Jack Sharry: Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for this edition of WealthTech on Deck. We’ve been very fortunate to have so many thoughtful, smart, articulate leaders from across our industry share their thoughts on the future of financial advice. And it is heartening that many of our guests welcome the opportunity to come back to share with us what they’re learning and thinking and excited about today, I’m very pleased to have our good friend Dr. Ken Dychtwald join us to share what he is working on presently. Over the past 45 plus years, Ken has been a leading visionary and thinker regarding the lifestyle, health care, economic and workforce implications of the age wave. Ken is a psychologist, gerontologist and best selling author of 19 books on age, aging, and age related issues. Ken is the founder and the CEO of Age Wave, an acclaimed Think Tank and consultancy focused on the social and business implications of global aging and rising longevity. Today, we will focus on the opportunities of an aging population that is marching to and through retirement in an historically rapid pace. Can’t wait to find out what Ken’s on his mind and what it all means for our industry, Ken, welcome back to well, tech on deck. Good to have you here. It’s always good to be with you. Jack, thanks for having me back. So let’s start with what you’re working on. We had a little brief back and forth to get this set up, and I know you got a lot of exciting things on your mind. Please share. What are you paying attention to?

Ken Dychtwald: Well, I think what’s going on is that more and more people are sort of starting to tune into the fact that we’ve got this fantastic sort of change going on with regard to how people think about retirement and how they are prepared or not prepared, and what kind of help they want and need for the financial side of all of that. And so what I’ve been doing is various studies and written a couple of more books in these last few years, and working with financial firms all over the world to try to help them see that this may be the biggest opportunity that’s ever been in front of the financial services industry. So you kind of started this whole thing decades ago, dare I say, with the age wave, the first book that you did, which was a best seller, my guess is it probably continues to be, because it was such a seminal work. And now what I’m hearing is less the age wave, and as you intended originally, that it’s coming. It seems like it’s here, and longevity is increasing, not only in the US, but globally. So talk a little bit about that. What’s going on? Yeah, let me go grandiose just for a couple of seconds here. Sure. Keep in mind that throughout 99% of human history, you know, over the past couple of 100,000 years, the average life expectancy worldwide was under 18. I’ll say that again, throughout 99% of human history, the average life expectancy now that doesn’t mean that everybody died before they turned 20, but, you know, there were 40 and 60 and 80 year olds, but there were very few, and so life was short, was usually rough, and even at the beginning of the 20th century, most people died within two weeks of some kind of a symptom. So life was short. What’s happening now is that life expectancy is creeping up. It’s approaching 78 in the United States today, and more and more people are beginning to think to themselves, well, if I’m going to live 80 or possibly 90 years. When should I retire? How much money am I going to need? Is there time to reinvent myself? How do I make sure I’m healthy for those years? How do I get my health span to match my lifespan? And Who can I trust? Who can I turn to for counsel and advice? Help me chart a course? And it’s a course that people are becoming increasingly aware is going to be longer than their parents or grandparents. There’s going to be more years after their kind of core working years. And people are also beginning to realize that they may not have the funds in place to go the distance. So I don’t mean to get personal, but I can’t help it. You’re talking my language. So I’m of a certain age. We’re contemporaries. I’m of a certain age where I’m looking out ahead. I’m still working and gladly So, but at some point I won’t be and I’m thinking, how much longer am I going to live? Am I going to see my granddaughter, who’s now 9am? I going to see her graduate from high school? Am I going to see her get married and so on? So all those thoughts very personal, and I imagine I’m not alone in this. In fact, I know I’m not, because I talked to plenty of my friends that are wondering the same thing. It’s hard to predict, it’s hard to know, it’s hard to plan, but I know I should and I probably don’t do it enough. So talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in the numbers, in your research. Where are people, where are their heads at? What are they confronting or not confronting? Where are we in this process? Well, first, let me give a personal story. I am 74 right now. Be 75 in spring. My dad, who lived in 93 passed away around a decade ago. He was a good man. He and my mom had a solid relationship. My dad was diabetic, and so he figured he’d probably live around 60 or 65 Years, and he planned financially to go that distance and to make sure our mom, his wife, was looked after in the years after that for a little while. Well, as I began this story, I mentioned my dad lived in 93 so he outlived his money. You know, that was the good news. He got to know my kids. He got to be together with my mom for 71 years, all sorts of things, but it was very rough on him to have to get a check from me every month. And so yeah, it’s not as though people are ill intended or ignorant or anything, but often people find themselves living longer than they thought they would, or certainly living longer than people have ever lived before. Now let me relate that to the financial services industry. A lot of the financial services industry is hinged around the idea that people will retire near their 65th birthday, then live a few more years, and so they need to save for that short amount of time. Now, what we’re seeing is that people are scratching their heads like you are and I am and wondering, Well, how long am I going to live, and am I going to live my last two or five or 10 years with health, or is it going to be very costly? And am I prepared for the future? And most people, as you hinted at in your question, are uncomfortable thinking about their later years. And fact it is, it is unpredictable. And so more and more we’re hearing people say that you should contemplate the idea of living 90 or even 100 years now, you may not go that distance, but better to have a little extra resources in place than to find yourself falling short, which would be a really miserable way to have your final years unfold to be broke.

