MacGyvering & Navigating the GoodLife

What happens when MacGyver meets Wonder Woman in the world of human services? In this episode, Dr. Mike Strouse and Ivo Ivanov sit down with Veronica St. Cyr, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Navigating Life. Together, they explore how private social platforms can foster connection, build trust, and transform care for individuals, families, and communities. From GoodLife’s award-winning Neighborhood Network to the bold vision of creating new “blue zones,” this conversation is all about redefining what’s possible with creativity, technology, and heart. 

Episode Links:

• Who is MacGyver?
• Watch our Video Episode: Noel's Quest for Independence
• Explore the Navigating Life app
• Explore GoodLife's Expanded Neighborhood Network for Aging Adults
• Explore the active "Blue Zones" and learn about the history of the concept.

Transcript

Ivo Ivanov (00:06):

Hello and welcome to the Quest for the GoodLife with Dr. Mike Strouse, executive director (Note: He’s actually the “Chief Executive Officer”, Signed, Producer: Megan O) and president of GoodLife Innovations. He is also a behavioral scientist, a horse whisperer, a blue zone man, a renaissance man, and an adventurer. He shares most of his personality traits with the great Indiana Jones. That's why he's wearing that fedora. That's right, and strives to discover a pathway to the good life, not just for himself, but for everyone. This is a podcast, as you know. We call it a podcast. I'm your co-host with the Co-most Ivo Ivanov. The show is produced by Megan Olafson, and today, today we have a guest, a very special guest. Her name is Veronica St. Cyr. She is a social media expert, a marketing whisperer, a bonafide wizard who has found a way to turn even loose-loose into a win-win. Yes. Currently she's the director.

Dr. Mike Strouse (01:21):

 She's at the right place, Ivo.

Ivo Ivanov (01:24):

No kidding. No kidding. She's the director of strategic Partnerships at Navigating Life. This is a cutting edge social media platform that is very, very different. How different? Well guys, we all have been captured by social media, right? Social media is everywhere. Basically. Almost the entire world is on social media. But what is private social media? Well, I'm going to give it to Dr. Strouse and Veronica. I hope she can explain to us exactly what is navigating life and why is it so valuable.

Dr. Mike Strouse (02:09):

Well, Ivo, of course, you left out your rockstar status, which we covered well last time. But welcome back to the US. I am glad you're here. Thank you so much, Veronica. We always start this out always the same way, and ask people that our guests, who are you? If you were in film, and normally I'm always curious about all of this because I'm curious of who people think they are, but Veronica, for you, I already know who you are. I'm just not going to say it yet. I already know.

Veronica St. Cyr (02:44):

Okay. I can't wait to hear that

Dr. Mike Strouse (02:47):

Because I've experienced it firsthand and not everybody gets to experience this, but my hero is Indiana Jones and for a lot of reasons he's a scientist and he's a cool guy. I always wanted to be a cool guy and I'm a scientist. I love the idea that you can be audacious with your goals and then maybe even achieve them. Who knows? And that's kind of how we approach things here. As a behavioral scientist, I like to think of big goals and working back from them, and that's where we get into the audacious thing that we're now creating a blue zone from scratch and you're part of it. So before we get into that, tell me who you think you are and then I'll tell you who you are.

Veronica St. Cyr (03:30):

I love that I'll be able to find out who I am in just a few short minutes. So it's funny, I think about this often and I think it's something we all do, is find commonalities and traits and characters that we see and try to relate them to ourselves. So I know who I try to be. I think you might tell me who I actually am, but who I identify with and aspire to be like I would say is MacGyver. I absolutely love the ingenuity and creativity that comes with connecting things that maybe weren't meant to be connected or looking at something that the world tells you as a specific purpose and finding a new way to solve a problem. I even think about this where God, sometimes I look up at the constellations and I think, isn't it kind of unfair that we already decided what all the shapes are?

(04:30):

We already know that's Orion. We can't make new shapes because that's already part of Orion's foot that can't be a part of something else. And I think it's a way that I love to try to approach the world. I think that there is always, always a path forward. There's always a solution. There's always a better way of doing things. And I love that MacGyver can take a paperclip and a light bulb and a piece of string and break himself out of a situation. And I think that's what I'm just trying to do every single day in this industry.

