Re-Thinking Virtual Reality

Michael Hughes 00:00
Hi everybody and welcome to The Art of aging, which is part of the abundant aging podcast series reunited, Churchill’s. On this show, we look at what it means to age in America and in other places around the world with positive and empowering conversations that challenge Encourage, inspire everyone everywhere to age with abundance, I’m pleased to bring to you a another in what we call our aging innovators series. And we are talking with Kyle Rand with Ren Devere, CEO and founder of our endeavor, about his work in virtual reality technology and working with older adults. And Kyle, I gotta say, when I first or when we first thought about the aging innovator series, you were probably the first or one of the first people that came to mind that I really wanted to interview. Obviously, we’ve known each other for several years and admire the growth of read endeavor. And I just think we’ve been amazing things. Now that I’ve fallen over you, welcome, Kyle with the podcast. Thank you, Mike, for

Kyle Rand 01:00
having me. You know, podcasts are always so fun to do. But they’re always more fun when you’re doing that with friends. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Michael Hughes 01:08
I really appreciate that. So look, Kyle, you’ve got an amazing history. But this is the part where I want you to introduce yourself. Tell us about your endeavor, tell us about yourself. What would you like to share to kind of kick this off? Yeah, there’s

Kyle Rand 01:22
so much. So hello, everyone really excited to be here today. Again, my name is Kyle ran. I’m the co founder and the CEO of endeavor, rent ever at its core, we are a company that was founded back in 2016. And on a mission that to overcome social isolation amongst the aging population. And the primary way we do that is through VR through virtual reality. And that might sound kind of funny, but it’s probably easiest to understand that our entire guiding principles we’ve been building out this company in this approach has been that the foundation, our belief, the foundation of all human connections, is positive shared experiences. And so we see as a huge opportunity, as we innovate and change the landscape of aging, it’s to make sure that as you get older and older, even if your world starts to shrink, you still should have the opportunity to experience the world and most importantly, to experience the world with people that you care about people you love, or people that you might have the opportunity to build a new relationship with. And so that’s what we do every endeavor, we’ve been doing it for a long time, and we love it.

Michael Hughes 02:23
And it’s really inspiring peril, because, you know, I, some of our other guests have reflected on just the, you know, the cycle of aging. And the idea that, you know, as you get older, your body may tend to disappoint you more. But that may be a period of your life where you’re most creative, or you want to experience new things, or share or whatever. And that’s, it’s nice to know that solutions like this are emerging and becoming real, because I think it’s very helpful for us, as we look forward in our own lives, to know that even if our world is getting smaller, because perhaps our function is being limited, there are opportunities to open it back up and actually experience really new and compelling things. So that is awesome. But you know, you’re a guy that could be doing a lot of things. I mean, you could be creating a new sports drink, or you could be creating a new, I don’t know, running shoe, or you could be doing a lot of stuffing what, what, why aging? What, what really inspired you to kind of get into this world.

Kyle Rand 03:17
And first of all, I have to say, I think you’re over indexing on my potential outside of I have to think good question. And I think anybody who’s listening to this, who actively works with older adults will recognize that it’s a calling, right, the moment that you feel an attachment to the aging process, no matter what causes that originally, it’s really hard to turn away from. And for me personally, like I grew up with, specifically, super close to my grandparents. And unfortunately, my college career was bookended by losing both of my grandfather’s won to a super southern cardiac event. And one to having a cancer diagnosis after she had previously survived brain cancer. Like she was this super, super powered woman that was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And then we saw I saw firsthand just how bad the care transition process can be for family members. Even if everyone’s doing their best, right, it is a difficult thing to go through. And it’s happening to so many people. And I think once you experience it, once you see it, or once you get a taste of what could go wrong. It’s hard not to want to throw your hand up and say, Hey, we need to make this better. There’s an opportunity to make this go right for everybody. And, you know, I’m sure you hear this or you’re excited by this too. I think it’s really unique. This industry right now, I think the two big words that really stood out to me are people are talking about purpose, and people are talking about thriving. And those are two words that are so wonderful to build a career around, right? Isn’t nothing fake or anything. It’s fun, it’s purposeful. It’s meaningful and like ultimately as humans, I think that’s what we all want as we Start out our career.

