Living Longer Means Rethinking How You Work Right Now

building a better society for healthier, longer lives. So we sort of stick around for that bit, but first, as always, senior reporter and author of the Money Distolveed newsletter, John Steppeck is with me.

suspect everybody does. The UK pension, which is not not tiny, comes with what we call a triple lock, whereby it goes up every year by the higher of a completely random number two and a half percent average wages or inflation right, and richards Nik is suggesting adding to that what he calls a plus, which is that the personal allowance, your income tax personal allowance will never be lower than the state pension, so you will therefore never be taxed

on your state pension, unless, of course, you are already taxed on your state pension because you don't have an income tax allowance because you earn over one hundred thousand pounds or one hundred and twenty five, where it's completely tapered away that allowance. See, I'm already irritated. I've worked myself up into a frenzy of fury, and I haven't even let you speak yet, John, Why is this a

completely absurd idea? Not politically, by the way, because it's an excellent political idea giving money away to pension It gets you votes lovely. Why they bother at this point, I don't know. But why is it a an appalling financial idea?

one reason is bad. The other reason is bad is because we we already can't afford this, and you're adding. And not only is it you know, it's more expense for related to the state pension, but it's also because of all of these lockings that we're doing, a it's always going to rise in real terms, so it's always going to be bigger than our basically can't inflate this

debt away. And on top of that, it's also uncertain, so you can have a rough idea of what liability you're committing to, but if inflation spikes, as it has done obviously in the last kind of couple of years, then that liability rockets. So this is just it is. I mean, it's so cynical in terms of being a purely political move, and a lot of it seems to

be in response actually to well the last budget. So Jeremy Hunt, National insurance contributions for employees, and obviously National Insurance is a tax that isn't paid by pensioners because it's a tax on people who work, or so people of working age. And the reaction from me, I cannot imagine that this is the majority of pensioners. But the reaction from a kind of mouthy pro pensioner lobby group was to be like, oh my god, you're terrible, this is awful. How dare you know? You're given a tax

cut to other people. But this was not a.

up a little. And along the way, I mean, you and I had this conversation, we kind of hope that what it was was a glide path to getting rid of NI altogether, because it's both dishonest and ridiculous and complicated and having effectively having two income taxes inside a tax system where we do not hypothecate which good thing, by the way, is absurd, absurd, So getting rid of NI good thing. Pension is complaining about getting rid of NI bad thing.

you know, why do you hate pensioners? And you know, I mean my immediate thought, and the thought of anyone who actually knows anything about the financial system, would have been, what on earth are you talking about the one group of people who are in no position to complain after fourteen years of Tory misrule, if you want to put it that way, pensioners. They've they've done so much better than and aggregate than any other section of the population.

So I can sort of see why he must have been panicking because he was thinking, oh my god, it's like, you know, I used to forego one budget without throwing them a freebie, and suddenly you know, I'm the that lords them. So you know, but I think this kind of like kne Jet policy. Is it posted tourning around and presenting some facts to people, you know, instage Just Piney can see, well, okay, we're going to make sure you never have to pay tax on this and that.

What's the next thing that's gonna what?

to happen. And it's very likely that once we get a new labor government and that they have that wonderful six months when they can actually do stuff if they are brave enough. If they are brave enough, it may be that they do look at the state pension, possibly in the pension system as a whole, and say, hang on a dick, we really need to make some changes here. This is so expensive. You know, the state pension is already of a five percent of GDP eleven point three

percent of state spending. I've got that number in frontally because both John and I have written about it this week, because that's how cross it makes it. So you can find a column from that on me and money, just not from John. But change is coming, right, I mean, either we see the triple lock dumped somehow, we see the triple lock abandoned, one element taken out right, or we see big changes to the way tax relief on

pensions works. Or I was thinking about this the other day, and I was thinking, and I mentioned this in the column. I'm waiting for some pushback on it. Entirely possible. What would happen if the state pension was abolished altogether? And if I know, I know, I know. But let's say that auto enrollment picks up, so there's a higher levels of obligatory personal and state employer contributions. Right, maybe it stops being maybe it stops in voluntary. Maybe everybody has

to enroll, right, Maybe that happens. And at the same time, we do have a very effective pension credit system where if you if you come into your late sixties with no income of any kind whatsoever, you get put in the pension credit system. You get two hundred and one pounds a week, you get housing benefit, and you get all the other smaller payments that you get it in your later years that one way or another would hold body and sould together. So if you've got both those

systems running concurrently, do you need a state pension system? Now, don't get me wrong, I want a state pension system, But do you need it?