Jack Sharry: So talk a little bit about that, because I know and looking at some of the materials that you shared with me, that people are clearly engaging in that question, in that process of determining what that looks like. Talk a little bit about that, because it seems like the I think I’ve heard you say this before, the term retirement is needs to be retired. It’s just not appropriate anymore. People don’t just up and retire there. Certainly there are those that do that. But talk a little bit about how it’s playing out in terms of what people are doing, how they’re thinking, how they’re living their lives, as they aren’t waiting for it to end. They’re really engaging far more than I probably at any point in history. But I’d love to hear more about your thoughts and what you observe, sure, and

Ken Dychtwald: I’ll give an anecdote to start this answer off. My a couple years ago, my wife and I went to see Top Gun, and we took note of the fact that Tom Cruise, whether you like him or not, he was 59 when he did that movie, and he did a lot of his own stunts. And that I went home and kind of Googled up movie cocoon, and Wilford Brimley, he was a little old man that starred in that movie. When that movie was filmed. He was 49 years old. So one of the things that we’re all beginning to scratch our heads about is the fact that aging isn’t what it used to be. That, you know, when our parents or grandparents reached the age you and I are at now, Jack, they were kind of thought they were in the very final moments of their life. Now we have, you know, Harrison Ford coming back as Indiana Jones at 82 and you know, I tell you, what, if Warren Buffett was willing to sit down with me and talk to me about my financial strategies, I wouldn’t say, No, you’re too old, even though he’s 93 so the whole notion of when are we old and how long or should we be working is being rethought, and I think in a couple of three ways. Number one, more and more people today are realizing that they don’t want to live a longer life, just to be old longer. They want a more cyclic life. They want to maybe retire a couple of three times, maybe take sabbaticals, maybe go back to school. Maybe I’ve been a dentist my whole life, and now I’d like to be a college basketball coach. And they probably need for their financial advisor to not just assume that they’re going into wind down mode. But to ask the question, you know, what are you thinking about in this next chapter in your life? And the studies we’ve been doing over the last several years, people are increasingly referring to this new chapter in their life as a time of freedom, not a time of decline, freedom from, I don’t have to show up for that job like I used to, and freedom too. I can do what I want to do. Now, the other thing we’re noticing is that people are increasingly looking for role models. You know, we’ve never really had a lot of role models. You turn 65 or 70 and you don’t see people older than you in TV shows or in the movies, or they’re, you know, maybe if they are, they’re the older relative with Alzheimer’s disease. People are looking for examples of what they might become and what’s possible for them. The last thing I’ll say is that they really are. This is a time where there’s a lot of anxiety and folks are contemplating how long they should work. Maybe I should work a bit longer. How much money do I really need? What’s inflation going to be doing to the funds I saved, and where the right places for me to put my resources? And more than ever, we would have imagined that at this moment in history, there’d be less need for financial professional guidance. But now. Now, people are wanting it more than ever, but they want it in a more whole person way. Don’t just talk to me about my investment numbers. Ask me how my kids are doing. Ask me if I’m, you know, if I’m nervous about the future, ask me if I’ve got a new dream in my mind about what might be next for my wife and I in our lives so people, they don’t necessarily want you to be their life coach, but they want you to increasingly be more familiar with their whole person concerns.

Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah. I love this, so I want to come. I want to dig into that in just a moment. I want to go back to something you said that I had not heard from you before, and that is about being a mentor, or people looking for mentors, and I’ll tell my own personal anecdote. So as I scroll through social media and look at Instagram or reels or stories that don’t know the difference, that’s I guess I’m an OG on that front. But in any event, a hero for me is Bruce Springsteen. So here’s a guy I think he’s in his mid 70s at this point, just turned 75 Yeah, fit as a fiddle, thoughtful, smart. I’m not even a big Bruce Springsteen fan. I know that’s probably sacrilege for half our audience, but I respect him so much, and I just sort of admire I want to hear what he has to say. So in an odd sort of way, yeah, I almost view him like a mentor. But explain that mentorship thing that’s kind of interesting. I have not heard you say that before.

Ken Dychtwald: Yeah, the idea that we all benefit from mentors. You know, they might be teachers, they might be coaches, they might be people that we look up to. They might be people whose lives are kind of exemplary, and people say, Well, young people need mentors. Well, I think older people need mentors too. And sometimes your mentor could be a younger person who’s turning you on to technology or showing you how the latest music is. You know, why is Taylor Swift so famous and popular these days? So there’s this exchange that can take place across the generation and across the life stages. However, I want to add that as we grow older, we’ve got a lot of life experience. We got a lot of life lessons. You know, we’ve fallen down and gotten back up a lot of times and yeah, particularly during difficult times. When you pass your 50th or 60th birthday, you might not jump as high or run as fast, but you probably have more resilience and probably have more wisdom than when you were younger. And younger people today are really looking for that. They look to older adults, and they think, Wow, maybe I could learn some things from them, so we can step into that and be more purposeful and be more contributory. And it doesn’t necessarily have to mean volunteering 30 hours a week, but it might be that there’s some people in the community or next door neighbor who could benefit from some of what you’ve learned or the life lessons you’ve accumulated. And it’s sort of like if you’re going to take a hike and it’s in a rough terrain. And there’s some people coming back from that trip, not a bad idea to ask them. You know where the fresh water is and if there’s anything to watch out for. And so as we grow older, more and more of us are realizing that the younger generations are reaching out to get some guidance from us. I’ll add one other slight sliver to this. There’s a fellow named Chip Conley who is kind of an expert at midlife and beyond. And he he was a older retired guy that came in and built Airbnb. And he uses the word mentor, that the idea of not just let me tell you about everything I know, but what can I teach you? What can you teach me? And there’s a place where a bond of great dynamics and relationships can occur.

Jack Sharry: Interesting. You and I talked a little bit about the mentor thing, but not quite in the context, going both directions, going up and down, but a friend in common, you and I know, and have high regard for, John Thiel, and he’s been on our board at lifeyld, and just a wonderful guy just announced a new business that he started checking out indivisible partners, which is fascinating. I don’t know what John’s age is, but I’m gonna guess it’s not below 60. In any event, he and I talked from time to time, and I at a recent call, I thanked him for his for being a mentor to me. He kind of his head had a head snap, like, because I got him by a few years. He was like, What do you mean? I said, Well, I just learned from you, and I really appreciate it. Now, conversely, I probably have 20 mentees in the industry, younger folks that I talked to on a semi regular basis, some more regular than others, but there it goes both ways. It’s all about learning and sharing and growing and developing. So I love what you’re talking about there. Now back to the business at hand. So you were starting to get into the importance of the financial advisor and advice in this context that not necessarily be a shrink, but certainly be someone that’s there as a coach, counselor, some a guide, if you will. So talk a little bit more about what that might look like, where that should look like going forward.

