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Healthspan, Not Lifespan: Harvard Researchers on Why Staying Healthy Matters More Than Living Longer · The LIVING Room Podcast | Inside The WNDR Lab

0:00
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to flourish as a species?
0:02
SPEAKER_00: We doubled life expectancy in the 20th century, but we never engineered a corresponding increase in our health span.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: But what we're proposing here is for the first time in history, we actually do something about how we age as a species.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: We doubled life expectancy, but we continue to age almost exactly the same way we did in 300 BC.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: And that is a problem.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: We would only add about 2.5 years to life expectancy if we eradicated all cancers off of planet Earth.
0:28
SPEAKER_03: How do we cure cancer?
0:30
SPEAKER_03: How do we cure Alzheimer's disease?
0:31
SPEAKER_03: And not saying we shouldn't do those, but that fundamentally isn't getting at this question is from a biological perspective, why does an old person get diseases a young person doesn't?
0:41
SPEAKER_03: That's a question that can be answered and solved with the right investment.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: In Boston, we have two neighborhoods two miles apart, Back Bay and Roxbury, where life expectancy differs by 23 years.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: So in in Roxbury, life expectancy is 69.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: In Back Bay, it's 92.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Your zip code is the biggest predictor of how long you live in the US.
1:02
SPEAKER_03: Why is it that making male rat doesn't get cancer and a rat does?
1:04
SPEAKER_03: There's a mechanism for that, and we can study those things.
1:07
SPEAKER_03: And that's where investment should go to be able to then do something about what's coming in the future.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: There was a Pew survey in 2013 that asked, would you want to slow your biological aging and live past the age of 120?
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Only 38% of Americans replied yes, which is pretty stunning.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Biological age is the single biggest risk factor for all the diseases of aging.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: And I could delete one moral bias from our civilization.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: It would be this idea that what's natural is morally superior to what's unnatural.
1:54
SPEAKER_02: And welcome back, Will.
1:55
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:56
SPEAKER_02: Great to have you and great trainers.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Ray.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: By the way.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: Noted.
1:59
SPEAKER_02: We're here today to talk about your project, which I'm excited to unpack.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: But can we start with this term bioethics and what this actually means?
2:09
SPEAKER_02: Because I think everyone listening will have heard of that word or that uh terminology, but probably don't quite understand what that means.
2:16
SPEAKER_02: And I suspect it's going to impact every one of us.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: So the the root of the word ethics is actually Latin for custom habit.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: So what is ethical was by and large what has been customarily done for millennia often.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: But I always found that definition to be a little bit underwhelming, right?
2:37
SPEAKER_00: I think we can do so much better than what has been done.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: Um so the kind of bioethics I want to work towards is one that applies a scientific method to quantitatively reason through what is good for us as a species.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to flourish?
2:53
SPEAKER_02: Is that the same terminology that you would use?
2:57
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I would because I defer to expertise and I defer to reignings.
3:00
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I honestly, I will, this is hopefully where this conversation will go.
3:03
SPEAKER_03: I think there's like the ethics of what we do in tech in technology and aging research is something that doesn't get discussed a lot actually in the academic space because we're so kind of a head down trying to do the research.
3:14
SPEAKER_03: But I think it has such implications not just for what research lines we do, but also how you communicate what you're doing to the public, how you change policy, how you change people's perceptions.
3:24
SPEAKER_03: So I think aging itself, which I I think we'll get to, but has a very loaded term, which instantly gives people a sense of like, well, we should do something about it, we shouldn't, and and like it's good or bad for us.
3:35
SPEAKER_03: And I think it's very different thinking about aging from a biomedical point of view from from diseases.
3:42
SPEAKER_03: And so like that that's what we want to get to.
3:44
SPEAKER_02: Ray Rainey, your work is an interesting mix of you know, longevity science, geoscience, philosophy, ethics, um, economics.
3:54
SPEAKER_02: And I think at a very high level, from my understanding, you're you're challenging this idea that aging and death is in some way good for us or or natural or something that we should um just accept.
4:08
SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
4:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: So we I think we've learned to tell ourselves these stories about how aging is a blessing.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Aging is this mystical thing that was designed by kind gods to furnish human life with meaning when we know from a scientific standpoint that nothing could be, you know, further from the truth.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, we did not evolve to age for the good of our species.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I remember being maybe age nine or ten and learning that Japan was going to go extinct as a country.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: And that really struck me.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, but then I learned very quickly that we were all gonna go extinct, right?
4:47
SPEAKER_00: As individual biological beings.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: And that seemed to bother my peers at age nine and ten also.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: But then there's uh a cutoff age, maybe you know, 15, where we get this learned acceptance.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: It becomes the norm to say, oh, actually, it's a good thing.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: We evolved to age for the good of our species, and you know, adults embrace it more than kids.
5:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: I think then, you know, we're we we've also been conditioned, I guess, to believe that we should accept this very natural and steady decline in function that has comes along with aging.
5:26
SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of what we challenge with what we do is like how can we how can we sustain vitality and energy and um flourishing for longer?
5:36
SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of where you're heading with the work that you're doing, but not just that.
5:40
SPEAKER_02: What's the economic impact of that?
5:42
SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, ideally we would want to engineer a world where we can decouple or increase in wisdom from or increase in disheartening diagnoses, right?
5:54
SPEAKER_00: And it's it's difficult to really picture this world because we're talking about a world where we have biologically young but chronologically old, wise experience adults around.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: And the way healthy people behave in the economy and in hospital settings is very different from the way unhealthy people and their loved ones behave.
6:14
SPEAKER_02: When you say behave, what do you mean by that?
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I mean um voluntary labor supply, for instance, from an economic standpoint.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, I spent the last two years working with a team of economists to build um a simulation tool with returns on investment for specific RD advancements in aging science.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: And we we basically modeled increases in voluntary labor supply, which is to say, you know, if we could just get people to remain in the workforce when they want to, you know, if you think about it, there's about 40 million Americans today who are unpaid caregivers to older adults.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: And then on the other side of the same point, it's 40 million caregivers.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and they they in fact provided 36 billion hours of unpaid care in 2024 alone.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: So this is people looking after their family, I assume.
7:03
SPEAKER_02: Right.
7:04
SPEAKER_02: 40 million.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: And that's, you know, if you model that at a minimum wage, you're gonna get a 600 billion opportunity cost a year from those 36 billion hours of unpaid care.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: And then on the other side of the same coin, you have millions of Americans who are leaving the workforce every year because they themselves are getting diagnosed with a condition of aging.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: So the the opportunity costs are tremendous, even if you do not change the age of retirement at all.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: You let people retire when they want to.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: But you know, it turns out a lot of people, and you can think of this in the US, um, physicians, politicians, um, teachers, they don't want to leave the workforce, right?
7:42
SPEAKER_00: They they want to stay in the workforce past their cognitive health span.
7:46
SPEAKER_02: Politicians.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
7:48
SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, crazy senior faculty at universities.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Very true.
7:53
SPEAKER_03: Tenured faculty.
7:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
7:55
SPEAKER_02: So we're really talking about, you know, if we can improve when we say voluntary employment or voluntary work, do you mean like if we can improve people's capacity to want to still work?
8:09
SPEAKER_02: And by that, their health span, this term that I think we're we're overusing a little now, but uh I think everyone understands what that means.
8:16
SPEAKER_02: If we can improve our ability to continue working has a tremendous economic impact that is in the trillions.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: Right.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: And and today, um, health is a good proxy for work, right?
8:29
SPEAKER_00: Most people who are healthy want to work in some capacity, and ideally they want to get paid for it, right?
8:35
SPEAKER_00: Nobody grows up thinking, oh, I want to grow up to be an unpaid caretaker to my parents, my aging parent.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: Right.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: And we um in economics, we we call it age-related disutility of labor.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: So as you grow older, there's kind of a weight that increases, there's a cost to working that goes up as well.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: And that cost can be cognitive or physical.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: So we we basically change the weights in the model.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, and we say, you know, maybe that person aged 65 now behaves like someone 60 in the sense that they are healthy enough to want to get up and their, you know, costs of labor are lower.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: 65 is the new 60.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: So we're just starting there, right?
9:17
SPEAKER_03: What would that do from return if we could start there?
9:19
SPEAKER_02: I I heard on, I think it was maybe part of your TED talk, which is superb, by the way.
9:24
SPEAKER_02: Um, or it could have been on a different podcast, you mentioned 41 being the new 40.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: Can you can you explain what you mean by that?
9:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we it it sounds like a tiny change in the economy, right?
9:36
SPEAKER_00: But from uh from an aggregate standpoint, the the returns are pretty astounding.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: If you just take every American over the age of 40 and you make them behave in the economy and in hospital settings like Americans one year younger, but you're you're really saying, you know, they're biologically younger, but they're chronologically older.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: Right.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: So so their income goes up because, you know, our income as a species is suddenly triangle-shaped, so that most of us peak income-wise around age 58.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: And then very predictably our income goes down as we age, you know, primarily as a result of biological aging.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: So if you could let our income keep going up and the the costs of labor go down because you're biologically younger, your health span is longer, the the returns are pretty extraordinary.
10:28
SPEAKER_02: So would it be safe to say that there's pretty there's very clearly a benefit for optimizing health and extending lifespan?
10:40
SPEAKER_02: Do those two both apply?
10:42
SPEAKER_02: Because the reason I ask that, and this is a question both of you, is that I think we're a little confused as as the sort of general population when we hear two conflicting perspectives here.
10:52
SPEAKER_02: Because a lot of people, you'll hear this narrative, you know, we we don't want people to live longer because of the economic burden that it would have on society.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: Why would people be saying that if the opposite is clearly true?
11:04
SPEAKER_00: So we we doubled life expectancy in the 20th century, but we never engineered a corresponding increase in our health span.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's entirely natural that people would have this yuck factor reaction to it, right?
11:17
SPEAKER_00: Because if you again doubled life expectancy without doubling health span, we would indeed be in trouble.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Right.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: But what we're proposing here is for the first time in history, we actually do something about how we age as a species.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, we double life expectancy, but we continue to age almost exactly the same way we did in 300 BC.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: And that is a problem.
11:38
SPEAKER_02: And by that you mean there's this like far too long of a period at the end of life where we're just struggling with pretty severe physical and cognitive decline.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Right.
11:48
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:49
SPEAKER_03: And I think one thing to think about is really to understand the difference in life between life expectancy and aging, right?
11:55
SPEAKER_03: So increase in life expectancy is just, you know, the the data point in that is one, it's when you die.
12:01
SPEAKER_03: And the increase in life expectancy we got in the last century of 40 years was really changing things that used to kill us.
12:07
SPEAKER_03: You use this phrase kind of quickly when we're young.
12:09
SPEAKER_03: So you know, pathological diseases, infectious diseases, that has a mathematical effect on life expectancy, lets us all live much longer.
12:17
SPEAKER_03: It hasn't pushed the boundary on maximum lifespan, it's just moved median lifespan expectancy more towards maximum.
12:23
SPEAKER_03: It's done nothing about the way our bodies age at all.
12:27
SPEAKER_03: And in fact, we we've touched on this a little bit.
12:29
SPEAKER_03: In fact, it's then revealed all these problems that come later on.
12:32
SPEAKER_03: It's caused this huge increase in age-related conditions.
12:35
SPEAKER_03: And then the questions become, okay, what do we do?
12:38
SPEAKER_03: Like, obviously, that's a wonderful thing.
12:40
SPEAKER_03: What do we do to then stop this second problem?
12:43
SPEAKER_03: And and what we're currently doing is trying to, you know, whack-a-mole, put out, put out the diseases as they come, put out the fires as they come.
12:50
SPEAKER_03: So, okay, how do we how do we cure cancer?
12:52
SPEAKER_03: How do we cure Alzheimer's disease?
12:54
SPEAKER_03: And not saying we shouldn't do those, but that fundamentally isn't getting at this question is from a biological perspective, why does an old person get diseases a young person doesn't?
13:04
SPEAKER_03: That's a question that can be answered and solved with the right investment.
13:07
SPEAKER_03: We don't know fully now.
13:09
SPEAKER_03: And can we think about age as a modifiable risk factor?
13:13
SPEAKER_03: Can we think about why some people age more gracefully than others, what's behind that at the real biomedical level and apply it?
13:20
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's where we get into this kind of ethics around what people think about aging.
13:25
SPEAKER_03: I'm very sure that the the the biggest bang for buck investment to affect morbidity and old age is to not think about treating those diseases, but think about more fundamentally how can we prevent all of them?
13:38
SPEAKER_03: How can we think about the the biomedicine of prevention?
13:40
SPEAKER_03: But that's thinking about age as uh as a process, as a risk factor.
13:45
SPEAKER_03: And as soon as you start to think about, oh, could we modify aging as a as a process, whether it's through exercise diet or or a wonder drug yet to be discovered, that has a kind of ick feeling for people.
13:58
SPEAKER_03: People are suddenly like, oh, we don't want to do that.
14:00
SPEAKER_03: We understand we'd love to cure Alzheimer's disease because we don't want people to suffer from Alzheimer's disease.
14:05
SPEAKER_03: We'd love to cure cancer, but we want to do that still.
14:08
SPEAKER_03: We're just we're just entrained to do that through a kind of curative medical point of view.
14:13
SPEAKER_03: If you think about, well, there's a way to maybe cure or delay the onset of those diseases by thinking about aging, suddenly that becomes kind of, well, that's I'm less comfortable with that.
14:23
SPEAKER_03: That's that's less normal or natural, that's unnatural.
14:27
SPEAKER_03: This is something aging is something that is kind of like you know, a rite of passage for all of us.
14:31
SPEAKER_03: And that's what we're kind of fundamentally trying to get at.
14:33
SPEAKER_03: It's not about you know whether you choose to live to 150 or you could or not.
14:37
SPEAKER_03: This is a question that is hypothetical first and also down to everybody to make that choice.
14:42
SPEAKER_03: But essentially, what do people think about being old?
14:45
SPEAKER_03: The way, if you ask someone now, do they want to live to 100?
14:48
SPEAKER_03: Their answer will depend upon what their vision of a hundred-year-old is, right?
14:52
SPEAKER_03: And most people's vision of a hundred-year-old is the 100-year-old that we have now, or even the 65-year-old we have now with four different chronic conditions, who can't work, who can't do these things.
15:02
SPEAKER_03: So, how can you answer that question properly?
15:04
SPEAKER_03: You can't until we really begin to think about could we reimagine aging in a different way?
15:09
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that feeling of being uncomfortable with the idea of doing it for aging, but not for Alzheimer's or cancers is potentially because we associate those with suffering very acutely.
15:23
SPEAKER_02: Like, and we know and have quite often we have instances with our family members or loved ones, and like you get diagnosed with the ailment, the disease, the illness, and that is very much something you then want to cure.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: Where aging is this very gradual thing that's happening to all of us.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that's why?
15:40
SPEAKER_02: Because I think you said actually again in one of your talks, you know, if we did cure cancer, for example, we would improve health, we would improve lifespan, but it's kind of marginal across the board because you survive one thing, you then are still at risk for another.
15:56
SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
15:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean you would only add about 2.5 years to life expectancy if we eradicated all cancers off of planet Earth.
16:04
SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
16:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:06
SPEAKER_02: But then I assume, you know, we're still talking about trillions of dollars.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: And and in fact, um, economists Murphy and Topel from the University of Chicago modeled the returns on investment from curing all cancers, it would add up to over$80 trillion in the long run in net present value.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: Right.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: So that's, you know, it should be pretty intuitive to think about why is you know doing something about the way we age as a species a good thing.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: If you target just one of the diseases of aging that are downstream of biological aging, you add trillions of dollars to the economy, right?
16:42
SPEAKER_00: And the same is true, but 10x if you do something about aging itself.
16:46
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about that.
16:48
SPEAKER_02: And let's talk about the model and Silverlining's bio, um, which by the way is remarkable.
16:53
SPEAKER_02: And everyone should go and read that because I think, and will you put me onto this?
16:56
SPEAKER_02: I think it is I I read the whole thing in one go and I thought it was remarkable.
17:00
SPEAKER_02: So congrats.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
17:01
SPEAKER_02: Can you explain to the listeners what that even is and how you ended up with this kind of manifesto almost?
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: So I spent the last few years working with a team of economists to build this interactive report and simulation tool with returns on investment for specific RD advancements in aging science from slowing reproductive aging to slowing brain aging and the effects that that could have on GDP and population growth.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, there's a lot of um talk about increasing birth rates, for instance.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, if you do increase birth rates, um, newborns don't work.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: They temporarily remove their parents from the workforce.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, and they very predictably grow biologically old and chronically ill.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, in the short term, you're left with a worse dependency ratio.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: There are fewer working age adults.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: And then in the long run, you're left with the same problem of aging adults, right?
