 My name is Justin Ladner. I work on AARP's Thought Leadership Team, and it's wonderful to be here today. So we're going to have a really wonderful panel discussion. Before that I'm going to talk to you a little bit about a report that our team just put out. This was last year and we've been talking about it a lot this year. It's called the Global Longevity Economy Outlook. I should give you a little bit of background in the kind of work that I do. So broadly speaking, my role at AARP is to oversee our longevity economy portfolio, and that is the research that we do discussing the economic activity of people 50 and older, both in the United States and around the world. So the sort of origin of this portfolio dates back to 2019 when we published the Longevity Economy Outlook, which focused on the United States and individual states, and we talked about things like the consumer spending of people 15 older in the United States, how that produced GDP, how that supported jobs, how it supported wages, and also other things like the non-economic or the, I should say, non-market contributions of older people, such as volunteer work, caregiving, those kinds of things. And that report really resonated with people, so we decided to follow that up with a report that covered the entire world. So in this report, which we published last November, we cover or we estimate global, we obtain global estimates for consumer spending for the 50-plus population, and then we also look at 76 individual economies where we can measure things like consumer spending and the impact of that spending on outcomes like GDP, employment, and wages. So I'm going to give, this is a very data-intensive report, I'm going to give a very broad overview so we can get to our panel discussion. So I'm going to talk about four things related to this report. First, sort of the major underlined driver of change when we talk about the longevity economy is demographic transition. So basically every part of the world is aging, quite a few, quite a lot of the world has already aged significantly relative to only a few generations ago, and that aging is really accelerating, particularly in developing parts of the world today. They're experiencing unprecedented rates of demographic change, which have some very powerful implications for how those economies will develop. So that's kind of the key driver of all these results, is that the population is aging. As that population ages, its role in spending becomes correspondingly greater. So as a population, as the 50-plus population, a country goes from being 10% of the population to 20% to 30% to a case like Japan where it's nearly 50%, that group becomes a much, much more powerful consumer group. And of course that has big implications for businesses, for public policy makers, and so on. So consumer spending becomes more and more driven by older consumers, and as a result of that, older consumers become more and more responsible for supporting economic outcomes that we really care about. So the three that I'll talk about today are GDP, the production of goods and services in an economy, employment, and wages. So I should also say, we cover, as I said, 76 different economies in this study. Going along with SoCAP's regional tracks for this year, I'm going to focus on a set of nine economies, three from Latin America, three from Southeast Asia, and three from sub-Saharan Africa. And I'll also tell you the global findings just to give you a baseline. Okay, so first, demographic change. The economy's covered here, again, I mentioned the regions we're drawing from. If I think about the world as a whole, in 2020 already, about one in four people were 50 or older. By 2050, that fraction's going to grow to nearly one in three. So about almost 33% of people by 2050 around the world are going to be 50 or older. That varies quite a bit from economy to economy. Some places less than 10% of people fall into that group. Kenya, Ethiopia are some of the youngest places in the world. Some places are quite a bit older than that. I mentioned just a little bit earlier that Japan is just about the oldest economy in the world. Nearly half of people are 50 or older. So in the next 30 years, the rate of demographic change in terms of population aging is going to be staggering in a lot of parts of the world. And these nine economies that I've highlighted here are really good cases. It's hard to put into context how rapid this change is, but I'll try to give you an example. So in 1940, in the United States, according to the United States Census in that year, about 20% of the population was 50 or older. In 2020, about 36% of the US population was 50 or older. So that's an increase of 16% points in about 80 years. So you can see there that Brunei is going to experience a significantly greater change in less than half the time in 30 years. Several other countries are going to be going at that rate. So a place like Kenya, even though Kenya in 30 years will still be a relatively young economy, that 50 plus population is still doubling its share of representation in that economy in that period of time. So these are huge rates of change, and they have these powerful implications for how these economies function, how these societies function. So as we experience this kind of demographic change, we experience correspondingly big increases in consumer spending share. So already population or households that are headed by somebody 50 or older, they already have a very, very powerful, large share of consumer spending worldwide about half of all consumer spending is controlled by households that are 50 or older. That fraction globally is going to is going to grow to about 59% by 2050. It's going to grow to be significantly higher in certain parts of the world. So a place like South Korea, that fraction is going to grow to be north of 60, 70%. In the economies that we're looking at on this figure, again, we see a lot of really rapid growth that corresponds with that rapid demographic change. So a place like Brunei again, really stands out. In 2020, 50 plus households in Brunei, they account for about 40% of spending, but that's still a fairly small fraction by global standards. By 2050, that fraction will go all the way up to 62%. It'll be higher than the global average. So again, these are really, really rapid rates of change. So with consumer spending, increasing with 50 plus households, accounting for a larger fraction consumers funding, they then have a larger impact on an economy. And there are three measures I mentioned that we focus on in this work. This is a to not get into too much technical detail. This is what we call an input output model of an economy. So basically, you imagine you go to a store, you spend a dollar, that dollar gets distributed in a number of ways. Some of it goes to the employees of that store, they then spend that money, the store buys inventory from another supplier, that store invests, maybe they build a new store, maybe they invest in computer equipment, basically that dollar that I've spent gets distributed throughout the economy in different industries in lots of different ways. And so my spending has this multiplicative effect. And that's the basic way that this works when we have older consumers or consumers of any kind, going and spending money, that money ripples through industries in an economy, it ripples across economies. So if I'm a foreign consumer and I buy something from another country, I stimulate that country's economy. Basically at the end of the day, the dollars that are spent end up generating GDP employment and wages. And so that's what I'm going to focus on for these next few slides. So GDP production globally over a third of GDP generated globally about 45 trillion dollars in 2020 was generated by consumers 50 and older. That fraction is going to grow to about 39% by 2050. And if I look at these economies, I see again this wide variation, some of these economies are very young, so their current fractions of GDP generated by 50 plus households are quite low. Examples would be Ethiopia, Brunei, place like Botswana, those are below average. Others are already generating quite a bit of their GDP from 50 plus consumers. Cambodia's interesting case, Cambodia Laos, those are both sort of indicative of Southeast Asia. Basically those are economies that are aging very rapidly and they also have