Interviewing Tim Parr, the CEO of Caddis eye glasses for the spring Season 6 (!) of my podcast this week, it struck me that ‘sight’ and ‘seeing’ are so intrinsic to innovation - and hence disruption. It’s often based on personal experience. A wake up call of sorts, at a time when you are ready to hear it - or you have no other choice. Entrepreneurs so often start a business that answers a personal need.
Tim Parr walked into a glasses shop a decade ago looking for something to be able to read with. He was given a choice between expensive high-fashion branded glasses - and junk. And suddenly realised that nothing on offer was ‘culturally relevant’ to him - or his entire generation. He quickly found that 90% of people need glasses to read after 45, something that he seems to have been first to see as a business opportunity. That’s a pretty big, largely unexploited, market.
A decade later, he understands that the business he is actually in isn’t to sell glasses, it’s a gateway to Q3 ageing needs. Not products for the older old of Q4 (also a huge market). But for all of us, still-healthy, active, engaged Q3 folk that he’s been marketing to since he started out with t-shirts in his first company. And that so few brands want to engage with yet - or know how.
Check out his website, and the ‘mission’ he’s on, and you’ll immediately see a different tone, language and imagery. He described us (and me) better than anyone I’ve ever heard. I particularly liked this descriptor of our cohort: “I don’t care if you don’t get it, I wanna say it.” That just about sums up my entire career!
how disruptors are often actually connectors
Listening to Tim Spector, the UK’s Mr. Gut and creator of the Zoe app (that I’ve written about here), on Desert Island Discs, was like an illustration of Tim Parr’s target demographic. A bit of a rebel since an early age, a reluctant doctor, then an innovative scientist redefining how we eat. Back in 2011, he fell over and blacked out skiing down a mountain with a minor stroke. Four years younger than his own dad when he died at 57, he felt a sense of ‘impending doom.’ And switched from the science of the epidemiology of populations and twins to focus on individual preventive health. It started as a search for self-cure but then, discovering how hard it was, for everyone.
“We are more bugs than brain,” he asserts, and now spends his life tailoring diet to healthy microbiomes, dumping decades of calorie-counting, sugar and fat-reducing, homogeneous nutrition advice. He’s not always popular with the establishment. But I had lunch with a 60-year-old friend Friday who said he - and the Zoe approach - has transformed her life. She’s never felt better or been fitter (I’ve never eaten so many nuts and seeds). We agreed that one of the great advantages of age is a degree of time affluence. Which is wisely invested in preventive health stuff. So here’s to the next piece of your anatomy you’ve probably never thought about. First the microbiome, then your feet!
Courtney Conley is a former ballet dancer who wrecked her feet and much of her body until one day she decided to become a doctor to figure out why. She specialises in feet and when I heard her say that the No.1 reason for falls in older adults is low… toe strength, I had to listen up. (Attia, in his book Outlive, says the No.1 predictor of life expectancy is grip strength).
I love the metaphor of feet as foundations to the rest of us, which seems pretty obvious. But she insists they are a hugely under-studied and wrongly-treated part of our bodies. If you want to hear her in full, super-enthusiastic, all-out nerdy swing, you can listen to this interview with Dr Peter Attia on his podcast. But I warn you, it’s 2.5 hours long! If you want to just cut to the chase and measure your toe strength, to your Toe Strength Dynamometer! And if you want to start strengthening your feet, you can sign up, get a little analysis of your foot type (I’m a Type A), and then a set of exercises to ensure your toes are a-tapping for life.
There will be so much new understanding of ageing in the next decade, it’s mind boggling - and impossible to keep up. But as another podcast interviewee, Peter Hinssen, futurist and author of The Phoenix and The Unicorn, said, “we are the last generation of humans who will live without augmentation.” Most of us have glasses, which are a form of early augmentation, but scientists are busy figuring out how to strengthen and delay ageing for many different parts of us. It will be a truly revolutionary decade. And many of these anecdotes point to people who see a problem - and don’t accept it. Or who see it with eyes that allow them to connect dots that others haven’t done before.
So Tim Spector, who spent a decade researching twins, had his ‘aha’ moment when he realised that twins were similar in many ways - except their microbiomes. It’s the moment of ‘seeing’ the link that opens up the opportunity, the path, the solution, or just the right question. Hence I’ve been thinking about this ‘seeing’ thing.
how writing weekly makes you live differently
Over dinner with friend D., we were comparing what kept us writing our weekly substacks. She’s been at her’s for 5 years, and is thinking that may be enough. I’m coming up to 3 soon. And still enjoying it. Why?
