Ken Dychtwald: Navigating the Waves of Generational Change

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. It's no longer just about the money. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Ken Dyckwald. Ken is a psychologist, gerontologist, and bestselling author of 19 books on aging-related issues, including his newest book, Radical Curiosity: One Man's Search for Cosmic Magic in a purposeful life. He's also the founder and CEO of Age Wave, an acclaimed think tank and consultancy focused on the social and business implications and opportunities of global aging and rising longevity. In today's conversation, we explore the dynamics around generational change, the shift from a three-stage life to a multi-stage life, the impact of our aging population and how the baby boom generation has completely redefined the concept of retirement. We also discuss how the role of the financial advisor needs to evolve from one focused on return on investment to one focused on return on life. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Ken Dyckwald. Tell me how you're thinking about retirement and longevity has evolved from, say, the early '70s to where we are today?

It seems crazy to me, but I got interested in the aging field 49 years ago when I was 24. I'm now 73. I went out and studied it for a number of years at Esalen, which was then sort of the nexus of the human potential movement. And I was particularly interested in what was emerging as kind of the alternative new approaches to health and wellbeing, what was then starting to be called holistic health. Meditation, yoga, biofeedback, nutrition, breathing exercises, tai chi, things like that. They were kind of on the fringe, but they were intriguing to me. And, you know, the meta message to it all was that we humans had enormous capabilities, but by and large, we're only kind of scratching the surface and only using a tiny bit of that. Let's see if we can kind of liberate some more of who we are as men and women and people at every stage of life. And then I made a switch. I left Esalen and I got invited to join two wonderful women, Gay Luce and Eugenia Gerard. You know how life sometimes serves up all sorts of strange serendipitous moments, and they were thinking of putting together a year-long curriculum. You know, how can we have people not just attend a workshop or listen to a lecture, but literally sign up for a year-long class to try to see if they could kind of cause themselves to function at a higher level of health and wellbeing. But Gay Luce decided, let's just do this program with older people because her mom had been grappling with hypertension and she found that with biofeedback and meditation, the hypertension went away. So I was 24, and here I am teaching yoga as a kid, as a long-haired kid. And I was also finishing a doctorate in the psychology of the body and writing my very first book, which I started writing when I was 22, a book called Body Mind. And before I knew it, I became really captivated by these older people. That surprised me. I wasn't expecting that. Not so much that they were sharply dressed or, you know, I even liked the music they liked, but they had a perspective. It's one thing to be around young people or seekers or personal growth folks who are kind of trying to figure things out. But when you're around people who are looking back on their life and wondering what they could have done better or what they would've done differently now that they've got some wisdom, it was very illuminating for me. The project came to be called the Sage Project.. And before we knew it, it became successful and we were being asked to set similar programs up all around the world. Then in 1982, there used to be a thing called the Office of Technology Assessment. It was the think tank, the nonpartisan think tank of the Congress. And there was a 2-year study project put together that I was invited to be involved with. And the idea of it now, track back with me here, 1982, the idea was how is America gonna be transformed by the aging of our population? So at that point in my career, I had been around older people and I had even thought I was clever cuz I realized that aging wasn't just something that happened when you turned 65. It was the process of your, you know, your life unfolding. But now all of a sudden I was looking at demography. And there were 20 people in this group. They were the kind of leading figures in the field, and I was kind of the runt of the litter. But before I knew it, I began to realize, wait a minute, birth rates are flattening. They're slowing down, they're diminishing, and that's gonna play out over time. The gravitas and heft and weight and power of the young people is gonna be diminishing in the 21st century. And because of breakthroughs in healthcare, antibiotics, a brand new pharmacopeia, the ability to store and manage foods. I was mentioning the other day that there used to be a show called The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason, and he had an icebox in the living room. And people, young people can't imagine that there was a world before refrigerators. But once refrigeration came along, our ability to store and manage foods and All of those things. And then penicillin in the 1920s and '30s. Before you knew it, during the decades of the 20th century, more and more people got spared the misfortune of dying young and longevity started rising. So it's like a seesaw. Young people were diminishing in power and relative strength, and older people we saw back then were gonna be rising up. And then in the middle of that was my own generation, the boomer generation, who have had a tendency to kind of break rules and try new things and reinvent themselves. You know, we went off to college. My mom and dad had not been to college, and many of us changed careers. I initially went to school to be a physicist and came out a psychologist. We changed jobs. We changed marriages more than any other generation. We even changed religions more than any previous generation. And so the projection back in the early 1980s were this boomer generation is probably not gonna grow old or retire the way their grandmas and grandpas did. And that kind of spun me loose. I really felt like I was reading Gulliver's Travels and with the aging of the population, everything would have to be redesigned. Literally, there were weeks where I just couldn't sleep at night. I was so excited and What I began to think about was, well, kind of everything. The auditory range in our telephones is geared to the ears of the young. The size of the typeface in our— back then it was print materials— were geared to the eyes of the young. The length of time it takes for the traffic lights to change was geared to the swift movement patterns of young people. The bucket seats in our automobiles were built around the form and fit of 22-year-old men. And Even our language, we didn't ever want to be thought of as old. We wanted to be young forever. And I thought, wow, we got a lot of changing about to happen. So I had been in the nonprofit sector and my wife and I decided that we would try to learn business. And we started our company, Age Wave, 37 years ago. So over the last decades, almost 40 years now, Age Wave has worked with about half of the Fortune 500. And over this last decade, we've had the really one, well, it's 15 years really of working with many of the great financial firms to try to figure out how is this age wave and this new model of retirement and longevity gonna impact the work of financial advisors? And the results have been quite profound. I know we're gonna get into a number of them, but it's been a blast trying to figure out an industry which wants to be people-centric, but it's got a history of being product-centric. So how do you get them not only tuned into people and what's going on in their lives, but also a kind of a whole new generation of 40 and 50 and 60 and 70-year-olds that don't wanna live or retire or conduct themselves the way their parents did. So it's a big kind of revolution underway.

