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Eric Topol: I had a patient who came to see me, she was then 97 now 98. And she was stunning in terms of being so humorous and captivating and intact. She was, you know, oil painting and doing jigsaw puzzles and Rummikub every week.
Carl Zimmer: Wow
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HOST: Dr. Eric Topol is a cardiologist with a scientific interest in how we get old. and he is particularly fascinated by people like his 98-year-old patient, who’ve made it to old age without experiencing any serious disease or cognitive decline.
Eric Topol: She was functioning as if she was 30 years or 40 years younger.
HOST: Back in 2007, Topol and a group of researchers launched an experiment to find out how some people manage to age so well. They recruited 1400 people from ages 80 to 105 who had never had a chronic illness.
Topol and his colleagues hypothesized that the reason was genetic – something in their DNA was giving them an edge. so they sequenced each volunteer’s genome and then searched for unusual genetic patterns that would explain their good fortune.
Eric Topol: And we didn't find much. You know, there's been a fair number of findings seen in longevity, certain alleles and genes variants that have shown up. But here we didn't see it
HOST: It might sound like a big disappointment. But it actually gave topol some newfound hope. How you age is not just a matter of the genes you inherit.
Topol: As a person with a terrible family history, I said, oh, that's good. Because, you know, maybe I'm not going to follow suit from my parents and my aunts and uncles and everybody else in my lineage.
HOST: We’ve spent most of this season exploring the scientific research on aging. There have been impressive breakthroughs, and there are still many mysteries left to solve.
But it's important to remember that there's a lot we already know. There are tons of studies about what enhances our health as we age. And as it happens, there is one person who has read and evaluated thousands of them, and put the results in a book. That person is Dr. Eric Topol and the book is Super Agers: An Evidence Based Approach to Longevity, which came out in May of 2025.
I've known Topol for 15 years, and interviewed him many times. As the founder and director of the Scripps research translational institute, Topol tracks the biggest innovations in medicine. He has published over 1,200 peer-reviewed articles, and is among the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. so, who better to talk to about the here and now of aging?
Because his book is so fresh and there’s so much ground to cover, we're breaking the format a bit here and devoting the whole episode to one conversation.
I'm Carl Zimmer, and on this episode of The World As You’ll Know it, I talk with Eric Topol about how we can all become super agers.
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HOST: To write his book, Topol looked at everything, from diet to medical testing. The result is an expert’s guide on the most effective ways to improve our odds of staying healthy when we get old.
Eric Topol: Not just the big three of diet, exercise, and sleep, but there's many other layers of data. And there's many other details within the top three that people aren't familiar with, that I even wasn't familiar with until I got deep into it.
Carl Zimmer: Yeah, so let's talk about those big three you mentioned. You know, everybody's heard about exercise. Yeah, go get some exercise. What's coming to light about the biology of exercise?
Eric Topol: One thing I would say is the epigenetic clock, the methylation clock – the only thing that's definitively changed that favorably has been exercise.
HOST: We talked about the epigenetic clock back in our episode on biohacking. It's a blood test that measures how fast we’re aging. Studies have shown that exercise slows the clock down.
But there is a lot more research showing that we live longer if we exercise. Topol writes about a study that followed over half a million people for ten years. People who walked briskly for seven and a half hours a week lived an average of four and a half years longer than people who did not.
Topol: There appears to be like a dose response, but still even limited exercise is helpful. You know, one minute of exercise is five minutes of healthy aging. That's a pretty good investment, 5X, right? Now, it might be a slight exaggeration, but you know what? There's something to that. So the exercise story is the dominant one for evidence. It's extraordinary because whether it's looking at hand grip or resistance training or aerobic or all the above. Any way you look at it, exercise is promoting healthy aging.
Carl Zimmer: How much exercise should we aim for?
Eric Topol: Yeah, well, it turns out the five days of aerobic activity, 30 minutes, whether that's walking or bicycling, treadmill, all these things that will get your heart rate up for 30 minutes, that's great. And then two to three days of resistance training.
HOST: You might just think of resistance training as a good way to build muscle. but topol says that it also seems to promote healthy aging.
In a 2022 study, scientists found that sixty minutes of resistance training a week was associated with a lower risk of death from any cause. Resistance training has also been linked with better sleep, higher bone density and a lower risk of cancer – all of which can contribute to healthier aging.