18:01
SPEAKER_00: So, what would what would it mean to actually do something to not just create new humans, but invest in the existing ones we already have?
18:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: Right.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: That that was the answer we wanted to, the the question we wanted to answer.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, and we we wanted to look at GDP and demographic changes, right, in the US.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: So we we found that if you could slow aging by five years in the US population of adults aged 40 and older, you would add about 2 trillion per year to US GDP, or roughly the equivalent of adding a Canada-sized economy to the US every year.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: And that over several decades would add up to over$100 trillion.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, more than um the modeling of eradicating cancers.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: And that's, you know, just a five-year shift backwards.
18:48
SPEAKER_03: And it's like such a key point that we hear a lot about the change in the age of our population, the baby boomers are getting older, we are having this kind of shift from more people, you know, over 65 than under five.
18:59
SPEAKER_03: And what can we do about that?
19:00
SPEAKER_03: And yes, one way is to think about birth rates and think about how we change that demography.
19:05
SPEAKER_03: But at the moment, when so many people fall out of the workforce, become a burden, you know, to others around them, to the economy, and then a suffering burden to themselves.
19:15
SPEAKER_03: In fact, just changing that demography itself doesn't really do anything.
19:18
SPEAKER_03: We put a massive burden, I think, on people in this kind of age range between 25 to 45.
19:24
SPEAKER_03: They're having children, then they're also trying to be the most productive in their careers.
19:27
SPEAKER_03: So prepare for their parents is kind of the only subtle thing, which is incredibly hard to maintain.
19:32
SPEAKER_03: And actually, there's then a lot of people that could be really made to contribute in ways that they would want to to help.
19:39
SPEAKER_03: So you could re-im, you can really reimagine how the demographics contribute to society if you think about aging as something that we can do something about.
19:48
SPEAKER_03: And that how we do something about can take many different forms.
19:51
SPEAKER_03: It can take applying the things we know well work well for some people now to make them healthier.
19:56
SPEAKER_03: It can be these kind of thinking about biomedical approaches that might be more moonshot-like to really maintain functional capacity, like into old age or even passport barriers we have.
20:06
SPEAKER_03: But like they sort of revolutionize the way that human suffering and revolutionize our our life experience, I think, in a way that becomes then, you know, as you put it so well, like a moral imperative, I think.
20:18
SPEAKER_02: And so I guess actually there's sorry, I'm gonna sound really simple and naive here, but if we if we can improve uh health span by five years, not only are those people are it still gives them the capacity to work and flourish and enjoy their lives, but then there's less burden on the people that would otherwise be looking after them.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: Right.
20:37
SPEAKER_02: And so that's all factored into this model.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:40
SPEAKER_02: What about some of the like un the unpaid carers, for example?
20:43
SPEAKER_02: How do you factor that in?
20:44
SPEAKER_02: Like how do we actually calculate that?
20:46
SPEAKER_00: So that's an implicit function in the model.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: And it goes along the um age-related disutility of labor.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: We basically lower it by a little bit to say, you know, the costs of working for that person will go down a little bit.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: And as a result, um, you know, people will want to work longer.
21:04
SPEAKER_02: I love on the model that you can actually like play around with the you know, the different um diseases, illnesses, different uh systems of biology.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: That must have taken an incredible amount of work to aggregate.
21:18
SPEAKER_02: And I know you worked with over a hundred scientists, is that right?
21:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I interviewed a hundred and two scientists um for this project.
21:26
SPEAKER_02: Number 102.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh I think so.
21:29
SPEAKER_02: It might have been last of the party.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's right.
21:31
SPEAKER_02: So was that a mixture of sort of geroscientists and economists?
21:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, those were um strictly scientists working on longevity.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
21:42
SPEAKER_02: No way.
21:42
unknown: Yeah.
21:43
SPEAKER_02: Okay, here's a question for you then.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: Having had all of those conversations, you know, what what ultimately turned out to be the thing that they said people should be doing to help achieve this that we know now?
21:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the the single highest return.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Thing we can do is advocate for more federal funding in aging science.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: I think we need more basic research done in the space.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's precisely the kind of funding that's being detracted from universities right now.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: I think we we have a lot of work to do before we can say with certainty whether or not we're reversing aging in humans, but it is possible, right?
22:25
SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm both immensely optimistic in the long run and also um cautious in the short term, right?
22:32
SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of work to be done, but the the returns would be extraordinary.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: I think that they would exceed, um, far exceed the impacts from even astounding scientific marvels like germ theory and antibiotics.
22:46
SPEAKER_02: In the same way that that allowed us to massively increase lifespan in 1980.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, antibiotics alone are estimated to have added some 23 years to life expectancy, but but they only added years to life expectancy, right?
22:59
SPEAKER_00: So we would be, for the first time in history, actually changing how we age our disease risk profile as a species.
23:06
SPEAKER_03: I also think one thing to think about when we talk about the life expectancy change in the last century and now how we want to make kind of, you know, the health of those years different in this next century is that life expectancy increase, they say in the US that we saw, which on average was about 30 years or so just under, I think, wasn't true for everybody, right?
23:23
SPEAKER_03: That's different state by state.
23:25
SPEAKER_03: It's different whether you're in the top 1% of earners or the lowest 1% of earners.
23:29
SPEAKER_03: It's it's different in very different ways.
23:31
SPEAKER_03: It's different why education is a predictor.
23:33
SPEAKER_03: So those different outcomes create this huge inequity in the gains that we get from the things we invest.
23:39
SPEAKER_03: And what's really interesting, I think, around aging is now we have the tools to really measure at a molecular level how our bodies age to some degree.
23:48
SPEAKER_03: People are repeating those studies now to see how biological aging is different across different demographics.
23:54
SPEAKER_03: And in fact, that shows there's a huge variance in how people's bodies age depending upon a variety of social inequity factors, right?
24:02
SPEAKER_03: So that means then it becomes like a snowballing effect that that due to you know basically where you're born, you're given a lot, which means your body ages at a different rate than if you're if you're more fortunate.
24:15
SPEAKER_03: And then that leads to chronic disease burden, it leads to all these things.
24:19
SPEAKER_03: And so it becomes really, you know, from my point of view, like we can, there's some things we can do now to change that, because if it if it works for some, it means we've solved that problem for some.
24:27
SPEAKER_03: So we can apply that to others.
24:28
SPEAKER_03: And that's things that you know that we can understand to release a health span.
24:32
SPEAKER_03: And then when we think about why we should do it more broadly, why we should think about aging.
24:36
SPEAKER_03: And this doesn't need to be, you know, we want to live to 200 or these sort of things, but why we just think about aging as a modifiable thing, it becomes really, you know, a question of right, of human rights, I think, in many ways.
24:49
SPEAKER_03: So enable these things.
24:50
SPEAKER_03: We have this difference in how people, how people's bodies succumb to the environment they're in and what they do.
24:56
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's really that's not spoken about a lot, I think, in the kind of in the narrative of the moment around longevity science, right?
25:04
SPEAKER_03: That's not really touched upon, I think.
25:06
SPEAKER_02: I want to speak about that now, Will.
25:07
SPEAKER_02: Okay, right.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: And here's why.
25:09
SPEAKER_02: I think our ambition, certainly as a as a company, is like in the the long-term true north, how can we help everyone achieve 100 healthy years, right?
25:19
SPEAKER_02: And I think if we completely remove this concept of helping people live forever or live to 150, we're not even doing a good job of living to 100, even with access to all of the things we know to work.
25:32
SPEAKER_02: Then we factor in the people that don't have, I mean, there's two billion people that don't have access to clean drinking water.
25:39
SPEAKER_02: Like it's such a wide gap between the things we know to work and the things everyone has access to.
25:45
SPEAKER_02: So how do we close that gap first?
25:48
SPEAKER_02: I think is probably the question that I'm most interested in answering.
25:52
SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, then maybe, and we should talk about this now, like then maybe talk about what does it look like to add decades of functional years once we've achieved that?
26:01
SPEAKER_02: And it does it's not a zero-sum game, of course.
26:04
SPEAKER_02: You need people with resources to move the science forward, but how do you think about that gap?
26:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, both Will and I live in Boston, and in Boston, we have two neighborhoods two miles apart, Back Bay and Roxbury, where life expectancy um differs by 23 years.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: So in in Roxbury, life expectancy is 69.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: In Back Bay, it's 92.
