“There are so many ethical tradeoffs we need to solve before we embrace the idea of radical longevity. We have created the science and technology to extend our lives while we haven’t created the life we want to extend.”
Sergey Young is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of one billion people. To do that, Sergey founded Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all.
Sergey is on the Board of Directors of the American Federation of Aging Research (AFAR) and the Development Sponsor of AGE REVERSAL XPRIZE global competition designed to cure aging. Sergey is also a Top-100 Longevity Leader, who is transforming the world, one workplace at a time, with Longevity@Work – the first non-profit corporate longevity program of its kind.
Sergey Young discusses his Longevity Investment Fund, dedicated to the advancement of anti-aging and longevity research. As written in his latest book Growing Young, He lays out five buckets of behavior that contribute to living a longer and healthier life and predicts where the biggest healthcare transformations will come from. While longevity technology is rapidly advancing, Young stresses the importance of addressing ethical issues like inequality and humans’ impact on the planet if people are going to live longer.
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MODERATOR
SPEAKER
Sergey Young
Founder
Longevity Vision Fund
Dr. Dina Radenkovic
Partner
SALT Bio Fund
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Intro
03:40 - Longevity Vision Fund
20:19 - Longevity practices- five buckets
29:17 - Health data sharing and innovation
35:57 - Ethical considerations around longevity
49:45 - Building awareness and education around longevity
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone and welcome back to SALT talks. My name is John Darsie, I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conferences, which we're excited to resume here in the fall of 2021, in our home city of New York. But that's to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.
John Darsie: (00:45)
And we're very excited to bring you the latest in our series of conversations about healthcare and biotechnology with the great Sergey Young. Sergey is a longevity investor and visionary, with a mission to extend healthy lifespans of one billion people. To do that, Sergey founded the Longevity Vision Fund to accelerate life extension, technological breakthroughs and to make longevity affordable and accessible to all. Now Sergey is on the board of directors of the American Federation of Aging and Research, and the development sponsor of Age Reversal XPRIZE global foundation competition designed to cure aging. Sergey is also a top 100 longevity leader who is transforming the world one workplace at a time with longevity at work, which is the first nonprofit corporate longevity program of its kind.
John Darsie: (01:35)
Sergey has been featured as a top longevity expert and contributor on CNN, Fox News, and Forbes. He's the author of several books, including most recently The Science and Technology of Growing Young, a fantastic read that we would highly recommend that you pick up if you're interested in the subject matter. He's also the mastermind behind the online life extension platform sergeyyoung.com. Now Sergey is passionate about sharing news from the exciting world of longevity, and definitely a premier thought leader in that space. Hosting today's talk to somebody who also knows a lot about longevity research, that's Dr. Dina Radenkovic, who's a partner at the SALT Fund, which recently raised a fund to invest in early stage programmable biology companies, which we're very excited to launch. Dr. Dina, thank you so much for joining us. I'll let you take it from here.
Dina Radenkovic: (02:26)
Thank you John, and Sergey excited to have you on our SALT talks.
Sergey Young: (02:30)
Hi John, hi Dina, hi everyone, I'm very excited to be here with you today.
Dina Radenkovic: (02:36)
Well, I mean, congratulations on the new book, it's a big achievement, and it managed to cover quite a lot in this field of longevity. When is it coming out? Tell us a bit more about that.
Sergey Young: (02:46)
Yeah it was a lot of fun, at least for the last three years. It's going to be published in August 24th, and we are already number one in three categories on Amazon, longevity, aging and preventive medicine. So I'm very proud even one month before the book launch.
Dina Radenkovic: (03:03)
And well we hope that success has its own longevity, and that it maintains post the book launch as well, we have no doubts about that. So, could you maybe tell us a bit more about your book in the project? We've seen, I guess, a bit increased interest in the field and several textbooks, including for example, David Sinclair's book, have tried to explain perhaps the science behind it. Certain books like the one from Peter Diamandis, trying to focus on the new technologies that will enable the science to be delivered. Where would you rate your book? Could you give us a bit more of a flavor while we wait to get the hard copy?
Sergey Young: (03:40)
Yeah. So Longevity Vision Fund is one of the few longevity focused funds in the world. And at certain point in time, we were like the largest font in the world which is 100% focus on longevity. This is not to say how great we are, this is to say that the space and a field of longevity is just right in the beginning of its growth. And, through my work in the fund, we're looking at 200 different companies a year, which are in the field of science and technology of living longer, and then the digital health. And I thought, this is what I can share with the world. We have a lot of books with scientific background, more kind of scientific view, but not a lot of books which talk about different technologies, which going to transform our ability and give us more optionality in terms of our lifespan and health span.
Dina Radenkovic: (04:41)
Fascinating. So it's basically like a massive overview for everyone who's interested in this field of longevity and to see what's coming up. And you mentioned your fund, and obviously we want to focus on the new content of the book but, you were one of the visionaries and you definitely had the temerity to go into this field of aging, which is evolving, and it's attracting more people, and it's proving its value. But can you tell us a bit more about raising and setting up that fund? You were one of the first people to set up 100 million funds solely focused on longevity and, how did you define the investments? What was your experience there of setting up a solely longevity focus fund, and putting it in the name as well?
