The Psychology of Living Longer

Laura: In a 100-year life, there's a lot of time to live differently, and we think a lot at the center about having more flexibility in how we go through life. You might want to retire several times in your life. I encourage people to retire early and often, but to continue to think about work and reentering work. Work is good for people.

Laura: The way we work is not.

Brent: Welcome to The Life Lab by Death Clock. I'm your host, Brent Franson. The mission of Death Clock is to help 100 million people live ten years longer. Today, we speak with Dr. Laura Carstensen. Dr. Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She's a professor of psychology at Stanford, and she's the author of A Long, Bright Future: Happiness, Health, and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity.

Brent: This is a conversation that's much more about the psychological side of longevity and the social impacts of living longer lives than it is about the biology of being healthy and living longer. She's really got a great perspective on how we might think differently about our lives, given the fact that we're living to 80 and 90 and not living to 40 and 50.

Brent: She's a wonderful guest. I hope you enjoy.

Brent: Dr. Laura Carstensen, welcome to the show.

Laura: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brent: I'm looking forward to our discussion because we tend to focus on this show on the biological sides of longevity. I suspect today we will spend a lot more time talking about the psychological aspects of longevity, so I'm looking forward to that. Before we get into that, can you give us a sense of your background and your day job?

Laura: I'm a professor of psychology at Stanford. I've been at Stanford for 35 plus years. About 20 years ago, I co-founded, with a number of other faculty at Stanford, the Stanford Center on Longevity. I'm the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and a professor of psychology.

Brent: You founded that in 2007, which means you were way ahead of the curve in terms of the longevity craze. Longevity, at least in the popular context, makes people think, "I'm going to take rapamycin, I'm going to live forever, I'm going to do a full-body scan."

Brent: I imagine that when you founded the center, it was not with that definition of longevity in mind. Could you give us a sense of what you think of when you think about the word longevity, and what it means to you?

Laura: We were very careful when we named the center to call ourselves the Stanford Center on Longevity, not for longevity, to distinguish us from people who are trying to extend longevity. We have no objection to people living for a long time—that's great. But our center isn't on that. Our center is on the mismatch between the length of our lives today and the worlds into which we're born, which are worlds that were quite literally prepared by and for young people.

Laura: Our mission is to quickly build a culture that supports long life. By culture, I'm including science, technology, the built environment, and the social norms and behavioral practices that take people through life.

Brent: Okay, so you mean the world that we walk around in every day is really built and designed for younger people and is not meant for old people? Where would you draw that line between the world being built for people of a certain age and below?

Laura: Life expectancy in 1900 in the United States was 47, and life expectancy had never been higher than that. If you think about everything from the buildings that line our streets to the ways we think about education, these evolved around lives that long. It's not like somebody said, "Let's go build a world for young people."

Laura: It's that there weren't many old people. Only 4% of the population was over 65. That's not a lot of older people. Alzheimer's disease was not a problem in 1900 because people died way before those became problems. What our ancestors did in the 20th century is nearly eliminate premature death. They were solving problems for young people—people 50 and younger.

Laura: They did an amazing job with medical advances that allowed people to recover from bacterial infections or accidents. We had antibiotics and vaccinations that could protect people against diseases. That's what our ancestors did. Lo and behold, they saved the lives of young people so well that we started to live even longer.

Laura: But culture doesn't catch up as fast as life expectancy did. Culture—from educational practices to behavioral norms like when you're supposed to get an education, get married, or retire—hasn't changed to accommodate these much longer lives. That's the challenge. That's why we founded the center: to ask how we can apply science, technology, and sociocultural change to support people for century-long lives, not just half-century-long lives.

Laura: Not just half century long lives.

Brent: Is it true that life expectancy was 47 for people who lived to adulthood? I imagine the rate of dying in childbirth or under five years old throws off that 47-year average. If you made it to adulthood back then, would you live to 60, whereas we live to 80 today?

Laura: Life expectancy goes up the older we get. If I'm 75, I'm going to live at least to be 75. Your question is a good one, and a lot of people believe life expectancy in adulthood hasn't changed very much.

Laura: It was really about saving children. When computing an average, having a lot of low numbers throws it off. In the first half of the 20th century, that's largely what was happening: reducing infant and child mortality.

