basically huge models of everything on the web. And I mean that does very very well. In certain domains like if you're doing Python programming, right? There's so many useful Python programs on the web like modeling all of those is great. What you find in in something like mathematics, let's say, and that's my original background that my PhD was in math. I mean they're very very good at proving math theorems within known branches of math. And if you're trying to go out on a limb into a branch of math that's new or not much is known, they're much less good, right? They're not retarded, but they're much less good because there's just less training data on the web about these weird obscure little branches of math. And they can transfer knowledge from well-known

30:04branches of math to new ones with scant presses on the web, but they make a lot more mistakes. And with something like longevity biology, what you find is they just come back to what's in the literature every time. So, and are you contrasting that with AGI? I say that AGI is information generative. I'm contrasting that with a system that we have developed in Singularity Net and our sister project BGI Labs in Rajuva bio. I'm contrasting that with this probabilistic logic reasoning system called PLN and probabilistic logic networks, which we use together with together with LLM's because we we have a different sort of knowledge graph. We fill it up using an LLM having the LLM read a bunch of research papers and interpret a bunch of data sets and then spit knowledge into this knowledge graph that we have. But then we can do like explicit probabilistic logic reasoning

31:06like different kinds of AI thinking on this knowledge graph. And what I find is these different kinds of AI logical thinking are better at taking leaps beyond what's in in in the literature. So, like if you're if you're looking for what does the literature say about this pathway causing brain aging right LLM's are super brilliant at that. But the the nature of trying to do frontier science is exactly you're trying to go beyond what is in the literature and sometimes that will contradict what's what what's in the literature right and that it you really have a hard time flogging the LLM's to question what's baked into the weights of of the model and let go and go in some other directions. So, like I mean to take a physics take a physics example like if you trained an LLM on physics before quantum mechanics. I mean you're not going to get that LLM to agree

32:10with you on the invention of quantum mechanics let alone help right because it's it's got baked into its weights how the universe works like it's it's a deterministic classical system and it can't revise those those weights during during inference. So, I think yeah the thing is Sam Altman could be right the models like Astra could do 90% of human jobs or something after appropriate system integration on the other hand breaking radical new research frontiers like that that would be in the other 10th century. Yeah it sounds to me like like when you're describing probable ballistic knowledge it would be the difference between a human reading in a consumptive fashion a book versus theorizing in an imaginative fashion after reading the book. Yeah on the other hand I mean every one or two-year-old child is theorizing in an imaginative fashion all the time

33:14just to figure out stuff that's radically new to them even though it's it's obvious to us right. So, like we're we're concerned about the high end here because that's where there's economic and scientific and humanistic value but on the other hand the process of leaping beyond you knowledge into the great unknown like that's that's how we grow up in in the first place. Yeah yeah so so boots on the streets here from a practical application standpoint when I was having dinner with my friend he's actually a former podcast guest it was Matt Morgan who's been on the show before he said well you know Ben is solving many of the problems that we currently face in human longevity with AGI potentially even radically extending human lifespan with application of what can be learned via AGI. What exactly are you doing that might result in a meaningful increase in in human

34:15longevity? A lot of people think about NAD the wrong way so the typical approach is a bunch of IV infusions to top levels up or precursor compounds like NNN and NR that provide the raw materials for NAD and then you hope the body does something useful with that downstream but the replacement of mindset doesn't necessarily address the big question which is why is NAD declining in the first place that's what makes NUCHITO time plus very interesting instead of just trying to pour more NAD precursors into the system. NUCHITO takes more of a systems biology approach by supporting the actual cellular mechanisms involved in NAD production and recycling specifically it targets NAMPT that's a mouthful which is one of the key rate limiting enzymes in the NAD salvage pathway and it also helps address CD38 activity which is one of the major drivers of NAD depletion as we age so instead of just replacing NAD you're supporting yourself's own ability to maintain NAD

35:19and this is not just theory it's human clinical data showing significant increases in cellular NAD levels along with improvements in markers tied to inflammation, glycation, biological age. That level of clinical validation is uncommon in the longevity supplement space on a podcast I recently sat down with their founder Nicholas Conlon who has spent more than a decade researching NAD restoration and cellular aging and we went deep into the science on that podcast which you can find wherever podcasts are found so it's less about topping off the tank when it comes to NAD and more about restoring the machinery that keeps the system functioning properly in the first place. Right now you can get a 20% discount at NUCHITO.com using code Ben20 at checkout that's NUCHIDO.com and use code Ben20 20% off today. Most events like conferences and exposels and stuff that you go to you sit you listen you go home very few have you actually getting a chance

