What If We Doubled Life Expectancy?

The human species was able to double its own life expectancy in under 100 years - could we do it again? Justin and Lance discuss the history of preventative medicine and what a future with humans regularly living to be 100+ years might look like.

tags: tsou, justin weller, lance jackson, age, old, medicine, antibiotics, elderly, healthcare, economics, disparities, history, aging, immortality, science, policy, activism

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to this state of US beyondmainstream cable news and party lines. With
a millennial and a boomer. Thestate of US wise just passed the noise
and uncovers all the issues that matter. Here's your host, Justin Tweller.
What if we doubled the human lifespan? It might sound like a crazy

(00:23):
notion and understandably why, But betweennineteen twenty and twenty twenty, the average
human life span did in fact double. How did we do it? Science
mattered, but so did activism.According to a recent New York Times magazine
piece, which is extensive. Today, we're going to highlight some of the

(00:46):
key points and discuss some very surprisingfacts about how things like wealth didn't matter
in life expectancy and milk was aleading culprit in cities throughout the world of
death. These might sound like bizarrefacts, but they're woven into our very
recent history, and they're part ofwhat made it possible for us to more

(01:07):
than double the human lifespan. Couldwe do it again? And what would
that mean for us? While questionslike this could only be answered with the
assistance of true Chad senior historian andan educator of more than thirty years.
Here is your friendly redneck liberal LanceJackson. Well, I'm not going to
take too long because I want toget into the information, but I have

(01:29):
an exalted feeling about today's show,and that's our word of the day.
Exaltation e x a l tatio inn. It is a noun and it means
a feeling of great joy, pride, or power. And I'm exalted about
having the opportunity to share this articlewith you, and you need to read
it. You know, it's linkedat the State of US. It is

(01:51):
an extensive piece from the New YorkTimes Sunday magazine, but it is one
of the best pieces writings that I'veread this year, and it's got so
many neat things in it, notonly for medicine, but also historical and
positivity for us in the future ifwe can continue to do some of these
things. So, without further ado, let's get started. When we read

(02:13):
this article, I immediately thought ofImmortality, inc. Right, which was
the It's a book for those ofyou that don't know, and we had
the author on the show. He'sa National Geographic Explorer, Chip Walter,
and I highly recommend the read.But one of the things that we didn't
really get to talk about in thatone, but we touched on was what
would the implications be of doing somethinglike doubling or tripling the human lifespan?

(02:35):
You know, I mean, howwould we deal with that, How could
it happen? What will we do? Well, we actually have a very
recent historical example from nineteen twenty totwenty twenty to point too and say we've
already done that, Right, It'snot as far fetched when you read that
book. It's not as far FETsnow when you realize we've already done this.
And I'm not sure a lot ofpeople realize that. I mean,

(02:57):
you know, I guess I supposeI knew it technically, but you never
really think about it in terms ofdoubling the lifespan. Right, the average
life expectancy for somebody in nineteen twentywas half what it was just last year
in twenty twenty. Yep. Andthat's crazy. I mean, that's huge.
And one of the things that inthe world. This isn't just the

(03:17):
United States. I mean, thisis a worldwide in the United States as
well, but it's worldwide. Thisis something that we've we've accomplished as a
world, as a world of peoplewe so closely in our politicians and everybody
today you hear about talking about howlife expectancy, right and general health is
tied to how much money do youhave? Right, the wealth and income

(03:42):
gap that we see in society,and what a difference that makes to all
components of life. But interestingly enough, before the year seventeen fifty, wealth
actually didn't matter with life expectancy.Based on all the data we had,
whether you were you know, richor poor, educated or or not,
you basically lived, You had aboutthe same life expectancy no matter what,

(04:04):
right, no amount of money escapedlife expectancy. And then things started to
change, and that was the beginningof things with the smallpox vaccine, right
correct. And you know what's interestingin what I learned in the article was
that the smallpox vaccine can be tracedback to the tenth century in China.