Laura: At the time, people thought that's all we were going to do. But life expectancy in the 20th century was going up at every age, and today life expectancy is continuing to go up for people 65 and older. We're seeing it inch up by about three months every four years.

Laura: We're still seeing this increase. It isn't just about children; life expectancy has gone up at all ages.

Brent: There was some counter-narrative around COVID, or a popular belief that life expectancy is flat or declining, and that we spend so much money on our healthcare system. But you're saying it's actually increasing, despite the dip during COVID.

Laura: It did dip during COVID, and we're now back to where it was before. At the end of the 20th century, life expectancy went from 47 to 77. We gained 30 years in the 20th century. Then COVID hit in 2020 and it dipped, similar to the dip during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Laura: Now it has recovered and gone up to 79, which is close to where it was before COVID.

Brent: Okay, so we're not quite back at an all-time high, but we're approaching it.

Laura: Just before COVID, we were approaching it. We are now at an all-time high. A lot of countries have longer life expectancy than the United States, so we are not at the top of the heap. But yes, for us in the United States, life expectancy is now at an all-time high.

Brent: If I'm recalling correctly, somewhere like South Korea is 84 or 85. The high watermark globally is still right below 85, correct?

Laura: Yeah. We're talking about averages. Yes.

Brent: We've eliminated many issues where children die before adulthood, moving life expectancy from 47 to 77. Now we are primarily dying from diseases of abundance or behavior: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

Brent: It seems we're going to need a different set of solutions. How would you characterize where the problem lies today in continuing to increase that number?

Laura: We're very good today at treating acute diseases. The medical community is great at it. But because we're living longer and haven't addressed the diseases that emerge in the second half of life, we're dying from chronic diseases. The top causes of death today are heart disease and cancer.

Laura: To put that in perspective, 100 years ago, the top causes of death were gastrointestinal diseases and the flu. These were acute diseases, which is why people died at all ages. You would get flu or food poisoning, and you would die fast.

Laura: With chronic diseases, we can live for decades with heart disease or cancer. 75% of cancers today are treated effectively and managed. That's really good news if you have heart disease or cancer, as you can live for a long time.

Laura: But it means that we have a frailer population, and we need to find ways to address chronic diseases so we can either delay or treat them much more effectively.

Brent: Switching to the psychology side, you have some theories I'd like to explore. It feels like there's an umbrella theme over them: happiness tends to peak when we are older.

Brent: Happiness is lowest in midlife when kids are young, and counterintuitively highest around age 70. It's counterintuitive because you assume you don't have all your physical or mental faculties, and you're not in the prime of life.

Brent: Why would we be happier then? Can you help us understand the trend of happiness throughout the average life, and why it might be higher when we're older?

Laura: This is so surprising to people that it's called the paradox of aging. I spent 20 years trying to disentangle different findings to see if we could make headway in understanding it. It doesn't seem to make sense that the time in life when you have the most physical problems, social stigma, and ageism is emotionally the best time in life.

Laura: There's an experience where we're losing friends and loved ones through death, so there's a lot not to like about aging. But emotionally, it's the best time in life. What a paradox! Let me clarify findings about life satisfaction versus findings about emotional experience.

Laura: Life satisfaction follows a U-shaped curve: it's high in early adulthood, dips in midlife, and comes back up in later life. When we study emotion day in and day out—how happy or sad people feel—we see a steady linear decline in negative emotions without that dip.

Laura: Positive experiences—happiness, contentment, joy—stay pretty level throughout life. With negative emotions decreasing and positive emotions staying stable, on balance you are happier. It's not that you're super happy in your 70s compared to your 20s, but rather that it's driven by experiencing less negative emotion.

Laura: Less negative emotion in life leaves a more positive emotional balance.

Brent: Satisfaction follows this U-shaped curve. In youth, I feel satisfied, but in midlife—the sandwich generation with young kids and aging parents, grinding away at work—I feel less satisfaction.

Brent: As kids get older and leave home, satisfaction increases again—that's the U-shaped curve. On emotions, negative emotions decline linearly while positive emotions stay stable, making the net experience more positive as we age.

Brent: As we get older, we just have fewer negative emotions. Is that true for both men and women?

Laura: Yes, through the late 60s and 70s it peaks and then levels off. It's a good story for old age. The difference between satisfaction and emotion is that life satisfaction is a cognitive assessment of your life.

