Something You Should Know - Why You Are Not As Smart As You Think You Are & How Long Can You Reasonably Live?

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

It is rare to see a UPS truck turning left. Sure, sometimes they have to but they try not to. And there is a really good reason why that we can all learn from. I begin this episode with a discussion on that. (http://mentalfloss.com/article/60556/19-secrets-ups-drivers) Could it be you are not as smart as you think you are? Apparently so according to David McRaney author of the book and host of the podcast called You Are Not So Smart (https://amzn.to/2tGvPTq). David explains some of the interesting quirks and flaws of the human brain that make us think the way we do – that also makes our perception quite inaccurate a lot of the time. I bet you’ve wondered if it helps to pay your credit card bill early. Well, if you carry a balance it does. I will explain a simplified version of the math to show you how. You may not get rich from doing it but it certainly worth knowing and can save a fair amount of money over time. http://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/pay-credit-card-bill-early-and-save-1.aspx How long will you live? It’s important to grasp this because there are ramifications to the question for you, your parents and your children. Longevity continues to rise and with that comes the good and the bad. Dr. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology and public policy at Stanford University is founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and author of the book, A Long Bright Future (https://amzn.to/2KqrvPe) offers up so fascinating insight into how wonderful it is to be living so much longer than our ancestors – and why perhaps the best is yet to come.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, you don't often see UPS trucks turning left. There's a reason why and a lesson to be learned. Then, you are not as smart and your memory is not as good as you think. The very first time you remember something is the most accurate, and then each continuing time we recall something, it gets less and less accurate. It becomes more and more in line with what we know now and what we're experiencing currently and our current state of mind, our current beliefs.

Also, do you save money by paying your credit card bill early in the month, or does it make no difference? And longevity is on the increase, and it may be increasing faster than you realize. There's a fellow at Cambridge who argues that the first person ever to live to be a thousand is alive today.

There are people who are working on ways to try to actually uncap that cap on mortality. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily.

Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more.

Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. I record this part of the podcast just a few hours before it publishes and just a few hours before you likely hear it. And as I'm recording this, I've got up on my computer monitor our statistics. And one of the statistics that it tracks is series downloads of all time.

That means the total number of times any episode of this podcast has been downloaded. And we're at 9,999,967. So any minute now, we will hit 10 million. I mention it because it's a big milestone, 10 million downloads, and I mention it because you are a part of it, because you download and listen to this podcast, and that helped us get where we are. So thank you for that. First up today, UPS drivers know a thing or two about driving. So maybe we can all learn from their knowledge. One thing that UPS drivers, you'll notice, try to do is they try not to turn left.

Why? Well, UPS obsessively tracks their drivers, and they have discovered that a significant cause of idling time resulted from drivers waiting to make left turns, essentially going against the flow of traffic, according to a former UPS public relations manager. So drivers are instead encouraged to drive in right-handed loops to get to their destination. Consequently, many of the routes are designed to avoid left-hand turns, and UPS says that policy has saved hundreds of millions of gallons of gas and reduced carbon emissions by hundreds of thousands of metric tons since 2004. Another thing UPS drivers are encouraged not to do is drive in reverse. According to a UPS drivers are encouraged not to do is drive in reverse. According to a UPS spokesperson, the first rule of backing up is to avoid it. The way UPS sees it, backing up increases the likelihood that a driver will unintentionally bump into something or someone.

Again, that's advice we can all use. And that is something you should know. You have a pretty good idea of just how smart you are, right? Well, maybe not. You may be way off. According to David McCraney, David is a journalist and he's author of a book called You Are Not So Smart, and he is host of a podcast that has that same name. Hi, David. Hey there. So glad to be here, and thank you so much.

So you say that the two tenets of your premise are that, one, you are unaware of how unaware you are, and two, that you are the unreliable narrator of the story of your life. So let's start there. What do you mean I'm unaware of how unaware I am? Let me give you a real quick example, a study that I think illustrates this very succinctly. There's this great study where they would show people a group of ladies stockings and they would show this at a department store. This was done in the seventies and they would ask people, okay, take a look at all these stockings. There'd be five pairs lined up and they say, pick the pair out of this, out of this set, you know, test them all. You know, they would test one at a time and they would feel them and look at them and they'd say, which one of these do