Sergey Young: (05:22)
Yeah. So it's been pretty difficult road. Well the good news, I've been investing for last 20 years. So in fact, I have so many full time jobs, including the job of being loving husband and father of four kids, similar to some of us on this call. And so obviously it's all went through the experience, the outcome, and the failures, and successes that I've made through my private equity investment history. So right now I'm managing multi billion dollar private equity portfolio. So in a way, it was easy. But, what was difficult is to realize that longevity is an investment tail, it's so immature, it's almost like an orphan for huge institutions.
Sergey Young: (06:11)
And having said that, I thought if I want to support the space, if I want to give a kind of help to entrepreneurs and a scientist who's going to bring in more solutions for us to be healthy in this world, I'll just set up like a small fund, rather than reading news and books, I just wanted to write my own book in terms of investments metaphorically speaking. So I thought, I'll just set up $50 million fund. So then I met one of my investors, so I raised 50 million in the first five minutes. And I'm insecure overachiever, I couldn't really appreciate something which has been given to me like in five minutes, and I think it sounds very familiar to some of our audience, so I immediately raised the bar.
Sergey Young: (07:03)
I said, okay, it shouldn't be like 50 million because it was too easy, I'll raise 100 million. And it was amazing. Again, I've been doing investments for last 20 years. But like ... so we invested in LVF One, we invested in 16 companies. Our average holding period today is 2.5 years, and we already have four out of 16 companies public, and another three will be public by the end of this year, by the end of 2021. This was the fastest transformation from private to public I've ever seen in any of my portfolio. So that's been amazing. What else? We quickly realized that because longevity is such an unknown theme for the world, regulators, investors, portfolio companies, so we adopted the approach then we took intentionally broad definition of longevity, so our definition is like, whatever increase the average lifespan and health span on earth is longevity for us.
Sergey Young: (08:12)
So we invested in a lot of proper biotech place, but with only one additional side effect, they all need to contribute to healthy and happy living on the planet. And, again, since my mission is to change one billion lives, and some people ask me, "Sergey, why it's only one billion?" And what I've done is, we are focusing on affordable and accessible version of health care and longevity, so this is one of the investment criteria that we use, this technology, this intervention, this scientific discovery needs to have a profound effect in terms of affordability and give an opportunity for at least millions of people to benefit from that initial term.
Dina Radenkovic: (09:08)
Fascinating. And I mean, we both agree that longevity is a great space to build and invest and support companies. And I think you've proven it with the success in your portfolio so we can talk a little bit about that. But let's take a step back. How was it in the beginning? I remember once we met, I think it was in London about two years ago, you told me that, "Oh I caught the longevity virus." How is it switching and telling all these people? "Oh, I'm no longer just going to manage private equity, I want to set up a longevity fund." And what made you catch the longevity virus, or get interested and so excited about the field?
Sergey Young: (09:42)
Yeah. Well unfortunately I would say, we all start to develop interest into healthy living once we hit our own barrier, our own obstacle, we receive a wake up call. So I had two and they both on the personal side. The lung cancer case with my father back in 2005, he survived, but the quality of his life is never recovered. Or, I had, well back in 2014, I had my own health case. So I had high cholesterol in my blood. This is not rare, like 40, statistically actually, 40% of the people suffer from that around the world. But I've been offered to take study in this special class of drugs every day until the rest of my life, and I was not a big fan of this idea.
Sergey Young: (10:35)
So I started to experiment how I can achieve the same result, improve my health without necessarily taking medication every day. And that's it. And then the final thing, I started to push a lot of my friends and people who I know to do medical checkups, few of them discovered early stage cancer, and these days, unlike 20 years ago when cancer was kiss of death, your recovery rates, if you do a really early diagnostic of cancer can be as high as 95, even 100%, depending on the cancer type. So they all call me up and say, "Sergey, you saved my life, literally, thanks for pushing me to do this checkup, I owe you." And once you receive a few of calls like this, you're on the hook. You know I mean, you're just like, I have a bigger mission in life, I can change so many lives, and this is how this whole thing started.
Dina Radenkovic: (11:36)
Fascinating. Yeah, it's true with the new diagnostics, and you actually touched upon that in your book is that almost every cancer can be curable if discovered early enough. Okay, and then I guess, moving forward, you set up the fund, it was 100 million fund, and now we understand why it was that number and how you structure your investment. And you mentioned you already had 16 investments, a lot of them have done extremely well, I think the field has done a lot better than a lot of the skeptics thought initially. Could you tell us a bit more, you mentioned that it was obviously a very early field. And how do you pick your investments, you went for some really successful biotech firms. Tell us a bit more about that. You mentioned they all need to have a side effect to extend life expectancy, how do you assess that?
