Society Has Everything Wrong About Ageing | Andrew Scott | Modern Wisdom Podcast 201

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 #longevity #ageing #health - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So one of the ways I sort of visualise things was 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 am I going to invest in my relationships? And so they're aware that there will come a point where you have to flip. Similarly, if you're just focusing on skills, like, that's great, you're building up your skills, but what about the other things? And that's why I think life has got more complicated, because 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.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Andrew Scott. Andrew, welcome to the show.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Nice to talk to you, Chris. A pleasure to be here.

• 0:47Chris Williamson?

  Lovely to have you here. So we're talking about getting older, kind of.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm an old man of 55, although not an old man of 55, that's one of the things. So I buckle on the air of longevity, I'm an economist. And I kind of think society's got something wrong, because we keep talking about this aging society, and you know, there's the birth rate's declining, people are living for longer, so there's more old people, which is certainly true. And the number of people aged over 65 is growing everywhere, over 80's growing, the fastest growing age group, the number of people aged over 100. For the first time ever, the world today has more people aged over 65 than under 50. You kind of get the story. And the general problem is that that's seen as a challenge, because old people are a problem, they get ill, they don't work, they claim a pension, we can't afford it.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  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 live to be 100.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  One in five girls is going to be triple figures. The Queen's going to be knackered, writing all those letters.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  I mean, the Queen apparently used to have one person sending the telegrams of 100, now she's got a department of seven.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  In Japan, they used to extend out a silver sake dish when you reached a hundred. They've scrapped it now because they couldn't afford to do it because so many people are reaching age a hundred. Um, and that, but the thing is, we kind of therefore, what that means is everyone of every, so the average Brit has never been so old, but never had so long left to live.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  What an odd paradox.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So kind of if you've got more time ahead of you, in a way you're kind of younger, not older, but you know, the, what this is, the way I put it is as follows, you've seen these big increases in life expectancy, but we haven't changed our concept of age because we measure age by the number of candles on your birthday cake. And of course, twelve months is always twelve months, but how we're aging is changing. We're actually aging better. So biological age and chronological age are, are breaking out a little bit their relationship. And if you look at the scientific research happening, they say, wow, you've got, you haven't seen anything yet. Some wild things are going to happen. You know, everyone's can live to a hundred and twenty 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 twenty four hours to thirty

• 3:20Speaker 00

  two hours, which is like life expectancy going longer, you'd run your day differently. I mean, what would you do, Chris? Would you get out of bed the same time and go to sleep the same time? What would you do?

• 3:30Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely not.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  If the day went from twenty four to thirty two.

• 3:32Chris Williamson?

  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, the moon is going to slow the earth's rotation over the next couple of billion years sufficiently that we're going to end up with some really, really long days, you know?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  I didn't know that. That's a good one. But, you know, so, so, so the, but this just pushes this metaphor 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 extra years have come from, they've kind of come at late middle age. It's like someone's inserted kind of another 20 years aged 50. And that then raises all sorts of issues because as the day, you know, going, taking the day from 24 to 32 hours. You know, I, I, I would probably get out of bed earlier and go to bed later. And 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 reached the sort of.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  And I still call them breakfast, lunch and dinner, but I'd shift them and they will be different and at different times I invent. 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 used to exist before the 20th century. So with life expectancy gains, we created these two new stages of life. Previously, you just had children and adults, you didn't have teenagers. And of course, as 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, they're having kids in their 30s rather than 20s. Again, another kind of weird stat, I think last year in the UK for the first time ever. More women over 40 had a child than women under 20.

