Why the Traditional Retirement Model Is Outdated and What Comes Next

speaker-0 (00:04.45)
Welcome people. Today we have the pleasure of talking with Ken Stern. Ken heads up the Longevity Project out of Stanford, I do believe. But it’s always better to get the full information from the person I’m talking to. So Ken, welcome. Tell us about who you are and what you do.

speaker-1 (00:26.092)
Yeah, so as you said correctly, Neil, I’m the founder and head of the Longevity Project, which I developed in collaboration with the Stanford Center on Longevity. We’ve been working together for seven or eight years. And what we do is we try to foster greater public understanding of the opportunities and challenges of longer life and focus really on how we need to reinvent the life course so that longer lives can be healthier, more productive, and more equitable.

And because we believe fundamentally that aging is not just about the last quarter of life, it’s really sort of how you live your entire life. We focus on everything from how we’re educated and how we work to how we retire. My personal expertise, and it’s the topic of my recent book called Healthy 100, which is how strong social ties lead to long lives. It’s about the importance of social connection and healthy aging.

and why we have such a deficit here in the United States and what we can do about that.

speaker-0 (01:31.802)
healthy aging. Talk to me about that. Why are we not aging healthy?

speaker-1 (01:38.862)
Yeah, well, there a lot of reasons. One of the challenges talking about healthy aging, traditionally in the US, we’ve thought about the importance of exercise, the importance of nutrition, sometimes the importance of genetics, the importance of health care. And those are all important. But one thing we’ve typically forgotten to talk about is the importance of social connection to healthy aging and how we need to maintain purpose, meaning, and connection in the second half of life.

And so we’ve underweighted it. We actually have a social connection deficit in the US and it is translated pretty clearly into shorter life expectancy and shorter healthy life expectancy in the US, certainly compared to our peer countries. If you compare the US to every other economically advanced company, a country in the world, we’re last in both those measures and not by a small amount. We’re closer to Jamaica and Belarus than we are to, we’re actually almost identical to Jamaica and Belarus.

quite a far behind Japan and Korea and Italy and Spain and Switzerland and a lot of other countries where people live much longer and much longer in good health.

speaker-0 (02:49.772)
Is that because of the social side of things? I have my own opinions, but I’m going to hold hold them to myself. But for example, I’m Canadian and Canadians are viewed as a very. I’ll use the term social or country as opposed to US tends to be very individualistic. Is that part of that issue?

speaker-1 (03:17.902)
Not really. mean, I think, you know, let’s actually sort of trace back for a moment. So there so we live in the U.S. almost a decade short less in good health in Japan. That’s not a small amount. Right. I mean, if you live in Chicago, you’re to live eight or nine or 10 years shorter in good health than say in Tokyo or for Coca. There are a lot of things that go into there’s not going to be one single closet. But if you look back.

So I already told you, Neil, that we’re dead last and getting laster, if that’s a word. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, until roughly the mid, around 1980, US was never number one, but it was never last in that group. was sort of always middle of the pack, it had been for half a century. And then in 1980, we started diverging from every other advanced economic country.

And that’s, the 1980s, it’s not a coincidence, 1980, number of things happened. One is the beginning of BC crisis. So you should put that down as a cause. But the other thing is it’s when we started declining in terms of social connection. It’s when Bob Putnam, that was sort of the study period that Robert Putnam from Harvard wrote about in Bowie Alone. It’s when participation in religious organizations and participation in unions and sewing circles and book clubs and PTAs and Elks clubs all started to decline.

and with it, with our social connection. I have an 18 year old son, spends an hour less a day, his generation spends an hour less a day with friends than my generation did. There are huge, every measure of social connection you look at has declined, declined precipitously over the last 45 years, half century now, and shows no sign of being relief. And that is one of the root causes, and it has relatively little to do with personality, it has to do with

how we live and how we’re organized and the fact that those things that brought us together don’t exist in the same ways as before.

speaker-0 (05:17.614)
It’s interesting that I have set up a relationship with the Rotary Clubs and their membership has been in decline. They were set up back in the 50s. And when that club type mentality, that organizational mentality was high, but now their average age of their members are 64, 65. So…

