Speaker 1: Welcome to two percent. I'm your host, Michael Lieser. So
Speaker 1: there is a lot of focus on longevity right now.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants to live longer, and if you were at
Speaker 1: all interested in longevity, you have probably heard of the
Speaker 1: Blue zones. These are places on Earth where people live
Speaker 1: well past one hundred years of age. There are Netflix
Speaker 1: series about the Blue Zones, there are books about the
Speaker 1: Blue zones, and these things all tell us exactly what
Speaker 1: we can do to live like people in the Blue
Speaker 1: zones and in theory reach past age one hundred. But
Speaker 1: there's a little problem, well a very big problem, and
Speaker 1: that's that the Blue zones might be one of the
Speaker 1: longest cons in history. That is what my guest today
Speaker 1: concluded after he dove deeply into the data and found
Speaker 1: a lot of critical airs. I'm talking to Saul Justin Newman.
Speaker 1: He studies population aging at Oxford and he is also
Speaker 1: a researcher at University College London, and he's got a
Speaker 1: new book it's called Morbid Debunking Modern Longevity Science. So
Speaker 1: he's going to talk to us about what he found
Speaker 1: about the Blue zones and what it can tell us
Speaker 1: about the new science of longevity. Saul Justin Newman, thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1: All Right, here's where I want to start with something
Speaker 1: very basic. What are the blue zones?
Speaker 2: Blue zones were supposed to be regions of the world
Speaker 2: where people attained remarkable ages at remarkable rates, and they
Speaker 2: usually did. The remarkable age is age one hundred.
Speaker 1: And how did they start? How did this idea even began?
Speaker 2: I think the idea is how it began as a
Speaker 2: bit of a mystery, because the process was to go
Speaker 2: to an island of a European country, which is Sardinia,
Speaker 2: and say, people here may live a very long time.
Speaker 2: Let's check now why that particular island was chosen as
Speaker 2: a bit obscure, but the basic idea was someone ran
Speaker 2: a small stuff. They decided that this region of a
Speaker 2: very poor part of Italy was living an extremely long time,
Speaker 2: and they called it a blue zone. Amusingly, they also
Speaker 2: jumped straight to the conclusion of why people were living
Speaker 2: a long time in this area, And I love this
Speaker 2: because it hasn't made it into the lifestyle advice. But
Speaker 2: the original conclusion was because of all the incest. Of
Speaker 2: all the incest, Yeah, the person who had done this
Speaker 2: had gone to this island and decided that incest was
Speaker 2: causing extreme longevity in these little mountain towns.
Speaker 1: I did not hear about that when I went to
Speaker 1: the Blue Zone's website. I think that was told to
Speaker 1: eat sardines or something instead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit by design, I suspect.
Speaker 1: So then it expands, So it starts in Sardinia, and
Speaker 1: then they start tacking on places that are considered blue zones.
Speaker 1: How did that play out?
Speaker 2: It played out effectively as a sort of magazine article,
Speaker 2: not as a scientific process. We had a gentleman arrive
Speaker 2: from out of the blue and he picked up this
Speaker 2: idea of regions where people live forever, and he wrote
Speaker 2: an article, this is the third most popular article in
Speaker 2: National Geographic of all time, about these three regions where
Speaker 2: people supposedly lived past one hundred. One is in California
Speaker 2: in Low Melinda, one is in Okinawa, and the other
Speaker 2: is this Sardinian blue zone. And the idea was that
Speaker 2: if you do as the Romans do effectively and behave
Speaker 2: like they're doing these three very very different places, you
Speaker 2: too could live past age one hundred. It's a very
Speaker 2: alluring idea, and it launched a sort of lifestyle chain
Speaker 2: of products, starting with cookbooks and moving on to absolutely
Speaker 2: everything under the sun. I think they even have a cologne.
Speaker 1: Now nice and then so it has they identify these
Speaker 1: three places, and then they start adding on places. Right,
Speaker 1: there's like coast, different places. But the idea is typically
Speaker 1: they will identify something these people do, these people who
Speaker 1: are supposedly long living, and therefore that is kind of
Speaker 1: the key to living longer for you as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's a central claim that people in
Speaker 2: these places live very, very long times, and then there's
Speaker 2: these subsidiary claims that we've figured out why this happens,
Speaker 2: and there are these nine sets of behaviors that are
Speaker 2: why people in these regions live a long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what are some of those behaviors?
Speaker 2: Absurdly drinking every day, which is a bit of a stretch,
Speaker 2: you know. I find it stounding that that's out of
Speaker 2: number one, especially because Low Melender is a tea total place.
Speaker 2: But the others, you know, they fit neatly into preconceived
Speaker 2: ideas of what we think is healthy. There is so
Speaker 2: gentle exercise is probably the most sensible, and then there
Speaker 2: are these vaguely defined sort of feel good sounding concepts
Speaker 2: like being the right tribe or connects with your neighbors
Speaker 2: or hang out with loved ones. You know, stuff that
Speaker 2: you want to do anyway, and it's very easily marketable.
Speaker 1: To your point on the marketing, why do you think
Speaker 1: this idea took off so well? Was it just like
Speaker 1: a brilliant packaging around basic advice with something science and
Speaker 1: sounding about people all living older precisely?
Speaker 2: And it's not just that it's a proven market strategy
Speaker 2: going back to I mean, going back to the first
Speaker 2: Emperor of China. I mean it's not a new sales
Speaker 2: pitch to say that, oh, I have the secret to
Speaker 2: living forever, and you just follow my advice, pay me
Speaker 2: my money, and I'll get you there. Now, the beauty
Speaker 2: of that is, first, if people don't live forever, they
Speaker 2: can't complain because they're dead, so your customer complaints division
Speaker 2: has very little to do. But also it's something that
Speaker 2: everybody wants to hear, right especially now we know what
Speaker 2: contributes to longevity, and it's going to see a doctor.
Speaker 2: It's exercise, don't drink, don't smoke right now. If you
Speaker 2: don't want to do that, then you are wide open
Speaker 2: for sales pitches, right, really wide open, and it's really
Speaker 2: kind of an easy win to even just imagine that
Speaker 2: there's a pill that will make you live longer. But
Speaker 2: even if the placebos, it's an appealing idea. It's sort of,
Speaker 2: you know, here's my anxiety reduction process for the day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and especially if you like to drink. You see
Speaker 1: that and you go, I like this blue zones idea.
