Building a Longevity Nation. Reimagining the Second Half of Life with Michael Clinton

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Foreign.

Speaker B: 00:00:05

Welcome to Beyond Longevity, the podcast that explores not just how we age, but how we can build a longer, healthier future for ourselves. My guest today on Beyond Longevity is Michael Clinton.

Michael spent four decades at the top of the publishing world, including as president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines.

He now serves as special Media Advisor to the CEO of Hearst and is also the founder and CEO of Raw Forward, a B2B platform focused on the 50 market and the wider longevity economy. His new book, Longevity Nation, is published on May 5. It is his second book following the success of Rule.

His new book is about much more than living longer.

It looks at the people, ideas and trends reshaping the second half of life and what happens when longer lives begin to change work, money, health, education, and the old model of life itself.

Michael is exactly the right person to write this book, not only because he has watched these shifts from the top of major institutions, but because he has lived them himself.

He has now been to 127 countries, runs seven marathons on seven continents, and for over 25 years has traveled with an adventure group on demanding trips, including Kilimanjaro and the Everest marathon. Much of that came well after the early part of life, and he has no intention of stopping.

So when he talks about staying open to life and continuing to build new chapters, he's not speaking in the abstract. Today.

I want to talk to him about what longer lives really mean once they stop being a theory and start becoming a social reality, and about whether we are truly ready for the opportunities and the challenges that come with that. Hi Michael, thank you so much for joining us on Beyond Longevity today. Your life, your career is just absolutely incredible.

But let's start sort of right at the beginning. You grew up, and I hope you don't mind me saying so, in quite humble backgrounds. Let me ask you something that's a bit out there.

What's your very first memory of when you were small?

Speaker A: 00:02:34

Wow. I think one of my very first memories, my father was from New York. He was the son of Irish immigrants. We were raised in Pittsburgh.

And one of my very first memories, I was a young boy, maybe 4 years old, 5 years old. We came to New York City to see my father's father. His mother had passed away, and I knew at 4 or 5 years old that this is where I belonged.

New York City is where I should be. I'm like, why are we in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? So the rest is history, of course, because I ended up living there and live there now.

But yeah, that was probably one of my Very first memories is meeting my Irish grandfather in his apartment in New York City.

Speaker B: 00:03:17

How much do you think your upbringing shaped your ambition and the way you approach life? Do you think you've always had that drive that was an innate drive you had, or do you think that was shaped through experiences throughout your life?

Speaker A: 00:03:33

That's a great question. I get this all the time. Is it nature or nurture? I think it's a little bit of both. I had very special parents who were only high school graduates.

I think that you mentioned humble beginnings, which is true. We lived in a working class neighborhood. No one had ever gone to college in the entire family but my father.

We had a ritual where every Friday night we would go to the library as a family.

And I was able to pick five books to read, which of course, because I'm such a Type A, I ended up reading all five over the, over the weekend, ready to, you know, pick the next five. But my dad was someone who was very interested in words, in literature, in current events, in books. It was self taught.

And, you know, he turned me on and my siblings on to the importance of ideas and words. And I think that was the spark originally. And then as I went through school, some of the teachers recognized that and cultivated that.

And I do remember once when I was in high school, my mother coming to one of the meetings and one of the teachers saying, you know, I think Michael would be really good in the magazine business. Yeah, I was all of 17 or something like that. But, you know, I went to a city high school. I think there were about 15 of us who went to college.

But when I did get to college, I knew I had found my tribe, found my people, found my place, and the rest was just propelling me forward.

So I have to go back to my father, whose love for work really was the one who nurtured me into what became my ambition in publishing and writing and so forth.

Speaker B: 00:05:12

Let me be a little bit devil's advocate here. I definitely agree with the fact that journalism really was your career, but you've done so many things afterwards and at such an intense level.

Do you not think that any other career that you would have chosen, you'd have been as successful as in journalism and would have loved, maybe equally.

Speaker A: 00:05:35

We all have our fantasy careers that we wish we had done. I was always interested in being a commercial airline pilot. I ultimately became a private pilot.

I was interested in being a television broadcaster, news broadcaster. I loved architecture. But you follow a thread and I was one of those people who just kind of went narrow and deep, I would hope that my personality.

