Affording the Extra Years

This podcast is brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com. There are two major trends happening in society, and as a financial advisor, you are perfectly positioned to guide your clients through them. Hi everyone, I'm Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Professor Andrew Scott of London Business School. Professor Scott is an economist focusing on longevity and the aging society. By the end of today's show, you'll understand what these two trends are, how they affect your clients, and how you can add tremendous value in your clients' lives by guiding them through what Professor Scott calls the new multi-stage life. So let's get started with Professor Andrew Scott. Professor, you have been exploring this idea of the intersection between two major trends. One of these trends is the accelerating pace of technological change, and then the second is the idea of increasing longevity. And you think that the intersection of these two trends is requiring us as humans to make some changes. So I'd love for you to just set the stage with what's going on with these two trends and why should we be concerned about them?

I think what's really interesting is if you look at sort of technology and longevity, there's a lot of negativity about both of them. We can't afford to grow old and we've got a technology that's going to take away all our jobs. Now, I know why people worry about that. But the real essence of the new book, New Long Life, is to say, well, technology and demography are not destiny. We can influence things. And in particular, we can shape how to use technology. And we can certainly shape how we age, because we know that age is to an amazing degree malleable. Whether it's through exercise or other things, we can influence how we age. But together, these two things are going to transform something pretty fundamental to us as humans, which is our life. It's going to change our careers, our education. It's going to reshape everything, just as the Industrial Revolution brought about a huge shift in the economy, but also where we live, how we live, who we interact with, and how we structure our life. The same thing is going to happen with longevity and technology, and we should be able to turn these to our advantages. You know, smarter machines should be a good thing. A longer, healthier life should be a good thing. So what do we need to do individually to prepare for this? What do we want to achieve from these developments? And then what do we actually need from governments and education system and corporates to make it happen? So that's kind of the agenda of the New Long Life.

Yeah, and I think there's concern out there that as technology continues to increase at a rapid pace, that there's a possibility that A, it's going to put a lot of people out of work, and B, that technology may be moving much faster than humans' or society's ability to keep up with it. And I think that's something that you're addressing in the book as well. So how do we keep up with our social structures, with our ability to learn, and to keep up with this accelerating pace of change? How do we do that?

One of the key things in this sort of new long life is investing in your future self more and more, which in a sort of most abstract way is about making sure you've got options so that if your job does become redundant, you've got other skills and other ways to move into. It's not a big shock. But thinking much more about out to your future self. But on the technology side, I think, you know, what's really important here is what we do individually and what we do socially. And we don't yet know what technology is going to bring about, but we do know that the technology does move more slowly than we think. We're still some way off having driverless cars making a big impact on the streets, for instance. So we do have time to prepare. But also, I think it's also particularly in the areas of automation, We've got to make sure that we use technology in a way that's good for us as humans. So if you look about the economic analysis of what would technology do to the labor market, you've got the standard two channels. One is it's going to lead to some jobs disappearing because you get automation. But the other is that actually machines make workers more productive so that, for instance, we don't just get rid of doctors because now there's a scanner who can tell you what your diagnosis is, but we make sure the doctor's got a more reliable scan and information, but then has that human touch that is so important to how we respond the treatments. So we've got to make sure that we don't try and eliminate humans from work. And I think that's a really interesting issue because there's sort of a Silicon Valley view that humans are flawed and machines are smart. But really what we've got to do with society is say, okay, machines are getting more machine-like. We as humans are going to focus on being more human-like. I'm a numbers person, I suspect you are as well, and many people listening are sort of numbers. But, you know, AI is going to do all the calculations far better than we can. So there's no way you can compete in getting better at calculations than a machine. But what you can do is then think, well, actually, what do my clients really need? And it's not some complicated polynomial being solved. It's actually understanding what their human needs are, how they respond. And that's where the real value comes from. So focusing on developing your skills and your practice in that area, I think, is going to be key.

A lot of things we could pull on there. So let's start with the thing that you just talked about here last, and that is this idea of we have to be more human-like. So, can you go a little deeper, maybe give some examples, or what are some of these more human-like skills that we need to improve upon? And let's talk about financial advisors in particular. What are some of the skills that they're going to need? I think people might call them the soft skills, but I think we probably would agree that the soft skills are actually the hard skills. So, tell me a little bit more about that.

