[Highlight] What Happens to Society When We Live to 100? with Celine Halioua

0:00Celine Halioua:Hey, Ben Kesnoka here, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, a network-native venture firm. What you're about to hear is a clip from a longer conversation. If you'd like to listen to the full-length version, find the link in the description. And of course, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Enjoy.

0:20Celine Halioua:You've been in longevity since it was niche. Like, it feels like over the last, what, seven, eight years, this has become pretty mainstream, at least in Silicon Valley in terms of people talking about it as a topic. What aspects of longevity right now do you feel like are non-consensus that you expect to become more consensus in the future?

0:39Sam Kirschner:The idea of FDA approved drugs for lifespan extension is the biggest thing. I think longevity is still synonymous with supplements or tests or I did this thing and I optimized my resting heart rate. And like, to be clear, like those things probably do help. But I don't think it's seen as like a biological process that is intervenable just like any other biological process that occurs in someone. I think the minute we hopefully get a drug approved, that will change. And it will be considered like pathological aging, I think, should be considered a disease space or like anything else. Right. Right.

1:19Sam Kirschner:And with that will come like a quantification of are you aging in a like in a way that one would expect, like a detangling of the physiological decline of age and the chronological age. Obviously, chronological age is great. I'm happy I am 31 now and not like an idiot 21 year old anymore. Right. But I do sure wish that I had the ability to learn new languages as robustly as I did when I was 21 or, you know, be able to deal with the insult of low sleep. right um as well as i did when i was 21 oh my god the new dog has been sleeping with me every night because i don't have the heart to kick her out which is really bad i need to work on it but she literally like she's giant and she sleeps so chaotically and it's just right i feel like a new mother can you tell us a little about your new dog oh absolutely pull my arm um so i i um She just adopted a baby Roddy named Wilma slash Squishy, depending on how I'm feeling in the moment.

2:22Sam Kirschner:I think she's just going to be a two-named dog at this point.

2:25Celine Halioua:Most of them are like hundreds of named dogs. I know. I think Harper has hundreds of names at this point.

2:29Sam Kirschner:But she still has a predominant name of Harper. Like, I'm not sure which one's going to be the predominant. Is it Squishy? Is it Wilma?

2:37Celine Halioua:A Roddy named Squishy is pretty amazing.

2:39Sam Kirschner:It's kind of hilarious, isn't it? And she is a Squishy. Like, her face is so, like, Squishy. Um, so I wasn't planning on adopting another dog. I've been pretty like traumatized after losing my senior Rottweiler Della last year. Uh, but one of the shelters that we do some work with at, at Loyal, um, the SFSPCA, I was like, oh my God, we had this really cute dog come in. Look how sweet she is. She has a snaggle tooth. You want to come meet her? And I kept on like putting it off, putting it off. I'm like, no, I'm traveling. No, I don't have time. And finally they got me to come in last weekend. and I went home with the dog.

3:17Sam Kirschner:I didn't even bring a dog bed in my car because I was like, there's no way. And actually, I brought dog food with me because I was going to give it to the shelter. And yeah, that did not work out.

3:27Celine Halioua:I'm not shocked.

3:28Sam Kirschner:You know, literally nobody is but me. I like to think that I'm like moderately self-aware, but I think on this variable, I was not at all. But she's super sweet. But I've never had a young dog before.

3:40Celine Halioua:Oh, wow.

3:41Sam Kirschner:I've always adopted senior dogs.

3:42Celine Halioua:So your first dog was Wolfie. As an adult. Is that right? Yeah. As an adult. Okay.

3:48Sam Kirschner:We had a bunch of dogs as kids.

3:49Celine Halioua:Were they all seniors when you were kids?

3:51Sam Kirschner:No, but they were mostly just like random rescues we found on the side of the road.

3:55Celine Halioua:So you never had puppies?

3:56Sam Kirschner:No. We never adopted a puppy. And I never did the puppy training thing. And also, yeah, ticks. So we had like a backyard, right? Like it's a little bit different than like city dog training. So, yeah, my white carpets are not white anymore.

4:12Celine Halioua:Well, we have an amazing trainer for you if you need it.

4:14Sam Kirschner:Actually?

4:14Celine Halioua:Yeah.

4:15Sam Kirschner:That would be great.

4:15Celine Halioua:She's in Oakland, but maybe she'd come out to you because you're a celebrity. I'll let you know.

4:20Sam Kirschner:Thank you. Thank you.

4:20Celine Halioua:Shout out to Toby. Thanks, Toby. So going back to longevity, one of the things that people talk about is the idea of like a thousand-year human or there's, I think, these ideas, I see the eye roll, these ideas that longevity can make us live like hundreds of years long. And it seems like that's probably unrealistic. What do you think are the better ways to think about longevity?