Yeah. And you have been so perceptive in terms of seeing where this is going, seeing where the generation is going, seeing what is happening as people live longer and they live healthier longer and what that means for society. So going back to the '70s when you were first having your conversations with older people, those are people that were born like around 1900, I suppose, maybe some even in the 1800s. So that was a generation that is obviously dramatically different from today.

Let me say one thing about that. And I gotta tell you, I'm never asked about that. So, but I do wanna make a point because I think it relates to this kind of coming outta COVID time. I'm in my 20s and the elder men and women were born, as you said, at the beginning of the 20th century. And I would ask many of them, What was the most powerful experience of your life? And almost all of them said the Depression. It was a formative experience. It shaped the way they thought about money. They had this feeling that something terrible could be right around the corner. You should save for a rainy day. They were very frugal and that served them well because in their later years, they didn't live that many years in retirement., but there were not credit cards before the 1970s, so you didn't spend what you didn't have. It was a different mindset around money. And so my initial introduction to older people was that first of all, they were not that great as consumers because they were very tight-fisted around their money, but they were responsible savers. They also had the benefit of the safety net of Social Security. And then coming along in 1965, a very powerful safety net of Medicare. And so that generation of older people were shaped by the Depression and were very responsible and frugal around money. Now, the boomers came along. I know people don't often think about how sociology and demography affect their clients, but boomers came along and it was good times after World War II. GI loans were readily available and people were buying homes and going to college and credit cards came along. And before you knew it, the boomers grew up believing that nothing bad is ever gonna happen. You don't really need to save very much, spend all that you got and life will be grand. You know, when I was a little boy, I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. My brother and I shared a bedroom and we lived in the same home as our grandparents. So my mom and dad were on one floor, my brother and I, my grandparents were on the next floor. And on the third floor, there was a boarder who would kind of walk in and out of the house to get to her little room upstairs.

Sort of the original Airbnb.

Way before the Airbnb idea came along, there were boarders. That was a normal thing. All of a sudden the idea came along, you know, we're watching Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, and we're seeing people having their own bedrooms and white picket fences and suburbia took off. And before you knew it, people felt they should have their own home, their own bedroom, and then ultimately different televisions for different parts of the room and people having their own telephone. Now the boomers have grown up in an era where individualism is real and, you know, they're a little self-indulgent for sure. They tend to take themselves and their own interests and hopes and dreams much more seriously. Our grandparents worked for a living. They, It wasn't about having a good time. It was about earning money and putting food on the table for your family. The downside is now that the boomers are getting older, they never really developed smart money habits, most of them. And that's going to be problematic in the years to come.

You mentioned that the Depression was obviously a formative factor for that generation, and I'm always fascinated by What are the things that affect a particular generation that cause them to behave the way that they do? And so we've got the Depression, we've got World War II, Kennedy's assassination, we've got 9/11, we've got COVID. So we've got all these.

And also back for that generation, you know, and I know Tom Brokaw, he wrote a book called that group, The Greatest Generation. They were also a profoundly racist generation. There were water fountains depending on what color you were. And schools were not integrated. And so that was a generation that grew up and women's rights were very limited. So they had some great strengths to them as a generation, but there were some areas that they could use some improving.

Right. And I had an earlier conversation here on the Barron's Podcast with Professor Bobby Duffy, and he wrote a book called The Generation Myth. And in his book, he talked about this idea of the period effect, the cohort effect, and the life cycle effect. The idea being period effect, like we're talking about here with the Depression, that's something that happened to everybody at the same time. And so that would affect like all generations. The cohort effect would be things that happen to people with their generation as they're growing up. And then the life cycle effect is more about how as we get older, we tend to change. Say we get married and that affects how we behave. We start earning money, that may affect how we behave. I'd love your take on that. Do you think about it that way? Do you think about it differently? And how do you think about the things that are happening today as they may affect the waning years of the baby boom generation and now the years of Gen X as they get into their 50s, 60s, and 70s? Are they going to be different than the boomers that preceded them?