Dr. Mike Strouse (05:00):

You'd think that MacGyver was an Apollo 13 because they got whatever that was, duct tape, duct tape, and everything else involved and landed that sucker. So, now that you bring that up, you may be more right than me except for some very specific situations. And then I'm more, right, maybe it's why we've always clicked is because in a way, especially when you're doing things that other people really haven't done yet trying to accomplish some things, especially as it applies to technology, you know, I/DD services and maybe to a lesser extent senior services just special need populations. They are not where I go to learn about technology. They're just not. In fact, we're bolting together some technology into iLink that was not intended for iLink, but it was transformational. And so I like the MacGyver idea. Now, I will tell you though, my vision of you, I see Veronica, the cool Veronica turning into Wonder Woman at the top of the hat. And I only say that is because I was in this socially awkward situation. I can't even remember where it was, Veronica, but you came to my rescue and it's like you turned from one thing into this other thing and it's like I saw it happen, right? Like that I was rescued from an awkward situation. I go, “Hey, this is somebody I need to get to know.” we’ll get into all the details of that, but I know who you are.

Veronica St. Cyr (06:49):

I love that. I have always, I've admired Wonder Woman, I love the God, what do you even call those? The wrist armor, the way you can just deflect anything coming at you. That's actually interesting too. I think the origin of the name Veronica has to do with, I think it–tracing it far back–is I think an evolution of Veritas. I think truth, which is funny because Wonder Woman has the lasso of truth and to live honestly. And I think that's when we first met. I know that was something that kind of came up and my cat might make an appearance on the audio, you wouldn't even need to know, but she's giving me the death glare. Yeah, I love that, Mike, that's really sweet. Because I like to live very truthfully and honestly, and I think for me, something that has always been really important to me is to stand up to bullies. I just think that's something I felt, well,

Dr. Mike Strouse (07:52):

That's kind of what she did. Ivo, she kind of did that and I deserve most of what I get. You do not. I didn't deserve all of that. I was getting at that moment and what most people just kind of sit back but not Veronica.

Veronica St. Cyr (08:10):

You know what, sometimes

Dr. Mike Strouse (08:11):

To watch a little bit, it's like, okay, I don't have to say anything.

Veronica St. Cyr (08:17):

But I think that's the spirit of a lot of people that are in the human services industry, too. And I think that's why it's nice to equate us with these idealistic people that have these traits of just this quest for justice and doing the right thing. Because I think it is so much easier to sit back, I think all the time about the bystander effect and how that's such a psychological trap that all of us can fall into. And I love the idea of speaking up and speaking out and because I am so I've been actually told my voice carries through walls. I feel like I should use it for good. And I think part,

Dr. Mike Strouse (09:02):

You do a lot of things, but I've learned that what you really do is very much the MacGyver. You connect people and part of it is that you just see matches out there. I think, and I did too by the way. I'm looking to create something with a bunch of people that hasn't been really done before. We've done versions of it, but not this lofty, literally, I think people look at me when we were talking about creating a “blue zone” and all the sincerity. I mean, I told Ivo I'd be happy if it was sorta light blue. Maybe it doesn't have to be a beautiful dark blue, but it can get there. And you know what we always think about? The GoodLife is the good life isn't a destination. It's a journey because by the time you get on top of a hill and you're at a better place, you have this beautiful vista and you see something else.

(10:04):

There's pioneers and then there's settlers. And I really want to be a pioneer and I want people around me to want to be a pioneer. There's always something better. And it's not that we shouldn't be settling for good enough, it's just that our job isn't to do that. Our job is to do more. We have a cool program called the Neighborhood Network and it's very cool and very different. It won in 2016. It won the Autism Speaks most innovative service model award internationally. And then in 2020 it won the Moving Mountains Award with ANCOR and University of Minnesota research and training center and National Association and direct support providers. I mean, it was a pretty prestigious award to win. And none of that really is important except it gets it out there to people. But the concept behind it was transformational. Really. The idea was Ivo, one of my favorite interviews was Noel in Arkansas and Noel is what maybe a 25-year-old young man. He has some physical disabilities, but he's smart as all get out and he's very articulate, but he had the short end of the stick and in-home care, despite his social skills, he had a very dedicated family, thank God, because they filled in all the gaps for him. And I think as a country that works when you have a dedicated family, but many people don't have the family structure to fill in the gaps of inadequate care.

(11:49):

And he just had this amazing sort of story. We couldn't do a normal podcast because he has a little bit of articulation challenges. And so we did a video podcast and threw it out there to everybody. So it's not on all the same platforms, but you just got to watch it because anybody that doesn't watch that, won't understand what the problems are. And he really articulated what the problems were of in-home care; people try to associate a staff person with a person that provides in-home care on an island. So a person who has a need will have either, have a staff person to support them, but one, and the problem is their needs are 24/7. They ebb and flow all over the place and there is no perfect staff and they can't be available the way they want them to be available in that industry is constant turnover.

