Modern Wisdom - #201 - Andrew Scott - Society Has Everything Wrong About Ageing

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Andrew Scott is an economist and an author. Society has never been so old and yet never had so long still to live. More women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20 in 2019 and 1 in 5 women born today will reach 100 years old. What does this ageing globe mean for how we should see our life's journey? How should public policy be changed? And what are we going to do with all these old people (including ourselves)? Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Buy The New Long Life - https://amzn.to/3eO9NUd  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Andrew Scott and we're talking about longevity. Society has never been so old and also never had so long to live. More women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20 in 2019. And one in five women born today are going to live to be a hundred based on predictions for the UK population. All of this means that our existing paradigms, what we think of as age, old, mid and young, are pretty much out the window. Every generation that lives is eight years older than the generation before, which means that every three generations lives for another generation. All of these knowledge bombs, sadly, are not mine, but they're Andrews and you're going to get to hear this and much more in this episode. He's

a wonderful speaker. The book is fantastic. The new long life. You're going to love this episode. So cool. We get into some stuff to do with society's interpretations of age, how people can really refine their careers, lifelong learning, romance, everything. Really, really cool. I am getting tons of messages about the Modern Wisdom Academy and this Monday, I've got the first ever Modern Wisdom Academy episode, no, going live for free. And I'm going to tell you how you can get a hold of it before the episode on Monday. I want to get some feedback about the format and the way that it looks and also gauge interest for how many people really want this Academy product. I know that it's

a lot of you. I'm so excited about this. I don't think I've ever been so excited to get a project off the ground. The opportunity to get the best podcast notes right, there's on the planet to summarize all the key learnings, the main takeaways, the best quotes from every modern wisdom episode ready for you. The day that the episode goes live gasses me up so much, it's going to maximize everyone's retention, it's going to supercharge your progress. I'm just so excited. I think there's another podcast on the planet that's doing this. So, um, yeah, this is going to be sick. Monday, you'll get to find out. You also get the Oli March on episode notes. That's the one that we went for, which shows the Oli March on episode considering it was super popular and there was some real sort of mic drop quotes in there. So, yeah, we're going to, we're going to get those notes up and available for you on Monday.

And you get to check out a little bit of a preview for the for the Academy. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Andrew Scott. Lovely to have you here. So we're talking about getting older, kind of. Yeah, an almond old man or 55, although not an old man or 55, that's one of the things. So I work on the area of longevity, I'm an economist, and I kind of think society's got something wrong because we keep talking about this aging society, you know, there's the birth rates declining, people are living for long because there's more old people, which is certainly true. And a number of people aged over 65 is growing everywhere, over 80s growing,

the fastest grade group, a number of people aged over 100. For the first time ever, the world today has more people aged over 65 and under five. You kind of get the story. And the general problem is that that scene is a challenge because all people are a problem, they get ill, they don't work, they claim a pension and we can't afford it. But actually, I think we need to flip it around and actually look what's really happening, which is on average, we're living for longer and we're healthier for longer. So whatever age you are, you've got a lot more time ahead of you.

And certainly the younger you are, the more time you have got ahead of you. So the UK government in 2018 said one in five girls would live born today would have to be a hundred. One in five girls is going to be triple figures. The Queen's going to be knackered. Right. In all those lessons. It's work. I mean, the Queen is apparently to have one person sending the

telegrams of a hunger. No, she's got the bottom of seven. In Japan, they used to send out a silver sarky dish when you reached a hundred. They've scrapped it now because I couldn't afford to do it. Because so many people are reaching age a hundred. And that, but the thing is we kind of therefore, well, that means everyone have every, so the average Brit has never been so old but never had so long left to live. What an odd paradox. Yeah, so kind of, if you've got more time ahead

of you, you know, why are you kind of younger, not older, but, you know, what this is the way I put it is as follows. You see these big increases in life expectancy, but we haven't changed our concept of age because we measure age by a number of calendars in your birthday cake. And of course, 12 months is always 12 months, but how are aging is changing? We're actually aging better. It's a biological age and chronology of age are breaking out a little bit their relationship. And if you look at the scientific research happening, they say, wow, you haven't seen anything yet. Some wild things are going to happen. You know, you know, everyone's going to live to 120 and be healthy forever is kind of what some people are saying.

But this is really about having more time. And what I always say is that, you know, if your day went from 24 hours to 32 hours, which is like life expense, you're going longer, you'd run your day went from 24 hours to 32 hours, which is like life expense, you're going longer. You'd run your day differently. I mean, what would you do, Chris? Would you get out of bed at the same time and go to sleep at the same time? What would you do? Absolutely. If the day went from 24 to 32. Someone asked me, what superpower would you have if you could have one? And I said, never need to sleep. And that's essentially the equivalent

of what you've just given me there. Oh, God, if you gave me, if you gave me another eight hours in my waking day, it would be, it would be glorious. But then Parkinson's law, right, you expand your work to fill the time that's given for it. Like it would be, it would be phenomenal. I mean, the moon is going to slow the earth rotation over the next couple of billion years sufficiently that we're going to end up with some really, really long days, you know. I didn't know that. That's a good one. But, you know, so this pushes me a bit more because we kind of think that this longer

life is all the years come at the end of life. But it's not actually, in a way to think about where these actually has come from, they kind of come at late middle age. It fits like, someone's inserted kind of another 20 years at age 50. And that then raises all sorts of issues because as the day, you know, again, the taking the day from 24 to 32 hours, you know, I would probably get out of bed earlier and go to bed later. I'd have a lovely sleep in the middle of the day.

And I would probably not have three meals. I'd probably have five meals, hopefully smaller meals, I'd never reach there. And I still call them breakfast lunch and dinner, but I'd shift them and they would be different and at different times. And that's kind of what's happening with this life expectancy increase. In the 20th century we created teenagers and pensioners. They didn't use to exist before the 20th century. So with life experience, we created these two new stages. Previously, you just had children and adults. You didn't have teenagers. And of course, that's life is getting longer. I think you're also seeing major changes in behaviour. So people are now getting married at 30 rather than 20 that have in kids in their 30s rather than 20s. Again, another kind of weird start.

