The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – SeniorITy: How AI and tech can enhance senior living by Lucia Dore, Carole Railton

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

SeniorITy: How AI and tech can enhance senior living by Lucia Dore, Carole Railton Luciadore.com Do you feel frustrated and left behind as every aspect of daily life – from banking and shopping to health and communication – becomes increasingly dependent on technology, the internet, and artificial intelligence (AI)? SeniorITy empowers us as we age, and those hesitant to engage with new technologies, by exploring the positives of becoming knowledgable and fully connected online. Accepting technological advances can help you live a long, healthy, and more rewarding life. Learn how to: Understand why you find it difficult to engage with the digital world Overcome frustration with the technology necessary for everyday life Make decisions about the best tech options for you Protect yourself and your data online Embrace digital advances that can increase independence and improve quality of life Biography Founder at Lucia Dore Consultancy | Co-Founder at Behavioural Shift. Masters Fine Arts (MFA), BA (Hons), LGSM, Post Grad Dip Journalism, TESOL

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. There you go. Welcome to the big show, our family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being

a part of the show thanks for coming by as always we have the most smartest most brilliant people on the show they share with you their journeys their stories everything is done in light the ceos the billionaires the pulitzer prize winners all the great authors who spent lifetimes sometimes checking out and developing their ideas their, recovering from all their cathartic moments, and sharing and dispensing the wonderful ideas, thoughts, paradigms that they can share with you on helping make your life better. Today, we have another amazing young lady on the show. She's the author of the latest book that just came out, May 4th, 2023, Seniority, How AI and Tech Can Enhance Senior Living by Lucia Dorr. And she's going to be talking to us about what in her book and how, you know, AI is really hot right now, how that can apply to folks that are in their senior living eras and how they can, you know, understand what's going on and how it's working.

And that may include me as well, because I'm still trying to figure out what all this noise is about. And I'm like, what are you doing this stuff again i don't know i can't i'm still trying to figure out the vcr and how to set the timer lucia lucia door joins us on the show she is a financial journalist editor author and documentary maker she has many years experience in the print and online media working in in the UK and Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Asia Pacific. She's written many articles, white papers, and management reports and books, case studies, investigative articles, opinion pieces, books, newsletters, as well as web content.

One of the books which she co-authored is about refugees in New Zealand and others about the seniors and technology in AI. She joins us on the show. Welcome. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. There you go. Thanks for coming on. The weather here in the summer in New Zealand is changeable.

You guys are here in the summer. It's winter. I'm freezing my butt over there. I'm going to have to come over your guys' way one of these days. I need to learn to move between Australia and New Zealand in the winter when it's here and then move back and forth so I can just skip the whole

winter thing. That's what people do in the winter. Because they come here. Canadians, Americans come to Queenstown for skiing. Ah, there you go. Queenstown for the skiing. Ah, there you go. Queenstown for the skiing. I never thought of that.

So give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? They can find me on really my personal website, which is lucia.dor.co.nz and also on behavioral shift which is www.behavioral.com there you go so tell us about your book and the title of it has seniority and then the it part of it is in a capital it seniority how ai and tech can enhance senior living give us a 30 000 overview please oh it's really about how the seniors can practice or look at ai and technology and how they're using it so often, and they often don't know. It looks at wealth, health, ethics, the fear of using technology, how your body language has changed over the years, and things like that.

We have learned a number of things from that book. One was seniors were defined as people over 65. There you go. So there you are. That's quite a number of them. We don't know. Nobody wants to think they're old at 65, but, you know, it's people not up to date with the latest technology,

but we found people are fear technology, not just because they don't know it, but because younger people don't know it either. It's often because older people just aren't aware of the latest things, the latest developments, and they're not kept up to date. The younger people can just sort of pretend that they know and people assume that they'll pick it up. There you go.