(04:26):
You know, we think of itmostly as being from England in the seventeen
hundreds, and the whole idea ofthe cow pox and opening up the arm
and then spreading it, you know, cutting the arm open of an individual.
And people are afraid of vaccinations.Now they can't get a shot,

(04:46):
and they used to take a knifeand slice your arm open and put us
into your arm to develop the immunityto it. But you know, that's
something and it was very as ahistorian, we read about it that Washington
had the troops vaccinated a wait aminute, talk about vaccineslator it was a
mandatory vaccination for the military because hewas losing so many troops to the smallpox

(05:12):
that he didn't have enough troops tofight in Some historian say that was one
of the turning points of the warwhen the Americans vaccinated themselves from this disease.
But yeah, and the reason itwas going is because it'd been around
a long time, but it tooktime for it to spread. But people

(05:32):
were doing it because royal families werebeing wiped out. So to your point
that you know, two hundred andfifty years ago, it didn't matter if
you were rich or not. Thesediseases struck everybody. And so it was
like, well, we all haveto get together and find a way to
make it work. And wow,there's that concept again, right, we
all have to get together and finda way to make it work. And

(05:54):
then wait a minute, even ifyou don't want it, we're going to
mandate it. We're going to saythis is what needs to be done because
it's for the betterment of all.And part of what created that wealth income
gap, and you just touched onit was that actually it was a lot
of royalty and the upper classes thatstarted to embrace it because they were dying

(06:15):
at these rates and they said,you know, we got to do something
about this. I meany, youcame in a lot of ways a concern
for their continued existence. Right ifyou stay in power, you know,
that poses an issue. So that'sthat's pretty fascinating. But then the other
thing is, you know, soyou see things start to get better,
get better, get better right throughlike you know, late seventeen hundreds,

(06:40):
early eighteen hundreds, and then wehave industrial industrialization that starts to kick in,
right, and we see massive increasesin productivity, right and and wealth.
But we also see that now whatstarted to happen is we got all
these people living and working in closequarters, and we've got to have centralized

(07:01):
water and centralized sewer, and wegot these farm animals in our cities,
and all of a sudden, rightwe've got problems. And one of those
problems was surrounding milk. Well,yeah, and the whole point is is
that we saw these gains and thenindustrialization in the nineteenth century basically wiped out

(07:21):
all those gains in life expectancy because, like you said, as we started
to find out, the more peoplelived together, the easier it was for
disease to spread. And you say, well, yeah, duh, everybody
knows that, Well, they didn't. Then that was something that we found
out, and then it was like, okay, so now we have a
new set of problems that we haveto deal with. And to your point,

(07:46):
milk was known as liquid poison becauseit was like, well, and
you talked about this off air withme, the day of waking up,
you know, your famous person JohnAdams would wake up and he'd want some
milk, so they'd go out andmilk the cows, and he'd have some
milk for breakfast, and then they'dgo on about their daily work, and
he'd want some more milk at nightwith his dinner before he went to bed,

(08:09):
so they'd go out and milk thecow, so there was nothing to
worry about the freshness. And thenearest farmer was ten or twelve miles away,
so the animals didn't interact with otheranimals or other humans, so there
was no chance of disease spreading.But now you have all these people flooding
into London and New York City andPhiladelphia, and you have thousands of people

(08:31):
living here. Well, the milkhas to be you know, on a
horse drawn carriage from miles away.Well what happened to the milk, Well,
it spoiled and so it became peopledrank, and people drank it and
so what it became known as liquidpoison, you know, And how do
we fix that problem? Well,then you have uh, the gentleman whose

(08:52):
name is part of the process,right, pasteurization came into play. And
in fact, this is fascinating,It was fifty years after he actually first
developed it that you started to seeit being used in the United States.
And pasteurization, for those that don'tknow, is basically simply put, it's