I think last year in the UK for the first time ever, more women over 40 had a child than women under 20. No way. Which is a massive change. That's a huge, huge difference. And also, we've been talking about it a lot on here, evolution in the dating market and the

brutal, evolution's brutal travesty about women is the narrow window that they have to have children in. And that, start that more women have children over 40 than under 20 is really, you know, that's great news for a lot of women. Absolutely, but of course, you're then seeing all sorts of changes happen. So the other one is that on average, the devil straight is falling in the UK. And I think that's because people are getting married later. They kind of know themselves better and blah, blah, blah. I just want to say you can't succeed if you get married early, but I think I said.

And although the devil straight is falling on average, you're actually seeing the devil straight rise amongst the over 50s, and I think doing some back of the envelope calculations, it's probably growing fastest amongst the over 80s. So I can't think of a better start about longevity than divorces rising in the 80s because it's a kind of a sign of how long you've been together and how much more time there's still is to go. You're seeing rises of STDs amongst people aged over 60 because you're getting so much more dating happening in this sort of remarrying market. So these are kind of deep changes in how we structure our life. And of course the younger you are, the bigger the implications. And of course one of them, you said, you, you know, work expands throughout the time available. Some of those years,

you can have to spend working for longer. Well yeah, previously if you only had 15 years or 10 years left after retiring, you didn't really need to be too concerned about what the pot of gold was that you had saved up in your in your iser or whatever it was at the time. That's all going to change. So there's so much to get into. I mean, to start with the new long life, which is your book, why did you feel like that needed to be written? Just to kind of open this door, break the fourth wall to people so they actually understand what's going on. Yeah, so in 2016 we wrote the 100 year life which was about the day going away, it was about 24 to 32 hours and what that means and we were sort of saying it changes careers, it changes relationships, changes how you plan your life and then what we were trying

to do was put a positive narrative around aging and saying actually actually, the really good news is, you're living longer in your healthier for longer, you've got more time. And it's not at the end of life, you can use it across all of life. So it's like a liberating story. One of the feedback we got was, great, I'm going to have to work for longer, where the job's going to come from. There's this tech coming along. And that's going to take over our lives, it's going to make us all jobless. And I think what's interesting is these two phenomena of aging and smart AI and robotics. I call it the Frankenstein Syndrome.

There are, we're fearful of these great inventions. We've added years to life. We've got this wonderful new technology coming along. But we're think it's going to be a bad outcome. So the question is, in neither of them are destiny, we can shape them as we see fit. So how do you prepare for these forces? What do you want to get out of them? And then how do we make sure society achieves that? And I think, you know, this to me is a key thing, we are about to see some pretty fundamental

changes in life and work. And we've got to make sure it works for us as people and as a society. So we need to start saying I want this and not that. When the Industrial Revolution first happened, you saw GDP improve, you saw this great new technology, but it was a pretty bad experience socially for lots of people. Wages didn't rise, anxiety was high, living conditions were poor. And then after a while, you started to see trade unions, a labour movement, and they said, this is what we want from it. And so we then saw, you know, the working week go from six and a half days to six days to five days. We've got the weekend, we've got bank holidays. We've got all sorts of changes to make sure that it could actually work for us socially. And that's kind of why we wrote the New Long Life. We have these smart new

technology, these longer lives, rather than be frightened by them, how do you make sure we actually seize the advantages of them? Are people going to be working until 75 then and 80 is this realistic? Well, I think they are. I mean, it's quite staggering, what's already happening. But yeah, I mean, we do some simple calculations in the 100-year life, which sort of says, if you're going to live to 100 and you're prepared to save, say, 10% a year of your income, which is pretty ambitious, and you want to retire in half of your final salary, you'll probably work into your late 70s. So yeah, that's, that's, so then the immediate thought is, wow, God, how is that going to work? Because if I start work at 20 and I carry on doing the

same thing to my mid 70s, that sounds pretty dull. And you know, I'm going to get bored and also, well, I keep my job or something happens? So this is where we say we're seeing a major shift. And, you know, your listeners, I think, will be already aware of this. I think it's more of a shock to older people. But the three-stage life that was invented in the 20th century of education, followed by a career, followed by retirement, is already disappearing. A retirement's kind of already gone.

There's no point where everyone suddenly stops working. And you're seeing more and more people over 50, over 60, over 70 working. I think at one in 10, Brits over 70 are working, and that number's just rising. So we're seeing there, but we're then seeing changes right the way you're along the career path, because of course, you do things differently.

And yeah, for instance instance one of the things we see is a lot of entrepreneurship by people in the 70s and people in the 20s and I think you can kind of understand why because you know if we have got this longer path how do we use it to our advantage and I think that gives us more time to investigate and explore you certainly don't want to commit so early options become more important the longer the horizon you hold them for. So again, not marrying early perhaps is a way of keeping your options open, discovering what you like and what you're good at rather than rushing into the first job. You know, these are all possibilities that we can try and experiment with.

So that explains a way, the fact that I'm still single at 32. Yes. Are're young man. Thank you. So that's what you're saying, Andrew, is that actually it's perhaps the most prudent approach and not that I'm just hopeless, hopelessly single. Yeah, it's so interesting to see the way that people's relationships with their jobs have changed, right? Like, you know, we've got my core industry is nightlife.