Those young people they have no idea what they do like i always just i like i always say youth is wasted on the young but so ai artificial intelligence and all this stuff so give us a little bit of history and background on your life and how you came down these roads and well what happened is that i had been a journalist for i I still am I write about disruptive technologies but I was really focusing on financial technologies what happened is that I started I was working with a colleague in London about on seniors and I was based in New Zealand and she was in London she was caught in in the healthcare system and over COVID, caught COVID

and a number of problems with that. But in a way, the fact that AI was used in the healthcare system helped to save her. Oh, really? You know, there are some of the case studies in that, the fact

that she didn't have to, prescriptions you know automatically sent to doctor or the doctors send it to the um to the pharmacy to to be acknowledged and you it can be delivered to your house in the uk it can be delivered mean, that there was all a saving grace, and she was able to. People may not like the fact that you can't see doctors in person, but the fact that she was able to do it virtually also enabled her to speak with doctors that she wouldn't be able to. And the fact that there are so many machines in the healthcare system,

when you're in the hospital, it all helps you keep you alive so we were looking at that and that sort of it came about after I had been working on AI and journalism so when I had been involved in in doing all that in fact in the middle east so we looked at a number where seniors they focus on what happens with seniors generally what you know in terms of you know accessing difficulties and dating in maybe issues with diet and things like that, but not with technology. Oh, wow. So when you wrote your book, what did you learn from it? What did you see that maybe opened your eyes and made you go, oh, wow, there's some really interesting things going on?

I mean, I think that you realize that most of the organizations that deal with seniors still deal with things like their physical attributes, which are important for seniors, but it's, you know, like going to the gym and all the rest of it. But dealing with technology is seen as a sideline. It's important, but it's not a must have because people feel because they've never had to deal with technology, they don't want to deal with it now. You know, people who are older than me, you know, they grew up in a world where we didn't have all these technology gadgets. I was lucky enough to grow up in a world where we didn't have them for the first part of my life.

And so, you know, learning to talk to people and look at people and be engaged with people instead of looking into a phone and, you know, going and doing things in real life and, you know, playing in the street and, you know, having an imagination, you know, that was a part of our life. And so I've lived, you know, with my life, I've lived on the two halves of, of kind of the old world before cell phones and now cell phones. And so I have that, but you know, a lot of these younger people don't, but you're right. A lot of, a lot of people, you know, didn't have to deal with this sort of stuff that are in the senior class. So what are

the main reason a lot of seniors don't want to engage with technology or do you find that they want to engage they just try to they have a hard time figuring out where to on ramp or or what i we had i came out after looking at i was in fact living for quite when i came back from the middle east and i had been in Queenstown for a while. I was living at the country club with a number of, you know, so I had older relatives around me and people around me, you know, in the 80s or 90s and it was quite interesting watching. Although everything had to be geared towards technology, you know,

like in terms of even the medical records, the fact that you have an alarm and it allows somebody to be helped. That's use of AI. But what we found is that people fear technology just because they're not up to date with it. A number of people have been working on technology when it first started, the IBMs of this world, the Ciscos, etc. And they haven't been brought up to speed with the latest developments. And they're told by younger people often that they're too old to learn. And I thought that was true. Yeah.

But, but that's what a lot of people believe and therefore they believe it. We found that they like being taught by people. They know their relatives, but that's not necessarily the most effective way to learn. My mom likes to learn everything about technology. If I do something on her phone or help her with something technology-wise, she wants to see how I do it so she can be empowered and do it herself.

And, you know, she's just like everybody else. I mean, she just has to be taught. We all have to kind of learn it from somebody else or kind of learn how to do it herself. And, you know, she's just like everybody else. I mean, she just has to be taught. We all have to kind of learn it from somebody else or kind of learn how to do it. And so I think to her, she really enjoys the challenge of it and, you know, understanding her world. And, you know, I think most, I don't know about most seniors, I can't speak for them because I'm not quite a senior yet,

but I haven't given up yet. So maybe, I don't know, I think I'm at the point where I'm just going to give up on learning anything new at this point. I'm over it. What was quite interesting is that I found that my mother, who is about 80, she wouldn't touch technology at all. Really? And she wouldn't even use internet banking. And she would have to go into the bank and get checks and get cash. That's a real hassle, particularly if you're in a rural town. That's a really big hassle.

