Latest / Gladden Longevity Podcast / The Exponential Curve of Aging - Episode 351

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The Exponential Curve of Aging - Episode 351 · Gladden Longevity Podcast

• 0:00
  And I had this boss who said to me when I was kind of full of myself
• 0:04
  one day about being the publisher of GQ,
• 0:06
  he he said, Y y you have to think about something.
• 0:08
  You're sitting in a rented seat,
• 0:10
  and that seat can go away tomorrow.
• 0:14
  And who are you? So it was like a lightning bolt hit me,
• 0:17
  and I I said to myself, I better get a life.
• 0:20
  Hey everyone, I just finished a conversation with Michael Clinton.
• 0:23
  Michael is a former editor of Esquire magazine,
• 0:26
  contributor to other magazines.
• 0:28
  He's really a renaissance man and he has multiple degrees of
• 0:33
  He's well traveled. He's an entrepreneur.
• 0:35
  He's a marathoner across all seven continents.
• 0:38
  He's passionate about longevity.
• 0:40
  He's passionate about optimizing health and human potential.
• 0:43
  And as you can imagine, it becomes a very far-ranging conversation.
• 0:48
  We go down many, many rabbit holes into building longevity communities,
• 0:52
  into creating new structures for health.
• 0:54
  It's a really, really fascinating conversation.
• 0:56
  I hope you enjoy it.
• 0:57
  He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook.
• 1:03
  Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30,
• 1:06
  and he's got the science to back it up.
• 1:08
  This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
• 1:12
  Michael, welcome to the Glad Longevity Podcast.
• 1:14
  It's great to have you here. So Yeah,
• 1:15
  Great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me.
• 1:17
  absolutely.
• 1:18
  So, you know, I'm really curious about the book that you've written,
• 1:21
  the books that you're writing,
• 1:22
  and ~ this concept of roar into the second half of life.
• 1:26
  the title is very catchy, right?
• 1:28
  Because we tend to think of the second half of life as being slowing down,
• 1:32
  or most people do, we don't here,
• 1:34
  but it sounds like we share a similar view of,
• 1:36
  you know, what life after
• 1:37
  you know, pick an age can look like.
• 1:39
  Tell me a little bit about how you came to that realization.
• 1:42
  Yeah,
• 1:43
  well, thanks so much. I mean, I like to say that we're living twenty first century
• 1:46
  lives in twentieth century constructs and institutions,
• 1:50
  right? Things that were sort of carried over when life expectancies were sixty two,
• 1:55
  let's let's say a hundred years ago.
• 1:57
  You know, it it all started with sort of a personal epiphany.
• 2:02
  I was the president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines.
• 2:05
  I had an incredible career in magazine publishing and it was really terrific.
• 2:11
  And I was sort of
• 2:12
  ready to wrap that up and people would say to me,
• 2:14
  you're gonna retire. And I said,
• 2:16
  Well, not really. I mean, I'm gonna leave this job,
• 2:20
  but I'm gonna go off and do other things.
• 2:23
  And and actually what I did, I started a master's degree at Columbia just
• 2:27
  a about a year before I was stepping out.
• 2:29
  So I was sort of getting myself prepared for,
• 2:32
  you know, a a a different chapter.
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  But through this process, I started agitating about this a bit.
• 2:37
  And I realized and found out that there were many,
• 2:39
  many people like me who were in their sixties who were far from done,
• 2:43
  had so many ideas about the future,
• 2:46
  were positive about the future.
• 2:48
  You know this that if you're sixty five and healthy,
• 2:51
  you're gonna live to ninety-five,
• 2:53
  maybe a hundred, maybe older. This is a a huge gift of time for
• 2:58
  our this generation that we have,
• 3:00
  first time ever. So that led me on a path.
• 3:04
  Which led to me writing the book Roar and then launching a business
• 3:07
  and doing the new book, Longevity Nation,
• 3:10
  et cetera. So yeah, I'm in it.
• 3:11
  I'm in I'm I'm in the longevity conversation.
• 3:14
  I joined the Stanford University Center on Longevity Board and I'm I'm in it.
• 3:18
  Okay, well good for you. Yeah,
• 3:20
  no, I think that's great. You know,
• 3:21
  part of the epiphany that that I've had is that the first realization
• 3:26
  is that aging is an exponential decline,
• 3:29
  not a linear decline, right? Biologically it's an exponential challenge,
• 3:33
  if you will, opportunity. On the other hand,
• 3:35
  when it comes to, you know, the impact that we make and the opportunities that
• 3:39
  we have in front of us, it's an exponential curve in the opposite direction,
• 3:43
  right? You have more opportunities now than you did twenty years ago
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  or even ten years ago.
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  So the tragedy of life as I see it is when those lines intersect.
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  Exponential decline of health versus exponential,
• 3:54
  you know, enhancement of impact and opportunities.
• 3:57
  And I think what's exciting to me,
• 4:00
  and the reason that we focus on living young for a lifetime and making
• 4:03
  a hundred to new thirty and things like that that you're familiar with
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  is because it enables us to have that exponential.
• 4:10
  increase and impact and opportunity continue to rise.
• 4:13
  And so when you think about the the investment of time,
• 4:16
  attention, and resources into optimizing longevity and health and living young
• 4:20
  and things like this, there has never been a better return on investment.
• 4:24
  And and you know, I've made some good investments,
• 4:26
  you've made some good investments,
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  but there's never been a better return on investment than that one.
• 4:30
  Right. And the other thing about it is that when you when you actually start
• 4:34
  to live that curve, it puts us on a trajectory to actually
• 4:39
  Be something that nobody's ever been before,
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  which is both youthful and wise simultaneously.
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  And it enables us to actually up level or upgrade,
• 4:49
  if you will, even the human experience.
