Welcome to This Is Getting Old: Moving Towards an Age-Friendly World. I'm Dr. Melissa Batchelor, your podcast host. Today's guest has covered the tech world for more than 30 years, and she has never been shy about calling out the billionaires who built it. So when Kara Swisher set out to explore the science of longevity for her new CNN docuseries, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, she brought that same skepticism with her. She talked with Nobel Prize-winning scientists and longevity researchers, but she also talked with ordinary people who are aging well, including my co-host for this episode, Gail Conn. Although the ordinary people didn't make it into the final version, this conversation was recorded in conjunction with the 2026 Age-Friendly Ecosystem Summit that's hosted by the GW Center for Aging. The summit will run across the last four weeks of this October from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, and I've included a link to register to join us in the description below. We built this conversation with Kara around the four themes of the summit: longevity readiness, the caregiving workforce, brain health, and housing and social connection.
During this conversation, Kara compares exercise to a savings account you pay into for decades. She says that friction keeps our brain sharp, and that the most important thing she learned making the series is that human connection matters more than anything. She's honest, opinionated, and often very funny. So, here's our conversation with Kara Swisher.
Well, welcome, Kara. I'm Melissa Batchelor, and I'm the director for the Center for Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University, a professor in the School of Nursing, and the people that are here with us today are from the planning committee for the 2026 Age-Friendly Ecosystem Summit. This is the sixth year that we've done that event, and we were going to have you as part of our day one panel, but we're happy to do a kind of breakout interview with you to accommodate your schedule.
And I asked Gail to co-host with me. Gail explained to me yesterday how you guys knew each other, and I think Pam connected you with Gail, and I think it was connected to your docuseries, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever.
Part of that, you were also talking to normal people aging well, and so we just wanted to have a conversation with you about that today.
All right, Gail, do you want to start?
So, this summit that we're doing, Kara, is in four parts, and there are four weeks of gatherings that have speakers at them. And the first one is the one, as Melissa noted, that we had you involved in, and that's age-friendly initiatives to longevity readiness. And I think that's what you were trying to evoke from the people who you were interviewing for the series. After your experience interviewing those with unlimited funds, can you tell from feedback if you've made an impact helping viewers live longer, healthier, more connected lives?
Oh, I don't know if that's the case. I wouldn't know myself, you know, if they had. But I do think we were trying to impart some ideas about what it means to live forever — not as a real thing, but as a concept — that we could live healthier, longer lives, or healthier, shorter lives. It depends on your life. But I think we were trying to get at the ideas that there's all this narcissism around living forever, and actually there's some real developments being made every single day. Just even today, the people who won the Nobel Prizes, they're around brain cognition and everything else. And so there's all these incredible advances to be made, and we should focus on those, especially around cancer, which is of course the number one killer — heart disease and cancer.
I think one of the things that your docuseries focused on was really how individual people are trying to live forever. And the work that we do is looking at, from a systems level, how do we prepare our communities and develop systems and policies to help people to age better, to live longer and healthier lives? And so, in part of the docuseries and talking to people that are kind of normal people, did you talk to other people besides Gail? And what was the context?
Yeah, lots of people. Not everything made it in, but yeah, we talked to a lot of different people. We talked about food and nutrition, about sleep, about a whole range of different things that you can do, about government policy, around, you know, sort of happiness was one of them, not excessive use of technology, especially AI bots and things like that. So it was the gamut. And then we looked at some of the really futuristic cancer research that was happening. We talked to Jennifer Doudna at Berkeley, who had won the Nobel Prize around her CRISPR technology. And so we were looking at all manner of things, but a lot of it had to do with food, health, exercise, a little bit about exercise, and some of the things that were medical interventions like GLP-1s that are promising and things like that.
But we tried to really do the gamut of it and also talk, obviously, about how we live in this society and what we don't live with, which is universal health care. And I think one of the things is most countries that have a higher life expectancy live longer than us, like Korea, where we went, they have universal health care. I mean, it's a real simple thing. We should have universal health care, universal day care, and a $25 minimum wage, and our health would go up significantly. But we prefer to give money to billionaires instead, or they prefer to give it to themselves, and the president facilitates that.
True. Gail, do you have another question?
So, I do. I was going to move on to another section. So, Melissa, if you have another question about the longevity readiness, I was going to move on to the second week. And the second week, the topic is the invisible workforce: care partners in crisis and the path forward. You alluded to this when you were talking about the wage issue, but...
There will be more people your age and older than those who are 60 and younger in a few years.
Yes, of course. Among the policies that will be discussed on October 15th are paid family leave, respite care, and caregiver tax credits. Given the prevailing wages for long-term care workers and the often challenging patient assignments, U.S. residents are hard to attract to this work. Do you have thoughts about how we can support those who need personal assistance to get the care each one needs?
Well, there's a lot of different policies. Our immigration policy right now is cruel, and it's pushing out, for example, Haitian immigrants, all manner of immigrants, Filipinos. There's a lot of people who come in from other countries to do this work for everybody. That's one. And obviously, we have to sustain them with a viable minimum wage. It's sort of like at the beginning and end of everything because it gives people money to be able to live. And you know, the more unhoused you are, the more unstable you are in that regard, the sicker you get, the more costs into the system. We're kind of like shooting our feet off constantly on these kind of things. And day care — I don't mean just kids, I mean adults, elderly. You have to think of it that way. This stage of life requires a lot. I have a mother who's 92 who needs a lot of care, and it's time-consuming, and the people who do it are amazing at what they're doing, and I happen to pay them quite a high wage because I think it's worth it. Their labor is worth it. But we sort of minimize lots of different labors of care in this country, around nursing, around teachers, caregivers. And so we have to sort of change the mentality of how we do this because it's going to become a crisis because of the aging population.
They have all kinds of methods in Korea, which has a much higher level of age — people live much longer there, and they have all manner of efforts they're making around that and dedicating a lot of time and attention to it because it's a real crisis. Whether it's housing — putting young people and older people in the same housing, which is a really interesting and innovative way to do it — or, you know, actually they're giving some of these elderly people AI dolls, which in this case I think AI works really well for them because they have some companionship, and it creates a doll-play situation which is good for them mentally and cognitively. And it's monitored really closely because they care about safety and privacy in that country, as opposed to ours. And so there's all manner of things we could think about of how to help people age gracefully.
And what we tend to do is we run a sick-care society, which is we keep them alive far too long in really bad states, and spend all that money on the hospitalization or the last five — I think people spend more in their last five years of life than they do throughout their lives on health care, which is kind of ridiculous because it's the end, right? So how do you get palliative care? And it does begin with paying people a decent wage to do this. People are attracted by money, and if we paid people enough — it's not that Americans don't want to do it, it's that they don't like the money they're getting for it. It's also really difficult work. We have to sort of stop pretending and hiding the idea that people get old and sort of shelving them away. Which is, you know, that's not a new thing — people used to do it. Indigenous tribes used to do it. It's a really difficult thing, but they had to move around and there was a real significant danger to the tribe in that case, so it made sense. Today we have all these ways to take care of people. You redesign the idea of old folks' homes, and there's far too many people at home alone. There should be more community-based efforts around that. But there's a whole range of things you can put into place, and again, it begins with universal day care for the elderly and young kids, and that we should prioritize in our society so people, you know, they come in and they're cared for, and they leave and they're cared for.