36:22to test ideas and concepts and fun toys and tools and strategies in real time and have you leaving with a different understanding of how your body actually works enter you pneumonia this three days in West Palm Beach where you're actually in it so you're testing things talking to experts trying technologies you've never had access to before surrounded by people who are just as obsessed with longevity and biohacking and health and all this stuff as you are I'm talking brain health hormones peptides longevity protocols gut health mobility you name it the full picture and not just talks you get to try this stuff right there on the floor I will personally be in West Palm Beach at you pneumonia speaking I'll be leading a live movement session and honestly the people you meet there are just half the value serious curious already doing the work and you get to leave with new tools new ideas and be ready to add yours to your life and life to your years so if you want to be in a room where ideas are actually tested and applied is the room November 5th through the 8th

37:26in West Palm Beach Florida and honestly that pretty good excuse to spend a few days on the sunshine there in November save a hundred bucks when you register at bengreenfieldlife.com slash you pneumonia should you need help you pneumonia is e-u-d-e-m-o-n-i-a bengreenfieldlife slash you pneumonia come curious leave calibrated and I'll see you there I think that the most concrete and specific longevity project we're working on now and my team has to do with these fruit flies that I've already mentioned which were originally experimentally evolved that UC Irvine and then they were taken on by a company called Geneshen and now we're working on them within the Rajuv bio has been off of singularity net because we we already know by using AI to model the genomes of the flies

38:29and connecting that with chemical databases we found novel combinations of traditional Chinese you give them to a middle-aged fruit fly they can more than double its life right and that's that's just herbs like it's very clear to us if you can do a gene therapy and just twonk the same genes that the herbs are twonking like you can you can have an even bigger impact on on the flies life and you can okay and then when you say when you say Chinese herbs like how many different herbs are we talking about five I guess oh like like are we talking about also herbs that people would be generally familiar with I mean some like a stragglerist was one and somewhere I'll spare names who's the I can't remember yeah yeah I'm actually I've come across a stragglerist before when it comes to potentially decrease in the rate at which telemere shortened I didn't forgive me this is a dumb question but when when you're saying five Chinese herbs I'm assuming that these were selected or chosen or suggested by an AI or AGI model yeah yeah yeah we fed it

39:36we fed in a big database of traditional Chinese medicine and for each herb that database tells you what are the known active chemical ingredients then you can look in pub chem chemical database it will tell you of those chemical ingredients like what proteins did they dock to right and then you can see what genes code for those proteins and the AI can connect the dots and what what was fascinating there is in traditional Chinese medicine they have a certain freaky science telling how to combine these herbs and the AI combines them in a totally different way so like they're really mixing up the different plants in a way that TCM just would never do because of the way TCM tries to guide things and that's interesting okay so so are there RCTs or human clinical trials using traditional Chinese medicine in the way that a Chinese trained doctor or biologist might use it that we didn't we didn't we didn't we didn't try that on the fly okay we just tried with the

40:45AI suggested okay we did we did however I mean we tried a few of these substances on humans with positive impact like like we we showed we showed that you can in many cases rollback moderate Alzheimer's to mild Alzheimer's in people using these things and then with really now no I'm assuming by the way like are we talking like case studies anecdotes that was a small clinical trial with dozens of people yeah so I mean would wow with with neutrals articles you can do an informal trial yourself because it was not a lot of regulations on herbs that we I mean with another another concoction of Chinese herbs which has anti-inflammatory properties I mean we tried in it and you can show it greatly decreases c-reactive protein levels in human bloodstream but again these are small trials on dozens of people don't don't at low cost and these trials are done

41:48by janeshian not by my company they're the company that that bought the flies out of UC Irvine okay we've been working with the flies we haven't done our own trials yet but we've done a lot more AI work and we so we've found we've found the by looking at DNA and then RNA in the flies and how they differ between the long the flies and normal flies I mean we we we we found sort of four transcription factors in in the genomics that that that seem highly causal for the flies in longevity so I feel like we have found I mean there's there's like so a fruit fly has around 14,000 genes and about 2,000 of them are quite different between the long the flies and the normal flies so it's quite broad based difference not like there's one gene that you try on the other hand there's