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Carl Zimmer: Now is there such a thing as too much exercise?
Eric Topol: I don't know that we have any solid footing for saying we should go extreme. There's really no good reason to do that. And there's more injuries and potentially adverse effects. If you're really into extreme exercise, we don't know if that's really giving you extra benefit. We don't know that.
Carl Zimmer: And you mentioned grip strength. Why would grip strength matter? Does that mean we should all be squeezing stress balls all the time or something? What's the story?
Eric Topol: Well, grip strength is kind of a reflection of muscle mass in your upper body, not just in the hand, but the correlation there is extraordinary. And so it wouldn't hurt to have stress balls or other things to get extra strength there. But I don't know that you want to fixate just on your hand grip.
HOST: Another surprising predictor of health? how much you sit. In the book, Topol cites a study that followed nearly half a million people for 13 years. It showed that people who mostly sat at work had a 17 percent increased risk in mortality.
Eric Topol: I thought it was not real. But the more I got into it, I said, hmm, it really makes a difference from the data that you're not sitting for more than an hour. Getting up frequently is really important. I think we had not realized that and I was a skeptic.
MUSIC UP AND OUT
Carl Zimmer: Let's shift now to diet. Would you say that there's a particular headline about diet in what you talk about in the book?
Eric Topol: Yeah, there's, I'd say, big issues there. Number one, what's a really good healthy diet, which has been ambiguous for a long time.
HOST: Topol says it’s getting less ambiguous, Thanks to a number of new studies.
One of them came out in March of 2025. Scientists followed over 100,000 people in the United States for 30 years. The researchers looked at how the participants were doing when they reached 70.
They wanted to know how many of them were experiencing healthy aging. That meant no chronic conditions. memory largely intact. able to do basic physical tasks, like carry groceries. only a fraction of people made the cut: just nine percent.
But what did those nine percent have in common? For one thing, they shared a pretty similar diet.
Eric Topol: They ate basically fruits and vegetables, plant-based diet predominantly, you know, a Mediterranean diet with seafood and a lot of nuts, legumes, and whole grains. It is the diet that is best backed up, and I review all those diet studies in the book.
HOST: Topol is skeptical of diets that claim you can fight aging by boosting your intake of a particular nutrient. Like protein, which is a focus of many current diets. Topol warns that too much protein can cause health problems… just like not enough of it.
Eric Topol: If anything, the data suggests that could be toxic and promote atherosclerosis and other pro-inflammatory. Particularly if you're getting protein sources from animals.
Carl Zimmer: So you're concluding that these high protein diets are questionable or maybe should be avoided. There are other diets too, keto diets, raw food diets. Is there any particular one that you think really stands out?
Eric Topol: None of them have data to support health outcomes. I mean, there's exceptions, like a keto diet has helped people that have intractable seizures. Okay, that's an exception. It's being studied to see whether it could help people in cancer. But overall, none of these diets, including intermittent fasting, have been associated with these types of health outcomes across the age-related diseases.
Carl Zimmer: You're focusing people on something like the Mediterranean diet with a lot of fruits and vegetables?
Eric Topol: Yeah, exactly. Seafood's good. Red meat should be kept low, if at all. You know, and if you stick to that type of diet and avoid ultra-processed foods, you're in really good shape.
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HOST: Ultraprocessed foods include things like soda, potato chips, and sugary breakfast cereals. They’re the items at the supermarket with a long list of ingredients on their label – stuff like hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors. They're not the sort of foods you can make at home.
Eric Topol: Each of us can do something about it by reading labels. If it has a label, maybe that's not a good sign in to start with. But if those things are in the label that you don't recognize that are not in your kitchen, that's a problem.
HOST: In his book, Topol writes that diets heavy on ultraprocessed foods are linked to a range of chronic diseases. They can lead to a 40 percent higher risk of type 2 diabetes, and a 66 percent elevated risk of cardiovascular death. One study showed that eating a quarter serving or more per day of ultraprocessed red meats – things like hot dogs and bacon – is associated with a 13 percent higher risk of dementia.
Eric Topol: 70 % of our diet in the United States is ultra processed food. It's the highest in the world.
Carl Zimmer: 70% you said? Wow.
