Chris Farrell Explains the Money-Happiness Connection

speaker-0 (00:04.142)
Hey folks, welcome back. Today we have somebody that a lot of you will probably recognize, Chris Farrell. I’m not going to tell you about him myself because it always sounds better coming from the person that I’m talking to. So Chris, welcome to the podcast. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell people a little bit about who you are, what you do.

speaker-1 (00:28.622)
Well, thank you for having me. And professionally, I’m a journalist, author, speaker. And I would say a lot of my work the past 10, 15 years has involved both the sort of personal finances of an aging population, the economics of an aging population, and this whole moment that we’re going through about rethinking, reimagining the possibilities in the second half of life.

And, uh, Other than that, I’m also the proud father to children who are both successfully launched, which is great. And, um, and I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is not my hometown. I grew up in a military and then shipping families. So we moved every two, three years lived in Guam, lived in Germany, lived all over, but for a long period of time to twin cities has been my home base.

speaker-0 (01:24.32)
regular contributor with PBS, Which show?

speaker-1 (01:28.706)
So I was a regular columnist for PBS Next Avenue, which was the online magazine targeted at the 50 plus. as happens, we had a really good run for many, many years, and then the funding ran out. It’s always the case. It happens, but it was a, it was a great publication. was a wonderful people, Rich Eisenberg, Carrie Handon number, just wonderful, great people to work with.

speaker-0 (01:43.714)
That’s always the case.

speaker-1 (01:54.54)
really proud of the body of work with publication called Next Avenue. And if you go to next avenue.org, you can still see a lot of the articles. Like you see all the articles, they’ve been archived and a lot of them are still very relevant.

speaker-0 (02:07.618)
Now, I remember reading about some of things that you’ve been talking about, and one thing really caught my eye, and that was the reimagining of retirement. What are your thoughts about where retirement is right now and how it’s changing? And is it going to change, and is it changing for the better?

speaker-1 (02:30.766)
So there’s a very powerful image of retirement. And that image, I don’t know if you ever watched the Seinfeld television show, wonderful, very funny. And remember where he would go and he would visit his parents who were living down in Florida in a retirement community. And I would sit there, my parents never lived in a retirement community. They had no desire to live in retirement community.

but we could sit there and watch Seinfeld and we’d all kind of laugh because we knew what this existence was like, what the image was. It was a very powerful image. so really what people were embracing in retirement is full-time leisure. you, if you think about it, life is divided into thirds. You go to school, you work and you save, and then this third part of life, you embrace full-time leisure. you know,

it was a great moment of progress. It was one of the most powerful shifts in society. Whereas you think of, know, before social security, before Medicare, and before the growth of the retirement communities like Sun City, you know, really people worked until they died, most people. And the people who weren’t able to work that they died is because they had illness, they had infirmaries. And, you know,

Only the people who had full-time leisure were the wealthy. And then you come to, you know, the post-World War II period where there were so many changes that were going on. And one of them was the creation of this new moment called retirement. It was a mass embrace. Now, not everybody could retire far from everybody moved to Florida, moved to Arizona, moved to Southern California. And it were able to embrace full-time leisure, but that became the dominant image.

And what is happening now, I think, is a rethinking or reimagining. And there’s a number of reasons behind it, thinking about this last part of life. And some of it is genuine positives, some of them are negatives. So looking at some of the positives, we’re better educated than ever before. We’re healthier than previous generations. And so…

speaker-1 (04:48.174)
This notion of that you develop your career, you gain all the skill, this knowledge, this experience, and then you walk away from that just one day, you just turn off the light bulb, you walk away from that and you embrace a very different existence becomes less and less attractive to many people. We’re also, it’s a very different economy. So if we were having this conversation in the 1950s, 1960s, know, smokestack America when…

steel manufacturing and mining. mean, these were the commanding heights of our economy. That’s one thing. But now we’re in economies dominated by services, dominated by information. And so, to say that you’re going to be working in a coal mine for another 10 years versus to say, well, I’m going to shift my career and I’m going to work part time in the back office of a mutual fund company or in a medical clinic, helping out there.

It’s a very different demands on your time. So, and the other thing that I think is underestimated in all this is work as a social institution. You if you don’t show up, actually someone calls and says, well, where are you? And you you, you gossip, you, like people, you dislike people, you have conversations with all kinds of people. And what we were learning is that community is harder and harder.

