The Super Age: What Happens When Seniors Outnumber Children? It's Time To Prepare | Bradley Schurman

Unlocked Professional: AI and Future of Work: I think that artificial intelligence is going to mint a lot of millionaires. I think it is going to create the opportunities for individuals to build million dollar plus companies. I don't think they're necessarily going to be quote unquote the best and the brightest by our traditional definition. I think they're gonna be the ones that challenge the norms.

I think they're gonna be the ones that lean into trying different things, that are not afraid of the new. Periods like this, come with pain first and then pleasure. We're gonna be in the pain period real soon here. Decide, are you gonna stay with the old way of doing things or try the new?

For every job that we lose, we'll gain at least a new one back. That's a norm, a historic norm. You said AI isn't replacing workers and expanding societies, it's filling gaps and shrinking one. Which I think we've already talked a little about.

Is there anything else that you can expand on? Yeah, I mean, it's a demand thing. So technology often comes in when we have a gap and that gap might be the cost of labor. is not taking people's jobs.

AI doesn't have that function of taking jobs. Your corporate ownership does. They decide how to utilize talent or utilize technology. So those decisions are being made by your boss, not by a machine.

That's the first thing is the framing. The second thing is, is that it's here and it's not going away and it is going to take away redundancies from certain jobs. Most of us grew up in a world built around young people, but that world is changing forever. The first time in history, there are more grandparents than there are kids.

This is a massive shift and most leaders are completely ignoring it. They're still playing by an old set of rules that no longer apply. Our guest today has a rare superpower. He can see the future of where we live and work by reading population data.

He's the founder of human change and the creator of a first of its kind tool that ranks cities by how well they will survive and thrive in the decades ahead. He helps companies and leaders understand that retirement is a dying idea and that to win in this new era, we need to redesign our world to include everyone at every age. He shows us how to find your real advantage in a world that is both shrinking and graying. Bradley, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. You spent years as a director of AARP, one of the most powerful advocacy organizations in the world. When did you realize it was time to leave the nonprofit world and start showing business leaders how to change instead?

In many ways, my role at AARP was starting to show business leaders about that transformation that was underway, leading partnerships with groups like the OECD and the World Economic Forum. and establishing a new body of research there called the Aging Readiness and Competitiveness Index, which measured national approaches to our rapidly changing population as it relates to its age structure. But I had spent quite a bit of time there, nearly 15 years at ARP, and I felt like there was something more I could do.

I had hit midlife at 40, and I think like most people, I had come to the conclusion... that I had a choice. I could either stay and be comfortable and contented with my position, or I could pivot and do something bigger, something more. And I chose the latter.

And I am entirely thankful for doing that. Within just a few years of leaving, I published my first book, The Super Age Decoding Our Demographic Destiny, which is a blueprint for nations and businesses to understand and lean into. this transformation that is underway. And you mentioned it, there are more older adults than children now.

And in just a few years, there'll be more older adults than those under 18, which is just wild. It changes everything and we need to adapt accordingly. I'm really glad, as we talked about before, that you're tackling this, because I think that it is absolutely important and it needs to be called out. So really excited to learn more about what you do and how you do it.

Before we get into those details, I do have one fun fact. You have a self-described grandma hobby you love to bake. So what do you like to bake? Bagels.

I make them just about better than any place you'll find in New York City. And I will take people to the mat on that. I just love it. It was my COVID hobby.

I think many people picked something up during that period and mine just happened to make the best bagels that are out there. That's a skill that will live with you forever. So. That's, it's good.

And an analog skill too, but like all skills in this new era, you need to have a degree of curiosity to it and creativity in solving the problem. And one of the things that I could not figure out with that bagel is how I could not get that crust perfect. And it turns out a real New York City bagel is a successful one because of the pH of the water. And I had to get my Washington DC water to match the pH of New York City's water and that solved the problem.

Glad that you were able to find a good path. Let's start with the big idea, the super age, a point in history where people over 65 outnumber kids under 18. What impact does this have on the future? It changes everything.

Most of our systems are built on the premise that our world will always grow. And that is simply not the case. Now the global population is still growing, but it's growing very unevenly now in places like Japan, China, Korea. Italy, the populations are actually declining.

They're losing people each year, as well as aging at the same time. In places like Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Mexico, most of Latin America, our population growth has really slowed. We're heavily reliant on immigrants to fill the gaps. The only place where we're really seeing dramatic population growth now is in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So this changes the nature of work within our nations. We're more reliant on technology to get the job done. We are also going to be challenged though in the coming years with a decline in consumers because it is predicted pretty clearly now that in most of the West we can expect the populations will decline in the coming years. And that shift is something we've never had to encounter before.