Dina Radenkovic: (12:24)
Because a lot of the companies that are get incorporated in longevity, almost feel like they need to mask as an oncology, like cancer company or a more traditional biotech because of all the implications that we have in the field of longevity. FDA does not recognize aging as a disease, they don't want to mention ... position themselves as to focus. The field is just getting moving. So. how are you picking, I guess, kind of being a pioneer and a very early stage fund with an extremely successful track record?
Sergey Young: (12:57)
Yeah. So what we've done, I mean, all you need to do is just look at statistics like, what are the reasons for death for the age 50 plus? And four killer monster diseases which are responsible for 90% of deaths after age of 50 are cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases. And the last one is actually breaking you. We still don't know what we don't know about dementia and scammers, et cetera. But for the rest of, for like three out of four, we have really good knowledge of like, what are the mechanism and root cause of these diseases and how we can treat them? So again, I mean just looking at the typical biotech or medical devices company, and you put it in a context of current mortality statistics, and exactly ... because, what is available to us today is, and a whole life extension strategy for the world in the last 100 years was eliminating early death.
Sergey Young: (14:09)
That's why if we look at this statistic, the life expectancy, lifespan, average lifespan on earth increased by two times. Somewhere from 40 to like 75 in the last 100 years. And this is not that we started to live longer, it was more about we were eliminating early death. Specifically like infant death or some other earlier stages of our life. But the maximum lifespan on earth was always the same. It was somewhere around 120 years, it is actually 122 thanks to this beautiful French woman who died 20 years ago. But, so what we doing is like 30% of our capital is invested into something which is relevant right now, like early diagnostic of cancer, or affordable medical diagnostic devices, or wearables.
Sergey Young: (15:12)
This is companies like Freenome, who have portfolio of cancers and use our blood tests to identify risk of colon cancer. This is super important because, in today's world to identify whether you have colon cancer risk or not, you need to do colonoscopy, and it's invasive, it's expensive, people hate that. I was delayed in my procedure for like two years, and I'm longevity enthusiast. So right now it's just, a few $100 and your blood sample and it's the same efficiency like the old invasive procedure. Or, affordable and accessible ultrasound devices. They're the size of our smartphone, the company called Echo Imaging that we invested in. This device costs like $2,000 while ultrasound device in the hospital next door is somewhere around between 100 and $200,000.
Sergey Young: (16:11)
It has the same efficiency, you scan, the holds a number of scans going to cloud, and then it's artificial intelligence pre analyze that before nurse or doctor can have access to the outcome of your ultrasound. So this is like 30% of our fund, like what we can do today. And 70% our fund is dedicated to what I call in the book neo horizon of longevity. This is the discoveries in science and breakthroughs in technology, which going to be available to us in the next five, 10, 15 years. So that's very important actually, to stay healthy now, because you need to stay on longevity breech, like Ray Kurzweil told us, for another 10, 15 years for your body and mind to be worth extending this resource in 10 years from now.
Sergey Young: (17:01)
But if you look at neo horizon of longevity, we're looking at genetic engine therapy. We're looking at regenerative medicine, in particular to organ regeneration, we all will have an ability to regenerate our organs, or to replace our organs if you want to imply here like an old car metaphor when you can replace certain parts and the life ... and the car extend its lifespan if you want. And some of this is in the field of drug discovery and drug development. I do believe that in 10 years from now, we're going to have a new special kind of drugs, which are longevity drugs or age reversal drugs, they're going to fight aging processes inside our body or in our DNA, unlike drugs that we have today which are very specific to one particular disease.
Sergey Young: (17:56)
So we trying to diversify portfolio like LVF One will have at least 20 to 25 companies in our portfolio, we right in the end of our investment period, just another 12 month remain. And literally this week, we just closed the first 100 million for LVF Two. We have a lot of interest from our LPs, from a lot of new investors so we raising the next fund, and we already completed the first call for that. So we have another 12 months to raise another 100 million for LVF Two as well. And probably final comment that, it's very tempting to look for one silver bullet solution to human health and longevity. And if you use your logic, if this would be possible, then it's either Mother Nature in the form of evolution or, talented human brains in form of science would have found a solution already.
Sergey Young: (19:00)
So it's not a silver bullet, it's going to be combination of the things that we need to influence to live longer, healthier and happier life. Well that's why a certain degree of diversification inside our portfolio in terms of technologies, geographies, different classes, is helpful.
Dina Radenkovic: (19:18)
Fascinating. Well, I'm a medical doctor by background and I certainly believe that health is very complex, and that it can ... I often get asked like, "What is going to be the single pill that's going to help us live longer, happy to 200 years?" And I tell them well, it might be a bit more complex. But you've touched upon so many things. First, congratulations on the fund and we're very happy that it's going well, your work really means a lot in the field. But you mentioned so many topics that we could just go and dive deeper. One of the first things you mentioned is this advanced diagnostics. And I think before we go and talk about the new test and the diagnostic kits, I think everyone is interested to see what did you do?
