The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Chris Conway Discusses Life Expectancy Assessments and The Future of Healthcare

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Chris Conway Discusses Life Expectancy Assessments and The Future of Healthcare ISCservices.com Show Notes About The Guest(s): Chris Conway is an expert entrepreneur and operator in the life settlement practice. He is the founder of ISC Services, a micro longevity assessment business that estimates life expectancy for the insurance and life settlement industry. With over 32 years of experience in the field, Chris is known for his critical thinking and straight-talking approach to helping investors and asset managers develop the next generation platform for life contingent businesses. Summary: Chris Conway joins host Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show to discuss his expertise in the life settlement practice. He explains how his company, ISC Services, offers research-driven life expectancy assessments for the insurance and life settlement industry. Chris highlights the importance of individualized assessments and the potential impact of genetics on life expectancy. He also discusses the changing landscape of healthcare, the rise of long COVID, and the role of technology in improving life expectancy predictions. Key Takeaways: ISC Services provides individualized life expectancy assessments for the insurance and life settlement industry. Genetics play a role in life expectancy, but lifestyle choices and healthcare access can also have a significant impact. Long COVID is a complex syndrome that may have long-term effects on health, but its impact on life expectancy is still uncertain. The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, with advancements in treatments and technologies improving life expectancy. Quality of life is an important consideration in aging, and individuals should strive for a balance between longevity and enjoyment. Quotes: "Life insurance is the only form of insurance that will pay a claim if you have it in force when the claim event occurs." - Chris Conway "You can positively or negatively affect both your credit score and your life expectancy." - Chris Conway "There are anomalies in the world where people demonstrate the ability to live beyond the averages, even with unhealthy lifestyles." - Chris Conway "The longer you live, the longer you will live because you're demonstrating the ability to endure these things." - Chris Conway

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Boy, she does that so much better than me. Welcome to the Big Show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

As always, welcome to the Big Show. We bring you the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winners. All the smartest people on the planet bring their stories. They cultivate them over their lifetime or sometimes multiple lifetimes, if you believe in that. If you're in Hollywood or something, I don't know. But they bring their stories and as we always say on the chris foss show stories are the owner's manual to life that's how we learn you watch movies tv all that even the kardashians are stories unfortunately and i don't know why

why am i being why chris why who hurt you what which kardashian hurt you all of them actually if you watch the show i lost like five iq points over there chris conway joins us on the show today he's our featured guest and he's gonna be telling his stories about life lessons and stuff you need to know during it or else i don't know i just start saying that on the show all the time it's funny he chris conway is an expert entrepreneur and operator in the life settlement practice he has been offering research-driven life expectancy assessments for a range of industries so we can all figure out how long we're going to live he'll tell us actually the day we're going to die no i'm just kidding he's

not going to do that maybe he will i don't know we'll find out you got to listen to the show damn it he also gives this for senior living senior living sector, offering the research-driven life expectancy. So you can plan when you're going to get your inheritance, I guess, basically. We'll find out. His peers know him as a critical thinking, straight-talking entrepreneur, advocate, focused on working with investors and asset managers to develop the next generation platform for life-contingent businesses to prepare for the coming wave of older age consumers. Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you? I'm well, Chris. Thank you very much. I love the intro and appreciate the opportunity to

talk to you today. Appreciate having you as well.C services is at www.iscservices.com. There you go. And give us a 30,000 overview of what you do and how you do it over there. Well, we operate what we call a micro longevity assessment business. In simple terms, we estimate life expectancy for the insurance and life settlement industry predominantly, but there are other markets we can talk about on an individualized basis. So as opposed to a population number where everybody gets lumped in together, we look at each individual one at a time and assess life expectancy and actually issue a report, which is a snapshot of the condition of that person in the moment. Wow. That's pretty good. So it's like Carfax people maybe or something.

That's a good way to look at it. The other analogy that we think we may evolve into is something along the lines of a credit score. Boy, if you give me a credit score based on my health, I might not be able to call for any mortgages. That might be true for a lot of people.

That's the example. You can positively or negatively affect both of those right that's true you can improve your credit score and you can improve life expectancy on the insurance forms and health forms that are like do you smoke do you drink do you take meth do you take crack you know to some extent yes we actually consume that as input. We don't normally deal directly with the public, although we can, but we get that kind of information in as part of the data, if you will, that we analyze for our clients. There you go. And so what's my life expectancy? When am I going to die?