(09:13):
heating the milk to a given temperatureand then rapidly cooling it. And the
reason you do that is it killsharmful bacteria in the milk, makes them
inactive. And they found out itdoesn't degrade nutritional value of the milk,
you know, in any substantial way. And right. It removes a lot

(09:35):
of the risks. It increases howlong the milk can stay good for.
And that's why today you see thatin many cities it is illegal to sell
unpasteurized milk. You have to youmay only sell pasteurized milk because of the
dangers associated with unpasteurized milk to thepoint of your opening. Though. It

(10:00):
took an activist to get it done. This wasn't government led. But there
was a department store owner who decidedto take this process and he opened up
milk depots in New York City,in the low income part of the city,
and he sold it for less thanit took him to produce it,
and he started saving lives and itgot the attention. Fourteen percent mortality rates

(10:24):
among children among all people dropped byfourteen percent, and it caught the eye
of Theodore Roosevelt in order it waspresident at the time. And if you
remember, we did a book onTheodore Roosevelt, and he was big on
the health of the nation, andhe ordered a study and it's like,
wow, this is working. AndChicago actually became the first US city to

(10:48):
require pasteurization, and by the earlynineteen twenties unpasteurized milk had been outlawed in
almost every major American city. Butagain, it was an individual making it
happen that caught the eye of government, which then studied it and then boom
took it and made it to wherenow we can all drink milk and we're

(11:11):
not dying from it like they werein the early twentieth century. Well,
because a big part of this wholepiece, right, is this idea that
science, social activism, and governmenthad to work together in order for most
of these things to become widespread andhave the impact that they ultimately had on
our topic, right, which islife expectancy. You know, you think

(11:33):
life expectancy and things like milk don'timmediately come to mind as having been a
huge component of making that possible,but in fact it was a major component.
People have been drinking milk from animalsfor you know, thousands of years,
but up until very recently, wedidn't do anything to make it safer.

(11:56):
Now we make it safer. Nowwe can still consume and get a
lot of the nutritional benefits from itwithout the inherent risks that were present for
the vast majority of human history.And I think that's what we see in
a lot of this stuff is findingways things that were problems right that we
faced ongoing throughout history. And that'sone of the things we're going to talk

(12:18):
about next. Infant mortality huge problem. It wasn't so much, you know,
not just when you become an adulthow long are you going to live?
But your chances of making it toadulthood were abysmal. You know,
they were not not good odds ona worldwide scale. What do you think
so far though about what we've discussed. Please send us an email podcast at

(12:41):
the State of Us dot org.We'd like to hear your thoughts. Do
you find it as interesting as Lanceand I do? Did you know that
milk was a huge component of changinglife expectancy overdoubling it in one hundred year
period. We've got more to talkabout, including infant mortality and everything else
that contributed to a doubling of lifeexpectancy, things like penicillin. To find

(13:07):
out more, keep it here onthe State of Us and we'll be right
back. We are this State ofUs. Here's your host, Justin t
Wellers. A lot of things contributedto a doubling of human life expectancy,
worldwide between nineteen twenty and twenty twenty. Milk was a major component and part

(13:33):
of a number of these different componentsmade a change to infant mortality rates,
right, And that's what we're lookingat next, is this idea that And
in fact, you mentioned John Adamsbefore. He's a great example of somebody
who had multiple children and lost multiplechildren in childhood. And this was I

(13:54):
mean, we all think about thisnow as it's a travesty right to hear
about, you know, a parentthat lose as a child, because we
are all used to having, especiallyif you live in the United States,
grown up in a world where thatis unusual. Right, It's not typical
to hear about parents who have losta child. Usually you know, the

(14:15):
child grows up and they experienced theloss of their parents. But just back
in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds,it was very common. Many parents were
familiar with the loss of a childbecause if you had five or six children,
the odds were that one or twoof them would probably die before making
it out of childhood for lots ofdifferent reasons. But that's part of what

