Something You Should Know - Why We Love Our Cars & What Happens if You Live to 100

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Are you planning to re-gift a gift this Christmas? People have been regifting forever - although it was a Seinfeld episode that made the concept popular. This episode begins with a discussion of how you should re-gift and what the rules are. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/g30169200/regifting-etiquette-rules/ For many of us, our car is extremely important. It is hard to imagine life without a car. So how did the automobile become such a big part of our lives in a relatively short period of time? Joining me to discuss that as well as the fascinating history of cars and what the future may hold, is Dan Albert. He is an historian and writes about the past, present, and future of cars for “n + 1” magazine. He is also author of the book, Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless (https://amzn.to/2Wj6uO2). Every year people get stressed out around the holidays because there is a lot to do and people fear they won’t get everything done. Listen as I discuss why this is a needless worry. Once you hear it, you’ll be able to enjoy the holiday season a lot more and stress-out a lot less. Source: Donald Wetmore author of KISS Guide to Organizing Your Life (https://amzn.to/2WfXXLM). Life expectancy has continued to increase dramatically. You are more likely to live to 100 than at any time in human history. Not only are people living longer, they are also staying healthy and active longer. All of this is having an impact on our society and culture. We are more likely to keep working well past 65. Young people are more likely to postpone getting married and postpone the start of their career. Plus, if people are going to live a lot longer, they are going to need more money to support them in all those later years. These are just a few of the ramifications of our new longevity that I discuss with Andrew Scott, Professor of Economics at the London Business School, consulting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Longevity and author of the book The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World.(https://amzn.to/3nrIDI1). Whether you are young or old, you will want to hear this discussion. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! This episode is sponsored by Geico. https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Today on Something You Should Know, if you're going to be a regifter this Christmas, you need to know the re-gifting rules. Then, the amazing story of why we drive and how cars have become such an important part of our lives.

The one thing I would add that people don't talk about very much is driving is really fun because you can get in that car and go anywhere. People like to drive. You're balancing risk and control. Then, if you're worried you won't get everything done for the holidays, you need to hear something. And are you prepared to live a long, long time? Because there's a good chance you will. Basically, life expectancy over the last 120 years

is increased by two or three years every decade, which means roughly you're living about six or seven years longer than your parents and 12 to 14 years longer than your grandparents. So there is a lot more time ahead. All this today on Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, this episode of Something You Should Know is being sponsored by Geico. Geico is the exclusive advertiser in this episode. You will only hear a Geico commercial. You will hear no other commercials. And you will only hear one Geico commercial. They are our exclusive sponsor today. They're also my car insurance company.

And I really appreciate them sponsoring this episode. First up today, are you considering re-gifting this holiday season? The term re-gifting actually started in a Seinfeld episode called The Label Maker that aired back in January of 1995, where Elaine accused her friend Dr. Tim Watley of being a re-gifter after Tim Watley gave Jerry a label maker that Elaine had given to Tim Watley. As it turns out, a lot of people re-gift and have been re-gifting for a long time, and there are some generally accepted rules to re-gifting. First of all, make sure you know who gave it to you so you don't accidentally give it back to the person who gave it to you in the first place. Secondly, if you use the gift even once, it's unacceptable to re-gift it.

Thirdly, you really should re-wrap the gift, and if you've had it for a while, dust it off so it doesn't look like it's been sitting around. Make sure the original gift card is removed. This is a very common re-gifting mistake. And don't admit your gift is a re-gifted gift. Keep it your little secret. And that is something you should know. Imagine for a moment life without your car or any car. Cars have become so central to our lives and they got that way very quickly, really in just a matter of a few decades.

So how did this all happen and what is the future of the automobile? Will there ever be flying cars? Will we all have driverless cars soon? Well, here to discuss this is Dan Albert. He is a historian and a writer who writes about the past, present, and future of automobiles for N Plus One magazine. He is also author of a book called Are We There Yet? The American Automobile, Past, Present, and Driverless. Hi, Dan. Welcome. Hi, Mike. Good to speak to you. What I find so interesting about automobiles is how quickly they became such a big part of our lives.