I'm just kidding. I probably have to fill out the forms. So who are your clients on this? Is it a big business then usually? Our clients range from life insurance brokers, financial planners, senior living facility operators to large investment funds, often with brand names that are unfamiliar to the household but backed by some of the largest financial institutions in the world. And they purchase policies based on life expectancy assessment and other things. And we sell those property estimates, if you will, into those marketplaces. Do you guys, because I don't know if there's a way or I've seen questions around this, but do you guys take in genetics at all? Like, do you ask questions like, you know, how long do your family members live? What were their sort of health histories? We do.

The family history is a relevant factor for underwriting. Interestingly enough, in the insurance market, there are actually states that prohibit now the use of that information. Really? But from our perspective, and we're a subset, a very small subset of the life insurance industry, but those are relevant factors. There's a lot of things you can do to improve your life expectancy or harm it, but there are some things that you can't yet do anything about,

like who mom and dad were and how they behaved and so on. Yeah. I'm hoping I have my mom's genetics she's had a really clean run through life and she's old and that's mean to say but you know it's a fact it's a fact of life i think she'll she you know she gives me a bad time about it on her birthday but she's you know she's had a straight run she's had she's 81 years old she's never had any major you know stroke heart attack nothing clean run so far the know, she's had a straight run. She's 81 years old. She's never had any major, you know, stroke, heart attack, nothing. Clean run so far. The only thing she's had is, you know, some knees replaced.

And she's, you know, she's lived her life. And so I'm hoping I have a run like hers. You know, I have a lot of these friends that are having heart attacks at 55, and some of them are kicking over, and I'm just like, oh, geez, wow, that's my age. It can be frightening to reach the point, and I've certainly reached that point, where you think, hey, that could be me because the calendar lines up such that you're the same age, been hanging around together doing the same things. But your genetics can help you a lot. Yeah.

In fact, I think think isn't that largely what it is you know you see people live to 100 and it seems either that or i don't know if it's my perception but it seems like a lot of jewish people live a long long life like they usually make the 100 and stuff i don't know if that's i don't know if there's a a lot of data for a lot of reasons political reasons and otherwise where ethnic background, there are factors, for example, sickle cell disease. Certain conditions are relegated predominantly to certain ethnic groups. But there are more people living longer, particularly amongst those that are elderly, wealthy, well-advised, have access to the best health care and, and, you know, have a genetic predisposition. I have a

grandmother that made it to 101, broke her hip at 97 and survived, which is rare. Sadly, my mother did not make it that far because something came in from the outside, a cancer that was not genetically oriented. But it doesn't hurt to have longevity in your family history. And we do take that into consideration because it is a factor. But it's only about, researchers tell us it's 30, 35% of the force behind your life expectancy. It's not as predominant as one would think. And that gives you the opportunity to change it. Yeah.

Yeah. Just get healthy. And, you know, I, I, you know, all these smoking and drinking and, you know, meth and party and heroin and lions and tigers and bears and whores. And we're just going right down the, I don't know, all those things are bad for you. Oh my. Yeah. That's what you, you, you got the joke.

I was trying to set up in some, oh my lions and tigers and bears. But you know, I've had a pretty, I've had a pretty good run. I, I, I, I haven't had to use my health insurance ever. It's like the dumbest thing I pay for. But to me, at this point, it's just like an extraordinary event sort of thing. But I just never have had to use it in 55 years. Well, look, you don't want to use your insurance, right? I mean, the funny thing about life insurance in our business,

and I've been around that business most of my career, is that life insurance is the only form of insurance that if you have it when the claim event occurs, it will pay. Most people, you know, they spend their whole lives trying to drive safely and not have accidents and so on. And they spend a lot of money for the protection that they hope never to need. Life insurance is one of those things that a lot of people have, but don't understand. Well, it is the one form of insurance that always pays a claim. If you have it in force when that event occurs, because we all eventually go to the great beyond.

Wait, what? I thought it was exempt from that. So there you go. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get in this business, what? I thought it was exempt from that. So there you go. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get in this business, Chris? I mean, the true story is that I was working for a small consulting firm in Lexington, Kentucky. It's a beautiful town. And we went to the Cincinnati area to do a seminar on advanced planning, a financial planning technique.

And one of the fellows in the audience at the end of the presentation asked me if I wanted to have a beer. And we went for a beer and we sat down, had a nice chat. And he said, have you ever heard of a viatical settlement? This is 1990. And I said, I have not. And the viatical settlement market grew out of the AIDS epidemic, where people with AIDS, which was at that time, a terminal condition, almost guaranteed. And they were selling their life insurance to get money to pay for care, because there was no social infrastructure. Healthcare didn't cover it. It was an epidemic that the National Institutes of Health and so on were working on, but nobody could fix it.

