>> i'm katie from greenlight and were thrilled was tonight's event with stephen johnson presenting his new book a short history of living longer. will be talking with randall and rose. before we start i want to say a huge thanks to stephen, randall and the team at riverhead books to all of you for showing up so we're not able to host events at our store spaces,our community of readers here . for the chance to make space for conversation and connection . before we get started we have a few things to go 'sover. you can see features but they can't hear you. you can see fellow attendees at the top of your screen. that will depend on what type they're using red there are a couple of different ways you can interact with the authors . the first is to chat which you can find that looks like one speech balloon and you're

alsoencouraged to post thoughts in the chat . if we have a specific question you like to have answered please post that in the q and a module . you can find out about it on the speech balloon. it will be pulling questions only from the q&a at the latter part so make sure you're putting your questions there and not in the chat and importantly tonight featured book is available for sale. you can shop in person at our locations, every day of the week. you can purchase stephen's book and many others on site including his most recent book any of all mankind . or you can order online@greenlightbooks.com for a pickup or shipping anywhere in the us. i'll be dropping a link in the chat. she stephen also stopped by to sign copies of the book so you can get a signed book by request. make sure to indicate your signed copy in the comments and check out while ordering online or look for a signed copy in the store . if you care about supporting the authors and the ongoing

existence of independent bookstores are featured book is a great way to show your support. our interviewer is randall munroe, author of the new york times bestseller what if, the explainer and how to. the popular web: xkcd. he lives in massachusetts. he will be speaking with our featured author stephen johnson who is the best-selling author of 13 books including where did i come from, farsighted and the ghost. he supposed and cocreator of the pbs series how we got to now and most of the podcast american innovation. he lives in brooklyn new york and in marion county with point. his book extra life is a story of how humans have doubled our life expectancy and couple ofyears gaining what amounts to an extra life . stephen will tell us about the book andtalking with all of you please take it away stephen .

>> thank you, i appreciate it. i'm really glad to behere , this is the first official book tour of the extra life world tour which is taking place entirely in this room. but it's really wonderful that we're doing this s in brooklyn, i'm in brooklyn right now. it's a perfect venue to start out this adventure. so thanks for having me and it's a total honor to be here with randall who is just, we are huge fans, everyone in my household is a big fan of randall work. he's the only offer all three of my sons have actually read. so it's in the ron robinson household he's a big deal. this is a real treat for me but i want to just dark with a couple of words about this project because it is a

multi-platform project that started this book. it's also a tv series that premieres tomorrow night as well on pbs. at 8:00 which i cohost with david sugar, running four episodes every tuesday night. but the project goes back now for five years. i had written many years ago as katie alluded to a book called the ghost map which is the story about colorado in the 19th century and one of the reasons why i wrote that book was to remind people how much progress we have made in terms of health and safety and productions and mortality over the last hundred 50, hundred 70 years ago and it goes back really to a story about waterborne disease and how just hundred 50 years ago in a big city you could drink a glass of water and be dead in 48 hours. that was just the mortality

of life so many years ago i was trying to wremind people that one, we'vemade a lot of progress . we tried to celebrate that progress and point out , the most important innovations in life are not just the latest smart phone or zoom or whatever it is that we tend to celebrate in the high-tech world but sometimesit's just like clean drinking water which changes our lives . i always had that theme as an interest and critically about four years ago, the story of life expectancy would be an existing framing for a book, that you could talk about that number as changed over time. as a powerful indication of just how much progress we've made with health and when i was first thinking about it three or four years ago i thought were coming up on the centennial of the end of the spanish flu, the end of the

great influenza which ended in 1920 depending how you date it and that was the last time in which there was a serious sustained drop in global life e expectancy and after that there was a century of extraordinary progress so we effectively double the average human lifespan in that period which is if you think about it the most remarkablething we've ever done . it's an extraordinary thing with some positive effects but also -ones in terms of population growth . i thought if this book comes out maybe we could do a television series and it would come out around 2020 and that would be the anniversary of the centennial of the spanish flu so the timing would be good. so i wrote the book for riverhead and in early 2020 we were starting to get together the television show and all of a sudden the world was transformed by covid and

what had been a very loose historical thing and this thing that happened 100 years ago, suddenly we were right in the middle of one of the mostimportant events in the modern history of human health . i had just written a book about it and was working on a television show. so many of the themes in the book are really about what's happened over the last year. there's the central opening chapter and first chapters of the show tomorrow night is about the vaccine and the history of vaccines. there's a lot about data collection and a lot about how we develop their acute x. it's just the world we've been living in front and center . suddenly it's become relevant so dwe've come to think about this project now that we're living here in 2021 as the 200 year history of right now.