Laura: When asked how satisfied you are, you compare yourself to others and think about how you're doing in your job and relationships. That's a different question than asking, "Brent, on a scale of 1 to 9, how happy are you right now?"

Laura: That's about momentary experience. How you view your place in the world follows the U-shaped curve, but emotional experience gets steadily better from young adulthood into old age.

Brent: Is there selection bias here? Unhappy people who lived hard lives might not make it to 70. Are the people left at 70 or 75 simply fortunate enough to have made it that long?

Brent: So they have a fair amount of life satisfaction and happiness.

Laura: Those hypotheses have been examined and tested. There is some truth to it, but it doesn't account for the phenomenon. Unhappy or depressed people have a slightly shorter life expectancy, but not enough to explain this finding.

Laura: Also, we don't have many deaths under 50 in this country and most of the developed world anymore. Most people survive past 50.

Laura: Because most people are making it to older ages, being happier at 70 is not driven purely by a highly selected sample.

Brent: Why are we more satisfied with our lives at 70 than we are at 40?

Laura: I can only speculate. Most of the work on satisfaction has been done by economists through large population surveys, which don't go deep into individual reasons. In youth, anything feels possible, and there's a sense of promise about the future.

Laura: Midlife is a time when we have control, but everyone depends on us.

Laura: Children, colleagues, and older relatives depend on you. In this country, we work way too hard in midlife—50 or 60 hours a week, sometimes two jobs.

Laura: People tend to be less satisfied, and marital satisfaction dips under this strain. When kids leave home, marital and life satisfaction increase. People are less stressed and can look back with self-acceptance, feeling okay about what they've accomplished.

Laura: Self-acceptance increases with age, leading to greater overall satisfaction.

Brent: In youth, we hold onto fantasies like becoming a racecar driver or a famous actor. In midlife, you realize those things won't happen, but you appreciate your life and family despite the hard work.

Brent: There's a narrative that when men stop working or kids move out, it's a tough transition where sense of meaning is lost. How do those anecdotes fit into this narrative of happiness in older age?

Brent: Are those anecdotes wrong, or how do they fit into the data?

Laura: Most of it is mythology, like the midlife crisis. While some people in midlife leave spouses or buy sports cars, it happens no more frequently than at 30, 60, or 70.

Laura: It's not typical. Middle-aged men buy fancy cars simply because it's the first time in their lives they can afford them. It's not a crisis.

Laura: We also believe in empty nest syndrome. Stanford students often express concern about how their parents will manage once they leave for college. I tell them, "Trust me, they're fine."

Laura: Marital satisfaction returns to honeymoon levels when children leave home. It's not that parents don't love their kids, but raising them creates logistical and relationship strain.

Laura: In later life, with kids grown, you have fewer daily obligations and errands.

Laura: People tend to get happier with age.

Brent: Is it true that men lose a sense of meaning when they stop working?

Laura: That hypothesis drove research for years under the assumption that retirement must be terrible, especially for men whose identities are tied to work.

Laura: While some men are unhappy in retirement, on average there is very little change in satisfaction. If you're happy while working, you'll likely be happy in retirement. When people retire, they don't just sit around all day.

Laura: Many competent, successful people use retirement to work without financial pressure—volunteering, getting involved in the community, or starting new ventures.

Laura: People like retirement and do well in it.

Brent: We used to live to 47, and now we live to 80 and beyond, but our culture and environment haven't caught up.

Brent: Is it true that the longer you work, the longer you live? Is 65 still the right age to retire, or is that too young if we live to 100 or 110?

Brent: But if we eventually live to 100 or 110, I don't know, maybe 65 is too young to stop working.

Laura: We should structure work completely differently. If we started fresh without historical baggage, nobody would design a system where people work frantically in midlife to fund 30 or 40 years of full retirement.

Laura: When Social Security was created, life expectancy was around 50 or 60, so setting retirement at 65 made sense then. Nobody expected people to live this long.

Laura: It's a poor design psychologically as well. Having nothing structured to do for 30 years isn't ideal. Nobody needs to play that much golf.

Laura: Contrast that with midlife, when people are working hard and raising kids, and could really use more leisure time. At the Center on Longevity, we advocate rethinking how we move through life.