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  What does it even mean to be human,
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  right? This is where if we could end up with ~ a 30 year old body and a
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  300 or 3000 year old mind, it's like,
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  my gosh, what an exciting opportunity,
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  right? With all these impact and opportunities.
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  This is why I get so excited about longevity,
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  quite honestly. It's not just about living
• 5:08
  fifty years longer. It's not about more golf for me.
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  It's about how do we actually step into the fullness of the human experience,
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  right? So anyway, just to let you know.
• 5:15
  Yeah.
• 5:16
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're aligned.
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  We're definitely aligned. Mm-hmm.
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  You know, I think we are the th this generation,
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  I'm big on role modeling. I'm big on the idea that,
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  you know, when I was thirty years old and I looked at a 70 year old,
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  it was very, very different than today's seventy year old.
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  You know, when I turned 70, I went and did the nine day hike to
• 5:35
  the Everest Base Camp and ran the Tensick Hillary Everest Marathon down.
• 5:39
  nice. And my point was, I mean,
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  that's just my thing. I'm a I'm a I'm an adventure marathon runner.
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  Right. I always say to people,
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  you know, you don't have to do that,
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  but when I was thirty or forty or fifty,
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  I never saw any seventy year olds doing that.
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  And so all these people who are living,
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  as you say, these optimized lives,
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  these dynamic lives are really not just role models for their peers,
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  but really for the next generations.
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  That's right.
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  That's what gets me excited is showing the forty year old what sixty seventy,
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  eighty, ninety can look like.
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  if you have a different set of attitudes and different approach to life.
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  And I think that's the exciting piece of this whole discussion.
• 6:18
  Yeah, I agree. I agree with that.
• 6:20
  You know, I've got kids and I've got grandkids now.
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  And I just got back from Vail.
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  I live here in in Texas at six hundred feet,
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  but I just got back from Vail mountain biking with my son and my kids and grandkids.
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  And, you know, we climbed from,
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  I don't know, eighty, four hundred feet to ten,
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  five, and then, you know, we're riding these cool trails and looping
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  up there and went to a bike park and all this kind of stuff,
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  right? So I was born in nineteen fifty four and you know
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  Most of my peers are not doing that sort of thing,
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  but the beautiful thing about it is being able to do whatever you want
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  and then demonstrate that to to the next generations changes their their complete
• 6:57
  preconception, if you will, of what aging looks like.
• 7:01
  It looks like more fun, not less fun.
• 7:03
  Yeah, well, you know, it's funny,
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  we we're living parallel lives because we just came back from a twenty
• 7:08
  two person family reunion in Santa Fe,
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  New Mexico, which is seven thousand five hundred feet.
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  Yeah. And we have a family house there and we were out horseback riding
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  and hiking and running and doing all the things with the next generations
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  in the family. And you know, I was the I was the ringleader.
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  And so the the youngest one in the family is in the whole family is sixteen.
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  So
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  And we shipped him off to outward bound about a week later because that's
• 7:35
  a family tradition. But yeah, yeah,
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  see see you know, I always like to say,
• 7:39
  you know, when I was growing up,
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  my parents smoked, drank, they had no exercise regimen.
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  We ate ultra processed foods. You know,
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  that was kind of the culture, right?
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  Today, think about the scenario that you just described and I just described
• 7:53
  a as the you know, role models for our families and our our kids and and so forth.
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  So yeah, parallel lives here.
• 8:00
  Yeah. Well that's exciting. It's good to meet you.
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  We'll have to have an adventure together here.
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  So you are quite the adventurer.
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  You've gone to a hundred and twenty-six different countries and you've been
• 8:09
  a marathoner on all seven continents.
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  We have a client actually that just completed all seven continents last fall,
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  actually in Australia. But you're also a pilot photographer.
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  You own a vineyard down in Argentina.
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  So this is an interesting life.
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  Tell us a little bit of how you curated this for yourself.
• 8:25
  Yeah, no, it's it's great. I mean,
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  what I I love to tell this story because it's a life lesson that I learned
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  and I love to pass it on. ~ when I was thirty-nine years old,
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  I had a great job. I was the publisher of GQ magazine,
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  which you can imagine. Fun job.
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  I had a great personal life, love life,
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  all the above. But I thought I was the most boring human being on
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  the planet because all I did was work.
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  You know, typical typical male too.
• 8:49
  the guys, but and I had this boss who said to me,
• 8:54
  When I was kind of full of myself one day about being the publisher of GQ,
• 8:57
  he he said, Y y you have to think about something.
• 9:00
  You're sitting in a rented seat and that seat can go away tomorrow.
• 9:05
  And who are who are you? Right?
• 9:08
  So it was like a lightning bolt hit me and I I said to myself,
• 9:12
  I better get a life. And when I was thirty nine,
• 9:16
  forty, I I I always had this adventure gene in me as you as you said,
• 9:20
  but I wasn't expressing it as well as or
• 9:23
  As I should. So I I took a flying lesson.
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  I took a race car driving course class and I went and hiked Kilimanjaro with
• 9:29
  a bunch of friends to celebrate turning 40.
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  And I was like, this really, this really turns me on the adventuring side
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  of my personality. I love
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  And
• 9:40
  it. I created, yeah, I created this thing called life layering,
• 9:43
  which I write about in Roar. And life,
• 9:45
  like life layering is building another identity so that your identity
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  is not your profession or your
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  partner or your family or your,
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  you know, parenting, those are all good,
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  but they all e they they all change as we live longer,
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  right? The kids go away. Sometimes jobs go away.
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  Sometimes partners go away. Yeah.
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  And you know, so what are your what are your identities?
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  What are your personas? So I started building this muscle and I have,
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  you know, the
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  identities that you rattled off.
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  I can sit there and say I've got lots of things I'm interested in.
