Fully Alive: Unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, longer life - Zach Gurick | Jon Sabes | Long Life

 

Anyone would love to live a long life. But of course, you do not want to spend your later years chugging down medicines, drowning in debt, or simply bedridden. Zach Gurick sits down with accomplished entrepreneur, leader, and visionary Jon Sabes to discuss lifestyle and science, especially the breakthroughs in epigenetics, which are redefining our longevity experience. Jon breaks down the four tenets of an active lifestyle, why you should keep a daily journal, and how to set up a health-centered environment. He also explains how financial well-being is deeply connected with health, particularly with how your life will play out as you grow old.

The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Secrets To Living A Healthy Long Life With Jon Sabes

Introduction

Welcome back to Fully Alive, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. We’re diving into a conversation at the intersection of health, wealth, and longevity with a true visionary entrepreneur, Jon Sabes. Jon is the CEO of Longevity Partners and the author of Healthy Wealthy Longevity, a groundbreaking book that explores how lasting happiness and financial prosperity are directly linked to living a longer, healthier life.

A serial entrepreneur and longevity enthusiast, Jon has spent his career reimagining financial services through the lens of wellness. From licensing’s insights to pioneering the use of epigenetic clocks and life insurance protocols, his work is transforming how we understand risk, reward, and the very experience of aging. In this episode, Jon shares how lifestyle and science, especially the breakthroughs in epigenetics, are redefining our longevity experience.

He’ll explain how health is our most important asset and how just a few core tenets can make a significant difference, no matter what your current age or health status is. Get ready for a fascinating conversation on the future of health, wealth, and the science of living, of Fully Alive. Here’s my conversation with Jon Sabes.

 

Fully Alive: Unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, longer life - Zach Gurick | Jon Sabes | Long Life

 

Jon, thank you so much for joining us. It’s really a privilege and an honor to have you on the show. I’ve been really looking forward to our conversation. I’m excited for our listeners and our audience to get to hear from you and to learn from your wisdom, your experience, and your expertise. Thanks for being here with us.

Thanks for having me, Zach. I’ll do my best. I know about wisdom, but I’ll do my best.

Entrepreneur And Visionary Jon Sabes

I always like to start by just learn about your backstory a little bit. I know you shared some of that with me earlier, but you’re described as a longevity enthusiast, a serial entrepreneur. I always like to uncover, like, where do people’s passions come from? I just think it’s interesting to hear people’s journeys and the things that happened or didn’t happen in their lives that led them to what they’re doing now. Would you mind sharing your backstory and how you got into this work that you’re doing?

Happy to do so. I’m an entrepreneur with two decades of work in the longevity space. My angle on longevity has come from the financial services industry, and I’ve worked on Wall Street as a lawyer and financier. I like to say I ended up in the mail room of the life insurance industry, where life insurance policies are surrendered.

They’re lapsed, and the secondary market has evolved to offer seniors the opportunity to sell their life insurance policies for much more value than the carriers would otherwise offer. My career moved on to commercializing molecular biomarkers of health and aging. I was doing that. I was building new life insurance underwriting protocols. That led me down an entire rabbit hole, so to speak, on understanding how we age and why we age.

Again, I wasn’t a biologist, I wasn’t a PhD. I’ll call it the common man’s understanding of that. From there, I’ve continued in the longevity space, where again, I’ve focused on financial products and services and how they play in the role of healthy aging relative to financial planning and specifically retirement planning, where that’s a really interesting space that I’m focused on, now with my latest venture called Longevity Financial Partners.

Connection Between Health And Financial Prosperity

You’ve done all kinds of different things. You’ve really covered the gambit there. I love that. You know a pretty good amount about a lot of things. In your book, Healthy Wealthy Longevity, you talk about this powerful connection between health and financial prosperity. How do you see those two areas being merged together?

I wrote a book called Healthy Wealthy Longevity. It was meant originally to coincide with the launch of this business, Longevity Financial Partners, that really thinks about healthy aging and the role it plays as we grow old, and as we retire, what does that all mean, and how do we best optimize that for ourselves? Unfortunately, when I was starting the business and writing the book, my mother became ill.

