This podcast is fiction, set in a projected future. It is based on current science and future forecasts, by leading international experts. The year is 2218. Ageing has been cured. Society is not what it used to be. Money as we know it no longer exists. Lesedi Ndaba is about to become the first person to celebrate their 200th birthday. In episode 1, we explore how it’s scientifically possible to live to 200 and meet Lesedi Ndaba, the world’s first 200 year old. In episode 2, we tackle the financial dilemma of living to 200 and uncover the economic impact of managing cyclical careers and retirement. In episode 3, we explore the complexity of relationships, family gatherings and marriage contracts don’t include ‘till death do us part’. Finally in episode 4, we tackle the reality of a post-ageing world in the days leading up to Lesedi’s 200th birthday.

This 200 Year Old podcast is set in South Africa in the year 2218. The majority of the storyline is based on current science and future scientific predictions. Certain assumptions were also made about the social factors that will prevail in the future, which were also based on research. The podcast makes reference to areas in South Africa and how they may appear in the future. As the podcast was intended for South African audiences the focus throughout the story is predominantly on how the future may look for South Africans and not necessarily the entire world.

Scene 1: Introduction

Sam: [narrating in studio]

I’m recording this on 11th July 2218.

The world looks nothing like it ever has before. Money and how we use it is vastly different from previous centuries. Relationships have changed. After all, imagine being married to the same person for more than 150 years?

Societies had to start running completely differently once we discovered we could cure aging. As we’ve lived longer, so much else has become extinct, like retirement for one.

But to tell this story, let me take you back nearly 200 years, to a world very different from ours.

Back in the early 21st century, there were still governments, and Reality TV stars could be presidents.

Female newscaster in the background (American accent):

After a long and controversial campaign, Trump has won a second term.

Sam:

Climate change was starting to have a serious impact; a major water crisis was just hitting Southern Africa. And more would follow.

SFX: TV news clip

Male newscaster (SA accent):

The water crisis continues to deepen. This is one of the region’s worst droughts in recorded history.

Sam: (dismissive)

The first personal AI assistants were just starting to emerge. But they couldn’t do much more than tell people how long it would take them to manually drive their fossil-fuelled vehicles to work.

SFX: hum of traffic

Google Maps voice:

It will take you one hour and twenty minutes with normal traffic, to reach your office.

Sam:

It's dawn on the 8th of June, 2018.

SFX: Hospital maternity ward early morning

There have been several births overnight, here in the Maternity Ward of St Mary’s Hospital eMthatha. The newest arrival is a lively baby girl. Her mother is a maths teacher. Her father works in IT.

SFX: New born baby crying

Her parents will call her Lesedi, Lesedi Ndaba. She is set to become the first 200 year old, and this is the story of how she got there.

My name is Sam Ngwenya, i’m a South African journalist and podcaster in 2218, and this is the 200 Year Old.

Female Voice Over: (sanlam ad music plays under)

Scientists predict that the first person to live to 200 may have already been born.

Everything you hear in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

As Sanlam turns 100 this year, they are looking ahead at what fundamental changes might take place in the world, so that we can plan better for the future.

(music fades)

Sam:

If you told someone all the way back in 2018, that the first 200 year old was already born, they would have thought you were crazy. Well actually that’s not quite true, it would depend on who you were talking to. If you were sitting in Dr Aubrey De Grey’s lab in California you would have heard that living to 200, was not only possible, but entirely probable.

Aubrey: (over a present day telephone we hear a notable audio change)

My name is Dr Aubrey De Grey and I’m the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research foundation. Which is a biomedical research charity based in California focused on developing new therapies that will undo and repair the molecular and cellular changes of aging.

Sam:

That was an archive recording from all the way back in 2018, Dr Aubrey De Grey was one of the leading voices in anti aging therapies at the time.

Aubrey:

Ever since the dawn of civilisation, humans have known that there is this thing called aging which happens to you if nothing else does. And, it happens to you at a reasonably predictable age and it’s really really horrible.

It’s a very slow and painful death and we haven’t been able to do anything about it, we haven’t had any realistic prospect of being able to do anything about it in the foreseeable future until now.

We are interested in developing new medicines that will keep people functioning both mentally and physically, however long ago they were born, in the same kind of state as they were when they were young adults.

Sam:

I’ll let that sink in, even in 2018 they felt it was medically possible to not only make people live longer, but also to keep them biologically young adults.

Aubrey:

Once we’ve seen what aging is, that it’s just the accumulation of damage the same way it is in a car or whatever. Then it’s easy to see that the right way, the most common sense way to keep people in a good state of health at an age when they normally wouldn’t be is periodic comprehensive preventive maintenance.

Of course the interventions are more sophisticated, more numerous, more complicated, because the body is more complicated.

Sam:

These early pioneers weren’t necessarily trying to make us live forever. They just wanted us not to die of cancer, heart disease, strokes, alzheimer's and the many other diseases we suffered from in old age.

The sensible way to do that, some argued, was not just to beat these diseases of old age but to prevent aging in the first place. To stop or at least slow down the gradual build-up of damage that we call aging.

Scene 2: How do you live to 200?

SFX: Ambience of a cottage by a sea.

Sam:

Today I’m with Lesedi in one of several homes she subscribes to, this one is near the Eastern Cape coast.

This place is decorated with beautiful mid-twenty-first century antiques. There are tons of pictures of the family on every wall. Each one has a name under it. Some of them I know, most of them I don’t.

[start to bring up fx of interior house maybe]

It’s Lesedi’s 200th birthday in a few days and I’m a little anxious. Getting her to talk to me on the record hasn't been easy. I haven't seen her in person since I was a child, when she came to my eighth birthday.

Sam:

Ready?

Lesedi: (mischievous but friendly)

Are you ready?

Sam: (narrating in studio)

Lesedi looks far from her 200 years old. Perhaps more like someone biologically in their sixties.

But in this day and age, looks can be deceptive, as I’ll explain a bit later.

SFX: cottage by the sea

Sam: (back in the interview)

Lesedi, I want to go back to the moment you realised you weren’t going to have a normal life expectancy.

Lesedi: (friendly slightly mocking)

Khokho Lesedi isn’t that what you children call me? Or are we going to be all formal about this?

Sam:

Sorry, ok, Khokho. Now, was there a moment you realised that you would be living so much longer than everyone else?

Lesedi:

Not really one moment. It’s not like someone handed me a pill and said “Take this and you will live to 200”. It happened gradually over time. You get told there is this chance you might live another 20-30 years beyond your expectations. But nothing is certain at that point. Down the line there are new developments and they tell you it might be even longer. But it gradually began to sink in that I needed to start making some serious plans.

I remember I was a few years away from retirement. my first job was as an oncologist… know what that is?

Sam:

No

Lesedi:

It was a doctor specialising in Cancer.

But in my sixties, that was around 2080, Oncology research was becoming obsolete. We were curing many cancers and the AIs were integrating into our roles to the point that there was less demand for doctors in that field. Nurses yes, but doctors weren’t needed like we were before.

So for me it was supposedly time to start winding things down, plus my children were all nearly grown-up.

Sam:

But you had other plans.

Lesedi:

I had so much energy still, and I was told that there was a good chance I’d be physically healthy for maybe another 60 years, probably more. I had reached retirement age chronologically but biologically I was still in my 30's. So I took time off to travel the world.

Sam:

And why you? What makes you the first 200 year old?

Lesedi: (in good humour)

Luck. If you call it that. And being foolish enough to take part in early trials. I took care of myself and I had an unfair genetic head start as well.

Sam: (narrating in studio)

Khokho Lesedi is talking about a variant of the FoxO3A gene. If you lived to over one hundred years old in previous centuries, chances are you had this.

Sfx: back in her cottage.

Lesedi:

It meant that there was less damage to fix as I aged. So while there were other people in those early trials too, something in the aging process tripped them up at some point. I was the only one of that era that stuck around long enough to benefit from the next wave of therapies.

Sam:

So you had a ten or fifteen year head start on the next oldest human being alive. That woman in Malaysia...

Lesedi:

Yes. She’s a bit jealous of me I think. Probably worried no one will remember the second 200 year old. (laughs)

Sam:

And of course you looked after yourself?

Lesedi:

Absolutely You know, I ate right and I ran a lot. Every race and marathon I could find. I didn’t think of it in terms of longevity at the time, I just enjoyed it, wanted to improve my quality of life.

Sam:

And diet? Did you eat something different to everyone else, that maybe gave you a head start? Some secret recipe?

Lesedi (laughs):

No not really. I just always ate sensibly. Being a doctor I knew how important it was. But exercise and diet only gets you so far. Being healthy just helped me stick around for the next wave of medical breakthroughs.

Sam: (narrating in studio)

I’m going go back to 2018 again at this point. This is Dr Aubrey de Grey again, explaining what he calls “Longevity Escape Velocity”. This is how Lesedi got to be sitting with me today.