And at the same time, we have more people that are in need of human support, primarily in the caregiving space. So a lot of innovation is needed now to really lean into this. Also in our businesses, we were always taught that there would be more young people coming in. And that's just not the case.

This year, American universities in particular reach what we call the enrollment cliff, meaning that the total number of students will now be in decline for the foreseeable future and perhaps for a very long time, if not forever. And this will show up in our labor force in the coming years. So thinking about how we hire, how we retain people over time, isn't something that HR teams had really had to think about much over the past 70 years or so. And now it becomes a front and center challenge for them to address.

This is an interesting topic for me, and I've heard some other thoughts and perspective and opinion. And I'm wondering if other people out in the audience have a similar perspective that I do or did maybe prior to being enlightened by some of this information where... It was almost a thought of we're growing too fast. There's too many people.

There's an abundance and what are we going to do? then, then as I started to learn more and more about some of the logic behind why you need to have continuously replenishing new people, bringing in new population to help manage the work that exists, but also the economy. So could you just go a little bit deeper? There's really nothing it doesn't touch.

So you were right to say we were raised on this idea that we were growing too fast as a population. And there was quite a bit of thought that went into this in the middle century and the late middle century where the population was growing very fast. We had just had the baby boom and the world population was growing at an astonishing rate. In fact, over the past, I don't know, 50, 60 years, the gold population has nearly quadrupled.

So yeah, it felt like we were growing at an astonishing rate. But demographics, I often say, are like water. They move very slow. and all of a sudden they show up one day and they come knocking and different organizations, different institutions, different parts of the economy are now feeling the pinch.

They're just feeling it in very different ways. Like I said, around healthcare in particular, there's a huge pinch right now because we don't have enough people to fill the roles needed to deliver care. The other places where we're gonna start seeing this, I think in short term, are in the real estate market. Now, Everyone's been complaining rightfully about the cost of housing in America these days.

This is mostly an English language world problem, although there are price problems in the West as well across Central and Western Europe, but it is a particular challenge here in the United States. The largest group of real estate owners in the country are now starting to exit the market. And as a result, the price of housing will start to come down across the nation. Now, There are other challenges too.

Excuse me, not only do older people not pay as much taxes, that is those who are in retirement, but they also take up a lot more services. So the cost of our delivering care, delivering benefits like social security and Medicare are only going up. So this puts a pressure on younger generations too. Effectively think of it like this.

The world used to exist like a perfect pyramid. where you had a large number of people at the bottom taking care of a few number of people at the very top. That pyramid is now inverting. And some countries, like Japan, have very few people at the bottom and a lot of people at the top.

And this changes our entire social contract, or at least it's forcing a change of our social contract and requiring that people stay engaged longer, whether they want to or not, in revenue generating work. And that's where older workers come into play now. Because if we don't have older workers, the system that we have really starts to collapse on itself fairly soon. And let me put the fine point on this, is that for older adults, people who are expecting to get their social security checks and their Medicare, this is Gen X now in the next 10 years or so, some entering very soon, in 10 years, they're gonna see their benefits cut by about 20 to 25 % on social security.

On Medicare, We know the cost of healthcare continues to go up each year. They'll have to pay more out of pocket for their care. So this is forcing a reckoning that could have been adjusted years ago because we had this data in the 80s, we had it in the 90s, we had it in the early aughts and our political leaders in particular just chose not to do anything about it. There's so much to that, Brad.

It's so macro, right? Yeah, it just touches everything. it's one of those things that's really hard for people to wrap their heads around because it does touch literally every part of their lives. It's not like a specific acute pain point.

It is a chronic pain point that will impact everything. And you cannot find a single American these days that hasn't felt the pain of demographic change. You can't find them. They don't exist.

One of the things that I think is quite interesting is about the intersectionality with other kind of macro issues of the day. So like the housing affordability crisis, the care crisis. That is forcing Americans, many of them, about 20 % of the total population now, back into the traditional way of living. When I was young, when you were young, the whole aspirational goal was to get out of, out from underneath mom and dad's roof and get into your own place.

That's actually going into reverse now. People are staying home longer with mom and dad. They're more likely now to live in what we call multi-generational households, where at least three generations live under one roof. And prior to the 1950s, this is just how Americans lived.

So in some cases, we're going back to historical norms. And there's not necessarily a judgment call on whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing. Data doesn't allow us to do that. What data does is it allows us to tell people, this is what's happening, and this is how you could possibly respond to the change that's on its way, or in this case, already here.