I would have been successful in anything I set out to do. But I was lucky. I found my niche. I was the publisher of the university newspaper. I found my niche.

I went to New York City at 22 specifically to get into publishing. I knew this was for me.

I didn't have a lot of other things once I got out of college, I didn't have a lot of other things that I was really thinking about. I really wanted to pursue the publishing world, and that's what I did. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:06:27

And very, very successfully.

You spent years at the very top of Hearst, which is one of the biggest media organizations in the world, with a front row seat to culture and consumer behavior. And I think you really had a front row seat to see how people's aspirations were changing.

How much do you think now, looking back, did that chapter of your life shape the way you think now about longevity and the second or third or fourth quarter of your life?

Speaker A: 00:07:02

In the first book that I wrote, roar into the second half of your life. I had an early epiphany. I was the publisher of GQ in my early 30s. And it was a very, very heady job for.

For someone the go go Years in the-80s and 90s of New York City and publishing and global publishing. But I had just come back from Milan from all the shows. I had been at Giorgio Armani's house.

I had been hobnobbing with, you know, movie stars and all the things, you know. And I came back and I was telling who was then my boss about this experience, and he stopped me and he said, just remember one thing.

That is a rented seat that you're sitting in. It is not a seat that defines you as a person.

And that was like a lightning bolt that hit me because so many people define themselves by what they do for a living, that when that living sun sets, if you're in a sort of, you know, traditional kind of career, a lot of people get lost in who are they? And it's especially in an era of longevity when. If you're 65, pick a number. If you're 65 and healthy, you may live another 30 years.

You know, in the past, you would, quote, retire from a profession or a job and go. In our country, people always joke and say, move to Florida and play golf. The metaphor. But you didn't live much longer.

So it was kind of a short span of life. Today, 30 years of additional life in a world of longevity which is.

Is driven by lifestyle and medicine and technology and AI, which is going to manifest all of this, the hundred year life in the future. It makes people sort of stop and rethink. So I started going back to that 39 year old person.

I started thinking about this early in, about who else am I beyond being the publisher of GQ or being a publishing executive, who else am I? You know, I had a great personal life, great love life, great, all of that. But what were my other identities that I was really wanted to cultivate?

I started that journey young.

And I really, in all the keynotes that I do all over the world and the speeches that I do, I always suggest to people that they think about this, that they think about this and really be introspective of who are they if they're not being defined by their job.

Speaker B: 00:09:22

You've mentioned a few things I want to pick up on a little later. But let's start with raw. RAW started as a book, right, and then became a platform. Tell us what RAW stand for.

Speaker A: 00:09:35

Thanks. The idea of ROAR was developed when I was stepping out of my 40 year publishing career.

You know, I have, as you mentioned, I had a great career as I was full. I was the president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines.

Our team launched Oprah Magazine, we bought Hachette, we bought Rodale, we became a global powerhouse. I was the chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America.

But I was ready to sort of put a punctuation point on that career and move on to the next thing. And everyone started saying to me, oh, you're going to retire? I said, well, not really.

I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to retire from this job, but I'm not going to retire from life. And actually, as a side note, I went back to school to get a master's degree in nonprofit philanthropy at Columbia University as I was transitioning.

But I started getting agitated about this thing about you're going to retire.

And so I was like, I, I started talking to people and I talked to a lot of other people who were like me, who are like, no, 65 isn't an end date, it's a start date, it's a restart date, it's a rewire date, which is the way we use it in the book. So ROAR is an acronym which stands for, you know, the reimagination process and how you rethink this.

If we're going to all live longer, the second half life cycles are changing dramatically, right? In every which way. And we have to rethink and reimagine. And by the way, it's not Just the individual.

It's institutions, it's government, it's businesses, it's structures. Structures have to be rethought. So the reimagination process, the O is, you know, owning your numbers and owning where you are at.

Midlife, your health numbers, your wealth numbers. You're going to be able to afford 100 year life. Be pro age. You know, aging is the new, the new black, if you will. Redefining what aging means.

I think that word longevity has really put a positive spin. Aging is a negative word that has a lot of baggage, cultural baggage.