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  And the thing I like about this life layering concept is that you can start
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  it at any age. ~ I was just talking to an eighty two year old who said to me,
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  you know, I'm starting a new life layer in this year.
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  And I'm like, fantastic. You know,
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  you can start it at any age. And the idea is to yeah,
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  just build build identities that fulfill you and bring you purpose
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  and bring you engagement in in your in the world at large,
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  especially when you're over fifty.
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  And some of these other things begin to have less of a of an importance
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  in your day to day life.
• 10:53
  Mm-hmm. I think it's a beautiful concept,
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  this idea of life flaring. There's sort of a this kind of dovetails
• 10:59
  in with the concept of neuroplasticity around,
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  you know, who we are or who we think we are,
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  or or who we think we need to be,
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  quite honestly, right? all those things come into play.
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  But being able to break out of some of those constructs and get down
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  to feeling self sufficient, if you will,
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  right? Feeling safe in who we are,
• 11:17
  whether we have a job or we don't have a job,
• 11:19
  feeling loved and lovable, whether we have a partner or we don't have a partner.
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  all those kinds of things kind of frees us,
• 11:25
  if you will, to to wear many hats,
• 11:27
  right? So yeah, super cool. I've been thinking about getting
• 11:30
  a pilot's license actually here recently.
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  And I just I just bought another motorcycle.
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  I've done a lot of motorcycle trips around Europe and the US and New Zealand,
• 11:40
  places like this. I love to surf and,
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  you know, mountain bike and snowboard.
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  I'm planning a heli trip this year and it's just
• 11:47
  You know, why not why not do all this stuff?
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  It's the it's like a giant playground here.
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  It's a beautiful garden planet.
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  Let's go out and see it and enjoy it,
• 11:54
  right?
• 11:54
  Well, you know, it's so funny.
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  Whenever I'm giving talks around the world,
• 11:57
  literally, and talking to people like yourself and just but more importantly,
• 12:01
  groups. You know, the this and you know this better than anyone,
• 12:05
  you know, the number one natural medicine is movement,
• 12:09
  right? And exercise and being engaged on that front.
• 12:13
  And once again, I say to people,
• 12:14
  you don't have to go out and run a marathon in Mongolia as I did,
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  but you can go out and take a walk around the park,
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  you know, just get out there.
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  And and build build that practice.
• 12:24
  My you know, my dad, my dad lived to be ninety-two and a half.
• 12:28
  Okay. He had no no diseases, no illness,
• 12:31
  full cognition, great amaz. I mean,
• 12:34
  could talk to you about you know current events and books and anything you wanted.
• 12:38
  But the last year of his life,
• 12:39
  he became very sedentary. Yeah.
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  And I kept saying to his wife,
• 12:43
  get dad up, get him moving, get him walking,
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  getting, you know, getting building some strength,
• 12:48
  some balance. And of course, you know,
• 12:50
  he fell.
• 12:51
  And because he was atrophied and it was the long slide down.
• 12:55
  I mean he he could have looked a hundred,
• 12:57
  I think, you know, but but he stopped moving and I think that's so critical
• 13:01
  d I mean you know that better than anyone,
• 13:03
  you know, as a dog.
• 13:05
  Yeah, there's no doubt about it.
• 13:06
  There are things that actually undermine our loss of the ability or even
• 13:11
  the desire to move, right? And I think this comes down to actually architecting
• 13:16
  an exponential strategy for an exponential problem.
• 13:19
  And the way that we've constructed that is to look at longevity itself through five
• 13:24
  different circles or five different lenses,
• 13:26
  if you will. the first one is the life energy circle,
• 13:29
  which is really the psycho-spiritual space because we know that
• 13:33
  when the psychospiritual space is healed and healthy and we can live in a stress,
• 13:37
  a very low stress scenario, that we live a lot longer,
• 13:41
  we age a lot slower, and we heal a lot faster,
• 13:43
  and we respond to regenerative therapies a lot better.
• 13:46
  So that's really the circle that binds everything else together.
• 13:48
  Then there's longevity itself,
• 13:50
  which is rarely addressed in longevity clinics,
• 13:52
  which is actually going after the actual currents in the Niagara River that
• 13:55
  are carrying us towards the falls,
• 13:57
  and that's an exponential
• 13:58
  current, right? So those are the hallmarks of aging that are both expressions
• 14:02
  or phenotypic expressions of aging as well as drivers of aging.
• 14:05
  And then there's health, of course,
• 14:06
  right? All the organ systems. And then there's performance.
• 14:09
  How do we stay fast, agile, strong,
• 14:11
  quick, balanced, et cetera, great mobility,
• 14:13
  flexibility. And then the third one is environments,
• 14:15
  which is how do we construct the environments to remove toxins,
• 14:20
  but how do we also construct them in a way that makes it easy to engage with what
• 14:25
  it is we want to engage, right?
• 14:27
  And
• 14:27
  keep us on track. Because nobody has discipline at eight o'clock at night,
• 14:30
  right? I tell people if I had chocolate ice cream in my freezer at eight o'clock
• 14:33
  at night, I'm going to eat it.
• 14:34
  So I'm not any different than anybody else.
• 14:37
  I just don't put it there. Right.
• 14:38
  So it's it's a it's those five circles in the way that they interface.
• 14:43
  And and then out of that the target is you know,
• 14:46
  at age a hundred to have a thirty year old body and a three hundred year old mind.
• 14:49
  But the point is that in order to do that,
• 14:52
  you've got to be actually be working in all of those circles from an earlier
• 14:56
  point in your life to deconstruct them.
• 14:58
  What are your assets? What are your liabilities?
• 15:00
  Where are you in the aging process?
• 15:01
  Or a mosaic of many biological age.
• 15:03
  There's someone only as young as our oldest age.
• 15:05
  So, you know, where do we need to,
• 15:07
  where do we need to apply leverage?
