638. Are You Ready for the Elder Swell?

Summary

Freakonomics Radio - Episode 638: "Are You Ready for the Elder Swell?"

Release Date: June 27, 2025

In episode 638 of Freakonomics Radio, titled "Are You Ready for the Elder Swell?", host Stephen Dubner explores a significant demographic shift—the rise of the "Elder Swell." This phenomenon refers to the projected increase in the population of individuals aged 65 and older, which, within the next decade, is expected to surpass the number of people aged 18 and younger in the United States. Dubner, alongside experts Kyla Scanlon, James Chappell, and Andrew Scott, delves into the causes, implications, and potential solutions to this emerging societal trend.

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Understanding the Elder Swell

Dubner opens the episode with compelling statistics that highlight the urgency of the Elder Swell. He explains that this shift is driven primarily by two factors: declining fertility rates and increased life expectancy. Advances in public health, medical care, better nutrition, and peaceful living conditions have all contributed to people living longer and healthier lives.

Quote:
Stephen Dubner [00:02]: "Within 10 years, there will likely be more people in the US 65 and older than there are people 18 and younger. This is a brand new state of affairs and the rest of the world is following the same path."

Beyond simply living longer, Dubner emphasizes the importance of "health span" versus "lifespan." Health span refers to the number of years individuals remain healthy and active, not just the total years lived.

Quote:
Stephen Dubner [03:12]: "The real headline of the Elder Swell is not just that more people will be living more years, it's that those years are expected to be better."

He cites a study by the International Monetary Fund which found that modern 70-year-olds are in much better physical and cognitive health compared to their counterparts in the year 2000.

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Historical Context and Policy Evolution

To provide a comprehensive understanding, Dubner introduces Kyla Scanlon, an economic educator, who discusses the historical development of American policies addressing aging. Scanlon references James Chappell, a history professor at Duke University, whose book "Golden: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age" explores the evolution of Social Security, Medicare, and other elder care policies.

Quote:
Kyla Scanlon [12:22]: "Compared to the other problems that America faces, like child poverty or racial inequality, older people are doing reasonably well."

The episode recounts early proposals like the Townsend Plan from the 1930s, which aimed to provide pensions to all Americans over 60. While visionary in its egalitarian approach, the plan was deemed financially unsustainable and lacked political support, particularly from President Franklin Roosevelt.

Quote:
Kyla Scanlon [13:12]: "Some people think it was a crackpot carnival barker scheme. Some people think it was a beautiful utopian dream."

Instead, the more conservative and contributory Social Security system was implemented, which has since played a crucial role in reducing old-age poverty.

Quote:
Kyla Scanlon [15:10]: "If I could design a system from scratch, is this what I, or most economists now, to be honest, even in the 1930s would have designed?"

Scanlon emphasizes the need to modernize these systems to accommodate the current and future aging population, highlighting that while Social Security and Medicare have been effective, they require updates to remain sustainable.

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Current Challenges and Economic Perspectives

The discussion transitions to the present-day challenges posed by the Elder Swell. The ratio of workers to Social Security beneficiaries has declined significantly, complicating the financial sustainability of Social Security.

Quote:
Kyla Scanlon [28:24]: "The first thing is about the same amount of spending. Cause unfortunately, I think you've still gotta deal with the current disease burden."

James Chappell, an economics professor at London Business School and author of "Longevity: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives," provides insights into transforming the economy to support a longer-lived population. He advocates for an "evergreen economy" that focuses on maintaining health and productivity throughout extended lifespans, rather than viewing aging solely as a societal burden.

Quote:
James Chappell [33:23]: "My big thing is to focus on a longevity society rather than an aging society."

Chappell highlights the importance of creating "age-friendly jobs" that accommodate older workers by offering roles that are less physically demanding, more flexible, and provide greater autonomy. This approach aims to retain the valuable skills and experience of older individuals in the workforce.

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Innovations and Startups in the Elder Care Space

Kyla Scanlon interviews Andrew Scott, an economic commentator, and Katie Fike, co-founder of Aging 2.0 and Managing Partner at Generator Ventures. They discuss the intersection of technology, startups, and elder care, focusing on innovations designed to improve the health and longevity of both humans and pets.

Celine Haliwa, CEO of Loyal, is introduced as a key player in extending the lifespan and health span of dogs. Loyal has developed drugs aimed at making dogs live longer and healthier lives, serving as a precursor to similar human-focused initiatives.

Quote:
Celine Haliwa [09:34]: "We aren't working on developing drugs for any specific disease per se. It's really more about taking your currently relatively healthy, albeit aged dog and having them live longer and healthier."

Katie Fike discusses her venture capital firm's focus on aging-related startups, emphasizing the importance of bringing together experts from gerontology and technology to address the unique needs of an aging population.

Quote:
Katie Fike [47:03]: "I realized that these worlds were just so separated. The people in aging care services, the ones who really understood the needs, didn't know the people who were creating the apps or creating the business models, the people who were launching new startup companies, didn't even know about some of the opportunities that were hiding in plain sight in the aging space."

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Personal Reflections and Ethical Considerations

Andrew Scott shares personal reflections on the impact of longevity research on his life and that of his dog. He underscores the emotional and ethical dimensions of extending life, particularly in ensuring that these additional years are lived healthily and meaningfully.

Quote:
Andrew Scott [55:48]: "I have a dog too, and she's the same."

Katie Fike touches on the ethical aspects of longevity work, clarifying that the goal is not immortality but rather enhancing the quality of life through preventative medicine.

Quote:
Katie Fike [10:42]: "I'm definitely not an immortalist. I'm not trying to make people live till 150 or 1000. I just think longevity and lifespan extension drugs are a kind of sexy way to talk about preventative medicine for age related diseases."

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Future Outlook and Policy Recommendations

James Chappell proposes three major policy ideas to achieve what he terms the "longevity dividend":

1. Raise Workforce Participation: Encouraging individuals to work longer by creating supportive policies and age-friendly job opportunities.
2. Boost Productivity of Older Workers: Enhancing the productivity of older employees through training and better workplace practices.
3. Incrementally Increase Retirement Age: Gradually raising the retirement age in line with increased health spans.

Quote:
James Chappell [37:54]: "In your book you propose three major policy ideas for countries to achieve this longevity dividend that you call it, including raising the proportion of people working in the years running up to retirement, boosting productivity of older workers and increasing the retirement age."

He emphasizes that policies should support older individuals in remaining productive rather than merely pressuring them to extend their working years without adequate support.

Quote:
James Chappell [38:20]: "If you could slow half that rate of decline, 80% of people age 50 are working a third by 65. If you could half that, that gives you 4% of GDP every single year."

Chappell also critiques current government approaches, advocating for a shift from viewing older adults as a market to seeing them as a vital and productive part of society.