very big export sectors. So even if they don't sell a lot of goods and services to local 50 plus consumers, they do sell lots of goods and services to foreign 50 plus consumers. So it's an interesting case where an economy, even if it's very young, it can generate a lot of benefit from older consumers around the world based on their economy. But anyway, the basic story here is we see big change, big rates of change in these places. Cambodia by 2050, over half of its GDP will be generated by consumers 50 year old or either domestically or around the world. And actually Cambodia ranks number one in our set of 76 economies in terms of that value in 2050. So it's a quite remarkable rate of change in a short period of time. Very similar story for employment. Again this is not the amount or the fraction of employment that 50 plus people are actually physically doing. So this isn't the share of employment accounted for by workers that are 15 older. It's the share of employment that's supported by the spending of those workers. So again, we see very similar patterns to what we see with GDP. Countries that are aging particularly rapidly. Countries that rely on older consumers in other parts of the world. They're going to see they have the highest shares now and they see the biggest rates of change. And a very similar thing with labor income. As you would imagine the results for employment and labor income are highly correlated. Okay, so before I end the presentation and bring up the panelists, I want to talk a little bit about some forthcoming work that we have because I think it's a nice lead in to what we're going to talk about in the panel discussion today. And the basic idea here is with the longevity economy results that I've just talked about you might be inclined to say, well, so you're telling me that older people are becoming a larger part of the population and therefore they're more economically important. That's important but it's also kind of a one-dimensional story. And the point that I want to make is that that's really not even close to the end of the story. The truth of the matter is that we aren't just having population aging. We're having the economic roles of older people evolve in really fundamental ways. And so this year we're doing a series that we call revelations through data and the focus is on busting myths and myths and misconceptions and kind of highlighting surprising facts about those evolving roles that people don't necessarily think about but really should because they're important from a social point of view, from a policy point of view, or from a business point of view. So this is an article that actually will be published this week. This is just some extracts of the findings here. And we call it thinking beyond prime working age. So in the United States prime working age is defined as people that are age 25 to 54. The basic idea is that in this age range you probably have finished your formal education, you're probably not old enough to be considering retirement. So you have, generally speaking, a very high attachment to the labor force and you tend to be extremely economically important. You're far more likely to be supporting a household, for example. You tend to pay the lion's share of taxes. You tend to account for a large fraction of consumer spending. So from a policy point of view, from a business point of view, this group of people tends to receive a lot of attention. And the point that we make in this article is that as important as that group is and continues to be, if I look at people who are beyond prime working age, people who are 55 and older, their role in the labor force has just completely exploded over the last 30 years in fundamental ways. So I'm going to show you some examples of that. The very first thing we can look at is just labor force participation. This is, the labor force is basically anybody who is currently working or looking for work. That's our simple definition. If I look at the share of the labor force that's 55 and older, just 30 years ago in 1992, only about one in nine workers would have been 55 and older in that group. It would be quite unlikely to be 65 and older in that group. Only about 2.7 percent of the labor force was 65 or older in 1992. If I fast forward to 2022 and I look at this change over time, you see this explosion in the representation of people 55 and older. Basically, it's more than doubled in this period of time. Again, it's hard to state exactly how rapid this change is, but it's basically a more rapid change in a labor market than you really have ever seen. There's no good historical context for how fast this changes. And it's particularly fast for particularly old age groups. So for example, if I look at the 55 to 59 age group from 1992 to 2022, there's an increase in their share. They go from being about 5.4 percent of the labor force to being about 9.3 percent. So something slightly less than doubling. But if I look at 65 plus, I get a near tripling in that value from 1992 to 2022. So it's a very, very rapid rate of change. Just 30 years ago, only about one in nine labor force participants were 55 and older. Now it's something closer to one in four. If I look at the full-time workforce, I see a very similar pattern. Now the relevance here is that full-time workers tend to have a stronger labor market attachment. If you're working full-time, it's probably for a strong economic reason. You're probably supporting a dependent family, for example. Or you are, you're basically in the labor market for a more prolonged period of time. That's a good indication if you're, if you're working full-time. So this is not the increased labor force participation of older workers. It's not a story about workers necessarily going back just to be part-time, or just to do a little bit of work on the side. This is very much driven by workers who are, who have a much longer full-time commitment to the workforce. Again, a very similar pattern. You see that the oldest age groups here are experiencing the greatest change. Again, 65 plus, we see a tripling in their representation in the full-time workforce in just this 30-year period. Now, what if I talked about self-employed workers? So our panel discussion is going to focus a lot on entrepreneurship. If I think about older people in general, they have always actually, I would say, punched above their weight in terms of entrepreneurship. They've been more likely to be self-employed relative to the younger counterparts. But again, their share, their representation in self, in the self-employed workforce in the United States has really exploded in the last 30 years. It's gone from being about one in four, something less than one in four, 22.7 percent in 1992 to nearly 40 percent in 2022. And again, this is a, this is a huge rate of change. Now, finally, one thing that I'll point out just to end and then start the panel is that, of course, as this population, as people 55 and older, become a larger fraction of the labor force, their share of income grows correspondingly. And in fact, it's more than doubled if I go back to 1992 and then compare it to 2022. In 1992, about 12.9 percent of all labor income, this is income earned from salary or wages in the United States, was accounted for by somebody 55 or older. Now, that fraction is something closer to 26 percent. It's about 25.4 percent. Again, a huge change in a small amount of time. Excuse me, and this has big economic consequences. This group now accounts for a much larger fraction of consumer spending. They're much more likely to support households. Their fraction of taxable income has gone up significantly, so they contribute a lot more to the tax base. Again, basically it's a group that's become incredibly economically important. And the point of this article and this work in general is to highlight that because of that importance, we should have labor policies and employment practices that basically work for every generation, that don't just focus on one group of workers, that make sure that at every stage in the life course somebody can work and meet their goals. And in doing so, basically promote economic activity that's beneficial to every generation. Okay, so I'll conclude by just saying in all this work, we have a few basic recommendations. And there are five that come out of the Global Longevity Economy project. The first one is