Yet my father, who was 87, was really into technology. He did all his banking on the internet. He never went into a bank. He paid everything online he wanted to know all the time what was happening exactly oh you're going too fast tell me what do i have to do how do i do that what do i have to do you know because then it would give him the tools to learn and he was really quite au fait with what was happening. So I think if people are patient with them, they will start. But it's interesting.

My mother wouldn't even learn. I have an uncle who's 92, and he will not touch technology. I can see that because, you know, you're like, hey, I lived a great life without any of this crap going on. So I'm fine. I didn't need this to get here. So you guys have fun with your stupid toys. And I think there's, you know, I think when they're older and they're not looking for a job, it probably doesn't matter that much.

Like, what am I going to do? I don't need work. It probably doesn't matter. But it matters if you're in the workforce. If you want a job when you're older or you want to, because at that point, you need to understand and to use technology to be able to go forward. Yeah. To be able to be taken seriously. Yeah.

In the workforce. Plus, with technology technology there's a lot of good things like my mom likes her british show she likes certain shows and and so you know she's got to do the chromecast thing where you broadcast it off the off the off the ipad there and you know all the different things that go into that and sometimes the technology gets mucked up because you know it's technology but you know it makes it improves the quality of life because you can you know enjoy some different things that you can do or shows or whatever uh good stuff i think she has games that she has on her phone and so you know she she likes to do all these things you know follow the news follow her emails talk talk to her friends you know everybody talks by text now no one calls

each other and talks anymore so you kind of have to adopt that way if you want to talk to people um no nobody uses the phones anymore they don't call what's like i'm not a senior and it still bugs me i'm just like what what's wrong with a phone call i like calling people and saying hello hey how you going let's talk like human beings it's really it's really this weird thing we did for a millennia until we got to this stage of it but yeah and so you talk in the book about how how it can enhance senior living what other things using ai have you seen that have helped as i mentioned i think in the health care system but in everyday living in terms of the fridge, the cook, the cooker,

the rain, you know, it all makes a difference. The fact that often, you know, you can touch a stove and it can go on or off. It can go off immediately, something doesn't work or something is bad the fridge automatically makes a noise if it's left open yeah little things like that or people might choose to leave the house and put the alarms on yeah that's something that they couldn't do before but they feel i think they get used to doing it and they don't realize that that is what technology has enabled them to do. Yeah. And it's enabled them to be wealthier as well. Yeah. I mean, many people can track their investments online, like my father.

You know, you can look at what's happening online you can do your own investing if you choose you couldn't do that once and either things that they need to understand and I think they need to feel comfortable even using things like iPads the fact that they can read or Kobos or whatever. They can read and they can enlarge the print to make it easier for them to read. Technology is allowing that. Once they couldn't. You write in your book about how to overcome frustration with the technology

necessary for everyday life what are some tips to to not feel over overwhelmed or frustrated when you're presented with new technology and you're trying to understand it i think that you have to and that you have to sort of sit down and realize you are not unusual. Just because you're older doesn't mean you're stupid. Yeah, that's true. And I think people have realized people who are older have been told that so often, oh, they're stupid. You won't understand anyway.

So you just have to – they need somebody who is patient with them, and they need to be patient with the use of it and realize that other people get frustrated too. They're not alone in that. And they have to just do everything slowly in their own time and follow the instructions. And if need be, call in some help and don't feel bad. Yeah don't don't you shouldn't feel like you're stupid i mean we all go through you know we went to a school we had to learn stuff new i i flunked most of it because i was an idiot and you know it's not that you're stupid it's just you know you sometimes you need a different format of learning. Like some people learn being shown how to do things.