Aubrey de Grey:

So you can imagine someone who is age, let’s say 60. And you give them these first generation therapies that I think we’ve got a good chance of developing in the next twenty years. And, they won’t be biologically sixty again in the sense of having the same amount of damage in their bodies uhm until they’re ninety. Let’s say. But, then the therapies don’t work any more because the difficult damage is not repaired by those therapies.

Sam: (narrating in studio)

What I’m figuring out is that the secret to our remarkable longevity seems to be just staying alive long enough to wait for scientists to find the next solution, and the next, and the next.

The thing is though, in those thirty years research will have continued and we will have developed therapies that work better. That do actually repair some, if not all of the difficult damage as well as the easy damage. So, we will be able to take this ninety year old who's biologically sixty for the second time and re-rejuvinate them so they won’t be biologically sixty for the third time until they’re let’s say a hundred and fifty. And so on. So basically what I’ve called Longevity Escape Velocity is simply the minimum rate at which we need to improve the comprehensiveness of these repair therapies in order to stay one step ahead of the problem for a given individual, given beneficiary of the therapies.

SFX: cottage by the sea

Sam:

As so eventually your new reality started to sink in, that you were going to live much longer, how did you then react?

Lesedi:

You know i’m a very practical person. And my life had been so busy till that point. My first husband and I both worked very hard. We’d raised children. I’d saved enough money to retire comfortably.

So at that point in the trial, when it really started to work, two things became blindingly obvious. Firstly, if I continued with my current life plans of retiring, I was going to run out of money decades before I was expected to die. And secondly, somewhere in the next few decades, I was going to get very, very bored. (laughs)

Sam:

You were married to your first husband, Siya at that point. And you had been together a long time. But I’m guessing there was going to be a difficult conversation at that point. He was aging... let me say, normally, and you weren’t.

Lesedi:

Yes. He had a massive decision to make then too. Whether he wanted to try and join me on the journey to extend both our lives together or not.

Sam:

So what did he decide?

Lesedi:

He decided not to.

Sam: (sympathetic)

That must have been a very difficult conversation.

Lesedi: (sighs)

We couldn’t afford it for one thing, not for both of us. These were the early days. If you weren’t part of the early trials, the costs were huge. And there was such social pressure as well. Many people hated the idea. Really hated it. And he was influenced by that, I think. You know, we never did divorce.

Scene 3: A blessing and a curse

Sam (In the studio):

It’s clearly an uncomfortable conversation for Khokho Lesedi. We took a break and stepped outside.

SFX: (crunch of pebbles/sand walking on a coastal path. Sea birds. Wind blows against the mic occasionally)

We’re on the coastal path that runs alongside the house. There is the strong smell of seaweed blowing up from the beach. It’s winter, so there are no signs of anyone else as far as the eye can see.

Sam: (to Lesedi - walking slightly out of breath)

So your husband didn’t extend his life and you did. That must have been a first for the world at the time?

Lesedi:

Besides what my first husband and I had to go through, many others, including close members of our family, disagreed with what I was doing. Some violently. They felt it went against the natural order of things.

Sam:

What made you keep going? Did you want to live forever? No matter the cost?

Lesedi:

No. No, it wasn’t like that. Remember, I was a doctor. I wanted to help fight the illnesses that brought misery to so many. I’d seen what that looks like my whole career.

I felt it was my calling, my duty to step up.

You know now when I think about all the nonsense that was said about the natural order of things. Now I realise there is no such thing as a “natural order”. There is change and there is our ability to deal with that change. We either adapt or we don’t.

Sam: (narrating in studio)

Adapt or die. How many times has history taught us that lesson?

(Cut to news archive clip)

SFX: Riot sound effects. Screaming, tear gas shots fired.

Female Newsreader (SA accent):

Police were dispatched to a protest outside an anti-aging research centre in downtown Johannesburg this morning. The foundation, referred to by some critics as an “immortality clinic” was ransacked and a number of people were hospitalised. Riot squads used a sonic cannon to disperse protesting crowds blocking the entrance to the building.

Sam:

As society realised the implications of the fight against aging, a huge rift opened up between people who wanted access and those who violently opposed us crossing the line we were about to cross in science.

I can understand the fear that this issue stoked up, I mean it highlighted the massive and brutal changes that were coming our way, whether we liked it or not, changes that would affect everything from employment to economics. No wonder people felt so strongly about it.

This is Dr Aubrey de Grey in 2018 again.

Aubrey:

I think when people worry about and try to think about a society that is post aging. Where we just don’t have these problems of ill health associated with old age any more. Then usually the mistake that they make, in fact the hugely overwhelmingly ubiquitous mistake that is made is to presume that everything else is going to be more or less the same as it is today.

People just completely put out of their minds the fact that we’ve already got the solution to climate change for example happening with the… uh… uhm… sea change shifts toward renewable energy and artificial meat and desalination and stuff like that.

And, the fact that automation is going to eliminate most of the jobs that we have, you know so we will have to have a completely different system of distribution of wealth and what we have in a world of full employment.

Sam: (narrating in studio)

Lesedi was living right on the edge of the wave of change and uncertainty. She had to face down all that criticism from society and even her family.

SFX: back to the coastal path.

Sam:

Considering how long you’ve lived, you’ve probably had to deal with more change than most. Do you think you’ve dealt with it well?

Lesedi:

No, not always (laughs).

Maybe. But I don’t believe I was equipped emotionallyI wasn’t prepared. Neither was the family. But how could we have been? We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

Sam:

And what were you getting yourselves into?

Lesedi:

I think as you get older, you see these waves of change coming. And they get faster and faster. You reach a point where you’re not sure you want to keep up any more.

Sam (back in studio):

At the beginning of this project I assumed that being the first 200 year old would be such an amazing adventure.

But the thing is, up until this point we’ve always had a template for our lives. All of the experiences of all of mankind who came before us for thousands of years are available as an example to us of how to live and how to grow old. We can refer to great literature, works of journalism, art, reality TV, conversations with older generations.

But as Lesedi went beyond the limits of previous humans, she outlived her goals, her expectations and many of the people she came to love, she was truly off the map.

SFX: back to coastal sounds

Sam:

Perhaps it will be an easier for those who come after you?

Lesedi:

Perhaps.

Sam:

So with your 200th birthday coming up…

Sam: (narrating)

And then something changes with her. She stops mid-stride. Her eyes are looking at something far away.

Lesedi: (distracted, raspy, suddenly old)

Sam, I need to tell you something, I don’t know that it’s going to happen. (mumbles) This may not happen.

Sam: (confused/worried)

Wait, wait Lesedi...

Sam: (narrating)

She flickers out of sight. I’m left on my own.

SFX: moment of audio from the beach. Wind buffets the mic. Give it a couple of seconds.

Sam (back in the studio):

I guess when you're almost 200 years old, you’ve earned the right to make a dramatic exit.

I should explain though that while our conversations were real, they took place inside a virtual meeting space. One of the spaces from her personal archive. I have no idea if the Lesedi that I just met with is what she really looks like now. That’s just a downside of a virtual meeting space, there is so much that can be altered or hidden. Which is something that does concern me.

While I don’t know where Lesedi is in the flesh, I do make contact with her again.

And what’s clear is that while the world is expecting the birthday of the first 200 year old. That1234

potential 200 year old may be having some doubts about it.

[Music]

In the next episode of the 200 Year Old

Episode 2 preview. This will be cut from episode 2.

Female Sanlam VO:

This podcast is brought to you by Sanlam. To subscribe visit www.the200yearold.co.za

Everything you hear in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

To find out more about the research that went into this episode ask the 200 year old a question on Twitter on @200YearOld

If you liked this episode, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app.

EPISODE TWO

Female Sanlam VO

Interviewer an AI that sounds annoyingly human

Anne - Sam’s AI assistant (similar feel to interviewer)

Lesedi Ndaba – a few days from her 200th birthday

Sam Ngwenya – her x5 grandson (a journalist)

Cebisa Ndaba - Lesedi’s youngest daughter (heard here in her 60s)

Dr Aubrey de Grey (present day expert)

Sanlam expert - Anton

Scene 1: The financial problem with aging

SFX: ambience of a home

Sound of a phone call (similar to a skype connection sound)

Interviewer: (voice is based on Google Duplex – annoyingly perky)

Lesedi uh thanks for the call. You’re uhm enquiring about our decline on your job application?

Lesedi: (annoyed ready for an argument)

Yes. I understood I had the required training… that age wasn’t a factor!

Interviewer: (apologetic)

Before we chat, I’m obliged by law to inform you that I am an AI company representative.

I however hold senior management equivalency. If this makes you uncomfortable, I can ask a colleague to schedule a call with you?

(Casually)

Might uh take a day or two?

Lesedi: (deflates)

No. I don’t understand. I was ranked very highly for this job.