about creating actionable plans for aging. So this aims a lot at policymakers, at every level of government, local state and federal, or overseas at any level of government. Create an action plan. Basically, how is aging going to affect your economy, your society? And how do you plan for that? How do you maximize this opportunity? That's one of our recommendations. The other recommendation is to encourage economic development that meets needs of every generation. Basically, as I mentioned before, almost all, or a very significant fraction of the population aging that's going to happen in the next 30 years, is going to be happening in low to middle income countries. These are countries that are doing a lot of development investing. And it's important that that investing basically be done through a lens of aging so that the investments that are made are helping people at every stage of the life course and ensure people's success at every stage of the life course. If you don't do that, if you only invest, for example, in programs that are going to be targeted at a younger audience, you end up short changing a part of your population that's growing very rapidly over time and ultimately hurting everybody. So encourage development that works for every stage of the life course. For businesses, consider aging and longevity of business imperative. This involves basically thinking about how is your consumer base going to change over time? So as the population ages, what does that mean for your business in terms of who you're selling goods and services to? Also, what does it mean for your workforce? I just presented these slides that talked about the changing workforce over time. So as your workforce ages, what does that mean about different policies? What does that mean about policies that relate to training, access to resources for your workers? How does aging affect that? Basically, think about that as a business imperative. Another thing that we talk about a lot in the longevity economy work is to recognize the value of unpaid contributions. So we tend to think about economic activity as being the things that we directly measure, things like GDP, things like labor force participation, but there are so many parts of the economy that are not directly measured. Volunteer activity is a wonderful example. It's worth more than $100 billion a year in the United States. It's hugely valuable. There are some services that communities can only receive through volunteer work. So it's hugely important and older people play a big role in that. Caregiving is another extremely important unpaid economic activity that is often unpaid. So in all the work that we do in the longevity economy, we basically highlight this idea that even the things that we're reporting, even the things that we can measure, we're really understating the value of the longevity economy because we're not capturing a lot of those unpaid activities. And so those unpaid activities ought to be supported as well. So how do you design policies that support caregiving, for example? How can you have work policies, for example, that allow somebody to work and be a caregiver or to work and do volunteer work? Finally, tap into growing global population of older consumers. So one of the big themes in the longevity economy, in the global longevity economy report is that older consumers are important everywhere. If I look at any economy in the world, an older consumer is going to be important there either because that economy is aging very rapidly or because that economy interacts with older consumers overseas or both of those reasons. So those are kind of our five big recommendations coming out of that report. So without further ado, I'm going to welcome our panel. And I think we'll go back to the panel slide. So let's see. I don't want to go in any particular order, but first I'll welcome my colleague Felicia Brown. And then we have Heather Carter. And finally, Amy Nelson. OK. Thank you all so much for joining us today. So I thought I would start our conversation by talking about older consumers and basically what that means from a business perspective. So the first question I'd like to start with. And I think I'll go to the end. Amy, I'll start with you. What are common misconceptions or stereotypes about about older consumers just as a group in terms of what they buy or any misconception you can think of? And what's the sort of how is that a barrier to success, both for those consumers and also for businesses? I think a big issue that we have is this belief and bias that older consumers are not tech forward or tech first. And Gen X is now older and they have been working with technology for decades. And so I think it's a loss for everybody because we aren't looking at older consumers as people who are people who want to learn new tech to better their lives, right, to stay connected with family, to make more money, to manage their money in a better way. And then I think it's, you know, it's a loss on the other side. But if investors aren't thinking about it because they're not thinking about all of the massive opportunities that there are out there. Do either of you want to? Yes, I would, am I on? Hi. I would just add that I think on the business side to, you know, there's a lot of opportunity for businesses to understand the nuance of that audience and that consumer, right. And to really do a lot more study on what their interests are, where they want to spend money and invest and speak to that consumer in a more kind of holistic way, you know, that people that are aging are way more physically active. They're way more active on technology. They're sexually active, right. And nobody's really marketing to them kind of a more diverse range of products and things. Yeah, I agree. I think one of the challenges we have in society overall is that we use we put a lot of energy and resources around marketing to the younger consumer. It almost feels as though once you hit that 50 or 55 mark like you're dying and and we live in a very different society where older people are doing more. But there's just not there's just a lack of acknowledgement to that. And so if you think about television and advertising, music, you know, it's all to the younger consumer. And so forgetting the value that the older consumer has to the to the marketplace. Yeah, I think those are all wonderful points. And actually, you all three mentioned something that is a great segue into the next question. And that is not only this idea of to what extent are older consumers sort of not being paid attention to. But to what extent are older consumers just not understood because they've changed over time? So so what are your thoughts on that? Basically, do we have a stereotype about old consumers that sort of says, hey, people of this age only buy these things and that's really not true anymore. Absolutely, absolutely. There's this notion in America and perhaps across the globe, too, that, you know, once you hit a mark, once you hit an age mark, you're pretty much done. And so from an employment perspective, and I work in the working jobs area and I lead our small business work, but from an employer perspective, they think about it as older workers are too expensive and they have to train them differently. It takes more money to train older workers. They cost too much. We have to continue to pay them too much. We can get a younger worker at a much lower cost. So I think I forgot your question, Justin, but I think that- These are all great points. Yeah, I think it's just this perception that we have of older people that has become very negative. But if you think about it from a socialization perspective, people are working longer. They're starting businesses. People are in their second and third marriages. There's just more vibrancy among older people that just goes overlooked. This example I always think about when I was growing up in the 80s, I loved the Golden Girls. You guys, Blanche was like 50, right? And they've got her like in a retirement home in Florida, I'm going to have a 10-year-old when I'm 50. So I mean, the world has shifted. But I don't think, to Heather's point, that a lot of what we're seeing as options to buy is changing. And I think it's silly sometimes I think about it because if you look at Viagra, it was the best-selling drug of all time. The company that said we think that men