Speaker 1: They drink. I'm going to drink too. That's great.
Speaker 2: Exactly the pitch to California Wine Months, like they specifically
Speaker 2: say what kind of wine you should try? Right, it's
Speaker 2: you know, go and get Sardinian kanna now wine like why,
Speaker 2: you know, who knows? But this is a very easy sell.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's it's also backing up off a sales
Speaker 2: pitch that was around in the seventies that was essentially
Speaker 2: exactly the same. You know, in the seventies there was
Speaker 2: something called longevity zones pitched in the same magazine, pitched
Speaker 2: in National Geographic by a professor of medicine Harvard called
Speaker 2: Alexander Leff. Now let's just say these haven't exactly held up.
Speaker 2: You know, one is in the Hansa Valley of Pakistan,
Speaker 2: We've got a one in a place called Viilka Bamba
Speaker 2: and Ecuador, and we've got another in Soviet ab Kazia, Georgia.
Speaker 2: Now these aren't centers of longevity. And the short answer
Speaker 2: to why these places looked on paper, why like people
Speaker 2: living past one hundred, was that they were just committing
Speaker 2: pension fraud or they had just simply no idea how
Speaker 2: old they were.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get into that. So how did you start
Speaker 1: to become skeptical of this idea? How did that tell
Speaker 1: us that whole story of how unfolded and how you
Speaker 1: ended up writing about this.
Speaker 2: I began just with a friend sending me a scientific
Speaker 2: paper because I'm a huge note it's unapologetic at this point.
Speaker 2: And I finished in medical science doctorate and a friend
Speaker 2: of mine had sent me a paper saying, you know,
Speaker 2: you're interested in how long people live. His paper, the
Speaker 2: paper involved was in the top scientific journal in the world,
Speaker 2: and it involved someone accidentally rounding off most of their
Speaker 2: data to zero by accident and then publishing the results.
Speaker 2: And that's I mean, that's a shocking thing to do,
Speaker 2: and it got me interesting. It's a huge problem if
Speaker 2: you use the correct column in the spreadsheet. The whole
Speaker 2: thing fell apart and you reached the opposite conclusion. But
Speaker 2: the conclusion was about how long it is possible to live?
Speaker 2: You know, what is the limit to human life? So
Speaker 2: it's a really compelling question, how long is it possible
Speaker 2: for me to live? How long? And the fact that
Speaker 2: this debate was being undertaken with such terrible evidence was
Speaker 2: amazing to me. And it became more amazing when the
Speaker 2: other top journal in the scientific journal in the world
Speaker 2: published papers stating exactly the opposite conclusion to the first paper,
Speaker 2: and that was based on something even worse. So what
Speaker 2: these people had done is they'd taken every one hundred
Speaker 2: and five year old or record of one hundred and
Speaker 2: five year old in Italy and they had fit a
Speaker 2: model to it. But it was the most biased mathematical
Speaker 2: model possible. It was the only one that gave them
Speaker 2: a publishable result. And so here you have two halves
Speaker 2: of an academic debate. Neither of them are remotely close
Speaker 2: to following the rules or having any integrity. And it
Speaker 2: dragged me in against my will, into this question of
Speaker 2: how long is it possible to live? Do this start
Speaker 2: or even make any sense?
Speaker 1: How did that get you the blue zones? Eventually you
Speaker 1: start kind of stripping away at this question. You're kind
Speaker 1: of like a thorn in the side of these researchers.
Speaker 1: And then what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean more than a thorn. It's it's a
Speaker 2: massive embarrassment to have to retract something from these from
Speaker 2: these papers, and that's exactly what these groups should do.
Speaker 2: But I was sitting on a bus and came up
Speaker 2: with theoretical idea. It's a very non intuitive theoretical idea
Speaker 2: because usually in science get you get measurement error. You
Speaker 2: know what happens. It happens for the Hubble space telescope,
Speaker 2: and happens for the particle colliders in Switzerland. You always
Speaker 2: get measurement error, and usually you can ignore it. You
Speaker 2: can just say, look, who cares, there's a small amount
Speaker 2: of random error. It washes out in the statistical model. Well,
Speaker 2: I found out that mathematically, in a survival process, that's
Speaker 2: not true, and you get this very non intuitive result
Speaker 2: where the number of errors grows exponentially over age. So
Speaker 2: by the time you reach these advanced ages, you theoretically
Speaker 2: expect all of them to be trash. Just it's much
Speaker 2: easier to be an error in paperwork than someone who
Speaker 2: has outlived the rest of humanity, way easier. And this
Speaker 2: is especially the case because a quarter of the world's
Speaker 2: children still don't get a birth certificate. So if you
Speaker 2: go back one hundred years when these people were supposedly born,
Speaker 2: has any paperwork, It gets made up at some point
Speaker 2: between then and now, and if you make a mistake
Speaker 2: in that process, you end up being one hundred and five.
Speaker 2: And that's effectively what these old age hair records are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there airs in the record keeping. So to walk
Speaker 1: us through, especially with the blue zone, what are some
Speaker 1: of the errors you've found in these supposed people who
Speaker 1: are living past one hundred and five?
Speaker 2: Well, the Oknawen one was extraordinary because I didn't find this.
Speaker 2: The Japanese government found out that most of the people
Speaker 2: in Japan who were over age one hundred, I mean
Speaker 2: more than eighty two percent were dead. They were long dead,
Speaker 2: so most of them been killed in World War Two.
Speaker 2: And the remarkable thing is in Japan you have this
Speaker 2: sort of self registration of who has died in your household,
Speaker 2: and if an American plane puts a bomb through the household,
Speaker 2: who reports all the deaths, nobody does right, and you're
Speaker 2: keep living on paper. Right. So there was this amazing
Speaker 2: finding in Okinawa that if your town had been firebombed,
Speaker 2: you could predict around eighty percent of the variation in
Speaker 2: people reaching one hundred. So if your town's been firebombed,
Speaker 2: everyone reaches one hundred.
Speaker 1: Right, because they died in nineteen forty four, exactly.
Speaker 2: The real secret to longevity, right. And the same goes
Speaker 2: with fire bombing cities where all the records are kept.
Speaker 2: So the Japanese government had gone out to effectively have
Speaker 2: a celebration of old people in Tokyo, and they'd gone
Speaker 2: looking for the worlds for the oldest man in Tokyo.
