What If We Never Age? - William Blair Ep. 49
What would it cost to live forever? In this episode of The Active Share, Hugo is joined by Dr. Greg Bailey, co-founder and executive chairman of Juvenescence, for an in-depth discussion about the science of aging, the societal and economic impacts of extended lifespans, and how advancements in biotech are paving the way for longer, and healthier, lives.
Transcript
Hugo Scott-Gall: Welcome to The Active Share podcast that explores less obvious investing insights in a world that’s always changing. I’m your host, Hugo Scott-Gall. Today, I am very pleased to welcome Dr. Greg Bailey, co-founder and executive chairman of Juvenescence. Dr. Bailey is a physician, financier, and biotech entrepreneur, passionate about longevity and the science of aging. In his career, he has co-founded Ascent Healthcare Solutions, played a key role in the founding and financing of Medivation, which was acquired by Pfizer, and been involved in ventures like Biohaven Pharmaceuticals and Portage Biotech.
The companies he’s been involved with have created $25 billion of value through various biotech mergers and acquisitions, completed five successful exits, three public listings, and two successful Phase 3 drug trials. Dr. Bailey, Welcome to The Active Share.
Dr. Greg Bailey: Thank you very much, Hugo, for having me.
Hugo Scott-Gall: In a minute, you’re going to tell us the secret to eternal life.
Dr. Greg Bailey: No pressure.
Hugo Scott-Gall: No pressure. But big reveal that I think pretty much everyone wants to know the answer to. Before we get there, let’s talk about you and your journey. You started out as a physician working in what the U.K. would call accident and emergency. And now, you’re a biotech entrepreneur with a long list of illustrious achievements trying to solve aging. How did you start there and how did you get to here?
Dr. Greg Bailey: I guess I’ve always had a bit of an entrepreneurial aspect. And if you’re doing A and E or emergency medicine—that’s what it’s called in North America—you are only allowed to work a certain number of hours. And you graduate medical school, you’re a workaholic. So, you’re allowed to do 40 hours and that still means there’s 128 hours left to do. So, I started looking at other opportunities, began syndicating real estate to doctors in Toronto, which is where I’m from, and gradually got a name as a doctor—with a little bit of business acumen. So, I was headhunted to work on two biotech ventures. And that was the slippery slope.
Hugo Scott-Gall: You’ve ended up on aging. Why did you hone in because you had currently gotten wrong some of the drugs you’ve worked and been involved with. I think the No. 1 selling prostate cancer drug, the No. 1 migraine drug. So those are not—well, they help with aging, but that’s not necessarily where you are now. How do you alight on how to extend people’s healthy lives, their lifespan?
Dr. Greg Bailey: So, my personal journey actually began meeting a gentleman named Luigi Fontana, who was one of the top doctors in the world for caloric restriction. And what we knew was caloric restriction— we’re starting to begin to talk about the secrets of life. So, pay attention to your audience. That will allow you to live longer, healthy. It’s 1800 calories for men, 1200 calories for women. And so, I always thought that was very interesting. And then the next year, I was at an event and Valter Longo presented. Valter said, “You don’t have to chronic caloric restriction—1800 calories and 1200 calories.”
He said that if you once every month if you’re overweight, once every three months if you’re normal weight, and once every six months—and Valter, I apologize if those numbers have changed— five days 800 calories, that you literally reset your body. And the hypothesis that my scientists have generated is that it sort of tricks your body into thinking it’s going to a fasting state. And it begins to process energy in a different way, which spurs an engine in your cell called mitochondria. We don’t know that. That’s just a theory. But that this process literally has a similar effect to caloric restriction. And that process and that diet has become very well known. Valter sells it under the name Prolong.