Yeah, I don't use exactly the same language that this individual that you just mentioned and whose work I'm familiar with. But for your listeners, there is the period of time in history. So I'm 73. If I grew up 73 in the year 1609, it'd be a very different time. And by the way, I want to point out that if you can try to picture in your mind Before the industrial era, like when we were signing our Constitution, there's a painting that we've all seen of all the signers in the room, and they all had white wigs on or they powdered their hair white. Why? Because being old was considered cool, that you were considered to be wiser. You were considered to own the land. You know, if grandpa, we were an agriculturally based nation. If you wanted a couple of acres one day, you better be Respectful to grandpa. But then the industrial era came along and changed all that. And the period became different. It became a youth-focused era, young backs and young minds and fresh ideas and new thinking is what drove America. And that's terrific. But then there is this cohort effect, which is what group are you a part of? Now, not everybody who's a baby boomer is identical, but we grew up listening to some of the same music and we had some of the same leaders and we, some of the same political issues affected us. One way or the other. That's the cohort. What's the generation you're a part of? And the third is, you call life cycle, I refer to it as life stage. So my kids are in their 30s now. My son just got married. My daughter is falling in love. They're in a stage of life that's separate from the period of time in which they've grown up or the generation they're a part of where they're, you know, they're moving into their next stage of life. And not everybody does that on the same day or at the same moment. But yeah, when you're in your 20s, you generally tend to be, you know, forming your identity and starting your career and maybe starting to think about how much money you might— you'll be able to make. But when you're in your 50s or 60s, you're more likely to be an empty nester. You're— and that's a whole new period of life. All of a sudden, you know, the purpose of getting the kids to school and making sure they do okay in their homework goes away to some extent. And you begin thinking about, should I keep working? Should I not keep working? My company, Age Wave, has just done this fabulous study. We are so fascinated by the outcome. And by the way, the study's free and it can be found on our website, which is just agewave.com. And it's called The New Age of Aging. Why? Because partly a boomer thing. All of a sudden you look around and there's Springsteen selling out his world tour in 15 minutes and there's, Oprah at 69, no one's going to tell her that she ought to be quiet and she's done.

Yeah. Martha Stewart on the COVID of—

Martha Stewart on the COVID of Sports Illustrated, the swimsuit issue. And hey, and if people are asked if they had somebody to sit down with and get some financial counsel, a lot of people would say Warren Buffett and he's 92 years old. So all of a sudden we're looking around and we're seeing these new role models, Jamie Lee Curtis and Smokey Robinson just dropped a new album at 83. And it's not just one-offs. What we're seeing is every TV show we watch, every commercial, every ad, all of a sudden you're starting to see older people appear. We did in this study, we asked people, when was the best time of your life? And get a load of this, Steve, 71% of people over 65 say the best time in my life is now, or it's still in front of me. Now, our grandparents would've said, Oh, back when I was young. What else? We ask people, what's more important for you? The fountain of youth, youthfulness, or youthfulness? 83% said usefulness. This is different that people today are thinking of this new stage of life. It's almost like the third age for them, and they call it a whole new chapter in life. They don't view it just as a wind down. They think they might work longer, or maybe they can get an employer to let them work 3 days a week or be a consultant or have a little bit of, you know, money continue to come in. But the stage of life we used to call retirement is getting all turned upside down right now.

Yeah. And I want to talk about this idea of stages of life because for a long time we used to think there's really 3 stages of life. There's the learning years, so maybe from 0 to 20, let's call it. And then there's another 30 or 40 years of work, and then there's 10, 20, 30, 40 years of retirement. So sort of a 3-stage model.

Oh my God. No, it used to be only 3 to 5 to 7 years of retirement, but go on.

But today there's people suggesting, and we're seeing it, where it's really a multi-stage life. And I know Andrew Scott, Linda Gratton have talked about this extensively. I had Professor Scott on a podcast here earlier talking about this idea of the multi-stage life. And so we see these younger folks, millennials, let's take them as an example where they sort of break the rules just like the boomers have been breaking the rules since their beginning, where they don't go through this linear, I'm going to learn for 20 years and then I'm going to work for 30 years and then I'm going to retire. They're going to segue in and out of the workforce. They're going to take sabbaticals. They're going to get on a sailboat and circumnavigate the world for a year. They're going to downshift in their career when their kids are young so they can spend more time with the kids. And then when they're empty nesters, they're going to go, you know, get more aggressive in their career. What are your thoughts on that? What has your research shown on that? And what do you think that portends for financial professionals as they try and help people plan financially when their income streams might not be consistent like it was, say, with the baby boomer generation who might go to work for one company and stay there for the next 35 years?