And not only that, but how they also became an art form and a status symbol, and how they spawned so many other industries. Car dealerships, repair shops, car washes, car insurance, like our sponsor Geico. Road construction. How did this happen? How did cars become so central to our lives so quickly? It really begins in the same way it begins everywhere around the world, particularly in Franceance with very expensive cars really toys for the super rich the billionaires of their day but as soon as the

automobile gets here a lot of people are thinking boy if we could make a cheap one we could sell millions of them and get a lot richer than if we just sell a few to the rich guys. And a lot of companies around 1900 are trying to do that. The big guy there is Henry Ford, of course. And he starts with a series of models. But in 1908, he launches the Model T. And that really is where things explode. Millions of the Model T are sold and we become a nation on wheels. And then since then, cars have taken on this entire life of its own,

where it's become an art form, it's become a status symbol, it's become so many things that seemingly it's just supposed to get you from here to there, but it has become so much more. I agree. You know, people often mistake the automobile as a means of transportation. As a means of transportation, although it gives everybody flexibility, it's kind of a terrible way to organize a transportation system for a society or a nation as a whole. And that really begins with General Motors and a fellow named Alfred Sloan.

And he realizes that we can ladder the automobile. In other words, you start out with a relatively inexpensive car, say a Chevrolet, and you work your way up through an Oldsmobile, then a Buick. And then if you really are doing well, you can get yourself a Cadillac. And that's a brilliant idea. It's called planned obsolescence. And even when you have a Chevrolet that could go for 10 years, in a couple of years, you trade it in and you trade up. And it's a sign that you're making your way up the social and economic ladder. But cars have become almost magical,

I think, in the sense that, you know, in your teenage years, your car and your ability to drive a car is like a rite of passage. And the idea of the open road, that cars represent this freedom, that you're able to just get up and go wherever you want, there's something very special about that. Right. There's a couple of things I like to think about. I think about it as kind of a push and a pull. So the push, obviously, is from the automobile industry, the highway building industry, the idea that building highways and building more infrastructure and selling more cars is the way this nation, the United States, becomes really incredibly powerful.

It's the way we win wars by building lots of Jeeps and tanks, all these industrial things we can do. And that's the push. The pull is no matter what you think of environmentalism or the very real deadliness of the automobile, it is incredibly hard to beat as a personal, individual way of getting around, because you can get in that car and go anywhere anytime you want. And when you're a teenager, my God, there's nothing worse than having your mother drive you on a date or having to call mom to get home from school. So getting a set of wheels is hugely important for young people. And the one thing I would add that people don't talk about very much is driving is really fun. We talk about being stuck in traffic. We talk about, you know, the huge expense of owning an automobile,

but people like to drive. You're balancing risk and control. So the only way that cars could have become popular is if there are roads to drive them on. And so how did that work? Which is the cart and which is the horse? Did we have roads so we needed cars or did we have cars so somebody needed to build the roads? Right. Well, you look at road building in this country and it's fascinating to me because in the very early days, people were not necessarily excited about having their neighborhood roads paved. They preferred to have kind of muddy tracks or gravel because they didn't want automobiles traveling through their neighborhoods. Very

quickly, though, you start to get paving and you start to get roads that allow you to travel from one town to the next. And a lot of reason for that is to switch from railroads for distribution to truck distribution. And it's not even so much, boy, we want to let people, you know, have fun in their 57 Chevy. It's about a changing economic or changing dynamic. The interstate highway system really begins as kind of a twinkle in the president's eye in the 1930s. And it's very much about creating jobs, about smoothing the flow of commerce around the country, and then also linking the country together. Then we get into a situation where, again, trucking industry, people who own automobiles,

you think of the AAA, all of them lobbying for more and more highways, so that by 1956, the interstate system in particular becomes an expression of national power and really of the car culture that you're talking about. There's a perpetual situation where you get congestion, you get traffic, you build more roads. And as a lot of kind of anti-car, pro-mass transit people like to point out, roads create their own traffic. The more roads you build, the easier it is for people to drive, the less expensive it is for people to drive, and so you get more driving. So in terms of the question of is there demand or is there kind of, again, that push-pull, I really think the two things are going on at the same time, but you can always find political support among a large population for more roads. Think of cars and the golden age of cars and the history of cars. It seems very American, but there are cars all over the world. So why is America, maybe because we're in America, but it just seems that American cars have had more character, more specialness, whereas cars in other parts of the world seem more utilitarian. I think you're absolutely right about that. It comes down, I think, to maybe three things. One