Yeah, I think the most valuable part of this conversation is for the audience in particular is to know what's out there, know what's coming, help them prepare. So we'll get right into, get into some more of the details of your work. So you've helped build the Geography of Prosperity Index, a scoreboard that shows which cities are built to last and which ones are quietly falling behind. So why is a place like Frederick, Maryland actually a stronger bet for the future?

than a fast growing high profile city like Miami. And then also, just a little bias here, but what is your prediction for the future of San Francisco? First of we measured urban areas, not cities specifically. And there is a bit of a distinction here because some urban areas comprise multiple cities.

It's the way the government defines them. And it's the best place we can get for... stabilized, equalized data. So I just want to share that first.

So like San Francisco Bay Area, New York, New Jersey, and Washington DC is DC and Arlington and a few of the surrounding jurisdictions. But these give us a snapshot of how a city, a community, a region is actually doing. It's the best thing we have right now. But what I found as I was going across the country, telling people about the Super Age in my book, I kept hearing the same conversations.

and they all landed on the same point, which is the world that we used to live in no longer exists. And we don't have the tools that help individuals, institutions understand what those shifts actually mean and where to place bets. And probably the highlight of this is watching just the migratory pattern of Americans over the past two decades ago. They have been moving south and west.

sometimes searching for affordable housing themselves, or sometimes following corporations that have moved into these areas because they are lower cost and lower tax and sometimes considered to be pro-business states. What has changed though is that the risk assessment in these areas has changed too. We are living in hotter summers now. We are living with less rainfall in some parts of the country.

We are living with greater and more frequent natural disasters. Some people will just classify this as climate change broadly, and there's quite a bit of debate around that. I tell people ignore the debate completely because the insurance companies have already figured it out and they're pricing it in to your policies. So in a place like Miami that comes off as very high risk, especially as it relates to climate and extreme weather, it isn't just about the storms.

It's the fact that their insurance premiums go up there about 30 to 40 % per year. That's a compounding increase of rate. And all of a sudden, the math of leaving a northern state, leaving a place that is very institutionalized in the way it delivers services, might be higher taxes, all of a sudden doesn't look so bad anymore when you're having to pay out of pocket when your property becomes destroyed or damaged during one of these events. Now, The index itself runs across five dimensions.

Population renewal, climate resilience, automation and artificial intelligence readiness, social cohesion, how well does the community get along and connect with one another, and the last is governance and foresight. Do you have a government that's working and has the vision and the institutional capacity to really navigate these massive disruptions and dynamic events that are happening to us right now? And that's why a city like Frederick, of all places, that surprised us the most, came out surprisingly high, is that across these dimensions, Frederick measured very well, and it varied especially well amongst the governance score.

Places like Miami in particular, rank relatively low overall in governance, and of course, no surprise, ranked very low on climate and extreme weather. Now, a city like San Francisco, Excellent question. Overall, the Bay Area does incredibly well on the index. In fact, it makes the top 10.

But there are serious risks around their governance. They rank terribly poorly in governance. And you need good government and you need strong institutions during periods of rapid change because they will come with rapid disruptions. And these institutions, whether we love them or hate them, they're partners in navigating the change.

Does quality of life at all play into this? equation? Not into our measure directly. We tried to be as agnostic as possible about what I would call kind of soft measures.

But when you're talking about quality of life, I assume you're also factoring in the economics of life. And that piece is something that so many different organizations have already really started to analyze. And we felt like we would just be muddying the waters if we added into that mix, because there are so many good measures that are out there already. that can really assess what the cost of living is in a specific locale.

There are certainly cities in the country that we see greater social cohesion as a result of having more equality as it relates to income, for example. Cities like Milwaukee and Minneapolis score particularly well around a measure like this. And yeah, does the two go hand in hand? Of course.

But economic measures, and I always try to hit this home, economic measures are really a backward-looking measure. They're a snapshot of what was, not will be. What we were trying to do with this geography of prosperity index is give people a sense of the foundations for what is coming, and do they exist where they live. And this will help individuals make decisions about where to move.

or if they stay what they need to adjust because in many ways it's a diagnostic tool, but also for corporations looking to decide, do I move my business from point A to point B? Or if they're doing site selection for HQ2 or an R &D facility, do they operate in a place like Pittsburgh or in Memphis? This will help those businesses understand. And of course, for civic leaders.

Civic leaders are doing the best that they can with limited resources. And those resources vary greatly across the country, largely dependent on the relationship between the city and the state. And these tools can help them get there. The book, which is forthcoming next year, The Geography of Prosperity, A New Map for the American Dream, really gets into these local stories because the data tells us one thing, it doesn't tell us how.

