Senior Care Academy
Senior Care Academy is a podcast dedicated to providing valuable information and expert advice on navigating the world of senior care for both senior care providers, and families with aging parents. Hosted by industry professionals, each episode covers a wide range of topics including healthcare options, legal considerations, financial planning, and emotional support for caregivers. If you are a healthcare provider, have aging parents, or are a senior adult, this podcast is for you! Tune in to gain valuable insights and resources to help you make informed decisions and provide the best care for your loved ones.
Senior Care Academy
Revolutionizing Senior Living Through Advanced Technology with Jon Warner
Join us as we discuss aging, and technology with Jon Warner CEO and Board Advisory for Digital Health, Coach for Healthcare and Wellness startups, and genius when it comes to innovation and Technology in the Aging Space. If you work in the Aging Space, have a parent who is aging, or are a senior citizen yourself, this episode is for you!
Strap in as we navigate the future, where artificial intelligence isn't just a buzzword but a key to unlocking personalized care 'by stage, not age.' we draw from a health and healthcare background to discuss overcoming policy challenges, and our entrepreneurial spirit nurtured over time. We're unwrapping the global aging care tapestry, gleaning lessons from international best practices, and tapping into the power of non-leading market research techniques to listen to the needs and dreams of our elders, guiding impactful tech solutions.
Our final musings touch upon the nature versus nurture debate in cultivating leadership skills, with a nod to late bloomers who find success through perseverance. I share insights from my role as a mentor, nurturing startups by connecting them to invaluable resources and networks. We also discuss how next-gen tech like AI and supercomputing could tailor care to individual preferences, painting a future where aging is not just about added years, but enhanced quality of life. Join us for a heartfelt exploration of the intersection where technology compassionately meets the wisdom of age.
So, looking at your LinkedIn, you did some stuff before you got into aging and tech. So how long have you been in the aging and tech and what got you into it originally?
John Warner:Yeah, 15 years now a long time. And yeah, I got into it by accident in some ways. I ended up joining a board called St Barnabas in Los Angeles back in 2012, I think it was and that was a safety net organization for older adults. We had 14,000 older adults we were looking after all, living on about $1,000 a month so very much the kind of working poor and I was blown away just by you know how much need they had compared to the general population I was used to seeing. I've been in healthcare a long time, but this sort of network was very different and I just love that space. I just thought there was lots of need in it and lots of upside things we needed to be getting after and doing, so I stayed in it. And what about you two guys? Have you been in the aging space for a long time? What's the story?
Caleb Richardson:It's been three years. Basically, the majority of my professional career has been in the aging space and I started in it originally because it was in 2020 through COVID and everything I grew up with just in a massive family. So on both either side, I'm one of like 120 plus descendants. Growing up, my grandparents were really well supported with 30 plus grandkids within like 15 minutes, and then, with COVID, realized that that was kind of more of the exception and so I started. It was an in-home care company originally, and now we're branching out into more of a technology space, developing some stuff to try to help older adults have that connectiveness and support that my grandparents had. So that's what got me into it.
Alex Aldridge :I was a caregiver for the in-person side of help relief for about five months. Side of uh help relief for about five months, okay, and then coming up on a year, I've been here in the office doing business development, reaching out to retirement communities, home health and hospice communities and agencies, uh, piloting our new tech platform, and then part of part of that research was actually stumbling upon people like yourself with a lot of experience in the aging space, in the tech space. I was super impressed with your ranking in the top 200 leaders in aging and health tech. Do you work super closely with the other people on those lists or do you guys mingle, often cross paths? How does that work?
John Warner:I mean, lists are strange, aren't they? And why you end up top of them In reality. I know about 80% of people on that list. I know maybe 10% of them well, because we go to conferences together and we operate in similar spaces. But I think that was more to do with the fact that we publish quite a lot and we go to quite a lot of conferences. So, you know, in a LinkedIn environment these days, I've got a ton of followers and we follow each other. So I think you know you gain some benefit from all of that. So I don't take lists that seriously, but nonetheless, I think it's interesting because there are lots of thought leaders out there that I like to follow and many of them are on that list. It's always good to have lists like that out in the open domain, because there's new ideas out there. Right, there are new and different things we can be thinking about. So you know, let me go back a little bit and just tell you how I play in the space. You know I've been in this, as I said, for 13 or 14 years now in earnest. What I've ended up doing in the last 10 of those is doing advisory work for a bunch of companies I'm probably up to about 50 now.
