Steph Smith: “This opportunity is totally overlooked”

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, we're live with Steph Smith. Steph Smith, this is your eighth time on the podcast, is that right?

**Steph Smith** (0:04)
I know. It's wild. Yes.

**Sam Parr** (0:07)
You sent me a document in advance, and it had a bunch of stuff, but there was one topic that caught my eye. It's called the Silver Tsunami, which basically just means that we are living way longer than expected. If it's cool with you, I just want to talk about that topic this entire time, because there was so many stats here that shocked me.
Give me the background. Tell the listener the background. What's the Silver Tsunami and what's the one-sentence summary of this entire topic?

**Steph Smith** (0:44)
I mean, the simplest summary is just we're expected to live way, way later. And I think there's this kind of misconception that we've hit some sort of basically plateau in aging. So, in the last, I think, several decades, the stat is for every decade, we've added two to three years to the average lifespan, which means that we are expected to grow older compared to our parents, compared to their parents, et cetera, et cetera. So, you can just go to, I mean, the simplest way to look at it is if you just go to Our World In Data, Life Expectancy, you can see around 1900, something fundamentally changes and we're just growing way, way older. That has to do with child mortality, but also just, again, extending that maybe like 50 year period. And so, what that means is that you have this cohort of people, you called it the Silver Tsunami, who are just going to be around for a lot longer than maybe people expected. And that impacts tons of things. That impacts the pensions that people were expecting. It impacts the kind of nursing homes you need. It impacts the kind of health care people think about in that later age. It impacts a lot of young people who then, at least in theory, have to support those old people. And so, this whole silver tsunami is a little bit overlooked.

**Sam Parr** (2:01)
So, all right. So, I want to go through the story. So, the story of what has changed and the story of what to expect in the next... Well, I guess if you're listening to this, you're probably at least 18 years old, all the way up to 80 years old. So, but let's just say the average. Let's just say the average is 25 to 35 years old. If you're in that demographic, what to expect. And then after that, we'll go through the different business opportunities or potential issues and other things like that, that might exist if all this comes to fruition.

**Steph Smith** (2:32)
Yeah. So maybe let's start with a really simple stat. I got this from a book called Longevity Imperative that I read recently. And he's from the UK. So he uses UK data here. But he says, in the UK in 1965, the most common age of death was the first year. That's perhaps not surprising. But today, the most common age to die is 87 So that's a really simple just encapsulation of how things have completely flipped on their side. But then let's move on to maybe cohort data. So I'd like you to guess the chance of a newborn girl in Japan as of 2020 data. What is their chance of living till 20?

**Sam Parr** (3:10)
Close to 100 percent, 98

**Steph Smith** (3:14)
So 99.6 percent chance. Now guess the same for living to 40

**Sam Parr** (3:19)
To 40? 90 percent?

**Steph Smith** (3:25)
Ninety-nine and the chance of making it to 60

**Sam Parr** (3:30)
No, no, no, that's too high. Ninety-five again.

**Steph Smith** (3:32)
Ninety-six percent. So if you think about it, a woman in Japan born in 2020 or as of 2020 data, has a 96 percent chance of making it to 60 That's pretty close to 100 percent. Obviously, that's not 100 percent. But the point is, your calculus changes when you fundamentally expect to live to 60

**Sam Parr** (3:55)
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