you think is the best pair of stockings out of the group? And people reliably would pick the very last pair. Um, what they didn't tell those people was that they're all the exact same pair of stockings. They came out of the same pack. And what people didn't know was that when things are presented in a series, they call it the serial position effect. And you don't really know what else to go on. You will go on the last thing that you saw. That'll be the thing that's most salient in your mind. Now, when they asked the people, why did they choose the stocking that they chose? People didn't say that because they didn't know that. They instead said, I like this pair because it has the best texture. I like this pair because it has the best color. I like this pair because it reminds me of my wife's

stockings or my mom's stockings or something like that. People always came up with a story to explain their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to themselves. But that story was not true. It was a complete confabulation, as they say in the psychological sciences. It was a lie that they told themselves because it seemed reasonable. And we are always doing that. We're always lying to ourselves in a way that seems reasonable to explain ourselves to ourselves. But the notion that what we're saying is actually true, well, that's sort of, that can be a crapshoot at times. And in that experiment, they cleanly demonstrated that, that those people didn't actually know why they were doing what they were doing, but they never said, I don't know. They came up with an explanation. How else are we deluding ourselves or at least explaining things to ourselves in order to make sense of what we say we believe, if that makes sense?

The fundamental thing that really everything is built on top of when it comes to this wing of psychology is, of course, confirmation bias. That's the number one thing. I'm sure people listening are probably familiar with that term by now, but a few years ago, psychology is, of course, confirmation bias. That's the number one thing. I'm sure people listening are probably familiar with that term by now, but a few years ago, that was something that had not yet reached, I think, public consciousness in a strong way. And, you know, confirmation bias, I will say that it is often explained poorly. Some people say that confirmation bias is like when you buy a new car and then you see that car everywhere. That's not confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the whole reason we have science in the first place. It's the tendency to when you see something happen in the natural world, whether it's in your kitchen or it's out in a forest someplace or it's on TV, you then create an instantaneous hypothesis as to why that happened. And then you go looking for evidence to confirm that hypothesis. And when we go looking for evidence to confirm our hunches, we always can find it, especially now with social media and search engines and the internet and smartphones. And what we tend to do, which is something they, in psychology, they call it the makes sense stopping rule. Whenever we tend to feel, whenever we feel like we have found evidence that supports our hypothesis, we tend to stop looking for any more

evidence. And so that's confirmation bias. We are biased to confirm our assumptions and stop looking for evidence when we do. The whole role of science was to create an institution and a framework that seeks disconfirmation first. If you have a hunch about how the natural world works, go looking for evidence that would disprove your hypothesis. Because if you ask people to do that first, they often do find that evidence right away. And you do that enough times and you can start to iris in and zero in on the actual truth or something that is as close to the truth as we can get. So knowing this, if we're all faulty thinkers, if we all have this confirmation bias, what do you do to protect yourself? How do you

protect yourself from your own thoughts? That means you have to do what pilots do before they take off. They don't trust themselves. They don't trust themselves to do the right thing. They have a checklist. Even after hundreds of hours of experience and lots of training, they still commit to a checklist and they still commit to a co-pilot who's going to check up on everything that the pilot does and vice versa. The whole idea of this is human beings can't trust themselves to do the right thing, not as individuals or in groups. And when we have a better understanding of how we fall short of the angels of our better nature, or however you want

to put it, that gives us the opportunity to create these sort of institutions and practices that allow us to reach the goals that we would not be able to reach if we just trusted ourselves to our own devices without any kind of checklist-type behavior that gives us an opportunity to actually bypass these things. Because these things are, you know, you can't delete them from the brain. You just have to find a way to work around them or work with them. Yeah. The conversation today is with David McCraney. He is a journalist and author.

His book is called You Are Not So Smart, and he is also the host of a podcast by the same name, You Are Not So Smart. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue.

It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back,

and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla

who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others,

in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, David, when you say our memories are mostly fiction, I think people have a sense of that. I don't know that I would say that my memory is mostly fiction, but I know that when I look back at memories of my life, I tend to remember the good and somewhat discount the bad. And, you know, things are, some things are a little more fuzzy than, than perhaps they used to be. But, but you're saying it's deeper than that. Yeah, it's way deeper than that. I think by default, people tend to believe that the, that memory works like a video camera or works like a hard drive, that we tend to believe that we just simply store our recollections.