John Warner:In that timeframe I spend my time trying to help third-party organizations that want to focus on the older adult community and to better understand it in the first place. I think the best way you can de-risk any startup initiative is to really dive deeply into customer discovery with your target customer. I'm very fond of saying you can't generalize about a population and it wouldn't matter where it's a population of kids or just adults generally. But in older adults we throw plus signs on the end of the 50 or 65. Row, plus signs on the end of the you know 50 or 65. And then we talk about them as if they're all the same and that's crazy, right? If we were in the stock business, are we supplying three-year-olds versus four-year-olds would matter an awful lot because their feet grow Well same in the older adult community.
John Warner:And it's not just demographic stuff. Like males are different to females, it's also, you know, a person at one stage of life is different to another. So what I'm most proud of generally is that I've kind of been trying to push very hard that idea of doing deep dive customer discovery into the older adult population to listen to their uh, their fundamental needs and then render solutions that help them. In reality, some of those companies do that well, some of them not so well, but either way at least, if they're failing, it's not because of a lack of listening or a lack of understanding of the market. It's because of other drivers. They don't have the capital, or they don't have the tools to do it, or the staff to do it in the way they need to. So that's what I would say to that question.
Caleb Richardson:So, advising 50 different companies that are focused on the older adult space, what trends do you see as far as technology adoption among the older? Like you said, there's a big gap between the baby boomers that are retiring right now versus the seniors that are in their 80s and 90s that need the care. So how have you seen technology help on both sides of the older adult spectrum?
John Warner:Sure. So again, let me start general and I'll get specific. So generally, we've seen a massive move in the last 15 years or so, with older adults being much more comfortable around technology in general. You know we're up at something like a 90% ownership of a smartphone in everyone up to the age of 85. So that's incredible right in and of itself. Now it doesn't mean they're using all the functionality, but they've got that there. That's one big thing in the mix.
John Warner:I think in the boomer population, as you call, it which at the top end now we're talking about individuals that are in their 70s. We've got very high adoption of technology, so we're seeing people wearing smart devices, wearables you know whether it's Apple Watches, Aura Rings which I have on my finger those sorts of things. I think it's the detail. I think we still don't have anywhere near enough understanding of older adult needs as opposed to the rest of the population. So we haven't designed many of these devices, many of these applications, this software, these apps in a way that's necessarily as user friendly as it needs to be.
John Warner:And sometimes that's down to health conditions. I mean, if I've got Parkinson's disease and I shake, it's very hard to press a little button. It just, you know, aging issues and, in some cases, health issues which are more prevalent. So that's the work that needs to be done. I'm not now worried about will they adopt it or won't they. You know, short of issues like privacy and security and those things, people still worry about that, but then every generation worries about that, right, but I I worry much more about design and design thinking for this particular population do you feel that with advancements in ai that those user-friendly inner like interfaces, apps, wearables would can start coming to fruition?
John Warner:yes, but I don't think it's AI that's going to drive it. I think AI is a turbocharger of something else. So, you know, ai at this stage we're still in the world of narrow AI, not generalized AI, and we have to train it right. So large language models have to be built and they have to be built intelligently so the AI knows what to do. We have yet to build them.
John Warner:I can't think of a single AI model that I know that has got a deep LLM about older adult needs. Now, is it coming? Yes, probably. I suspect you know, if I look at you two guys who are a lot younger than me, if I were going to go and place a bet on where I'd spend my money in the future, go build that LLN. Go build the one that says how do older adults roll in a very granular way, maybe in five-year increments, maybe on the male and the female side, maybe by disease state? What about the people who are sailing into dementia or who live in an assisted living environment or living in affordable housing, whatever it might be? If you built that intelligence into the large language model and then built on the top of it yes, you're right, would turbocharge the effort to better understand their need. But it ain't out there.
Caleb Richardson:I've never seen it anywhere in all my time in uh in this space yeah, I think it would take a lot of education of the AI for, like I said, all the granularity of, you know, a 65 year old male that lives in an assisted living versus living at home, versus one that has cognitive disparities, like it's so different and it needs so much more data than what we've currently given them.
John Warner:I completely agree with you, caleb, and I, and I think you've also got to start using stage, not age. Although I said it and I set it up a 65-year-old might actually feel like a 50-year-old and a 65-year-old might feel like a 75-year-old. So you've got to get into the psychodynamics of how people feel about themselves, right. I mean, for example, I'm not quite in retirement yet, but I have a bunch of friends who play pickleball. Some of them are old and decrepit and can hardly move around the court and they're younger than me. And there are others who are way older than me that beat me really easily and it's depressing, and that's because their mental attitude is completely different. So we need to accommodate things like that in our research and in a large language model we might build that we can then let AI start to interpret and help us. For now, I'd suggest we go back to customer discovery. I think the best thing we can do is just talk to people and listen hard. That would be my big advice.
