Why entrepreneurs ignore an aging America - at their peril

Kara Miller:

Welcome to Instigators of Change, a Khosla Ventures podcast where we take a look at innovative ideas, the people who come up with them, and those who invest in them. I'm Kara Miller, and today, entrepreneurs and companies generally want to be where the market's expanding. If you're wondering where the market is expanding in the US...

Joseph Coughlin:

The fact of the matter is the aging population is the fastest-growing population in the United States, and frankly, indeed, the world.

Kara Miller:

But generations of conventional wisdom have taught companies to focus in on 18-year-olds, 22-year-olds. The thing is, sometimes conventional wisdom gets it totally wrong.

Joseph Coughlin:

Part of the reason why the nation is aging and the world is aging is, frankly, we've stopped having kids. The small part is that you need 2.1 children per female just to keep the population even. Kara, between you and I, I thought that during the COVID quarantine, there would be a baby boom. In fact, there was a baby crash. We're looking at 1.6, 1.7 in the United States and far lower in every other industrialized country.

Kara Miller:

Today on Instigators of Change, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab offers a vision of the future and explains where the money really is. That's just ahead.

Joseph Coughlin is, I would say, annoyed. He sees something coming down the road and it's really, really hard for him to convince people to look.

Joseph Coughlin:

I'd like to say that economics is one part math and two parts witchcraft and engineering is two parts hope and one part mathematics, but demography is destiny because the numbers and the people are already here, shall we say.

Kara Miller:

He says demographics are kind of like climate change. We have a good sense of what's ahead, and it edges closer and closer, but it's hard to accept.

Joseph Coughlin:

"Well, we'll get to that. It's not going to happen anytime soon," but the thing with demography is that we're starting to see how aging and birth rates and the like are converging to create an entirely new world that we've never experienced.

Kara Miller:

That new world is confusing to companies, to investors, because the business lessons that they've learned were based around baby boomers, and maybe to a lesser degree, millennials, but those groups were so enormous it made sense to focus on them when they were young, to hook them on certain products, or experiences. But the facts on the ground have changed and executives actually don't realize it, says Coughlin.

Joseph Coughlin:

Where the money is, 70% of the spending power is in the hands of the 50 plus, and yet they get less than two to 3% of the advertising dollars.

Kara Miller:

What might get corporate America to understand how data's going to change our future? Well, it could be a celebrity with a megaphone. When Coughlin wrote recently in Forbes about the retirement of tennis great Serena Williams and how retirement's not just a questionable word, it's a questionable concept, Williams weighed in, "We all transform," she tweeted in response to Coughlin's piece. "Retirement? I prefer forever evolving." Coughlin believes another force pushing corporate America to switch its outlook could be personal experience, pure and simple.

Joseph Coughlin:

I would hope that as their ranks of their executives, shall we say, age themselves, that as the Gen Xers are well into their 50s and the boomers beyond, and as I said, millennials are, they're no longer the kids, they've cranked over 40 and 41 years old, I'm hoping they'll look in the mirror and go, "Wait, I've got a lot of years, I've got a lot of money, and I've got a lot of demands." But so far, it's slow. Corporations like any bureaucracy do what they did well and they're reluctant to change. But I think they're starting to see a new generation gap. It's not about how we all weigh in on social issues, the new generation gap is I expect there to be a pill, a policy, or a product of something that's going to help me live longer better. I think, shall we say, the new older generation is not nearly as polite nor as patient as previous generations.

Kara Miller:

When you think about innovators, when you think about investors like people who help companies get off the ground and you think about just all your conversations in your own networks, how keyed in do you think people are who fund the beginning of companies to this realization of, "Whoa, the money and the people who live in the US, that's really changing"?

Joseph Coughlin:

They're starting to get it. They're starting to look around. I mean, the data have been around for a long time. I mean, heck, 20, 30 years ago people were talking about, "Hey, the baby boomers are getting older." Oh, my God, they've been getting older since they were born. The VCs and the capital of markets are starting to pay attention, but it's hard for them because remember, their investment thesis, as they say, is not just based upon spreadsheets and return on investment, it's also on the story that they follow. When they think of old age, they think of wheelchairs, long-term care, people living alone, or needy and greedy. They don't think of the fact that we now have a generation that's expecting more different, exciting, better-educated than every time before, and frankly, more tech-savvy.