Eric Topol: 70%. The American diet – and it's higher in children, by the way. So it's pro-inflammatory body-wide. It promotes dementia, cardiovascular, diabetes, cancers, I mean, we have to do something about this.
HOST: Topol hopes that ultraprocessed foods will ultimately be treated the way cigarettes are now – with regulations and labeling to advertise their toxic effects and reduce their use. For now, he urges people to eat as few ultraprocessed foods as possible.
Another concern for Topol are dietary supplements. He writes that there’s very little evidence that those who follow a healthy diet get any added benefit from vitamins or supplements like vitamin d, vitamin c, fish oil, and many others.
He also cautions against off-label use of drugs like rapamycin or metformin, which have slowed aging in mouse studies, but haven’t been thoroughly tested in humans.
Eric Topol: We also have to keep in mind that all these shots on goal to reverse aging have liabilities, whether it's inducing cancer or getting rid of the wrong senescent cells or, I mean, you name it. They all have risks and they haven't been proven in people. Maybe it'll happen someday, and I hope it does. But in the meantime, what you eat, your physical activity, your sleep, and a lot of these things we've been talking about, that doesn't cost anything. It's very low risk, so why not take advantage of it?
Carl Zimmer: So you mentioned sleep. That's the number three of the big three. What do we need to know about sleep?
Eric Topol: I learned a lot. That was the thing that perhaps I changed the most from the research that I had some familiarities with. A breakthrough was to learn that we have these glymphatics in our brain.
Carl Zimmer: What's that?
Eric Topol: Not lymphatics, but glymphatics. And they are these basically vessels that will take… the toxins in our brain that we accumulate each day. And basically they get pumped out of the brain during deep sleep. So deep sleep is our slow wave sleep. It's the one that suffers the most as we age. And it is associated most with dementia, Alzheimer's, neurodegenerative disease and also even the other big age-related diseases. So it's precious.
HOST: Studies have found a strong link between health and how long you sleep. Sleeping less than seven hours a night is associated with a greater risk of things like cardiovascular disease and mental health problems.
The discovery of those glymphatics might explain why: seven or eight hours of sleep a night helps ensure that you spend enough time in deep sleep – the part of sleep when your brain waves slow down and the glymphatics in your brain clear out the trash.
Eric Topol: What I learned is I got to get more deep sleep because once I started measuring it, I was aghast. You know I was at 15 and below minutes per night, which is really bad. And I had to learn how to get it up to 40, 45, sometimes even 60 minutes, which is great now. And, you know, I'm supercharged for better sleep.
Carl Zimmer: What did you do to get your sleep better?
Eric Topol: So first I had to start tracking it, which I'd never done. And then once I started tracking it, it was, oh wow, this is really horrible. So then I started saying, hmm, I better move evening meal earlier.
Carl Zimmer: Hmm. Well, why would that help?
Eric Topol: Maybe it's just for me, I mean it’s, everyone's different, you're not using so much of your energy for digestion. And that may just free up your body to get into deep sleep, which interestingly, a lot of that occurs early after you fall asleep, not as you would think late in the night. So that was one thing, but also, you know, when I exercise – too late in the day, or for me, pushing myself early in the morning, which I didn't feel like doing it, you know, I think I was making myself more stressed out.
HOST: Topol says that sleep tracking apps on your smartphone or wearable fitness tracker aren’t perfect, but if you are looking to get a better sense of your sleep, they are a decent place to start.
Carl Zimmer: could you feel a difference once you were starting to get more of that deep sleep? I mean, just day to day?
Eric Topol: Night and day for me, that's the wrong term, perhaps. It just gave me a functionality. Like, you know, I might forget names or certain things and I wasn't forgetting them, you know, you almost could feel as if your clearance from your brain of these toxins was really working. The other thing I just would point out is we learned things like Ambien, they backfire. They actually give you a sense you slept more, but they completely block the exit of these toxins through the glymphatics. And people don't know that. They need to know that.
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Carl Zimmer: Another big concern as we get older is about our cognition, whether we're just going through a cognitive decline or there's always the fear of dementia. what do you think are some things that we could be doing to minimize the risk of that decline?
Eric Topol: Generally we don't have any good data for these brain activities. You know ,doing various puzzles and
Carl Zimmer: Ah, Sudoku
Eric Topol: Sudoku and then these apps that, you know, stimulate your brain and, you know, we don't have great data that is promoting your brain health.