So this is really important for most of history. Two things. First of all, I'm gonna say something you're gonna think Dyckwal is not thinking. He's lost it. Throughout 99% of human history, the average life expectancy was under 18. Now that doesn't mean that everyone died when they were a child or in their teen years, but some people lived to 50 or 70 or 90, but not very many. Life was very short. It was the 17th and 18th and 19th and 20th centuries that we began to have life expectancy creep up. At the first day of the 20th century, it was 47. Last day it was about 77, 78. Now it's creeped a little bit backward during COVID but I've been on geroscience panels with very reputable scientists who believe that maybe not in the next year or two, but in the coming decades, the reasonable chance that we're gonna be able to wipe out some of the terrible diseases of aging, like Alzheimer's or cancer or diabetes and living to 90 or 110 may become normal. So for young people today, living to 100 may become normal. So that's point 1. Point 2 is somebody dreamed up this idea that we ought to have a linear life and progress happened so slowly. The idea was that you went to school one time and while you were in school, you learned everything you'd ever need to know to last you the rest of your life. And then sometime in your late teenage years, you'd make some kind of a career decision before you even knew what the world was gonna be like in the future or even who you were. And you stuck to it for 40 years and you work yourself to the bone. And then you had leisure, what we call time affluence in our company. A lot of people have been scratching their heads the last few decades and saying, I don't know if I want to just work like a dog for 40 straight years. Maybe I'll take a sabbatical. Or maybe I'll change my career, or maybe I'll go back to school because what I learned as a chemist or a physicist or an engineer or a stockbroker, it's not really what people want anymore. And also there are people who decide that, you know, retirement's not for me. I remember there was a big cover on Fortune magazine. I mentioned Lee Iacocca. The COVID said, how I flunked retirement. Some people retire and they find themselves bored. You know, over the last decade, the average American retiree watched 47 hours of television a week, and 75% of those retirees didn't volunteer at all, which is kind of nutty that we've got, you know, a billion people in the world over the age of 60 right now, and nobody's tasked them with anything. We haven't really created anything productive. For older people to do. And as you mentioned, the boomers and the Xers are beginning to think about that and say, you know, I want to have a more active life. I want to try new things. I may want to keep working longer. I may want to work flex time. And that means that the financial advisor, if he or she assumes that you're 57 years old and you just can't wait to retire and then have a vacation for 25 years, You may be getting it wrong because that person may be thinking of becoming an entrepreneur and wants to discuss it. Or if it's a couple, you know, back when I was growing up, women represented about 1% of the primary wage earners in America. Now they're almost 35%. So you gotta pay attention to the women. They may be the primary wage earner. And since they live longer than men, A lot of them are not particularly happy with the financial advisor who disregards them. What else? Can people afford to retire? You and I may be able to remember back when you didn't have financial advisors, you had stockbrokers and you had insurance agents. That's all getting mashed up now. And people are saying that they want to be advisors. They want to help people think about their future. They want to help people, you know, plan. They want to help people make sure they've got proper funding. And by the way, I don't think you should wait until the night before you retire. I think we ought to be teaching financial and life planning in high school so that people can get the benefits of compounding. And I think every financial advisor should volunteer to go teach a class at their local community center or local high school for young people. But the other thing is that everybody is different. I can line up 10 55-year-old, let's say, men. One of them just became a grandfather. One just became a dad for the first time. One's retiring. One is starting a company, you know, I mean, one is retiring from one company but creating a whole new field. You know, look at Bill Gates. He was a successful businessman and now he's a philanthropist. So you have to ask questions. You can't just say, hey, let me tell you how the market's doing today. If you want to be an effective financial advisor, you've gotta be holistic. As you may know, we did a series of studies with the Edward Jones Company. We've done studies with Merrill and Ameriprise and Thrivent and HSBC over the decades, all on our website, agewave.com, all free. But what we found in the Edward Jones work, which, you know, they're a fine company, was that there were 4 key pillars that the advisor needed to think about because their clients were worried about and wanted to talk to somebody. Health. What's the sense of having a lot of money if I don't have my health and I don't even understand how to interact with the healthcare system? It's very confusing. They want a little bit of a guide. Family, especially during the COVID years, people really was like the silver lining. People realize, wow, people I love and who love me back are the most important elements of my life. So how do I remain close with my family, my kids, my siblings, my parents, if they're still alive? You might find yourself a caregiver. By the way, in the last decade, more and more people, and this is dangerous, when they're approaching their retirement years, they're subsidizing their adult children. They want them to be happy and secure. So we calculated a couple of years ago, right before COVID the average 55-year-old was giving twice as much money to their adult children as they were to their own retirement savings. So they need an advisor to say to 'em, hey, you gotta watch out for yourself. Let's plot this out. So to make sure that you don't wind up being a burden on your family when you're older. So health, family, purpose. We found that purpose mattered. That you can have money or you can have a house or you can be healthy, but if you don't know what the heck you're doing with your life, you're kind of at a loss. My grandparents were not worried about purpose in their later years. They knew they had a few years to go before their batteries wore out, so they just took a vacation and socialized with the family. New generations want to talk to somebody or want to read a book. Or want you to guide them to what could I be doing? How can I make something of myself? You know, how can I be purposeful? How can I be useful, as I mentioned, versus youthful? I'll give you one example. Before COVID I gave a speech at a conference and the other speaker was Harrison Ford and he is a climate activist and he's a, you know, I never met him before, so, you know, he was a compelling speaker and he said to the audience about 1,000 people, We gotta get all the young people in the world planting trees to save the planet. And everybody gave him a standing ovation. And I had a private meeting with Harrison afterward. And I said to him, you know, first of all, I fawned over him and told him how I loved his movies and what a career. I said to him, you know, as I just said to you, there's a billion people in the world that nobody is tasked with anything. Why don't you get them planting a few trees? And he took a moment and he said, I never thought of that. Many advisors have not thought about what exists in the world after work, after your primary career. And to double down on that, 80% of the American population haven't figured out how much money they think they're going to need in their later years. And most financial advisors are oriented towards helping you save for retirement. Got it. But who's there to help you spend it down or to teach you, do you need an annuity or what can you afford? Or maybe you need to make some choices. Maybe you need to downsize your home, or maybe you need to get a roommate, or maybe you need to think of ways that you can live more frugally so that you can go the distance. So the advisor becomes more than just a stock picker or an insurance agent. The advisor understands not only the portfolio of financial products to and through retirement, but the advisor of the future is also going to be more holistic.

