“Stretch the rubber band”: Stanford Center for Longevity’s researcher Ken Smith and co-author Karen Breslau, on conclusions from SCL’s new study that seeks to radically redefine how to live better, when we’re living longer.
This is the OLD map. But a damn good song.
Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 110 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on November 30, 2021. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email dj@midlifemixtape.com ***
Ken Smith 00:00
What is the thing that makes me want to get up in the morning, and how can I actually orient my life more towards that direction as I get older?
Nancy Davis Kho 00:09
Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.
[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]
Nancy 00:33
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[MUSIC]
Hi everyone. I’m Nancy Davis Kho, the host and creator of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Especially compared to Thanksgiving 2020 where the four of us were all huddled at home already, everyone just came out of the bedroom again for dinner, this year was wonderful. Our older daughter had a friend in for a visit, and our younger daughter had to actually come home from college to spend the holiday with us, which is a beautiful thing. We headed over to my high school friend’s house for a big gathering, the highlight of which to me was when her son asked me in front of the crowd to share a crazy story of his mom from high school. Oh, I had to crack my knuckles! The possibilities… went with the hydroplaning one. Thank you science, thank you vaccines, thank you booster shots and rapid tests. And as always, don’t take any of it for granted. You never know what’s coming next.
So we’re heading into the last month of the year and I know that makes many of us feel contemplative about what’s to come. I recently bought my niece a candle for her 30th birthday that says, “Smells like high hopes and low expectations” which I think is probably the right energy for 2022. That is by the way from Anecdote Candles. This is not an ad for them, but their candles crack me up. They smell great. They are really beautiful. So, high hopes and low expectations.
But in all seriousness, a writer friend of mine here in Oakland, Karen Breslau, mentioned to me during the fall that she was busy working on the final report for a brand new research study from the Stanford Center on Longevity, called The New Map of Life. Here’s the deal: in the United States, as many as half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100, and this once unattainable milestone may become the norm for newborns by 2050. Yet, the social institutions, norms and policies that await these future centenarians evolved when lives were only half as long and they need updating. In 2018, The Stanford Center on Longevity launched an initiative called The New Map of Life, believing that one of the most profound transformations of the human experience calls for equally momentous and creative changes in the ways we lead these 100-year lives, at every stage.
I thought that would be a really good backdrop for the kind of planning and thinking you might be doing around your personal goals in 2022. So I invited Karen and Senior Research Scholar at the center, Ken Smith, to join me to talk about this study, which only came out last week! It is poppin’ fresh. Let me tell you a bit about Karen and Ken.
Karen Breslau is the founder of Feature Well Stories, a narrative strategy agency in Oakland, California and a co-author of “The New Map of Life” with the Stanford Center on Longevity. She served as foreign, diplomatic and White House correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and was a producer and reporter for NPR. Karen also worked as a speechwriter and communications strategist, and is co-author with Janet Napolitano of “How Safe are We? Homeland Security Since 9/11.”
Ken Smith joined the Stanford Center on Longevity in 2009 and is the Senior Research Scholar and Director of Academic and Research Support, as well as the Center’s Mobility Division. He brings a broad background of over 20 years of management and engineering experience to his role, including positions in the computing, aerospace, and solar energy industries. Ken developed a special expertise in working closely with university faculty to develop projects while at Intel, where he was deeply involved in the creation and management of their network of university research labs.
So let’s join these cartographers of The New Map of Life and see where they’re leading us.
[MUSIC]
Nancy 05:10
I’m so pleased to be here today with Ken Smith, the senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity and Karen Breslau, who is the co-author of the Stanford’s new study, The New Map of Life. Welcome to the show, Karen and Ken.
Karen 05:25
Thank you, Nancy.
Ken 05:26
Glad to be here.
Nancy 05:27
I’m glad you’re here as well and you know, obviously, a key question when it comes to discussing The New Map of Life: hey, what was your first concert and what were the circumstances? I think that’s an important point on everybody’s roadmap of life. So Ken, I’m going to put you on the spot first. Tell us about your first concert.
Ken 05:45
Sure. By the way, I love that question. It’s like a social carbon-14 dating process.
Nancy 05:50
Okay, wait. What? I was more of a business major. I don’t know what you just said.
Ken 05:54
Oh, it’s a method that scientists often use to date things like fossils by how much of this carbon 14 remains in the material.
Nancy 05:59
Oh, sure.
Ken 06:00
This is just a social version of that. It tells you a lot about sort of where you came from and when you came from at that time.
Nancy 06:10
Yes, of course! All of a sudden, I dialed back to high school science classes, which is the last time I took one. So yeah, sorry. Yeah, listeners, I don’t know much about science, but let’s hear about Ken’s concert.
Ken 06:20
So my first concert was I saw the Doobie Brothers at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin in 1979.
Nancy 06:26
Nice.
Ken 06:27
I think it was probably a celebration of freedom of driver’s license. I went with a group of high school friends. That was back in the day where you were at the DMV on the day of your birthday.
Nancy 06:36
Right.
Ken 06:37
So the first thing we had to do was go to a concert together without the parents, without getting dropped off, so it was kind of a first freedom.
Nancy 06:45
That is an amazing way to celebrate stepping into that new phase of life. I mean, holy smokes, who didn’t want to be 16 and get their license if that was on the other side of it. Was it a good show?
Ken 06:56
It was a great show. I still remember.
Nancy 06:58
Aright, Karen. What about you?
Karen 07:00
I wish I had something as cool to report...
