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

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Andrew Scott, and we're talking about longevity. Society has never been so old, and also never had so long to live. More women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20 in 2019 And one in five women born today are going to live to be 100 based on predictions for the UK population. All of this means that our existing paradigms, what we think of as age, old, mid and young, are pretty much out the window. Every generation that lives is eight years older than the generation before, which means that every three generations lives for another generation. All of these knowledge bombs sadly are not mine, but they're Andrew's and you're going to get to hear this and much more in this episode. He's a wonderful speaker, the book is fantastic, The New Long Life. You're going to love this episode. So cool. We get into some stuff to do with society's interpretations of age, how people can re-find their careers, lifelong learning, romance, everything. Really, really cool. I am getting tons of messages about the Modern Wisdom Academy. And this Monday, I've got the first ever Modern Wisdom Academy episode note going live for free. And I'm going to tell you how you can get a hold of it before the episode on Monday. I want to get some feedback about the format and the way that it looks and also gauge interest for how many people really want this Academy product. I know that it's a lot of you. I'm so excited about this. I don't think I've ever been so excited to get a project off the ground. The opportunity to get the best podcast notes writers on the planet to summarize all the key learnings, the main takeaways, the best quotes from every Modern Wisdom episode ready for you the day that the episode goes live gasses me up so much. It's going to maximize everyone's retention. It's going to supercharge your progress. I'm just so excited. I don't think there's another podcast on the planet that's doing this. So yeah, this is going to be sick. Monday, you'll get to find out. You'll also get the Olly Marchon episode notes. That's the one that we went for. We chose the Olly Marchon episode considering it was super popular and there was some real sort of mic drop quotes in there. So yeah, we're going to get those notes up and available for you on Monday. And you get to check out a little bit of a preview for the Academy.
But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Andrew Scott.
It's lovely to have you here. So we're talking about getting older, kind of.

**Andrew Scott** (2:54)
Yeah, and I'm an old man of 55, although not an old man of 55, that's one of the things. So I work a lot in the area of longevity, I'm an economist. And I kind of think society's got something wrong, because we keep talking about this aging society. You know, there's the birth rates declining, people living for long, because there's more old people, which is certainly true. I mean, a number of people aged over 65 is growing everywhere, over 80 is 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 five. 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 and we can't afford it. But actually, I think we need to flip it around and actually look what's really happening, which is on average, we're living for longer, and we're healthier for longer. So whatever age you are, you've got a lot more time ahead of you. And certainly the younger you are, the more time you have got ahead of you. So the UK government in 2018 said one in five girls would live, born today would have to be 100

**Chris Williamson** (4:02)
One in five girls is going to be in the triple figures. The Queen's gonna be knackered, right in all of those letters.

**Andrew Scott** (4:10)
I mean, the Queen apparently used to have one person sending the telegrams of 100, and now she's got a department of seven.
In Japan, they used to send out a silver Saki dish when you reached 100 They've scrapped it now because they couldn't afford to do it because so many people are reaching 100 But the thing is, we kind of therefore, what that means is every one of every, so the average Brit has never been so old, but never had so long left to live.