Quote:
Kyla Scanlon [25:50]: "Yes, that's right. And not as a category of need that we all share and that therefore the government should be involved in."

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Andrew Scott sharing his philosophical views on longevity and the potential for continuous personal growth and education throughout an extended lifespan. Dubner underscores the critical need for society to adapt its policies and attitudes to support the Elder Swell, ensuring that the additional years people live are healthy, productive, and fulfilling.

Quote:
Andrew Scott [57:22]: "I would have."

Stephen Dubner wraps up by highlighting the personal and societal transformations necessary to embrace the Elder Swell, emphasizing that proactive and innovative approaches are essential for a sustainable and thriving aging population.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Demographic Shift: The Elder Swell represents a significant demographic change with profound implications for economy, healthcare, and societal structures.
2. Historical Progress: Social Security and Medicare have effectively reduced old-age poverty, but these systems need modernization to remain sustainable.
3. Economic Adaptation: Emphasizing an evergreen economy that leverages the productivity and health of older populations is essential for economic growth.
4. Technological Innovation: Startups like Loyal and initiatives like Aging 2.0 exemplify innovative approaches to extend health spans and improve quality of life.
5. Policy Reform: Policy recommendations include increasing workforce participation, enhancing older workers' productivity, and gradually raising the retirement age.
6. Ethical Considerations: Longevity work focuses on enhancing life quality rather than achieving immortality, requiring careful ethical considerations.
7. Future Prospects: Society must balance economic needs with supportive measures for an aging population, ensuring policies are inclusive and forward-thinking.

This episode of Freakonomics Radio offers a comprehensive exploration of the Elder Swell, providing listeners with valuable insights into how society can adapt to and thrive amidst this unprecedented demographic transformation.

Transcript

[Stephen Dubner]

Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by WhatsApp. On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. So the calls with your mom, chats about the latest work, drama, late night voice messages, and all those photos and videos of your dog. Every personal message stays private because no one, not even WhatsApp can see or hear your personal messages. WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Foreignomics Radio is sponsored by Meta AI. Meta AI is a personal AI that's tailored to you now with its very own app. It's built to get to know you, offering helpful answers and inspiration. Just start typing or speaking to get the answers you need wherever and whenever. Because Meta AI is your personal AI. Download the Meta AI app now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Let's start today with some numbers, some demographic statistics that I think you'll find surprising. Here's the first one. Within 10 years, there will likely be more people in the US 65 and older than there are people 18 and younger. This is a brand new state of affairs and the rest of the world is following the same path. Let's call it the Elder Swell. How can this elder swell be explained? It's been driven by two big lower fertility, which we talked about in part one of this series, and a massive increase in life expectancy, especially over the past century and a quarter. That is thanks to, among other things, more abundant food, cleaner air and water, less war, and vastly better public health and medical care, especially the treatment and prevention of diseases that used to kill so many children. But the real headline of the Elder Swell is not just that more people will be living more years, it's that those years are expected to be better. This is what researchers call health span versus lifespan. Let me give you another set of surprising statistics. The International Monetary Fund recently conducted a study of older people in 4041 countries. It included both physical and cognitive testing. The researchers found that on average, the physical condition of a modern 70 year old corresponds to that of a 56 year old in the year 2000. And a 70 year old person today has the same cognitive ability as a 53 year old person in 2000. Now, much of that gain comes from lower income countries which had more catching up to do. Still, it is a remarkable gain in health span over just a couple decades. So today on Freakonomics Radio, how can we prepare for the elder swell?

[James Chappell]

One of the great achievements of the 20th century is to produce an aging society. It's so weird we see it so negative.

[Stephen Dubner]

We'll look at whether our infrastructure is ready for the elder swell.

[Kyla Scanlon]

One of the great promises that the American state makes to its citizens in the 20th century is you will be cared for in your old age.

[Stephen Dubner]

We talked to some longevity scientists.

[Celine Haliwa]

I hope that we can shift the average lifespan of the population by 10 to 20 years. I think that's doable with modern science.

[Stephen Dubner]

We'll hear why innovating in the elder space is still really hard.

[Katie Fike]

If the winds go against you, money can dry up really, really quickly.

[Stephen Dubner]

And what's it like to think about living to 100 when you're just 27?

[Andrew Scott]

I don't think about things that way. I will live however long I live.

[Stephen Dubner]

Have you done much thinking about how long you'll live? Even if you have, it's probably time to give it a rethink. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that.

[Andrew Scott]

Explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

[James Chappell]

O.

[Stephen Dubner]

How old are you Kyla?

[Andrew Scott]

I just turned 27.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you think about yourself being old or not yet?

[Andrew Scott]

Well, everybody thinks about death. That's kind of our unconscious. All of the time is processing that.

[Stephen Dubner]

I think, hey, I wasn't taking you all the way to death. I was just asking about the being old part.

[Andrew Scott]

It's definitely something I think about in terms of retirement, like will I have Social Security? What will the healthcare system look like then? What will the economy look like? But I think for most people you just focus on the day today and you're like, okay, no, I'll be older one day.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm speaking with Kyla Scanlon.

[Andrew Scott]

I am an economic commentator so I do social media videos about the economy. My first book in this Economy came out in May 2024. I do a lot of research around the attention economy, specifically focusing on sentiment and how that impacts the real economy.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you want to talk about the phrase you coined, the Vibe session?

[James Chappell]

Yeah.

[Andrew Scott]

The Vibe session is that study of why sentiment is diverging from what you could suppose to be economic reality.

[Stephen Dubner]

Tell me a little bit about how you became interested in econ in the first place.

[Andrew Scott]

I studied economics and finance and data analytics at university and then I went out to Capital Group in Los Angeles to work for them.

[Stephen Dubner]

What is Capital Group?

[Andrew Scott]

Capital Group is an asset management firm. So they're on the buy side. I was in a rotational program there and for me like I grew up in Kentucky, I didn't even know you could major in economics until I got to college. And I just was so stunned that we pretend that people don't need to know about economics. They live in the economy, they should understand it.

[Stephen Dubner]

And when we came to you and asked you to do some reporting for us on aging and longevity, science and so on, what was your first thought?

[Andrew Scott]

I'm very interested in the demographic crisis. We have a bunch of people who are aging and the fertility rate is below the replacement rate. What are we going to with an aging population that is clearly having a bunch of health problems? How do you take care of a population when there might not be enough younger people to take care of them? So yeah, it was a very exciting issue.

[Stephen Dubner]

So Kyla Scanlon, a young economics educator who is excited by the Elderswell, did some interviews for this episode Hi, my.

[Katie Fike]

Name is Celine Holiwa. I am the founder and CEO of.

[Stephen Dubner]

Loyalty Loyal is a Silicon Valley startup that wants to extend the lifespan and health span of dogs.