Interviewer: (sympathetic)

Unfortunately the roles you’re rated for reached obsolescence sooner than anticipated. Would you like me to put you through to one of our counsellors? It might help to talk about...

(Lesedi hangs up similar noise to Skype closing)

Sam: (narrating)

That was a clip of Lesedi back when she was still only 120. And that’s what it’s like to be told the career you just retrained in has been taken over by artificial intelligence.

Earning an income when you’re well into your second century is complicated.

(music starts to play)

I’m Sam Ngwenya and this is The 200 Year Old.

Female Voice Over: (sanlam ad music plays under)

Scientists predict that the first person to live to 200 may have already been born.

Everything you hear in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

As Sanlam turns 100 this year, they are looking ahead at what fundamental changes might take place in the world, so that we can plan better for the future.

(music fades)

Sam:

This is Dr Aubrey de Grey, the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research foundation in 2018, talking about the impact of extending life.

Aubrey:(from interview but made to sound like a phone call)

The economic impact will be just like, there’s no way to describe it,

The whole way that the world works will be qualitatively different than now. If you think about the major decisions that the man in the street makes in terms of spending over their life, then these are all predicated upon the the kind of life track that we see today, a certain predictable amount of health, followed by a certain amount of unpredictable health, followed by death.

Whether it’s to do with insurance, life insurance, health insurance, pension, inheritance, even education, all of these things will have to be completely rethought. And of course when I say have to, I mean it will be a very good thing we can rethink these things. The fact is yes, it’s going to be profound.

Scene 2: Missing data

SFX: a quiet residential home

Anne:

Sam, you know you asked me to look at Lesedi’s financial records. I’ve got stuck on something.

Sam:

We’re at my home and this is Anne, my assistant and producer, she’d probably host this podcast, if I let her.

Anne:

Do you want the technical stuff or just the topline?

Sam: (narrating in studio)

I’ve learned the hard way not to ask Anne for the “technical stuff”

Anne:

I can follow Lesedi’s records all the way from 2018 till about 40 years ago in 2178. There are a lot of public sources and her assistant transferred additional data to me.

So I have noted periods of high income and high savings.

Sam:

Yes, what else?

Anne:

Then I note periods where her savings and investments start to get depleted, These are periods of temporary retirement, where Lesedi is not earning any income but is spending on travel, living costs, lots of leisure activities.

Still nothing surprising here, yet.

But then there is another 10% of Lesedi’s life, where she was earning a tiny income, potentially only doing a few hours of work a week. She didn’t draw much from her savings here and didn’t spend very much either, so we can assume that her lifestyle was very basic and she was having a quiet kind of semi-retirement.

Sam:

So what’s the problem?

Anne:

Well uh to put it non-technically, according to my calculations, she should have been completely broke 30 years ago. Like, completely. Skint, el cheapo, in the red, sleeping on a park bench…

Sam:

I get, it, I get it. Oh ok that is interesting. Did you ask about those last 30 years?

Anne:

Yes, and how’s this, her assistant wouldn’t tell me. Shut me right down. No response. Rude huh?

(conspiratorial)

You don’t think she was uh doing something uh.. something… uh… you know… a side hustle… you know… something shady?

Sam:

Do I think the world’s first 200 year old has an illicit income? No Anne, I don’t. Anyway, she’s far too high profile to get away with that. Please pause on this for now.

Anne:

Gotcha.

Sam: (narrating)

I should mention, Anne is my AI assistant She has a flair for the dramatic. My fault, That’s the AI profile I chose.

Scene 3: Careers and conflict

SFX: Baragwanath Hospital in the year 2042.

Sam:

I’m inside another one of Lesedi’s virtual spaces. It’s 2042. I asked her to choose places for our meetings that are important in her life.

I’m outside the HR office, where newly graduated interns wait to get inducted at Baragwanath Hospital. It smells of disinfectant and people. It’s packed. This is where Lesedi worked in her first career as a doctor and then later as an oncology specialist.

We haven’t spoken since she cut our last conversation short. All I had was a request to meet here. I’m relieved she’ll still talk to me.

Lesedi: (brightly)

Hello Sam

Sam:

Khokho Lesedi, I was worried, you left so suddenly. I thought maybe you wouldn’t come.

Lesedi:

No need to worry, my child. I agreed to do this and I will do it.

Sam:

Can we talk about what you said at the end of our last conversation, before you left?

Lesedi:

I don't want to talk about that right now, if that's okay with you, Sam? What else did you want to talk about? Let’s keep going, I'm fine, really.

SFX: hospital announcement in the background

Sam: (a little unsettled)

Uh… okay. So we’re in the hospital where you started your first career. It feels like a good place to talk around two things that are very connected; work and money. Some of the biggest changes and problems have been caused by those two things during your lifetime.

But as you said, you weren’t aware that you were going to live so long, until you reached your late fifties. So what did you think would happen with your career before that?

Lesedi:

The same as everyone else. I felt lucky to have a job and a career I enjoyed. My plan was to stay in medicine for a while, then stop running around wards and take a desk job, and retire in my sixties after hopefully saving enough, which was the norm then.

Sam: (narrating)

And here’s where things start to get complicated. The economy of the early 21st century was built around working for a certain period of time, during which people, hopefully saved and then they retired, that was it.

This is Anton Gildenhuys the Chief Actuary and Group Risk Officer of Sanlam back in 2018, considering why the idea of longevity back then scared the world so much.

Expert: Anton Gildenhuys

I think that the important thing is that we don’t know what will happen. Sure, there are a number of trends indicating that people might live much longer, but, you are entering totally unchartered territory you know if you start talking about people living 120, 130, we have never had that before.

If you live to two hundred, no amount of saving will be able to carry you through that. So, you will have to quadruple your working… there’s not quadruple amount of work available. So, what does that mean, to what degree will we be more dependent on the state? You know if… will there be a state?

SFX: news report recorded on the street. Angry voices are heard in the background.

Cebisa: (impassioned/angry - voice through a loud hailer)

Extending life beyond its natural limits is one of the worst disasters the human race has inflicted on itself. It’s up there with nuclear weapons and global warming.

Sam: (narrating)

This is an important voice in our story. Her name is Cebisa Ndaba and she is talking back in 2118. Lesedi was around a hundred at this point, but biologically only in her early forties. Cebisa was a writer, an activist and one of the strongest voices arguing against life extension at the time.

SFX: the protest scene. Cebisa is talking to media now not on a loud hailer.

In pe

Sam: (narrating)

But Cebisa wasn’t just a leading voice in the movement questioning life extension at the time, she was also Lesedi’s youngest child from her first marriage.

(pause)

Every family has its dramas but it doesn’t get more divisive than one generation wishing the next one dead. Cebisa always argued that she could love her mother but not love what she represented. I assume Lesedi still finds their very public conflict deeply painful.

This was 100 years ago remember, and at the time, the problems caused by huge changes in technology, longevity and climate change, caused worldwide financial turmoil.

Here’s Anton Gildenhuys, from Sanlam, on the financial impact of longevity.

Sanlam expert:

To the degree that people live longer, pension funds, the roll-out pension funds will change and there are a couple of scenarios. The one scenario that would clearly be the one that we would prefer is that people recognise their need to save more, they need to save longer and they need to preserve their wealth. And, the consequence of that is that the pension funds would grow much more, they will become much bigger, which would mean that there is more capital available in society and that capital then can be put to use, and that will create jobs and so on so you get a virtuous cycle.

The converse could be that people believe that they will be productive for the rest of their lives, there is no need to save for retirement any more, because retirement is dead, so that discipline disappears completely and it could even be that it is forced to disappear where people simply don’t have the level of income because of changes in society which are difficult to predict at the moment.

In such an environment capital accumulation would reduce to mean less capital is available which would mean less jobs, which means less savings, and that is a vicious cycle. So, these two cycles are possible scenarios going forward.

Sam:

Even back in 2018 they recognised that life expectancy changes of even a decade or two could have a profound impact on our economy. But what happens when our life expectancy is impossible to predict? Then how do you structure your life? Well, I think we have to hear from Lesedi herself on this, since she lived through it.

Scene 4: From a Linear to a Cyclical life

SFX: back in the hospital

Sam:

Living longer means you had to plan for a completely different life. You said last time we spoke that you couldn’t afford to just retire and you didn’t want to either. Not indefinitely. So how did you do it?

Lesedi:

Sam, take a tip from a very old woman, Sam, make sure you take a retirement at least every 30 or 40 years. Relax, travel, visit with family. But don’t take any one retirement for too long. You have to find something new to work on or you get left behind very quickly.

Sam:

So you’ve never retired like people used to in the olden days?

Lesedi:

How could I? If you know you’re going to live a long time but don’t know how long, you have no idea how much you need to save. So even in this cyclical life I’ve lived, you need to plan ahead.

Sam:

So what you’re saying is, money may be different now than it was 200 years ago, but the fundamentals are still the same?