• 15:08
  And I think what was missing for my dad,
• 15:10
  your dad, you know, my mom, et cetera,
• 15:12
  is they certainly had the desire to live young.
• 15:16
  And they played golf and fished and,
• 15:18
  you know, did all kinds of stuff,
• 15:19
  but they never had the actual strategy that it takes to actually make good
• 15:24
  on the desire that they have.
• 15:26
  And I think what we have now is we actually have the construct,
• 15:29
  sp particularly in conjunction with the systems biology approach and AI
• 15:33
  and all the other things we're leveraging now,
• 15:34
  to actually actually make good on the on the reality ~ and the aspiration that
• 15:39
  we had. So yeah.
• 15:41
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I I have two I two thoughts on that.
• 15:44
  One is, you know, I'm gonna pick on the boomers again,
• 15:47
  of which you and I are both ones,
• 15:49
  in that as a generation, we were the first generation to sort
• 15:55
  of stop smoking, start start eating better,
• 15:59
  you know, running aerobics, fitness,
• 16:01
  you know, all of the I always talk about the generational transfer
• 16:05
  of health versus the generational transfer of wealth.
• 16:09
  Because our kids grew up in a household where they were eating better
• 16:13
  and they were learning about exercise and skiing and you know,
• 16:16
  hiking, all kind of stuff. And you know,
• 16:18
  that is that's given this generation a definitely a link a leg up
• 16:24
  in their personal longevity journey.
• 16:26
  The the other thing in in writing the book Longevity Nation,
• 16:30
  I interviewed 70 people around the world.
• 16:33
  And the big aha for me was the convergence of
• 16:38
  medicine, technology, and AI, which is going to manifest.
• 16:43
  I mean, you know the numbers. T the the studies say that today's five year
• 16:46
  old has a 50% chance to live to be a hundred.
• 16:49
  And what will lead them to that will be not just lifestyle as we just discussed,
• 16:54
  but you know, the the amazing amount of diagnostics that are available
• 16:58
  now and tests and classes of drugs and precision medicine
• 17:04
  and preventative approach. They're going to create a whole different
• 17:08
  ecosystem that is, you know, fits it fits into your five circles in in lots of ways.
• 17:14
  That's right.
• 17:15
  And so I think it's really very very,
• 17:17
  very exciting. Some of us may get to a hundred,
• 17:20
  but these next generations, man,
• 17:22
  they're really going to get there.
• 17:23
  So you know it's normalized.
• 17:25
  Yeah, I think I think it's exciting to think about because,
• 17:29
  you know, we do have we're gonna have more opportunity and more impact than
• 17:34
  our parents did, right? Because we're gonna stay youthful.
• 17:36
  And and I think as the younger generation sees that,
• 17:40
  I think that they can gravitate towards that.
• 17:43
  I think, you know, with AI coming in,
• 17:45
  concepts around job replacement,
• 17:47
  things like that, it's gonna be important for them to find meaning.
• 17:50
  You and I have a ton of meaning in our lives,
• 17:52
  right? We have a ton of purpose,
• 17:54
  a ton of
• 17:55
  motivation. The question is gonna be,
• 17:57
  I think, to help them help them find their meaning.
• 18:00
  I think that's gonna be one of our our jobs as elders in the tribe,
• 18:04
  so to speak, is to help people through the transition to find meaning and purpose.
• 18:07
  Because ultimately th if you don't have that,
• 18:09
  then you stop caring. Right. And so yeah,
• 18:13
  it's important.
• 18:14
  I mean, you know, IRL is the big battle cry these days and you know,
• 18:19
  in real life and you know the experiential economy.
• 18:22
  One of the things I love along around this idea,
• 18:25
  and you know this, the ~ it's always astounding to me the kids in
• 18:30
  our family who know the music from the Eagles.
• 18:32
  I'm like, How do you know that music?
• 18:33
  That's my but
• 18:34
  That's right.
• 18:35
  you've got all these multi generational people.
• 18:38
  My brother's coming up to New York this week,
• 18:41
  and he and his two so he has one son who lives in Brooklyn.
• 18:44
  And his other sons in in Pittsburgh,
• 18:46
  where we're from and where he lives.
• 18:47
  And they're all coming up to go to the Rush concert.
• 18:50
  My
• 18:51
  my god.
• 18:52
  brother, my brother is 66, and you know,
• 18:55
  the one of the kids is ~ I'm like,
• 18:56
  I'm not interested in Rush myself,
• 18:58
  but you go have a good time. Because they did invite me.
• 19:01
  But you know, you hear about whether it's the Rolling Stones or it's the Eagles.
• 19:06
  I mean, you've got this connection happening with multi-generational,
• 19:11
  which that's just one one example.
• 19:13
  But a good ex it it's a good example because it it brings connectivity,
• 19:18
  relationships around, you know,
• 19:20
  different subject areas and so real really important stuff.
• 19:23
  Yeah, I love that. You know, when you look at the blue zones,
• 19:25
  of course, you see families that are integrated across,
• 19:28
  you know, generations, right? There's an integration.
• 19:31
  People are having dinner together.
• 19:32
  They're they they they know their grandparents,
• 19:34
  they know their great grandparents for that matter.
• 19:36
  And then back to the idea of physical motion,
• 19:38
  people are out walking around gardening,
• 19:40
  you know, and they're eating tons of fresh herbs and things like that.
• 19:43
  I think one of the big challenges for us is to actually get nutrient dense food.
• 19:47
  I think
• 19:48
  if we could get really high quality nutrient dense food,
• 19:51
  we'd be miles ahead instead of,
• 19:52
  you know, kind of processed whatever or even organic food that's lost
• 19:56
  a lot of nutritional value. So I think I think it's gonna be really interesting.
• 20:01
  You know, my grandchildren are a bit younger than yours.
