The Billion Dollar Bet: Will Humans Live to 150?

In 2000, two scientists — Steve Austed, a biologist and Jay Olshanksy, a biostatistician — made a bet. Would a person live to the age of 150 by the year 2150? Austad bet yes and Olshansky bet no. The wager? $150, which will grow to more than one billion by the time it’s settled. In this episode, we revisit this twenty-five year old bet to find both men sticking to their guns. We also speak to Nobel Prize winner, Venki Ramakrishnan, about new insights into what causes us to age. The episode explores the latest science around aging to expose two competing ways of understanding the human lifespan. Are we locked into a hard age limit established by centuries of data? Or could a scientific breakthrough push us far beyond it so that many of us will live decades longer?

You can listen to The Billion Dollar Bet: Will Humans Live to 150? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Billion Dollar Bet: Will Humans Live to 150? is an episode from The World as You'll Know It by Aventine.

This episode is 34:54 long.

This episode was published on May 20, 2025.

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