This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
DANA GRIFFIN:
Humanity trumps every barrier when people are connected in a safe and nurturing way and they’re given an opportunity to make an impact. The fact that we’re able to take this brilliant kid and amplify his future—with the wisdom of older adults—makes not only everyone in that connection better off, but their communities, and hopefully society down the road. Selfishly, I want to grow in a world where older adults matter, where aging is impact, where we have something fabulous to do and we’re appreciated because we’re doing so much good. This is what gets me really excited, that technology can actually allow us to do this at scale.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know how, together, we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future.
ARIA:
We ask technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers to help us sketch out the brightest version of the future—and we learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
From video calls to messaging apps, technology connects us like never before. It helps us reach people across continents and communities in an instant. And yet so many of us experience loneliness. According to the American Psychiatric Association, one in three adults in the United States experiences loneliness at least once a week.
ARIA:
And it’s not just adults. The CDC reports that over 40% of kids and teens feel persistently lonely. For anyone, prolonged social isolation can lead to depression, anxiety, and longterm health issues, like dementia for older adults. The reality is clear loneliness is more than just a feeling. It’s a public health crisis.
REID:
And the financial burden of loneliness related health issues is staggering, clocking in at billions of dollars each year. It’s clear that fixing this crisis is going to take more than awareness—like innovative solutions that prioritize human connection.
ARIA:
One woman going head to head against this epidemic is Dana Griffin. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Eldera, a global platform tackling this issue in a unique and powerful way. Dana started her career in advertising and performance marketing and then pivoted to tech, becoming an entrepreneur and AI for Good advocate. Soon after she founded INNRwisdom, the precursor to what we now know as Eldera.
REID:
Raised by her grandparents and guided by older mentors throughout her life, Dana has always understood the value of elder wisdom. Now she’s bringing that to the world through a platform that bridges generational divides with the help of AI. Dana currently serves on the boards of AI Commons and BrightFocus Foundation, speaking on the importance of using AI for social impact.
ARIA:
This week we explore the mission of Eldera, the power and necessity of intergenerational relationships, and how AI can be a tool for fostering human connection and building stronger communities.
REID:
So let’s dive in. Here’s our conversation with Dana Griffin.
ARIA:
It seems clear from your background that intergenerational connection has been a lifelong theme for you, especially since you were raised by your grandparents. Can you share how these early experiences shaped your perspective on intergenerational relationships, and how important they are?
DANA GRIFFIN:
Yes, thank you for starting there. I don’t think my story is really unique around the globe, but it is what made me really, really interested in and appreciative of intergenerational stories and intergenerational connections. So I was born in Transylvania, in Romania, and I was raised by my grandparents until I was eight, and it taught me so much. You know, my grandparents each spoke a different language to me. One of them read Greek mythology to me. The other one read Jules Verne to me and we had comparative conversations, and it was a really wonderful upbringing. And when I was eight, my grandma passed away, and I had to move in with my parents for the first time. It was a little more difficult. It was a little difficult growing up in that situation. But what made it really life-changing is that our next door neighbors were retired teachers, and I think they figured out that I needed help.
DANA GRIFFIN:
So they called my parents and said, “Hey, we need a young person to help around the house, send her over.” And so I ended up going over to the neighbors every day, and they did my homework with me, and they fed me, and we played games. And while those formative years were really difficult, I’ve learned that there is a lot of good out there. Children, sometimes they don’t have perspective. They think life is hard and sad, and many times it is. But if you are just exposed to one different perspective, then you can really start seeing a better future for yourself. I ended up moving to the United States for university, and I continued meeting amazing older adults who looked out for me. I had an advisor, Anne. She realized I had a hard time kind of making ends meet, so she gave me this booklet of every single scholarship that was published and she said, “Listen, you don’t qualify for all of them, but if you’re the only one applying, you’re going to get it.” And I did. And it just made college much easier. And I just had these people that just saw something, that I needed help, and they wanted to make a difference. And to this day, a third of my friends are between sixties and nineties, and I know who to go to for advice on anything from healthcare to dating. And I thought that’s kind of how everyone navigated life.
REID:
You know, today society often discounts the older population, causing them to be isolated from younger generations. So share your thoughts on the stereotypes commonly associated with older adults and how those perceptions impact them—both socially and emotionally—and then how we should be thinking about it? What kinds of connections we should be making?
DANA GRIFFIN:
Honestly, I see it as the biggest waste of human potential. The largest untapped resource on the planet. Our longevity increased by over 60% just in the past century, which means that up until the 1950s–when retirement was invented—you used to live to work to 65, and live to 68, and you had three golden years. Yay, go have fun. Well now that changed radically. Healthcare, education—we’ve increased longevity from 68 to close to 86, but we have not built the social infrastructures to support that new reality. So going away and living your best life in a retirement community for 20 years—it’s not something that my generation wants, or even the people who are growing old right now, and it’s causing huge problems. One of them, and a very public one, is loneliness. It’s a very expensive problem, but it’s a new problem because we used to live in multi-generational homes where older adults had a role to play.
