Century Lives
If there is one thing we know about retirement, it’s that the rules are changing. Longer life, better health, changing work conditions, and challenging financial times mean that the new retirement will be different from the old. But how will it be different? In Season 5 of Century Lives, we explore the new retirement through the stories of eight different employees of Harris Health, the largest public health system in Texas. The employees are united by the fact that they share the same workplace, but they are divided by very different personal stories and goals – and very different financial situations. They are nurses, doctors, carpenters, CEOs, and security officers, and they are imagining very different retirements.
Episodes
October 2, 2024 • 24 mins
It may not come as a surprise, but fixating on someone’s age can affect how you think about them—and even how they think about themselves. And the health implications are dramatic. People who have a negative view of aging live on average 7.5 fewer years than those who have a more positive view, even holding constant for other health and social factors.
In this episode, Ken travels to some of the longest-lived countries in the wor...
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September 25, 2024 • 25 mins
It’s been said that you are what you eat, and Italians are aging like the fine wine that makes them famous. As older Italians retire and leave their careers behind, an astonishing number of them are beginning new chapters as volunteers. In this episode, Ken travels across Northern Italy to explore its vibrant new culture of volunteerism. Along his journey, he gets the best advice about aging he’s ever heard.
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September 18, 2024 • 23 mins
The national motto in South Korea is “hurry, hurry,” and that’s what the country did as it turned its metropolitan areas into “lifelong learning cities.” Across the nation, adults of all ages now have access to free classes that help them keep learning—and connecting to each other. In this episode, Ken goes back to school, where he learns about the traditional art of teamaking, and meets a recent college graduate who is older than ...
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September 11, 2024 • 22 mins
You can’t go anywhere in Japan without running into older workers. They might be driving your taxi, serving your food, or selling you tickets at a tourist attraction. Japan has the highest percentage of older workers in the world. You might think this has to do with economic necessity and changes in pension rules. But when you look closely, you’ll discover the widely accepted belief in Japan that work brings you “Ikigai," which tra...
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September 4, 2024 • 21 mins
Americans are obsessed with youth. But instead of keeping us younger, that focus is proving detrimental to our health. Join us as we explore how the U.S. can reframe our government policies and social perspectives to help extend our lives. In the first episode of Century Lives: The Century Club, “The Fountain of Youth,” Ken searches for centenarians in Italy, drags his Gen Z son to Florida’s Fountain of Youth tourist attraction, an...
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February 21, 2024 • 24 mins
Though attitudes about retirement are shifting rapidly, traditional notions of retirement still hold currency. In Episode 6, we meet Maria and Brendan D’Souza. Maria is a senior nurse at Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, just a few years away from retirement. Her son Brendan is freshly minted from medical school, starting his career just a few floors away from his mother. They share a family bond, a career, and many of the same interests...
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February 14, 2024 • 29 mins
For some, work is a calling, and they can’t ever imagine giving it up. In episode 5, we meet Michael Segal, and hear his incredible journey—beginning with being left for dead on the floor of a convenience store in Austin, TX and ending with his lifelong commitment to helping trauma victims survive and flourish in the trauma wards of Ben Taub Hospital.
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February 7, 2024 • 25 mins
For some, retirement is just the starting pistol for that next act. Whether it is a new business or an entirely new career, retirement is just an out-of-date term for starting something new. To this group, entrepreneurship is a big draw (older Americans are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs) but it’s really about the freedom to pursue an exciting new phase of life. In episode 4, we meet Tasha Mayweather, and are drawn into...
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January 31, 2024 • 24 mins
Retire young: travel, spend time with family, perhaps tend to a nice piece of land in the country. It is the retirement that we all are supposed to want, but relatively few people get. In episode 3, we meet Carrie Nealis, a nurse in her late 30s who dreams of having the retirement her parents did. But she is challenged by the uncertainty of our times and the nagging belief that her generation will not share the same opportunities o...
