Dive into the new normal of longevity and the power of SuperAging with leading guides David Cravit and Larry Wolf. These pioneers—who transitioned from new product marketing and branding—share their inspiring work as authors of SuperAging: Getting Older Without Getting Old and founders of the SuperAging News platform. They break down their empowering framework: the seven pillars—Attitude, Awareness, Activity, Accomplishment, Attachment, Autonomy, and Avoidance—that will help you live a longer, more fulfilling life. Learn how a positive attitude can boost your lifespan by reducing inflammation, and discover the exciting future of AgeTech and medical breakthroughs that will reshape how we think about getting older.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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SuperAging: Your Expert Guide To Thriving In Your 70s, 80s, And Beyond With David Cravit And Larry Wolf
In this episode, we’re diving into a topic that every one of us cares about, how to get older without getting old. To guide us into that conversation, we have two of the leading voices reshaping the way the world thinks about aging, David Cravit and Larry Wolf, Cofounders of SuperAging and Authors of SuperAging: Getting Older Without Getting Old.
David and Larry come from the marketing and media world, career storytellers, researchers, and trend analysts who spent years helping organizations understand shifting demographics. One shift they’ve been tracking closely is what they call the new old, a generation of older adults redefining work, purpose, relationships, health, and longevity in ways we’ve never seen before.
Together, they’ve created SuperAgingNews.com, a platform built around their seven As of SuperAging, a framework that blends attitude, activity, autonomy, connection, and meaning into a practical blueprint for staying vibrant as we age. Their work is full of stories, research, and simple but powerful insights the kind of little tips that make a big difference, as they like to say.
We’re going to talk about everything from why attitude might actually outweigh genetics to how to train yourself to be more optimistic, the rise of “unretirement, how technology can extend independence and purpose. We’ll also explore what it takes to stay curious, connected, and fully alive into your 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond.
David and Larry continue to be two of the most insightful curators of information on aging anywhere on the internet. If you’ve ever wondered what’s possible in the second half of life or how to build a roadmap to a longer, healthier, more meaningful future, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive into SuperAging secrets with David Cravit and Larry Wolf.
David and Larry, thank you so much for joining us. I’m excited to learn from you, from the wisdom and experience and knowledge that you have both acquired on your journeys. I’m excited for our readers to learn from you as well. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for the great work you’re doing, and for being willing to share that with all of us.
Thank you for having us. We’re excited to be here.
Thank you for inviting us, Zach.
The Marketing Pivot: The Build Up To “SuperAging”
I learned when we spoke briefly earlier that your background really is in marketing and now you’ve transitioned into SuperAging. Can we just maybe start with how did you guys end up where you are? How did you get into this work that you’re doing now, and what are you really hoping to do to inspire people to do?
It started out as a marketing study of attitudes only of Baby Boomers. I wrote a book about this years ago, about how the Baby Boomer generation, which I’m a member, was determined to reinvent aging by not thinking of ourselves as old or as geezers. We’re not going to age the way our parents did. We’re not going to be old and helpless. We’re going to continue to be productive and be aggressive about living life to the fullest.
At that time, it wasn’t even predicated on longevity necessarily. It was just, as a generation, we’re not interested in going off-stage, we’re not interested in being old and helpless, even if we don’t live one day longer. We’re not going to behave as old people. We had quite a lot of evidence about that, and I wrote about that.
I connected up with Larry, and we both come out of the ad business. We said, “What started out as an attitudinal reinvention of aging suddenly intersects with another trend that not only do I want to reinvent aging and not see myself as an old person, but now, I can actually live longer.” all of a sudden, we’ve got all this medical research and behavioral research and new technology and new drugs and new treatments. It isn’t just I attitudinally change. I can physically change. In my 60s, the traditional age of retirement, I could have 30, 40 years ahead of me.
The fastest-growing age group in America, in percentage terms, are centenarians, 101,000 Americans are over the age of 100. The Boomers lucked into something here: they took an attitude that they brought with them independent of longevity and smacked it right into the middle of longevity as a trend. That’s where we said, “What can we bring to the party?” We’re not doctors, we’re not clinicians, we’re not fitness coaches, we’re not finance experts. We’ll go and get that information. We’ll curate that information and organize it and serve it up to our audience. That’s how we got into it.