everyone needs to get it. And I thought the other interesting thing that you pointed out in your piece, and this actually maybe where sort of frozen tax thresholds come into play effectively. If you if you say you've got a pension that's somehow you know, paigey, you know, like in the region one hundred and thirty pounds a year,

your entire state pension is getting clawed back anyway. So there is a way, there is a point at which if you kind of you, if you actually had the goal to freeze the income tax threshold for the next thirty years, say, and suddenly the number of people who are you know, paying who are getting the personal allowance claw back climbs to the same numbers, say as are paying forty percent income tax today. It suddenly becomes a kind of mainstream thing rather than a very rich thing.

Then actually you could essentially remove this the pension by the bike door.

column on it. Do read my column on it. Welcome to Meren Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Meren Sum's web. Here's my conversation with author Andrew J. Scott as we talk about his book The Longevity Imperative, building a better society for healthier, longer lives and, by the way, hopefully also richer lives. Andrew, Hello, thank you so much for joining us today.

And then, of course we have the main driver behind increasing lifespans, which is not so much that people are living longer once they've passed sixty, is that they're not dying younger. So can we talk about that a bit first, in that I absolutely understand that these numbers, the average numbers a rising because people don't die in their first year or their second year or under five anymore. We've

pretty much nailed that. But is it really true that if you are just separate out that people live longer.

the highest life expectancy. A newborn girl in Japan has I think in ninety seven percent chance are making it to sixty. So what we're seeing now is nearly all the life expectency gains are happening from the age of seventy and above, so life expensive growth is slowing down. But now it's almost entirely about your chances are going beyond seventy into eighty and ninety. So that's the shift

that's happened. We've seen improvements at all ages, but now the increases are coming more and more at the older ages.

or so years. So how confident are we that someone born into modern Japan might have the same life chances in terms of health as someone born into Japan fifty sixty, seventy years ago.

think we can be recently confident. I mean, I think what's stunning is over the last one hundred and fifty years, the best practice life expectancy, the country of the highest life expectancy has increased two or three years every decay. And I think that's likely to slow down, possibly to one or two, but I think it's still very likely. And one of the problems we've got is life expectancy. Intuitively, it seems a simple concept, but it's actually quite complicated.

And when I first started in this area, statisticians that I don't like life expectancy as a concept, and I thought, why not. It's a great thing, but I can see the challenges in particular the numbers you're referring to about declines. First of all, they're very much during COVID for most countries, which is understandable. Secondly, they tend to be focused on the US. We saw a small foreign in life expectancy outside of COVID, but that's totally due to this phenomena

of deaths of despair. It's midlife mortality. Your chance of living longer at sixty five continues to increase. And the big confusion in all of this is the blind numbers that you tend to read, which the government promotes. It's not really life expectancy. It's gonna sound a bit morbid. It's the average age of death. It basically assumes that

you live your entire life in that particular year. So if you're a newborn, you use the survival rate of a sixty year old today rather than the survival rate you're likely to face in sixty years time. So those tend to be very much an underestimate of life expectancy. That's why when you have a global pandemic, you see a fall in life expectancy, But as the pandemic goes away,

you see a return to growth. So I don't want to trivialize and say it's going to be automatic, but the vast majority of countries will continue to see gains in life expectancy. I suppect those at the top will see a slow down because, as I said earlier, sort of the scope to improve life expensive if you'm going from nought to sixty is pretty minimal now. So all

the gains are going to come later on. And yes, we have to worry about antibiotics resistance, Yes we have to worry about a whole host of things, but it's a pretty entrenched trend that I think, if you look at some of the innovations that are coming along in terms of medicine, is likely to continue.

in terms of those at the top end. But I still think we'll see more and more people living into older and older ages, and some of that may not be a good thing, because we do have a health system that tends to keep people alive rather than keep people healthy.