that's what it's -- that's how i visualize it in my head . i hope it's not interpreted as kind of avictory lap . there's a lot of encouraging trends that are celebrated in the book and a lot of roads that i think could be more celebrated and achievements that should be widely known. the eradication of smallpox which i'll talk about is truly one of the most momentous things we've ever done and yet most people know more about the moon landing and they know about the ca eradication of smallpox. i'm trying to remind people we're capable of these things th but it's also recognizing that it's not inevitable that this will continue. lifespan will not keep marching upwards if we don't pay attention tothe importance of public health . if we don't think about

changes to our behavior that can enhance our lifespan and people around the world so hopefully in the book that inspires people to keep working at this. but that's my opening spiel. let me turn it over to randall . >> congratulations on the launch of the new book. even if it wasn't exactly f when you expected. it's a really cool book, i really enjoyed it and thanksnv for inviting me to talk about . so when are we going to die? >> i can list out those numbers individually for everyone ifthey want . [laughter] >> it's always funny looking at life expectancy, because it is such a weird number. it's both -- because it's not just how long you're expected to livefor anyone's expected to live . it's how long you would live

if this death rates continued forever. so i guess my life expectancy goes up a little bit every year that i live . but there were a bunch of things in your book that caught my interest and i was curious tohear more about . i read an estimate many years ago. i don't know if this came from maybe one of your books or somewhere else. said they tried to pick out the year at which on average people who went to a hospital work better because of it. like, when will this broadly speaking, when the going to see a doctor start helping mo you more than it hurts ? >> i don't know that we truly know the answer. it would vary from place to place but that was one of the things. depending what you're going for. that was one of the things that was the most ranking for

me doing the research was how late medicine kind of arose as a useful intervention in the story of life. so to give a little bit of a context to this. until 1750, it didn't matter where you were in the world, what your station in the world was. life expectancywas evenly distributed at about 35 . that was a factor of largely 40 percent of children who died before they reached adulthood and also it was less likely if you made it through childhood, it was there you made it to 70 or 80 . it was less likely today. so before the kind of takeoff begins around 1750 there's tremendous wealth inequality in the world. but there's no health inequality. you could be the richest person in the world or the poorest person in the world

and it doesn't having impact on yourhealth . and the paradox is the story of life expectancy is when we start see progress it opens up this gap and you see the elites living longer than the working poor.ac in factthe working poor in industrial countries go backwards for about 100 years . so you have this kind of long period first start to get better. and then in the second half of the 19th century the industrial working class tarts to improve their life expectancy as well and you start to see the entire population of countries in europe and the united states living longer lives . and that goes on steadily until a brief interruption until recent times. but the impact of medicine, going to the doctor and getting a pill to make you live longer and cure some disease that you have or get rid of an infection really doesn't have an impact until

antibiotics. so kind of the post penicillin era. that's 1945,1950 . up until that point i have some fun in the book at looking at these old catalogs of the mark davis company, pharmaceutical catalogs froms 1910 . and it's like, every medicine. e it's like a structure of arsenic and here's cocaine and it just was like this tremendous amount of junk kind of quack cures that were out there. so it's a sure thing because you think of medicine as being one of the pillars of modern progress but we've solved a lot of problems and invented airplanes and radio and television and a bunch of f things before we started wmaking additional drugs to improveour lives .

