The Road to Healthier & Longer Lives — with Andrew Scott
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Episode 302. 302 is the area code serving Delaware. In 1902, the first modern air conditioning system was invented and Real Madrid was founded. How do crayons say hello in Spain?

Crayola. Long weekend. Little rusty. Go! Welcome to the 302nd episode of the Prop G Pod. I'm in New York. By the way, it has been beautiful here. And anyone who says that New York is not doing well, I don't know what New York you're living in. My God, I think it's on fire. New restaurants.

Ton of people out. People seem optimistic. They seem happy. And I love being here. So I'm at Jack's Wife Rita. I get up. I think, should I go work out or should I go get a latte and a waffle and grapefruit with yogurt? So I pick waffle. So I go to Jack's Wife Rita. I love eating outside there.

And this woman comes up to me and says, hi, this is my son. And he's like, the kid is like 11 and says, we love your podcast. I'm trying to get my son into it. And I got very paranoid or very subconscious about the profanity of my joke. So see above Crayola, because I'm worried that this little, this young man is going to be listening and his mother is going to be horrified. Anyways, it has been absolutely wonderful, wonderful here. And I'm trying to

understand the balance between being alone and being around other people and what you do when you're alone in terms of reflection, rejuvenation,

And as I get older, it's just very strange for me and my kids. I really look forward to getting a break from them. And then literally the moment I step onto the subway to go to Paddington to go to Heathrow, I start missing them. It's very strange. I'm not entirely sure what that dynamic is. And I have a hack, which I'll do at the end of the podcast for keeping in touch with

With your kids. Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Andrew Scott, a professor of economics at London Business School, whose research focuses on longevity and aging. We discuss with Professor Scott his new book, The Longevity Imperative, Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives. I think about this topic a lot.

As you get older, you start to think about your health, and there is no denying cell death. The mortality rate is still 100. No one's been able to figure that out. But you have a decision, or the things you can't control is where do you want to start decline from. If slowly but surely you decline down to zero, where do you want to start the decline from? Because it's going to start, and what I've decided is I only have a limited amount of time left. I'm 49, 59, 60.

And I want to start from an eight or a nine such that by the time I get to zero, I'm just a little bit older. And more importantly, when I think about lifespan, I think about healthspan. And that is how do I have from, say, 80 to 90, a life of travel, being able to play or at least participate or walk around with my grandkids, be somewhat mentally sharp. That's actually my biggest fear is that I started losing it mentally. I already feel like I have some signs of that. I don't know if it's absent-mindedness or what have you.

But there's definitely a part of my brain that is leaving the building. And I'd like to think it's because other things are taking up more time in my brain or more gray matter. My brain is smart enough to try to figure out space allocation or efficient allocation of neurons or whatever you have. But you wouldn't want, I think when you get to my age, you really want to start thinking about trying to get to as high level as possible such that you can manage the decline faster.

uh, as easily as possible, but I, I'm, or as gracefully as possible, but I'm fascinated by it. The biggest shock I have found when I knew I would lose strength. All right. That's fine. The thing that really surprised me though, that I didn't anticipate how important it is, is a loss of balance. And I'm not talking about this bullshit. I want to, I want to kayak on weekends and go see my favorite DJ and work remotely. I'm not talking about that kind of balance. I'm talking about actual balance, like not falling and slipping and breaking a hip

It is so strange if you look at the human form that you're basically, I'm six foot two in my foot. I have actually freakishly small feet for someone as tall as me, which is unusual. I'm a size ten and a half, even though I'm six foot, I was six foot three, now I'm six foot two. I'm shrinking. My spine is curving. Isn't that nice? Isn't that nice when you start shrinking? Literally. Literally, I'm shrinking. I'm growing hair everywhere on my body that I don't want it.

I went into a dermatologist the other day and like, why do they even look at anything on me and pretend that they're going to evaluate it? Everything he looks at through this like weird little, weird little light or scope. And then he's like, well, that's going to have to come off. I mean, why do we even, it's like, okay, whatever you see on me, pretty soon he's going to start cutting off ears. I leave there five or seven pounds.

His name is Dr. Analik. Lovely guy. He's sort of the cosmetic dermatologist to the stars and Scott Galloway. And that's the reason that I look 58 and 7 8s and not 59, because he injects poison into my forehead, which just makes a lot of sense. And if someone had told me when I was younger and handsome and fairly athletic that I'd be letting a

a nice man inject some sort of strange toxic substance into my forehead such that it would deaden my muscles and make me look three months younger, I wouldn't have believed this person. And by the way, this guy must be a billionaire. I won't even tell you how much this costs.