And I became fascinated with turning the life insurance product on its head and using it in a different way. There was a lot of social benefit involved and all that, but I just never heard of it and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I often describe it as kind of a virus where you get an idea in your head and you can't let it go and it's a real thing. I've been in the business for 32 years ever since then because I think it has a lot of potential. It's interesting. There are problems to solve. But it was just a casual conversation over a cold Budweiser that got me started.

Now, did you start this company? Did you launch it? We actually bought the brand from a friend of mine who, sadly, he was an actuary and an underwriter he he loved life and he lived large and he passed of a heart attack oh wow his business partner is a super guy still around um and we i contacted him and i said i have no idea what i'm going to do with this thing but would you sell it to me? I knew this fellow's family. We were friends and we bought it without knowing what we would do with it. Again, it was

a component of the business we were in. And we, I was fascinated by the potential that it had to serve an older age market that was much larger than the life settlement business. And, and he was retired and interested in racing sports cars on the weekends and that kind of thing. He sold it to us. Turned out there were some liabilities there. And then about five years in, my business partner and I said, you know, what are we doing sitting on this thing? Let's fire up the engines again. So we had an operating history and then a pause. And then we re-entered the market, which is life settlements is small. And I mean,

we had orders on day one and have been going at it ever since trying to grow the business and promote the industry and see if we can develop the technology and the science and the art of underwriting as best we can in that marketplace. There you go. Well, I'm hoping with my mom's genetics and then my genetics so far, I mean, I've been overweight. I drank kind of hard for about 15 years, but I quit all that. I never smoked. I'm hoping that I have my mom's genetics

and the fact that I've had a clean run so far. But I don't know. You never know. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. I could get cancer tomorrow, I suppose. That's genetics and the fact that I've had a clean run so far. But I don't know. You never know. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. I could get cancer tomorrow, I suppose. That's always an option. But I'm hoping I got some sort of good genetics going on because, like, I don't like doctors. They don't like me.

And, oh, I do. Full disclosure, I did have to start getting testosterone treatment. My free testosterone is a little low. So, I guess, technically, but that's not an insurance. I'm just paying that with cash because i don't really i don't really want to mess with it so this is kind of interesting what what are some changes that you're seeing in the world with with you know with your analyzation and research of people are you seeing you know higher cancers more overweight

americans this might be a dumb this might be an obvious question. You know, as the baby boomers are just in mass going into retirement, what are some of the different things you're seeing? And maybe, I don't know, some advice you give to people, live their lives a little bit better, like quit smoking and meth. I mean, one of the things that I've learned, and I'm not an underwriter. I own the company. We employ underwriters and doctors and actuaries and so on. Most of them are friends and people I've known for a long time. One of the most interesting things we see in the population of lives that we look at,

older age people, generally they're fairly well off, although the life settlements market is trying to to become more efficient so it can serve the average consumer, if you will. One of the things we see is something that you're kind of referring to when you talk about your family history and the fact that you've avoided the need for health care so far. And that is. There's there's an average life expectancy for the average male and female, non-smoker, smoker, et cetera, in the population. But if you get past the window where you're likely to be amongst the average and pass away, 75 to 85, let's say. It's not that broad. But then you reach a point at which all the things that might have impacted you, your life expectancy, haven't. And we all have people in our lives that are overweight, smoke, and drink, and they're 95 years old. And they eat steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

They do all the things they're not supposed to do. And the truth is what's fascinating is that there are anomalies in the world, people in the world that demonstrate the ability to live beyond the averages, even though all the things that they do from a lifestyle perspective, particularly or healthcare-wise, never go to the doctor, these kinds of things, argue that they do from a lifestyle perspective particularly or health care wise never go to the doctor these kinds of things argue that they shouldn't what we're seeing for example in the cancer world is is it's more of a health care issue but we consume the results of these things that there's a significant degree of customization of treatment, genetic treatment for cancers.

Yeah. Because a lot of cancers are driven by genetics to a certain degree. And so when you underwrite an individual, if you see that they're eligible for that treatment or a trial related to it, it makes it very difficult to say that it's not going to work until you have enough data to know what the statistics are but a lot of people come out of those situations more so than you would think in other words they call it experimental but a lot of times these things work it's the same with transplants you know it used to be that transplants were even successful ones. You'd have a shorter than