DANA GRIFFIN:
They looked after the kids while the middle generation worked. Everybody had a role, everybody had a purpose, and loneliness wasn’t a problem. But the reason why I bring this up is we’ve created this almost like fake social infrastructure that segregates ages, segregates people by age, and it’s really causing huge health problems. Loneliness in older adults causes a 50% increase in dementia. The loneliness cost, just in the U.S., the CDC estimates is around 406 billion a year. A year. That’s unnecessary by the way. But what’s worse is that, when we broke up the generation, kids became even lonelier. The CDC says that over 40% of kids identify as lonely, and they have not yet developed the coping mechanisms to deal with this—which is leading to the highest mental health crisis and youth suicide rates in history. So we came up with this interesting, seemingly innocuous solution 75 years ago that, down the road, has really significant social challenges. So the way I look at it, it’s almost like there’s an invisible network of wisdom out there. We have the largest older generation in history. They are the healthiest, the most educated, and we push them out of society when they’re pretty much in the prime of their time.
ARIA:
I love how you put it, there’s all this compassion and empathy, but this is also just a numbers game. This is—let’s look at the lost productivity of our society, let’s look at the increased healthcare costs, let’s look at the wasted human capital. Because although we actually might want people to retire at 65 or 70, to let the younger generation into those leadership roles—I think we talk about that often, especially in our government—that doesn’t mean that they can do nothing. You don’t have to go from, you know, 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, to zero. Like there’s all of this human capital that can be spent and it can have these really positive implications. And so you’re talking about human life expectancy increasing over the past years and there not really being these policy changes. So can you talk about either on the policy perspective what you would like to see changed? Or maybe even more importantly, how can technology help us address some of these challenges, and also opportunities, with this increased human life expectancy?
DANA GRIFFIN:
I think change needs to happen both on the technology and the policy level. This is because one of the biggest issues we’ve created with ageism is not just its socially inept, it’s actually making older adults feel invisible. So if we want to reengage them, and truly have them make a meaningful impact in society, we have to remind them that they’re valuable—and that can happen through both policy and technology. We have a billion people over 60 today, and as I said, they’re the healthiest and they’re the most educated generation we’ve seen. And that number is about to double. By the time I’m going to be in my sixties—by 2050—it’s going to be 2.1 billion. We don’t have the infrastructure to support that new demographic reality. And just making sure that young people take care of older adults is going to fail pretty soon, because we already have more people over 60 than under 10.
DANA GRIFFIN:
So that means that we do need an infrastructure change, and a policy change, to drive that infrastructure change in a way that we kick off what is called the third dividend in the very nerdy aging space-–where we now live long enough that we can move past just thinking about studying, and thinking about success, to moving into thinking about significance. And that’s where things get really exciting—because with this new demographic shift, interestingly technology has just matured to the way where we can truly, safely, meaningfully connect humans in a way that’s beneficial to both. We’re encountering new challenges that we don’t have solutions for—loneliness being one of them. There isn’t actually a scalable solution to loneliness today, and that’s where technology can come into play. I think technology and AI can help us do so much good—learn so much, have fun—but there are some intrinsically human core needs and values that only humans can transfer to other humans. But if you tell me that chatbots are going to make you feel less lonely, I will die on that hill. I will fight you. I think only humans can make humans feel less lonely.
REID:
I actually agree with you about the importance of human connection. It’s one of the things where I think in terms of the design of AI chatbots, it should not be trying to isolate you, but actually to help you connect. For example, with Inflection and Pi, if you go to Inflection’s personal intelligence Pi and you say, “Hey, you’re my best friend,” he says, “No, no, no, I’m your AI companion. Let’s talk about your friends. Have you seen any of them recently? Maybe it’s time to set up a lunch date.” You know, that kind of thing, and I think we want to have the design of these things to be nudging and helping with the human connection. But you know, you brought up loneliness—weirdly we both have older generations feeling lonely and younger generations feeling lonely. So you know, what are the specific roles you’re seeing technology playing today—both exacerbating it and then what are some of the solutions—technology and otherwise?
DANA GRIFFIN:
Let’s start with some of the challenges. Technology inadvertently has made us more lonely and has caused some of the mental health issues in young people. And I’m talking particularly about social platforms. And obviously they were not intended to cause any harm, but sometimes when we build huge global infrastructures, we really have to get very imaginative to get to the scale effects of it. Reid, Aria, when you and I were growing up, we were told to go out there and change the world, right? That was the premise. Today, kids are growing up told, “Go out there and save the world.” The challenges that are put upon them—whether it’s climate, political, migration, or mental health, or something that we can’t even totally conceive—that’s so much pressure to put on young people. And by the way, we do have to rely on them to build a better future, so we have to give them absolutely every leg up that we possibly can. And the only untapped human resource out there today are older adults. And there’s so many of them, that we can use technology to vet them, train them and support them, so that every single kid out there—growing up today and in the future—has not just one, but maybe a task force of older adults who guide them and help them build resilience, and give them perspective about life.