>> one thing that i think been driven home for a lot of us in the last year but is just it's always been really impressive is just that the randomized controlled trial. it's just there's no substitute for it. and you'll hear doctors talking about this now on tv and yes, you can tget this observational data but there are all these biases. it just is hard to figure out is causing what. and this, that's why there are randomized trials are called the gold standard. that sounds like it was pretty recent. like when did .we come up with that and you know, where does that come in in the list of accomplishments that have made people live longer. >> its ranks very high. and it's really not a coincidence. basically the randomized controlled trials emerge right about the same time penicillin and antibiotics emerge.

and it's really not an accident at some level. what arsenic has enabled you to do. people don't totally understand this but the basic idea is you can do these trials where you have a control and then you have a drug that your testing and nobody knows including the people running the trial which subject is in which group. and that prevents bias and all these different things. it was really the first nexus that enable people to figure out if something was working or not . that was a crucial breakthrough. and if you go back and look at the role of the fda in regulating drugs up until the 60s, there was never a question that the drugmakers were not required to show that their drugs worked. until the 1960s.

initially all they had to i show is that the ingredients ut listed on the bottle were in fact ingredients in the medicine. that was the initial standard so if you wanted to put arsenic in your medicine , as it was fine aslong as you listed it on the bottle . then it became make sure it doesn't do any actual harm to the patient who are taking the drug. d what they didn't have to prove was that it was effective area so one of the reasons they didn't have to prove it is there wasn't a way to measure whether it was effective. so that was a major support and i think that we underestimate the big themes that run through a couple of chapters in the book. when we think about what are the big breakthroughs that drive our health forward awe always look to physical objects. the needle with the vaccine in it. the magic bullet still in and asked ray machine but in fact a lot of the breakthroughs involve data and data analysis and new ways to see

patterns andthat's what the . there's the kind of thing i think that your work goes to in a way. there's an interesting thought experiment about there's no reason rcc's couldn't have been developed earlier and there is some precedent in the scurvy experiments done in the 1700s but no one formalized it as a technique until austin did around 1950. so there's an alternate history where somebody actually invents the rct in 1850 instead of 1950 and perhaps medicine actually improves a little bit faster because there is a way of measuring what works and what doesn't for whateverreason . >> if we have gotten those earlier, if we had been able to look at the things we were doing to treat specific conditions and check which ones work, what you think

would be the most helpful thing we would have stopped doing earlier? >> maybe bloodletting perhaps . bloodletting was recommended well into the 20th century. there are kind of reputable doctors saying you want to bleed the patient. that was pretty high on the list. there's great stuff in the book about just the list of toxins that were given to treat king george, king george the third who famously went insane for a period of time and there's a wonderful movie and play the madness of king george written about it but one of the early signs of his illness was that he was raging against his doctor's and that he was being poisoned by his doctors and years later they found a lot of hair and analyzed it and he just had believable levels i was arsenic reasoning that was based on the medicine he was being given. so there was, there are a lot

of things that i think would have been quickly exposed as being dangerous if we had access to that class so you mentioned the penicillin discovery. and so it always seems really weird to me as a general concept that hears this mold, i'm going to rub it on this wound. and i've always thought of that as the example of the idea that has the biggest difference between how good an idea is and how good an idea seems. but i've always figured you're still not, it's not like i can go to the grocery store and find a moldy cucumber and take it home and get medicine that way. >> it's funny you say that

because there is a part of the story that does involve that although we're not recommending that you do that . this is not a science experiment you want to perform on yourself but the penicillin story is maybe my favorite story in the book. and it's actually the centerpiece to the second episode of the show that comes out next tuesday. the classic story about no penicillin that a lot of people know is alexander fleming accidentally leaves out a petri dish on his shelf , goes on vacation and comes back and there's mold, mold has gotten into the petri dish and it's causing the staff bacteria in the petri dish to die basically. and he's like aha. a bacteria killer, i'll name itpenicillin . and 15 years later he gets the nobel prize. so it's a great story because

he's the patron saint of anyone who's ever kept a messy desk. if i don't clean this up i'll win thenobel prize myself . it's all about happy accidents so people love that story and i like that story but it turns out that it's really just a tiny part of the story because the real problem with penicillin was scaling up and making enough of the stuff . first proving that it could cure a bacterial infection in a human being which was not all evident from what fleming was doing but it was hard to make enough of it. that was an extraordinary adventure that didn't start for another12 years later that didn't involve fleming at all . and involve this amazing global collaboration in the middle of world war ii as all these extraordinary scientists in england and in the united states were racing