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Which is a massive change.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  That's a huge, huge difference. And also, I, you know, we've been talking about it a lot on here, evolution in the dating market and the

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  brutal, evolution's brutal travesty about women is the, the narrow window that they have to, to have children in. And that stat that more women have children over 40 than under 20 is really, you know, that's great news for a lot of women.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Absolutely, but of course, you're then seeing all sorts of changes happen. So the other one is that on average, the divorce rate 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. It's not to say you can't succeed if you get married early, but I, it's sort of, you know, I think that's it. And although the divorce rate is falling on average, you're actually seeing the divorce rate rise amongst the over 50s. And I think just doing some back of the envelope calculations, it's probably growing fastest amongst the over 80s. Um. So, you know, I can't think of a better stat about longevity than divorces rising in the eighties because, uh, you know, it's a kind of a sign of how long you've been together and how much more time there still is to go. You're seeing rises of STDs amongst

• 6:46Speaker 00

  people aged over sixty because you're getting so much more dating happening in this sort of remarrying market. Um, so, you know, these are kind of deep changes in how we structure our life. And of course, the younger you are, the bigger the implications are. And of course, one of them, you said, you know, work expands to all the time available. Some of those years, you're going to have to spend working for longer.

• 7:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, previously, if you only had fifteen years or ten years left after retiring, you didn't really need to be too concerned about what the pot of gold was that you had kept saved up in your in your ISA or whatever it was at the time. Whereas now, that's all going to change. So there's so much to get into. I mean, to start to start with, the New Long Life, which is your book, why 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?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in two thousand and sixteen, we wrote The Hundred Year Life, which was about the this, you know, the day going as it were from twenty four to thirty two 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, the really good news is you're living longer and you're 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 was like a liberating story. One of the feedback we got was, oh, 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, you know, that's going to take over our lives. It's going to make us all jobless. And I think, you know, what's interesting

• 8:24Speaker 00

  is these two phenomena of aging and smart, you know, AI and robotics. I call it the Frankenstein syndrome. You know, there are

• 8:33Speaker 00

  We're fearful of these great inventions. We've added years to life. We've got this wonderful new technology coming along, but we think it's going to be a bad outcome. So the question is, 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 the 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 know, you saw GDP improve. You saw this great new technology, but it was a pretty bad experience socially for lots of people.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  You know, 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 technologies, these longer lives. Rather than be frightened by them, how do you make sure we actually seize the advantages of them?

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  Are people going to be working until they're 75 then and 80? Is this realistic?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Well, I think they will, and they are. I mean, it's quite staggering what's already happening. But yeah, I mean, we do some, I 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 on half of your final salary, you're probably working to your late 70s. So, um, yeah, that's, that's, so then the immediate thought is, wow, God, yeah, how's that gonna work? Because if I start work at 20 and I carry on doing the same thing to my mid 70s, that sounds pretty dull. Um, and, you know, I'm gonna get bored,

• 10:40Speaker 00

  uh, and also will I keep my job or will something happen? 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. 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 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 along the career path, because of course, you do things differently. And, yeah, for instance,

• 11:22Speaker 00

  one of the things we see is a lot of entrepreneurship by people in their 70s and people in their 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. The 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.

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  So that explains away the fact that I'm still single at 32?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Yes, you're a young man.

• 12:04Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. So that's what you're saying, Andrew, is that actually it's, it's perhaps the most prudent approach, and not, and not that I'm just hopeless, hopeless, hopelessly single. Um, 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 nineteen, twenty years old are beasts, absolute freak savages when it comes to

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  being able to think laterally, 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 fourteen years between me at thirty two and them at eighteen, nineteen, I'm sitting, I wasn't anywhere near as mature as that. And that's only in this time period, right? So you're starting to see young people being older and old people being younger.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, I think that's, and I think that's kind of right, because in that three-stage life, sort of age and stage come together. But in a multi-stage life, you can kind of, and by multi-stage life, I mean, you're going to have several different parts to your career. And this is just talking about 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