[Katie Fike]

Yes, well, Save the Dogs, Save the World was my attempt at branding and marketing. It's a romantic summary of the Loyal thesis, which is Save the dogs by helping them live longer, healthier lives. We aren't working on developing drugs for any specific disease per se. It's really more about taking your currently relatively healthy, albeit aged dog and having them live longer and healthier. I have an 85 pound senior Rottweiler at home who I would have brought, but you would have heard her drooling everywhere. And this fact of nature is the bigger a dog is, the shorter their average lifespan is.

[Stephen Dubner]

When Scanlon spoke with Haliwa, Loyal had already raised over $125 million in funding, mostly from venture capital firms.

[Katie Fike]

On the biology we have two categories of drugs. One for a senior dog lifespan extension that's more broadly around improving the metabolic fitness of your dog, which is thought to potentially drive their healthy or unhealthy aging. Specifically translating the biology of caloric restriction, caloric restriction being the most og way, so to speak, to extend lifespan. It was first shown in the 1920s. So we're trying to basically emulate and target the downstream pathways that we believe are activated by caloric restriction that lead to this lifespan extension. Importantly, without you a having to give your dog less food and b without your dog not wanting to eat, everyone always asks me why not just do ozempic for dogs? And it's because the whole treat feeding relationship is actually super important to the dog. Human relationship. Nobody wants a dog that doesn't care.

[Andrew Scott]

About treats anymore because it's the reward mechanism.

[Katie Fike]

Exactly. It's super important for bonding, for training. And honestly, I think a lot of what we interpret as our dogs loving us is our dogs begging us for Food.

[Andrew Scott]

Oh no.

[Katie Fike]

Somebody who owns a dog who is a big food monster. Like, I am extremely guilty of this.

[Andrew Scott]

I have a dog too, and she's the same.

[Katie Fike]

And the second category is around big dog short lifespan. Specifically trying to compensate for what we think are the genetic changes that people inadvertently bred for when they were selectively breeding dogs to be very, very large. The thought being that growth hormone drives the dogs to grow really, really fast in puberty, which is great. If you're a big dog person, you don't have a medium Dane or a small Dane. You want a great. But unfortunately in dogs this process doesn't turn off sufficiently once they're fully grown, which we hypothesize causes them to age faster and die sooner. So the drug, what it does is dampens down the levels of this growth hormone that's circulating in these dogs blood to a level that's seen in healthy, smaller breed dogs.

[Stephen Dubner]

You could imagine there are people who hear Loyal's slogan, save the dogs, save the world and think, well, sure, because dogs are great and the average dog is maybe more likable than the average person. But Celine Holliwah is really focused on the save the world part of the equation.

[Katie Fike]

This was something I thought about a lot, especially when I was starting Loyal, which was how do you have impact on societal norms, public policy, et cetera, when you don't really have a lot of money and influence. I was 23 or 24 when I started Loyal. I think the way Loyal will have its impact is by normalizing it culturally. If you can go to your vet and get your dog prescribed a drug to keep him healthier longer, you're inevitably going to ask, well, why can't I do this for my grandma? The reason I started the company was to get the first drug FDA approved for lifespan and healthspan extension. It'll help us, quote, unquote, save the world, AKA help work on human longevity and human quality of life too.

[Andrew Scott]

How do you think about the ethical considerations of longevity work?

[Katie Fike]

I'm definitely not an immortalist. I'm not trying to make people live till 150 or 1000. I just think longevity and lifespan extension drugs are a kind of sexy way to talk about preventative medicine for age related diseases, which I think is actually one of the most important things that we could do for society. Obviously, acute care for age related diseases is extremely important. We'll always do it. But the most efficient way, so to speak, to treat these really complex diseases is prevention. So that's really what I'm trying to work on. I'm hoping we can prove our point in dogs and help a lot of dogs along the way. But I think this could be one of the most valuable things in human medicine too.

[Stephen Dubner]

How did we get here? To a world where firms with backing from venture capitalists are chasing FDA approval for longevity drugs for dogs in order to get the same for people?

[Kyla Scanlon]

American society today has an age pyramid that was not imagined before.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is James Chappell. He is a history professor at Duke university.

[Kyla Scanlon]

In the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, it's not like there were no older people, but it was 2 or 3 or 4%. We're looking at 20%. We're looking at a massive growth.

[Stephen Dubner]

Despite a setback during COVID the average life expectancy at birth in the US is roughly 78 and a half years for females. Lifespan is around 81 years and it's around 75 for men. If you go back to 1950, the average was 68.2. A full 10 years less. And if you go all the way back to 1900, life expectancy was 47. James Chappell is only 42 years old. So how did he get interested in the elder swell?

[Kyla Scanlon]

I'm from Florida. I grew up surrounded by older people. And it just struck me as bizarre that there was so little historical writing about this. The gap I'm trying to fill is a narrative about how American society as a whole has grappled with old age not only as an economic problem, but also as an issue of expanded leisure time and the environment and things like that.

[Stephen Dubner]

So Chappell wrote a book to fill in that narrative. It's called Golden How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Compared to the other problems that America faces, like child poverty or racial inequality, older people are doing reasonably well. Have been massive expansions of the state in the 1930s and 1960s to care for older people. And they've worked. I mean, old age poverty is relatively low.

[Stephen Dubner]

In his book, Chapel writes about earlier ideas for elder care schemes, including a 1933 proposal called the Townsend Plan, which was promoted by a California physician named Francis Townsend.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Some people think it was a crackpot carnival barker scheme. Some people think it was a beautiful utopian dream. The idea was that as soon as you turn 60, no matter what job you had, if you're a man or woman, black or white, whatever it is, you would get a certain pension from the government every month. And it was to be large.

[Stephen Dubner]

The money was coming from where?

[Kyla Scanlon]

Basically from general tax revenues. It was not from contributions from your paycheck and there was another stipulation that you had to spend all the money that month. So it's sort of a wacky scheme. They tried it out. They found some older people and just gave them all this money to see what they would do. They got haircuts and fur coats and things like that. The idea was this is a way to spur consumption and that will help the American economy.

[Stephen Dubner]

Also, like universal basic income for old people.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Absolutely. So it's maybe a crackpot scheme. What made it a beautiful one is the egalitarianism of it. It truly was for everyone. It had millions and millions of older people energized around this movement.

[Stephen Dubner]

Franklin Roosevelt didn't like it, though, did he?

[Kyla Scanlon]

No. This was very much not Franklin Roosevelt's kind of policymaking. It was enormously expensive, of course, it was very untested. Roosevelt and his team preferred to do versions of things they had seen done before, especially in Europe. Roosevelt creates a team, the Committee on Economic Security, and he gets people like Francis Perkins, a very serious, respected reformer.

[Stephen Dubner]

A female secretary of Labor.

[Kyla Scanlon]

That's right.

[Stephen Dubner]

The first female cabinet secretary. Period. Yes.