So if you look at the standard analysis of technology in the labor market, it says don't think of a job as just being a single thing. Any job is made up of lots of different tasks, and some of those tasks can be automated, some can't. So for instance, if you think about me as a professor, as a teacher, grading is something that probably could be automated. It's not there yet, but it will be. It's a type of routine task that can be done by machines. So what's going to happen is over time, grading will be done by machines. So some of the tasks that currently make up my job will be done by somebody, by a machine. I don't think that means loads of professors getting made unemployed, because what will happen is the other tasks that I do will expand, and those are tasks that are harder to be automated. They rely upon more human skills or non-routine things. So if that could be the, you know, the research that I do, or the talking to the student, understanding why they haven't done very well or explain to the student what needs to motivate them. So you're going to see that jobs will shift, and the type of tasks you do will expand to things that humans are relatively good at. The same, of course, is for a financial advisor. I suspect right now there's a great deal of work involved in just getting the information and processing the information and presenting it to a client. But actually, that's going to be done through robotic advisors. There'll be so much data, it'll be processed. So then the question will be really where will the value come from? And it will come from you understanding the client and their wishes and getting them to actually develop the plan that is best for them. You know, when I was growing up, I needed to know certain dates because you just have to know. But in a world where information is just readily available at the push of a button, knowing the facts isn't really that important. It's whether the facts are true, how to assess why someone's saying it, and all those more human skills, the sort of creativity, the empathy, the interaction effects, and the judgment under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty, they're the things that machines tend to struggle with. So in a way, we've kind of been forced as humans to develop machine-like skills in some areas that won't be necessary anymore with artificial intelligence. So there's gonna be a big switch towards those more human skills, the non-routine, maybe cognitive, it may be more empathy, but I should say that perhaps the softer skills become more important.

And I think that ties into something else that you've been talking about and writing about, which is this idea that we have to be continuous learners. And the way that we learn earlier in our life might be different than the way we learn later in our life. So, I'd love for you to talk about that and maybe tie that into this conversion from a three-stage life to a multi-stage life and how learning is overlaid into that.

So with the— in the 100-Year Life book, we talk about this increase in time. And we just said, well, if you are faced with a 100-year life, if you want to kind of save enough for a decent retirement, you've probably got a 60-year career. And that notion of working from 20 to 80 just seems abhorrent. I mean, it just seems undesirable. You'd just be bored, exhausted. Your skills probably would have run out. Your sense of drive and purpose would. So we talk about a multi-stage life, one where you're going to have several different stages to your career. And then for you're going to have to do these transitions. Now, different stages could have different purposes. They could be about making money, or it could be one stage is about making money. One is a better work-life balance. One is being entrepreneurial. One is doing something and more socially minded. I mean, it could be whatever, but you can go through transitions and those transitions will require reskilling and learning. And it could be literally reskilling in terms of, you know, I used to be an engineer and now I'm going to retrain as a plumber. I mean, whatever the shift may be. Or it could actually be just a different type of learning, which is that, you know, I'm no longer a professor, I've now got a different role, and how do I adapt to that change? It's more of a psychological learning. But all of that tells you there's a process of flexibility and transition and change and being open-minded, which a three-stage life of education, work, retirement, and a linear career path didn't really put a big value on preparing for other roles. So your book of life's got longer, but the chapters have got shorter. So a lot more change and transition. And on the subject of technology, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz from Harvard have this great analogy that technology and education are always in a race. If your education can keep ahead of technology, you're doing okay. Well, if technology is going to increase even more, then education has to increase even more. But the question is, when are you going to do that education? Because there's not much more room for education at the beginning of life. Most, you know, the majority of people go to college, etc. So that suggests that education is going to be spread out over time. And that's where we come into adult learning, because adults tend to learn differently from younger people.

And I think I've heard you say that in our younger years, it's more about learning how to learn. So it's not that we necessarily have to learn a specific skill or concept. And then in later in life, it might change to be more specific. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the ideas that, you know, I have with longevity is that we always think that living for longer is about the end of life being longer, but kind of end of life is roughly the same length, a little bit longer, but it changes everything else. It works right the way back. And the same goes for education, because if you know you're going to get more education later, it's going to change what you do now. I think that change has two components. The first is what you need to learn And as you just said, a really important thing is learning how to learn and how to unlearn. So it's not so much about just drilling certain skills into you, but actually how do I go about learning? How do I discover new things? How do I test ideas? And that's going to be a really important skill to have for the future because you're going to learn to update yourself. Of course, you'll have to learn certain skills, probably get your first job., but those skills may well become obsolete in 10 or 15 years' time, or even shorter, depending upon what you study. So you're going to have to sort of learn to change and set about rediscovering things. The other thing which is really interesting, and there's a project happening in the US called the 60-Year Curricula in many colleges, which is that, you know, if you are working from 20 to 80, it's a 60-year curriculum. And what does it mean to graduate, to get a degree? You haven't finished, you've never been— you've got to keep coming back. So in which case it says, well, Should I do a 4-year program? Should I just do 1 or 2, get a job because I've got the skills I need for that, come back later on? So there's huge changes here.