And you want to tap into something, tap into vanity. You want to tap into a growth market, tap into something that helps older men feel like they can have arrested adolescence through the rest of their life. I would have never guessed I would have been doing any of this shit. My entire skincare routine is the following. Sometimes I splash water on my face. That was my beauty routine until about, I think it was about six years ago. I went on

with Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC, and I watched the show, and I looked like the land of the living dead. Why are we so horrified when we see ourselves now in the mirror when you're above the age of 34? Because supposedly you cement the way you look at actually at 39. Anyways, not what you're expecting on today's show. What else is going on? I head back to London. I'm

On Thursday, I'm super excited. I'm seeing the Champions League final with my sons at Wembley Stadium, which is a great stadium. I was surprised at the upside. I'm what a beautiful venue Wembley is. The nicest venue is actually the Tottenham Hotspur venue. But anyways, Wembley is a close second and I'm going to see Borussia Dortmund will play against Real Madrid. I'm really, really excited about this. I'm taking...

I'm taking my boy. So anyways, I got that going on. And then I kick off a wonderful summer. I'm super excited. Market my book. Start on the next one. We've just launched Prof G Markets. By the way, please subscribe and like. So anyway, summer is off to an absolutely wonderful start. All right. What else is going on? Just a quick message, a quick call out to the graduates. Congratulations. There has been a lot of

of noise around commencement and graduation. And it feels like we're either upset that a comedian is tone deaf about the challenges the youth faces or a Kansas City Chiefs kicker wants to, despite being raised by

a woman who is a physicist thinks that women's true calling is to be in the home. I actually don't mind that. Well, I shouldn't say I don't mind his views, but I don't mind occasionally. For God's sakes, you invite someone. College is supposed to be a place of provocation. The reason the Greeks put a university outside of the city center was such that people could say provocative things and have license to be provocative. That's the basis of tenure is that you don't get burned at the stake when you say, well, maybe the world isn't flat. And

And it's disappointing that people have such an emotional, triggered reaction to these speeches. Yeah. Is is, you know, does he have his head a bit up his ass or a lot up his ass? Yeah. By the way, how basically if you didn't see the speech, he was essentially saying that I think women's true calling is to be a wife. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.

How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabel, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. Fine. That's a viewpoint. I get it. And I think it's okay to have outlier viewpoints. But just realistically, we now live in an economy where women under the age of 30 are making more money than men because they're attending college in much greater numbers. And many of the higher paying jobs obviously require the certification of college and good for them.

And we also live in an economy where for the first time people aren't doing as well economically at 30 than their parents. So I'm sorry, boss, unless unless someone has a five and a half million dollar a year contract to kick a fucking ball through two uprights. I'm not sure that's realistic or very smart advice to people. But anyways, just my own advice now, my own preaching is.

There is so much controversy and so much agita and emotion surrounding college campuses and graduation right now. And the first observation I would make is that much of it has been absolutely fueled and inflated in terms of how

intense and how controversial and how chaotic it is. It isn't. There's been 2,300 arrests on campuses across the nation. About 40 to 60 percent of those arrests are people who aren't even students.

And if you look at really the numbers here, it just isn't that dramatic. Of course, the media loves to zero in on some of the most upsetting or distressing or spectacle or the biggest spectacle. So I would argue that these protests have been more spectacle than they've been significant in terms of actual scale or participation. And that's not to say that it's not important. That's not to say that these kids, you know, what they're saying doesn't have

It doesn't merit attention. It's not to say that some of the things that my view have gone on campus have been totally unacceptable. We need just to discern that we don't mistake a mouse for an elephant. But what I would also say to recent grads or to upcoming grads is that it's easy to feel like the world is a terrible place if you read the media. And the reality is it's not.

If you're coming out of college in the United States, first off, you have to recognize your blessings. And that is the U.S. does just a few things really well. We make the best weapons. We make the best software by hands down. We make the best media, especially of men in tights with a cape. What else do we do really well? College. I really hope that my son comes back to U.S. college. I

I have found having spent some time, I taught at Instituto Impreza in Madrid. I've spoken at a bunch of universities around the world and have taught and attended university in the US. And I'll tell you, we've got a lock on it. Now, are there real issues in terms of cost and this bullshit rejectionist culture? Absolutely. But in terms of just the raw experience, college football, fall leaves, land-grant campuses, a chance to marinate, meet friends.

I really do think the U.S. college experience is singular, not only in terms of the experience, but the doors it opens because of the certification and the access to incredible colleagues from around the world. The best and the brightest, should I say that? The best and the brightest become PhD students oftentimes in the United States if they have access. The richest kids in the world come to U.S. universities, I say, the first day of class at Stern, make friends with all the foreign students because their father owns the soccer team.

in Ecuador or wherever. Basically, all the foreign students, we talk about diversity in graduate schools. That's bullshit. We let them in because they pay full freight because their dad is, or their mother, is ridiculously fucking rich. So when you meet

The kids from Brazil, hey, they love to party. They're the funnest. Hang out with them. But also, they're going to be the most fun to hook up with in Rio because dad owns the biggest hotel chain in Sao Paulo and Rio. Anyways, we let in – we attract just this incredibly diverse, interesting, rich, to be blunt, and also freakishly remarkable kids into the PhD program. The PhD students at these universities are just incredible.