• 13:59Speaker 00

  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 at every age, because, you know, you will find people in their thirties, or their fifties, or their seventies, saying, you know what, I'm going to, I've got another twenty, thirty years ahead of me, and other fifty years, I would do 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, that's tricky. So that in a way is a transition that's kind of binds lots of different people together.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  I'll tell you what I would absolutely love. I would love to see someone in their seventies rocking up to do an undergraduate degree, you know?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Well, they are doing it, you see. 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 so so if you accept that chronological age is not a good measure of biological age, you're gonna age differently because of bad luck, the environment that you live in, and because of your own diet, behaviour and healthcare. So actually, what happens as you get older, you see this great diversity in how people age. You can be, you know, like Colonel Tom Moore in your hundreds, raising millions for charity, or you could be in a wheelchair at fifty. So actually, the older you get, the less relevant age as a number is.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  But we really just assume that age tells you something, and that therefore everyone over sixty five is the same. Now, you wouldn't dream of saying everyone under thirty five is the same, but we kind of say it for the over sixty fives. But that three-stage life of education, work, retirement led to lots of age segregation. You've kind of lost this intergenerational mixing. And I think that's that's really important. So your idea of sort of people in their seventies going back to university, it's actually happened, a number of places are doing it. And of course, it's got to be a slightly different programme 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,

• 16:15Speaker 00

  which I think really get in the way of just seeing people as people.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  Is that a by-product of just the period of change? That inevitably you do need to categorise some people into, this is the um, 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 a hundred years or fifty years, are now like a ten-year gap.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  So I think, you know, that that's the theory. And certainly, um, you know, there are modern inventions, these generational labels. They didn't used to exist. I I I think there's something in them, and you're absolutely right, that sort of theory that, you know, as the world changes, this ten years is different from that ten years. But 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 that 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, uh, you know, a child who's brought up playing with an iPad from an early age can be very different from one who, you know, for whom, you know, the telephone was uh, something uh, to use.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  So there's clearly going to be a difference, but of course, what you see is technology spread throughout society. Look at what's happening in COVID. Old people are using technology a lot more. So it does spread through. So I think the, the, the danger of the generation stuff is too far. I, there's a whiff of, um, I call it demographic astrology. I don't know if you like horoscopes.

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  I'm, I don't, but my, my, my mum does. So be careful what you say. You'll be getting, you'll be getting the message on Instagram.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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 that's quite small compared to the differences amongst millennials and amongst baby boomers. So it's, it's too easy way of stereotype. And 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 baby. And I'll tell you why it worries me, because it becomes a zero sum game.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  And why that's important is that, you know, to come back to some of the stats again, uh, a hundred years ago in nineteen twenty, when Spanish influenza happened, a twenty year old had a fifty percent chance of making it to seventy. So most young people didn't become old.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Today it's ninety percent. 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 ageism becomes a problem because it's kind of a prejudice against your future self. Uh, and so, you know, I, I think, you know, when you've got this long life ahead of you, you've got to think about different stages in different ways. And sadly, the young aren't young forever, although if the scientists get the way, perhaps that will happen. Um, and I think we, we, we forget that, you know, this, you know, you're always a millennial, you're always a baby boomer, but millennials are getting quite old now. They're, you know, they're middle aged, that the, um, you know, it's the Gen X are now the younger ones or Alpha Gen or whatever's coming through.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Uh, you might be. Um, so I don't think, so there's this smart technology coming along. I don't, I mean, it depends how smart the technology gets. There's, in the past, technology is what's made us richer. It hasn't created 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 of lots of different tasks. So just bear with me on this one. So a job may involve

• 20:31Speaker 00

  20 or 30 tasks. I'm a economics professor. I've got to do research. I've got to teach. I've got 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 were what are called routine, uh, sort of kind of non-thinking tasks, 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 technology 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,

• 21:15Speaker 00

  financial advice, the sort of the standard stuff, like give me a bunch of numbers in terms of what to do with a marketing plan, give me a bunch of numbers and calculate of an investment plan, that can all be done by AI, and it is increasingly doing so. So all those tasks are starting to get done. The other set of tasks that is happening is things like driverless cars that are non-routine. So it's unpredictable, but sort of instinctive rather than analytical. And they're also disappearing.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  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 avatar. So 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.

• 22:02Chris Williamson?