Caleb Richardson:So my grandpa is on that, he's 89. Both my grandpas On one side he's 86, and he still is running the ranch every day. And then my other grandpa's 89 and he's still on the roof fixing it and he's convinced he's going to live until 140, because I guess somewhere in the bible it says the age of man is 140 and he's yeah, he's convinced on it. So what questions would you say when you do the customer analytics? Help us understand where people self-identify as their age or like how they're feeling.
John Warner:Yeah, so I mean, again, I think you've got to listen to individuals about what makes them feel good about themselves. This isn't just true of older adults, right? I mean, even you guys would know how much do you feel listened to in terms of how you roll? When's the last time in your life anyone talked to you and said you know how do you approach life when you get up in the morning? Why do you feel positive some days and negative on others? And what's going on?
John Warner:Now some of those things will be tangibles. So there'll be things like I don't feel well today, my body ache, I've got arthritis if I'm older, or whatever it might be. In other times it's just because I feel down, because something I tried to do yesterday didn't come off, or my cat died, or whatever it might be. So again, I think we're more back to. Let's create the listening culture and then let's run out the analytics on the back of it.
John Warner:The earlier you can start, the better in terms of your specific question, because the quicker we're getting after that, the more we can define this whole stage, not age stuff and then it becomes a rubric, right, it becomes a category that we can think, well, this person might be 65, but actually they roll like a 55-year-old. How do we then render products for them that make them feel young at heart, or like your grandfather who thinks he's going to live to 140. And you might end up saying to him well, wait a minute. If you're going to quote the Bible at me, Methuselah lived till 900. So why stop at 140? Right?
Alex Aldridge :I think it's interesting that you bring up stage, not age. I don't know, I've never heard that phrase before. I really like it personally. I don't notice personally in other communities that they've adopted this style of thinking. Since you're at the forefront of the aging industry, what other ideologies are you experiencing, wish?
John Warner:I'd have invented the phrase stage not age. It is a wonderful book that you should both read, written by a woman called Susan Golden, who did all her research at Stanford, and the book is actually called Stage Not Age. So she unpacks it and really gets into what are those stages in life? Because they're a little bit different. Right, we don't use categories like boomers versus Gen X, versus Gen Y versus Gen Z. We're using stages. It's a wonderful book just for doing that. So I don't want to claim credit for her work. I agree with you.
John Warner:I think it's a much better way to think about this. I'm not fond of, as I've already said, of generalizing about what are good models to think about older adults, I mean, you know to the extent they're helpful. Like that one is, you know, the stage not age. I think that's useful. I think actually the reverse is true. We've got to get down to a much more individualized approach. So if we start with conversation with individuals, we can aggregate up, not down.
John Warner:If we start with a category, I think one of the things we do is then hide the detail underneath it. So it'd be the same with boomers. Boomers today are a 72 and a half million population in the US alone two and a half million population in the US alone. Why on earth would we say all boomers hate Apple Watches? That would be crazy. That'd be completely crazy, right? Why would we start there? It'd be far better to talk to a sampling of individuals and go and say tell me how you feel about the Apple Watch, if you were testing that, for example, in order to go and find out what are the factors that drive their like versus dislike. So I think, again we're back to customer discovery.
Alex Aldridge :The more that's listening centered, the better it is do you think in 20 years, when I'm I'm 23 now, so in 40 years I'm looking to retire. How do you think the way that we identify customer needs or client needs or elderly needs will change in the next, like 20 years? I know you've mentioned an individual approach and I know you mentioned the development of AI. Have you seen companies that are developing new ways of approaching this individual idea of a person, this individual idea of stage of life? Have you seen people develop that progress, that?
John Warner:no-transcript. So I think that's another of those arbitrary things when it comes to how do we understand what people want to do. I think there's lots of things that technology is going to be able to enable and assist with, and I think we're seeing that. We see that in the social media world and I know that we see the bad of social media sometimes, but sometimes it can reach people very quickly. We can do things like this. We can talk on an electronic environment. It means we can talk to people at scale. We can talk to people in remote locations, we can talk around the world, which means we can gather opinion on a much more holistic basis. So that's the wonderful promise of technology. And then, behind all that, we can have ambient listening. We can have AI.