is we got there first. So the United States at one point was producing 90% of the automobiles around the globe. And there was also an ethos of the American automobile, which was kind of like, well, why should I buy a little Volkswagen or something crummy? It doesn't cost me much more to drive a nice Chevy where I kind of float along the roads in my soft suspension and my soft tires. So it's a question of really wealth. The United States gets there early. The United States has good wealth distribution compared to the rest of the world. But it is true that now, more and more, as the rest of the world begins to enjoy the same levels of wealth, that cars are not just the utilitarian things that they were. I remember a time when pretty much everyone drove an American car in the United States.

And I also remember a time when American cars weren't that great. They weren't very reliable. I know we had a lot of problems with our cars, really strange problems. And then it seems that along came the Japanese cars that were very reliable and really gave Detroit a run for its money. Yes, you're absolutely right. Now, I will say, earlier on, the American automobile, if you go back to the 50s, even the 40s, they were very well built. And they were very reliable when you compare them to what begins to happen in the 1960s and the 1970s. It's a complicated story, and there are a lot of reasons for it. But absolutely, first,

the Germans, particularly with the Volkswagen Beetle, come in and start to eat the lunch of the Detroit companies. And then the Japanese come along with cars that just are bulletproof and go for miles and miles and are inexpensive to repair. And the United States and Detroit in particular has a very hard time keeping up. They've become kind of fat and happy and gone soft in terms of production. And when you get into the 1980s, boy, those cars were awful. Because not only were they terrible in terms of reliability, but they were ugly, they were dull. Driving a 1983 Chevy is nothing like driving a 1953 Chevy. And that becomes a real problem. And that's why the United States domestic producers, Detroit, used to own 95% of the market, and now they own maybe 30%

of the market. So absolutely, it's become a global phenomenon. Other producers are producing better cars than Detroit. And this continues to this day. I know that happens in a lot of businesses, but you would think that you could, like, you know, say to the guys in Detroit, you know, you guys are getting too big and fat and happy, and you need to change the way you're approaching this, and you'll do better, and then they would do better. There is a standard thing that happens in industries as a whole, which is disruption, right? That's the word we hear a lot today. And it happens in a lot of industries where the incumbent companies are unable to turn on a dime and build something new.

We're absolutely seeing this right now with electric vehicles. It's not as if General Motors hasn't invested heavily in electric vehicles. It's that the culture of the company, the processes of the company have been built up over years and have become sclerotic. You know, the veins, the arteries are kind of clogged up, and they are finding it incredibly difficult to make this transition, where if you think of smaller companies, startups, Tesla, everyone knows, but there are others, Rivian is a big one, where they just started fresh, brand new company, able to build their processes and their culture around kind of 2010, 2020, where they're kind of Silicon Valley type companies, if you will. And they, just like

the Japanese, are going to be able to make this transition to electric vehicles more quickly and more easily. Don't you think, too, image is a problem? I mean, if you're going to buy an electric car, don't you want a Tesla more than you want another General Motors car? I don't know, and I don't know that anybody knows just yet. There are obviously huge fans of Tesla. I've driven a Tesla. We even put a deposit down on a Tesla. And it was very happy with a Tesla. My nephew wants a Tesla. So what's happened is a generational shift.

We're talking about cars, the history of them, and our love affair with them. And we're talking with Dan Albert. He is a historian, a writer, and author of the book, Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless. And this episode of Something You Should Know is being sponsored by GEICO. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the

hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Dan, when I think back to cars in an earlier time, like in the 60s and the 50s, when I think of like the 60seness from make to make that a sedan, a Kia sedan pretty much looks like a Toyota, looks like a Honda. They all kind of look alike. There doesn't seem to be that individual character that cars of yesteryear had.