So you're surrounded by prosperity and achievement and professors who have their issues but are generally speaking some of the brightest people in the world trying to do good work. And coming out of college, if you were just to look at your phone all day long, you might think, wow, I'm kind of fucked or I'm entering into a world that is not a very nice place.

And that just could not be less true. Despite what's going on in the Middle East or in Ukraine, more people live under democracies than have ever lived under democracies. Life expectancy has exploded around the world. The year I was born, life expectancy in China was 46. Now it's 76. They've brought 500 million people out of poverty. We have reduced abject poverty globally by about 80%. We have vaccines for all manner of

There is real, real progress that we can be exceptionally proud of. As Warren Buffett says, the middle class person lives a better life now than the wealthiest person in the world just 100 years ago. And I realize that's small compensation when other people are vomiting their own blood.

faux life of personal experiences and things, and you are stressed out and working hard and have a lot of mental stressors. I understand that young people are facing a lot, but here's one thing I think we should all keep in mind, and I hope that young people take to heart. You have more agency than anyone in history at your age. What do I mean by that? There were traditionally all sorts of gatekeepers, the family you were born into, laws that

offered agency or success to a predetermined group of people, effectively a caste system is saying, well, you're not going to have any agency. And there's a lot of bad things about that. They would argue there's some good things about it. And that is when people feel like they have agency, they also feel like when things don't work out, it's their fault and their judge for it not working out, right? That in America, you can do anything has a dark side. And that is if you're not successful, it means you screwed up. And that's not

That's not true either. Market dynamics will always trump individual performance. The smartest thing I ever did was being born a white heterosexual male in 60s California because it just afforded me incredible opportunities. And as I've gotten older, I've realized those blessings and I've tried to be a little bit more humble.

And a little bit more, I don't know, generous in terms of trying to pay it back. Having said that, you coming out of college this year have more agency than any individual in history. You have access to influence. There are people, you don't have to go to journalism school, be a white male, find someone at CBS that likes you and finally work your way up to journalism.

CBS Morning News or anchoring something to have influence. You don't have to go through a ton of certification and elite colleges to end up at a newspaper, a shitty newspaper, and then a mediocre newspaper, and then a big newspaper to have influence.

Mr. Beast did not need to go to Hollywood, get an agent, star in a TV show and finally get his big role in a movie to have influence globally on the zeitgeist or find an agent and write an incredible novel. He started doing videos, uploaded it to an open platform, YouTube. And now more people spend more time watching Mr. Beast videos than they spend watching any television show in the world. He didn't ask anyone's permission. He didn't need permission.

parents with connections in Hollywood. He had incredible agency. Whatever issue you get behind, should you be able to articulate it in a compelling fashion that weaponizes or leverages new media, you have more agency. When I was growing up, there was no such thing as

As a person in their 20s or 30s making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I was a baller because I was making $60,000 a year right out of UCLA working at Morgan Stanley because most of my friends were making $48,000 working at Arthur Anderson. That was the difference between...

Being doing well and being a baller was 48 versus 60 grand. You just didn't have the type of opportunities. It is easier to move now. It is easier to move and more acceptable to move to a foreign country. For God's sakes, if you want to marry someone of your same sex and walk around hand in hand, that's your fucking right now. And it's a wonderful thing. You have agency now.

More important than economics to pretty much be who you want to be. Do we still have work to do? Absolutely. But you have agency. Are the headwinds really severe in some instances? Yeah. But if you're coming out of college, it means a few things. One, it means you have your shit together.

It means that you are somewhat mentally and emotionally fit. It means you're probably blessed. You were probably born into a family with a certain amount of prosperity. It means that you have the ability to play well with others. It means that the greatest wealth-creating engines in the world, the U.S. corporation, are probably going to be interested in hiring you. It means you have a base of friends that care about you and you care about. And trust me on this, all of my kind of six or eight closest buddies from college are

None of us had a ton in common other than experience and time together, and now we're just all great friends. We're really loyal to each other, and it's a source of huge comfort and huge reward. You have all of these things. You have more ability to change the world. You have more opportunities now.

to create economic security for you and your family. You have more reasons and more resources at your fingertips to try and live a prosperous, virtuous life. You have agency. We'll be right back for our conversation with Andrew Scott.

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Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Andrew Scott, a professor of economics in London Business School and author of The Longevity Imperative, Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives. Professor, where does this podcast find you?

In New York, actually. Let's bust right into it. Walk us through your idea of an evergreen agenda. Yeah. So I think, you know, we hear a lot about AI and climate change as these big trends are going to change our future, which clearly they are. We have lots of engaged debates about how we adapt and adjust to them. But we rarely talk about something I think is incredibly important, which is how we adjust to our new longer lives.