We also thought that there was an opportunity to positively brand aging. One of the things we talk about in our book is the difference between default aging and super aging. Many people still have the attitude of, “I’m getting older, I no longer can do what I did when I was younger. I want to minimize the pain, I want to get older as gracefully and as easily as I can.”
However, they have really no gusto, no zest for the later years of their life, which can be as exciting as the earlier years of their life. We thought there was an opportunity to umbrella everything we’re doing under the name SuperAging. My background is really new product marketing and new product branding. What better thing to brand than aging? Way back when, many decades ago, I created a brand for General Mills, a cake mix called SuperMoist. The story of my career, my life really, is from SuperMoist to SuperAging.
It’s very important what Larry just said, the idea of actually branding aging and saying we represent one brand of aging. There is another brand that we’re opposed to, and that’s classic marketing positioning, positioning your brand as the un-cola. There’s the default aging brand, and we come up with a different brand, which is an interesting way of looking at it.
Navigating The Longevity Information Glut
Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing a little bit of that journey. You mentioned before that you’re tour guides through this information glut. As you start to look into the longevity space and how do we extend our health span, there’s so much out there and it gets confusing because there are differences of opinion. It can be overwhelming. One person says, “Do this and take this supplement,” then another person says, “That one’s not good for you, take this one.” You see yourselves as tour guides through the information glut. Tell us a little bit about that.
What happens is, first of all, everything that’s on our website and in our book, every single thing, is sourced. It’s not David and Larry dreamed up this idea that if you eat radishes, these good things will happen. There’s always a study, there’s always a third party that produced the information, so it’s got some credibility. We’re also really focused on longevity itself. The reason I mention that is that, let’s take fitness and exercise. There are a number of exercise books. Just for seniors, there are a number of YouTube videos from chair yoga to you name it.
By focusing on longevity, what we’re saying is, “If you want to get ripped, if you want to have a ripped physique, you really do need to go to the gym. You really do need to be in the hands of a fitness trainer because he’s watching what’s happening to your biceps and your middle and your calves.” However, if the goal is to live longer, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that little steps, little things that you can do, we call them exercise snacks, can produce dramatic improvements in longevity.
If the goal is to live longer, there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that little things that you can do can produce dramatic improvements in longevity.
We’ve focused on that. We don’t say this is a competition, that our method is better than his method. We want to bring you all of those within that philosophy. There are ten-minute little exercise snacks, for example, that have been shown in clinical research to produce dramatic improvements in longevity. We’re not trying to pick only one thing and we’re not trying to negate things.
Obviously, we do steer away from some of the more radical things. We’ve been very cautious about biohacking. We bring you the evidence, but we don’t want it to be, “Here’s ‘s magic cure for everything.” We’re setting a process, we’re setting a systematic program, which we call The Seven A’s of SuperAging that will get you there.
However, you yourself have to also be an intelligent consumer of that information. Of course, anything to do with health and diet, you have to see your doctor. We’re not trying to be the doctor, but there’s a lot of, as you said, a glut of information, and we think it is possible for us to streamline some of it and give you some useful tips.
To amplify that, with AI, there is so much going on with so much new information. Our ability to analyze and aggregate data and analyze it really has increased exponentially. For instance, a simple example, the brand-new RNA technology that was developed really to accelerate the COVID vaccine, which happened in record time, is also applicable to cancer.
There are all sorts of exciting research going on with RNA cancer vaccines. That’s just one of a myriad of examples. We try to keep our readers up-to-date on all the exciting new things that are going on. There’s just a myriad of things happening, not only medically but with lifestyle, with financial planning just so many areas, in all the areas actually of the Seven A’s of SuperAging.
Unpacking The Seven Pillars Of Super Aging
We live in an exciting time. Things are rapidly changing and the pace at which things are changing is even increasing itself. It’s a very exponential time to be alive. I’d love to just dive into the Seven As, the seven pillars of SuperAging that you guys have put together. Can we just talk through each of those? Just give us the Cliff Notes version of the Seven A’s.
The Five Remaining Pillars: Activity, Autonomy & More
Yeah, we’ll do that. I’ll take the first 2 because they’re foundational to everything else, and then Larry will do the other 5. The first two are Attitude and Awareness. Think of those as the umbrella, and the other 5 nestle under the umbrella, because if you don’t have the first 2, the other 5 are going to be tougher.
