Marc friedman author of the new book, the big shift navigating the new stage beyond midlife talks about the need for better social programs and savings plans for people in their 50s, 60s and 70s who want meaningful and sustaining work later in life. From the Commonwealth Club of california in San Francisco, this is 45 minutes. Good evening and welcome to the meeting of the Common Wealth club of california. I am chair the clubs grown ups for amend your host for today. We also welcome our listening audience and we invite everyone to listen to us on line at Commonwealth Club. Org. Now its my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker. Marc freedman is ceo and founder of encore. Org, a Nonprofit Organization working to promote Encore Careers. Second acts for the greater good. He spearheaded the creation of the experience core, now one of americas largest Nonprofit NationalService Programs engaging people over 55. And the purpose prize, which annually provides five, 100,000dollar prices to social innovators in the second half of life. Freedman was described by the New York Times as the voice of aging baby boomers who will are beginning retirement for meaningful and sustainable work later in life. While the work wall street journal stated, in the past decade, mr. Freedman has emerged as a leading voice in discussions nationwide about the changing face of retirement. He is the author of the the big shift navigating the new stage beyond midlife, published in april of 2011 which the New York Times called an imaginative work with the potential to affect their individual lives and our collect good issues. Recognized by Fast Company Magazine three years in a row as one of the nations leading social entrepreneurs. Freedman is widely published and quoted in the National Media and has been honored with numerous over awards and fellowships. Freedman has an mba from yale university, was a visiting Research Fellow at Kings College university of london. He lives with his wife and children in the San Francisco bay area and now join me in greeting creating Marc Freedman. [applause] thank you john and thanks so much to all of you for coming out at the end of the work day to talk about the future of work. I read a quote from jordan campbell four years ago. He said that midlife is when you get to the top of the ladder and you discover its leaning against the wrong wall. That quote shook me up and it made me think about the wall that my letter was winning against. I spent 20 years at that point focusing on trying to create more opportunities for people in the second half of life to improve their circumstances of kids through the experiences the john milford mentioned and many other efforts. I felt it was the right purpose in life but i was flagging at that time. I wrote a second quote around the same period and it was one from Mary Catherine basin the daughter of Margaret Meacham and it says we have stretched midlife so long it has become like a runon sentence in desperate need of punctuation. I needed to get a little bit about punctuation. A. , max was probably too little and. That is what i needed. I went to my board of directors and i asked him if i could take a sabbatical. And i happily agreed. I think maybe they were feeling that i was sliding a little bit as well and i began making very grand plans. In fact i decided to go to the opposite end of the year to australia to take a big trip for three months with my wife and our two Young Children. And i began the process of accumulating guide books to sydney, melbourne and the outback in that pile started growing higher as the days leading up to the trip began growing shorter and finally i reach the point where i had absolutely no desire to go to australia and spent three months in a hotel room with two screaming children then two and four years old. In fact the sabbatical was what i had to do to recover from the trip with the kids in the hotel room. So i called up United Airlines and took all my frequent flyer miles to take this extravaganza and 41,000 they let me have my miles back and let me stay at home. Instead of going with my dreams in life that have been my one opportunity to get away, i felt a huge sense of relief come over me. There would be no Airport Security lines, no 14 hour flights, no coming back three months later to long piles of emails and correspondence and all those kinds of things. I was telling this to a friend because i was amazed that i had that reaction. She said oh yet there actually was now a body of research in psychology that shows one of the great pleasures in life is to plan a fantastic trip in that not go on it. You have to do something. After all ike cross this big midlife divide and so i decided to take a car trip with the family up to portland. Began planning again and collecting more guidebooks, looking at google maps and i realized i couldnt make it all the way up to portland in one drives. So i had to stop in medford. I got on the internet and started shopping for rates and found homewood suites in medford. I called them up and having lost a thousand dollars not going to australia i thought i should try to get a discount on this room and i ran through the aa rates. Finally i found a big discount. Aarp. I had gotten my card and it was the first chance that i actually used it. I got off the phone and told my wife that i had saved as 14. She still remember the thousand dollars we were out from not going to australia and she asked me, had i remembered to get the two crips . I called the 18yearold at the checkin desk back and i said this is mr. Freedman. I just asked you about the Senior Citizen discount. Thats me. Can i have two crips . In that moment i realized i had entered