26:26
SPEAKER_02: That can't be right.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: Is that right?
26:28
SPEAKER_02: 23 years and they're two miles apart.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: And your your zip code, zip code is the biggest predictor of how long you live.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: It's not that big, 23 years.
26:38
SPEAKER_03: That but that's life expectancy.
26:39
SPEAKER_03: That's not just biological things, but like, yeah, it's huge asparagus.
26:43
SPEAKER_03: It's incredible.
26:44
SPEAKER_03: And and as I said before, now we have these souls, we begin to show that's also true for for some of that difference, some of that is deaths from things that are not age-related, but some of that difference comes from age-related conditions and chronic disease, which is a a product of the rate of aging difference between those people.
27:01
SPEAKER_03: And that's something that we have never really thought about or measured until recently, which is wild, right?
27:06
SPEAKER_03: Why is how is it that big?
27:08
SPEAKER_00: What's um so the one of the main factors is just opioids, um, and then um driving.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, people who drive to work tend to just have higher mortality rates.
27:19
SPEAKER_02: Um is it access to medicine to develop?
27:23
SPEAKER_00: That is also true.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: And you know, I I would argue that we should invest in aging science um not in spite of the fact that we live in a world with limited resources, but because we live in a world with limited resources.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Because I would argue that those vulnerable populations would actually benefit even more from, you know, imagine a truly preventative therapeutic that allows you to delay cancers, Alzheimer's.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: Um age-related poverty is a real thing.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, if you're um a working class woman who needs to suddenly care for her aging mother, um, I I would like to help that woman, right?
28:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think we as a field, we are, many of us are thinking about helping those populations precisely.
28:10
SPEAKER_02: I guess we've got proof of concept there as well, right?
28:12
SPEAKER_02: Like infant mortality, vaccinations, they they all cost money to solve for at any level originally.
28:18
SPEAKER_03: And as how the how the public, how humans think about aging.
28:22
SPEAKER_03: So in many ways, one of the responses you often get is well, you know, aging is a luxury.
28:27
SPEAKER_03: You've got to live long enough to experience aging, right?
28:29
SPEAKER_03: So it's a privilege.
28:30
SPEAKER_03: So why should we be thinking about these privileged people who, by definition, have become old enough to reach that thing?
28:36
SPEAKER_03: Why should we think about them and not think about all those other things you talked about, which lead to lower life expectancy?
28:42
SPEAKER_03: And there's the so like is it disease of the rich effectively?
28:45
SPEAKER_03: So we shouldn't target it.
28:46
SPEAKER_03: And actually, that is so kind of born of human conditioning to think about what aging is.
28:53
SPEAKER_03: You know, aging starts when you're, well, it depends who you ask, but it certainly starts a long time before you're 70, right?
28:58
SPEAKER_03: So the the modifying the kind of track, the trajectory that you're on in how your body ages, gives huge benefits to people when they're 30, when they're 40 for disease, you know, the things that prevents it things happen early.
29:09
SPEAKER_03: So actually, this idea that it only matters to think about aging when you've reached whatever we define as being old, yeah, is not true at all, right?
29:17
SPEAKER_02: So it's not just for the privileged people that are.
29:19
SPEAKER_03: So actually, yeah.
29:20
SPEAKER_03: So it is true that if you are, you know, if if if many of the things which reduce life expectancy in those areas are things that may be unrelated to age, but actually many of them that, you know, whether it's a cardiovascular disease or it's, you know, succumbing to type 2 diabetes, these are age-related conditions which are maybe happening in much younger ages in those those people because of the what's happening to the nutrition.
29:43
SPEAKER_02: So what so what you're really saying is the thing that makes us feel uncomfortable about extending lifespan and certainly um adding decades of functional years to people's lives, the thing that makes us uncomfortable about that is that there's so many people that don't get to that point.
29:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
29:58
unknown: Right.
29:59
SPEAKER_03: So then that and then it feels well, okay.
30:01
SPEAKER_03: So this is like the and and and that's not how I think about it.
30:04
SPEAKER_03: I think this is true that you know aging science as a whole is really trying to understand the biology of how, you know, at its essence, it's what's a functioning system and how does it lose function with time.
30:15
SPEAKER_03: And you can lose function in many different ways at different ages, and systems break down at different points, right?
30:20
SPEAKER_03: So that's aging, and some of that leads to diseases in your 40s or your 50s, at least.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: So it's really trying to get around this thinking that aging is one just the privilege of the very fortunate, but also that somehow it's this kind of like this you talk about so well, it's just this this natural thing which we have to have to be human, even right.
30:40
SPEAKER_03: And those are interesting conversations which I think need to be uh led in in sophisticated ways to make us really think about where do we invest the money?
30:48
SPEAKER_03: I think there's a lot of barriers to investing in aging as a kind of route to therapeutics because it's seen as like not the same as biomedical health, right?
30:58
SPEAKER_03: It's not the same as treating cancer, it's not the same, you know.
31:01
SPEAKER_03: If I try to think about could we prevent cancer by thinking about aging, the response will be, no, I don't know, that's that's a bit of a weird thing to do.
31:10
SPEAKER_03: I don't think that's the right way to do it.
31:11
SPEAKER_03: If I say, well, I want to prevent cancer by just understanding cancers and treating them, no one has any problem.
31:16
SPEAKER_03: But my colleagues who do that in my department get very different taken and fundamentally that's just two different approaches to the same endpoint.
31:22
SPEAKER_03: But once you put this aging word in, once you put then it invokes all these kind of questions in ourselves, which it's worth thinking about why we hold them actually.
31:31
SPEAKER_03: Why do we why do we have this sense of aging as an immutable thing that we shouldn't mess with?
31:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
31:36
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think if people could you know, when you ask people whether they want to live to 100, most of the time the answer is no, because of this final period of decrepitude or or or decline.
31:47
SPEAKER_02: But if you were, you know, if you could guarantee 10 great decades, we'd all say yes.
31:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: So so there was a a Pew survey in 2013 that asked, would you want to slow your biological aging um and live past the age of 120?
32:03
SPEAKER_00: And only 38% of Americans replied yes.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: Which is which is pretty stunning, right?
32:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think it is a function of our outdated ethics.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it aging is something that affects every single family economy and government, but we have this notion that it is something that affects exclusively developed nations, something that affects exclusively the top 1%.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: And it's it was true um up until the last century, but um somewhere in the 20th century, we started dying slowly as a species rather than quickly.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: And I think no single government or family has really managed to respond to that question.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: What do we do about the way we age?
32:48
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
32:48
SPEAKER_03: And that's also really true.
32:50
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, life expectancy has gone up in different countries and different types.
32:53
SPEAKER_03: Has it?
32:54
SPEAKER_03: Is it still going up?
32:55
SPEAKER_03: It depends who you're talking about.
32:56
SPEAKER_03: So, do you mean in the US and which demographics?
32:59
SPEAKER_03: So I think that life expectancy is still going up in the US.
33:01
SPEAKER_03: It's diminishing returns, right?
33:02
SPEAKER_03: So the gains that we're making in the US are slowing down because some of those things that gave us those gains have been done already, right?
33:10
SPEAKER_03: But that's not true for every every part of society.
33:12
SPEAKER_03: So there's the the things, this is what I think about health span, right?
33:15
SPEAKER_03: So health span are like to me is how we can press morbidity, and there are things that we can do now that we know work because it's already worked for some people, right?
33:23
SPEAKER_03: So that's what we can apply.
33:24
SPEAKER_03: Once you've done all those things for everybody, which we haven't yet, you've reached your limit, right?
33:29
SPEAKER_03: If if if if the company does what it wants to do and optimize everybody's health, there's going to be a barrier to where you can go without really rethinking biological aging as a as a as a as a modifiable process, right?
33:40
SPEAKER_03: And then it creates, well, is that something we want to do?
33:42
SPEAKER_03: Is it something we don't want to do?
33:43
SPEAKER_03: There's lots of nuance of those arguments.
33:46
SPEAKER_03: So I think that life expectancy is increases are slowing down.
33:50
SPEAKER_03: And that's because the the way we've get got them through curing infectious disease and maybe they'll come back.
33:57
SPEAKER_03: Well, who knows, right?
33:59
SPEAKER_03: It's diminished.
34:00
SPEAKER_03: But that has just led to this other problem.