John Warner:We can have all sorts of things that are passing what we're capturing and giving us those deep data insights, and that's really exciting. Because then I think to your question, Alex, I think we're going to see things like stage, not age. If we were testing for that rather than guessing are there 10 stages in life? You know this is going back to Shakespeare, right, the seven stages of life for him, then we might find there's 23 or there's four, but I think the technology will help us get there.
Caleb Richardson:So that that's how I feel about that I like that because, thinking of like in marketing, even for businesses, the more specific you can get on what a person needs are like, if you can give your ideal customer a name and age, it makes it so much more. The marketing for them is so much more personalized. And I think it's the same on the care side where, yeah, there's the seven stages right now, but if we can make 23 and we can speak directly to them and the things that are available to help them, it'll make the care so much better. So you, you spoke on stages across US, europe, australia. Do you normally talk on the stage, not age or what's the most common topic that you speak on.
John Warner:Since the mid-90s, I've been involved in health and healthcare generally and I would say my focus has been innovation and technology across health and healthcare and I've worked all over it. I've worked on the provider side, on the payer side. I've worked in biopharma, med devices, you name it. So therefore, my conference work whether I'm on a panel or I'm speaking tends to vary. My greatest passion is vulnerable populations, and the biggest vulnerable population is the aging population. It's partly because it's so big and it's growing. For the next 20 years. We're almost doubling those numbers in a 30-year time frame. It's just gigantic.
John Warner:That's why I focus on it, my approach in terms of speaking. If there's a theme at all, it's context matters much more than content, by which I mean I never like to talk about technology as a specific. I like to talk about what are the enablers or drivers of technology and what are the friction points we need to overcome to get there. And if we don't think about those first, we build all of our technology on a bed of sand. It becomes a point solution or it becomes something that's just divorced of any real need. It's just like a pretty bright, shiny object, right? How many objects have we got like that that we buy I mean even our phones right, which we might replace every couple of years, why this is a very expensive piece of equipment? Why can't we download software to the same device that just updates what we've got and gives us everything we need? So I think that's where my focus is when I speak in either situation.
Alex Aldridge :When you have the opportunity to be on a panel and you provide your context, what tends to be the thing that you say that makes it click for your audience, or the big aha context moment.
John Warner:Well, I wish I knew the audience were going aha. As a result, I'm not sure my talks are that good, but generally I think what I try to get across is that I think that whole concept of friction points versus drivers is maybe the first thing to wrap your head around, because we don't think that way naturally in life. Right, and I would start with friction before I'd start with drivers. I think we're all naturally orientated to be optimistic, so we tend to think oh, I've come up with a great idea and I can push that to market and I can get people who can help me, whether it's capital or it's people or whatever it might be.
John Warner:What we're not very good at is thinking about how do I reimagine the current situation? So what drags me back doesn't destroy the opportunity to create something new, and there's lots of things. It starts at the top with things like policy. It might start with reimbursement. Is there reimbursement for this? How long does it take to get new? I don't know anything CPT codes or Z codes if we're in social determinants, for example. So I think we've got to have this growth mindset to start off with that says wait a minute, let's go and make sure we've got a plan to deal with the friction and the drag and all of the obstacles I may face. At the same time, I'm trying to reimagine what the technology or the innovation is that I'm trying to bring to bear. So that's the point that I think is a theme for me. So I just think that's very open minded, very growth mindset, orientated very into reimagining the world that we live in today in order to create the world of tomorrow.
Caleb Richardson:Yeah, I think of Uber and everything that they had to go through with, like the policies and everything in New York, and I'm sure they didn't have that in the top of mind and they probably burned through a lot more capital than they might have needed to if they had all of the frictions in mind to start. So, with all the entrepreneurs and founders and companies that you advise, is there a?
Caleb Richardson:common thread of what is a successful entrepreneur or founder working in the aging space. I feel like there's a lot of people, especially, like you said, over the next 30 years this demographic is going to double, basically and there's a lot of opportunistic people that try to come in. I was talking to somebody yesterday in the residential assisted living space. We talked about how it's a huge pet peeve of real estate investors. They take assisted living as a real estate play rather than actually caring about the population that they're about to serve. So is there a through line on the founders? Is it more business savvy or is it more personal connection to the population that they're going to serve? What would you say is the trait of the most successful?