Dina Radenkovic: (20:04)
You mentioned that you were deferring your colonoscopy, you're a pioneer in this space, you're an advocate. And so, what is your longevity plan? What tests do you do? How do you optimize your own health?
Sergey Young: (20:17)
So, I'll tell you about five, our five main longevity choices. Like longevity which I put in, I call it five longevity buckets. But there's more information in the book, it's called bonus chapter, who wants to live forever quoting Freddie Mercury song, but it's about 10 things that I do, and actually the last, the bonus chapter is twice as long as any other chapter in the book. So it's just a lot of information. And this is the fascinating thing, this is why I started to do longevity and longevity investments, exactly for this moment when people try to change something now, rather than waiting for 10 years to become a healthy and happy version of themselves.
Sergey Young: (21:03)
So five buckets. One, when I have 30 seconds on longevity, I just push people to do their medical checkups every year. And I always say, this is the most important day of your life every year, as we discuss previous discussion, my wife has a little bit different view of what is the most important day within the year. But, otherwise, I'm doing my checkup every year, so I choose the place in California in San Diego, it's a human longevity center set up by Peter Diamandis, Craig Venter, so many great minds, but you can do a checkup in the hospital next door. It's not rocket science. And it's pretty standard procedure, just make sure they address to the maximum extent possible cancer, heart disease, diabetes risk. So that's your brief, this is the type of discussion you need to have with your doctor.
Sergey Young: (21:59)
And, well that's amazing, we have a lot of technology to help you to live longer, we just need to be mindful and preventive and proactive about your health race. So that's one, second piece is, I call it passive longevity award, don't do stupid things like tobacco smoking is just like, statistically, minus 10 years from your lifespan. Using seat belts in all occasions is plus two years to your life. What else? I just got a letter from my very good friend from California, she's amazing woman, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur. So she's going to climb the mountain called K2. And this is the most dangerous mountain in the world, mortality rate is 25%.
Sergey Young: (22:47)
And I couldn't really explain that, right? Like Russian Roulette 100 or 200 years ago was six, sorry, 17% risk of dying from the first shot. But she took a risk which is much harder than this crazy exercise. So it is about responsible behavior. So the third piece is about diet. And, there's a lot of disagreement in the academic space, what actually extends your life, but there's only one agreement, reducing the caloric intensity of, or like a number of calories that you take every day by 15 to 25%, going to extend the healthy portion of your life by three, five or seven years. That's it. Well that's amazing. I mean obviously it's easier to say than to do, so my life hacks, I eat a lot of vegetables because even if I have a half of my table full of vegetables here today for the dinner, they so intense in terms of calories, so this is great.
Sergey Young: (23:56)
And it's not a lot of harm you can do to your body and mind with vegetables. And obviously it's about controlling the quality of your meat and fish. And I'm avoiding industrial version of meat and fish, it's going to be a wild fish or organic meats, so this is extremely important. Industrial meat got certain substances that you want to avoid after like certain concentration like antibiotics, growth hormones, equally bacterias. I think it was statistics for US when 70% of antibiotics is consumed by animal and by fish on the farms. Well that's ridiculous. And I do fasting, but I do a very radical version of fasting, it's 36 hours, Monday evening to Wednesday morning.
Sergey Young: (24:46)
You don't need to go that far, but just a window fasting, like consume all your food within the day, within the like six hours interval or eight hours interval, I think would do fine as well. So that's like bucket number three, diet. Four is about physical activity. We have this binary mentality or physical activity so I'm either doing like iron man or iron woman, or I'm just sitting in my home and watching football. And we don't need to be that binary. Just use your wearable, whether it's Apple Watch, Fitbit, Whoop, Garmin, it doesn't matter. Count your 10,000 steps today, because you can integrate walking into the to many activities that you do, and that's it. This is like two thirds of your physical activity agenda for the day. And on top of that, if you like yoga, you can add stretching, you can add cardio, weightlifting, whatever you like.
Sergey Young: (25:46)
And the fifth is, I call it peace of mind. And every time we talk about health, we talk about physical health. While I think the mental aspect of that is sometimes much more important. I don't want to live longer or not if I'm not healthy and if I'm not happy. So it's sleep, and my rule is eight hours in the bed, which is seven hours of sleep, and I use wearing, some of the wearables. I have plenty of wearables. Like I have glucose monitor here, all of this. I'm recreating internet of body, similar to Internet of Things and I'm an example of that. So sleep, meditation and mindfulness, because we need to decrease the level of cortisol in our blood, our body and mind were never created by the God and Mother Nature to handle all the stress that we have around us so we need just to be decreasing the cortisol, dangerous stress hormone in blood.
Sergey Young: (26:52)
And then finally, it's about sense of purpose. If you think about spiritual leaders and people who have a big mission, or a big dream in life, they always look younger, they live longer, they're more happier, so even statistically they're going to live plus five, plus seven years and they're going to enjoy the life. So it's having sense of purpose, sharing the best of you with the world, helping other people to succeed, and giving more than you take is important as well. So that's my five longevity buckets.