34:01
SPEAKER_03: But across different demographics of other countries where life expectancy has gone up, the numbers of people living in those countries has means that the burden of age-related disease in those countries per person greatly exceeds developed countries, actually.
34:15
SPEAKER_03: So we're getting this problem is coming.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: And I would add that um countries like Brazil, where I'm from, are getting old before ever getting rich.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: So it's not like we get to say, you know, we're already dying from infectious diseases like dengue.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: We're not going to do the slow deaths.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: Um it's not a thing, right?
34:32
SPEAKER_00: You have to do both.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: Um so those countries that are developing, I think, risk getting stuck in a cycle where they don't get to become developed because their populations are aging so quickly.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: Even in the US, the country with the highest number of young immigrants on the planet, by the end of this decade, we're gonna have we're gonna be spending a full half our federal budget on adults age 65 and older.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: That's about$3 trillion a year.
34:58
SPEAKER_02: That's wild.
34:59
SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of money.
35:00
SPEAKER_02: Can can we switch gears a little bit here and get a bit practical?
35:04
SPEAKER_02: And and uh the reason I asked that is you've spent a lot of time with gyroscientists, scientists across all these different fields of aging in the same way that we do.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: What's been the sort of number one takeaway for the things that we can do now?
35:19
SPEAKER_02: And the reason I asked that is it's kind of loaded because I I think I know what the answer would be, but you gave a really good example that there are plenty of instances in the in different animals who are living many, many decades longer in good health than we are.
35:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, and the giant tortoise is a good example, and they're certainly not winning any awards for the most exercise or highest step count.
35:45
SPEAKER_02: And so let's start with the first part of that question.
35:48
SPEAKER_02: Then what do we think is going to happen next?
35:50
SPEAKER_00: So the the specific question I asked scientists was what is one RD approach you believe is underfunded and underserved by commercial incentives, but could result in outsized returns.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: And I got um a number of different answers.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, for instance, one just vastly underfunded um thing in aging science is avarian aging.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, we just we have decades of research to catch up to.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, we are, you know, if we could do something about the way women age and if we could um slow reproductive aging, we would we would also delay quite possibly diagnoses like Alzheimer's, which are at least correlate with um age of menopause.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: Um so there's so much research to be done.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I should say that I focused primarily on the research side of things rather than the more actionable um lifestyle interventions that are possible today, too.
36:47
SPEAKER_02: But they must have given you some clue as to those lifestyles.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, the the clues are the the very obvious ones, right?
36:55
SPEAKER_00: Sleep, exercise, um, eat well.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's gonna get an Apple Prize for that.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
37:01
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think that's the challenge.
37:03
SPEAKER_02: That that's the sort of paradox, is that there are so many people that are not doing those right.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
37:09
SPEAKER_02: And so that is having a huge outsized impact on the numbers that we're talking about, right?
37:14
SPEAKER_02: And if you could, if everyone did the things we already know to work, how would that change your mind?
37:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I we actually um in my book, I have a book coming out with Harvard University Press.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: We we actually modeled um redesigning aging, the ethics and economics of human longevity.
37:31
SPEAKER_02: Um might give that name to this podcast episode.
37:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, great.
37:35
SPEAKER_02: When's it coming out?
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Um it is coming out later this year.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, we we actually modeled the returns from getting the entirety of the US population to adopt exercise.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: And and they would vastly exceed the returns from any biomedical RD, right?
37:52
SPEAKER_00: If you eradicated all cancers, it wouldn't even come close to getting everyone in the US to exercise.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: But but that does that mean we should close down the NIH and stop funding scientific research?
38:04
SPEAKER_00: No, right?
38:04
SPEAKER_00: Because even if everyone exercises, um, biological age is the single biggest risk factor for all the diseases of aging.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, um, your your disease risk is higher if you're a sedentary um, or or I'll go back.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: Um your disease risk is higher if you are an athlete at 80 than it is if you're a sedentary 30-year-old, right?
38:31
SPEAKER_00: Your odds of dying are much higher if you have done everything right by age 80 than they are if you, you know, you're a smoking 30-year-old.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because age is the biggest risk.
38:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, got it.
38:41
SPEAKER_02: It took me a while to get that right.
38:49
SPEAKER_03: We don't know why that's right.
38:51
SPEAKER_03: And and it that's not a that's not a black box which can't be opened.
38:55
SPEAKER_03: I think when you get to what you can invest in, I think we are, you're right.
38:59
SPEAKER_03: There are things we can do now, and they are really taking sophisticated approaches to those majors that we talk about here that we really can do, that we know work, which we can optimize, and we can really do a lot for how people age and do.
39:11
SPEAKER_03: But but then when you think about something like a giant tortoise or a naked mole rat or these exceptional ages in nature that deal with biology in a completely different way than we do, that can live for 250 years if they're a whale or a naked mole rat that just doesn't get cancer, right?
39:24
SPEAKER_03: Or these so biology and evolution in many ways has has solved those problems for some species, right, in different ways that we can study.
39:32
SPEAKER_03: That it's not just magic.
39:34
SPEAKER_03: And I think when we think about investment in terms of what we do once we once we have diminishing returns and we can do for everybody what the fortunate have right now, which is we're nowhere near doing.
39:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, agree.
39:45
SPEAKER_03: But but you know, and let's let's start there and let's deliver things that have real promise and that you can really do.
39:51
SPEAKER_03: But whilst we're whilst we're doing that, we need to think about what comes next, right?
39:56
SPEAKER_03: And that means not false promise of what exists now or doesn't exist, it's investing truly, really understanding biology as a phenomenon and aging as a sorry, aging is a phenomenon.
40:04
SPEAKER_03: And that's really trying to understand well, why is it that an 80-year-old is exercised, has higher disease risk than a 70-30-year-old?
40:11
SPEAKER_03: That's not just because that's just not inevitable, just because it's age, it's like there's a mechanism to that.
40:17
SPEAKER_03: Why is it that a naked mole rat doesn't get cancer and a rat does?
40:20
SPEAKER_03: There's a mechanism for that, and we can study those things, and that's where investment should go to be able to then do something about what's coming in the future.
40:27
SPEAKER_02: So so we've known that for a long time, right?
40:29
SPEAKER_02: We've known that these animals live a lot longer.
40:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
40:33
SPEAKER_02: Right?
40:34
SPEAKER_02: We why is it taking so long, Will, for us to actually see that translate to humans?
40:39
SPEAKER_03: Well, it we've known it for a long time, but actually conceptually, I think even until fairly recently in the in the scientific field, people would have said, well, we know it, but that's because of a multitude of genetic traits which we can't do anything about.
40:52
SPEAKER_03: Even though this is just variance that occurs in nature, there's never going to be a way to, you know, get the benefits that a giant tortoise has in a human, right?
41:00
SPEAKER_03: That you have to be a giant tortoise to get them, right?
41:02
SPEAKER_03: So the inevitability of these things.
41:04
SPEAKER_03: But now we know some of those things aren't true.
41:05
SPEAKER_03: So this kind of this field of juroscience where we have, in lab settings, done a single intervention that's a genetic mutation or a drug or a diet, and then changed the whole way an animal ages, their relationship with time.
41:16
SPEAKER_03: They don't just live longer, they live healthier.
41:18
SPEAKER_03: We can so we can speed up and slow down aging like it, like you know, almost like a rear stat in a model system.
41:25
SPEAKER_03: That only happened about 25 years ago in science, right?
41:28
SPEAKER_03: That's pretty recent.
41:29
SPEAKER_03: And then when it did, it was a massively uninvested field.
41:34
SPEAKER_03: It was a kind of small fringe science that was kind of a little bit looked down upon by the scientific community.
41:40
SPEAKER_03: There was no investment in it.
41:41
SPEAKER_03: So although we begin to understand, you know, we've known that naked moral rats are kind of exceptional.
41:46
SPEAKER_03: How many labs in the world are really studying the biology of that?
41:49
SPEAKER_03: Six or seven at the max, right?
41:51
SPEAKER_03: So we haven't really done what I think is the real legitimate RD to understand these questions at a level that needs to be done to get to the up to get to the answer to those, we're we're doing it a bit, but you know, aging is a massively underfunded science.
42:07
SPEAKER_02: So if we threw enough money at this, you know, collectively as a population level, and and then whilst you super intelligent scientists were digging into the mechanisms that might solve for that, whilst you're doing that, if we're all focusing on the things we know to work to help sort of build this suit of armor to improve our health span and and vitality and energy and all of the things that we know are going to decline with time, that gives us our best chance of being around when we can benefit from those things.