Michael Hughes 05:01
Yeah, you know, and remember, my colleague, Reverend MLflow, and Higgins, who also is a host on this podcast, I, she has a wonderful analogy about stages of life. And it’s almost like, you know, you build these vessels for yourself, as you as you go through life. And in the vessel, you put all these things you put the people that you’d like to go with you, you put the goals you’d like to do achieve, you have all these things you want to attain in terms of your career and jobs, and things like that. And then something happens that cracks the vessel. And when the vessel cracks, then there’s a readjustment and sort of an idea to maybe take out some of those old things and put new things back in again. And you know, I’ve certainly had things in my life where that have that reevaluation. And for you in college, I mean, that must have been just, you know, for me, that has been really impactful and given you a lot of perspective, when your grandparents passed, right?

Kyle Rand 05:57
Totally. I love that analogy. Because I was while grandma was going through that experience, I was in this mindset of I want to do a PhD, like I was doing all sorts of research, my undergrad career was double research in cognitive neuroscience, I was looking, I was working on cognitive decline with aging population. And then I was doing our engineering research. And I thought that I was going to be a neuro engineering PhD. So I actually moved down to Brazil, to pursue this research course. And then something happened where the vessel cracked, that ended up having me be like, Ah, this is not the right path for me. And I decided I wanted to go into the broad healthcare space. And then the experience of Graham, I continued, and it was a redirection in the best possible way, I’m thankful for it. And,

Michael Hughes 06:47
of course, there was another sort of inspiration in your, in your past that sort of led you in this space. And this was really just the beginning of the discovery of virtual reality, but just sort of this light bulb in your head, and those of your other founders, where, you know, you thought, you know, VR was a great way to kind of, you know, achieve the things that you wanted to out of out of, you know, the offerings you wanted to build. I mean, how did you come to VR? What, Where did VR kind of, you know, play into it?

Kyle Rand 07:21
It’s so interesting, because our early days, it’s fairly easy to get some right summarize, our early days were spent at MIT, in 2015 2016. And that was right as VR was starting to come out, right, like everyone was getting their like, first VR headset experience. I remember personally, my first VR headset experience was with one of those old cardboard VR headsets, I remember. I was put into a roller coaster experience. And I thought it was the worst thing ever, I like threw the headset. Far, far away, I was like, I do not like that’s so important that your first experience is a really positive experience. And luckily, headsets have come up very far away. But as we were in this ecosystem of people testing and playing and throwing people into rollercoasters, we came to really understand that ultimately, what this technology allows, is, no matter where you are in life, no matter where you’re sitting, you put this headset on, you can go anywhere in the world, you can do absolutely anything. And if constructed and done well, you can do it with anyone. And most importantly, this is where we are today, it doesn’t have to be the person sitting next to you. It could be someone who is living 300 miles away, 3000 miles away, if they’re in the same experience with you, you get to share that. And going back to like how we built this entire company, our whole premise is that if you can enable and deliver these shared experiences to people, you can build those relationships. And we’re actually seeing this happen in a clinical trial that we have going on right now that’s funded by the National Institute of Aging, which just I think, is a really simple way of saying, look at how far we’ve come from this original like, wow, you can do so much too. We can actually see clinical benefits when you use ers the right way.

Michael Hughes 09:09
You’ll know I love that the early use case for VR was a roller coaster because it can see that it’s really stress testing how people react to virtual reality experiences. And of course, we’ve always kind of seen the videos of someone like you know, batting something in a game and smacking their smartphone or their their screen off a wall or things like that. And but no, it has come a long way. So can you please outline for us just the offerings that you have right now? And what is read endeavor give to people right now?

Kyle Rand 09:37
Yeah, so we have a lot. So we’ve been again, coming up on our seventh birthday this quarter, which is wild to think about.