The bias that they have to fight is the following. When they think of a startup, they think of some kid wearing a hoodie and sneakers writing code for a widget that a teen or a 20-something will use. By the way, that kid is almost uniformly male when, in fact, the real innovators are the people that are living longer lives of providing care. In fact, I interviewed people from my book, The Longevity Economy, where women were having a difficult time getting in front of VCs because they expected some kid in a hoodie with sneakers writing code, not a middle-aged woman who actually knew what the jobs of the consumer were and what those innovations might be. Then the third reason they're having a difficult time, it's about services. An aging society is going to be about experience and service, high-end expectation. Generally speaking, VCs and capital markets, they like stuff, they like widgets, but that's not the economy of tomorrow.

Kara Miller:

Let's talk a little bit about money, which I know you've written about. A shocking amount of money in this country is in the hands of people over 50. Even though you just talked about a young person trying out a new whatever it is, video game or whatever, we think about that, but in fact, young people are not the people who have money to spend on new stuff, in fact, if you look at. Just talk a little bit about the distribution of wealth in this country.

Joseph Coughlin:

Well, as we know from other discussions, the distribution of wealth is highly inequitable, and shall we say, lumpy. While the highest concentration of wealth is in the hands of the 50-plus, primarily real estate wealth, that's not even well distributed within that group. Nearly half of tomorrow's retirees have less than $25,000 to plan on a retirement. But that other part of it, they are the ones that do have that wealth, they're the ones who are buying the high tech, high style, and yes, high priced.

Kara Miller:

Are there companies that have come across your field of vision, your desk that you feel like have done a really good job of understanding that there are a bunch of older people with money to spend with time, and this is a huge market to be tapped?

Joseph Coughlin:

They're starting to come around. The companies that already own, if you want to call it that, the aging marketplace, are the financial services industry because it's around retirement and basically whole lifestyle, and of course, pharmaceutical. There are new diseases being advertised every day with a molecule chasing it. But in-between the more the lifestyle and the like are, shall we say, the auto industry started to do a better job at understanding that yes, everyone needs mobility, but we want it safer, we want it more comfortable, we want experience of sound and service.

That leads us to a little lesson that we've learned, Kara, is that no company really wants to come out and say something, "We market to old people," because frankly, we've learned that from the auto industry in particular that you can't make an old man's car. Why? Because a young man and a young woman, not only will they not buy it, but an old man and an old woman will run with her hair on fire away from it, so you're finding the companies that do best are the ones who do it by stealth. They talk about well-being, they talk about comfort, they talk about efficiency, and those values, if you will, tend to skew even more to the older consumer.

Kara Miller:

It's funny, I actually remember decades ago talking to my grandparents and they said somebody was young who was in their 40s and I just remember thinking, "What?" Then I said something and I remember my grandmother saying, "Well, as you get older, young seems different, the bar for what's young keeps moving." But I hear what you're saying, whether they're 25 or 55 or whatever wants to be like, nobody thinks of themselves as old, or probably 75, so they want to be not talked to that way from a company.

Joseph Coughlin:

Absolutely, and because when we think about aging, the old age story, it's not about more years to be enjoyed, it's about losing capability and engagement, and unfortunately, that story is still there. It's false, but it's a false narrative. But what we want our products and services and experiences that show us what we've gained that leverage what we have that give us a new vista to experience the many days that we've gained. I mean, just as a side note, think about this, in 1900, life expectancy was a mere 46 or 47 years old. Today, the average, and very few of us to say we're average, The average life expectancy is in the high 70s. That means we've gotten three-plus decades a longevity dividend to cash in, so we're looking for services and products and indeed even public policies that help us cash in that longevity dividend.

Kara Miller:

You mentioned pharmaceuticals real quickly. Do you feel like healthcare or companies related to healthcare are evolving given just the huge numbers of people that are moving towards consuming more healthcare?

Joseph Coughlin:

Yeah, you're starting to see, we've seen direct-to-consumer marketing for the past couple of decades, but one of the things that you're seeing differently is we're no longer talking about being sick. We're talking about how to manage being ill. It sounds like a word game, but it's not. Sick is the inability to do the things you want. We're now seeing the pharma industry, biotech, and the device industry say, "Gee, Joe, you may have one, two, three chronic conditions. You're ill, but you're not too sick to work part-time, walk the dog, visit the grandchildren, go on travel," and so the real push now is not about treating your disease, but making it possible for you to enjoy longer life.