(14:37):
changed life expectancy was we improved thelikelihood that you're going to make it out
of childhood. No, to yourpoint, it is much improved. Right,
The United States is at its lowestever infant mortality deaths, just under
six deaths per thousand births. Theinteresting side note and kind of sad when

(14:58):
you think about the United States,is we rank thirty three out of thirty
six in developing countries in stopping IFmortality. So while we have improved it
and we're better than we've ever been, we're still near the bottom in comparison
to the rest of the world.And there's your impact. Where we started
with, well, it didn't usedto matter how much money you have,

(15:22):
and now we know because we've saidit on the show. Right, the
biggest fact towards how healthy you willbe is your zip code. So the
question becomes what made the difference?I mean, all these children right used
to die, Now substantially less die. Why. Well, in early childhood,
right, you're a lot more susceptibleto all manner of diseases and infections

(15:45):
and those were very prevalent, weren'tthere. Right, what do you drink?
Well, if you're drinking milk,we talked to milk, right,
And if you're not drinking milk,it's water, and so well what's in
water? Well again, bacteria Andespecially when you have centralized water systems like
in the big cities after industrial andthey don't have sewage systems, and you're
like, what do you mean.No, the sewage used to run into
the streets and go into the ground, and we know that throw the chamber

(16:08):
pot out the window. And earlyJamestown and places like that, that was
one of the biggest problems was cholerabecause they didn't understand how their waste was
going into their drinking water. Andso they didn't I mean know, they
didn't because they didn't show up.The bacteria is not there. I mean,
you know, there's things that youcan't look at. It can't look
at us all that's that's got bacteriain that that's going to harm me.

(16:30):
But they figured that out. Sowe chlorinated water, you know, and
by the middle nineteen teens, almostevery major city Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati
by all, by nineteen twenty hadchlorinated water. And we saw that again
rear its ugly head when we talkedabout Flint, Michigan, you know,
with the old pipes, and wetalk and again weaving other things into it,

(16:53):
the whole infrastructure bill of well,gee, we haven't replaced some of
these water systems and sewer systems foralmost one hundred years now, and so
they're going to start to corrode andwhat's in our water, you know,
And we're finding out that in someplaces it's things that are not very healthy,
and again it tends to be forthose in the lower classes, which

(17:15):
is why we still have an infantmortality rate that's so much better than it
used to be, but still notas good as it is in the rest
of the world. So these areall things that we've done before to improve,
which you know, in the lastsegment of the show, stay tuned
because it's like, well, wheredo we go from here? Do we
double it again in the next hundredyears or are we going to do away

(17:38):
with all of the gains that we'vemade. So but there you go,
right, chlorinated water, things getgood, and then we also then what
about a bunch of other childhood diseases. What do we do for those?
So we get good milk to drink, we're safe milk to drink, we
get safe water to drink. Butthat's not the whole story. What else
is there justin well, vaccines right, and explosion of vaccines fact, because

(18:00):
we talked about kind of smallpox earlyon and that was kind of the early
one. But you had a lotof issues right with whooping cough, tuberculosis,
polio, and others. And youlook at the early nineteen hundreds and
nineteen fourteen, nineteen twenty one,nineteen twenty three, early nineteen fifties,
we're releasing all of these vaccines andpeople are getting them on a widespread I

(18:23):
mean, when's the last time thatyou heard, you know, a child
in the United States dying of whoopingcough? Well, you probably can't think
of an example. And the reasonyou can't. Or tuberculosis is because or
polio, right, is because wedeveloped vaccines and they were widespread use.
And as we know, as achild, you're far more susceptible as a

(18:45):
very young child to those kinds ofthings because you haven't gone through enough to
build up your immune system's strength.You don't have the same capacity to fight
those things as as many you know, healthy adults do as you do as
a child as a baby. Likeit's like, I don't know, and
I should have looked this up,but I remember with my daughters years and
years ago. You know, atsix months or whatever you get your DPT

