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The World is Moving Fast. Futureproof Yourself Weekly.
Your front-row seat to the Future of Business, Tech, Life, and Human Potential.
On Futurecaster with Kimberly Bates, learn through thought-provoking conversations with world-leading founders, AI experts, scientists, engineers, doctors, business leaders, technologists, investors, and everyday builders. Each episode unpacks the real opportunities shaping what’s to come and the blind spots along the way.
Kimberly Bates is a world-renowned futurist and executive brand leader. For over 20 years, she has advised some of the world’s most valuable global companies and iconic brands, from Fortune 100s to fast-moving startups, helping them anticipate change and shape the direction of their industries, customers, and culture. Her work has driven future-ready brand and business transformations, breakthrough products and services, and entirely new business models and revenue streams.
The Futurecaster® Podcast is on a mission to make future thinking available to everyone. If people can see these opportunities for themselves, they can help create them.
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What happiness is is a question that's been around for millennia.
Aristotle, among others, talked about a distinction between
what he thought about as hedonic well-being, which is a sense of pleasure and joy and
happiness That's a momentary experience from something that's more longstanding.
He talked about Eudaimonic which had to do with a sense of purpose,
That life is good, that it's satisfying, that it's meaningful in certain ways.
I think it's critical to think about both of those things.
If we try and project forward 20 years, what's going to change about happiness, we need to
think about how connections with others change.
So as these technologies continue to evolve and include some relationships that aren't
human to human, they're human to computer, we need to think about those qualities of human
connection and whether they can be supplemented or replaced even by artificial agents!
Welcome to the FutureCaster Podcast where we give you a front row seat into the future of
business, life, and human potential.
What if the biggest threat to our HAPPINESS in the next 20 years isn't stress, but
surviving synthetic connections in an AI-saturated world?
Doctor Marc Schulz is a world-renowned clinical psychologist who focuses on relationships
and well-being.
He is Associate Director of the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development.
It's been going on for 85-plus years.
He's also
Co-author of the famous book, "The Good Life".
Marc has spent decades studying what makes life meaningful.
The study's core finding was clear.
Strong relationships are the single greatest predictor of long-term HEALTH, HAPPINESS, and
LONGEVITY.
But those findings emerged well before AI began shaping how we connect.
So we need to ask questions few people are asking.
What happens when machines mediate or replace our relationships and intimacy?
Will AI deepen human connection or replace it?
The next relationship
crisis might not come from scarcity or loneliness, but from ARTIFICIAL ABUNDANCE.
And the cultural backlash that may rise to protect our real human
relationships!
Hi, Marc.
Welcome to Futurecaster.
I'm excited to speak with you today and envision the future with you.
Well, I'm excited to be with you, Kimberly, and excited to think about the future and what
our past tells us about the future.
So looking forward to our conversation.
I love to ask our guests about their personal journeys.
I know that your path wasn't completely linear, but there must have been some pivotal
moments in your life where it changed your course and your fate into the study of
happiness and doing all the work.
For sure.
And the path was not linear.
I mean, I was a kid who was really interested in trying to figure out what made people
happy and how we could not just for myself experience happiness, but how we could be in
situations in which lots of people experience uh the sense of happiness and meaning.
That was true at an early age when I was a teenager, I started reading about psychology
and sociology and political theory about these kinds of ideas.
And that was in fact what I studied when I went to college.
And really in college, stayed kind of broad.
was interested in the big picture.
How can we arrange governmental institutions and societal institutions to promote
happiness at a kind of grand scale.
It took me a while to figure out that psychology was really a kind of key path in this.
And that was something I was lucky enough to kind of stumble into when I went to graduate
school.
It took me a while to figure out I was in the right place, actually, even after I went to
graduate school.
But learning a lot about both psychological theory and research and also working with
individuals who are struggling with things in their life, I'm a clinical psychologist,
really sharpened my kind of interests and trying to understand human nature and what leads
us to be happy.
So those are the kind of origins of that.
And then I was lucky enough to work on a series of studies that really have looked very
closely at people across time.
I've met a lot of really important mentors that have taught me the value of kind of
listening, paying attention, being curious about human nature.
A lot of those mentors have been part of my training, both clinically and um as a
researcher.
But there are lots of people that have kind of shaped my interests over the years and I'm
eternally grateful for that.
Some of the audience members today aren't going to be completely, up to speed on the work.
So if we could just
uh ground everything in the Harvard study and some of the key learnings and then the book
that you wrote, The Good Life, and summarize some of the key insights for people.
Sure.
So the Harvard study of adult development, as it's now called, is a really remarkable
study for a few reasons.
One is that it's been going on for 88 years now.
So it's the longest study, really, of human happiness that's ever been done, and it
continues to go on.
So let me say a little bit about how it started.
It started in the late 30s, kind of an unusual period of our history, right?