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January 24, 2024 • 32 mins
It’s a common story: approaching retirement with little or no savings, uncertain how far social security or savings will take you, dealing with climbing health care costs and the potential responsibility for providing financial support to adult children. Increasingly, retirement is a financial struggle for millions. In episode 2, we meet Genie and Burgess Etzel, both approaching the final year of their careers at Harris Health. Per...
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January 17, 2024 • 23 mins
If there is a new vision of what “The New Retirement” should be, it is the “all of the above” retiree: stay healthy, stay involved in something you are passionate about, and be a dedicated caregiver to your future grandchildren. In episode 1, we meet Esmaeil Porsa, the CEO of Harris Health, to hear about his arduous and shockingly improbable road to the top of Harris Health, and what it means for the retirement that may not come as...
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December 13, 2023 • 36 mins
In episode 6, we explore an insidious epidemic, equivalent to the health effects of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It can cause inflammation, heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. And it can cut our lives short by as much as 30 percent. It’s not Covid - or a virus - or a bad diet. It’s loneliness. More than 60 percent of Americans report feeling lonely and disconnected. And that number keeps going up. Today we’ll explore the he...
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December 6, 2023 • 35 mins
Obesity rates have exploded in the US over the past half-century, with negative consequences for healthy longevity. We travel to rural Arkansas, where we visit countless dollar stores and explore the impact of ultra-processed foods on the obesity epidemic. We also examine potential solutions – from anti-obesity medication to Food Is Medicine interventions – as we begin to tackle obesity as a disease and not a personal choice.
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November 29, 2023 • 34 mins
In Episode 4, we explore how the built environment—and trees—impact communities. Renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead designed Buffalo, New York, around its parks, and it was once considered the best-designed city in America. But in the mid-20th century, one of his parkways was torn out and replaced with a highway that connected downtown with the new suburbs, in the name of urban renewal. We explore the impact of the...
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November 15, 2023 • 34 mins
In Episode 3 of Century Lives Season 4: A Lifetime of Inequality, we go to Phoenix, Arizona, to understand how it is that the built environment can have great consequences for lifelong health and longevity. We focus our story on trees, which are abundant in wealthy North Phoenix, and almost completely absent in South Phoenix—instead replaced by concrete, warehouses, railroads, highways, and the like. In Episode 3, we discuss how cl...
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November 8, 2023 • 37 mins
As it turns out, a person's lifelong health and longevity take root even before they are born. Preterm birth and low birth weight are connected with a range of medical issues that span the life course—including all-cause mortality. But when it comes to maternal and infant health, complications for Black mothers and babies far surpass those of other demographics. In Episode 2, we head to Los Angeles County to find out why—and to lea...
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November 1, 2023 • 36 mins
In Episode 1 of Century Lives Season 4: A Lifetime of Inequality, we visit Albuquerque, New Mexico, to explore the impact of early childhood education on lifelong health. The story looks at the impact of high quality early childhood education on health, and then follows the 12-year effort to pass Constitutional Amendment 1—an amendment to fully fund childhood education for all children in the state.
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April 26, 2023 • 32 mins
In our last two episodes of the season, we explore the challenges of concentrated urban poverty—and the depressive effects it has on health and life expectancy. And we examine two different approaches that might remedy it.
In episode 6: a story about going. We reexamine Moving to Opportunity: a grand 1990s public housing experiment intended to improve the incomes of public housing residents. That didn’t work, and the program was in...
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April 12, 2023 • 35 mins
In our last two episodes of the season, we explore the challenges of concentrated urban poverty, and the depressive effects it has on health and life expectancy. And we examine two different approaches that might remedy it.
In episode 5, we tell a story about staying. We visit Woodlawn, a neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, that is literally on the wrong side of the tracks. We learn how health improves when a community that long s...
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March 29, 2023 • 29 mins
Do the ladies of the Quilt Guild, the short order cooks at the City Pool Hall, and “Pumpkin Joe” hold the secrets to longer life? In episode 4 of Century Lives: Place Matters, we travel to Eastern Kentucky: a region marked by drug use, job loss, and life expectancy decline. But these folks live in Wayne County, a bright spot where life expectancy exceeds that of neighboring counties by four years. In this episode, we investigate th...
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