Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn so that we can operate at our highest point of contribution. What would you do with an extra hour in your day? Would you use it to be even busier, or would you use it to create space to think? This isn’t a hypothetical question. We are all faced with this scenario now because of the launch of a whole array of AI tools, including ChatGPT, and so this is part one about how to use AI to make a more essentialist, effortless lifestyle. By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to choose wisely how to use AI in your life. Let’s get to it.
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this podcast, and if you are not one of those people, subscribe right now, pause, subscribe, and then make it easy on yourself to get new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Mauro, welcome to the podcast.
Mauro Guillén:
Oh, Greg, thank you for having me. I’ve been longing for this interview here today.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that’s a very kind thing to say at the beginning. I mean, you and I, we can’t say we go way back. It was all quite recent, but we met at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, and you made time in my very first week there to meet with me, which I appreciate, and I thought that you were going to be around at Cambridge longer than I was, but this is not what happened. My enjoyment is cut off short.
Mauro Guillén:
Life surprises you, and there are many twists and turns, unfortunately.
Greg McKeown:
Well, you have done some great research on a new book, and we’re going to get to that, but I am curious about that journey. When you started the journey, did you expect to be that a decade?
Mauro Guillén:
I assumed it to be five years plus another five years, which is a decade, yes. But then, of course, my wife didn’t move to the UK, and we had to reconsider everything because personal life and family I think is more important than work.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, well, I mean, look, you don’t have to convince anybody on this podcast of that because we believe in doing what’s essential. Nevertheless, I wondered if the experience itself was what you expected it to be.
Mauro Guillén:
Yes, it was. Cambridge is a lovely place. It’s quaint. You can easily go to the big city if that’s what you want to do on a given day, but Cambridge is this amazing place where you meet all sorts of people, including yourself.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that’s a kind thing to say, and it is good to have you here. You have been doing new research, it seems, in a way to be an extension of the work that you’ve been doing before in these series of megatrends every 10 years, looking at what will be around the corner in 2020, then in 2030, and so on. But this is a little different. Can you tell us a bit about this new book?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, this new book is about what I think the future of how we live our lives is going to look like. We are seeing major changes in the world, including the decline in the number of babies and also the fact that we live longer. And finally, we see technological change shaping everything we do at work, at home, and during our leisure time. And so the book is about the perennials, how we are seeing everywhere that people are no longer really acting their age in the same way that they used to, that people are rejecting those stereotypes about old and young and what you should be doing at different ages. That’s, in a nutshell, what the book is about.
Greg McKeown:
Now, the word was perennials, and the idea, if I’m not mistaken, is to distinguish this from millennials and all of the other vernacular that we use for each microgeneration that comes along and how we are supposed to think about each group as having a particular set of behaviors and mindsets, and we think about it in a sort of very group way. But what you are saying is that you see evidence that we are shifting past what you think are artificial determinants of behavior.
Mauro Guillén:
No, absolutely. I mean, I think we’re moving into a post-generational, if you want to put it that way, kind of society and economy where once again, we are not restricted to whatever is age-appropriate. So, in other words, we can see people learning and attending school at a very advanced age, which is something that didn’t really happen in big numbers until now. Or we can see that we have multiple generations in the workplace, or we can see that our usual living arrangements, which was if you remember the nuclear family, you remember Little House on the Prairie. That’s from your part of the world, in a way. So we are no longer seeing two parents and one or more kids, plus a refrigerator, a washing machine, and a car in every household. Now we’re seeing more complicated patterns and living arrangements out there.
Greg McKeown:
Let’s come back to this point that you made as part of the trend that there will be fewer children. So a very surface understanding is that we have an increase in population the world over that it’s going to go on in a sense forever. I’ve definitely heard of people being alarmed by that, and maybe there are alarmists involved in that conversation, but when you actually look at the data, you find a very different trend. Can you talk a bit more about that?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I mean, this has been going on for quite a while already in very rich countries like the United States or Europe or Japan, even in China, which is an emerging market that the number of babies has been dropping for the last 30, 40, 50 years, depending on the country. So the last time we had a baby boom, for example, in the United States was in the 1950s. The last time that there was a baby boom in Europe, including the UK, was in the late fifties, in the early sixties, and so on and so forth. So this number has been dropping, and to the point about the size of the human population on earth, I think we can safely assume that by the year 2060, 2070, and 2080, we will reach a maximum. We will reach a plateau. In other words, that the population will probably not grow any further than that, whether that’s at 9 billion or 10 billion human beings. We shall see. But I think every demographer, every expert on population these days is projecting that the population on earth, a human population that is, will reach some kind of a plateau.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, and there’s a narrative that still exists that this is just growing exponentially, and yet when you look at it, you find that it’s a completely different shape than people are expecting because even while you have some countries in the emerging markets where population is increasing, as you say in the developed countries, you find that we aren’t even at the level of continuation of our existing population sizes. Can you speak specifically to Japan, for example? That was one of the earlier countries to reach this point.