They’re not getting that younger generation coming through.

speaker-1 (05:49.154)
Yeah, so so we are historically the us is a nation of joiners. I mean actually did toqueville wrote about sort of civic participation 250 years ago We’re no longer a nation of joiners. We’re a nation of people who spend their times on their phones And that is means you have less friends. You have less reason to be out. You’re moving less You have less social connection with social cues. You’re lonely or being lonely Is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s why

the surgeon general, the last surgeon general declared a loneliness epidemic in the U S not because lonely. He was concerned about loneliness per se. was concerned about the impact of loneliness on our health.

speaker-0 (06:32.3)
You had started off saying that there were opportunities and there were problems associated with the longevity side of things. Let’s try to be a little positive here. What are some of the opportunities?

speaker-1 (06:45.23)
So when I wrote the book So actually I’ll tell you I’ll give you sort of big wind up if you don’t mind sure the reason I got focused on social connection well, I’ve been focused on an ageing longevity for a good decade now for about four years ago I also hold host podcast called century lives from the Stanford Center longevity and It’s a documentary podcast. We take on one big issue for six episodes right now in the middle one on aged

About six seasons ago, we did what we call Place Matters. It was the impact of place on health. We looked at a number of communities where people live longer than the underlying social economic data said they should. And we started in a place called Presidio County, Texas, which is middle of nowhere Texas right across the border from Chihuahua in Mexico.

And we went there trying to find out why it’s one of the poorest counties in Texas and one of the 10 longest lived counties in the US. We didn’t really know the reason for that. And we went there, tried to keep an open mind and learned it wasn’t diet, high in fats and fat lards. It wasn’t exercise. The local principal said he was considered an eccentric because he biked to work some days. It wasn’t healthcare. The nearest American hospital was 70 miles away. It was about how people organized and lived their lives.

In Presidio, they lived in multi-generational households, grandparents and parents and kids all living together, all taking care of each other, all having a social network. And if they weren’t in the same house, they were on the same block, know, aunts and uncles, cousins, in and out of each other’s house, taking care of each other. And that created the social fabric of life in that community. And we saw it everywhere we went for that season, whether it was in Wayne County, Kentucky, or Co-op City in the Bronx.

And said to me that there are opportunities even in this era of disengagement for people to live and take care of each other. I went for the book then. I looked at other countries which are doing better. Five countries, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Spain, Italy, and asked the question. They all have the same technology challenges we do. You get on the subway in Seoul or Singapore. People are face down on their phones just as they are here in Washington, DC, where I live.

speaker-1 (09:08.718)
But they have created a social infrastructure that connects people specifically in second half of life, because that I was looking at, to make sure that people have the opportunity to work or volunteer or live in intergenerational communities or life have lot of lifelong learning. And can you have lives of meaning, purpose and social connection as the age? It’s not a coincidence. Japan and the UK both have ministers of loneliness and they’ve taken on

They’ve taken on loneliness and the error of social disconnection as a civic problem, a civic project in ways that we’ve not done here before. And we can do it, right? There are actually lots of things going on here. They’re just not scaled, say where they are in another country.

speaker-0 (09:55.572)
interviewed Dan Levitt. He’s the senior’s advocate for the BC government. And it turns out there’s only four senior’s advocates in Canada with the various different provinces, which tells you that the thinking is starting to shift. His role is, I think he said, eight years old. So it’s starting to shift.

speaker-1 (10:04.247)
No.

speaker-0 (10:24.214)
the society as a whole has not shifted. And I’m starting to look into his equivalent in the US to see whether I can find some appropriate people. So I agree with that concept of we aren’t yet thinking about that second half of life the way it should be thought about.

speaker-1 (10:46.35)
Yeah, so this is a very different, mean, one of the things that has happened is we’ve sort of inherited a 20th century model of how we’re supposed to live. And it’s built around the notion that you have education 18 to 21, you work till 65, and then you start declining till death. That may have made sense in a world in which most people actually died fairly young. Life expectancy at the beginning of the

of the 20th century was about 42 in the US. Now it’s 79. We’ve had more years to life in the last 150 years than all of human history combined. And we just haven’t really rethought sort of the rules of how we’re supposed to live our lives. What we’ve done is taken all these years and sort of shoved it in old age, even though by and large we’re actually healthier and gonna live longer than our parents’ generation.