Yeah. And I think that is so spot on. And there's a lot of people in the financial industry in recent years that are talking about this idea of life planning, financial life planning. So it's definitely happening. And this idea of purpose, I think, is something that some people can feel it's a bit squishy.. But I've seen this in my own life. So my parents, my dad is a week and a half away from turning 94. My mom is 89, and my dad has clear purpose in his life. And it is CNBC, it's the newspaper, and it's his computer. And so like clockwork, he'll get up and the first thing he does in the morning, he puts a pot of coffee on, he goes into the bedroom. Turns on the computer, looks at what the futures market is doing, turns on CNBC, and his day consists of looking at the computer with his magnifying glass, listening to CNBC, falling asleep on the couch, and segueing in and out of that. So he's happy and he's been doing that. He's been retired since he was 58, and that basically has been his whole life. And he loves it. He's happy. The worst thing for him is the weekend because the markets are closed and By contrast, my mom has had to retire multiple times because she couldn't figure out what to do with her free time. The one savior for her has been bridge. And so even though she's 89, her eyesight isn't great, she can still play bridge 2 or 3 days a week, gives her a social life, gives her some stimulation. So she just laments the day if she may not be able to play bridge. And so they've each found a way to give them purpose, and it's very different. So I think that is such a key thing that we have to think about.

You know, I've written 19 books now. My 15th book was called With Purpose. And when the book came out, I realized that purpose meant different things to different people. For some people, purpose means faith, purpose-driven life, faith-driven life. For other people, purpose means doing altruistic things. There's a thing called a Purpose Prize where people who are kind of move out of their main career and they volunteer and they do work pro bono and they try to give back. For other people, purpose just means, hey, I'm gonna do what I want to do, like your dad. And one of the neat things is that we now can see our parents, or many of us older brother or sister, and say, how do I want to do it? We've got some role models, you know, we got some choices to see. There has never been a better time to be in the financial services field. Never ever. Why? Because so many people are scratching their heads, particularly triggered by COVID and saying, wow, what if I live 80, 90, or 100 years? What can I afford? What am I gonna do? What's gonna be important? They don't really have anyone else to talk to. They need someone, person may not make the decisions for them, the financial advisor, but to realize that they need your help at the very least around their financial side. The other thing is that they really want you to stick with them after retirement. And we've gotta sharpen our wits just to help people. It's not even a good word. You know, I'm not a financial advisor, but I sit in it lots of conferences where I also get to speak and I hear decumulation, but I've never heard a person out in the world use that phrase. We need to relanguage and create some life to how do we make sure our money goes the distance or else people live in fear. And that's not the way you want to live your later years. Let me give you an example. When it comes to our health, we think we're super healthy as a nation. We spend the most of any country in the world, but we are right around 39th, 40th, depending on what day you check in terms of countries and how long we live. And there's what's called lifespan. That's the number of years you live, but then there's your healthspan. And what you really want is to have your healthspan match your lifespan. But ours doesn't. We have a very low healthspan. It's about 66 years. So people spend the last 12 years of their life with some kinds of disability and often expensive and not fun. By the way, we're 60th in the world when it comes to healthspan. And this is all in this report, New Age of Aging. And frankly, I think that anybody running for president ought to be forced to answer the question, How are we gonna match our health spans to our lifespans? Because we spend a huge portion of our budget on illness and it's not what people want. So how much does it cost people out of pocket? Get ready because it's gonna rattle you. And I'm about to say the average couple from retirement day to the end of their life will wind up spending over $500,000 out of pocket. On healthcare and long-term care, and we're not prepared. We need to create a healthier version of longevity for everyone, not just the billionaires.

Yeah. Everything that you say, 100% in terms of the world needs financial professionals right now more than ever. And this idea of the healthspan versus the lifespan, advisors can be involved in that. They're not the, health professional, but they can have relationships with the health professionals. This whole idea of the holistic planning that you're talking about, the advisor can be the nexus of connecting all the right partners to help us humans have a greater life. And so I 100% agree with what you were just saying.

Let me add something that I've been thinking about a lot. You know, maybe it's having a PhD in psychology, working in gerontology all these years, but I often hear the ads and I hear financial firms talking about, we're here to help you manage your finances. And I think about it differently because I've now spent 49 years watching what happens when people live different kinds of lives. And I think financial advisors, when they're doing their finest work, are saving lives. You're helping that person maintain their dignity. You're making sure the person doesn't run out of money. You're helping that grandparent put their grandchild through college. You're saving lives. You're creating better futures.

I mean, what's more important than that? Yeah. And one of my business colleagues, Mitch Anthony, we have a company called ROL Advisor, and that stands for Return on Life. And our whole thing is helping financial advisors shift from a focus on return on investment to focus on return on life. And so it's not about how much money can you make. It's not about do I have enough money to retire? I mean, yes, that obviously is important, but it's about money's a tool and what am I going to use the money for? How am I going to use my money to help me live the kind of life that I want to have, to have purpose in my life? So it's not about accumulation as much as I can. It's about How can I live the best life possible with the money I have each and every day? Not for some future period of retirement that I'm not guaranteed to have. I'm not guaranteed tomorrow, let alone 10 years from now when I think I want to retire at age 65.