• 20:04
  I've got one that's fifteen, one that's twelve,
• 20:07
  and then it drops off to seven,
• 20:08
  five, three and almost one. And particularly for the littler ones,
• 20:13
  you know, it I think it's so important to start to nurture their interests and,
• 20:17
  you know,
• 20:18
  Help them to explore, help them to see that the world's a bigger place than
• 20:21
  the constructs they live in, things like that.
• 20:23
  So I love I love the idea of reaching back across generations.
• 20:27
  And it is fascinating that for whatever reason,
• 20:29
  you know, the music that we grew up with is still resonates with with
• 20:33
  you know people today, right? It's like like that wasn't true when you
• 20:36
  and I were growing up. Like we weren't listening to people that played
• 20:39
  in the twenties, right? We were we were not listening to that.
• 20:42
  You're
• 20:42
  so not interested. You know, I'm just back,
• 20:44
  I'm just back from ~ Okinawa, which is of course one of the blue zones.
• 20:48
  And, you know, I spent a couple of days in the blue zone area,
• 20:52
  which was fascinating. And what you say is so true in terms of the gardening
• 20:56
  and the fresh vegetables and the co-ops where people bring what they grow
• 20:59
  and the community shares it. Yeah.
• 21:02
  I participated in a 45-minute community movement and exercise class.
• 21:09
  But the thing that I really that really resonated with me that was like,
• 21:12
  wow, is anyone who is over eighty in the community,
• 21:18
  the entire community is focused on making sure that they have a human contact every
• 21:25
  day
• 21:26
  Mm.
• 21:26
  of their lives. Now, when you think about,
• 21:29
  you know, how many people are lonely or isolated or don't have support systems.
• 21:35
  That's pretty phenomenal because they they all share in making sure that
• 21:40
  X person gets an exposure to another human being every that that is that
• 21:45
  was to me one. That's huge. That's huge.
• 21:47
  Yeah.
• 21:48
  You know, it's really huge. I will share with you that ~ in my life
• 21:51
  I had actually struggled with depression.
• 21:53
  And it wasn't until I did my genetics and figured out why I was predisposed
• 21:59
  to to depression that I was able to solve it.
• 22:02
  And I was able to get on the right combination of supplements and things like that
• 22:06
  to where and also learn to meditate and some other spiritual insights.
• 22:09
  But I got to a point where I I wouldn't get depressed,
• 22:12
  right?
• 22:13
  Even if I would come under lots of stress back in the day.
• 22:16
  And now with my spiritual practices,
• 22:18
  I I don't really experience stress.
• 22:20
  I kind of live life in flow, if you will.
• 22:22
  But but the interesting thing about that is that there were other times
• 22:26
  in my life where I've been lonely.
• 22:28
  And what I take, I take a a supplement called SAME,
• 22:32
  which is a a methyl donor, and it helps me to make dopamine
• 22:36
  and serotonin because I'm a bit challenged there,
• 22:39
  right? So when I take it, literally ten minutes later,
• 22:42
  I'm not depressed.
• 22:43
  And I discovered that if I was feeling lonely and I took SAMI,
• 22:47
  in 10 minutes I wasn't feeling lonely.
• 22:49
  So there's a massive, there's a massive kind of overlay between depression
• 22:55
  and loneliness. And we we know that people that are depressed or people that
• 22:59
  are lonely die a lot sooner, right?
• 23:02
  They they re don't recover well.
• 23:04
  They, you know, they don't respond to other,
• 23:06
  you know, interventions. And so I think one of the greatest things that
• 23:09
  we can do for for ourselves and for each other.
• 23:13
  quite honestly, is to ensure that we're looking out for each other,
• 23:16
  ~ whether it's regards to both depression,
• 23:18
  loneliness, anxiety, all those things kind of play into a similar circle
• 23:23
  and have a similar impact on health.
• 23:25
  So I think it's beautiful that they were doing that in Okinawa,
• 23:28
  that they were making sure that people were seen.
• 23:30
  And I think we can probably take that lesson and actually do even do it better.
• 23:34
  Right. We can we can understand whether the genetics of this person,
• 23:37
  what do they actually need from us,
• 23:39
  what do they need in their diet or things like that to where we can
• 23:41
  Keep them an active part, a a valuable and valued part of the community
• 23:46
  as opposed to a project that we're just trying to take care of.
• 23:50
  Yeah.
• 23:50
  know, there there's also a lot of work.
• 23:52
  I've been fascinated to read about a lot of work in what I'll call generational
• 23:57
  trauma. And you know, if you if you come from
• 24:02
  a family that experienced trauma in a prior generation,
• 24:07
  even one, two or three generations,
• 24:11
  That's right.
• 24:12
  you know, you carry that generational trauma.
• 24:15
  with you into next generations and that's a hidden that's a hidden anxiety.
• 24:20
  So it's really important to understand our family backgrounds and you know what kind
• 24:26
  of I I come from a poor working class family.
• 24:29
  You know, I was the first one to graduate from college.
• 24:32
  And same you know, yeah there you go.
• 24:34
  And when you when I went back and to try and understand my family
• 24:38
  and the struggles and the the depression and the poverty and all of that it
• 24:43
  Once you have an understanding of what where you c come from and
• 24:47
  so many people don't know their family history,
• 24:50
  you know, it's so interesting.
• 24:52
  I mean, I've talked to people say,
• 24:53
  Well, tell me where your family's from.
• 24:55
  I I have no idea. And I think it's so important.
• 24:57
  It's part of the this to your point,
• 25:00
  part of this idea of understanding why we have certain things in us.
• 25:06
  That's right. You know, I think there's a couple of things that come to mind
• 25:09
  as you say that. The first is there was a study you're probably familiar with that
• 25:12
  was done on women in Holland or the Netherlands during the occupation during World
• 25:17
  War Two and all the stress that they were under.