Other countries have rethought those rules. People work differently, they learn differently, they live differently than they would do. Because they now understand that in Japan, the median life expectancy for women now is 90. That means half of women live longer than 90. It’s actually an extraordinary thing. It means if you’re a woman in Japan, died 89, you don’t say that’s a long life, you say that’s bad luck. I mean, it’s really sort of a sea change in understanding what

what our life course is.

speaker-0 (12:13.806)
You said average is life expectancy is 90. the… Still, regardless, are going to be older than 90.

speaker-1 (12:20.386)
Media, media actually.

speaker-1 (12:26.638)
Right, right. It’s an incredible thing, right? Unheard of in human history. You know, when I was born in 1963, were 2000 centenarians in the US, people who were 100 years or older. Today, there are 100,000. By the end of the century, there’ll be a million. It’s just 10,000 people turn, I’m just now throwing numbers at you, 10,000 people turn 65 every day. It’s a much older society, but much with an opportunity, should be a much more active, engaged society as we age. If we

think about that and change some of the rules how we live.

speaker-0 (12:59.426)
When I talk, I mentioned Dr. Michael Royes to you before we started this interview. When I interviewed him earlier this week, he was saying that a 90 year old will in the next five to 10 years, their chronological age may be 90, but their biological age will be down in the 40s. Which means we’re that expectancy just because of changes in diet.

changes in medicines, changes in approach to life is possible so that we’re now living to be 120, 140 type things. Yeah.

speaker-1 (13:37.41)
Yeah, I mean, I’m not sort of from the fountain of youth aspect part of longevity. You know, there’s been lots of accretions. I mean, sort of the addition of what’s now 40 years of additional life has been by changing public health and vaccines and clean water and clean air and better maternal health. All those things have moved it forward. But we’ve also gotten healthier.

better and more reliable food supply. So, you know, in Japan where they’ve been tracking sort of foot speed and grip strength, is some two of the traditional measures of health as we age. Today’s 85 year old is roughly the same as a 65 year old 50, 40 years ago. We don’t need any sort of great medical interventions to make that happen. It’s already happening.

That’s a great thing, right? I mean, it means that the years past 65 aren’t these years of rapid decline as we tend to think of them as. But we need to understand that those are, know, the second half of life can be as meaningful, connected and purposeful as the first.

speaker-0 (14:52.524)
You mentioned that you’re doing a podcast right now series, six shows, I think you said, this time around it’s age tech that you’re focused on. Tell me about that. That’s one area. We have a pillar technologies for retirees and I haven’t done a good enough job with bringing those stories forward. So tell me a bit about that.

speaker-1 (15:14.648)
Yeah, so it’s an interesting time. So we did our reporting for this season almost exclusively from the Consumer Electronic Show at the beginning, which was in January. And we went there specifically to look at technologies that were changing our mobility, changing our brain health, changing social connection. Actually, our most recent episode out this week was on social connection, technologies of social connection. You know, it’s often hard when you’re looking at these brand new technologies.

It’s really hard to know how they actually play out in real life or period of 10, 20 years. But you can see that there are technologies that are going to help us remain mobile, allow us make it easier to age in place, allow us to get better health care in our homes, and will allow us to engage in cognitive health programs.

which by and large we haven’t been able to before the last few years. So there’s actually a lot of interesting technology to point to that is coming out now. maybe 80 % of it will just fail for one reason or another, but some will be making a difference for people 10, 20, 30 years from now.

speaker-0 (16:33.006)
So one of the things that we always hear from a caricature of older people is that they can’t handle tech. They don’t deal with technology that well. Is that something that’s changing? It is.

speaker-1 (16:52.526)
So it’s not as real it’s never been as real as people say You don’t learn you don’t stop learning as you get older you don’t stop to have any ability to learn as you get older But what I think is happening now more important than sort of the myth of seniors not being great at technology is that The seniors of today, know are you know?

spent a lot of their lives with technology. Someone who’s turned 65 this year, 10,000 people a day, there were people born in 1960. They grew up with television. They’ve used computers all their lives. They’ve had flu since they were in their 40s or 50s. They’re using artificial intelligence now. They’re different than someone who turned 65 in 1970, who knew television and nothing else.