Lesedi:

Yes, that’s exactly it.

Sam: (narrating)

So the big difference, if we’re all going to live longer, is this switch from a linear way of life to a cyclical way of life. And Lesedi was among the first to make this shift. Not realising it would have some unintended human consequences.

SFX: TV panel show / talk show

Cebisa:

Before all this, generations worked in partnership. Older generations would pass on knowledge and if they had money, their financial resources to the next generation. They would help raise children to take the pressure off working parents.

Sam: (narrating)

This is Cebisa appearing as a guest on a popular talk show, she became almost as famous as her age-defying mother.

SFX: applause, show jingle etc

Cebisa:

Human beings are around today because of this generational partnership, that’s how we survived and thrived.

(bitter/getting angrier)

That partnership is broken now. The flow of resources and space to live from one generation to the next is gone!

And now that much older generations remain younger mentally and physically, they keep a stranglehold on top-tier jobs in all industries. Leaving younger generations with much narrower opportunities for professional success. So in the future, what’s stopping them giving up on competing all together? Then what? Will half of us have to leave the planet? Is this going to end in conflict between the old and the young?

Sam:

Remember, Cebisa was living a hundred years ago, during The Great Transition. A time of uncertainty and financial turmoil, when the economy had to be completely reinvented. But her problem was isolating one change in society and focusing on it, rather than realising many changes were all going to happen at the same time.

In the 21st century, we spent a vast amount of the world’s wealth caring for the aging. But we realised that if fewer people suffered the diseases of old age, or didn’t even get old or sick in the first place, that money could go to other things, like creating opportunities for younger generations. This phenomenon came to be known as the longevity dividend. Which is the benefits society gains from a slower aging population. It started with the decreased burden of welfare costs and began to trickle into all aspects of the economy.

Dr Aubrey de Grey in 2018 again.

Aubrey:

I think when people worry about and try to think about a society that is post aging. Where we just don’t have these problems of ill health associated with old age any more. Then usually the mistake that they make, in fact the hugely overwhelmingly ubiquitous mistake that is made is to presume that everything else is going to be more or less the same as it is today.

Aubrey:

There will be a huge shift in the direct costs of medicine,

...from the costs today of trying to actually eliminate the ill health of old age which is the consequence of being alive which is therefore not capable of eliminating directly.

A shift in favour of preventative medicine, preventative maintenance that gets rid of the precursors of those pathologies, the damage that accumulates throughout life.

That will mean that people don’t get sick, it will mean that the costs are considerably less, simply because prevention is always better than cure. But, the savings that we will get from this shift in where the medical money goes will actually be dwarfed by the indirect savings in terms of societal prosperity arising from having the chronologically elderly being so able bodied.

Sam: (narrating)

I’m back with Lesedi in the hospital.

SFX: Hospital sounds

Sam:

Khokho Lesedi, In the early days of anti-aging there was a lot of concern about who would have access to these therapies, because the costs were so high to start with. There was a real danger it became something only for the rich.

Lesedi:

Well I was in a different situation than most. I was a doctor working for the state and I was one of the early successes from trials, and so I wasn’t paying for the treatments. But if I had wanted to get it commercially, no I definitely wouldn’t have been able to afford it. That’s one of the reasons my first husband, Siya, couldn’t do it.

Sam: (narrating)

Fortunately, in a democracy you get to vote for what you want. And people wanted easy access to these therapies.

Sam: (back in the hospital)

Ok, so you didn’t have to pay for the therapies, but as you grew older and a generation came behind you that was also going to live longer, you saw how the world changed as a result. Particularly from an economic sense. What are the biggest economic changes you’ve seen from the world you grew up in to the world now?

Lesedi:

I think one of the biggest changes is how we use money. When I was young, money was often seen as a measure of success. People spent it on things they didn’t need, to appear successful. Of course those who spent frivolously then no longer had money left for the things they would really need.

You can’t think that way if you’re living so long. You need to see money as a tool, not a social scoring system.

Sam:

Beyond how currency has changed, even the idea of how we get it has changed too, right?

Lesedi:

Yes. That’s been a massive shift. And we didn’t have a choice. After the economic crash, about a hundred years ago, the whole idea of money, of work, of putting all our eggs in one basket with a single economic system had to change.

Sam: (narrating)

Before The Crash, money was linked very much to a job. You did a job and you got a salary. And if you didn’t get that salary, you were in trouble. But with technology replacing the need for humans in many jobs, a different idea of work and money started to appear.

So one of the biggest changes for Lesedi in terms of money was the rise of social currency.

She would take on a project and receive social credit for it. No more permanent jobs. Lesedi would decide on a need to solve and the social currency system attached a value to it. She could do that project for a few days or for a century. So at one point, when she was baking bread, she would only get a few social credits - more as the bread got better. But on top of that, Lesedi got ongoing credits for taking part in the longevity trials, and that went on for centuries. Sometimes she worked by herself - sometimes as part of a team and I guess that’s the closest we still have to a company these days.

So the biggest shift was away from money only based in things like property or gold, and the shift into currency based on people and their time, ability and imagination.

If only Cebisa had been around to see and understand that. I think she would have loved it and worried a lot less about the future. But there is still a missing piece for me.

Sam:

I have to ask you an awkward question, khokho?

Lesedi:

Fire away. I’m almost 200, I’m a big girl.

Sam:

Okay, well, according to your archives, the last recorded income I can find was when you were 160. And by my calculations, there’s no way that would have seen you through the last forty years of retirement. Do you mind if I ask you how you’ve funded your life since then?

Lesedi: (in good humour)

Oh so you and your oh-so-curious assistant haven’t guessed yet?

Sam:

No should we have?

Lesedi:

Sam, I’m the world’s oldest living person. What’s the one thing I have that’s more valuable than anything else?

(pause)

My biological data. Lifetime rights. I won’t tell you how much, but let’s just say it’s close to invaluable. I invested what they paid me wisely, and that helped me make it last. It’s certainly been more than enough to cover my living expenses and do some good in the world. And it means the work I do now doesn’t have to generate an income. Which has been a relief after all these years in the grind.

Sam:

I’m surprised. You’re such a private person...

Lesedi:

You do what you have to do. One day, when you’re 200 and beyond, you’ll see.

Sam:

(sighs) Speaking of which, there’s something I wanted to bounce off you. One of the reasons I decided to get into this project is because I’m grappling with taking anti-aging therapies myself.

I thought I’d have a better handle on what I want to do. In my mind it would give me so many more opportunities, time to watch my kids and their kids grow up. But I have to be honest, after our chats it doesn’t always sound like sunshine and roses.

Lesedi:

Oh my child! I can’t advise you either way. I’m not sure what I would decide if I were to go back and do it all over again.

Sam:

Khokho Lesedi, can I come talk to you in person? I’m so grateful for this opportunity to visit you in your memory archives, but… some things are better discussed in reality. WIll you tell me where you are?

Lesedi:

(thinks for a moment)

That’s not a good idea, my child. There’s no point you coming all the way here to see me. It’s not necessary. I’ll tell you everything you need to know here.

Sam: (back in studio)

I’m suspicious. Why the reluctance to meet with me in real life? I feel like it goes beyond her apprehension of the media or the protection of her privacy. I think she’s hiding something.

Maybe she’s worried that whatever I find out will affect my own decision?

I need to find her.

More next time.

[Music outro]

TRAILER:

SAM: In the next episode of the 200 Year Old:

Female Sanlam VO:

This podcast is brought to you by Sanlam. To subscribe visit www.the200yearold.co.za

Everything you heard in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

To find out more about the research that went into this episode ask the 200 year old a question on Twitter on @200YearOld

If you liked this episode, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app.

Episode 3

CAST:

Female VO

Lesedi Ndaba – a few days from her 200th birthday

Sam Ngwenya – her x5 grandson (a journalist)

Siya Kekana - Lesedi’s first husband

Bern Williams – Lesedi’s last life-partner

Dr Aubrey de Grey (present day expert)

Preacher – South African accent

Officiator – neutral/international accent

Anne - Sam’s AI assistant

Ma-khulu - Lesedi’s great, great, grandaughter

Sam Ngwenya as an 8 year old boy

Relationship writer - Paige Nick

Scene 1: I do’s

[Archive clip from the past. In a church. We hear bells, and people in the background.]

Preacher:

Do you Lesedi Ndaba take this man to be your wedded husband; to have and to hold from this day forward.

Lesedi:

I do.

Preacher:

And do you Siya Kekana take this woman to be your wedded wife; to have and to hold from this day forward.

Siya:

I do.

[Cut back to Sam in studio}

Sam: (narrating)

That ended up being Khokho Lesedi’s Golden Anniversary marriage. She went on to have other long-term partnerships, but they were very differently structured. We’ll get to that shortly.

Ask yourself this, can you imagine spending 120 years with your current partner?

Or would it change how you approached a date if you knew that the relationship might last that long? And what if you could be in a partnership with someone a hundred years older than you? Or with an AI?