Speaker 2: And this bizarre process has played out where city officials
Speaker 2: come around to the house. They talked to the grand daughter,
Speaker 2: and the granddaughter says, he's out of Gifu Prefectory. He's
Speaker 2: gone for the day, and Guefoo Prefecture is four hundredilometers away.
Speaker 2: The guys one hundred and eleven, So it's a bit
Speaker 2: of a stretch.
Speaker 1: It's one hundred and five year old guy just taking
Speaker 1: a little jount.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred and eleven. One hundred and eleven year
Speaker 2: old guy apparently he's taken a job, and when they
Speaker 2: come back, she's like, oh, he's out again, Like I
Speaker 2: guess if he's down at the girlfriend's or something. So
Speaker 2: this keeps happening until they get a bit concerned and
Speaker 2: the grand daughter turns up to the police station and says, oh,
Speaker 2: we've had a terrible thing going on. The granddad has
Speaker 2: barricaded himself into his room and is fighting off the
Speaker 2: entire family, which again for one hundred and eleven year old,
Speaker 2: is quite the feet right, yeah, a strong guy with
Speaker 2: a strong guy. When the police turn up, he's in
Speaker 2: the room and he's been in the room for thirty
Speaker 2: years dead and they have been collecting the pension the
Speaker 2: entire time and living in living in the house like
Speaker 2: the whole extended family. And there's another guy in the
Speaker 2: backpack at the end of the bed. Now that's this
Speaker 2: is surprisingly normal for one hundred and five year olds
Speaker 2: have That actually happens all the time.
Speaker 1: So people are effectively saying that their relatives, who in
Speaker 1: this case died thirty years ago are alive on paper,
Speaker 1: because that way you can keep cash and grandpa's checks
Speaker 1: from the government pension checks exactly.
Speaker 2: They had cashed out roughly one hundred grand in his
Speaker 2: pension the day that the city officials had come around. Right,
Speaker 2: So there's a big withdrawal. That's normal. But then they
Speaker 2: go looking for everyone else who is very old, because
Speaker 2: they discovered the oldest woman in Tokyo hasn't been seen
Speaker 2: since nineteen eighty six. And they go around all of Japan.
Speaker 2: Now they check ninety two percent of cases and they
Speaker 2: find that eighty two percent of them are dead. Now
Speaker 2: that's over two hundred and thirty thousand people who are
Speaker 2: dead in reality and alive on paper. And this is
Speaker 2: data that the Blue Zones demographers had just said was
Speaker 2: the best in the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, practically this plays out for the listener. You hear
Speaker 1: some advice from Blue Zones that there's these so many
Speaker 1: people over one hundred five in Japan, and therefore you
Speaker 1: should eat the food they eat, you should do this
Speaker 1: thing they do. But it turns out they've all died
Speaker 1: in the eighties.
Speaker 2: They've all died in the eighties. And not only have
Speaker 2: they all died in or in the forties, not only
Speaker 2: have they all died but you know, this is supposed
Speaker 2: to be based on interviews with two hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: odd centenarians. Now those have never been published. And if
Speaker 2: I had the secret to eternal life and it was
Speaker 2: in a few interviews, I would publish those interviews. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and this is much more a sort of oh, trust me, bro,
Speaker 2: these interviews say what to eat? Where's the data? Because
Speaker 2: the Japanese government is saying eighty two percent of these
Speaker 2: people at least are dead. And this happens in every
Speaker 2: blue zone. I looked at the Greek blue zone, right,
Speaker 2: they had a really similar process play out. They had
Speaker 2: more than nine thousand centenarians on paper. The global financial
Speaker 2: crisis comes along and the effectively the Greek government first
Speaker 2: do a review find roughly two hundred three hundred errors.
Speaker 2: But the German government comes in and says, we'll not
Speaker 2: give you a penny until you really check. And it
Speaker 2: turns out at least seventy two percent of these people
Speaker 2: are collecting the pension from the graveyard. And after that,
Speaker 2: the island of Yourkorea, which is one of these blue zones,
Speaker 2: just has no centenarians.
Speaker 1: Wow. So this feels like one of those where I
Speaker 1: think if it were we looked at these numbers, we
Speaker 1: think there's a lot of people who are centenarians there.
Speaker 1: We rolled with the idea, but the fact that then
Speaker 1: there was a claim around what we talked to all
Speaker 1: of them, but then they never published the interviews. That's
Speaker 1: where it starts to feel a little more sketchy to me.
Speaker 2: It really becomes sketchy when you look at the low Melinda.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about that, because in the US, you
Speaker 1: would think we had good record keeping and things like that.
Speaker 2: The US is really surprising in this regard, right. We
Speaker 2: we sort of carry with us this idea that if
Speaker 2: something's written down officially then it actually is is probably true.
Speaker 2: But let's just ignore that for the moment and just
Speaker 2: look at Loma Linda on the face of it. Well,
Speaker 2: the CDC measures Loma Linda for longevity and it is
Speaker 2: nowhere near the best place in the US, and at
Speaker 2: least a quarter of the US and perhaps three quarters
Speaker 2: of the US has higher longevity than Loma Linda. Now
Speaker 2: that's the independent data. So when I took the independent
Speaker 2: data to the founder of the Blue Zones, I said,
Speaker 2: where is your evidence the people here live past one hundred. Now,
Speaker 2: he has admitted in The New York Times and to
Speaker 2: Science Magazine that he came up with Loma Linda because
Speaker 2: his editor asked him to, oh wow, find America's blue zone. Right,
Speaker 2: he asked him to find America's blue zone. The next day,
Speaker 2: on the drive between his house in La and Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: there's a turn at Loma Linda. And for twenty years
Speaker 2: he has marketed this as if there was the fountain
Speaker 2: of youth beneath the freeway next to the Costco.
Speaker 1: No Costco's pretty powerful man who knows it, right, and
Speaker 1: right near.
Speaker 2: The jumper juice there's the secret. Right. It's astonishing. And
Speaker 2: then the follow up claim is that, oh I forgot
Speaker 2: to delist it as a blue zone. Now again from perspective,
Speaker 2: this guy has sold part of his business to Adventist
Speaker 2: Health because there's an Adventist community on the basis of
Speaker 2: what I don't know what is the basis of this
Speaker 2: twenty years of relentless marketing. But then there's the meta problem, right,
Speaker 2: there's a deeper problem here, because this isn't a matter
Speaker 2: of you've got a bunch of people going along with
Speaker 2: a mail order scheme. I mean, in a sense it is,
Speaker 2: but you have one hundred scientific papers on this place.