It doesn't tell us how these people, these leaders are actually navigating the change. And we get deep into that. So I'm very excited for that to come out next year. And this tool that we're referencing, is that, by the way, is that your tool?

is my tool, co-created with James Cloninger and his amazing team at Motive. We've partnered for years on a number of different data-driven and data visualization projects. And it's funny, last year at this time, I had a conversation in South by Southwest and I had a local leader come up to me and she talked about how great things were economically in Austin and Travis County. And she said, but something feels off, something doesn't feel right and we can't put a finger on what it is.

And it was really that moment that the genesis for this project came into full view. We don't have the right measurements anymore. We have never lived through a period quite like this in American history. If there's any kind of touch point that comes remotely close to this, it's the period between 1914 and 1945.

And we all know what happened during then, massive technological transformation, massive communication transformation, massive geopolitical tensions, and of course, a pandemic and two world wars. So we're living that on a very compressed schedule. but we have never lived something quite like this. And they didn't have this data back then.

We have this data now. And that puts us in an extremely fortunate position because data, foresight, and the knowledge of history can help guide us through the coming decade, even 20 or 30 years, if we use it correctly. Appreciate all that context, Brad, behind. behind what you're building and the analytics there.

So just, could you just do a little bit of a deeper dive for the audience? Tell them a little bit more about specifically what your tool does. It is available online for their access as well. But tell them, tell us a little bit more about what the goal of it is and what kind of information they could be looking forward to.

Yeah, so if you get online and you go to geographyofprosperity.com, you can search for your city, you can see how it ranks, you can see how it measures on these five dimensions, and they're all very clear, they're all very transparent, as is our methodology. You can also rank your city against other cities in the nation, perhaps peer cities or places you're considering moving or moving your HQs. Now this is a totally free tool.

It was intended to be a totally free tool. because it serves as the backbone for my forthcoming book. Now, if you want a deeper dive into this, of course Reach Out will be happy to help you better understand how to use the tool, or if you're looking at things like site selection for your company, we're happy to help you with that too. But the basics are all there, free to use, a gift, a tool for the public to really tinker around with and better understand what their future could be in the community in which they live.

My take on that to recap is that this is a good tool for you to, for anyone that is considering what the future might hold, where might be a good place to live, where might be a good place for their grandparents to live or family to live. A good tool to go on and get an idea of what that future might look like in that specific area. It is just, again, for your own perspective and to help you, but it definitely sounds like an extremely valuable tool. I can see...

the utility to it for businesses as well, as you mentioned, to decide where they may want to have their headquarters in the future and how that'll play out. Yeah, it's also, I think, interesting for business when they're trying to get a sense of not only what the risk profile might be of a city, but also are there enough people around to fill the jobs? What might look like a strong population today might not look that strong 10 years from now. We're not doing that level of prediction in the tool, but we do have a sense of what the population renewal looks like within a place.

And we do have decades of data behind us that show what the birth rates look like, what the in-migration looks like, both from people abroad as well as domestically. And there are, course, cities in the country that have exploded overnight. These cities also happen to have some of the highest risk profiles for the other parts of the index. West Texas, for example.

home to more millionaires than you could possibly imagine, an incredibly young and dynamic population, and no services and supports, no governance to back it up. So that puts what looks like a very kind of rich, exciting place to be on really, I think, shaky footing. This gives you a sense of where stability and prosperity may thrive in the coming years, no more, no less. Great timing on the population renewal.

My next question gets into that a little bit. A city's population, one of your core concepts is that population renewal, which is a city's ability to keep its numbers healthy through new births and people moving in. If a city stops renewing itself, how does that impact life and work in that city? There are a litany of ways it can impact a city.

I think the single biggest one that everybody feels and understands immediately is the tax base. because when you have fewer people, there are literally fewer dollars flowing into the city. And you will see this decline in revenue show up in the way your rows are camped, in the way that your trash is picked up. All those things that you think, ⁓ those are just given.

Cities do that. I encourage you to take a look at a city like Detroit that lost two-thirds of its population since 1950. By 2013, the city had to declare bankruptcy. They couldn't pick up the trash.

They couldn't... keep the lights on the city streets. That shows you the most dystopian way population renewal can show up if it's not managed well. And Detroit is a massive comeback story in this country today.

Not only do they have their finances in order, but now for the past four years, their population has been growing, which is remarkable. But this is a pattern we're seeing now across the Midwest, across the Rust Belt states. is that the population there is now starting to renew, reversing that long-term trend that started in the mid-century. All of a sudden, there's money to do things again.

All of a sudden, people feel hopeful about the future. And I was just in Detroit, and I was amazed by how positive people feel about their place. And for a city that's really taken its licks for the better part of 75 years, that's a pretty cool thing to see in person. Now, if you are losing population, that's a tough place to be in.

What we want to illustrate with this is the diagnostic shows that there might be some risk appearing. We can't solve for the places that don't have great population renewal overnight. It's a demographic solution. That's something that takes time to adjust.