John Warner:Yeah, and again, I want to avoid generalizing, but I think you make a really good point. I really like your example. So entrepreneurship is about doing good and then doing well fiscally, and there's a balance there to be had. Right, and you can go too far in either direction and that's probably bad. Now the money one's easy, right. If you're in the game just to go and make a ton of money and you don't care about the people, you're obviously on a very different road and your customers are probably not going to like you. Now we see plenty of entrepreneurship businesses that make money, but by doing things that are pretty shady in terms of what they're doing. On the other end, though, you can be over empathetic. We can all say we care about older adults and have a business model. It doesn't work. It's unsustainable. I think you've got to find a happy balance. So again we're back to entrepreneurship skills and teams really have to have a growth mindset in the beginning in order to understand that balancing act for them in terms of what they're looking at. It might well be that very issue as a friction point is, if I come from the world of IL independent living, which is a real estate play, fundamentally, when I'm going into AL, how do I reimagine in my own mind what I need to do differently to turn up well in that space? And of course, it's very much more medically orientated, because in an AL I'm going to be doing a lot more in terms of maybe having to get people to hospital or into clinic or getting their drugs sorted out or whatever it might be. That's a whole different ballgame. So I think you've got to approach everything case by case, but the balancing act is the key and again, I think that sorry to keep saying the same thing, but it rests on listening hard and making sure you understand the customers you're serving. So I'll say one more thing about that.
John Warner:A pet peeve of mine that a lot of entrepreneurs don't do enough is really understand the population they're serving. So if I were rendering a solution to an AL, my very first question would be what's the population you're serving here? So that might be how many resident beds do you have? Is it 50?, is it 100?, is it 200? And if they say no, we're multi-site and actually we're a CCRC, I want to know the entire patient census or the resident census at a level of detail. And then I want to understand who's high risk, medium risk and low risk at a basic level and then get granular on that. Just that alone would make such a difference in terms of success. And I find many who have no idea. They just think, yeah, one size fit all, I've got this solution, we're going to go and plug in some activity software, everyone's going to love it, and it doesn't work because they haven't done any work in terms of the population, what their needs are.
Alex Aldridge :I love your ability to specify needs and avoid generalizations. I think it's been quite eye-opening for me in the last little bit that we've been chatting. What other abilities have you noticed that stem from great leaders? You're obviously someone who's been on a ton of boards and you've been CEO six times. Your career is wildly successful. What is those few traits that you've noticed helped you the most?
John Warner:I've said a few of them in the go and I'll add a couple to it. I like to start with this idea of being humble. I don't think a founder in a business, I mean. You see plenty of arrogant ones out there. There are some famous ones on stage and I don't want to name names, but you know who I mean the individuals who are incredibly arrogant in front of cameras at the top and they become household names. I don't think that's a recipe for success. They got there because they were maybe lucky, maybe they had rich friends, but arrogance didn't get them there.
John Warner:No-transcript, because they might be passionate but they don't have the skills to execute on whether this even works at any kind of economic level. I think those are some of the other skills. And then the last one I'd say is they've got to have some leadership ability, because leadership for me is about having an optimistic vision of the future and the capacity to lead people towards it. Again, there's lots of founders, I see, who should probably not be the leaders they think they are. I see this particularly in university settings. Right, there's a lot of professors and people that start businesses inside universities and they think, because they're the professor, they're the best leader for the business. It is rarely the case because they're used to lecturing, they're used to telling people what to do and not listening. So they all foul of other people very quickly customers and their own employees.
Alex Aldridge :Was there a leader in your life or a personal experience that kind of sparked your passion for phenomenal leadership and all your learning of all of these qualities that you've?
John Warner:Yeah, I've had several wonderful experiences of really good leaders that I've learned from over the years and again, without naming names, I've actually worked for people who were just superb mentors and they did listen hard and they did reimagine the way things and, just in their quiet way, made me think differently, take as much of that on board just in terms of how I now show up emulating what they did. You know, it's not about just going and suddenly being creative in a set of circumstances. It's about listening hard enough to know how to show up and in ways that are useful to the other people, not useful to me. It's why leadership is such a humble game. It's not a shout from the rooftops game.
John Warner:We're not going to war, you war, we're going to go and do something together in a better way. I generally fall on the side is most skills are learnable, so I don't believe in born leaders. However, if you're brought up in a good way by parents, teachers and others in your life early on, your chances of being a good learner and having a growth mindset and having humility and maintaining you know that sense of learning and wonder is made better because you've got that kind of in your genes, as it were. So I think there's an element of nature that you know, you pick up pretty quickly early on and I think you just enhance. So I don't think there's anything you know and I personally believe entrepreneurship is a skill to be learned. It is not magic. You can go and learn it. You can learn lean startup. You can read one of my books my slam book was all about this, which is how do you validate any idea you might have?
