And he's managed to wrangle all the big Blue Zones researchers together onto an academic paper about it.

You know, there's a lot of egos involved and a lot of these folks have worked on this for more than a quarter century.

Yeah, it wasn't that easy.

I'll be honest with you, it was pretty difficult, but it worked.

Everybody cooperated.

Jay told me that...

Historically, blue zones were not all evaluated the same way.

Right? They use different criteria.

And he's managed to wrangle all the big Blue Zones researchers together onto an academic paper about it.

You know, there's a lot of egos, uh, i- involved, and a lot of these folks have worked on this for more than a quarter century.

Yeah, it wasn't that easy.

Um, I'll be honest with you, it was pretty difficult.

But, but it worked.

Um, everybody cooperated.

Jay told me that-

Historically, Blue Zones were not all evaluated the same way, right? They used different criteria.

Maybe to help frame it a little bit, can we talk a little bit about life expectancy and the work that you all have done on that? And then link that to how prepared people are for how long they will live.

So just to give everyone a frame of reference, back in 1900, life expectancy was about 50%.

It was so low back then because of high infant, child, and maternal mortality.

So during the course of the 20th century, that was brought down by public health.

Life expectancy rocketed upward by 30 years.

It was pretty dramatic.

And some people predicted that it was just going to continue higher and higher into the 21st century.

But what are we missing? What are we getting wrong?

You're kind of the buzzkill when it comes to this unmitigated optimism that we're gonna live longer.

It's a realistic check based on what the human body has been telling us all along.

There is a lot of hype in the field of aging where people embellish and exaggerate what we can and cannot do.

And I...

Look, I've called anti-aging medicine the second oldest profession.

Long live youth

...

in their cups made of gold.

We're never going to get to 160, but we could probably push it to 90 or 100.

No.

Let me explain why I'm giving you a definitive no, not an ambiguous no, but a definitive no.

So I'm going to take you back to 1989.

In 1989, I attended a conference that was run by George Martin, a well-known scientist in the field of aging.

And at that particular conference, the issue of the upper limit to human longevity came up.

And I really didn't have a lot of ideas at the time on what that might be.

So I think this assumption that you can add some meaning, and I would call 10 years meaningful, but some number of years to your life by just treating yourself well, that doesn't seem crazy to me, but what's your perspective?

... after they hear Jay Olshansky's advice here, but... [laughs]

For males, it's about one to two percent, maybe a little more.

For females, about five percent probability of making it to a hundred, even once you've made it to middle age.

Now, again, these probabilities have always been low, and they were much, much lower a hundred years ago.

So you have to realize when you go from close to zero percent survival to a hundred up to one to two percent, which is where we are today, it's a pretty dramatic increase.

It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's really hard to get one to two percent of the population living to a hundred.

Let me emphasize, it may not sound like, like I'm talking about a high number.

If you could simplify that, what was your argument that we're-

Could science keep someone alive until they're 150 years old?

My good friend thought that it was possible, and I said, no, it's not possible.

The process of living itself leads to the degradation, the continuous degradation that ultimately leads to the demise of mind or body.

And we have components of the body that don't replicate.

And with that goal, we keep searching.

Winter will will come for me.

It will come for all of us.

The question is when and what can we do to to do what's the most important thing, in my view, which is to enjoy life while we're here.