I'm a person that I learn when I can do it. Like if you teach me, you know, you get a chalkboard and try teaching me how to, I don't know, use a phone. Like my eyes will glaze over and roll back in my head. And, you know, but if you hand me a phone and you show me how to do it and i can interact with it from a tactile experience i can understand it better so you know we all go through that life and yeah it's not and sometimes you know you need repetition this is why you know kids watch the same tv show over and over again that's how they master stuff that's how they practice stuff i think people have to realize the older people have to realize,

the younger people are good at technology, supposedly, because they do it again and again and again. Yeah. And they start from very young, and they just repeat it, and they're just used to doing that. Yeah. They're also used to the frustration that comes with technology. Yeah. that yeah they're also used to to the frustration that comes with technology yeah i was visiting with my mom the other day and and and i was typing some message or email or something on you know

pounding away on there on the phone and she's like how do you type that fast and i'm like i don't know i used to hate it i used to really hate doing it fast i used to make fun of all those young kids who can do it really fast but i've just been doing it for so long. I guess it's fast now. So it's a mastery of a skill, really. You just keep doing it. And I think that's what's quite interesting is that phones we're used to texting, but there is new technologies out there that allow older people to see and to text better.

Yeah, you can do voice messages too. One of my people, go ahead. Because of the size of their fingers. They often get frustrated because they touch the wrong keys. Yeah, I still do do that i misspell and screw stuff up all the time i'll send something i'll be like oh my god it's i screwed all that up but i mean you know like you say the most important thing is don't get frustrated don't get upset with yourself we all make mistakes i mean jesus anybody who's read anything i've posted on facebook and

been like did he learn grammar or what you know did Did he flunk second grade? Yes, he did. You talk about making the best tech options and choices for yourself. Tell us what some of the best decisions people can make for tech options that are in the world right now. What do you mean?

What they should go to to choose for all to pick? Like devices or applications or apps? Oh, there are. I list a number of applications in the book, but it was mainly to do with reading and writing. And a lot, unfortunately, and they keep being updated all the time some spanish companies

some american companies have been dealing with the new with different technologies and try like there are technologies out there that allow older people to get ahead of the queue. So if there's a queuing system, older people can get in first so they don't have to achieve that. Now, it will depend on who buys that technology, what companies want to buy that, but it is possible. You can buy certain technologies that as i say will allow for if you're finding it hard to hit keys right you can get phones that are specifically get really simple they don't have all the all the gadgets they don't have the cameras all they do is text they're larger phones but

you key in and they just dial out yeah and you know just like a normal phone and i think that that's all people want they don't want all the bells and whistles yeah you can just get a flip phone if you really want to and still be able to text. And you have that nice tactile keyboard. You know, when my mom was asking me how I type that fast, she says, how big are the little letters on your screen? And I told her, you know,

one of my problems is I have very large hands. I mean, I have these giant 10 to 12 inch span hands and I'm 6'2". Everything on me is large. So, you know, I'm sitting there anytime I'm trying to bang those, those, those little keys, I had to go in and find a program that could make the keys like half the screen basically. And they're like huge. And that's,

that's the only way I can do that. And so you're right. There are different applications. And if you just search for them, you can figure out ways to, to make that work better for you. Yeah, I think there are some examples in the book about what will happen, but they will have been superseded. I mean, every few weeks, if not every couple of months, you know, new technologies are coming out that are good. And so they are the, what is noticeable is some of the companies like IBM, I can't remember some of the, you know, Cisco, you know, they are working on technologies for older people. There you go. And I think that's important because…

But it's not something That is being discussed. Yeah. And it should be more because if we can make their lives better, easier, and I imagine there's a lot to do with not only what can be done in medical fields, but just the comfort of their life and stuff. I have a sister who's in a care center.

The comfort, making sure she's comfortable and she can watch her shows and different things who's in a care center, the comfort, you know, making sure she's comfortable and, you know, she can watch her shows and different things is really important to making her quality of life as important as it possibly can be and making her engaged. You know, she's got, she's got an iPad where she can play games and engages her brain. It helps keep her sharp, even though she's fading a little bit with MS dementia. And so a lot of those different things are important because, you know, you can, when you're retired, you have a little more time to yourself where the rest of us are chasing a buck around the world.