Instead, we talk about an aging society where they're just being all these more old people. But the really fundamental change that's happened is the young can now expect to become the old. In the US, 50% of children born today are expected to live into the late 80s.

And we're just not prepared for that length of life. We have to do what I call a three-dimensional longevity dividend. We already have long lives. We've got to make sure they're healthier for longer and productive for longer. And I think that's a great opportunity if we seize it, but we're not currently set up to seize it. So we struggle. So we have to be evergreen. We have to invest in our future because we have a lot more of it and it's never been as important to do so.

So give us the fundamentals of how you set yourself up for an evergreen future as a society or a country.

Well, as a society as a country, I think there's a bunch of things to be done. The first is we've got to have a health system that really focuses upon health. We've got a health system that's done brilliantly in making us live for longer. It's kind of slowed down the dying process. It hasn't slowed down the aging process. And it intervenes when we get ill. And that's a problem when you have age-related diseases. We've got a system that says, hey, when a disease sufficiently manifests itself that it's causing you a problem, come and see us and we'll try and look after you.

But with age-related diseases, once you get one of these things, the second one follows very, very quickly. You know, the United States, around $12,000 per head is spent on healthcare. Only around $350 is preventative. So that's part of it. The second thing is, you know, we hear a lot about social security problems. But again, looking at systems level,

We're very focused on making people work for longer by raising the social security age. But right now, people tend to leave the labor market from the age of 50. Age 50, about 80% of Americans are working. By the age of 65, it's down to a third. And that's not really to do with people choosing to stop work. They either get ill, they have to look for someone, they have to care for someone who's ill, their skills are out of date, or just ageism in the workplace. So how we keep people working from 50 up to the state pension age, I think, is a really key thing.

Peter Drucker, I think, said demographics are destiny. And it does feel like it's probably one of the biggest shifts in our society. I don't know if it's immigration, but this feels like it's right up there. And that is just economically in the U.S., we're about to get more than 50% of our government spending is about to go to seniors. And also in the U.S., 70% of Americans are obese or overweight. So

Let's first start. It strikes me that we're going to have to make seniors more productive. Let's just be very Darwinian about this. Seniors, quite frankly, are too expensive and not productive enough. I don't know if you agree with that thesis, but they're going to need to be less expensive and more productive if our society is going to

you know, maintain its economic vitality, if you will. So start with the economics. As an economist, I hear a lot about an aging society, which is this, there's more people aged over 65 than there's ever been. And that's a problem. Old people get ill, they need a pension, they don't work. But we underestimate the capacity of old people. And we've got to stop doing that. But I think the really big challenge is that for me, we're focusing on the wrong thing.

Because it's not an aging society with its focus on a change in the age structure of the population. The really, really big change is the young and middle-aged can now, for the first time ever in human history, expect to get old.

And we fear getting old. We worry about outliving our health, our wealth, our finances, our relationships, our sense of purpose. So we have to act now to age well. So an aging society begins when you have lots of people aged over 65. A longevity society begins when you have lots of people who live to be over 65. So I think we've got to really think about this because if we're not...

productive for longer over our life and we live for longer, we see a fall in the standard of living. So you're right, we've got to be more productive for longer. And that will, of course, involve more people working as the

older. But it's more about a new map of life, I think. It's about thinking about a career that's going to last longer than before, because you will need to be productive for longer. But right now, we have this notion that people get old at 65, and they're incapable of working, which isn't true. And it's certainly not true for everyone. And for those of us who it is true, we've got to stop that happening for the next generation. Because as I say, if we're living a longer life, we want it to be a healthy one, and we want it to be an engaged one.

So let's go to the health side. I'll put out a thesis. Obesity. If we were to attack that, I mean, that would be a good start. How do you take healthcare from being a defensive industry to an offensive industry, what you were calling preventive? What are the two or three things you would want to see happen in terms of our approach to healthcare or wellness? So two or three things is where it gets tricky. First of all, we as individuals have to do a lot more.

David Cutler from Harvard says that the most underused person in the health system today is the patient themselves. You say you're ill, you turn up and you get treated. We have to take more responsibility for our own health. That has issues about inequality, which we can return to later, but we've just got to be more mindful of our own health.

In terms of the health system, I think we're in a world where potentially we hear lots of things about how wonderful big data and AI is. When it comes to health, it could be truly phenomenal because we can now do genetic screening very cheaply. We can find out the diseases that people are most susceptible to. And we can start to target treatments so that we catch them early and keep them healthier for longer. So that would be, I think, two of the major things. There's big challenges. The health system makes an awful lot of money from doing intervention.

So the question of how we actually switch to prevention is, I think, going to be interesting. We perhaps need to have a system that's outside of the traditional health sector with its disease focus that provides cheaply access to the things that we need. Obesity is a very interesting one. I think what we need is a system that focuses upon certain key biomarkers, you know, things that say, look, if you've got this, this is a sign you're going to have disease problems later.