• 25:20
  And they were looking at the women that were pregnant.
• 25:22
  And then they looked at the life expectancy of those children.
• 25:25
  Because the obviously the moms were very stressed and the children grew
• 25:28
  up in a stressful situation, or maybe even be that they were born after the war.
• 25:31
  But the point is
• 25:33
  They had a significantly shorter life expectancy and many more health issues because
• 25:37
  of the epigenetic programming of trauma into their systems.
• 25:41
  So that's a big one. And then the other interesting thing is that each of
• 25:45
  us in our own lives have experienced trauma.
• 25:48
  And I think one of the interesting things is that we end up living
• 25:51
  in reaction to that trauma. All of us do.
• 25:54
  It that's the way our nervous systems work,
• 25:56
  right? It gets imprinted in.
• 25:57
  And so from my perspective, we become encumbered by that trauma.
• 26:00
  And it could be a combination of generational and personal.
• 26:04
  But nonetheless, I think one of the goals of developing the 300-year-old mind
• 26:08
  is actually to become unencumbered from the trauma,
• 26:11
  whether it's generational or personal.
• 26:13
  And that's that's its own journey to go in,
• 26:16
  understand that trauma, where it comes came from,
• 26:19
  to your point about family history,
• 26:20
  your own personal history.
• 26:22
  Who was to blame? What was how what did I contribute?
• 26:24
  You know, all these things. And ultimately be able to forgive everyone involved,
• 26:28
  including yourself, right? That becomes super important.
• 26:31
  And then transcend it to where you become grateful for everything that happened
• 26:34
  because it made you more human,
• 26:36
  more empathetic, more loving, more insightful.
• 26:38
  ~
• 26:39
  Yeah, it completely releases you.
• 26:42
  You know, one one of the things so Roar,
• 26:45
  the book the first book, Roar is an acronym.
• 26:47
  And the the O stands for, you know,
• 26:50
  own your numbers, own your shit,
• 26:52
  own your background, own your baggage,
• 26:54
  own your all the stuff. Because until you own all of it holistically,
• 26:58
  you can't move forward.
• 27:00
  That's right.
• 27:01
  I I think what's what happens is when you're over fifty
• 27:04
  You do get wisdom and experience,
• 27:06
  and it is time to sort of release yourself from a lot of things.
• 27:09
  It's not easy, of course, it's hard.
• 27:11
  But a part of that that runs parallel to that is the aging process itself.
• 27:16
  And, you know, we live in a culture that,
• 27:19
  which I think is changing, very different than Asia,
• 27:22
  which embraces aging. You know,
• 27:24
  we live in a in a an ageist culture which creates self imposed ageism.
• 27:29
  So people start saying, well,
• 27:31
  I can't do this because I'm 60,
• 27:33
  or I can't do that because I'm 70,
• 27:35
  or I can't do can't, can't, can't,
• 27:37
  can't, can't. And it's it's almost it's it's almost sub subliminal.
• 27:42
  It's not even it's not even they don't bring it to the forefront to say,
• 27:46
  well, why can't you do that? And so I think that adds to depression,
• 27:52
  anxiety, not accepting that, you know,
• 27:54
  if you're 70 or 80 and you're healthy,
• 27:56
  that is a blessing. And you should be really
• 27:59
  shouting it from the rooftops that you're you're 70 and and you know we're
• 28:03
  in a culture now we don't people don't even talk about their age but
• 28:06
  I think it's changing because you know this there are there are sixty
• 28:10
  two million Americans over the age of sixty five and that's going to grow
• 28:15
  to eighty million in the next decade.
• 28:17
  The sheer numbers are going to change the conversation.
• 28:22
  The
• 28:22
  That's your
• 28:23
  you know a hundred years ago there were only seven million people that were sixty
• 28:26
  five or older. So
• 28:28
  Now let's flex the muscle to say,
• 28:30
  wait a minute, let's change this script up because you know what we were told
• 28:36
  it ain't what's gonna be. So, you know,
• 28:39
  I think this we're seeing this happen in in real life now,
• 28:43
  which is great. It will help the next generations once again.
• 28:46
  So I think there's that piece too,
• 28:48
  in terms of embracing aging in a healthy way.
• 28:51
  I think it's one of the greatest opportunities to actually change
• 28:55
  the constructs around chronological age because it's so reinforced.
• 28:59
  You're at this age, you should be retiring.
• 29:01
  you shouldn't do that. you shouldn't no,
• 29:03
  you can't do that anymore. And it comes through your peers,
• 29:05
  it comes through your, you know,
• 29:06
  maybe your employers if you're employed,
• 29:09
  if it comes through the government.
• 29:10
  now it's time to collect social security.
• 29:12
  You know, all these different cues that we have.
• 29:15
  And you know, what I've basically done is to just say none of that
• 29:19
  is actually serving me.
• 29:21
  None of that is actually serving me.
• 29:22
  Zero percent of that is serving me.
• 29:24
  So I I just reject all of it. And I wake up 27 every day.
• 29:28
  And I have found that waking up 27 every day is one of the most powerful things I've
• 29:34
  ever done. Because if I don't feel twenty seven,
• 29:37
  I don't say, but you're you're good for your age.
• 29:39
  You know, you just did this, that,
• 29:40
  or the other thing, or you can do this,
• 29:42
  that, or the other thing. It's like,
• 29:43
  no, what do I need to do to be twenty seven?
• 29:45
  And in life, what I've discovered is we only get the answers to
• 29:48
  the questions that we're asking.
• 29:50
  That's right. So if I'm asking,
• 29:52
  what do I need to do to be 27?
• 29:53
  Not what do I need to be good for a certain particular chronological age,
• 29:57
  I find that that has driven so much progress for me in terms of recovery,
• 30:03
  regeneration, recapturing, whatever,
• 30:06
  to the point where I literally I wake up twenty seven.