normal life expectancy. Now it seems like the hardest part of that is finding a donor. But if you have a successful transplant, and I've got friends that are in their 50s, they're not part of the population we look at that have had two transplants. The quality of life is better for those folks. And there are a lot of things that used to take your life, that used to cause you to have a super short life expectancy, that have a treatment period that's shorter but if you get past that treatment period and we assess this risk like we'll say if this person gets a transplant all bets are off and they're as healthy as most of the other people in their group so those are some some of the things we're seeing just in the development of of medical technology you got to keep in mind, the United States is not top end in terms of life

expectancy as a population. I think it went down over COVID or something, didn't it? We're, you know, 50th in the world in terms of, I mean, we spend a lot of money on healthcare, but the outcomes aren't necessarily better. The other side of that coin, Chris, quite frankly, is that there's a movement to have everybody live to 100 or longer. There's nothing wrong with that. But there are people in our business that theorize that we wear out. Like machinery, we rust. I've got a few spots on my hand that my mother used to call liver spots. I don't think they have anything to do with that, but we rust, you know, and we wear out a little bit. It doesn't mean we can't live that long, but there's a big emphasis on quality of life at older age as opposed to quantity,

right? Nobody wants to be 80 and miserable, but they're fine to be 80 or 90 and comfortable. And that's, we are seeing, you know, healthcare technology drive that so that we're seeing more and more much older people, 90 year olds, and so on, than we used to see over the last, you know, 2530 years, people are living longer, because they're being propped up. The question is, is the quality of their life improving and so on? We're not sure about that yet because that varies from person to person. That's true. I suppose how much pain you might be having, how you feel, you know, you may still be alive, but you could really not be having fun. My sister's in a care center with MS and dementia now. And so, yeah, her quality of life isn't good, even though she's older. Sadly, she's not older having fun. My sister's in a care center with MS and dementia now. And so yeah, her quality of life isn't good, even though she's older. Sadly, she's not older than me. She's

younger than me, which is just a shitty thing about MS. So do you guys use a, you guys use a benchmark of someone who's really clean, like a baby who's never taken, you know, drugs, smoked or drink. And then you take the other end of it, a person who will live forever, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, and that's your bell curve? I'm just kidding. Well, I mean, from a population standpoint, yes. But the way that the underwriting business works is that you start out as what they call standard. So you are average amongst the thousand people of your age, gender, smoking status, et cetera. Standard is 100% in the life insurance world. And then you can have preferred where you're 85%.

You're much healthier than the average person in your group. And you can have ratings to the other side, 150, 200, 250, 300. And what that translates to is if you have a 300% mortality rating, you are three times more likely than the average person in your group to die sooner. And the higher your rating, the greater your risk of premature death. But you can change that, right? If you have 300% and you're drinking a bottle of Woodford Reserve every night, smoking a carton of Marlboros. You say that like it's a bad thing.

I'm not. I had to do that joke. There's a bottle of bourbon not far from my reach. Remember, I lived in Kentucky. But the point is that you can change that. If you stop smoking for a year, your body, generally speaking, most people would be considered a non-smoker from that point on because it's amazing what the human body can recover from. So you can do a lot of damage in your younger years. Yes,

will it catch up to you at the end? Certainly, that's likely. It happens a lot. But you can do a lot of good by modifying your behavior, the way in which you consume healthcare, and your genetics will have something to say say about that a lot of people take statins for cholesterol for example but a lot of cholesterol is related to your family history you know my entire family has high cholesterol so i have high cholesterol it's likely that my son will have high cholesterol if you know that you can be proactive about doing things about it but we basically it's a relative risk process the way you describe it. You have an archetype for standard, preferred, et cetera,

and then you have degrees of impairment that drive your relative risk. And then an actuarial table will tell you how many months or years you're expected to live. And you can build a curve say this is the average this is the midpoint and here are the people on the other end obviously everybody would like to be comfortable on the tail the longest end of that curve and live a long happy comfortable life yeah it's definitely not everybody does but they like to yeah it's it's definitely about quality of life when it comes to the end do you guys have a way of creating stupidity because

those people with darwinism seem to be the ones who die first so i i would tell you my children would say that i do and it's not particularly forgiving okay but we but we don't although we see it a lot um dude i have some family members can i have you assess them for that by all means if they'll sign the the federal authorization for us to take a look we'll take a look honestly i'm surprised i'm still alive from darwinism so there you go i made it this far but you know you bring up some good points. People need to be wary about their health, their quality of life. And you, I don't know, man, there's a certain age where you start thinking about that. One of my friends had been in a car accident and they were starting to fuse his spine together from one point to another, because once you start it, everything gets mucked up and you end up just, I don't know, paralyzed or walking around in,