  Which I'm sure it sounds like you're absolutely thrilled about the idea of more meetings.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, exactly. But so, you know, those things that we as humans will always be best at. And I think the best way to think about what's going to happen in the labor 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. And 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. If your education keeps ahead of technology, you're doing okay.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  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 reskilling required here.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  If you were someone now who is considering reskilling themselves, how would you make someone anti-fragile for the next couple of decades in the job market?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, you know, so one temptation, of course, is to

• 23:18Speaker 00

  get involved in coding and science. And there's lots of jobs in the AI world for that. The evidence suggests 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 twenty, thirty years. And so you may have to be continually evolving and changing. Um, 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 going to 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, you know, it's a combination of what we call T-shaped learning.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  It's going deep in one dimension and then broad in others. And then every now and then you'll have a, you know, your career will change because you've gone deep in a subject, but it'll need to evolve and shift into something different. So it is facing up to the fact that probably every ten, fifteen years, you're going to have to do a major reskilling or reorientation.

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  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. Uh, 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 Gail 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 Peter C. 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.

• 25:00Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  It is. And that'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, fits in maybe 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 hardwired to do. Most of human existence has been just surviving to the end of the day, let alone planning eighty, ninety years ahead. Um, and that, that, that's gonna be a challenge. I mean, certainly, uh, for me it is. Um, but the other thing is in thinking longer term, you've got to just rewind. 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.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  And some of that is financial. But actually, the most important things that need to 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 gonna 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, I'm going to go through lots of stages. What is it that makes it all hang together? But that, that sort of thinking long term, reinventing yourself and then managing to staple it together is important. And you know, this is where the, the jobs are going to be very different because the other thing that AI is going to do is not just

• 26:31Speaker 00

  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 tasks. 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've got a job, sometimes it's more task based. Sometimes it's flexible work. Sometimes it's uh, uh, not contingent. It's a proper job. Sometimes you'll be working onsite. Sometimes you'll be working at home.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  So you're going to be cycling through all of these different stages. And sometimes it will be a choice. You know, I, I don't want that full time job. I want to work in the gig economy. Other times it's going to be shit. I really want a job, but I'm stuck in the gig economy. So it's going to be a lot of that. So I think that leads to some big changes because you mentioned work-life balance. Don't get too historical here, but I, I would hazard a guess that work-life balance came in with industrial revolution. Because what the industrial revolution did was create a place of work and a place of home. Before, 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

• 27:51Speaker 00

  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, will 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, or I'm networking, or I'm doing some charity work. And it's a sense of productive use of time, but I'm not getting a cheque for it. And viewed 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.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  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 you're concerned, 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?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  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 really a 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, 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.

• 29:35Chris Williamson?

  Crack on.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  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 you know, I've got the money locked down. That's good. And so it's really about thinking about how your future then may unfold. And you know, 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. I saw it's 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.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  And normally earning large amounts of money involves some form of commitment. But you know, heck, if it's, if it bothers you, the money, and if you can get a job that you really enjoy that brings in money, go for it. But I think, um, yeah, uh, and certainly compound interest really helps. The, the, the best advice I ever heard is just to have as much your earning, try and put aside a fixed percentage into a long-term pot. And, and I think that's right, even if it's just a, you know, five pounds a week or something like that. Um, it, it, it really does make a difference. Um, so that, that would be the, the, the best advice. But that's not about basing everything around money. It's just making sure you have a pot that is that long-term pot.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Yeah. It's, uh, it's interesting to hear the explore exploit paradigm come back out again. It must be, it's like one in four guests talks about

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 31:14Chris Williamson?

  talks about that. Um, I, I, more, more guests in this year than I can, than I can name have come up with that dynamic.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  So it's, so one of the ways in a hundred and I, I sort of visualize things was it's like you're playing a computer game. You've got these four, uh, indicators, finances, uh, skills, um, help 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.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  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 am I going to invest in my relationships? And so they're aware that there will come a point where you have to flip. And similarly, if you're just focusing on skills, like, that's great. You're building with 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.