Laura: We have an initiative called The New Map of Life. In a 100-year life, you don't have to compress education, work, and family into early adulthood like our ancestors did.

Laura: In the past, people worked hard so their children survived to adulthood, and by 50 they were done.

Laura: In a 100-year life, we have time to live differently. We advocate for flexibility, where you might retire several times or adjust your hours throughout life.

Laura: I encourage people to retire early and often, while continuing to engage in work. Work is good for people; the way we currently work is not.

Brent: Is that observation unique to the United States? My father-in-law in Italy often argues that while the US has higher per-capita GDP, European quality of life is higher.

Brent: He criticizes the way Americans work and enjoy life, arguing it's better in Europe.

Brent: Have Europeans figured this out better, or does the Western world broadly have a flawed relationship with work?

Laura: We definitely have room to improve. Instead of measuring GDP, look at life expectancy: people in Western Europe live longer than we do in the US.

Laura: In Italy, France, and Germany, life expectancy is higher. However, many European systems still force early mandatory retirement, pushing talented people out when they are still in their prime.

Brent: You've got to help my argument. Let's let's try. Okay.

Laura: When France tried to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, there were massive protests. In many places, work is seen as a necessity rather than part of your identity.

Laura: No country has it completely right yet, but Europeans excel at taking time to relax and enjoy unhurried meals.

Laura: Eating meals on the fly in a car while rushing between jobs is not a ideal lifestyle.

Laura: You know, that's that's that is horrifying. And and I agree, that is, although I've done it many times. Not to say I don't stop at the 7-Eleven, but I, I found myself eating on the fly, you know, running from one thing I have to do to the next.

Brent: If you could wave a magic wand to change how we work, what would that look like? Having young kids, my wife and I feel how finite this time is, even as we build our careers.

Brent: My wife craves more time with the kids during this period, but wants to remain engaged professionally long-term.

Brent: A model where someone can work less while children are young and then work longer overall sounds ideal, but feels hard to achieve in today's environment.

Brent: If you were in charge of workplace norms, what would your ideal design look like?

Brent: Yeah. What does it look like?

Laura: It would be super flexible. Work is good for people of all ages. Women who step out of the workforce entirely when raising young kids are actually more likely to be depressed than women who remain employed. Being home with small children all day can be isolating.

Laura: So and it's really hard when you're trying to get them dressed and in the car. So you can take them to a doctor's appointment or something really, really hard.

Brent: Working mothers are less likely to experience depression than stay-at-home mothers?

Laura: Yes, that's correct.

Brent: Meaning mothers who maintain employment are generally less prone to depression than those who step away entirely?

Laura: Precisely. They are less likely to be depressed than stay-at-home moms. Caring for young children full-time without outside connection can feel isolating.

Laura: In an ideal work culture, we would move away from rigid 40 to 60 hour workweeks. People could work fewer hours per week across more years overall, dialing back during times like raising young kids or caring for an elderly relative.

Laura: Working even ten hours a week keeps your foot in the professional door, making full re-entry much smoother later on.

Laura: Stepping away completely for 20 years makes returning to work challenging.

Laura: That's really hard. And it happens to a lot of women, and it's not easy to do. If I were going to start a business, by the way, I would only hire women who would then I would workforce for 20 years, and they know how to do stuff, right. So I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying it's hard.

Laura: If work is viewed as a lifelong endeavor, people can stay engaged well into their 80s at scaled-back hours. Many 80-year-olds can comfortably work ten hours a week and benefit from the social and mental engagement.

Laura: You're going to work until you aren't able to work, but work when you're 80 years old, ten hours a week, you can do that. Most 80 year olds can do that fine. And they'd probably be happier if they were for the same reasons. Moms who are taking care of little kids are happy to have ten hours where they're not taking care of the little kids, so we can do that.

Laura: The 40-hour workweek was an arbitrary standard introduced by Henry Ford.

Laura: Technology and AI can allow productivity to remain high while reducing required human work hours, creating better balance for everyone.

Brent: Are we moving in this direction? In places like Palo Alto and Boulder, I see more fathers actively sharing childcare duties and parents utilizing flexible leave options.

Brent: Is that part of a broader societal shift, or just a reflective bubble in certain areas?