So it’s a new generation. And I think as these generations come into that, as new generations become old generations, they’re going to be more technically sophisticated than prior generations. So there will always be a little bit of catch up that you have to do, but there’s going to be much more technological sophistication for older adults now than there were a decade or two decades or three decades ago.

speaker-0 (18:17.326)
Yeah. So one of the things you had brought up right at the beginning of your answer was about the social networking aspect. Yeah. Is that something the social networks, the Facebook’s, the Instagram’s, the TikTok’s, that sort of thing? Is that actually being used by people that are older in age? I always think of those things as for the kids.

speaker-1 (18:42.638)
Oh, well, mean, Facebook is considered for the old folks now, right? Yeah. So there’s a much higher use of technology now by older adults. And I don’t mean just like, know, familiar things like Facebook. mean, like artificial. I mean, one of things I spent time with is a device called LEQ, which is it looks like a, like a table lamp, but it’s an AI, essentially AI companion. So you talk to it, it helps plan your day. It’s your friend.

I have a lot of challenges of technology replacing human contact, but there are all sorts of technology coming out that are being used by older people now already.

speaker-0 (19:24.248)
So that’s a really good question, because you went to the loneliness side of things. One of the things, like I’m in this house.

Every three, four days I’ll leave now to go food shopping, but the rest of the time I’m here. And I end up having conversations with my with chat, GPT or with co pilot. Is the AI be helping deal with the loneliness epidemic?

speaker-1 (19:54.195)
well, that’s big…

speaker-0 (19:55.246)
You know what I mean?

speaker-1 (20:02.36)
That’s a big complicated question. So it is true that lot more people are using technology as companions, right? Especially kids and thinking of them as their friends. And sometimes it’s even lovers, right? I mean, there is a lot of, there’s a lot of emerging data. I actually was just listening to a podcast on this before we got in the air.

podcast called 12 geniuses, which was did an episode on how people are now used, especially kids are now using and their way the technology evolving, they play the role of friends. I’m not a believer. I think that is going to harm social connection because what you see, you know, you see the data of, so I focus mostly on people in secondary life. Older folks using LAQ, which is essentially a

version of artificial intelligence built for older folks, 50, 60 times a day. And that’s great that they’re having conversations when there weren’t conversations before, but it also means they’re not going out and trying to find the human friends. They’re not moving. They’re not getting out of the house. They’re not having the challenges of human contact that I think is difficult.

hopefully impossible for AI to replicate. you know, every, I think it’s fair to say that every, we said modern time, virtually every connection technology that we develop has left humans lonelier than before. And that means like Facebook and phones often, which were marketed as bringing people together, ultimately have divided us and left us lonelier than before.

speaker-0 (21:53.152)
So when you’re talking lonelier, you’re talking lonelier from a person to person perspective.

speaker-1 (22:00.216)
Well, loneliness is actually, yeah, loneliness is actually a subject. So there are actually two different terms. So there’s loneliness and social isolation. Social isolation is an objective measure of how much contact you have with other people. And that is, as far as I know, only people that’s been measured. Loneliness, subjective feeling of yourself. Are you lonely? And

In theory, you could feel not lonely because of AI, but in truth, what we see is that even with the rise of all these new technologies, people are reporting that they feel lonelier and lonelier.

speaker-0 (22:46.018)
Hmm. Interesting. I’m going to look into that more because I suspect there’s a conversation there, not just with older people, So you’ve talked about older people. But you had to put forward the premise that we need to rethink. What was it? Education, work and retirement. So it’s more of a holistic view on how to live life.

