Patrick introduces Felix Werth as a German biochemist, entrepreneur and political activist who founded the Party for Rejuvenation Research, with the core message “Unbegrenzt langes Leben für alle, unlimited long life for everyone.” He also presents Felix as CEO of Fix Aging AI, a Berlin-based biotech startup using artificial intelligence to develop rejuvenation therapies, and welcomes him onto the LEVITY podcast.

Patrick notes that both he and Felix are based in Berlin and asks whether Berlin is a hotspot for longevity. Felix cautiously replies that he guesses there are more longevity-interested people in Berlin than elsewhere, but there are still very few, and that only recently have local meetups and groups started to form and grow.

Felix describes Berlin’s emerging longevity scene: local life extension meetups, Don’t Die meetups and the pop-up community Zelar City, where people lived together for a couple of months, co-worked and each worked on a longevity project. He emphasizes how surrounding yourself with like-minded people makes it easier both to live a healthy lifestyle and to stay focused on longevity.

Patrick recall meeting Felix at Vitalist Bay in California and mention another pop-up in Montenegro. says he has been going to life extension meetups since 2013 and conferences over the years, and finds it very uplifting to meet people who want to do something against aging.

Patrick remarks that it is odd to have to organize people who do not want to fall apart, become decrepit and die. Peter jokingly calls them a cult, and Patrick extends the joke by saying they gather around the “strange belief” that being healthy and alive is good. Felix responds that he hopes this will become mainstream eventually, not a fringe stance.

Peter asks about the leap from pushing away thoughts of death to becoming interested in cryonics, which most people never even consider. Felix recalls being afraid of death as a child, lying in bed crying while his parents told him he had his whole life ahead of him, and says he always remembered cryonics appearing occasionally in the media as something he wanted someday.

In 2012, Felix decided to sign up for cryonics and began researching providers and local cryonicists to contact. While searching, he found the Manhattan Beach Project conference on YouTube, which focused mainly on developing life extension therapies in the next 10 or 20 years, and realized for the first time that scientists had concrete plans to fight aging.

Felix describes being particularly convinced by Aubrey de Grey’s talk on the damage repair approach. He explains that if damage accumulates during aging, and you periodically repair it, you should be able to rejuvenate people and maintain health indefinitely, much like regularly repairing 100-year-old cars. He says he could not think of any fundamental reason why this principle should not work.

Before 2012, Felix had studied electrical engineering because he liked math and physics and disliked biology and chemistry at school. After encountering Aubrey de Grey’s work, he quickly decided to enroll in biochemistry at a German university for the summer semester starting in April, something he says he would never have imagined doing just a month earlier.

During his biochemistry studies, Felix learned how small the rejuvenation research field is, how little funding exists and how few people work directly on aging. He concluded that he could likely contribute more by doing public outreach and trying to grow the movement rather than becoming just one more lab researcher, and he began joining Facebook groups such as the Longevity Party to find collaborators.

Felix recounts how the idea of a real longevity party came from seeing the Longevity Party Facebook group and thinking that many people would vote for a party that invests more money in longevity research. Most people in the group thought politics would not work, but Felix eventually found three friends willing to co-found a party in early 2015, since German law requires at least three founders.

Initially, they named it the Party for health research, reasoning that everyone supports health and that rejuvenation also means preserving health as people age. Felix says this framing is more mainstream, because nobody is against health research, while many are explicitly against rejuvenation research. At that time, they promoted damage repair and openly discussed questions like overpopulation sparked by life extension.

Patrick asks if Felix was the driving enthusiast in the party’s early days. Felix confirms he did almost all the paperwork and organizational work, while a supporter built the website. He notes that over the years they repeatedly changed strategy based on public reactions and media focus, trying to find an approach that would both attract attention and reduce opposition.

Peter asks what Felix has learned about people’s objections and how to approach longevity as a political party. Felix says the party has participated in 24 elections, needing 1,000–2,000 signatures for most, which means approaching many more people because only a small fraction agrees to sign. He believes many people deny death and treat aging as something good, which blocks them from accepting counter-arguments.

Felix emphasizes that it is rare for someone to present an argument against life extension, hear his counter-arguments and then openly change their mind. Instead, even good responses often do not land, and people remain opposed. Patrick suggests that even if minds do not change immediately, hearing the idea at least introduces a possibility that can begin to work on them over time.

Felix concludes that public outreach is still worthwhile even if people do not “get it” right away. He believes that confronting people with the subject repeatedly increases the chance they might eventually change their stance. For him, the key lesson is not to become discouraged when initial encounters fail, because repeated exposure is likely necessary for any meaningful shift.