Michael Hughes 09:45
eternity in the age tech space, by the way,

Kyle Rand 09:49
and eternity. Eternity. So it all started with this core resident engagement platform, which is a networked VR system where you the easiest way to think about It is we deploy for headsets in a tablet to see building community. And then in the afternoon, part of the programming of the day, a group of residents will come down, they’ll sit in a nice, comfortable circle of chairs, and then activity director lifestyle like like the Richmond person will have a tablet. And through that tablet, they will say, where do you guys want to go today, and everyone wants it, let’s go to Paris. And the person leaving the session says, Hey, let’s do it. And within like three clicks, and a snap of the fingers, everybody in their VR headset is transported to the Eiffel Tower. And that’s where the journey begins. And then throughout that session, or staff members, both through our training, and the product itself, teaches them how to really make sure that they’re leading the session in a way that gets people to talk, and get people to share stories and get people to laugh together and just smile together and just experience joy together while experiencing new things. And if done well, and everybody probably listening to this knows, like staff members in these situations are really good at doing this. When done well. After the headsets are removed, we’ll see residents go leave the VR session and go sit down at a cafe or sit down at lunch and have a meal together and continue talking. Which again, for us, it’s utilizing the shared experiences to build relationships and build connection. And we see this happen day over day. So that’s like our core core bread and butter. And then we’ve always been innovation first company, right. And so our other two really big products are we have a program called endeavor Live, which is live sessions that were originally only available through VR, but we actually opened it up to anybody, any senior living community, through a tablet through their own computer can comes over and never live and we do live sessions every day. As of today, we’re doing three live sessions that range from everything from meditation to a book club, to travel adventure sessions. And then coming June, we’re going to be elaborating that I think six hours of programming every single day that everybody has at their fingertips, which for us is we look at kind of the staffing crisis and the way things are shifting. But that becomes a point of reliability in the way we’re doing our programs, which I think is a huge, huge value add any single community before they’re ready for VR, they can jump in our on our community, and what I love about how we’ve built our endeavor live, all of the communities that joined they’re all joining together. And so we have like live chat and other interaction methods, where people are like really forming relationships, not just within their community, but in between buildings, which I think this is the future of senior living, right. It doesn’t matter where you’re physically located, there are communities that you get to be a part of and Senior Living gets to inspire those communities, hopefully, through partners like us. And then on the other side, for people who love VR, you’re seeing VR provide benefit in all sorts of ways. We launched our endeavor fit, which was actually just most recently awarded on times best invention list last year. I

Michael Hughes 13:05
gotta tell you, man, my legs have never gotten more sore, in short, so it had me sit on the butt, you know, you sit in the chair, do the bicycle pumping, and then I had to smack things with my hands and really don’t go and I stood up afterwards. And I’m like, Man, I just had a workout on that. So that it was a lot of fun too. So never fit. Very cool. But sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. But yeah, tell us about your endeavor. Now.

Kyle Rand 13:30
It’s okay. What we don’t tell people is when our friends come to do the demos, or break up the resistance on the bikes and make sure they really are

Michael Hughes 13:38
reviewing, I knew that you didn’t come through resistance, I couldn’t actually get in the chair. So

Kyle Rand 13:43
yeah, there’s a lot that Riverside is capable of, I think, like, the simplest way to understand it is there is a lot of research that shows that functional strength or functional fitness is a really core part of longevity, and all reduction of prevention. But there’s also a body of research that says if you can do functional fitness and cognitive fitness, and you can put those things together, you’ll actually net increase the value add from that session on both sides. And so we took that, and then we added the third layer, which just is the most important one, which is the social backbone of everything that we do, where every time you’re doing the right number fit session, you’re getting an exercise, like a biking session, you’re doing it while having a cognitive kind of task that just emphasizes and enhances the benefit for you. And then you’re doing it socially. So in that biking session, I don’t know if you are going against somebody Mike Rose. Yeah, so you were biking you can see someone next to you biking and like someone passes you like Oh, I got a bike harder than somebody passes. You’re right. That’s exactly right scores together. And it just makes it so fun. And, you know, read never fit was really a labor of love and I will never forget we started do a test in community cuz I have never heard a staff and residents laugh so hard together, which is funny because it’s fitness, like who asks a fitness, but the joy and like the movement and like the surprises that come up in the session, it just gets people going. And I’m really excited about where we’re going with it, we just got a few clinical trials or pre clinical trials funded, and there’s a big future there

Michael Hughes 15:22
it is at the NIH thing that you were talking about.

Kyle Rand 15:25
No, that’s, that’s for our core resident engagement.