And then we want to think about those recollections. We bring them out of storage and look at them again. But that's not how brains work. The way brains work is they construct memories anew each time based off of what we know at the moment. So memory, the very first time you remember something is the most accurate. And then each continuing time we recall something, it gets less and less accurate. It becomes more and more in line with what we know now and what we're experiencing currently and our current state of mind, our current beliefs. So much so that it's very easy to implant false memories and it's very easy to see that sort of decay of, you know, accuracy over time. The memories are more like, uh, like, uh, a Lego set. You know, we, when I ask you to remember what you did on a certain day, you go through and you cobble that memory again

anew from the same legos and some some new ones you've acquired since then and what you make is not going to be exactly the same as it was when you actually experienced it so memory is extremely inaccurate that uh we don't remember things the way they were we remember things the way we are but there's no other way to do it or there's no other way to do it. That's true. But we do have the ability with, you know, the tools we have at our disposal to have more accurate representations of the past. And that's either through journaling or trusting other people to be journalists who record the first draft of what's going on right around us as it's happening, or to use tools like actual phone

you know cameras and recording devices so that we can recall things if the the idea though is like trusting a human brain to be the the master of recall is dangerous uh we see that in like the legal system where we trust eyewitness testimony. Uh, and there's, I would, his testimony is garbage. It's, uh, it's worthless. There is no reason to trust somebody's recollection of an event, uh, as testimony. Um, it's, uh, it's something that's such a throwback to a pre-scientific era that it just shouldn't be part of our legal system. Well, wait a minute. I mean, if, if, if you were there and, and at the and at the scene of the murder and you saw that it was Bob Jones and Bob Jones says he didn't do it and you know he did it because I don't trust that you did or didn't see anything because I know that memory is too faulty and you're not a reliable witness no matter what you say you saw or did. Now, given no other options, that evidence is what we have to go on.

But for the most part, eyewitness testimony is so poor and human recall is so poor and there's just so much there's so much scientific evidence to show this that uh personally i don't think that it should be part of our legal system at all the there's plenty of research to show that you can show someone a crime like actually show them a they'll do this in the lab where they show someone a video of a crime taking place and you cleanly clearly see the perpetrator of the crime. And then they give the, those eyewitnesses a police lineup and they ask, you know, to them to identify the person who committed the crime in the lineup and everyone will reliably do so.

They'll say it's number three or whatever. And then, you know, you can even do this with a hundred people and get an average where you say most people say it's number three. But what they don't reveal to any of those eyewitnesses is that the person in the video is not in the lineup. But since they don't know that and they see a person who roughly sort of kind of looks like that person. And just like in the experiment with the stockings, they're not going to say, I don't know. They pick someone and then they start writing that narrative that says that was the person. And they start rewriting their memories to say,

that is what I recall. And then you can't even argue with that person because they believe their memory more than they believe anything else, even though it's false now. And that happens so often and so easily. So what are some of the other ways we trick ourselves or delude ourselves? One of my favorites is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. So the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you imagine a person who's practicing their skills with a gun. They keep shooting the side of a barn over and over and over again. And then over time, the bullet holes tend to cluster in some places and not others. And then they put down the gun, they walk over to the barn and they paint a bullseye over the cluster. So it looks like they're a fantastic shot.

This is something that humans can't avoid doing. We're so, we're such good pattern recognizers and it's essential to our survival as a species to be great at recognizing patterns that when something is chaotic and random and noisy, we can't help but notice where it clumps up. And that's the thing about randomness is going to clump up in certain places. And then we tend to ascribe some sort of meaning to that clumpiness. We say there's some reason why that clustered together. And sometimes there's no reason at all. We've seen this with, you know, cancer clusters are a good example of this. There'll just be places throughout the United States where there are groups of people who get cancer at a higher rate than others geographically. And people tend to look for, well, why is that? And they'll find things that seem

similar between those regions and say, that must be why. And the real reason is that there's nothing that's happening here. Just about a third of people are going to get cancer, and sometimes it clusters up randomly. That's one good example of a human bias that can get us into a lot of trouble. You make the case that we have generally speaking too many friends on facebook but what do you mean by that oh god that's so crazy so this is something that was discovered uh a while back now uh by robin dunbar this seems to be that you can't keep up with very many people, right? We are unable to have a close friendship or a sort of reciprocal dynamic with more than about 150 people. It varies. People

are nuanced. So some people can go up to like 200 and some people can't reach 150 all the way. But it seems to be, we have like a limited amount of space cognitive there's a limited cognitive load for keeping up with other human beings and when i see keep up with them i mean think of like the kind of person you you know you could call on to help you move or someone that you could trust to keep a secret like we can only keep about 200 of those people in our lives at once because we simply don't have the cognitive capacity to keep up with more. Now there's a lot of speculation as to why that would be. Uh, and when we speculate, we have to admit that these are probably just so stories and we don't, we may never know the true answer, but there's a, a good educated guess is that we probably, the, probably the maximum size