ARIA:
I’m not sure I a hundred percent agree with you about the “change the world, save the world” dynamic, because I do think that man, World War II was scary. And man, the Cold War. And like every generation sort of has their big global problem they’re fighting against. I absolutely agree with you that when you’re 15 and you couldn’t see what your friends were doing on Friday nights—and now you can see that they’re doing things without you. And you’re left out, and you’re alone—and there are things on social media that have led to, or exacerbated, some of these things. And I also agree with you that having people in your life who support you is really positive and I love the ways that technology can help on that front. And so for those of us listeners who don’t know about your company, Eldera.ai, I would love for you to talk about the mission of that platform and why you think it’s sort of this unique purveyor of intergenerational conversations.
DANA GRIFFIN:
I want to start with clarifying something: it is not a unique purveyor. Intergenerational connections are as old as humanity itself. What we’ve built is an infrastructure that makes it available and accessible to anyone regardless of geography or mobility—in a way that is both safe and meaningful. And what I mean by that is that we train, vet, and connect older adults to serve as friends and mentors to kids around the world. When we connect a young person and an older adult, and they bond, and they talk weekly, sometimes two hours a week—because you are right Aria, kids want to talk to an adult, just not their parent. There’s research around this from Harvard that says that when kids build trusted one-on-one relationships with non parental adults, it helps them build resilience—and older adults get purpose. And you know, we couldn’t even do that a few years ago because technology plays a really, really important role.
DANA GRIFFIN:
We really used technology in three different ways at Eldera. First, it’s safety. So we built out an AI chaperone that checks every recording for any potential risks, but also learns from what makes a good match, a good conversation, a good pairing, and is able to help us build a better product. The second is matching. People think that you know, you match people that are similar. Well what we’ve learned from almost five years of data is the opposite. My grandparents used to say opposites attract—well, our data actually shows that [laugh]. That when people are really, really different—different geographies, different generations, different cultures—they actually feel so special, and unique, that it makes them very curious about the other person, and both of them start feeling better. They’re not trying to fit in with each other. They feel excited about someone who’s completely different than them.
DANA GRIFFIN:
We can look at a set of variables and figure out points where they will click—or the kids call it the bond—based on their differences, not on their similarities. And that has so many like cascading positive externalities. It creates incredible health benefits. In fact, the Cleveland Clinic named us a social prescription that solves both loneliness in older adults and mental health in kids. So think about this, two of the most expensive global healthcare problems can be solved with one intergenerational intervention. I think we have an opportunity to take almost a trillion dollars of social capital that’s sitting idle and build the infrastructure to turn them into a resource for society. And it’s incredibly beautiful that as humans we are wired to make an impact. One of my mentors, Dean Linda Fried of Columbia University, ran some of the seminal research on generativity in older adults, and she defines generativity as the desire to make a younger person’s life better—or how we talk about mentoring. And the sense of generativity and feeling useful will keep you healthier longer, but by decades. So that not only reduces our healthcare costs at scale, but it also creates a new social capital. And yet it’s not a solution for everything, but it’s something that we can do easily.
REID:
The technologist in me is very curious to ask the following question. My very first startup was called SocialNet and was kind of like helping people make connections—everything from dating, professional networking, roommates, sports, things. What have you learned about the do’s and the don’t’s of the matching? What is that new human connection that creates joy, and interest, and learning, and intrigue, about life on both sides?
DANA GRIFFIN:
That’s something that we have fun with, and it actually brings up the third part of how we use technology at Eldera, which is understanding wisdom. So Eldera started in March, 2020, but before Eldera I was obsessed with this idea of how can we use AI to codify human wisdom like we sequence the genome. Because if we can codify it, then we can help find it in every person and help give them a way to contribute to society with it. So that’s where it actually started. And when COVID happened, we realized that’s a great theory, set that aside, put people together now because they need each other now. But that initial theory taught us how to ask the right questions about each person. So when an older adult—or a parent with a kid, or a teen—joins Eldera, we ask them a series of questions. They’re open-ended questions and that’s something that’s very important—it’s not just a dropdown—but one of the most fun ones I can dive into is the superpower question. So we ask everyone what their superpower is and, let me tell you, the older generation is not used to answering that question, but we do it on purpose because we want them to start thinking positively about themselves from the get go — from the signup process. It’s really important to us. So the responses we get range from anything from, “My superpower is courage, it’s empathy, it’s resilience.” Wonderful. Then we get to, “My superpower is time travel,” and I’m like, “Oh you’re going to be a fun one.” All the way to, “What kind of question is this?” They’re all fantastic valid answers. They tell us just as much about who they are, from a professional perspective let’s say, as what their personality is—and I think that’s where we really see really beautiful correlations.