• 30:10
  I mean, I can do I can do everything I did at twenty seven and I can do a
• 30:13
  lot of it much better. In fact,
• 30:15
  I'm it's a really interesting thing.
• 30:17
  Back in nineteen seventy six, I graduated from college and a high school friend
• 30:21
  of mine got married that year and I sang a song,
• 30:24
  Paul Stukey's The Wedding Song at at their wedding,
• 30:26
  right? I don't know if you remember that song.
• 30:28
  Yeah. So they're having their fiftieth wedding anniversary this August
• 30:32
  and they invited me to come back.
• 30:33
  And so I thought, you what, I'm gonna go back
• 30:36
  Hope we're not seeing.
• 30:37
  I'm gonna go back and sing that song for them.
• 30:39
  They don't know they don't know that.
• 30:40
  In fact it's a surprise party for them.
• 30:42
  The daughters reached out to me.
• 30:44
  Yeah. So I'm gonna sing that song for them again.
• 30:47
  And I'm I I'm relearning the song,
• 30:49
  right? Because I hadn't played it in a minute.
• 30:51
  And I'm actually a much better guitarist now than I was then.
• 30:54
  And I've I think it'll be actually a better than it was then.
• 30:57
  And I and you know, it was it was well received then.
• 30:59
  So my point is that we can be on this trajectory of only getting better
• 31:04
  and having more fun. It's really not about there is no age that like it's it's
• 31:09
  useless. It's a useless construct.
• 31:10
  So anyway, I'm twenty seven, I'm gonna go back as a twenty seven.
• 31:13
  I you know, I want to talk about creativity for a moment because I
• 31:16
  did a whole chapter on creativity for longevity nation.
• 31:19
  And what I love about the concept is that,
• 31:23
  you know, creativity is is its own longevity hack.
• 31:26
  You know, is great for neuroplasticity,
• 31:30
  to your point earlier, great for community,
• 31:33
  great for joy, great for fulfillment.
• 31:36
  You can start a creative practice at any age.
• 31:40
  You can you know, I just we we collect these stories of people called
• 31:44
  the reimagineers on our website,
• 31:46
  Roar Forward. Our company that we launched off of Roar is called Roar Forward.
• 31:50
  And on Roarforward.com we connect stories,
• 31:53
  we collect stories of people who are doing all sorts of interesting things over
• 31:57
  the age of fifty. And one of the women that we did recently,
• 32:00
  she was in her seventies and she started taking a welding class.
• 32:05
  Cool.
• 32:05
  interested in welding and she started making you know different welding sculptures
• 32:10
  etc and to make a lot a cut to the chase she ended up creating these beautiful
• 32:15
  sconces of horse heads that were lit from inside their
• 32:21
  sconces wall it's called light horse design and anyway at 80
• 32:26
  she started business selling these to the equestrian community around
• 32:30
  the country and this create this creative expression is brought
• 32:35
  So much, a whole new different dimension of life.
• 32:38
  And, you know, I interviewed Paul Thoreau,
• 32:40
  the writer who you might know,
• 32:42
  who's 84. And I think he's writing,
• 32:45
  he's got five novels that are due to his publisher.
• 32:48
  And he he was the one that was really teaching me to your point about
• 32:52
  how creative people, especially as they do it for longer periods of time,
• 32:57
  get better and better and better.
• 32:58
  And of course, some of the best painters and the best writers did their best work.
• 33:04
  Really in the last half in in the in the last third of their lives.
• 33:07
  So I l I love creativity. It has no time stamp.
• 33:11
  There's no time limit. You can do it to the day you die and play that guitar
• 33:16
  and sing that song.
• 33:17
  Yeah, exactly. I appreciate the encouragement.
• 33:20
  You know, I I love I love creativity.
• 33:22
  In my own personal journey, I've had some really deep spiritual experiences
• 33:26
  and I'll share one with you, which is sort of getting directly
• 33:29
  in touch with consciousness. And when you when you do that,
• 33:32
  you realize it's just pure love.
• 33:33
  It's pure, pure love. And what does love love to do?
• 33:36
  Well, it loves to create. Hence this multiverse of everything,
• 33:40
  right? And what's the feedback loop on creation?
• 33:43
  It's joy.
• 33:44
  So my my purpose in life now is from a loving place to create joy.
• 33:48
  And I think I think as humans,
• 33:49
  we're actually at our best when we're creating,
• 33:52
  right? When you're creating your next thing,
• 33:54
  when I'm creating my next thing,
• 33:55
  getting involved in, you know,
• 33:57
  all the different projects. It's and the ability to actually find people
• 34:01
  to co-create with is one of the sweetest joys,
• 34:04
  right? It's really a sweet joy.
• 34:05
  That that is either a great friendship,
• 34:07
  a great partner, a great colleague or whatever.
• 34:10
  But the ability to co create, right?
• 34:12
  So I'm always looking for the ability to create and the ability to
• 34:18
  co create with someone, right?
• 34:20
  Because that's such that's it's just such a source of joy and it's it's such
• 34:24
  a source of satisfaction to your point.
• 34:26
  Yeah.
• 34:27
  Yeah, you know, I I wanna take that.
• 34:28
  You said something that really sparked a thought in me in this co-creation,
• 34:32
  but also in the friendship aspect of it.
• 34:35
  And I I give you a quick story because I think it's so important for us
• 34:39
  to make new friends as we live longer and make make friends of at every age.
• 34:44
  Yeah. So about I wanna say about I don't know,
• 34:48
  ten, fifteen years ago, I I needed a new doctor and I was sent to this doctor.
• 34:53
  And we started chatting and it turns out he's a marathon runner and we're like,
• 34:57
  Well, let's go run in the park someday.
• 34:58
  So we went and had a run in the park.