42:39
SPEAKER_02: So that's the strategy.
42:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
42:41
SPEAKER_03: Some of that might be in the short term, right?
42:43
SPEAKER_03: So, you know, that's my next a magic pill that is going to make somebody get rid of aging is not going to come anytime soon, doesn't exist.
42:49
SPEAKER_03: But it doesn't mean that there might be something that comes out of this geroscience field that has seen more investment in the last five years and any any time before.
42:57
SPEAKER_03: That could be, you know, this kind of therapeutic prevention concept, right?
43:01
SPEAKER_03: Might come online in the next five years.
43:03
SPEAKER_03: There are now things that have moved from those trials and labs studying funny animals that are under a microscope that are now in human clinical trials.
43:10
SPEAKER_03: So I think it will come in the future, but what we've got to do is not sell snake oil in the, you know, in the near term so that people are like confused about what's real, what's not, and we lose the faith around that research and not mislead people to go like, hey, do these things well and then and then it's kind of how can we create a vaccine so quickly to solve for COVID, but we can't solve for aging in that degree of urgency, given the impact on everyone's life and the economy?
43:39
SPEAKER_03: Well, um, do you want to um my answer to that, which would annoy virologists, is that's a much simpler question, right?
43:45
SPEAKER_03: Like the a a a viral infection is a lot simpler question.
43:48
SPEAKER_03: You you know, that the you do the aging, which is the whole systematic decrease in time.
43:52
SPEAKER_03: So I think But I guess also it's the urgency that was felt in that moment, right?
43:56
SPEAKER_03: I I guess.
43:57
SPEAKER_02: But is this not as urgent, if not more urgent?
44:00
SPEAKER_00: I would argue it's more urgent.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, because aging is universal, I would argue we have a bigger moral and economic imperative to solve it, not smaller.
44:09
SPEAKER_02: And it would help every single person on earth.
44:12
unknown: Yeah.
44:13
SPEAKER_03: I think that's the thing that's so great about what Rainey's trying to do is like that question that is it a moral imperative and urgent, that urgency isn't felt by most people, because most people will go either, well, I've got these other problems I've got to deal with first.
44:25
SPEAKER_03: I've got to get money for gas and these things.
44:27
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
44:27
SPEAKER_03: Or people in policy or biomedicine think, well, actually, we've got to cure these diseases.
44:32
SPEAKER_03: And this so actually this urgency, if you go to most people in the world, they don't aging is like a thing where it's like, well, I'm not, you know, just dream of being old.
44:40
SPEAKER_03: I'm not getting there yet, right?
44:42
SPEAKER_03: And also that it's like seen as like it's a problem which we just have to, it's this burden of being a human, right?
44:48
SPEAKER_03: It's just something that's just part of the human condition.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: And I think there's this sense of waiting for scientific results to emerge first before we commit significant resources to it.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly backwards, right?
45:00
SPEAKER_00: That that's not how scientists.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: We can't do that with Alzheimer's.
45:03
SPEAKER_02: Right.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, Alzheimer's is a perfect example.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: We we have an, you know, they have an equally well-documented snake oil history.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: They have maybe fewer credible results than aging science does as a field.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: And yet they wake up to three, four billion a year in federal funding.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: And that is entirely a function of how they have just managed to tell a better story about why it is that we should care about Alzheimer's.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: But but Alzheimer's is downstream of biological aging, right?
45:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, 100% of Alzheimer's diseases.
45:36
SPEAKER_02: Diseases and illnesses.
45:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: Right.
45:37
SPEAKER_03: And this has begun to get it began to get traction even in American federal funding and the national institutes of of health trying to really pitch this concept of gyroscience that actually aging should be something which should be touched upon by all the different disease institutes.
45:51
SPEAKER_03: But it hasn't really moved, I think, into the real public perception or certainly in policymakers.
45:56
SPEAKER_03: Like this is really the key to to solving not just human suffering but economic burdens.
46:02
SPEAKER_03: Like this really has potential to revolutionize, you know, everything about how we experience our lives.
46:09
SPEAKER_03: So that should be an urgency that we should invest in.
46:11
SPEAKER_03: And I think that is, you know, it it's because the conversation hasn't been framed really well.
46:17
SPEAKER_03: It's kind of just become people have very polarizing views about whether they would like to do something about aging or they wouldn't.
46:23
SPEAKER_03: People overpromise on social media, and then that that that has a swing back to like, well, this is never going to work, this is impossible.
46:30
SPEAKER_03: There's just a misconception, even the kind of concepts that, you know, there is a hard upper limit to human life span, right?
46:37
SPEAKER_03: Which I think is true for the bodies we have now, but intellectually that that's unmovable doesn't make any sense.
46:43
SPEAKER_03: It would make no sense that that is movable in a mouse and a nematod worm and a fruit fly, but something special about us that would make it, you know, immediately.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it was about 60% of scientists I interviewed said they're certain there's no upper limit to maximum lifespan.
46:58
SPEAKER_03: And that doesn't mean that we have the tools to do something about it now or that we would want to, but the idea that it's just it just is the idea that we are special, actually, as a species, and that somehow the blue whale or the tortoise or the naked mole rat or you know, that we're fundamental biology is fairly similar across the boards of those things.
47:16
SPEAKER_03: So we if we can think about those terms and it begins to reset how we tackle the problem.
47:21
SPEAKER_02: Could it be the the the degree of complexity?
47:24
SPEAKER_02: Like this is biology isn't just one of these domains, right?
47:27
SPEAKER_02: And we've spoken about this in the past.
47:29
SPEAKER_02: Could that be slowing down the level of funding and engagement because it's just such a difficult challenge to solve for?
47:38
SPEAKER_00: I think that that can only be part of the reason, right?
47:41
SPEAKER_00: Because um, again, if you think of disease like Alzheimer's, um, it's incredibly complex, right?
47:46
SPEAKER_00: And yet it wakes up to three to four billion in federal funding.
47:49
SPEAKER_00: You can also think of, you know, electric cars were immensely difficult to build, but we preceded that technological breakthrough with moral urgency, right?
48:00
SPEAKER_00: Um the climate science movement had a moral scaffolding that demanded public resources to be invested before we had any credible green technology.
48:11
SPEAKER_02: What would this what you when you say the the Alzheimer's federal funding is, I think you said three to four billion, what's the parity here with aging resources?
48:19
SPEAKER_00: Um aging gets about 0.54% of the NIH budget, which it which adds up to about 500 million a year.
48:26
SPEAKER_00: And you know, there's this idea that um Silicon Valley is going to solve it, right?
48:31
SPEAKER_00: That commercial incentives and venture capital were somehow going to solve this immense public health crisis.
48:37
SPEAKER_00: Um but my take is that most likely this is just gonna keep optimizing for more unproven supplements and more drugs with you know very disappointing effects on health span.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we're probably gonna end up getting drugs that extend our health span by two to three months, like GLP when agonists are probably already doing maybe a little bit more than that.
49:02
SPEAKER_02: Why do you think that is though?
49:04
SPEAKER_02: Why do you think that Silicon Valley and venture capital world?
49:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, because um pharmaceutical companies um for them, it's far more profitable to cure, um, to to basically extend the unhealthy lifespan of a cancer patient by two months than it is to get in the messy space of defining what we mean when we say biological aging or health span.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: Right.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: That is a very difficult problem.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: Um today, it requires either for you to go and define what you mean when you say biological aging with a number of existing biomarkers, or for you to run a clinical trial that takes decades to complete.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: So no one would be.
49:44
SPEAKER_03: I also think around lifespan.
49:45
SPEAKER_03: Why Alzheimer's got and to be clear, we should try and do something about Alzheimer's, which is how we do it, right?
49:50
SPEAKER_03: But what's there was a point in time, fairly recently, where grants going to the NIA NIA that were specifically for Alzheimer's disease that said that would maybe work on amyloid or tau or these things that would like, you know, how do you define what's really Alzheimer's?
50:04
SPEAKER_03: Would 40% of those would get funded.
50:06
SPEAKER_03: But if you were working on aging itself, which of course, if you could do something about would lead to benefits on Alzheimer's, was top 7% of grants.
50:12
SPEAKER_03: So there's a there's a what was called a split pay line.
50:14
SPEAKER_03: But part of it, I think the reason for that is not just the narrative, it's that, you know, we are, if it's too good to be true, right, it probably is, right?