Longevity is a positive word that 35 year olds can relate to as well as 70 year olds and older. The A is the action plan, which is really I wanted the book to be. I didn't want it to be homework. I wanted it to be fun and informative.

And so A is an action plan to really do things to help you reinvent yourself. And then ours are the relationships around you that help you to manifest who you want to be in the second half of your life.

And that, as you said, spawned a whole business called Roar Forward, which your listeners can tune into@roarforward.com so the book came out of a personal catharsis and turned into a joint venture with Hearst.

Speaker B: 00:12:18

Who is ROAR for? Who would go on the platform, who would get advice, what kind of people?

Speaker A: 00:12:23

So it's really a B2B business. We work with over 50 companies, global companies, and with C suite leadership.

And our mission is to inform, educate, help C suite leadership really understand what is happening in this phenomena because it impacts their products, their services, their communications, their clients, their customers, their employees.

And if they're not thinking about this as a business opportunity, they're going to miss what is a very dynamically different kind of consumer who is now 50 plus. So it's really B2B.

That being said, we have a monthly newsletter that it's consumer friendly and so forth, but we do a lot of different product lines and projects with the companies that we work with. And we work with business and government and academia and across section science wall.

Cornell Medicine here in New York is one of our partners, Global l', Oreal, et cetera. So lots of interesting sectors that are part of our world.

Speaker B: 00:13:29

But why do so many companies still misunderstand the older consumer who really has the biggest spending power?

Speaker A: 00:13:37

When the boomers were 18 to 34 years old, they were a mega, mega generation. That was a generation like we had never seen before. And it created something called the youth culture.

The youth culture really didn't exist prior to the boomers being in that cohort. So marketers and brands and companies became obsessed with young because of the sheer economic power that the boomers had then.

The problem is, is that the boomers got older and got a lot more money and a lot more economic power.

A lot of brands and marketers were stuck in the 18 to 34 year old syndrome I call it, because they said, well, if you get them young, they'll stay with us, they'll spark our brand and they'll be brand loyal for the rest of their lives. Which was once upon a time true and no longer true anymore for any age, for any cohort.

At the same time, when they were targeting youth culture, they stopped targeting people at 54 in the media matrix that's out there. And of course today, just to give a stat, in the US almost 35% of our population is 50 plus. The first millennials turn 50 in four years.

In the US, the spending power of the 50 plus consumer, $8.3 trillion is the estimate, would be the third largest GDP in the world. And enter those millennials, you've got this huge economic power and asset base.

But there's a big wrinkle in that, in that the 50 plus year old is now not brand loyal, very dynamic consumers, fit, health conscious, experientially doing lots of interesting things.

And a lot of brands and companies are stuck in old structures that were established in the 20th century, but they haven't evolved to accommodate, adapt and adopt to a rapidly rapid changing world. And by the way, this is not just in the us, this is all over the world. This is in the EU and the UK and Asia.

I'm just back from Japan and Korea which has a very different approach to targeting people over 50. But the Western cultures still have a big youth centricity and it's to their detriment.

So I could spend a long time talking about this Daphna, but those are the key salient points I think, sort.

Speaker B: 00:16:06

Of as far as countries go. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Singapore is quite ahead of the game and really has picked up on the older generation.

By the way, I don't know if you agree with me on that one too.

Seeing you come from the publishing world, I find a lot of the language that is being used for older people is very negative and I think that is something that ought to change as well. Just the way we talk about it.

Speaker A: 00:16:33

Words matter, images matter, messaging matters. We on our platform, every year we pick the top 12 ad campaigns that we've discovered that are ahead of the curve.

These are the brands that understand the nuance of language and imagery and messaging. And one of the great campaigns that we had for last year was Estee Lauder, which launched a campaign called because of My Age.

The beauty industry oftentimes gets stuck in this anti aging conversation, and they kind of flipped the script and created a sort of pro aging platform called because of My Age. The first person in the campaign was the former prime minister of Denmark. She's late 50s.

You probably heard they just brought Paulina Porzakova back into their brand ambassador roles. And that campaign was a really great example of a brand understanding the importance of language, the importance of imagery and messaging.