And work is an immediate community. And so this notion that you want to walk away from this community of work where people come together and it’s often intergenerational becomes less and less attractive. Now, to be very clear, this is not saying, Hey, I want to continue to be working 50 hours for 40 hours pay. And I’m not saying age discrimination is not real because age discrimination is real and it’s widespread. a lot of this is changing what you’re doing.

going to part-time work, going to flexible work, but it is continuing to stay engaged in the community. And then of course, it just simply makes your finances a lot better. If you still have an income coming in, that just helps out your finances. Now on the negative side, one of the most powerful negatives is that the evidence is overwhelming. If you don’t work for an employer that offers a retirement savings plan at work, you don’t save for retirement.

speaker-1 (07:15.094)
And you know, you may not save as much as you should have in that employer sponsored retirement savings plan. Maybe you could have been smarter in some of your choices, but the fact is you will have some savings. If you don’t, the evidence is overwhelming. don’t. Now, a lot of times the reason is a lot of small businesses don’t offer their employees retirement savings plan. You may be earning a low and unstable income, in which case it’s very hard to save.

But nonetheless, about half the private sector workforce does not have access to an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan. And so there’s also just as pressure as you get older to start having some money to continue to earn money. And that’s the negative side of all this, right? We want this to be a choice. We want this to be an option. But I think a lot of the thinking about it that’s going on is more for people who have an option or you’re going along, you’re working, and then

All of a sudden someone says, we’re downsizing. And by the way, you’ve been a great employee. You’ve been wonderful. And here’s a box and see you later. And all of a sudden now you’re facing, what do I do next? And that’s a very difficult, it’s a tough time. It’s a tough issue. And so again, that is also realizing, well, I can’t really embrace full-time leisure, but what is there else that I can be doing? So there’s a lot of factors that are coming together. And I called one of my books, purpose and a paycheck.

because people, because I always get asked this question, will the people work longer because they have to or because they want to? And my answer always is for a majority of people, it’s both. You want purpose. You also want a paycheck. There are some people for whom there is no choice. And there are other people for who have enough resources. They can do whatever they want. They can continue to work. They can not work. It doesn’t matter. They have those resources. But for a majority of people,

who are at that stage of life, it’s both. Its purpose and a paycheck is the search.

speaker-0 (09:16.312)
Yeah, it’s interesting. I talked with Dr. Catherine Rickwood back in mid February. She’s a researcher down in Australia and she was researching retirement with the workforce, that sort of stuff. So two things she was saying. One, she’s seeing a rise in work sharing. So instead of get to 65 and stop, like you were talking about, there’s that EI.

ease off from 40 hours to 30 hours to 20 hours and it’s handing over to somebody else coming up. So you have that benefits of handing over the experience to somebody younger. The other aspect is she was talking about there may be a we’re starting to approach a time where people reimagine life as a whole, where they’re looking for their purpose and focusing around their purpose. Because that’s part of what goes into retirement is how do you have a purposeful

retirement or older age. And notice I said older, not old. Right.

speaker-1 (10:20.888)
So those are two really important points because really, you know, part of this is when my youngest who’s just turned 34, when he’s 55, there’s going to be a very different set of expectations about what goes on later in life than when I turned 34. Because when I turned 34, it was pretty clear you worked and then you would retire and you’d embrace full-time leisure and do all your travel and do all kinds of good things.

but I think you’ll have a very different vision. And then what she was saying is the really the stage that is exciting, which is we’re living longer. Cause a big part of this is that we are living longer and we are better educated overall. And so once you start thinking about that way, then the sort of tripartite life that we’ve evolved, which is you go to school, you work hard and then you retire doesn’t really work because

If you’re thinking about having a 50 year career, maybe a 60 year career, the notion that you’re basically gonna have one career seems rather depressing. And I think it is depressing, but it opens up all kinds of possibilities. You might work for a private sector for a couple of years, you go work for the government for a couple of years, you’re self-employed for a couple of years, you go back to school to pick up in your 40s, to pick up some extra skills, you go back to school in your 60s, not to take…

that Renaissance Italy class or that physics class that you never took when you were 18, 19, 20 years old, but because you want to pick up some additional skills that you can use in the marketplace. And by the way, maybe you also just take that Renaissance Italy class at the same time, because that will enrich your life. But it raises up this possibility of multiple changes throughout a career, building that into your life plan and having that expectation that I’m going to be doing multiple things