are going to be sexually active over 50 or 60, they won. They won billions of dollars. And so for other companies to look at that and say, I want that market share, I want that opportunity, not just for Viagra, but for all the other stuff we do, I think it's an enormous opportunity that everyone is just missing. I completely agree and find that 40% of Americans over 65 to 80 are sexually active. We're just going to talk about sex again. We're just, that's what this is about. Welcome to this panel. It sells if we're talking about the economy. But you know, that's important, right? To recognize and we talk about people younger than 50 and over the 50s, like two separate groups. They're all just people, right? And they have pretty much the same kind of interests, right? And they want the same things. They might go about acquiring them differently, but everybody wants connection. They want quality in their products. They want affordability and they want convenience, right? And so I think if businesses can look at that kind of thread through line. Yeah, that's a wonderful, sorry, Felicia. No, I was gonna say, Justin, you showed the research that people are clearly living longer. People are working longer. They're in second and third careers like retirement. Like we don't even use retirement in our acronym anymore. We're just AARP. We're not retired persons any longer because we know that technically people just don't retire. They just continue to morph and they just continue to move into the next phase of whatever that is for them. So yeah, we don't even talk about retirement in the building. You know, that's a wonderful point. And again, to kind of get back to that work idea. I mean, another big thing that's changed in the United States and really around the world, if I'm just thinking about work, is the sort of the barrier between working and being retired is basically very fungible. Now people routinely come out of retirement. There's actually a pretty, a couple of percentage of people that were retired at any given point in time actually come out of retirement on a monthly basis because maybe they've decided that for whatever reason they've had a life change, they need to go back to work. Maybe they just decide that they're interested and continue working or they start a small business, for example, that's a very common thing now for older adults. So yeah, this idea of retirement, again, just the concept itself has really changed in the United States. And actually, this is a great segue. So talking about work and older adults as entrepreneurs, I wanna move into that now. I started off by asking about stereotypes that affect older adults as consumers. Now I'm wondering about stereotypes that affect them as entrepreneurs and their access to capital, their access to all the things that they need to be successful. So Heather, I'll start with you and then I'll go to the rest of the panel. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really unfortunate that in the venture community, it's this very poorly kept secret that VCs will only look at entrepreneurs that are 32 and under. And past 32, they become a little bit skeptical and you become less fundable. I think that's really sad because 32 was so young, right? And I think the media plays a bit of a part in that. I think that we have glorified young founders as being exceptionally innovative and they're the only ones with good and interesting ideas and enough gas in the tank to see those through. But yeah, I think that's a huge barrier for older entrepreneurs to even get funding and ultimately they have great ideas and I think a few things come with older entrepreneurs. They have more is more, right? In more years, they have more of a network. They have more disposable income. They typically have more of a support system. And sometimes it takes a little while to have enough life experience and wisdom to have the big idea and to want to solve some of the bigger problems, right? Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at 19. Evan Spiegel started Snapchat at 26, right? Like, those are great companies. Everybody's for the most part using, well, maybe not using Facebook as much anymore, but they're worthy companies but younger people are gonna solve problems but they see in the world, right? So connection, dating apps, right? How do I get my food delivered to me faster? You know, great, I use those apps too, but older founders are gonna solve problems for people in mass in different ways. Kimi, I'll go to you. I also think those are all amazing points and I also think that there's something when you think about only funding 32 year old white men, right? I guess we have to add the white men part to it. You know, a lot of 32 year old white men are able to start companies because they had privilege of their parents paid for college or their parents help them get started. You look at Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, their fathers help them build their companies and so you're losing out on a lot of people who just can't do that at the age of 32. I mean, when I started the Riveter, when I was 37, the only reason I was able to do it even that young is because I was married and my husband had a career that we had health insurance for our kids, right? And that allowed us to do it and I had a whole spreadsheet of like how long of a runway I had that we could afford childcare and I didn't take a salary. And I ran at that runway and I made it, but like if I hadn't, there would be no Riveter. And so I think you're losing out on the ability and innovation of a lot of people who just don't have the financial means that young to start a company to step away and do that and also immigrant communities. There are a lot of immigrants who come to America at an older age who have incredible ideas. I mean, the best startups in this country are very much driven by immigrant populations. So I think there's once again, an enormous opportunity. I mean, all you see when you look at this is opportunity to make money, you know, it's very real. And so I think those are some things to think about when you're thinking about the value of the founders that are older. You know, you think about, when you think about business owners, the average age of the business owner is 45. But nobody highlights that. We always talk about the Mark Zuckers of the world, the younger people who are 35 and under who through their lens and a lot of the world's lens that they're changing the world. And older people are changing the world too. They've been in business longer. And as Amy indicated, they're just bringing so much more to their business through their life experience, through their work experience, having worked for 30 plus years. You're leveraging all of that into your business. And so you're operating from a different vantage point. And so, but I think that the attention still remains on younger people. And so, but it says something, there's something to be said that the average business owner is 45. And so, I think about the pandemic. And the pandemic, as bad as it was, afforded an opportunity for people to really bet on themselves, take that leap of faith. There was a record number of business applications filed during the pandemic for a number of reasons. They pushed out of the workplace, they had childcare, they had elder care, they just could not go back into the workplace. But most of those applications were among older people. And so, many of them started without knowing how to start a business. Many of them were people of color, many of them were women of color. And we did a research around women's entrepreneurship two years ago now. And what we learned from that was, while they didn't know what they didn't know, they started anyway. Because they wanted to take that leap, they wanted to have something for themselves. So, entrepreneurship is not just for younger people. Younger people, older people are betting on themselves and they're leveraging all of that wisdom and know-how that you've indicated into their businesses. Now, the challenge is the capital and the training that they just don't know where to go and they don't have the capital to kind of, to get started. And most of them bootstrapped their businesses. So. Felicia, that's a wonderful point. And actually, it highlights something which I think is, I bring up a lot. And so, for example, those