Attitude is the foundation of everything. It used to be having a positive attitude was seen as a generically good thing. Everybody said you should be an optimist, have a positive attitude, but we don’t know why, you just should. Now they’ve actually linked it clinically to longevity. They’ve shown in study after study that optimists outlive pessimists. They’ve actually traced it down to the cellular level because optimism reduces stress, and a reduction in stress causes a reduction in inflammation, and inflammation is the number one source of most age-related diseases.
Optimists live longer than pessimists because being optimistic lowers stress, which reduces inflammation, the main cause of most diseases related to aging.
Being an optimist will increase your lifespan. That means having a positive attitude to aging. It means having a positive attitude to the future. Perceiving, “I have a future. I could be 65 years old. I’m going to act like I got 30 years to go, 40 years to go,” given that any one of us could get hit by a bolt of lightning, of course. Apart from that, my attitude to life is I’ve got a future. I’m not afraid of that future, and I have time. I have enough time to accomplish new things. The attitude is foundational to everything.
The second one, which I can deal with much quicker, is Awareness. As you pointed out, there is so much new information flooding the marketplace. We think, if you’re going to be a SuperAger, you need a bit of a program. It could be as simple as checking in hopefully, with our website, SuperAgingNews.com, or reading a book.
Have a program that says, “I am checking in periodically and trying to renew my knowledge, update my knowledge, pick up the latest.” You don’t have to be obsessive about it, but it just says it’s part of my conscious activity now to keep tabs on this. If you have a positive attitude that says, “I got enough time left to do great things. I have a bit of a program that lets me check in on information, good information sources.” By the way, just to add to what Larry said about the glut of information, look at your guest about hormone therapy.
Here we had the FDA putting that black box warning on hormone therapy, and all of a sudden, they’ve taken it off again. Now they’re saying not only does it help with menopause, but it might do other great things. We had a story about that. It’s changing quickly, and all we’re asking people is be aware. Be aware that you need to be aware and check in periodically on that. Those are the 2 that set up the next 5.
Attitude Is Longevity: The 97-Year-Old Student
Before we dive into those, maybe you could insert this. You told me a story, and I think this applies to the attitude of having a future that’s bright and maybe even bigger than your past. You told me a story about a 97-year-old woman who started an undergraduate program at the same time as her great-granddaughter. Could you share that?
Yes, this is a perfect example of what we mean by attitude. The story, the headline, was a 101-year-old grandmother gets a college diploma in the same ceremony as her great-granddaughter. Isn’t that wonderful? The real story for us was she enrolled at 97. A 97-year-old says, “I’m going to undertake a four-year program leading to a diploma.”
The reason she cited doing it, obviously, statistically, she’s got to know that the number of years she has left to apply whatever she learns is a lot less than what her granddaughter has. It was that the process itself was valuable. It was enriching. It had an inherent value of its own, “Even if I don’t outlive this by very many years, I’m here, I’m proving it, I’m taking classes, I’m submitting essays.” There’s a value in that alone. To have that optimism to sign up at 97 for a 4-year program is wild, but it’s increasingly commonplace. It’s happening more and more. I’m glad you reminded me of that story. It’s a wonderful story.
I love that story. I’ve shared it since you’ve shared it with me, it’s so inspiring. To have that optimistic, “I’m 97, but yeah, of course I’m going to be here in 4 years. I might as well start another something new and exciting.” The statistic is optimists live 15% longer than pessimists. If you think about 100 years, that’s 15 extra years. It’s amazing. Thanks for sharing that.
We’re on the lookout for those kinds of stories all the time. By the way, there’s a skydiving club that you have to be 70-plus to get in. It’s counter-intuitive. There’s a track meet for centenarians.
The third of the Seven As is Activity. The process is really important. The basics, diet. All kinds of good things have been written about diet, but you can really boil it down to four very simple things you can use to pave your way to a good diet. One, obviously, portion control. Two, avoid what’s really bad for you. Avoid processed foods, avoid sugar.