I mean, there's a lot of interesting stuff coming along in terms of drugs and biology, but it's all the stuff that everyone tells you and that you know, which is, don't eat too much, exercise a lot, keep moving, don't drink too much alcohols and toxin smoking is bad for you. Sleep is particularly important, A sense of purpose, a sense of engagement, friendships, and all the stuff that we know makes a good life. I think all this change is

a couple of things. The first is this is, as Peter Astio says in his book Outlive, there's some sort of breakthroughs in terms of what type of exercise to do and how to do this sort of the diet, the fasting stuff is very sort of trendy at the moment, the high intensity draining, et cetera. So there's some sort of innovations. But my own attitude and that is that that's about optimizing as opposed to just mainly doing the

right thing eighty percent of the time. And then the other thing that's really changed is your incentive to do it, because at the heart of my book is a statistic that just says, you know, you are now the majority of the young are now likely to become the older. Again, going back to the ons, they estimate the fifty center children born today will live into their nineties. And you know you are now likely to get old. But we fear getting old. So what do you do now to

age well? Because you can start to age better at eighty, it's a whole lot better to start when you're in thirty, forty to fifty or sixty.

then that's something of a game change. It to people who have not yet aged well, and I'll say, oh, I don't know, fifty six or whatever thing it feels damn he said, I should, you know, take more exercise diet, except twenty years ago I did. GLP one is a drug that I've taken it.

we can do something about it. But we don't really know how to maintain health. But because we focus on disease, that's a really big problem with what's happening is we live our longer lives because we're now vulnerable to aging related diseases. And it's a bit of a dismal litany, but cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, all of these, the biggest risk factor is aging. The older, we get

them more like we are to get them. So if you sort of tackle one of those diseases, say cancer, you've still got the risk of all the other ones. So your health is still impaired. Your life expectancy is

still curtailed. But if we can sort of go upstream and focus on the aging process itself and age better, whatever that means in terms of biological aging, then you have a huge benefit downstream on multiple diseases, which is a huge benefit because then sure you're going to live longer, but crucially going to be healthier for longer because you

push back all these multi morbidities. Mate. That's where the gop one drugs are very interesting, because what they're saying is I'm not going to tackle a disease, I'm going to tackle a biomarker, in this case obesity. And obesity you can have an argument whether it's a disease or not, but I'd rather avoid that one. It's clearly an indicator of bad future health. And so if you can tackle that biomarker, you're going to have a benefit on multiple diseases.

And if you look at some of the sort of evidence coming through, it looks like it's good for cardiovasca, it could be good for kidney disease, it looks like it's good for diabetes, and that's where it's a real ganger, because that's a step towards preventative health, where I'm maintaining my health for longer and pushing back getting diseases, and that's really what we need to do.

from intervention to prevention. So it could be things like GLP, but I think there's a whole host of shifts that

need to occur. So let's start first of all with public health, which of course is not everyone's favorite, but one of the reasons we're living longer lives in the twentieth century is public health made huge improvements in reducing infant mortality by raising awareness of what needs to be done with young children it was successful, and reducing them hound to be a drink and how we smoke, all

of which have had a benefit. And I think, you know, helping raise awareness, making it easier for people to do exercise, to eat healthily, for the environment to be cleaner, etc. It will be important and those social changes are in part inspired by public health. Then there's the health system itself which has to move towards prevention, and I think there there's going to be a shift out of hospitals,

probably to something like the community. I think it's really interesting during COVID that we managed to do a four scale mobilization of preventative health outside in the main the GP and the NHS through using community spaces. So there may be things like vaccination. Clearly, if you look at the trouble we've got is that there's loads of diseases

can get us. So in the book, I talk about how we can use huge advances in genetic screening, extraordinary developments in big data in AI, and say Andrew looking at your family history and your genetics. We think you're going to be particularly vulnerable to these diseases. We are going to concentrate on screening you for those. And you know, this is where I think the big revolution has to

come from. I'm a little bit nervous about AI in general, but I think big data in healthcare and has huge potential to identify what are most at risk at and then design interventions around it.