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  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 accruing this wisdom, you know, there isn't.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  There isn't. And that's both, you know, it's called liminality, that sense of sort of, you know, in-between-ness, where you're neither betwixt and between. Of course, it can be exciting because like, I can, you know, I don't have to do what 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 going, oh, that looks interesting. I mean, it was, as part of the Hundred Year Life, I started reading up about how we invented teenagers. And it's kind of just fun, how we invented teenagers. You know, for most of human history, you became, went from a child to being an adult, and it occurred sometime between 12 and 14. And then suddenly, with industrial revolution, we extend schooling.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  And suddenly, you know, people at school to 14, 16, and now 18. And 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 soxers and the stuff. Oh, no, the first thing was like the Boy Scouts and the Boys Brigade. It was stick them in uniform, give them some discipline, and you know, that's what you do.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  Children, little children army, yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Then it was the bobby soxers, which was sort of, you know, it's being middle aged when you're young. And then kind of James Dean comes along. It's like, that's it. That's what teenage years are. It took forty, fifty years for society to work out how to use that time. And now, of course, we all know what teenagers are, and we know what they do. It's kind of a rite of passage. But we're seeing the same thing, I think, in people's twenties. I think we're also seeing the same thing in people's fifties, where it used to be called a midlife crisis, but now I think it's called something different. And also people in their seventies behaving very, very, very differently. I mean, I, you know, the average age of the Rolling Stones, I know this is a good or a bad example, it's like mid seventies or something. And

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney turned like seventy two the other day, didn't he?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. But then of course you see other things, like, I think, how old is Prince Charles? Is he seventy one?

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Whatever they're giving the Royals, man. Like, whatever they're doing to them, they're some N A D booster direct from Doctor David Sinclair.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  There's a lot of, a lot of, but, yeah, no, the David Sinclair, but, you know, but he's seventy one and he still hasn't got the job. That's the interesting thing.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  How long am I supposed to wait for this thing?

• 35:19Speaker 00

  It's gonna be the oldest mon, if he comes to the throne, it'd be the oldest monique ever to come to the throne.

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, a perfect example of this as well. Let's look at the presidential candidates.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's getting older. And people say, I mean, the criticisms about Biden seem to actually hold, 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 seventy, seventy is like, what, like maybe fifty five or sixty now? And forty back then is probably closer to like fifty five now. It's, everything's changed.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  JFK was not as long as you think, and actually in pretty poor health, which is also quite interesting. But, yeah, he had all sorts of health ailments. But, but I think this is where the sort of the generational label's come in, because, you know, 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, you know, if our leaders get older and older, how to then younger people get their voice heard. And I think that is a challenge. Comes back again to these intergenerational vehicles we have to create.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  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 1,000. And 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, that's forever away. But we are, that will be a spectrum. Someone's not going to one day just be a thousand. Someone will be 150, then they'll be 200, then they'll be 250, then they'll be da, da, da, da, da. And like, we are seeing this happen in front of us

• 37:12Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:32Chris Williamson?

  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 at, and then potentially even take a dip. So that's going to push the average age even further up.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  It is. And I know David, well, in fact, I'm writing with David. So and, you know, I look at the how society adapts to longer lives that already happened. And 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 and it's really going to be malleable. Now, I don't, I'd never know what to make of those claims. It's pretty clear that what is happening is an interesting shift. As we get older, chronic diseases get more important. Cancer, dementia, heart disease. And if you've got all of these, they're all correlated strongly with age. The biggest risk factor in getting cancer

• 38:32Speaker 00

  is age, not smoking. Not that smoking is a good thing, but you know, it's, so what a bunch of people are saying is let's focus on slowing down aging.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  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 they'll be behaving differently. And, you know, we said earlier that seventy is the new sixty, it's not really, seventy is the new seventy. Because you may have the health of a sixty year old, but you've got ten more years of road 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.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  The Chinese population's going to go from one point four to one billion over the next thirty years. There'll just be four hundred million people less.

• 39:33Chris Williamson?

  That is insane.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  And of that one billion, forty five percent will be over sixty five.

• 39:39Chris Williamson?

  Is this all because of this single child policy?