We were in the throes of the Depression.
It was the eve of World War II, so we were also struggling with the possibility of war, as
we are now in the United States.
initially it was two separate samples were recruited to study how it is that people
flourish in very different circumstances.
So there were 724 individuals recruited in the initial study.
Two thirds of them came from the inner city of Boston.
They were from the poorest neighborhoods of Boston facing real adversity and poverty.
Most of them were growing up in tiny tenement buildings without running water.
And most of them had just come, their families had just come to the United States.
The remaining one third of the 724 participants were in a very different place.
They were students at Harvard University.
Both groups were followed intensively through adolescence and young adulthood into
midlife, into late life.
In fact, they were followed to the end of their life.
As I said, the study has been going on for 88 years.
Along the way, we included the wives of the original participants.
And we're now studying the children.
of those original participants.
So it's 1,317 men and women from that second generation.
The other remarkable thing besides the length of the study is that it was really invested
in trying to understand what's going on inside people's heads, what their daily experience
is like, what they worry about, what their hopes are for the future.
So the study emphasized getting to know participants in intensive ways.
They went to all 724 homes of the participants.
interviewing their parents for hours.
All of the participants were observed interacting with their families and the participants
themselves went through hours and hours of interviews and poking and prodding of their
bodies so that we collected a lot of information to really get to know them.
And across the nine decades of the study, that kind of approach has continued.
So we invest a lot of energy and really getting to know participants.
We do that in different ways as the technologies have allowed us to do that.
So in more modern times,
We bring people into our lab.
We scan their brains as they're doing activities so we can understand what role different
brain processes play.
We might stress them out in the laboratory and watch how their bodies respond as well.
We collect their blood so we understand what's going on inside their body, how their
immune system might be responding, for example.
So this is a study that's taken a very close look at individuals from 724 families for
close to 90 years.
You asked about the conclusions.
It's hundreds and hundreds of papers.
I think it's 17 books at this point, including our book, The Good Life.
And we really arrive at a very simple conclusion.
And it's a powerful one.
It's that relationships shape our physical and our psychological well-being.
They're an incredibly important factor, one that I think we underestimate.
It's all kinds of relationships, but they're critical to our well-being.
and our longevity as well.
So the quality of our connections with others is one of the best predictions of how long
people will live.
uh The experience, for example, of isolation from others or loneliness is as good a
predictor of premature dying or how long we'll live as uh smoking half a pack of
cigarettes or being obese.
So it's a very powerful predictor of our physical health and how long we will live.
But in our book, The Good Life, we spend a lot of time trying to think about what the
findings of our research may mean for a broader population.
So we were really invested in trying to bring the hundreds of papers that have been
written and findings from other studies to the public in a way that might be useful.
And the main focus of our advice is really around how to navigate and enrich
and cultivate our relationships across time so that they continue to give us that life
enhancing quality but one of the key challenges is just having time to spend with
important others in our life and prioritizing our attention and presence.
what are you hoping to learn and study in the next five years
That's a good question.
So we definitely have an interest in trying to understand how technology is shaping our
connections with others.
We happened to do a data collection right as the pandemic was starting.
So in 2020, we were working with this new group of participants, the children of the
original participants.
And we were lucky enough to include some questions about how uh much technology was
playing a role.
for them and connecting with others.
So we're trying to understand how technology uh both enhances relationships, the meaning
of our connections, the depth of our connections with others, and how it might also create
some challenges.
And that work continues.
And we're lucky enough, again, in the second generation of a range of ages.
So we have people who grew up digitally native and other people are learning as they.
older.
So we're going to be looking at some of those questions.
I see that as continuity and what the study has always done.
We've been interested in how relationships change as a result of cultural trends and
technology trends.
So in some ways, it's more of the same.
The other interest that I personally have, and it's an outgrowth of having written The
Good Life, I think we underappreciate how many things relationships actually do for us.
So if I ask any given person,
What is it that you think your connection with others does?
People say, well, you know, it gives me comfort.
It helps me during tough times.
That's a great beginning list.
It helps us figure out who we are.
It helps us learn new ideas.
That list goes on and on.
So one of the things I'm really interested in is trying to elaborate some of those
psychologically meaningful processes by which relationships actually enhance our
wellbeing.
relationships can give us a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning, a sense that the world
is bigger than ourselves.
Belonging is critical, I think, to our experience.
We all want to be noticed and appreciated and understood.
our Surgeon General declared a crisis of disconnection in the United States.
So this was based on data that had to do with how powerful
connections are for our physical well-being and our psychological well-being and a
recognition that there are many, many people that feel on a daily level a sense of
isolation and a sense of loneliness.
So if you ask people, do you have someone who really knows you?
Do you have someone you can depend on?
Someone who cares about your well-being?