Michael Hughes 15:28
And just for listeners, you know, the topic of exercise balance called what we call dual tasking, exercise is something that we’re going to develop and put up as an IT as as another part of this series. But I wanted to switch a little bit and just talk about your experiences with, you know, people that are may consider older, and then their use of technology, because I think there’s a lot of tropes out there, you know, anywhere from like, you know, oh, the, you know, the older lady that puts on a VR headset, and oh, wow, and cool. And isn’t it? But also, the idea that, you know, older people can’t use technology, or they don’t want to use it? And if what has been your experience with, you know, someone that you know, maybe in assisted living maybe in their 70s 80s 90s First Coming into contact with your technology, learning to use it? I mean, are there any commonalities, whatever reflections do you have on that? I think

Kyle Rand 16:20
most importantly, my, as a society, we need to get past the stereotype that older adults in tech don’t mix. Like we have seen people can do this for seven years. We have seen time and time again, older adults fall remote with VR, which I think probably a lot of people listening, you know, maybe haven’t spent that much time in a VR headset, probably they think, oh, it’s for kids. It’s, we hear this all the time, right? Oh, yeah, my kid has a VR headset, he uses it all the time. But older adults, if you create a product, ignore the word technology, if you create a product that delivers real value, and what I think is most important, is not full of friction, right? That doesn’t create these frustrating moments of trying to understand like, what button does what if you can remove that, and then have a product that really just delivers value, they will adopt it, they will fall in love with it. And we actually see a lot of the times that older adults are much faster to adopt and much faster to try something which goes directly against the stereotype that older adults in tech don’t mix. It’s just wrong.

Michael Hughes 17:30
And I suppose that, you know, when we’re when I’m thinking about the way that you create your offerings, the different videos and things like that, I guess that the way that you know, you have worked with older adults? I mean, have they inspired new types of videos and offerings? To what degree do you tend to co create with the people that you serve? Yeah,

Kyle Rand 17:48
that’s a really great question. I think co creation is like, very important to us ever since the beginning. If I can kind of tell you where we were versus where we are today, in the very beginning, we thought that the only thing that was appropriate as we were launching was gonna be soothing experiences, like we were looking at, like animal therapy, and puppies, and nature and soothing experiences. And don’t get me wrong, all of those are amazing. And we have one animal therapy experience that I think it’s still like our most popular. But where we are today, we started hearing from communities that had residents who wanted to go ride a hot air balloon, or wanted to go on a roller coaster, this request came just like a month ago, again, or somebody who wanted to dirt bike again. And the requests ultimately like came from a desire to continue living life. Right, remove all physical limitations. You want to continue living life, whether that’s doing things that we used to love to do, or doing new things that we never got the opportunity to, or going back to places from the past or experiencing new cultures, it is a desire to just keep living, which goes back to purpose, and thriving. And when you get those requests, like it’s very in line with who we are, why we do what we do to say, Yeah, we got to make that happen for someone. And so much of the chagrin of our experienced team, we have built up this expectation and understanding that if you have something you want to do, let us know. And we will figure out how to make sure you can do it in VR, which sounds

Michael Hughes 19:26
like the most fun job in the entire world to actually go out and live these experiences and actually VR create them and bring them back in and then sort of see the surprise and the delight when that. And also you built up quite a library and are continuing to build up this very big library of VR experiences, right? Totally.

Kyle Rand 19:45
We have like, it’s huge. You can do anything on Reddit ever.

Michael Hughes 19:49
I also wanted to mention, you know, one of the things that I enjoyed was the integration with Google Earth because I put on the headset and you know, I’m from Toronto and I was able to go back and see my house. I grew up in Toronto and Google Earth and look around and kind of I mean, it wasn’t I wasn’t moving in it. But that’s, I mean, that for people that were there for reminiscence, I think that’s kind of, you know, that’s a great feature too, right.