She was 83 years old, and she had decided that chemotherapy and all that entailed was not for her. I was caring for her during that stage. She said, My life’s been a dream.” The Healthy Wealthy Longevity book that I had begun writing about financial services and longevity became really more of a personal journey where I recognized that for me, longevity had been an actuarial statistic, molecular biomarker.

It had been all these things, but it landed in a personal way that I had not internalized, and this thing called longevity, how long we’re here, how long we’re around, is our most valuable asset. It’s so precious. When it’s gone, it’s gone. That book, Healthy Wealthy Longevity, became my personal journey. In that book, I connect this idea of good health and financial well-being. It’s a topic, something like, “Money cannot buy you happiness,” or “You shouldn’t want money.” It’s taboo to even talk about money in the context of life.

I feel like we’ve done a disservice to particularly younger folks. I’m sure older members of the audience know that a degree of prosperity really is important to your overall life experience and your longevity because it turns out having a little bit of money means better outcomes in your overall health span and lifespan. I connect with those two in a way that I hadn’t seen a lot of other books basically do. I believe it’s foundational to living your best life. Your life is a dream, and it can be a dream when you look back on it.

Having a little bit of money means having a significantly better outcome in your overall health and lifespan.

I love that your mom was able to live a life and at the end say, “My life has been a dream.” What an amazing thing for all of us to strive for. Thank you for the work that you’re doing to put those concepts together. I’ve looked at some of that data as well, and see that a lot of times people who have more financial resources have had better access to health care and better doctors or things like that. There is a bit of a longevity inequality in our country. It’s a question of whether people who have more resources live longer and healthier and extend their health span because they have access to those things, or whether it comes first, I guess. What are your thoughts on that, and how do we work towards closing that gap?

That wealth disparity does equate in the United States to a longevity disparity. There was a study about ten years ago that came out from the Brookings Institution that documented this. It was like, “You people just didn’t even want to talk about it.” It was unsettling that the top earners were getting an additional ten years of life as compared to the low-income earners. That was really unsettling to a lot of folks.

One of the things that you and I talked about was the fact that I work with some folks at the Blue Zones. The Blue Zones is a group, and it’s an area of study. It’s well published that some research was done that located five geographic areas around the world called Blue Zones. They’re called Blue Zones because these people in these populations lived extraordinarily long, were extraordinarily healthy without chronic disease, and the most incredible thing about this, I felt, was that they were measurably happier.

Now, that in and of itself was great. You’d think, “That’s great.” Here’s the kicker, and it ties exactly into what we were just talking about, these places, 4 out of the 5 were financially poor. It goes to this very point that in the United States, yes, you have to have a degree of money, but you don’t have to have a lot of money necessarily to have good health.

I think that was one of the things I did want to point out within my book, which was yes, there are Blue Zones and yes, these people live longer and they live healthier and they stave off chronic disease for decades longer than we do in the United States, and they’re measurably happier. Here’s the kicker. They don’t have a lot of money. What that means is if you’re probably tuning in, you have enough. Most of us do have enough money, and that should be a relief to everyone listening, like, “It’s just a mind.” You just have to get your mind right, as I like to say around this concept.

Understanding The Concept Of Epigenetics

Thank you for sharing that. That it really does come down to our mindset, then. It debunks that myth a little bit, so thank you for sharing that. We talked a little bit about how you discovered epigenetics. Could you break that down for us and for those listeners who aren’t really super aware or understanding of epigenetics versus genetics and how that affects us and how our lifestyle choices can turn those genes on or off? Can you break that down for us a little bit?

Happy to do so. Again, as I said, I’m not a PhD, I’m not a biologist. I have a common man’s understanding of it, but I think a pretty good one. Necessity is the mother of invention. In my business, I just said there has to be a better way to predict how long we live. We can do everything. Technology is changing everything, and yet I felt the life insurance industry was using technology based on the ‘60s and ‘70s and his like, “Do you give blood and pee in a cop to try to get this thing called the life insurance policy?”

Anyway, I just went out on the search for, is there a better way to predict how long we live? I’d never read a peer-reviewed scientific article in my life, but I started this thing called the internet. You can gain access to so much information. What I found in my research was that there really wasn’t a big connection between our genetics and our lifespan. I mean, yes, if your parents lived long, then it increases the odds, but there really wasn’t a direct, if your parents lived to 100 and you sat on the couch, ate potato chips, and did nothing, and smoked cigarettes, you probably won’t live as long as your parents.

