I told Sean Hannity "no" on live mics

Sitting with Sean Hannity and Gary Brecka exposed a flaw in the longevity industry. Here's what actually controls your lifespan.

I recently found myself sitting with Sean Hannity and Gary Brecka, the health influencer who famously helped UFC owner Dana White take his health back.

Mics were hot. Cameras were rolling. Sean had recently launched Hanging Out With Sean Hannity, a long-form podcast.

Gary and I weren’t there to talk politics¹. We were there to talk health.

Sean looked at Gary. “Gary, you said to me that if you’re alive to the next five years, the odds of you living to 100 go up exponentially.”

“Even higher than that,” Gary said. “If you’re alive five years from now, it will be your choice if you want to live to 100. We have a unique time where there’s a convergence of early detection, big data, and artificial intelligence.”

Sean then pointed to me. “Do you agree with Gary?”

My mind said “f*ck no.” But my mouth said, “Can we all live to 100 in the next five years? I don’t think so. No.”

Today’s post explores:

• Why the average person born today lives 20,000 extra days compared to about 150 years ago.

• The flaw in early genetics studies that led the longevity industry to vastly underestimate how much your DNA dictates your lifespan.

• Trends in longevity—have we hit a ceiling?

• Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and three of the country’s top doctors weigh in and answer the question: Can we live to 100 in the next five years?

• What you can do, and where Gary and I agree: A massive dataset shows what predicts death, and how you can gain 20 extra years.

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Yesterday’s podcast: Protect your brain + AMA

Neuroscientist Tommy Wood jumped back on to explain what fitness activities reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Plus, I answered six fitness-based questions from listeners, including one from the department of dipshit questions (involving golf, baseball, and cigarettes).

• Listen here

• Watch here

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A history of human life: mostly brief and brutal

The anthropologist Michael Gurven concluded that sometime around 50,000 years ago, humans developed the ability to live past age 70². But few were so lucky—only 16 percent of people for most of history made it that far.

A quarter to a half of people died before age five. If you survived childhood, you’d probably still die in what we’d now call early middle age—between 25 and 40, from infection, murder, childbirth, starvation, weather, falls, drowning, snakebites, you name it.

When people crowded into cities, things tended to get worse. Diseases spread faster. Food ran out more often.

Even as recently as 1860, a person born in the US could expect to live about 39 years.

Escaping early death

It wasn’t until around 150 years ago that we started improving the odds of reaching 70 or beyond.

We didn’t figure out how to live longer. We figured out how to not die so early by debugging our environment.

We cleaned drinking water and built sewers. We washed our hands. We developed vaccines and antibiotics. We fortified food with missing nutrients. We installed guardrails, seatbelts, and airbags.

In Extra Life³, author Steven Johnson calculated that because of those public health advances, a person born today can expect to live roughly 20,000 more days than someone born just a century and a half ago.

He also ran the numbers on what gave us the most extra life. Here’s what he found: