What is The Super Age and How to Prepare for Our Demographic Future?

Bradley, thank you so much for joining me today. 

It’s my pleasure. Thank you. 

So what exactly is the super age? 

The super age is a term that I stole/ borrowed/ co-opted, however you want to frame it, from the UN. It’s a designation of populations, and there are three stages to the aging of populations:

One is aging, which is 7% of the population. Aged, which is 14% and then Super Aged, which is 20%. Of the population over the age of 65, 65 is this classic definition of when we move from being adults to being old people, it’s rather outdated. But it’s a terminology that people still use today. And one that I wanted to lean into in the book to show that this period wasn’t a negative one.

Often how super age is portrayed. And one, that’s actually a positive one where our society, our economy can, can really grow and flourish in this new period. If we leverage the resources, the human capital in the right ways. 

So why is it so important that people understand this concept and who should know about?

Well, everyone needs to know about the shift in populations because like climate change, it affects everything in our daily life. Whether we want to admit it or not. The aging of the population, the outdated systems that we have in place for work for retirement, for social welfare, they all need to be reconsidered because population aging, isn’t just more old people.

It’s the confluence of two mega trends. The first is declining birth rates, which are happening virtually everywhere in the world with the exception of. Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America and radical extension of longevity. The number of years the, we get to live on this planet.

So for the longest period of time, we had a lot of young people born About half of them made it to adulthood and even fewer people made it to advanced age. It doesn’t mean that people didn’t live a long life. There were people that did well into their eighties and even nineties and there’s records of this back until the Roman and the Greek period.

But the sheer number of older people, people who are living to advanced age now is, is shocking. It’s revolutionary in the United States, you know, 76 million. Baby boomers were born. 70 million of them are still alive today. That is a market shift and because of the declining sizes of younger populations, marketers, innovators, businesses need to take note because it will transform the labor market as it’s already doing in a pretty seismic way, at least here in the United States.

And it will also transform the products and services, the business. Need to develop if they want to continue to grow and expand the marketplace. 

So speaking of the changing labor force, how has the workforce already changed and how it’s expected to change in the future, because of this phenomenon. Also, what is anti retirement?

There are a number of different pieces that has already happened. COVID was like a shot of adrenaline into our system. And you as a technologist, as a tech expert, really understand how it pushed us forward in ways that we hadn’t quite anticipated well, that happened in the labor market as well. So as a demographic, demographer, you know, we were looking at predictions of the labor market, starting to contract around 20, 30, 20, 34, a bit further out.

And what happened during the pandemic? Again, at least in the United States. Just that there was a significant contraction, a significant departure of older people from the former labor formal labor force. So we’re talking millions here left because of forced redundancy, chosen retirement, or because they were fearful of the pandemic of getting sick.

That caused things to tighten up. And when older people leave the marketplace, the labor marketplace, they have a lot harder time getting back. So it usually takes twice as long. And they usually make half as much when they get back in. So that’s not really a good deal for folks. So they’ve been sitting this one out, some have begun collecting benefits.

Some are living off retirement savings. But there is a growing number of people that are moving into entrepreneurism, opening up small businesses and quite a large number of people that are moving into the gig economy because it gives them that flexibility to really work. And that’s aided by technology.

Obviously that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

There is no such thing as somebody who is overqualified for a position, that’s hogwash.

In your book, you write about ageism in the workforce, but also about the fact that many of the C level new entrants are older than they used to be in the past. And also that some of the most successful founders out there are over the age of 45. How does that compute?

That’s psychology 1-0-1, you know, older people don’t see themselves as older. I’m 44. I don’t see myself as 44. I think of myself as much younger. Even though my body would disagree on a number of fronts. That being said, it goes for these CEOs as well. They see themselves as still very relevant and part of society.