Alex Aldridge :and there's lots of others like me.
John Warner:You just have to have an open enough mind to go and do it. So beyond that, I just don't believe in the born leader.
Caleb Richardson:I would agree more on the nurture side. There's that example of everybody starting in the same line for a race and then if you have different advantages, if you were brought up good and taught that you can do anything and all, that you might be starting 15 steps ahead of everybody else in the race, but that the people still have the opportunity to play in the race and they'll get there eventually. So I like that a lot.
John Warner:Well, and you know there's very good books out there, right? I mean, there's lots of people who write about this, but the whole idea is late bloomers often will be individuals that look like they've got tons of talent and they, as you say, race ahead in the race, but they catch up. There's people like painters like Picasso, who couldn't sell a single painting for the first 40 years of his life and then all of a sudden sells a ton of paintings later in his life and you have to be patient because he was honing his skill, found a niche and then becomes the best selling painter of all time. So that's why I think nurture beats nature every time.
Alex Aldridge :I love how articulate you are about personal experience, how you relate, like stories, to what you're learning and what you do now and who you work with now, like what's your role as a mentor to them or as an advisor. What does your day to day look like? What do you find yourself doing the most?
John Warner:So these days, because I'm sailing into my older age look at all of this white hair on the head right I'm on eight boards of startups today. I chair six of those boards. My job is to help steer them, listen to what they're doing, try and help shepherd them to maybe new avenues, new pathways, jump over obstacles in maybe better and smarter ways, sometimes connect them with people that I know. I've got a very big network these days. Sometimes that's capital, sometimes that's business development, sometimes that's even on the client side of things. That's how I show up.
John Warner:I have a portfolio life with that many companies to go and advise and they're all very varied. By the way, I have to kind of reprogram my head every time I want to. I just came off a board call before I was speaking to you two guys and that business was in the post-acute space. They're a very big business with lots of clients that are trying to reimagine how the post-acute space might look in 10 or 15 years' time, given the burgeoning population that we're seeing. Fascinating work, for example. It varies depending on who I'm showing up to advise or mentor.
Alex Aldridge :Do you find yourself gravitating towards a certain type of individual, or do you find yourself enjoying spending more time with a specific type of person?
John Warner:So it's interesting. Advisory board work is different to main board work. I've been on main boards as well and that tends to be governance orientated. If you do advisory work, I'd like to like the individual who's the CEO in a business. I like to enjoy working with the team they've got. So I spend a lot of time making sure I'm going to have some fun and I'm going to like the individuals I'm working with, because if I don't, they're not going to enjoy it and I'm not going to enjoy it. So absolutely I have to like the people and sometimes I get that wrong. Right, you think it's going to be a good ride and sometimes it isn't. Again, I'll tell the audience this anyone listening to this I roll my contracts every six months deliberately because I want the chance to say enough already and they have a chance to say enough already to me in the other direction. I think that keeps it honest in both directions.
Caleb Richardson:I think that's a great practice because really any sort of position and relationship in a startup, when you're trying to change an industry or do something innovative, it is a long commitment and it's like a marriage for people If you don't have that six month window to say, okay, are things still working out with us and do we want to keep going. I have some friends that have their own startups and they're kind of in that space where they're just like in a marriage, how you can like be like roommates, but not in love. It's like the same idea with like board members that they're roommates but they just do not enjoy each other's company, but they don't have that setup that you do. So I like that.
John Warner:Absolutely company, but they they don't have that setup that you do. So I like that absolutely and you're right, you've got to build a relationship over time and that's where a strong relationships go to better places. It's as simple as that.
Caleb Richardson:If you had a magic wand that could change one or two things about the aging industry and how people are using technology to innovate it. What would you fix or change?
John Warner:so, yes, you're right, there'll be things I won't repeat too much. So you know, listening to that population and doing your customer discovery going to be in my number one, but the number two I'm going to go a little deeper than what I said earlier. So the one thing I would change is I would want to assemble much better data sets about older adults. I think this whole idea of population health is powerful. I think we've got the tools to do it now. Supercomputing and AI, as you mentioned earlier, allow us to go and create really, really strong databases, and not just in the usual stuff. Right, we talked about sort of you know, demographic factors like age and gender, but why can't we pass the population in psychographic ways, for example, preferences? So these are questions like I mean, I could ask it of you two.