What we’re talking about there is lifestyle. What we’re actually talking about is gene expression. We’re all born with a set of genes that we get half from mom, half from dad, and those genes are pretty much immutable. You get the copy when you’re born, and yet those genes express in very different ways based upon your lifestyle. When we talk about gene expression, what we’re talking about is the science of epigenetics.

Epigenetics actually refers to a biological region above the genome. It’s the epigenome. It’s the epiduris. It’s the skin of the genome. What I learned in my research was that when you do lifestyle, you’re actually causing chemical reactions at a molecular level, these little things called methylation, methyl groups. These methyl groups come and they attach to your epigenome and they cause gene expression. When I learned about this, it was just remarkable.

There was a professor out at UCLA who had discovered this thing called The Epigenetic Clock. Dr. Steve Horvath at UCLA has discovered this epigenetic clock, and what he’s measuring is patterns of DNA methylation along the epigenome. He could tell if some people were biologically aged faster, advanced beyond their chronological age, or younger. When I met with him and I started talking about this thing called the epigenetic clock and the science of epigenetics, it was just incredible. I said, “I want to license your technology for this little industry called the life insurance industry.”

He was like, “What’s that?” I’m like, “It’s just a little business that is all based around predicting how long you will live.” He’s like, “Great, because this is the business. They asked the first question, “How old are you?” The second question is, are you male or female? The third question is, do you smoke or not?” He said, “Do you smoke? I could tell you if you smoke, how much you smoke.” I said, “That’s incredible,” because epigenetics, he was measuring methylation occurring along the epigenome from tobacco use.

Tobacco use, that explains why, let’s just call it bad behaviors, drives poor gene expression that manifests itself in a poor health outcome, i.e., Lung cancer, i.e., diabetes, i.e, anything. When I learned this, and when you understand that, you can connect up to your lifestyle, because once you learn this, you cannot unlearn this, and that’s why your lifestyle is driving so much of your health outcome over your life.

Thank you. That’s actually a really helpful, I like the term, common man explanation. You describe that in a way that makes it so that we can all understand that clearly. These epigenetic clocks, I’m fascinated by that too, essentially we’re measuring our biological age instead of our chronological age. That’s what you’ve introduced now into the life insurance industry?

That’s what I was working to do until, as an entrepreneur, things happen. That’s what I was commercialized. It’s incredible. This is the whole area of biological aging. The example we always used to talk about is identical twins. We can understand this in the context of identical twins, exact same DNA, but yet if one lives a healthy lifestyle and the other does not, we could measure their rates of biological aging.

We would find that the one with the good lifestyle had a D-accelerated rate of aging. They were likely younger biologically than their chronological age, versus the other twin, who was living an unhealthy lifestyle, and they had an accelerated aging clock, and they had an advanced biological age relative to their chronological age. Statistically, yeah, those two individuals would absolutely have a higher or lower overall mortality risk over their lifespan.

This is what I was commercializing. It turns out you can measure these patterns of epigenetic methylation for tobacco use, for metabolic health, for cardiovascular health, over a whole range of occult health measures. It’s an absolutely fascinating area of science, and I feel very lucky to have learned this, and I love sharing these concepts with other people.

Living An Active Lifestyle

All these lifestyle choices that we’re making have a significant impact and turn our genes off or on, and then obviously lead to healthy longevity or not. In your book, Healthy Wealthy Longevity, which you put together, I know you give some frameworks, you give some practices. Could you maybe go into some of that? What are some of the content from your book that you’ve really researched and put together for us?

Again, it goes back to this idea of why lifestyle drives so much of our overall health outcomes. For me, it was why I got really interested in this Blue Zones concept. Blue Zones is all about healthy aging, and it’s all lifestyle-driven. It explained why these populations have these really incredible health outcomes, given the fact that they have low financial resources and they really don’t have advanced medical care or anything. They just live a healthy lifestyle. Because of that, our bodies are just incredible machines that will self-repair, that will take care of themselves, and they will self-optimize to live as long and vibrantly as possible.

I really started leaning into Blue Zone lifestyles because it’s a great way to understand what healthy aging looks like. There are Netflix documentaries on Blue Zones. There are books on Blue Zones. There’s my book that talks about Blue Zones. All of these things go back to basic lifestyles. I also like to say we’re each very unique. Some things work great for some people. Some things work better for others. I’m not very prescriptive on this. I’m pretty open-minded on this, although I don’t speak, and drink less alcohol. There are some basics.