Mauro Guillén:
Well, Japan is one of the countries where fertility, meaning the number of babies per woman, has been dropping for the longest time. And as you know, they have a serious process of population aging. They have 30 to 35% of their population above the age of 60 already, and that is just a new situation that we haven’t seen in the world before. We are new to this process by which there are more grandparents than grandchildren, if you allow me to put it that way. So just imagine that kind of a world.
Greg McKeown:
Well, what does that mean? I mean, let’s slow that down for a second because you shared that with me in our previous meeting, but this idea, there are more grandparents than grandchildren in Japan today. That’s a current situation. Is that correct?
Mauro Guillén:
When you were growing up, when I was growing up, remember there were many grandchildren, right?
Greg McKeown:
Yes. The ratio is completely different. It’s completely
Mauro Guillén:
Different.
Greg McKeown:
The assumption is that for every grandparent, you’re going to have multiple children and then even more grandchildren and it’s shaped, it’s a tree shape in its expansiveness. But that has not been true for Japan and elsewhere for, as you say, some time now. What are the ramifications of that trend on the social programs that have been built in these governments?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, the first obvious consequence is that we have perhaps too many schools and too many colleges, too many seats in educational institutions. Also, we think, unless, of course, we have people of different ages also studying. The other thing is that we have pressure on social programs, healthcare, and pension systems. Those are the obvious ones, but there’s several other things that are going on. So, for example, we have more and more people who are living alone. They don’t have any children. They don’t live together with anybody else in the United States, for example. It’s up to 30% of households now have a single individual. Now, some of those, of course, are widowers or people who lost their spouse or partners, and their children are already gone. But there’s a lot of young people as well, living alone, 30% in the US.
Greg McKeown:
I just spoke to somebody a couple of Sundays ago who shared how for six months he’d lived in isolation, complete isolation because of, I won’t say, the pandemic, but because of the lockdowns around the pandemic. And then the next week, a completely different person I spoke to who had the same situation for two years because he’d been furloughed at work and he has no immediate family, and he wasn’t allowed to travel. He had total isolation, as isolated as I think a person reasonably can be for two years, and they’re, of course, not isolated incidences. So the ramifications of this are, of course, on multiple levels, but have you looked at what the ramifications are at the psychological level?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, not at this point in particular. The book doesn’t really talk about the problems of people who are lonely unless we’re talking about people who have decided to retire and they feel lonely, not because they don’t have somebody else living in their household, but because they have been by retiring, they cut themselves off from their social circle at work.
A very important motivation for something that is also changing right now, which is what we see so many people who retired or partially retired, and then they decide to go back into doing something, whether it is by getting employed again at a company or organization, or they decide to do some or perform some work over the internet in the form of gig work or as freelancers, a big wave that we are seeing right now in that respect, especially in the United States, where it is so much easier to do that than in other parts of the world, whereas there are restrictions imposed by governments on what you can do once you retire.
Greg McKeown:
One of the things that’s so interesting just to pick up on here in this theme is that over that same period of time that you’re describing with this population change, there’s been this massive increase in Alzheimer’s. There has been an 87% increase in Alzheimer’s cases over the last 10 years, which means that you can’t explain it by genetics. You have to accept that there’s a lifestyle element to Alzheimer’s. And so what you’re describing as this increased longevity of the human experience combined with the old rules and social expectations of retirement around 65 means that you can have 20 or 30 years of disengagement. And I think you add to it this other factor of, okay, there aren’t as many grandchildren. There isn’t the family dynamic in that meaning necessarily. I don’t know. It’s just an interesting unintended consequence of increasing longevity at some level without changing the habits, behaviors, and lifestyles that will help to have strong mental cognition into those later years. Your thoughts?
Mauro Guillén:
Yeah. Well, it gets even worse than that, Greg, because it’s not only that people retire and then they stay at home. They’re cut off from their social circle at work, and that contributes to the development of some of those conditions like Alzheimer’s. But it’s even worse because what people do when they retire, on average, is that they watch more tv, and that actually compounds the effect of the social isolation from not working. It actually compounds it.