Speaker 2: You have prominent scientists right at the top of the
Speaker 2: field backing it up. Now, if it's made up, why
Speaker 2: are they unable to say that it's a fantasy? See
Speaker 2: and you know you find this again in Costa Rica.
Speaker 2: The basis of finding the Costa Rican blue zone was
Speaker 2: mister but paid a Costa Rican demographer and they went
Speaker 2: out the next day and discovered a Costa Rican blue zone. Now,
Speaker 2: when the un measured that data, they said that Costa
Speaker 2: Eca was quote bottom, near the bottom of the pack
Speaker 2: in terms of late life survival. So really the question
Speaker 2: is why are our supposedly independent scientists not able to
Speaker 2: detect a twenty year fantasy? And this is one of
Speaker 2: the most popular concepts in this field. And I've had
Speaker 2: no answers to this.
Speaker 1: Why do you think this has gotten so much coverage
Speaker 1: even in science circles? Like you said, I.
Speaker 2: Think the science circles are just as susceptible to this
Speaker 2: beautiful idea that things are better far in a faraway place. Right.
Speaker 2: Most science is done by white, Western educated people, whatever
Speaker 2: that label, that sort of catch all label throw on it.
Speaker 2: And I think a lot of people those people are
Speaker 2: the target of this marketing, and they've brought into it,
Speaker 2: and now it's turned out to be bank they're hugely embarrassed.
Speaker 2: I mean there's a sort of a field wide embarrassment
Speaker 2: in the demographic community that we've sat around and just
Speaker 2: sort of believe this. Not just the first time, this
Speaker 2: is multiple times we've bought the same story and it's
Speaker 2: turned out to be bunk. So, you know, in one sense,
Speaker 2: it's just that we are susceptible to this marketing idea
Speaker 2: that shangrile Ara is there and all we have to
Speaker 2: do is go there and act like it and will
Speaker 2: be fine. It's very alluring, especially because you get to
Speaker 2: go for a holiday, beach holiday degrease. Right, it doesn't work,
Speaker 2: but we've bought it. Anyway.
Speaker 1: What do you think that says about us?
Speaker 2: I think it says we're still in this mindset of
Speaker 2: monster leone. Right. We want there to be a fountain
Speaker 2: of youth because it's easier than the tough reality of
Speaker 2: not just taking care of your health. But I get
Speaker 2: asked all the time, what's the secret to living a
Speaker 2: long time? One of the most uncomfortable answers is be
Speaker 2: born in a rich place that has free healthcare. Right now,
Speaker 2: especially in America, that's not a message you really want
Speaker 2: to hear because you can't do anything about it. I mean,
Speaker 2: one of the key problems in American health seems to
Speaker 2: be that you buy fake medicines because you can't afford
Speaker 2: real medicines. It's just a simple fundamental problem. It's not
Speaker 2: the people who mind. This is not their personal fault.
Speaker 2: There's a systemic problem here where if you have someone
Speaker 2: who can't afford their cancer ments, they will buy anything,
Speaker 2: and an industry is developed to feed that and this
Speaker 2: is part of that industry. The longevity industry is as
Speaker 2: part of this framing that we can give you a
Speaker 2: secret pill that's ten times just so it's ten times
Speaker 2: cheaper than the real stuff, unless you're pitching to billionaires.
Speaker 2: And that has really rotted out the evidence base of
Speaker 2: medicine here. I mean, it's really shockingly rotting out the
Speaker 2: evidence base of medicine. We have these laws coming in
Speaker 2: to the states that effectively throw out the hippocratic oath,
Speaker 2: and they're being pushed by longevity research. The Alliance for
Speaker 2: Longevity Initiatives is pushing this idea that we can I mean,
Speaker 2: this is now a law on the books. You can
Speaker 2: now give a person an experimental treatment of any dose
Speaker 2: for any reason, as long as you say it's to
Speaker 2: extend longevity, and if they die, you are not liable.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it's a little alarming. Yeah, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a quick break and then we are going to
Speaker 1: talk to Saul about the fallout that happened after he
Speaker 1: released his findings into the world of longevity. So you
Speaker 1: do this paper on the blue zones, and you have
Speaker 1: this new book Morbid Debunking Modern Longevity Science, which is
Speaker 1: an amazing read. And I also have to say, I'm
Speaker 1: a writer. When I have to open books and read
Speaker 1: books by scientists, I sometimes go, Okay, this is probably
Speaker 1: going to be a little bit boring, but I'm going
Speaker 1: to learn something and I accept that. Dude, you're a
Speaker 1: really funny writer, and I loved it for that. This
Speaker 1: is an amazing read. But so the paper comes out,
Speaker 1: you got the book coming out. What happens when the
Speaker 1: paper comes out for you personally? Like, how does the
Speaker 1: how does this field react?
Speaker 2: It's incomparable the feeling of stirring up so many people
Speaker 2: all at once and having It's if I've cast out
Speaker 2: stamp collectors and every stamp collector on earth is suddenly
Speaker 2: emailing me like in old caps, you know, oh my god,
Speaker 2: how could you possibly you know, run down the field
Speaker 2: of flatly it's the torrent coming in is mixed with
Speaker 2: people from other fields. They are laughing the backsides off, basically,
Speaker 2: like I compare it to I'm a hedgehog that's accidentally
Speaker 2: wanted into a balloon factory. You know, people are losing
Speaker 2: their minds trying to get rid of me and not
Speaker 2: knowing what to do. Really, And you know, I had
Speaker 2: people emailing my boss they said you have to fire
Speaker 2: this guy, and they're like, why is he a bad plan?
Speaker 2: Scientists like, what's the problem. Some of the peripheral stuff
Speaker 2: is accidentally hilarious, right. I opened the book with a
Speaker 2: discussion of a gentleman from Moscow who has decided the
Speaker 2: world's oldest woman is a fake, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: it's fine, wants to dig up the corpse, wants me
Speaker 2: to help, and has decided to see see the Queen
Speaker 2: and Vladimir Putin and basically everybody he's ever heard of.
Speaker 1: Into this just standard every day email.