John Warner:And you're much younger, right, so I might say what's your relationship to food? And one of you says, well, I like Italian. The other one says I like Chinese. Well, that's pretty important data in a database, isn't it? If I'm in an AL and I'm in the dining room and I know that, I know you're not going to go and eat any Chinese food if you don't like it, or maybe I'm going to maximize on Italian food for the group of people that like it.
John Warner:We don't do that, and now we have the tools to do it. We have the tools to collect preferences like crazy, assemble it in databases, analyze it and start to change what we do. And then it's a short step if I take my food example into thinking about food is medicine or food is health. How do we get into healthy eating? And how do I do that? Because I know what your food preferences are. So I think population health data, turbocharged by AI and supercomputing, I think, is a wonderful thing to change in the next five to 10 years. Build those data sets, and that's what I would go after.
Caleb Richardson:I like that a lot Food as nutrition If you can start with something as simple as what's your favorite food, because your options get more limited a lot of times, especially as you get older and older, with like salts and different things. So the amount of clients that we've had where I've gone into their home and like they have pediatric and like bland food, it's like if we could have that data set of I love chinese okay, now let's make healthy food in the chinese kind of space specifically for this person.
John Warner:That would just be incredible to see exactly and again, not to go crazy on this, but keep the question. The discovery question is better is what's your relationship to food? Because people will say at the beginning not what their preferences are for cuisine, but they'll say I hate it or I love it, or I overeat, or I find it hard to swallow, or I find everything bland in my mouth these days. That, in the listening mode, allows you to start slicing and dicing what possible solutions look like, because are there lots of people who struggle to swallow? We know there are. As people get older, sometimes it's because of the drugs they're taking, which actually create a gag effect. So you know, the more we know, the more we build our database, the more we build the interdependencies and then we can get to things like cuisine almost as the sort of the icing on top of the cake. So that's how I think about these things.
Alex Aldridge :We've talked about a lot today. We've talked about listening. We've talked about data sets and measuring data. We've talked about advancements in technology. Is there something in the aging space that's an unsung hero that's not spoken about? That needs to be emphasized in our day-to-day conversations at work.
John Warner:One of the things I'd say perhaps is an unusual angle on this, and maybe it's because I wasn't born in this country. I think we can be a little bit too insular. I think we look for solutions inside our own shores a bit too much. Sometimes it's inside our own state or our own city. I think there's best practice all across the world and we would be wise to broaden our horizons. I see some wonderful best practice in lots of other places.
John Warner:Take a society like Japan, which will look like America in 30 years' time. They've already got the older adult population at the percentages we are sailing towards. What are they doing differently? Are we paying attention to that? Are we listening to the innovation that they're doing? The same is happening, not quite to the same extent, in Germany and Holland, for example, where I'm going. In Australia, they've been trying all sorts of new and experimental things with rural populations that are aging. Now that's a huge problem.
John Warner:Experiencing with technology in the 5G realm that is really fascinating, and a rural population of 700 million, more than double our own population. Are we paying attention to all of that? Are we paying attention to Kenya? That's done more with mobile phone technology than any other nation on the planet, including ours. If we don't pay attention to that, how will we ever know? We'll just innovate within our own little backyard. So that would be the one thing I would say do Pay attention more broadly. These are broad platforms. I think the wisdom of crowds is huge compared to what we might come up with as individuals.
Caleb Richardson:Are there any questions that you wish? We would have asked you that we didn't.
John Warner:Yeah, none of us me. I'm very curious about what you two guys are up to. I love young people who care about older adults who've got their whole life ahead of them, right. So what do you guys want to achieve in the next decade in terms of change in this space?
Caleb Richardson:So kind of what you were talking about. Our platform. We built it out originally for growing the in-home side of the business form. We built it out originally for growing the in-home side of the business. We found that it was kind of a one size fit all marketing out there. It's crazy how it's like all the same stock image saying do you need this help?
Caleb Richardson:And everybody's helping people that are in their eighties, and I really felt like there was a big discrepancy, kind of an education of like what is available, how can you extend the quality of life and not just the longevity of it, and so we built out a platform where basically it was it's filled with interest-based live virtual groups. So it's a really simple for the adoption side of things. It's a really simple interface that makes it so that way older adults can come and learn Spanish and come and learn piano and come and opt in for interest-based activities. And then on the back end we're building out what you've talked about of how do we figure out what phase of life they're in, so like really fast questionnaires and to try to gauge where they're at. What do you enjoy about whether they're getting senior services or not, what do they like about life and building out these questions to have more of that granularity. But it's been really cool to see we made it. It's completely free for older adults and then we go and find younger hosts that are experts in their field to kind of put on these classes and it's had some cool benefits for us personally.