But the areas where we see a convergence of this challenge, both in terms of demographics, but also in terms of the automation of our lives. is really along the retirement belt, extending from Myrtle Beach down to the villages in Florida. And in each one of those cities, six of the 10, they're in the bottom 10 of the United States in our measure. They don't have a population to renew for services and supports and to fill key jobs.

And of the jobs that exist there, they're in tourism, they're in retirement, they're heavily disruptible by automation. So it's a multi-risk place. I'm curious too, as we talk about aging generations of senior citizens, if you will, based upon your experience, how interested is that population on actually being employed and doing work? It's sizable.

It's sizable. The question is what job, what industry, what part of the country? There's a lot of different factors to look at. But as a general rule, like I said earlier, we're reverting to a lot of historic norms.

The historic norm of everyone retiring at 65 is a modern norm. It's a modern norm that was developed here in the United States in the 1930s, where everyone got to retire at 65. But what's interesting, if you look at the actual employment data from like 1950, for example, more than half of all men over the age of 65 were still in work. More than half.

That number dropped down to about 14 % in the 90s, and it's been making a steady climb ever since. I think it's about 24 % of the population now. over the age of 65 is engaged in some paid labor. Now this can be part-time or fractional work.

This could also be a full-time job. But like with all things, that number teeters out over time. It's very rare to find somebody in their 80s still working. But I look at my mother and my father who are both 75 and they're still working, albeit in part-time work.

And they're doing it because they want to, not because they need to. There's a whole other cohort of people. that are staying in work longer because they financially need to do it. They're not just doing it for the feeling of belonging and purpose, which some higher net worth individuals do.

Yeah. And the type of work people are doing between then and now has changed significantly. And then also as we project things out and within the show, as we discussed what that future of work looks like and the AI tools then. that's just gonna continue to have more impact on the type of job.

Yeah, and I would say automation tools too. Japan, which has been leading this aging of our population now for 30 years or so, Japan is one of the leading countries in assistive robotics. So they employ robotics and exoskeletons in just about every field of work now, A, to make sure that more women can work in jobs that were mostly physically demanding. but also if they can extend the working lives of the men that are already in that job.

And that could be everything from handling luggage at one of the big airports in Tokyo, or we are working on a construction site. These skeletons, these exoskeletons, both the low-tech and high-tech versions, you're seeing now show up in companies around the world. In fact, a very low-tech version of this, meaning non-mechanical, was actually fully integrated into the that opened up in Germany just a few years ago. And all it does is it reduces the repetitive motion on the body.

So what it does is if you use it at an earlier age, a younger age, you can extend your working years because you're not breaking down your body over time. So this isn't just about solving for older adults. I try to make that point all the time. It's about how do you extend working lives in a meaningful way over the course of a lifetime, not just at the end.

Because if we all decide at one point, ⁓ we need to solve for 65 year olds and 65 year olds alone, people are gonna be resistant to that kind of change. And that's shown up time and time again. Agree. Shifting gears a bit here.

So in one of your recent YouTube videos, how aging societies will change everything, you said AI isn't replacing workers and expanding societies, it's filling gaps and shrinking ones. Which I think we've already talked about. Is there anything else that you can expand on about that? Yeah, it's a demand thing.

So technology often comes in when we have a gap. And that gap might be the cost of labor or the amount of available labor that exists right now. And AI is getting a bum rap for taking people's jobs. AI is not taking people's jobs.

AI doesn't have that function of taking jobs. Your corporate ownership does. They decide how to utilize talent or utilize technology. So those decisions are being made by your boss, not by a machine.

That's the first thing is the framing. The second thing is that it's here and it's not going away. And it is going to take away redundancies from certain jobs. I think most of us that are in white collar work, if we're being honest with ourselves, can say that even today, we spend about 20 % of our time on administrative tasks.

Those things that we absolutely hate doing. If artificial intelligence can trim that by even just 10%, which is remarkable. 50 % of that, 20%, down to 10%, if you've got a 10 person team, that means one of those people is no longer needed to get the same output. So that's where the job losses are coming from.

They're not coming from a smart people, they're coming from the people that were not curious enough to lean into the new technology and figure out how it can make their daily jobs better and improve that of their companies. I tend to talk about this a lot, but the cotton gin, there are shifts. When new technology comes out, there's a shift and you have to adapt to it. And yes, a lot of people lost their old way of work, but the ones that were able to adapt to the new systems that were in place were the ones that were able to have continuity.