Brent: I mean, it's whenever I would the trips that the families are taking and the flexibility that they seem to have. And so is there a trend in the right direction? If we were to look at the trend from 20 years ago or, not really, you're just been spending all your time in a couple of bubbles?

Laura: There is evidence of a real cultural trend. Fathers today are much more involved in parenting than previous generations, which strengthens family relationships and overall well-being.

Laura: Right? So a woman would stay home, she her the household was hers and the bringing home the paycheck was is and for a lot of men, they felt disconnected. The mother was much closer to her kids than the dad was. They don't really give a hoot about him. Today, I know there are. I hear the results of surveys all the time.

Laura: Sharing parenting responsibilities benefits everyone.

Laura: Often after the birth of the first child, a husband can feel really out of it. If he's the guy who goes back to work and then comes home and the mom says, oh, look what the baby did today. And then and you kind of feel like I didn't get to see that, you know? So it's good when both parents are working.

Laura: If we could redistribute the extra 30 years of life expectancy we've gained, we shouldn't just tack them onto old age. We can use them to space out childhood and parenting years so families have more time together.

Laura: Where would you want those extra years? No one has ever said I'd make old age longer. So let's put them in childhood. Let's let the kids go out and climb trees and run around. Instead of thinking about where they're going to go to preschool before they're even born. You know, kids are getting put on waiting lists. You know what?

Laura: Children learn naturally through play and exploration. Extending time during childhood and parenting allows families to flourish, followed by working longer across a career with fewer hours per week.

Laura: And then we'll work longer, but we're not going to work 40 hours a week at any time during our lives. Let's how about that? Or the deal?

Brent: That sounds appealing, though in a competitive market, it can feel risky for individuals to scale back unless broader societal norms change as well.

Brent: Broad societal adoption is needed for it to work seamlessly.

Laura: Systemic shifts start small and spread as people see positive results. Productivity studies often show that reducing work hours or moving to a four-day workweek maintains or even improves output because workers are better rested and focused.

Laura: It's going to happen exactly this way, but it already is. You know, we've been talking about these trends already and how it's going. But here's the I if I push back a little bit on the productivity issue. So two things. One is it doesn't look like productivity declines when people work fewer hours. I don't know any science published articles, let me say on this, but I know a number of companies have done experiments within their own company to see if they reduce the number of working days or hours.

Laura: Does productivity fall? Microsoft did this at a plant in Japan that they had, and they, had to lock the doors to keep the employees out because they wanted to come in. On that fifth day, productivity went up when they went to four day work weeks as opposed to five. I just think about this immediately. If I only had if I could get a three day weekend every week.

Laura: Wow. I really want to get back to work. It feel better. So it isn't the case that the number of hours we're putting in has to be this many. We could probably be as productive working far less because we'd be rested, we'd be happier, we'd have some leisure in our lives, you know what I mean? So. So there's that.

Laura: AI and automation can further enable higher productivity with fewer work hours.

Laura: So we're at a point in history where the stars are aligning.

Brent: I hope so, but we have to beat the Chinese doctor, Carson said. You know, and that's going to be the ones we're in competition. We've got to win.

Laura: Demographic changes like falling fertility rates in many countries mean societies must adapt to smaller populations and longer lives.

Laura: I'm the absolute. I think it's great for the planet. Imagine we enter a phase in life and history where every child who's born gets to live out their full life. That's success. That's great. And that's kind of where we are. We're in the developed world, so we're having fewer children, but they survive. When fertility, though, drops really, really low.

Laura: I mean, less than one, which it is now. And many countries Korea, China, Japan, a couple generations. You don't you know, you could get you can easily drop below a functional economy in just a couple generations when fertility stays this low.

Brent: How do falling fertility rates align with your thesis on restructuring life stages?

Brent: We're having fewer kids. We are having kids later. And so I and I think we've kind of vilified, like parenting just broadly, I think being a father is the most beautiful thing that's ever happened in my life. But I think the common trope if you don't have kids is it's a huge pain and it's not very good.

Brent: Biological fertility limits remain fixed even as life expectancy extends.

Brent: But biological fertility just is what it is. So how do you think about the net good or net harm of a fertility rate in the context of a longer life? And what that would mean if we go back to the, you know, Doctor Carstensen gets to wave a magic.

Laura: If financial and career pressures are reduced early in adulthood, people feel more supported in having children younger if they choose, rather than delaying due to work demands.