Ken Dychtwald: So we were on, I was on your program with Ken Sella from Edward Jones A little while back, and we talked about the work age wave my company had was doing at that time with Edward Jones, great company, and we had built the notion that there were four pillars that mattered to people as they grew older. One of them, of course, was health, and another was relationships. Family. The third was purpose, and fourth was finances. And it turned out that people thought finances, while important, were not the most important that what you know, who wants to live a long life, you can all have your health, but what matters most of all are the people you care about and who care about you. So what people were saying was they want their financial advisor to be tuned into that, not just to see them as a person of an age with a certain amount of money, but rather as a whole person with people they cared about and thoughts about what they might do next, and they wanted to be able to talk to somebody about it. And guess what? Most people say, there is no one you can talk to about your future life. Think about it for a second. When my kids were young, they’re now in their 30s, but when they were thinking about what they’re going to do after high school, there were all sorts of counselors and programs and college visits and military discussions that took place. But as people reach their 60th, their 65th year, or even anticipate that they don’t know who they can talk to, so a lot of people in the financial services world, I fully understand that fact that they got into the field maybe five or 10 or 30 years ago, when your job was principally managing investments and savings, perhaps insurance and so on. But now what’s required is to widen your scope a little bit and be more customized, more personalized and more holistic, and that’s just the ticket to the future. I mean, if you’re not willing to widen out like that, you’re going to lose business. And I want to add something here that back when I was growing up, you and I were growing up, women represented only about 5% of the households where they were the primary breadwinner. Now it’s almost 35% and growing. So you got to be careful that, you know, you’re not stuck in the 1980s or 90s. And think about, you know, investments and savings and finances as a guy thing. You know, guys helping guys. More and more women have needs and wants. And we know from studies in the industry that when a man passes away, 70% of the time, the woman will leave the advisor behind and usually find a new one, because she’ll feel that that advisor never really took me seriously in the first place. Let me add one other piece to that, that longevity is not an even game for men and women. Women live about five to six years longer than men, and so charting a course for a woman to live to and through retirement is a little more complicated, a little more needing of attention than it might be for men and also women wind up with the resources. So if a man passes away, the woman gets the estate, gets the insurance, gets the decisions, and so advisors need to be far more tuned in to not just the man, but the woman and the situation in the entire family.

Jack Sharry: Yep, again, personal experience suggests, as I’m looking ahead and just had our third grandchild and starting to think about that next generation that I’m not going to be around forever, sad as that may sound, and looking ahead to what I want to do with the balance of my life. What does that include? It’s not just it will include some kind of work volunteer. I don’t know, call it what you will, but I’m looking at, how do I want to spend my time, to contribute what I know, and to to bring value wherever I go. I’ve sort of built that way you you and I think share that. And then the question then becomes, because we’re, frankly, in the midst of shopping for an advisor, because I’ve yet to find one that has worked for me just right. But I’m looking for someone that can provide guidance that goes beyond the current advisor always fills me in on the models that we have and the investments we have, and I just don’t care. I just know it doesn’t matter. I we picked high quality managers. They’re doing their job, and it’s going to go up and down over time. It’ll probably do better than most. That’s all I care about. But what I find is that that person doesn’t know about my newest grandchild, doesn’t know about some of my the interest that I’m pursuing, and I what I’m hearing is that this is really the model for the future. Is to know that whole person to make sure that you’re providing guidance across the board, maybe not telling what to do in their spare time. They can free that on their own. But how do we bring it all together? Am I getting that right?