So I take students 18 and 19 year olds, these rough, hewn rocks and try and buff them into brilliant entrepreneurial gemstones over the course of three years. And I see these kids, we've got some of the guys that work for us, who at 19, 20 years old, at beasts, absolute

freak savages when it comes to being able to think, literally, to problem solve, to be able to deal with the chaos of being in a nightlife environment, for instance. And you think like only in the gap of 14 years between me at 32 and then at 1819. I'm sitting like, I wasn't anywhere near as mature as that. And that's only in this pit time period, right? So you're starting to see young people being older and old people being younger. Yes, well, I think that's the, I think that's kind of right because in that, that three-stage life sort of age and stage come together. But in a multi-stage life think that's kind of right because in that that three-stage life sort of age and stage come together, but in a multi-stage life you can kind of, and by a multi-sled

life I mean you're going to have several different parts to your career and this is just on that longevity, let alone things like technology coming into play. But you're going to want to do different things at different points in time, it may be this is a time to focus on relationships, it may be a time to focus on skills and learning or making money or making contribution in society. And you're going to flip all those around. And that does require a certain flexibility. And I think actually that's where, I mean, particularly as you get older, it's going to be more important to sort of be young. So adolescence is meant to be a time of change where it's kind of kind of scary because you're no longer the child you were, but you're not yet the adult you're going to be.

And that's exciting because I could be anyone, but it's also terrifying because who am I? And we have all these institutions to help people through that, but in a way we're going to see that more and more every age because you know, you will find people in their 30s or their 50s or their 70s saying, you know what, I've got another 20, 30 years ahead of me, and other 50s are doing something different. So how do you go through that process of change? And as a teenager, we kind of accept it, but we now go try and accept it at other stages, and that's tricky. So that in a way is a transition that kind of binds lots of different people together. I tell you what I would absolutely love. I would love to see someone in their 70s rocking up to do

an undergraduate degree. You know? Well, they are doing it. You say, and so I mean, so this is a really good point. And, you know, I think we've got a bit messed up as a society about age because we think so the real secret of age is we age very diversely. So if you accept the chronological age is not a good measure of biological age, you're going to age differently because of bad luck, the environment that you live in and because of your own diet, behavior and healthcare. So actually what happens as you get older, you see this great diversity in how people age. You can be like kind of a ton more in your hundreds raising millions for charity or you could be in a wheelchair at 50.

So actually, older you get the less relevant ages and number is, but we really just assume that age tells you something and that therefore everyone over 65 is the same. Now you wouldn't dream of saying over under 35 is the same, but we kind of say it for over 65s. But that three-stage life of education at work retirement led to lots of age segregation. You've kind of lost this intergenerational mixing. And I think that's really important. So your idea of people in the 70s, going back to university, it's actually having the number of places it's doing it. Of course, it's got a bit slightly different program with some overlap, but we have lost a lot of that intergenerational

mixing, which is why we have all these dreadful stereotypes around about Gen X, baby boomers, millennials, which I think we're really getting the way of just seeing people as people. Is that a byproduct of just the period of change that inevitably you do need to categorize some people into this is the, this is the epoch of the world that you lived through and this is the epoch of the world that I lived through and because of the pace of change, those epochs whereas previously might have been 100 years or 50 years, are now like a 10-year gap. That's the theory. And certainly, there are modern invention these generational labels, they didn't use to

exist. I think there's something in them. And you're absolutely right, that sort of theory that there's a world change is this 10 years, is different from that 10 years. But you kind of know that change doesn't happen quite so discreetly. You know, we can't point to that, oh, well, that's what caused that change. So everyone's, everything's a little bit overlapping. And I think, you know, for me, the trouble with the generational stuff is not that there

isn't something, of course there is, you know, a child who's bought up playing with an iPad from an early age and be very different from one who, you know, through whom, you know, the telephone was something to use. So there's clearly going to be a difference. But of course what you see is technology spreads throughout society. Look at what's happening in COVID. I hope people are using technology a lot more. So it does spread through. So I think the danger of the generation stuff is too far. There's a whiff of, I call it demographic astrology. I don't know if you like horoscopes. The idea is, but my mum does, so be careful what you say, you'll be getting the message on Instagram. People like them. But the idea that your character is firmly pinned down by precise dates you were born in. I think can be limiting. And you know, if I think of the difference between the average millennial and the average baby

boomer, I think it's quite small compared to the differences amongst millennials and amongst baby boomers. So it's too easy way of stereotyping. I think it's useful to think about young and old, and there are real tensions there, but I'm not quite sure how much insight we get from calling someone a bae, and I'll tell you why it worries me because it becomes a zero-sum game.

And why that's important is that, you know, it comes back to some of the stats again. A hundred years ago, in 1920, when Spanish influenza happened, a 20-year-old had a 50% chance of making it to 70. So most young people didn't become old. Today, it's 90%. So basically, young people are going to become old in a way that they've never done before.

And this is where some of the ages and becomes a problem because it's kind of a prejudice against your future self And so you know I think you know when you got this long life ahead of you you've got to think about different stages in different ways and Savi the young young forever, although the scientists get the way perhaps that will happen Um, and I think we we forget that you know this you know you're always a millennial you're always a baby boomer, but millennia is getting quite old now. They're middle aged. That's the Gen X and now the younger ones are wow for Gen or whatever's coming through.

And I think that's a better way of looking at things than just saying, you're that group, I'm this group, there's a constant conflict between us. I get it. So a machine's going to take our jobs. You looked at technology and technological change a lot. Am I going to be replaced by a robot on a microphone in a couple of years time? You might be. So I don't think so. There's this smart technology coming along. I don't, I mean,

depends how smart the technology gets. There's in the past, technologies, what's made us richer. It has an creative mass unemployment. It's created higher productivity, higher wages and a shorter working week. And let's hope that happens. It's pretty clear that AI is going to change the jobs we do and it's going to change how you do them. So even if you don't lose your job,

what you do is going to change. So the way economists look at this is they look at a job as being made up a lot of different tasks. So just bear with me on this one. So a job may involve 20 or 30 tasks. I'm an economics professor, I go to do research, I go to teach, I go to grade,

and I have to go to endless meetings. So the question is, which of those tasks can be automated. And if you look at what AI is doing, the first set of tasks it started to get rid of, we've what are called routine, kind of non-thinking task tasks that you can just write a list of processes and the machine can do it. So back office processing, check clearing that type of stuff. Now what you're getting with technologies is it's starting to do two other things. It's starting to do routine cognitive tasks. So what's that? That seems like marketing, legal advice, accounting, financial advice. The sort of the standard stuff like give me a bunch of numbers and tell what to do with the marketing plan, give me

a bunch of numbers and calculate an investment plan, that can all be done by AI and it is increasingly doing so. So all those tasks were starting to get done. The other set of tasks that is happening, it seems like driverless cars that are non-routine, so it's unpredictable, but sort of instinctive rather than analytical and they're also disappearing. So it depends how much of your job is made up of the task that can be automated, and then how much that you're going to shift into the other task. I think in terms of me as a professor, we'll probably get grading done by robots and AI, possibly teaching done remotely, but then I'll have more meetings and more research.