HOST: Doing a mental workout might not prevent cognitive decline, but Topol says that doing a physical workout could help.
Eric Topol: Exercise is perhaps the most important thing you could do to avoid mild cognitive impairment. It does reduce the tendency towards neuroinflammation. It does preserve the blood brain barrier integrity so things just don't leak across. you see with more exercise, structural integrity, the lack of atrophy.
HOST: Along with exercise, another simple intervention could have a huge impact on our cognition in old age: hearing aids.
That connection is only just coming to light. In 2023, researchers at Johns Hopkins studied a thousand people between the ages of 70 and 84, tracking their cognition over three years. Some of the volunteers were physically healthy. Others had medical conditions that are linked to a greater risk of cognitive decline, like high blood pressure and diabetes.
One group of people got hearing aids. At the end of the study, the researchers looked at how well they did compared to people without hearing aids.
Among the healthy people, there wasn’t any difference over three years. but among the people with risk factors, the difference was stark. The people in the high risk group who got hearing aids saw a huge reduction in their cognitive decline.
Eric Topol: The likely explanation there is that auditory stimulation is important to keep that brain activated. People who have hearing loss and they should be screened for that as they get older, they really could benefit. I mean, that's something you could be, these days you can do pretty inexpensively over the counter. So yeah, it's a big deal.
HOST: Fewer than 1 in 3 people who could benefit from hearing aids have used them. For younger adults, the figure drops to 1 in 6.
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Carl Zimmer: We were talking before about, you know, dangerous things to avoid. I was surprised that on that list you talk about loneliness. Loneliness is bad for your health.
Eric Topol: Yeah, as we get older, we tend to live in a cave and we don't come out. We have very little social interaction. and as you get 70 and beyond, you're just more recluse. You're lonely and you're isolated. Turns out that really has a very strong association with bad outcomes of the big three that we talked about.
HOST: Studies of loneliness consistently find a link to greater risk of death from any cause. At the high end of those studies, the risk is 32 percent.
Eric Topol: There's a lot of theories about why it's so strong, but we are social animals and we do gain stimulation from being with other people. And I think it's really important for mental health as well, which as you're well aware, that's just very intertwined with our physical health.
HOST: Making some key changes to our lifestyle can improve our chances of healthy aging. But, Topol isn’t claiming that those changes will guarantee we don’t get sick. He says the best way to deal with cancer or Alzheimer's or other diseases of aging is to get ahead of them – to find out about your risk of developing them as early as possible.
Eric Topol: So for the example of Alzheimer's, the thing here is that that's one that many of us most fear.
Carl Zimmer: Mmhmm.
Eric Topol: Who is the risk? Well, we can see whether you have ApoE4 allele, which is one fourth of people. That's pretty substantial. You get a three-fold increased risk.
HOST: The apo-e protein helps ferry cholesterol and other kinds of fat through the bloodstream. The version called apo-e4 puts people at much higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. It's not clear why. Maybe the way it moves fat inside the brain contributes to the progression of plaques and tangles.
But scientists have known for years that a test for apo-e4 will show if you have elevated risk for Alzheimer's.
Eric Topol: If you're worried about it, if you want to know, that's one thing you can easily get. It's inexpensive and it's a very standardized, high-fidelity test.
HOST: Topol says that many other genes can also contribute to your overall chance of getting Alzheimer's. but each one only has a tiny effect. so scientists have been developing new tests for diseases like Alzheimer's in which they add up all those little risks. They call it a polygenic risk score.
Eric Topol: Now the polygenic risk score will tell you if you're at this high risk zone. Then you get another blood test. It's called a P-tau-217, which is the best test we have right now.
Carl Zimmer: So the tests you were talking about before, those are for looking at your DNA to see if you have those genetic risks for Alzheimer's. And then this P-tau test. This is where you're actually looking for a protein that's building up in your blood as you're moving on the path towards Alzheimer's?
Eric Topol: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's a marker of tau, know, PTAU. It's a phosphorylated tau and one of the sites of tau
Carl Zimmer: And tau is one of these proteins that is very characteristic of Alzheimer's in the brain.