V for vegetables, a fundamentally vegetarian diet, not obsessively vegetarian. You can enjoy fish, meat, whatever, occasionally. To me, the most critical element is E, Enjoy what you’re eating. Dinner, meals should be fun. Food should taste terrific. It should be a shared experience with family, good friends. Enjoyment really is critical.
Exercise, again, so many ways to do exercise. As David said, with exercise, snacks. You don’t need a gym, you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment, you don’t need a trainer. There are so many simple things you can do at home. Flexibility, you need to do a bunch of basic stretches, maybe as snacks a few times a week anyway to keep your body flexible. Aerobics, you need to move, you need to keep that heart pumping, you need to work on your balance, breathing. Strength training is very important.
To stay healthy, you need to be flexible, move your body, keep your heart active, practice balance, and do strength training. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.
The critical thing is use it or lose it. The older you get, the more maintenance the machine needs, whether it’s an automobile or your own body. As important as physical exercise is mental exercise. The wonderful example David talked about regarding the 97-year-old lady going back to school for her degree. The way people avoid cognitive decline is the same as physical decline. You exercise your mind. You challenge yourself all the time with new things. It’s important to keep learning, keep challenging yourself mentally.
For instance, before this interview, I had about an hour with my Tai Chi master, practicing my Tai Chi swordsmanship. Luckily, it was a single lesson, because to see me with a Tai Chi sword is very comical, but very challenging and really a new thing that challenges me mentally as well as physically. Activity. You want to take control of your health management. You want to take control of your life.
From activity follows Accomplishment. You need to have a purpose in life. You need to have goals. You need to work at something, whether it’s your former career, whether it’s new gigs, whether it’s going back to school, whether it’s doing volunteer work. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, as long as you’re enjoying it and as long as you’re doing something and you have purpose and you have goals. The thing I like about work is it’s a lot of fun. It’s interesting. Accomplishment is very important.
The next Seven A, Attachment. Relationships are very important. As you age, you lose some important relationships. There are ways to develop new ones. The internet can expand your universe. Family is so important, old friends. It’s important to keep in touch, to maintain relationships. People move, so if you’re in a different place geographically, you really need to stay connected. There’s a lot of science on this. People who feel isolated or lonely tend to have far more health issues, shorter lifespans, and a not-so-good quality of life. Attachment is very critical.
Isolation and loneliness can lead to significantly worse health outcomes, shorter life spans, and a lower quality of life.
Next is Autonomy. If you’re going to live a long time, you need the money to do it. Good financial planning, financial autonomy is very important. Looking maybe at your finances in a new way if you’re going to be around another 20, 30 years. Also important is physical autonomy. There’s so much new happening with technology, so many ways to make your home a more user-friendly place. As you age, many useful things, which we cover in greater depth in our book and our workbook that can help you maintain your physical independence.
Lastly, Avoidance. One thing that drives me crazy being in my 80s is ageism. You see it in the marketplace, you see it in medicine, you see it in so many different areas where the older are treated somewhat more dismissively with a different attitude. The other area of avoidance is scams. Older people really are a primary target of scammers. Technology has facilitated much more sophisticated scamming with AI. They can imitate voices of your friends, your family. They can clone your own voice.
There are a lot of very sophisticated, very potentially damaging things going on with scammers. Just simply never give financial information, never have any financial dealings with someone you don’t know well, who hasn’t personally experienced, that comes highly recommended by trusted friends and advisors. In a nutshell, that is the Seven A’s. I urge everyone to read our book, SuperAging: Getting Older Without Getting Old, and it’ll cover all this stuff in depth and hopefully contribute to a longer, healthier, more rewarding life.
Thanks for sharing that. Just to recap those quickly, it’s Attitude, Awareness, Activity, Accomplishment, Attachment, Autonomy, and Avoidance. Those are the seven pillars, the Seven As of SuperAging.
I just want to add one little thing here. It all does feed back into awareness too, because so much is happening. Larry mentioned scams at the end. That’s a good example of how you have to keep checking in because there are new ones every year. There are new tricks of the scammers, and there’s very good information, by the way, that comes out of the FBI and other regulatory agencies. We cover this regularly.