But what we're seeing.

When I was doing the research for my new book, Longevity Nation, which comes out this spring, what was really fascinating to me is the evolution of moving out of the word aging into the word longevity. Moving out of words like age appropriate to person appropriate.

Because, you know, you may have your first child at 50, you may be a young parent at 60, you may, you know, decide to take on a new fitness, nutrition, exercise approach in your 70s. You can start that at any time, for example. So these words are really important and there's a lot of debate.

You know, some people would say, well, we should use the word older.

And yes, you are older in the context of aging, but there are a lot of negative words in that space in the uk you probably know the name Eleanor Mills, who launched the queenager movement, which is really a fun, beautiful way to frame it. So there are lots of different words that are popping up that I predict will supplant a lot of the negativity and negative words that are out there.

We're watching that happen live.

Speaker B: 00:18:43

Before we come to your new book, Longevity Nation, I just wanted to ask you, can you give us some examples where you've seen organizations other than Estee Lauder that you've already mentioned that have adapted to that shift? Personally, I find publishing is not doing too badly in that sector. They do incorporate older models or those kind of things. Tell us your thoughts.

Speaker A: 00:19:08

Yes, you saw this in this last year, the most age diverse models on the runways in Milan and Paris. It was really quite extraordinary. They still need to translate into a lot of the. Into their brand campaigns.

A lot of the luxury fashion brand campaigns are still models under 30. They do have an occasional model.

But to your point, editorially, I love the recent cover of Vogue where, you know, Anna Wintour, 76, was on the COVID with Meryl Streep, 76, looking amazing, both of them photographed by annie Leibowitz, who's 76. And you know, what we love to say is this is what 76 looks like.

And you're gonna see a lot more imagery in the celebrity culture that is changing perceptions and changing ideas. And so it is happening. It's happening in movies, it's happening in television series. Gene Smart and Hacks is a great example.

Kathy Bates and Matlock, you know, great, interesting characters who are not grandmothers. You know, generally in the past generation, when an actress got to 60, all of a sudden the roles were about grandmothers.

And now you're seeing, you know, just this blossoming of roles. You're seeing it culturally. The advertising world is playing catch up on this, many of them.

But behind the scenes, there are a lot of companies doing a lot of really innovative things. So, for instance, l'. Oreal. Back to l'. Oreal.

They have a program called l' Oreal for all generations where they have identified and acknowledged that their employees over 50 should be retrained, retained, promoted, hired. It's a global commitment. They're one of a number of companies that have this global commitment to employees over 50, which is really important.

In Singapore, as you mentioned, it is a bellwether nation state. There's a lot of countries and cities and communities can learn by going to Singapore.

One of the things they do is the age inclusivity in things like urban planning and community areas and parks and so forth are very, very organically, naturally multi generational. You know, in western cultures. The US is another example.

We have these 55 plus communities, we have this nursing home construction, and people are sort of ghettoized at a certain point and they're all hanging out with other 70 year olds. And that's not healthy. You need to have multi generational connections. And, you know, Singapore has been really good at that.

And other Asian countries are good at that. So whether it's government, urban planning business, everybody can join the chorus in their own way to rethink this whole second half of life cycle.

Speaker B: 00:21:55

A lot of people fear the reinvention because it sounds risky and destabilizing. And many people seem to shrink rather than open up as they get older.

What have you learned about what helps get people to grow and to change their life?

Speaker A: 00:22:12

In all the work that we've done and the travels that I've done, some people say, well, I'm really happy with my life. I don't want it to change at all. But then when we start peeling back The Onion.

We begin to see that there's a lot of chinks in that armor that, that they're not necessarily thinking about. And, you know, a good example of that, of course, is the empty nest phenomena.

When the kids leave the household and all of a sudden the mom and the dad are sort of having to rethink who they are. And they don't anticipate that necessarily. And so they do realize that they have to evolve and change because they'll always be a parent.

But it's not going to be to the same dimension that it was when the kids were in the household growing, growing up. There is a lot of fear around it. A lot of people say, I don't know what I should do next. I don't know what course I want to take.

And the A in Roar, the action plan, we have a lot of fun tools and a lot of fun exercises for people to go through to figure out what that might be.