And there are plenty of cases in our own history where we saw entire corporations not adapt properly. I was just in South Bend a few weeks ago and I visited the Studebaker Museum and That's a storied company in the United States. In fact, Studebaker once claimed that the sun always shines on a Studebaker, the play on the old British empire saying of the sun never sets on the British empire. It was a massive corporation known largely for carriages.

And Studebaker was slow to transition into automobiles and never quite connected with the American public's imagination around cars and never was able to retool its plans to really deliver on the shift to automotive. So even in an institutional case, the lack of foresight, the inability to pivot affects the whole and affects that place of South Bend, which is finally starting to turn itself around after about 10 or 15 years of direct investment in the new economy. But individuals can take a lesson, learning from this too.

When new tech arrives, lean into it or at least lean into trying it because if you don't, I can guarantee you there's a dozen other people that are and they're your competition for the future of your job. Couldn't have said it better. Just as an aside, I often laugh about how we have these existential conversations about tech and whether I should use AI or whether I shouldn't. I want to go back to 1990, 1994 when PCs were really becoming the full norm in the office place.

I want to ask people, Knowing what you know now as a Gen Xer, would you have said no to a personal computer in your office? Can you imagine how ridiculous that sounds looking back now, 30 years ago? How ridiculous that sounds? Or even a more recent example, somebody says, ⁓ I'm not gonna use an iPhone, I'm not gonna use a smartphone.

We would call those people fools. The same applies to this technology today. In fact, it might be more important to learn this. than a smartphone, than a personal computer, because of the speed of the transformation that is happening around these technologies right now, these LLMs.

This is a true disruptive force in the way we do business and the way we live our lives. Going back five months ago, the experience I was having, even working in big tech, was that there was still a significant amount of people that were not adopting or hesitant. I remember one conversation in particular stands out. to me, a senior software engineer that I was talking to, you're using AI or leveraging it in your workflow, and he was so opposed to it.

No, I would never use it, it just kicks out garbage, it just creates more work for me. It's like he was so opposed to it. And I understand that it's not perfect, but I do think that it will definitely level up your results. So the idea that he was so resistant to that, just, it made me, that's part of my motivating purpose here.

I'm like, If he's that far off, where's the rest of the world? I think we're finding different levels of adoption in different places. And I don't think there's enough data for me to give you a really definitive answer on this. But I find that sometimes resource scarcity kind of pushes people forward a lot faster in the adoption of technologies, pointing out people who are like solopreneurs or small companies or...

These are the kind of folks, fractional type people, these are the type of folks that seem to be really leaning into AI and making it work for their business because they live in a world of scarcity. So having a tool that costs you 200 bucks a year to get the upper end version versus hiring somebody to do the same type of job for 30, 40, $40,000 a year, that just is a no brainer. You'll work with some of the inconsistencies with the model in order to get that same output, if not better.

from a machine and if you're using agentic, you're getting an employee for a couple hundred bucks that works 24 hours a day. That is a big change in how you operate. Now, the most recent data out of big corporations is really concerning, largely because these big corporations don't have, they don't have really good parameters around whether or not to use AI and how to use AI within the workplace. But guess what?

Water finds a way and tech finds a way too. workers are using it regardless. Now this presents a lot of risk for companies, especially if there isn't some kind of oversight with this, because risk can accumulate, especially if people are using it for things like communications, which doesn't necessarily check bias, because AI is riddled with bias, or legal type work. If you're checking with your AI to file a legal brief, it gives you a guide, but it's not perfect, that's why we have people professionally credentialed as lawyers to do that kind of work.

So, There's a mix here, but I think the people that are really resistant to it are much more likely to be in a corporate type setting where there is some insulation around them versus individuals that are solopreneurs or fractional or kind of small company owners that have a much more greater benefit, cost benefit to trying the new technology and quite frankly, just leaning into it. People are on a personal level using it to help them with their email. basic stuff, but maybe not necessarily leveraging it as much at work.

then with enterprises or bigger companies, you really are relying on what tools they're open to using and have integrated into that environment and what data is being put into it. So that does play a factor, but couldn't agree with you more that me myself as being that solopreneur, it's an absolute level up and we have no choice but to use that. Yeah, we're forced into it for better or for worse. I think for better.

I was an early adopter, I know you were too. We can do rings around folks. And I don't feel like I have nearly the deep enough, a deep enough skill set compared to other of my peers that are really using a gen tech now. I'm not there yet, I'm close, but I'm not there yet.

So I can imagine there are people that are one, maybe two years behind me on the tech that cannot compete, just cannot compete with my skill set. I had a good friend who would often say that if you miss a leap, it gets harder to get across. And that kind of analogy applies to all technologies. If you miss it, if you miss that step forward, it gets harder to leap across when the time comes and you're forced into it.