The reason we cover it regularly is that there’s new stuff all the time. It’s not a question of your intelligence level. It’s a question of your information level. You need to know what are they up to this year, and you need to have a source that’ll tell you that because the crooks are trying to stay one jump ahead, and you’ve got to stay one jump ahead. It’s a very simple example, though, of the need to keep up-to-date.
Thank you for sharing that. There’s so much new good information coming out all the time. We just need that to be a part of our consciousness, that we’re checking in.
“I’m on the lookout for this. I’m checking in periodically. It’s part of my plan.”
The Daily Habits Of SuperAgers: From Tai Chi To Brain Games
I love that you guys have this framework that you’re sharing, which really helps make it easy to follow. You’re both SuperAgers yourselves. Larry, you just mentioned you’re in your 80s, you’re doing something new, Tai Chi swordsmanship. I’d love for each of you to share a little bit about how you implement these in your day-to-day lives, and maybe that could inspire us to follow your example as well.
I’ll kick in because I don’t have anything as exciting as Tai Chi swordsmanship, so I’m in awe of Larry. I do practice the Seven As. In my area, I live in Charleston, South Carolina, so like you guys, a warm climate. We have a pool, and I exercise in our own little pool, and I walk a great deal. I follow a lot of the food advice.
On our website, we’re not a, “Here’s a massively complicated multi-hundred-page book on diet,” site. We like little food hacks. We like it to be fast, convenient, tasty, and good for you. I’m watching that. Also, to the earlier point about exercising your brain, I try to learn new things all the time. Because one of the things that we wrote about and again, this came from experts the brain craves novelty. The brain wants new stuff that you didn’t do before.
The brain craves and wants new stuff that you didn’t do before.
It wants new challenges. I’m a very inveterate brain games and puzzle guy. I read new books. I’m renewing my attempt to master a language that I used to know that I forgot, which is Hebrew in my case. I have an online course in that. I listen to lessons in that. I’m never going to become a fluent speaker. I want to urge your readers to think about language too.
We did report on one story where they taught a control group and a test group Spanish. These were people who did not have dementia and they didn’t know Spanish. They gave the test group, I think, three months’ worth of Spanish lessons. At the end of it, their cognitive scores, which they did a baseline at the beginning, had jumped more than the control group. None of them could really speak Spanish.
It wasn’t that they were fluent in Spanish, they were beginners. Three months later, still a beginner, but what the brain had to go through to do those lessons improved their cognitive scores. These are the kinds of things. I’m very involved in because, of course, if you are overall healthy, you’re still worrying about what else could come along, and dementia is a big one. That’s where I concentrate. Larry, I know, has a more demanding program with sword fighting, so I’ll let him develop that.
Another thing I wanted to mention is as you get older, you do have certain limitations. I have eye problems and some visual limitations, so I can’t run around the tennis court anymore, and I love tennis. I can’t aggressively ski downhill, or I’ll ski into a tree. What I’ve done is I’ve taken up golf, which is a lot of fun. If you can’t do one thing, you can do something, and there are other activities that are terrific, that are fun and engrossing.
Mental activities, so many great things to do, like travel’s a wonderful thing. There are so many new places to see, so many new things to experience. The mind craves continuous activity. It craves novelty. Continuing to do a lot of stuff that’s fun to do, as David says, and intellectually challenging makes tons of good sense.
I think we’re offering brain games on our website now, actually. They’re fun to do. I like puzzles, not because I’m learning anything. It’s just they’re a great escape. They’re quite addictively fun. It just depends on who you are and where you are, but life is full of new possibilities and it’s important to keep that always in mind.
Can I just throw in one more comment on travel that Larry mentioned? Travel to unfamiliar destinations is becoming increasingly popular. Thematic travel, because the “older market” still dominates travel. The travel industry has made a conscious effort to understand our needs and to serve up what we want. There is spa travel, there is historic travel, there is legacy travel where you go right back to the homeland that your grandparents came from and search out your whole DNA related to, “Where do I come from? What’s my genealogy travel?”
There’s skip-gen travel. Grandparent and grandchild and the parents stay home. There are all kinds of new forms of enjoyment through travel and aside from it could be a lot of fun, that also stimulates the brain. “Here I am in a new location. It isn’t the same old same old.” I’ve got to take out a street map, I’ve got to figure it out, I might have to learn a few phrases in a foreign language which I’ll never master but it’s enough for the two weeks I’m here.” All of those things promote wellness and longevity.