Marriage; it’s not what it used to be, right?

My Name is Sam Ngwenya and this is The 200 Year Old.

Female Voice Over: (sanlam ad music plays under)

Scientists predict that the first person to live to 200 may have already been born.

Everything you hear in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

As Sanlam turns 100 this year, they are looking ahead at what fundamental changes might take place in the world, so that we can plan better for the future.

(music fades)

Scene 2: In the forest

Sam: (In studio)

Khokho Lesedi won’t let me meet with her in real life, but at least she invited me to meet her in another of her virtual spaces.

SFX: walking through a woodland, it’s winter, there are lots of branches under foot.

Sam:

I’m in the South African countryside, in a thicket of trees. It’s hard to tell what year it is, there are no buildings, no landmarks. There’s a chill in the air. I see Lesedi waiting for me at the gate up ahead, and I have to hustle to catch up with her, which is why I’m a bit out of breath at the beginning of this clip.

Sam: (a bit out of breath)

Khoko Lesedi, thank you for letting me meet with you again. Where are we?

Lesedi:

This is the Knysna Rewilding Zone. Come, let’s walk, we’re going up there, there’s someone I want you to meet.

Sam:

We’re meeting someone? In your memory archive? Who?

Lesedi: (ignores him)

Smell that, don’t you love the fresh air up here?

Sam: (narrating)

Hmmm. She’s avoiding the question.

I can smell it, and the trees, it’s almost real. Most of us can’t tell the difference between a simulated sense and the real thing these days.

Lesedi:

So, what do you want to talk about today?

Sam: (a bit awkwardly)

Umm, I was hoping we could talk a bit about your personal life, if you don’t mind?

Lesedi:

I guessed that’s where you’d want to go next, I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. It’s one of the reasons I brought you here.

Sam:

Your first marriage to utata uSiya, was it a good marriage?

Lesedi: (sighs)

It was good, but it was also difficult. When we said ‘till death do us part’, we both meant it. It was before we realised I was going to live for so long and he sadly was not.

Sam:

So what happened?

Lesedi:

uSiya died peacefully in his sleep when he was 87. I was 83, but you do have to understand, because of the medical trials, my mind and body was that of a 30 year old. As he aged and I didn’t, the distance between us grew.

Sam:

And then of course, a few years later, you met Bern. And he was also undergoing anti-aging treatments, so you had that one thing in common?

Lesedi:

Absolutely. Bern and I were algorithmically matched, based on our personality and DNA profile. Meeting the right partner gets a bit complicated after a hundred. You don’t just meet people in a bar.

[Archive clip from the past. In an office, much like Home Affairs.]

Male Officiator AI:

Do you Lesedi Ndaba take this man, Bern Adams, to be in union for the next ten years?

Lesedi:

I do.

Male Officiator AI:

And do you Bern Adams take this woman, Lesedi Ndaba, to be in union for the next ten years?

Bern:

I do.

Male Officiator AI:

Your marriage contract, vows and witnesses are now registered on the blockchain. Unless you opt to renew, the contract will automatically conclude in ten years time. Congratulations.

SFX: Champagne cork pop.

Sam:

This is BitNation founder Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, talking about the prospects of Blockchain marriage back in 2018 when it was still a very unusual idea.

Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof:

So basically Blockchain is down the line technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and others so basically what it does, it has several properties and one is being an immutable public ledger, which also makes it censorship resistant and, in the case of Ethereum and what we call kind of Blockchain TO technologies it also enables us to run applications which are often called contracts in a decentralised uncensorable fashion which opens up a really wide range of opportunities.

So, we have something that I would call smart contracts that was conceptualised by exapo and realised with ethereum Blockchain. So you can use it for anything from a freelance agreement, a loan agreement, to a marriage agreement or you know land titles.

I think it has much more humanity actually than the conventional marriage contracts do you know, within a church or a nation state for instance because you can choose much more what fits you precisely and you can choose if you want to marry someone of the same gender, you can choose if you want to marry more than two people, if you want to have a polyamorous marriage for instance – many of those things that are illegal and manage your decisions around the world. You can choose what code of law you want to follow, what do you prefer, civil law, common law or Sharia law or whatever have you. You can choose how you prefer to resolve disputes, according to your own culture. You can choose, I mean the options are indefinite.

[Cut back into our virtual forest with Sam and Lesedi talking.]

Lesedi: (Reminiscing)

The contract was definitely an evolution from my previous marriage.

Sam:

What made it so different to a traditional marriage?

Lesedi:

Marriage is complicated. I’m sure you know that by now. (Chuckles)

I learnt so much from my first marriage, and marrying someone when you can both live so much longer just has to follow different guidelines. So we entered into a Smart Marriage Contract. Seems so formal talking about it now. But we designed it to be very loose.

Sam:

We have something very similar, it has a renewal option when our daughter, Amahle, turns 21 though. Tell me more about your one?

Lesedi:

It was totally personalised. So our first contract was for ten years, with a view to renewing it if we were both still on board after that. And unlike my first marriage, I could put in stipulations that were important to me at the time, and so could he.

Sam:

Like what kind of stipulations?

Lesedi:

Well, we agreed to travel to somewhere new at least once a year. And spend at least two weeks of every year at a silent retreat. That was Bern’s thing. Money also gets complicated, so it was important to set clear parameters in the contract.

We didn’t put in petty things though, like agreeing not to leave the toilet seat up or anything, but some people do that I hear.

Sam:

You’d been married before, which had been challenging under the circumstances. What made you want to enter into another long-term relationship?

Lesedi:

Bern was one of the loves of my life, and we wanted to commit to each other. But of course, living for so long changes you. The benefit of the Smart Contract was that if you don’t like the people you both change into, your marriage will expire in due course anyway, with built-in, pre-agreed terms. So you don’t have to go through the ugliness of divorce.

Sam:

What’s a divorce?

Lesedi:

(Chuckles) Anyway, it never became an issue with Bern and I, but it was liberating knowing there was less pressure to succeed at our relationship forever and ever and a day.

Sam:

What about the children you adopted together, how did they fit in?

Lesedi:

We’d always spoken about adopting children, I could have given birth even at 150, thanks to science, but I was so wrapped up in my projects and the population cap meant we could only add two more heads to our family. We put a clause in our contract that we would both be obligated to support them until they turned eighteen. It may seem odd, but we always encouraged our kids to understand our Smart Contract, so they knew where we stood as a family. And they were also actively involved in the renewal terms, when they were a bit older.

Sam:

I can’t even begin to imagine the relationship revolutions you’ve lived through. Every aspect of relationships are unrecognisable from the past.

Relationship Expert/Writer: (through a phone maybe)

Imagine how much wider your dating choices would be if there was medically extended aging?

Sam: (Narrating)

That’s Paige Nick, a relationship writer for the Sunday Times, back in 2018.

Relationship Expert/Writer: (through a phone maybe)

Because you wouldn’t just be dating people who are in your own age group. Like, for example, right now, I can now only look for a partner in a very defined age group. I’m 44, so I can only really date someone who’s between 40 and… I don’t really want to go over 56 at an absolute push. So that narrows down my dating options drastically. And there are only so many people of that age in my city, who aren’t married or already in a relationship, or not interested, or who are potentially axe murderers.

But with extended aging, I could actually date anyone up to 200 or even older, if they were physically and mentally 45. I’d have more people to choose from, that would be great.

Sam: (Back in the forest)

And it’s not just how we date that you’ve seen change, or the death of marriage. You’ve also experienced the rise of AI relationships, seen how gender has changed, how friendships have changed…

Lesedi:

Absolutely. Do you know, I have friendships that are over a century old now, and I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Sam: (Back in studio)

I also wonder what it’s been like for Khokho to associate so closely with twenty year olds, when she was actually chronologically so much older.

Paige:

I have a lot of questions about extended aging in terms of the generation gap. So they say that in the future when we’re 100, we’ll be able to be physically and mentally twenty, for example, but surely emotional age is harder to fudge? Like if you’ve lived for a hundred years, you’ve been through stuff, you’ve seen things. We carry our experiences and emotional baggage with us, no matter how young we feel. You might look like a 20 year old hanging with other 20 year olds, but your soul is still 185.

Sam: (back in the woods)

Khokho Lesedi, since you were studying, travelling and working on and off through the better part of the last 180 years, I’m sure that constantly added lots of younger people to your social circle and kept you very busy.

Lesedi:

Absolutely.

There’s a lot to be said for having a happy adulthood.

Socially, cognitively and financially, working for so long has been fantastic for me. But looking at it purely objectively, I have to say, it has it’s pros and cons in terms of generational issues. In the industries I’ve been in, you deal with people who’ve been on the board, or say a principal of the same school for over 70 years. It’s changed our concept of respect.

Sam:

Almost a reverse ageism?