(12:49):

The average I think is over 50% part-time. You can't deliver individual in-home care with 50% part-time with a hundred percent turnover because every turnover is a hundred percent because there's nobody there to help them learn what they don't know. There are advantages to facilities, but we don't want 'em. But they have some advantages, like there's always multiple staff there. If somebody can't do something, there's a backup. There's an experienced staff to help new staff, you have a way to supervise 'em more because there's a place and you can have a core group of staff support multiple people who have intermittent needs like assisted living. There's all these advantages to it except nobody wants it. They don't want a facility, they just want the advantages of a facility. So we got this idea that, well, with technology and the right strategy to organize care in the neighborhood, we could create almost a virtual facility without one so that we can give everybody an in-home care experience, but with all the advantages that they didn't have for normal in-home care. And we've done that. We've really done that in multiple examples of time. So we know that that's something that works and can work well. It can always be improved, of course, but the idea is there. So we're now expanding that. But now the idea is, okay, what if we went out there and organically just heat mapped areas to find out where need was, and we literally laid a Neighborhood Network over that 15 minute deployment hotspot.

(14:38):

Where we could literally bring care into as an amenity of a neighborhood and all that was great. So that's what we're working on now, Veronica. So that's our project. And UnitedHealthcare is asking us to organize care in Wichita using a similar model. For example, did you know in Wichita, Evo, there's 75 people in a nine digit postal code that need night care, 79 people, Medicaid people, every one of 'em have their own staff and they're only a minute from each other.

(15:14):

And so it's a typical neighborhood, but it's a high density urban area and this is what they exist. And this isn't even including private pay, it's just Medicaid people. $120 a night, they pay for somebody to sit there for a need that might happen once a night or twice a week. And that's how they do it. And they don't have enough staff. So there's constantly openings. And even though there may be somebody high school track length away, they act as if they're not even connected. So we heat mapped everybody, we now know how many people there are and we literally can go back there. We estimate being able to do, oh, I would say probably three hours a night of total cost as opposed to eight for delivering a hundred percent of the units of care. And right now, that group there that has somebody working all night, they're only able to get 50% of the authorized units of care because of turnover even though there's somebody right by it.

(16:24):

So we could cut the cost by 70% and deliver a hundred percent of the care just like we do in a neighborhood network just by organizing that. That's what I'm driven by, Veronica, is organizing care. But you gave me an idea that solved a major problem. We had used a platform called a Facebook Workplace, I think it was called, and we used it through COVID by the way. We were trying to figure out how can we socially connect people when we're all isolated. And it was a really good answer for us. I mean, we were able to enjoy and have connectivity when we couldn't connect and it was really cool. And ironically, that app ended, it’s being retooled, but it wasn't really a direct hit for us, sort of a social context on that. But what I was missing in the neighborhood network, when we go to a new place that we, it's not when we created, we're just going to a heat map zone.

(17:33):

Now what I have to do is make them feel part of something Veronica. I've got to make them. It's easy when you go to assisted living, you walk in a building, there it is. It's all organized. You can see, oh, there's the assisted living facility. I mean I walked in it. There it is. They can get the fact that there's a core group of staff supporting that. They can see it. Here's my room, here's the layout of it. This is where the social thing is. It's all sort of a neighborhood created around a social or a physical facility. But now I just picked out a 15 minute deployment, which by the way, Veronica, the one we're doing now, the national average for seniors is about 19% of the population is in a normal living community. Well, we did a lot of science behind this.

(18:27):

This is all going to be really about private pay that we're doing now because 70% of all seniors are private pay. And I have a big affection for it because you can have a little bit of money more than what you need because you've been a saver in your life or you have some savings, but it's certainly not enough money to pay for assisted living at $8,000, $10,000 a month if you need that, right? My ideal population is somebody that thinks about the future. They may have a little bit of money, they've tried their hardest, they've worked all their life, they've saved some stuff, but they could lose it all if they have a care need. And a lot of people do. And so I can tell you, I know Ivo, you work very hard, physical fitness, you always have all your life people that are not my age, but Veronica's age, they pay a lot of money, even money sometimes they don't have, for fitness trainer or for coaching advice or for the apps and stuff just to try to have a better appearance, be a little healthier, be a little bit more active, that sort of stuff.

(19:42):

What would a senior do to avoid losing their loved one, to avoid moving to assisted living, to avoid losing all the money that they've accumulated in life? What would they do to avoid all of that? I mean, shouldn't that be worth a couple hundred bucks a month to invest in, right? If at your age you're going to invest, I've seen, I invested $125 a week for personal training not many years ago. Why wouldn't you invest a couple hundred bucks to belong to a social network and a program that could help extend your life and make you healthier as a senior? So that's the concept. And so we've been, our lofty goal is, okay, we've identified this area and I told you 22% or 20% is what the normal world is as seniors. This is 35% is filled with some areas that are 55+ or some areas that have maintenance free housing.