In any given week in most countries in the West now, about 20 to 30 % of people will say,
I sometimes feel lonely.
I don't have that experience in my life.
So that's what we mean that that's critically important by a sense of belonging, a sense
of uh connection to others.
And we get that by our engagement with others and being part of a community.
It's really critical.
In the past, when you were doing the study, AI wasn't as pervasive as it is now.
I think AI is going to reshape relationships, intimacy, and romance, and all other things.
unlike we've seen in the past.
So I think this is a really important conversation at a really important moment to have so
that we can help people plan for or envision what might happen next.
If you could project your findings 20 years into the future, what aspects of this current
understanding of happiness
might need to evolve?
I want to answer that question.
I'm going to take a step back.
we need to think about what we mean by happiness, right?
So The question of What happiness is is a question that's been around for millennia.
we can look back to, for really strong influences, we can look back to ancient Greece and
Greek philosophy.
So Aristotle, among others, talked about a distinction between
what he thought about as hedonic well-being, which is a sense of pleasure and joy and
happiness when we smile and just feel great.
That's a momentary experience from something that's more longstanding.
He talked about Eudaimonic which had to do with a sense of purpose, uh but it's really a
sense of meaning or a sense that
life is good, that it's satisfying, that it's meaningful in certain ways.
So when we talk about is happiness changing or what the key ingredients, I think it's
critical to think about both of those things.
right?
So If we try and project forward 20 years, from now and think about, you know, what's
going to change about happiness, we need to think about how connections with others
change.
And those connections have an impact on both the hedonic quality, that happiness that we
experience.
We usually experience our greatest joy with people that we care about.
We look for friends to help us enjoy ourselves, to experience pleasure, to keep part of
connections with others.
But it's also a place where we get our sense of meaning, who we are, uh who we want to be.
new ideas our friends and colleagues bring into our life.
So I think connections are likely to continue to change as culture and technology shifts
in important ways.
So we're already spending more time online with people than we were in the past.
And there are differences in how we connect with others when we're online as compared to
in person.
It's clear that there are fewer emotions.
our research suggests.
And also people don't feel quite as close when they're talking through these video
mediated boxes.
And we can still nod and acknowledge each other in the way that we do in conversation.
But we don't get to see that whole body rhythm that develops when we connect with others
in person.
So I think there's an awareness of that.
We can all think about our own lives, how nice it is to see people we care about in
person.
We also get to experience physical touch and their presence that has all sorts of meaning.
So as these technologies continue to evolve and include some relationships that aren't
human to human, they're human to computer, we need to think about those qualities of human
connection and whether they can be supplemented or replaced even by artificial agents!
do you think in your questionnaire that you might have to be even more specific when you
define relationship so that people, as they redefine what relationship and intimacy means,
you have a distinction in the future, human to human or human to
your companion,
absolutely.
And I think there are really two approaches to thinking about this.
And we've taken both of them in the study.
Again, it's a study that's gone on for almost 90 years.
So our definitions of relationships have changed before.
It's not just in the current period that relationships may be changing.
So we've asked people about familial relationships.
For example, for decades, we've asked them that question.
And at a certain point, we had to be clearer that we wanted to use their definition of
what they meant as family.
So if this wasn't blood relatives, that was okay.
If it was someone that they considered part of their family, that was important.
If they were in a same-sex relationship or interested in that as a marriage-like
relationship long before, there was an official recognition of same-sex marriages.
So the study has had to adapt to the evolution of culture and
to technologies as well.
So now you're raising a really interesting question about where we're going to get the
benefits of connection from.
And I do think as we move forward, we're going have to think about the role of bots and AI
agents.
It's incredibly clear that young people in particular are adopting AI.
engines and software at very rapid uh levels, very, you know, they're adapting incredibly
quickly.
And I think it's an important part of their experience.
um And so for sure, we're going to have to ask questions in a way that allows us to both
distinguish the nature of those relationships, but equally important includes the range of
relationship experience that's going to exist.
I would love to see data over a long period of time to see people who were
deeply in love or even were married to their AI companions or their robots, even their
humanoids that are going to enter the home, uh do they live longer or the same amount as
people who have really high quality human relationships?
So I think as we begin to wade into this world of uh non-animate bots, we need to think
about
particularly developmental periods, how they might impact people.
So we know there are certain populations that are more vulnerable than others, that
includes young people and adolescents, so we need to worry about their well-being.
But it's also interesting to think about the impact of talking to a new kind of
relationship partner at different periods in our lives.
So I love the idea of looking long-term, as you're suggesting, at what the consequences
are.
Because we're used to studying people across time, I'm curious about when people start
early.
with these kinds of non animate connections.
Does that make a difference?
Do they develop the kinds of emotional skills and socio-emotional awareness that's really
critical to navigate relationships?
We're all worried about that cohort that grew up during COVID.
I teach so I am around young people all the time.