group that we lived in for about 3 million years, uh, was probably around 150 or 200 people. So we've never developed the, we've never been pressured by the environment to have a greater capacity than that. Which is something that we learned that once we had social media, because I know in the early days of Facebook, and even today, people will have 1500 to 2000, quote unquote, friends, but you can't really keep up with that many people all at once. And if you do try to do that, you're going to have just the most basic surface level relationships with those people. I think we've come to understand that over the years, but in the beginning, there was sort of an attempt to manage that many people all at once,

and it's just impossible. That can be applied well, though, to our organizational systems. If you want to build a government institution or a corporation or a business or a military unit, you want to make sure that you don't task any individual having to keep up with more than 200 people. And you have to make an allotment for the fact that they probably already have friends and family that they're keeping up with. So you're going to have to figure out what's the best, what's the maximum number of people that you should ask that person to keep up with within your organization. So David, what's the takeaway from all of this? I mean, you've made the case that we're not as smart as we think we are, but what do we do with this? I think the most important thing for me is there is a unity in this humility that I think is important. um, shame or feelings of inadequacy that come from accepting the fact that you're biased in some way, or that you tend to have some kind of, uh, less than optimal reasoning, or that you,

uh, commit logical fallacies when you get into arguments or that we are tribal when it comes to politics or, uh, we're bullheaded and obstinate when it comes to changing our minds. And we are all resistant to evidence that might threaten our identities and all this sort of stuff. None of that has anything to do with you as an individual. That's just how people work. And once you accept that, we can create a better world that says, okay, given those things, what sort of institutions should we create? What sort of interpersonal relationships should we forge? What sort of cultures and governments should we try to foster? And what sort of policy should we try to use if we want to change people's behavior to something that mitigates harm or improves the lives of everyone around us?

I feel like the value of it is in just tossing away the notion that we are reasonable people, that we are rational thinkers. And once you toss that aside and see how people actually think and work, you can build a world based on how people actually think and work. You know, you wouldn't build a car for people that have four legs because people don't have four legs.

But we tend to build institutions and policies for a type of thinker that we're just not. And once we accept that, we can have a better world and a better future. Well, if you would like to know more, you can just search the phrase, You Are Not So Smart, because that is the name of David's book, his podcast, his website, everything. The podcast is You Are Not So Smart, which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts. His website is youarenotsosmart.com. And the book is You Are Not So Smart by David McCraney.

And there is a link to it in the show notes. Thank you, David. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI,

discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker, John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games,

and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Funny to think that just a few centuries ago, life expectancy was much shorter, much shorter than it is today. And while that's good news today,

have you ever thought what it means to you or your parents or your grandparents? We're living a long time, and with that come problems as well as opportunities. Laura Karstensen is a professor of psychology and public policy at Stanford University, where she is also the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She's also author of a book called A Long Bright Future. Hi, Laura. Welcome. So exactly how has life expectancy changed over time and in the last few centuries?

So through most of human evolution, life expectancy hovered around 20. It then inched up by the mid-1800s. It was 35 or something. 1900 life expectancy was 47 in this country, and by the time the 20th century was over, it was 77. Today it's 78. And it's still going up, but it's inching up now. But big, big gains in the 20th century in life expectancy came about by saving the young ones. When I talk about aging, I say it's not really a story about old people. It begins with a story about babies. It was in the 20th century that 25% of babies who were born died before they reached five. What's happened is that today,

most babies who are born in developed countries around the world are having the opportunity to grow old. That's a spectacular accomplishment. Right, so when you say life expectancy is going up, one of the big factors, though, is not that people are necessarily living a lot longer as much as so many babies were dying young that it was dragging the number down. That's right.

That said, you can compute life expectancy at any age. Generally, we say life expectancy at birth is. But you could also compute life expectancy at 65, and that's still going up. So that's where we're seeing about three months added every year. So this is not finished with us yet, this process. So life expectancy is going up. It continues to go up, and the question is, why?

Why is it going up? Are we just better at curing diseases? Are we better at just prolonging death? Are we living healthier? What's the reason? Great question. Medicine has something to do with it, but you could thank your garbage collectors as much as your physicians for these advances.