50:22
SPEAKER_03: That's what humans kind of think of.
50:23
SPEAKER_03: And what the geroscience field and the aging field is trying to say is that actually there might be single things you could do which would have multiple outcomes on all of these diseases at once, right?
50:33
SPEAKER_03: So it's like there might be black boxes that you don't need to look in, right?
50:36
SPEAKER_03: You don't need to understand why the patient, Alzheimer's patient, didn't get neuronal death if you could target aging, right?
50:42
SPEAKER_03: And that sounds too good to be true, right?
50:44
SPEAKER_03: So it sounds like, wait, you're saying we shouldn't just take an individual disease approach, you should do one thing that hits everything.
50:51
SPEAKER_03: So it kind of it it smacks of bullshit slightly, right?
50:54
SPEAKER_03: It's like kind of like, well, that doesn't, except for we know we can do that in some settings.
50:58
SPEAKER_03: Actually, we we know in a lab, and it's still the most profound thing I think I've ever seen with my own eyes, which goes back to this nice little nematode worm that I like to work in.
51:07
SPEAKER_03: My lab that you know that lives and dies in two weeks.
51:09
SPEAKER_03: And I've watched hundreds of thousands of these things die, right?
51:12
SPEAKER_03: Spent my life looking down microscopes, watching these things age.
51:15
SPEAKER_03: They always live and age and die in two weeks.
51:17
SPEAKER_03: Just over and over and over and over.
51:19
SPEAKER_03: And then you can take this one gene, you can modulate just one gene, and suddenly now you look down the same microscope, and that same species lives eight weeks.
51:29
SPEAKER_03: And at week six, when the other ones have been dead for four, they're still moving around looking youthful, right?
51:35
SPEAKER_03: So that is that sounds too good to be true, right?
51:37
SPEAKER_03: But you did one thing and everything that went wrong did it stop suddenly, right?
51:42
SPEAKER_03: And we can do that in fruit flies and we can do that in mice.
51:44
SPEAKER_03: So so one, we've shown in labs that it's possible to have this kind of one-in, multi-out approach, right?
51:50
SPEAKER_03: There's lots of ways that and reasons it's not easy to translate that to therapeutic, but that's what we're trying to do.
51:55
SPEAKER_03: But so And that's happening now.
51:56
SPEAKER_03: That's happening now, but not at the level of scale that we like to do.
51:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
51:59
SPEAKER_03: But then also, even in so, but but not many people have seen that down a microscope and experience it and would say so.
52:06
SPEAKER_03: You go, like, it's just sounds like it's not wouldn't work, right?
52:09
SPEAKER_03: And then also, even from a human perspective, actually, we know that you look around and you see some friends that age better than others.
52:17
SPEAKER_03: We know that if you look, people, you know, like quitting smoking, change your whole trajectory and how you look.
52:22
SPEAKER_03: We can see people aging at different rates around us.
52:25
SPEAKER_03: So we kind of have this one level where we understand that aging is modifiable and different, and that we know that if you exercise or you do these things, you can really change your trajectory.
52:34
SPEAKER_03: But yet still, even then, with that kind of knowledge right in front of us, people still kind of think, well, I'm just on an inevitable path, right?
52:43
SPEAKER_03: To really get people to believe that it's worth doing these things because it will modify their risk for all these different age-related conditions, needs a buy-in that has to get around this concept that aging is just a thing that's going to happen to you no matter what.
52:57
SPEAKER_03: It might happen, but the rate at which it will happen is not is modified.
53:00
SPEAKER_02: But I think we would very quickly change our tune when it comes to buying in if there was a single molecule or therapeutic that would actually like allow us to do that.
53:07
SPEAKER_03: Or we could really, and so we're getting to, we could quantify at a molecular level the effects of things like exercise and sleep on biological aging.
53:16
SPEAKER_03: Right.
53:16
SPEAKER_03: At the moment, if your outputs are, okay, if you're doing these things really well, your disease risk is lower, but you have to wait to get that disease to see it, or your lifespan might be different, but you've got to wait for death.
53:25
SPEAKER_03: If you could really show to make people really engage in those behaviors, actually, you've done these things we've asked you to do, and now I can show you that your overall aging rate has changed before you have to look at disease risk, then people will get a buy-in to that.
53:39
SPEAKER_03: And that's kind of what I don't think.
53:40
SPEAKER_02: That's true, Will, because people are like, and we've had our own discussions about these biological age clocks and their reliability.
53:47
SPEAKER_03: Their utility for consumers not there yet.
53:49
SPEAKER_02: No, I know, but the consumer doesn't necessarily know that, right?
53:52
SPEAKER_02: And so people are seeing these biological age clocks, and this and when they're sticking to a plan, their app is saying, You you know, you've reversed your biological age by two years.
54:02
SPEAKER_02: And we discussed this internally, and actually on one of our episodes, that you know, the science is not quite there to have reliability in them.
54:09
SPEAKER_02: But as a consumer, they don't all know that.
54:11
SPEAKER_03: That's well, that gets to like why we need investment in both the research and the communication about what's there and what's not, right?
54:17
SPEAKER_03: So you can have an app for a fitness tracker that can give you a biological age and say you've moved the dial, and that might be useful in engaging your behaviors and making you do good things.
54:24
SPEAKER_03: So I don't want to say it's a bad thing or be good, but of course, being told you know that you have a biological age of five years or three years younger that moves so quickly is is not real science, right?
54:36
SPEAKER_03: And then again, these kind of consumer marketable, like age-related biological clocks that you can mail your saliva away and come back, they're not, they're so variable, and the technology is so weak right now that that's not a good outcome.
54:49
SPEAKER_03: So we need to get that out in the world that these aren't ready for prime time for consumers.
54:53
SPEAKER_03: However, that science is real and investable, and we can make that we are we are actually coalescing as a field to make good versions of those that can be used for clinical trials and could be used for those things.
55:05
SPEAKER_03: So it doesn't have to be one or the other, right?
55:07
SPEAKER_03: So it that's what it gets to just explaining to people look, this is a new field that's coming online that we can we could accelerate much quicker if we invested in it.
55:18
SPEAKER_03: It has really smart people, but at the same time, you are gonna have to wait a little, you know, a bit of patience, and these are things you can do now, and it's that balance is really hard to find, right?
55:27
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's one of the I think that's actually a really good example of if there were more funding and more science and more research being done, we'd we don't have to wait for some silver bullet.
55:37
SPEAKER_02: Like there are things we could prove that those biological age clocks are valid, we could uh create more technology and tools to help people adhere to the things we know to work while we wait for the other science to be done.
55:46
SPEAKER_02: But all of this is a funding issue, right?
55:49
SPEAKER_02: Rainey, what what talk to me about numbers?
55:52
SPEAKER_02: Like, because if there were more money being put into this, then we would speed the whole process up for everyone.
55:59
SPEAKER_02: Do you have do we have actual numbers as to what that would take?
56:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, if I if I had infinite resources to devote to this field, I would do something like operation warp speed for aging.
56:10
SPEAKER_02: Love it.
56:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, for reference, that costs the US government about$18 billion, which is, you know, relatively low relative to the returns you could get on investment.
56:21
SPEAKER_00: Um but we don't live in a world with infinite resources.
56:25
SPEAKER_00: And most often the funding we do get to work on projects is far lower than that.
56:30
SPEAKER_00: So in that world, um, the the answer I'm gonna give you is self-serving.
56:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's what I decided to do because I think it's the single highest impact thing I could do with my time.
56:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, I am founding a think tank to focus on human longevity, on accelerating timelines for real results in aging science.
56:51
SPEAKER_00: And the the name of the think tank is Florence, um Latin for flourishing.
56:56
SPEAKER_00: And I really want to ask, what does it mean to flourish as a species?
57:00
SPEAKER_00: Right.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: And how do we redesign these stories, these narratives we've been telling ourselves about what it means to age and um whether or not um, you know, it's a it's a thing we ought to accept.
57:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, and maybe instead we want to engineer a world where we can decouple or increase in wisdom from disheartening diagnoses.
57:20
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, for a think tank, which, you know, I think is kind of outrageous that a think tank does not exist with a focus on aging science.
57:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm fundraising five million.
57:31
SPEAKER_03: Um I think that's incredible.
57:34
SPEAKER_03: That's so key about that is like if if you want to really change investment across the board and government investing, people have to, these are complex issues, right?