This goes into what I’ll call the core tenets. Those core tenets are move more. You’ve got to move. Move, move, move. Motion is lotion. Just keep moving. You always have to keep moving. A sedentary lifestyle is absolutely predictive of a shorter lifespan. The second one is to eat wisely. What you put in your mouth is medicine. I’d like to say movement and food are your two best medicines. Those are the two things that I believe will drive 80% of your overall health outcomes in life.

Movement and food are the two best medicines that will drive 80% of your health outcomes in life.

By the way, you’re never too old to eat better and move more. This body is absolutely so. It wants to live a vibrant, healthy life. You just have to feed it some movement and some good food. By good food, those are the things we talk about. Whole foods, clean foods, non-processed. It’s not rocket science here, but it does require consistency and application. The last two tenets, right within the Blue Zone framework, are purpose and connection. Having a reason, having those who are expecting you to show up, is so important. Wanting to show up for others is incredibly important, and then connections.

Staying connected with others. Those relationships keep us vibrant, keep us moving, maintain that purpose. Those are the four tenets. Movement, eat wisely, purpose, and connection. Those four. I’m not prescriptive beyond that. Whatever works for you, that’s the movement you should do. It’s the food you should eat. cannot be ultra-processed. Get some purpose, could be religion, could be faith-based. It can be just friends and family, and stay connected in your community with your friends and your family. Just stay connected.

How Lifestyle Choices Drive Gene Expression

I love that, and thanks for making that simple too. I want to go back to a couple of things that you said that reminded me of some other things we were already talking about. You said it’s never too late to make these changes, and that reminded me of when we were talking about epigenetics and gene expression. I think it is a myth that a lot of people, unfortunately, believe or buy into, that our genes make up our longevity, but really, that’s not true.

The science shows maybe 7% to 20% or so is what I’ve been told by experts is really dependent on genes, but the rest is really dependent on our lifestyle choices. These four core tenets can actually make a significant difference. It doesn’t actually take that long to change our epigenetic or gene expression with some lifestyle choice changes. I’ve heard that just 3 to 6 months of making lifestyle choice changes can turn genes off or on. Have you come across any of that research or data?

A couple of things. The research says that your genes are responsible for about 20% to 30% of your overall health profile. That means 70% to 80% of the rest of your health journey is something else. That something else really is lifestyle-driven. The majority of that is going to be lifestyle-driven. It comes back to this whole idea of lifestyle. This lifestyle then translates to proper gene expression.

A great analogy that folks will use on epigenetics is you can think of your genes as a blueprint. You get your blueprint, and then you get your general contractor. You’re the general contractor. If the contractor shows up drunk, I don’t care how good the blueprint is. The house is going to be faulty, it’s going to leak, it’s going to slide off the cliff, whatever. Another analogy is sheet music. I should say, as opposed to a poor blueprint.

A poor blueprint with all sorts of errors in it, if the contractor shows up and is very diligent and works hard and looks at everything, that will repair. Your house is going to last a thousand years, regardless of that blueprint. That’s a great analogy to understand how that lifestyle is driving gene expression. A lot of our genes aren’t correct, but we can suppress, I’ll call a mutated gene through lifestyle. I have a genetic mutation. It’s called MSH6. MSH6 increases my risk of colorectal cancer from about 8%, which is generally speaking, males have 8%, to about 30%.

I’m at a very high risk of colorectal cancer. How do I know this? It’s because my brother got colorectal cancer. He’s fine. He’s okay, but I learned of this, and so how do I decrease the risk of manifesting colorectal cancer? It’s not by sitting around eating potato chips and a poor diet, and this and that, it’s by a healthy lifestyle. Even though I have a mutated gene, I can suppress that gene through a healthy lifestyle. That’s really what we’re talking about.

It’s 70% to 80% of who you are that is going to be through your lifestyle, driving that proper gene expression. Some genes are expressed moment to moment, day to day. Genes are doing all sorts of different things depending on the cells and the function of the cell. Some genes are literally methylated and expressed on a moment-by-moment basis. Others are expressing over a lifetime. The genes are doing all sorts of different things, super incredibly complex things.