I don't know, what's that when you die? Rigor mortis. There's a joke there. It's a dark show. Just walking around with rigor mortis. Isn't that what's called a zombie? Anyway, we'll leave that to HBO. But I remember we used to tell him because he would walk with a cane

and he would fight to work with a cane. And I remember telling him, I'm like, dude, why don't you just get a wheelchair? And he goes, Chris, you understand this is a fight over quality of life. And he goes, as soon as I go in that wheelchair and I start losing muscles in my legs and my abilities, he goes, I'm never getting out of that wheelchair. And he goes, so I'm fighting. I'll do everything I can to not be in a wheelchair and i was like wow i never i never really thought about quality of life up until that

and you know now the older i get that seems to be the the fist fight i'm having with my body and and you know trying to lose weight you know i'm doing the exempt pick right now i started that about seven weeks ago and i've lost a lot of money so i got that going for me uh a little stress they're still they're still they're still dying in but i have lost a little bit of weight but you know and so the kind of the zempic thing is kind of interesting it's turning into this kind of i don't know what you call it a monolith or something like planes are flying lighter people losing weight hollywood stars like oprah actually look good finally again i just picked on oprah yesterday so you know what do you see maybe yes

this new craze with the zempic blue tide it seems like it's having a look. It is a, you know, I mentioned statins earlier. I have a colleague and friend from the industry who's now kind of semi-retired. But when statins came out, the effect that they caused was so dramatic that they assigned a credit. They actually gave you some benefit, some longer lengthening of your life expectancy if you took statins. And at the time, he theorized that eventually everyone would take them as a protected measure, prevented measure. It's interesting. And again, I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor.

But the dramatic change, I have a friend, a former partner that I hadn't seen in a while, went into New York, met for lunch. He looked fantastic, but he couldn't finish his lunch. And I mean, he was full, he was satiated. He was fine. Don't you hate people like that? Terrific. He'd lost it. And he's, he took it for, for, because he was a diabetic Don't you hate people like that? Terrific. He took it because he was a diabetic. And the change was dramatic. I mean, I hadn't seen him in a while, but he looked terrific. He felt fine. And it's an interesting question, Chris, because we don't know, right? We're going to start consuming health information and underwriting it and evaluating it from people who are taking this because it is a monolith.

I read something the other day that you just referred to about, you know, the way airlines say fuel is is to cut weight. And they think that passengers are going to be lighter to carry and they're going to save a lot of money and hit the bottom line with savings from fuel, jet fuel. It could mean something like that changes the game. Yeah. It's affecting whole economies. In fact, I think Sweden or wherever it was developed, they're seeing, I swear to God, they're seeing lighter planes becoming. Maybe it's over in Sweden, wherever this country is origin from. It's like

becoming their economy, their number one export. And so many people are saying, I mean, like Oprah just admitted to it the other night on Letterman, or not Letterman. Well, I just told how old I am on Stephen Colbert. Letterman 2.0.

But, you know, it is interesting. I'd heard about it, and finally I bit the nail because my insulin resistance, probably for all the fun I had all of my life, was really just fighting me. And I know insulin resistance is a big killer too. And, you know, and here in America, you know, where we overeat everything and our food is made to drug addict us with dopamine hits,

someone told me they're using it for addiction as well. Because I just thought it was a thing that would regulate my insulin and try and get my insulin resistance sort of issue cut down. And it does something to your brain like you just do not give an f about food like i'll go open my refrigerator and i'll look at it and there'll be food in there that's enticing my brain just goes i'm not interested like that's what my buddy told me he said he's simply not interested in eating another bite yeah and then i'll go out to eat i like to go out on the weekends and just treat myself.

But, you know, just to kind of reward myself because our weeks are pretty heavy here. But, you know, I like to go air out. That's my decompression. And so I like to go out to eat to nice places. And so I'll go out to eat. I'll order a fine

dinner and, you know, the salad and my roll will come and I'll be like yeah okay i'm done like it's really it's you almost have to force yourself you're like you really need to eat like i intermittent fast but i'm like you know you really should like try and have a meal maybe today maybe and you're just like okay i'll force myself to do this but it's really weird. I went out to an Italian dinner the other night, and I remember it wasn't that much food, but it was a fine dining food. I had three meals I turned that into. I ate like a little bit at the restaurant, and I came home, I had the next day for lunch,

and I had the other half for dinner. And it was like about that much food. So hopefully that will change maybe our life expectancy. If we can get insulin resistance down, addiction down. It's a crazy drug. You know, a lot of people are like, I don't know what it's going to do. And I resisted it for a while. They're like, could have side effects.