• 35:00
  Well, anyway, this guy's ended up becoming one of my bet probably my best friend.
• 35:04
  You know, h his our families are melded.
• 35:07
  He and I've run marathons all over the world together.
• 35:10
  He was at Everest with me. You know,
• 35:12
  we we co create these experiences through our running that is joyful.
• 35:18
  He's probably fifteen years younger than me.
• 35:22
  So, you know
• 35:23
  And he's always in awe of I can't believe you're doing this.
• 35:25
  You're like my role model of what I want to be doing when I'm you.
• 35:29
  But I think co creation has lots of elasticity in its definition.
• 35:33
  And one of that is the importance of multi generational friendships,
• 35:37
  you know, and I just use that as one example.
• 35:40
  Yep, absolutely. I think I think the multi-generational element of
• 35:44
  it is really important. I have that with my son.
• 35:46
  He and I can co-create and riff.
• 35:48
  I have it with a daughter of mine that actually lives in Brooklyn.
• 35:50
  And she's ~ she's an artist, singer,
• 35:53
  and waits tables, you know, as people do.
• 35:55
  But the point is when we get together,
• 35:57
  we can co-create stories and all kinds of stuff,
• 36:00
  right? And it's it's it's such a joy.
• 36:02
  I think I think people forget about that.
• 36:05
  They feel like they're so responsible that they need to be doing stuff.
• 36:08
  When really the call is to create and co create.
• 36:11
  If if people would just Yeah, if you just focused on that.
• 36:14
  If you walk into a room of people and ask yourself the question,
• 36:17
  Geez, I wonder what I can create here or who can I co create with,
• 36:20
  it will change your perspective on walking into that room.
• 36:23
  I love that. You it's very really very very very true.
• 36:26
  You know, I had such a great time doing this book,
• 36:29
  Longevity Nation, and talking to so many people.
• 36:31
  And of course, of course I wanted to talk to doctors,
• 36:34
  but I also wanted to talk to technologists and urban planners
• 36:37
  and higher education and creators and marketers,
• 36:41
  because every part of it touches the culture,
• 36:45
  society, and the future of how we we may live and should live and might live.
• 36:51
  And
• 36:53
  You know, I it was really, you know,
• 36:55
  a a joy to use the word to talk to so many of these of these leaders around
• 37:00
  the world. you know, I went to Singapore I went to Singapore and
• 37:03
  met so many interesting people there.
• 37:04
  As you know, Singapore's doing such incredible things and yeah,
• 37:07
  went to Japan and I went to the EU and UK and the Middle East and you know,
• 37:12
  just seeing what's happening is so exciting to move the
• 37:16
  the longevity agenda forward. ~
• 37:19
  Which was it was a great, great experience over the last year and a half to to,
• 37:24
  you know, do that and ultimately write this new book.
• 37:26
  Yeah, I love that. I love that.
• 37:28
  Yeah, I hope to do some of that exploration myself.
• 37:30
  Well, Michael, I'm I'm ~ a little bit under the gun on time here.
• 37:34
  I'd almost hate to cut this conversation off.
• 37:36
  So where can people find more about you and what you're doing,
• 37:39
  your website and all this?
• 37:41
  Thanks for asking. Well, first of all,
• 37:42
  Roarforward.com is our business,
• 37:45
  but they can follow me on LinkedIn.
• 37:46
  ~ mostly I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn.
• 37:49
  You know, we're also on Facebook and so forth.
• 37:51
  But LinkedIn is the place I like to be because it's a non-toxic environment
• 37:55
  and it really is. You learn a lot from people and each other.
• 37:58
  I did a post this weekend, you'll appreciate this.
• 38:01
  It had 126,000 impressions,
• 38:04
  166 comments, 57 reposts.
• 38:08
  I mean it
• 38:09
  It hit a chord with people. And the post was really about how marketers,
• 38:15
  you know, marketers stop targeting people after at the age of 55.
• 38:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 38:23
  Because they feel like, well, they're,
• 38:25
  you know, they're not and
• 38:27
  They're set in their ways, right?
• 38:29
  we're gonna go chase the 18 to 24 year old.
• 38:32
  And boy, they're missing a major growth market because that the 50 plus.
• 38:38
  all that we've been talking about are living very different kinds of lives,
• 38:41
  have a lot of disposable income,
• 38:43
  are not brand loyal, trying new things.
• 38:46
  And this that that post like hit a hit a nerve
• 38:50
  That's great. I love that.
• 38:51
  on Sunday. I was like, whoa. But yeah,
• 38:54
  so you know, LinkedIn, go forward.
• 38:56
  We have a free newsletter all around longevity.
• 38:58
  People can sign up for we have a membership group.
• 39:01
  People can explore on the on the website.
• 39:03
  And of course I'm selling books.
• 39:04
  Thank you.
• 39:05
  Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I love that.
• 39:07
  Thanks for having me. ~
• 39:08
  yeah,
• 39:09
  it's great. When I you know, when you think about the marketing opportunity,
• 39:11
  especially if you have layered personalities,
• 39:13
  each individual represents six different people,
• 39:16
  right? So there's a lot of there's a lot of identities to go after,
• 39:19
  right? Yeah, yeah. That's
• 39:19
  Yeah. Well well said. Well said.
• 39:21
  Yeah.
• 39:22
  Michael, such a pleasure. I really enjoyed this and ~ we'll we will need
• 39:26
  to do it again.
• 39:26
  Terrific. Thanks for having me.
• 39:28
  How do we live young for a lifetime?
• 39:29
  How do we make 100 the new 30?
• 39:32
  The answers are out there, and we're bringing them to you every episode.
• 39:36
  Make sure you're subscribed, check out more episodes right here,
• 39:41
  and follow us on social media so you never miss a breakthrough.
• 39:44
  Thanks for listening.