But we keep going back to this idea that if you're 50 or 60 and healthy and you live another 30, 30 years or so, what are you going to do with those 30 years? You just can't float, you just can't be.

You have to have purpose, you have to have engagement, you have to have a redefinition of who you want to become. And by the way, this is not a weekend project. In the book Roar, and on our platform, we collect stories of the people we call the reimagineers.

These are all the people who are inspirational who at 50 or 60 reimagine their lives and up and down the socioeconomic ladder. So, you know, everyday people to people who were CEOs who reimagined.

And these reimagineers to us are the role models that are helping to define the future of longevity. And one quick story. I was just at a graduation of a woman who decided to go to veterinary school at 56 and she's become a veterinarian at 60.

I was at a graduation party and she said, you know what? I, I can do this for 20 years. It doesn't have to be a 40 year career.

So I think it is a rethink of what is this whole second half of cycle and this whole longevity topic, what is it going to mean for the individual? And rethinking that is really the, the call of the day.

Speaker B: 00:24:37

So in your earlier book Raw, which I think was much more focused on reinvention at an individual level, your new book, Longevity Nation, which is coming out beginning of May, seems to be much broader and more societal. What made you want to write this book now? And what changed in between writing Raw and now Longevity Nation?

Speaker A: 00:25:02

So roar was four years ago, and you're right, it was more sort of personal development. It was for the individual.

But as I started to go on this journey, I joined the Stanford University center on Longevity Board and I started meeting a lot of people in what was emerging as the longevity sector. It was really beginning to gain momentum.

And most of the books that had been written are medical and science books written by doctors, which is really an important component component of longevity.

But what I really saw is that there were hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people who were all working in different ways to enhance the longevity phenomena.

And there were men and women that were in technology and higher education and travel and urban planning, and there had never been anything written that kind of gave it the breadth of. Of what is happening in this phenomena.

And when I spoke about the idea to Laura Carstensen, who's the founder, I call her one of the OGs of longevity. She was the founder of the Stanford center on Longevity. She had told me there was nothing like this that had ever been put out into the marketplace.

So I decided I should tell that story. I wanted to raise the voices of all of these incredible people who were doing all this incredible work for all of us.

I wanted to have a special focus on female voices because in the longevity sector, a lot of it tends to be male centric. And I wanted to capture more and more of the women who were working in the sector.

And there are some incredibly inspirational people around the world. And so I took the word reimagineer and I moved it into those who are reimagining business and technology and medicine.

Ron Jean Nagy, who we talked about earlier at Stanford, is a great example of someone who was really helping to set the tone and the future of longevity. And it was amazing. I interviewed about 70 people. These are all experts in their field.

And it's funny, as I was doing all the interviews, I said to myself, you know, they're really building a nation of longevity innovation. And that's hence the title was born organically out of the interviews.

So, yeah, so the re imagineers of the world, and we sprinkle in some individual stories too, some personal stories to bring it home to the individual. But most of them are all these great innovators.

Speaker B: 00:27:33

Let me ask you something that is not often discussed when speaking about longevity. What do you think about the inequality within the longevity field?

Speaker A: 00:27:46

It's significant, but there's Some good news that's emerging, which I'll talk about, you know, in every social movement, and I call this a social movement, the longevity movement. And every social movement, it generally starts with the people who have the financial capacity, the educational capacity, the privilege.

You know, if we think about the early days of the women's movement, you know, it was really led by incredible women who were professional women who had had the ability to step out and create this. And then it came down across the cultures and society and everybody sort of the movement moved throughout society for everyday people.

In this one, the analogy that I make is all of the great discoveries in medicine, technology are going to have to be available to everyone. So here's a great example.

The GLP1 phenomena, which is a miracle phenomena that has now showing huge benefits to the longevity elements of people's lives. When it first was introduced, it was very expensive. It was only available mostly to wealthy people who could afford it. Insurance didn't cover it.

Now what's happening rapidly is insurance is beginning to cover GLP1 in America. In July of this year, Medicare will cover GLP1. That's a huge, huge democratization of GLP1.