Eric Topol: And this is the one, this site is the one that is most discriminative. It shows up the earliest. So if you have APOE4, family history, polygenic risk score, then if you wanna know more, you can get this PTAU 217 test. Now, once you have that, If it's high and it's concordant with the others, then you know you're high risk. But what's great about this, Carl, I think a lot of people don't know this, is that it's modifiable by exercise and lifestyle.
Carl: Alzheimer’s?
Eric Topol: The P-TAU 217. So you can bring that down. We've seen in a prospective study three studies that you can bring that down with more attention to lifestyle. It's a little bit like LDL cholesterol for heart disease, right? You can bring it down and you should be able to lower your risk subsequently. You change your diet, you're exercising more, you're getting better sleep, and you may in the future take a GLP-1 drug, because you may have seen that there's multiple big trials now with the Ozempic drugs that are being tested for Alzheimer's in thin people, okay? Because it has a marked brain anti-inflammatory effect.
So it isn't just lifestyle, it's do things to prevent inflammation in the brain. And we can do this now.
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Carl Zimmer: Now I know that for a long time, you know, you have really been a champion of bringing this kind of information to patients, so that people can know about their own health, their own bodies, to have that data. As opposed to, you know, doctors just sort of holding onto it. Now, you know, you can just go online and just get a lot of these tests that you were just talking about. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are now in 2025 about, you know, how much should people be going off and doing this testing or screening just on their own and getting these results on their own versus working with a healthcare provider who's really kind of calling the shots?
Eric Topol: Yeah. A lot of these companies are charging, you know, arm and a leg for these tests that are very inexpensive to run. You want to get a low-cost high-quality test done, but you'd like to get guidance from physicians. The problem is, a lot of physicians aren't up on this. And they should be, because patients are gonna come to them more and more, or they're gonna join these longevity companies paying a lot of money to get what they could get through their doctor. I hope that we don't go overboard on testing. I don't think everybody should get any of these tests. If you don't have high risk, don't do tests because you're going to get false positives. And that's why this terrible thing about recommending people get total body MRI, which is what some of these longevity companies do. There are no data for that. you've got these celebrities and other authors that are pitching these tests, companies. I think that reckless testing is a very serious problem. But if you're in the high risk group, then yes, they're high yield. High true positives, low false negatives, that's when you wanna use it.
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HOST: Topol is convinced that people can increase their chances of healthy aging by taking control of their own health. but they can’t do everything on their own. Healthcare systems are going to have to change, too, to make better use of tests.
Another system-wide change that topol says we need? Cutting down on pollution. In his book, topol singles out air pollution and microplastics as especially dire threats to healthy aging.
Eric Topol: Fine particulate air pollution. The effects are what you would expect. They induce body-wide inflammation. They induce everything that we talked about. Risk, More cardiovascular, more neurodegenerative, and more cancers. And we're not doing anything about air pollution. In fact, at the moment, it looks like we're doing things that are gonna make it worse. And then the microplastic story has gotten seriously to the point of concern because we've seen the accumulation in arteries, in the plaque of arteries.
And the people that had that in a careful prospective study had four to five times higher risk of heart attacks, strokes, and death in the next few years. So it's in the brain, these plastics accumulate everywhere just like dirty air that we breathe. And these are the things that are pulling us away, you know, these are chasing our tail, that we could make headway on the things we’ve discussed, but we're not doing anything about the things that are holding us back.
Carl Zimmer: And these are the things that you can't really fix for yourself with a great new exercise program or your own personal diet.
Eric Topol: Yeah, I mean, there's certain things you can do. I mean, obviously the plastics are accumulating in megatons and they're non-degradable and they just keep accumulating in the ocean and the water and the air and everywhere, right? I mean, we eat the seafood and the seafood eat the plastics. And so, yeah, you just can't win here.
Now, what can we do as individuals? Don't drink from plastic containers. Don't store things in plastic. Don't use plastic utensils and things that you would be cooking with. Like for example, if you're using a microwave, oh my gosh, don't put something in plastic into the microwave because now you've got whatever plastics problem, you've taken it to the fourth power that you're going to ingest. So we can do some things at the individual level. But a lot of people just aren't taking it seriously. We have to do better than that.
Carl Zimmer: Is there anything in particular that you see a lot of people doing, hoping to live longer, that really isn't helpful?