for different employers and it may involve the same set of skills and continuous learning. But I think that’s the really exciting part. We’re not there yet. There are some people that are there, but it’s not institutionalized. I mean, it seems to me one of the goals here, if you work at a company that has a 401k plan, when you retire, they hand you your 401k packet, right? They say, you know, here are your, you know, your rights, here’s your 401k, here’s what you can do. They don’t hand you a packet when you retire and says,

speaker-1 (12:47.064)
Well, here are some of your off-ramp options to part-time work, to gig type work, to an encore career, to going back to school to pick up a couple of skills that you might need. We have not institutionalized that. ultimately that’s your goal because it’s really right now, a lot of people, the reason why they’re struggling

is they’re trying to map it out. They’re trying to navigate it on their own. They’re finding like-minded people, but it’s a lot of work. And ultimately, what she was describing, I’m going to say, will be institutionalized. It will be the expectation.

speaker-0 (13:27.702)
Yeah, there’s a lot of ageism in that as well, where you get to a certain age and it’s like, well, he’s in his 50s. We want somebody younger that has more energy. It’s like, yeah, but that energy does not match the knowledge that’s gained after all that time type of thing. One of my early interviews, I had a comment from somebody saying everything he keeps hearing about is white collar.

because everybody just talks about that. But the blue collar worker is also facing these type of situations. I’m wondering whether you’ve seen a difference there.

speaker-1 (14:05.582)
Well, so it is dominated by higher educated white collar workers. But I think the real key here is to think about skill, not education. So one of the things that I did with doing research for my book is I went down to Pittsburgh and there was an organization there that trained future machinists, young people would become machinists. And the reason I went down is all the 60 year olds had left.

And the reason why they left is there’s such a demand for machinists that they had retired. They were teaching, they were giving back, and all of a sudden they could make all kinds of money going back into the job market. So that’s what they’re doing. So the instructors are now in their seventies and eighties. And it was a wonderful, wonderful group of instructors and deeply engaged and machinists. It’s a fascinating profession because

It’s kind of engineering, but it’s very creative, it’s very artistic. And so the air was all about skill. And so I think skill is the big thing. Are you in a job where you’re constantly learning? And a machinist is always learning. And that’s blue collar work. But it skill, blue collar work, and you’re always learning. And there was a study, series of studies that were really important done out of Germany.

One looked at a done by a bunch of economists and they looked at, got access to a Mercedes Benz truck factory. And what they found, which addresses what you were talking about earlier, what they found is that the most productive teams were multi-generational. And it was that combination of energy and skill and experience merging together. And they also found that older workers were not less productive.

than the younger workers, which has always been that sort of belief there. Might have to make some adjustments, but they are as productive and the multi-generational teams were the most productive teams in the organization. They did another study with a very large insurance company and they found that only one group deteriorated over time. And that one group for 30 years had been opening envelopes at the organization.

speaker-1 (16:29.046)
And what they realized is if you’re just doing the same job over and over and over again over the years, then yes, you know, there’s gonna be a certain amount of lack of engagement, lack of learning, lack of, you know, feeling that you’re part of something. And this whole field of industrial organization, know, changing jobs really helps within an organization, changing tasks within an organization.

And I was up in, a series of stories for Marketplace up in, sorry, I’m going on long here. I interrupt at any point, but it’s up in Northwestern Minnesota. And the reason why I went there is there are these small towns, they have a big entrepreneurial company in that town. So the demand for labor is really strong relative to supply, Lake Digi-Key, and then Marvin Windows up in Warsaw. so,

What I kind of want to do is look at the future, which is where you have a tight labor market, but you have strong growth. How do companies adjust? And one of the adjustments that they have made is they do a lot of training and you’ve been working there for 10 years and you’re getting bored in your job. What would you like to do? We’ll train you to do that. Because once, as it was put to me, once that worker’s passed that probation period,

You never want them to walk out the door again. You want them to stay. you’ll train the, somebody within the company may have 10 to 12 different careers within that company and they’ll train you for each of them. Well, think about what that does to your mind, to your brain. You’re engaged. You’re learning new things. You’re meeting new people. You’re making new connections. And so, you know, I think that is really a big part of it. whereas in so many companies,