Yeah. That to me is a big, I completely agree. I think the term retirement is out the window. I don’t think we should even be thinking about that. I think we need to change into almost a biometrics format of flow through your entire life. And trust me, I’m just talking off the top of my head. Yeah. How do you see all of this changing?

Or do you see it changing? society is really hard to change. It evolves over generations.

speaker-1 (23:52.118)
So it’s a big challenge. So I would say it’s already changing a lot of the world, which gives me hope that it can change here. And it’s changed a lot of the world because cultural norms around aging have changed. It’s not like you’ve had the government come in and say you have to live differently. People have gradually become to understand that life is different than it used to be and needs to operate differently.

So for instance, let’s take Korea, South Korea as an example, a norm is developed around the importance of lifelong learning. Like in Korea, the rule is no longer that people sort of learn to 18 to 21, it’s an expectation that people will learn across the life course. It’s actually a constitutional right now in Korea that you have a right to lifelong learning.

And that means that it’s a matter of civic engagement. It’s also people associate learning with positive social connection, positive cognitive health. They also associated with being economically competitive as you learn during your careers, but also it doesn’t end in your career. So people have come to expect the rules of how we learn have changed very rapidly there.

In Japan, the rules of expectations around work have changed. And that’s because people have not because people need to work past 65. Some do some don’t, but 80 % of workers over the age of 85 do it because report that they do it because they associate work with social connection, purpose and meaning. They don’t want to stay at home and sit on the couch. They want to be out as they were in their lives. And what’s happened in Japan because companies need older workers.

declining population, the rules of work have changed. So there’s a lot more part-time work, a lot more job sharing, a lot more assistive technology, because the rules around how we’re supposed to work across the life course has changed, as they should. I mean, the retirement age, you know, we have a fixed notion here in lot of places still, but the retirement age of 65 is sometimes sort of morally mandated. It was invented by Bismarck in 1880, because he wanted to avoid paying pensions to minors.

speaker-1 (26:18.926)
who died usually in their 40s. So he picked a retirement age of 65 where he didn’t actually have to pay out to anyone. And that actually has gotten paid down through the generations. So what sort of this Prussian noble picked as a way to avoid financial liabilities, now some type of moral right, those don’t make any sense now. And we have to have that cultural change before we have also the economic and system changes behind.

speaker-0 (26:49.768)
Do you see work changing here? You mentioned part-time or job sharing, that sort of thing. Do you see that happening?

speaker-1 (26:58.478)
I do. I don’t see it happening yet. mean, the US is, there’s like a great demand. you know, when I wrote my chapter on work, I figured that was the least popular chapter I wrote, like saying, hey, a lot of people are gonna wanna work past 65. Turns out a lot of people do wanna work past 65, but a lot of company, very hard to find work that people want. And it’s not the case in elsewhere in part because

we’ve been economically insulated from it. Our birth rate, which is declining pretty rapidly, is still well above Japan or Korea or any of the country, any of other of these countries. But our birth rate is falling. And the other thing that we had in our favor was high immigration rates, because immigrants are younger and brought younger people into the labor force. And that’s changing, obviously. companies are going to start feeling the labor pinch.

And the idea of a world of warfarin is going to be a lot more attractive all of sudden. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to happen soon.

speaker-0 (28:03.958)
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the technology spaces. Like I’m a former enterprise architect and it got harder and harder for me to find contracts just because of ageism. But ISIS, that’s a good question for you then. What about ageism? Because I suspect right now technology is for the young, it’s the view. But I’ve been within technology from 88. So I understood how and where everything that’s coming from.