Much of the gain in life expectancy really came about because once we understood how diseases were transmitted, we improved the sanitation. We established garbage disposal or garbage waste disposal in a clean way. So the world we live in is much healthier today. And that's really what brought about these kinds of changes in the first place. Part of your question was about, you know, are people just living longer, but they're still sick, or are they actually healthier? And the good news is that for the last 50 years, each generation that has arrived at old age, let's give it an arbitrary number of 65, has been healthier than the one before it.

So people are not just living long because the death is being prolonged in a hospital or a nursing home or something, but people are healthier. And yet we hear that, you know, Western cultures, we are more obese, that we're more sedentary. Do you think the graphs could start to go the other way? Could life expectancy start to fall? Yeah, there's no guarantee in this that the graphs are going to keep going up. You know, again, throughout human evolution, they've steadily gone up.

And this obesity problem is so great that it actually could begin to go down again. It would be unprecedented in history, but it could. But at some point, I mean, if you plot it on a graph, which I'm sure you do, at some point the graph has to level off. Humans can't continue to keep living longer and longer. I mean, we can't live to be a million, can we? Oh, right. But now you're talking about a different concept, and that's lifespan, how long someone can live. The changes that occurred in the last century had nothing to do with changing how long someone could live. It was changing how long people did live. And again, it was these improvements

in the world that we live in through public health, through scientific breakthroughs, but also through electricity and other things that helped improve the well-being of populations. But we're not living longer than anyone ever could live, the lifespan idea. Rather, this is the average. So on average, people are living longer. So lifespan is the ceiling, and life expectancy is the average that keeps moving up towards that ceiling. So at one point, it's going to either have to stop at the ceiling or it's going to break through it. Well, that's true, too.

And we could. There are some people, some serious scientists, who are trying to see if they can increase lifespan through medical intervention. So that had nothing to do with where we are today, but it could, in the 21st century occur. So we could increase lifespan, as you say. There's a fellow at Cambridge who argues that the first person ever to live to be 1,000 is alive today.

Come on! Well, I'm not putting my money on that bet, but there are people who are working on ways to try to actually uncap that cap on mortality. Science can never tell you something can never happen, right? We can just rule things out. So we can't say it will never happen. I don't put a lot of stock in it. I don't lose sleep over it. I think if we thought it would happen, I would lose sleep over never happen. I don't put a lot of stock in it. I don't lose sleep over it. I think if we thought it would happen, I would lose sleep over it, but I don't.

We don't know where lifespan is. I guess this is the bottom line here is we don't know what the average lifespan is for humans. That is, under optimal conditions, how long would people live? And biologists argue about this all the time, but it's all at a theoretical level because we really don't know the answer. But some of them argue we could go to 140, 150, and there are others who think it's closer to 110. But that's kind of where the debate is today. But how much of how long we live, everybody's individual, and some people die young, some people die old, some people have accidents.

But I would think that whatever it is that moves the needle for the whole population has to be more fundamental, like genetics. Or is it more about how we live our lives. Well, the exciting news is what you do matters probably more even than your genes, especially as you get into older ages. So this is not to say that genes don't matter, they matter enormously. But what we've learned about genes in recent years, largely through the Human Genome Project, is that genes express differently in different environments. And so the environment matters enormously even when there's a genetic cause of something. One of my favorite examples is diabetes. So diabetes has a strong heritable component. So genes have something to do with getting diabetes or not.

But in parts of the world where people eat a Mediterranean diet, a low-fat, you know, olive oil, nut lard, you know, that kind of diet, there isn't a correlation between genes and diabetes. So what we've done is somehow provided the perfect environment for genes related to this disease. Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of like the idea of, you know, anybody can drown, but you can never drown if you never go in the pool. So they've got that figured out.

But I think what we're learning is that that tends to be a general rule. A whole lot of things express or don't express. I mean, the simple one is something like alcoholism. I mean, you can have a strong genetic tendency to be an alcoholic, but if you never took a drink, you would never be an alcoholic. So when you look at all this research, what does it all mean? Well, I guess I could answer that partly. I guess it means that perhaps we have a lot more

say-so over how long we live than maybe we thought. This, I think, is where the science gets really exciting, because we are learning a lot about what predicts long life and what predicts shorter life. And one thing we're learning about is lifestyle, exercise. Exercise, it's hard to express how important exercise is, not just for physical health and reduction of disease risk, but it turns out for cognitive health, for memory. And so exercise is the best thing you can do that's known so far. We're also learning an awful lot about the social world and social environment and discovering the exact mechanisms by which social stress comes to kind of remodel