I would say two things in answer to that question. The first is to kind of challenge that notion. You know, there's a car club that's centered around cars from the 1980s and 1990s. That boggles my mind. There was not a car in the 1980s or 1990s that I could imagine collecting. One of the things that happens with car collecting is, you know, young guys who at 16 got their license, as you talk about it, and girls too, boys and girls both, when they reach that age of the 40s, the 50s, 50 years old, they want to relive their youth. And if they had a youthful time in the 1960s, you see the price of those vehicles go up. But also, as I say, there are a lot of people out

there that remember, again, I can't imagine it, a 1990 Chevrolet that they absolutely must have. So they were dull to me, the dullest cars around. The flip side is you're absolutely right. One of the things that has happened is we've become far more disassociated with our automobiles. And that's a function of really the quality of the cars and their ability to run without us developing an intimate relationship with it. There's no more carburetors to tune. There's no more need for kind of waxing and washing because cars don't rust out like they used to. So I think it's not just that the cars have a certain sameness and, you know, dullness, ugliness, if you will. It's that that emotional connection is gone away because the cars are not so needy.

But I can look at a Kia sedan and a Honda sedan, and there's a great deal of similarity between all the, you know, generic-y sedans. They don't, there's no style, individual style to them. They all look kind of that overly, you know, egg-like look to them. They all look kind of that overly, you know, egg-like look to them. On the other hand, if you look at a modern, say, Honda Civic, and you compare that to the newest Kias, people who have an eye for this

sort of thing do see a real difference. Creases that are different, a stance that is different. The other thing I would say is we're talking about sedans. People are not buying sedans. People are buying SUVs, big and small. And the three largest selling vehicles in the country are pickup trucks. Chevrolet, really General Motors, and Ford dominate that market heavily. We buy something like 3 million large pickup trucks in this country. And the styling is quite different in those. And if you have even a little bit of an eye for this sort of thing, and you are still engaged in the concept of, you know, I'm a Ford guy, I'm a Chevy guy, then you do see a difference. And you do have

not only a difference between, say, a Ford and a Chevy, but a 10-year-old Ford and a modern Ford. So again, I challenge that a little bit. That said, there is actually an interesting reason why all of our vehicles are starting to look similar, and that has to do with manufacturing. So people don't realize that the sedan that you're driving is actually the same vehicle as the small SUV your neighbor's driving. They're built on the same platform. This gives the automobile companies what they call scale. And that's part of the reason the vehicles all look the same. It's because underneath, they are the same. The other thing is that a lot of the need for, for example, higher gas mileage, meaning you need more aerodynamics, all of those things, safety regulations,

cause a certain similarity, sameness. So whatever happened to flying cars? What happened to flying cars? Indeed, the recent interest in flying cars, and there have been periods in the past where flying cars were considered, you know, the next wave. A lot of that recent interest has to do with the idea we're going to have autonomous or robot cars, but also the Silicon Valley guys who really are, frankly, quite full of themselves. And when they were kids, they watched the Jetsons with the flying cars. And so flying cars got a lot of press. But if you go back to the 1920s, and even post-World War II, the idea of flying cars was not only came out of a bunch of young guys who kind of wanted their boyhood dreams to be fulfilled, but a real expectation that an airplane or a helicopter would soon replace the automobile. And there's two things

going on there. One is, if you think about the scale of life, in other words, how far did you travel in your daily life? People went from maybe riding a streetcar, walking, perhaps a bicycle, to the automobile. So you go from kind of measuring your world in footsteps to measuring your world in odometer clicks. The world has expanded for you. If that trend is going to continue, and many people expected it to, the next thing is the airplane or the helicopter. So the first period of this is the 1920s, and Henry Ford actually produces what he calls the flying flipper. The flipper was a nickname for the Model T. It was going to be very inexpensive. And he produced them in kind of an

experimental way. And they did tests and kind of a roadshow barnstorming around the country with this very small, easy to fly, flying car, if you will. The other thing that's very interesting is during World War II, the helicopter was an incredible adventure. And coming out of World War II, a lot of people expected the helicopter to take over. You have places like Filene, a very famous Boston department store, promising to start doing deliveries by helicopter. You also have places like Macy's and Gimbel's, these big department stores, selling airplanes. And yet with all that momentum, it didn't happen. It did not happen. It turns out airplanes are very difficult to fly, even with the flying cars that were supposedly getting down. The bloom has kind of gone off that rose because they are hard to fly. They're really noisy.