It’s so interesting. The brain craves novelty. Our brains continue to have neuroplasticity throughout our lifetimes, and we can continue to make new synapses within our brains. That’s what people should understand. We continue to have neuroplasticity throughout our lifetimes.
By the way, that’s been also proven clinically. That’s not just a lucky guess. That’s been shown through study after study. Much of this we report on our website.
Your “Exercise Snack” Micro Shift For Today
For someone who wants something quick and practical they can go do after reading, what’s a micro shift or mini shift or exercise snacks that someone can go do now that would make a difference and move the needle for them?
Simple stuff. Go take a walk. Do a crossword puzzle. Call up an old friend you haven’t spoken with in a while. Try a new dish, a new restaurant, cook something new. A myriad of things. Whatever strikes your fancy, whatever comes in your head that will be fulfilling at that moment, do.
Of course I have to give a blanket recommendation. Visit our website SuperAgingNews.com, but I would give a more micro recommendation. When you go to our website, we have an article you should search for on how to be an optimist. Can you actually be trained? Can you train yourself to be an optimist? “Optimists live longer but unfortunately, I’m a negative kind of guy.” Let’s say that’s one of your readers.
“I’m a glass half empty person, so does that rule me out?” You can actually train yourself to be an optimist. I think that one article would open up, “I can reassess my entire package. I can take an inventory of where I am in life. How healthy am I? What have I got going? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? I can actually take that first step down the path toward opening up all these possibilities.”
I go back to attitude. Transform yourself into someone who believes that there is an exciting future if only you can wrap your arms around it. That’s what I would do. By the way, these are techniques. This isn’t just a pep talk from David and Larry. Professors who have developed programs. One of them was I think at Penn, they actually had a school, a faculty of how to teach optimism to people. We’ve reported on that and people aren’t aware that very interesting stuff being done around how you can make yourself feel more positive about the future.
Transform yourself into someone who believes that there is an exciting future and you can wrap your arms around it.
David, I want to amplify one important thing you said. If you have a few spare minutes, go to SuperAgingNews.com. That really will expand you mentally. It’ll help you learn new things. Just spend a few minutes, you’ll find it addictively interesting. A few minutes might turn into 30 minutes or whatever.
You’ll see the whole landscape at a glance, which I think is important for people to realize, “This is actually quite possible.” It can be intimidating like, “I’ve got to work on my diet, I’ve got to work on my food, I’ve got to exercise, I’ve got to get new information.” It can be overwhelming, but it starts by saying it’s there to be had, and I can navigate through this. There is a plan for me. I don’t need to accept these limitations. Other people are doing this too,” because they are. This is maybe the futuristic side of SuperAging. I don’t know if it’s part of what you expected to hear. The SuperAgers are pioneers in what is going to become the new normal.
Scientists, like Dr. David Sinclair at Harvard, say that the first person to live to 150 is already alive. Whether he’s right or wrong doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that he’s saying this with a straight face. In the future, living to 100 is going to become not necessarily that wild and impossible a thing. I think of the SuperAgers as the advanced scouts walking through this jungle with a machete, carving the first pathways toward what is going to become the absolute normal. You might as well get on top of it now if you can.
I think it’s important that 65% of all people who have ever lived past the age of 65 are alive now. Our life expectancy has almost doubled in just the last 100, 120 years. Those of you who are over 65 are pioneers. You’re charting a new path. This hasn’t been done.
That’ll become the norm, though. This is also another wild one which I discovered that people don’t think of. It’s the first time in history we have both the parent and a child on Social Security. Just think about it. You’re 65 years old and you could easily have a 90-something parent. You got a parent and child on Social Security for the first time ever. It’s happening.
Future Of Longevity: Medical Breakthroughs And AgeTech
What other trends or shifts do you believe will most reshape the aging landscape over the next 10 to 15 years?
Two right away. Medical discoveries. Right now, they are very close in the lab to being able to slow down the natural process of aging, what happens at the cellular level, either by flushing out senescent cells or lengthening telomeres. There’s a whole nanotechnology about slowing that down. There are serious scientists who say, “Yes, that’s cute, but the real thing is we’re going actually to be able to reverse aging at the cellular level.” They’re starting to do it with mice. That’ll be one. Some people have said in that spirit, if you can buy 10 years, you could be buying 50 years. That’s wild.