Kyle Rand 20:16
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much research that shows that reminiscence therapy is one of the best things you can provide to people on the right care spectrum. And, like, the research shows, if you can do real good reminiscence therapy, you can decrease the pressure, decrease anxiety through those things, you can very likely decrease active symptoms and active behaviors. And that is so impactful for not just the residents, but for the staff members working within the communities for their families, who want to visit and may have had a bad experience. It just is such an opportunity. And one of the things that we’re doing in this clinical trial is we’re studying the use of reminiscence therapy, compared to other like traveling, the adventure sessions for the full spectrum of cognitive planning, for actually looking at mild to moderate cognitive impairment, including moderate dementia, and what we’re seeing when we’ve done it, like I don’t know if you’ve tried this yet with our platform, but we actually get family members involved. And family members go in and create a reminiscence journey, where they’re saying this, let’s go back to their childhood, oh, let’s go back to where they got married, let’s go to their college campus and the first home that they grew up their favorite vacation destination, and families create these journeys. And then they do the experience with their loved ones. And through that, which is an incredibly important part of, of essence, therapy. They’re actively engaging in therapy, right? They’re back at their childhood home, and they’re talking to their parents about memories from childhood, and then reacting to those memories from childhood that infuses joy and delight, and again, human connection in each of those experiences.

Michael Hughes 21:57
And that leads to another subject I wanted to talk to you about is this idea of intergenerational interactions, intergenerational experiences, and I know that that, well, I’ve heard that one of the markers of longevity is one’s ability to connect with it and make friends with continuously people older and younger than themselves. And but I’m just, you know, just the thing you were talking about family members, you know, is one thing to generations being in the family. Have you fostered? Are you looking to grow? I mean, what what’s your experience been just in general with sort of developing interact, intergenerational experiences for people or bringing generations together?

Kyle Rand 22:39
Yeah, I mean, I am a product of the benefit of what happens if you do real good intergenerational programming, right, like I actually started my grandparents inside, I started volunteering in the senior living community when I was in middle school, high school, and a lot of my foundational understanding of like, what the opportunity is to really inspire life with these older adults came from the days that I was scooping ice cream for older adults, as a team. And I think every single senior living community, probably is trying to figure out how to actually build a really robust volunteer program. And I think that technology offerings are one of the ways you can really bring a lot of a lot of younger kids in to the community and say, Hey, you get to try this cool thing, you get to try it with older adults. And if you do it the right way, you can also learn something through the process. Right. And that’s why I think the reminiscence journey options, really, they provide a lot of potential. And then the other side of that is, we all know how important family members are. Right? They are there through the decision making process, they experienced a lot ahead of a move in. And while senior living, I think does a phenomenal job of you know, taking a lot of the active burden, also family members plate, we have to remember that there’s still like, pent up burden and pent up guilt. And that process is that it it’s a decision, it’s a single move in but it’s a continuous kind of emotional journey with families. And if we can make sure that we are providing opportunities for family members to stay involved in the human side of care, but not the physical side of care, then we’re going to have better relationships with the family members, the residents are going to have better lives because families will not be so scared about visiting that they’ll want to come and spend time and they’ll be able to stay engaged longer. And to your point. If we do this correctly, we can actually increase longevity with our residents, which is a value add to every single stakeholder in senior living.

Michael Hughes 24:46
It makes caregiving fun tour and makes the caregiving fun. Even if you know even if you’re a middle schooler coming into, you know a facility and volunteering and not knowing what to expect and then having the opportunity maybe to share a VR experience with someone that’s much older than yourself. And then in the experience, maybe you hear stories, or you’re just that joining in together, I think it’s a reminder for us that there is this continuous to continuance of us as we age, you know, there’s always weight, finding joy, and this richness and understanding. And just, I mean, you know, you put a nine year old and a nine year old together and they share a VR experience, again, is that continuous is that you’re always going to have those touchstones of joy, which is very inspiring.

Kyle Rand 25:34
You know, it goes back to kind of what we need to do is we need to help society reshift their understanding of what aging looks like, and what older adults are and who they are. And remember that they’re humans. And I think one of the things that is always in the back of our mind is that for a lot of young people, whether or not they’re nine years old, or 19 years old, or 29, or even 39, they’re, it’s not always clear how to engage and interact with an older adult. But if you can provide a moment of connection through a moment of joy, and through a shared experience, like a VR experience, that it creates something natural and tangible, and it can be small, but those small moments are what ends allow a full conversation to start to bloom.