Kara Miller:

You mentioned there the idea of working part-time. Give me a sense. There are certainly a lot of significant people in industry, big investors, famous thinkers who I talk to all the time who are well past retirement age, traditional retirement age, but they're still working. What's your sense of the state of retirement now? Are people still by and large saying, "I'm done at 65"? Is this dividing line by money or the type of job you have? How have things moved since, let's say 20, 30 years ago?

Joseph Coughlin:

Well, first off, most people would not believe this, but retirement is not a Newtonian law of physics. It was made up as an idea in the late 1800s, early 1900s because the nature of work was primarily physical, and if you could no longer do the physical work as fast, as efficient or as safely, not only did you want to retire, but the people you were working with wanted you out of the way. You were a bad piece of equipment. In part, it's about education and also the nature of the job. What we're seeing is yes, people are still retiring, but not necessarily to stop work but to do something different. We saw during COVID, people were not just moving away from where they were going to the office, they were saying, "You know something? I want to do something new and different," so they may be retiring from being a lawyer, or running a shop, or being a store, or even a handyman, not just to quit. Not just to stay home and watch the grass grow, but to try to do something else.

Kara, if you permit me, I'd like to do just a little bit of math to let all your listeners appreciate why. From zero, birth that is, to 21 years old, and for some, it may make it easier, drinking age is about 8,000 days. From 21 years old to midlife crisis, 46, 47 thereabouts is 8,000 days. I bet people are starting to get the algorithm now. From midlife crisis to 65, that law of retirement, if you will, is 8,000 days. But here's the thing, the fastest-growing part of the population is 85-plus and 65 to 85 in change is another 8,000 days, so if we take out that birth to 21 years old and push that off to the side and call that childhood, what we're talking about is not a brief period of life called retirement, a trip to Disney and the beach and grandchildren, you're looking at one-third of adult life, and that's a long time to play a bad game of golf.

Kara Miller:

You're right. I mean, that's like the amount of time it took to have and raise your kids and send them to college, right? Then they're gone. It sounds like you're saying fewer people are done at 65 in terms of actually working, they still want to be engaged in labor force in some way or other.

Joseph Coughlin:

Yeah, and by the way, the word is they still want to be engaged. Look, nobody wants to be on the same truck or work station or cubicle for another 30 or 40 years, but they want to do something. We found that during COVID, it was essentially a really good fire drill for retirement. You can't paint the spare bedroom 50 different times. You can't remodel that often. The games and the gardens that you thought you were going to spend your time doing, well, you were home for a good year or year and a half and you found you ran out of things to do, and so it's engagement, whether it's volunteering, going back to school, starting a new job, or for those who can, maybe consulting back to the industry well.

Kara Miller:

I know you talked to a lot of people who are not just past retirement, or past 65, but I know you also talked to lifestyle leaders I think you called them who are over 85. Whether it's people over 65 or people over 85, when you do these interviews, what have you heard that surprises you and that you think surprises industry, too?

Joseph Coughlin:

Well, I think, and by the way, my team at the MIT AgeLab, they do a great job working with these panels of people over at 85 and 50 and over 65, not just here in the United States but around the world, and some of the things that we have found that I think even companies are surprised at is how young 65 and 75 and frankly even some of the 85-year-olds feel. I'll give an example. Only 30% of people over age 75 in a study we did identified themselves as old. That means 70% of them still feel like, hey, there are things to do, people to see, and things to buy. But the other thing that was really good for those of us that are under 65, the overwhelming positivity that the people that make it to 65, 75 and 85-plus, life's not that bad. They're coping, they're doing better. While we're younger and we lament things that are going on we don't like, as we get older, we start to filter out the negative, and focus on the positive.

Kara Miller:

What industry in your view, I know you've consulted with a lot of companies, I know the AgeLab advises a lot of companies. What industry do you feel like needs the most investment and attention or a couple of industries that would be fine in order to handle how older Americans are changing things and just altering the landscape?

Joseph Coughlin:

I think one of the runners up would be retail. I mean, we look at retailers as a running experiment of what's hot. They are continuing to court teens, which are in shorter supply and even shorter on money, so we need to rethink those spaces and places that we call shopping. Yes, there's online shopping, but experience shopping is also something we should think about for an aging population.

We should also look at the housing industry overall, start coming up with new ideas. The notion of senior housing, just listen to the name. No one wants to be a senior in the first place. That's a name or a framing from decades ago, let alone the offering that's out there today, and frankly, even the developments of housing that are out there for everyone that's outside of senior housing, we're not thinking about not just the physical, but the things that people like to do, and where they're located.