Oh, I'm sure it sounds like you're absolutely thrilled about the idea of more meetings. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, those things that we as humans will always be best at. I think the best way I think about what's going to happen in the labour market is that as machines become more machine like your advantage is in being more human-like. So what is it to be more human? It's caring, sharing, empathy, but also sort of decision-making under uncertainty, ambiguity, leadership, those sorts of things. So that's kind of where the jobs of the future I think are,

not necessarily in the sort of, let me be ever smarter than the machine, but it does require everyone's in a race with technology. For education, he's a head of technology, you're doing okay. So we have need to advance our education, but also it's going to require different skill because I say I think most people won't lose their job, but what their job is will change. So there's going to be a lot of upskilling and re-skilling required here. of upskilling and re-skilling are required here. If you were someone now who is considering re-skilling themselves, how would you make someone antifragile for the next couple of decades in the job market? Yeah, and so one temptation of course is to get involved in coding and science and there's lots of jobs in AI world for that.

The evidence is just that that probably just gives you a job for 10 years because soon it becomes out of date and you need to do something else. So I think the first thing is to accept that probably, you know, there's no job that's going to be secure for 20, 30 years. So you may have to be continually evolving and changing. But one of the most important things is just learning how to learn and to be flexible and also finding out what it is that you like because if you're gonna be doing something for a long while, it's important that it's the right thing for you. So that experimentation is also very, very important.

But in general, it's a combination of what we call T-shaped learning. It's going deep in one dimension and then broad in others. And then every now and then you'll have your career will change because you've gone deep in a subject that it'll need to evolve and shift into something different. So it is facing up to the fact that probably every 10, 15 years, you're going to have to do a major reskilling or reorientation. That's so interesting. It's funny listening to how the rhetoric that you're putting across ties in with so much stuff that we've touched on recently, Dr Adam Hart, who wrote Unfit for Purpose, which is an assessment of our evolutionary heritage and how it's misaligned with

modern society, saying all the same things, right? We're just, we're a gale golden curating your life, which is looking at how the work-life balance is done. Again, it's all the same stuff. And we had Pete a sea brown learning to learn, make it stick, creator. We had him on this two years ago. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and check it out, it's awesome.

But yeah, we had him on. And he was talking about that, that the ultimate ability, the ultimate anti-fragile skill is to learn to learn. It is. And it's so interesting. So there's a number of things that I won't pick up on, which is really, you know, as you say, fit Simba, I'm saying, the first is that with this longer life, one of the great skills is going to be thinking long-term. And that's not something we're hard to do. Most of your human existence has been just surviving to be under the date, little I'm planning in 1880 years ahead. And that's going to be a challenge. I mean,

certainly for me it is. But the other thing is in thinking longer term, you've got to just rewire, first of all, you mustn't kind of copy what your parents do because your life will be longer than theirs. But you've got to just re-white. First of all, you mustn't kind of copy what your parents do, because your life will be longer than theirs. But you've got to think about investing in a range of, I call it, assets, because I'm an economist and somebody that is financial. But actually, the most important thing is that you see through this life will be your skills, your relationships, your health, and your sense of identity that can navigate through these processes

of change. And that's going to kind of be a great opportunity because I think one of the great things about living for a long time is then it can be your life. You know, it gets a bit Buddhist-like and I'm going to go through lots of stages. What is it that makes it all hang together? But that sort of thinking long-term, reinventing, and then managing to staple it together is important. And this is where the job is going to be very different, because the other thing that AI is going to do,

is not just cause lots of changes to your career, but we're seeing jobs now, sometimes you have a job where I go to a place of work and I have an employer who pays me money. But we're increasingly seeing jobs also being specified in terms of task. So in the gig economy, I have a task and I get paid for that task. And I don't have an employer, I just have somebody who pays me for that task. And over this long career, you're going to go through a whole bunch of cycles where sometimes you go to a job, sometimes it's more task-based,

sometimes it's flexible work, sometimes it's not contingent, it's a proper job, sometimes you'll be working on-site, sometimes you'll be working at home. So you're going to be cycling through all of these different stages, and sometimes it'll be a choice. You know, I don't want that full-time job, I want to work in the Go Go Army. Other times it's going to be shit, I really want a job, but I'm stuck in the Go Go economy. So it's going to be a lot of depth to it. that leads to some big changes because you mentioned work life balance. Don't get too historical here, but I would have to guess that work life balance came in with

industrial revolution because what industrial revolution did was create a place of work and a place of home. Before and everything kind of happened in the home or in the fields. And there wasn't a separation between a place of work and a home, there wasn't a separation between work and leisure. There probably wasn't much leisure and it was all work, but it was kind of blended together. And then we get this work life balance. How do I get my life at home and my work done here?