I think ageism shows up in very strange ways. You know, I don’t think that firing decisions are necessarily motivated by age. They may factor in, but a lot of time businesses are cutting costs. And because of our systems that tend to reward seniority or have rewarded seniority with pay, older workers tend to be the one of the earlier ones to go because they cost more. So if you can get three heads for the cost of one, wouldn’t you do it? Where ageism does seem to pop up in a more prevailing way is in the hiring process, the recruitment process in large part because businesses have trained themselves to look for young talent.

Essentially since the first boomer entered the workplace in the 1960s, because that talent is cheaper and a lot easier to find. We have to confront the attitudes towards the recruitment process now, because there is no such thing as somebody who is overqualified for a position, that’s hogwash.

It’s just silly. If you have a lot of experience, especially good experience running a business, I want to talk to you. I want to learn from you and. More and more enterprises should take note of this. This is a great opportunity to bring in skills that you may never have dreamed of coming from a single person, and money isn’t the only motivator anymore for people being at work. Not only does it help your finances (staying employed), but it also helps your physical and your cognitive health.

To better socialized you avoid isolation, which is which is a killer in this country and around the world. And you end up providing more and having greater purpose in your life.

What businesses can do outside of offering salaries is offering flexibility, offering things like caregiving to take care of loved ones. These are prevailing trends of benefits that older, but all working age adults really do love. So if businesses want to recruit this talent, they don’t necessarily just need to think in terms of dollars and cents. They need to think in terms of the whole benefits package, the whole individual at the end of the day. 

I couldn’t agree more. So while we’re on the subject of ageism, a 2018 study By Dr. Levy and her team found that ageism towards the old led to excess costs of $63 billion for a broad range of health conditions during one year in the United States alone, how does that happen? 

You know, bias slips in, in a lot of ways. One of the larger challenges with our healthcare system is that we simply don’t have enough geriatricians, people who specialize in the care of older populations.

We also often struggle with including older populations in clinical trials for medicines. And sometimes we’re dismissive of older people when they need care. So ageism kind of pops up in, in various and sundry ways. And it’s not always intentional. I mean, I think that folks need to realize that it’s, it’s not necessarily an overt bias.

But it is something that lingers in the back of most people’s heads. I mean, everyone’s a little bit ageist at the end of the day. And even the best of us, even the ones of us like ourselves, who are acutely aware of the damaging effects of this bias? We’ll sometimes find ourselves slipping into an ageist stance.

I’ve infantilized my parents before and that’s embarrassing. I’ve caught myself doing it, thank God, but it is a bias that we constantly have to fight against because it is one of the few biases that we readily accept today. 

It sounds to me like there are so many opportunities all over the place. Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs or investors in this space? What are the biggest opportunities to tackle some of these problems?

Well, hands down technology is the biggest place for innovation right now. I think there’s no question about that. Especially around AgeTech because one of the greatest hurdles that we have to overcome is tech literacy, amongst older populations and delayed uptake of tech which often goes unreported.

Globally eight out of 10 people own a smartphone today on average, which is, you know, a pretty remarkable statistic considering that smartphones only came out 15 years ago with the iPhone. But, when you look at older populations, the user rate drops pretty quickly. Young people are at near nearly a hundred percent, under 50 it’s nearly at a hundred percent.

I think that from 65 to 75 it’s eight out of 10 and then 85 plus is a six out of 10. There are people that are still being left behind in this digital transformation. And it’s only gonna continue to speed up. So anything that helps with tech literacy is big.

Anything that’s going to help populations across the board, not just the old populations, but people that are my age, approaching middle age, understand the transformative, the disruptive effects of the metaverse as it emerges are going to be highly valued. The book mentions the fact that Silicon valley for all of its faults for sexism and its racism, its biggest issue is ageism.

If you get old in Silicon valley, you’re in your thirties that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, think about all the talent that’s being left behind. So when I talk to businesses about what the opportunities are for this new era, sure you can build products and services for older populations. There is a demand for that.

So I certainly think the work that’s being done by people like Jake Rothstein, who we both know very well at UpsideHome is revolutionary. I think Papa and on-hand you know, tools that help older people with things around the house or light caregiving are, are revolutionary.