And this is why I'm interested in what you mean when you say turning it into a preventative service rather than a treatment service, because we have a long history of knowing that people don't change their behavior when they're given an alert about something that affects them specifically.

be easier to have it through a drug. And so you know, is vaccinations prevention or is it intervention? But I think we will see more and more vaccinations which can be useful in bringing down obesity, blood pressure, etc. So there will definitely be treatments. I think also we may well see a ship and I think this would be controversial, but I'm an economist. I think incentives are very important, and so there may even be some monetary

incentives to change your behavior. If you deliver on these things, then we'll give you some money or resources, because after all, the NHS will be a net saver. And I do think that's one of the really big shifts that's got to occur. So I think we need to really embed it within government a target for healthy life expectancy. I for instance, think the state pension age should be indexed

on some concept of healthy life expectancy. You cannot expect people to work for longer if their health is not sustainable, and I think we then have an incentive to invest in health outcomes rather than treating disease outcomes, and I think you need to then also embed that in the NHS to ensure that you get better outcomes. I also think we probably with an aging population, have to recognize that as we have more people aged fifty to let's say seventy, the health of those individuals is going to

be crucial for the economy. Because one of my hobby horses is to try and stress the governments that you can increase the state pension age. But in the UK only about a quarter of people are working at the current state pension age, so you're not really going to have a big effect. They aged round fifty, about eighty percent of Brits are working. By sixty five before the state pension age is down to about twenty five thirty percent.

So how do you stop that really big decline? And I think part of that is around preventative health, and I think at the moment we tend to assume the money we spend in the health system is just a cost. And it's nice to have better health, but it's just a cost. But increasing it with aging populations we're going to see actually, it's going to be crucial for economic growth. There's not much productivity growth in the UK at the

moment or many other rich countries. So most of GDP growth is employment growth, and most employment growth is workers aged over fifty. And the more we can keep workers aged over fifty working, the better it is for GDP.

mind and not changing what they do. But I also think another challenge is that when you rise to the top of a profession with an existing skill set, it's very hard to then say, right, I'm going to give up on that because the way the future is something different.

And so when we have an nhsy's geared around intervention, it will take a very big mindset to shift towards prevention, which is why I suspect we have to do something outside of the NHS, which will lead to all sorts of financing issues, because how is the treasure you're going to finance prevention and intervention at the same time. But the economic return on investment for prevention is quite considerable.

The other thing we haven't really discussed myriory is that us as individuals we go along and say, hey, I not very well do something about it, But when it comes to prevention, we are going to have to be a lot more active ourself.

Increasingly more and more years you're educated for, and then you work for thirty or thirty five years, get your state pension and the pentin that you build up inside your your work environment, et cetera, all to enrollment we have today lovely, and then you hit hopefully sixty maybe sixty five, and you retire. Now, I know that you and academics and economists like you think that the best thing for us to do is to change the way we do that, to not have these kind of solid

blocks of time dedicated to education, work, retirement. But that's a difficult thing to persuade people, because when they've been working for thirty thirty five years, quite like to stop. So come the age when they and get their hands on their bension.

more productive over our lifetime. So it's very hard to move away from the notion that we'll have to work for longer. And that's just an adding up constraint. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone has to work for as long as they feasibly can. I think we're going to see a great deal of variety in hytergeneity because of course, not everyone can have the same life expectancy. Not everyone can find it so easy to work. So we really have already I think seen retirement as a com concept

change phenomenally. It's no longer there's a single age where everyone comes to a hard stop at work. It's a continual process. Some people work for a long time, some people stop working before the current retirement age. Some people are working part time beforehand or part time afterwards. Some people unretired so I think we're seeing a great deal