(19:08):
shot and then at two or whatever. And please, yeah, you can
send in your emails and correct meand say I'm given, I'm not.
I'm not trying to say this isfact. But I know them before school,
at a very young age as atoddler, you get the booster shots
for your DPT and you also inthat process get your polio vaccine. And
it's all a part of taking yourchild to the doctor for those checkups in

(19:33):
their first you know, two tothree years of life, and we give
them these things and they're safe.And now you don't hear of children dying
of these diseases anymore because we arevaccinating everybody. If they get to the
doctor. Again, there's your wealthinequity. But for you know, you
take them, and that's just partof you know, and you have to

(19:56):
have those to go to school,right, you have to show immunization records
as a toddler so that you canenter public education. And the other big
one, I mean in addition tovaccines. Because here's the thing, right,
and I think the article does anice job of pointing this out.
Remember, for those of you thatwant to read it, it's linked at
thusstateofus dot org. That's our website, the State offus dot org. It's
linked there. But it does agood job of pointing out that up until

(20:21):
this time, medicine was mostly focusedon, you know, if we can
keep you from getting sick, youknow, then you have a better chance.
But once you get sick, therereally was very little that medicine could
do for you other than provide comfort. Right, I mean, and this
is Lance jokes about this sometimes,but hospitals were the place that you went

(20:44):
a lot of times to die,right, because there really wasn't a lot
that they were going to do tocure you, per se up at you
know, through the eighteen everything beforethe eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds,
there wasn't a lot they could do. It was just you know, yeah,
well medicine, medicine and science haveworked on trying to stop you from

(21:04):
getting sick. They had not spenttime on, okay, how do we
heal you? And and that's wherepenicillin comes into play, right is the
widespread use, uh and implementation ofpenicillin. Basically, right was the floodgates
opening on antibiotics, which allowed usfor the first time to really fight illness

(21:27):
on the front lines inside the body, very actively and very effectively. And
of course it led to all mannerof other antibiotics which are widespread today.
And that was the other thing,is because no matter, I mean,
we had vaccines for a lot ofthese important things, but kids still got

(21:48):
sick, right, And once theygot sick, it was like, well,
hopefully they come through it, right, and if they don't, then
they die, you know, andthat's all there is. And now it's
well, now there's something we cando. We can try to fight this,
right. But in every major war, in every battlefield before World War
Two, the major killer was disease. You know, was all Washington inoculated,

(22:11):
right, right. But I'm youknow, all of a sudden,
gangreen, I'm thinking world you know, I'm thinking of the Civil War,
gangreen and diseases that you've got.Because the surgeons were using the same didn't
know how to clean their utensils,and it didn't know that was a thing
that they were actually transferring germs fromone person to another as they operated on

(22:32):
them to try to save their life. And the reason I mentioned that is
penicillin was basically developed folks during WorldWar Two. That was the whole idea
behind it. Now, there hadbeen some playing around with it, and
the idea was, oh, thisworks, but we can't produce it on
a large enough scale. I mean, the first person who got penicillin was

(22:53):
a police officer in England who actuallygot better. The problem is they ran
out of penicillin and he died andhe went back he because I getting sick
again. And so they're like,okay, we're onto something. How can
we mass produce this? Well,the English were leading, were leaders in
this, but they were looked likethey were going to be invaded by Germany
here in nineteen forty one and nineteenforty two. So they contacted, of

(23:17):
all people, the Rockefeller Foundation andsaid, what can you guys do something
about this and help us? Andthe Rockefeller Foundation got into bringing these scientists
to the United States so they couldbe safe from German bombs, and in
the biggest secret other than the ManhattanProject, which was the development of the
atomic bomb, the US military,along with these English scientists and other scientists,

(23:44):
went to work on developing the processto mass produce penicillin, and by
the time the US landed on thebeaches of Normandy, they had with them
enough penicillin to keep the troops aliveif they weren't killed by the bullets or
the bombs or the explosions. Theynow had a way to treat what in