I certainly think. That there needs to be more of that. But I think if businesses are really looking to expand their footprint they need to take a look at some of the bigger players like Apple, who has really, as a company embraced generational diversity and they’re building products and services across all of their platforms that are really generationally inclusive.

I’ve been kind of, I’ve been perseverating over this Apple advertisement. I think it’s called Bob. It’s a 32 second commercial and it’s shot in the woods and all you see is the forest and it’s quiet and you hear a robotic female voice say: Bob has suffered a hard fall, he is located at X latitude Y longitude, please send help.

Absolutely. And I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction and having these big tech companies like apple and Amazon creating features in their existing devices, specifically for older adults and for their family caregivers.

I mean, it’s one of those things, you know, when you’re like us and you’re in the space, you’re always attuned to these things. And I mean, it was one of those nights. We’re watching TV in the house, and I was just kind of fiddling on my phone and I hear this commercial and I stopped everything and I rewound and watched and rewind and watched because I thought this is genius.

Time and time again, businesses screw up. There’s basically three legs to a super age strategy: You have to understand your workforce, you have to make it intergenerational and multi-generational, you have to recruit and retain older workers alongside younger workers. You have to incorporate those folks into your teams specifically around innovation and design, but also in marketing and communications time and time again.

People screw up the marketing communications. Even if they get the recruitment right, even if they get the innovation and design right, they screw up the way they talk about the product. So Apple could have chosen the path of showing a little lady or a little old man flailing on the floor with an Apple watch and saying, I can’t get up, but they didn’t choose to do that.

They chose to show us a more positive view of the future, where populations that may need that service are active, engaged, and out in the world, not locked away in a bathroom, flailing on the floor. 

There are so few examples of advertising done right for this demographic.

Yes. And there’s a reason for that too. You know, the advertising industry, as well as fashion and large swath of tech are, are still relatively ageist holdouts in the regard that they, they celebrate youth at a much higher rate than other industries. You know, industries like automotive. They understand that the marketplace has shifted.

They’re producing cars now with embedded technologies that take longevity into account, and why not? Why wouldn’t they? Two out of three new cars that are purchased in this country are purchased by people over the age of 50. Well, you can build a car that’s beautiful, that looks like a sports car, that acts like a sport car, but also has push button start and rear view cameras and motion detectors, sleep detectors, all of those things can be built into a car now. 

So on the outside, you can see this really sexy device, this really sexy vehicle, this status symbol, but inside the guts are a health connected device and that’s really kind of amazing that they’re getting there now.

And in large part, they’re being driven by companies that have adopted really age friendly hiring practices. You know, companies like Porsche and BMW and Mercedes they’re driving this change in automotive right now. 

It’s great to see companies really adopting age friendly products and age-friendly hiring processes.

I think we’re definitely on the right path. It might take us some time, but we’ll get there. What would you say is the biggest misconception people have about the super age? 

Well, the, the number one misconception no questions asked is that when we live longer, we’re simply adding extra years at the end of life.

So we get to spend extra years in bad health or in decline. That is a common misperception that is What an extended life looks like that we’re going to be sick and decline for longer periods of time. The reality is that because of scientific innovations, because of improved personal behaviors, because of our social connections.

We’re actually pushing a lot more healthy years into the middle of life. So middle age is extending. I talk about this new consumer group that’s emerging right now. And we’ve discussed this before, this idea of a middle plus or these people that are super agers. Some people call it the new mid – Chip Conley, a fellow author calls it Modern Elder. This is a new consumer group and time and time again, people say well, tell me about them. What do they mean? Well, they are older in terms of the number of times they’ve gone around the sun, but they’re younger physically, cognitively than previous generations of that age.

They’re staying engaged in some type of work or economic contribution for longer periods of time as earners. They’re actively engaged as consumers. They’re intimately focused on their health and their longevity. And they’re going to do just about anything they can do to extend those healthy years. They are a new demographic of people.