And these corporate schemes for picking one winner for their company, that's just not the way the technology is developing right now. Chat GPT was the only thing people talked about a year ago. And now, you know, more people are leaning into Claude and those are just the basic kind of retail models that are out there. So imagine if you had made a full bet on a corporation at ChatGPT and another model is really left past it.

Or you haven't even thought about ClaudeBot, for example, which is like the sleeper hit, although I think it has exploded a bit recently, of Identic. So yeah, it's so fast right now. It's so fast and it's overwhelming, but... We've been through big shifts in technology before, and if you don't keep up with it, it will swallow you whole.

You say that place matters more than we think. How does the zip code where someone lives actually affect how long they live or how much money they can earn? Yeah, your zip code is a single single best predictor of your long term success where you were born. And this means that a person living in the right zip code could live 20 to 40 years longer.

than appear within their city or across the country. In fact, highest, there's a code with the highest longevity in the countries in North Carolina in the research triangle, high income, high educated, great access to healthcare, relatively safe climate. Those people there live to be about 90 on average. But if you go out West, you go to some of the reservations, their life expectancy is close to 54.

So yeah, it does matter dramatically where you live. Now that's not fixed. Those are averages, my friend. Those are averages.

And people can beat those averages. There are plenty of folks that have come from nothing, born into extreme poverty, that have managed to break out that living of the American dream of having great success. And they move into zip codes that perform incredibly well. Is there a specific kind of archetype for that zip code?

It comes down to money, number one. Money begets money, money begets success. That's the rule. But money also begets services and supports that other communities don't have.

And these are the basics. These are like real basics, like grocery stores with fresh produce, clean water. That's not a universal anymore. Those things really matter to a long-term successful life.

So here's a curve ball and we're going to go global on this one. So you mentioned Japan previously. actually... We went out to Japan last year, had a great time, beautiful place.

I experienced firsthand what you mentioned, is that they have a higher aging population. I think the person that got my, I got a haircut there by a 90 year old. They have an aging population, however, they don't necessarily have maybe the same level of money and or income there. So I know you mentioned that income.

⁓ Yeah, it's very simple. like wealth here, gives you access to services and supports. We don't have a great social welfare system in this country, meaning that we don't have universal care that is affordable. If you have money, you can get great care in this country.

In Japan, they have more of a universal model, meaning that everyone effectively could get access to care. Now, what Japan has that we do not have, they do not have obesity in Japan, not like we have here. The way their diet is structured, the way they consume smaller portions, fish, vegetables, rice, not a lot of overly processed foods, that's the Japanese diet. Compare that with an American diet on any day of the week, and you're gonna find the complete opposite, and that's why we have much higher rates of obesity.

Also in Japan, specifically in the big cities where the vast majority of people live, you have highly developed transportation systems that do not require a car and require more walking on foot. So Japanese people. are walking everywhere. Ike riding, walking, like that's the norm and taking public transportation.

The last part I think is often overlooked in conversations about wellbeing and that is the connectivity of our cities. And you'd be surprised how important something is that sits just beneath our feet in cities and that's the sidewalk. The sidewalk not only allows us the mobility to walk around, but it also creates what we call weak ties in sociology, just being able to say hello to somebody or being seen yourself. And those contribute to a sense of community, a sense of wellbeing.

They help guard against isolation and depression and loneliness, which as I'm sure Surgeon General famously said a few years back, it's like nearly smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, being isolated and alone. So if you eliminate those things, those basic things, the bad diets, the poor exercise, the ability to connect with people on a regular basis rather than being in that cocoon of the automobile, my golly, all of a sudden you have a greater chance at longevity. And the Japanese are the longest lived people on the planet, no question about it.

They've had incredible success here. I don't think we'll ever come close to matching it. The big takeaways I have is mental and physical health plays into that equation significantly. And so whether it's money, the money driving that, whether it's the societal factor, all those things, it's about having a better environment that you thrive in.

Really the social health. Like people don't give that enough credit to the social health. Like just being able to connect with human beings. Folks seem to forget we are by nature tribal people.

Human beings grew up in packs and we stayed in packs for a reason. It is only in recent memory that we started separating from the pack and becoming more individualistic. And I'm all for individualism. You'd be crazy as an American not to buy into that idea of individualism, but individualism has its costs and those costs can be social isolation.

It can be isolating, yeah. Exactly. A lot of the data that you're talking about discussing is US based, but I've had the luxury of being able to travel pretty significantly over my life and nationally and internationally. And seeing those parallels of how life is so much different helps you create your vision of the world and think about what might work best for you.

just, again, seeing those cultural differences, I think are also just... something that has changed my perception on the world and how it works? ⁓ Yeah, I think for anyone who's out there that's saying that this is a referendum on the way we live as Americans, it's not. There's not a right way or a wrong way to live, but there are trade-offs.