You're absolutely right. And you know, you're in— Mitch's work is very well respected. And by the way, I'll tell you, having worked now with literally tens of thousands of financial advisors, the great ones know this. That's why they do so well. And this isn't just a passing thought, the idea of being more holistic. This is the future generations coming up. The men, and particularly the women who live 5 to 6 years longer than the men, really want things explained to them. They want to have things explained in examples. They want you to know that their relationship to their kids matters. They want you to know that their money is tied to how they feel about their health. That they're connected and they want you to be interested. And it doesn't mean you've gotta be a life coach, but you've gotta ask some questions. You've gotta express and see their lives, who they are, what their dreams are. And they may be different than the next door neighbor or your other clients. I was brought in years ago. I won't mention the name, one of the great firms, and they said, we wanna be person-centric, not product-centric. And that's how we're reoriented ourselves. And they're one of the biggest firms in the world. And I said to them, do you know what percentage of your clients have special needs kids? And there are about 20 people around the table. No idea. Do you know how many of your clients are caregiving a parent? No idea. Do you know how many of your clients are about to come into an inheritance? No idea. And it just kept going. And so The opportunity to learn more, to have a better understanding is real and it's powerful and it's, I think, transformative. It is not 20 years away. It's now. And look at the fact that more people pursued financial advisors over the last couple years than ever before. Numbers are growing. People are looking to consolidate. They want someone they can trust. Women are stepping into the market. People are living longer. It's about to be $80 trillion of inheritance passed over the coming decades. So there's gonna be money distributed in different ways. Families need to be focused on. Great opportunity to be in the business right now.

Never better. You have a new book out called Radical Curiosity, and it's a collection of stories and reminiscences and lessons learned about your amazing life on this earth. And I want to read a quote here from the book. And this relates to your time at the Esalen Institute back in the early '70s and all the crazy experiences that you had when you were there. And I encourage everyone listening to this to get a copy of this book, because if you want to know what was going on, sort of the hippie period in the '60s and '70s, Ken, you do an amazing job. And you were right there in the thick of it about what it was like. And I have a personal fascination with that, but that's for another episode. But here, I want to read this quote from you. You said, quote, as I had more of these experiences with so many remarkable people, a narrative was emerging. It was the idealistic and hopeful notion that humanity might be at the brink of an extraordinary evolutionary jump, that we were going to see kinder people, we were going to have richer relationships, we were going to understand our bodies in a way that would help us be healthy and vibrant and orgasmic and beaming. That we would see people less superficially and more deeply. And from all of that would come a new psychology and new medicine, maybe even a new humanity, end quote. So that was this idealistic promise and hope from the human potential movement in the '60s and into the '70s. And what I want to ask you about that is, did you personally ever lose that sense of idealism of this human potential, this blossoming of humanity in the future? Did you ever lose that sense of possibility? And then also, what thoughts do you have for people today who I think are just the opposite? We have war, we have political divisions, we have COVID, we have all these different things going on that I think a lot of people are concerned clearly about the course of human events here.

What are your thoughts? Well, you're asking me the hard questions, aren't you? First of all, I was a young man then. I was idealistic and hopeful, and I'm still idealistic and hopeful. And in this book, Radical Curiosity, let me spend a moment as to why I did it, and then I'll answer your question. About a decade ago, we were doing a big research project on inheritance for a financial firm. And in the focus groups, we found that nobody wanted to talk about inheritance. You know, that's the word the financial community uses. And people said, nah, it's all about money and, you know, dividing up the spoils. You know, we don't want to talk about that. So I said to the focus group moderator, let's try another word, legacy. Does anybody want to leave a legacy? Does anybody want to receive a legacy? And the floodgates opened.. And what we learned, we did this massive study, was that there were 4 elements to leaving a legacy. One was property and money, and that was 4th, interestingly. Next were possessions with emotional value. There was a study at the University of Minnesota called Who Gets Grandma's Pie Plate? And that said it all. Next in importance were instructions and wishes to be fulfilled. Uh, my dad sat my brother and I down towards the end of his life and made us understand how much he loved his wife, my mom, who had Alzheimer's. And would we promise to look after her when he was gone and make sure she was always home and secure? And we did. We would've done it anyhow. But number one were values and life lessons. What did you learn? Not just what did you do in your life, what have you learned? Where'd you fail? What did you learn from that? Where'd you succeed? How did it satisfy you? What was love for you in your life? Do you believe in God? And so I thought, you know, if the values and life lessons are the most valuable things, we have to expend the effort to gather them. So I thought I would write a memoir initially just for my kids. You know, I've had crazy stories and crazy adventures. And as you know, Steve, when you're an author and you're on the lecture circuit, you meet other authors on the lecture circuit. So you meet Jimmy Carter, you meet Ronald Reagan, you meet Bucky Fuller. I got coached in feminism by Betty Friedan and Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers. And I got a chance to learn from Nelson Mandela. And all those stories are interspersed with my own personal journey and my successes and failures. And as I was writing the book, people heard about it and they said, said, you know, we know you as Mr. Age Wave guy. We don't really know your inner story. So I decided with a lot of people encouraging me to turn it into a book and finish it during COVID And it's coming out again right now. It's been recrafted to include the years since COVID Also a little bit more of my own feelings about aging. So Radical Curiosity is a different kind of book than I've ever done before. And by the way, I would encourage everyone Everyone listening, even if it's only for a couple of hours, turn on your tape recorder or your recorder in your phone, or have your child or grandchild ask you questions. Get your life lessons. You'll feel better doing it. It'll help you integrate the way you think, and they'll be there as a treasure for the future. Back to your question about hopefulness. I'm distressed over the last few years. You know, I turn on the news and it's like, oh my God, you know? And I personally am a big believer in truthfulness and I'm strong American and believe that we've got founding fathers and mothers had intelligence operating when they talked about transition of power. So I look at the last few years and I don't feel quite as dreamy as I did when I was a young man. I feel like there's more work to be done. We need to remember to care for each other. We need to remember that the air we breathe is the same air you breathe. And so if I get sick, you could get sick. We're more interconnected. Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers, when I was a young man, she said to me, you know, we put too much emphasis on independence. We ought to think more about interdependence. How can I help you? How can you help me? How can we together live better lives? And I try to keep that front and center these days.