Overall, again, this lifestyle is going to drive the majority of that gene expression towards a positive health outcome. Again, just going to keep reiterating the basics, do the basics right. There are remarkable studies that show even older individuals, when they take up exercise, even just mild exercise, some basic walking, just basic healthy lifestyles, they have remarkable differences and changes in their overall health span and lifespan. That goes to this idea.

It is absolutely never too late. The studies that look at geriatric or older individuals engaging in healthy lifestyles show just incredibly remarkable results. I know you guys work in an older community. I just want to tell people you will not believe your results. I can guarantee it. Just stick with it. It’s not going to feel like it on the first day. It’s like saving. It’s like putting something in savings. You’ve got to put the savings in each day after a month, after six months, “You’ve got a little bit of money here.” It’s the same thing with your health.

I love that. As you said, it’s just simple. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming or super intimidating, but just small changes can make a big difference over a long period of time.

 

Fully Alive: Unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, longer life - Zach Gurick | Jon Sabes | Long Life

 

I like to use the compounding analogy. We always think about compounding interest. We’ve always heard that, “If I just put a penny a day, a dollar a day.” See, we all know the compounding from a financial perspective. That same compounding applies to every aspect of your life, particularly to your health. That health is compounding. You might not feel it at first, but trust me, it’s compounding. I would tell you it’s going to compound in your relationships and your purpose.

That’s the thing I have learned over the years too, where when I brought more intention and focus, some things I was a little light on, which is bringing more intention to improve my relationships, improve my purpose, I saw those things compound in ways, just like a savings account would to bring me so much more vibrancy and happiness in my own life. I would just encourage folks to know that the same concept of compounding happens in all domains of life.

Daily Journal: Your Little Self-Coach

Thanks for sharing that. I love how it all works together when we get things all moving in that direction, like you said, having that intention and focus leads to more purpose and more enjoyment, more engaging connections with others, and everything else all flows together. I love that expression. There’s a proverb, “A healthy man has a thousand dreams, a sick man has but one.” It all works together. Could you share a little bit, too? I know the book that you put together, Healthy Wealth Longevity, and you also have a journal that goes along with it. Could you share a little bit about the journaling exercises you put together?

One of the things that I discovered in my own journey was this idea called journaling. One of the podcasts, which I don’t listen to so much, about Tim Ferriss, a great podcast, brings a lot of thought leadership, but this idea of daily journaling, in particular, prompts journaling. There was this thing called the five-minute journal. I went to get it. It was like an inch and a half thick, and I traveled a lot. I built my own little journal. I wanted the slim little thing.

Literally, all it is is each day, it’s just like, it prompts me on a few key things. I’ve been doing this now for almost two decades, and I would create different versions of this. I try different things. I started handing them out to folks, and I’ve got a lot of positive feedback. The idea behind journaling, and particularly prompt journaling, is this idea of keeping your mind on what’s important to you. I like to say we’re all in a battle for our own attention.

Everyone’s trying to get our attention to what they want to talk about. What I would encourage folks to do is to focus on what they want as an individual. What do you want to see in your own life? Prompt journaling is a way to focus your attention just for a few minutes each day on what you want to get out of that day and then out of your life. It’s a way to again compound your thoughts towards that which you want.

The goal is to get what you want out of life. That doesn’t mean it has to be exclusive. I have lots of things that I want out of life that are common. I want a safe and happy society. That personal objective that I have an intention of manifesting, so to speak, shares a common value with a lot of people right now, particularly with so much going on that it frankly threatens that.

By writing things down, I believe it is the first step in manifestation or creating the reality you want because you literally take a thought, you add physical energy to it, you emotionalize it, you write it on paper, and it exists. You keep coming back to it and coming back to it. After, again, this idea of compounding, I’d like to see the person who’s going to stop me from achieving something I’ve written down, I’m going to do a thousand times. It creates power for you to get what you want out of life, whatever that is.

Writing things down is the first step in the manifestation of the reality you want.

There’s a lot of energy behind it. As you said, if you’ve written it over and over like that. Some of the prompts in the journal that you put together are the same every day, or are they different?