And I'm like, I don't know. I'm 55 and I'm fighting to lose weight. And somehow I just cannot. You know, my intermittent fasting will pull it so it'll be interesting to see maybe it'll change whole swaths of of our country and i don't know then we can do more big macs it look it it could and and yeah there could be some long range effects that nobody can predict it's it's the, you know, the COVID pandemic, you know, within two and a half years of the initial event, right, people were talking about long COVID,

we have a medical director who said, I don't know about you, but I don't think two years is long. You know, the long range effects might not be what anybody thinks they are right now they're you know you do analysis in the moment and we do this right we do we do work now we sell a service now and then we have to wait years for the outcomes to validate what we've done and it's iterative we've been doing it for a long time but we have to do it from longer and longer and more and more to really know. And then you get back to what you were talking about earlier, which is if it improves the quality of your life now, right, and addresses some other issues that might impact your long-range quality of life, that's kind of how health care works right i mean yeah yeah and with the health the the food supply i mean this is just my opinion but our food supply you know if you travel and you i'm sure you do you go to other places in the world the food supply is not vacuum sealed and

packaged the way it is here doesn't have fluorescent colors and so on and so forth. We got to do something. But it was a dramatic, just that one friend of mine, really, I was amazed at the transformation for him. Because he was severely diabetic and, frankly, not healthy prior to starting. I mean, I've had, I intermittent fast. I've intermittent fast for a long time. I lost 100 I intermittent fast. I've intermittent fast for a long time. I lost a hundred pounds intermittent fasting. But I kind of hit this wall about six months ago where it just wouldn't work anymore.

And I couldn't do long-term fasting or else I would wreck. And part of it may have been low testosterone a little bit, but just, you know, it was insulin resistance. I could tell. And so, yeah, it's strange. It like almost rewires your brain and i feel more emotionally stable too like chemically and everything else not that i've had emotional problems but there's i don't know i just feel more chemically stable i guess that's what i'm trying to say you brought me to my question i'd set up for you next about covid and stuff you know i i've got friends that long covid and i and they're pretty sure they've lost 10 years off their life.

My sister has it. She's had COVID like four or five times being in a care center. And the way it's done damage to her, I think permanently, especially with her dementia. But so what are you guys seeing with long COVID and people that have it? Are there any indicators yet? Are you guys still studying the data? I mean, this is the interesting thing. So a lot of people think that COVID would have affected, would have caused more deaths in the life settlement market because it was causing more deaths everywhere.

It actually didn't in the main. And one of the reasons for that we believe is that the population or the group of people that have availed themselves of life settlements so far is, again, elderly, wealthy, well-advised, with excellent access to the best health care available. Long COVID could have, obviously, there are long-range effects for the people affected by that set of symptoms and conditions. We don't know how long those things are going to last or what impact they're going to have on life expectancy overall. However, a lot of people that have it have other things.

And one of the things that's kind of weird about the underwriting business from an outsider's point of view is we all know people where they've got diabetes and they're overweight. They've got heart disease and they've got whatever low T and, you know, inflammation and all these. And they've got all these impairments and some underwriting organizations stack those things. Everything counts. But part of what we're all trying to do in life expectancy assessment on an individual is figure out what are the things that are really matter. So for example, you can have bad knees and bad shoulders and back pain and so on and so forth. But those things are not going to shorten your life expectancy. They're going to make you miserable, perhaps.

They're not going to shorten your life expectancy. The ancillary effects they cause, swelling, inflammation, inability to exercise, all those things can cause, you know, increases in your mortality risk. But that's one of the things we're trying to do with long COVID. It's a set of a syndrome, if you will, right, a group of symptoms and so on. But you also have to look at what else is going on with that life. So if you've got esophageal cancer and long COVID, and esophageal cancer treatments not going well, the fact that you have long COVID is not, I'm not saying it's not meaningful, but it's not going to be the driver. And that's one of the things that skilled underwriters have to figure out is what's

really driving the excess mortality and how are these other forces perhaps exacerbating the thing that is the driver. So long covid could be one of these things that makes other things worse it could be the thing that's that's the driver but it it's more likely at least so far there's not enough data yet but enough time to have passed for it to be long to really say the other thing is is that just like ozempic i mean 10 years ago there was nothing for weight loss like this yeah right and there's a tremendous amount of global resource put towards the research whether whether you agree with that or not lots of people spend a lot of time and money studying all these things and the

pharmaceutical industry you know has an economic incentive to come up with things that will at least treat if not perpetuate you know these kinds of conditions a lot's being done about it now i think what you're going to have to do sadly is wait because COVID is now something that it appears like we're going to have to live with a version of it the same way we do with the flu. If that becomes true, I don't know how much work, how much benefits going to flow through to the treatment of symptoms of long COVID.

