In general, I love meeting with the non-academic side of this work. I met de Grey and some of his associates at last year's AAA meeting. The relationship is complicated, as you know.
I see the value in both types of research -- people working outside the system don't have to worry about IRBs, paper-writing, etc, and can take risks we can't. OTOH, there are a lot of very smart people on the inside who are working on "things that matter". For example, Jim Kirkland and senolytics. They have access to expertise, funding, samples, and personnel that the non-academic community cannot realistically match. Although the entrance of Calico et al is a new quantity and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
As a very short summary of my focus, I came into the field, read a lot of papers, and came to the conclusion "no one knows what causes aging". So my focus is on bioinformatics systems to process a lot of data and help me figure out what direction should be most fruitful to focus on. I work with wet-lab people but don't do it myself.
I hope the new generation of academic aging researchers will reach out more to the non-academic side more, though. I plan to do so.