So, that was interesting. So, caloric restriction, intermittent fasting—intriguing. This is like 14, 15 years ago. Then I bumped into Peter Attia. And Peter and I were talking about diet and one of the aspects that your body goes insulin resistant around 45, 50 years of age, plus or minus five years. And this is your different organs, which means that the organ can no longer process sugar properly causing the sugar to go sky high in your brain, in your heart, in your muscles. We hypothesized at that time that that may be a Type 3 diabetes—that there’s really high sugar in your brain leads to one of the forms of Alzheimer’s disease. So, you could modify this and then Walter Bortz, head of gerontology at Stanford —bumped into him—former head—and he said that he felt that if you’re fit, you mentally and physically decline at half a percent a year, unfit, two percent a year. That’s a heck of a delta. Then I thought, Hugo, there’s nothing magical about caloric restriction. There’s nothing magical about changing how your body deals with blood sugar or the sugar content or exercise. Must be working on a cellular level. And then I began to see all the studies that were coming out. Scientists were beginning to understand the pathways that cause your cells to age.
And the one thing I know about scientists—if they can see the pathways, they will figure out how to tinker with them. So, I began to work with my two business partners and said, “This is coming. This is going to be a huge thing.” Last point was it almost felt like a responsibility. I’ve been very fortunate, as you mentioned in the prologue, in that the companies I’ve dealt with have raised a lot of money, been very successful. And I thought, “This nascent industry is going to struggle for credibility and to raise money. And so, it’s going to take a little time getting the money and attracting the right people.” And it felt like a responsibility, candidly, for myself and my partners to try and build something.
‘Cause we thought, “We can raise money and we can attract great people to this opportunity to change the healthy trajectory of the world—everyone.”
Hugo Scott-Gall: So, I get it. Right? And for a lot of people, how much would they pay to live longer? But more importantly, how much would they pay to live healthier? So, if progress is about solving problems, this is clearly a big, big problem. If you are a person who scores highly on fitness—those annoying people who sleep for at least eight hours a night, and sleep and never get stressed and has fantastic nutrition, only drinks water. Is that enough? Is that going to help you live a long time and live healthy? Or do you need more than that? Is that where medicine comes in?
So, the answer can lie within us if we get all those things right. But very, very few people do. And they’re probably very boring if you meet them. So, is it those key things that natural—or is it actually you need something else? Can you talk a bit about those things? I listed fitness, sleep, stress, and nutrition. But I think you’re going to say that fitness is the real gold.
Dr. Greg Bailey: It’s the biggie. So, and I’ll steal this from Peter Attia. You can start off flying at 10,000 ft, and then you begin to decline starting at age 60, 70. And then you end. The flight ends. Or if you’re 30,000 ft, you just push that whole curve out. So, the lifestyle things push the curve out. So, if your blood pressure is under control, you’re not smoking, your nutrition is good, you’re fit, you’re sleeping, you literally start at a much higher point when there’s the aging decline.
But the extraordinary thing is—for your audience—is the aspect that we’re beginning to understand why your body declines, what pathways are involved with that, and how to modify those pathways. So, you will live longer healthy by doing the things that you’ve just mentioned, Hugo. But to really push to 120, 150 and being healthy, it’s a whole different thing. So, when we started the company, there was a group that challenged me and they said, “What do you want Juvenescence,”—that’s the name of my company—“to be in 10 years?” And they said, “By the way, do you want to guess what Uber said?” And I said, “Rideshare?”
And they said, “No. They want to be the moving company. They want to move everything. They want to move you. They want to move your food. They want to do it by plane, helicopter.” I said, “Well, then we want to be the aging company.” And so, if I’m really going to solve for aging, I have to figure out Alzheimer’s because nobody wants to live to 150 if the last 60 years of their life they have Alzheimer’s. Nobody wants to be in a wheelchair for the last 60 years of their life. So, how do I regenerate tissues? How do I slow cellular aging? You have to do this multi-factorial thing. And so, Juvenescence is trying to address all of those.
Our scientists were able to cut off the limb of a living entity and regrow that limb. It was in a frog. And they’ve subsequently begun to do it in a mouse, which is a mammal like us. And science fiction is becoming science. That’s just extraordinary. So, you hurt your knee skiing and we may be able to help you with the damage. Or if your liver begins to fail, we may be able to regrow— not give you a liver. We give you your liver. Then I tell people, “This can happen so much faster than you think.” So, it’ll be all of these elements to answer your question.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah. So, maybe go a step back. So, the reason we age is what? Even if you do all the things. Even if you’re the sort of perfect person I described, you’re still going to age and the reason you’re aging is what?
Dr. Greg Bailey: They have what are called the hallmarks of aging. Things that just change within your body. The ability to not clear toxic materials the way you used to. I talked about the mitochondria. The engine of the cell begins to falter, and I’ll explain why that is. And so the materials—they’re just not cleaning. It’s called autophagy. There’s mitochondrial. The DNA begins to fracture. So depending on who you read, some people have 15 hallmarks of aging. Some people have eight. But just to take mitochondria as an example because it’s a biggie. Because the minute the mitochondria, which gives your cells energy, is gone the cell dies. And it’s, to me, an easy way to understand it.
It’s like Hugo, if you have a fireplace in your house and you don’t clean the chimney, eventually the more logs you burn it will close the chimney and the fireplace will cease to work. As your cells begin to use energy, they create negative react—they’re called reactive oxygen species. And they’re cleared very well when you’re young, and they cease to be cleared as well as you get older. So by the time you’re 70 or 80, it’s not working. The chimney is beginning to close down. But we understand that now. And we understand that these oxygen species that are negative-reactive oxygen species—we may be able to modify them with antioxidants.
So, number of things that we can do to begin to modify that. There’s four main cellular pathways that people talk about. There’s one that’s very popular in the press called NAD. And we know that NAD decreases as you age, and that is part of the energy cycle for the cell. And so, people are trying to take NAD to boost it in their cells. Problem is it’s got to get into your body, and it’s got to get into the cell. So, it’s not just that easy. But part of the reason it’s declining is because of an enzyme called CD38, which increases as you age. And it destroys NAD. So, me taking that product without modifying the CD38 pathway means that I’m trying to fill a bathtub with the sink open.
Hugo Scott-Gall: So, maybe you could talk a little bit about—we’ve established kind of what it is that causes aging. And we’ve established that even if I live this monastic lifestyle of perfect, most rest and nutrition, that’s not going to be enough. So, if you do a bit about kind of the science products, the things that are in development to address the issues.
Dr. Greg Bailey: So, a great segue. Thank you for that. So, I mentioned CD38. There’s an institute called the Buck Institute. Two hundred of the top scientists in the world working to try and solve aging. They have a magnificent building in Northern California. And they created a product which is a CD38 inhibitor. So, by this time next year, we will have that in human trials, and to try and modify the NAD that I just talked about. So, this is really fascinating because what we try to do at my company—I’m sure other biotech companies are doing the same thing. I don’t want to give you NAD really high because it’s on a feedback loop with other cellular pathways. I want to bring you back to a physiological level of when you were 35 or 40. So, I’m not trying to spuriously raise it. I’m trying to get it to a physiological level.
So by decreasing the enzyme, I can hopefully get it to the right level for your cells so it doesn’t influence the other three major cellular pathways. So, that’s coming. And then there’s the Klotho pathway. There’s a number of other pathways that we aren’t working on, but others are. It’s really fascinating. And then there’s the modifying genes, which is really exciting as well.
Hugo Scott-Gall: How far away are we from being able to access drugs, I guess, that can address some of the inherent aging issues that everyone has? Is there anything you could do about lifestyle-inflicted aging, but just natural genetic—how far away is it that I will be able to go to a specialist who says, “Well, if you take these things and these things in combination, this is going to really make a difference.” So, I guess that’s probably the question on most people’s lips. Hopefully, it is. That’s my job to ask them. But how far away are we from the next stage of, I guess, more efficacious, more scientifically-proven aging treatments?