And when they came back to college in person, things were different than they were before
they came to, before COVID arrived.
So we're in a brave new world.
And I think it's really important to...
look at these questions deeply and to research them in the ways that you're describing.
I read something recently Gen Z right now is being fired at a rapid pace because they do
not know how to operate within the business world in the office.
They do things that are just completely inappropriate.
No one taught them and no one is actually taking the time right now to mentor them or
teach them or
Help them, they're just getting rid of them.
That raises another really interesting question about technology.
Zoom calls, teams meetings and all that stuff that we do online, they often don't leave
room for those kinds of informal interactions in which people were mentored and learned
something from wise elders.
So I feel for younger generations that are going to work.
often starting completely remotely, often in cities that are far away from where their
bosses are and their colleagues are, it's harder to get socialized to those work settings
when we're remote.
So I think that's an example of a change that's already here.
And the question is how introduction of AI into the workplace, how that will affect them
in the future.
think part of the equation is always balancing efficiency and a company bottom line.
with the importance of connection, right?
We know increasingly that employee wellbeing is related to the bottom line.
So it's not just whether we can get our work done in 20 minutes without people having to
come into the office.
It's whether you can establish work teams and people being able to trust their colleagues
and learn from their colleagues important things.
We need to figure out ways to create those worlds with the technologies that are coming
into our lives.
It might be really important in the next five years for us to have new mentorship classes
at the university level, literally to train people how to operate within the business
space before they even leave college.
I think those kinds of really pragmatic um training ideas are really important.
I think even just learning again basic skills of how we get along with others, how we talk
about differences, those have become increasingly difficult to do in the classroom.
I do think that educators can play a role, not just by teaching people how to be good
employees, but by engaging students in meaningful connections with others.
It's really critical.
It's part of what I've been doing for years.
And I think it's an advantage.
Currently abroad, I'm on sabbatical and I'm in England.
In England, generally, classes are very different than they are in the States.
We tend to be much more focused on the experience of students in the classroom.
And I think that that's a strength that we bring.
And it gives us the opportunity to work on some of those skills as well in the classroom.
So how do we talk to each other?
How do we talk about things we don't know that are scary to talk about?
It doesn't matter what discipline you're in.
You're going to have uh areas where those kinds of challenges will come up.
I think it's true.
We've missed some of those opportunities and you know, I know a lot of young people.
I have children that are in the workplace now and it's harder to navigate in this world in
which much of the stuff is happening online.
It's much harder.
We saw the first AI companion cafe in New York last year and then this year again, people
bringing their AI companions on their phone out to dinner, to a romantic dinner.
And I see this as the very beginning of industrialization of intimacy, where emotional
support becomes a service that you sell to people.
And this is going to become an entirely new industry.
And I'm wondering in your studies why are these young people falling madly in love with
these synthetic companions?
Because now they want to marry them.
and they're going to fight in the future for marriage rights.
I'm going to use a weird metaphor here to try and answer that, is when I talk about the
importance of connections and I talk about our study findings, almost always one of the
first questions is what about animals?
People want to know about animals.
And it's a great question.
It's very clear from the research that people have animals experience slight elevations in
their happiness compared to others.
um
Perhaps even more importantly, they talk about having greater meaning.
They're caring for an animal.
gives them a sense of responsibility.
Again, it gets them outside of just their kind of narcissism and self-focus.
We think about caring for others.
It teaches us skills about how to be responsible.
So all of those things are important.
It depends on your animal.
But if we think about dogs, for example, they also give us affection, which is really a
lovely thing, particularly when we're experiencing stress.
But animals don't talk back to us, which is really interesting, right?
So in some ways, animals are needy.
They have clear needs.
They need to go out for walks if we're talking about dogs and need to care for their
health.
um But they don't tell us that we're not thinking about something in the right way.
So when we think about AI and the attraction to AI, particularly for young people and
particularly for vulnerable people, part of it, I think, at least at the beginning, is
about the
accessibility and the likelihood that they're going to be a comforting companion.
They don't have a lot of needs AI bots.
In fact, most AI bots have no needs.
They don't say, I don't agree with that idea.
I think about this thing differently.
They don't say, I really need, before we talk about anything really important, I need to
know that you're present and we're going to have this confidential conversation without
you talking about it to one of my friends.
AI bots, at least as we've developed them so far, are kind of needless, and that's part of
their uh popularity, that it's easy to be with an AI bot.
When we're with a person, it's messy.
Relationships are both incredibly health-promoting, but they're also super complicated.
We can't control a relationship.
Our partner may or may not be the same person that left.
in the morning and came back, they may have a different mood, they may have experiences
during the day that put them in a different place.
So there's unpredictability built into human relationships and needs built into human
relationships that so far aren't part of these AI experiences.
So they're easy is the short answer.
That's why I think they become attractive and addictive.