As people get older, and you mentioned age is really important, we don’t train the older worker. They’re going to retire. They’re not going to be part of this assignment because we need young people in there because they got the energy, they got the ideas, they understand the technology. know, so-and-so is reliable. Just let them go do their thing. They’re invisible. And I’ve had so many older workers say to me that at some point they’re not being pushed out of their company. They’re not being

speaker-1 (18:52.974)
oppressed, they don’t exist. They’re reliable. They don’t exist. And that’s a terrible situation to be in. And that’s not good for your mental and physical health. So one of the things that I think is really important, there’s so many adjustments that need to be made with an aging workforce and an aging population, but one of them is to see the possibilities, the opportunities, and then institutionalize that, create that. So if you got a challenge,

you make sure that you have some of your older workers in there because they have skill, have knowledge, they have experience, but you also want your younger workers, your middle-aged workers. I mean, you want that diversity and that’s where you get a lot of your insights. That’s where you get a lot of your innovation and that’s where you actually will get a lot of your problem solving.

speaker-0 (19:40.878)
If I remember correctly, you had an article where you were talking about how the lack of available workforce, and you touched on it there, could easily be solved by just allowing older people to continue working.

speaker-1 (19:57.23)
Well, it didn’t drive you crazy. after, you know, when 2008, which was a horrible time, 2008, 2009, 2010, and, but then the job market was recovering and then you would have these managers, executives saying, I can’t find the workers that I need. I can’t find the workers. I said, give me five minutes. I have a line of 55 year olds outside your door. Now what it is is

they couldn’t find the workers that they wanted of a certain age who are willing to get paid a very low salary. mean, once you started looking at their requirements of what they wanted, you go, well, of course you can’t find any workers. so, yeah, I mean, I think now what is there’s greater recognition. I do think there has been something of a, there is a cultural shift and it’s not a cultural shift because of enlightenment.

But I do think more and more companies, senior management is walking by somebody like me with white hair and not saying, well, when does this guy going to retire? But saying, how can I keep him around for another year? You want that knowledge transferred to the younger generation.

speaker-0 (21:09.08)
I suspect also because the population itself is getting older. Not everybody’s going to want to retire. Like me personally, I’m 61 years old. I would die of boredom if I was to do the traditional stop, go play golf. I can’t play golf for the very simple reason I’m six, seven and no golf clubs are long enough for me. But that’s a different story.

speaker-1 (21:12.696)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (21:32.34)
So I keep doing what I’ve been doing. I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2004. I’ve worked for myself and there’s no reason for me to stop doing what I’m doing.

speaker-1 (21:42.176)
Exactly. And what’s important is not everybody has to do what you’re doing. That’s not what we’re not going from retirement is full-time leisure and anything other than that’s not retirement. We’re going to choice. You want to keep working. You’re an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs never retire. That’s they like what they’re doing. They may be less intense. They may find something where you have more control over your time, maybe not trying to change the world.

but just make sure you’re getting, you’re paying your bills, plus taking some nice trips, all kinds of, you can have different demands on being an entrepreneur, but entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs. This is what they wanna do. But there may be other people, they’ve had a low unstable income, they’ve worked at places where they’ve liked their colleagues, they’ve had good colleagues, but the jobs have not been particularly engaging, there hasn’t been room for advancement, there hasn’t been room for training.

And you know what? The concept of full-time leisure is the best thing that they can think of it. They heard it and it is the right thing. It’s a great thing. So my thing is that there’s this kind of false debate going on where people go, you just want people to work longer and be miserable for a longer period of time. You know, verse N and what I’m arguing is that, this is all about choice, more choice, but given the opportunity more and more people

will choose in some form of fashion to keep working. And as an economy, as a society, that’s desirable. It improves your taxes, it improves your workforce, it improves your innovation, your economic output. So the most underappreciated asset in the United States today is an aging workforce. It is not talked about that way. It is not thought about that way, but that is the reality. And there, the challenge for management

If you want to get ahead of your competitors, you want to do better than your competitors, then figure out how to take advantage of an aging workforce while they’re still stuck in the mindset that says, got too many older workers.

speaker-0 (23:52.814)
Here in Canada, what we’ve been doing, because we’ve seen this bulge coming of people getting retirement for the last 25 years at least, we’ve basically been encouraging immigration into Canada, increasing that, which has brought its own issues. But now what we’re starting to see is people are getting to that retirement age and they’re not necessarily stopping.

