Women live five years longer than men.

As soon as puberty hits, the risk of death per year for men and women diverges.

And it never converges again.

When we're teenagers, well, it's basically because men are idiots. Say, you know, we take more risks, we drink more, we smoke more, we drive too fast. But also the sort of more tragic side of this is men are much more likely to commit suicide than women are later in life. We're at higher risk of things like cardiovascular disease. Now we don't really know exactly why that is.

It could be that the testosterone, certainly in early life,

in making us do stupid things, but it could be accelerating some of those age-related diseases. There's some really fascinating studies that have been done looking at eunuchs. This has many have had their balls chopped off. And... Andrew Steele is a scientist, writer, and co-founder of the Longevity Institute. He has spent over a decade studying the science of aging.

James and Andrew discuss the useless habit of optimizing your life,

why your face reveals your age and...

What is the problem with aging?

Between 5 and 25% of how long you live is explained by your genes.

So if your parents died between the ages of 60 and 85 or something, that doesn't really have

a bearing on your longevity.

That means that between 75 and 95% is down to lifestyle, but it's also down to luck.

There's a huge component of just randomness.

If you were to give five low-hanging fruit to people, when they finish this episode, they can go away and go, I'm going to do that.

Number one, do not.

Isn't it annoying when people interrupt your podcast to promote random crap and spend a minute talking about the benefits? I respect your time, so I do it in 12 seconds. These are some of our Neutonic products, and they're really good. So please head to Newtonic.com and find out for yourself. Right, let's go back to the episode now. Don't forget, newtonic.com. So Andrew, what is the problem with aging? Well, it kills us. If you think about what happens to you as you get older, what's going on inside your biology makes loads of diseases more likely. Cancer, heart disease, dementia. You hardly ever hear about these in young people. It does happen sometimes. But the risk factor, the single biggest risk factor is what scientists call it, for getting any of those diseases, is simply how old you are. So most people who die of breast cancer, although you hear about a lot of people in their 30s who get it, it's mostly a disease of women in their 60s, 70s, 80s years old. And what that means is, if you add up all the different causes of death, around 90% of deaths in rich countries are caused by aging. And not only is it deaths, it's all the suffering that comes along with it, is the frailty, is the hearing loss, it's the incontinence, the impotence, all of these different conditions that become much more likely as we get older. And so that, for me, is the problem with aging. So if we were to look at aging, not as just something that happens, but maybe a cause of death, let's say if we were to categorize it as like a disease, as I think I've seen in your book, if you were to say that, suddenly people would go, hold on, all these people are dying from this disease. Maybe we should allocate some funds, resources, or more effort into fixing

that. How does that look? Because some people, if they were to look into longevity or aging,

they could be very much easily taken down the path of Brian Johnson, looking to live to 200?

I think you want to live forever, doesn't he?

Where do you stand on people when they talk about that? And does that tarnish your mission and your approach, would you say? Oh, wow, there's like five questions. Sorry, no, that's all right. So I think the field is at this really interesting place at the moment. I think this is the single most exciting bit of science for the future of medicine. It's hard for me to tell you how excited I am by this stuff. But at the same time, when you're scrolling through your Instagram feed, almost all of what you see is bullshit. And how can it be that this word longevity, to me, as a scientist, is so, so exciting, and yet out there as a consumer, it's just a minefield. And the real challenge is like, is separating the factor in the fad and trying to understand, you know, how could this possibly be so exciting, given all the nonsense you see out there online? And the reason I'm so excited about it is we have literally dozens of ways in the lab to slow down, maybe even reverse aging animals like mice. Now, this doesn't mean it's ready for humans to go out and start taking all pills the mice are taking because humans are not mice. But if we've got so many ideas, all of which work in a lab setting, then surely some of those are going to work in people. And we need to do those trials and find out which those things are before we start recommending that people do it. And I think the challenge is because we've got all these promising results, all the influencers, a lot of fitness people or just general nutrition health people out there, they've rebranded what they're doing as longevity. And people hawking supplements, you know, no longer are these supplements for heart health or for some particular thing. They have this sort of catch-all longevity idea. And that is, you know, there's a fundamental truth there. I think if we treat

the aging process, whether or not we call it a disease, if we can come up with medical ways to

...