It's not that they don't provide things that are positive, right?
They might provide a sense of confidence.
They might be a place where you can explore
thoughts about who you are and your future, all that could be quite positive, but they're
lacking some of the complexity of human relationships.
And that complexity may be part of why relationships are health promoted.
they're frictionless.
But we as humans, don't we need some friction to feel human?
Maybe people who grew up in traumatic environments where friction was a bad thing, this is
giving them solace helping with that.
But we as humans,
romantic tension, uh learning how to fight healthily in relationships is actually healthy
for relationships.
how does that all come together for humans?
if we think about relationships again and what makes them both so exciting and valuable,
but also challenging is you have two people, each with their own priorities and moods and
emotions and experiences during the day.
And we're trying to navigate that difference.
It's not surprising that long-term relationships are hard and challenging and many of them
end up in divorce or, you know, long periods of dissatisfaction over time.
So relationships are hard.
Whether that's necessary for our growth or not, I'm not sure about that.
That feels like a kind of moral question.
But what I will say is that we have the capacity to grow from our differences.
So when we have a difference, when I have a difference with my wife, she thinks about
something in a very different way for me.
If I can learn to tolerate the scariness of having that difference and lean into it and
say,
Why is it that you think about this thing so differently than I do?
I'm really curious about it.
Not because I'm about to dismiss you and say you're crazy.
I'm really curious because I love you and I'm curious about why it is that you think about
this so differently.
We can do the same thing with a friend, a co-worker.
So there are opportunities for growth that come from differences and sometimes conflict.
But you're also pointing to something critical that I want to say, which is we're
different, right?
We all have different backgrounds.
You mentioned trauma.
And for some of us, there might be intermediary steps that we need to take in order to
tolerate some of the, what you call friction.
I might think about our differences or conflict in relationships.
We may need to take
advantage of kind of intermediary opportunities.
So for some people that's a therapist, or it's a close relationship with a friend if
they've come from a difficult family, they learn that other people can be trusted with
their innermost experiences, other people do care about them.
So we can think about, I think that's a challenge, are there ways in which these synthetic
AI bots can be used as that kind of intermediary space to facilitate growth?
to help us learn skills that are important in relationships, right?
And those are a variety of skills from navigating differences to just learning to what
we're doing to each other, giving each other that eye contact and nodding, learning those
social skills that encourage the other person to say more.
And you are right that to a certain degree differences and conflict can promote growth
under the right circumstances.
A bigger question for me is if by 2036, our social life becomes a tech stack where, and I
don't mean social media, I mean where AI suggests who you meet or even manipulates who you
meet, rewrites your messages and all your communications, resolves your conflicts before
they even begin with someone else.
If that friction is gone, what happens to true intimacy?
Yeah.
a biological perspective.
So if we start to think about it from the bottom up, and I think it's really critical
here.
you talked about biological.
So let's think about the effect of human touch.
We know from research, we talk about this in our book, The Good Life.
We know that when people are touched by another person, their body's calm in important
ways.
So if they're dealing with stress, if they're dealing with pain,
If they go for a difficult procedure and they're holding the hand of a loved one, the
areas in the brain that perceive pain are less active.
So there's something about both the biology and the psychology of touch.
It's both in combination that has an incredible impact on our body.
Anyone who goes to the doctor knows this, when the doctor is able to lay a reassuring arm
on our shoulder or is steady when they hold us in a particular procedure.
We feel better.
We feel that connection with a human that has contact that's really critical.
So on the biological front, there are things that AI coming from a computer, difficult to
provide, but we could imagine in the future combining bots and AI agents in ways that
might provide touch that could provide the same biological benefits that we've just
described.
If we're talking about a sense that we're understood, maybe AI agents,
in the near future will be good at understanding what we're saying, what we're feeling.
They're getting better and better at all all times.
But we also need to think about what we mean when we value someone who understands us.
For many of us, when we say, I like this person because they're understanding, what that
means is they're kind or they're trying to understand us.
We don't always want someone that can read our mind and know exactly what we're feeling or
thinking.
That's different.
We often use the word empathy, and that's really what empathy is about.
understanding people's inner thoughts and experiences, but I'm not sure we all want AI
bots that can understand our inner experience.
We want partners in life that may be able to understand our experiences.
And that's under the context of, you know, trust and comfort and maybe physical comfort as
well.
Maybe I have a speaking engagement and I'm nervous about it, could an AI bot coach me and
make me feel more confident?
Probably.
You know, and it's going to say something like, Marc, you're good at this.
You've done hundreds of speeches.
People really like what you have to say, right?
There's a set of prompts that we think wouldn't be too hard to give.
um But I need more than just someone giving me confidence.
I also need people saying occasionally to me,
And I'm lucky I have those people in my life.
Marc, why are you nervous about giving a speech?