But in this world of these evolving jobs, work I think would take on a much broader meaning, because sometimes you'll be doing work where you're not getting paid for it because you're brushing up on your skills to get another job or I'm doing some marketing hoping to get a job while I'm networking, I'm doing some charity work and it's a sense of productive use of time but I'm not getting a check for it. And if you'd like that, I'm not sure work life balance even exists anymore, it's kind of just all blended into one, which many people are finding with COVID as a work

from home anyway. But it's a very different way of structuring a career and how you think about things. From as I've got the fortune of being able to ask an economist this, from a personal finances perspective, what is your view in this case on managing wealth? Is the most optimal approach, as far as your concern, to front load wealth acquisition, to downplay liabilities early in life and then to be able to iterate on that compounding effect as much as you can, or is it to live your life and then because you've got long enough to continue to earn as you get older, where do you sit on this spectrum?

So because I kind of think of lots of things as being an asset, not just money, you're going to get compounding on everything, you're going to get compounding on your health, you're going to get compounding on relationships. So it's a real question of balance. I think the financial one is interesting because in this multi-stage life you could spend the first 10, 15 years, not earning money, you know, sort of washing your face financially, but that's just, you know, that's just the aim of it. And then saying, right, I need money. Or you could be working

really hard to get money to give you freedom later. I think in the end, part of that is going to be about you as a personality, about your attitude to risk. And I've got the money locked down, that's good. So it's really about thinking about how your future then may unfold. And it could well be that's great getting the money. But of course, you may be missing opportunities, which won't come again later.

So it's now a lot more complicated. So that's sort of a wimping out from the answer, but any investment advice has to be tailored for the person. And I think it's totally legitimate not to focus on finances early on. I think actually the really big value of this new stage of life is exploring, not committing, a normally earning amounts of money involves some form of commitment. But heck, if it bothers you the money, if you can get a job that you really enjoy that brings in money, go for it.

But I think, yeah, and certainly compound interest really helps. The best advice I ever heard is just to have a much your earning, try and put a side of fixed percentage into a long-term pot. And I think that's right, even if it's just up, you know, £5 a week or something like that. It really does make a difference. So that would be the best advice, but that's not about basing everything around money. It's just making sure you have a pot that is at long-term pot. I like it. Yeah, it's interesting to hear the explore exploit, paradigm come back out again. It must be, it's like warning for guests, talks about that. More guests in this year than I can have come up with that dynamic.

guests in this year, then I can have come up with that dynamic. So one of the ways in 100, I sort of visualized things, it's like you're playing a computer game, you've got these four indicators, finances, skills, relationships and health, and then your ability to deal with change. And what you've got to make sure is that none of them are going in the red. So it's fine if you're focusing on money right now, as long as you think, actually, when am I going to update my skills, when I'm going to invest in my relationships? And so they're aware that they will come a point

where you have to flip. And similarly, if you're just focusing on skills, it's like, that's great, you're booting at your skills, but what about the other things? And that's why I think life has got more complicated, because a life over 70 years and a three-stage life, all those things were taken care of just by following what everyone else did. That won't work anymore. You have to do things differently.

It's interesting, this changing dynamic, especially again, having spoken to Professor Adam Hart about our misalignment with our evolutionary heritage, who we are physiologically, biologically, and what this environment is doing to us, without the old examples being set by the people that are ahead of us, there's no, you know, I lead such an incredibly different life from my parents, so unbelievably different from when they were at my age and also from when I will be at their

age. So it's like, when do you, when do you learn, right? There's no one here teaching us a crewing this wisdom, you know, there isn't. There isn't. And that's both, you know, it's called limonality, that sense of sort of, you know, in betweenness where you're neither, you know, betwixtam between. Of course, it can be exciting because it's like, I can, you know, but Twix then between, of course, it can be exciting because it's like, I can, you know, I don't have to, where everyone else did. But I think for that, the other thing you need to do

is to look around you and see what others are doing and how they're experimenting and going, oh, that looks interesting. I mean, it was part of the 100-year life, I still started reading up about how we invented teenagers. And it's kind of just hard. How we invented teenagers. You know kind of just hard how we invented teenagers. For most of human history you became, went from a child to being an adult and it

occurred sometimes between 12 and 14. And then suddenly with industrial revolution we extend schooling and suddenly people at school took 14, 16, and now 18. And then it's like, shit, what do we do with these young adults without responsibility? And it took about 60 years to work it out. It's so interesting. So, you know, the first sort of stuff was things like the Bobby Soxes and the St... Oh no, the first thing was like the Boy Scouts

and the Boys were Gate. It was stick them in uniform, give them some discipline, and you know, that's what you do. Children, little children army, yeah. Yeah, then it was the Bobby Soxers, which was sort of, you know, it's a B middle age when you're young, and then kind of James Dean comes along, and it's like, that's it, that's what teenage years are. It took 40, 50 years for society to work out how to use that time, and now of course, we don't know what teenage is, we all know what teenagers are. We know they do, it's kind of a right of passage.

But we're seeing the same thing, I think, in people's 20s. I think we're also seeing same thing in people's 50s where you should be called a midlife crisis, but now I think it's called something different. And also people in their 70s behaving very, very, very differently. I mean, I think the average age of the rolling stones,

I know this is a good or a bad example, it's like mid 70s or something. And so that's a whole hommacan, Paul McCartney turned like 72 the other day, didn't he? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. But then it was just the other things like,

I think how would his print charges be 71? I mean, they're given the royals, man. Like whatever they're doing to them, they're some NAD booster director of the David St. Clair as well. There's a lot of that, but yeah, no, the David St. Clairster, but you know, but he's a certain one and he still hasn't got the job, but that's the interesting thing. He's a good tip for a living flop. How long am I supposed to wait for this thing?

It's going to be the oldest monitor. It becomes the trend. It'll be the oldest monitor ever to come to the throne. Why be a perfect example of this as well? Let's look at the presidential candidates. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everyone's getting older and people say, I mean, the criticisms about Biden seem to actually hold true. But people are saying like, how can you have, they compare them to JFK, right? Who's this sort of young, vibrant guy? And you think, well, yeah, but in this new frontier, it's actually like, is 70, 70 is like, what, like, it's maybe 55 or 60 now, and 40 back then is probably closer to like 55 now.