They are a new market group. They are a new life stage. And as soon as businesses start to see them for who they are. They’re going to run towards them. Once they realize the power that this group of people has, they’re never going to turn away from them. It is a kin right now, in some cases to the emergence of adolescents, teenagers in the last century, you know, we started seeing early kind of ideas of adolescents and teenagers as early as the 1890s.

But it wasn’t until the 19 hundreds that we actually said, you know what? This is a specific life stage. And it wasn’t until the boomers were born that we said, oh my God, there’s a youth market. There was never a youth market before. The same thing can be said for retirees, but this is a more dynamic group than we’ve ever seen before.

And the ones that are leading the charge, they’re wealthy and they’re active. And if you’re not going to build it for them, they’ll build it for themselves. Like this is a group that doesn’t take no for an answer. 

We cannot afford for individuals to retire at 65 years old or earlier as they do in some countries

So when we have added years, added healthy and active years to our lives, some economic and social norms change across the adult lifespan. So what are the, some of the most noticeable changes? 

Well, this goes up and down life. So with the stretching out of life, we’re not just seeing this new middle-age emerge. We’re also seeing a shift in our attitudes towards youth. So in many cases, there’s an extended adolescence that’s taking place, too. Kids are, and young adults, I should say are more often being financially supported by their parents. They’re delaying big ticket purchases, whether it be cars or houses, they’re delaying marriage.

They’re delaying having kids or choosing not to have children at all. So it’s a full on shift of life. It’s not just about old people. I can’t hammer that home enough. Older people play a significant role in this new period, but they’re not the only discussion point. There is a shift up and down because of this shift.

We have to take some of the programs that we’ve held as vital to the success of people in old age, making sure people don’t fall into poverty, like our pension systems and we have to revisit them, because the numbers don’t add up anymore, despite what anyone will tell you about the value of these programs and they are inherently valuable, they cannot run off the old model.

We cannot afford for individuals to retire at 65 years old or earlier as they do in some countries, we just can’t afford it anymore. So there are policy implications to doing this. These are difficult choices that our leaders have to make. But there are ones that they will need to choose to make, if we’re going to stay as viable, healthy economies and quite frankly, societies at the end of the day, 

I couldn’t agree more.

So one of the points you talk about in the book is the urban and rural divide. And you talk about the fact that nowadays rural areas are perceived as tethered to the past while urban ones believe that they are reaching for the future. And then you go on to describe rural communities as canaries in a coal mine. Can you elaborate on that point?

Canaries in a coal mine is a dated term, I suppose. My grandfather was a coal miner. So it was bit of an homage to him. You take a Canary down to the coal mine, and if there were noxious gases being released, the Canary would be the first thing to die.

We’re starting to see that happen in rural communities because demographic change is going unchecked in many parts of the world. We’ve ignored our rural populations in favor of the urban ones. And we’ve not been able to see the fact that their populations have aged a lot faster than the ones in cities.

And there’s a number of reasons for this. Rural populations have been hit harder by the headwinds of modern society. Digitization automation, globalization, even urbanization has changed the landscape of what it meant to live and work on a farm or in one of these communities. It’s simply not economically viable anymore.

So younger people have left for the suburbs, the cities in hopes of finding a good and paying job. One of the women that I interviewed for the book, one of my readers is a friend’s mother who still operates a family farm in Oklahoma. Her name’s Sheila Hutan Forney, and Sheila, you know, said, we love our farm life, but we know that it’s not sustainable for our kids. So the kids have moved. They’ve moved into cities. So what’s left behind is a much older population. A cultural landscape that’s fading, a commercial landscape that’s fading healthcare systems – what’s left of them in rural communities are under constant strain.

They are buttressed by national dollars, at least here in the U.S., in order to make sure care is delivered. Schools close, banks closed. The store is closed. These places become food deserts, which is ironic because they’re agricultural centers. It really presents a dark and unnerving dystopia of what’s to come.

If we don’t do a better job of managing demographics at the end of the day for folks that are there, they’re there because they love it for the most part, but even if they want it to move, they really couldn’t afford to because there’s little value in the land anymore. 