Speaker 2: Standard every day email. And I mean I have to
Speaker 2: dig it up because I found out the beauty of
Speaker 2: this is the apparently the Kremlin has to respond. So
Speaker 2: I've got to find the Kremlin response to can we
Speaker 2: players dig up the world's oldest woman's corpse which has
Speaker 2: been on the ground for twenty years, because I want
Speaker 2: to know it was Vladimir Putin's take on this obvious
Speaker 2: why not reach out? You know, this astonishing sort of
Speaker 2: Kingstone Cops approached to science. It was always deeply funny
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you pointed out and everyone gets mad.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the paper is great and you
Speaker 1: get a ton of you ge a ton of notoriety
Speaker 1: from it. I mean, it gets covered everywhere like it's
Speaker 1: a big moment because people go, oh, yeah, this this
Speaker 1: makes sense. This guy's say it is right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean that's that's the beauty of having people
Speaker 2: in parallel fields who deal with this kind of data
Speaker 2: all the time. Because in epidemiology there's a joke, you know,
Speaker 2: map is a poverty map. You know, you want to
Speaker 2: look at disease prevalence. Every map is a poverty map.
Speaker 2: But in this case, the poverty map is saying the
Speaker 2: worst of poverty, the more one hundred and five year olds,
Speaker 2: And that simple cognitive dissonance of you want to lift
Speaker 2: to one hundred and five, be dead, broke and live
Speaker 2: in the worst place possible. Is funny.
Speaker 1: So I think one of the big bear you poked
Speaker 1: is the sort of blue zone empire. Obviously. I mean,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about, it's sold to this health corporation
Speaker 1: for what was it, like seventy five million or something
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 2: Some insane amount of money. I mean, they are making
Speaker 2: huge amounts of money.
Speaker 1: Describing you, Dan Bututner, who's the guy who popularized the
Speaker 1: blue zones? He said the following quote. Saul Newman is
Speaker 1: a plant biologist with no academic training or expertise in demography, gerontology,
Speaker 1: or geriatrics, and has no record of publication in these
Speaker 1: fields of study. He will fully omits or misunderstands the
Speaker 1: rigorous age verification and statistical analysis involved in identifying blue zones.
Speaker 1: What is your response, I've.
Speaker 2: Been a demographer at the University of Oxford for five years. Right,
Speaker 2: he's completely made it up. And what It's amazing that
Speaker 2: there's now a scientific paper that says the same thing,
Speaker 2: and then I know of there might be it seems
Speaker 2: that there appears to be multiple and the beautiful irony
Speaker 2: here is if you're claiming to be very good at
Speaker 2: understanding people's life history and records and you can't detect
Speaker 2: that the guy at the University of Oxford at the
Speaker 2: Lever Hume Center for Demographic Science as a demographer, like,
Speaker 2: if that is beyond your powers of comprehension, what are
Speaker 2: you doing? Like? Should I trust you? No? Not as
Speaker 2: as far as I could kick you.
Speaker 1: Quick break, and then we're going to talk about why
Speaker 1: it's important to set the record straight on these topics.
Speaker 1: So let's talk more. I mean, you kind of alluded
Speaker 1: to this, but what's the harm in this data being wrong?
Speaker 1: So do you feel like you're correcting the record or
Speaker 1: is there actually harm in all this being wrong?
Speaker 2: I mean there's a temptation to still see this is okay.
Speaker 2: I'm fighting out a pub trivia and this is the
Speaker 2: way I initially saw this problem. But there's an extraordinary
Speaker 2: problem nested in this because we use this extreme old
Speaker 2: age data as hound model for the future. We have
Speaker 2: this optimistic model that things are going to get better
Speaker 2: in the future. So if we want to project what's
Speaker 2: going to happen, we need to look at the oldest
Speaker 2: people live today, because in sixty years, that'll be us.
Speaker 2: It's a great assumption, right assumption. But when people are
Speaker 2: setting your pension rates, when people are setting your life insurance,
Speaker 2: when people are planning long term for healthcare, these are
Speaker 2: the numbers they use. And you're telling trillions of dollars
Speaker 2: of investment. I had a firm with three hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty billion euros in investment. Come and talk to me,
Speaker 2: Come and ask me to talk to them. And the
Speaker 2: reason is that they are using late life mortality models
Speaker 2: based off this data to say how much you have
Speaker 2: to pay into your pension. Right, because if I start
Speaker 2: working now, I'm retiring, you know, in fifty years. And
Speaker 2: the fact that they've been using this completely you know,
Speaker 2: trash data to estimate those rates is very disturbing. I
Speaker 2: mean it's extremely disturbing. One of the people a sort
Speaker 2: of throw a pebble at in this book is responsible
Speaker 2: for validating more than fifty percent of the one hundred
Speaker 2: and five year olds in the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and for the average listener, if these pension rates
Speaker 1: are assuming someone's going to die much older than they
Speaker 1: probably will, you're going to have to pay more because
Speaker 1: they're assuming you're going to live longer than you will
Speaker 1: you have to.
Speaker 2: Pay way more every single day. Every single day you'll
Speaker 2: have to pay more. Right, And so it's that it
Speaker 2: is that simple, and it's that shocking that it has
Speaker 2: its direct effect. You know, the difference between nine and
Speaker 2: ten percent going to your pension rate is decided by
Speaker 2: people in London who set the insurance rates that base
Speaker 2: their decisions off my colleagues at the University of Oxford,
Speaker 2: and governments who base their data off off United Nations
Speaker 2: estimates of the oldest people in life today. Now I
Speaker 2: haven't just published the funny paper. I've got a paper
Speaker 2: examining every one hundred year old in the world since
Speaker 2: from nineteen fifties until now, measured by the UN done
Speaker 2: to a categorically garbage. They are garbage. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: really clear. Yeah, I mean, according to the UN estimates
Speaker 2: their best estimates, the top one of the top ten
Speaker 2: countries in the world for people reaching age one hundred
Speaker 2: is also one of the bottom ten in the world
Speaker 2: for average longevity.
Speaker 1: How does that work?
Speaker 2: Good question? No one has even asked that question at
Speaker 2: the UN right, and it's not alone. You know that
Speaker 2: in the top ten is Western Sahara doesn't have a government.
Speaker 2: It's one of the ten best places in the world
Speaker 2: for people reaching age one hundred according to the UN. Malawi,
Speaker 2: which is, like I said, bottom ten Kenya, which is
Speaker 2: bottom ten. Puerto Rico makes it in. Now. Puerto Rico
Speaker 2: is a very interesting case because they had a very
Speaker 2: long running berth certificate system. But I can buy one.