So there’s a bit of a blip of unemployment simply because the people that we were expecting to go into retirement aren’t. So the immigration tap can be slowly turned down a little bit. it’s the people that are working that pay for the taxes for the roads, for the pensions, the pension coming from the government, the healthcare system, that sort of stuff. It’s those taxes that need to keep flowing.

So you need those people still working.

speaker-1 (24:51.726)
That’s right. as I said, you know, work is the community. And so I think a lot of the challenges that we face is, I for one thing, everybody in the United States should have a retirement savings plan. mean, that’s just, yeah, that’s just clear.

speaker-0 (25:06.254)
Should be and are are two different things.

speaker-1 (25:09.398)
Right. Exactly. There’s, there’s, that’s been, I mean, Jimmy Carter, right in the twilight of his presidency proposed, you know, various, universal savings accounts and stuff like that. And every president, most presidents since then have had various ideas and there’s been gradual improvement, but not the, you know, not that final, you know, let’s just solve this problem. Some problems are intractable. This is not an intractable problem. This is actually a relatively easy one to solve.

especially once you consider the list of things that need to be addressed. So it’s about, you but I think a lot of the challenges are how do we make work more engaging for more people? And that’s what we need to be spending a lot of time rather than the solution being, well, you put in your years, now go off and enjoy yourself.

speaker-0 (26:00.002)
Yeah. The shift when it was viewed as a global economy that everybody wanted to move towards, moving more of the blue collar stuff offshore led to that white collar, which allowed for, in my mind, a more…

adaptable workforce, because a lot of the skills can go from one job to another, even though the actual topic of those jobs change. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. How do you see society changing as a whole because of this?

speaker-1 (26:36.204)
I do. mean, I think, you know, the demographics of aging is one of the more powerful economic forces that underlay so much. And, you know, along the line, you also have, you know, climate change being another one. the demographics, it affects everything. How you think about how you structure your health care system, how you think about transportation in your area, whether it’s rural or urban. The workforce is probably, you know, one of the most most powerful.

It has big implications for thinking about housing because one of the things that with good intentions, I think we created a bad situation. So no one’s bad in this, in this story, but we really created a housing stock that segregates people by age. And yet there’s all the evidence that the generations like living together. So

If you, you know, there’s a minority movement and you can find good examples where you’ll have a senior community and you’ll have young graduate students living there, right? It’s a deliberate intergenerational community, but that’s not the majority, but it’s a really good idea. And there was this wonderful story told to me. I never managed to check it out, but it’s totally for someone who are reliable, which is that

in near University of Washington, there was a senior center and there was a graduate student apartment complex. And I think probably young professors too. And the senior center opened its dining hall to the graduate students. And it worked really well. I mean, because people would eat together, they would enjoy each other’s company. And then, you know, as one person told me, he says, the great thing about it is we go to bed at

at six, you know, and they’re going to bed at midnight, but they get together during this period of time of the various meals. And so I think it has real implications for how you think about urban design. there was this wonderful man whose name I’m blanking out, was a Temple University, was at a conference, and he’d been involved 30 years, 35 years in the sort of age

speaker-1 (28:59.95)
movement with cities. so someone asked them, what have you learned, know, over your 30, 35 years in this field, what have you really learned? He said, I learned one thing was good for old people is good for young people was good for young people is good for old people. But we oftentimes have these conversations. We’re talking about one or the other.

speaker-0 (29:25.302)
That’s not just about young versus old. It’s about all the…

buckets that we’ve defined for people. What’s good for everybody is right across all those buckets.

speaker-1 (29:40.334)
Yeah, that’s right.

speaker-0 (29:41.932)
Yeah, interesting. So part of what you had also written about was entrepreneurship in retirement. Are you starting to see more of that?

speaker-1 (29:53.934)
lot more of it. It’s, this is one of the changes that really surprised me. So I wrote on retirement, which was a book about rethinking the economics and personal finances of rethinking the, uh, the latter part of life. And that was published in 2014. And so if I were writing in 2010 and I were talking about someone 65 years old, the notion of starting your own business, you got to be kidding me. Really? No, that’s too risky. And I was completely wrong.

me totally wrong. And if you look at new business creation,

the 55 to 64 year old age group is, has an extremely strong presence in new business creation over the past 20, 25 years. you look at self-employment, which makes a lot of sense, but self-employment, self-employment rates go up as you get older. what has changed is it’s, it’s a little bit like, there’s this wonderful book called life by Keith Richards.