It's everything. And of course JFK was not as long as you think and actually were pretty poor health, which is also quite interesting. It was, yeah, it had everything. Of course, JFK was not as long as you think and actually were pretty poor health, which is also quite interesting. It was. Yeah, it had all sorts of health ailments, but I think this is where the sort of the generational labor's come in,

because we've got to try and find a way as life gets longer to get different voices being heard in all sorts of ways. I mean, this is key for all of society. And if our leaders get older and older, how do then younger people get their voice heard? And I think that is a challenge. It comes back again to these intergenerational vehicles

we have to create. Yeah. Speaking of Dr David Sinclair, who I'll send this to once we're done, he was on the podcast a year and a bit ago, and he was talking about how he believes that at some point in the not too distant future, humans very well may be able to live to a thousand. I'm sat in Harvard Medical School looking at him and thinking like, yeah, that sounds great, but that's like, you know, that's proper science fiction

stuff, that's for every way. But we are, that will be a spectrum. Someone's not going to one day just be a thousand. Someone will be 150, then there'll be 200, then there'll be 250, then there'll be, da da da da da da da da. And like we are seeing this happen in front of us right now, we are seeing people get older. The entire demographic of the world is getting older. And I read this story the other day,

I don't know whether you've seen this in the Washington post, about there's 40 million Asian men who are, they can't get married. So you've got this population, the birth rate is now starting to level out. It looks like maybe about 10, 10 million, 11 million or something is where the world's going to kind of even out and then potentially even take a dip. So that's going to push the average age even further up. It is and I know David, well, I'm writing with David, so I look at the House Society adapt to longer lives that already happened. So to me the big insight is that to a degree we didn't expect we found that age is malleable. There are things we can do that affect how we age. And David in this extraordinary scientific way says, yeah, just wait, I'm going to fiddle about this. Really going to be malleable. Now, I didn't, I never know what to make of those claims. It's pretty clear that what is happening is an interesting

shift. And as we get older, chronic diseases get more important. Cancer, dementia, heart disease. And if you look at all of these, they're all correlated strongly with age. The biggest risk factor in getting cancer is age, not smoking. Not the smoking is a good thing, but it's... So what a bunch of people are saying is, well, it's focused on slowing down aging, which is a staggering thought. But you're already sort of seeing quite advanced drugs that hold the promise of getting rid of arthritis.

So you will start to see more older people, but there'll be behaving differently. And, you know, that we said earlier that 70s, the new 60s, not really 70s, the new 70s, because you're kind of, you may have the health of a 60 year old, but you've got 10 more years of road under you on the clock. So it's kind of a really different combination. So I think that's interesting, but I think it's important to disentangle two things. One is the change in the age structure of society, which is there's more old people, because there's fewer people being born.

And in Asia, that's really dramatic. I mean, it is extraordinary what is happening in Asia. The Chinese population is going to go from 1.4 to 1 billion over the next 30 years. There just be 400 million people left. That is. And of that 1 billion, 45% will be over 65. Is this all because of this single child policy? So I mean it's basically because when you grow very fast, your birth rate fall is very quickly. And so you get smaller cohorts coming through and then more people living longer. Actually in the US and the UK and Europe, that's much less because the birth rates fall

much more slowly over time. So we're aging less. But the other thing is not just there's more old people but how we're aging is changing. And this is why I'm so glad to be talking to you and your younger group because actually that's the group of maybe most affected by this. And the challenge we've got is that if I, when I said to people how long do you going to live for, how many of you even thought about it, most people haven't. And I get that, it's kind of not a pleasant thought. And then about a third of people stick their hand up in the class when I ask this.

And I say, OK, so what information do you use? And they'll say their grandparents. Now if you look at the data, and it's a big argument where it's going to carry on or not, over the last 100 years, in every decade, life experience has gone up by two or three. Which basically means that every generation is living six to nine years longer than their parents, and 12 to 18 years longer than their grandparents. So if you base yourself on your grandparents, if that trend continues, you're out by 18 years. So wow, and then it's like, great, it comes back that the day going from 24 to 32 hours

long, don't just use it all at the end of life, you can use it right the way through. And you need to do that because otherwise, if you try and just copy that life that your parents had, you're going to be working till 75, 76, which is gruesome in one single block. So, to me, time is a social convention. We structure it in a way to make it work for us. And what's interesting right now is it's kind of our structured life isn't working for anyone. The younger generation are saying,

I can't get all the things that past generations did. I can't afford a house. I won't get a pension, I never secure a job. Absolutely, they need to do things differently. But actually, it's not working for people in their 50s because they're now trying to work to their 70 and they're so much age-based stereotypes, they can't get jobs. And then you only need to look at COVID and the disaster that's unfolded in care homes to recognize that we don't have where looking after people in the end of life.

So at all ages we've got to try and come up with what Laura Kastner's Nutstanford calls a new map of life. It's particularly urgent, the younger you are, which is so great to be talking about this, but to focus on it, we focus on aging as about the old, but really if it's a longer life, it's for everyone, it's about all of life not in So who does the burden of this lie with because it seems to me to be an economic problem, both locally and globally, it seems to be sort of a social action problem or a social reform problem that needs to occur top down, but then there's also this emergent self identifying the social norms that we have. Like how do we identify, not what we told about age, because you can tell someone whatever you want,

it takes a very long time for them to internalize that and then begin to bleed that back out of them and also agree with everyone else, right? So, where does the book stop with this? Or where does it start? Actually, where does the book stop with this? Or where does it start? Actually, where does the book start with this? So, absolutely. So the new, long life, the latest book,

which looks at technology and longevity and twined. So it says, how do you prepare? And I'm afraid there is a lot that you need to do in a period of social change, because the other thing that's happening, rightly or wrongly, is a lot more responsibility is being thrown on the individual. So, you know, for instance, if you've got this multi-stage life where some of it's in the gig economy, you're now taking responsibility for learning

the skills and your career in a way that a firm would do a few of them. Health is incredibly important and, you know, I think there's more awareness of younger groups about the importance of investing your health and keeping fit for the future, but again, there's an example at responsibility. So there's lots of things that the individual has to do, but then my goodness, there's a bigger social narrative. And some of that is around changing our concepts, for instance, around age, which I think is happening with COVID. I think it's very interesting, because COVID is like a viral attack of our aging. It's really impacting older people. But we're starting to see a narrative emerge

about what it means to be old. Is it just a number of year candles on the cake, etc. There's things that the education system needs to do. We have an education system very much based around the first 21, 24 years of life. It needs to focus on lifelong learning. Corporates need to think about things very differently rather than just get obsessed about the graduate intake. They have to think about recruiting and the majorly in the early 30s and mid 40s, right the way through at multiple career points.