(20:49):

There's just some older parts where people have lived for a long time, but people just want to age in place. About 20% of the people are over 75 in this area and there of modest income. We do this because we have census data, information that we gather of modest income. So they got enough money that they don't qualify for Medicaid, they got not enough money to get any kind of support from assisted living. So they're “betweeners” and they're my target audience because I care about the “betweeners” that without something, they're in trouble. My own parents were in the last years of their life, they could do 90% of the stuff they needed to do to be independent. They couldn't do 10%, but that was random, intermittent, unpredictable, 10%. So they had to move to assisted living, and so they lost 90% independence for a hundred percent care.

(21:55):

We can't afford that as a country, they couldn't afford that. So here we are. And so I'm so drawn, I'm going to stop talking and we're going to work with Veronica. What I was so excited about is Navigating Life. I don't know to call it a social platform, but it certainly is, and you can describe it more Veronica, but what it did in my head instantly was, hey, this could be like E-neighbors or any other kind of thing where I could use it to define my neighborhood as a thing and how can I make all these random people there that are seniors, how can I make that a thing? All of a sudden they wake up the next day and they realize I live in this particular enriched neighborhood that offers things that no other neighborhood offers, including care five minutes out 24/7 when I need it, and I only have to pay for what I use.

(22:54):

It's all designed to reduce the cost as much as possible, let people live as independently as possible. But we did some research, we'll get into this later, but there are nine things that I identified in looking at some research that were related to maybe a “blue zone.” But when you're looking at seniors, a big one is people who have purpose, they want to be socially connected and not isolated. Number two, there's several things just, drinking water, silly, seemingly small things, but there's little things that have to be done to maintain people, people's life as great as possible. So with all that preamble, let's talk about what in the heck is Navigating Life?

Veronica St. Cyr (23:44):

Yeah, that is a great question. So I think Ivo, you set the stage well at the opening, but navigating life started primarily as a way for an agency that provided services, particularly it started in adult IDD services to offer community-based. It was without walls programming where no one came to a facility or a physical place and you had someone providing care for about three or four people in the community where they would pick them up and they would spend the day together in the community, they'd volunteer, they'd go exercise, they would all eat lunch together, whatever it was. And there was this kind of spark moment of how can we manage for quality and stay connected to all these groups that are out in the community and build some trust with maybe the families or the networks that are connected to those folks who are like, this is innovative and new. I've never heard of anything like this. I don't know if I trust to send my son, daughter, sister, a cousin to a program like that without parents or people following vans around to see where they're going. Do you GPS track people? Do you pull some kind of big brother surveillance where you're always on, always watching? And so there was this thought of, what if you could put the technology in the hands of someone as it started, who is providing that care to just share some photos, videos, updates of where people were in that journey throughout the day and automatically geotag their location, the time and the date. So there's this instant trust building that people are where they say they are. And then on the back end of that, it creates this automated audit trail so you can kind of see what people are doing, what activities they're a part of, when they're happy, what they're wearing at that event, if you ever need to pull up that information.

(25:51):

And there was this light bulb moment of, well, if we as a provider of services are getting such incredible quality of communication, trust, building transparency, our staff feel like we're not asking what are you doing? Where are you? Because they're choosing to share some of that. What if we invited the family network in to be able to follow along with that as well? And that was the first kind of big turning point of Navigating Life, becoming a product that wasn't this grassroots proprietary idea, which started in Massachusetts because what we saw was all of these families that I think all of the time, this is really why the product started first and foremost was four families. Once we kind of uncovered this truth, which is: you have families or caregivers, siblings who have someone in their life who has a barrier to living an independent or full life and they're doing the best they can, but we're people and we all have our own dramas and problems and things that we're working on.

(27:00):

And to add this other layer of fear and anxiety and worry over somebody you love, are they happy? Are they living a fulfilling good life? Are they engaging in activities? Maybe they're working on skills, are they able to live independently? Whatever it is, all of a sudden just through giving people a little bit of information and also giving everyone the same context to see with their own eyes what people are doing daily. We saw relationships with Families - 180º and at the start, it was such a benefit to a provider to feel like, oh, we have the trust of the families of the people we're providing services to. We're cutting the amount of phone calls we receive from family members or guardians asking for information by 50%. So when we talk about efficiency, the amount of time that some folks who are already at these understaffed provider agencies just fielding calls where all people want is information, they want to know, is someone happy?