And I don’t know if you read it. It’s a musician. It’s a wonderful autobiography and he has this story, you know, in London and they were going to record a song and they were given like 15. was so expensive. This equipment and to get the time they had like 15 minutes or maybe half an hour. And that was it. Cause it costs so much money. He said, for that amount of money you can have now in your garage, the best studio imaginable.

So what has happened is we’re dominated by services, we’re dominated by information. Technology has helped really lower the cost of starting your own business. And what people are mostly doing is they’re taking their knowledge, their skill, their experience, the connections that they made over the years, the people that they know, and they’re selling their services, their skill, that’s the product that they’re selling. And the office,

speaker-1 (32:01.358)
co-sharing workspace or it’s a empty room in the house or the condo. And, you know, technology is lower the cost of your accounting and your invoicing. And so there’s a lot of solo entrepreneurship that’s also going on or there’s no data. is apps, I have least, I haven’t found any data on this, but one trend that I just find absolutely fascinating, it doesn’t matter where I travel, I come across examples, which is, you know,

in older generation, 50s, 60s, 70s, going into business with their adult children and starting a business. And eventually the adult children were inherited. And I was interviewing Stephen King. He really is very, very knowledgeable about this whole area. And we were laughing because we said, you know, if our fathers came in when we were 18, 19 years old, if our fathers came into our room and said, hey, would you like to start a business together?

we would have run from the room as fast as possible. But if our kids walked into our room and said, hey, would you like to start a business together? We drop everything and do it right away. And I think there’s been a profound cultural shift about the generations getting on well together. So that to me is one of the more fascinating trends that’s part of this. So, but if you think about it,

you’re in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you have skill, you have knowledge, you have experience, you have a network, you have contacts, you probably have some resources, not much, but you probably have some resources. Again, you may have your own home where you can operate out of, and you know what you’re selling, you know what the product is. And so that now I think more and more people are embracing that plus

You got the algorithms and the algorithms got age discrimination just built into them. so, right. And by the way, just to anybody who’s listening, this doesn’t matter what age you are, hardly anybody gets a job going through the portals. So, you know, we could get jobs the old fashioned way. You know, somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. so many people are also reaching that point where they go, you know, I could start a business and I know I can.

speaker-1 (34:26.958)
pay my bills, I know I can feed my family, and I have maybe a little more control over my time, and I don’t have to deal with certain things. I don’t deal with other things. I’m not naive, I’m not romantic, but I won’t have to deal with certain things that I’ve been dealing with for the past 20, 30 years. And so I think there’s more and more people are embracing it, but it’s because they have experience. I mean, that’s the bottom line. They have experience. It may be a hobby.

Well, thing is, if you think about with a hobby, you have a hobby, you actually really understand that market. You really know that market. Now you may not want to turn that in business because it’s, it’s a love that you just don’t want to put involved business in that. Fine. But many people, yeah, they’re fine with it, but you understand the customer in a way that other people just don’t understand that customer, or you may go back and sell your product, your services to your former company and you know,

They’ll pay you well for doing that.

speaker-0 (35:25.806)
That’s exactly how I fell into being an entrepreneur. In 2004, I was working for a little company called EDS. And EDS got caught up in the Enron scandal. And their stock went from, and I’m going to be wrong here, something like $112 down to $8 in three days.

speaker-1 (35:48.128)
It went down a lot there. You’re right about yes.

speaker-0 (35:51.214)
And when that happens, the time, EDS had 168,000 employees worldwide. I was in Canada. We had 16,000 employees. They laid off half of us.

I went looking around and this is early days of cybersecurity. cybersecurity really hadn’t taken off yet. Looked around, I couldn’t find anything here in Vancouver. Then I realized everything I’d been doing was not here in Vancouver, it had been in other areas. So I reached back into EDS because I knew that the chief security architect had been looking for people. And he brought me on as a contractor.

So that’s reselling my services back to my company or the company that I was with. And I’ve been on my own ever since.

speaker-1 (36:40.354)
Yeah, it’s a really and companies, you know, used to be the boomerang employee was a tarnished employee, a tainted employee. And now people realize, no, the boomerang employee understands us, our culture, our system. They’ve now gotten some additional experience and exposure to a different company, a different culture. They’re actually a more desirable employee than so.

But these changes always, as you know, take longer than they should happen. But they are happening.

speaker-0 (37:13.55)
Mmm.