• 39:42Speaker 00

  So, I mean, it's basically because when you grow very fast, your birth rate falls 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 rate's fallen 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 who are going to be most affected by this. And the challenge we've got is that if I, when I say to people, how long do you think you're 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.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  And then about a third of people stick their hand up in the class when I ask this. And I say, okay, so what information did you use? And they'll say their grandparents. Now, if you look at the data, and it's a big argument whether it's going to carry on or not, over the last a hundred years, in every decade, life expectancy's gone up by two or three. Which basically means that every generation is living six to nine years longer than their parents and twelve to eighteen years longer than their grandparents. So if you base yourself on your grandparents, if that trend continues, you're out by eighteen years. So wow. And then it's like, great, it comes back that the day going from twenty four to thirty two hours long, don't just use it all at the end of life, you can use it right the way through.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  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 seventy five, seventy six, which is gruesome in one single block. So, you know, to me, you know, 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 structure of life isn't working for anyone. The younger generation are saying, you know, I can't get all the things that past generations did. I can't afford a house. I won't get a pension. I won't never secure a job. Absolutely, they need to do things differently. But actually, it's not working for people in their fifties because they're now trying to work to their seventy. And there's 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

• 41:54Speaker 00

  in care homes to recognize that we don't have a way of looking after people in the end of life. So at all ages, we've got to try and come up with what Laura Carstensen at Stanford calls a new map of life. It's particularly urgent the younger you are, which is saying, which is great to be talking about this, but to focus on, 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 end of life.

• 42:19Chris Williamson?

  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 a 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, um, 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, and, and also agree with everyone else, right? So

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Where does the book stop with this? Or where does it start? Actually, where does the book start with this?

• 43:06Speaker 00

  So the new Life, the latest book, which looks at technology and longevity entwined. 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 if you worked for them. Health is incredibly important and, you know, I think there's more awareness in younger groups about the importance of investing your health and keeping fit for the future. But again, that's an example at responsibility.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  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 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 years, candles on the cake, et cetera? 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.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  They have to start thinking about recruiting 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 we said 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 you 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.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Or they can use technology to augment workers, to improve what they do, the quality of the work, quality of the product and productivity, and so wages.

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  Why would they do that from a business's perspective?

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Because they make more money.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  They make more money by including, by remaining, keeping workers there. How?

• 45:34Speaker 00

  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 we'll be able to tell you about what your health is. So we could get rid of lots of health workers. But what would 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 then what you're doing is freeing the teacher away from the mundane routine stuff,

• 46:17Speaker 00

  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 am. I have an instructor. Why 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 worries me particularly post-COVID is that firms will just use technology to cut costs. And I'll be stuck on a phone to some pretty shit piece of technology that is very frustrating, doesn't provide me a good service and has made someone lose a job. So there must be an incentive that the government can provide through the tax system.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  So for instance, in America, and I think it's probably the same for the UK, there's lots of incentives for firms to invest in capital equipment because they get a write-off. So let me invest all the AI, I get a 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 revolution, there was lots of automation. The second stage of industrial revolution was much more augmentation. So this comes back again to starting a 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,

• 47:43Speaker 00

  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 aimed to 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? Um, I think Karpov 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.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  We're not very good at being machines. That's, that's why calculating numbers is difficult. Machines are great at that. We're good at being humans.

• 48:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are correct. It's, um, it's interesting. I think it was 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 at from the artificial general intelligence insight community, it would appear that proper broad spectrum AGI is actually moving very slowly. The narrow general intelligence is getting very, very good, but the, the ability to compile and synthesize all of these different pieces of information is still where the competitive advantage

• 49:19Chris Williamson?

  for the very foreseeable future is going to lie for humans. Is that something you agree with?