the biochemical systems in our bodies and put us at greater or lesser risk for different kinds of diseases. So the prescription then is to exercise, and what else? Well, you should pursue relationships that are meaningful and overall positive. None are completely positive, but overall good. And you should see those people. Make sure that you don't lose touch with them. Leisure is good for people. Taking breaks from work is good for people's health. So as we understand some of these things, and an awful lot of them sound like common sense, I guess what we're discovering is that they actually

affect not just quality of life, but how long we live. And living a good, kind of healthy life is going to result in positive old age outcomes. But then why is it that longevity keeps going up when people seemingly in droves keep defying the advice you just gave of exercise and relationships and all that. It seems that people are eating horribly, they're not exercising, people are more lonely and isolated than ever before, and yet longevity keeps going up. Well, the people who are suffering the worst of this aren't old yet. The youth are the people today who have the biggest obesity problems. Boomers aren't doing great, but we're doing better than the kids. So the generation that people are really worried about are people who are 10 to 20 today.

And it's not clear what their old ages will be like. So as someone who is obviously really into this, what is it about all this that makes you excited? What do you lie in bed and think about at night? Well, to me, the greatest opportunity we have is to now restructure the whole life course in a way that best uses extra time. So far, what we've been doing with these added years is to put them all into leisure at the end of life.

That is, the only stage of life that's gotten longer with all these added years is old age and it's retirement. I often ask students in my classes, if you were going to design a life course for somebody who's 50, that is, when should they get married, have an education, all these things, and then what would it look like? And then now design a life course for somebody who's going to live 90. And they're very different kind of life courses. They look different. And I believe that we can solve many of the problems of society today because of longer life. So rather than create new problems, I think that we can solve them.

What's an example of a problem we can solve by living longer? Young people, children, need more attention than they're getting. For an awful lot of children, both parents are in the workforce. They're spending time alone or without an adult who pays a lot of attention to them. We're now going to have more adults than children, many more. And to the extent that we can harness that resource and direct older adults to the needs of children, then we're going to improve their lives and we'll improve society overall.

Certainly, if you look at today's older people, say 64 to 74, that's a group of people that is hardly distinguishable from the 50-year-olds in terms of health. And for many of them, they're feeling like they've been sort of pushed out into pasture and people aren't asking them to do anything. We can build a new world that stretches out life instead of just making retirement longer and improve those kinds of problems. I like what you said, because it's something I've thought about as well, is that, you know,

as life expectancy grows, what grows is our time in old age. And wouldn't it be great if we could, you know, have more time in our 20s or 30s or 40s or whatever, rather than it all be at the end? But maybe that's not literally changing, but essentially changing. Laura Karstensen has been my guest. She's a professor of psychology and public policy at Stanford University,

where she is founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her book is called A Long Bright Future, and there's a link to it in the show notes. Thanks, Laura. Thank you very much. As you might imagine, there are several places that are off limits to airplanes for security reasons. You can't fly over the White House, for example. In fact, most of Washington, D.C. is a no-fly zone. But there are some other places you cannot fly over that might surprise you.

Disneyland and Disney World. After the September 11th attacks, Disney successfully had a temporary no-fly zone restriction slipped into a nearly $400 billion federal spending bill in 2003, which established the restricted airspace over its Anaheim and Orlando theme parks, and that restriction remains in place to this day. You can't fly over the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. George Washington's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, you can't fly over. The wooden structure

there is so fragile that a no-fly zone was established to prevent further damage caused by the vibrations from overhead aircraft. As a result of this restriction, even aerial photography of the home is rarely allowed. You can't fly over the Camp David Presidential Retreat in Maryland. Due to the high-profile nature of the visitors and activities at Camp David, the airspace above the compound has a three-mile no-fly zone around it. Area 51. Its exact location isn't known for sure. It's either in California or Nevada, but the whole area is off-limits to airplanes. The Air Force says it uses the area to test

new military technology, but Area 51 became the stuff of legend after the so-called Roswell incident, and is allegedly where a recovered alien spaceship was stored after crashing in New Mexico in 1947. What's weird is that this spot of nearly empty desert is more restricted than the airspace above the nation's capital. And here's an odd one, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. This million-acre expanse of pristine wilderness runs 199 miles along the Canadian border, and President Harry Truman established the no-fly zone back in 1948, and it is still in effect today. And that is something you should know.

You'll find us on Facebook and Twitter, and what we do over there, in addition to let you know about new episodes, we also post additional content that I know you would enjoy. So do like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn, and we'll see you over there. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa D. Montz, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you.

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