Dina Radenkovic: (27:28)
Wow, fascinating Sergey. Well I'm glad that you, I mean, you definitely have this big mission so it's helping one billion people live longer. And it's really exciting to people now who have that all in this big, last chapter of the book so they can find and make their own longevity practices. Certainly agree that with this kind of five buckets or however you structure it, people will live long enough in order to live longer, to wait for the new therapies, which are the ones that we've discussed like gene therapy, and epigenetic changes, and other anti aging interventions that are coming up. But I guess the one thing that might be interesting to this class, and I think you mentioned it in your book, and it's still a bit of a controversial issue, is the data that is collected by the wearables, and the data that is collected by diagnostics.
Dina Radenkovic: (28:17)
And as we convince people to switch from a reactive to proactive medicine that, their day of medical testing is the most important day and the happiest day of their life, because they're doing something very useful for themselves, we're collecting data. We both have a continuous glucose monitor on right now, we can compare our blood sugar, see how you're responding even to this conversation. But you mentioned an interesting concept that, health or data privacy will have a fight and health will win. What are the implications of this data collection? And how do we maximize the use of that data without breaking the barriers that people have about just confidentiality of their healthcare data that has, to be honest, a bit prevented organizations from all over the world from collaborating, working with each other in sharing insights?
Sergey Young: (29:16)
Yeah. Well this is a huge problem, and this is the biggest opportunity that we have in terms of changing the regulation so people are not afraid to share their health data. Because what drives your skepticism about this is the sense and fear of expected inequality when you have any kind of job conversation, or you you're trying to buy insurance. Well, that's it, this can be easy to regulated. But obviously the value of health data stored in one place, and where artificial intelligence and human intelligence can work with that, is enormous. And for some of the countries it's going to be a source of competitive advantage.
Sergey Young: (29:59)
Well, this was one of my key messages in UK Parliament. UK had this enormous opportunity to leverage the data of its citizen, obviously in a way which respect their privacy for the benefit of the nation, and the benefit of humanity. And the same thing is happening in Dubai, in Singapore, not necessarily in the US. Well, the problem is US, and I say it with a lot of love, right? US has the most inefficient and most expensive health care system in the world. We in US spend 18% of our GDP on health care. Think about UK, it's 8%, or Singapore, this is 5% of GDP. And they have far better results in terms of increasing lifespan. In fact pre COVID. Last five years pre COVID in US, the average lifespan has been decreasing in three years out of five.
Sergey Young: (30:58)
Well that's ridiculous for a developed country of this size, and the level of this success and the history. So we need to change this as well. And again, we don't need to be binary about this whole thing. And right now we really binary like, health data in hands of big tech or healthcare authorities, no. But you know what's on the other extreme? Right now, in some of the healthcare systems, 60 to 70% of data exchange is done through fax machines. Guys, when was the last time you actually seen fax machine? Are you okay with your data, your health data is transferred through faxes?
Dina Radenkovic: (31:43)
Yeah.
Sergey Young: (31:43)
No, I'm not we just under leveraged this whole thing. Like, when was the last time you was trying to collect all your health file to have intelligent discussion with your doctor? You would need to come back to any cleaning and every doctor you see, and I'm trying to make a paper copy. I have these two big files in my offices because I still don't have one electronic health record, which collects my health data even for the last 10 years. So I'm not saying we need to be really radical and transparent about this whole thing but, what I'm saying, we don't need to be so old style about exchanging the health data through fax machines.
Dina Radenkovic: (32:27)
Yeah, fascinating. I mean there's certainly a lot of implications there but I absolutely believe that we could derive so much from the data, and if we could show and demonstrate to people that their health and their lives would improve, they would give the data away for an improved service and in care facility.
Sergey Young: (32:45)
Yeah, just one other comment. So when you think about healthcare today, what are the kind of players that comes to your mind? It's hospitals, insurance companies, big Pharma as well. In 10 years time, I do believe that the largest healthcare companies on earth are going to be called Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. If we will not do this through regulatory means, just by changing our policies and educating the public, and changing healthcare system, change will not come from old players doing new things, change will come from new players, disrupting the whole old system. Well that's why Apple is, and there's so many big tech companies, over investing in healthcare. Just, I think it was last year Morgan Stanley did a report saying, "Apple can do up to 50% of its revenue by the end of this decade from healthcare."
Sergey Young: (33:40)
And watch out Apple, they have a history of disrupting so many spaces, so the same change can come from Apple. And Apple Watch and so many other wearables are becoming our personalized healthcare device. It's not helping me to integrate with my WhatsApp, or count 10,000 steps a day, they would add couple of features in the next two years, and this is going to be 95% of my health data that I need to monitor every day. That's amazing opportunity but also, I would like for us to use this opportunity to the set of changes on the regulatory front, and in terms of changing the public ethics and social contracts for the benefit of everyone, rather than outsourcing this whole thing to Apple, or to Google, or to Microsoft, and then obviously enjoying this whole thing, but paying a lot of money to the big tech.