against the clock to scale up the production of penicillin for war because they knew so many soldiers were dying of infection and in hospitals so if you could get a drug that would cure those infections you would have a material advantage in the war and it was top-secret so part of what i say about this is it just shows you our priorities as a culture. when you think of what the famous top-secret military project during the war that involved global collaboration and scientists from around the world you think the manhattan project, building the atomic bomb what penicillin was just as riveting as a story just as important and yet it involved life-saving medicine, not a weapon of mass destruction so i wonder why we don't tell that story. it's not how we tell the manhattan project but to get back to your cucumber, i

never thought i would found myself sayingthat . one of the things that they started to think about is that maybe there are other molds that are out there that could actually be replicated more effectively or might be more effective eat repelling bacteria or killing bacteria so they sent soldiers all co around the world to collect soil samples to see if there's mold in the earth all around the world. but they also sent a young i think she was a biochemist. who was nicknamed moldy merry . in illinois, peoria illinois to go look for moldy fruit in supermarkets. and she found moldy cantaloupe in oneof the supermarkets there . and to this day of the organically produced penicillin in the world is

from that one. >> literally from curia. i always like when you can trace back the specific origin of something to like a physicist and be like oh yeah, this copy of this came from that one spot. class. >> that legacy is fascinating. >> so there are all these different things we've done that have improved our life texpectancy and a lot of them aren't like a device. it's like arealization that we should do things differently for a hibetter habit or a better piece of infrastructure or something . so from where we are right now, if you're putting in charge and you can convince everyone to do something differently. in somewhere like where you are in new york or

massachusetts or something, and you wanted to bump up life expectancy, like land you've got a pulpit and you can go and go into oeach house and give them a 10 aminute seminar on how you dneed to do something or you can pass a law that as long as it's not too unreasonablepeople grumble and follow . what would you do if you're trying to improve how long everyone lives here? >> today i would say that they should get this vaccine that has been developed . but in normal terms, one of the big issues, i don't have the answer for what one should do but justthinking about people around me , there's, when we were talking about how to get the introduction of inequality as

soon as the lifespan gets extended, that's, that should be our focus right now. there's a lot of focus on how far can we owextend life and we can talk about that if you want but the can we push the envelope all the way past 120 or so which seems to be as far as humans can live orcan we get everyone to live 200 . that's certainly important to look at but the gaps that are the thing i think that we want to spend most of our focus on. so where i live in brooklyn, you can travel three stops on the 2 train and average life expectancy when you get out will be about rheight years less than it is in my neighborhood. and there are parts of manhattan i could go into where life expectancy would be five or six years higher than it is where i live. but that's just the most

uneventful form of any quality that there is read how much time do you have. do you get to live for your grandkids or your great grandkids. so i'm dodging the question a little bit because it's hard to figure out what's the most important thing would be but i also am not dodging it in the sense that our ability to keep track of those kinds of inequalities and our ability to measure and build kind of a public record of them and say hey, thesepeople are living longer than these people . why west and mark that is one of those advances that we were talking about that wasn't about the vaccine. it was about a way of looking at numbers. but when you see these outcomes where you see just think of the impact of covid african-americans.

it's just completely out of whack. to be able to see that is really important because it forces you to ask questions about why things are happening so there's this new really interesting development that a number of folks have written about which shows up in the book and on the show which is this idea of weathering. that one of the reasons why you see african-american communities in the united states having these lower lifespans is because there's this slow, steady impact of chronic stress on the body that comes from living in poverty or dealing with discrimination and that over time is as dangerous as smoking cigarettes or driving a car without seatbelts but it's still built out as these slower more incremental social crisis and problems. not actual toxins in the environment although there are toxins in inner-city communities. so the idea that the

psychological burden of living in that situation could have a material impact on your lifespan. that's a genuinely new idea . and i think that one of the ththings we want to think about so i guess my answer is we should eliminate racism and poverty. that would be the thing that would help us a lot. but it's a serious point because it's saying it's not just about the traditional factors that we think about when we thinkabout health . it's also about those political factors. >> i think that's a good point. and that's something that comes out a lot reading the book is how much the story of life expectancy, of that gap first opening up and then closing. so why did that?