of flexibility and variety. But you're quite right. My challenge is with governments who just set out to raise the state pension age, because I don't think that solves the problem at all. It solves a government problem, which is, oh, i'll pay less in pensions, but it does nothing to keep us productive for longer. And so my concept of the evergreen society is how do we stay healthy and productive for longer. Now, some of that is about preventative

health and just what we've talked about. There also be a need for lifelong learning and education. As you said, we're getting more and more education. I don't think it necessary has to be about going back to college. It could be something you learn on YouTube. You just got to keep updating your skills. But there's another challenge, which

is can you keep working in your job? So you know it's a convest The way I look at this is it's sort of you know you're going to want to carry on working if the gains are staying in work ex seed the costs of gain to work, and for many people, if you're ill and work is very physically challenging or very boring, you don't want to carry on working and totally you know, I get that, but of course there's an adding up constraints. So how do we create what I call age friendly jobs, which are

jobs that older people are able to do. Now I'm a university professor, that's pretty easy for me, and I've done some work on this and the number of age friendly jobs, jobs which are more flexible, provide moral autonomy and less physically demanding. Actually that's the work trend. More and more jobs are getting like that. But if you're working as a construction worker, if you're working in a

very physical activity, that's not an option. So I do think we've got to think about how we support people in shifting careers when they get to a point where they can no longer what they used to do. And we do this all sorts of ages when we have

active labor market policies. And you know, if you're a construction worker, you may not be able to carry on working in something physically, but there should be all sorts of skills that you have depending upon the person to shift into something you can carry on doing.

an example. My father and law as America, used to be a truck driver and then they try only went to move and worked for a charity helping older people. And he's got great personal skills. It's not something that he requires a huge physical strength for, and so I think that's perfectly possible to do. I'm not saying you have to punish people to do it. I'm not saying that you have to push people into bad jobs, but I think there are skills that people doing physical and

manual jobs have got. They perhaps used to enjoy the camaraderie of physical work but no longer do. But they want to do something where they use their other skills. And I don't think that's about learning how to be a full stack developer in terms of software code. I completely agree on that. One of the problems with lifelong learning is that the people who did it later in life tend to be the people who did it earlier

in life. But I think there's other ways you can learn skills, including shifting from being a construction worker to perhaps helping out in a care home, which I think are perfectly feasible. And I think that, you know, I don't know for some people, I held hope that was a rewarding shift, But I agree with you. We can't have bad jobs. We don't want people condemned to do bad jobs.

engaged for all. And we sort of did that at early years, so there's no reason we shouldn't be able to do it at older years. But it does require a big rethink, and a big rethink it involves a lot more than just saying, hey, I'm just going to whack up the state pension age, because that does nothing to keep people healthy, productive, and engage for longer. That's

just a route to misery. So in some ways I completely agree, Mary, and I think your challenge is a good one, which is raising the state pension age easy for those people already working beyond the state pension age, but it's futile because the large majority of people can't and they need support and help. But we have education, health policies, and active market policies a younger age. Why don't we do it at older age because we underestimate the capacity of older people.

think it's going to happen. I think it was hungry where if you have more than four kids, a woman doesn't pay income tax, which is a pretty big financial incentive.

be ninety. So we haven't built the institutions to support a longer life, which is why we say, oh, my goodness, look at this aging society. Probably I'm always struck by the reference to aging society. I don't know anyone goes, yeah, brilliant, We've got an aging society. In some ways, it's one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century. Fewer infants lost in early life, fewer parents snatched away in midlife, more grandparents meeting their grandchildren. But we refer to it

as an aging society. And when it comes to AI and climate change, we talk in engaged way about how we adapt and adjust to make the most of this longer life. When it comes to age, anxiety would just say, oh, these old people, they can't work, they're real, they need a pension and they're a burden. That's a crazy situation when the majority of us can expect to become old. So how do we change? How are we aged?

