I’m a little embarrassed to admit I haven’t visited my Auntie E in a long while. I last saw her in 2020, six years ago. She’s 108 years old now, so she’s a bit of an outlier in the longevity department. In my defense, I had been phoning and emailing her. The thing is, she was losing her mental faculties decades ago, so I was afraid of what I would find on the next visit to her family farm, where she lives alone.
If you want a refresher on my Auntie E and the list of previous MW posts featuring her, here they are:
| Post Date | Post Title | Auntie’s Age |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 6, 2010 | THE GRACIOUSNESS OF ‘NO’ | 92 |
| Sep 20, 2012 | WEEKEND WITH AUNTIE E | 94 |
| Jun 1, 2018 | AUNTIE E’S BIG BREAK | 100 |
| Feb 6, 2020 | AUNTIE E CONFESSIONAL | 102 |
Here’s what transpired when I made my most recent pilgrimage to her front door early last month.
“Well this is an unexpected surprise! Come on in Dear.”
“And it is so nice to see you too. But what do you mean by ‘unexpected visitor’? I told you I was coming in our last phone chat.”
“Well, you’ve said that for six years now. And my last visitor—just last week—sent an advance reconnaissance team.”
After a brief awkward silence…
“Good one, Auntie. You are kidding, right?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t go into this. Your expression changed for the worse just now.”
“You had a visitor that requires a security detail?”
“Yes. For the first time ever. And he didn’t have the full detail with him because, as he said, we’re in the ‘middle of nowhere‘. It was Mr Musk. Elon. Let’s sit down and talk about this.”
“Okay Auntie, I’ll play along. What was the purpose of his visit? And how did he find you?”
“That was my first question, of course. He said something like…
“I’m interested in longevity. I have a team of AI Agents scouring the world for stories of people demonstrating unusual long yet vital life. There was an article in something called ‘The Creemore Echo’ about you leaving your retirement home to return to your family farm. The rest was easy. The short runway at your Collingwood Airport meant I had to take my little staff jet, the G550. Then my Cybertruck from there to here.”
“My goodness, that’s so much effort and I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer to your next question. I don’t know why I seem to have aged so well. I’ve lived a moderate life but not a monastic one. I’ve come to believe I’m just lucky.”
“And I’ve come to believe the wealthier I am, the luckier I get.
“Mr Musk, that’s not how the saying goes.”
“Please call me Elon.”
“It seems you tech billionaires are all very interested in—or at least investing in—longevity research and technolgy. Mr Bezos, Mr Ellison, Mr Zuckeberg, Mr Altman…”
“I won’t talk about Altman. Like those other boys, I’m interested, but unlike them, I don’t invest. I believe life extension-focused research is a waste of time and money because it will lead to social and cultural stagnation.”
“Yes, a very inclusive, generous thought. But you said that quite a while ago and you’re well past 50 now, right? I can tell you that the older you get, the more you think about aging and your own future. You have to fight that impulse. I can also tell you that the closer people are to the poverty line, the less they worry about their longevity.”
“It might be more of a because-we-can thing. So tell me, why did you leave the retirement home?”
“Well Mr-er-Elon, I felt that the institution no longer had anything to offer me.”
“HA! That’s a John Goodman line from 1987’s Raising Arizona! You’re a movie buff!”
“I said it for your benefit. You are clearly heavily influenced by movies and science fiction.”
“You are well-read, aren’t you? One of the burdens of being the wealthiest person on Earth is that everyone knows more about me—right or wrong—than I know about them.”
“Forgive me but I’m not feeling sorry for you yet.”
“More examples of that last thought, please.”
“’We’re all living in a simulation’ is from watching The Matrix too many times. Your Neuralink is part Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 sci-fi novel, and again, The Matrix Trilogy. The design of your Cybertruck parked out there is part ‘Spinner’ from Blade Runner and part ‘Wet Nellie’ from The Spy Who Loved Me. I’ll admit I don’t know where the Mars thing comes from. You did read or see The Martian, didn’t you?”