Laura: Women my age look at each other and kind of go, there's a reason women are age, don't have children. Yeah. I mean, this is not no, thank you, but I think it's often the case and it's completely up to any individual. Having your kids when you're young is great idea. And your 20s, that's great. And so what we're doing now is pushing.

Laura: Integrating career and family more flexibly allows people to make choices based on life preference rather than rigid professional timelines.

Laura: You know, you're you're you're going to do better. So we could do that. Then again, because in this model you don't have to say, I got I just graduated from college, I'm 20, I'm going to go work at McKinsey and bam, I'm off and running. And if I find time for life, I'll do that later. We can now integrate all of this so we can, if we're working a little bit less, fewer hours, all these things are possible.

Laura: So I would never prescribe to people the number of kids they should should have. I just don't think it's a good thing. I'm with you on the idea that you don't want populations to fall so low that, again, you don't have a functioning economy where you could, you know, have, you know, there are there are demographers today who had take bets on when the last Japanese citizen will remain standing.

Laura: You know, I mean, that's how low it's just every generation's lower, you know. So we're going to peak at around 9 billion on the planet. Wouldn't it be great if it was five? I'm not saying we should never have kids. I think if we begin to live our lives differently and it doesn't, we don't feel this terrible financial strain and terrible physical strain of trying to do it all at the same time.

Laura: People will start to have kids again. Right now it's just super hard to do it, super hard to do it. It's it's financially hard. It's a lot of work. A lot of people are just saying, I don't want to live that way. And so they're not.

Brent: Could you explain Socioemotional Selectivity Theory? As I understand it, as people age, they prioritize meaningful relationships over new exploration.

Laura: And use in middle age?

Brent: Yeah. Is there something that we can take away from that transition from a more I mean, you should tell me if I'm butchering the takeaway, but from this more experienced, focused, valuing experience more when we're younger and then valuing valuing, emotional connection more when we're older.

Laura: That's right. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory suggests two main classes of goals drive behavior: future-oriented exploration and learning, and present-oriented emotional fulfillment.

Laura: But it's learning, basically exploration, meeting new people, learning new things. So it's learning and it's very future focused and then emotional experience. And that's more present focused. So goals you pursue that are realized in their very doing. So if I like talking to you this is I'm realizing my goal right now. If I'm talking to you because I think you might get me a job next month, it's a future oriented, right?

Laura: When time horizons feel long, people focus on exploration and preparing for the future. As time horizons shrink, people prioritize meaningful present experiences and close relationships.

Laura: The old economics of it. And so people make clearer decisions about what's most important, and that's what they engage in. And for most people, those are emotional relationships with other people. And so that's the shift. The problem that I think maybe even accounts for younger people's high rates of anxiety and depression higher than we see in older people, is that they're both of these classes of goals are valued.

Laura: Younger people often balance both goal types at once, which can create stress. Older adults benefit from focusing primarily on present meaningful connections, leading to greater emotional well-being.

Laura: You don't have to prepare for everything. You don't have to think, are you going to get me a job next month? You don't have to worry about that stuff. And so you can just be in the present. You can be where you are. Enjoy it. Notice the birds and the trees and the beautiful sky and you just seem to be present.

Laura: That's the secret, I think, to better emotional well-being with age.

Brent: It highlights how outdated our traditional life stage models are. Thank you for your insights and research. Where can listeners find out more about your work?

Brent: And now I got to go. I got to go work the career ladder right now. And then I got to squeeze in some kids if I want to, right before the fertility window ends. And then at the end of life, I have all of this free time that, you know, I don't really know what to do with. It would have been better spent at other points in life.

Brent: And so I thank you for your time and for the work that you're doing. Where can we go to find more about this work? Just go to the Stanford Longevity Center website.

Laura: You can visit longevity.stanford.edu to learn more about The New Map of Life initiative and join the conversation on rethinking how we structure a 100-year life.

Brent: Dr. Laura Carstensen, thank you so much for joining us.

Laura: Great pleasure. Thank you.

Brent: The Life Lab by Death Clock is recorded in Boulder, Colorado, and San Francisco, California. Produced by Patrick Godino, music by Patrick Lee, and hosted by Brent Franson, founder and CEO of Death Clock.