And so, you know, when you're not talking to us as we're chasing a buck around the world, you've got things you can do and things you can enjoy and all that good stuff. Yeah, so there is something that people are very aware of. The technology companies are increasingly aware of what seniors are wanting, and everything is being designed more with older people in mind. And people, I think seniors need to be aware of that, that they're not alone. Now, one of my friends who's in his senior years, he found that engaging with ChatGPT, because ChatGPT is a generative AI tool, and it will talk to you.

And so you can literally sit there and have a conversation with it. And it's kind of designed in a way to have a conversation with you and give you results or things that you might be interested in. And you can literally have a chat with it. And he actually wrote a book about having conversations with it and how it can be utilized. And he found it actually helped him because he's retired and he's kind of reclusive and likes to kind of do his own thing. And he found that by having a conversation with him, it kind of, it didn't really help bring a human into his life, but it helped him bring in, you know, almost a human, an

AI thing. And then the conversations he has with it are very engaging in the fields and knowledge. You know, he's written several books, a successful author and he wanted to, you know, there's things he wants to talk about or explore, like tell me how to fix this. And so it really enhanced the quality of his life. And, you know, he's like, you can just sit there and just talk to it and it'll go back and forth and I'll give you results. And I can see how something like that, especially, especially if people are more reclusive in their senior years

or maybe they're not as outgoing or maybe they're in a care center or a senior facility living where they're not out running marathons these days. But they can still have that interaction. They can have something that still stimulates their mind and engage them and they don't feel alone no exactly i think that that technology also in here we talk about in places like japan robots i mean is that a good thing for them to be so attached to robots for company?

But maybe, maybe that's the solution. I also want to add that my colleague was also dyslexic. Oh, really? Yes. So it was quite interesting and relatively late in diagnosing dyslexia, which is probably what happens to a number of people. But the fact that technology and AI have allowed dyslexics to wear colored glasses, and that helps to alleviate visual distortions.

Oh, that's right. They have those things now where it can help people. I know that's a big issue for a now where yeah it can help people i know that's a that's a big issue for a lot of folks in what they do you talk about protecting yourself and your data online there's a lot of predatory evil people who prey on seniors you know one of my friends he had uh his grandmother was called up she was fairly late in her age and this person on the phone was pretending to be him and saying that he was in jail in new york city and he needed eighteen thousand dollars worth of bail money sent to him wired and to get him out of jail and And of course his grandmother was, you know, at, at her wits end

and, you know, wanted to help. And, and, and all she needed to do was call his house to see that he was really at his home. And they have AI now where they can actually duplicate your voice as well. And there's, they have a whole gaming system to it. If you, if you Google it, they have like a, you know, some guy will call and claim he's from the bond company and then he'll say if you call this number you can talk to the lawyer and then they call you know it's a full racket of of grifters and scammers and so she wired eighteen thousand dollars of her money to this place in the bronx in New York, and it was a total scam. And, you know, you see this thing now with the, they have the thing where they get the senior citizens

to take and open up their computers so they can be hacked, and their bank accounts can be cleaned out. There's the gift card system, you know. So what are some ways you talk about in the book on how? Well, in the book, we don't talk about cyber crime so much because because it's changing so much and there's so much of it and then it was evolved a lot of it was dating with loneliness oh really yeah and the fact that that yeah tell me more about that what we found we spoke with one person who's a criminologist in Thailand, and he was noticing how cybercrime obviously had increased.

And a lot of it was a result of dating and older people were our target. Wow. there's a whole lot of, I think, you know, they might lose cards, for example, but all that is, like, there's an African country, I think, I think it might be Ghana or somewhere, where they collect all the rubbish, credit cards and computers, but but they because people ship the computers to these countries and then they the criminal gangs they take the all the stuff from the computers and therefore they can get access to all the data that cyber crime you know and then they can target the older people because they think they're going to be more susceptible, particularly in cases of loneliness. And then there was, oh, I can't remember, but this person in Thailand,

this criminologist sort of said there are a lot of times that they just want to, on everything, they want to focus on older people because they thought they would really get a better return. Get a better. You know, and older people kind of came from area where there wasn't a lot of this evil stuff going on and it wasn't so easy for criminals to get to them, access to them.