i was surprised to read about this from the dickinson mount, is that right? talking about theintroduction of agriculture and i hear people bringing this up now . and i'm always a little bit it seems like a strange idea but a really interesting one so what's was forming a mistake? ? you interrupt that development? >> it's a fascinating question and i allude to it at the end really. the book starts with this. there's a long opening chapter about what i call the long ceiling.there's basically what i mentioned before that average life expectancy around the world was about 35 and it didn't

matter what where you were area we believe that was the case all the way back to kind of three agricultural times. and that that study existing hunter gatherer societies are also creating archaeological sites and doing analysis of damage and things like that so ahunter gatherers might have lived about 30 years on average and had a similar childhood mortality rates to people in europe until 1700 or 1800, about 35, 45 percent so we are really all that different. from pre-civilization human beings. until about 300 years ago. there'sreally no progress on that topic . the one point where there seems to be a noticeable trend in that early history is precisely the moment where agriculture arrives and where

large urban settlements happen. and it's in that period and this is what you see in the dickinson mount where there's actually a noticeable decline in human outcomes in terms of health and life. it drops to somewhere as low as 19 in some of these communities as far as we can tell. you can see this physical deformities of the body that people have to adopt in this farming lifestyle. so there are people like jared diamond and others that have made the argument that the rise of agriculture was the greatest mistake in human history and we were relatively happy and in our own way affluence until we adopted this agricultural lifestyle and we basically were enslaved to it for thousands of years until we rose our way out of the original standard of living. and it's a fact and it's a fascinating question that it raises the question of if it

was a downgrade for humans in terms of quality of life and length of life, why didpeople keep making them ? what was it that drove the adoption of the agricultural lifestyle when it seemed like such a bad deal? that's a whole other thing but that's not what i wrote the book about. but i brought it up in the book because it shows up at the end of the book. i wanted to remind people that the upward march of the extended life is not inevitable. it's not justgoing to keep on happening . if we don't look at the evidence and we don't listen to science and continue solving the problemswe have . and we're facing things like climate change that may pose a serious threat to the extension of human life if we may have overpopulation problems. in the coming years, we may have migration problems, we

may have a resurgence of famine. so we know that it is historically possible for people to adopt lifestyles that cause life expectancy to go backwards for long period's of time. we actually did it for a while. so it's not enough to just sit back and be like we've solved it all and we just have to watch the march of science and let it continue its merry way. we have to continue to figure out what's working and what's not working and otherwise we can go backwards. >> there was a passage towards the end of the book that ithought was really striking .if you don't mind i can just read it here. you talked about how you have this really impressive list of here are the things that have saved millions of lives

and billions of lives and they are innovations like a bifurcated needle, refrigeration, sewers and so on. i really enjoyed that. and you know, i've tried to put together lists like that but you pointed something out that had never really clicked for me. which was how few of those came from what we think of as technological developments in the current sense. the private sector, companies coming up with things and selling them to people ieand often things that we were selling to people were doing the opposite . where selling cigarettes our cars withoutseatbelts . and you pointed out that most of these changes have come instead from activists struggling for reform. from university-based scientists sharing their findings open source style and from nonprofit agencies

having breakthroughs in countries around the world. >> .. . >> with these changes seeming so technological and so kind of so many of them take the form of things that you buy or think to interact with in the end, why do they all follow that route? why is it ralph nader and not -- >> i think it has changed a little bit as that passage alludes to. like the covid vaccines are a good example of that where you

have a model now we see moving towards more of this kind of public-private partnership where you have core science done kind of open source style supported by governments, academic research, and then you have some private-sector energies that are tapped into an scale in capabilities big corporations have. that's a potent combination. it may be the future. it's really not the past. penicillin was one the first examples of that. fisa was involved in scaling up penicillin, those large, most important research was done in academic context and funded by the military but it was a private sector engagement in that as well. >> there was the supermarket. >> of course. the key contribution. before that point, a number of the things were kind of deep infrastructure things, the sewer system. that was very hard to make