The major producers, pharmaceutical companies, are cutting their prices in half in a year. So that is a really great fast example of how the GLP1 is going to become very available to everyday people.

And it's really exciting because as you know, it started with diabetes and that in treating obesity, but the enormous byproduct of other things, reducing inflammation, better cardiovascular, better organ function, treating other addictions, it's really quite a remarkable development for human history. And it's really exciting that it's going to be available to most people in the next year.

So to your point, we have to make sure that all these discoveries and all the people I interviewed, that's their goal. They want the things they work on, they want them to be available to everyone, not just to the elite or to the wealthy.

Speaker B: 00:30:13

You know, we all know the American dream. How does the American dream evolve to include longevity?

Speaker A: 00:30:19

America has a lot of work to do on this topic because unlike Asia, and I would say the UK and other countries in the eu, there's a really high recognition of this phenomena, of the amount of people that are living longer lives. And as you know, birth rates are down in 150 plus countries below the 2.1 replacement rate.

And when you look at countries like the UK or Italy or Korea, Japan, China, the highest percentage of people over 50 is significantly more than in the US. And so in those Countries.

There have been a lot of things to adjust to this reality, a lot of things that we talked about, for instance, in government programs and businesses being aware of it, and we talked about urban planning. The US it's not on the big radar yet. It's becoming to be on the radar.

So if the American dream is going to include longer, healthier lives, then government and public private partnerships and nonprofits.

In the book I learned, for example, that the US nonprofit world, there are only four nonprofits that really invest in what we'll call the future of aging or longevity. Only four.

And when you think about the amount of monies that the nonprofit worlds have to that invest in a lot of other things, this has to hit bigger on the nonprofit side. Businesses have to invest in it.

Government, our Social Security structure is going to have some real challenges in the next decade because of the enormous amount of people that are tapping into Social Security versus the number of people who are putting money into Social Security. So the US has a lot of work to do. And in the book I talk about this, this awareness has to be raised and people have to create some action plans.

So because yeah, the, the life expectancy right now in the US is around 80, but it's not the top of the list. The top of the list is in Asia. You know, I was just in Korea.

It's projected that Korean women will be the first cohort to have 90 as the average life expectancy and late 80s in many Asian countries for women. So our life expectancy, a lot of things have to happen to build that.

But I think that we're all collectively, globally on the path to this 100 year life being normalized for our children. The Science shows that 50% of 5 year olds today have a chance to live to be a hundred.

And so if you go back a hundred years when life expectancy was 62, and you say everyone's going to live to be 80, people would go, that's crazy, it's impossible. Right? Well, today, 100 years from now, they might be saying 100, that's nothing. You know, we're working on the 150 year life. Who knows, right?

But it's all moving really quickly.

Speaker B: 00:33:18

So what do you think policymakers still fail to grasp about what happens when, you know, millions of people live significantly.

Speaker A: 00:33:25

Longer lives beyond Social Security.

And in our country, you know, Medicare, Medicaid, which are healthcare services to people 65 and over, there need to be a lot more government programs, policies for age friendly cities. There's no federal program in the US for creating the age friendly city. It really happens very much on the local level.

Programs that support, support the retraining and pivoting of workers and professionals that may want to move into a new career, a new profession, a new job. We have a real crisis here in that we don't have enough tradespeople.

You know, you're not going to necessarily, at 65, want to become a construction worker, but there are a lot of other businesses in the tech world, the electrician world, that aren't heavy labor.

Why aren't there programs to say to people in their 50s, if you're being displaced by AI in your job or you're looking to do something new, here's a program that will fund your training to become a technician in technology, an electrician, you know, pick your trade. So none of that exists. And those are just three examples of things that could become policy that would help in this longevity nation development.

Speaker B: 00:34:47

The wonderful Aviva Wittenberg Cox, who's been a guest here on Beyond Longevity, recently described your book Longevity Nation in Forbes as a manifesto for the longevity movement. Did you write it to define that movement or to show people how much society is already changing as we live longer lives?

Speaker A: 00:35:08

Great question, and thanks to Aviva for that wonderful review. It was really the secondary, the latter that you described. I call this the survey course.