(28:06):

Do they have what they need? Are they fulfilled? And I also think about taking that a step further. You then have so many staff or caregivers where maybe English isn't their first language and you're putting all this pressure on people to capture the nuance of how someone's doing or for someone themselves if they're using this technology to capture what they're doing in written word with the nuance of language and human services and how easy is it to snap a photo and share your experience. So I think the big evolution of an app like this was we used to think it was more for the facility or it was the anti-facility. It was how do we create this thing, which I love that you talk about, Mike, when people can't be together in this kind of virtual space,

Dr. Mike Strouse (28:57):

We always look at how do we create a neighborhood, but we also have all kinds of programs. Like the other part of this is where we don't have a neighborhood and where people are fairly socially isolated. And I say that in Shared Living as a rule. We have 135 people that we serve in about 88 shared living placements in Kansas since 1999, and they're an amazing group of people that have an average tenure getting close to 10 years now average, we're talking about average 3% turnover a year. And for those 135 people, we only have to recruit two families a year to maintain 135. If those 135 people were in group homes, we'd have to recruit 150 people. So just to put that in context with our national crisis that shared living is just amazing thing, but they can be isolated and technology, we use all kinds of technology to pull 'em together, but in truth, this social network, I envision for that we could use it as almost a cooperative where they can connect with each other, share ideas and even share natural supports and things like that, but they're not in a neighborhood, but we can still give them a neighborhood vibe.

Veronica St. Cyr (30:25):

And that's exactly it, Mike. I think the power of a tool like this, and ultimately it is a tool that it's up to us or anyone licensing it or using it to kind of customize it to create what that network should look like. And I think that's the magic of having something that's simple in nature that you can spin up and you can have it be because it's private, it's invite only and you can create that for one specific group where everyone's sharing. You can have it for much smaller communities. You can choose to invite more people that folks can then share their experiences and connect with. But I think about that all the time of, you know, there are so many social media tools out there that are, they're not compliant, they're not maybe really secure. We're hearing, so there's such, especially with the advert of AI and being integrated into how much so many people are relying on AI, we're having more conversations than ever about data security and privacy and protecting some of that information.

(31:31):

You think about all of these platforms that we're using, some tech giant billionaire owns all of that data, owns all that information and can do with it what they will. I think creating truly private technology that an agency can use, that anyone who receives support or is connected to them can trust that information stops with that agency and stays there, I think is a really incredible way that you can use some of those awesome tools to get all the benefits that social media can give people. And there's a lot of tough stuff out there, but that ability to combat loneliness or isolation, I think that it's something that I would wager a guess, and I don't want to make assumptions about other people, but I bet a lot of us take it for granted on most days that if we go out and we have an experience or we're feeling lonely, you can pop on an app on your phone or on your computer and you can share or connect.

(32:37):

You can find someone who has pickleball is a big thing. You can connect with people through pickleball, you can connect with people through a plant group and just share about how you're taking care of your plants. There is like, endless communities for people to make connections. I just was talking to a friend last night who's like, oh, I'm in this group of people who just go to this one lake in my community and they'll make plans to kayak with their neighbors. And I'm like, when do you ever hear about people just connecting and going out and socially just having these experiences with people and this is someone who lives alone, who maybe doesn't have friends at their fingertips that live close to go connect with. And so I think that especially in Shared Living, I had a conversation with a director of shared living for an agency that was licensing our technology in a myriad of ways and she said, I can't believe every shared program in the US isn't using some kind of technology like this because that digital isolation, we think all the time we've built ramps, we've really talked about physical access and inclusion and there's this other forefront where all of us are, we're on a zoom right now recording this.

(33:56):

We organized this [podcast] over email, we're going to conferences and we're able to connect and form these relationships that can then carry on and almost filter through us making other connections through each other and to just not give everyone, because they have some kind of barrier to independence, the ability to also share their experiences and make those connections feels like such an absolute miss. And I think that as stewards of technology and as you said Mike, pioneers in this field, it's us. It's up to us and I think it's a duty that all of us have to try to create those pathways for people.

Dr. Mike Strouse (34:37):

People who sell technology. Most people, and I'm not throwing anybody purposefully under the bus, but it's just a challenge. They sell the technology and they explain what it can do, but they never help people change how they do things. And so what often happens is people struggle trying to make purpose out of the technology or they struggle…you know, the best they can do is to bolt the technology onto their current service model. What we learned is that that technology makes new service models possible. I mean, literally you're not getting the most out of technology if you just simply bolt it on. It can change how you do things, but the challenge with technology really is how do you cultivate a new culture that your technology has made possible? So I listed the broader group of our development staff, people who are supposed to develop a model, and I said, look, here are the things that I found.