The prompts are the same every day. Again, I’ve personally designed it. You can get it from my website. I’ll see my little scribbles in there. It’s just very simple. Our top three. What are the three things I want to get done today? That could be as easy as, “I want to go to the hardware store and get some nails,” or it could be, “I want to call my son or my daughter,” or “I want to lift some weights.” There we go.

I don’t always do it every day, but at least I write it down. Goals. “Today will be great.” Complete the sentence. There are a whole bunch of reasons why today would be great. Gratitude. “Today, I am grateful for.” There’s a whole bunch of things to be grateful for today. Just write one, pick one. It’s fine if you use the same one every single day, break it out, think of another one, why not?

Self-affirmation. “Today I affirm for myself that I’m a great dad, I’m a great husband, I’m a competent coworker,” whatever that is, you need to get that positive self thought out. This negative self-talk is no bueno. You need to have positive self-talk. Affirm for yourself that you are going to be that person you want to be.

You can think about yesterday or in the evening, Marvel. “Today I was amazed by something. The sunset was so beautiful. The sunrise came up.” Whatever that is. Personal growth. “Today could have been better if we could always grow. We can always be a little bit better. I wish I hadn’t spouted off my mouth to my spouse. I wish I had been kinder to the server who spilled coffee on my lap.”

Whatever it is, there’s just always something we could reflect on to be a little bit better the next day. That’s this idea. I have some little notes. Remind me, “What did I write? Why is it so difficult to talk about money?” Remind me why that is. I would think I was asked the question, “Why is it so difficult?” You can write down your little reminders. That’s a day in my prompt journal.

It keeps you focused on, like you said, those positive things, gratitude, self-reflection, and moving forward towards your desired future. Thanks for putting that together and making it so simple for you. I love that it’s a small journal that you can take with you anywhere if it’s in your pocket.

It goes in your little pocket, your vest pocket, your backpack. I call it like it’s your little self-coach. Anyone who’s had a coach at any point in their life for whatever sport or thing they were doing. When the coach is gone, it’s like, “You’re on your own.” This little, I call it my little self coach, where I’m like, “He’s yelling at me again.” “Do your movement, do your weights, do this, do that.” This is my way of self-coaching.

Setting Your Environment Up For Success

There you go. That’s great. You’re obviously someone who practices what you preach, and it’s clear that you’re leading a healthy lifestyle yourself and making good lifestyle choices. Those of us who are just listening cannot see, but if you’re watching this video, you have your weight bench and weights in the background, and you have several different bikes in there as well. Can you tell us about your own personal health habits and what your typical day or week looks like in terms of what are those practices that you are imploring that you’re doing to stay healthy?

You’re looking at my office studio at my house. It was a room I always imagined building for myself, designing it. I think that’s a great takeaway to think about your own life, designing your own life, and your physical surroundings. In fact, that’s really one of the big lessons that come from being in these Blue Zones. We’ll go back to this concept where these Blue Zones, the environment itself, promotes a healthy lifestyle.

Dan Buettner likes to talk about “We all fall down on our own self-discipline.” This is true. It’s hard to maintain self-discipline to do all these things that we know we should do. Making it easier for ourselves is really key. Having my weights really close to me, having those bicycles look, “I got to look at them every day.” Bike over to the store versus drive the car. You can shape your environment in a way that promotes a healthy lifestyle.

How can you fault anyone, including myself, if I’ve got a quart of Ben and Jerry’s favorite ice cream and a salty, sugary snack in the cupboard? After dinner, I’m as bad as the next guy. I’ll go in there and eat all of it. Getting that stuff out of my pantry, limiting my options in terms of some of the things that I don’t want to do, really sets me up for success. That’s what I think is a key takeaway is set your environment up for success. Help yourself just by shaping your environment so that your default healthy habits are a little better.

 

Fully Alive: Unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, longer life - Zach Gurick | Jon Sabes | Long Life

 

How can you fault yourself for not eating healthy? If you didn’t go to the grocery store, buy us some fruits and vegetables, make them readily available, some on the counter next to the M&M’s or whatever else. At least you had the chance to choose an apple or a peach as opposed to a handful of M&Ms. That’s the key takeaway there. I think if I could encourage anyone tuning in, that’s how you’ll help yourself the most by setting yourself up for success. Make it easier. Make those healthier choices easier to do. You’ll do more of them.

I can imagine when you’re finished with a Zoom call like this, maybe you would go, “I could go do a set or two on your bench press right there,” like you said, you have it around zero.