Probably the third one that I would hit a little bit is financial services, and we work with them quite bit, but something brochures around people walking beaches and on golf courses may fit for a few percent of the population, but for the rest of us, show us a vision of retirement that's engaging, enticing, and something I truly want to invest, and plan for. We haven't done that yet.

Kara Miller:

Do you see the shoots of that anywhere? Because I mean, the idea of housing, millions of people, it maybe something different than what we have now, which is like people closed off from each other, that is not a small undertaking. I wonder if you see the shoots of that anywhere, or not really.

Joseph Coughlin:

Now, we're starting to see little things. First, a disclaimer, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Parrothead, a follower of Jimmy Buffett, and not that I'm saying that this is the answer, but the fact is that they're developing complexes on Margaritaville, or latitude lifestyles for the 50-plus. I don't know what that means. Is that a 20-year hangover?

Kara Miller:

I don't know.

Joseph Coughlin:

But the bottom line is that people are looking for something new and different, and if business is about anything else, it is not simply about products and services, it's about sketching out dreams, something to go for. If you think about it, retirement as we know it today was either all about health or what Del Webb created, which was all about playing in retirement.

Kara Miller:

It's like Sun City, Arizona, right?

Joseph Coughlin:

Exactly.

Kara Miller:

He just built these places where people would go play golf and have fun.

Joseph Coughlin:

Now, we think of that or grandchildren and Disney as retirement, and maybe it is part of it, but boy, for 8,000 days, one-third of your adult life? The industry needs to cast a new dream and we'll see if we buy it.

Kara Miller:

One of the central issues following from the conversation we've been having to me is the issue of loneliness, which is both like a spiritual issue, but it's really also a health issue. Not that long ago, there's a piece in The New York Times about this, New York City found that "57% of New Yorkers had felt lonely." Again, this quote from The New York Times, "had felt lonely some or most of the time in the past month, and two-thirds felt that they had been socially isolated." The fact that more than half of the people in a city, and these people are very in proximity, quite close together, feel very alone, and they also found that health consequences like blood pressure and stuff were worse for people who felt lonely, so there's a real medical upshot to this, but it seems like a bad direction to be going in when you think about people aging, their kids moving out of the house, maybe their spouse dies. Is that the direction we're moving in?

Joseph Coughlin:

Look, social isolation is not just a national crisis. It is a global crisis. Heck, the United Kingdom not too long ago, if you remember, anointed a minister of loneliness.

Kara Miller:

I do remember.

Joseph Coughlin:

It almost sounds like it came out of a Saturday Night Live skin. But no, the fact of the matter is that social isolation is affecting everyone across the lifespan. By the way, to your point about healthcare, a study was done in 2015 indicating that social isolation leading to loneliness had the physical impact of smoking 11 to 15 cigarettes per day, so hypertension and stroke likelihood and the like. My students in my Global Aging & Built Environment class, a graduate class looking at how the built environment changes everything, it's not just about proximity. As you pointed out, you can be alone in a city of nine million people.

Are you living in a place or choosing to retire in a place that gives you the opportunity for chance collisions with new people, to do things, to remain engaged? One of the reasons why people work in retirement is not just for money, but think about it, you spend more time with your colleagues and work than you do your own family and friends. When you retire, suddenly an entire social network has vaporized, and so we need to start thinking about where we live, how we plan to be engaged and meet new people because as one woman told me in a focus group in Chicago a number of years ago, "At my age," and she was in her 80s, "At my age, there's a natural attrition to friendship, so you have to keep on growing." In other words, start thinking of your retirement portfolio, not just as money, but ask yourself, "How healthy is my social portfolio?"

Kara Miller:

You work with a lot of students at MIT, but also Harvard, Wellesley, who then in turn interview older people, work with companies, advise those companies, think about developing products and solutions. Do you feel like some of the issues that we've laid out are solvable at scale? A big company could say, "Yes, I'm going to take this on in a way that would matter and that would move the needle"?

Joseph Coughlin:

We're starting to see that now. Kara, I started the AgeLab nearly 20 years ago, and in those days when I was looking for research dollars from corporations, most of them were not that interested. It was like, "Nah, it's not our market. That's not what we do." Luckily, I had a few companies that stepped up and made it possible to keep on going. Today, that's starting to change. By the way, the one thing that pandemic did is it started to take what used to be considered a soft problem into a hard market, social isolation, health and well-being, connectivity.

