In this episode of HLTH Forward, I sat down with Jamie Justice, a longevity scientist and ultramarathon runner who currently serves as Executive Director at XPRIZE, to explore what it really means to age well.
I asked her about the personal roots of her research, and she told me how her early work studying fatigue and endurance revealed a surprising paradox: older adults sometimes showed preserved endurance compared to younger people in lab settings, though this turned out to be largely a laboratory artifact. We talked about how understanding the limits of the human body — what breaks it and why — teaches us how it actually works, and how that same philosophy applies to running ultramarathons. She shared that around mile 30, the mental battle isn't really about the body giving out, but about learning to override the brain's urge to quit, a lesson she said carries over into big professional challenges too.
From there, our conversation moved into bigger questions about longevity as a society. I pushed her on the economics and purpose behind wanting to live longer, and she explained that most people aren't chasing immortality — they're afraid of losing independence, memory, and dignity, not death itself.
We discussed her work leading the XPrize Healthspan competition, a $101 million effort to fund therapeutics that can restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function in older adults, and she walked me through some of the most surprising team entries, from AI-screened plant compounds to a "superteam" out of Mount Sinai combining repurposed drugs with exercise. We closed on a deeply personal note, agreeing that for both of us, death isn't the enemy — what matters most is living with purpose and leaving with dignity, which felt like the perfect way to end our time together.
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