DANA GRIFFIN:
I’ll give you a very specific example. We connected a young girl—who’s 15 at that point—Justine, who was a Haitian immigrant in Miami. She had just immigrated with her parents to the states maybe a year before and she was in high school. Connected her with 82-year-old Mary Ellen from L.A. And Mary Ellen went to Radcliffe, she was on the board of Esalen since 1984. So we connected two of them, and what Justine tells me—because we do feedback forms—is that she feels like she’s looking at a mirror of herself when she talks to Mary Ellen. And so I asked both of them about it and they discovered, in being so curious about each other, that they have a shared childhood experience. So when it came time for Justine to navigate the US and navigate getting into a really good school—and Justine is really, really smart—Mary Ellen reached out to the community and got several older adults to help Justine apply to schools and get scholarships.
ARIA:
I love it.
DANA GRIFFIN:
And you know, when you connect to people that are incredibly different, you almost force them to find what they have in common. And that in itself is the bond. And that creates the joy. So Mary Ellen wrote an email to the person who introduced her to Eldera, saying that it was the best introduction she’s gotten in 40 years. And it wasn’t about Eldera, it was about Justine!
ARIA:
I’ve been so lucky to have mentors in my life, to have people doing me favors helping me out—I hope I’m also doing that for other people—and if you can sort of bring that joy to so many people who might not have experienced it, for whatever reason, I think it’s so powerful. And so when you have your younger cohort—it’s six to 18 year olds—and you’re thinking about that intergenerational connection, do you think there’s something special about, sort of, six to 18 with the older adults? Are you going to expand to people in your twenties? Why focus on that demo? May you change, or you think that’s where, sort of, the special sauce is?
DANA GRIFFIN:
I started there because I believe that young people need the most support. I mean it’s not just that I believe—data shows globally that young people need the most support. Young people are also the hardest to build technology for. A lot of people build technology for the 20, 30-year-olds and so forth, but you have to be incredibly mindful about how you build technology that keeps young people safe. And that’s what I really, really think that technology has evolved in a way that is only now allowing us to do that well at scale. That’s why we started with the kids—they need it the most and we can do it now. We do not build things fast and break things, like we’re the opposite of that. We’re dealing with the two of the most vulnerable populations on the planet. We build very slow, but it also works.
DANA GRIFFIN:
Here’s the really interesting hack that we’ve realized lately. So we always have more kids sign up than older adults, because parents see their kids use and and love Eldera, and they tell the other parents, and then for every parent that signs up, 12 new parents sign up. Mentors tell their best friend. So that’s a little bit of a problem there that we’re solving now with technology—with what we call the “wisdom footage”—we can talk about that later. But what we’ve realized now is that parents sign up for Eldera, because they want the access to the mentors too. Now it’s really taking us down this path where just recently in the past few weeks we have really big companies reach out to us saying, “We want to offer Eldera as an employee benefit, because our employees who are parents are the most stressed generation. And we think that you can help them out, both with their parents and their kids.”
DANA GRIFFIN:
So that’s why we will eventually grow into other areas. But I want to clarify that Eldera stands for the era of the elders, so our atomic unit—our core—is the older adult. We look at the older adult, not as someone who needs care, but as the person who cares. So when we build technology, it’s really to understand what makes them special—which is what we call the “wisdom portrait”—and how can we offer them opportunities to contribute where they feel incredibly valuable. The first one is, connect them to kids, which gives them purpose—they live longer, it’s great. The second one—which they kind of already started hacking Eldera doing this—is connecting them to each other in a way that they can age in place. In fact, there are many friendships who started on Eldera—now they have walking groups. But the third one—and I think what’s really, really interesting—is that older adults helped me and my team build Eldera.
DANA GRIFFIN:
They wrote a 32-page manual on how to Eldera, for new mentors! They have this incredible wisdom, they have time on their hands, so we’re going to allow down the road for companies to tap into the wisdom—really wisdom reservoir—that we’re building, and get older adults to help them with content, with the accounting, with whatever it is—on a part-time basis—in a way that keeps older adults financially stable long term. I think we’re just building a social infrastructure that allows for older adults to continue to make an impact in the world. So ideally we’re going to be solving multiple problems for multiple people, but really the core is building this global network of human wisdom.
REID:
There’s so many different threads here that are super interesting, but one of them is what is the way in which you’re connecting the kind of elder generations also to each other? And then say a little bit about what you’re learning—what are some of the patterns of discovering the wisdom from the older generations?