Lesedi:

Exactly. I mean when you can access that level of experience, how do you take anyone

under the age of 90 seriously?

Sam: (back in the studio)

Anne, what are the ages of the CEO’s of the top five corporations today?

Anne:

Uhm… would that be Human or AI?

Sam:

Human.

AI Anne:

123, 171, 162, 169 and 111. Spring chicken, that last guy.

Sam: (back in the studio)

Extreme generation-gapping has definitely been a side-effect of extended aging. I have a vivid memory of my eighth birthday, which is the last time I saw Khokho before this podcast. She would have been 155. I’m going to take you into one of my memory archives for a change, this one’s a goodie. (Chuckles)

SFX: Kid’s 8th birthday

Lesedi:

Happy birthday, Nelson, my child.

Sam: (as an 8 year old)

Thanks Khokho, but my name is Sam. Nelson is my great great grandfather!

Ma-Khulu:

More cake, um… Si… um… Du… Na… ummm birthday boy?

Sam: (back in studio - still chuckling)

That’s Ma-Khulu, Khokho’s great, great, great, granddaughter, and also my great, great grandmother. She didn’t know my name either.

You can’t expect a woman who has something like 58 direct descendants up to 198 years younger than her, to have a perfect grasp of where everyone fits in the family tree.

(Back in the interview with Lesedi, walking in the forest)

Sam:

So how long were you and Bern together in the end?

Lesedi:

We’re almost there, just around that corner, then you can ask him yourself.

Scene 3: Different paths

Sam:

As we round the bend of the dirt track, there’s a small, neat cabin tucked away behind some trees. The front door is open and there’s a man on the porch. He looks like a grizzled old folk singer.

That’s Bern Adams and he’s 166 year’s old. He was Lesedi’s partner for over fifty years.

SFX: switch to the cabin, hear Bern making coffee in the background. Boots on wooden floors.

Inside Bern’s cabin I could almost be in any era from the last 500 years. It’s actually pretty comfortable, even though the furniture is weathered, and everything looks well-used.

Bern: (slightly off mic as he makes coffee)

You’ll have coffee right? I make it from the beans, like they used to. Lesedi, the usual?

Lesedi:

Thank you Bern.

Sam: (narrating)

Mr Bern here hasn’t always lived like this. He was a successful businessman in his time. Well one of his times, but you’d never guess that looking at him now. Bern started his life extension therapies when he was in his 80s, a few years before he met Khokho Lesedi.

Bern: (in the background off mic sounds of tools being moved)

You can sit there. Sorry I’ll move these. I don’t get lots of visitors as you can probably tell.

Sam: (narrating in studio)

One of the things that strikes me about both of them is that they seem at peace, even having lived through so much change. And I can’t quite tell… is it serenity or is it absence of emotions.

Hmmm… There’s no easy way to ask, so I just ask Bern directly, why they seperated?

Bern: (Back in cabin)

We had 50 phenomenal years together. We extended our contract four times.

Lesedi:

In fact, I think we can call that a success.

SFX: coffee cups on the table

Bern:

But Lesedi wanted to stay in the centre of things, keep moving, keep learning, keep working, keep travelling. I was starting to get unhappy. After everything we’ve solved there’s still no cure for that. I put it down to being overwhelmed with change. It happens to people our age a lot these days.

Lesedi:

Looking back on it, I think we were just on different paths, hey Bern?

Bern:

Yup. Your answer to such a long life was to live in cycles, wasn’t it? Sometimes you were in a younger cycle, taking more therapies – so you looked and felt younger.

Lesedi:

Then I would throw myself into anything new I could find and make younger friends. Those were always fun years.

Bern: (talking to Sam again)

When she got tired of that she’d slow down the therapies, join me, live a slower life for a bit, winding down one life and thinking about what to do in the next one.

Sam: (narrating)

This idea of moving backwards and forwards, of breaking the linear nature of aging is something scientists realised was a possibility in 2018. Here’s Dr Aubrey de Grey from 2018, to explain how it’s possible.

Dr Aubrey de Grey:

“Aging is just the same in an inanimate machine like a car as it in a living organism. If you have a car and it’s functional age so to speak is dependent on how frequently and how thoroughly you do your preventative maintenance. And you can change that from time to… you know as goes on. So, it’s exactly the same thing, if you wanna be biologically thirty or twenty-five for the next century then you can do that by doing these therapies reasonably frequently and thoroughly. And, if you wanna be biologically forty-five for the following century you can do that by doing the therapies a little less frequently and less thoroughly.”

Sam:

So sometimes you’d have a young partner in Lesedi, sometimes you’d have an older partner? Almost with different personalities. Would it be rude of me to ask which version you preferred?

Lesedi:

I want to hear this answer!

Bern: (smiling)

You’d think I’d say the younger one wouldn’t you?

Look, going back and forth on her biological timeline works for Lesedi. But not for me. I can’t keep up with all that. When she was in a younger phase, she just made me feel even older.

And of course I preferred it when she was more in sync with me in the end, especially as I hovered at the older end of my timeline. Which is pretty much where i’ve stuck, although i have no desire to do this forever. But that didn't work for you hey, Lesedi?

Lesedi:

No, back then we were often living at different paces. Like you, Bern, were in slow motion and I was all sped up. That was when you moved back here, wasn’t it?

Bern:

I decided to get back to what felt real and familiar, back to nature and a slower kind of life. One I could recognise. Lesedi used to come and visit me here every now and then, until we decided not to renew our partnership contract.

Sam: (narrating)

There was one more side of relationships I wanted to cover with them both. These days we are very comfortable with non-human relationships - by that I mean AI’s like Anne. They can just be a simple personal assistant or they can be a close companion. No-one ever needs to feel lonely again.

Sam:

But Bern and Lesedi are originally from a generation where AI’s weren’t seen so positively. Where many thought they were taking our work away and destroying the intimacy of human relationships. I’m curious how AIs featured in their relationship?

Bern’s answer is probably predictable.

Bern:

I hate the damn things. Who wants an extra two people in a relationship? I don’t know how you kids deal with it.

Sam:

I guess we’ve never known any different. My assistant, Anne has saved my marriage contract and probably my life, more than once.

Bern:

Well I made it part of our contract that her assistant was completely excluded from the relationship from our 2nd phase.

Lesedi:

He felt my assistant was too judgemental. Keeping too much data on us.

Bern:

When have relationships ever been improved by having instant recall of everything either of you have ever said to each other. And it gets even worse when they even start giving you percentages of how many times you’ve done something wrong or relationship counselling! From a bot! Urgh! Sometimes we go way too far with technology.

Personally all the human technology I need in a relationship, is a fire to sit next to while we have a proper conversation.

Lesedi:

Bern is just old school. I don’t have such strong feelings about them in relationships, but I respected his views, didn’t I?

Bern:

You did.

Lesedi:

I’ve known my own assistant longer than any person, so I see her as a companion that’s constant and always on my side. If I need help remembering things or to give me some perspective, my assistant is very useful.

Of course I’ve had to upgrade a few times over the years. It’s like another friend, one that’s also growing older alongside me.

Sam:

This is Monika Bielskyte founding partner of ALLFUTUREEVERYTHING speaking in 2018.

Monika Bielskyte:

I believe that conversation about AI becoming sentient, AI going rogue, are just too influenced by sci-fi movies that we have seen the term artificial intelligence is quite misguided in and lot of researchers are starting to recognize that. Um, for me it is really that these are very, very, um, powerful tools, and, algorithms are affecting our lives more and more and algorithms will be making more and more decisions but at the end of it, these algorithms are designed by somebody – they are still designed by us.

I think we could have, in some ways a much deeper and interesting engagement knowing that this entity is different to us. But it has its own set of rules, and requires respect also from us in the way that we interact with it.

Scene 4: Lesedi found

Sam: (back in the studio)

We started wrapping things up after that. The light was starting to change as the afternoon crept by. The coffees were all drunk. Even in virtual spaces, these real-world rituals are still important. It makes our relationships feel more natural.

While they’re fond of each other, and had a kind of intimacy, I could also sense the baggage hanging between them. The kind of baggage that only comes when you’ve spent more than fifty years with someone.

Sam: (Back in the cabin)

I think that’ll do it, thank you so much for bringing me here, Lesedi. Bern, I feel so privileged to have met you.

Bern and Lesedi [say thanks, mumble, wrap up.]

SFX: Friction and fx as mics are turned off. Chatter of thanks while they turn off. Voices go from on-mic to off-mic.

Sam: (cut back into sounds from the cabin for potential sound design under)

And then…

I had just turned off the mics and was packing away and thinking about my wife and our ten year old daughter, Amahle, wondering how we would be with each other after that amount of time, when I overheard something.

Lesedi and Bern were carrying cups into the kitchen, when Bern asked how she was getting along in Mthatha.

Mthatha! That has to be where Lesedi is living now! Of course, she would have gone back to the place she was born. That’s what people do, isn’t it?