(24:07):
previous wars had been deadly germ situations. We now had a way to keep
these soldiers alive. And in thatsame line of working to keep you alive,
a lot of times when your body'sill, one of the common issues
is that you become what dehydrated,right. Your body's fighting, it's struggling,
you know, to get through this. It's using a lot of energy,

(24:30):
using a lot of water, usinga lot of resources. And another
one of the great equalizers was IVS. Right. This basically this basic concept
of injecting directly into you some nutrientsand the hydration that you need to keep
going. And while this started tobecome known, there were some places in

(24:51):
the world where we don't have peopleright who were qualified to put IVS in,
and that led to the thinking ofthe oral rehydrations system right, which
is basically the very low tech versionof an IV giving people lots of water
to drink boiled water, lots ofboiled water, and you supplement it with
sugars and salts, which is,for those that don't know, from a

(25:12):
medical standpoint, very similar to what'sin ivy fluids. Right. And of
course the whole concept of ivy fluidshas transferred into a whole host of other
things that we do through intervenious injection, right, and through those nice bags
hanging in the hospital that sends youall kinds of stuff. But it's again
on that same line of Okay,you're ill. Now you don't have to

(25:36):
die from being ill. Right,we can give you antibiotics, we can
get you rehydrated, we can dothings to keep you alive, to get
through this. Where before you justget sick and you die, Well,
if your water was filled with collarof bacteria, then you die from drinking
the water, which is what youneed to defeat the flu and the cold
and everything else. And drinking lotsof boiled water, right, very sterilized

(26:00):
water, and we add salt andsugar electrolytes right to give your body energy.
Again, and now we've started tosolve one of those common issues of
well, you're sick, but you'redrinking water. That's bad. Well,
think of pediolite. But that's afirst world thing, right, We'll go
to the store and we'll pick upa bottle of pediolite to give it to
our young people. But if you'renot in an area where that you have

(26:22):
that, which is a majority ofthe world, you can basically. Now,
what they've done is they've sent out, you know, private citizen groups
who go to villages and say here, here's all you need to do.
You boil this water, throw thisstuff in it, and your child will
who would have died now lives andthey think, oh wow, you've got
major modern medicine, and all itis is homemade pediolite, you know.

(26:45):
So that's the big thing is thatwe've taken these ideas that we've learned and
we've had implementation around the world thatyou don't have to go to the store
to get it. You can doit wherever you are. If you have
water, and you have some andsugar which almost you can find that anywhere
in the world, and you havefire, you can take care of this

(27:07):
situation for people. And we've takenit and not just it's not like we
developed in a laboratory and said,oh, this is what you can do.
We then took it to the peopleand said here's what you can do
and showed them how to do it. And I think that's the key.
Sometimes we hold on to information andwe don't share it with others, and
it's the sharing with others that leadsto the major changes. So we've still

(27:30):
going to look at the last bigthing on this checklist, which was vanquishing
smallpox. How was it done andwhat was the significance and also what's next
to find out? Keep it hereon the State of Us and we'll be
right back. We are this stateof US. Here's your host, Justin

(27:55):
Teeweller. The defeat of smallpox isarguably one of the greatest defeats mankind has
ever seen. And you might say, how is that possible. Well,
smallpox was about as deadly as itgets, very deadly. It was far
more contagious than COVID nineteen with athirty percent mortality rate. Right, That
means that if you got smallpox therewas a thirty percent chance that you would

(28:21):
die. It killed thirty percent ofpeople that got it, So that's pretty
bad. I mean those are notgood odds, right, not very good.
Odds at all, you got athree and ten chance that this thing's
probably going to kill you. Nowyou might say, well, you know,
let's put that in perspective. Right, Well, I mean, we
know we're going we got everything goingon with COVID, and you know all
the turmoil that it's causing amongst theworld. Well, in the United States,