We do that now after you just suggested that we know we know that’s going to happen 100%.

Why Financial Planning Is Vital To Longevity

I love how you’ve simplified things, but you’re really taking these larger concepts and making them practical for us. When you think about the future and what’s on the horizon, what excites you the most? What are you hopeful for in terms of your companies and the things that you’re involved in? What’s on the horizon for you?

I’d first say I’m very optimistic about the future. I think there’s so much to be optimistic and excited about for the future. That’s not to say we don’t have a lot of challenges in front of us. For me, the challenges that I’m working on right now, in particular, are these ideas around longevity in the context of financial planning.

It’s a real challenge, and it’s a real issue that seniors in America have in terms of a fear of outliving their assets, having enough money, given this existing condition called extended longevity. When Social Security was adopted in 1935, life expectancy at birth was 61 years. That meant that the minority of individuals were expected to even get Social Security. Now, if you make it to 65, the odds are you’re going to make it to 80. That’s twenty years. Again, at the time Social Security was enacted, it was a statistical anomaly to make it to 100.

If you’re 65, you’ve got a chance to get into 100. It’s not a statistical anomaly. How are you going to figure out how to make your assets not live 10, 20, that’s 35 years. With market volatility and cost-of-living increases, and healthcare, it’s a really big challenge. What I’m optimistic about is I think there’s some really exciting opportunities to do some innovative things that will give people new tools to help better manage, I’ll call it, longevity risk. I’m excited about that. That’s what we’re working on. We’ll have a lot to say about that in the coming months ahead.

That’s great. That’s interesting. Longevity risk. I haven’t really thought about that before because it’s always more of a positive thing. There’s the risk of, like you said, outliving your assets.

It’s this paradox that arises, like, “Great, we’re all living longer. Awesome. How do I pay for it?” At the same time, what has happened is we call it the great risk shift. It used to be you could rely on Social Security. You could rely on a corporate pension. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, this thing called self-directed retirement plans came up, and everyone thought, “That makes sense. I’d much rather have control over my own assets and dust my own money. I don’t trust the pension.”

That all made sense, except that now we’re on the other side of it. We have the first generation now actually coming through and going, “How do I use this account balance to plan for unknown longevity, the unknowable?” That is a real big challenge. What we’re seeing now is this dealing with individual planning risk with an individual account versus group or pooled risk.

You can do it really well with group and pooled risk, i.e., planning for longevity. When it comes to an individual, you have no idea if you’re the outlier. Even if you have a poor lifestyle, you are the oldest person known to have lived, who was 122 years of age. She was a known tobacco smoker up until the age of 105. The point is that living a long time is an outlier. Whoever lives to 100, I’m telling you, you don’t know who it’s going to be. You’re going to be an outlier.

Whoever lives to a hundred will be an outlier.

How do you plan for an outlier? It’s really difficult to do at an individual level. We have a lot of challenges to deal with there. I want to bring tools and solutions to that. I also want to talk about how we live healthier and age better so that we can increase this thing called health span that meets our lifespan. We can make sure the years we do have are good years, versus just a lot of years.

Thank you for sharing that. I think that’s really the goal here is how do we make our health span match our lifespan, and then fill those years with purpose and meaning. Another thing that I think is part of this conversation is that the statistics are showing that people are actually working much longer or doing some work later into their lives as well. Maybe that’s another way that people will extend those earning years or not start dipping into their retirement funds as early.

The Right Time To Retire (And How To Do It Right)

I’m working on my second book right now. One of the key topics starts with the invention of 65. Retiring at 65 is absolutely just a cultural artifact. It’s purely invented. In these Blue Zones, they don’t even have a word for retirement. They don’t even know what that is. Retiring at 65 was a cultural artifact that started in Germany with Otto von Bismarck in the 1800s. It moved over here to the United States with the Social Security Act of 1935, when we were in the depths of the Great Depression, and we needed a financial safety net for millions of aging seniors who were destitute. That became a cultural artifact.

At the time, we didn’t expect 4 out of 5 Americans living to 65 and beyond and going from it being a modest financial backstop to like the primary source of income through retirement, not for a few years, but for decades. We’ve got a real problem on our hands right now, couple that with the baby boomer generation, and some real challenges ahead. All of this is on point. We’re living it in real time. We’re going to see a lot more of this in the future. It’s incumbent on everyone to play their role, being individually responsible, taking ownership of their own health, their own finances, so that we can collectively navigate these times and make the rest of our years our best years.