Michael Hughes 26:15
And ETL we really get into the subject of ageism here, Kyle, because you know what one of the one of the most very important things with at the booth Ross Parker center does at United Church homes, and it’s really to call out and combat these outdated ageist beliefs. And, really, I mean, I think that you have, you know, maybe a unique take on this. And I’ll tell you why. I mean, I’ve long admired what you’ve been doing, you know, we’ve been friends, I followed your work, and I always say, oh, my gosh, you and you’re younger than I am. And I’ll call you this, oh, look at this guy, he’s done so much. And you can’t believe he’s only this old, he’s done this. But that is an ageist point of view. Right? And I guess I mean, have you yourself? Is that something that you’ve experienced, as you’ve kind of developed in your career and as a leader, and all that is people kind of maybe discounting you because you might be younger than your peers in this space? Totally.

Kyle Rand 27:11
I think ageism definitely goes in both ways. And recently, probably in the past couple years, I’ve become far more confident, calling out industry peers who talk about us as like a lack of experience being a lack of business acumen. And that’s not true, right? Like we we’re in the business of helping people understand that age is just a number. Age is just a number, whether it’s 20, whether it’s 30, whether it’s 40, whether it’s 90, whether it’s 110. Age is just a number. And we should be treating each human as a human, very capable of their own individualistic skills, strengths, weaknesses, all of the above age is a part of it, but

Michael Hughes 27:52
well may Acropolis just about well may a couple for me, if I had experienced that it came from a good place. Now, we need a point taken. And thank you for sharing that with our listeners. So we are going to move on to I’m sorry, if you want to say something cool. I did.

Kyle Rand 28:06
Yeah. I mean, there was a moment at a reset nationwide Senior Living event, where I was standing in line with one of my colleagues who was just about my age for the bar. And this is like a happy hour at the exhibitor center. And we were standing in line, just having a nice conversation, and I returned to engage with a group that walked up behind us. And immediately another vendor looked at us I was like, Are you boys even old enough to be drinking? And I don’t know what she was thinking. But I was just like, okay, so ageism is still alive and well, cool. Good to know. Good sit out.

Michael Hughes 28:42
You want to be treated me if he could you treat me seriously, please. You know, that’s, that’s, that’s, I don’t know, this is a throwaway line, or what have you. But yeah, I guess we’re keeping that in. Okay. So, yeah. What I want to move on, and this has been a terrific conversation, Kyle, I mean, we could absolutely talk for hours. And, you know, I look for the next time we get together, have a chat. But we do like to enter podcasts with asking our guests three questions. And, and really has to do about your yourself and your own perceptions of yourself as you’ve age, that sort of thing. They’re the same questions for every guest. Is it? Okay, we ask those of you. Let’s do it. Okay, great. But first, tell us where we can find you.

Kyle Rand 29:29
Where can we learn more about render ever? So come on over to render.com You’ll see a lot follow us on LinkedIn. We’re always posting new videos of some of our partners in action. And then if you really want to see what render ever can do, we have a whole Vimeo showcase called moments from the fields that shows all of the magical things that we’ve seen, ranging from a woman with glaucoma was legally blind seen for the first time in years. One of my favorite videos of a woman with expressive aphasia Going and experiencing puppies, a roomful of puppies. I’m talking again for the first time in months, to all the way to the piece that we just did with the BBC, that features some of our great partners over nbkc, your name. And my old grandfather, Charles Zhang. So that is definitely worth a watch. It just went live this past week.

Michael Hughes 30:19
Okay, so that’s moments from the field. Is that a YouTube is that Vimeo is

Kyle Rand 30:23
a you can find it on whenever.com. Actually,

Michael Hughes 30:25
there’s a like 100 debit. You bet. Okay. All right. Well, here we go into our questions here. Okay, so question number one, if I can get my paper straight here. When you think about how you’ve age, what do you think has changed about you, or really grow with you, that you really like about yourself?

Kyle Rand 30:40
I think one thing that really, I’m always astounded by is my understanding of aging changes, I think, daily basis, like I used to probably be a bit of a Sunni teenager who would joke with my parents that they were getting old. And now when I talk to my parents, I’m like, You guys are so young and full of life. Like, there’s so much that you can do and I’m always like, hyping them up for like all the opportunities, which translates to the way I think about my own aging process, the way I like talk to people within this industry and the way I help younger individuals understand what aging can and should look like. And I think that’s just the nature of the awesome influences that I have to the relationships in this industry.