Remember when you were in college and you took that psychology 101 and you sort of got the survey course and you're like, oh, I kind of like psychology. I want to pursue it. This is the survey course on longevity.

It was really to stimulate thinking for all kinds of people, but mostly for leadership, mostly for those who are in, in meaningful seats that can have impact. As I was developing it, I realized that it is the survey course.

The moment we're in right now for longevity, it's all gonna change in a year, two or three. I'll have to write another book. But it's the survey course for what we know now.

Speaker B: 00:35:54

Listen, Michael, I can ask you so many more questions. I know your time is limited, so I'm gonna cheat a little. I'm gonna ask three questions in one and then we're going to do rapid fire questions.

Speaker A: 00:36:07

Yeah, I better make some notes here. Then.

Speaker B: 00:36:10

When you look ahead to the future, what gives you the most hope about the longevity movement and what worries you the most? And third part, if listeners just take one idea from your new book, Longevity Nation, what do you most want them to take away from it?

Speaker A: 00:36:32

I think the most hope that I see and others see is the enormous Enormous development in medicine, the medical sphere, all aided by AI. It is just revolutionary.

What is going to happen in preventative medicine, diagnostic testing, medicines that are being created, that are being generated by the AI phenomena. It's going to help manifest the Hundred year life. It's really the most exciting part of longevity.

And you know, we talked about GLP1s, but there are many other things that are moonshot projects that are being developed for vaccinations and pills and tapping into genetic codes that centenarians have to create pills. I mean, it's really quite remarkable. I'm most excited about that. Where we're using the most and we talked about this is two things.

One is as this longevity sector is created, it becomes a marketplace and you have a lot of people who jump into it that are not science based or evidence based. You're putting a lot of promises out there with products that are not proven to be true.

And so people get sucked into things thinking that these are going to help them. And that's part one and part two, I think, is this.

We talked about it earlier, making sure that all of this is available to everyone and making sure it's not just for the elite. And so I worry that we have to make sure that that happens globally and government and business can help on that.

On the personal side, for somebody who it's well documented what longevity hacks are and what people can do, you know, there's been a lot of debate about what percentage of your own personal longevity is genetic versus in our lifestyle control. Most of the thinking has been it's 25%. It's a new study that says, well, it's maybe it's 50%.

In the science community there's still a lot of debate because, you know, there are always studies that come out and one study refutes another study and then the next study comes out. It's back and forth and back and forth.

But what we do know is that a large percentage of our own personal longevity is tied into what we can do as individuals, lifestyle factors and all the elements in that. And the number one thing that I learned, and I continue to learn is the number one thing is movement. The number one thing motion is lotion.

As Dr. Mark Lack says from Weill Cornell Medicine. It is exercise and movement every single day of your life until the last day on planet Earth. Because that has a whole host of benefits.

And what I love about that message, Daphna, is anyone can participate in that idea. Anyone who is of any socioeconomic background can participate in that Idea. You don't need money to do it.

You just need the will and the purpose and the focus to do it.

I interviewed an amazing woman who's doing work where she's taken people who are in their 60s and 70s who never exercised or never had any daily movement of any consequence. And she put them on a light program and she saw within months remarkable changes in their health metrics. Remarkable changes.

And these were people who were sedentary most of the time. And so that's magic medicine. That's magic medicine for everyone.

So that would be my one pearl I've learned on this journey that I would share with you.

Speaker B: 00:40:10

Listen, listeners, so nice to end on a positive note. I love it.

Speaker A: 00:40:14

Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:40:16

Here are my five rapid fire questions. What's the single best piece of advice you would give your younger self?

Speaker A: 00:40:23

The best thing I would give my younger self is to think big, think bigger and think even bigger about what you want to accomplish in your life.

I think when you're younger, you're sort of feeling your way, but the world is yours if you think big and you think bigger and you can have an impact in what's important to you. And I do believe you can start that at any age.

Speaker B: 00:40:46

Name one habit everyone should adopt for a longer, healthier life.

Speaker A: 00:40:49

Well, we talked about movement, right? I would combine that with here in New York in Central park, we have something called off leash. I have a beautiful vizsla, her name is Hannah.

When I'm in the city, we go off leash in the park.