Aside from that, without asking for any big breakthroughs, what Larry talked about earlier about AI and technology and autonomy, the ability of technology to dramatically improve treatment and autonomy. We’ve gone in a few years from wearing a medallion that beeps if you fall. If you’re a grandma and you fell at home and you’re alone and it beeps, and your daughter-in-law, 100 miles away, hears the beep and sends someone. That’s morphed into the whole home is a smart home with smart floors, with smart everything, all sensor.
With your permission, of course, that can actually not only monitor how you’re doing but anticipate, “The way she walked into the kitchen this morning, we’re worried about the likelihood of a fall.” There is going to be passive monitoring of all your vital health signs that will be emailing the results to your doctor in real time. The hospital of the future, say certain industry leaders, will be the home for recuperating. I don’t mean for high-end surgery, but for recuperating. Instead of having to stay in the hospital for a week to recuperate, they’ll send you right home, they’ll be monitoring you from home.
The hospital of the future will be the home for recuperating.
Elon Musk has just come out with a new project, a robot he says is going to make surgery by humans obsolete. It’ll be able to do things far more precisely and accurately and breathtakingly, quantum leaps. Not to knock surgeons. All of this aging technology, AgeTech, if you will. What’s impelling it is that industry is realizing how big that market is and how much money there is in there. What used to be resistance to these are just old people now is suddenly becoming, “There’s trillions of dollars of value here.” That’s also very exciting for us.
Just to add one minor thing. There’s so much happening with AI technology, it’s impossible to predict where it will all go. One of the things that I found particularly interesting, there are AI avatars that can really build relationships with isolated people or with people in early stages of dementia. We talked with one company that has an avatar that the patient can interact with. Instead of putting Grandma in front of the TV, you have her interact with an avatar. It’s just mind-boggling. It’s almost science fiction, and I think we’re only at the very beginning of the development of some very sophisticated AI technologies.
We are just beginning to develop very sophisticated AI technologies.
You mentioned earlier the loneliness. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, and so if we can create a solution for that with some of those types of technologies, that can really make a big difference.
It’s starting to happen, thank goodness.
We live in an exciting time. We might be able to buy 50.
The fact that someone’s saying that with a straight face. It doesn’t have to be 100% true, but that it’s mainstream now. It’s not a sci-fi impossibility.
Setting Up To Super Age: Advice For Your 40s And 50s
Maybe that should help people who aren’t optimists. As you said, you can train yourself to become an optimist. Even just learning some of those statistics and facts that are out there can shift your mindset.
To know what’s out there is eye-opening.
What about people who are reading, they’re maybe in their 40s or 50s, even? What would you say to them? How should someone set themselves up now so that they can be a SuperAger?
I would start with the Awareness factor and the Attitude factor. If you believe in default aging, even in your 40s, if you haven’t even thought about this topic, you’re saying, “I got 25 more years in the workplace, and I meet with a financial planner and I got my retirement program, and my retirement program is predicated on I’m going to be 65 and I’m going to need a very conservative program because I’m in old age.” Are you even thinking about this topic? I would suggest a little model I’ll give you. It used to be unthinkable for a college graduate to need a financial planner. The financial planning industry was aimed at retirement planning. “See you when you’ve got some money.”
Now, the financial planning industry is going after everybody. I think the same thing is going to happen with longevity. Why wouldn’t you want to know about longevity now if you’re in your 40s? Why wouldn’t you want to know what can happen at the cellular level if you eat more of this and less than that? Why wouldn’t you want to know about exercise snacks if you’re struggling with, “I haven’t got enough time or money to afford a gym or a personal trainer?” I think that you could plug into this. Let’s put it this way. You’re never too young to be thinking about getting older without getting old.
It really does start now.
My two boys have already turned 50, I can’t believe it. It seems like only yesterday they were at home and teenagers or toddlers. It’s amazing.
You should know all this stuff now. The degree to which you’re practicing it, the degree to which you’re thinking about it. I’ll just throw one crazy example at you. There are now coaches on what to do with that part of your life. There are people who are coaching people in their late 50s and early 60s and even older to develop a plan for that phase of your life.