And they're expensive. And you have to imagine what's the benefit you get from that. From your perspective as an automotive historian, what do you think of the concept of driverless cars? What I find fascinating is as early as the 1950s, there was the technology to produce what we would call today a driverless car. They were confined to the highway. In other words, the expectation was not, oh, you could pull into your driveway all by yourself, but you would drive your car to the interstate, and the car would drive itself the rest of the way until you get off the interstate. Today, that vision of the driverless

car is coming out of really Silicon Valley. And the idea is we're not going to spend any more money on roads. We can't even fix the roads we have. But the robot car is going to come and solve all those problems. The reality is, if we go back several years, Uber was going to produce driverless cars. Tesla should have driverless cars on the road today. It turns out to be a very difficult technical problem and, more important, a very difficult business problem. Nobody can figure out how to make money

selling people driverless cars. Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens with driverless cars. I know for me, I'm not in any big hurry to get one, but we'll see how it goes. This has been really interesting to look at the history of the automobile and understand a little more why it's become such an important part of our life. My guest has been Dan Albert. He is a historian and writer, and he is author of the book, Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless.

And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Dan. Michael, I really appreciate, and I really enjoyed this. You really asked great questions, so thanks so much. Life expectancy keeps going up, and that's generally considered to be good news. But with lots of people living longer, there are consequences to that, good and bad. For example, if you're going to live to be 100, well, you'll need more money than if you're going to live to be 100, well, you'll need more money than if

you were going to live to be 75. And today, barring something horrible happening to you, you're more likely to live to be 100 than ever before. Andrew Scott is someone who's really looked into the longer lives we are leading and the ramifications. Andrew is a professor of economics at the London Business School and a consulting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Longevity. He's author of the book called The New Long Life, a framework for flourishing in a changing world.

Hi, Andrew. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this. So, what's the premise here? What is it that we need to be concerned about? We need to think about the structure of our life differently. We're living longer lives and on average healthier lives. So whatever age you are, you can expect more time ahead of you than past generations, which means you're going to behave differently. And that's going to already affecting how we work, how we get our education, when we get married, how society adjusts to these longer lives that we have. So what that means is you have to do things differently from past generations. You've got to think differently and behave differently to

prepare for that future. How so? Well, loads of different things. One is you've obviously got more future, so you need to invest in that future more. Now, most people think of investment as straightaway about finances, and that's obviously important. But you could invest in a whole bunch of other things because really in the 20th century, we got very excited and we introduced something called life insurance because there was a big risk you would die young and you wanted to leave your finances in a good state for your family. All we've got now is kind of the need for longevity insurance.

The big risk you face today is outliving not just your wealth, but your health, your skills, your sense of purpose, and your sense of relationship. So you've got to invest in that. Now, one of the things that's happened with longevity is the book of life's got longer, but you're going to go through many more changes and transitions. Your career now is not just made up of one long session or one long segment,

but you're going to have to take mid-career breaks to prepare yourself for the next stage. So the book of life's got longer. The chapters have got shorter. So you've also got to be more flexible and more adaptable. And that means looking around and experimenting a lot more too. So what does that mean? I mean, experimenting and preparing? What does that look like? What is that different than what I'm doing now? Well, I don't know you well, Mike, so I don't know what you're doing. But if you think about what emerged in the 20th century, we sort of

got a three-stage life, which was education, work, and retirement. And that second stage work was sort of a pretty linear career path. What we're seeing more and more people doing is having segmented careers. We're seeing new stages of life begin to emerge. So let me give you something more about that experimentation. So in the 20th century, we invented teenagers and we invented pensioners, retirement. They didn't exist before the 20th century. Literally, we didn't have a word teenager. We had children and we had adults. And we've had that nice period of teenagers where sort of we finally worked out what to do with it.

It's a period of change and transition and experimentation. Well, we're going to have to be doing that much more often across the course of life. In your 40s and 50s, you're probably going to be working through to your 70s, which means you've got more work to do than you've done already. So you're going to need to be looking to reinvent yourself in order to get the skills or the platform to survive the next 20 or 30 years. So we're going to see more transitions occurring, which is where the experimentation comes, because I think the experimentation has a number of different components. One is just seeing what options are out there.

