 How would the economy react to a cure for aging? Would a cure for aging only help the rich or actually lift people out of poverty? What happens to a country's GDP when their workforce never dies? How will industries adapt to a consumer that never ages? Will inheritances be a thing of the past? Would older generations who already have accumulated wealth just own everything forever? What will society choose to invest in once our new eternal perspective sinks in? Will people change careers every decade leading to a new kind of renaissance? Or will everyone become beach bums and just have sex all day with their new young bodies? Welcome to Lifespan News, I'm Emmett Short. There are a lot of technologies starting to mature and converge through AI like Yamanaka factors and AI-generated novel chemical cocktails to reverse aging or mitochondrial replacement and so so many others. So it's never been more realistic to hope for a cure for aging in our lifetimes, which got us thinking about the implications for a world without aging. This is part two in our series on an ageless future. Part one was on the environment and you can click here or the link in the description to watch that. The other episodes in this series will focus on the government and our perception of ourselves and the world around us. So today, obviously we're talking about the economy, so let's get into it. The first thing you always hear when some naysayer spouts off about the cure for aging is it's going to be way too expensive. It's only going to be for the rich will never ever get it. Yeah? Well, deal with this study from 2021 that shows that adding just one year of life to every American would result in 38 trillion trillion with a T added to our GDP. That's just America's GDP. That pays off our deficit with a few trill to spare. 10 years of life added earns 367 trillion. So yeah, it's actually in a country's best interest to extend the lives of its citizens. An aging population means a poor country. So once an aging cure gets developed, countries are going to be in an arms race to immortalize their population. That's the kind of arms race I can get behind. Just look at Japan. 28% of people are 65 or older. They got a labor force shortage, social security burdens, shrinking GDP and growing health care and pension costs. They're not even having enough kids to replace the workforce. They're not even doing the fun part right. Without an aging cure, Japan is kind of doomed. And it's not just Japan. Many countries have low birth rates and aging populations. If there was all of a sudden some magic pill that stopped their workforce from aging out, you can bet they'd be crop dust in cities with this stuff. So investing in aging seems like a no-brainer to me. What do you guys think? And speaking of investments, did you know that eradicating all types of cancer would only result in extending the average person's life by 2.8 years? That's all you get. 2.8 years after eradicating all cancer. Think of all the billions of dollars being wasted on cancer, most of which doesn't develop in younger bodies. When we could be investing it in age reversal, which solves a lot of cancers too and makes our money back 100 times over. With every person in a society being a productive and healthy member of the workforce, the world could see more abundance than we can imagine. So what would we do with all that money? Hopefully we'd find a better way to make choices in what we invest in. I mean surely there should be some easy way to calculate the risk versus reward of major societal investments like cancer research versus aging research. Our founder and president Keith Camito thinks so, which is why he's developing a sort of Drake equation for moonshots, if you will. I can't go into too much detail, but the Drake equation, if you're not familiar, is attempting to answer the Fermi paradox, which is the question, if life is so ubiquitous throughout the universe, where is everybody? So the Drake equation is a way to calculate the likelihood of an intelligent civilization forming in the cosmos and it has all these different variables that you can play with to figure that out. So our founder Keith, who is a mathematician and inventor of many technologies that use today, like the streaming services used by HBO, Major League Baseball and Disney, and he made a Chuck Norris joke generator just saying, the guy is prolific. So Keith is developing this equation, a way for society to publicly agree on those variables so that we can calculate the risk versus rewards of investing in moonshot projects. So I don't know everything about it, but you should absolutely follow Keith on X, subscribe to our channel and check out lifespan.io to stay up to speed on how it's developing. Hopefully once age is solved, people will be much more long term focused and will be willing to spend their time and money on big projects like controlling the Earth's climate, asteroid defenses, space colonization, AI safety or understanding and harnessing new physics for faster than light travel. Who knows, sky's the limit. I want to know what you would work on, something important to humanity or would you concentrate more at a local level in your community? Or would you just hit the beach every day and surf? Let me know in the comments how you'd react to having a fresh young body, but don't get too explicit. I mean, would you even care about money or success if you knew you'd be that young and healthy forever? I mean, procrastination could reach epic proportions considering the timeline to achieve your goals would be extended almost indefinitely. In a future without age, maybe a common phrase might be, I'll do it next century. I mean, I'm not saying I wouldn't indulge and take some time off, but I'm old enough to realize that a frivolous lifestyle is not fulfilling and most things in life that give you a sense of happiness and fulfillment take work and strategy and patience. And since work is so integral to a meaningful and happy life, I guess we'll just never stop working, right? Or maybe we'll have centuries long careers punctuated by long vacations. Who knows, in a few hundred years, everybody's LinkedIn bio might read like high stakes negotiator, experimental physicist, opera singer, forensic analyst, sustainable urban planner, Mountaineer, vintage, vintage fashion curator. That's a good one. Olympic luge gold medalist and great, great grandfather. Everybody's resume is going to need a table of content. So but that means don't rely on wealth transferring from one generation to another ever. Say goodbye to that inheritance, which raises the question, is that fair? Is it fair for wealth to be concentrated with older generations for kind of eternity simply because they were here first? No, it's not fair. But who said life was fair? You can bet some people will be trying to lobby to get their grubby little hands on that wealth and distribute it equally to themselves. And I'm not saying that's wrong or right. You tell me in the comments, but how will they do it? Maybe they'll go for a mandatory wealth transfer after a certain age, age 200. All your money gets taken away and given to your kids. I'm just spitballing. Or what about social incentives for wealth transfer? Maybe you get a fancy title, some prestige, free big gulps for life, and a big award show where they hand you your cup. Maybe governments would mandate investments. So people of a certain age who had ungodly amounts of money would be compelled to invest a certain percentage into risky long-term moonshot projects of their choice. It's like happy 500th birthday mort, would you like to donate a trillion dollars to the Dyson Sphere project or wormhole research or the lobby to get America to adopt the metric system? It's been a long time coming. How do you think we should go about making it fair? Or should we even try? I mean, hopefully in a world filled with such abundance in the future, even the life of a poor person would be filled with more luxury than a rich person's life is today. That's the hope. Fingers crossed. Hopefully we'll know very soon what an economy looks like that doesn't have the shadow of aging hanging over it. I mean, we've talked about some pretty wild stuff from imagining an economy bursting at the seams with growth because no one's clocking out for the last time to rethinking the whole deal with wealth, inheritance, and what we choose to throw our cash and time into. We're basically at the front porch of making the biggest shake up in how we live, work, and play. So are we on the brink of a new golden age full of abundance or is the future gonna look more like idiocracy? Welcome to Costco. I love you. It's really on us to figure out and hopefully our optimism leads us in the right direction. So if staying on top of the latest in not getting old and staying sharp is your jam, don't forget to hit up lifespan.io. And hey, don't just sit back and watch this unfold. Jump in, get your hands dirty, like, share, subscribe, and click on the next video. I'll put that right here. The last one in the series will be here until the next one is ready and then it'll be here. I'm Emma Short. This is Lifespan News. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.