private-sector kind of rally to build sewers. that was something the state had to do to clean the water. in some cases like the big innovations something like smallpox eradication really changed the world but there was no private-sector company that's going to be able to build a profitable business vaccinating villagers in bangladesh. there's no way to make that make money. and so you are dependent on different kinds of institutions like the w.h.o. and the book one of the things i argue is the invention of institutions like global institutions like w.h.o., that's the support for vaccines in some level. there's a weird thing about medicine which you would think with medicine there would be this basic mechanism in the market where if they are a company made junk medicine that

didn't do anything, the market would punish that come in the market would reward medicine that worked. it would be a financial incentive even before the fda came along to regulate it, to steer pharma towards better drugs. medicine is different from all other consumer goods because of two reasons. one, there's the placebo effect. people think there taking the pill that will make them better, some disproportionate get better just because that psychosomatic impact of it. but also people have their own internal pharmacies in terms of the immune system. most times people to get better. if you sell them a bogus bill, they will often just get better on their own either because of the placebo effect or because of the immune system. they will attribute it to the so they will go back and buy more of that pill. that doesn't happen with other products. if you make fake television you

don't have 30% of the market take the fake television home. there's something fundamentally tricky about the development of medicine that traditional logic of markets developing in the most efficient kind of outcome that matches consumer needs. it just doesn't really work. >> if anyone, i want to mention if anyone has questions i know we have gotten a couple but if you want to open the q&a tab on zoom you can feel free to ask anything you want and we can go to those inee a minute. but i ask, you mentioned a tv show a couple of times. i believe that's coming out. you got your first episode tomorrow. >> yes, 8:00 on pbs.

it's basically an adapted version of the book. an interesting thing, , bounces back and forth between the history and the present tense of covid. we are talking about the origins of vaccines and the predecessor technique of that and i'm sitting in a room talking to fauci on the day moderna efficacy results came back. it has a very cool i think on it unique, have seen a lot of programs do this for your learning a lot of history but seeing it constantly in the context of the present moment. the challenge was we made it all last fall and early winter of this year, so everything was locked down. even my cohost was in middle of england which was a major lockdown. it was logistically this enormously complicated process to get it made, but we felt like we right in the middle of the story.

we did manage to get it done but again that comes out tomorrow night as well. . >> so you were talking to doctor fauci the day the results came out? did he know what they were going to be quick. >> yes it is possible he had nine a day or two before but when he talked to us about it it's like he just learned it he was saying at one point i have had a lot of bad breaks we had a great break with this when we have taken 60 percent efficacy but 95 is so off the charts it is you have no idea. >> he is very charming of course in the show.

>> you have also mentioned that you have paperback coming out and it is a book i have enjoyed a couple of your books but i was not familiar with this one so tell me about it. >> so tomorrow is the publication date for the paperback release for the last but they came out one year ago. it's called enemy of all mankind. it is a single thread narrative the goes off in different directions and it's about a pirate, a completely different topic who pulls off a heist of an indian treasure ship in 1695 and triggers a global crisis that leads to the first global manhunt in the history of the world is like the story the first global capitalism with the older regimes in india and

rising appropriations with the east india company with the pirates so people are interested that book is newly out in paperback with the classic tale of history for father's day a great father's day book. >> sorry my brain was derailed by the mention of pirates. [laughter] it's like the real-life version of the rabbit hole you told me that little bit now i say no we're doing an event but i want to go read more. [laughter] so we have a couple of questions in the q&a. but the first question is connected to what we were discussing earlier that life

expectancy did not vary by social status but then began to so why is that? why did that start? >> the big change which is central to the vaccine story is that there was a technique so it is famously invented by jenner in 1796. and he gets a lot of credit like fleming. but there is an earlier technique some college inoculation it's like a smallpox scab somebody who has it and then insert that