Michael Hughes 31:23
Okay, so question number two, what surprised you the most as you’ve aged?

Kyle Rand 31:27
You know, I used to operate on four hours of sleep every single night. And now if I don’t get a full eight hours, I am a gurvich. Like, I need a really good sleep house. Yeah, it was a just a switch that happened because I remember when I had to do this to read, you know, with my glasses after reading it suck, but they didn’t just like some somehow just turn a switch and it happened. Or, funnily enough, as I was getting ready, don’t make fun of me for my 30th birthday. A lot of people were like, your 30s and your answer, 30 that’s gonna hit and I kept being like, that doesn’t make sense. Like it is just another day. And then I turned 30. And I think the next day like, I pulled something in my back. And I think within that month, I became very reliant on my sleep. Not even kidding.

Michael Hughes 32:16
Oh, dear, well, let’s not let the round number in the birthday, you know, just sort of associate that but believe me, I could go off and be every we could go off on a rant on birthday cards, right? The 56. A lot of them are just terrible. But that’s another

Kyle Rand 32:29
if there’s anybody who’s perpetuating. Yeah, if there’s anybody who’s perpetuating ageism the worst its hallmark.

Michael Hughes 32:35
Okay, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s okay. We’ll be those. We’re trying to be neutral. That rhymes with blah merch, or what have you. So let’s, anyway, the opinions expressed on this podcast are only that of ourselves and not of our respective. Yeah. And then the third one is, you know, is there someone that you’ve met or been in your life? I don’t even think it needs to be one person. But is there someone or some people that you’ve met or been in your life that has set a good example for you an agent, we call, you know, we want to we call an agent abundantly or aging with abundance, you know, it’s just somebody like that has inspired you.

Kyle Rand 33:10
You know, I, the moment I met Hazel McCallion, I was wowed. And still, I was just talking about her like two days ago, I still think of her as like, this superhero, incredible woman who really, not only just had a heart full of gold, and like really gave so much to her community, but just showed how much you can do. And how really, truly age is just the number one who’s

Michael Hughes 33:34
Hazel.

Kyle Rand 33:37
Hurricane Hazel. Oh, you’re gonna have the greatest afternoon, Hurricane Hazel. You I’m sure you’ve met us. She used to be the chief elder Officer of Riviera. She was the mayor of Mississauga for I think, four decades. And you can look her up like every single thing about her you will fall in love with like she was I think she was like ice skating for the Maple Leafs, like during their opening day. Like when she was 98 or something like that. She just that’s

Michael Hughes 34:06
just called Hurricane Hazel. You know, because Hurricane Hazel was huge in Canada back in the day that I heard about that growing up, there’s that there was an actual hurricane, I think right where we were.

Kyle Rand 34:17
We were hearing about her because she is bigger than any weather than ever. Really, you’re gonna have anybody who’s listening. If you don’t know about either. Metallian go look her up and just stand like four hours. She is amazing.

Michael Hughes 34:30
All right, well, okay, so, Kyle, and that’s a great point to end on. I’ll definitely look that up. That’s such a surprise and delight for me on this episode. And I just genuinely want to thank you for giving us the time, your time today to do this podcast. It’s been great. And I want to thank you our listeners for tuning in listening to this episode of The Art of aging which is part of the abundant agent podcast series from United Church homes. You know week you can find us at abundant aging podcast.com You can find us on youtube under United Church homes. You And we do want to hear from you. What has changed about you, as you’ve aged that you love? What has surprised you the most? Most? How do you define abundant aging? Who is your abundant aging hero? And what topics would you like us to cover on these shows? What ideas do you have? What’s the back do you have from us abundant aging podcast.com put a quick shout out there again for endeavour.com as well, and especially the moments from the field video that you have, and any anything else that you’d like to say before we end the episode, Kyle?

Kyle Rand 35:31
No, this was wonderful, Mike, you’re wonderful everything you guys are doing to help shift and help brain all these conversations, right and understand what aging look like. That’s what we need to do. So thank you for having me. I really enjoyed every conversation with you.

Michael Hughes 35:45
Thank you so much. Okay, until next time,