And we have chosen individualism over collectivism time and time again, and that comes with the trade-off. And that typically means a shorter life. That's just the trade-off that exists. Plenty of Americans, the largest number in perhaps history, are emigrating now overseas because they don't believe in this kind of lifestyle anymore.

That's their choice. One thing that just stands out to me, which again was shocking, is when we were in Japan, we went into a grocery store and my daughter loves strawberries. So we asked for some strawberries. said, and they mainly speak Japanese.

And I just said, where are the organic strawberries? Can I get some organic strawberries? And the lady said, what is that? Actually, through that question into, I think, Gemini or Chachibeete or something, it was like, they don't have the same pesticides.

They don't have organic. The way that they go about making strawberries is completely different, and it's more focused on how can we promote healthier products in general instead of having to have two categories of shitty versus healthy. Yeah, and you'll find that everywhere. We make a lot of trade-offs here for the market.

One of my favorite things to see is like a bottle of Fanta in Europe. And our bottle of Fanta here is this like neon orange color. And in Europe, it actually looks like the juice of an orange. Same product family from the same corporation, but different rules and different trade-offs as a result.

Again, it's just choices. Like we can make value judgments on that ourselves. I'm not here to do that for your audience, but they are choices that we make and we've actively bought into them. So we talk a lot on this show about being an architect and not just a worker.

So looking at where the world is heading, what do you think the future of work looks like in the next three, five, even 10 years? I'll give you a little teaser from my book. I probably shouldn't do this. My editor will not be happy.

But I think we're in a period of uncoupling or decoupling from the workplace. And I think technology is largely aiding that transformation. whether we like it or not. know corporations hate it.

I know city mayors hate it because it is killing or at least putting on life support some downtowns. Few people understand much less believe this statistic that we have finally gotten into a durable normal now post-COVID where just over 10 % of the working population is in a fully remote job. That means that Millions of people now don't have to choose to live within the city in which their company is based. And more and more so, companies aren't doing hardship pay or doing a cost of judgment depending on where you live.

So if your company is based in a high rent area, high salary area like San Francisco, one of the most expensive in the country, and you choose to work in Des Moines, that's extra cash in your pocket. That's your choice to do that. There's another 25 % or so of the working population that is in a hybrid job. The hybrid is funny because there's no kind of clear measure on what hybrid is.

It could be one day in the office, it could be four and a half. Moving target. Moving target. But for those people, and I think there's a significant chunk of them that might be two or three day a week in the office, they don't necessarily have to live in a core city anymore.

If you're in New York City, for example, You don't have to stay in New York City. You might move into the Hudson Valley and commute in those couple days. So suck it up to stay on the train for an hour and a half to save more money in terms of your housing costs or get more physical space. So I think that the kind of misunderstood part about where we're going is that there is this decoupling from the corporation and the physical location of the corporation.

The second thing is I think, and I'm a big believer in this, I don't have the data to back it up. It's just a gut feeling. I think that artificial intelligence is going to mint a lot of millionaires. I think it is going to create the opportunities for individuals to build million dollar plus companies.

I think we're already starting to see that. The question is how many and how fast? And these people are not going to be the ones that you'd expect today. I don't think they're necessarily going to be quote unquote the best and the brightest by our traditional definition.

I think they're gonna be the ones that challenge the norms. I think they're gonna be the ones that lean into trying different things, that are not afraid of the new. That has always been what success has been in this country, especially scalable success. It isn't just grinding away at the same, it's breaking the mold and trying something that's different.

And I think the new tech really allows that opportunity to exist for a lot of people. Now I will say this, I always say this, periods like this come with pain first and then pleasure. that we're gonna be in the pain period real soon here. This is where the sorting hat comes into play and folks decide, are you gonna stay with the old way of doing things or try the new?

Out of this comes the pleasure period where new industries level out to where people have new types of jobs to go into. But for every job that we lose, we'll gain at least a new one back. That's a norm. To the audience, my suggestion, and I think Bradley's as well, is try to be ahead of the curve on that.

Stay with the curve. Adopt the tools. Thanks again for joining us, Bradley. Where can people go to follow you and to find out more about your work?

I think if you want to get to me directly, go to bradleesherman.com. That's Bradley Sherman, S-C-H-U-R-M-A-N.com.

And you can also take a look at the Geography of Prosperity Index at geographyofprosperity.com. I encourage you to check out your city's listing and let us know how you did. Yeah, very interesting conversation today.

I do appreciate it. Everything we talked about. is in the show notes and thanks for helping us stay unlocked. Don't be a stranger.

Thanks for having me.