And obesity clearly is a huge problem, particularly in the US and the UK, which stand out. So how do you change that? Some of it is around public health, and public health has been hugely effective in the past around smoking and drinking. We tend to be very cynical about it now, but I think we can do more in that area.

Then you've got things like GLP-1 drugs, Ozempic, and those things coming along, which although my heart sinks a little bit, because wouldn't it be great if we can get behavior change to happen, at least the early evidence on those suggests they really could be a game changer in terms of bringing about future improvements in health. Well, let me go personal. You're obviously one of the top domain experts in this world. What have you done personally? How do you approach...

your evergreen strategy, your longevity, what are the things you do that you think your neighbors and your colleagues and your peers are not doing? Yeah, no, well, I think what's interesting about all of this stuff is that, you know, you hear people out there doing these extreme lifestyle hacks

I haven't got the self-will or discipline to do that. So I tend to do the basic stuff. I try and eat better. I drink less. I sleep better. So all of the basic stuff. And although that's getting a bit of a scientific makeover, what really changes my incentive to do it? At 58, I have to do things differently from my father at 58 and my grandfather at 58 because I have more future out of me. So some of that is just taking care of the basic hygienes.

As an economics professor, I've probably always been mindful about money. So I think that's something that I have been fortunate to be able to do something about. But, you know, Scott, one of the things I've heard a great deal about this topic, took me a while to get it, is we're living a longer life and what's the point of it?

You can sort of starve yourself at breakfast, you can do high-end tool training, etc. But there's a great quote by the Greek poet Pindar which says, the point of life is to become who you are, having discovered what that is. And that notion of adult development, of using a longer life to change and become who you want to be or to try and shift and to say, who really am I? And I think that's the really interesting thing about longevity. My father, born

born in 1925, was never a teenager. He went from being a child to an adult at 14. We rushed adult development. We're sort of extending adult development now. I look at my children in their 20s and 30s doing things very differently from me.

But it's not just about that first stage. I think we've got scope to try and say, actually, what do I want to do and how do I spend my time? And we're so hardwired to think of aging as about decline. We've medicalized old age. So I do hope that that's focused on adult development and saying, hey, I've always done this, but is that really what I want to try and do? So for me, that's the one I perhaps struggle with or focus on the most.

the very human thing about longevity. I think, you know, the extreme supplements and stem cell stuff gets out of the real point of this is, how do we spend that time? You know, obviously you want people to live long, happy lives. Societies go into decline when their birth rate drops. And I'm going to make a very reductive thesis that as more and more of our

of our revenues go to supporting and caring for seniors, we lack the investment, the forward-leaning investments that grow the economy. The economy, and couple that with inequality, doesn't present a very optimistic future for young people. They stop having kids, and your society becomes less productive. You have sort of, you don't have, I don't know what's the term, it's not population decline, it's population denigration.

And I always hear this notion that, okay, we have to make our seniors more productive. And this is going to sound ageist. I'm not sure they're interested in being more productive. Is that wrong? Well, I think, you know, one of the things just like,

I'm not sure how useful it is to talk about people being old. Aging is a really diverse process, and we have a rather monolithic concept of people after age 65. So I kind of agree with you. It's not that all old people need support. I think we need to be much more shrewd in thinking about, you know, for instance, in London, you get a free pass, travel pass, if you're over 60. That's kind of daft when you're an investment banker cycling to the tube station to go to work.

So we've got to think less of age as telling us something about people and think more of them as individual circumstances. So I think, you know, for me, you're right, though. I think the challenge in aging society always becomes about care homes and adult diapers. But the people who have the longest life expectancy, for whom the standard life course is no longer working, is the young. You know, in the book, there's that great Coretta Scott King quote,

The failure to invest in youth reflects a lack of compassion and a colossal failure of common sense. The young are the ones who have the longest life, and right now that traditional lifestyle of raising a family, achieving financial security, and looking forward to retirement just isn't going to make sense for them. So I think we need some pretty profound changes.

But that's all part of what I call the longevity agenda, because if the young have a reasonable expectation of living to 100, my goodness, how do they support that longer career? But I do think we need institutions to support people doing what they want. And your point about the falling birth rate, I'm not sure how much of that

is choice versus circumstance. It does seem that people around the world want to have fewer children. Now, I've got three kids. I think having kids is great, but there does seem to be something about the world, the modern world, which is partly to do with expense. You know, it's expensive to raise a family, but people do seem to want to have fewer children. And I think that's a really, part of this fundamental change has occurred to us as humans. We now have very long lives.

And we want to do things differently. But our social institutions are set up based upon old ways of behaving. 100% agree with you on the kind of the looking at social programs through the lens of age is the right way to do it. That Social Security in the U.S. should be renamed if we were on a senior security. Because it seems like we're not...