Do you see policy shifts at the government layers? Now, the reason why I ask that is if you think about it, back in the 60s, politicians were typically in their 40s. Think about JFK. Now you look at the current crop, they’re all in their 70s, late in 80s, maybe even older. You’d think that at this current age, those politicians would be aware of what’s impacting them.

But it doesn’t appear like that.

speaker-1 (37:48.878)
You would think, but you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t appear like that. do think over time that, um, what you’ll see is there’s an artificial divide in our, and in the United States, I don’t know about Canada, but I know in the United States, because you had, there are a lot of protections and benefits if you work for a company as an employee. then if you are a contractor and you’re independent, there are very few.

benefits and protections. you can make a both positive, negative case about that. But my sense is with the aging of the population and the growing desire for flexibility and need for flexibility, which you look at every survey that has ever been put out there, that’s what people are looking for is more flexibility. I think, and if we’re talking about longer careers because of increased life expectancy and better education,

then I think your policies need to support the individual and the household more than the company being the target. And so where this is in the United States, two thirds of families get their health insurance through the employer. Well, the employer, we all know that’s a bad system because if you lose your job,

There’s your health insurance. All of a sudden your family loses their health insurance. And yes, I know there’s things like COBRA, but nobody can afford COBRA. So, you know, yes, it’s there, it, it’s an emergency, but it’s very, very expensive. So if you attach it to the individual, to the household, so a lot of the things that I talk about, you talk about, people talk about change, transitions, learning, you know, it all requires a certain amount of flexibility.

And so you want your health insurance and your retirement system to support that flexibility, that job changing, that, okay, I’m going to go off and be an entrepreneur now for a couple of years and see if I like it. And by the way, if I don’t like it, I’ll go back. But if I do like it, I want to keep going. But I actually don’t really want to be an entrepreneur if my family is not going to have health insurance coverage or we actually practically, I’m not going to be earning enough money upfront to actually pay.

speaker-1 (40:15.202)
that health insurance premium. So I do see us moving toward a more flexible benefits world and a more universal benefits world and then let the market work because the market is absolutely incredible. The market does amazing things, but you kind of want everyone participating. You want the risk pool to be as wide as possible when it comes to health and when it comes to retirement.

speaker-0 (40:40.174)
Back in 2015, I created what’s called a reference enterprise architecture. So a model of what businesses look like because at the time I was designing large systems. But I started at the business layer. And when I created that architecture, I came to understand that the people in the company are not the company. What they are.

are they’re selling their time and their services to the company. Even as employees, they’re selling their time and services. At the end of the day, the employee doesn’t think about the company first. They think about themselves and their family first. And really what we, the model that should be working is that we treat everybody as individual contractors that are selling their time and services. If they’re an employee, there’s a specific set of

tax structures and that sort of stuff set up as an employee and you’ve in essence got a long-term agreement with that company. But that’s the reason why when you look at people move from company to company is they’re finding where can I sell my services more for, which is the epitome of a small business.

speaker-1 (41:52.504)
Yeah. And if you think about organizations, they’re designed to continue whether you’re working there or not. mean, after you think about most organizations, even people who have a big impact, after about six months, they don’t exist anymore. But that’s the design. It’s an organization.

speaker-0 (42:07.342)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (42:13.08)
Hmm, interesting. So.

What about, you started off saying that before World War II, retirement was viewed as full-time leisure, which was for the rich. Do you still see that stratification, or you no longer then saw that stratification after World War II? Do you see that moving back towards that direction because of the way the cost structures are right now and that sort of thing?

speaker-1 (42:43.308)
Yeah, I think, you know, doesn’t matter where you look in society at the moment, there’s just increased stratification, increased inequality. One of the reasons there was an interesting study I was looking at the other day, why are, you know, if you were, if you were back in ancient Greece and you’re sitting down with Plato and you described what the wealth society today, it would be that’s paradise. And so

Why are people so grumpy? But it is because of this inequality. Things like Disney have become incredibly expensive. Disney used to be sort of the classic, you were a working class family or a middle-class family. Disney was a vacation for you. And now it’s become again, it’s rubbed in your face. Well, you don’t have that much money, so you have to wait in line, somebody else, there’s all these things. Or now you get on an airplane and they’re,