Yeah, I suspect that as the population ages and there’s fewer and fewer workers, you’re going to see older workers staying longer. But in the technology space, that unique thinking that is part of the young, where they come in without any preconceptions, is what has kept technology moving forward. So I’m just wondering how that’s going to impact the technology space.

speaker-1 (29:02.36)
So let’s actually sort of step back, and let’s.

start with your premise that lot of workers face ages in the workplace. And that’s exactly true. About 75 % of workers are the age of 50. It’s not something that starts at 65. It tends to start at around 50 or even earlier. I’ve reported either experiencing or witnessing ages in the workplace. It’s pretty rampant in the US and not just in technology fields. And that is because we have sort of a uniquely youth-oriented view and a uniquely

a negative view on aging among advanced industrial countries. You don’t see this elsewhere. And I don’t think you see it in the technology space, at least not as viscerally as you see it in the US. My sense is that

when it becomes harder and harder to find enough workers, even in technology companies, older workers are going to start looking better. I think the research shows generally that younger workers have some advantage, older workers have some advantages, and that’s when you actually have multi-generational teams. I think one other thing I would actually mention about agents and less about work is the impact that agents have has on your

There’s a researcher at Yale named Becca Levy who’s done sort of the foundational research. And she started off by finding that those who have older people have positive views of aging as compared to those who have the most negative views of aging tend to live about eight years longer, even when you hold other things constantly, just because they have a much more positive view of aging and they behave different.

speaker-1 (30:52.802)
And you can understand if you think you’re going to be old and die, you don’t take as good care of yourself. You don’t go to the doctor, you don’t get out of the house, you don’t do all the things that we know, you don’t get socially connected and become sort of fulfillment. The other thing she’s found, and I think this is really important because it astonishes me. She did research this year where she tracked the health of about, I think, 14,000 older Americans.

across 11 years. And she found out, you know, we sort of have this story that, you know, at once he had a certain age, 50, 60, 70, whatever it is, you start to decline and that decline is inevitable and either short or long. And if you manage to just hold your own, you’re doing really well. She found out that about 25 % of the people in the group were stronger physically at the end of the 11 years and about 25 % were struck, were better off cognitively at the end of it.

Yeah, and even I who like live in the space and believe everything that she studied before, Becca studied before, I still have a hard time believing it just because I have this notion that those years are years of decline. And one of the reasons, actually the best thing, one of the reasons we didn’t know this before is because the survey instruments never actually permitted the idea you could do better. They actually stopped, you know, sort of break even.

So they never even took data that some people could do better. So even the researchers never even contemplate that you could get stronger or cognitively sharper as you age, but a of people do.

speaker-0 (32:32.302)
Yeah, I think that’s right across the board, not just in research areas, but market research, anything. You look at market research and it gets to 65. Anything beyond 65 is consolidated into a 65 plus. But now you’re talking like 30 year span of people. And everybody’s different in that grouping. Yeah.

speaker-1 (32:58.542)
It’s a, we need to, I think a lot of things will happen when we start reconceiving sort of what the second half of life is about. And that’s where I actually see a lot of progress in.

but it’s episodic, it’s not across society. I think before we make real progress, we have to change the cultural context.

speaker-0 (33:23.336)
Yeah, I think that goes to your, you were talking about intergenerational involvement. I think a lot of that is, and I’ve mentioned it in other podcasts, I think as there became two dual income families, the kids had to stay with somebody, so they stayed with their grandparents. Whereas your my generation, it was staying at home moms. So like I didn’t know three of my four grandparents, because

You know, back in the 60s, they were, they died young. Whereas now they’re living a lot longer and the kids are staying with them or being, you know, kept. My sister-in-law who is 73, she is taking care of her grandkids.

speaker-1 (34:10.85)
Yeah. So there’s actually a huge rise in what’s called grand families. There’s woman named Madonna Butts who started a group called Generations Night has a new book coming out of it, coming out on it in a few weeks, I think. And there’s a large rise in the generational living in the US, multi-generational households that started around the Great Recession and has continued since then, spurred somewhat by the pandemic, also existing before and continuing afterwards.

that’s, think really positive because the generations, fit together like pieces of jigsaw puzzle, stealing a phrase from our friend. you know, developmentally it’s great for kids and it gives purpose and meaning to older generations. The problem is we still have this notion. Yeah. in a lot of ways that the generations shouldn’t live together, you know, we’re the only country in the world that has all these retirement communities in places like Florida.

