The Biggest Myth We Believe About Aging | Dr. Michael Gurven

**Michael Gurven** (0:00)
Part of what middle-age and older adults were doing over our evolutionary history is part of the reason that this whole post-reproductive life stage exists in the first place. And it's what made us a successful species. And I feel like we kind of forgot about that.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a Chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:34)
Welcome to the Midlife Chrysalis. It's Chip Conley and I have a confession to make, which is that I have always wanted to be an anthropologist. I'm sort of like Margaret Mead in pants. I think Margaret Mead probably wore pants if she was out in the outback, hanging out with the tribes. I don't know. But all I know is that I've always been fascinated by this. My youngest sister became an anthropologist, cultural anthropologist at UC Berkeley. And so I was always intrigued by that. Understanding of societies. And I particularly enjoyed that when I went to Bali. I've been to Bali 13 times, not since COVID, but I used to go almost every year for a few years. And the cultural anthropology of Bali, in fact, Margaret Mead did go to Bali, was fascinating and I would read lots of books about it. Well, that's part of the reason we have our guest here today, Michael Gurven, Dr. Michael Gurven, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, whose book Seven Decades, How We Evolved to Live Longer is spectacular.
It actually mentions me and Emea in the book as well as Mark Friedman, who introduced us and Mark Friedman started something called Nonprofit, that's called Cogenerate. I love this book. It's an alternative way to look at longevity and it's much more societally focused. It shows us that frankly, a lot of societies live till age 70 when we think that, oh gosh, longevity is a new thing. Well, no, people live that long if you could make it through the early years of your life.
In this episode, we're going to go into some of the depth of what we can learn from indigenous tribes that apply to modern society. Hope you enjoy it. I'll see you at the end with my three key lessons of the episode. Michael Gurven, welcome. Dr. Michael Gurven, you're a doc.

**Michael Gurven** (2:17)
Yeah, not one with real skills that can actually save lives, but unless there's a need for...

**Chip Conley** (2:23)
You study life.

**Michael Gurven** (2:24)
I do. I do study life. Yes.
Thanks for having me on your show.

**Chip Conley** (2:29)
Thank you. Your book, Seven Decades, How We Evolved to Live Longer, spectacular book for anybody who wants to look at longevity from a different lens. I mean, longevity is getting such a lot of attention right now, and it's often very biological and very biohacking. The thing I liked about what you were doing is you're doing societal hacking. You're trying to understand from a sociological perspective and anthropological perspective, what can we learn from indigenous cultures as well as modern culture. Give us the premise of your book, Seven Decades. By the way, I love the cover. The cover, who was that? There's this just cheerful guy in his 70s, Asian.
Yeah, there you go. He's just probably in his 80s.
He looks beyond 70 to me in his 70s.

**Michael Gurven** (3:19)
Yeah. Well, it's funny because some people look at this and they're like, why did you put such an angry man on the cover? And I'm like, I think that says more about you. That person is smiling.

**Chip Conley** (3:31)
Rorschach alert.

**Michael Gurven** (3:34)
Yeah, that person is very happy. Yeah.
So thanks. You're right. There's a lot of books out there about fitness, about health, about longevity, aging, anti-aging. And I did want to do something a little different. It's not just here's the wisdom of indigenous people, but it's really just taking a broad, what I call an evolutionary perspective, looking back in order to reflect on our present and think about our future. And I think one of the premises is that long life is not as new as we think it is. I mean, certainly there's been longevity gains in the last half century. But longevity is an essential part of our species design. And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about that. I think a lot of people think that we only live to like our 20s or 30s, and then we died because that's a life expectancy.
But that's not the case.
You know, mortality was always high early in life. But if you survive, you know, to adulthood, there was a really strong chance that you would make it well into your 50s and 60s, and even into your 70s and beyond. So that title of the book Seven Decades basically says over most of our evolutionary history, seven decades would have been about how long we could live if, you know, for the most part, things were going right. And it's not just like a special treat, you know, extra chocolate on the Sunday from us being a successful species or figuring something out technology-wise, but it's actually built in to our species design. And it's part of the reason we are a successful species. And so, you know, I harness, this is where I intersect with the kind of work that you and Mark Friedman were doing, is that part of what middle-aged and, you know, older adults were doing over our evolutionary history, is part of the reason that this whole post-reproductive life stage exists in the first place. And it's what made us a successful species. And I feel like we kind of forgot about that. And so the kind of work that you're all doing about, like, trying to reframe, you know, our older years and thinking about, you know, middle-essence and these new stages and turning that burden into opportunity, that's what we've been doing over our evolutionary history. And so I feel like it's maybe a long-standing historical justification for the kind of the work that you and others are involved in our own society. And it's proof. We did it before, right, over our evolutionary history. There's a reason why our evolutionary trajectory is vastly different than the line that went to chimpanzees, you know, our closest cousins. And so, yeah, I think that's there's a hopeful message, an optimistic message here that sort of plays against the sort of numbers game of my demographic colleagues who just see gloom and doom when they count the numbers of over 65s and all that kind of stuff.