Peter asks whether Felix sees generational differences in responses. Felix notes that some older people say it is too late for them personally but will sign for their children or grandchildren, while others say it will not be for them and still refuse to sign, which leaves him wondering why they do not at least support younger relatives. He accepts that someone already 80 and in poor health is unlikely to benefit in time.

Felix argues that cryonics is especially important now because rejuvenation medicine is only a matter of time, and people who die shortly before its arrival are effectively “the last” unlucky ones. He imagines a scenario where scientists promise to cure aging in 10 years, but someone gets cancer or ages out after five years and has no backup unless they signed up for cryonics.

Patrick asks why they pivoted away from the health framing if it reduced opposition. Felix explains that even with a focus on doing something against age-related diseases, they did not gain much additional support or many votes. He speculates that many people may think big parties already invest enough in this field and that their party’s low recognition was a major limitation.

Felix reasons that if only 10 % of people know about the party and they get 0.5 % of the vote, wider recognition might translate to more support. Because media were uninterested in generic health research, they shifted to a more provocative strategy: making it explicit that they are talking about living for thousands of years and using posters with slogans like living in 800 years or unlimited lifespan for everybody.

The new posters attracted far more attention. Felix says that earlier posters about more research against Alzheimer’s and cancer led to little discussion, but the radical longevity posters were frequently photographed, shared on social media and written about in the press. He notes that many people treated them as strange or satirical and did not see the scientific background behind them.

Felix describes the logistics of election posters in Germany: participating parties can hang posters for free in the six to eight weeks before an election, and printing each poster costs only about four euros. Because they had little money, they prioritized high-traffic areas like train stations and shopping streets, hanging about 1,000 posters in some big elections and around 7,000 for the European election.

Patrick asks about funding, and Felix explains that public funding only begins at 1 % of the vote for state elections or 0.5 % for federal and European elections. Even then, public funding merely doubles the donations received, so small donation volumes would still mean limited public money, though it would certainly help. He stresses that funding is not the only reason a political strategy matters.

Felix lists several advantages of being a party: people can signal support by voting or becoming members even if they cannot give time or money; election participation brings free TV and radio airtime, sometimes at evening prime time, for 60–90 second campaign videos that reach millions; and journalists tend to be more interested in parties running in elections than in informal advocacy.

Peter and Patrick show one of the party’s election videos and ask Felix to comment. Felix explains that the video states aging is the main cause of death worldwide and visually depicts a scientist or doctor playing chess against death, echoing the imagery from The Seventh Seal but updated to a modern scientific context. The goal is to dramatize the struggle against aging itself.

Peter points out that in the original film it is Max von Sydow as a knight, while here they replaced him with a scientist. The video ends with death taking a literal beating, which Peter notes, and Felix says this level of violence was intentional. Their thinking was that violence grabs attention, and they indeed received substantial attention from this campaign spot.

Peter asks whether German election rules could give someone in Sweden a model for getting free attention with TV spots and posters, and whether Felix would recommend founding a similar party there. Felix says yes, otherwise he would not have done it himself, even though political work was not enjoyable or in his natural skill set, because he believed it offered the greatest personal impact.

Felix reveals that about a year to a year and a half ago he stopped active work for the party because the constant rejection involved in collecting signatures became psychologically damaging. He describes approaching strangers, trying to save their lives by promoting life extension, but being treated as an annoyance by most people, and he believes repeating this for years was unhealthy for him.

Reflecting on the trade-off, Felix says he originally believed that even if party work made his life more stressful and less healthy in the short term, it would increase his chance of reaching longevity escape velocity enough to compensate. He now thinks the stress and unhealthy patterns shortened his life more than his advocacy extended it, so continuing no longer made sense for his personal survival goals.

Patrick asks whether anyone inside the German establishment shares Felix’s longevity outlook. Felix says he does not know anyone in government. Peter brings up the recent policy paper by the National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, about recognizing aging as a disease, asking whether Felix was involved. Felix says he was not and that Leopoldina merely advises government; it is unclear what will actually be adopted.

Felix notes that Germany already has aging research institutes such as the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the Leibniz Institute on Aging. He describes submitting several petitions to the German government requesting more funding, and receiving surprisingly detailed multi-page rejection letters listing existing initiatives and implying that, in the government’s view, enough is already being done.

Patrick mentions Michael Greve, the German billionaire associated with longevity, and asks whether he has engaged with the party. Felix recalls that Michael Greve organized large conferences in Berlin with over 500 attendees and early life extension meetups where Felix first met like-minded people offline, but says Greve is not interested in politics. He adds that many supporters, such as professors, avoid political ties.

Patrick shifts to Felix’s entrepreneurial work. Felix says he is now doing something he enjoys again - programming - instead of talking to strangers on the street. With his startup Fix Aging AI, he aims to use the newest AI tools to implement rejuvenation medicine by developing enzymes that break down damage inside cells, contributing specific pieces to a broader damage repair approach.