DANA GRIFFIN:
So I’d like to take full credit for the older adult to older adult, and I can’t. When I mean that older adults are building this with us, they really do. So it was maybe two months into Eldera, when they called me and they said, “Oh sweetheart, it’s great talking to the young people, but we want to talk to each other to see what the others are doing to be good mentors.” And we’re like, “Oh, okay, cool, let’s do that, let’s do that.” So then we started what we call “mentor council”. Every two weeks we do a big group Zoom and they talk to each other, and then they also tell me how to build Eldera better—which is the most incredible thing, I can tell you. Literally everything we build comes from them. So they started talking to each other and I would follow up these conversations with these long emails—you know, agendas of what they talked about. And they’re like, “You know sweetheart, your emails are really, really great, but we can’t find anything in them, so can you build something so we can talk to each other in between mentor council?” And we’re like, “Oh, okay, we can do that, yes.” So we white label the social platform—after older adults get criminal background checked and trained, they get invited into the platform. And they talk to each other about everything. They start with mentoring—they start with introducing themselves, and mentoring. But then they talk about movies, and books—and they now have a book club, and socials that they all created amongst themselves. So initially it was completely organic, and then what they said is, “You know, when I was a new mentor, I was so nervous that I didn’t have something special to give. That I wasn’t good enough, that yeah, Judy’s great with kids, but I’m not really great with kids. Why would you even want me here?”
DANA GRIFFIN:
So what do we realize? It’s very important to connect a new person with an existing mentor who is actually a little more similar to them. This is where it’s very interesting. So there are different, completely different, types of matching that we look at. I’ll give you an example: we never match a kid and older adult in the same geographic area. We did it on purpose because I don’t want them meeting in the park—there’s a lot of implications for that. The benefit of that is that parents pack up the kids and travel across the country, or across the world, to meet the mentors, with mentors. The older adults, we do want to connect them in the same geographic area. We do want them to have similarities because then they feel like, “If Judy can do it, maybe I could do it too.”
DANA GRIFFIN:
And that takes me to your second part of the question, which is about the wisdom. How do we really understand the wisdom? There’s several inputs that we take into consideration in building this—what we call the wisdom network. So one is the “self-express profile”, which is just scratching the surface. But then every single conversation that happens at Eldera is recorded and archived for safety. That is how we use the AI chaperone, to understand what happened in the conversation—but that is also how we understand the deeper contextual wisdom of each older adult. And to get like super nerdy, we define wisdom as the triangulation of all the knowledge you’ve gathered throughout your life, filter it through your own life experience, and applied with your own common sense—which makes it as unique to you as your fingerprint. So it doesn’t matter if you are a retired CEO, or if you are a grandma who knows how to take care of preemies, or you give really good dating advice—your wisdom is incredibly valuable, and it’s our job to build a technology that elevates that, and connects you with opportunities to contribute.
REID:
So we’re discovering these sources of wells of, kind of, human wisdom that are these massive depth of human capital, human wisdom, you know, that is largely untapped, that could be delightfully deployed in the world. So you know, a natural thought today is well how do we get that trained into AIs? How do we get that in interactions that might make a difference—kind of in a captured, scalable, interactive way? So what have your thoughts on that been so far? And what might we see you kind of enabling, or designing, or you know, considering in the future?
DANA GRIFFIN:
So I think AI today already has some of that information. So when I started thinking about how do we codify wisdom, I went back to those things. And I looked at everything from African proverbs, to philosophy, to commencement speeches, and then I started triangulating all of those different sets of data to start creating a wisdom graph—but that was called INNRwisdom, that was pre-Eldera. I think what’s very, very different about connecting humans based on their wisdom is that, when they connect across generations, they actually transfer something much more human that AI can’t. They can build resilience in the younger generation. They can teach them about empathy in a way that even Pi—which I love by the way—cannot quite do like a grandma who survived the war. And they can teach emotional intelligence. And in the future that we’re going towards, those most human skills are going to be the most valuable, because everything else we can do with technology—and certainly I do a lot with technology, it’s a great helper for me.
DANA GRIFFIN:
The where we’re going is what I’m hoping—well this is why we’re building Eldera—is what we like to call an age integrated society. So today we look at the big systematic scale issues in silos, we look at healthcare and separately we look at education. And if we just look at intergenerational connections, they can drive health outcomes. So we already know when we connect older adult to young person, they each feel better. And then healthcare costs go down, cognitive decline gets delayed, mental health issues go down. But then kids also learn some of the most human traits that they can possibly get from a person who cares about them—not from a curriculum at school, or from a chatbot. So I think that if we look at integrating older adults in society based on their wisdom, and create this vast network of wisdom, then we can impact education as well.
DANA GRIFFIN:
And I’m a big sci-fi fan. So to give you an example, one of the seminal books that helped me in this was [The] Diamond Age. So [The] Diamond Age talks about how can you create social mobility through education. And the education primer was actually a combination of AI and a human whose care went into it, and those two together was what drove high societal change. And I would be lying if I said that was not an inspiration behind Eldera. I think that every kid deserves to have a person who cares about them and shows up for them no matter what. And that is actually possible today because of technology.