[Kyla Scanlon]

It's gotta be. Yes. And they put together a plan which looks like what we now call Social Security. It does not bear any resemblance to either what the socialists wanted or what the Townsendites wanted. It was a much more conservative vision where it's not for everyone. It is for people who have worked in certain sectors of the economy and have paid these contributions to the state taken out of their paycheck, and then when they turn 65, the amount they got back would be indexed to how much they put in.

[Stephen Dubner]

You praise Social Security generally in the book and say it's worked and it helped create the entire state of modern retirement. But if you think about just the basic economic setup of it, it's so inefficient in so many ways that no economist would ever dream up a plan like that today, would they? It's got too much lag in it. It's got too much variance. Do you still embrace the construct of the program?

[Kyla Scanlon]

Well, yes. It depends on what you think the alternative would be. If I could design a system from scratch, is this what I, or most economists now, to be honest, even in the 1930s would have designed? Probably not. There are, I think, systems even in Europe today that are more egalitarian, much simpler to administer. I mean, Social Security is so complicated, but given what we know about American history, was the alternative a rational, egalitarian system, or was the alternative nothing at all? I think the alternative was probably nothing at all.

[Stephen Dubner]

So how does all this dovetail with our healthcare system and the creation of.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Medicare, the medical system that we now know today, where like you go to the hospital and you encounter amazing technology that's being born after World War II, very high healthcare costs. This is sinking older people who are largely on fixed incomes. So the Social Security Administration starts arguing for something like Medicare. What a lot of people wanted was simply universal healthcare. What we did instead of was we linked health insurance mainly with our employers. It makes a smidgen of sense in this moment in the late 1940s. Does it make sense in 2024? Of course not. One of the externalities of linking health care with employers is that what about people who are unemployed? So people who are middle aged and unemployed in general in American history, no one cares about them. What about all these millions of older people who worked good jobs, they did their best, they're on Social Security, they are left out of this system of health insurance. And so Medicare emerges to fill this gap. It is passed in 1965. It's part of Johnson's Great Society legislation.

[Stephen Dubner]

So here's something you wrote. Between 1935 and 1975, Old Age Security was arguably next to military might, the central preoccupation of American policy. You write about the passage of the Social Security Act, Medicare and Medicaid Act. But additionally you write that every year legislation streamed from Washington that addressed problems in housing, nutrition and care for older people. It just astonishes me that so much effort was put into a policy framework that was forward looking in a way that we don't think of policymaking often these days. Can you explain why that happened?

[Kyla Scanlon]

It's a little hard to explain, to be honest. I would say first, coming out of World War II, America is gearing up to fight the Cold War. And they have to show that the American system has something to offer that the Soviets are wrong. They this is not simply a dog eat dog world where the poor go to die and the rich tycoons drive over their bones. We have to offer something. One thing that makes old age an interesting bipartisan area of concern is that it's not really very socialist. Most reforms you can imagine and that people were proposing have some kind of link with the socialist tradition or with trade unions or the working class or economic inequality. To pursue them is to criticize the system of American capitalism. Old age isn't like that. You can be in favor of serious old age benefits without making any claims at all about the justice or injustice of American capitalism. It's also not a special interest group really because it is of all the categories of need, one that barring catastrophe, all of us one day inhabit. American policymakers knew they had to be doing something and this seemed like the safest area to pour really tremendous levels of resources. I think we need another period of innovation in this space because Social Security and Medicare have not really been touched and they are old. I mean Medicare is 60 years old now. Think how much the healthcare space has changed.

[Stephen Dubner]

What sort of innovations would you like to see?

[Kyla Scanlon]

Well, I like most people like polls show like 80 or 90% of people would like to see modest reforms to at the very least save Social Security. It's one of the astonishing parts of the American political system that a very popular program is about to hit financial trouble in 12 or 13 years. And the political will to address this is just non existent. The bills are in Congress, they're relatively easy. Increased taxes on higher earners, move around the Social Security earnings limit and this problem can be resolved. This is the biggest poverty reduction program in the country. It's eminently fixable and it gets harder to fix every year. We settle into what is now the very familiar dynamic where Democrats, all they want to do is quote unquote defend Social Security and Medicare and the right either doesn't talk about it at all or has these fantastical dreams of privatization that creates a dynamic where the right is trying to attack, the left is trying to defend and no one is trying to improve these systems, which is what is actually required.

[Stephen Dubner]

Well, some people do say that older voters have too much leverage and that it's often exercised at the expense of children and others.

[Kyla Scanlon]

That's a pretty common argument that people trot out. I think that there's been a lot of unfortunate discourse about gerontocracy and the power of older voters because I really do not think that that's true. Social Security and Medicare were not passed by older voters. The AARP was not pushing for these things. The Congress that passes Medicare is one of the youngest Congresses in American history. It had less Republican than Democratic support, but it did have significant Republican support and I would say support by people in numerous age brackets. In fact, political scientists have shown that it's really middle aged people who are pushing for these things and young Congress members. The reason is that these were understood at the time not as sops to the special interest old age lobby, but as a way to secure and stabilize the families of middle aged people. Because who's actually in danger if, you know, if grandma falls it's unfortunate for Grandma, but it's really unfortunate for Grandma's four kids who have to leave their jobs and things like that.

[Stephen Dubner]

So, keeping in mind the advances of Social Security and Medicare and other policy that aim to help older people talk about how modern retirement came to be a thing, it's easy to take for granted that this is the way it's always been. But it was shocking to me reading your book, how recent the phenomenon that we now see as normal wasn't normal at all. Normal for most people, the fact that.

[Kyla Scanlon]

We have an expectation that I like my job, but at some point I'm going to stop doing it, and I would like to hang out with my kids and do some hobbies and service work for 10 or 15 years before I die. This is a very recent expectation. For most of human history, there is no such thing as a formal exit from the labor force into retirement, let alone one where you could rely on some kind of payments either from your employer or from the state. The basic timeline is that in the 50s, about 60, 65% of older men are working. By the 80s, it's more like 20, 25%.

[Stephen Dubner]

Wow.

[Kyla Scanlon]

It more or less has stayed stable since then. And it's not just that you stop working and hang out in your house. There is a huge infrastructure retirement that's created senior centers and senior citizens discounts and ARP cruises. All that stuff emerges really quickly over this period. One thing that's very interesting about the emergence of retirement after World War II is that a lot of workers did not want it. It was not really a demand of labor unions or of the working class. Many workers, even in jobs that seem to us exploitative or dangerous, workers want to stay in those jobs. And so there's a lot of resistance in the 50s and 60s to the creation of retirement, especially in this country, to mandatory retirement. Mandatory retirement was actually a pretty big part of the American economy in the 60s and 70s. Lots of workers in lots of fields were forced to retire when they turned 65. Americans hated that. That was one of the AARP's first big causes. It becomes illegal in the 80s in most fields.