If you think about what's happening to younger children today, younger adults, as about teenagers, we've seen people in their 20s commit much later. The average age of having a child, of getting married, committing, not having much in your late 20s more and more rather than the early 20s so that postponing of commitment is not I think a bad thing because I'm gonna explore unexplored what's out there I'm gonna see what I like what my values are and I think you're gonna have to keep doing that repeatedly through life in order to get yourself ready for that next stage. Because, of course, over a longer life, yourself will go through more of these changes. What other areas of life are being affected by all of us living longer and longer?

Well, it's already beginning to affect all sorts of things. So in the United Kingdom, where I live, the fastest growing age group for divorce is 80 plus, which is quite an extraordinary outcome. There's more and more people living in their 80s, and they're living beyond their 80s. And so we're seeing more and more divorce at that age group. So we're seeing changes right the way through. The other thing, of course, is we are seeing people investing much more in their health as more and more people live for longer, the most important thing to do is to age healthily. So we're seeing a really concerted effort for people in their 70s and 80s to be fit and active in a way that I don't think their parents or their grandparents were. Yeah, well, I think about when my grandparents were my age, they were old, but I, I, they wouldn't

do the things I do. It's, it, it wasn't, it was like they'd already given up. Exactly. And, you know, if you look at the sort of life expectancy at 65, uh, 50, 60 years ago, then you didn't have a lot of years left compared to today. You have another 10 or 12 years left, Basically, life expectancy over the last 120 years has best practice life expectancy is increased by two or three years every decade, which means roughly you're living about six or seven years longer than your parents and 12 to 14 years longer than

your grandparents. So there is a lot more time ahead. And you can see that change. For instance, the average age of the Rolling Stones, I think, is about 15, 16 years more than the average age of the US Supreme Court. You can see it too at the younger age. I said earlier about getting married later. My father left school at 14. He was in the army at 17. He's married at 18. He's got a kid at 19 and a house at 20. I didn't do any of that to my mid-20s. My children are doing it now. They're going to do it probably late 20s, early 30s. And what's that?

Why is that? Why are we delaying getting out of the world? One of the mistakes I think people think about these longer lives is They think it's about being older for longer. But if you've got more time ahead of you at every age, then in some sense you're younger. This is not quite the same thing as saying 60 is the new 50. But it's definitely, you know, we tend to measure age by how many candles in your birthday cake. But we also think about how many more birthday cakes you can expect.

So in some sense, you know, the average Brit, for instance, has never been so old, but never had so many years of life left. So life expectancy has increased so that the average Brit now is older, but they have more life ahead of them than any past generations ever had at that age. So in some sense, we haven't got an aging society. It may be that I'm further away from when I was born, but I've still got a lot of years of life ahead of me. So we always think about these extra years of life that sort of come at the end that we're just, you know, once we hit 70, we're just older for longer. But if you really look at what is happening with the data, what's sort of happening is that the extra years of life,

most of them have come at the end of middle age. It's like sort of 50 plus has been extended. So what does that mean? Well, you've got more time and we're using that time across our life. It's not just, oh, I'm retired for longer. So people are using some of those years at the beginning. I think just as we in the 20th century saw the development of teenagers, so people didn't just leave a school at 14, they carried on until 18 or beyond. And they started to spend more time developing as an adult. The same thing we're now seeing in people in their 20s. And I think what's interesting, you're seeing an increase in the age at which people marry. But you're also seeing a fall

in the divorce rate. It's almost as if people get married later, they know themselves better, they know how to deal with issues, and so relationships are more stable. And I think that's also the same thing we're sort of seeing with career paths, because if you are going to live to 100, and a child born today in rich countries

has a very good possibility of living to 100, then you're probably going to be working to your late 70s. And I don't know about you, I would therefore not be in a rush to start work at 20. So all this thing is about saying if we've got a longer life, we can do it at a different pace and in a different way. And we're seeing that ripple through all the different ages. As you mentioned, you're doing things at your age that your grandparents certainly wouldn't have been doing. Similarly, I'm sure if you've got children or when you have grandchildren, they'd be doing completely different things as well. Are people doing this though, it's not that this is any kind of deliberate attempt. It seems as if this is more just of

an adaptation to what is. There's nobody leading the charge here and saying you should do this or you should do that. You're looking at, you're taking pictures and saying this is what's going on. Exactly. So, you know, it's really interesting how we structure a life. Because if I would say to you age 20, hey, how do you want to structure your life?

