{"podcast":{"title":"Thought for the Day","slug":"thought-for-the-day-385283","podcast_index_feed_id":385283,"rss_url":"https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p00szxv6.rss","website_url":"http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00szxv6","image_url":"http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/3000x3000/p058ghkx.jpg","author":"BBC","episode_count":26,"summary":"Reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-28T20:17:08.183060+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283"},"episode":{"title":"Jayne Manfredi","slug":"jayne-manfredi","published_at":"2026-05-08T10:12:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283/jayne-manfredi","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283","url":"http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0nk312m","audio_url":"http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0nk2zvw.mp3","summary":"Good morning. If you live to be one hundred, will you still be the same person inside who you’ve always been? Will the same things still make you laugh? Will you remember the best moments of your life…and the worst? Will you still care about the world and will it still care about you, if you live to be one hundred? Let’s ask Sir David Attenborough, who today reaches one hundred. He’s helped create some of the most beloved and respected nature programmes ever made. But he’s a mere whippersnapper in comparison with some of the antediluvian patriarchs from the book of Genesis. There is Methuselah, of course, who is listed as living 969 years. He appears in the genealogy from Adam to Noah, who only lived for 950 years. After the flood, the patriarchs got younger. Moses, for example, only lived for a mere 120 years. There are symbolic and literary interpretations for why these men were described as being extraordinarily long-lived. These stories tell us that ageing should not be feared but revered. That the older a person was, the more respected they were, the more important they were, and crucially, the closer they were to God. Today, ageing is more feared than ever before. We have an obsession with artificially preserving youth to an unnatural degree, as if ageing were a shameful secret. The middle-aged are spoken of with a hint of derision. Our parents dismissed as privileged, clueless boomers. And the generation before them? Silent. Of course, old age doesn’t always lead to wisdom, but anti-ageing rhetoric, however subtle, does lead to a disquieting erosion of worth. To see the elderly as God sees them would be to regard ageing as a privilege, and to see those older than us as repositories of wisdom and experience, instead of a burden on public resources. It is the elde…","meta_description":"Good morning. If you live to be one hundred, will you still be the same person inside who you’ve always been? Will the same things still make you laugh? W…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":189,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/thought-for-the-day-385283/episodes/jayne-manfredi/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283/jayne-manfredi.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}