What we've learned about aging should create immense optimism among people in their teens,

20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s about getting older.

If we design a society for longer lives, which we could do, every age could thrive because

of longevity.

There is huge cause for optimism and we can get rid of the headlines that we see almost every day in the paper that the longevity we've created is a looming disaster.

Hi everybody. I'm Emily Capital Lupo, whoop SPP of research algorithms and data, and I am joined today by the incredible Dr. Linda

Fried. Dr. Fried, thank you so much for joining us today.

It's a pleasure to be here, Emily. Thank you.

I heard you speak on another podcast where you were talking about how early in your career

frailty was loosely defined with this kind of casual, you know it when

you'll see it kind of attitude. What do you think most people are getting wrong or don't

understand about frailty? And I'd love if in answering that question, you could use that as a

jumping off point to tell us about your background and how you got into this space. I became a geriatrician in the late 1980s when I was leading a clinical program that did

geriatric assessments on older people with complex health problems.

And the entry criteria for that kind of approach was that people should be frail.

And that frailty really was a condition that was central to understand so that we could take

better care of older people and the physiologic and biologic changes that happened with

aging.

The problem was that confronted me that all the clinical trials and evaluations of geriatric assessment were coming up negative, meaning they weren't showing the impact we were seeing clinically.

And I started puzzling over this a lot because what I have been trained to

understand was that frailty was a condition that was recognizable and occurred in a subset of older

people as they aged and that it marked a state of high vulnerability, decreased ability to tolerate

...