Dr. Greg Bailey: So, some people may know about a drug called rapamycin, which was discovered on Easter Island by the statues in the soil. So, it was clearly left by the aliens to help us age. And lo and behold, this is indeed an anti-aging drug. There’s a pathway called mTOR, which is one of the four major pathways. It’s an acronym for mammalian target of rapamycin. So, this drug literally is influencing this pathway that’s now named after it. And it’s used now for immunosuppression and immuno during transplants. But it conceivably could be an anti-aging drug that we have today. A number of the top scientists in this sector are on this drug for anti-aging properties.
The problem is we haven’t done a proper clinical trial. So, nobody could tell you the right dose. Is it 10mg, 20mg? Nobody knows. And some very good research had been on dogs by Matt Kaeberlein at Washington University. I believe, unless he’s changed his mind, the best regimen for that—and please, everybody, I’m not your doctor. You need to consult the doctor for this. You will anyway to get the prescription, and they probably won’t give it to you. The last time I talked to him, it was 6mg once a week for 10 weeks, three month holiday, and then repeat the cycle. And I think Peter Attia is on a different dose. And Peter has a book called Outlive, that many of your audience may have read, on the science of what’s going on. So, that’s going on. The other thing I’ll say is there’s already an anti-aging drug on the market. It’s doing incredible sales.
I think it’s going to do $150 billion a class. And that’s the Ozempic, the GLP-1s, Mounjaro from Lilly. They increase how long people live by decreasing the diseases that so many people have by being overweight, by having metabolic syndrome. A real shocker—and again, I apologize if there’s been more research on it. But I think Shulman at Yale did, and he tested 21 22-year-old Yale students—slim, in reasonably good shape. And found that 25% of them, I believe, were already insulin-resistant. So, they were already having sugar beginning to destroy or doing damage to their organs. So, these sort of tests that we can do and these sort of drugs are going to have a profound effect.
And some of them are already here, like the GLP-1s, Ozempic, or rapamycin. In five to seven years, there’ll be five more on the market.
Hugo Scott-Gall: And the thing there is that they reduce inflammation?
Dr. Greg Bailey: Inflammation’s a huge piece of the puzzle. But it’s more complex than that. To truly solve aging is going to be very, very complicated. May need quantum computing. I don’t even think our current computing can deal with it. In drug discovery, AI is very good for chemistry because it’s pattern recognition and it can look at 20 million things in a nanosecond. Which would take a human years to look at to try and find interesting-looking chemical compounds. But it’s rubbish of biology because biology is chaos theory. And it’s not there yet. So, similarly with unlocking therapies for anti-aging, it’s going to be complicated.
But there’s some low-hanging fruit. Like, potentially rapamycin or the GLP-1s like Ozempic and semaglutide Mounjaro.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that. Which is when you think about drug development, there are several ingredients. Clearly, there’s pre-existing medical knowledge, which probably it’s been accelerated by understanding of the genome. But there’s a limitation to as well, which is just availability and data. And then there’s compute. And we know that there’s something of a revolution going on in compute power, which is basically best is called the current—next generation of compute power is called, right now, generative AI. So, if you put a very valuable problem to solve, which is aging—we know that when guys in Silicon Valley get very rich, what do they do?
They usually, suddenly start looking a bit younger, start looking a bit more fab, and then they start talking about living forever. And possibly sometimes they change their wives. So, turns out that very rich people will spend a lot of money to live for a very long time if that’s possible. So, it’s a valuable problem worth solving. Is this next generation of compute power going to be enough, or are we going to have to wait for constant computing? But I think what I’m saying, to preempt your answer, is that within a decade if we carry on the same curve or rate of change in computing power, this could really begin to unlock better drugs to treat aging.
So that really is quite, I guess, exciting. Am I overstating your position?