4:40Sam Kirschner:I think the way to think about it is long tail outcomes that maybe five random people in this Japanese fishing village have lived to 115 and they still do the Sudoku every morning or whatever. Like I think those long tail outcomes becoming more like common outcomes. That's how I think about it. I think radical lifespan extension is going to require a subset of interventions that are going to be so very difficult. And I think completely possible, to be clear. Everything is, in theory, biologically possible. It's just how complicated is it? And specifically, what is the ratio between when you need to intervene, how extreme the intervention is, and are there near-term tradeoffs to that long-term intervention?

5:31Celine Halioua:I've heard some stats where it's like one in three people who are born today folks think will live longer than 100 years. So do you believe that? Or I guess how do you think that – what's life going to look like in 100 years from now?

5:43Sam Kirschner:I think the biggest thing is we have a lot of societal norms around unhealthy aging and aging writ large that will hopefully push out over time. I think the issue with human is that so much of aging is environmental and behavioral and no drug is going to change that. It's going to help, but it's not going to change that. But if you keep that same ratio, you're hopefully just going to shift the curve over a little bit. And you're still going to have some people that live really long and really well because they go running every day and they're also genetically lucky. And maybe they don't live near power plants, so they don't have all the carcinogens or whatever.

6:22Sam Kirschner:and you're gonna have people who just get their shit out of the stick no matter what right um but hopefully everybody will move over to the right a bit i'm really excited about a world one of my favorite ideas is that you know you get very like what's the impact of increased cognitive flexibility and reduce cognitive aging in a society so you know people tend to crystallize as they age um We kind of consider this normal. Like, you know, it's like, oh, my racist grandpa. Right. Or like, well, I don't know what the thing is going to be that like millennials are considered like old school boomer for.

6:57Sam Kirschner:Right. But I'm sure there will something that Gen Z's will look at us and be like, oh, my God, like they're so archaic. Why don't they understand how the world works? And it is interesting that you kind of have these like crystallizations within like cultural norms of society and of generations. And I do wonder if like a cognitive aging drug will change that. if it'll change your ability and like increase your ability to relearn something or change your priors or um adapt your worldview in a way that is i think actually just very biologically difficult with age and with with time i mean even something as simple like i think about this a lot it's like i don't listen to new music anymore i listen to like the stuff i like like new music from the same artists I like but I don't listen to like the new stuff um and you could say that's like social because I'm not like listening to the radio or not hanging out with like you know people at a time but I think it also is a little bit of a crystallization of preferences

7:56Celine Halioua:that like maybe aging drug would change do you think it's nostalgia too or like almost like a a love for what you already are like experiencing or like some draw to something that you know so

8:07Sam Kirschner:well and it comforts you i just find it difficult now like i used to love the process of like my discover weekly and like learning new music and like adding new things to my like uh saved songs list and now i'm just like i could do that but that just sounds really painful i'm just gonna listen to this like 2000s album instead i'm gonna listen to the strokes right and i do think some of it's that but i think some of it's just like i think some of it is just a crystallization, right? I don't want to like learn or adapt to new music. I want to stay in my one musical swim lane. So I think that's like an interesting potential.

8:47Sam Kirschner:I don't think the music thing particularly matters, but like giving a change how you view society or POVs on society. And then also like the burden of elderly sick parents. What does a society look like where our parents are healthier longer, are able to support us longer, where, you know, you, the word of child isn't responsible necessarily until later, much later in life to do that sort of caretaking, both financially, but also just from a responsibility and like physical standpoint. I think that could actually be a really big driver of increased socioeconomic equality, right? Because, you know, if God forbid our parents need to be in care, we can probably afford a home for them or support or nursing or whatever, vast majority of people cannot.

9:36I couldn't have five years ago, right?

9:39Sam Kirschner:And that is a limiter of socioeconomic mobility, right? I'm very lucky that my parents have been healthy and I've been able to take huge career leaps and leave them and go and do things that have allowed me to build loyal and whatnot. Some people, their parents get diagnosed with cancer and they have to stay at home. There's no choice, right? And they cannot take the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley.

10:02Celine Halioua:It's really interesting to think about what does the future look like if people can live longer and healthier lives, like health insurance changes, life insurance changes, retirement planning changes.

10:12Sam Kirschner:Yeah.

10:12Celine Halioua:I mean, it's one of the fascinating things of like, you know, you look at your 401k or whatever, you're trying to figure out like how many years can this get me, right? But it's like, oh, you can live to 85 if you pull X amount out per year. But it's like, okay, what about if I live to 100? Like how do I even know what it's going to be? That's true. It's really interesting in terms of the implications of just like how we structure the world.