confusing territory, what might be called the oxymoronic to remember that time in grade school when he learned about oxymorons in these contradictions in terms . If you think about the way we treat people who are living in the stage of life, like 60 is the new 40 and at the same time if you go to my pharmacy in berkeley on solano avenue, they give you Senior Citizens discounts. Its the old 80s and the same time the new 40 and we hear about the young and the old and the working retired. Newsweek had a cover story about aging baby boomers entering the workforce and they described describe in as the walking dead. Every contradiction, every difference, every kind of oxymoron to describe this period at a personal level and that same kind of contradiction and confusion is true more broadly societally. The longevity revolution, this vast expansion in Life Expectancy over the last century. We have increased to 100 years. Average Life Expectancy at an amount that was equivalent to all the increases up to 1900 so this is a remarkable triumph and at the same time if you pick up the editorial pages all you hear about is the gray tsunami and these who seem to take america to the its almost as if the Weather Channel has sponsored the entire demographic revolution. So how is it that the best thing that ever happened to us as individuals, the longer healthier lives that we are leading leaving and projected to lead and more extended ways in the future turns out that these are worse things that happen to us. You are crucial for his vegetables and Walking Around the block and you stretch and live wells he can live long and yet it seems if you pick up any of the New York Times issues over the last couple of months you see people with the coming trade off. All these tremendously difficult scenarios that are supposedly going to be the hallmark of our future. Back to mach 3 is supposedly destiny, inevitably so. The condition of the individual level that some this sounds longevity. The ox more broadly, its no surprise in that context that you start seeing some desperate prescriptions. The book booms day projects euthanasia for boomers at 70. The most recent version of little bit less dark, the best exotic i suspect many of you have seen a film which is built around the proposition of outsourcing the elderly. If we cant figure out how to have a society with so many more people over the age of 60, lets just send them someplace else and after all, its less expensive to live in places like india where the stars in the movie end up gone. I am here today to talk about an alternative to either euthanasia or outsourcing, what soon will be a quarter of the population, and argue that the solution to much ails us as individuals in a society lays in rethinking the map of life, the map of life that was in many ways set up in three score and 10, which seems like a longer lives of the past century but is inadequate to the five score lifespans that more and more people will be living in the 21st century. Half the kids born since 2000 the developed world are projected to see their 100th birthday so we cant just fold, spindle, made late stretch and extend this life course that really was set up for a very different arc of life to one that is really, has an extra decibel point, an extra zero to it. So i think what is happening, to really cut to the essence of what im saying today is that the nature of life is under every bed a radical transformation as the numbers are. All those numbers that we are so familiar with and that period that has been characterized in these oxymoronic terms is actually an entirely new stage of life. 60 is not the new 40. Its not the old 80. 60 is the new 60 in these tens of millions of people who are flooding into this territory or something entirely nail on the landscape. And get something that is poorly recognized seen mostly as a problem to be solved that i think may well amount to be an opportunity to be seen if we play our cards right. This whole proposition at one level probably sounds counterintuitive. Like the oxygen in the air, fixtures when in fact they are much closer to being fiction quickly learned that in trying to trace and understand the history of retirement in america, this idea in the golden years that has seen so much a core part of the American Dream for the last halfcentury. In fact, if you go back even to the 19 30s when Social Security was invented, 65 was the picked as the eligibility age for Social Security based on the prussian military that bismarck had convince the state would never pay out a single he was a think in his late 70s at this time and in the 30s we picked this age, gave out the first Social Security check in january of 1942 a woman named Ida May Fuller in vermont, who took 20. 75 into the system and proceeded to live just shy of her 101st birthday reaping 22,888. 92 in the process. She saw the beatles come to america and the moon landing. Not that everybody at that point was going to live this 20 century lifespan but the handwriting was already on the wall. Edvac of the late 1940s Walter Luther describe retirees as tool to work, too young to die, which turned out to be a problem for those individuals who are trying to figure out what to do during the extended spans beyond their working years but also for the Financial Services industry, which was having a hard time convincing people to invest in it period that was a dreaded time, period that people hardly wanted to think about, talk about and definitely did not look forward to or think about investing in. So they began selling retirement as a kind of an aristocratic period where people could go to the ballgame in the afternoon and that vision wasnt cemented until the early 1960s