US don't. I mean, we are seeing a change in our age structure, but our fertility rate has fallen by less and more slowly, so we haven't got the same really dramatic change in age structure that Japan and China have got with their declining population, and we use immigration more. But yeah, I think China Japan is a good example. I think they've done well at instigating a sort of these age friendly jobs where there's options to work part time and flexibly as you get older, which I think

is a really good thing. You know, going back to our conversation about retirement, I think a point I want to try and make is that in the twentieth century, when we created that three stage life that you refer to, education, work and retirement, as we lived longer, we took more and more leisure after retirement. I think as we live longer now, we're going to take more and more leisure this side of retirement through part time work and possibly

even career breaks. But that's another topic. But Japan has done very well I think creating those flexible age for any jobs. It's also done a pretty good job on diet and health, but inequality in particular, I think is important.

that's a fundamental shift. We can now all expect to become old, and that is going to require some pretty deep seated changes that won't come through immediately. But just as the twentieth century saw us invent teenagers. We saw us invent retirement and pensioners. It invented the midlife crisis, invented the weekend. That's a whole mixture of government practice, social norms, all of which occurred over several decades that I think is a process that we will see as

we adapt to these longer lifes. So some of it it's going to take a long while. And I hope I sort of type define myself as a patient optimist, although the world is testing me sorely on the optimism these days. But you know, these changes do happen. But what can we do in the very very short term, And you know, I've already sort of touched on what I think the main ones urgently shifting to a system of preventative health. It's the only way to save our

health systems, the only way to safeguard our economy. And there are plenty of very simple, relatively cheap things we can do to keep us healthy for longer. And not only is that incredibly valuable because health is our most important ast the thing we value the most, it's also crucial for the economy. When you have a rise the fastest growing population is those aged over fifty. So absolutely a focus on preventive health. Some of that I think

we'll have to be done outside the NHS. That's about incentives. I think it's about a target for healthy life expectancy, because that's the key part of the Longevity Imperative book is we've got a system that's done really well in credding us to live for longer. We've slowed down the dying process. We haven't slowed down the aging process, and that is what we have to focus on because right now, these long lives, the gap at the end of life

between when we're healthier not is getting wider. We're getting more years and good health, but more years in bad health, and that has to be a number one priority. And nowhere is that a target right now. So a healthy life expendence is a target. How do you then increase the incentives to do that? I would say make the state pension ager function of healthy life expectancy. So then the Treasury have an incentive to say, you know what, I'm not just going to give you a big check

to spend on the NHS. I want you to deliver outcomes that actually boost the economy by keeping people in work and keeping them healthy. And that's not about pushing them beyond sixty five. I think that's an unfair bargain to ask of people. If you haven't got the skills, you haven't got the health and the opportunities, you should not be forced to work beyond that. So we've got to make sure we get those age fifty to sixty six sixty seven, which is the current state pensione age healthy,

fit and engage. That seems a very fair political bargain. So that would be some of the very concrete things that I would do.

Eighty percent of people are working at fifty, only about thirty percent by sixty five, and most of those are not voluntary exits from the labor market. It's they get ill, they have to care for someone as ill, they deem not have the skills, updated skills, or there's just pure agism in the workplace. So you've got to know how long you live for, how long you can work for, how much money you need and you retire, and what the rate of return is in your earnings. There's no

simple solution to that. I think saving more possibly is the answer, but it all depends. As you said. You know, some people like the university professors, very happy to carry on working for longer. I suspect you may be in that situation as well, Marin, in which case, if you're going to work for longer, you can actually save less because if you keep your years of retirement fixed as they were before life expectancy increased, you've got a longer time to earn the money, so you can save less.

If you want to retire for longer, you've got to save more. But I think we're going to see a great deal of heterogeneity in how people respond to it. But the key in all of this, I think is it's not just a financial issue. It's very hard to avoid the conclusion that basically also have to invest in your human capital, because if you've got the health, if you've got the skills and the purpose, if your financial plans go awry, you can still earn some money to

bring them back on track again. And I think that's the really, really big change. The other thing I think we'll see as a new financial system, we need much more personalized finance. That three stage life where everyone had the same retirement age and the same needs doesn't work over this longer life where people will have very different aims, very different preferences, very different circumstances. I think we also need to see a much more joint thinking about health