And have a career path where you can ramp up and ramp down rather than just slog your way through. Governments have a lot to do here as well because, you know, I talked a lot about aging, technology worries me because you'd be so late about, will jobs be lost or not? They don't have to be. And I think what's really interesting about technology is we use the word technological progress, but I think we should use the word technological achievement, because there's only really progress if we make it work for us as humans. And particularly around jobs, firms can either use technology to automate and to get rid of workers and save costs. Oh, they can use technology to augment workers to improve what they do, the quality of the work,

the quality of the product, and productivity and so on. Why would they do, the quality of the work, quality of the product and productivity and so wages. Why would they do that for a business perspective? Because they make more money. They make more money by including, by remaining keeping workers that out. Well, so let's give the example of health or education actually. So what we're finding more and more is of course, you can learn stuff on the internet, you can have a robot that does tests for you, you can learn loads of stuff.

So you can get rid of lots of teachers, you can do robots that eventually get better and better at diagnostics and will be able to tell you about what your health is. So we can get rid of lots of health workers. But what will be even better would be to have a health worker or an education worker who sees you Chris as a person and says okay I can see you're struggling in this issue or you're doing really well here. Let's think about how we get better how do we improve it? So there what you're doing is freeing the teacher away from the mundane routine stuff which is just conveying the information and focusing on the individual and saying how do I get this individual to do better?

So I go to the gym, well, when I'm allowed to go to the gym, I have an instructor. Why do I have instructor? It's not I don't know how to use the machines, it's not I don't know how to do a push up. They're just going to motivate me to do the things I don't want to do and to do the things I do badly better. So that would be an example. And you know, what I worry is me, particularly post Covid is that firms will just use technology to cut costs. And I'll be stuck on a find some pretty shit piece of technology that it's very frustrating doesn't provide me good service. And it's made someone lose a job. So there must be an incentive that the government can provide through the tax system. So for instance, in America, I think it's probably the same from the UK, there's lots of incentives affirms

to invest in capital equipment, because they got to write off. So let me invest all the AI, I got to capital write off, it's like a tax advantage for automation. We need to provide incentives to do augmentation, because that's how we prosper. And that's that first stage industrial evolution,

there was lots of automation. The second stage of industrial evolution was much more augmentation. So this kind of is back again to starting our social narrative. What do we want from this? And there's a dystopian route to go and there's a utopian route. But unless we start a social narrative and it takes a long while, but in particular, I think especially around technology and I think longevity as well, it's really important that it's us as a society that say how we want this technology to go, and not Google and Facebook. And right now that's the problem. The incentives about what AI is produced is not really angry, I think, at technological

progress in a social sense, but more around technological achievement and a profit motive as well. So I think it's quite urgent we start thinking about, you know, if we have an opportunity to be more human as machines become more machine-like, how do we seize that? I think it's Carpoft said that AI won't change our human nature, it will just reveal it. I think that's a good way of looking at it, actually. We're not very good at being machines. That's why calculating numbers is difficult.

Machines are great at that. Where could it be in humans? Yeah, you are correct. It's interesting. I think it was in Cal Newport's book Deep Work, where I was reminded or I was first told what it is that we do in the workplace, that we're complex decision engines. That's what we're able to do. And it would appear, based on who you look out from the artificial general intelligence insight community, it would appear that proper broad spectrum, AGI, is actually moving very slowly,

that narrow general intelligence is getting very, very good, but the ability to compile and synthesize all of these different pieces of information is still where the competitive advantage for the very foreseeable future is going to live for humans. Is that something you agree with? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a whole bunch of issues here. So there's, you know, what task you're doing your job, which gives you some defence. There's regulation made a fengible. But then there's that one about, you know, we're still some way off the singularity if ever it's going to happen. So completely agree. And then, you know, certainly, you know,

deep knowledge has shown us that there's some fantastic things that AI can do. It's pretty expensive in doing it. So, it's only when it becomes cheap, it also starts to rival. But there should be, I mean, I think it's the trouble with technology is that the technologists, I think, fall for two problems and economists have problems with their own. But the technologists, they exaggerate how fast the technology is coming. You know, drivers cars are coming along and leaps and bounds, but still most of the cars on the road are not driverless and is some way before they will. And that's not about the technology that's about just implementation. The second thing is they see the jobs that will be destroyed,

but they don't see the jobs that will be created. And if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be destroyed, the farming jobs will be destroyed. But we invented a whole bunch of jobs that no one could have predicted. Some of those jobs were about supporting the machines, but actually most of them like the managerial roles, etc. Just were just didn't exist before. And you know, the same thing will happen this time around. There will be whole new jobs created. Some of the main that's supporting the AI and the technology, but in general, there will be a lot of jobs that will be very human-orientated, exploiting that comparative advantage that humans have. All of this, of course, is not destiny.