Greg McKeown:
What does that mean? Doesn’t surprise me. What does it mean?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, because you’re passive and you’re just listening to the TV, right? It’s not interactive, and you’re not talking to other human beings. You’re not doing what we all do all day long, which is interact socially. So it is also those bad habits that, on average, people, not everyone, but on average, people acquire during retirement that then exacerbate that effect that you were talking about.
Greg McKeown:
It’s hard for me not to see in these trends that we’ve discussed so far and others that we could point to a really concerning trend about the disconnectedness of people. I had Jeannie Allen on the show a few months ago, who wrote Find Your People. And one of the things that she points out is that in a previous generation, if you didn’t have the eggs you needed, if you didn’t have something, you’d go and knock on your neighbor’s door, and you’d bother them in a light way, and then if they needed something, they’d bother you. But of course, now we can just go to the shops, or we can get Amazon to deliver something really quickly. And so you aren’t as connected as a community if you say the same thing about this discombobulation of the traditional family experience that you have 30% of people living completely alone. If you add to that the lockdowns, it strikes me as not surprising that we are seeing the kinds of statistics we are about social isolation, that the number of friends, men, and women identify as having has considerably been reduced over the last 10 years, but the trend has been going for the last 30 or 40 years. Am I right to feel concerned about this?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think we should be concerned about, precisely yes, that erosion of a community, this is a theme that has been around already for quite a while. It started with another book, if you remember, The Lonely Crowd, and with Habits of the Heart, another book that documented all of these things that you’re talking about. So we have Google now; we have other search engines. If we want to learn about something, like, for example, when is the next collection of trash on your block? Before this, we would knock on the neighbor’s door, but now what we do is we go online and we check on it. Right?
Greg McKeown:
What do you see AI’s role is going to be on the trends that you are talking about?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, AI, I think, is a revolutionary technology. There’s no question about it, but I think most people are assuming that the main effect will be to replace human beings doing this or doing that, perhaps including being a host on a podcast or being a professor in the classroom like myself, that AI armed robots might be able to do your job and my job much better than what we can do. But I think AI will also complement human abilities. I’m going to just give you an example that I talk about in the book, which I think is really important. So we have had, for the longest time, this resistance on the part of companies to hire employees in their fifties or their sixties because they prefer to hire younger workers. And you see employees in their fifties and their sixties or potential employees, they have one big advantage.
They have experience, but it is also the fact that they have one ostensible disadvantage, which is that they are suffering from cognitive decline. I’m in my late fifties. I’m sure I’m already suffering from cognitive decline at some level, and I see AI as perhaps being able to help people at age, whatever it is in their fifties or their sixties or even beyond that, who would like to continue working because they find fulfillment, because they do not want to be isolated and so on and so forth, to be able to perform as if they were in their twenties, help by AI. I think we’re emphasizing too much how AI is going to replace us. I think we need to think more positively, more optimistically, about how AI may increase our capabilities, especially when we see that we’re declining in certain respects, for example, with age when it comes to cognitive power.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk has described AI in a variety of ways. Of course, he sees there being cataclysmic risk associated with the unregulated explosion of really high-competence AI tools. So there’s that version, but at the same time, he’s sort of describing, well, the Tesla bot and how this will be able to revolutionize robotics and be able to provide specialized robots for healthcare or in elderly homes or during surgeries, or is even suggested bringing joy to children in hospitals. I mean, there are all of these other scenarios, but when I was in Davos, there was a panel that I attended with three of the world’s leading authorities in robotics or not authorities. I mean, they’re practitioners. They’re using robotics. They have companies at the cutting edge of this, and I was trying to get behind the machine and to say, are you really imagining that this can meet the emotional or the spiritual needs of another person? And really, they just kind of sidestepped the whole question and just answered whatever they had pre-planned to answer. But I’m curious about your own thoughts about this as there are these trends moving together. Do you have an optimistic view of this disconnected feeling that many people have right now?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think right now, what a lot of people are thinking about is the immediate implications of what it is that they do. And most people I talk to, what they’re doing is trying to see how AI, especially large language models like ChatGPT and so on and so forth, how they can use them to do better what they’re doing. So I think Greg, there can be two effects on this, right? One is that we become so much more productive that instead of needing, let’s say, five lawyers at a law firm, young lawyers helping document the case who are looking at all of the jurisprudence on it and so on and so forth, you can actually get the same work done with two human lawyers, plus a very good application of ai. So this is what traditionally technology has done, that it has increased productivity. That doesn’t mean that all lawyers will be without work. That means that we are going to need fewer lawyers to get the same amount of work done, and perhaps the work could be done or completed also more accurately by AI, depending on what we’re talking about. That’s one scenario, and people feel threatened by that because they know that perhaps there won’t be as many jobs available to them.