labor force numbers. It's this idea that basically, as a population, older adults have already figured out a lot of solutions on their own. They figured out how to get back into the workforce, how to start their own business. And as a result, you see that they are much, much more involved now in the business community than used to be the case, even just a generation ago. But my question is, I mean, obviously, that's not an ideal world. You don't want a situation where somebody who's got something of value to add has to overcome barrier after barrier to add it. So what are the practical solutions on our end? What, if I was to think about basically ordering what we could do to increase access to capital, to reduce these barriers, what are the practical things that actually have a chance of occurring, basically? And how do we get to those? How do we actually affect that change? Ugh, such a heavy question. It's definitely not fun like Viagra. Back to my, all roads lead back. Yeah, it's just, it's a lot of work. There's a lot of work to do. I mean, I think about, I'm not the business owner on the panel, but supporting and advocating for small businesses and all the work that I do from a practical perspective is really, is believing, is believing in what the possibilities are and believing that, and having those conversations. Because like I said, I think they started not knowing what they don't know. And so helping people to get the information they need, connections, networks is so important for these business owner's success. I mean, to add to that, AARP does amazing work in terms of bringing business owners together with resources, education, workshops, opportunity. And then there are other avenues to look as well. And I think it really is about learning what you can do and how you do it. But you know, Techstars, which works with companies that want to raise venture capital, has an accelerator focused just on companies in the longevity space. You have like the National Association of Women Business Owners, which works with, you know, small business owners of every age and every background. But I think it's, you know, when I was starting the Riveter, I didn't know any of those things existed. I remember learning about Techstars after I'd started the Riveter and I was like, shit, I wish I'd done that. I could have done this better if someone had helped me figure out how to do it instead of just doing it on my own. But so I think it's even getting the fact of the existence of all of these amazing resources and organizations into the hands of people who want to or may want to start businesses and also into the hands of funders. Because as an investor, even if you're not going to invest in a small business or the startup, you can point people coming to you to other places where they can learn, where they can access capital, and where they can still move forward even without your financial backing. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And I would also say from the funding community side, I think VCs, banks, anybody that can, angel investors, I think they have to be intentional about their funding and they need to be loud about what they are looking to invest in and who they're looking to invest in. You know, I speak to many VCs in the community and they say it's a pipeline issue. Women traditionally only get about 2% of venture funding. People of color get even less than that. I don't actually know the stat for people over 50, but it's probably extremely low. And I would argue that it's not a pipeline issue. It's that when people hear those statistics, right, they feel like it's a foregone conclusion. So why start and why bother? So yeah, I think that VCs, angel investors, et cetera, need to say, we want you to pitch us. We are open to hearing and, you know, and then beyond that, there's gonna be a massive transfer of wealth from boomers to Gen X to millennials. And I'm just putting this out there that unless you want all of that money going to Uncle Sam, maybe invest some of it. Invest some of it in people like you and in silver tech. And, you know, why not start a fund? Yeah. So actually, one thought that comes to mind, and this is because a lot of the work that we do is about multi-generational collaboration. So for example, we talk a lot about multi-generational workforces. We've done a lot of survey research which shows that both older and younger workers like to work in a multi-generational context. Older workers and younger workers, both because there's sort of mentorship opportunities that go both ways. There's just a lot of benefit that gets gained and we actually find that these groups are more productive. And I'm thinking about that in the context of entrepreneurship. And Heather, I wanted to ask you this question about the sort of opportunities for collaboration, multi-generational collaboration in startups and obtaining capital. Do you see that as being a big thing going forward? Yeah, I mean, I think it's crucial. You know, the whole point of startups is that they are being disruptive to the status quo, right? And that they are improving on what there is currently on offer. And so if we can't have multi-generational allyship and interaction, and that means everybody getting a seat at the table, that means representation at every level, it has to be a ground up thing. It can't just be a top down, right? I see bigger companies trying to have initiatives around that, but I think it has to be bottom up as well and I think it happens at that level. Felicia, I know you do a lot of work in our working job space, as you mentioned. Can you talk about some of the multi-generational aspect of that work? So from a work perspective, we have what we call the employer pledge work that we're doing. And really, that work is really around advocating for multi-general work teams. Because there's more value in diversity and there's more value in cross-aged teams as opposed to just one age in the workplace. And so we do a lot of work around really encouraging and promoting the fact that there's more greatness and more better thinking in the room when you have a multiple of ages in the room. So that's the work that we're doing. We're working with employers to help them see the value of having not just older workers, but older workers working alongside younger workers and vice versa and all that you bring into the workplace. Just something to add, if you are an investor and you're working with startups or small businesses or if you're an employer, it is an enormous hack to share with the companies that you're working with to seek out older Americans to join their smaller businesses or startups. The Riveter's first CMO was retired and I convinced her not to be retired to come build this company. And I knew nothing about marketing and she was a genius and she was a mentor. And she was willing to mentor younger teammates. And so we were able to build an amazing company on the marketing side and it was a marketing company so that made sense. Like because we were able to bring together those different generations, our CFO was over 50. And she came on and she was like, I'm kind of interested in doing more HR stuff. I've never done it. I'm like, great, you own HR. Because she had this experience and I trusted her, but I think it's once again the opportunity that if no one's seeing it, you can go and grab this incredible talent to help build newer companies. And also I think about the small business administration. Everybody knows about SBA and they have these resource partners that are like the Small Business Development Center, the Women Business Development Center. They have SCORE and all of those partners really work to bring all levels of entrepreneurship together but also bring those seasoned entrepreneurs to the less seasoned and regardless of age just really depends on your expertise and your know-how that you can leverage to help business owners who are kind of new to this business game. Yeah. So Amy, I wanted to ask you, and actually this is a question for both you and Heather because you both founded the Riveter Together, if I recall correctly, about that process as a founder, starting, getting capital, putting together your workforce, all these different things, thinking about how the landscape looked for you back then versus today, do you think things have improved? Do you think if you were