putting in a powder to put it up through their nose to give them a very mild case of smallpox it's much more dangerous than vaccination. 2 percent of the population would die but it was so deadly that it was the better and safer choice. so be too developed outside of the west we don't know where it was first developed we think it was independently discovered and made its way into turkey and have british aristocratic woman randomly moved to constantinople and she saw people being

vaccinated and at that period she and documented her children. she brought it back as a technique in convince the prince of wales to inoculate her children and it spread as a technique through the elites because of the role model that i like to see this marked reduction among the elite and that period and a lot of those are children so because child mortality is such a big driver of life expectancy decline that's when you first start to see that increase because the children of the elites are not dying of smallpox. >> you mentioned child mortality and this is a question i feel there are a

couple of different stories of life expectancy that you hear. and now is just child mortality. ryan tomlinson just asked me today how much is it? what is the life expectancy of 30 or 40? >> it is very interesting since i started to work on the process on this project a regular response lifespan hasn't really changed to dale babies are not dying anymore and that is not true that's not the explanation. it is true infant mortality has gone way down but it's much more complex. if you look at the numbers and

that was is an amazing advance because childhood was an incredibly dangerous time just 100 years ago and 150 years ago two out of five of your children would die that was par for the course. so it was the most perilous point of your life until you got very old when you were five or two. so to think all that has been transformed so we should not just dismiss that. but we also know the terms in the uk in 1920 if you live 220

your life expectancy at that point is 60 so bunch of kids were dying so if you made it to 20 past the crucible of childhood you can live another 40 years now you can live to about 85 years. that is 25 extra years the grown-up scott. that is a generation that's the difference between grandkids and great again on - - great grandkids. and now in recent years countries like the united states where there is progress it's happening at the older part of the spectrum because we have gotten the most out of a can of childhood and infant mortality. so i to jerry and or centenarians over 100 years

old are the fastest growing demographic we meet a lot of 100 -year-old people out there. >> someone asks about the articles that you see in the newspaper about a human lifespan revolves around stories and they live 130 years so how helpful or hurtful is that mindset and why do some have a long lifespan quick. >> there does seem to be some variation so talk about the blue zone and there is some inherent ability with longevity so there is a genetic component to make some live longer and with diet and

lifestyle are obviously a huge factor as well. when they try to figure out how long hunter gatherers lived, doing that observationally the people that you're supposed to make in the beginning i can do with my mouth but the western demographers would try to understand how long people were living in a society but a lot of the 60 or 70 -year-olds did not look very old because of their exercise they were not sitting at their desk all day so they looked fit it was hard to tell how old they were

because the numbers system stopped at three asking how old they were it would be older than three that's the only answer they had. [laughter] so it was hard to figure out how will they were but their lifestyle clearly made a difference in terms of their physique. >> and i really liked that you did not well on that question that you talk a little that at the end of can we live forever and that was an interesting discussion but i do get tired of the stories where we found the key to living forever this one way to squeeze out a few more years. but i feel like it so much more interesting of a story and how we have kept from dying and all the other steps

so i want to throw in a question of my own. another person i had not really learned about was francis kelsey and just for the people here, give a summary of who she was. >> she was basically a figure who started her career early on and then involved in a terrible drug poisoning case one of the sulfa drugs that predates penicillin and basically then had illustrious career at the fda and ended up

playing a key role as a regulator to keep the manufacturer that we saw and was be sold as anti- anxiety medication and medication for morning sickness causing terrible birth defects. so in the early sixties to look more rigorously if these drugs work and stopping it from getting to the market in the united states and getting presidential medal of distinguished service. and a wonderful figure the things that we celebrate and

then to attribute to government regulators with the heroic narratives that is practically a swearword now and it is stifling of progress. it is a huge sign progress sometimes you need to accelerate things but building up that kind of institution you have vaccines but also the fda and then we should remind ourselves that is progress also. >> and the obvious context we

are all sitting here with many of us having gotten the vaccine developed in the last year and whenever i read through the studies or clinical trials of the vaccines i'm struck by how those randomized trials are just so good. but there is so many ways to do it wrong. and the fda and briefing documents and reports i instruct. it is weirdly inspiring. those that work so hard to get at the truth for no reason other than it will help other people. i really appreciate that you celebrate that. it is worth celebrating and especially worth celebrating in an obvious and a visceral way right now. >> thank you. a lot of it tries to figure

out ways those people and what they do narratively compelling. a lot of the stories, you could do it looking at these jobs but it is a mystery. so how do we figure out? so there is some detective work. someone tries to subdue the threat and if you have ingredient you can build a story and once you build the story then you can get people to think about it and say that's amazing to solve the problem.