Just basing criteria on who needs it, but based on age, do you think there'll be significant changes in public policy that says, in the U.S., the wealthiest generation in history is seniors? And there's still a huge problem. A lot of seniors are retiring without money. But one, do you advocate for some sort of means test where they wouldn't, a wealthy banker in, you know, 70, 80 doesn't get Social Security? And also, what do you think of these plans to give kids jobs

You know, $7,000 on birth, they can't touch it. You treat them like infants and then when they're 65, based on previous market performance, they might end up with a million bucks or something. What do you think of these kind of

What economic ideas or what public policy ideas do you think we should be more seriously considering? Well, the only thing I'd say about giving kids money at that age, the asset management industry would love it, but I'm not sure it solves the real problem. So I think we tend to think the aging society story is about a pension issue. It's really about how we create resources over our lifetime. And finances doesn't, you know, the rate of return you get on the stock market depends upon the underlying performance of the economy. Right.

Now, just to go back to some of the issues you took about the economy, I don't know. A question I like to ask people is how much growth do you think in employment over the last 10 years has come from workers aged over 50? It's now the majority of employment growth in the rich countries. So in America, it's two-thirds of employment growth the last 10 years as workers aged over 50. In my country, it's 75%. In Europe, it's over 100%.

There's not much productivity growth these days. So all GDP growth is coming from employment growth. And all of that is coming from older workers. So I think for me, the key thing in all of this is how do we keep people active and engaged for longer? And of course, at 20, that might not seem important. But the thing that's changed is that 20-year-olds now can become a 50 or 60-year-old. I was talking to some Chinese students the other day, and I was showing them China's demographics, which are horrific compared to America's.

population's falling, number of people aged over 65 is going to be 45%. And I said to these 30-year-olds, how do you feel about all these 65-year-olds in the future? They said, it's terrible. All these old people, they're getting ill, they need a pension. I said, who are they? They said, what do you mean? I said, well, who are these old people? They said, well, they're old people.

I said, "No, they're you. They are you in 35 years' time." And that's the really tough change, because for most of human history, the young haven't become old. So we've got to make sure the young age well in a way that is productive, healthy, and engaged.

And there's, I think, no policies around that right now. Government seems shocked when I tell them, hey, you know what? At 50, four out of five people are working. At 66 in America, only one in three are. If you could half that decline, that's a 4% increase in GDP every single year.

So that's a lot of money. It's the nearest thing to a macroeconomic free lunch that I can find. So, you know, that would be where I would absolutely laser focus on how do I keep people working from 50 to 65. And of course, once you start thinking about that, you realize that someone who's 30 and in bad health with obesity, they are not going to be working at 50. So you're just storing up these really big problems.

You'd referenced China, and I read this crazy stat that I think when I was born, the average life expectancy in China was something like 45, and it's now surpassed the U.S. What has China done so right over the last generation? It has to have had the most remarkable increase in longevity likely registered in history now.

Yeah, and that's why China's got this dramatic aging society problem. It's had this dramatic increase in life expectancy and a very big fall in the birth rate in a very short period of time. So it's got that huge change in the age structure, which America has got a much more modest version of. Kind of what's happening in America is that in the future, you're going to have the same number of people of all ages from 0 to 80, basically. That's kind of where we're going to.

Whereas China, you know, you've got one child policy, so you've got one kid, two parents and four grandparents, which is just very unusual. What do they do right? Well, they kind of did what everyone else did. I mean, one of the big things to do is to lower infant mortality. And that's about nutritional intake of expectant mothers. It's sanitation and hygiene. All of that gives a really big improvement.

I think as you have fewer kids, you spend more time nourishing and looking after them. We know, for instance, that parents spend more time with children now than they used to. Whether that's a good or a bad thing, I'm not sure, but they do. So they've done just very quickly what everyone else does. I think the more challenging issue you raise is how does China, with its GDP per head much less than America, have higher life expectancy than America?

And America, the gap between American life expectancy and what's called best practice, the country with the highest, has now increased to eight years. And I think that's a staggering challenge. You know, as a macroeconomist, if U.S. GDP declines, it's over the headlines, it's policy initiatives to do something about it. But this eight-year gap now between U.S. life expectancy in countries such as Japan, that's a sign that things aren't right. But isn't it because it's poor people dying so we don't really give a shit?

Well, it's a lot about inequality, I agree. And I think if we could target, you know, we found that we know aging is malleable. And if you have low income and stressful work and poor environment, you age more rapidly. So I, you know, one of the things I think is so important is to have a target for healthy life expectancy in a country. At the moment, nowhere in government or the health system is there a target for healthy life expectancy. And I think if we did have one, we'd start to pay more attention to what would happen to inequality.

We'll be right back. So I want to pivot to another topic. Obviously, you're known or you're getting a lot of press and warranted attention for your focus on longevity, but you're a professor of economics at LBS. And I'm fascinated after being in London for two years. Amazing culture, some of the best academic institutions in the world.

fantastic, or what I call institutions that typically lead to a very robust economy. Yet the UK hasn't grown in five years. Seven in 10 IPOs of the last decade are below their offering price. And one company in the US, Apple, is worth more than the entire FTSE.