Part of that, too, is like you said, this retirement age is really just something that’s arbitrary and made up. If people do continue working longer, that solves that purpose question a little bit, too. Maybe you’re retiring from the things you no longer want to do, but hopefully you’re retiring to something that you want to do, or continue to find passion and purpose and meaning from some meaningful work. It can serve a dual purpose to continue working longer.

I think you’re describing a modern arc of retirement. Again, I’m not judging. If you want to stop working at 65 and start playing golf and fishing, cool. That could be plenty of purpose and activity. That’s all good. I have older friends who do, and that’s wonderful. I know for me, I really don’t think I’m going to stop working. I think I’m going to continue to work in some form of fashion.

That may change over time. I might have different roles, but I think there is a modern arc for retirement. Certainly, what they used to say, the new 50 is 60 or the new 65 is a 45-year-old person. You can sustain this lifestyle and be vibrant and engaged many more years than frankly our parents could or otherwise. Thinking about a modern arc of retirement as opposed to disengagement, I think it is very sage and wise advice.

As you said, a lot more to come on that. It’s incumbent on all of us, like you said, I appreciate that, to take control of our own health, over our own finances, to be like with some of our friends at Found Life say to be the CEO of your own health and to be the CEO of your own finances as well. Really taking ownership of those can make a big difference.

I think that what’s the saying, it’s expensive to be poor. I think we know that you have to pay a lot. It’s expensive to be unhealthy. Even if you’re concerned about your finances, but not your own health, you can just justify it simply by saying, because you’re going to mitigate a lot of expenses. Again, you are never too late to start. I can guarantee that part. You just have to keep going, and it might feel uncomfortable, and I might feel like, “Oh.” Just give it some time. Give your body, give this miraculous thing called the human body a chance to respond to some healthy inputs.

It is never too late to start living a healthier life. Give this miraculous thing called the human body a chance to respond to your healthy inputs.

Get In Touch With Jon

Jon, this is fascinating. I really appreciate the work that you’ve done. As I said, the way you’ve simplified these larger concepts into the practical bite-sized things that we can do and implement, and you made things that could be intimidating easy to take those steps. Thanks for the great work that you’re doing. Where can people connect with you, and how can we get your book, your journal, and things like that?

Thanks for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure. People can connect with me on any of the social media channels that they like. It’s Jon Sabes. I’ve got my own website. The book is on Amazon, Healthy Wealthy Longevity: The Good Things in Life for as Long as Possible. The journals, if you’d like those, are available through my website, JonSabes.com. Engage with me on social media. Anything I can help with, anything I can do to help you or any of the audience, I’m here. Appreciate you. Appreciate the show and the good work you’re doing and the message you’re sharing out there to folks.

Thanks so much, Jon. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to have you. Thanks for joining us.

—

What a fascinating conversation with Jon Sabes. I hope that you enjoyed that as much as I did. I love how we talked about his mom at the end of her life, shared that her life was a dream, and what a gift to be able to get to the end of our lives and say, “My life has been a dream.” I think that’s what we all shoot for and what we all aim for.

Some of the things that we talked about are that it’s never too late to make these lifestyle changes and that even just a few small changes can compound over time to make a significant difference in how our genes are expressed and how we feel in terms of our health, but also our purpose, connection, and relationships as well. There are four core tenets that we covered again that I like how simple and easy that is just move more, eat wisely, find a purpose, and connect with others.

Those core tenets, like really wanting to show up for others, having purpose and movement, and food. Those are easy things that we can all do. You don’t have to have a whole lot of money to make a significant difference. That was another thing that we talked about there, that the five Blue Zones in the world are more impoverished places, not really financially thriving places. It’s really about the mindset there.

These are things that all of us can do and that all of us have the resources to do. A couple of other things that we covered were about the prompt journaling, and you can find Jon’s journals on his website, JonSabes.com. Check out his book, Healthy Wealthy Longevity, check out his journals, and then just practice those four core tenets and see what happens if you’re stuck and need a little inspiration there. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time back here on Fully Alive.

 

 

Important Links