Dina Radenkovic: (34:44)
Yeah. And I think there's certainly space for new companies in this field, there's healthcare-
Sergey Young: (34:48)
Oh yeah.
Dina Radenkovic: (34:49)
... from consumerism, from paternalism, they can drive, and I think both the work we do on the investing side is really designed to support new companies disrupting the space. But I fully agree that, with the new connected devices we'll be able to do a lot more. And I like your, I mean people say futuristic, but I would like to say it's realistic, evidence based approach of the healthcare at home in the future. Perhaps you could give us a bit of an overview. I had a similar dream and people say it's science fiction, but I'm saying it's reality very soon that, you would wake up and you would have your medical devices in your home, and you would figure out what's the exact dose of vitamins and nutrients you need to take in the day. And then you're sleep monitored and you've already mentioned some of the few devices that you have, but they're advancing.
Dina Radenkovic: (35:43)
So, hopefully in a few years, you don't even need to go to the hospital, only for acute emergencies. So, I think there's a lot to do about that. And I think you actually talk about it in the book as well, and in a very illustrative way.
Sergey Young: (35:57)
It is yeah. So I have two chapters in the end, right before the bonus chapter, like what you can do today. For me this is the most important part of the book. But, so one describes our day in 30 to 50 years from now, so I'm going to define it. But the other chapter, the final chapter of the book is also important, it's called morality of immortality. There's so many ethical trade offs that we need to solve before we embrace the idea of radical longevity in this world. It's almost like, I just did a TEDx talk on that, again, it's called morality of immortality.
Sergey Young: (36:30)
And what I say, we have created the science and technology to extend our life, but we still haven't created the life that we want to extend. So that's important. So I'm going to be telling you all these beautiful things about human avatars in a minute, but we need to understand that, we need to start the global conversation about the future of the world, how we need to change that, in terms of closing the inequality gap, in terms of adjusting our social norms and social contracts like marriage, career, our approach to life. Or in terms of just resetting our relationship with Mother Nature. Right now, I mean you think you'll leave like 75 or 85 years, you can be irresponsible about your ecological trade offs.
Sergey Young: (37:23)
But in the future, when we all live radically longer, we're going to face the consequences of our own actions. So we need to sort it out today. Well, this was the ethical side, and I actually do believe, in 20 years from now, the biggest obstacles to use all these beautiful technologies, it's not going to be science, it's not going to be technology, it's going to be ethics and regulation. So, this is about the ethical side of it. So then, well let's take a look at the next 20 to 30 years. So how the world of medicine in our life will change. Number one, we will have a proven ability and very safe tools to modify our genes.
Sergey Young: (38:04)
So we can eliminate a lot of diseases, we can fight a lot of diseases and therefore increase our lifespan. So that's pretty clear. We're going to help people who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases to leave their highest quality life, because of the integration between human brain and artificial intelligence. And we people, we tend to be binary, it's either black or white, one or zero, so I don't think it's going to be either artificial intelligence or human intelligence, we're going to coexist, and it's all going to be very complimentary. So human brain, AI integration going to be essential part of it. We were looking at different non invasive interfaces but, seems to me that Elon Musk has his own way of building Neuralink and using actually invasive technology of electrodes to combine you with computer power.
Sergey Young: (38:59)
And this is not the last time that he was right and I was wrong, so I'm not make a prediction on what technology will win. So what else? We're going to be having options of using human avatars technologies, and actually my resolution for next year is to create the virtual avatar of Sergey Young. Because I want to change one billion lives so I need more guys like me participating in a conference, co-hosting ask me anything events, doing a lot of different things. And in 20 to 30 years from now, it's going to be okay to have a human avatar. I still don't know whether it's going to be a robotic avatar, and I actually interviewed the man who invented this whole concept back in 1980, he is Professor Susumu Tachi from Kyoto University.
Sergey Young: (39:55)
And she still call it telexistence, but we call it human avatars. So it's either going to be robotic on virtual avatar, and it's not going to be that scary, you will have an opportunity to replicate yourself in a virtual world in a controlled manner, and therefore leveraging up your efficiency, and fulfill more dreams and fulfill your mission in life. Similar to the concept of Internet of Things, it's going to be the concept of internet of bodies, we all going to be interconnected. We interconnected today anyway, but through very inefficient interfaces. So I'm using my eyes, my fingers to type the messages, my ears to listen but, it's all going to be seamless, we're going to be full of sensors.
Sergey Young: (40:45)
I'm full of sensors today anyway. But like, for the rest of the world, we can monitor ourselves. If I'm taking enormous care about my own car, I should take the same level of care, use a lot of sensors and technology to manage my most important tool, right, my body and my mind. So this is what going to happen. And we're going to have a completely new category of drugs in 20 to 30 years from now, which going to be drugs, which tackle aging at its core, rather than just trying to eliminate disease one by one. So that's just the view of the future, the picture of the future that I have. But guys you need to be careful, I'm always over optimistic, do we need to have a little bit of skeptical voices around this as well. So I'm totally aware of that.