57:42
SPEAKER_03: That need to be thought of and really like that that conversation needs to be led in a kind of in a in an intellectual and concise way that brings in different people, right?
57:51
SPEAKER_03: If it's just aging researchers in a lab saying invest more money, of course, the public, well, of course you say that, right?
57:57
SPEAKER_03: That's you have a you have a bottom line that you need to have an agenda.
58:00
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, if you can get people together who have different opinions around aging, and and like that means, you know, people from the arts field from into really get this conversation together.
58:08
SPEAKER_03: Let's really fundamentally try and understand what it is we're trying to do here, what aging means for societies, what it would mean to think about it in a different way, and how can we lead that conversation in a sophisticated, science-forward and mature way that can then really work with policymakers with the public, right?
58:24
SPEAKER_03: That means that that's readying us all for what's coming down the line, which will change that investment.
58:30
SPEAKER_03: I think that's what's so cool that that Rainey's trying to achieve.
58:32
SPEAKER_00: I think we we need to build out the moral framework for why is it that anyone should care about the science, right?
58:39
SPEAKER_00: Just like in the 1950s, we started caring about climate science far before we had any scientific results.
58:45
SPEAKER_02: That's so true.
58:46
SPEAKER_03: You know, and that and that gets also to like, you know, why should taxpayers invest in this, right?
58:51
SPEAKER_03: And that's a question which I think is very defendable.
58:53
SPEAKER_03: And I would sit down with anybody from any income group and say, this is why I think this is really worth your taxes going to it.
58:59
SPEAKER_03: This is really why it's but but we're not having those conversations really well.
59:02
SPEAKER_03: And if I was living somewhere and didn't want my tax to go up and was like, why am I investing in this, like these scientists and this aging thing?
59:08
SPEAKER_03: I don't want that, right?
59:09
SPEAKER_03: I just and that's natural, but we've got to have those conversations.
59:12
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm sure that's true.
59:13
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I would I would want that, or maybe that's you would, but I don't think it's true for everybody, and I think that's really uh but even just having those conversations between you know when there's a a lack of trust in in science per se a little bit and certainly in academics and these things, and there's a skepticism around what are people trying to monetize and what may not, like we have to engage all of us in this conversation in a way that I think what we're trying to do today, right?
59:39
SPEAKER_02: It's really I also think just selflessly, both selfishly and selflessly, whoever does invest the the capital to to both build this think tank and actually come up with solutions to these things, if we can, that's going to be the most valuable product in the world.
59:57
SPEAKER_02: You know, if you if you can if you can build something that we can prove improves health band by five years, that is trillions and trillions of dollars.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_02: And so that will help spread that for everyone who ultimately deserves it, which is which is all of us, and make it much more affordable and much more scalable.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_02: And that will change the world.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_03: And I think, you know, if you look now to five years ago, investment has changed, right?
1:00:21
SPEAKER_03: There are more companies in that space, that messes are beginning to change, but really not at the pace that it that it could or it should.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_03: And like getting that kind of concept mainstream and understanding like what the deliverables would really be, I think is so critical.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I want to be mindful of your time here.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna ask you one more question, both of you.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_03: I thought I got away with it.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna ask you first, Will.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_02: And then we'll finish with Rainey.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_02: What makes you most optimistic about this field in general, the field of bioethics?
1:00:50
SPEAKER_02: Just optimistic, no pessimism here, please.
1:00:53
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm always an optimist.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_03: So the field of bioethics is not one that I think I know particularly well, so I shouldn't speak to, but but having now met Randy, and we've spoken a lot in the in the last few months, trying to work out the the one that it exists in the first place, that there are people that want to come and think about this question in a new way and have a real see the promise of what this area of biomedicine can do, but also realize like what needs to be done to maximize that promise.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_03: So that's what makes me really excited is that this is something that you know that folks are beginning to talk about, but they're trying to think about this question in a way that isn't forcing it to be science fiction.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_03: It's going like, this is like, let's think about this in a really deep way for society and then and bring those things together.
1:01:31
SPEAKER_03: Just like I'm optimistic that it's super cool in the aging space, we can bring social and behavioral scientists alongside biologists, like put these people together in a room and go, look, we're all thinking about the same question.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_03: Like bioethicists and that and that the humanity of how we feel about aging is another part of that puzzle that needs to be there.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_03: So having just the fact that we're sitting in this room together makes me optimistic and excited.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_02: Collaboration, I think, is what makes me excited.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_02: Rainy.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_00: So I'm optimistic about how there used to be only two factions in longevity science.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_00: One of them was just wellness influencers, and then the other side of things was just fringe immortality researchers.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_00: And now I increasingly see a number of researchers and companies coming up that are somewhere in the middle, right?
1:02:20
SPEAKER_00: That they they just perceive this as an urgent public health issue and they want to do something about it from a scientific standpoint.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm very hopeful that, you know, 10 years down the road, we're gonna have some exciting therapeutics.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_03: I agree.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_03: And even in Politico, so Ray and I met when we were both at the Massachusetts uh Senate House lobbying that state government to invest in aging research, right?
1:02:42
SPEAKER_03: So that even those conversations are beginning to be had between the fact that we were in a room with policymakers as an ethicist and a biologist in this room talking about aging and with people there who work in, you know, in homes for older adults, really all in the same room trying to work out how do we get at this problem.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_03: That wasn't happening, I think, 10 years ago.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_03: It's super cool.
1:03:01
SPEAKER_03: And we need more of that.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_03: And that's really, I think, that the thing we need to think about.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, the that politicians are beginning to think about prevention as something that has a bottom line for their constituents.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_03: Like, how do I think about environmental exposure and that might, you know, that that's something which certainly feels like it's moving in the street.
1:03:18
SPEAKER_02: It's moving.
1:03:19
SPEAKER_03: And then so that's the time to like push it.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's what we're trying to do, or Rennie's trying to do is like how can we accelerate that process and catalyze it?
1:03:25
SPEAKER_00: And you know, if if I had a magic wand and I could delete one moral bias from our civilization, it would be this idea that what's natural is morally superior to what's unnatural, this naturalistic bias that I think too many of us employ um subconsciously.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: I think it's at the root of many of our problems as a civilization.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: It's the the reason why, you know, two-thirds of American families invest in supplements, but not they're they're not so willing to think about drugs, therapeutics as a thing that's good for a species.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a great point.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_02: Okay, Rainey, everyone has to do a quick fire round before they leave.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_02: Uh you have around 30 seconds to answer each, but no more.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_02: What is the most overrated longevity hack in the media right now?
1:04:16
SPEAKER_00: Supplements of all sorts.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_02: What is the most underrated?
1:04:21
SPEAKER_00: Love.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_03: Not even 30 seconds.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, one word.
1:04:28
SPEAKER_02: Um what if you weren't a scientist, what would you be doing?
1:04:32
SPEAKER_00: Novelist.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_02: What was your favorite book of all time?
1:04:40
SPEAKER_02: Favorite song of all time.
1:04:46
SPEAKER_02: What is your typical daily routine to help protect against the signatures of aging?
1:04:54
SPEAKER_00: I run for about 50 minutes daily.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_02: You get to ask Will one question.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_00: This is good.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: Um where do you see yourself in 50 years?
1:05:06
SPEAKER_03: In fifty years?
1:05:12
SPEAKER_03: Alive?
1:05:13
SPEAKER_03: I mean, so that's that's really an answer.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_03: I think if you think about I would love to be alive to see my son who's gonna be born on June 4th, to be seeing his children's children, just about not quite.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_03: I mean that would be that would be an amazing thing to do.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_03: So or an in this chair in Chris's living room, having these conversations.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_00: In good health.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_00: In good health.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_02: Wait, now now you have to answer that question too.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh 50 years.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_00: Probably having dinner on the moon or something.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_02: Dinner on the moon is the mic drop moment.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_02: There we go.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_02: Rainey, I'm so glad you're doing this.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_02: I think it's important work.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_02: And where can people find out more about this?
1:05:53
SPEAKER_02: At silverlinings.io.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_00: Silverlinings.io, yes.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_02: That's uh I highly encourage everyone to go and visit the website and read this.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_02: It's incredible, it's remarkable.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_02: Read the book when it comes out.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and read the book, and we'll add that into the show notes.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for coming in.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_02: It's a privilege to have you on board as part of the team.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_02: Will you're great too.
1:06:12
unknown: Thanks, man.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_03: Next receipt.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_03: I feel very privileged to have made it into the living room again.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: Thanks, guys.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.