Yeah, and I think just like the nature of work is changing, the nature of learning is changing. I think the nature of the advice that financial advisors give need to change as well. And what I mean by that is, as you talked about this 3-stage life, where the third stage is retirement, that obviously has been the main focus of financial advisors for decades is making sure you have enough money to retire, that you're not going to run out of money in retirement. But with this multi-stage life, what are your thoughts in terms of how financial advisors need to prepare their clients for this multi-stage life? How do they need to be thinking about their money with this multi-stage life?

And it's a really profound change, isn't it? Because in the 20th century, we invented this three-stage life. We invented retirement. And with that came a shift in the notion of a pension. So if the three-stage life is going, retirement, which is already, of course, changing pretty dramatically, is going to change too. And if you think about one of the main points of stage 2 is to accumulate money, which you then shift into stage 3 retirement. And that's been, of course, rightly the focus of financial advisors. But if we move away from a three-stage life, how we allocate time and money between different periods is going to be very different. Now, already we're seeing that because we're seeing a lot of people work for longer. You know, number of Americans working aged over 70 has doubled the last 10 years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics says it's going to double again in the next 10 years. So you could, as a financial advisor, say it's all about financing that third stage and you need more money to do it. But of course, if you've got this multi-stage life, I'm going to need to ramp up my money up and down in all sorts of different ways. I might need to save some money in my 40s to pay for being re-educated in my 50s. If you think about the financial special advice too. If you say to someone, well, okay, if you're not going to save more, you're going to have to work to your 70, you can't just stop there because the question is, well, how are you going to carry on working until you're 70? Because if you look at employment, starts to fall from about 45, 50 in most countries, and that's not early retirement. It's a little bit of early retirement. Some of it's bad health, but a lot of it is just losing a job because older people are seen as being expensive or their skills are out of date, and they find it really hard to get another one. So if you really want to help people plan for later life, you've got to make sure they can carry on working after they're 50, which is about maintaining their health and their skills and their relevance. So, you know, wow, if you really want to secure someone's income in retirement, you've got to look much more broadly than that. And so, you know, I think you've got to think about people investing in a broad portfolio of assets. It's not just investing in money, it's investing in your skills, your health, your relationships, and your flexibility. Now, when I talk to financial advisors, they're kind of the best ones to get this anyway. This is what they do. But really, we've got individuals going to take a lot more responsibility for their future because if their jobs are multi-staged, firm doesn't quite look after their career development in the same way. The individual is going to have to look after their education, their health, and their finances. So you're getting this intertwining of the most important things in terms of generating health and wealth and skills. Yeah.

A couple of things you touched on there that I want to explore a little bit further. One is you were just talking about how we're all probably going to have to be a little more self-reliant to take care of some of these changes. But then you also talked about we need to have a broader portfolio of assets. And I think you touched on this idea of 3 different types of assets in the first book, The 100-Year Life. You talked about productive assets, vitality assets, and transitional assets. So, I'd love for you to just tell me a little bit more about those types of assets. How should we be thinking about those both as individuals and taking it upon ourselves to be self-reliant and excel in those, but then also where can we turn to other people to help us to think about those? And again, I'm thinking about financial advisors here, where I think they can be the person that can help their clients think about their assets in a broader range, as you describe in your books?