to redo that again today, it would be easier? Do you think it would be harder? Do you think, how does longevity play into this at all? And if so, how? So I think some things have sadly not changed since we started the Riveter which are that women still only receive around 2% of venture capital funds and for women of color it's much less. For black women it's statistically 0% of VC funds and that's just not budging for whatever reason. It's biased. And then I think some things are changing though that do present an incredible opportunity because women, folks of color and older Americans have historically gotten less venture capital funding. They have learned to build in a scrappy way which Felicia touched on earlier, they've bootstrapped and in this current economic environment the bootstrapers will win. When we started the Riveter in 2017 it was the time of like Adam Newman and WeWork and these wild valuations that made literally no sense to anybody except maybe the VCs who thought they sounded good and these companies perhaps did not have very sustainable business models and they raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Today that's not happening for most people in the VC market and so the people who can say I know how to bootstrap, I've done it, I've been scrappy. I think they have an incredible opportunity to really come out ahead. Maybe not from venture funding but maybe that's not the right answer or they can get funding later in a later stage of their business but I think that is a difference that we'll see today that is very cool. It's now used to be sexy to be the person who raised the most money and I think now it's sexy to be profitable and I think that's really exciting because I think a lot of really great entrepreneurs who are typically overlooked will win in this climate. What Amy said. And I will add that what I've seen in the past, just the past three years is the power of community. Like yes they're bootstrapping but how community is rising up to support community and that's really how these business owners are surviving particularly black women. Like the power of community supporting one another, creating these spaces where they can come and sell their goods and services in the same place and don't feel like that's competition but that they're supporting one another and bringing people to that space to help those businesses grow. I wish I think that's a wonderful point. So one of the huge things that we talk about in all of our longevity economy work because I think one of the biggest misconceptions that really creates a barrier for older workers, for older entrepreneurs, for older people in general is this idea that we live in a zero sum game where if I take from one group or if I do something for one group it's about taking from another group. So for example, like if somebody continues to work longer they're keeping a job that somebody entering the workforce might otherwise take which is of course absurd because you don't replace somebody who's retiring at 65 with somebody who's entering at 22. That just doesn't happen. But kind of thinking beyond that. So we make this point that by developing policies that work for older workers, we basically mean that's synonymous with developing policies that work for every generation. So when you help somebody stay in the workforce longer, get training so that they can start a new career you're helping them directly of course, you're helping their family directly, you're helping their employer or their future employer by giving them a skilled worker. And we know that in this particular labor market it's increasingly hard. For example, during the pandemic we found that a lot of people left the workforce, a lot of older workers in particular left the workforce and companies basically couldn't replace them. So there are all these benefits in the longevity economy that are about benefiting everybody not just benefiting one group. And I promise I'm gonna come to a point here. The question I was gonna ask is about thinking about these kinds of changes and what they mean for broader social growth. So I think I'll think about or I'll ask a question from the kind of investment point of view. How can we identify opportunities to invest to help older entrepreneurs, for example, that help them, that are good business opportunities, but also promote broader social and economic benefits? And whoever wants to start with that can go. Well, I'll just speak a little bit about, I think companies that are doing interesting things in the silver tech space and that I think are just good for society in general. There's this idea of connection, right? And in this digitally connected world how just people are feeling more disconnected than ever. And we're seeing this across multiple generations. There's a kind of slow startups that are popping up that are actually trying to solve for connection in real life connection with digital components. One that I think is particularly interesting for the older generations is Roomster. So people that have found themselves, whether they've been widowed or otherwise alone, they are now single income household or no income, right? And they can find and partner up with other people like themselves and essentially create dual income households and solve for loneliness and all of these other things. And I think that's just a beautiful thing and something to think about in terms of community and connection and it's the new golden girls. Yeah. Fuchsia, in terms of the work that ARP does, I mean Fuchsia has so many different things at ARP but one of the things that she mentioned is all the work that we do on entrepreneurship, she's really at the heart of that. Could you maybe expand on some of those different initiatives, if you had to tell somebody in 30 seconds or however long you wanna take, what are the things that are most important to you in that space, what would you say? So I will say that when we started this work a few years ago, our core audience was really people who were trying to get started. Like people who just needed information, like they had a thought that they wanted to start a business but where do we go? How do you do that? And so we really wanted to serve that need that people did not have the information that they needed to really think about like what does it take to start a business? Like and what are the risks associated with that? And so really just arming that they already mean themselves with the appropriate information to really just kinda get started. And so I look at our work as a front door. You know, you come through this door that we've created and you get the information you need around how to start, how to manage, how to grow and then you take that information to outside organizations that do training that provide access to capital to help you with your pitch, with pitching. And so we just serve as a front door. We just are the information arm. And so when the pandemic hit, we realized that people started and like our audience was not the people who were just kinda sitting on the sidelines thinking about it. They were like, okay, I've started now. And so like now what do I do? And so we were like, oh, wait a minute. So we need to now kind of pivot to address some of their needs. And so we built this resource center, essentially. And the resource center is just chock full of information around how to start, how to grow, how to manage, how to respond to people who are thinking about getting started, people who've started, people who've been in the game for a while but they need to know how to get new customers. And so we really just kind of filled this gap that we were seeing as a result of what was happening in this space, around this small business space. So but the other thing I started was this Meet the Founder series because what I learned was people wanted to hear from other people how they got started. Like how did you do this? And so I started this series called Meet the Founder and it really interviews and tells the story, essentially. It's not about promoting their business but really about promoting the how to and what did they do and who did they talk to and how did they get this courage to really step out on faith and do this without having all of the information that they needed. So we have a small business resource center for the 50 plus and there is chock full of