And, you know, they, they hear some good, you know, some, what sounds like a well-meaning person on the, on the thing. And they haven't been talked to for a while. And, and so, you know, they hear some good, you know, some what sounds like a well-meaning person on the thing and they haven't been talked to for a while. And so, you know, they think they don't have this sort of suspicions.

I think that many of us who grew up in, you know, kind of cyber crime and, you know, all the emails that we get and everything else, there's the deceptive emails. But it's definitely important that, you you know the senior folks are educated you know my mom's called me before and said hey there's this you know thing from the cable company and i'm clicking the link and i understand what's going on and and you know it's they they have these fake websites that they build you know and it's meant to steal your data or steal your credit cards or steal your logins and stuff and you know you know, they send you all this crap that is deceptive. And so, yeah. And a lot of seniors, you know, that's something they need to understand and work with and stuff.

And I think they're a little bit more trusting because they grew up in an era where you kind of trust people a little bit more. Yeah, I think, I mean, I've been scammed recently, you know, and there was a lot of money involved, but I wasn't, in the end, I didn't pay the money because then I thought this is not right. Because I know, but there's a lot of times that I think that older people are just seem, they just appear more vulnerable, they're more trusting. And that is unfortunately has to change.

We also noticed in the book, say, if you're buying things, you have to be very careful online buying things. You might end up in the dark web or something. Even today, I received something saying, oh, your details are on the dark web i know that car doesn't work anymore so i don't know quite what they're talking about but retail is a good thing people can buy online you know and then they can but they can have avatars that that dress up they show what the clothes look like in their size and whatever,

which they couldn't before. So people, I think seniors could really benefit from that. They don't have to get in their cars. They don't have to go out. They don't have to shop. They could do it online, but they haven't been taught how. They haven't been shown that that's a real advantage. There you go. And so it's just important that they're careful with what they

do and how they do it and all that good stuff. So as we round out, give us some ideas. You've got your websites here I'm looking over. What are some of the services you offer? Looks like you do some different things there. And how can people onboard with you and reach out to you for help? Well, we are involved in coaching. And anybody who wants to look at technology for seniors, whether it's good for them. If it's not, we look at that. And we have some podcasts as well. There you you go do you want to plug any of the podcast titles at the moment we just started um okay we're just starting but one would be

no i can't really do the you know do that at the moment we are just starting okay there you go and so what's the website that people can utilize to reach out to you and find out more the best way is to go to my personal website which is luciador.co.nz and um and i also have a consultancy which deals with translation work, et cetera. So I will help, you know, separately, luciador.com, which is my consultancy. As I say, that will sort of look at both management consulting and communication. I mean, as a journalist, that's what really I've been involved in so it's they're the two main sites so if you look at those then you'll be able to get hold of me through that it will automatically go to

my main email which is yeah so there you go it's been wonderful to have you on the show and any final thoughts as we go out no i just like to say that i don't think anybody should be fear technology because you're older you can benefit from it and i don't think ai will be taking over the world either because at the moment it's a long way from that. It's really, it's a long,

long way from where that will happen. So when you mean taking over the world, you mean like, like Terminator style taking over the world? Yeah. Like jobs and be able to do everything that humans do. I don't think they can. They still need human input. I hope that that is a while off because I kind of like keeping my day job.

So there you go. Oh, I'm sure you will. I hope so. I mean, there are podcasts that are now being replaced by AI, but I don't think any are as funny and interesting as I am and Orgid looking, for that matter. So there you go. Exactly.

I don't think it will work like that i don't think ai you still have to understand what ai does there you go there you go it's been wonderful to have you on the show thank you for coming on okay thank you thank you chris thank you very much and thanks for tuning in go ahead and order up the book wherever fine books are sold seniority how ai and tech can enhance senior living might be a great gift to give away to your parents or grandparents and maybe help them navigate the tools

of what's going on in the crazy world of tech because every day it just keeps going, oh my gosh, even with AI, I'm just like, seriously, more? What are we doing? I can barely hold it on at this point. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com,

4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.

Thank you.