To the point about my students, not only are they a great energetic group of people that keep me young, but those issues have become personal with them and they are pushing those issues and their innovations into companies in a way that we're starting to see that technology to monitor your health doesn't have to be something that radiates old man walking. It can be something cool, that interfaces on appliances and cars need not be clunky, but could be attractive to all generations, and that the services that younger people once used only because they were starved for convenience are now possible to provide care for a loved one at a distance, so I am not just optimistic, I am wildly optimistic.

Kara Miller:

What have those younger people seen in coming to these problems of people who are maybe 60 years older than they are? How do they look at it differently? What's the lens that they bring to it that is surprising? I mean, because you have people who are 25 trying to see it through an 85-year-old's lens, and I wonder how that works.

Joseph Coughlin:

We do that in three ways. They're in the field, they're in your house, they're in your car. In fact, to be a little bit creepy, we like to watch, so we go out and we find people around the world and we watch, and of course, we do surveys and we ask people and they come in our lab. Before COVID, we had upwards of a thousand people coming to the lab, let alone the people we spoke to internationally. But then we also have AGNES, the Age Gain Now Empathy System, which is a suit that gives the user, shall we say, the joys of feeling not just older, but having one, two, three chronic conditions like arthritis and diminished vision and the like.

One of the things that the students have found through the eyes of AGNES or through the experiences of the people that they sometimes go into their homes and cars and stores with is we have a list of what we call stupid problems, being able to get into a bathtub, or open up a jar, or being able to use a device. The lens of that younger user who knows the technology, knows the science, and the possibilities, sees those struggles that many older adults have been hacking and their caregivers have been hacking and they solve them. They go, "No, there is an app for that. There is a technology," or we can change the design, so it's not saying it's for an old person, but it just made it easier for everyone, and so those young eyes coming with new technology, looking at old problems give me the optimism that tomorrow's going to be not just about living longer, but living better.

Kara Miller:

If you were starting a company today founded on the principles of the things we've talked about and just the opportunities you see, is there a sector or two or a service that you think you would provide if you were starting from ground zero and you're saying, "Yeah, this feels the hottest to me"?

Joseph Coughlin:

While the AgeLab works with older people, our vision, some may even call it a hallucination, is about 100 years of good living, 100 years of good life. The one area I would really attack with gusto right now is actually my own industry; that is education. How do we start from grammar school through graduate school to start preparing people to believe that they're going to be living more and more to 100 years? Nearly half the children born today are likely to live a hundred years. How do you prepare for that in health? How do you prepare for that and where you're going to live. Not how many jobs are you going to have, how many careers are you going to have? How do you remain engaged throughout the lifespan?

While we are living longer, and everything from sanitation to medicine has made that possible, our education, our workforce and those related institutions are still baked in the 1800s/early 1900s thinking where you go to school for a short time, you work for a long time, and you retire for a short time. Now, we have a longer life, we need to rethink how we educate people to prepare to live longer and better.

Kara Miller:

Does that mean to you weaving education into a life, being like, "Okay, well I am 52, but I still want to know how to code, I don't know how to code, but I've decided I'm going to do this thing, and it's probably going to require some coding, and I'm going to figure it out"?

Joseph Coughlin:

Absolutely. Frankly, the definition of education these days should be Java's a nickname for coffee. Therefore, you're literate. By the way, Java's also a computing programming language as well, so yes, the idea of weaving education, not from zero to 12th grade, or college if you do that, or vocational school, but education for a life's time. Think about the new technologies, the knowledge that has developed in the lifetime of 40 or 50 or 60 years. We're kidding ourselves if we think a paper that you'll receive from somebody wearing a medieval gown at age 21 prepares you for the next 50 to 60 years of life. That's a ritual, that's not a right in terms of staying engaged in a workforce.

Kara Miller:

Just to stay on this question of education, do you feel like education at some point in the next five, 10, 15 years is going to be totally reinvented somehow, some way?

Joseph Coughlin:

I think you're starting to see it now. You're starting to see the vocational schools reblossom. You're seeing the community colleges playing a greater role for younger people and you're seeing four-year institutions doing a lot more online with certificate programs and the like. I'll give you an example. My own home department, the Center for Transportation Logistics, gave birth to something called the Micro Masters in Supply Chain. This is the idea that frankly, learn fast, do, come back, learn more, do. That's the new longevity reality of the workforce and how it must change education as well.