information to kind of help people find their way. I love that and I think you can never underestimate the importance of hearing the stories because you can't be what you don't see like in that kind of reductive phrase but when I was raising money for the Riveter we raised $30 million, we raised a lot and I raised most of it was pregnant and I had never seen a pregnant woman do that and it scared me because I thought if I haven't seen it, can it be done? And of course it can, of course it can but you have to hear the stories. You have to see the failure too because we always see the story on the front page of entrepreneur or Inc or Forbes of the kid genius that X, Y, or Z but for most of us, many of us, our success stories are riddled with very horrible failures and so hearing those and I know that you talk about them and it's so important and I think there's just so much there. So I want to have some time for the audience to ask questions so if you do have a question, when we get to that point please just raise your hand and I'll call on you but before that, I wanted to touch on one final thing and it kind of gets back to this idea of barriers and I think one of the huge ones is just social attitudes about age in general and we talked about this a little bit. Heather, I'll go to you first because I know that you grew up in the UK and so one thing that comes to mind is that there are different attitudes about age across countries, across geographic boundaries and then there's also differences in attitudes over time so the way we think about age today is different from 30, 40 years ago. Can you speak to the UK-US difference in terms of perceptions to aging and does that play a role in your mind? Yeah, I think it does and I have to be honest because I am so like quixotic about the way I think of England now because I don't live there anymore and I've lived in the US for so long I'm like now the UK is like the beacon of just all things good and great but also to be fair, I mean, England is a really tiny country respectively and it fits into the US like 75 times and then some so I think what works in the UK and the things that they do really well as relates to aging and whatnot is not realistic to say that it wouldn't necessarily work here but I would say it's like the three P's, right? We have public social safety nets. The NHS is one of them, it's obvious and that's a huge thing, right? And while here we do have Medicaid and Medicare and other safety nets for vulnerable and aging populations in the UK, it's over the course of someone's lifetime and so there's a lot more emphasis on preventative care and I also think that it decreases stress too when you don't have to think about the financial implications of what it is to just take care of yourself physically, mentally, right? It should kind of be just a basic human right like air and clean water and then the other one is proximity. Again, small country, everybody is kind of close together so there is just such a big sense of community and it's an old country, so traditions and stuff. There's just a really big sense of that and the last one is pubs. They're just like, I mean, you talk about like, places for intergenerational gathering and that's it, right? They have like these watering holes, people just hang out and it's just fun for the whole family and I think there should just be so many more pubs here in the US and we've got to bring that. Is anybody seeing Welcome to Wrexham? They've got that pub right next to it, yeah. I love those scenes, they're great. It's a good business idea, Heather. Yeah. I'm going to do it, all right. Anyone want to fund this? Amy Felicia, do you guys want to comment on this sort of evolution of attitudes towards aging? Has anything gotten better or things getting worse? I think from a cultural standpoint in America, we're starting to be more open-minded about aging. I mean, Madonna's on the stage in her 60s just killing it, right? We don't really blink anymore at that. But I still think in America we see aging as a problem and not an opportunity. Like if you look at a lot of the startups in the longevity space in biotech, they're all about preventing aging. I don't really want to live forever, maybe you do. But this is something that's going to happen and so it's like how do we make it better? How do we make sure people have enough money to live their whole life with their investment or whatnot? Or they can work as long as they want to or perhaps not work until they die, right, all of the different things. So I think from a cultural standpoint, we're more open to a different viewpoint. But I think from a advocating for a better life as we age standpoint, we're not spending enough resources on it. Yeah, I think that we still have a lot of work to do. I think that aging still has a negative connotation to it. You know, you have a shorter runway. You have more time behind you than you have ahead of you. Instead of looking at it as, yeah, I may not have as many years behind me, but my better years are ahead of me. Like I have so much more wisdom now and I know I've made mistakes and I've learned from them. Like all that aging brings with it from a positive perspective, we don't tout that. We still kind of look at aging like, this kind of negative like, oh my God, and like how can I live longer? How can I reverse this aging wrinkles and you know, all that skin care and it's still very negative from my perception. Yeah, I think one of the things I often think about is this idea of this sort of static, like we have a narrative about life and there are these mile posts and for so long it was you kind of hit all those mile posts and then right after that you died. And now it's much more, there's a whole decades longer after that. You know, you have kids, they go to college or whatever your goals are. I don't think we've started to think or I think we are now but I don't think traditionally we've thought about what's next, what does the third act look like? It's not just about concluding the narrative, it's about a new opportunity. I think about, I'm not a woman of a certain age and I think about some of the conversations that I'm having with my peers and no one is talking about like after they finish their 30 year career, like I'm gonna sit home and watch daytime television, everyone's talking about how I'm gonna leverage this experience into something else, like thinking about what my next act will be and not sitting on their laurels but really around like what's gonna rejuvenate me and now it is the opportunity to really do something that I've always wanted to do because I've earned the money that I needed then I can fund that desire that I wanna do now. I think that's a great message. Now I want, let me actually check and see how much time we have. We do have a little bit of time for questions. I wanna open up to the audience in case a couple of questions come up. I saw your hand in the back first so I'll go to you. Hi, my name is Sandy Lacy and I'm the executive director of the Howe Innovation Center at the Perkins School for the Blind where we're working on accelerating innovation in disability technology, disability and aging highly correlated. I was wondering if one or two of the panelists would mind talking to what you're seeing with regards to how advanced technologies are opening up like accessibility for the longevity economy. I'll take a stab at that a little bit. We have the age tech collaborative at AERP that really looks at startups that are really kind of being revolutionary around helping people to age better. And so I don't know every one of those startups that are in the collaborative but those are the kinds of things that are attractive for the age tech collaborative. So I encourage you to go to their website and they have a whole listing of some of the startups that they've been working with that address a myriad of things to help us age better, age more positively. And so I would imagine something's there around disability. Okay. I just, I know of one that's working on nobility disabilities and I forget the name of it but they're working on better, more flexible with different technology for races, for limb disabilities and injuries and people experience a higher proportion as they age. And so I think something like that is aging better. I'll actually say one thing. So I mentioned this article series that