Speaker 2: It's trivial to buy about Puerto Rican bersertificate. They won't fit,
Speaker 2: you know, because I don't sound very Puerto Rican if
Speaker 2: you haven't noticed. But it's around six thousand dollars. And
Speaker 2: this got so systemically bad that in twenty ten, Puerto
Speaker 2: Rico simply decided, look, we're giving up on birth certificates. Yes,
Speaker 2: we're part of the richest nation on earth. Yes the
Speaker 2: NSA is crawling up everybody's backsides through their iPhones, but
Speaker 2: we give up and we're restarting. Now. That gives you
Speaker 2: an idea of the systemic problems that are just being
Speaker 2: glossed over here, because you know, when it comes to
Speaker 2: measuring age, we only have paperwork, that's it.
Speaker 1: Do we have any sense of who the actually actual
Speaker 1: oldest living human has ever been? That we're firm on.
Speaker 2: Not the foggiest not the foggiest, not the foggiest idea. Right.
Speaker 2: I looked at the world's oldest man. Right, the world's
Speaker 2: oldest man. He has this paper validating everything. Okay, one
Speaker 2: of his birthdays was by admission, made up by his family. Right,
Speaker 2: it's a problem. Number one. Number two is the people
Speaker 2: in the scientific paper write his age down wrong and
Speaker 2: say he's born in nineteen eighty seven, nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven. It's not a high level of rigor
Speaker 2: going on. Yeah, and then he gets married to the
Speaker 2: same woman three times, apparently without being divorced.
Speaker 1: Good for him.
Speaker 2: Apparently he changes his name, but there's no record of
Speaker 2: this ever happening renewed vows. Yeah. Yeah, So like the
Speaker 2: name he's born with is different to the name he
Speaker 2: dies with, but there's no record of that name change.
Speaker 2: So it's like, Hey, I'm born Bob Jones and I'm
Speaker 2: dying Tim Horton and the wreck. It's it's just astonishingly
Speaker 2: for the holes, but nobody. Nobody cares because it's a
Speaker 2: story about a sweet old man reaching in an astonishing age.
Speaker 2: One cares.
Speaker 1: I've seen this television show it's called mad Men, Right,
Speaker 1: It's like he enters the war as Dick Whitman. Dondreper dies,
Speaker 1: so he takes his identity and that explains it all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well, it's surprisingly easy to commit pension from
Speaker 2: I'm not advocating anything here, but one of the few
Speaker 2: people I have sympathy for in this story is there's
Speaker 2: a bunch of cheeky old people out there who their
Speaker 2: mom or dad dies and they just don't tell anyone,
Speaker 2: right Like, the Greeks and towns are fantastic at this.
Speaker 2: They're just like, don't ask any don't ask me. He's fine,
Speaker 2: He's just on holidays in Gifuod Prefecture, right Like. It's
Speaker 2: sort of there's this fantastic process and if you just
Speaker 2: don't tell anybody, it's not like there's a giant machine
Speaker 2: in the government that goes you know, there's not a
Speaker 2: death radar that tells you this guy's dead. So it
Speaker 2: just keeps sending the pension check every month, and it
Speaker 2: happens all the time.
Speaker 1: So so amazing. I mean, I think at an individual level,
Speaker 1: I can be like, wow, these are some creative people.
Speaker 1: I kind of admire their wit and cunningness. At a
Speaker 1: big population level, I go, that's probably not a good
Speaker 1: thing for that to happen too often.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, at an individual level,
Speaker 2: these people kind of lovely, like the Aggie Fenton used
Speaker 2: to get people to buy a drinks because you just
Speaker 2: go to the local pub and be like, I'm the
Speaker 2: oldest woman in the world, give me, gim me ape
Speaker 2: and be it.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. We'll take a quick break and then we'll
Speaker 1: ask Saul why Silicon Valley is so obsessed with longevity
Speaker 1: and whether any of it is legit. All right, so
Speaker 1: we talked about some of the money that Blue Zones
Speaker 1: has generated seventy five million on the deal, and then
Speaker 1: whatever all the books and all that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was when I was in Costa Rica, there was Blue
Speaker 1: Zone sweat all over the airport. I'll say that. But
Speaker 1: I feel like the new, much more moneyed version of
Speaker 1: blue Zones is sort of happening in Silicon Valley with
Speaker 1: this tech e longevity movement, which you wrote in the book.
Speaker 1: Wrote about in the book. What's your take on all
Speaker 1: of that happening there?
Speaker 2: It's very simple. The if you're a grifter with creativity,
Speaker 2: who better the target? Right? Who better? They've bought everything
Speaker 2: else there's only one thing left, and that's this illusion
Speaker 2: that they're going to live forever. So you have these
Speaker 2: incredibly sophisticated grifts going on, and the best thing is
Speaker 2: they don't have to be any different than any historical grifts.
Speaker 2: You can just say, you know, I've got the tech
Speaker 2: based secret to living forever. You could take something that
Speaker 2: was sold to Emperor chinshi Wan, the first emperor of China.
Speaker 2: You could sell it to these guys and they would
Speaker 2: believe you one of the king. You know, sort of
Speaker 2: processes I talk about is this idea of transferring young
Speaker 2: blood into yourself. That's a way to live forever. Now
Speaker 2: that's not a new idea. Dracula is a popular old book,
Speaker 2: but it's also transparently. Obviously it doesn't work, and it
Speaker 2: has not prevented the sales. It hasn't prevented the sales pictures,
Speaker 2: It hasn't prevented this sort of the startup approach of
Speaker 2: why you just slapped a couple of leaders of children's
Speaker 2: blood into you, and of course the results are horrific.
Speaker 2: You know, where do you get children's blood? Is one
Speaker 2: of the things I deal with in the book. And
Speaker 2: the solution is not great. But I also talk about
Speaker 2: the fact that blood don't is a young recipients of
Speaker 2: blood donations are old. It already happens, like the logic
Speaker 2: just is not there. This is one of the most common,
Speaker 2: if not the most common medical procedure in the world,
Speaker 2: to give a blood transfer usion. It doesn't make your
Speaker 2: age backwards. But you have this ecosystem of people selling
Speaker 2: anything they can to billionaires on any basis, and this
Speaker 2: has fallen into this this ecosystem. There are plenty of others.
Speaker 2: There's plenty of magic pills floating around Silicon Valley, none
Speaker 2: of which work. But it is creating an extraordinary problem
Speaker 2: because to be able to do this, you have to
Speaker 2: throw out the evidence base of medicine. You have to
Speaker 2: be able to ignore the hippocratic earth. And there is
Speaker 2: now a concerted push to do that, and it's it's
Speaker 2: highly effective.