Well, wise words indeed there. There's a bunch of people that you mentioned in the book, and what I wanna do is I'm gonna say a few names here, people that you know really well, and I'd love for you in sort of a rapid-fire way to tell me what comes to mind. Is there like an insight, a lesson, a thought that you have as I say the name. So the first one is lightning round, huh? Lightning round. Here we go. Put you on the hot seat like you used to do back in the Esselen days. I'm ready. Okay.

First one, your wife, Maddie. Well, I should say that when I married Maddie in 1983, I had been single. I was up until I was 33. And the night I married her, I told her, we had no money. I said, that was so much fun. I wish I could marry you every year. And she said, People don't do that. I said, we could do that. You know, we celebrate birthdays and holidays and religious occasions. Why don't we celebrate our marriage? So she said, okay, if we're gonna do that, let's do it in a different location. So without necessarily having to spend a lot of money, every year Maddie and I have gotten remarried. So we've been remarried 39 times. What do I think of when I think of Matt? I'm just a lucky guy. I forget about the money, forget about the success.

Having a soulmate, pretty special. I love it. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.

How about Joseph Campbell? You know, I knew Joe in the '70s and, you know, he was an author of Myths to Live By and Hero with a Thousand Faces. And Joe believed that the stories we read, the stories we tell shape who we become. And that was very influential for me. I get coached every week, even though I've been keynote speaking for almost 50 years and I'd like to think I do well. I get coached every week in storytelling and try to make sure I use good examples and try to make sure I explain things well. And I think financial advisors could probably benefit from some of Joe's teachings about the importance of giving an example versus just talking numbers.

He was a good man. And the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, Dick Price.

Dick was a special guy, passed away a quarter of a century ago. Brilliantly insightful, fabulous therapist, had a dream to create a community at Esalen where artists and creators and philosophers and psychotherapists could come together and share ideas.

We need more of that.

Will Schutz. Will Schutz created encounter groups and he was sort of a mentor of mine. It was a masterful type of therapy that I don't think people would do today.. It was a little too risky, a little too outta control. But for back then, remember the movie Bob and Carol Ted Nallis was modeled after Will's work.

And I'm not gonna give away the punchline here, but you tell a great story about, I think it may have been your first program there at the Esalen Institute back in '72 or '73, somewhere in the early '70s. And I think it was with Will Schutz.

And again, not gonna give away the punchline, but my gosh, it's, you wanna get, it's a story. I'm not gonna give it away either, but right.

Worth reading. Make your— Absolutely. Yes, for sure. All right. Now I'm gonna share the names of 4 women that I know you know really well, and they do a similar thing. So I'd love to get your reaction.

So Peggy Horan, Deborah Meadow, Vicki Top, and Britta Ostrom. You know, they're not famous women. We've been friends for over 50 years. They created Esalen Massage, which you might think, well, what's the big deal of that? But they trained thousands of people. They're now in their 70s and 80s. And I just recently did a documentary that's posted on the Esalen website called Esalen's Massage Legacy, where I asked them what were they thinking regarding touch and healing and helping people relax and calm down and feel more at home in their bodies. I feel fortunate to be friends with such grand elder women.

Yeah. And this may sound like a stretch, as it relates to these 4 folks here in massage and touch. I recently had a conversation, did a podcast with Gail Coleman, and Gail is very much into somatics. And so that's what we're talking about here with body. And she wrote a book. And the idea is so much of how we think about money is wrapped up in, say, early childhood experiences. We have all kinds of reactions, positive and negative reactions around money. And a lot of that, as you well know, Ken, more than anybody, can get trapped in the body. And through somatics, through massage, through touch, there are ways to release that. And I'd love if you have any reaction to that, to think about somatics as it relates to money and how we might be able to use somatics and massage in a way to release any of the negatives we have around money.