I kind of think of it like a dashboard, like a plane or something, or one of these computer games. And you've got 4 dials in front of you. One is your finances. One is your productive assets, your skills and knowledge. The other is your vitality assets, which is your mental and physical health and your relationships. Another is your transformational assets, your ability to deal with change. And once you start thinking of those 4 different dials, once you start dealing with longevity just by working longer, you realize that, yeah, okay, that solves the financial problem. Problem, but my productive assets will long be hitting zero. You know, if I've got a 60-year career, anything I learn at 20 is going to be superfluous by the time I'm 70. So I've got to do something to boost those productive assets. Then you look at your vitality assets. If you just work for 60 years nonstop in the way that we currently do, your physical and mental health will probably be poor, your relationships certainly will be. So you need to take time out to build those up. And then finally, the transformational assets, which are really important because over a longer life with especially with technology, you will see more change. You've got to invest in that playfulness and reinvention. So once you see these 4 different dials, you realize that the 3-stage life can't survive. It's got to be a multi-stage life, and I've got to think about investing in lots of different ways. And I guess, you know, just having this conversation is very interesting because you— we keep using the word financial advisor, but is that really what your advisors are doing? You know, they're telling you this is how to manage your finances to support what you want to do, But you've got to construct a life where your finances support the life plan you want rather than your life is backed up to support your finances. And you really got to know the person's preferences and what they need. And the other really big challenge here is age, because one of the things that is behind this longevity agenda is that chronological age is not a very good indicator of what matters to us. So firstly, we're sort of— we're healthier for longer. So kind of 70s than you 60, that type of argument. So we've got to sort of think differently. But the other thing is that the reason why we're aging better and why on average 70 is the new 60 is that age is malleable. We can influence biologically how we age. But of course, not everyone ages the same. You can be running 100 meters at age 100, or you can be in a wheelchair at age 50. And that diversity and risk of age is really important. So I guess Putting it another way around, actually, what I think for financial advisors, and I'm very keen on this, is as follows. In the 20th century, if you looked at mortality risk, there was a risk of dying young. We saw a big growth of life insurance. How do I make sure that my family is okay when I pass? If you look at what's happening to mortality rates now, more and more people are dying in their 80s and 90s rather than early. What that means is we've got a new risk around, which is longevity risk. Which is the danger of outliving my finances, outliving my skills, outliving my health, outliving my sense of purpose. And so, wow, that's a really big different shift in terms of what we need to offer in terms of advice, because you've got to make sure you invest in your health and your skills and your finances and your relationships. And just investing in finances ain't going to cut it.

Yeah. Now, you talked about about the idea that I'm saying financial advisor. And the reality is that many financial advisors, many of the best financial advisors say, "Well, as you say, finance is just one aspect of what I do, but I really look at the whole life portfolio." And one of the things that I really liked about how you frame this broader portfolio of assets is instead of just looking at a traditional financial balance sheet of a client, you can add these other asset classes, these vitality assets, these transformational assets as additional line items on the person's balance sheet. So, I think that's an interesting concept for financial advisors to be thinking about and how can you, as an advisor, impact that? So, I think that's an important thing to consider here. And then a second thing that you talked about that I want to explore a little further is this idea of optionality. And I know in your first book, you talked about how as life becomes longer, there's more opportunity for change and options become more important. And you said that searching for options options and keeping them open for longer will be a direct consequence of a 100-year life. And then further, you said investing in protecting these options will become an essential part of life planning. So tell me a little bit more about this idea of optionality and how should we be thinking about that?

The options is tricky because of course, we're familiar with a financial option where effectively the value of an option depends on two things, the volatility of the underlying asset, and then the length of time over which you hold the option. And as life extends, options become more valuable. And if at every age, which is roughly what's happening, everyone's got more time ahead of them, at every age you should be interested in options. Now you can think of options in different ways, and so one way I think about it is look at a picture of my father aged 14, and he's got a suit and tie, he's got a job, I think he's probably in a war at 17. He's sort of married at 18 or 19. He's got a kid at 20 and a house at 21. He hasn't got many options at that point. He's fully committed. Then I kind of do all that stuff in my mid-20s, and I sort of see my kids coming on, and yeah, it's early 30s, mid-30s. But actually, that's because adult development is taking longer. You're keeping your options open. Let's explore who I am, find out what I'm good at, find out what I like. 'cause then I've got this long period ahead of me. So that was sort of how I first started thinking about options. But then you realize that if I'm also not going to commit to a career so early, and if I start working for a firm, I know that this is not who I'm going to be with until retirement. This is just one stage of my career. You can see why you have all this sort of, I think, misplaced debate about millennials not committing. It's just because this is only part of their life. Whereas my father, you know, he's in the same career forever, in the same industry forever. So options become important in a multi-stage life because you've got to think that if I take this path now, what does it rule out later? And so taking paths that keep more options open later is really important because, you know, if I do need to go consultant later on or want to move overseas or do a shift, keeping those options open is really important. Of course, one way of keeping options open is just have a pile of money behind you. Building up liquid assets that can help fund you, that's great. But it's not just about that. It's also, as I said, about skills and who you are. And really, in the new book, we try and think about a schema whereby at different points in time, you take different paths. And you've got to just think that as you've got more time ahead of you, there's more future selves ahead of you. And you've got to think of those future selves not just by giving them good health, more money, and more skills, and more better relationships, but also that the future selves could be divergent. There's more paths that spread out and you've got to allow for those different scenarios, which of course makes financial planning hard because there's more future options.