Kara Miller:

Finally, like I said, you've worked with a lot of companies, folks at the AgeLab have worked with a lot of companies, Clearly, they've learned stuff from you. What have you learned from them that surprised you or that was more of a hurdle than you realized? Because they're out there trying to sell these products, trying to in a way that you aren't, so I just wonder if there's a couple of lessons or a couple of anecdotes you can share from companies?

Joseph Coughlin:

I think one of the joys of working with companies is the very thing that gives me and my team sometimes odds to speed and that is they need to work fast. As a result of that, it makes us work faster, but more importantly, working with the private sector enables us to take ideas and move them quickly from the laboratory into the living room, so that's been a complete joy. The challenge, however, is increasingly companies are having so much put on their shoulders, or frankly, on their balance sheet that they think in short-term rather than the long game, and longevity is about the long game. It's about understanding that you want to be able to serve, support, and entice a customer from the young age all the way to a hundred years, and they're still learning how to do that. But I think together we're envisioning that just a new story of old age, but a better way of living an old age.

Kara Miller:

One thing I actually keep wondering about there is you've talked about people wanting to stay in their home as they age, and they don't really want to move into senior living, but it seems so clear coming down the pike that there's going to be a real shortage of people to help you in your home, right, like home health care workers. There's already a shortage and it's not going to get any better if you've got a lot of old people and fewer young people. I mean, I don't know what that adds up to, but it doesn't seem like a lot of help in your home. That feels like an area where there's just going to be enormous demand, people wanting to stay in their homes, and there being no way for them to do it because the person they'd have to pay, it's just out of their range.

Joseph Coughlin:

No, absolutely, and frankly, the investment community and the startup community need to start thinking more about trusted services, so a major thrust in my lab is up, but caregiving and home as service, not as place, imagining not just the technologies that'll enable you to stay in your home longer, but who do you trust across the threshold of your mother's door when she's 85, a bit frail, and living alone? Good investment now is not going to be just about the IP you can protect, but on the service model that enables you to provide a solution for things like caregiving, home as service, trusted transportation, service and product. We need to start thinking more about investing in solutions, not widgets.

Kara Miller:

Yeah, except I feel like people who are thinking along those investment lines are thinking, "Yeah, but it's great to help your mother who's over 85, but how is that scalable?" Right? It's just, every person who crosses the threshold is one person, whereas widgets are so nicely scalable, right? Once I've got one, I sell a million of them.

Joseph Coughlin:

Well, one of the things we're looking at in our consortium called the C3 Home Logistics, to provide convenience, connectivity, and care, is that frankly, the investment opportunity is to replace the oldest adult daughter. Now, sounds a little weird when I say that, but the oldest adult daughter, after a partner or spouse is the number one caregiver. She's the one who's buying the widgets and the services. The company that can architect the integrator that replaces her, and by the way, she's either moved away, busy, or she was never born, that's the company that's going to win in the longevity economy.

Kara Miller:

Are you saying that solving for that oldest adult daughter, which I actually can totally see, and have seen, actually, that's a question of how do you sort move somebody around their house in an easier way, but maybe not with fully a human on site all the time? Are we talking about some degree of automation or robotics here?

Joseph Coughlin:

Oh, absolutely. It's going to be high touch and high tech together. I mean, think about it, most caregivers are doing mission control from their offices while their mom or dad lives either a town away or states away.

Kara Miller:

Right. Okay, so you do think there are players coming into this space who are thinking, "We're talking about millions of people here needing help. They're not going to necessarily be able to pay somebody $40,000, $50,000 a year to help them, a full-time person, so we're going to have some sort of technological solution."

Joseph Coughlin:

Absolutely. Think about the following. 85 to 90% of people over age 50 say they wish to age in place. They do not want to move into senior housing or something like that. Only 40% of them believe they're going to be able to do that. I think you're going to start to see homes and services be branded, not by location and proximity to schools and the like. You're going to start to see housing be branded around, "Hey, this house is powered by," pick a name brand company, a major company that can provide both people and technology.

Kara Miller:

Joseph Coughlin is the director of the MIT AgeLab. He's the author of the book Longevity Economy. Joe, thanks so much.

Joseph Coughlin:

All right, Kara, thanks for having me.

Kara Miller:

Coughlin says that as we speak, companies are hard at work on becoming the technological safety net for your parent. They can monitor houses and people with sensors, they can bring robotics into play, and they can usher in personal help when it's needed. I'm Kara Miller. Our show is produced by Matt Purdy. I'll talk to you next week.