Few things capture Brooks Tingle’s approach to being a longevity warrior like watching him walk on stage in a dark suit jacket and custom Air Force 1 sneakers earlier this month. The CEO of John Hancock was there to kick off the company’s 3rd annual “Longer. Healthier. Better” symposium for brokers, dispensing the kind of common sense one might expect from someone who’s spent the bulk of his career at a life insurer founded in Boston 164 years ago. Not for him the magic elixirs and fads of his biohacking brethren. Tingle, 60, is a man who thinks about actuarial data and probabilities, about how to transform a largely transactional business that’s betting on your lifespan into a partner in boosting your health span, or how long you’ll live well. “Of course it’s good for the business,” he says, “but I’m also passionate about this stuff.”
Longevity is a hot topicas thecountryis getting older.The median age is now close to 40, and the percentage of Americans over 65 is projected to grow from 17% today to almost one in four Americans by 2050. One in three will be over 50, a figure that may get higher if immigration slows as the fertility rate of 1.6 births is well below replacement level. Policymakers fretabout how to pay for it. Some consumersaremovingabroadordelayingretirementbecause of it.
But there’sopportunity, too.With Americans over 55 controlling almost three-quarters of the nation’s wealth, they are investing heavily in trying to live not just longer but better.There’s an explosion ofnew technologies,spa treatmentsand real or dubious ways for people tobiohack their way to preserving it. The global biohacking market is expected tomore than double to $69 billionin the next fouryears,and entrepreneur Bryan Johnson predicts he canmake humans immortalby 2039.
But most Americans are not fully prepared for a normal lifespan, never mind one that extends to 100 and beyond. As author and longtime longevity pundit Ken Dychtwald noted at the conference in remarks condensed for Fortune, “for the first time in human history, tens of millions of us can reasonably expect to live into our 80s, 90s, and beyond—yet we’ve barely begun to innovate for what those extra decades should look and feel like.”
The Longevity Preparedness Index
Tingle thinks about all ofthisa lot. It’s why he just partnered with JoeCoughlin, founderand directorof the MITAgeLab, to createaLongevity Preparedness Index.Itmeasures people’s readiness for aging againsteight“domains”of strategies thathave been shown to improve the length and quality of life.Taking steps to improvehealth and wealth are just two of them. The otherareas includeplanninga roster ofactivities, buildingsocial connections,creating a care plan,picking the right community, finding optimalaccommodation,andpreparing for tough life transitions.In a survey of 1,300 U.S. adults, the average score was 60 out of 100.(Click hereto take the quiz yourself.)Americans score especially lowwhen it comes to planningcontinuing care, even though 70% are likely to need it.
Courtesy of John Hancock
“You can’t always control how you age,” says Coughlin, who famously created the AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System) suit that lets people feel what it’s like to navigate the world in an old body. Barring a miracle, most of us won’t be doing power push-ups and racing upstairs in the last years of life. Aspiration and preparation are different. Coughlin points out that having an accessible home and someone to talk to and drive you to appointments are proven factors in determining not just how well you live, but how long. “Ask me if I think death is something that can or should be cured,” said Coughlin, racing by in bright orange pants before answering that existential question. “We have plenty of evidence on how we’re likely to age.”
Added Tingle: “I didn’t want to be just another financial services company that did an annual survey that waves their finger at everyone Americans saying you’re not saving enough for retirement. You need health and wealth but there’s much more to preparing for a long life.”
“What the heck am I going to do?”
Then again, thinking about death is a bummer. A lot of people buy life insurance as protection against the worst, hoping that they’ll never have to use it—or have it pay out after a long and happy life. That’s essentially how John Hancock brokers have sold policies from 1864 to today, where it generated $8.6 billion a year in insurance revenue as a subsidiary of Canada’s Manulife Financial.
That’s howeverylife insurer makesmoney—by selling you policiesin whichyou can affordto pay them more than they’ll ever have to pay you.It’s a relationship that customers tend to maintain for more than two decades and yet it rarely extends beyond the act of purchasing a policy. As he put it:“A lot of these planners tend to talk about a transaction, or to the extent it is planning, it’s around planning around one dimension of what we believe is fulsome preparedness to live a longer, healthier, better life.”
Tingle’s goal is toencouragethosesellerstobecome enablers of longevityand build deeper (and more profitable) relationships withcustomersby giving themincentives toinvest in their own longevity.He’spartnered withconsumerhealth-techcompanies like Oura andPrenuvo, and also featured ClearCardo,as well asthefoundation of Damar Hamlin, a Buffalo Bills player whohad a cardiac arrest during a game three years ago,whofunds CPR training and externaldefibrillatorsin youth sports.“It truly shifted my perspective on life,” Hamlin toldTingle during the conference.“We all have our platforms…you have to lead where you are.”
For Tingle, threeyears ofbuilding outaplatform forlongevity havepromptedsome internal reflectionson what it means to grow old.“I’ve been at Hancock for 35-plus years now,” he said. “Simple math says there are fewer of those years ahead of me than behind me in terms of this version of my career, and I plan to stay as long as they’ll have me.”
“Wehave this gift that, frankly, most of our grandparents,and their parentsandgrandparents, didn’t have, which is decades of life afteryour first act professionally,” he told me. “IfI leave at 65, 67,and liveto87 or 97, I think, ‘What the heck am I going to do?’”
Does he have an answer? Not yet.Buthe’s living healthierand“I’m certainly going to be prepared.”
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