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a whole bunch of issues here. So there's, you know, what task you do in your job, which gives you some defense. There's regulation may defend you, but then there's that one about, you know, we're still some way off the singularity if ever it's going to happen. Um, 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 as only one becomes cheap, it also starts to rival. But there should be, I mean, I think this is the trouble with technology is that the technologists, I think, fall for two problems and economists have problems of their own, but the technologists, they exaggerate how fast the technology is coming.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Um, you know, driverless cars have come along in leaps and bounds, but still most of the cars on the road are not driverless and there's some way before they will. And that's not about the technology, that's about just implementation.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  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 were destroyed. You know, the farming jobs were destroyed, but we invented a whole bunch of jobs that no one could have predicted. Some of those jobs are about supporting the machines, but actually, most of them, like the managerial roles, et cetera, 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 them aimed at supporting the AI and the technology. But in general, there'll be a lot of jobs that'll be very human orientated, exploiting that comparative advantage that humans have.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  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, that hopefully is what we will see.

• 51:12Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, Rory Sutherland, past Modern Wisdom guest and fantastic behavioural psychologist. He, he talks about how he thinks Silicon Valley sees everything as an optimisation 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, right? So you can have something which by every objective measure was great, but it did the thing that it was supposed to do.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  The machine which is going to be your new comedian, right? The machine can tell a joke which logically, rationally, deliverably 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 programme for.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's 100%. And, you know, that's a nice ball walk. And by the way, you know, there's lots of great advantages to come. My, my worry is that if, 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

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  That's where the power is, right? The disproportionate amount of power.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:38Chris Williamson?

  So what is it? Is it, we kind of touched on it there. Like, is it, is it legislation? Because it's all well and good. Me and you and David, Dr. Dr. Sinclair, saying, we need to think more about aging. We need to think very carefully about how jobs are being replaced. But like, who are we? Who am I 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?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think this, this comes back. So, you know, I, I, I do think it is 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.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  If you go back to industrial revolution, which I, I, you know, still tailors so much of our life. You did see, is only with the spreading of democracy and the rise of the labour 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 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 homogeneous. 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. And I think this is where we are in a difficult situation because

• 54:05Speaker 00

  For a society to be healthy, just two pretty simple things have to happen. The first is everyone has to feel that in some way they're benefiting from the economic achievements and growth that's happening. And the other 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 aren't working, so what do we want to replace it with? But we do seem to in that interim period at the moment where we've got more people looking back, either trying to preserve the system or complain about it rather than advocating something going forward.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  I think that's inevitable because, you know, 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.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  But this, I think, is where the AI stuff can become dangerous because if the AI just generates jobs for a certain type of people. And if, you know, 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've got lots of social divisions. We've got people being excluded from the political process and that never ends well. So I think, you know, that's why, to me, how to make this happen, it's civil society. It's a social debate that then says, I want this. And I'm hoping in COVID we'll see something that lasts because I do think in COVID we've learnt that we cannot rely upon firms.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  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 of late. And I think that's a healthy sign going forward if we can carry on with that.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  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's 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 risk. Phenomenal, you would adore it. It's brand new. He also is part of this Future of Humanities Institute at 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

• 56:45Chris Williamson?

  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 sorts of stuff, and we've got all this crazy evolutionary heritage and we're tribal and we're basically just shaven apes that somehow are able to impact our own will and all this sort of stuff. I think, oh God, like, how are we even able to step out onto the street without ripping each other to shreds? But on the 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 space,

• 57:26Chris Williamson?

  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 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.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  Well, that's kind of what we're saying in the new life. I mean, my thought in the new life at the beginning is, you know, we've shown this great technological ingenuity in making lives longer and healthier and inventing this extraordinary new technology. So we 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, when I'm sitting on a plane, I'm putting my life in the hands of people that I just don't know and will 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 interpersonal trust.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Now, of course, when society starts to become fractured and this group are excluded, then that trust starts to disappear. But I do think ultimately, you know, there is a deep-seated sense of trust in humans and that has to be what we, that 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 carry on doing that.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  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 is interesting?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  There's a website for the book and then there's my own website as well, which we'll give you a link to. But yeah, start with the book and start the narrative and start thinking.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Thank you so much for your time.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Thanks, Chris. It's been a blast. Thank you.