Caleb Richardson:So we're trying to decide if we want to white label it at large for other home health companies and people that have these large censuses but they don't understand their census, because for us one it made marketing a lot easier because rather than saying book, a free discovery thing to see if you need help, it's like hi, I just saw an ad on facebook, do you want to get married?
Caleb Richardson:It doesn't make sense. So, like I made it so that way we're able to get in front of in front of people a lot sooner, because we're not saying do you want to move into an assisted living, we're saying do you want to come and learn piano for free, and then we're able to have educational classes of like, what benefits are out there, how do you use reverse mortgages, just everything that's available that people just don't know. So we're trying to decide if we want to kind of do like a white label version, if there's value for other companies to kind of make that micro nucleuses of their census to connect them to each other on interest-based activities, especially in the assisted living space, like you mentioned. They have their free activities every day but it's bingo, like a yoga class and it's like the same things and only 5-10% of their senses are coming out and it's like probably because people are unique and you're not treating them unique.
John Warner:That's right. That's right. Yeah, very interesting. I mean there's obviously a certain amount of competitive intelligence that I'm sure you've gathered some of. It sounds a little bit like kind of masterclass which is really providing support for the caregiver, because very often that's people of my age looking after my parents. Right, we need certain information and so on to learn about something we've never experienced before. You know, mom and dad is ailing, you know, heading towards death or whatever. It might be Right. There's all of that. One of the boards that I chaired. Have you guys run across Element 3 Health? They've just been rebranded.
Caleb Richardson:I need to look into Element 3, health.
John Warner:Yeah, so go take a look online. You know interesting business. They were really spun up to try and deal with social isolation and loneliness as their premier thing, but what they were trying to do is render a service that got people socializing in clubs and activities together, both online and offline. They've raised about 17 million over the years. But, you know, be a good journey for you to go and look at how others went and did it. And look at wearehelpfulcom, not because it's the same business as yours, but because he came out of one medical which Amazon bought, you may know, and has built, I think, an amazing platform for caregivers. That's wearehelpfulcom. And Element 3 is just rebranded. I don't know what they rebranded as, but they rebranded. I can't remember the name, but you'll find them online.
Caleb Richardson:Yeah, we need to stay in touch because right now we've used it internally and it's helped us grow and we're kind of trying to decide what we want to put resources and time as far as development to, and so we're just going about different surveys and questionnaires and research. So before we dive in and commit to all the development time, well, uh, yeah, do that.
John Warner:so, by the way, that element three business is now called grouper, so it's hello, groupercom, if you want to write that down, alex, they just rebranded. What I'd say about your research is yeah, you've got to do your market research and I think that's important and that surveys and everything else. But don't forget, the best customer discovery is face-to-face, in person, in your target customer group. So you want to quietly sit in IELTS, als, you know memory care, whatever SNFs you name it, and just listen to people and go and say you know, how are you solving this problem today? Are you bored, you know? Are there things you don't know? Are you on YouTube the whole time? I mean, there's lots of curated platforms out there, but quietly go and sort of don't, you don't leave them. You don't say, hey, we're thinking of spinning up this new website. What do you think that's?
John Warner:Market research Discovery is about not leading the witness. You're just trying to say what's it like to be you? What are you struggling with day by day? Where are you trying to get? What can't you do you'd like to do? Tell me more about that and you just listen and take notes. That's way more powerful than market research. Keep away from surveys until you've done. The National Science Foundation would say you should do 100 interviews like that, one on one. That's how you de-risk a startup.
Alex Aldridge :I like that. You said that I went to go visit a home health and hospice agency and I mentioned a couple of the things that Caleb had mentioned about branding and it did feel like I was leading them, but they resonated with a few things that I was saying and they opened up and they're like oh, I'm looking to do this, I'm looking to do that, and those few sentences provided way more value than anything I could have said.
John Warner:Yeah, and you definitely need to go and ask them about your platform eventually, but you're better keeping off that in the early stages. Just tell them that you're a couple of young blokes that are trying to write a white paper on how to make the older adult world better and then say I just want to know kind of what you're struggling with and keep off your solution. That's the way to do it, I think.