ARIA:
I mean I love that and I certainly agree that actually some of these sort of EQ interpersonal skills might become more important as we go forward—as AI is taking care of everything else. I have two technology questions for you. One is on your platform, are people communicating via video, voice, chat? And if it’s different ways, do you see different outcomes depending on how people are communicating? And then secondly, earlier you talked about how, you know, “My friend Judy is so good at the, you know, talking to young people, but I’m not,” and one of the things that AI is so good at is sort of being that coach—being that helper, helping people along. Do you guys use AI, or plan to in the future, to sort of help the mentors be the best mentors that they can by giving them those prompts?
DANA GRIFFIN:
So we built Eldera, you could only Eldera one way—and the mentors use it as a verb and now we all use it as a verb—which is one-on-one weekly video conversations. That allowed us to record and archive the conversation, keep everyone safe. Video conversation also gives us very rich data because we can look at the transcript for safety, but we can also look at facial expressions and tonality, to pick up safety and, candidly, also joy. Because when we share Eldera, we share videos about Eldera, they come from those conversations that the parents and the mentors service for us. Now, we’re opening up a new way to interact. So we are now welcoming every older adult over 60, who doesn’t have a criminal background, to join our social platform—our closed Eldera platform—and join socials, and meet other mentors, and be part of even intergenerational socials.
DANA GRIFFIN:
We sometimes have intergenerational socials around mental health, or AI, where kids and older adults and parents all come together. We believe that that pathway will give them the confidence to say, “I can do this too.” So that means that they’re going to be able to participate in social platforms; they’re going to get opportunities to contribute, not just to the kids. Now we will be using AI to support mentors in many ways, but one thing that makes us completely different from any intergenerational solution out there, is that we are not at all curriculum based—on purpose. We think older adults are the last generation who still know how to build that true human relationship, to pull it out of the kid [laugh], You know, to get them to play guitar for the first time on the screen, which they wouldn’t do. So while we give them potential prompts on how to better help, we want to make sure that technology at Eldera never, ever disrupts the human connection—it only amplifies it.
DANA GRIFFIN:
One particular thing that we’re looking to build out is, there are already amazing algorithms out there that can surface early mental health distress in kids—and I think Fei-Fei Li was the one who built the first sample of that. And in talking to the Cleveland Clinic, we realized that if we can pick up on very early stages of mental health distress in a conversation like this, and we prompt the older adults to say, “Hey, ask Cecilia about what happened at school,” we could solve that little issue right away rather than letting it get worse. So we will be using AI in those ways. In potentially alerting older adults opportunities to do good by using their capabilities, but above and beyond what they might actually pick up.
REID:
What are some of the—what you might be seeing in this kind of learning loop of the generations in humanities? Is there anything that you’re seeing yet? It may be early, it may be harder to capture in this, but it’s one of the things—you know, obviously having just published Superagency—it’s kind of thinking about what the progress of knowledge is, and can of capabilities, and I’m curious if there’s anything particularly you’ve seen there?
DANA GRIFFIN:
Absolutely—that’s the long-term vision. We believe that older adults have this incredible, we call it wisdom, but we can really break it down to very interesting intuitive pattern recognition—contextual pattern recognition. Young people are very quick learners and we see the transfer of wisdom in almost every connection. I can give you a couple examples. So for instance, one of our, now frontend, engineers was an Eldera mentee—and he was an Eldera mentee for a few years, and he’s brilliant, Jackson—and we paired him up with this amazing legendary engineer, who built the first Netflix app. He built Pinterest “pin”, and he just retired from Pinterest three years ago. So we paired those two together. And Kent—the engineer in his sixties—he doesn’t really like to code anymore, even though he’s brilliant at consumer tech, because it’s a little hard on his eyes.
DANA GRIFFIN:
All Jackson wants to do is code. So we pair them together. They’re actually building the next generation Eldera—they’re building our front-end, that we’re launching in a couple weeks. Neither of them could do it alone, but together they’re really elevating, and they are planning so many cool things. When they talk on our team calls, they’re so in sync. So that’s one way. The second—the higher version of this is—imagine when we do that at scale? Imagine where every older adult wisdom does not kind of perish with them, but it amplifies a young person’s curiosity and intellect. It really is a loop. In fact—to get nerdy—our logo is a stylized Fibonacci sequence
REID:
That is definitely math nerdy.