Greg McKeown:
Let me ask this in a different way. In the book 2030, or in your new book, have you specifically drilled down on the trend of AI?
Mauro Guillén:
Yes, I have referred to it in The Perennials and also in 2030, my earlier book, in terms of how it may have an impact on the way we organize our lives moving forward. I believe that AI is probably going to increase our leisure time if we can increase productivity by that much. But inevitably, like every new revolutionary technology, it’s going to benefit a few people. It’s going to have quite bad effects on others. So it will be, at the end of the day, incumbent upon us to make sure that nobody’s left behind because of this new technological revolution. Now, that’s one aspect, but before you asked me this last follow-up question, what I wanted to say was that I think the vision that some very pessimistic people have is that we could have a blending or a merger between robotics and AI, and we could have robots out there that, for example, could wage war, or could tasks, or could even come to dominate humans in the most extreme pessimistic views about the matter. So I think the most bleak scenarios, the bleak scenarios are those that have to do with the convergence of robotics and AI.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I remember Elon Musk talking about this before Chat GPT, certainly before OpenAI was a household name. He just said, when people say to us, well, there aren’t robots on the streets with machine guns. He’s like, yeah, by the time that happens, it’s over. It’s like it’s too late to have the conversation then. And, of course, there are many other scenarios. AI can have these kinds of, it seems to me to be a megatrend of megatrends, right? It’s something that is going to influence and already is influencing enormous areas of our lives and moving at such a rate. I’m thinking here now of the president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, who wrote a book called Tools and Weapons, and he was trying to outline how technology has, of course, both aspects, as you were just mentioning, it can be a tool, it can be a weapon. I mean, at least he was allowing for both. My experience in Silicon Valley is that very often, we are planning for the upsides, sort of assuming that there won’t be downsides, that it’s an asymmetric scenario, that all technology is an asymmetric thing in our favor, but then, of course, you have these unintended consequences. What was the most surprising finding in your new research?
Mauro Guillén:
The most surprising finding in The Perennials is the extent to which we are seeing, especially among people above the age of 50 or 60, that they’re adjusting to this new situation by doing things that normally you wouldn’t see among those people. So lemme just give you a couple of examples here, please. We have in China about 320 million people above the age of 60, and one-third of them, one-third, are right now attending college. They’re attending special schools that the government has set up for people above the age of 60, and they’re learning new skills, and they are then using those skills to pursue some kind of an occupation. Not always, but quite frequently for pay, right? So this is extraordinary, I think.
Greg McKeown:
Is it a government requirement or…
Mauro Guillén:
No, not at all. It’s an opportunity that they have available to them. But we see in the United States something that is different, but that is also really important. You see, about 40% of all retirees go back to work, okay? Either for a company or organization or they become freelancers or in the gig economy, and more than half, I think the statistic was 53% of early retirees, those who retired early, go back, eventually go back and also work. This is revolutionary. That is to say, we are seeing this breakdown of that mystical stage in life, which was retirement, with very large numbers of people doing things during retirement that our parents or grandparents didn’t use to do.
Greg McKeown:
Keep going. What other things are you seeing that are surprising you?
Mauro Guillén:
Well, I think it surprises me very much that we are seeing multi-generational households, especially in the United States, growing by leaps and bounds. So these are households where you have three or more generations is 18%, 1-8%, 18% of the American population, about 60 million people who live in those households. And you might be thinking, well, those are perhaps poor households. Younger people can just leave. No, that’s not the case. In more than half of these households, the family income, total income is a $100,000, which is above the mean for the American population, which is $70,000. So that is clearly not the motive. And then, on top of that, the other really striking thing is that poverty among these multi-generational households, the poverty rate is much lower than for the American population as a whole. Be mindful of the fact that whereas today it’s about 18% of Americans who live in multi-generational households, 20, 30 years ago, it was less than 5%.
So this is a growing trend, which once again defies this model that we had in mind of the nuclear family, that people get together, they have kids, and then the kids, at some point, they leave the home to study and then to work and to establish or start their own family.
Greg McKeown:
Thank you. Really, thank you for listening to this episode. What is one thing you can do immediately in the next 5 to 10 minutes to be able to turn this conversation into action in your life? And who is one person that you can share that action with so that they can help you be accountable, and you can help them? For all of you who have written reviews on Apple Podcasts, thank you. If you haven’t done that already, you have the chance to get free access to the Essentialism Academy simply by writing a review, posting it there, and letting us know about it. Go to gregmckeown.com/essential for more details. Thank you, and I’ll see you next time.
