Overall, I think interviews like this one are great for the cause. This one was pretty standard. It looks pretty much like a dozen others with Aubrey. I comment here on how this one reaffirms the notion of the 7 known forms of damages as possibly thee main approach, and how it makes the style over substance mistake.
Some of us have been looking for a definitive list of thee aging strategies that could go all the way to creating indefinite life extension. Seivtcho even started a topic for collecting them a while ago
here. The more I read things like this interview, the further I move toward thinking that the 7 known forms of aging damage are the main approach to defeating aging. I have asked around and nobody seems to have a better answer. Besides damage accumulation, various organizations and researchers will typically list things like CR, and then anti oxidants and telomeres as this article does, but those approaches don’t hit the nail on the head. It seems they cannot go all the way through to the defeat of aging and the creation of indefinite life spans. The only other contender that I know of that some of them will often list is the evolutionary approach, and I haven’t found enough compelling reasoning why it can go all the way to creating indefinite life extension yet.
Another thing I got from this transcript is that it reminds me to stress the importance that it is the ideas come first. First and foremost it is the validity and the sincerity in the ideas that are the most important, and bow ties, semi colons and neat square blocks of text come somewhere down further on the list of what is important. Aubrey, though he does the latter two, as we know doesn’t dress the part. So people say things like the narrator says here in this transcript:
Aubrey is a gerontologist. He studies ageing and he's obsessed with finding a way to cheat old age.
Why is what Aubrey talks about referred to as obsession, but when Sinclair and Demasi talk about ta65 and sirt1, that isn’t referred to as obsession? It’s funny that even people that dedicate, many times,
even more time, to things like coaching football, baking, landscaping, and things like that, aren’t typically referred to as obsessed, but people trying to prevent people from dying so that they can experience more of this incredible opportunity to exist here are. It’s important that we point that out to try to curtail that trend.
Notice that telomeres and free radical damage are covered by the 7 forms of damage that Aubrey is talking about, yet they don’t acknowledge that. They talk about them as though those two approaches stand on their own, and talk about them with a more positive language, as if they seem to be on to something more than the 7 damages are, but they are only parts within those 7. For example, when Sinclair talks about a resveratrol like drug reversing aging, Dr. Demasi says, “That’s incredible.” The response in that vein about Aubrey though is, “Aubrey is obviously talented. But is he right?”
They close with, “For all my doubts, I couldn’t help thinking that science needs individuals like Aubrey to revitalize our thinking. After all, it’s limitless curiosity and imagination that underpins every great discovery.” So because he doesn’t dress the part, I contend, his comprehensive strategy, which encompasses the other decent but weaker pieces of that comprehensive strategy, is sidelined, and called obsession and imagination. This is a life or death cause, and people act as though formalities trump rationality. They don’t. I’m glad that interviews like this help spread the message, but they need to put reason first.