[Stephen Dubner]

So your main argument is that we had this massive boom in life expectancy mostly over the 20th century, which resulted in a lot more older people, and that the boom is not just continuing, but accelerating now. And you argue that we've adapted generally pretty well with policies including Social Security and Medicare and so on. In other words, if you just want to look at the 20th century in toto, you could say, wow, Those were some really significant positive solutions to this growing issue. That brings us to now though, 21st century. Where do you think we stand? What are the headwinds? Has progress stalled and what do you see as proposed solutions?

[Kyla Scanlon]

The issue of the booming population of 80 plus older people who need care has been persistently viewed as a kind of afterthought, like something that can be solved with very precarious sectors of the economy and by squeezing as much labor out of middle aged women as possible. And I think there is a possible world where we say actually no, this is going to be a major and dignified part of our economy. It's going to be well regulated. It does seem to me that progress in this area has stalled. What I would say more specifically is that progress has shifted to the private sector. So to take for example, assisted living facilities. These are in innovation in America in the 1980s. Like so much of what America does with old age policy, it's something that European socialists came up with that was meant to be government funded and then Americans copied it and made it private. Insofar as there has been serious government action in the last two decades, it's often been to empower private industry even further. Something like Medicare Part C and the introduction of Medicare Advantage plans. It's basically about giving private insurers a bigger role to play in healthcare for older people.

[Stephen Dubner]

It's looking at the older population essentially as a market that can be divided up among private players.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Yes, that's right. And not as a category of need that we all share and that therefore the government should be involved in. One of the great promises that the American state makes to its citizens in the 20th century is you will be cared for in your old age. This is a capitalist country. You are going to work hard in middle age, but Once you hit 65 or 67, you can relax a little bit. You've earned it. I think in the 21st century, our business should not be to roll back promises that were made a century ago. We should be thinking about how to secure them for the future.

[Andrew Scott]

Future.

[Stephen Dubner]

James Chappell brings a historian's toolkit to the elder swell. Coming up after the break, how does an economist think about it? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll Be right back. Freeconomics radio is sponsored by Fidelity. Fidelity. Active ETFs have the flexibility to shift and transform as markets. So instead of just riding an index, they can seek to outperform it. Adapting to market conditions and pursuing new opportunities as they emerge. And While you get the potential outperformance of an actively managed fund, you can still buy and sell on your terms. Like other ETFs, markets can change in real time. Make sure your ETF can too. Learn [e-mail] ActiveETFs before investing in in any exchange traded fund, you should consider its investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Contact Fidelity for a prospectus, an offering circular, or if available, a summary prospectus containing this information. Read it carefully. While active ETFs offer the potential to outperform an index, these products may more significantly trail an index as compared with passive ETFs. ETFs are subject to management fees and other expenses, market fluctuation and the risks of their underlying investments. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC Member NYSE SIPC does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry company seniority, skill. Wait, did I say job title yet? Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions apply.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Okay, let's talk about Claude, the if.

[Stephen Dubner]

You know, you know AI assistant that's got everyone buzzing. Clawd is like having a super smart, emotionally intelligent buddy in your pocket that.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Responds like a real person would.

[Stephen Dubner]

Claude can help with just about anything, whether you need advice, inspiration, or even someone to help craft that perfect text.

[Kyla Scanlon]

To your crush, Claude can switch from.

[Stephen Dubner]

Being your life coach to your personal stylist to your side hustle strategist all in one conversation. Head to Claude.com that's C-L-A-U--E.com and start chatting with Claude for free. Before the break, we heard about the economic scaffolding that was erected decades ago for older Americans. But there are a lot more older Americans today than there used to be, so it's natural to wonder just how sturdy that scaffolding is. Here's one indicator. In 1965, there were four workers for every beneficiary of Social Security. That number is now less than three, and it continues to shrink. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made major staffing cuts at the Social Security Administration, even as more people than ever are filing for benefits. And with Trump's big, beautiful bill taking aim at Medicare and Medicaid, it's fair to say that the sturdiness of the scaffolding going forward is at best uncertain. And it's not just here. Many countries around the world are dealing with the same problem. So it's time to bring on an economist to help us sort this out. His name is Andrew Scott.

[James Chappell]

I'm an economics professor at London Business School, and these days I'm somewhat obsessed with the topic of longevity.

[Stephen Dubner]

Scott began his career in various advisory roles for the UK government, including in the House of Commons, the bank of England, and the Treasury.

[James Chappell]

I did all the things you think a macroeconomist should focus on, the monetary policy, fiscal policy, financial stuff. And then I got a little bit bored. There's only so many times you can talk about interest rates going up or going down.

[Stephen Dubner]

And so he became a professor.

[James Chappell]

One of the joys of working at business school. You're always talking about those big trends that are going to change the world. And so you're not just talking about interest rates, you're talking about globalization and artificial intelligence. I used to give this lecture on an aging society, and it was pretty miserable. You just project forward these endless numbers of old people. Old people are seen as a problem. They get ill, they need a pension. And then halfway through this lecture on aging society, there was a slide that said, hey, on average, we're living longer and we're healthier for longer. And I thought, that sounds quite good. How do we turn that into a bad news story?

[Stephen Dubner]

This led to Scott writing a book called the Longevity how to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives. The book opens with the story of Scott's identical twin brother, David, who died a few days after they were born in 1965 in London. That year, the most common age of Death in the UK, what's called the modal age, was between 0 and 1. Today, the modal age is 87. You did not mishear me. The most common age of death in the UK today is 87. It's the same in the US one.

[James Chappell]

Of the great achievements of the 20th century is to produce an aging society. It's so weird. We see it so negative. It's mourning the loss of fewer children. It's fewer parents snatched away in midlife. It's more grandparents meeting grandchildren. And all we can do is turn around and say, oh, my goodness, we have an aging society. I mean, it's quite extraordinary.

[Stephen Dubner]

So I have a feeling I know how you will answer the following question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Is aging a privilege or a curse?

[James Chappell]

Well, it's a privilege. I'll Come at it from a very simple economic point of view, which is that an increase in life expectancy means we have more time. And for most people, that's a good thing. So what do we fear about it? We fear outliving our health, our wealth, our skills, our purpose, and our relationships.

[Stephen Dubner]

Those are a lot of things to fear. It sounds like you're about to help us supersede that fear somehow. Are you a magician?

[James Chappell]

Well, no. We fear getting old. So what are you gonna do now to age better? That's never been imperative before when there's only a 10% chance of making it to 90. You don't think I'm gonna spend my 30s, 40s, and 50s preparing for a long life? No, we have to. That's a radical moment in human history because we've never had to support such a length of life.