(35:48):

I'm not going to say that there aren't others, but here are the things I found that seniors need in their ecosystem to live longer. And I'm talking about, Veronica, I really want to go way upstream. I'm tired of people who have one foot on the assisted living boat and the other foot on the dock. The truth of the matter is people get sedentary, they get isolated, they get into these issues and then they spiral and then by the time they realize they're in a free fall, it's almost too late. It was too late for my parents to work on what they needed to do when they were at the end, but if I went upstream and can cultivate certain healthy practices, certain ways of living, I can stave that off for five years maybe. What we looked at is like, be socially engaged with family and friends. Work on your mind, your memory, and sharpen your soul.

(36:44):

Keep learning, take care of your spirit. So much data is out there on spirituality and especially for seniors. Have purpose. People want purpose. And we're really going to exercise that by having people volunteer to help neighbors in need kind of paying it forward. And then maybe down the road somebody will pay it forward with them on volunteering, which then reduces costs as well. As a behavioral analyst, I can tell you the most important skill that you can ever teach, ever teach somebody to maintain their privacy, to maintain their independence, to maintain their safety. Literally every positive skill or the most important skill that you can teach is to teach a senior when and how to ask for help.

(37:34):

If you can teach a senior when and how to ask for help and make them feel completely comfortable doing that, then you can avoid lots of things and they can live with greater independence. Lots of seniors are very prideful. You know what a PERS is, you wear it around your neck and you hit it, and then as soon as you do, all hell breaks loose like nine one one's coming and the sirens go. And that's the way it is. You press that one button and that's not my idea of an engaging system. I want somebody to press a button and say, “Hey, when you're in the area, could you drop by and have some coffee” or “can you bring me some food for my dog?” Or it is like you got to practice asking for help and feeling comfortable doing it and having these relationships where you help people and get help.

(38:30):

And there are other things like eating right and drinking right and being physically active and hearing, make sure you don't put yourself in situations. You can fall. And I always say “simply measure what's simply important” and always have an emergency system at the ready because there will be those as you get older. And so these are all the things that are out there, but then the idea is, okay, how do you cultivate a culture where these things are always in the front for it? And part of that is technology, not technology is this complicated for the senior, but technology that's in the background, you've just got to create this program for want of a better word, where this social network is sort of in their life and organic.

(39:24):

And that's going to be the hard part for us. We realize that, okay, we can put all this technology in place, but getting people to use it and cultivating that environment and culture is going to take a lot of work. The memory I have of what drives me on this is that, and I'm not going to say the name of the technology, but it was an emergency kind of technology. I went and asked somebody and said, yeah, we have this blah, blah, blah technology. And I said, wow, when was the last time you used it? And she said, oh, we've never used it. When would you use it? And he said, well, I'd have to call somebody. I'm not sure what would happen if you used it. And he said police would come and this, that and the other. So I would not feel comfortable pressing that. And immediately I realized no senior would want that. I mean, they may get it because it's like, okay, it's better than dying, but it is not much better than dying. What I love about this is it's friendly and it can be all of these things, but getting it to be all of these things, buying the technology is probably the easiest step.

(40:40):

Learning it is probably the second easiest step. Using it and developing this culture that I really want to see happen is going to be the hard part and I'm really anxious to see how that plays out. What's your experiences in other places that's done that and how that's worked? Has there been successes or even failures in that that we could learn from?

Ivo Ivanov (41:06):

Veronica, Mike, it's no coincidence that he spoke about the “blue zones”. Mike identified the five blue zones around the world. These are the places where people live the longest and happiest lives, and he kind of deconstructed those components of the five blue zones and found the common denominator, and he discovered that it's not just physical activity or the way people eat and live their lives. The most important component was social interaction.

Ivo Ivanov (41:39):

And so that's why we are so excited that you are our guest because we are looking for a way. Mike is looking for a way to MacGyver this and to find a social interaction opportunity for the men and women that are served by GoodLife that will help us become a “blue zone”. And we were hoping that you can help us become from a powder blue zone, a darker shade of blue, blue zone. And social media has been with us since the beginning of civilization. One might argue that the first Instagram was cave art, the public square was social media. Social media was with us. Obviously digital social media is completely different and it's instantaneous and it covers the entire world. But you mentioned that Veronica, social media platforms are businesses and their product is not social interaction. Their product is data. They harvest data, they package it, and then they sell it to third parties.