I think most of us would say, well, we like the idea that we may have more options for our future, but as humans, isn't it difficult for us to envision the future, to plan for the long term because we're more focused about right now, what's happening right now, what am I doing today? I can't think about 5, 10, 20 years from now, let alone next week. So, What advice do you have for people and professionals who advise and guide people on how do you think about the future? How do we do that?

I think there's two things here. One is that you may be someone who likes to plan, but you just won't be able to plan because as the horizon gets longer, the forecast interval gets broader. So there's just more risk, and even if you are forward-looking. The other challenge is that I don't think people are good at being forward-looking, because evolutionarily we've always sort of been sort of programmed to worry about the problem just around the corner rather than the one that's 10, uh, 20, 30, 50, 70 years away. So a really important life skill is going to be how good you are at thinking of your future self. And I stress that's a life skill because I do think it's something you can work on. So I'm, I'm very taken, for instance, by some of those saving products that show people a picture of them, future selves, and say, this is what you're going to look like, what do you do today? And it changes people's behavior. And I do think it's sort of— it's a habit and a muscle that needs to be worked on. If anything, I think it's the sort of the health and the future relationships that are the key ones. But it is that sense of thinking of your future. And I think it's very hard to get 20-year-olds to do that, and that's probably a good thing. And but, you know, once you start at 40 or 50, I think people are beginning to be aware that actually they've got to do things differently because the crux of the 100-year life and the new life story is whatever your parents did, or certainly whatever your grandparents did, isn't going to work for you. It does require much more introspection and much more thoughtfulness than has previously been the case. I think eventually we'll get new social norms. And we can just copy those. But right now, it's much more self-discovery.

One of the things you talk about in your book is a framework, and you talk about this idea of narrate, explore, and relate. Does that tie into this idea of trying to help us plan for the future?

There's a story that we need to tell. There's a narrate story. So how does my life fit together? What's it about? So narrate, explore, and relate is a framework used in the book. Narrate is sort of how do all the chapters of my life fit together if I've got these new chapters. And one really important thing there that I'm mildly obsessed about is that we use time and age to provide a pace to our life. But we've got to move away from this reliance upon chronological age. And there's all sorts of simple ways of doing that. So what matters is biological age, not chronological age. So making sure that we're as healthy as we can be at every age is important. But the other thing I think is particularly important for financial planning is to think about not just how many candles there are on your birthday cake, your chronological age, but kind of how many more birthday cakes there are to come. So, you know, in the UK and the US, actually, the average American or Brit has never been so old, but they've never had more years left to live. And I think, again, that forward-looking perspective rather than just a backward-looking perspective is important. And if you do look forward, if you've got more time ahead of you, then aging is a different thing. You know you've got to invest more in that future. So we need new ways of thinking about narrating, just as retirement has changed and what we expect people to do in their 70s and 80s. Let me give you another really big change I think is going to be huge for financial advisors. In the 20th century, it wasn't just we invented retirement and teenagers. Our notion of work changed. And work became something whereby we left our home, I went to a place of work and I got paid for my time, and in that time I provided a variety of tasks, and the firm sort of took on a responsibility for my career path, my education, what was going to happen. In this multi-stage life with new technology, what we mean by work is going to be very different. Some of your career may be spent in a traditional job where you have well-defined hours, a salary, and you deliver a certain number of tasks. At other points, you might be just being paid for doing a task, like an Uber driver. You know, I just get to do this and I get paid for this one thing. I may be a freelancer or a consultant. So you're going to see a whole bunch of cycles over your career, whether you're working from home or whether you're working at a firm, whether you're working for a firm or for yourself, whether you're getting paid for a job or just delivering a certain and that means that you are going to take on a responsibility for your career path in a different way, which means a lot of your leisure will have to be spent doing work, unpaid things, but they're investing in your future. It could be learning the skills, it could be discovering a new network, but that's kind of important. You think about relate, a lot of your friendships and your identity come from your notion of your career and your work.. But if I'm suddenly going to have 4 or 5 different roles over my life, then actually I'm going to need to find new ways of developing relationships and friends. And I think it puts an even greater pressure on family relationships, which will also become different because there's going to be 4 generations, not 3 generations, and fewer children. So intergenerational relationships become important. And that's, of course, we're being forced to discover in COVID What's important is our local community rather than perhaps our work relationships. So, these are some of those fundamental ways we have to sort of think about how we structure our life.