sometimes somebody comes for the wonder drug or stopping a dangerous drug from getting on the market because they are relying on statistical tools. >> well, thank you so much. i think we're just about out of time some good hand things back over to katie at green light, but thank you so much for taking this time to chat. it was a lot of fun, thank you to the audience who asked question. >> thank you so much. everyone should also be buying your incredible books. they're amazing. hilarious at the same time. my book is less funny but his death is fantastic, so thanks for joining us and i'm honored -- to be with green light for the first event. >> thank you. >> thanks so much to you both for the fantastic discussion thanks a lot for joining us.

don't forget to buy your copy of "extra life." please look for the reporting on our youtube channel later on. thanks, everybody. have a good night. >> is a look at some of the best-selling nonfiction books according to parnassus books in nashville.

>> some of these authors have appeared on booktv and you can watch their programs anytime at booktv.org. >> on a a weekly author interw program "after words" new york staff writer patrick keith reported on the wealth that was built on fossil fuels which included valium and oxycontin. >> it's interesting, that john alber line, i think about that all the time picky set if you want to do something evil rapid in something boring. what he's getting at is we live in a society where this great deal of complexity and sometimes it's just hard to figure out what's going on with a particular story, particularly i think if it intersects with the legal system or the financial system, if you read that coverage in the business pages, sometimes it's a little hard to kind of see the forest for the trees.

one thing i think about a lot as a writer is kind of subverting that come is taking situations that are may be innately very complex, , forbidding lake complex, so complex that some readers might just be kind of inclined to check out. and making the challenge for myself, can turn this into a great story? is there a way to translate the complexity into a narrative that has a kind of hook that will grab people? so for me part of the reason i was interested in the sackler family, i'm interested in family stories. i think family dynamics are interesting. i have written about families before, but i also thought that this was an opportunity to kind of tell a story about the opiate crisis, about big pharma, about the kind of corruption of medicine by money, but tell it

in the form of a family saga. something i hope is pretty approachable both for people who may have been touched by the opioid crisis, may have some personal prior connection to this or also for people who don't, who never read an article about the opioid crisis, don't feel like there are not that many people who are directly or indirectly touched at this point but they are out there and i want to try to find a way to engage those people as well. >> to watch the rest of this program visit booktv.org. click on the "after words" tab to find this and all previous episodes. >> here are some programs to

look out for on this july 4 weekend on booktv. today we're live with harvard university professor and a story annette gordon-reed. she will answer your questions about american presidents, slavery and emancipation. call in during our in-depth program or submit your questions via e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or via.org or via social media at booktv. tonight on our author interview program "after words" former xerox ceo ursula burns the first black female ceo of a fortune 500 company shares her insights on an american business. tomorrow it's an extra day of booktv. some of the authors you'll see, patricia sullivan, "wall street journal" columnist jason riley

on a life of economist, soul, and alex marlow of breitbart news with a critical look at mainstream media. find full schedule information online@booktv.org online at booktv.org or consult your program guide. >> welcome everybody to the institute of politics andro glol affairs at cornell university's book and author series sponsored by bernard schwartz. tonight, "madam speaker: nancy pelosi and the lessons of power" written by susan page. will have a nice conversation with susan page. she will be interviewed by chris rybak and myself and then we'll throw it open to your own questionss about 7:35. want. want to welcome our friends at c-span who are with us this evening as we tape and for those you are unfit with the institute of politics at cornell we have one very simplee mission, that s to deepen discourse and raise understanding on complex issues in a bipartisan way. the forward begin a little bit of housekeeping if i may. on