Dr. Greg Bailey: No. As I said, the minute you begin to know the pathways, scientists can begin to play with it. And then when you throw in unlocking the human genome, understanding the deep mind, the extraordinary thing that Google people have where they now understand the proteins. So, DNA uses RNA to create proteins. Proteins are messenger RNA and then the proteins actually work on the cellular level and then they create metabolites. We know how many DNA—we know how many genes you have. We have an idea of most of the proteins. Metabolites is a whole different thing. But these metabolites could be very important.
And again, you’re going to really need the AI to sort them out because there’s millions. So, it’s coming and it’s coming very quickly. So, I think you have pictured it well. And then to rebalance those four cellular pathways—mTOR, the target of rapamycin, NAD, which I mentioned. The other ones are AMPK and sirtuins. They’re on a feedback loop. And I think to actually get them to the right balance for you is going to be very different than what medication I would have to take. So, precision medications and I think the AI is going to play a huge role. The other big one that people aren’t talking about is actually using AI in clinical trials. With our cancer agent at Medivation, we had to wait I think it was 11 months to see a positive signal. With AI, it might say after one month, you have a 99% chance the drug is going to work. Because it can just immediately see the pattern that we can’t see, which will expedite drugs, which will have an extraordinary effect and save money.
And hopefully means drugs, which when it comes to buy them, will be less expensive because you didn’t have to go through the $800 million of clinical trials.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Yeah. And I think that you never quite know all the effects of a primary innovation. But you really meaningfully change compute power, you unearth a lot more value than an existing data set. And then we combine that with other data sets and really good things start happening. With your sort of biotech investor hat on, do you think we’re about to enter a golden age of return on R and D and that might be with higher levels of R and D, or it might even be actually drug development costs go down. So, you can spend the same dollars, but just on more than drug research.
So, do you think we are perhaps entering into technologically enabled—a bit of a golden age? Does that get you pretty excited as a biotech investor?
Dr. Greg Bailey: I think it was Macquarie. They said that in 2000, medical knowledge was doubling every five years. In 2010, they thought it was every three and a half years. In 2020, they thought it was every 73 days. Because of the enormous amount of money that came in during COVID, I think we are going to enter a golden age. I think that that science just opened so many doors. Since stepping down as the CEO of Juvenescence, I have three pillars. 1.) Is pass on the knowledge I’ve learned from the top scientists in the world, and thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to chat here.
2.) Is to convince payers, whether it’s national healthcare services or insurance companies, that we’ve got to change from what our current model is, which is sick care. You get sick, hopefully you have a cure or at least a treatment—to prevention, which will render enormous savings economically. And the third one is convince people that they can invest in biotech. The number of people that say, “I don’t have an MD or PhD. I can’t invest in biotech.”—I’ve had so many times during my career. And I tell them, “But do you have shares in Tesla? Do you have shares in JP Morgan? Can you run a bank? Could you build a car?” It’s the same model that you have to look for when you’re investing in biotech. And that is good management, diversified portfolio, enough capital to get through an inflection point, and you can make an extraordinary amount of money. So, to your question about a golden age, if people are willing to do that—even if they take one percent of their net worth to dedicate to that, we will have an extraordinary renaissance.
And it’s going to be quite remarkable because to your point, science is opening these doors. Great management with adequate capital will do it.
So to the audience, this is a rare opportunity. Just make sure that it’s a solid management team, and make sure it’s a diversified portfolio.
Hugo Scott-Gall: So, impediments are taking the other side of that. Impediments may well be in the form of—I guess there’s always regulation. And technology typically moves faster than regulation does. And it may well be things like access actually to compute power or the limitations that we just don’t have enough data. I think this is a recurring theme around this next phase. Let’s call it sort of GenAI. Which is we exhaust the existing data set pretty quickly. But I wonder if that’s sort of true in medicine where the data might not have been interrogated in the way that they’re going to.
But is there anything else I’m missing on that list of potential impediments that can slow things down? And really, I guess to make it more specific around aging, this is a fairly new area. And are regulators ready when it comes to either approvals or availability? Whatever it is, is there some education that’s required first?