We can't just leave it to the markets. We have to have the right education system, the right government policies. But yeah, that hopefully is what we will see. It's interesting, Rory Sutherland, Pastor Mon and Wisdom Guest and fantastic behavioral psychologist. He talks about how he thinks Silicon Valley sees

everything as an optimization problem. And that sort of hyper technocratic view of the world fails to take into account that the people who at the very end are going to judge whether a thing was good or bad are not input process, output, perfect rational machines. So you can have something which by every objective measure was great. But it did the thing that it was supposed to do. Machine which is going to be your new comedian, the machine can tell a joke which logically, rationally, deliverability is funnier than any joke that's ever been told. But there's something that we just don't quite get about the fact that we

don't like that. And it's irrational, but that is something which is difficult to program for. Yeah, no, 100%. And that's a nice ballwalk. And by the way, it's such a great advantage to come. a nice book and by the way, you know, it's not so great advantages to come. My money worry is that if certain groups become incredibly important, then they will drive the direction of AI research in a route that maybe that we don't like it, but it's the way it's going because it's easy and it's going to be. That's where the power is, right? The disproportionate amount of power. Yeah. So what is it? It kind of touched touched on it there? Like is it is it legislation because it's all well in good me and you And David dr. Dr. St. Clair saying We need to think more about aging. We need to think very carefully about how jobs are being replaced

but let who are we? Who am I to to enact this change that signing it what we could sign a petition at change.org and get someone to read it and throw it away? Well, I think this comes back, so I do think of this about raising awareness and raising a narrative and experimentation and people are saying, this is what I want, I'm not getting it, and then making sure that gap is closed.

If you go back to industrial revolution, which I still tailor so much of our life, you did see, is only with the spreading of democracy and the rise of the labor movement and civil society and charities a campaigning attitude that led to change. And I think it has to be the same again. I think the interesting thing be the same again.

I think the interesting thing is where is that going to come from? Because with Industrial Revolution, the concept of, you know, the working class was much larger and more homogenous. And that doesn't seem to exist so much now. Not in that sort of large single issue way. So it has to be civil society. I think this is where we are in a difficult situation because for a society to be healthy, just two pretty simple things have to happen. The

first is everyone has to feel it in some way. They're benefiting from the economic achievements and growth that's happening. And now there is in some way they have to feel that they've got a voice that is listened to and reflected in the outcome. And if you have those two together, societies tend to prosper economically and socially. So that's what we have to achieve. That's why we need a narrative. We need to start thinking about this because everyone's aware that the old ways are working, so what do we want to replace it with? But we do seem to in that interim period at the moment, what we've got more people looking back, either trying to preserve the system or complain about

it, rather than advocating something going forward. I think that's inevitable because we said it's, we don't know what works, we don't know what's going to happen. But I think we do need to start having that as a social debate. But this I think is where the AI staff can become dangerous because if the AI just generates jobs for a certain type of people and if we get AI which ends up with certain groups of people being excluded from the political process or political process not working so well, then we end up into some very uncomfortable conjectures about the future. Well, we got lots of social divisions, we got people being excluded from the political process and that never ends well. So I think, you know, that's why, to me, how do I make this happen? It's civil society. It's a social debate that then says, I want

this. And I'm hoping that COVID will see something that lasts because I do think in COVID, we've learnt that we cannot rely upon firms. We can't always rely upon the government even though they have a big role to play. And in the end we have to rely upon each other and those around us, even those who perhaps we haven't spent much time with the late. And I think that's a healthy sign going forward if we can carry on with them. I mentioned this at the beginning of COVID that I felt as tragic as it is, if one thing can come out of it, it unites us in our humanity, right?

It doesn't even rain everywhere on the planet at the same time, but I know what it feels like to be in lockdown, the same as someone in Wuhan, the same as someone in Texas, the same as someone in South America. And like, I'm reading the precipice by Toby Ord at the moment, which is on existential risk. It's a very good meta analysis of all different types of existential risks, phenomenal. And you would you would adore it. It's brand new. He also is part of this future of humanities institute or Oxford University, who are literally impossible to get a hold of, which means that to the listeners, if you're hoping I'm going to get Toby on, it's not happening apparently because he's just impossible to find.

But, like, speaking, listening to what he's talking about there, in one way, it doesn't surprise me that having people that are separated by nation states and borders and have cultures and all this sort of stuff, and we've got all this crazy evolutionary heritage and we're tribal and we're basically just chaven apes that somehow are able to impact our unwheel and all this sort of stuff. I think, oh god, like how are we even able to step out under the street without ripping each other to shreds? But on a flip side of that, I think let's say that humanity does level out at about 10 billion, 11 billion people. Like, it shouldn't be that hard to get one species that's got more than enough

spec, tons, tons of space, tons of resources, bags of technology, even more time to accrue wisdom now and increasingly more time for individuals to iterate on making themselves better, making the society better. Like it shouldn't be that hard. It should just be, you should be able to do it and get humanity to work. Well, that's kind of what we're saying the new long life. I mean, my thought in the new life at the beginning is, you know, we've got, we've shown this great technological

ingenuity in making life longer and healthier, and inventing this extraordinary new technology. So it should be smart enough to have the social ingenuity to make it work for us. And, you know, what is interesting, I think, about humans is actually to some extent our success is based around a deep trust of people we never meet. So you know what, I'm sitting on a plane. I'm putting my life in the hands of people. I just don't know. And we'll never meet again possibly. Everything from the pilot to the person who's checking the engines and I trust these people.

And that's quite extraordinary, that deep seated into personal trust. Now, of course when society starts to become fractured and this group, we excluded then that trust starts to disappear. But I do think ultimately, there is a deep seated sense of trust in humans and that has to be what we rely upon.

So yeah, that we should be, I mean, we've got a pretty good track record of making things work for us. Let's just hope we can do that. Yeah, well, we haven't not made it work yet, but obviously as someone like Toby says, that's the problem that as we keep on not making it work, there's a greater chance of us managing to do it the other way. So this has been fantastic. Thank you so

much for your time, Andrew. The new long life will be linked in the show notes below. Anything else that you want to plug, any other places people should go to check out, stuff that you think's interesting. There's a website for the book and then there's my own website as well, which we'll give you a link too. But yeah, start with the book and start the narrative and start thinking. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. Nice Chris has been a blast. Thank you.