What's interesting is you don't hear as much about it as you did nine months ago. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's a, I don't know what percentage, but I think it's a smaller percentage of the population

that has long COVID. And I'm no scientist or whatever. My perception, from what I understand from my friends who have it, the damage, the body overreacted because it didn't have a blueprint to work with initially. It had never had this attack. And so we didn't have any sort of genetic preparation or DNA preparation, whatever the hell it's called,

you know, the mRNA sort of whatever, the blueprint. And so the body over-inflamed many of its organs to fight it off as it does, but it really, you know, over-inflamed to the point that it did damage. And so it's done damage to their body organs. A lot of times they'll be my friends and their lungs are shot. I mean, there's some people, their lungs are so bad that they're on oxygen.

And I think in that case, yeah, you're definitely looking at, you know, something that's permanent, permanent. I think now if you, I mean, if you've had your mRNAs and you've got that blueprint in your body that it can fight it and the body knows how to respond, it seems like people have had fewer COVID. But I think there's still people getting along COVID from it. So it's just one of those things where it's crazy. We may not, it may be a long time, like you say, before you find out what's the full effect of it. But that's kind of interesting, betting on the quality and length of people's lives so what's the lifespan of keith richards and do we do we all need to start planning better on what kind of world we leave behind for him he's what one of my

colleague competitors in the industry calls a super ager super ager right there are people out there who i actually mentioned him to my kids the other day who are obviously older they had no idea about whom i was speaking but you know what i'm talking about yeah there are people out there that literally make you scratch your head and you know like you said i could step off the curb and the bus is like you said, I could step off the curb and the bus is going to hit me. He can step off the curb and the bus will go around. Probably. Yeah. You know, it is remarkable how some people are able. And again, we see this a lot where our clients will call and say, how could this person possibly have a life expectancy of six years, a 92 year old, because there were all these little things wrong with

them. And if you stack all those and you go, look, the longer you live, the longer you will live, because you're demonstrating the ability to endure these things. And it's not normal. It's not average, but it happens. Yeah. It happens a lot. And aging is becoming a theme and there's a lot of infrastructure being built around it. Everybody talks about the baby boomers. I went to a presentation earlier in in or a little one-day conference on data and analytics in the senior living industry and the keynote speaker is the demographer and he was talking about you know the the generation behind the boomers is going to live longer and be even bigger during their older age than the boomers and the silent generation was not as big as the

boomers so this this aging science and all these kinds of things is going to continue to advance and grow and evolve in ways that you know we all kind of eventually brush up against but keith richards is the kind of thing that all is always to happen. You're going to think if that were me, I'd be in a box by now. How did they do it? And there are what's what also is interesting is it seems like probably because of the way that, you know, the world works, that there's a lot of famous people who lived very hard. Well, have a lot of fun fun but hard that make it into their 90s and you think i i do everything right there's no way i'm making it to my 90s you know that kind of thing maybe there is something about sex drugs and rock and roll maybe there is something about sex drugs and rock and roll it is a particular prescription maybe you need to put that on the

on those health sheets have you engaged in sex drugs and rock and roll. It is a particular prescription. Maybe you need to put that on those health sheets. Have you ever engaged in sex, drugs, and rock and roll all at the same time? Do you know Keith Richards? Yeah. Are you personal friends with any of the following? Do you have any DNA tied to the Richards family? You know, there's those fun things. My mom's had me taking one of those DNA tests.

23 and me. Yeah, it's like one of those things. And are you finding that, have you found that maybe that data really helps you guys do the business better? We don't get a lot of that data. It's an interesting business, right? Because they basically, you pay them to get back some interesting stuff that can sometimes be useful and so on. But it's a great way to collect a lot of genetic information about a lot of people. Drive science that'll drive treatment and so on

and so forth. So it's always cool when you can get somebody to pay you to do more of what you do. Yeah. From a research perspective, we don't get a lot of genetic reported or genetically reported data in the health care records that we see now. It's a very complicated area. I think technology will probably help distill, you know, certain genes that drive, for example, breast cancer is probably the most famous one, but we don't see a lot of that in the underwriting space. The other thing that, that the insurance industry has to deal with is as an example, I mentioned before, there are States that prohibit the use of that kind of information to determine

what you should be charged for your life insurance policy because they consider it discriminatory. So this would be, you know, it's probably an unfair analogy, but imagine if your driving record didn't matter. That would mean my premium for driving, if I'm a safe driver, would go up to cover your premium for driving when you're not because they wouldn't be allowed to ask you if you were not. So there's some politics that gets into that as well. The other thing that's going on in genetics is they're starting to study how disease and behaviors can change certain chemical reactions in the genes.