Eric Topol: People are trying all kinds of crazy things. You know, their peptides and their NAD +, and they're taking rapamycin. These are things that are unproven in people. We don't have a scintilla of data in humans that they improve health span. But we do have data that you take rapamycin, that you suppress your immune system. So no, I'm not into that. I'm not into taking metformin without better data. The NAD plus supplement and all these other supplements are bad with respect to any body of data. And my differentiating feature for truth is if somebody says they're a longevity researcher and if they're hawking a supplement, that's it. It's over.
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Carl Zimmer: If you could tell people just one thing that they could do, what would that be? I mean, what do you think is like the one thing that people aren't doing enough that if we could just do that, we'd have a huge improvement?
Eric Topol: Well, I mean, the best data we have is exercise, if you take one thing. And when you think of that, it's not just aerobic and resistance, it's balance, practicing balance and posture. I mean, basically, it's being fit, physically fit. If you're going to do one thing, that would be worth your investment of time and effort. And gradually picking it up. You don't have to get to an extreme level. But if that was the only thing you could do, that would be great.
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HOST: You can learn much more about evidence-backed healthy aging in topol’s book, super agers.
In the meantime, we asked some of the other experts we’ve talked to this season about what they’re doing for their health, given that they study aging for a living. They're all doing something a little different.
Daniel Belsky: I try to do more of the boring stuff, you know, eat a healthy diet, get as much physical activity as I can, you take the stairs instead of the elevator. I live here in New York City where there are everywhere.
Cindy Lustig: Being a professor, you know, the cognitive stimulation, that's there all day, every day. But yeah, I think you will actually discover that most people who are doing aging research, yeah, and particularly aging and brain research, most of us are gym rats.
Steve Austad: I'm kind of a fanatical gym rat. I rely on diet and exercise. I do time-restricted eating, although I did it before it became faddish, just because it fit with my lifestyle. I work when I get up. I don't eat until, y’know, 11 o'clock in the morning. I eat again about six or seven.
Rachel Wu: I can feel all of the issues that I am researching about. So I'll be like, I don't really wanna learn that. I'm just gonna ask my grad student to do that for me. It's so easy as an adult to hire somebody or to ask somebody to do stuff for you. And so I really need to check that and keep myself from doing that. So as I progress through the decades, I'll try to keep learning new skills at least once every three years.
Jay Olshansky: My wife and I both have assembled a group of doctors to monitor us very carefully. Every year, all the body parts and then diet and exercise are foundational. And I try and take as few medications as I can. A couple of years ago, my doctor wanted to give me a statin because my cholesterol was rising. And I said, let's do what we can to avoid taking a medication. So I just lost weight and my cholesterol plummeted and I didn't need the medication. So I want to stay off of medications for as long as possible, but basically control what I can control and monitor like crazy.
Venki Ramakrishnan: I take half a vitamin pill. People laugh at me. It's a kind of insurance policy to make sure I get the minimum daily requirement. I'm not even sure I need it.
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[CREDITS MUSIC IN]
HOST: On the final episode of The World As You’ll Know It: The Future of Aging…
Laura Carstensen: In the blink of an eye we nearly doubled the length of our lives. And that's a remarkable accomplishment. It really should go down in the list of the greatest human advances ever. And it's also among the greatest challenges
Andrew J. Scott: I'm 59. What economics tells me is I have to behave differently from my father at 59 or my grandfather at 59. And there's lots of economic and social aspects to that. Finance, relationships, all of these things need to adapt and adjust to the realities of the life we can now expect to live. They all changed in the 20th century, they just need to change again in the 21st century.
HOST: The World As You’ll Know It is brought to you by Aventine, a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today’s decisions could affect the future. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of Aventine, its employees or affiliates.
For a transcript of the episode and more resources related to what you've just heard, please visit aventine dot org slash podcast.
Danielle Mattoon is the Executive Director at Aventine. Bruce Headlam is the Editorial Director at Aventine.
Our Producer is Emerald O’Brien. Our Associate Producer is Marialexa Kavanaugh.
Our Editor is Joel Lovell. Kamilah Kashanie is our Managing Producer.
Original music by Davy Sumner with additional music from epidemic sound.
This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz.
Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. Our Senior Recording Engineers are Marina Paiz and Pedro Alvira.
Fact Checking by Will Tavlin.
Music licensing by Extreme Music and Epidemic Sound.
Our executive producer is Asha Saluja.
I'm your host, Carl Zimmer.
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