Ken Dychtwald: Yes, you are. Except I’ll, I’ll add some dimensions to it that I think a lot of financial firms are beginning to realize that they need to retrain their teams, because you can’t expect, you know, perfectly capable, maybe even excellent financial advisors that all of a sudden know how to have these discussions. We’ve created training programs and guide books at age wave. And we find that lot of financial advisors kind of gobble it up because they realize that they ought to be asking more questions, but they don’t know what to ask. What are the boundaries? Yeah, the second point I want to add is that people are looking to simplify and consolidate. That a lot of people might have two or three or four different financial advisors, and what you want to be is the go to person, and that things change. You know, if you asked me three years ago, what was the status of my family, it’s not the same as it is right now. So that’s a perfect thing, because it allows you to have a reason for that once a year or twice a year, discussion about what matters. To you in your life. We just did a huge study with the John A Harford foundation on how the health care system was out of alignment with the needs of people as they were growing older. And one of the big things we discovered, which I think is identical in the financial industry, is that older adults, people over 65 said, all my doctor seems to care about is, what’s the matter with me. What I really want them to think about is what matters to me. And I would say the same thing to the financial advisor, if what you’re trying to focus on exclusively is the performance of the money, but you’re not asking people, are you caregiving a sibling? Are you helping out a grandchild? Do you want to leave a legacy? Questions like that, you might be missing the boat, and this is a time to realize that this age wave and this longevity revolution doesn’t just mean that there’ll be more older adults, but there’s a new generation of older adults. These boomers really are demanding, and they want to be listened to and asked questions of I want to add one other piece to that, that the financial industry has largely been about accumulation. Makes sense when people only live a couple of three five years after their retirement. So you need to save a bunch and then, you know, spend a little bit of a down, and then you pass it along as an inheritance. But if you’re going to live 20 or 30 years after you’re done working, then more and more we’re seeing that insurance type products and platforms are stepping into the game far more assertively. You know, income for life, guaranteed life income. You know, you know what they all are. And the folks on the school are probably doing this or looking at this, and I think you’re going to see more of a mix of accumulation. And by the way, a better word is needed. But right now, the industry uses the word decumulation because about 80% of the public say, I have no idea how to manage my money after I’m done earning. And I could sure use some help, both with the right products and the right discussions.

Jack Sharry: So you’ve mentioned a couple things. I’m curious what else you might suggest at the firm level, as they’re looking at this changing demographic, as this growing longevity. So one is training. Certainly, products need to be tuned in to this demographic. Anything else that you’d, you’d highlight for these firms in terms of what they might want to be taking a closer look at.

Ken Dychtwald: Yeah, I think you hit two of the big ones. One is, obviously, don’t assume that your 2000 or 1000 or 20,000 advisors know how to play on this new playing field. Help them second that if you’re gonna have a long lived population, and we figured it out for the travel industry a couple of months ago that this time affluence, as I call it, the boomers in the United States, they’re gonna have 3.9 trillion hours of free time in the next 20 years. So that’s going to be a huge boost for the travel, recreation, education, gaming industries, but also helping people think about what they’re going to do with all that time becomes important. And last, I’m going to say AI. You know, we’re living in a world where AI is ramping so more and more of the functionalities that people have presented and offered is going to be offered by technologies. And so that’s not going to go away. That’s only going to ramp up. So you want to make sure your technology is on the cutting edge, but that also there’s a need, not only for the technologically and digitally based services, but also for your personal attention and caring and concern and clever ideas. So how do you be a partner with the technology? Not? How do you keep it out of the you know, out of the dynamic? Or how do you have it take over the dynamic? We’ve seen in the travel industry, for example, that the travel advisory role has grown larger over the last several years. That’s not because technology is not playing a part. It’s because people want technology to do what technology can do, but then they want real people to tune into them at an emotional and human level. And I often think when I talk to financial firms in my speeches and such, that people say, Well, we’re in the business of building wealth, and I think they’re in the business of saving lives, because I’ve seen older people who’ve run out of money. I’ve seen older women whose husbands didn’t prepare properly for their own passing. I’ve seen people avoid the issues of putting your intentions in a safe place and making sure that you’ve thought them through on a continual basis. And so I think the financial industry, it’s got a great opportunity to help save people’s lives by the 10s of millions. And I want to add one other thing to this, and this might be kind of a pope, but I’ll say it, because I believe it that the financial industry is largely oriented towards the top third of the population. And I think the financial industry needs to be a little bit more concerned for the well being of the entire population as they grow older and they live longer lives. And that might mean education of high school kids about financial matters. It might mean about public seminars or websites that are more easy to use or. Relaxing some of your guidelines for how much wealth people need to have, I think that the entire population needs to be better oriented towards the financial considerations of how do I live long, and how do I live well, and how do I make sure my wealth span matches my lifespan before we close.