(28:44):
you're talking about one point seven percent, right, versus thirty percent,
So you can imagine, I meaneverything you're hearing about COVID multiply that like
thirty times over. And now you'retalking about the scale and death of smallpox,
right, And that's just in theUnited States, where it's only one
point seven percent, and we've wipedout smallpox exactly. And so the point

(29:08):
is in places that you know,quote unquote COVID is really bad, it's
nine point two percent PERU is theworst, but worldwide it was thirty percent
for smallpox and we were able towipe it out. And the point is,
think of that the feel how didwe do it? Required how did
we wipe out smallpox? Well,this is where right, this is the
article. This is science, socialactivism, and governments working together to overcome

(29:37):
what was arguably you know something thatcould have come close to ending the human
race with vaccines. Those three aregetting together with the vaccinations and developing a
plan to get vaccines into the armsof all the people in the world where
there were still sporadic outbreaks so thatit didn't spread. And that's why we've

(30:00):
been able to basically eradicate get ridof the smallpox. Now, one thing
I wanted to mention that we hadn'tthat we kind of missed, and that
is all of this was developed throughan idea that came about with penicillin,
and that is our cts are randomizedcontrol trials, and you hear that all

(30:22):
the time now, and I justwanted to mention that this was something that
we've developed. So when they say, well, we've got a control group
and we're testing it and we're goingto see this and you know, we
just got you know, FDA approvalfor the Pfizer vaccine. Okay, all
of that when people say well,this is this, this is that,
this is something we've been doing sincebefore World War Two. This is you

(30:45):
know, when people say, well, this is science, this is what
we've you know, this isn't new. We didn't go through a new way
to get this done. This issomething that the article points out was established
when they were working with penicillin.The these random control groups, these random
control trials that we do, andwe do that with everything now and so

(31:06):
when people are like, well,we did this and this is different,
this is different. Not really,you know, we've done all of this.
But the big question to me,justin and whatever you want to,
whatever else you have too. ButI like the way the article ends.
It asked a very basic question,will the rising tide of egalitarian public health,
meaning the equality of public health,continue to lift all the boats in

(31:30):
the water, or will all theseachievements be washed away, like industrialization did
in the nineteenth century, by anactual tide. I think there's a lot
of good news from this article,right. I mean, the capacity of
human society to double our own lifespanin a matter of one hundred years is

(31:52):
pretty fricking impressive. I think so. But there's a big of all this
stuff right, which is very positive, very encouraging. There's one thing in
here that we talked about very earlyon that's kind of easy to brush over,
and the one big negative is that, again in this modern era,

(32:13):
the one thing that changed was beforeseventeen fifty, Right, wealth made no
difference. Wealth makes a huge difference. Now. If you look at the
correlation between how much money you've gotand how long you're likely to live,
there is a very real, veryeasy to see trend that the more you
have, the longer you're likely tolive, and the healthier you're likely to

(32:36):
be. And the point of mebringing this up is to answer Lance's question,
I'm not sure what the average humanlife span will look like. I
think what we're going to see andChip talks about this and immortality, inc
right, is an increase in thetop possible lifespan. In other words,
we talk about that right now.And we know that for most you know

(33:00):
what, not most, but forhumans, it is not terribly unheard of
for somebody to live to be overone hundred, right, I mean,
that is still unusual, but weknow that it happens. We know there's
people who are one hundred, onehundred and ten and some that have made
it to Well, what's the fastestgrowing segment of the population. Yes,

(33:20):
now, I know that's numbers inmath, and you know people that understand
that. You're going to say,well, but that's just because there's not
very many of them, so whenyou get five more, it really raises
the rate. You're exactly right,but still that technically that is true.
That is the fastest growing age groupin the world. And obviously scientists have
been studying that, and we knowthat it comes from certain parts of the

(33:44):
world and one place in the UnitedStates as well. National Geographic has done
an article on this, and weknow that lifestyle and diet and all of
that, you know, the Greeceand the Mediterranean diet, because that's where
you know, this small group ofpeople have just yeah, very commonly is

(34:05):
eighty ninety and one hundred years old, and they're still working farms intending to
sheep and everything else. So we'relike, oh, what are you guys
doing where they're getting out and walkingevery day and they have low saturated fats
and they eat a lot of vegetablesand you know, drink a little wine,
and that's where all of our studieshave You know that we say that
those are the kinds of things ifyou want to live a longer life.