And you didn't know what anyone else was doing, that's a really tough question to answer. So we have social norms. and social norms say you do this and then you do that. But those social norms don't arise from anywhere. They're kind of the result of lots of people doing experiments saying, hey, this works. But, of course, as life changes, as our career paths change,

our lifespan changes, our social norms need to evolve. But we're at that point right now where our social norms haven't yet got to the new answer. Hence the experimentation, looking around and seeing what's happening. I talked earlier about the invention of teenagers, but it didn't happen in a year. It took about 60 years to work out what to do with teenagers. It's quite amusing if you look at the history. The first sort of instinct is for, you know, what you have is you have an increase in the age at which you leave school.

So there's all these young adults without responsibility, and it's causing some social problems. You know, hooligans, yobs, these words start to be used. And so the first response is to do things like the Boys Brigade or the Boy Scouts, invent these youth movements where you put people in uniform, give them some discipline. Didn't quite work. A bit later on, you get the Bobby Soxers. And then eventually James Dean comes along. Everyone says, hey, that's what a teenager is.

So it takes a long while for these new paths to emerge. So my kids, they're beginning to experiment and do things differently. And of course, that is then leading to all sorts of interesting clashes in the workplace because people in their early 20s have a different attitude to a career path than perhaps I or my father did when they started. We're talking about longevity and the ramifications of our population getting older and older. And my guest is Andrew Scott. He's author of the book, The New Long Life,

a framework for flourishing in a changing world. And this episode of Something You Should Know is sponsored by GEICO. So Andrew, are you just shining a light on what's going on, or are you advocating something? A bit of both, I think. I think, first of all, most people aren't aware of this increase in life expectancy that's happening. Because when you ask most people how long they're going to live for, they say, don't know, haven't thought about it, which I kind of understand is not the nicest thing to think about.

Or they think about their grandparents. But if those life expectancy trends continue, your grandparents are going to die a lot younger than most than you will. So most people aren't aware of this length of life increase that's happened. And that's a real problem because one of the things that's really important in these longer lives is to invest more in your future. And so I can't stress enough, it's not really mainly about your finances, but it's really about investing in your health and your relationships and your sense of purpose so that's why I'm getting more of an advocacy here the younger you are the longer the life you have to be compared to past generations the more you need to prepare for your future

differently well but finances certainly seems like that would be a big part of it because without the finances you really can't invest in your health and everything else because you don't have the money to do it. Absolutely. So finances are really important. But going back to those social norms, what we invented in the 20th century was a three-stage life, education, work, retirement. And that kind of worked when we were living to 70 and retired at 65 or something like that. But now, if you look at people living in their 90s or 100, we're seeing people work more and more into their 70s. I'm sure you're aware that over the last 10 years, the number of people in the US working in the 70s has doubled, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks it's going to double again. So we've got

more and more people working for longer. So that sort of solves the financial challenge, but does it? Because if you haven't looked after your health, if you haven't looked after your skills, you may not be able to get the job that you need to provide the finances that you need. So certainly you've got to worry about your finances, but your future self needs a lot more than just money. So your portfolio is a broad one. There's your finances. There's what we call your productive assets, your skills and know-how and your contacts. There's your vitality assets, which is your mental and physical health, as well as your relationships. And then another one, which is kind of important, is your ability to deal with change. Because

over a longer life, particularly with the technology trends that are coming along, you're going to country, there is this perception of how sad for them, that what a shame that they can't enjoy. And yet I talk to an awful lot of people who are at that age who said, I couldn't stop working if I wanted. I don't want to stop work. What would I do? I have nothing to do if I don't. They love to work. So what's the reality? Is it that people are having to work or people would I do? I have nothing to do if I don't. They love to work. So what's the reality? Is it that people are having to work or people want to work? Great question, Mike. And I think one of the challenges we've got about age is we misunderstand it. And in particular, we sort of think that age really pins down what people need. The key thing about ageing is diversity. Some people age well and some people

don't age well. And actually, it's a bit like all of life. People do things for all sorts of different reasons. So in the labour market, we're seeing more people aged over 65 working. And guess what? Over 65-year-olds have all sorts of different reasons for working. Some do it because they enjoy it, they fit and healthy, they get a sense of purpose and engagement, and they're really happy to carry on working. Others really don't like the job they're doing, they're not very well, but they need to do it for the finances and the health insurance. So in a way, it's just like the pre-65 market. What the data does show, going back to your question, is that in general, people who work for longer live for longer. Now, you've got to be a little bit careful with that, because if