Dr. Greg Bailey: Yeah. Regulatory is very important. Their mandate, obviously, is to protect everyone. And sometimes they’re overzealous. At a couple of my companies, we’ve certainly been shocked or at least surprised at what the regulators have come back to us with on things we presented. So yes, there’s going to be an education process to get the regulatory bodies to say, “You know what? We’re going to trust the AI that after two months it’s saying the clinical trial is positive. We’re going to let you have that as your interim readout, and we’re going to approve your drug.” That’s going to be a high hurdle. So, there’s definitely going to be a number of issues we’re going to have to confront.
Could we eliminate animal research by using the computers? Probably. Will the FDA accept it or the EU? That’s a different question. So, lots of issues. But I think fundamentally, investing in biotech is just such an extraordinary—it’s very similar to mining. You drill the hole. There’s either oil or gold or whatever you’re looking for there and your stock goes up 15, 20X or it’s not. Your stock gets cut in half if you have other properties. Similarly with biotech. Literally, you flick a switch. You have a positive Phase 2 clinical trial. Your valuation just increased by 20 to 30X. And you have a negative trial. It’s going the other way. So, a nice diversified portfolio works.
But yeah. I think that there are technological issues that are going to confront the regulatory people, not the least of which is—I can’t run a 75-year clinical trial on a drug. So, we have to get a biomarker panel that says, “When you took my drug, this was your age. And in one year, you only aged six months.” Greg Fahey and Steven Horvath did that at UCLA in 2018. They gave people two drugs, three supplements. They measured what’s called DNA methylation. Your DNA in your body methylates at different rates. And they showed that they measured it before the clinical trial, they measured after clinical trial. And in the period of time that they gave the drug—the two years. The people only aged—during the one year, their actual biological age, according to DNA methylation, dropped by two years. By the way, if we could do that every year with different combinations of drugs, you live forever. You have escaped velocity. Because if I can add two years for every year, you escape. A gross oversimplification, but just how people are thinking about it in anti-aging. And we’re not sure whether your cells will even go past 150.
Hugo Scott-Gall: So, I’ve got a couple more questions I want to ask you. One is on your own personal regimen and what you do because I think the concept of skin in the game is really, really important particularly when it comes to the world of medicine and the practitioners. But before that. Have you thought much—and this is not a medical question, this is perhaps more philosophical, existential—around what does the world look like, what does society look like if people are really living a lot longer now. An economist would tell you that creates real problems because older people aren’t necessarily productive, and they need to be funded by working-age populations. And so, aging is a real stress for societies.
But that might not be true if older people are productive. So do you think well, actually that’s pretty exciting? People live longer but they’re healthier for longer and therefore they can remain productive? And do you think that people who’ve grown up thinking they were maybe going to live until, I don’t know, 75, 80 and suddenly they’re going to find they can live to 100 and 110— that’s just maybe just too much for their brains to cope with?
Dr. Greg Bailey: I’m glad you asked. It’s a very complicated question. A gentleman named Andrew Scott has written extensively on the 100-year-life and the different indications. Harvard ran a study and said, “If we all live to 150, that could increase the population by three percent by the end of the century.” So, it’s not crazy numbers. But what I will say with this is to your point, we have an inverted demographic pyramid. We do not have enough young people to support the elderly where it could be the next major economic crisis.
But if I can take an 84-year-old or 85—pick a number—and they’re still healthy, they’ve still got corpus mentis, they can do what they do, and they continue to participate in society, then it changes everything. Interestingly, the difference between when you’re healthy and when you die, which is the difference between health-span and lifespan, in the developed world is 10 years. Except in Denmark, where it’s three years. Nobody knows why, or I don’t know why. And basically, wouldn’t it be great if it was one year, one week, one day? To your point, we were talking before going on air. Wouldn’t it be great to be healthy right up until the end.