(42:49):

And this is where you come in and I find it very interesting that MacGyver is your character because you looked at the situation and you realized that it has to change because our populations are vulnerable and data is very, very important to them. And you guys, that's why you are a private social platform and you provide levels of security that we don't see in any other social platforms. As you know, social media has divided us, has put us in echo chambers and has sold our information, and this is where you're so valuable and we are really eager to learn more about this.

Dr. Mike Strouse (43:31):

Yeah, I totally agree with that. But data still is important, but you've got to control it and it's got to be private. When I looked at the system and they have somebody that's geo geolocated or that you have things that you can turn and integrate into iLink for notifications and other things that could make a real difference even in life and death. What do you see as both the success or sort of potholes in the implementation of all of this, Veronica?

Veronica St. Cyr (44:03):

Yeah, and it's a great question to ask and conversation to have, and I think so much of what we're talking about is true systemic change. It's not like staunching the bleeding or putting a bandaid on a wound, right? We're talking about really, really rooting something out and changing something, which you understand why it's so hard to not do that. And I think in that vein, what I have seen as one of the barriers to technology like this being truly successful, unfortunately, is I think leadership buy-in at the top. I think that true change when we think about, I like to think that the trickle-down theory works probably the most effectively from an anthropological standpoint of whatever is the ideology of leadership at the top. What are the behaviors that they're showing that permeate through an organization? Just from some of the conversations I've had the privilege and eyeopening experience of having with a lot of leaders at a lot of different organizations and human services entities in my time with Navigating Life, I can almost tell from the first meeting if it's an agency that will have some kind of success with the app.

(45:26):

And there's some things that I look out for, but I think there's sometimes an almost, and it's not to knock anyone because they understand it. This work is so hard and it's changing and it's like every single time you turn around, there's a new very real threat to being able to provide true quality service. There's funding threats, there's changes in the administration, there's changes in policy, there's changes in payer models, there are staffing crises. And you see in all these other industries, there's this tech disruption and innovation that happens, but that's driven by profit and money. And that's the unfortunate way that when we talk about technology, that software is really expensive, so it makes sense. But I'll hear things like, I don't know if we trust our staff to use this technology or I don't know if people have the capacity to understand it.

(46:24):

And there's this almost immediate assumption that someone can't learn something new. You can't teach an old dog new tricks or our staff couldn't learn that if they're going to support somebody with it. And I think that's a tough stance to take to just believe somebody can't from the outset. And it's an antithesis for what so much of the mindset is that drives this industry and this continuous improvement in wellness for people. So I think one of the pitfalls I'll see is just not feeling like an agency maybe thinks they should use technology like this. It sounds really good, but then there's this almost like it is a risk in a way, as everything is risk, this buy-in to say, we're going to believe in this. We're going to believe that they can. And I just talked with an agency a little bit ago who said, when we were getting started with Navigating Life and we were putting the technology in the hands of people that we provide services to share their experiences, we were using it in some of our other programs for people we employ to use it to share.

(47:34):

We had all these what ifs. What if someone posts something they shouldn't, what if x, y, z happens? And none of those things came true. And I love the quote, “I know worrying works because all the things I've ever worried about have never come true.” Now that's a privileged position to take. Of course things you worry about are going to happen, but it's people. And so I think that not having that upfront belief can be a pitfall. I think where we've seen it really successful are having some innovative minds who say, we know that someone might post something they shouldn't, or we might six months into using this come into an issue as we would with anything else in life. We're going to stub our toes on the coffee table. We're all going to have missteps and slips, and it's just a part of being human.

(48:24):

But to be able to push through all the fear and the noise of what would be all the reasons why, you can have just as many reasons why you shouldn't innovate or do something new as you could of why you should. And the only reason we'll ever see true change is people who are willing to take a chance in doing something new, ingraining it in their culture. And so I think that honestly is the biggest key. Without that top down buy-in, you can have the greatest staff in the world, you can have the greatest technology in the world. It's really up to the human to be able to use it effectively with people and to encourage them and inspire them to want to use it. And I think it's like, and Mike, you might know this too, in Ivo, and even on the iLink side, it's like you think if you build it, they will come. I think all the time of a hammer is a hammer, and if someone can build a house or they can knock somebody over the head with it and you can try to put all these safety features on the hammer, but inherently there is a human component of using that tool correctly.

(49:31):

I think that's the piece that's the hardest because you can put all the bells and whistles and features and try to make the technology overcompensate for human error as best you can, but you can never fully control for the human component. And I think that's beautiful in a way, right? There's a freedom and a dance of how humans are going to interact with technology to use it effectively. But I understand why agencies say, well, doing something new has risk doing things the way we've always done it. We know this. This is easy. So why would we change unless there's some big disruptor that's going to force us to do so.