and wealth. I think we'll see more and more life insurance companies saying, hey, I make money if you could live longer. How can I make that happen? Or there's all these new treatments coming along, our start to try and integrate those together. And then the other really big issue, which I think is not dealt with at the moment is the way I call living insurance. We saw life insurance develop in the eighteenth nineteenth century, which was you know,

if you die early, your family is protected. The problem we got now is not just increases an average life expectancy, but actually most people live longer than the average. The mode is above the average. You've only got about I think a three percent chance of dying at the average life expectancy. So you have a very high chance of living beyond your average life expectancy. And one thing is can you save enough to live to eighty eight eighty nine?

But how do you save enough if you're going to be living to one hundred and one hundred and five And I don't think you can save that much. And so we need, whether it's annuities or ton teens, we need new instruments that can help us ensure against that variation.

keep yourself safe after that. I'm I'm not sure Tom teams are going to take take off again.

got two choices. I've got gold or I've got bitcoin. What am I going to buy?

public sector because one thing I don't know. I was talking about wearables to my wife the other day, as you know, like you know, watches that can monitors your your health, and she has worked in the NHS in the past, and one of the points was that integrating the kind of data and the kind of warnings and the things that your Apple watch will give you with the actual service you can expect from the NHS is extremely difficult because you know, either people kind of getting

a wee warning from our Apple watch that maybe they should go and get an EK you know, an electro cardiograph because their heart had done something a bit funny in the night or whatever. But then you get the doctors getting frankly pissed off that people are kind of coming and requesting you know, these e cages even though actually a lot of time when you did one on them,

you actually did find something. So I think there's a there's like an infrastructure issue here more than a tech issue at this point for health.

of a ration health service. I'm not saying that, you know, the US alternative is necessarily better, but you'll be doing that you look at how how we structure there's and also about the can over the kind of mentality I think of the health service as well.

that we talked about during the conversation. We talked about this idea that people should spread their working life out more thinly, that they should take more sobaut are girls and more breaks, that they should change career more often, all this kind.

needs drugs, And it's the same. It's the same with work, right, this idea that you can work in one thing for twenty years and another lifting for ten years, another thing for thirty or five years, whatever it is, and you can spread yourself.

and then recovering from that never happens. So the idea that you can go away and retrain for a year as a lawyer or something like that, I mean, I know that hams in the States a lot more, but again, you have to generally have the money behind you already, and it is a you know, a sacrifice, So it is something that most people really can't afford, even if they were motivated to do it.

It's just it's more socially complicated, more culturally complicated than I think the academic world likes to think krama being unkind.

used to it. We're already seeing changes. There's a lot more acknowledgment of the fact that if and I mean this does largely relate to men, because there's been men that have been retiring from those kinds of jobs. But you get to sixty five, you go into the golf course, you die by the time you're seventy because of a mixture boredom, loss of state, is drinking too much, and also that kind of stubborn sense that you've worked for forty years, you're never ever picking up, you know, a tool,

or doing or having a boss ever again. And I think that the psychology has moved on from that. I think people acknowledge now that actually, whenever you retire, you still have to do stuff. You still have to have a routine. I guess what I'm saying is, I think we're all kind of grappling our way towards actually just

how you live better in retirement. And probably the thing that the state should focus on is making sure that we're as healthy as possible within that or that we have the ability to use the already existing technology that could help us to live longer, and just make sure that we've got access to it. In a in a pleasant way, as opposed to having a basically shout at someone in a GP surgery until they give you what you want.

in various places. And this is where you simply buy an annuity, but you buy one that doesn't start for quite a long time, so you have your pensions freedom. You can use the majority of your pension money in whichever way you would like, but you pre buy an annuity that kicks in at an age that you want to be insured from. So say eighty five or possibly even ninety whatever it is. You say to yourself, Christ, I lived in ninety I'm really going to be a

bit worried. So I buy this annuity that kicks in at ninety, eighty five, eighty seven, whatever it is, so that you know that should you live longer than expected, there's going to be a regular income coming in or sely that takes away from your part when you start your retirement.