Dina Radenkovic: (41:42)
Wow Sergey, well, again, so many points, I just want to say first that, we are really excited to be the first people to interview your avatar here at SALT so book us in straightaway, I want to be one of the first people doing that. But for sure, and I think what you mentioned is a really important topic. And Eric Topol was discussing it in his book, Deep Medicine about two years ago that actually, technology will no longer be a limiting step, but it used to be. Now we're there, we're kind of using the technology to solve problems in biology. But what will be a problem will be doctors who will ... like empathy. How do we empower the human connection?
Dina Radenkovic: (42:25)
And then the one aspect that you mentioned is this morality or immortality? And often when people ask you and you say, you work in the field of longevity, people say, "But we already have climate change and there's so many disasters, and a big population for this planet, why would we want to live longer?" They think of it as a resource limited, closed concept. So when you say that you want to extend life for at least one billion people to live to 200 years, and you've written a chapter, and you have a statistical approach that will, statistically likely to give effect. How do you deal with that? And how do you ensure and, what are the other things that we need to address? Like cellular agriculture, climate change, and in what ways so that we can ensure that this growth in human health and longevity is sustainable?
Dina Radenkovic: (43:22)
The other concept that you mentioned that I would like you to elaborate on is this idea of, when you live longer, you tend to optimize for longer term goals, this kind of stems from the Stanford socioeconomic selectivity theory of aging, right? That if we know that we're going to live only for the next 10 years, we won't care about the planet, we just try to consume all the resources. But if we know that we have 100 years left, we would trying to plan more carefully. So, how do you think we can use longevity to actually drive that innovation that is needed to make it increase the lifespan more sustainable or beneficial for the planet as well? And how do you address, because I'm sure you get similar questions.
Sergey Young: (44:01)
Yeah. So, well I do believe longevity and fighting aging processes inside our body can be one of the few unifying themes for the nations and countries, and for the world. Because inequality gap is increasing all the time, and I do believe the affordable and accessible version of healthcare is something that can unite. It's almost like part of your universal basic rights, or income, or the services mix that you you need to receive. So, few things, I obviously receive these comments a lot, so I've developed my own way to respond to that. Number one, I'm not particularly concerned about overpopulation of the planet. Because if you look at any sensible research on where we going with overpopulation, our reproductive rates in all the continents, beside African are well below two for every female.
Sergey Young: (45:05)
So, if you look at the mathematical model of population of the planet, using the status quo like where we are today, the population of the planet going to increase to 10 or 11 billion by the year 2050, and then it's going to decline to eight billion in the end of the century. China will lose 600 million people from its population, if China will not address that. Going down from 1.4 billion to 800 million. And the same for majority of countries in the world. So it's not like we have an option to extend our lives, it's our obligation, and a need to respond to this risk of decreasing population of earth, so that's number one. Number two, I'm not really concerned about resources side and my very good friend Peter Diamandis is probably the best example of speaking about this topics.
Sergey Young: (46:08)
This is just like resource limitation is our limiting beliefs, and look at the cost of renewable energy, and it's just always declining, or the cost of computer power. Or, well let's talk about food. Before we go into different like a vertical agriculture, or cell based illiberal meat, 45% of food goes to waste in US every day. From our supermarkets, from our table, from our households as well, 45%. We live in a abundant world, we just not really smart about how we using these resources. So that's important as well. So I do believe, I'm not really concerned about resources, but I do concern about the ethics of the society. I just don't think we ready for the questions that we're facing. And again, life extension and increasing the lifespan, it's happening whether you want it or not, we doubled our lifespan in the last 100 years on earth.
Sergey Young: (47:17)
And this trend will continue. And then it's up to you, whether you're waiting for the next 20 to 30 years, or you thoughtful and proactive and preventive about this whole thing, and you trying to respond to a lot of basic questions that all people ask, "How my life will change?" Will it be several beautiful mini lives? Or, what will have happen to my career? Can I have as many careers as decades in my life? Or what will happen to marriage? Will we switch to more kids raising partnerships? Two thirds of the families go to divorce today in the first three, five or seven years of their life, depending on the country which you look at. So we need to solve this problems anyway, it's not like some crazy guys arrive with the magic pill to extend our life and then we have all this disaster.
Sergey Young: (48:12)
We already have this disaster, we need to sort it out and longevity technologists and the progress in the science and technology of longevity is a great opportunity to start that conversation and our thinking process on that.
Dina Radenkovic: (48:27)
Yeah I actually like your response, I like that longevity could serve as a solution, or at least a driving force to address some of the needs and the problems that we already face, and you're right there are so many problems to address and hopefully living longer and healthier and happier will serve as some engine to help us power through these issues. And I guess Sergey just to kind of wrap up, because we could talk for-
Sergey Young: (48:56)
Yeah, forever.
Dina Radenkovic: (48:56)
... 10 hours and even longer, 200 years.