Speaker 1: I went to this, This was a sort of work
Speaker 1: reporting task. I went to a longevity conference in Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: and you know, tons of people, they are super interested
Speaker 1: in longevity. There's all these booths with all these different
Speaker 1: supplements and procedures and X y Z and one of
Speaker 1: my friends, funny clever friends text me afterwards, and he goes,
Speaker 1: did you see anyone over that looked over one hundred
Speaker 1: years old? I go, no, I did not. I did
Speaker 1: see a lot of old people at the casino. They
Speaker 1: were playing slot machines, and they looked like they were
Speaker 1: having a lot more fun. I'll tell you that much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean old people at the casino is probably
Speaker 2: the right metaphor to go with here, except the payoff
Speaker 2: as zero percent. Right, I make this point. I'm going
Speaker 2: to make it as well as I can. Now. Once
Speaker 2: you're at age forty, the odds of dying double every
Speaker 2: eight years. Just like clockwork, every seven or eight years,
Speaker 2: your odds of dying double until you did. Now, a
Speaker 2: lot of people get upset about that, understandably, but that's life.
Speaker 2: There are a heap of people now claiming, especially in
Speaker 2: that space, that they can reduce biological age. And let's
Speaker 2: say they claim all the time, I can reduce your
Speaker 2: biological page by ten years. Now, let's think about what
Speaker 2: would happen if that was true. Every disease that gets
Speaker 2: worse with that age would drop, right, it wouldn't just drop,
Speaker 2: It would more than half your risk of dying from
Speaker 2: a heart disease. More than half risk of dying from cancer,
Speaker 2: more than half. You could run a clinical trial on
Speaker 2: any one of these diseases and be one of the
Speaker 2: world's richest people because you could do it again and
Speaker 2: again and again. So, if you could reduce my biological
Speaker 2: age by ten years, like really, actually do it, why
Speaker 2: are you selling it in a booth in Las Vegas? Right?
Speaker 2: Why are you not collecting hundreds of billions of dollars
Speaker 2: from merk, collecting your Nobil prizes and going home. Because
Speaker 2: it's not just the diseases that kill you. Every disease
Speaker 2: that gets worth worse with age, bolding, a rectile dysfunction,
Speaker 2: you know, whatever it is, whatever insanely profitable thing it is,
Speaker 2: If you can reduce that by ten years, biologically you're
Speaker 2: more than halved to the rate. So why are you
Speaker 2: pitching to me on Twitter? Right? The answer is because
Speaker 2: none of this stuff works, none of it. It's you're
Speaker 2: selling a skinny dipping less tripped to Ponstilion's family Youth.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny because I talked to a few of
Speaker 1: the people who were running the boost and you know,
Speaker 1: own these companies, and more than one kind of looked
Speaker 1: around and said, you know, like ninety five percent of
Speaker 1: the shit at this conference it doesn't work at all,
Speaker 1: but mine works. Well, yeah, yeah, we do the math here.
Speaker 1: How many people told me that I don't know if
Speaker 1: that math maths.
Speaker 2: There was a I had a beautiful study by a
Speaker 2: lady who went to Sudinia and talked to one of
Speaker 2: the hundred year olds and they said exactly the same thing.
Speaker 2: They said, my birth certificate is real, but that lady
Speaker 2: up the road like she's making it up.
Speaker 1: So for the people listening to this, who go, I
Speaker 1: kind of hate you because I've been eating beans the
Speaker 1: last eight years because I was told that it would
Speaker 1: help me live longer, and I hate beans. What do
Speaker 1: you feel most firm about in terms of things we
Speaker 1: can do to live longer? And then a sort of
Speaker 1: underlying question is with these practices, are we lengthening our
Speaker 1: lives or are we just not dying as early? How
Speaker 1: do you think it is?
Speaker 2: Not that the point of medicine is to make you
Speaker 2: live a longer and healthier life. So if you want
Speaker 2: a longer, healthier life, good talk to your doctor. That's it.
Speaker 2: Not some not some cookbook salesman on YouTube, go and
Speaker 2: talk to your doctor. If you can't afford a doctor,
Speaker 2: if you're in that unfortunate position, then the best thing
Speaker 2: you can do exercise, don't drink, don't smoke, Like I
Speaker 2: know you want to have a beer after work, but
Speaker 2: like that is the stuff that works. Now you can
Speaker 2: add some niche stuff like you know, obviously don't do
Speaker 2: crack cocaine underneath the Loma Lindow Overpass. But really we
Speaker 2: already know what you have to do, and it's very simple.
Speaker 2: It is free. Yeah, except in America for the doctors.
Speaker 1: Except in America for the doctors. Exactly how has all
Speaker 1: this work you've been doing changed your own habits thinking
Speaker 1: in life?
Speaker 2: It hasn't changed my habits much. You know, in terms
Speaker 2: of being a sole custody data to kids. This is
Speaker 2: as physically first you could be right, it's not. You
Speaker 2: sort of do the best you can. But in terms
Speaker 2: of changing my life, you know, as increasing amount of
Speaker 2: hate mail. But also it's been extraordinary the degree to
Speaker 2: which other professional demographers can just be bought, I mean,
Speaker 2: really just be bort I mean we have now a
Speaker 2: Blue Zones research institute. Despite the fact that Loma Linda
Speaker 2: was on the drive to Vegas discovered from the freeway.
Speaker 2: We now have some of the top demographers in the
Speaker 2: world just saying I'll take the money and I'll come
Speaker 2: and join you. Where is the actual basis of this
Speaker 2: is highly questionable. It's coming up. It's sort of in
Speaker 2: development at the moment. But I'm seeing the papers coming
Speaker 2: through that are trying to They're trying to reconcile a
Speaker 2: reputation of this idea without ever explaining why. For twenty
Speaker 2: years an idea with no basis in fact was taken
Speaker 2: seriously by the scientific community. So, you know, I talked
Speaker 2: briefly about the demographer from Costa Rica who was paid
Speaker 2: to fined at Blue Zone fines went in Costa Rica.
Speaker 2: But this is the format. Mister Buttiner has no expertise
Speaker 2: to speak of whatsoever, and seems to be very successful
Speaker 2: at simply saying I'll pay a consultancy to people who
Speaker 2: do have expertise, and they'll say things that curiously align
Speaker 2: with exactly what the marketing hype says.