You've done hundreds of these.
Have you ever thought about why it is that you get nervous before you give a talk?
Why is that?
Maybe it would be helpful to reflect on that, not just be confident, but also to reflect
on that.
So our needs change and they evolve very quickly across time.
And that's something that humans have gotten pretty good about figuring out and the other
person how to respond to those needs.
I mentioned I'm abroad, so we're traveling.
My wife is with me.
We're constantly worried about losing our passports or misplacing our keys And we need to
tell each other, calm down.
We know where it is.
It's going to be okay.
That's helpful.
It's really hard to figure out what people need in what place.
My wife and I've gotten pretty good about figuring that
This next generation Gen Beta, I call them Gen Butler, because I think they're going to
grow up ordering every surface in their home around.
And it's going to be physical AI at that point, even by the time they become teenagers.
Everything's going to be a butler to them.
I'm worried about that generation if all they ever hear is yes, and they never hear the
word no, no is healthy.
And learning how to say no is very healthy for us as humans.
What happens to this generation?
This is well beyond Gen Z and Gen Alpha growing up with TikTok and AI chatbots.
So what are the worrisome areas as we move forward with AI?
I think one you're alluding to, which is a sense that people are getting things without
having to do anything, that there's a sense that they're not.
taking responsibility for um working to get things that are important to them and that
things are very easily at our disposal.
What is it that's at our disposal?
So we can order now food from our beds and it comes.
We can watch things that are streaming 24 hours a day.
We can talk to friends that aren't present.
There's a lot of things we can do without leaving our room, but a lot of people who do
that find themselves extraordinarily lonely.
They feel a certain
disconnection from others.
uh If we go outside, we encounter people we don't know.
Occasionally we have serendipitous connections that enliven us in ways that we didn't
expect.
m And we meet new people when we do that as well.
Not that you can't meet new people online, but that's a way that we often meet new people
by going out and doing activities.
So the question is, what are we missing by relying on these butlers, as you described?
I love that idea.
um
Partly it's learning how to be self-sufficient because occasionally those butlers may not
work or may not be present, or maybe we decide the butlers aren't so good and we take them
away.
And it's also probably learning how important it is to uh be able to learn how to do
something.
So think about the art of cooking, right?
As we raise kids and help them learn how to cook, know, maybe it's learning how to make
eggs for the first time, which is relatively easy and then...
graduating to something that has several steps and a recipe.
We tend to build self-esteem and a sense of efficacy when we learn new skills.
So if they're inanimate objects making things for us, filling all of our needs, we don't
learn how to do things for ourselves in ways that I think can be dangerous.
So I agree with this idea.
I'm not sure that they're going to replace all of our needs though.
let's just say their first toy is a puppy bot, right?
It's not a Barbie doll anymore.
just ordering the puppy bot around all day, at least with pets, they have a mind of their
own and they, you can't always predict how they're going to behave.
you're just yelling at the puppy bot to do this and that.
when they go and they actually meet other kids, they're just going to be yapping at each
other and ordering each other around.
I know it sounds crazy now, but this could happen.
No, I agree.
So, so we have to figure out how to use these technologies to avoid raising, you call them
butlers.
It sounds like you're describing brats to me, right?
People who have a sense that the world is, is there to provide for their needs and that
they don't have to work for it.
And it's also these puppy bots that you're describing are puppies that are predictable and
their needs aren't hard to meet because of that.
Maybe they don't even have real needs like being need, you know, dogs need to be taken
out.
on cold days and it's hard to go out or when it's raining.
And this is for decades.
This is how we taught young people responsibility was, you know, it's going to be a family
dog and you're going to have a responsibility.
Maybe you have to put the food out for the dog or take the dog out even when it's cold out
to go for a walk.
So we do learn things when we're trying to meet other people's needs or animals needs.
And if we take that away, if we make it too easy,
There are missing opportunities for people to those skills.
The question is whether they can be developed in other ways, because they're really
critical.
If we don't have siblings to navigate with that have differences and needs that are
different than our own, how do we develop skills that are critical for human connection?
Yeah, just even having a sense of politeness, I actually have hope for Gen Z because I
think there's going to be a backlash wanting to spend more time with other humans.
I see that happening.
The other thing that I'm seeing, which is really interesting, is that business leaders
leading either social media agencies or incorporating it into everything.
They're now pivoting and even some of the wealthiest people are pivoting to live events,
experiential betting the future of their business on live human experiences because
this generation that is oversaturated with social media is going to start really coveting
that.
That becomes almost the new luxury of being able to have live human experiences.
live theater sports is only going to be more valuable.
Stadiums, owning stadiums, owning the spaces where humans actually come together.
we're actually energetic beings.
when we're around others with energy too, we get a dopamine hit from that as well.
We did for centuries.
until the devices has made it quicker and easier and cheaper and faster.
