Welcome to Intelligent Swared. I'm Senior Producer Connor Boyle. We're diving back into our discussion on how to stay healthy throughout a long life with neuroscientist and best-selling author Daniel Levittin today.

Daniel appeared back in 2020 to discuss his book The Changing Mind and neuroscientist's guide to aging well.

Joining Daniel for this episode is journalist and author Camilla Cavendish and her book is Extra Time 10 Lessons for Living Longer.

If you'd like to hear the final part of this three episode conversation, you can support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations by heading to IntelligentSquared.com slash membership or subscribe to our channel on Apple.

Let's rejoin the discussion now with Camilla Cavendish asking what is the importance of sleep in a healthy lifestyle.

You talk about the sort of circadian rhythms and how they change and I think you're an early morning person aren't you?

I am. So you stick to that. You say to yourself, I don't care what else is going on, I'm just going to get up at 5.30 in the morning.

Pretty much.

Which is tough but I guess that's the recipe for success.

It was tough at first but once I got my biological clock entrained that I'm going to get up at 5.30 and go to bed at 9.30.

It was a rough few months but once I did it was easy.

Let's talk about work because there's a whole debate going on here and in the States about, you know, should you work longer?

If you work longer are you keeping younger people out of the job?

I'm fascinated by the fact that in the US presidential election we have a huge number of leading candidates who are in their 70s.

When you're in the States, I mean academics, I would say that academics, judges and politicians just don't seem to have an age path.

So when I went back to Harvard, I went back to Harvard 25 years after I left and the guy who taught me is now in charge of the program and he's 83 and he's just as sharp as he ever was.

So in the States there seems to be this sort of three-pass Geico-Richards Act housing.

It's a free pass in those professions but in other professions we say no you can't possibly work past 55.

You know people have been made redundant.

So is your argument because your argument clearly is the same as mine because we need to work longer because you're talking about all of that.

Everything you've said in a curiosity, keeping active means you need to keep having a sense of purpose.

Should we have any kind of age limit in terms of the big jobs people can do like being president or is that actually just no longer relevant at all?

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