Welcome to the Lifespan Podcast, where we discuss the science of aging and how to be healthier at any stage of life.

I'm David Sinclair. I'm a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School,

and I'm also co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.

In this podcast series, we're talking about why we age, and how to slow, stop, and even reverse that process to give us longer and healthier lives.

In this episode, this final episode of the eight part series, we're talking about the very near future,

what's coming down the line that will potentially greatly extend our lifespans.

I'm joined here by my lovely co-host and my co-author of Lifespan, Matthew Lapland. Welcome.

Hey, thank you.

So, yeah, we've been talking over the last few minutes about what the future really looks like and how much it's going to change our lives,

but even how hard it is to predict the future just a few years out, because things are changing so quickly.

Well, in fact, we set off to give some predictions when we worked on Lifespan together,

and a lot of the things that you had said, you envision coming down the line, maybe five years out, maybe ten years out,

by the time the book had published, and certainly now two years after the book had published, they're already here.

We even have this illustration in the book of a person going online, doing a telemedicine interview with a doctor

and having medicines delivered to their home in that case by drones, but we're pretty much already there, thanks to the pandemic.

Yeah, we are. And I think there's a lot of other things that are just coming a lot faster than we could have even envisioned.

And also, in part, because of the pandemic, because the pandemic has really brought so many of us face to face with some of the constraints

of how our world was organized in the before times.

And how that, it's not very flexible.

It's not very responsive to the needs that we are experiencing, not just in the pandemic, but also as we re-orchestrate our lives in the 21st century.

And even when we wrote the book, there was pushback, even within our conversations, how realistic is it that people will take their own health care, medical care into their own hands?

And would they be allowed to? And we've been rapidly pushed into that world where you can take home tests for pretty much anything, you know, blood tests for pretty much anything.

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