[Stephen Dubner]

You write in your book about what you call an evergreen economy. I was thinking about that recently because I was in Florida where you see a. An awful lot of businesses devoted to the aging. There's all kinds of medical facilities, classic car treatments, there's golf. You know, it's a lot of things that we associate with aging, longevity, retirement, and so on. So that's, you know, an obvious tip of the iceberg. But when you take a step back and look at the bigger evergreen economy, everything from labor forces, pension, healthcare, et cetera, how do you expect it to be substantially different?

[James Chappell]

My big thing is to focus on a longevity society rather than an aging society. And I know immediately what happens when I see a consultant talking about an aging society. They start talking about the burden, and then they start talking about cruise ships and care homes and the market potential. What I call the silver economy. All of which is valid, all of which is true. There are a lot more older people, and the baby boomers mean there's even more older people because that was such a large cohort. For me, the evergreen economy is about how to remain fit and healthy throughout my life. So we should see a shift towards people or eating more healthily, which we're not seeing everywhere, but we're beginning to see. It's gonna be about how you do lifelong learning. It's gonna be about how you can support working for longer. And I think that's a really, really big change. Cause in the 20th century, we invented a three stage life. Education, work, retirement. As we're living longer and longer and longer, we can't just stretch out that three stage life. Let's take the case of retirement. Retirement, to be honest, has already gone the Notion that there is a single age where everyone comes to a hard stop of work has already disappeared. Some people retire at 60, some people retire at 70, some people go part time, then they retire, then they're gonna unretire. We're seeing a much more complicated pattern.

[Stephen Dubner]

One barrier to a lot of older people working longer is that they're not wanted. Their skills are considered outdated. Whether that's accurate or not, a lot of younger people honestly just don't wanna be around older people in the workplace and elsewhere. How ageist would you say we are as a modern society? And assuming the answer is at least a little bit, what are your suggestions for shifting that?

[James Chappell]

There's clearly all sorts of ageism around. And one of the ironies is that the more old people there are and the more likely the young are to become old, the more ageist we seem to be. Ageism is that weird prejudice against your future self. It's very strange. I get in a little trouble here because I think if I tell you that over the last 10 years in high income countries, the majority of employment growth has come from older workers.

[Stephen Dubner]

I read this in your book, I was shocked.

[James Chappell]

Everyone is.

[Stephen Dubner]

And the share in the UK is absurdly high. Yes.

[James Chappell]

And Europe even higher. So in the US it's about 60%, UK it's about 75% and in Europe it's over 100%.

[Stephen Dubner]

Just to be clear, this is the growth of labor among age cohorts. Yes.

[James Chappell]

Yeah. So if you look at the increase in total employment and say which age groups have seen an increase, it's older workers. It's a mixture of more likely to work and more of them.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let me just push on that data a little bit. How low of a base were we working off of there?

[James Chappell]

It's not like I'm playing around with people aged over 80 where of course you've got a very low base. This is from 50 Plus. We underestimate the capacity of old people. That's the ageism part. And of course, if we underestimate the capacity of old people and more and more of our life is going to come at later years and more and more of the population is going to be older people, we've got a real problem if we then underinvest and cut them out because we get the very bad aging society story that we worry about. So we have to adapt to living longer by being healthier and productive for longer. Mick Jagger's the one, everyone points out, he's 80, performing on stage. You're seeing age stereotypes being Challenged and some people adapting.

[Stephen Dubner]

But there's another issue which is that most people, excluding you and me and some people we know because we happen to toil in fields that we chose and that we enjoy, at least I do you seem to as well. Most people around the world don't enjoy their work. So for those who don't, how do you think about that balance?

[James Chappell]

The problem we've got is that we do, as we're living longer, need to get people to work for longer. So how do we redesign work to give people opportun opportunities to carry on working? I'm very keen on the notion of age friendly jobs.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can you give me a for instance?

[James Chappell]

Well, they've got the following characteristics. They're less physical, they're more flexible and they give you more autonomy. So professor's great tour guide's another one. Everyone likes jobs that are more flexible, have more autonomy, aren't very physical. But older people really like it in the sense they're prepared to take a bigger cut in salary to do those jobs. So really important we create those. Cause you've got to make sure that you ease the competition between older workers and younger workers. You don't create institutional blockages. Now there's been a huge increase in the number of these age friendly jobs, just the way the labour market's going. But of course if you're a construction worker, you do not work in an age friendly job. So how at 50 do you help someone who's been a construction worker shift into an age friendly job? That to me has to be a really important labour market policy because there's loads of skills that people have. My father in law is American, he was a truck driver, he stopped work too early. There are lots of things he could have done he'd have been brilliant at. He's got great people skills. We've got to help people with these shifts.

[Stephen Dubner]

So in your book you propose three major policy ideas for countries to achieve this longevity dividend that you call it, including raising the proportion of people working in the years running up to retirement, boosting productivity of older workers and increasing the retirement age. So let's talk politics. How do you see reconciling the needs you're prescribing with the realities of our political discourse at the moment?

[James Chappell]

On the politics, I wouldn't start with raising the state pension age. It actually quite annoys me at the moment that that's what governments are trying to do because not everyone can work for longer. That's why I absolutely focus on 50 to 65. There's a huge economic gain to be had to that in the US if you could slow half that rate of decline, 80% of people age 50 are working a third by 65. If you could half that, that gives you 4% of GDP every single year. That's a huge uplift in terms of resources. Then you can start worrying. I actually sort of raise the state pension age later. But what we've got to do is not make people work for longer, but support them working longer. There has to be about health, it has to be about skills and providing the age friendly jobs. And if you don't do that, you cannot raise the state pension age.

[Stephen Dubner]

There is this community of relatively small but quite prominent longevity hackers or, you know, scientists who are trying to really push the boundaries. What do you think of that movement? Do you think there are useful things that will come out of it? Or is it a kind of strange fantasy land or, or somewhere in between?

[James Chappell]

Yeah, it's a broad church, isn't it? What's really interesting about that group is that they've picked up on the malleability of age. Maybe they take it to extremes, but we're so wedded to thinking about chronological age. And if you think about chronological age, it's backward looking, not forward looking. So it misses the fact that actually a 65 year old today is different from a 65 year old 30 years ago because there are more years to go. The other great thing I think they are focusing on is that we've got a disease approach to health at the moment. But just as in psychology, had the positive psychology moment, that said, let's focus on what keeps people mentally well and happy as we're living longer. It is an aging process that is this biggest risk factor behind multiple diseases. The key thing about prevention is focusing on a biomarker. Could be these obesity drugs, it could be your sugar levels, it could be some biological process of aging. If you can slow that down, you postpone getting diseases. In other words, you stay healthier for longer.

[Stephen Dubner]

If you had the authority to remake a big wealthy country's healthcare system, maybe it's the us, maybe it's the UK with the same amount of spending currently. What are the first few things you do?

[James Chappell]

The first thing is about the same amount of spending. Cause unfortunately, I think you've still gotta deal with the current disease burden. Cause you can't just say to people, I'm not gonna treat you.

[Stephen Dubner]

All right, do you want me to give you an extra trillion dollars then? I mean, the US spends about 4 trillion on healthcare, let's say I install you in the US despite your citizenship and say I'm gonna give you an extra 25% of total healthcare spending. What are a few things that you think would address the issues that you see down the road?

[James Chappell]

Well, by the way, let me do the politician's trick and say I'm sure I can find efficiency gains to get into.

[Stephen Dubner]

That's what they said about the nhs and that didn't work out so well.

[James Chappell]

I do think you've got a ring fence prevention. And we talk about the nhs. NHS is set up to do intervention. There are lots of treatable things like, like heart disease, for instance. Diabetes looks increasingly like another one where if you intervene early enough, you can actually prevent or postpone certain diseases. So I would go for two or three key vaccines.

[Stephen Dubner]

What would you most want those vaccines to cover?

[James Chappell]

Cardiovascular disease, because cardiovascular disease links into diabetes, it links into dementia. So let me have those as the three that I would go for. There's a whole bunch of screening, genetic testing, all of which I think should be feasible with AI and big data. That's what the next few years are going to bring.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do any or many governments have a target for healthy life expectancy? And if not, should they?

[James Chappell]

I'm so glad you asked that. I think it's crazy. I mean, in my country, the biggest health target is the waiting list of operations, which is barely any relationship with health whatsoever. Health systems have to try and focus on a measure of healthy life expectancy. I mean, we've got to construct it. It's difficult, but heck, we focus on gdp, that's difficult to measure. So I think we can do it. I would make the Social Security age dependent upon that measure of healthy life expectancy. I do not think it is socially fair to demand people to work for longer if they're not healthier for longer. That gives ministries a financed incentive to invest in health because right now most ministries look at the health budget as a cost and say, I don't care how you spend the money, I'm just going to minimize how much I give you. We've got to recognize that actually if we can invest in health and we spend money in prevention, we get good outcomes. Every economist will say, we know health is one of the most important things in our life. We also know that interventions that keep us healthy, but also enable us to create resources that we can use over our life are particularly valuable. And I think we've got to bring much more in that health and economic perspective and how we allocate money.

[Stephen Dubner]

Most governments are not yet focused on allocating resources to longevity, as Andrew Scott would like to see, but the private sector is. Coming up after the break, Kyla Scanlon talks to some innovators who are going right past dog longevity and straight to the humans. I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

[Kristen Fortney]

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[Stephen Dubner]

Race the rudders, Race the sails, Race the sails.

[Kristen Fortney]

Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.

[Kyla Scanlon]

Over.

[Stephen Dubner]

Roger, wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailor. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started today at LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions apply. There is a growing body of research showing that some pharmaceuticals, including GLP1 treatments like Ozempic and Wegovy may have longevity benefits beyond their intended use. But the FDA has not approved any drugs that specifically target longevity. It's hard to imagine that won't change eventually, but the FDA may have to change first. The agency doesn't currently classify aging as a disease, which means the regulatory path to drug approval is not smooth. That's why loyal CEO Celine Haliwa, who Kyla Scanlon spoke with earlier is trying to get FDA approval for her dog drugs as a first step. But there are plenty of other startups out there that are going straight for the humans.

[I]

My name is Katie Fike and I am the co founder of Aging 2.0 and a managing partner of Generator Ventures.

[Stephen Dubner]

Fike's venture capital firm is focused on investments in aging and aging. 2.0 is a networking and founders program for startups in that space. Kyla Scanlon interviewed Katie Fike and asked how she got into the longevity business.

[I]

I was working for Lehman Brothers on the morning of September 11th in the world Financial Center. I'd actually been there until about three in the morning the night before, working on stuff that was, quote, very important. I came in that morning around 8. It was kind of a normal morning. And then obviously things quickly became very abnormal. I stayed in the building after the first plane had hit and then we were told to evacuate after the second one. Obviously it was a really traumatic experience. I was 21 years old. I had this kind of pit of my stomach feeling that I wanted the work that I did to matter more, not less. When real life happened, all this stuff that I'd been pulling all nighters for just really didn't seem to matter anymore. And a few months after September 11th, my mom sent me an article and then a book by an MD geriatrician named Bill Thomas. That book changed my life.

[Stephen Dubner]

Fike went back to school and wound up getting a PhD in Gerontology from the University of Southern California.

[I]

I had started my life in the tech and finance world and then I moved over into gerontology and I realized that these worlds were just so separated. The people in aging care services, the ones who really understood the needs, didn't know the people who were creating the apps or creating the business models, the people who were launching new startup companies, didn't even know about some of the opportunities that were hiding in plain sight in the aging space. And so what we did with aging 2.0 to start was getting those same people in the room. Sometimes people would want to put us in a little box and think like, oh, that's pretty niche. We would say, well, if it's more comfortable for you, you could just think about aging as the fastest growing, highest utilizing, most expensive consumers of our healthcare system. I remember one doctor used to say, if you're not a pediatrician or an obgyn, you're effectively a gerontologist.

[Andrew Scott]

It's interesting how many people don't consider this market. But you've also talked about the technology, you know, tweaking existing services like Uber and Tinder and helping those be useful tools for seniors. Could you talk through how you think about these mainstream tech platforms and how we could adapt some of this technology.

[I]

For older adults, the Uber for seniors or the Tinder for seniors? It starts to get a little similar to what traditional VCs often ask entrepreneurs, which is what if Google decides to do or what if Amazon decides to enter this market? That's a worthwhile question for entrepreneurs to think about when they're trying to think about should I leverage an existing technology or an existing model and bring it over into the senior care space? Because you're often competing against really well funded incumbents. What's often tricky about mentioning what are some of the most successful companies with aging? Some of the most successful ones have done it so discreetly that it's kind of hard to point out who they are. And the exact reason they're having success is because they're doing it discreetly and not so overtly. I think Apple is actually a fantastic example of that, where Apple has really focused on good design, really good customer service. If you walk by an Apple store, you will often see who's at the Genius bar might skew a little bit older, but they haven't made this the help bar for seniors. It's just Apple. Frankly, even being able to walk into a store in the first place is a very ageless and age friendly tactic.

[Andrew Scott]

Could you talk through what you look for in a pitch and how you balance this commercial aspect of how do you make money and the social impact of a potential investment?

[I]

In terms of the commercial side, we look at a lot of the same things that traditional investors would look at around any pitch. A strong team, a large total available market, good product, market fit depending on what stage you're at, ideally some early customers. It's really important to see an entrepreneur who's humble, who has high eq, who has strong empathy and who's willing to listen. We saw a lot of money get wasted and time get wasted by entrepreneurs who had their blinders on, thought they understood the solution, and really were not hearing the feedback they were getting from the market or from the customer.

[Stephen Dubner]

Scanlan also interviewed Kristen Fortney, co founder and CEO of a biopharma company called BioAid.

[Celine Haliwa]

We're focused on aging biology and therapies that can ultimately help aging. That's not by itself an investable prospect, partly because there are no medicines that are approved for that right now. What would the FDA regulatory path even look like? What would reimbursement even look like?

[Stephen Dubner]

Still, bioage raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital firms and they went public in 2024. Bioage has two drugs in development, one to fight obesity, the other for metabolic disease and inflammation. Here's Kyla Scanlon with Fortney.

[Andrew Scott]

Could you just talk through why you chose to focus on aging and your path toward co founding bioage?

[Celine Haliwa]

I deliberately went into the field because I was so excited by what it could mean for human health. There's all these different ways now that we can make, for example, a mouse live 30% longer, 40% longer. What's exciting is that it's not just living longer, it's living healthier longer. So in these animals, you're delaying cancer, you're delaying cardiovascular disease. What would that mean if we could do something similar for people? It could potentially have a much larger impact than going after diseases one at a time.

[Andrew Scott]

Can you talk about the industry at large? You know, just it being like a volatile space and how you think about the longevity of longevity companies?

[Celine Haliwa]

The funding environment in biotech has been especially challenging the past couple years. That's in contrast to 2021, for example, when a lot of companies were going public, a lot of big rounds were being done. There's pros and cons, right? Everybody today will be like, well, we're only investing in the good companies. And everyone was crazy back then. I think what's suff offering right now is the more innovative approaches which are riskier. There's still a lot of good science being funded, but a lot of it is building another drug for the same target. Very de risked science.

[Andrew Scott]

Can you talk about the de risking?

[Celine Haliwa]

What's relevant for Bioage is that there's still a few therapeutic areas where people are willing to take big swings. And one of those is obesity with the incretin drugs, you know, Zepp bound, wegavy. These are really unprecedented markets in biotech. And these medicines, they're really gen 1, right? They're these first injectable drugs that are having dramatic effects, not just on weight loss, but on incidence of disease. So everyone is very willing to finance additional exploration of this exciting new space. For example, our drug which mimics the effects of Apelin, it's a pill that you can take once a day that should improve weight loss and also can potentially improve body composition. Everyone in the obesity space would love to have a pill version of one of these injectable drugs. There are several of them being developed right now.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now I went back to Kyla Scanlon after she did these interviews to ask her how much investing momentum there is in the longevity space.

[Andrew Scott]

What's challenging for investors about the longevity space is that it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money. Two things that venture capitalists don't really like. They like to allocate as little money as possible and have things go as quickly as possible. And the CEOs of these more traditional longevity companies are like, we don't like how sparkly the has gotten because it distracts from what anti aging really is, which is just preventative. It's not about turning into a superhuman. I think investors like the sparkle aspect of it, but once they realize how hard it is to actually do good science, it might not be as interesting.

[Stephen Dubner]

And just how hard is it to do good science? Bio Age recently halted clinical trials of their drug Azela. When we reached out for an explanation, they said BioAge made the decision to discontinue the Ezellaprag trial after observing unexpected liver enzyme elevations in some patients receiving the drug. While these elevations were not accompanied by any clinically significant symptoms, the safety profile of the drug was no longer suitable for obesity treatment. Another of their drugs targeting neuroinflammation will have clinical results later this year. Year and bioage recently announced collaborations with Novartis and Eli Lilly. Still, at one point, bioage had a market capitalization of more than $600 million. Now it's down to around $150 million. And how about Loyal, the dog longevity company founded by Celine Haliwa? They've raised another $22 million since Kyla Scanlon spoke with Haliwa. And they've got 1,000 dogs enrolled in a study to test their drug that is intended to help older dogs live long. A few months ago, that drug got its preliminary efficacy approval from the fda, the first of three steps needed for FDA conditional approval. I asked Kyla Scanlon if she would want to give her dog Loyal's new life extending drug.

[Andrew Scott]

Oh my goodness. My dog was just diagnosed with cancer. So I would do anything in the world to give my dog a longer life. It is interesting, like how I think about her life relative to my life. I'm like, you have to live until you're 100. But you know, my dog is a pit boxer mix. She's on the larger side. And this is what Celine talked about in the interviews. Larger dogs are just, they're prone to dying a bit earlier. And so I'm seeing Celine's research and the whole thesis behind her company play out in my dog.

[Stephen Dubner]

How long do you expect to live?

[Andrew Scott]

I don't think about things that way. I will live however long I live. Yeah.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you have a number that you would consider, I'll put this in quotes. A success?

[Andrew Scott]

Well, it's always a bummer about my personality is I'm too philosophical and I read too much Carl Jung. And so death is just the next transition. Whenever it happens, it happens.

[Stephen Dubner]

Let me ask you one last question. Let's say that your generation, everybody who's 27 now, ends up living to on average 103, and that the quality of life is really good, which means that everybody gets, you know, another big, big chapter of 20 or 30 or 40 years where they're able to pretty much do what they want. I'm curious if you have ideas for other big chapters that you might want to do. Would you want to become an Opera Singer, a PhD philosopher, the President of some country, et cetera, et cetera?

[Andrew Scott]

Oh, yeah. I think what could be really cool if we all of a sudden added 20 more years to everybody's lives is like, how much more education. We could all consume you on learning forever, but it becomes more difficult because your time becomes more constrained. I would definitely take like 20 straight years to learn everything I could about various industries and then apply them to various ideas. I would have.

[Stephen Dubner]

I hope Kyla gets her extra 20 years, maybe more. Unfortunately, she recently had to put down her dog, whose name was Moo. Thanks to Kyla for helping out with this episode. She can be found on most platforms at Kylascan and her book is called in this Economy. And thanks to everyone else who shared their insights on the Elder Swell. I'd love to know what you thought of this episode and our whole Cradle to Grave series. Our email is radioreconomics.com Coming up next time on the show. Donald Trump has my colleagues in the Senate afraid of him. I think that we can beat fear. You may have heard that Cory Booker, the senior US Senator from New Jersey, recently took to the Senate floor for a record 25 hours straight to sound the alarm on Trump. But his concerns go deeper than that. If the Democratic Party or if leaders define themselves only by what we're against, we will be lost as a nation. We'll talk about that and we'll try to keep up with the news in real time. I'm just being told by my staff that an Israel Iran ceasefire has been announced. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. [e-mail] where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman with help help from Alina Coleman. It was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Dalvin Abuji, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Morgan Levy, Jasmine Klinger, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

[James Chappell]

Steve Wright the American comedian says, I want to live forever. So far, so good. That's kind of my approach.

[Andrew Scott]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side.

[I]

Of Everything Stitcher.

[Kristen Fortney]

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[Stephen Dubner]

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