42:54a few dozen of those genes that seem to have more causal impact and many of those have to do with four different transcription factors so we sort of seem to have used AI to pinpoint like some of the real biological network differences between the long the flies and the short the short live flies then then there's two questions right like how do you target those either with drugs, herbs or gene therapy and then what happens when you map from fly into human and it it seems that most of the stuff maps very nicely from flying to human because it's really it's very deep at at the level of sort of genomic regulation rather than being about very specific fly fly processes like it's not it's not like you get a stronger for acts and you live a long time or something right that's it right it's more about better metter regulation of the of the genomic network better regulation of

43:59DNA repair and and and better function of you know energetics like in mitochondria and and so yeah the combined the combined application of molecular chemistry and neutrosuticles using an AI or a GI model seems relatively straightforward but then do you see any potential future in expanding beyond neutrosuticles yeah what I'm saying when I say expanding on neutrosuticles I mean if you look at hyperbaric oxygen and red light and you know electrical fields and even you know simple modalities like exercise and sleep like is there a way to model those in as well yeah I mean in the opposite direction of that first of all before I come back to that the feeling you get we're looking at these genomic differences is like fuck if we can if we can just do gene therapy

45:00on 20 genes at once without causing bad side effects then maybe you're done right because if you can see you can see which genes like you just need to adjust their expression in different tissues and then you can see the impact that has on the biological networks and then trying to adjust the expression of these genes using herbs or even small molecules is such a blunt instrument so you you sort of feel like molecular nanotech is going to be the real solution I mean it doesn't have to be metal nano machines it could be engineered enzymes or biomolecules right but it seems like engineering molecules so you can insert them into the tissues in the body and then they just like mechanically alter like what what you're describing would be something like I don't know let's use something simple like like an amino acid sequence peptide like mot C as an exercise mimetic right people might inject it and it would cause an increase in amp K similar to what you

46:05might get from exercise or fasting and it sounds to me like what you're saying is like repeat that molecular mimicry for heat stress for for oxygen carry capacity for mitochondrial membrane whatever you could just go on down the line and replicate as many lifestyle factors as possible with molecules there's also engineered enzymes right so like if if you see the long live flies have several snips in a certain gene the short live flies don't have and you can map that into humans then you can engineer an enzyme it just goes in and actually edits the DNA to put those variations in there right and yeah and I mean you could you could do that in the test tube now and there's no fundamental reason you can't do that with the engineered enzymes it's just the delivery mechanism right like we don't have a good way to not have that enzyme dissipate on the way into the part of the body where it's supposed to do it do it do it's editing

47:07right so I mean I think getting delivery mechanisms to work in a very targeted way for this sort of nano engineered bio molecules like that that feels like the holy grail solution and if if an agi can design that like five years from now or something like that then that's that that I mean because that would let you just re-sculp the genome of every tissue in your body however the agi has has has designed yeah yeah it is interesting I mean I've I've undergone fallestatin gene therapy and without changing protein intake or weight training protocol gained I gained I gained 11 pounds in 11 pounds of lean mass in three months which is arguably very very difficult without steroids and massive increases in calorie intake from that simple intervention I'm not not saying that's a hundred percent bullet proof and safe for everyone but I mean I imagine if you could rinse wash and repeat that safely across a wide variety of

48:11working hard in pathways it'd be interesting so my friend Liz Parrish lives near me in Seattle she has a company called bioviva and I mean she developed therapy for telomere lengthening so she did this therapy with like injections into all different tissues around her body and she re-grue her telomeres right but then as as part of that same protocol she did a bunch of fallestatin injections also and now I mean Liz is super ripped after that yeah I think she's also from what I understand I believe done some clotho treatments as well yeah yeah that's right and I mean again it's an end of one experiment just knowing her as a friend it's interesting to see yeah impact it's hard to I don't know how to differ since she tried a number of things I don't know how to tell what should the effects under yeah yeah when it comes to actually she's looking