So, that changes everything, and that’s the goal. So when we were starting, the company asked myself and my partners what we were trying to do, we said, “We want to add 10 healthy years to your life.” If we do that, we give you an extra day of the week. It’s that profound and the economic consequences are huge. So yeah. There we need to do that. The other element to your question is if we were living to 200, do I create bubble people who won’t go outside, who won’t drive a car for fear that they’re going to lose 150 year? What are the mental issues with this? And they’re profound. Will suicide go through the roof? I’m guessing it’ll certainly jump. So, there are issues. And what we’re trying to do from my side, as far as the drug developer, is give you the optionality. You don’t have to take the drugs. And somebody said, “Well, my friends are all going to be dead.”
I’m like, “The drugs are not just for you. Your friends are going to have the drug as well, by the way. Just so you know.” But yeah. There’s going to be big issues we’re going to have to confront. But the fact that people are healthier longer, extraordinary effect on our society. And by the way, I’m never telling the French people that they’re going to have to work past 64. I saw what happened with the riots before when they added two years. They may have to work 10 to 15 years longer. That’s a bridge too far for me. I’m not bringing that one up.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Yes. That’s an appetite for risk that even you as a biotech entrepreneur don’t have. Can we talk skin in the game, your regimen, without getting too personal? But how you live your life, the things you’re currently doing? I guess there’s probably a list of them. But just the sort of—this is not doctoral advice to anyone. But just interested in the things you do.
Dr. Greg Bailey: Yeah. So, it’s interesting people come to work for us. Literally, you can see the change in their lifestyle. You just can’t be around it without acknowledging that these are not the hardest things to change. So, A.) Find something you enjoy fitness-wise. In a perfect world, you should mix some endurance training with some weight training with some yoga, Pilates for flexibility, high-intensity training, which is fantastic. ‘Cause in 13 minutes you get the same effect as running 10 mi or 10 km. So, mix of exercise. But gardening works. Just pick your spot. It has to be something you enjoy. The next thing I would say is nutrition.
The Mediterranean diet by and large for most people in Europe and North America is probably the right one. There’s definitely an ethnocentric element to it. Japanese people can eat white rice with impunity and don’t seem to get diabetes. If we ate the same amount, we’d probably just get diabetes. And then as many fruits and vegetables as you can eat. When I met Valter Longo, I said, “How do you do 1800 calories for a man?” He said, “Eat as many fruits and vegetables as you want in a day and limit your protein to 30g.” Which is wrong by the way. We now know that number’s wrong. But by the end of the day, I didn’t want to see another celery stick. I was like done. I was losing crazy weight doing that. Now, do we know it’s 1g per kg pretty much, unless you’re doing incredibly strenuous exercise or doing strenuous exercise is a good number for protein. And then sleep, as you mentioned. As much as you can do to try to get those seven to eight hours. But No. 1 is fitness. No. 2 is nutrition.
I’m doing all of these. I do 10 to 12 servings of vegetables a day. I do three to five servings of fruit a day. Always include spinach and broccoli and cauliflower and blueberries ‘cause they’re neuroprotective. And I try to do this – to spread the protein out over the day as opposed to one big sitting. They seem to think that works. I give my myself a chance to sleep for eight hours almost every night. I do a mix of exercise. And then I do supplements that I’ve vetted with the various scientists and a couple of drugs.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Once things become a habit, they cease to feel like a chore, right? You get used to doing that.
Dr. Greg Bailey: A hundred percent.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Great. Well look, I want to say thank you very much for coming on the show. It was serendipity that we bumped into each other on a beach in the island of eternal youth in the Mediterranean.
Dr. Greg Bailey: Absolutely.
Hugo Scott-Gall: But I’m glad we met. I’m very pleased you came on the show. Thanks for sharing your history as an investor, but also just frankly where we are on the cutting edge versus aging.
Dr. Greg Bailey: Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. And as I said, I hope your audience gets comfortable enough to invest in this sector. So, thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Brilliant.