particularly by the Retirement Community developers. My hero from that period, guy by the name of delbert g. Web. The inventor of sun city, the first largescale Retirement Community in the country. If you took a flyer on this idea that later life could be affecting childhood and he built a community and invested 2 million in the late 1950s, early 1960s into the opening of sun city and it was a wonderful moment the night before the community actually opened when one of his lieutenants was sitting around the table at a Mexican Restaurant in peoria arizona. He said how my for going to sell a 30year mortgage to summon a 65 years old . Maybe we shouldve thought about that beforehand. They all had sleepless lights and 100,000 people showed up. If you build it, they will come. This was an incog longing for Something Different than society offered at this stage of life. They essentially managed to make what was seen as a necessity, a virtue and retirement, this idea of the golden years for an extended period is what became the hallmark of the American Dream. Its not Just Retirement that was invented in the last century. It even adolescents, the idea of youth was concocted in the early part of the century. That word was coined in 19 four by a 6yearold. A psychologist named g. Stanley hal. We were in a situation in the country where there was a proliferation of the of that day. Neither young nor old as the characteristic of so many of us in our 50s, 60s and 70s. There were all these young people who were no longer children but they want quite adults. It was a time when there was a lot of disruption in the country, urbanization and industrialization, immigration. There was concern about all the zen people who had physical maturity but not emotional maturity. We essentially created a moratorium period. We had high schools and child labor laws and it took four years, until 1944 when we invented the word teenager and the birth of 17 magazine. There is some irony that youth was invented by somebody in their 60s. The main lesson really is that the stages of life were essentially responsive to problems. They were solutions and its ironic that g. Stanley hal himself, the inventor of youth, who proposed 20 years later a new stage of life between midlife and old age. Arguing that he had actually made a mistake. He should have invented the stage this stage iv people like himself. He promptly passed away a year later but in writing about this period he had a a set of beautiful images and insight which i think actually makes a lot of sense almost 100 years later. He described as period is an Indian Summer and he said human beings didnt reach the height of their capacity and tell a shadow started slanting eastward, which i love. Essentially has idea was that more and more people were reaching a point where they have the benefits of experience in the capacity to do something with it. Wrote a book a couple of years ago composing in later life in which he described this period of active wisdom and it all comes back to a sense of time. Its a familiar way of thinking about this period of life in the assets the people have as they move into their Encore Careers and continue trying to contribute to society, this experience. This essentially time lived is essentially as important as the other side. Is the question of time left to live. I know when i hit my 50s and by find this theme over and over again when i talk to other people, there is a recognition that there are a lot fewer years ahead than they are behind. That is just the reality even in this era of much longer life spans. That has a profound impact on peoples priorities, on their perspective and yet at the same time theres this awareness of mortality and the sense that time is being compressed. Theres there is a sense of the expansion of time. You read these articles about the centenarians and the continually growing Life Expectancy here and around the world. And at the same time you also realize how fast the last 20 or 25 years went by. Of its accommodation of perspective and motivation that i think of in terms of that great french revolution, fraternity, equality and liberty of this is quality, longevity and theres a realization that the road is gone forever. You pick up your College Yearbook and not everybodys there. Parents pass away. You read the obituaries and steven jobs dies. There is a sense that time matters in a way that you are not aware of when you are in your teens or 20s or even your 30s and yet the likelihood that there is a stretch of time up ahead. Its almost as if in the past wisdom was wasted on the old. This is the time you have figured out what life is all about and you were too worn out into rejected to do anything about it. Now you have got 10,000 people a day turning 60 who are reaching this point where they not only have all that benefit of experience and all that time lived but heres a perspective on life about what matters most and its time to do something with it. I think thats really what hal was talking about when he talked about Indian Summer in the shadows slanting eastward. Does not help us at all get past the oxymoronic problem. When i was writing this book i was trying to figure out, what do you call this stage of life . Paul use afraid phrase which explains 90 years after he wrote his book we still dont have a name for this period. Adolescence, the third chapter. I was struggling up against the publishing deadline and i had no name for this period. I found myself poised over laundry hamper with my motherinlaw who is one of those people he races through the times crossword puzzle on sunday and gets every word and its all said and done for in less than an hour. I said what am i going to do .