Speaker 1: What do you think the fectsos?
Speaker 2: If I knew, I would do it, you know, if
Speaker 2: I had an easy answer. But I think the thing
Speaker 2: we really need to focus on is that medicine was messy.
Speaker 2: The history of medicine is brutal, and it got us
Speaker 2: to a point where we have guardrails, we have safety.
Speaker 2: We cannot just throw that away because people at the
Speaker 2: top of government or people in a marketing company don't
Speaker 2: like the burden of evidence anymore. And as a scientific community,
Speaker 2: I think we need to really kick the charlatans out,
Speaker 2: Like it's obvious to everybody who needs to be fired,
Speaker 2: who needs to be removed? You know, you can't have
Speaker 2: one of these people has tenure at one of the
Speaker 2: best universities on earth and has sunk eight billion dollars
Speaker 2: of other people's money into what are effectively supplements sold
Speaker 2: out of Vegas, And why is that person still in
Speaker 2: the job. We need to ask serious questions about, like
Speaker 2: why why are we putting up with this removing For example,
Speaker 2: doctor oz Is won the BIGGESUS Awards, which is an
Speaker 2: award for claiming things that will be true when peaks fly.
Speaker 2: He's won it multiple times. Yet the amount of blood
Speaker 2: it took to get him off one of I think
Speaker 2: it was the University of Chicago, I can't remember exactly
Speaker 2: it took him to get him off a medical board
Speaker 2: in a major university is extraordinary. He should have been
Speaker 2: sacked day one, day one, and yet we put up
Speaker 2: with We put up with the quackery. I just don't
Speaker 2: understand why.
Speaker 1: Well, I think one thing that as positive as the
Speaker 1: fact that you and I are having this conversation, your
Speaker 1: work is resonating. And I think once you get enough
Speaker 1: public pushback, things start, People at least start to be
Speaker 1: a little more on guard and they start to go, okay,
Speaker 1: should we you know, what are the holes here? And
Speaker 1: it might be a slow process. I don't know, it
Speaker 1: might be fast processed. Sometimes things it's like you have
Speaker 1: a moment, kind of like when your paper came out
Speaker 1: and everyone goes, oh shit, we gotta we got to
Speaker 1: get our act together. But I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, I think the heartening part of this is the public,
Speaker 2: even when they're being tricked, they sort of have this
Speaker 2: feeling they're being tricked. You know, they're smarter than we have,
Speaker 2: a smarter than we give them credit for. Right at least,
Speaker 2: I agree. I know that the public is very smart
Speaker 2: at figuring out once I've been shown something as a trick,
Speaker 2: like they know. If you ever doubt this, go to
Speaker 2: a Reddit sub thread on something like a magician's show, right,
Speaker 2: they figure it out, even when they're intentionally being tricked,
Speaker 2: they figure it out. And I think that's sort of wonderful.
Speaker 2: We just need the equivalent of Penninella up the front
Speaker 2: saying this is how the trick is done, and the
Speaker 2: public could very quickly latch onto that. So that's the
Speaker 2: that's a really positive note coming out of this. You know,
Speaker 2: you ask me for my health advice, but the public
Speaker 2: know my health advice. They know it themselves already. They
Speaker 2: know that America, honestly, you need free healthcare. You just
Speaker 2: need it. It's something that is constantly there in the
Speaker 2: back of everyone's mind that there's something sort of deeply
Speaker 2: wrong with this system. And the more we're very explicit
Speaker 2: about that and explicit about the fact that people understand
Speaker 2: this problem, the more hopeful I am that it will
Speaker 2: get fixed.
Speaker 1: How was your work made you think about death? I'm
Speaker 1: fine with it, honestly, great answer.
Speaker 2: Like, is eighty years not enough? It's great to have
Speaker 2: eighty years. You know, if you if you go back
Speaker 2: to the past, the past is terrible past. It is like, like,
Speaker 2: even if you have eighty years in the past, is
Speaker 2: you know, people, the people, especially the right wings think
Speaker 2: to love to harp on about Rome being this sort
Speaker 2: of you know, tough and manly place where you go
Speaker 2: around and be tough and find battles and stuff like,
Speaker 2: you want to know something about them. The public bathrooms
Speaker 2: had a shared sponge that's the toilet paper, right, So
Speaker 2: you're going back and even if you're at the elite
Speaker 2: tier of the past, it's terrible. It's terrible. So you know,
Speaker 2: eighty years now is fantastic. It's fantastic. So just enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Just have a good time, right, Yeah, your probability of
Speaker 1: reaching eighty years has never been higher and never been high.
Speaker 1: Those eighty years are going to be an all likelihood,
Speaker 1: way better than they would have been had you met
Speaker 1: him one hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so much better. I mean it again, the history
Speaker 2: of medicine sort of puts a different spin on this.
Speaker 2: But you look at what people died of in the past,
Speaker 2: and you look at how long they got and you
Speaker 2: just think, Okay, no, we've we've lost that perspective and
Speaker 2: we've lost that feeling of joy in existing. To some
Speaker 2: extent because that constant threat of death is not there.
Speaker 2: It's great that constant threat of death is not there.
Speaker 2: But we don't need to sit around like anxiously panicking
Speaker 2: that we're not going to make it to one hundred
Speaker 2: and five. I think it's fine. It's fine to not
Speaker 2: make it to one hundred and five.
Speaker 1: That feels like a good note to end on. It
Speaker 1: is fine not to make it two hundred and five. Well, Saul,
Speaker 1: I appreciate you coming on the show man. Your book
Speaker 1: is fantastic. I recommend it to everyone listening right now.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thank you for checking out the episode, and thanks to
Speaker 1: Saul for jumping on and chatting with us. We are
Speaker 1: in your feeds twice a week, so please keep an
Speaker 1: eye out for more. If you have a question for
Speaker 1: our Ask Michael Anything section, please submit it in the
Speaker 1: comments or send it to media at twopct dot com.
Speaker 1: Even better, if you want to send us your question
Speaker 1: as a voice memo or a video, we would love
Speaker 1: to run that and answer it. We will try and
Speaker 1: answer as many as we can. Of course, please subscribe
Speaker 1: to the show really helps, and in closing, have fun
Speaker 1: don't die, and if you do die, pretend you're alive
Speaker 1: and keep collecting those social security benefits.
Speaker 2: Classic