So what can be done about it? How can we undo it? 

The pandemic has forced people to rethink space. It has forced a reckoning around whether or not it makes sense to go into the office five days a week, especially for knowledge workers. Obviously there are jobs where in-person will be the norm for the foreseeable future. And we’re not going to be replacing with robots anytime soon, but in the future, maybe there has been a migration of sorts out of cities. But not really in the way I think people expected.

When the pandemic hit, folks were saying, oh, well, folks are just going to move to a smaller, more affordable city. That happens, in some cases, but in a lot of cases, people were buying second homes, places to escape to. So they could come into the city for two or three days a week to go into the office. And then a country home or a place away from the city to release to, or to escape to in the future. If we want to help some of these rural communities survive or thrive or be reborn, we have to make critical investments that can lure people back to them.

You know, there are cities and towns in Italy, these hill towns in particular, some in Sicily as well. Whereas they’ve seen the harshest effects of population aging, and they’re giving away homes now or giving them away for a very low price. What’s luring some people back in there are also critical investments that government can make as well.

On the technology side in particular, one of the, I think more positive things that the government here is focused on is making sure that 5g is accessible in rural communities. Well, that’s going to help a lot of different things, but more than anything, it’s going to give rural populations access to the modern world that they simply don’t have right now.

And it will make doing business at the end of the day, more affordable and more efficient. 

Yes. I think this simply mind blowing that in this day and age, some rural communities don’t have proper internet access. And it affects older adults in great numbers. 

In this country, there are large swaths of the United States where you’ll drive through and there is no cellular signal at all.

I’m not talking faint, I’m talking zero bars and it’s unnerving. I’ve driven across the country. It’s unnerving when that happens, when you’re without connectivity. And yes, a good number of people live without that. So that’s a critical investment that our governments can make to ensure that these communities are buttressed for a period of time, ensure that these communities have access to economy for a longer period of time and to earning because that’s the critical failure at the end of the day, right? If there’s no money how can a community survive? So if you give them access to markets, give them better control over their work, through technology. That that could be it could be a point where they help themselves. 

Absolutely.

And it could also encourage younger people and knowledge workers to move into these rural places, I think that that’s a piece that’s been kind of hanging in the background of conversation right now. We talk about this delay in house purchasing and that’s a commonly known statistic now for younger populations, but they can afford properties and in more rural areas.

So there is a bit of kind of modern homesteading happening where younger people are saying, well, I could make my own in a rural community and they might be able to do that. But if we want to facilitate that being a move that is sustainable. We need to make sure that they have access to the right infrastructure for that to happen.

And it’s hard to live in the modern world today without access to to a smartphone or at least a reliable high-speed internet connection. You know, it’s just nearly impossible to do. 

Absolutely. So Bradley, that was actually my last question. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Buy my book!

Yes! 

I think the reality is Keren, at the end of the day, a you know this as well as me, if not better, is that this new period of time is just full of promise, but it’s also full of peril if we do nothing and there is a unique window that’s opening. I think it’s open already. Some people would still say it’s opening right now to get in, to make change.

I have been in this industry and in this space now for nearly 25 years, and I am constantly surprised at how in the past two years, I think it’s largely because of COVID and this awareness that older populations exist and there’s a large number of them. People have flooded into the aging space. And there are good actors, there are bad actors. There are really cool entrepreneurs. And there are people that are just like, they tried that 20 years ago. It never worked, but there’s a lot of interest in this space now. So if these people, if we can lead us into this new period, we can really design the world we want to see.

If we don’t take action, though, as a society, as an economy, it’s not going to be very pretty. We’re going to see things fall apart, very fast. 

Bradley, thank you so much for joining me today. I definitely encourage anyone watching, listening, or reading this to definitely go to Amazon right now and get Bradley’s book The Super Age.

It’s a wonderful read for anyone looking to get a solid understanding of this massive demographic shift that we are already experiencing and headed towards. Thank you, Bradley. 

Thank you Keren. Have a good one.