Sergey Young: (49:01)
Look I'm planning [crosstalk 00:49:01] to live 200 years so I have plenty of time.
Dina Radenkovic: (49:05)
Well I'm joining your longevity club, okay, and want to hang with the avatar for sure. So what does, coming up, you mentioned you have a new ... your fund, the portfolio has been growing incredibly well, obviously the book launch is in August, can you give us a bit of an update of the things that you're working on, excited about, you're preparing for SALT New York, covering all these ideas and advances in this longevity programmable biology space. Is there anything that-
Sergey Young: (49:34)
Yeah so what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to build awareness about the opportunities in longevity field for as many people as possible. So I just launched my longevity video academy. And and for someone who pre orders the book, if you go to sergeyyoung.com, you can pre order the book and you can have access to this academy. As well as like 12 videos, 10 minutes each, talking about different aspects of longevity and this beautiful today and beautiful tomorrow that we all developing. I've just done a, as I said, TEDx talk on morality of immortality, so this is going to be published very soon. I'm fascinated by the ethical dilemmas and trade offs that we all need to solve for that. Again my resolution for the next year is to build a virtual avatar.
Sergey Young: (50:23)
We're going to be working as a couple, together like real me and virtual me for the next few months until he will absorb all my intelligence and can replace me, and I can double down in effort on my mission with this. I'm looking for the country to change in the next 12 months because, if you want to change your health you have like three options, one you can try to do it on your own basis, and we are really lazy on discipline as a species. Or you can work with corporation, or you can work with a government to change the whole employee base habits, or the whole kind of nation, and implement and create longevity enabling environment in certain corporate environment, or in certain country.
Sergey Young: (51:16)
So I'm in discussion with few countries and one state in US, to help them to implement this, well I call it longevity at work because I've done it with few huge corporations all over the world. The largest project I've done was changing 300,000 peoples life. It was employee base of one of the largest financial institutions in 20 plus countries. And again, this is all pro bono, I'm not really taking any money from it. But it's fascinating how you can create a longevity bubble for so many people, and they all have an opportunity to live longer, healthier and happier life. Obviously investing in a essential part, I love to support the field with the money, with our scientific knowledge, rather than just making the public statements.
Sergey Young: (52:13)
And I do hope that early next day we can launch a age reversal XPRIZE, this pro bono technological competition. We expecting two, three, 400 different teams from 50 plus countries to fly, like who can reverse aging. And we just done the largest XPRIZE competition in the history of XPRIZE foundation with Elon Musk for $100 million, to remove carbon from the atmosphere and create the minimum viable products. It's $100 million price for this pro bono competition. So I'm trying to replicate the success. And we're going to launch another hopefully $100 million prize early next year. So then a lot of beautiful minds from scientific and entrepreneurial and technological background can compete and provide solution for aging, and therefore fighting all this killer disease.
Dina Radenkovic: (53:07)
Well, fascinating. And I'm really excited about the XPRIZE, I'll hold you on to that because, we do want a lot of young scientists and people from all over the world using all their talent to fight aging. And we'll wait to hear the announcement, it's going to be like bitcoin in El Salvador, right? That we give this country that is incorporating aging with Sergey Young. So, exciting to hear what's coming up. Thank you for sharing all the ... everything you're up to Sergey, it's incredibly inspiring. You definitely getting 10 years of extra life there in terms of happiness and sense of purpose. You've inspired me as well, I think you've inspired everyone listening.
Dina Radenkovic: (53:49)
It's really exciting to have you. I can't wait to get the hard copy of the book. I think everyone will try to get it. I think we're also having it in our physical event as well as, and in New York coming up in September. And, thank you once again for your time today. This is brilliant.
Sergey Young: (54:06)
Thank you. Thank you. If I can have like a one minute closing thought. Think about this, we outsource our health decisions to so many parties, to big foot, to government, to healthcare providers, to insurance companies. And, I do think we need to take back control and responsibility for our own health, we need to be a part of this conversation. And specifically today, post COVID, I think it was a wake up call for all of us. So, again, it's time to take responsibility for our own health. And we are here to help you stay healthy and happy.
John Darsie: (54:45)
Love it. Thank you, Dr. Dina for leading the conversation. Thank you Sergey for joining us on SALT talks. And thank you everybody for tuning into today's SALT talk with Sergey Young, one of the foremost experts in longevity. He has a great new book coming out that we're excited to give out to our attendees at the SALT conference in September. It's called The Science and Technology of Growing Young. So just another incentive for you to show up to the Javits Center expansion in September here in New York. But just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk, or any of our previous SALT talks, you can access them on our website on demand at salt.org/talks.
John Darsie: (55:18)
We post all the transcripts and show notes there as well, so a great resource if you're looking to learn about a variety of different issues that we cover. And also on our YouTube channel, which is called SALT Tube. We're also on social media, Twitter is where we're most active @SALTconference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook as well. On behalf of Dr. Dina and the entire SALT team, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT talks for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.