Jack Sharry: This is great. Ken. Thank you. As always, illuminating, fun, interesting, intriguing, challenging. Anything I haven’t asked you that you want to make sure our audience hears any anything that we haven’t covered?

Ken Dychtwald: A couple of things. We think that the world is divided into silos and sectors, financial, health, housing, but for the average person, they all kind of jumble together. And so we’ve asked people in recent studies, what are your biggest financial worries for your retirement, and number one on the list of the American population is the cost of health and long term care. And the average couple will need to spend, on average, $472,000 in their retirement on health and long term care out of pocket costs. So for financial advisors, they don’t need to be docs or pharmacists or experts on everything in terms of health insurance, but understand that. That’s what’s troubling people, even more than inflation, even more than you know, the ups and downs of the market. What happens if I need to spend a fortune of money on health care, most people think that Medicare covers long term care, for example. And when they retire and get older and they realize Medicare doesn’t pay for long term care, another point that I think is important that we bring light to is that we as a nation don’t do a great job when it comes to creating healthy longevity. We are ranked only 50th in the world. Now, get that we spend more money on health care than any country in the world, but 49 countries live longer than we do. We’re ranked 50th in the world when it comes to life expectancy, which is horrible. Even worse, there’s a new concept that’s getting a lot of attention, called health span. How many of your years are you relatively healthy? You can function, you can get along, you can travel, you can enjoy your grandkids. You can work if you want to. Well, we’re 68th in the world when it comes to our health spans, so the average American spends about 12 years of his or her life in a state of declining health, and that’s both very unpleasant and incredibly expensive. Now, I understand that there are all sorts of businesses and companies and sectors that make a huge profit off of a decade of ill health, but it’s not what people want, and I think we need to be more tuned into helping people match their health spans and their wealth spans to their lifespans. And we asked people in a very recent study, what’s your greatest worry about your longevity, and the number one response was Alzheimer’s, which 20 years ago, people weren’t even thinking about but now we’ve seen enough of our mom. My mom had Alzheimer’s, my wife’s mom. We’re seeing it in TV shows and movies, seeing it in political leadership. You know, there’s not always cognitive clarity towards the end of life. And I think that if I were to prod the financial industry and the kind of leaders that listen to and pay attention to you, Jack, I think if the financial industry stepped up and created sort of a Manhattan project to bring an end to Alzheimer’s disease, not only would that be perhaps the greatest thing we could possibly do, but also we would be helping people, financially and health wise, live longer, better.

Jack Sharry: Well, Ken as always, intriguing, wonderful conversation, learned a ton can’t wait for our next time around. One last question before we part. Now, you’ve been on the show a few times, yeah, I’ll be intrigued with the answer this time around. What do you do outside of work that you’re either passionate or excited about, that people might find interesting or surprising?

Ken Dychtwald: Oddly, during COVID, I decided to get more fit, you know, not being on the road and traveling. So I dropped 25 pounds. I work out twice a day. I been enjoying my wife and our 40 plus year relationship more than ever. And you know, one of the things I do that’s a little bit odd outside of work is that every year, my wife and I get remarried in a different location with a different religion, and my kids have grown up, and they’re sort of barking on their own lives in their 30s, and my son got married recently. So another thing I enjoy is my love for in my connection with my kids and regular communication and visits with them, we’re all getting together in a few weeks for the holidays in Hawaii. My son and his wife live in China, so we’re meeting up in Hawaii to have some fun together.

Jack Sharry: That’s great. That’s wonderful. So Ken, thanks so much. This conversation has been wonderful as always, for our audience. Thank you for tuning in. If you have enjoyed our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe and share what we’re doing here at wealth tech on deck, we’re available wherever get your podcast, you should also check us out on our dedicated website, wealth tech on deck.com all of our episodes are there, along with blogs and curated content from many folks from around the industry. Ken, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks so much.

Ken Dychtwald: Always great to see you, Jack. Be well.