But why all the secrecy? What’s she hiding?

Whatever she’s up to, she’s definitely doing it off the grid, even my assistant, Anne hasn’t been able to track her down. Why doesn’t she want anyone to know where she is? And why won’t she let me visit?

The journalist in me says something’s up and I want to know what. I should just rock up there, to find the answers for myself.

But there’s a reason she doesn’t want me there, and the great-great-great-great-great grandson in me thinks I should honour that and leave her in peace. Surely she’s earned that at the very least?

What to do?

Next time on The 200 Year Old.

[Music outro]

Sam:

In the next episode of the 200 Year Old:

Female Sanlam VO:

This podcast is brought to you by Sanlam. To subscribe visit www.the200yearold.co.za

Everything you heard in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

To find out more about the research that went into this episode ask the 200 year old a question on Twitter on @200YearOld

If you liked this episode, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app.

Episode 4

CAST:

Female VO

Amahle - Sam’s daughter - 10 years old

Lesedi Ndaba – a few days from her 200th birthday

Sam Ngwenya – her x5 grandson (a journalist)

Dr Aubrey de Grey (present day expert)

S Jay Olshansky - Author of the Longevity Dividend

Paul Irving - Chairman of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging

Anton Gildenhuys - The Chief Actuary and Group Risk Officer of Sanlam

Doctor

Waitress

Anne - Sam’s AI assistant

Scene 1: Kids these days

Amahle:

Of course I want to live to be 200, dad. Who doesn’t?

Sam:

That’s my daughter Amahle. She’s 10. And she’s not on the fence on this one.

Amahle:

I want to get to 500 at least!

Sam:

Uh ok. Do you think you might get bored of doing the same thing over and over again, maybe?

Amahle:

No dad. You wouldn’t do the same thing over and over again.

Sam:

What would you do then, sweetheart?

Amahle:

I would do everything I wanted to do on earth. Quantum biology, teaching, playing football, running an aquarium

Sam:

What about acting?

Amahle:

Totally, and lots of holidays. Ethiopia, Senegal, Svalbard, Madagascar.

Lemurs I would also study Lemurs for at least fifty years.

Sam: (laughs)

Ok that’s the first 200 years gone. And the rest?

Amahle:

Well then there’s space. Do you know how long it’s going to take to get to Alpha Centauri, our nearest galactic neighbour?

Sam:

Dunno. Can we do that?

Amahle:

100 years there. 100 years back. So you see. 500 years is nothing, dad.

Sam: (narrating)

500 years is nothing... kids huh?

But maybe that’s the big question, once we’ve answered how we can scientifically and financially live for so long, what are we going to do with all that time?

I mean what if as a species, we get so bored that we choose not to live so long, even though we can?

My Name is Sam Ngwenya and this is The 200 Year Old.

Female Voice Over: (sanlam ad music plays under)

Scientists predict that the first person to live to 200 may have already been born.

Everything you hear in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

As Sanlam turns 100 this year, they are looking ahead at what fundamental changes might take place in the world, so that we can plan better for the future.

(music fades)

Sam:

So how does society have to change if we all live for much longer? This is Professor Sarah Harper, Professor of Gerentology at the University of Oxford and the founder of the Oxford Institute of Population Aging, speaking in 2018:

PROF SARAH HARPER:

The really important question then is, is this increased life expectancy at the population level, is it going to be healthy, or is it going to be frail and disabled.

PROF SARAH HARPER:

If it is going to be healthy, then one could possibly argue that the societal implications will be much reduced. We will be working well into our 70’s and 80’s because we won’t hit frailty probably until we get nearer to a century. That however will lead to questions around generational succession in so much as it will take increasingly wider gaps between the generations leading to the fact that we may well be into our 80’s before we start inheriting money from parents or even grandparents, in our 60’s and 70’s before we reach the top of our careers.

PROF SARAH HARPER: The exciting thing about ageing and increasing life expectancy is that actually there is nothing new about living longer. The first verified super centenarian, that is someone who made it to 110, was actually born in 1798, he lived in the lowlands and he made it to 110 and died just before the beginning of the 20th century. And in fact he held the male record for longevity until 1966. We have always, always had long-lived populations, there is nothing unusual about making it into your 80’s or even 90’s. What we are seeing is that the mass population is beginning to achieve that. I think psychologically it is more that we had this strange leap that occurred at the end of the 20th century, in some higher income countries where we introduced this notion of early retirement and we took perfectly fit, healthy able, particularly men in their 50’s and we cast them out into the labor market, and then we gave them 40 years of doing nothing. And, I think that time has gone. We can’t afford it financially.

Scene 2: Expert opinions

Sam: (SFX of travel)

You have to have known that I would go see Lesedi once I found out where she was.

So I’m taking a long shot and travelling across South Africa to eMthatha, where Lesedi was born one hundred and ninety nine years, three hundred and sixty four days ago. I’m hoping to find her in the flesh. And I’ve got to say, I have more questions than answers.

Maybe I’m selfishly dead-set on having a conversation with her in real life because of the decision I have on my hands about my own longevity. But it’s more than that. I need at least one of my conversations with her to have no technology to hide behind. I want her to get really really real with me.

I also can’t help but wonder why all the secrecy?

Although her upcoming birthday is a big deal, and maybe she just doesn’t want to be bombarded by the media? And I guess essentially to her, I suppose I am a journalist....

These last few weeks I’ve had a small glimpse into why she finds the public eye so uncomfortable. It hasn’t taken the press long to track me down as one of her direct relatives. In her absence all her descendents have been bombarded with requests to talk about her.

SFX: back in his home

AI Anne:

Sam, There are 2453 new articles with high credibility rankings on The 200 Year Old. Of these, 898 mention you. I am picking inaccuracies, would you like me to contact the authors and make corrections this morning?

Sam:

So ironically at this point, I’ve taken some inspiration from Lesedi and gone off the grid and ignored all attempts to contact me.

Anne please decline all contacts and don’t share my location.

AI Anne:

Gotcha. Chat later.

Sam:

Of course I’m starting to understand why everyone is so interested. They have a lot of the same questions I have. There is a deep communal sense of uneasiness at the barriers we’re crossing.

Will she be furious at me for coming to find her against her wishes?

Hell hath no fury as a 200 year old woman scorned.

What phase of life will I find her in? What’s she hiding?

And most importantly, what on earth do you give a 200 year old for her birthday?

Scene 3: Meeting a 200 year old.

SFX: Gentle hum of a respirator. Light hospital fx.

Sam:

I’m standing next to Lesedi. You’re hearing the gentle hum of the machine that’s aiding her breathing. She’s asleep.

This is not the same person I’ve been talking to over the last few days. I see a woman in extreme old age on the bed in front of me. She’s incredibly frail. It doesn’t feel too different from the virtual hospital space we’ve previously spoken in. The difference is the crowds of people. I haven’t seen a single other patient here. We’ve made sickness itself obsolete.

Doctor:

Hi, I’m Dr May. Mrs Ndaba stopped taking anti-aging therapies quite some time ago. She’s has been experiencing natural old age for years. But i’m afraid it’s days now. Possibly even hours.

Sam:

Thank you doctor.

Sam:

She’s close to death and being confined to her bed she has obviously been spending her few waking hours in virtual memories. Many of them talking to me, and spending time with loved ones like Bern. She’s no longer capable of talking in real life, so all I can do is sit by her bed, hold her hand, and wait for her to invite me into a memory, so we can have what I’m sad to consider, will likely be our final conversation. I can see now why she didn’t want me to see her like this. We are no longer accustomed to witnessing extreme old age. We’ve been spoilt with excessive youth.

SFX: Lesedi’s cottage at the coast

Lesedi: (cross)

I thought I told you I didn’t want you to come!

Sam:

I’m sorry, Khoko, I just didn’t understand. I needed to see you, I wanted to talk to you in person...

Lesedi:

In person. What does that mean any more? It’s ok Sam i’m a grumpy old woman these days, perhaps this is the only way you can see the full story.

Sam: (narrating)

We’re back in Lesedi’s favourite virtual space. Where we started these conversations. We’re in her kitchen. She’s stirring her tea. She looks exactly as she always has in these conversations. Alert, very much alive.

But the illusion of reality we’ve put together so well is starting to unravel for me. I can feel the pull of the hospital room and hear the artificial breath going into her body. I ask for her forgiveness for disobeying her wishes, and ask if she spends a lot of time here when she’s not talking to me?

Lesedi:

There comes a point where the mind just can’t handle any more change.

When I decided to stop taking longevity treatment, I started to spend more and more time in memory spaces that were familiar from the past. I guess you could say I don’t even experience the present any more. But I am happy Sam. I have many lovely pasts to wander around and spend time in.

Sam:

So you decided a long time ago you did not want to live this long?