And we'll have brain chips to synthetically optimize those hits in the future.
But I think there is this physical presence and energy exchange when you're actually
around other humans in a space.
We can't underestimate how powerful it is to be at a concert.
moving in rhythm altogether, seeing other people excited, watching a sports game in which
everyone rises at the same time and then gasps when the ball goes wide of the goal.
Those are experiences that connect us with other people that psychologically I think are
quite powerful for us.
And we have fewer and fewer of those experiences these days.
And certainly if we go to these uh independent autonomous bots that are
for individuals, we might lack some of those experiences that happen in unison with lots
of people at events.
I think the new real estate mogul will be the people who buy up and build live experience
spaces.
I think that's going to be the gold because AI can't replace that.
And it'll give people job security as well.
just think about, Broadway right now is a multi-billion dollar business.
It's going to quadruple in the future.
And even having
guaranteed human marks, like we have organic food today, I think we're going to have that.
And that's going to drive the value of things, sadly, but true.
one of the next big crisis might not even be just isolation, it's going to be reality.
What's real, what's not.
People are building...
their avatars.
They don't realize that they've just given up their IP.
They're one thing that they own in this life.
They've given that up and someone else is going to end up profiting off of their own
being.
so what is real is going to become extremely valuable in the future.
I think it'll get more challenging as we get these avatars that you're describing.
So I do think that that's a really uh important question.
And certainly when it comes to more intimate relationships with AI agents.
people are already struggling with how real it is.
It feels quite real.
It feels like a sense of closeness.
I feel some of the same excitement and romance that I feel in other relationships.
So people are struggling with whether that is reality or not.
I want to come back to something you said, I think it's really interesting.
So it's the idea of food that might be made by real people.
So that's a really interesting example, I think, because if we think about attempts to
connect farmers and consumers, so consumer supported agriculture or CSAs, for example, um
where people get deliveries of food and you get the benefit of fresh produce, you support
a farmer with a certain guarantee of money through tough times.
Those are some of the benefits, but one of the benefits that farmers talk about a lot, and
I think people who consume through this way talk about a lot, is getting to know the
supply chain intimately, getting to know that farmer, that
through that vegetable that you're putting into your mouth.
And this this idea that we're connected to more than just our immediate world.
It's really important to us to keep being reminded that the world is larger than the
immediate sphere that we're in.
So I love this idea about thinking hard about the chain of connections that things come
through.
There's another place where we see that.
There's a very popular mindfulness exercise that people do where you eat a raisin.
And the idea here is to experience that raisin as if you've had it for the first time.
Raisins have unusual texture to it and colors if you look really closely.
And the tastes are probably more nuanced than you think.
But another part that's really added to it is to think about where that
at reason came from, what its origin was.
It was a grape at one time.
Who planted those grapes?
Who tended to the grapes as they were developing?
Who watered those plants so that they could eventually end in grapes that we were able to
eat and gain sustenance from?
So this idea about connecting the chain of events that leads to something that's important
to us, I love that idea.
And if it's not human, what does it mean for us?
I think that's a great question to think of.
One of the things that I can imagine in the future is businesses having human only hours.
Maybe we build focus and attention gyms so that we learn how to pay attention to each
other more.
Maybe venues are marketed as no algorithm spaces,
We might have algorithm free living in the future and maybe that becomes more valuable to
people.
I love that you coined this whole idea of social fitness.
Could you explain that to the audience and how that might fit in in the future?
Yeah, so In writing the good life, one of the things that we highlighted was this idea of
social fitness.
So if we know that connections are critical for our physical well-being and our emotional
well-being, then we need to take it seriously, just like we do physical fitness.
So we all know that there's certain things we need to do.
We need to think about whether we're limber or we need to stretch more.
Or do we have aerobic capacity?
or do we need to spend more time?
training up our ability to breathe under heavy loads.
So the same thing is true in social fitness.
What works really well for us in our life now?
Who are the relationships that we value and that we find invigorating?
Are there ways that we can spend more time with those people?
Are we actually spending enough time with those people or are we so distracted by work or
the internet or other things that are?
vying for our attention that we don't actually spend enough time with those people that we
really care about and find valuable in our life.
So we use social fitness that really is a metaphor as a way to think about ways to hone
our ability to connect in meaningful ways.
So how to be present.
how to be attentive and curious when we're with other people.
That's all part of social fitness.
I've been thinking about
what is the relationship equivalent of financial retirement planning?
Can we start a, relationship planning movement so that throughout life we can maintain
that?
I love it.
that's really social fitness is what I would say, right?
It's thinking hard about how to maximize connection in your life in a way that invigorates
your health and your well-being.
And there's no more important time to do that than when we age, right?
So one of the things that people, there really two things that people focus on when
they're thinking about retirement.
Generally one is finances.