If we want to stay young, if we want to think young, we've got to get out of our own cohort. Like, I can't just be hanging around other baby boomers because otherwise, I'm going to have a very close circle and a very close mind. Tell me a little bit more about the importance of expanding your circle of who you're around and how that cross-pollination can help us.

Absolutely. It's about the transition, because if you want to keep options open, you need to put yourself into different environments. And, you know, I'm lucky I've got a number of very good friends, but they do all tend to be the same age and the same background as me. So we have a lovely time when we get together. We talk about 1980s music, we talk about finance, we talk about sport. I have a lovely time. But actually, if I'm going to do anything different, they're really not a good crowd to hang around with because they're the same as me. So I'm not really going to get a different different perspective. And secondly, if I do try and do something different, they're not really going to support me because they kind of rather like me as I am because I'm like them. Which means you've got to try and put yourself into a different group, which is uncomfortable because then suddenly you're not the Andrew Scott economics professor who knows about these things. I'm just, you know, this guy with a beard in the corner who no one knows about. But it's sort of kind of good to do that because then you get new ideas and new perspectives. The importance of doing that intergenerationally is going to be really important. And you mentioned those dreaded words, baby boomers, millennials. I have a particular dislike for them, not because they're useless, but they're really dangerous. The idea that your time of birth pins down your character, there's a little bit in it, but the average millennial is not very different from the average baby boomer compared to the range within the millennials or the range within the baby boomers. How we get that intergenerational connectivity going is really important. And there's stacks of evidence that it's beneficial for both. It's certainly good for the older people to mix with younger people, but it works in both directions. And I think getting institutions that bring that back up is really important.

Well, let's wrap up with just a couple of quick things here. One is, is there anything else that you want to share that we haven't talked about yet?

We've covered an awful lot. We've done, hopefully, something on the finances side. I think, to me, the real insight as an economist about about this longevity is this malleability of age and the importance of investing in your future self. And how we make sure that individually and as a society we invest in that is key. We kind of need to do two things. We need to invest in healthy aging so that our health keeps up with these longer lives, but also productive aging, that we're active and partly earning money, but just active in general for longer as well. So healthy aging and productive aging.

And then the second thing is let's end on a real up note here. And that is, let's say that I have a magic wand and I can grant you one wish. So as it relates to the things that we're talking about here today, if I could grant you one wish that's going to come true, what do you wish would come true as it relates to what we're talking about here and what you're talking about in your new book?

So there's lots of big things that are policy ones. And if I were a policymaker, the focus has to be on keeping people able on wanting to work beyond 50, because that's how we have to finance all of this. But I guess, you know, the most important thing we can all do is to make sure that these longer lives are as healthy as possible for as long as possible for everyone. So that has to be the goal. There's some amazing work going out there, and some scientists say we're going to get there through treatments. But in general, what we're going to do is make sure that as we act today, make all these years of life as good and as healthy as they possibly can be. So that has to be the wish.

Excellent. All right. Well, Professor, what's the best way for folks to connect with you and get copies of your new book?

The book's out. Buy it on Amazon, The New Long Life, or the previous one, The 100-Year Life. You can go to my website, profandrewjscott.com, or you can follow me on Twitter @ProfAndrewScott.

Excellent. Well, Professor Scott, really appreciate it. Congratulations on the new book and appreciate you being here on the podcast.

Fantastic. Really enjoyed it, Steve.

Thank you. The one big idea I took away from my conversation with Professor Scott is how the interactions of these two big trends— the first one he mentioned is this accelerating pace of technological change, and the second one is increasing longevity, it's how these two trends are creating massive new opportunities for you as an advisor. What we're seeing happen is technology is automating many of the traditional roles that you performed, which now means you have more time to focus on the human-to-human interaction and the human skills that no technology will make obsolete. What I'm seeing is the very best advisors They're looking beyond traditional financial planning and investment management, and they're figuring out how to help their clients develop the social ingenuity so that their clients can flourish during a time of rapid technology change. They're thinking about how financial planning needs to evolve as we move from a three-stage life to a multi-stage life. My hope is that this conversation with Professor Scott has sparked an interest in you to learn more about these two major trends and how your advice needs to change to keep up with technology and longevity. All right, that's all for today. Please make sure that you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platform. And for more great podcasts, please visit us at Barrons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe. This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.