It’s weird. It’s a weird concept didn’t exist, you know, throughout human history, we’ve lived in intergenerational homes. It was only like in the 1950s that we invented this idea that people should leave their communities of lifetime and move to entirely different states and live only with people their same age. It’s a weird concept. No other country really has at least on the scale of the US, but it reflects sort of a cultural bias that the generations, you know,

people should be with people of their own age. And that’s against the entire design of human history.

speaker-0 (35:43.948)
I’m wondering whether that’s a society gotten wealthier. Let’s face it, North America, really North America, really got wealthy from World War II on. And that resulted in funds being available for doing other things. Whereas if you look at poorer nations, you have that family unit quite close because they have to support each other.

speaker-1 (36:12.2)
I think there’s something to be said for that deal. But there are other wealthier countries. You go to Switzerland. You don’t see, you know, France. don’t see this. The first senior housing community was actually a place called Youngtown, who’s outside of outside of Phoenix and started like 1959. And it was because the guy who started it was from Rochester, New York. He had gone home and he’d seen how actually how poorly

older people were treated and he wanted to create a place that put older people in the center of it. Actually sort of a beautiful concept. It’s kind of worked out in a way that is more about generational division than it is about taking care of the oldest and the oldest American.

speaker-0 (36:59.662)
Hmm, it’s like out of sight out of mind type thing at that time.

speaker-1 (37:04.684)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

speaker-0 (37:06.58)
Yeah, interesting. So with your podcast, how many years have you been doing that? Seven, I think you said?

speaker-1 (37:15.726)
So we’re on season 10. Season 10, they’re not years. We don’t know how many years that is. four or five years. We do tend to do about two seasons a year. It’s called Century Lives. Yeah.

speaker-0 (37:26.7)
Which one’s been the most popular? Just out curiosity.

speaker-1 (37:30.094)
Place map. So that’s the store that was Presidio, Texas, which I mentioned earlier and Wayne County, Kentucky and co-op city in the Bronx and Birmingham, Alabama, all places where people are doing surprisingly well. That was a good season.

speaker-0 (37:46.824)
It’s like blue zones within the US.

speaker-1 (37:50.978)
That’s right. That’s right. The interesting thing about, you know, blue zones tend to be these fairly remote rural communities that interesting about this is, you know, we took the same lesson away from Presidio County, Texas, as we did from Co-op City in the Bronx, which is Co-op City, the largest actually Co-op in the world. like 150,000 people live there, like 80 buildings. And so naturally at what’s called

a naturally occurring retirement communities. People move there, decent housing, it’s workforce housing, it’s relatively inexpensive, and they never leave. And they pass their homes on. So people create community because there’s, it’s incredibly mobile society of ours. People have real neighborhoods and real community and real social connection that goes on through the generations.

speaker-0 (38:44.59)
Tell me about healthy aging with regards to those locations. I know you were saying more about the purpose and the mindset side of things. What about the food side? What about the physical activity side, which is what we typically think of from a healthy lifestyle?

speaker-1 (39:08.482)
Yeah, pretty crappy in all those places, I would say. I mean, certainly no better than in the neighboring areas. You know, in terms of exercise, probably no different than in the neighboring areas. It may be, I mean, one of advantages of social connection though, that, know, movement is as important as exercise, Formal exercise. Getting your body moving. One of the things about being

Lonely and socially isolated it is you don’t move as much at home. You don’t have Yeah, right and you can all imagine we’ve all done But social connection Often creates movement gets people out of the house who gets them connected with other people it gets them on walks or gets them going to places it gets them walking to the bus I all those things that we tend to underweight as being important actually really important health even if they’re not formal exercise, so

speaker-0 (39:42.274)
Yeah. Sit on the couch.

speaker-1 (40:08.8)
I would guess, I don’t actually know that, there’s probably in co-op city, more movement than there are in some of the neighboring communities just because of the nature of social connection in those areas, especially among older adults.

speaker-0 (40:20.774)
So it’s primarily focused on the social connection side, I think.

speaker-1 (40:24.942)
Yeah, so I interviewed there the oldest woman I’m trying to remember her name. I’m Miss Louise. She died at 113. She just actually died earlier this year. I interviewed her a couple of years ago. She was 111 then. And she had been part of the dance group at Co-op City until just before the pandemic. And she was well into her hundred.

and she was still dancing, she was still part of this community. And if she wasn’t part of that community, she probably wouldn’t have been able to do all those things. She wouldn’t have had those people to help her get out and make sure she made it to the event. There’s a lot of good things that fall out of being socially connected. There is, I think, you know, there’s like this sort of correlative value between social connection and health because you have social cues about going to doctors and things like that.