If I was a 40-something person, and I’m very used to employment coaches and HR coaches and trainers for this and trainers for that, for me to just know that that exists versus not knowing that that exists is a step towards super aging. “Wait a minute, you mean that I might have to figure out that maybe when I’m 70, I’m going to need to talk to somebody about that or I’m going to want to talk to? There’s knowledge I’m not even aware of.” I’m not talking about spend as many hours on this as somebody who’s in their 70s, but to be aware of the topic and start thinking about, “What would I do now if I’m 45 and I know I was going to live to 125?” My whole attitude, everything might change now.” That’s what we mean.
I think that’s really the mindset shift. We need to start thinking, “When I’m 45, I’m not halfway done with my life. I’m a third of the way through, potentially, or not even.” I might live to 125 or 150. If you start thinking that way, then that shifts everything else.
Yes, it does. At least it opens up to saying, “I want to go after some of this information.” The intensity with which I go after it, the amount of time I spend on it, okay, fine. At least I should know that this is a topic that’s going to change the world into which I am aging.
Official Resources: Super Aging News And The Workbook
I am so grateful for role models and examples like both of you that are paving the way, that are pioneers and way-showers that are living this out. Larry, it’s so inspiring that you’re learning how to do Tai Chi swordsmanship in your 80s. You’re living it up. Tell us a little bit about the website, SuperAgingNews.com. What should someone expect when they log on there, and how can people also find your workbook?
All the stuff about our books and the ways to connect with us, we also have a free newsletter that comes out three times a week in your inbox with the leading stories. We organized the website around the theme of longevity and wellness, work and unretirement, because that’s increasingly topical. Living the Life, which are examples of what SuperAgers are doing. It’s in the big buckets that you would expect. Everything on the website is sourced to an expert. The newsletter gives you the stories of the week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the stories we want to highlight.
I think if they just go on there, it’s very well-organized and they’ll see it. I don’t want to dictate, “Go here, go here, click here, don’t click there.” It’s bite-sized. Most articles are 500 words or less. It’s always with links, we tell you where we got the information from, always encouraging you to dig deeper on your own. We’re quite happy to share this with other people. They’ll see at a glance what’s going on. There’s all the information about the books and our bios and everything is on there.
Another interesting thing about the website is we have an archive of probably of 600, 700 articles. If you’re interested in a particular topic, all you have to do is click on the little magnifying glass and type key in the name of what you’re interested in and an article will likely come up. Just to reiterate what David said, it really is worth everyone’s while to go on SuperAgingNews.com. They can and they should subscribe to our newsletter, get the exercise book, because it’s simple stuff that’s easy to do in your own. I think in minutes a day, you can make some big, important changes in your life. Read the newsletter, buy the book. I think it can make a real difference in your life.
Thank you both so much for the great work that you’re doing to curate, to be guides through the information glut, as we’ve said, to boil it down and make it digestible. I like that it’s in bite-sized chunks as well and that you have this framework of the seven pillars that you put together for us. Thanks for being way showers for leading the way for those of us that are coming behind you as well. Thanks for just sharing your wisdom and experience and these amazing nuggets.
Thank you so much for having us.
Thank you for inviting us.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here.
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What a fascinating conversation with David and Larry. They are really, truly pioneers in this new era of aging without getting older, or getting older without getting old, as they like to say. Just to recap quickly the Seven A’s or their Seven Pillars. Attitude, Awareness, Activity, Accomplishment, Attachment, Autonomy and Avoidance.
There were so many little nuggets in there. I love the story about the 97-year-old who started a college degree program and graduated at 101 with her great-granddaughter at the same time. We can learn to be optimists and optimists live longer and which actually affects us at a cellular level. We covered some of the things that are coming, the trends that are happening. If we can buy 10 years, that might lead to 50.
There’s so much happening. We just have to stay optimistic. We need to stay aware that these things can be part of our consciousness, so that we can stay aware of the trends and the shifts that are happening that will make that possible. Check them out. SuperAgingNews.com. They have curated all of this into an easy, digestible platform for all of us. Check it out. Get their book. They have a great workbook that goes along with it and I think you’ll like it. Thank so much for reading. We’ll see you back here next time.