ARIA:
I mean I was so obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence when I was a kid, so I really love that. [Laugh]
DANA GRIFFIN:
So we see this idea of intergenerational wisdom transfer at scale as the human Fibonacci sequence. It’s the golden ratio, the golden mean, where everything builds on each other in the most beautiful and natural way. This is what gets me really excited, that technology can actually allow us to do this at scale. Because today, let’s say a brilliant kid from Idaho, rural Idaho—this is a specific example—their only access to a mentor or wisdom is either geographically, in their small town, or in social media. But now we can connect them with a retired engineer in Silicon Valley, or a grandma in another small town, who went through similar things. We can connect them to a college prep person, a retired college prep person, to get advice on how to get into best colleges. The fact that we’re able to take this brilliant kid and amplify his future with the wisdom of older adults, makes not only everyone in that connection better off, but their communities—and hopefully society down the road. Also, one of my biggest hopes is that the generation that grows up today having an older adult mentor, when they get older, they see aging differently. I think that’s incredibly important, because selfishly I want to grow old in a world where older adults matter; where aging is impact; where we have something fabulous to do and we’re appreciated because we’re doing so much good. And to do that we really have to shift perspective now.
ARIA:
No, absolutely. And you know, you teed up my next question perfectly. You talked a lot about Eldera scaling. And once you hit on something like this, that you love, of course your primary objective of helping the older adults, secondary objective of helping these young people—it’s healthcare, it’s education. So what are the barriers to scale and then what are the opportunities with the coming of scale?
DANA GRIFFIN:
The barriers, initially, it was making sure that we have a product that is safe, and I didn’t want to scale too fast. I just want to make sure that we build in every safety feature. Then what we’ve learned is that—this is so counterintuitive—but it was the older adults not feeling like they have something to give, which breaks my heart. Because I feel like every single person I meet is so brilliant, and kind, and they have something so amazing to give. So now we are actually building technology that’s allowing them to remember what makes them special. And this is where AI comes in—you know, the wisdom portrait that I mentioned—is from the moment you sign up, rather than just taking all of your inputs to create the best match for you, we actually create a very simple and friendly output that reminds you what makes you special and how you can give back to society And you can share it with your friends and invite them to get their own wisdom portrait.
DANA GRIFFIN:
And you know what, if you use it at Eldera, fantastic, but if you just take that wisdom portrait and apply it externally in your own community, that’s fantastic too. The goal is the same. So scaling at the person level—if you want at the member level—is really reminding ourselves that unfortunately society has created ageism, which has negative effects. In fact, there’s research that if you have a negative view on aging, you’re going to live something like nine years less than if you have a positive view on aging, and we can change that. The second thing is policy. So I’ve been working with Medicare and Medicaid innovation, and we were talking about how can we use an intergenerational connection—whether it’s Eldera or something else—to lower both Medicare and Medicaid costs with one intervention.
DANA GRIFFIN:
So Medicare spends 6.7 billion only on loneliness in older adults. Medicaid spends 5.8 billion—I believe 55% of their budget—on mental health for kids. What if this one intervention at scale could completely redirect that healthcare funding to other areas? So policy is very, very important. You know, it’s a long road ahead in getting this implemented at a country level. There are other countries who are very interesting in implementing this at a national level. In fact, the five countries most affected by loneliness also correlated with the highest longevity and are also some of the richest countries. Which are the U.S.—obviously—U.K., South Korea, Japan and Australia. I think the really the next step for us is integrating Eldera into healthcare policies—that’s a longer road. A shorter road, which again I cannot take credit for, is that companies actually want to give this to their employees to help them be happier.
REID:
As you’ve begun getting the scale, have you determined any kind of, almost call it best practices, wisdom that goes across different cultural groups? Like I can imagine that in different regions of, you know, the U.S. or other countries, different communities, there kind of is different ideas and different understandings about which ways the elder experience and wisdom might be best engaged. Like one of the many, many different interesting things that comes out of scale is understanding where we could learn the best of, across communities or culture.
DANA GRIFFIN:
I think the first question I get a lot, how do you make sure that adults are culturally sensitive? This is a very interesting way of putting it. When you connect a young person with an older adult and they start caring about each other, those walls kind of fall down, and you know what the older adult might be calling the kid sweetheart and they just roll with it. I think it’s really all about the human connection and the care that can outdo any of those barriers. You don’t see that in social media. In fact, those types of generational wisdom, or habits, or cultural inclinations, are a big hindrance in social media-–they are not in one-on-one connections. I think that’s what makes it very, very different. In fact, we are very hot in South Korea right now. We had the South Korean dad find us very early on when we got written up in TIME for Kids by this undercover 10-year-old journalist Nora, who signed up for Eldera, and then she wrote a big piece about it that ended with, “Eldera was like an escape from quarantine for me.”