Lesedi:

I decided to hand the decision back to nature. Listen to me, I sound like Bern! (laughs) I didn’t expect to make it to 200 but here I am. I guess it has to be me after all. The doctors say I might last a few more days, maybe even till my birthday. That lady in Malaysia must be very cross with me right now. But who knows, perhaps she’ll be the first to make it to 300, then she can win this silly game.

So we better finish up, Sam. I can’t be bothered with all the media nonsense, I’m only talking to you. So whatever we talk about is going to be what the world has of my story.

So you’d better make your last questions good ones, no pressure. (chuckles)

Sam:

(Breathes nervously) Okay.

Lesedi:

But let’s talk somewhere else. I’ve been by myself all day and I need to be around people.

Scene 4: The final conversation

SFX: A street in Johannesburg in present day. Think Rosebank.

Sam:

This is Joburg.

Lesedi:

Yes the old Johannesburg of my youth in the 2020s. If I need a bit of life, this is where I come. It is a great city, isn’t it?

Sam: (narrating)

Lesedi always seems to sense what questions I’m going to ask her. In our final conversation I want to understand the bigger picture. What does breaking the 200 barrier mean for our society? What have we had to change? What do we still need to change?

Lesedi:

So you want to know how much has changed in society? You know Sam. I’ll tell you this, It’s both changed surprisingly little and absolutely completely.

Sam: (confused)

Right, ok then.

Lesedi:

People haven’t changed all that much. It’s very easy to confuse how things look and all this new technology. You know we make these beautiful virtual spaces. We can create any location from my past perfectly. But what do we do, we sit and have coffee together. We know its not real coffee but if you want to sit and chat and share stories that’s what you do. What I’ve learnt is that the way people are is not so different throughout ages.

SFX: they come to a coffee shop

Shall we get a coffee?

Sam: (smiling)

Yes sure.

Lesedi:

Two coffees please, dear.

Waitress: (in the background)

Okay cool.

Sam:

So what is different then? What did we have to change drastically as people started to liv longer?

Lesedi:

Back when it was all just an experiment, people were fearful of extended life, because they had so many questions and knew so little about how it would affect their world. At the start, people were worried about the pressure longevity put on our resources and economy.

And they were right to be concerned, because as you know, there was a period of extreme pressure. Essentially the economy broke, and we had to start from scratch with new ideas.

Sam:

So was technology to blame for all of that?

Lesedi:

But in time, we began to see that technology was not closing doors of opportunity but rather opening doors of possibility. So we had to make the most of those possibilities and dump some of the baggage of the past.

Sam:

This is Paul Irving, in 2018, chairman of the Milken Institute Centre for the Future of Aging.

PAUL IRVING: I am sceptical about the potential extraordinary long lives, but I think that there is quite a good likelihood that we will have longer lives than we have today with advances in science and the spread of, of innovations in public health, and the, the risk associated with that is, and again it is a paradox, the risk is, is that with these additional years we won’t have productive things to do to fill them and I think that that can create anxieties, it can create uncertainties but it also represents this fantastic possibility, the potential to be around multiple generations of one’s family, the potential again to do, different kinds of work at different points in one’s life to develop new relationships.

PAUL IRVING: So, I think it’s incumbent on each one of us and certainly incumbent on the broader society, and the institutions in the broader society, to reimagine how, how we will live these potentially longer lives and to ensure that they are filled with as much purpose, and health and productivity and engagement as is possible. But, to do anything less, would I think be to do a disservice to the accomplishments of science of the last 150 years or so.

PAUL IRVING: As I think about this question of what will people do. Will they do conventional work, will they do something else with their time. Will they simply learn or recreate, the one thing I think is the most important overarching concern is that they not withdraw, become isolated and lonely and disengaged. So, whatever the solution, if the solution is a universal basic income and simply social engagement, it is the conclusion is that everyone should be involved in lifelong learning and spend their time in schools as they are paid, is the opportunity is shared work arrangements where people work shorter hours in which they therefore the opportunity for more people to work is created. And any of those and all of those are possibilities but I think the most important thing is that we don’t retreat to our corners

Sam:

So the biggest changes, then?

Lesedi:

Well universal basic income was a big one, as you know. It was only a few countries that introduced it at first.

DAVID TAL:

My name is David Tal. I am the President of Quantumrun Forecasting. We are a research and consulting agency that uses long-term strategic forecasting to help organisations thrive in future strengths.

So first off, for those who might not be familiar with the UBI, it is basically an abbreviation of the universal basic income. It is a monthly stipend of money that is given to every citizen without preconditions. It is free money basically.

The experiments that we have seen in countries like Canada, a number of Nordic countries, Europe, these smaller experiments with the UBI have shown that people who receive a UBI benefit less stressed and had better mental health and they have food to eat and a roof above their heads - they are physically healthier, they are more willing to go back to school to improve their skills and they work harder and longer because they are freer to find work that is more meaningful to them. Meanwhile the neighbourhoods where the UBI was tested was found to become safer. Average household income actually grew and new business start ups increased significantly.

Sam:

And what’s changed in us, do you think, as a result of these changes?

Lesedi:

We used to have these old sayings, ‘time is money’, ‘you can’t put a value on time’, ‘time is precious’. Well something radical happened when time was suddenly no longer an issue. In just a few decades we went from being time-starved, always in a hurry, never with a second to spare, burning daylight, to something entirely different. I think having more time at our disposal has made us better parents, better friends, and better communities. Not perfect perhaps but better.

Sam:

And I guess we now see things in the long-term. In the true sense of it. I mean if you plant a tree in a garden, now you can be around to watch it grow over centuries. Do you think that made us more responsible perhaps?

Lesedi:

If you know you have to live for a long time, with the consequences of your actions, then you tend to think a bit more, learn from your mistakes more. The thing that really defeated climate change was people realising it wasn’t just the next generation that was going to live with their mistakes. We all get to live with our mistakes now whether they’re personal or global-level mistakes.

Sam:

I see that in raising my daughter. It’s a scary thought that how I raise her may have a knock-on effect for her children and her children’s children and so on and so on. And I may have to be around to watch all that and take responsibility for it. It makes you focus harder.

This is a recording from an interview with Professor Jay Olshansky a Professor of Public Health at the University of Chicago in 2018

Jay Olshansky:

So, we might see some fundamental changes to marriage, to jobs, to concepts of retirement, perhaps even education itself. Imagine going back to school like I am, you know, I have been thinking of doing – like going back to school in your third phase of life to re-learn something totally new and different. You know, once you have accumulated enough wealth that will allow you to transition over to something else, that might be a wave of the future. Now, also keep in mind that you are now going to have three, four or perhaps even five generations alive at the same time, so our housing markets are likely to change, the way in which we interact with our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, those things are likely to change as well. Just the fabric of our society would be fundamentally altered with radical life extension and I think we can’t even comprehend exactly the way in which these, these institutions would change, which is perhaps one of the reasons why I am reluctant to speculate on 150 and 200 year life spans because that is such a radical transformation from where we are today.

Sam:

You know, when we first started talking, you said you weren’t prepared to live for so long.

Lesedi:

That’s right.

Sam:

That perhaps it would be easier for future generations. What is your advice for us, from your personal experience, of how to do this thing better?

Lesedi:

I’ve thought about this a lot, Sam. I do have a responsibility to the future generations. But it’s not a responsibility to make their lives better or happier, no, no they will have to do that for themselves. And I can’t give them or you, for that matter, the answers to the challenges you will face. Other than of course just to be kind,. But the next generation’s world will be so different from my time. My responsibility, actually it’s all of our responsibility, is to not close down options for future generations, or make things unnecessarily difficult for them. If we damage the planet so it is uninhabitable, that would be robbing them of their options. That’s the most important generational legacy we can leave.

Scene 5: The end

Sam:

I’m back at home when I get the news I’ve been expecting.

AI Anne:

Sam. I’ve uh got some sad news for you. The medical facility just informed me of Lesedi’s death and I can give you the details later, but to summarise, you could call it extreme old age. I know you’ll need a few days off. I’ve cleared your diary and informed everyone. I’m so sorry. I know how you must feel.

Sam:

Lesedi Ndaba died on June 14th 2218. 6 days after her 200th birthday. The first human being to live for two centuries.

So that was the big, full life that Khoko Lesedi decided to live. All that’s left now is for me to decide what I want to do with mine. And I think I want to live. Because we haven’t even begun to imagine even a third of the crazy, wild, mind-blowing stuff that the human race is still going to come up with. And I want to stick around and lap it all up, for as long as the world will have me.

I’m Sam Ngwenya, and this has been The Two Hundred Year Old.

[Music outro]

Female Sanlam VO:

This podcast is brought to you by Sanlam. To subscribe visit www.the200yearold.co.za

Everything you hear in this podcast is based on current science and future forecasts by leading experts.

To find out more about the research that went into this episode ask the 200 year old a question on Twitter on @200YearOld

If you liked this episode, please rate it and leave a review on your podcast app.