But there’s also just an important thing to say here, Neil, which is your body wants you to be social connected. We’ve evolved over millennia to understand that being part of a group means safety and being apart from the group means danger. If you are chronically lonely, your body responds with chronic inflammation and that leads to cancer, it leads to heart disease, leads to cognitive decline.

Your body knows when you’re lonely. They’ve actually done studies at the cellular level of people who are lonely and people who aren’t lonely and your cells age differently. you’re lonely, you age faster. So there’s both a biological, deep biological response to loneliness and then a social response that we can all imagine.

speaker-0 (42:15.362)
Yeah, have that interview with Dr. Michael Royzen goes into that because it gets right down into the genetic level. It impacts the activation of genes, which have both positive and negative effects type thing. Everything has a positive and negative aspect. How did you get in? Did you get involved with Stanford?

speaker-1 (42:32.162)
Yeah

speaker-1 (42:38.702)
Oh, like everything in my career, you know, I spent most of my career, I’ve been in law, I’ve been in media, I’ve been in politics. So most of my career has been, in some ways, happenstance. met, largely my happenstance, a woman named Laura Carson, who’s the professor at Stanford and the founder of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She’s actually stepping down this year from the organization she founded 25 years ago. And I thought we were gonna have a nice conversation about the team.

I was getting older, so it was sort of interesting to me. And when I thought about a conversation about aging, I sort of imagined the question of how most Americans think about it, which is, what do do with all these old people? And she wanted to talk to them about longevity, which is how do we reinvent the life course so that our lives can be longer, healthier, more productive? And that was sort of a beautiful thought and really was sort of like this aha moment for me and got me involved.

speaker-0 (43:24.76)
Hmm.

speaker-1 (43:33.198)
first part-time and now full-time really thinking about longevity and then ultimately around social connection where I spend most of my time.

speaker-0 (43:41.774)
It’s amazing. Before I started this podcast, I wasn’t even aware there were centers for longevity. And now it’s like, I think I’ve come across five or six really good quality ones, Stanford being one. And it’s been a very interesting journey. I think we’re getting close to the end of the interview.

So can one of the things I always ask, the last question I always ask all my guests, if you were to give one piece of advice, what would it be?

speaker-1 (44:19.502)
You’ll have to stop me because I give so I give lots of advice on social connection What I do and it’s interesting I’ll press by saying, you know I wrote this book sort about social infrastructure and the social approach to social connection and everyone says that’s really interesting But what should I do? So I would say first I Know you said one thing but I can’t stop it one. The first thing is approach your

speaker-0 (44:25.09)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (44:48.43)
years past 60 with the same type of intentionality that you did in the years before 60. We’ve actually been trained to think planning for retirement is about financial planning. And that’s great. That’s really important. But you have, if you had 60, have, you know, 20, 25, 30, and maybe more years. It’s a lot of time. And with some luck, those are going to be years of good health. What are you going do with it? What’s going to give you meaning purpose? What’s going to get you out of bed in the morning? I’ve met so many people.

who hit retirement and they look around and say, yeah, now what am I supposed to do? And that’s so, I’m gonna stop there. would say view the second half of life as being as valuable or maybe even more valuable than the first and attack it on that level.

speaker-0 (45:36.014)
I like that. Be intentional about it. Ken, thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking the time. For everybody, I’ll be putting links to Ken and his Longevity Center in the description of this video. So feel free to reach out to him. Also take a look at the book that’s over Ken’s left shoulder. There’s some information in there that will help, and the link will be in the description as well. Ken?

I much appreciate your time. Thank you.

speaker-1 (46:06.818)
Neil, great to talk.