(34:27):
But then you also have though,what are we going to find in medicine,
What are we going to find inscience that kills people now, that
won't kill people in the future.Like we know that the ice age people
had cancer, they always died ofsomething before the cancer ever developed. We
can go back through and seeing therethey have cancer. They just didn't live
long enough for the cancer to killthem, right, And now we're living

(34:51):
longer. So it's like, oh, look at cancer. Okay, but
we find the curreus to that.Does that mean life expectancy will will rise
again or not? You know?Those those are the questions that I have.
Well, the contention of our book, right or the Immortality Ink book,
is that the single biggest killer isaging right, right, because to
that point, nowadays most people whenyou die, right, you die after

(35:17):
the age of thirty, not beforethe age of thirty. And that's kind
of this whole concept of this iswhere science is taking us. What if
we could you in other words,you still get older, but you don't
age the same way. You agemuch slower. Now, how long could
you live? And to my pointfrom before, I think the reason what

(35:38):
we're going to see My guess is, you know, so people check this
in fifty years and see if Iwas right, We're going to see a
big increase in the top possible lifespan of a human being. In other
words, instead of it being unusualto live to one hundred, there will
be many people that live to beone hundred. There will be many people
that maybe live to be one hundredand fifty two hundred years old. But

(36:01):
those will be people with the meansto live that long. That'll be most
people you see living that long willbe the people that could have afforded in
their twenties to get whatever this treatmentwill be that will essentially slow down the
process of aging your body, therebyallowing you to live a longer period.
And part of what Chip points outin his book is that's likely to cost

(36:24):
a lot of money because there's alot. There's billions of dollars being invested
in this, and you can betyour bottom dollar that they're going to want
every penny of that back, right, So they got to make a lot.
It's probably not something that's going tobe released to the wide public.
So to answer your question, Ithink we're going to see people living a
lot longer. I don't think that'sgoing to be most people. So what

(36:45):
happens to the average human life span? Anybody's yes, and that's not even
taking into account the possibility of war, right, or climate change or anything
else else. Like I said,I was excited to bring this to you
because I think it's a really positivething. Brings a lot of positive ideas
to light that we can apply totoday and hopefully you do too. But

(37:06):
that's our mission here at True Chad, and that's to educate people by providing
honest, open and respectful conversations.And do take a look at the article.
Tell your friends about it around thewater cooler as you work back into
the office, or if you're stillworking remotely on Zoom and say, you
know, there's this great podcast outthere and you need to hook up into
it because it just brightens your dayand you find out things that you hadn't

(37:28):
thought about or hadn't been told bythe major media outlets in the world.
So they said, wow, canI find it? Tell them, well,
the State of Us is on Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher, Apple podcast
and everywhere podcasts are found. Partof what this proves, lance I think,
is that when science, social activismand government come together, there's not
a lot that we can't do.And that's hopefully what we've communicated today.

(37:52):
Make sure to tell people that youcan get new episodes of the State of
US Tuesdays and Thursdays by four amEastern Time as a podcast, and of
course you can hear us on theweekend and select AM and FM talk radio
markets across the country for the Stateof US on True Chat in Urbana,
Ohio, I'm Justin t Weller,I'm Lynce Jackson. Special thanks to our
producer Bradley Butch, and thank youall our audience is always for tuning in.

(38:14):
We'll see you next time, bethe Chick. Be sure to check
out our website, the State Offusdot org for books, articles, and
all the ways to tune in theState of Us dot org.