you're doing a sort of demanding physical manual job, that's not the case. The longer you work, the quicker you die, because obviously your health suffers. But if you're doing non-manual work, the longer you work, the longer you live for. I think in general, that's just about a sense of purpose. And this is the other really interesting for. I think in general, that's just about a sense of purpose. And this is the other really interesting challenge we're seeing in society right now, because some people want to carry on being active, but they either can't work or don't need to work. So how do we find a role in our community for people? And we're seeing a number of interesting charities. There's an organization called Encore Careers, which tries to support people in using their skills and their know-how to feed back into society. Now, if you go back to that three-stage life of education, work, retirement, there's a sort of sense that old age is a period of frailty, dependency, and you retire. But as that stage now is getting longer and longer, we need to find ways to keep

people active. And of course, there's stacks of data that points to the enormous social contribution that older people can make. You had said that people are putting off starting their careers because they're going to work longer. That doesn't sound right to me because I don't know any young person who thinks, well, gee, when I'm 70, let me make decisions today based on what's going to happen to me in 60 years. I don't know any young person who thinks that way. No, I agree on that. Milton Friedman, the famous economist, has a great metaphor for this. It says, if you ask the billiard player how they do that fantastic shot where they curve the cube all round, they couldn't tell you the laws of physics, but they have an instinct about what they're doing. And it's the same thing, I think, with the development of teenagers. People

look around and say, hey, you know what? My friend's just doing a startup and he's living with a bunch of mates and doing something different, or they're traveling around the world. I quite like to look at that. But I don't consciously think they're saying, oh, I've got a lot more time. I think I'll do it. It's just, hey, that looks more fun. I've got time to get a career later. Or they think this would be a good way as getting onto the career ladder as well. So I think there's a whole mix of different things at work. Well, it's interesting that you say that, you know, we're living longer and so there's all these things to consider, but it doesn't feel like it, I guess, because suggest every 10 years, life expectancy goes up by two or three. That trend has been slowing a little bit of late, but that's the historical trend.

That's like me saying to you at the end of every day, here's another six to eight hours. In other words, I have more time in the day, I'd restructure the day. That's a little bit the metaphor I want you to think about in terms of how we're responding to this increase in life expectancy. And, you know, it is quite stunning because go back 100 years when the great influenza pandemic was happening. A 20-year-old only had a 50% chance of making it to 70 in the United States. So they kind of were young, they never got old. Now a 20-year-old in the United States has a 85-90% chance of reaching 70. So we've got to sort of think about this long-term framework much, much more. I mean, again, going back to those US statistics,

a 20-year-old US male today has more chance of having a living grandmother than they had of having a living mother 100 years ago. These are fundamental changes in the nature of the family and our life. Well, of all the things you've mentioned and the statistics you have given, the one I think I'll take away most from this is that the average age of the Rolling Stones is older than the average age of the justices on the Supreme Court. Because I think that's like a perfect example of the changes that you're talking about. Andrew Scott has been my guest. He is a professor of economics at the London Business School.

He's also a consulting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Longevity. And the name of his book is The New Long Life, A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Andrew. Brilliant. Thanks very much, then, Mike. Right about now, right about this point in the holiday season, a lot of people start to really get stressed. With so much to do and so little time left, people start to worry that they won't get everything done in time.

They won't get all the shopping done. But according to time management expert Donald Wetmore, and I remember hearing him say this a few years ago, the stress is unnecessary if you just trust yourself. Think back to any previous holiday. Did it all get done? Of course it did. And even if you didn't get every last little detail finished, it didn't matter. No one noticed. You probably don't even remember. So when you start to feel overwhelmed, just tell yourself,

it's okay, it all gets done. And in the unlikely event that it doesn't all get done, the world will not come to an end, no one will care, and the holidays will be great anyway. And that is something you should know. And that is the podcast today, This episode is sponsored by GEICO. They are my car insurance company, and they have been for many, many years. It's great to have them as a sponsor.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form

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Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Thank you.