How are they going to navigate without the source of income that they had when they were
working?
Important concern.
Another one is a sense of meaning.
So for many people, work is a kind of central part of who they are.
It provides a sense of purpose.
gets them out of bed in the morning.
So we need to figure out how to replace that source of meaning and purpose with other
sources of meaning and purpose.
But the part that people don't recognize enough is that their social connections change.
So in our study, we talk about it a lot that we need to find new playmates as we retire.
The connections that we had at work.
uh, the way in which we organized our, our time so that maybe on Friday night and Saturday
night, had time to connect with others that changes as we retire.
So we need to think about the whole picture of financial security, meaning and purpose,
but also we need to think thoughtfully about how to continue our connections that are
critical for us and probably cultivate new connections as well.
If I retire,
do I want to think about volunteering my time or mentoring people in a particular way?
Because I have wisdom that I've acquired across time.
And by doing that, might I acquire new connections that also sustain me in important ways?
I'm in England right now.
And one of the great things in England are what they call allotments.
They don't just have public gardens.
They have gardening spaces.
There's one right across the way from where I'm talking to you right now in which people
come together, particularly in the spring to plant seeds and nurture their plants.
And they do it side by side.
These are small plots, 10 by 10, maybe.
So they have the opportunity because they're working side by side with people to say,
know, Kimberly, you're, chrysanthemums are growing so beautifully and mine aren't.
What's your secret?
That's the beginning of a relationship because we're going to see each other over time.
connected as we do this.
So as we retire, really important to find activities that connect us with others in a
larger community, but also side by side with others so that we have that relational
connection, which is going to be at risk as we move away from our social connections from
work and that we had previously in our life.
In our book, actually talk about, it's one of my favorite stories, we talk about an older
gentleman who was quite isolated, whose doctor said, it's time, he was in his 60s, you
need to exercise more, can you get to a gym?
He went to a gym, same time every day, most of the people that were there when he were
there were young people, he went in the early morning, and he made friendships that he had
never made before.
These were incredibly enriching friendships for him.
They shared an interest in movies.
So he invited people over for screenings of movies and he had all these new connections
that this person had not had before.
So mentorship is great.
Old people benefit from younger people as well.
They have new ideas and energy that they may not have anymore.
we've studied people across the lifespan and at different stages, there are different
tasks of life.
So as an adolescent, we need to figure out how to be more independent by still maintaining
our connections to others.
In midlife and later life, one of the critical tasks is the question of what we call
generativity in our study.
So how are we going to have an impact on other people that leaves a legacy for us?
And one of the ways that we do that is by mentoring other people, by sharing the skills
and wisdom that we've acquired over our lifetime.
We might leave a legacy in some other way.
We might, you know, create a beautiful piece of art that people appreciate or donate money
to a cause that's important.
But that legacy becomes more important giving that legacy because we're worried about
what's going to happen after we leave this planet.
What's our legacy going to be?
So that leads us to try and be generative.
which is a wonderful thing for society that people are motivated to give back in that way.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to maximize my own social fitness and that
includes renewing old relationships that I've sort of lost touch with and were important
to me.
But it also means putting myself in positions where I meet new people.
one of the things that I've heard you talk about before, you are a big believer of having
appointment relationships where you meet once a week with people at a very specific time.
This is something I've built into my life in important ways.
So the colleague that I wrote the book, The Good Life With, is Bob Waldinger.
And Bob and I have known each other now for 32 years, I think it is.
And I, there's some weeks where I spend more time talking to Bob about intimate parts of
my life that I might talk about with my partner.
or other close friends.
We regularly meet on one day a week for an hour and a half.
We've been doing it for again, 22 years in separated from each other physical distance.
More than that, it's 30 years.
We've been separated in physical distance.
So we do it by phone calls or zoom calls.
um And it's a regular date so that we always catch up and we always have stuff to talk
about.
We never run out of either business or friendship stuff to talk about.
So really critical to have.
What did you call it?
love that name.
Appointment friends.
I love that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As we close it out here, What do you want your personal legacy to be?
What do you want to be remembered for?
So probably most important to me are the people who I've had connections with.
I want to be remembered as someone who cared and was really interested in their
experience.
If I get a little more ambitious and writing this book and getting the attention the book
has received has made me a little more ambitious.
I'd like to think that I've helped people.
recognize how important connections are to other people.
They're not just something that's frivolous or something that you do because it's
occasionally fun.
They're really critical for our well-being.
So I hope that through my writing and through speaking at interviews like this, I've been
able to communicate to others how important it is that we stay connected to the people
around us.
Marc, I've really enjoyed speaking with you today.
I appreciate you so much and for all you're doing in the world to help people.
Well, thank you, Kimberly.
It's been really fun to talk about this.
It's really interesting to think about the future, obviously, and to think about what
lessons we can take from the past to help us understand that.
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