I realize it's a multidimensional problem, but what is it about the UK that it seems like it feels like it's doing something to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, that it has all the underpinnings and the infrastructure of what should be a robust country?

you know, growing a slow growth economy. What does the UK get wrong? Yeah. So, I mean, I don't send us food parcels quite yet. I mean, we're still sort of okay, but yeah, growth has disappeared as it has in much of Europe. And it's striking. Europe led the way with technology and telecoms and now is so far behind. Part of that, I think in Europe is the sort of whole single currency project.

which has absorbed huge amounts of political focus on making that work. And of course, in the UK, we've had a Brexit, which has been, in a very British understated way, call it a distraction. And that's clearly not been very, very helpful. I would say the real challenge we've got around the world is that we've got innovation slowing. So even in the US, this sort of measure of innovation, macroeconomists have total factor productivity growth has slowed down.

So, you know, there's not much productivity growth or all the hype about AI is going to take away all our jobs. Right now, the issue we've got is we've got lots of people working. Unemployment is very low, but productivity is very low. So there's a shared global problem. Then demographics on top of that mean that you've got less population growth and you've got more old people leaving the labor force.

But I would say that Brexit for me, you know, as an economist, rightly or wrongly on the politics of Brexit, on the economics, it's not a good move to make it more difficult to trade with your richest neighbors on your doorstep. And at least that has short run costs.

And then I would say that we're also seeing some issues around austerity from the financial crisis. We, you know, UK is kind of 25% European and 75% American these days. So we also have challenges around inequality. So we're seeing a lack of infrastructure investment and we're seeing problems around inequality and health. And I don't want to,

Make it look like I'm a person with a hammer is gonna hit everything every sees everything as a nail but in the UK we have three million people who are unemployed long term because of health problems and

And a large numbers of those are aged 50 to 65. So that's one of our challenges. As you have an aging population, health has first order macro consequences. In general, the UK has always been good at innovation. We're always good at inventing things. We're just not very good at then scaling them and implementing them. But no, what do you think, Scott? What do you see from being there? What do you find frustrating about British institutions, if we've got enough time for that?

My observation of London is that there's not a lot of organic value creation. It strikes me it's a lot of people servicing wealth that has been created elsewhere. Let's look at AI. Some of the most impressive intellectual property around AI was developed at Cambridge. I mean, it's literally as if they come up with ideas, and I don't know if they're not as risk-aggressive. I don't know if the regulation is overdone. You know, it's hard for me to understand. It was a genuine question why the U.K.,

doesn't have a single company really that's worth over 50 billion in AI. And yet there are startups in AI that get valued at 10 or 20 billion in the United States. It's just odd that the UK doesn't seem to be able to commercialize some of the innovation that they come up with. I just can't put my finger on it. I find the business environment in

the US is can we make money together? Yes or no. And in the UK, it's sort of like a very polite, definite maybe. Yeah, no, I still, you know, there's that cultural thing. It's been a really long-standing problem in the UK that we've got, you know, an education system that is in some ways really unstructured, which is great because you kind of have to learn things out yourself.

And that kind of leads, I think, rather unequal education outcomes. But it's great at the top in terms of innovation, but it's never fed through. And then with a focus on global capital markets, you get what we call the Wimbledon effect, which is that it's very rare that a Brit wins the Wimbledon tennis tournament, but we kind of see it as globally one of the best in the world. And that's a little bit, I think, also the implication of having a global capital market based in your home country.

I read something that sort of struck my, captured my attention. I'm curious if you think there's any merit. The productivity, per your comments, is declining. And some economists are saying that the massive decrease in corporate tax rates, tax revenues from corporations in the U.S. used to account for 3.5% of GDP. It's now 1%. Our corporate taxes are the lowest they've been since 1939, since the Trump tax cuts.

And when you have taxes this low, corporations have a really good memory. They start returning more and more money to shareholders because there's less friction to get it out to them because it's taxed at a lower rate and they invest less. And as a result, there isn't the same forward-leaning investments in plants, property, and equipment, which reduces growth. Have we cut taxes beyond kind of the ultimate balance, if you will? Is that hurting productivity?

So I think, you know, certainly I would say in the UK that some of the fiscal austerity that led to cuts in government expenditure around health and education has definitely hurt overall economic growth for sure.

On the corporate tax one, the reason given for that is that as we've made capital more mobile, as firms can just relocate anywhere around the world, you've had to lower the tax burden on it, which means that you either have to increase the tax burden on labor or you cut the welfare state and benefits. And I think that does risk losing inclusive growth. So I think that is a challenge.

I see the returning of money to shareholders less around capital taxes and more around, you know, there's not things to invest in that produce that tangible growth.