Felix explains his concept: identify harmful bonds created during aging that the body’s repair systems cannot break down, and then develop enzymes either de novo or by adapting similar enzymes from other organisms so they work in humans. He frames this as targeting one of the seven categories in Aubrey de Grey’s framework, namely damage inside cells.

Currently, Felix works as a freelance programmer to pay his bills, which leaves little time to advance his startup. He has applied unsuccessfully for grants and has not yet approached venture capitalists. He notes that investors who care more about returns than curing aging may find his proposition too vague or risky, because the concrete targets will be determined only after applying AI tools.

Peter asks which AI tools Felix uses. Felix says he works with Cursor as an AI-powered editor, Chat GPT and Claude to assist with programming. He stresses that he does not do “vibe coding,” because he still reviews every line of code to check whether it makes sense and does not introduce unwanted behaviours, but finds the tools very helpful for speeding up development.

Felix enthusiastically describes a recent hackathon called hackaging AI, subtitled “agentic AI against aging,” where his team West Coast Vectors was among the winners. They joined a “sequence to function” track, scraping literature for a given protein and then using an AI agent to extract knowledge from potentially over 100,000 papers, generating concise reports linking sequence mutations to function changes affecting longevity.

For his startup, Felix says detailed structure-based design will be even more important, because he ultimately wants enzymes tailored to specific substrates, but this was not a hackathon task. Over the two weeks, the four-person team divided tasks, held regular meetings and produced a working app, while Felix learned how to program a rack system [verify spelling] and AI agents, which he found very educational.

Peter asks how Felix situates his work among the hallmarks of aging or Aubrey de Grey’s seven types of damage. Felix reiterates that he wants to focus on damage inside cells, including lysosomal and non-lysosomal targets, by designing enzymes to clear otherwise irreparable molecular junk. He says he chose this area not because it has the biggest impact but because relatively few companies are working on it.

Felix mentions looking at the website agingbiotech.info and estimating that only about five companies are working on damage removal inside cells. He believes he can have the most impact where there is little existing activity. He also needs a project that can plausibly be advanced largely via computer and AI, and enzyme design for intracellular damage fits both criteria in his mind.

Peter notes that the field already has big trends like partial reprogramming, DNA damage work and senolytics, and stresses it is important that different groups tackle different problems. Felix agrees and adds that his startup would at best deliver one or two of the thousands of interventions needed; other groups must develop the rest, and all will likely be required simultaneously for dramatic rejuvenation effects.”

Felix points out that if only one type of damage is repaired, the effect may be too small to detect in clinical trials because many other damages remain. He suggests this difficulty - needing thousands of therapies used together - may partly explain why relatively few people work on comprehensive damage repair, and why conventional drug development, which expects clear single-therapy outcomes, is challenging here.

Peter asks whether Felix has considered decentralized science funding, mentioning platforms like pump.science and researchers who have successfully funded experiments there. Felix says he has not yet explored this path but would be interested. He notes that his startup’s proposition - using AI to develop rejuvenation medicine - is not very concrete yet, which may make it harder to convince purely financially driven investors.

Felix elaborates that even if his team successfully developed an enzyme that breaks down one specific type of damage inside cells, thousands of other damages would remain. This means that from a standard biotech perspective, the path to observable clinical benefit is long and uncertain, which likely contributes to investors’ reluctance and his difficulty securing support so far.

Felix says he looks after his diet and tries to eat similarly to Bryan Johnson, who publicly shares his diet and supplement regime. Felix himself keeps supplements modest: vitamin D, K2, omega 3 and a multivitamin. After finding out his cholesterol was high, he switched to a vegan diet for six weeks to see whether diet alone can lower it, adding vitamin B12, protein and other supplements to avoid deficiencies.

Patrick asks whether Felix engages in extreme risk avoidance. Felix says no, and references a common argument that if people could live thousands of years, they might take no risks at all. He says he already believes we have a chance to reach longevity escape velocity yet still takes risks like flying, rarely thinking about death in everyday life, and admits this might be “stupid.”

Patrick asks Felix to recommend three books that meant something to him. Felix begins with Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey, calling it “like the Bible” because it explains the repair approach and how we could sort out aging and avoid dying from it. He then recommends Ageless by Andrew Steele as a very good overview of the field for someone not yet familiar with current research.

Felix also recommends The Death of Death by José Cordeiro and David Wood as another overview of the longevity and life extension field, and adds “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker to help understand the underlying psychological problem of why more people are not interested in this area, linking back to earlier discussions about denial and resistance.

Peter notes that LEVITY has had both Aubrey and José on the podcast, connecting Felix’s recommendations to prior episodes.