And it's a whole ritual of animals and people and the morning and doing something that brings you joy like that, pick your own joy that is a combination of your movement and your day is really a great compound. So do something around the movement world that brings you joy. And that might be something as simple as walking your pup in the park.

Speaker B: 00:41:25

The third question I have to sort of modify a little bit for you because the original question is if you weren't in the longevity field, what other career would you have chosen? So I have to amend it for you to say as your second career. If you wouldn't be in the longevity field, what career would you have chosen?

Speaker A: 00:41:48

So I'm a big adventure traveler. I just went to my 127th country, by the way.

But we have an adventure travel group that once a year for 25 years we take a trip together and we've climbed Kilimanjaro, we did the Tensig Hill Hillary Everest marathon, nine day hike to the base camp and marathon down. We've I've run seven marathons on seven continents. We've been to Ethiopia, Madagascar, Patagonia, Base Camp, Aconcagua. I could go on and on and on.

I would be in the adventure travel business. That would be my, it's my passion. So I would somehow be in the adventure travel business world. A very personal and invigorating passion for me.

So that would be that.

Speaker B: 00:42:33

By the sounds of it, you are.

Speaker A: 00:42:36

It's just not a business.

Speaker B: 00:42:38

It's just not yet.

Speaker A: 00:42:39

Not yet.

Speaker B: 00:42:40

Got many years ahead of you.

Speaker A: 00:42:42

Not yet what?

Speaker B: 00:42:43

Microdose habit, sort of five minute routine of small daily action yields outsized longevity benefits?

Speaker A: 00:42:50

Wow, that's a good question. Yeah, I keep going back to movement because that's my whole thing. But I would say it's not a micro thing.

But I like to talk about conscious consumption, conscious eating. What are we putting in our mouths? We don't think about it.

We just come home from a busy day and we put our hand in the chips and we start eating chips. And before, you know, we've eaten half a bag of chips.

And so, you know, I think it's common sense stuff, plant based stuff, less processed foods, less sugar. You know, as we talked earlier, I'm a wine producer, so you know, I think moderate drink, it's another example of studies, right?

Don't drink, drink this, don't drink that, drink this, drink this. But be smart about it. If you have no comorbidities, you know, drinking a glass of wine is important.

It's good for social gatherings and family and community as well as an enjoyment factor. So, but conscious consumption, really thinking. So I, I think about that, you know, throughout the day. What am I eating?

And that's I think an important part. That's another great longevity hack. So I would answer that way, last.

Speaker B: 00:43:56

But not least, what's the craziest longevity myth you've encountered and is there any truth to it?

Speaker A: 00:44:03

Huh? Well, I'm not big on, you know, the replacement of draining the blood kind of thing.

You know, you can go to a clinic and have the metals drained out of your blood. I'm not so sure that that's going to have any real long term benefit of draining and transfusing our blood.

You know, I don't know if there's any real science evidence in that. It's a sort of a longevity hack. I'm not so sure that that does anything that is going to be meaningful in terms of creating your own longevity.

There's a lot of stuff we could put on that list that's sort of unproven. But you know, people try different things and everybody has their own personal experiences. And if it makes them happy, I say be happy.

Speaker B: 00:44:50

Liefen Michael, thank you so much for coming on Beyond Longevity. You've been absolutely delightful and thank you.

Speaker A: 00:44:57

Thanks Daphne. Thanks. It was great to be with you. I hope to see you in London and the UK when the book launches. I'll keep you posted.

Speaker B: 00:45:04

That was Michael Clinton, author of Longevity Nation. At the heart of this conversation was a bigger what happens when people start living longer, but the old model of life no longer fits?

This is what gives this book, Longevity Nation, its focus. It asks what happens when millions of people live longer, but our institutions, our assumptions, and our plans for life have not fully caught up?

And Michael is a compelling guy to that question because he has not only written about it, he has lived it. He built a major career and then kept pushing into new experiences, new challenges, and new chapters of life.

And that, to me, is the real question underneath this whole conversation. Not simply how long life is, but what we do with it. If you've enjoyed this episode of Beyond Longevity, please subscribe, follow and leave a review.

Thank you. Sa.