Yeah. First, let me say that Deborah, Vicki, Peggy, and Britta have trained thousands of people who have trained thousands of people. So tens of millions of folks have gotten a massage, and you may not realize that massage was created by one of these women. But let me jump to a piece of your question. Money is not simply how many dollars have you got in your account. We've all got psychological and even emotional feelings about money. We did a study years ago and it turned out that three-quarters of women worried that they were gonna become bag ladies, even if they were wealthy, that running outta money was scary. This might sound like some kind of a fable, but when I was a boy, if I went to the doctor and I needed a medicine, he wrote the prescription in Latin. I was not supposed to understand it. The pharmacist was, and I just took my medicine. It's a little bit that way with financial services today. I listen to things like 529, 403(b), exchange-traded funds, and it's not obvious exactly what they are. You know, it's sort of like a secret language that the financial industry— and it's very male-oriented, bears and bulls making a killing. So we need to make money more okay. More comfortable. We need to ask people what are their fears around money. My wife and I, for example, have just begun a discussion. We grew up in very different situations. Her parents are rich, mine were not. And so how do we meld our views about money going forward if we're going to be living on more of a fixed income and on our investments and savings? And we both realize that we really never have been taught How does money make us frightened? Or how does money make us exhilarated? Or how do we use money as a substitute for some other kind of satisfaction? And I think that you're right, that money is not just some objective dollar value on a spreadsheet. It's got feelings to it, and they're different with different people. It's not a bad question if you're an advisor to ask. Tell me a little bit about your feelings about money, and people will answer and they'll give you a sense as to how to talk to them, not in Latin, but in English. I'd love to see the financial industry clean up its languaging so that it's more understandable for not just people near retirement and the high net worth crowd, but for middle income people, for everyday people, and for lower income people so that we can all have a better shot of living a better life.

Yeah. And one of the popular questions that some advisors are asking, those that are more holistic and into life planning, they'll ask, what was money like growing up? And to your point, you mentioned you growing up, money was not plentiful, but Maddie growing up, she was rather wealthy. And so you each would grow up with different expectations, different understandings. You probably grew up pretty hungry. And I think I read in your book about how you really, as Steve Jobs said, you know, you wanted to make a ding in the universe. You wanted to have an impact and you certainly have and continue to have that impact.

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Right. You know, that's a funny thing. People say to me, well, gee, when you turn 65, didn't you feel done? I don't, I still feel like there's good works to be done. You know, David Brooks, the columnist journalist, said that there's two resumes you'll have at the end of your life. One is your career resume, What work did you do? How much money did you make? How big was your house? You know what? Nobody will care. And then he said, there's your eulogy resume. And that is, who were you as a person? And there's always room to keep shaping that, keep evolving that, being a little kinder, being a little more generous, being a little more thoughtful of other people. That's fresh in my mind now, even having been sort of Mr.

Ageway for all these decades. And there's one other person I want to ask you here in this rapid fire before we wrap up with a final question. It's Houston Smith. So he wrote a number of books including The World's Religions.

What are your thoughts about Huston Smith? Go on YouTube and type in Huston, H-U-S-T-O-N Smith and Ken Dyckwald, and you'll see an hour and a half interview. Huston was considered by many the leading expert on religion in the world, raised in China as a Christian. He's a Christian, but he also became a Hindu and a Buddhist, was the head of the religion department at MIT. And I was asked to do his last interview before he passed away. I'm not a religious scholar, so I explained that to the producers and they said, no, we'd like to hear Houston's views about aging, death, and beyond. So I interviewed him about that. And there's one point I'll make. I said to him at one point, you've lived these 90-plus years studying the world's religions. And the great philosophies of our era and beyond. Is there any piece of advice you could give to all of us? And he thought for a second and he said, I thought it was going to be some sophisticated religious theory. And instead he said, be a little kinder. That's in the book too. The whole interview is in the book as well. Radical curiosity boils down to something that simple. To him it did. And I never forget it.

Every day I think it. I want to go back 43 years. You're a 30-year-old, you're talking to Esther Mueller. Ah. And she asks you a question.

She says, Ken, how will you use your life?

How will you use your life? And you fumbled it back then. Now here you are, 73 years old. You've had an amazing life, an amazing career, and hopefully there's going to be many decades more. I'm gonna ask you, Ken, how will you use your life?

So the situation was I was in Denmark and Dr. Mueller was the leading physician in Denmark and she was 83 and she invited me to lunch. And right in the middle of the lunch, she was very blunt. She said, how will you use your life? And I thought she meant, what will I do for money? How will I make a career? She didn't mean that. She meant, how will I use my life?. And I don't know that I under— was smart enough or wise enough to understand it then. I think I do now. I have attempted to use my life to bring awareness to both the challenges and the extraordinary opportunities of the age wave. Personally, business-wise, politically, culturally, had kind of a blast doing it. I still do. It's a blast talking to you. I get to meet folks like you. I get to feel like a little Joseph Campbell-ish. I've had a chance to impact the master narrative, the stories we tell ourselves and the future that unfolds.

Well, you absolutely have. And Ken, thank you for the time today. Thank you for the amazing work that you have done and that you continue to do. It's helped so many people and just really appreciate that. So for folks that wanna learn more about you, you've mentioned agewave.com for the website and there's all kinds of great resources there that as you mentioned are available for free. The new book is Radical Curiosity, and certainly get a copy of that.

So again, Ken, thank you very much for being on.

Thank you, wishing you all the best. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms, and for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.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.

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