And I think that's, you know, the example people always point to is, you know, when Facebook bought WhatsApp for, what was it, $17 billion, they could have bought Sony for the same amount of money. But rather than buy a company with 140,000 people, they bought, you know, 35 mates getting together with a company. And I think that's kind of one of the challenges we've got now, which is sort of investing in intangible capital isn't very labor or capital intensive. It's more IP intensive, right?

And I think that's why we're seeing a lot of money in global capital markets, but not a great deal of productive places to invest it in, which is why we're seeing shareholder returns and low rates of return. So just as we wrap up here, I want to switch to parenting. You have three kids. Based on your research, has it impacted the way you father or any kind of habits you're trying to build in or any things you're

Any practices or lifestyle changes you're really trying to endorse and urge your three kids to adopt?

I can barely manage my own life, so I kind of always reluctantly offer advice that other people's got. But it is an interesting motivation. I started writing Getting This World when I wrote a book with a hundred-year life, and I just lost my parents. So you start to think about mortality. And I was seeing my kids make very different decisions to me, particularly my middle child who was just leaving university. Good university, good degree. He said, Dad, I'm not going to get a job.

And I was pissed, you know, and I was trying to work out why. And there was a whole bunch of factors involved. One was I think I was jealous because at his age I was working as an economist in an investment bank. And is my life in any way, shape or form better because of that? No. No.

And here he was, good-looking, young, going to travel around the world and have fun. I'd also was cross because I paid for him to get through college and I'd gone without holidays. And here he was going to have a two-year holiday. So that kind of annoyed me. And I was worried for him. But it made me realize that life is different. People are doing different things. And that got me thinking about changing the life course. So if that's an answer to your question, it's like I can't judge what kids are going through.

I think we define children by technology and all this Gen Z type stuff. But actually, one of the really big things that's changing is they're going to grow up with me and their grandparents around for a lot longer than past generations.

So working on that intergenerational stuff is key and recognizing that hopefully they can learn from me, but I can learn a lot from them as well. Because if I want to be evergreen, I've got to think about things in a different way and learn it. And I'm unlikely to learn it from people who are my age doing what I do. I've got to be a bit more open-minded.

Andrew J. Scott is a professor of economics at London Business School, having previously taught at Oxford and Harvard University. He is also the co-founder of Longevity Forum, a consulting scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity, and co-author of the global bestseller, The Hundred-Year Life. His latest book, The Longevity Imperative, Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives, is out now. He joins us live.

from the great city of New York. In my opinion, always fighting for the top spot with London. And a huge oversight. I didn't ask you what your club was. What football club do you support, Professor? I don't know. It's a private grief. I'm a Spurs fan. One of the reasons I'm- Spurs, son!

Absolutely. But one of the reasons I hope for a long life is I might eventually see us win something. But we'll see. Yeah, my oldest is Spurs. I've probably been to a dozen Spurs games. The nicest venue in the UK. We got that going for us. Well, let me know. I've got three season tickets. I go with my two boys. They can't always make it. So if you... Done. Done and done. We love it. Well, anyways, Professor, really enjoyed the conversation. Me too. Pleasure to talk.

Algebra of Happiness, just a quick hack. I love this research showing that when mothers speak to their daughters, when they text them, their blood pressure would go up. And then when they call them, when mothers call their daughters and they hear their voice, their blood pressure goes down. And I've had some interactions recently professionally where I thought this just would have gone so much better if we just jumped on the phone with each other. And something I'm doing with my boys, I'm trying to do it every night, especially when I'm on the road as I am now.

I call them on FaceTime, and I just let them hear my voice for a few seconds. How are you doing? What did you do today? You know, how are the dogs? I'm engaged in football, not because I like football. I'll stop watching once we're out of the house, but it gives me

common ground that I can ask him about stuff. And sometimes the calls are literally two minutes. Something I'm also doing, I'm working out with him. I'm kind of acting as a remote trainer just so I can, not a big deal, they're kids, they're 13 and 16, but just seven or 12 minutes of exercise. But I'd like to think that my voice brings their blood pressure down. And it's sort of saying, I'm present, I'm here. I love the notion that one of the ways you give your kids confidence and security is

is to know that you're just always there for them. That if they get their heart broken, if they lose their job, if they're feeling mentally unwell, or if they're just upset, they can just always come home. And home is not only a physical space, it's someone who's living a virtuous life, who hopefully is a good person, maybe even an impressive person,

that is always there for them, is always giving them four walls of love and comfort. And for me, the way I build that home with my boys when I'm on the road is for 60 seconds, maybe two, maybe three minutes, I call them. I want them to hear my voice. Sometimes they're not that nice to me. Sometimes they act like I'm bothering them, but that's okay. They need to know that every day I will put up with that and I will call them because I am their home. They can always come home to me. I am that voice and it's worth it to me. I'm the four walls around them.

This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Every once in a while, we got to go G just for the fans.