49:16great she's looking young and she's showing it's healthy right yeah yeah knock on wood oh when it comes to the actual measurement of how well these things are working particularly in humans you know we went from like telomere measurements which I think were flawed because they were just a small sampling of telomere length on white blood cells to biological aging clocks based on pace of aging now to singular aging clocks for each organ but how accurate do you think the current biological testing landscape is oh not not very I mean I mean I'm not I'm not a huge expert on that but we sort of looked at that a bit in building an app we were doing a Rejuve that AI with it with it with the app sort of tried to take a bunch of medical information from the user and give them guidance on what to do for for health and life extension

50:18and we found users of that app they wanted a biological age estimate like they want to know well you know since last time I used the app I've gone from 42 down to 38 or something but I mean when I really looked at the data underlying any of these biological age estimates I mean it's it's it's it's a little dodgy and I mean we've all met people in the longevity field who are like well I'm I'm 75 but I have a biological age of 43 but you're like well why do you know so fucking old man and then and then they get a heart attack the next year right yeah yeah yeah and then of course there's there's also the well what happens if I drop you in the middle of the wilderness without food uh oh yeah I mean oh the I think tissue specific and like organ specific is certainly much better and I think you can get an accurate read a more accurate read of the age of the effective biological

51:19to the age of your your heart or lungs or muscle or specific body system on the other hand we don't really have a handle on the holistic systemic function of the of of of the body either right like there's yeah there's a whole there's a whole problem that happens at your age with with the sort of message passing through the extracellular matrix right and and and which is it's a combination of chemical mechanical and even optical with ultra-week photon emissions like going going through the body between the cells and that messes up when you get old also for a variety of complex reasons so you could have a bunch of different tissues being very healthy but if the extracellular matrix signaling fabric is fucked then then your whole body still isn't necessarily doing do it well so I'm sure I'm sure a lot of people just raise an eyebrow what you did were you were you

52:25referring to the um to the signaling mechanism between mitochondria using photonic light patterns that's that's part of it but there's I mean there's there's ultra-week photon emissions in the brain also and I mean in in the whole body I mean there's just a bunch of sort of molecular group in the body like in between the different organs and and the cells and there's something like a point six or point six five correlation between the sort of creases in this extracellular matrix and the acupuncture meridians actually so I mean there's some there's some like energetic flow happening in the extracellular matrix through through the body and this energy flow works worse as as you get old for reasons that are not or not fully fully understood right and I mean that's just just as an indication that there's like there's a holistic aspect to body

53:30body function oh yeah absolutely I mean it's interesting to talk to someone you who might be described as a sort of technologist in the longevity realm referring to things like meridian pathways Chinese traditional medicine and and I mean I mean I did I lived in China for 10 years my my wife is mainland Chinese so I had some contact with that world I mean I did a deep dive into TCM theory at one point and I mean it's just yeah it's really weird and crazy right like it yeah I mean the whole the vocabulary they use the way they're thinking is off you know I have a poster tucked away somewhere here in my office at TCM traditional Chinese medicine poster and it's a fascinating to look at all the different and how they how they refer to specific organs it's also sort of closed in the way the modern

54:31science isn't like there's a there's an ancient book which is like the Bible of TCM and now every new discovery has to be mapped back to what's in that book so it's sort of like how the supreme court that's to map everything back to the constitution which is so hard to change or something right yeah we're religious people after trace everything back to the Bible or the Quran and I think I think that's a constraint because even as TCM practitioners discover new stuff they can't revise the foundations just for cultural and historical reasons that that one's you know that that's a real nuanced discussion because it's highly highly subjects to interpretation based on faith beliefs right so so if an ancient text was believed and perhaps even accurately is influenced by some form of divination from the spirit world or by God and set in stone as that then you know then modifying your altering that outside of the scope of divinity might actually be incorrect so you

55:35know that obviously depends on on Chinese are always flexible everything is subject to reinterpretation but I do think it's a very tradition bound field right yeah which which is different than I mean science can be that way also yeah I think if we're going to cure aging it's not going to be by being tradition bound in in any sense but there's there's a lot still there's a lot of knowledge in TCM beyond the specific herbs right yeah and I think they did while their theories are weird and not always correct they're trying to grapple with the holistic function of the body in a way that Western medicine rarely is and that that comes back to a point you raise at the very beginning of this conversation which I think is key like for AGI to really solve aging beyond you know