So there's a group, for example, that's developed a way to know that if somebody ever smoked, whether they're lying or not, without a urine test and so on and so forth, it's genetically based. The problem is there's not much of a market for that right now. But other things might matter. You know, have you ever – you mentioned crystal meth a number of times, you know, have you ever done business with Walter White kind of thing?

How much meth have you cooked in your life? Exactly. How many Winnebago's do you have? So it, I think that eventually the healthcare data system underpins the United States, which is extremely diverse. There's thousands of companies that aggregate this data, but eventually genetic data could be useful to us. Right now, it's rare to get it, mostly because a lot of people that we deal with on a regular basis, 70, 80, 90 years old, have not gone through that exercise. Somebody buys it for them as a gift, they'll do it. But it's not something that the typical 80 year old says, I'm going to get a genetic test because they figure whatever they're dealing with now is probably in there.

But knowing that it's in there doesn't matter to them the same way if you're 50 or 60 and you want to know what's coming. There you go. It's a fun way to find out if you're adopted and then where you can go, like, thank God I'm not related to those relatives that I have. Thanks for an interesting Thanksgiving. Yeah. I was just reading, posting on Facebook,

some guy had two white parents, and he's white. I thought he was white. And he did one of those DNA tests, and it turns out his mom had a tryst with somebody, and he's mixed race. So on vacation. On vacation. Oh, my goodness. Yeah,'s mixed race. So on vacation. On vacation.

Oh my goodness. Yeah, there you go. So it's a great way to find out. You're like, oh, what was mom up to? You know, how come I look, that explains why I look like the mailman. They're jokes there. So this has been really insightful.

Tell people how they can onboard with you. What sort of clients you're looking for, how they can reach out to you if they have questions? Right now, we do business with senior living industry participants, mostly operators of continuing care retirement communities, things of that nature. We also do work with the financial planning industry, wealth advisors, people like that who are trying to map out how a retirement is going to be funded and for how long and when those risks are likely to change. And then, of course, we play a major role in the life settlements industry, which is the sale of unwanted life insurance by people who

have limited and ascertainable life expectancies. Okay. And that's where we evolved. And as we branch out, what we're looking for, Chris, is longevity risk. The risk of living too long has costs and implications for healthcare and economics and so on. We're just a means of measuring that on an individual basis. I'm sorry. So you've lived too long. We need to push off a cliff because you're costing us a shitload of insurance. Well, here's the interesting thing, right?

You don't want to outlive your money, right? But you don't want to not live and enjoy the end of your life wherever that's going to be. And if you think about it, right, a lot of people go online, they find a calculator and they put in the answers and they get an answer out. It almost always overestimates, right? Because nobody wants to be, I'd call it realistic, but most people would say, well, I don't want to know. What's interesting is most older people are much more comfortable with the remainder of their life expectancy than the people around them, the kids, the grandkids. So what we typically do is we're working with organizations, institutions, advisors, and so on that are working with older age Americans

and advising them with respect to these issues. They may not use the same terminology, but it's in there. You go to a financial planner and he says, by the time you're this age, you're going to have this much. And if you spend this much for this many years, and then we think you're going to live this long, there'll be this much left for the kids. Some people say, I don't want the kids to get anything. Okay. Well, then you can spend a little bit more and you can spend a little bit more. And part of what we do is provide that kind of almost like a credit score right that that that projection and then we can update

that as things change it's iterative there you go well this is gonna be pretty cool to to think about and hopefully we've given some people maybe some some thoughts of maybe I should give up the booze, the meth and the crack and the cocaine and the wild women and all that sort of stuff. Or what we call around here at the show Fridays. Don't do drugs. There we are. That's a joke, people.

Don't do drugs. The lawyers make me say that. The judge, too. I get one of the ankle bracelets off the stack of them next week. I love that joke. So thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Let me say that the judge too. I get one of the ankle bracelets off the stack of them next week. I love that job. So thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Very insightful, Chris, and you've scared the hell out of me to living better and getting off of everything that I'm not on. So there you go. Well, I hope you enjoy your holiday. I really appreciate you having us on and I hope you have a safe, enjoyable holiday and works for you and what

you do on fridays is your business there you go that's what i that's what i told the judge so anyway guys i certainly appreciate you guys tuning in go to goodreads.com for chest christmas linkedin.com for chest christmas subscribe the big linkedin newsletter the hundred three thousand linkedin group and all those crazy things we do on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time