I think one of the gifts of this weekly appointment with a blank page is that it makes me ‘see’ life - differently and more intently. It’s the same kind of dual vision you have if you wander about a place with a camera or without. As soon as you’re out to take photos, you look more carefully at everything. You study scenes for light and angles, the unexpected or the quaint, the metaphorical or the magic. There is purpose to your path.
That’s what elderberries gifts my weeks. It makes me see differently. As I wander through my days, I gather quotes and books and interesting experiences like breadcrumbs. Not to find a way back, but to help understand the way through.
At TATE Modern, where I wandered to get through a funk on Monday (inspiration and a widening of the lens being a wonderful way to recuperate from the low of self-inflicted sulking), I happened on an exhibit perfectly suited to my theme. (The number of times my weeks seem to toss me a very obvious red thread is astonishing). Capturing the Moment is a dialogue between photography and painting. And explores how artists, who once recorded things, people and events had to adapt to the arrival of photography. The new tech could record better and faster. So what was painting for?
So painting began a deep dive into the human soul, finding new ways to depict new dimensions in an endless, creative invention of new languages. When the world turns upside down, paint the experience of what that feels like, as George Baselitz did in 1938 Austria, at what must have felt a time on the brink. Hence the title of ‘Orange Eater’ - where we’ve landed since Adam first ate that damn apple (and blamed Eve).
The answer is a brilliant parallel to the arrival of AI. Where will we evolve when tech can do so much of what once we spent our time doing? I agree with my friend Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in his wonderful book, I, Human. We are likely to need our human skills even more. Get better at what makes us different. Creativity is one.
I’ve been following a fellow Canadian called Kris Krug, self-proclaimed ‘techartist, quasi-sage, cyberpunk, anti-hero of the future’. I am doing a course with him called AI For Cultural Creatives. He’s helping creatives of all sorts explore the new tech and harness it to future-proof creative pursuits. It’s all a bit mind-blowing and fascinating. A new land and language. You need to visit to ‘see’ it.
Like the land of the very old. It’s almost impossible to see into our own future selves. Helpful is the growing body of wise writing from the frontiers of old old age. I’ll leave you with a wonderful piece by 90-year-old Sam Toperoff called In The Land of the Very Old that I got from my friend Diane Kenwood’s newsletter, These Are the Heydays:
Ageing is not merely an accumulation of years; it is also a passage through various stages of growth. It’s a movement from one land into another–adolescence follows childhood, or as middle age presents some of us with midlife crises very different from any earlier passage. Each stage puts us in a different landscape, and I can now attest that being Very Old is qualitatively different from being just plain old.
Like adolescence, it ought to have its own designation. It doesn’t, I think, because it is a twilight time and there is so little that’s good about it, so little to look forward to.
Adulthood, usually a desirable period, follows adolescence, but retirement and the likelihood of becoming unproductive and ill awaits those who cross the border into the Land of the Very Old. No, not much to look forward to in that. Some propagandists have dubbed it “The Golden Age,” but that generally has been shrugged off as a bad joke. I recall telling Faith a few days after my 80th birthday when I lost my balance putting on my pants, “Eighty is different.” If I had to give this stage, this exile, a name, I’d call it “The Diminishing.”
And yet, he concludes in a wonderful glimmer of light, he’s never been happier in his life. He doesn’t understand it, but shares the paradoxical experience he’s discovered.
As does the glorious, 50-year-old Olivia Colman, who exults her way through a delightful comedy, Wicked Little Letters, I went to see with my 80-year-old neighbour. A charming, feminist romp through a wild and crazy true story, with a bevy of British actors who are a gift to any Friday night. My neighbour laughed her way through the foul-mouthed saga and hugely resonated with the featured feminist fight, echoing loudly with her own life. I love having friends who are older than I am. There is so much insight to be gleaned into what’s coming. And while everyone is talking about tech as the next big thing, the land of the old(er) is a blue ocean of undiscovered life forms.
But the innovators are starting to explore it. They always have.
Great post this week Avivah - so much in it! I usually read it with my breakfast at my desk, but will need to extend this to the lunchtime slot as well, as so much interesting reading.