56:42merely coming up with some therapies that will double our lifespan which is is already very useful right but for AGI it really comprehensively solve aging I mean I think we we are going to need an accurate systems biology simulation of of the whole organism right and then yeah what what once you have that the holistic nature of the body will just become very very clear because you see that with weather systems right like we we now have better and better simulation models of weather systems and you can see it's chaotic it's not localized or a wind over here because hurricane over there and once you have a computer simulation model then you can understand all that we have the same with climate modeling or ecosystem modeling now we just don't have effective like whole biological system models yet now ironically I think we might be able to pull together

57:43decent ones right now just using the totality of biological data sets gathered on the planet plus atlons plus other AI tools like the reasoning systems my team has developed like I think I think if you took every biological model and data set known to men and tried to have you know an AI system put together the best comprehensive body simulation you could based on this I mean that wouldn't be perfect it would be quite interesting yeah it's just it's very you do you envision that do you envision that biological simulation being digital or robotic I mean I think you want to be digital initially making it robotic is many orders of magnitude harder because yeah because that then you're literally you're generating our rotation robots I made it the wrong kind of stuff right yeah I mean robots don't even

58:44typically have skin that can feel anything yeah well yeah that's what I'm saying is you would literally have to create a robot with with simulated tissue yeah or I mean I think coming up with a reasonably accurate digital simulation yeah yeah I guess the only advantage of the robot would be what I raised earlier like the ability to test out you know think things like things like hyperbaric or certain certain weight training protocols etc. Building a robot out of engineered biological cells is probably harder than curing aging I mean yeah you could you could but you did weren't you involved in like a humanoid robot yes yes yes I'm still working with humanoid robots no I mean we have a new robotics company called mine children we have a little child robot named Cody and then I actually have a band where I play the keyboards with a lead singer is a humanoid robot

59:46named Desdemona but what's the name of your band Desdemona's dream okay cool I'm gonna put that in the show notes for you personally cool yeah yeah yeah but that I mean the thing is I mean the robot has a humanoid face that can smile and so forth but and I mean she can move her hands around but I mean there's motors and metal inside inside her arms I mean her face has 35 motors pulling the strings to make her give different different expressions so I mean it's not it's not intended as a a biological body simulation right and yeah I think yeah doing that that that probably needs a super intelligence not not a mere human level human level AGI and then then of course you have some weird ethical issues because if you if you've made this simulated human then it probably can experience things like like like a human and like randomly randomly

1:00:49talking with it in the lab is kind of a problem yeah I think you'd have to truly traverse the impossible in order to pull that off because you'd have to introduce a soul slash consciousness well that's a different topic I mean yeah yeah that's a whole different podcast yeah my own feeling on that is soul slash consciousness is imminent in the universe and it will pop up in whatever system you you build right and I mean this is more than I think that more the agent perspective I think like I think the soul whatever it is is not in the meat of your brain it's in the universe and your brain kind of amplifies that universal consciousness in a certain way and I don't see why a digital computer that's highly intelligent can't kind of amplify universal consciousness in its own similar but perhaps different way but that's another another frontier as you say yeah yeah Ben I want to because I know you're you're involved in a lot of different companies I want to kind

1:01:53of subscribe to a feed or newsletter to stay up to date about the developments in terms of what you're doing because I'm I'm pretty fascinated I'm sure some of my audience might be as well so where is the best place to follow your research do you have a blog or anything like that so I do I do have a a sub stack and if you just search my name Ben good okay sub stack you can go find that if you go to singularity net dot IO that that's my AI blockchain project but that's best organized in terms of having email mailing list and sort of a progress everywhere to go I mean Matt Morgan who you who you mentioned we're working together on a new AI company called BGI Labs and there's a there's a website bgi labs dot AI as well but that okay you say vgi or bgi be like you got beneficial beneficial general intelligence got it okay cool

1:02:57cool building going general intelligence for everyone's benefit including including extension of everyone's life for so we hope yeah and great initials too with the bg I'm going to put all this at bengreenfieldlife.com slash aji podcast or link to the show notes other podcasts that are similar to this one Ben sub stack bgi website and plenty more Ben thanks so much for doing this man here you're a fascinating guy up to some very fascinating work yeah yeah thanks a lot this is it's been a phone conversation my folks thanks for tuning in have an incredible week to discover even more tips tricks hacks and content to become the most complete boundless version of you visit bengreenfieldlife.com in compliance with the ftc guidelines please assume the following about links and posts on this site most of the links going to products are often affiliate links of which I receive a small

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