Dr. Mike Strouse (50:12):

Well, I know that we're going to be coming to the end pretty soon, Ivo, but I want to say the hammer's a great analogy because it really sort of depicts how we approach things from a technological perspective. I think most tech companies give you a hammer and then you have a hammer. What we are really experiencing right now is like, okay, yeah, you can give 'em a hammer, but what if you teach 'em how to build a house and they just need the hammer? That's the difference is that, and that's why we focus on models as opposed to the technology. The models drive the technology and the technology makes new models possible. So there's an interaction there, but I don't want to give somebody the technology, and I mean, I'm definitely willing for everybody to use it, but at the same time, you've got to give them purpose and you've got to engage them.

(51:10):

And so we hired a coach internally. This whole job is to cultivate uses of this technology that are meaningful. How do we cultivate activities, volunteerism, connectivity, let's get high engagement in those reasons that make this technology useful. So it's like, oh, that's what you use a hammer for? Oh, we can use that for a hammer instead of just give people a hammer and say, that'll be $9.22 cents, please. It's like, no, let's learn kind of some stuff that we can do that you probably would find this thing very useful with. I know it's a little bit of wordsmithing, but it isn't, I mean, it's like engagement starts with the reasons you do stuff and the model, the tools make that possible.

Veronica St. Cyr (52:08):

Yes, it's like such a symbiotic relationship that you've kind of figured out at GoodLife of how the technology feeds back into what you can do. But you're right. It's not something that you seem to ever license or look at without true intention of where its purpose comes into play and what you're doing, which is very cool to see.

Dr. Mike Strouse (52:27):

Well, one thing about this podcast is we like to engage people not after we do things, but actually sometimes before we do them, so that we can follow this journey along. It is nothing better than getting a project going is stating your intentions. This is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to do it. And then, okay, well, how'd it work out? Kind of thing. I mean, everybody's focused on this. Your role and the role of Navigating Life is critical to our success of our new Expanded Neighborhood Network, and we are super excited to involve you in your superhero traits in this project. MacGyver combined with Wonder Woman.

Ivo Ivanov (53:16):

Wonder Woman. Yes. The ultimate compliment is when your name becomes an adjective or a verb like Jordan-esque, we all know what that means, right? Or to “MacGyver” something. I mean, when you use this verb, everybody knows what it means. MacGyver is strapped with a ticking bomb in a shipping container that's sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and he doesn't panic.

Ivo Ivanov (53:44):

He finds a loose, loose situation. No matter what the predicament is, he turns it into a win-win. So I chuckled when you said MacGyver, Veronica because as you noticed when Dr. Strouse was talking in the beginning, we share so much of our DNA with MacGyver, our organization and our leadership, we find ourselves in tough predicament. Nobody panics, and our executive director (CEO) Strouse is our way. The we have plenty of Failures.

Dr. Mike Strouse (54:19):

I love it. We all know that. I mean, look, if you're not interested in failure, you're not interested in success as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I know nobody that has an errorless learning program that really is innovative. Anything that's innovated is filled with error. That old quote, Ivo, that they learned a thousand ways the light bulb didn't work before they found one way that it did and the way it works. I'm disappointed in a lot of things, but never dissuaded and Veronica, you said that there's always a solution out there. What you have done and what you've achieved is remarkable. And so it won't be whether that doesn't work. It's whether we're, are we developing the right program to take it to that next level? And I think we ultimately will, but it's going to be quite a fun journey. And when we're done, here's what I can tell you for sure is it'll be a thing.

Veronica St. Cyr (55:30):

That's the Goal!

Dr. Mike Strouse (55:30):

A Neighborhood Network that started as a whole bunch of disjointed people, disjointed parts and disjointed purposes and disjointed activities will become a thing and will line up people's goals, will line up people's interests, will engage people in certain activities that will make them realize that if we all kind of or in the same direction, we can take this to a Norman Rockwellian-level. And that's kind of what I want to do. Thank you so much, Veronica, for joining us with this and looking forward to the next year or so while we get this thing going.

Ivo Ivanov (56:15):

Thank you so much, Veronica. This was the pod-quest for The GoodLife with Dr. Mike Strouse. This show was produced by Megan Olafson and sound engineered by me, Ivo Ivanov, our fantastic guest today was Wonder Woman herself, Veronica St. MacGyver. Your host was Dr. Mike Strouse. Everything else is my fault. We thank you for being with us and we return as usual in two weeks.