we're publishing revelations through data. The fourth article in that series which has come out in a month or two talks about the labor force experience of disabled workers or disabled people during the pandemic. And one thing that we find, so if I look at the labor force overall, you see this massive decline of participation in March of 2020. And then for every age group below 65, there's sort of the slow recovery by about August or September of last year. We're pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels of labor force participation for every group except people 65 and older where they continue to be lower than they were before. Still historically high but low relative to right before the pandemic. If I look only at disabled people, I find that labor force participation among every age group including those 65 and older has gone up is actually higher than it was before the pandemic. In many cases, significantly higher. And the major reason for that is the expansion of access to remote work. And I think a really important thing here is that it's a story about technology. It's about having something that allowed people to work remotely. But the thing is that technology existed before the pandemic started. It was just the onset of this disaster which forced us to reevaluate what it meant to work and how work could be done that opened up that door. And so I think it's a great story about saying think outside the box, don't assume that whatever's in place is the best system. Try to find a system that works for everybody. Because in this case, it was an event that ended up opening an opportunity for a lot of people who always wanted to work but didn't have the opportunity to do so. So it's sort of technology and attitudes. Sorry, next question. I saw your hand first, I think. It's very close. I have only one mic. Yeah, actually, yeah. In the front here, the scarf. Sorry, it was very close. It was right at the buzzer. I couldn't quite tell. Thank you. So I'm Amy Lee, founder of Dian's Beheating in AI-powered telehealth platform that we have a mission to make arts, music, dance, and art accessible for those who are stuck at home, like myself who are going to cancer and recover and also elderly like my mom. And my question specifically is I actually just came back from WHO's arts and health week in Egypt. And they're globally speaking, we, US, are way behind compared to some of these other countries like in UK, they now have the social prescribing where you could prescribe a lot of these mind-body medicine approach and tracking the outcomes and able to make it accessible without the barrier of financial status of some of the people already impacted by disease. And so for you guys, what are some of the ways to eventually making arts and health practices, which including music, dance, and art, more accessible that medically have proven reduced risk of dementia, reduced cardiovascular death, diabetes prevention of falling, all these clinical study was heavily backed by science but they're not really well implemented. And for you, especially Justin, since you're in policy, I'm very curious about what you think about that. How do we create changes in the US? Gosh, that's a really interesting question. Health care policies, I'm definitely out of my depth there. So I don't have a great answer. I think that's a wonderful point. I mean, just in general, just speaking about access in general, we have a big equity issue in the United States where there's a population people that basically are priced out of proven technologies, of proven treatments that are helpful for them, both when they get sick and also in preventative terms. So we find that people that have greater income, for example, have better preventative health and therefore they develop things later in life or they're able to prevent things later in life. I don't have a great answer for the question. I'll open up to the panel. Does anybody have a thought? I really don't. I know that we have a brain health initiative and I know that some of our activations, our events that we have are around music and so it's tied to our brain health initiative and how music really helps stimulate the brain. But that's the extent of what I know. I mean, I don't work in that area but just kind of learning about what they do internally, it's a little bit about advocating how entertainment and music can really help stimulate the mind. I think also a certain amount of pressure has to be applied on the kind of payer level. I think if there's enough people asking for these kinds of treatments, modalities, et cetera, they're gonna be forced to look at that and their payers are typically just gonna look at what the longitudinal health gain is of that and if they see there's gonna be a savings for them, because it just all comes down to money in a healthcare system that's motivated by that, then that's possibly something they would subsidize but I think it actually has to happen there. And then to that point, I think a path there is building these communities, advocacy groups, et cetera, that help get you there. We build a community because we want change, because we want connection and I think AARP is an amazing example. It's become one of the most powerful thought leadership and advocacy organizations in this country because a group of people who were older in America decided to come together and use their force for collective change. And I think that's, in America, probably the most powerful way we have to get to change outside it. Elective bargaining, right? Yeah. Okay, I think we'll do one more question. Sir, I saw your hand first. We're the leading stars. Oh, okay, I'll tell you what, we'll do both questions. We'll do both questions. That'll be quick. You spoke a lot about entrepreneurs and also about older people as consumers. For public companies, though, it's very common to see them lay off older people with more experience. As soon as there's a little bit of stress and pressure, they can hire younger people a lot cheaper. Are you guys aware of any data or commitments or third party assessments of public companies on their policies around retaining, training, et cetera, a diverse age workforce? Actually, we do have that. My team colleague does much of that work. And so she is constantly, I think we have the value of the older worker. We just came out with that study last year. It talks about the value and the cost of the older worker. So I encourage you to kind of go to our website and look that up. So yeah, so we are right in that talking about, yeah, why older people are still valuable in the workplace and what they add to the workplace. Does anybody else want to say one more? All right, then you, sir, I'll get to your question. Really quick, really simple. I just want to appreciate you all for taking the time. Really fascinating discussion. My name is Kevin Nowers. I'm the general manager of Releaders and we have a business network. So the fact that 55 and older are becoming entrepreneurs and also have a ton of experience is really enticing to me. My question is, what is the number one platform for recruiting these individuals who are exiting the workforce or trying to re-enter? That's a great question. I think it's a great business opportunity. I mean, I actually, I don't, when Heather was mentioning dating apps, I'm sure there's a dating app that focuses on people over 50, but I don't know it. And I think it's the same thing with the recruiting platform. I don't know of one. AARP has a... We have a job board. Is that what you're talking about from a work or business? Oh yes, yes, yes. So we do have a, we have a job board. We have the AARP job board and a lot of small businesses use that job board to find employees. And so there's something to be said about recruiting an older worker because they, you know, they come to work, they show up. Show up? So, and so we think that's why a lot of smaller employers are attracted to the job board. And so it goes both ways. It's, you know, the employer's looking for someone but the employee is looking for a job as well. So yes, if that, I wasn't sure I understood your question, but yes, we do have that. Okay, well, I guess I'm very sorry. We're pretty much way over time for where we were supposed to be. But thank you so much. Great audience, great questions. Thank you to the panel. It's been a wonderful discussion.