DANA GRIFFIN:
Well, from that piece, we got picked up by South Korean postdocs and long story short, an 11-year-old South Korean, helped by his mentor, published his first book—Beautiful Theorems That Changed Math, that is on sale on Amazon, and all the proceeds are going to the Pediatric Cancer Society. And I’m giving you these examples because what we’ve learned is that humanity trumps every barrier when people are connected in a safe and nurturing way and they’re given an opportunity to make an impact. So whether it’s convincing a kid to write a book and publish it, or helping a kid get into school. Also a conversation in our mentor council was kids want to become YouTubers—now imagine 70-some-year-olds talk about the pros and cons of becoming a YouTuber, but like supporting the kids’ vision with it. And the last example I want to give—it all comes down to truly, truly human empathy—is one of our mentors, Connie. She’s in upstate New York, she’s a retired teacher, and she’s mentoring a 6-year-old kid in Austin. And she was interviewing the kid like, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” You know, “What are your goals?” And the kid, who’s normally super bubbly, said, “My goal is to not die,” and it just stopped the conversation, because apparently there was a school shooting. And so the little girl was afraid to go to school. And so Connie immediately reached out to the mom—they had a conversation about how to support a kid. But then she reached out to me and said, “I want to make sure that everyone in the community is aware of how school shooting affect kids.” And about a quarter of our community doesn’t have kids or grandkids, so they kind of hear about school shootings in an abstract. When now, suddenly, when your kid—because they call them “my kid”—tells you they’re afraid to die, you do something about it. They are organizing now locally to change local legislature to support the kids. These are just examples of human empathy that come out of relationships that would have never otherwise happened.
REID:
Alright, rapid fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
DANA GRIFFIN:
I grew up in communist Romania—as you know—I was eight when communism fell. And the first two TV shows that came to Romania after the revolution, one of them was Star Trek. So imagine a kid who grew up in communism, who had like two hours of TV and maybe three hours of electricity, suddenly sees Star Trek—Next Generation, Picard, all in. I think Star Trek completely changed the realm of possibilities in my brain. It rewired my brain to look for opportunities and I was so excited about it. I mean, to this day I watched literally every Star Trek episode that’s out there. I became vegetarian because of Star Trek, because now I believe that any species that has two eyes is too close to my species. We can go down that road too, but I’m such a huge fan and I continue to be a huge fan of Star Trek. And I think that some of the seeds that it planted in me when I was eight are hopefully coming through to Eldera today.
ARIA:
That is awesome. What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
DANA GRIFFIN:
I think people should ask me about my best party trick. So, if you are potentially more introverted, or you get invited to like super cool parties, and you wonder, “How did I get invited to this, and I don’t know anyone here, and everyone is so ridiculously cool,” then my best trick is find the oldest person in the room and start a conversation with them, because you are going to have a fascinating conversation, and you are going to feel welcomed. And case in point, about a year ago I went to a friend’s birthday party and I just didn’t know anyone. And I found this gentleman with a yellow jacket—older years, I can’t quite tell—but definitely the oldest person in the room, with his wife. I went up to them, started a conversation—we talked about wisdom, and books, and the most incredible like topics you can imagine. And at the end of the evening I realized I was talking to Kevin Kelly, and now we’re friends and I had no idea—I didn’t put two and two together. I was aware of his work, but I genuinely did not recognize him in this like jazz club situation. So that’s my best party trick and I would like to share it with everyone who has ever felt like they didn’t really belong somewhere.
REID:
I think I’ve seen that yellow jacket, and Kevin Kelly is a great futurist who I love a lot of his work. So next question, where do you see progress, or momentum, outside of your industry that inspires you?
DANA GRIFFIN:
I am so excited about the intersection of AI and healthcare and personalized care. I have friends who work in rare diseases and I get to learn from them how they’re thinking about AI solving rare diseases, because as I’ve learned, rare diseases are not rare. Even through the lens of solving rare diseases, if you really pan out, you can start looking at personalized healthcare. Because all three of us are completely different, and we should have healthcare that understands us, and matches us, and solves our own solution. So I’m very excited about that, both from an aging perspective—because I want people to live healthier longer, so they can serve at Eldera and help young people. But also it’s just fascinating to understand how much more we can grasp, and how much more we can solve, with AI in healthcare. So that’s what I’m most excited about.
ARIA:
Last question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity’s way in the next 15 years, and what’s our first step to get there?
DANA GRIFFIN:
So first, we’re about to live in the world where there’s more older adults than young people. Where it’s a complete demographic shift. Where we have this incredible generation coming on board. I think what’s possible—and if I have something to say probable—in the next 15 years, is that we build a new social infrastructure where our aging becomes an asset to humanity. Where countries with the highest aging are not worried about their healthcare, but are boasting about their reservoirs of wisdom that they have. Because I want to make sure that we all get to grow old in a world where aging is not just inevitable, but it’s invaluable.
ARIA:
I love that final thought. Dana, such a joy to hear about what you’re doing. Thank you so much for being here.
DANA GRIFFIN:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
REID:
And as someone who is only a few years away from that 60-year-old, a great delight. Thank you.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Vanessa Handy, Alyia Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Melia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Thanasi Dilos, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Little Monster Media Company.