10 tiers or 12 tiers is not just first class and cabin, right? It’s all sliced and diced throughout everything that we do. You go rent a car, see the exact same thing. So I do think that there is greater stratification. The thing that would most surprise the ancients is that the people who work the most are the people who have the most money. They work all the time. And the people, because

And I think there’s a shift because they get so much out of what they do. Now they spend enormous amounts of money and they get on an airplane and they can fly to all kinds of beautiful places, but they’re managing all these investments. They’re usually on the board of directors of this. mean, they’re doing all kinds. They’re not embracing full-time leisure at all. It’s quite the opposite. There’s sort of almost an ideology of productivity, the wealthier you become. what is…

Bezos, who, you know, when he retires from Amazon, he’s created this behemoth, one of the richest men in the world. Does he go to an island and play golf and, you know, meet with his friends at the country club and, and, and, and, and play cards? No, what he’s doing is he’s starting a space business and, you know, doing various other things too. And so, you know, I do think that has been a shift, but nonetheless, what they’re able to purchase.

speaker-1 (45:09.134)
is a kind of leisure that is denied most people. So in our society at the moment, many things that were sort of called mass affluence are being broken up. so the stratification is there, but the difference is people are actually the upper tier, however you want to define it, 1%, 1 10th, 1%, 1 10th of the 1 10th of the percent they work.

But it’s completely choice. It’s completely identity. It’s completely.

speaker-0 (45:43.534)
That goes to the entire concept of…

speaker-0 (45:48.974)
figuring out what your core is, what your purpose is, and then staying with that. I mean, regardless of whether it’s Jeff Bezos or my dad who just loved genealogy, and that’s when he was forced into retirement, he just stayed with that and kept working at that and doing what he loved.

speaker-1 (46:05.368)
That’s right. And that’s what that’s what you want. That’s about choice. Yeah.

speaker-0 (46:10.83)
Okay. Well, we’re coming towards the end of the interview, Chris. And I always ask this one question of every one of my guests. If you were to give one piece of advice to everybody that’s out there right now, what would that be?

speaker-1 (46:26.414)
Can I get two?

speaker-0 (46:27.672)
Sure.

speaker-1 (46:30.04)
Two things.

Never stop learning. Always be curious. And then secondly, nurture and stay connected to other people in different generations. And so if you stay connected, you’re engaged and you’re gonna learn stuff. And at the same time, you want to be in that mindset where I’m always learning.

That, think those two things will end up meaning that you have a good life. And I’m not talking about you have disappointments, you’ll have regrets, you made mistakes. That’s not what I’m talking about. But is that you are connected, you’re part of a society, you’re part of a community, and you are always learning, which means you’re always challenging yourself.

Your father, mentioned genealogy. So it’s learning more about your family. It’s learning more about the history. It’s there’s always another question to pursue. that just keeps, you know, to quote from Agri-Garicci’s Parod, that just keeps a little gray cells working. Right. And that’s what you want to do. So I would say, stay curious, stay connected and put that on your computer. One on one side, one on the other side of the screen.

And I think that will hold you in good stead.

speaker-0 (48:00.546)
You know, we never even had that conversation about the social isolation that happens when you leave work, since work is where, for men at least, where we get our social contacts.

speaker-1 (48:12.6)
That’s right. it’s, I mean, work is a community and always has been. one of, one of the, struggles and Peter Drucker, I don’t know if you remember him, sort of the philosopher of business. wrote in the 1950s, he did this study of GM and what he realized, one of the things is just how much the employees at GM, you know, they felt attached to each other. They felt attached to the company.

And then, you know, something bad would happen and the company would, would, would dump them. And it was brutal because they really did believe in that community. was a community. so layoffs could be just brutal, brutal, furloughs, brutal. and I always think, but I do think, so, you know, we all have to be wary of, of realizing it is a company. It is an organization. has its own dynamic, but nonetheless, what

And income is important, but you want to surround yourself with good people. And if there’s a company that there’s good people to surround yourself with, boy, take that job.

speaker-0 (49:21.036)
Yeah. Chris, thank you very much. It’s been a really interesting conversation. I really appreciate it. And for everybody else, don’t forget, click like and subscribe. Helps with the algorithm so that people get this. We’re taking off, folks. I mean, it’s amazing how well this podcast is going. So thank you very much. And notice the bubbles are coming up. Thanks, Chris. Much appreciated.

speaker-1 (49:28.686)
Thanks a lot.

speaker-1 (49:45.4)
There

All right. Talk to you later. Bye.