“I’m more partial to Project Hail Mary. I don’t know if the movie has been released way up here yet, but Andy Weir wrote the book in 2021.”
“I don’t go to theatres any more but I did read the book. Upliftimg, but more science fiction than science.”
“Were your parents long-lived?”
“Yes, by the life expectancy of their day—the first half of the 1900s. No, by today’s standards and certainly not by your standards. They died at 58 and 60 years old. They were farming people so they were active right up until their deaths. They didn’t linger with illness and they didn’t live long enough to develop any version of senile dementia. Have you come to the northern rainforest to discover some pharmamceutial, lifestyle or genetic secret to longevity?”
“I’m curious and my curiousity led me here.”
“May I ask you a question?”
(medium-long pause)“Yes.”
“SpaceX and the pursuit of a colony on Mars—that’s not to save you, that’s to save humankind from extinction a billion years from now?”
“Correct. For our civilization to survive beyond our solar system’s natural extinction event, we must become interplanetary or interstellar. Or we go the way of the dinosaurs.”
“Not all the dinosaurs died, but I get your meaning in the context of the sun dying. Humans have only been around for 300,000 years. That’s .03% of our total timeline. Don’t you think we can figure this out given how fast our knowledge and technology has evolved in the past 100 years?”
“Someone has to start the process and I can.”
“I believe you’ve acknowldged recently that you will not live long enough to go to Mars.”
“But I tried, didn’t I? Goddammit, at least I did that!”
“That’s Jack Nicholson as Randle P McMurphy in the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“Correct, Nurse Ratched.”
“Am I being too harsh? What I’m getting to is that you should focus on the present and your children’s future rather than the distant unborn future. Saving mankind from extinction sounds like a video game, your oft-stated ‘primary recreational activity’.”
“It seems your information on me is a bit dated, Eileen. May I call you that?”
“Yes. What I know of you comes from the traditional news—legacy news media as you call it—and the Lex Fridman podcast you did in 2023. I wanted to listen to the Fridman podcast you did last year on Neuralink, but it’s eight hours long and I’m not sure I have enough time left for that.”
“You should read the Walter Isaacson biography, if you want to know more.”
“On the Neuralink topic, are you sure you want to be in a world where anyone can be as smart as you? Or smarter if you don’t get your brain chipped as well? I note that you haven’t been on one of your own rockets yet.”
“I came here to talk about your longevity. What I’m sensing from you is passive aggressive hostility. I’m used to a little more sucking up. Is there anything I’ve done that you approve of?”
“I really liked the Elon Musk I saw hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2023. He admitted to and embraced his neurodiversity in front of the world. As I recall, the exact quote was,
“Look, I know I say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I have offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
At the risk of spoiling our moment, I’ll point out that you are a little ahead of yourself saying SpaceX is sending people to Mars. But I really liked that Elon Musk sharing the SNL moment with his mother, Maye.”
“(medium pause) Okay, thank you for that. Look Eileen, I’m auditioning for a great grandmother for my kids. Would like to apply? I will pay all costs associated with the process.”
“No, thank you. I would end up spending all my time fending off people trying to get to you through me. But let me leave you with this. Choose and pursue projects that help the people you are directly responsible for, and be more devout to your God of Spinoza [2]. He wants you to live for and enjoy today. The eventual extinction of mankind is a natural consequence of universal physics.”
Auntie E said she couldn’t remember much of the conversation after this. She said it seemed like more of a private conversation. Apparently Musk stayed for a Diet Coke (which the advance team told her to get) and a croissant from YF Patissier Chocolatier [3], because she refused to get any doughnuts for her expected guest. She even suggested she felt a little sorry for Musk, the richest man in the world. Of course, I’m not believing any of this.
Oh, what a kooky ol’ gal she is.
- Main image credit: Auntie E, April 6, 2026.
- Named for and attributed to Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Albert Einstein was his most famous 20th-century supporter, which may explain Silicon Valley’s facination.
- YF Patissier + Chocolatier is an outstanding artisanal patissier & chocolatier shop in the village of Creemore, Ontario.
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