Architecting Your Life: How Thoughtfully Designed Spaces Can Enhance Your Longevity – Episode 199

The podcast is about optimizing your living space and how the environment affects longevity. 
(0:34) 


Dr. Gladden is excited about today’s podcast (2:20)


Ryan talks about longevity, place, and thriving in a new book. (
05:00)


Ryan shares that lifestyle and environment impact overall well
-
being. (07:46)


Ryan goes over five areas: Place, purpose, social, physical, and financial. (11:45)


Dr. Gladden speaks about the importance of an assessment. (13:45)


The book title talks 
about the second half of your life. (15:44)


Ryan suggests that the principles of the book apply to all ages. (18:28)


Dr. Gladden explains that asking abstract questions helps you get to a better understanding of 
the situation. (21:45)


Planning your life is
age
-
independent and fluid. (24:15)


Ryan suggests that there are a lot of things you can do to create optionality in house design and 
use of living space. (29:07)


How do you help clients architect an environment that supports their mission? (35:25)
Ryan de
lves into how a place can be a life hack for habits. (36:54)


Ryan speaks about how the principles and methodology described in the book are what they 
really use. (40:35)

















Ryan remodeled his house with attractive features and accessibility. (43:15)


Dr. Gladd
en expands on how Ryan’s book promotes efficiency and ease of use in design. (45:26)
House is not necessarily a home. (50:01)


Dr. Gladden advises that if you are unhappy where you are, you can architect your future 
differently. (52:19)


Steve speaks about h
ow a remodeled house creates the desired lifestyle after tragedy. (55:05)


Ryan talks about what he will be doing differently in 5 years. (58:51)


Teenagers are more thoughtful about engineering their lives. (01:05:16)

Ryan gives details about research he is interested in. (1:00:55)


There is a value to relationships. (1:01:27)

Ryan is optimistic that people will be more thoughtful about engineering their lives and thinking about place differently. (1:05:33)


If you really find purpose and love what you are doi
ng, why stop it? (1:07:29)

Ryan shares his life hacks: Tracking time, 1-on-1 connections, smart scale. (01:10:15)

Ryan said he will be starting a podcast.. (01:12:50)

To learn more about Ryan, check out the following:

Ryan Frederick’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanefrederick?original_referer=(@Ryan Frederick)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/here-formerly-smart-living-360?trk=public_profile_topcard-current-company(@Here (Formerly SmartLiving360) )

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanefrederick/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D(@ryanefrederick)

Website: https://www.here.life/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/longevitystartshere(@here.life)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanefrederick(@ryanefrederick)

Go to www.here.life/assesment to take the Right Place, Right Time Assessment, to discover whether where you currently live is the best fit for you today and into the future

Jeffrey Gladden (00:05.682)
Welcome everybody to this edition of the age hackers podcast powered by Gladden longevity. I’m your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden. And I’m here with as usual, Steve writer, Steve, what’s new in your world?

Steve Reiter (00:19.146)
Uh, just getting ready to drop my boys off at the airport on Saturday to spend them, send them to Wisconsin to spend a week with my parents. And then I’m going to Silverton, which is in the very Southwest part of Colorado to spend four days backpacking up in the mountains and hitting up some Alpine lakes and maybe knock out Mount Sneffels, which is a 14 or, and, uh, yeah. I’m stoked for that next early next week.

Jeffrey Gladden (00:25.781)
Okay.

Jeffrey Gladden (00:30.27)
Right? Nice. Okay.

Beautiful.

Jeffrey Gladden (00:39.198)
Beautiful. All right.

Love it, yeah, good. Well, the surf came up here today, so I was out doing some body surfing this morning. That felt good to get back in the ocean again, so all good here too. Yeah, so I’m excited for this podcast today. We have a really interesting gentleman with us, Ryan Frederick. And Ryan is basically the CEO of Smart Living 360. But what’s really interesting about Ryan is that he’s focused on creating

Steve Reiter (00:53.116)
Nice.

Jeffrey Gladden (01:13.474)
places and spaces, if you will, for people to, I’ll say, well, we’ll tell him what he’s actually up to, but I think it’s really the idea of how people are going to live young for a lifetime. We’ll take it to that and see where we go. So Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan (01:29.545)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeffrey Gladden (01:31.174)
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about how you got into this. You know, you’ve done several things in your life here, and yet you kind of happened into trying to create spaces for people to thrive in, so to speak. What led you to all that?

Ryan (01:47.228)
I wish it was part of a master plan, but it never is. This is a bit more of a right turn that I was expecting. My background in undergrad was in electrical engineering, and I worked in Silicon Valley for a few years. And then actually worked for a company, this is in the dot-com days, worked for a company that I was a relatively early employee. We went public.

Jeffrey Gladden (01:51.756)
It never is. Right.

Jeffrey Gladden (02:03.519)
Okay.

Ryan (02:17.128)
And I was like, geez, this business thing is pretty easy. And then, and then, piece of cake, yeah, totally. And then we had an ethical scandal in our company. So we had a handful of people go to jail, cook the books as part of it, insider trading, and really threw me for a loop. Like, what do I wanna do with my life? Who do I wanna do it with? And went back to business school at Stanford, and Stanford, they encourage you to dream big.

Jeffrey Gladden (02:20.211)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Piece of cake, man.

Steve Reiter (02:23.682)
Ha ha ha!

Jeffrey Gladden (02:33.106)
Oh wow.

Ryan (02:46.336)
And I took a step back and said, well, what is something I can really get my heart and head into? I thought more about the megatrend of longevity. It’s about 20 years ago now. And so I spent a summer, wrote letters to people in senior housing. I didn’t really know, I didn’t know anyone. Place didn’t matter anything to me really. But I wanted to see, for example, what was it like for people later in life and then what role did a place have in that?

Jeffrey Gladden (02:46.579)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (02:55.594)
Yeah. Okay.

Jeffrey Gladden (03:07.734)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (03:16.209)
and that experience.

Jeffrey Gladden (03:16.874)
So when you talk about later in life, so what are we talking about? Retirement communities or what were you actually envisioning?

Ryan (03:23.224)
This was retirement communities. I mean, these people really in their 70s, this particular, actually lived in a community for about a month in Atlanta. I did, yeah, I was the only male, only person under 75 in my wing. So I got a lot of unsolicited cookies, brunch invitations. My wife elected not to join me. Yeah, yeah, I was married, but that didn’t trouble my wife. She thought, didn’t trouble my wife.

Jeffrey Gladden (03:26.815)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (03:30.706)
You lived in a retirement community for a month? Okay.

Jeffrey Gladden (03:42.418)
There you go. Yeah, exactly. You had a lot of people hitting on you probably. Yeah.

I didn’t know that. That’s not going to stop anybody. Right.

Ryan (03:51.636)
Yeah. So, but I can expose that and that’s led to this journey since then, which is thinking a lot more about what are the implications of people living longer, more people living to a hundred, you know, as you talk about 50% of kids born today will expect to live to a hundred. And then what is the role that place has physically, literally?

Jeffrey Gladden (04:09.161)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (04:15.424)
But also figuratively, are you with your people? Do you have purpose? Are you socially connected? A bunch of factors, of course, that matter. And that has led to a book that came out about a year or so ago for consumers. So a lot of the work that I do, in fact, the brand is under, it’s here, H-E-R-E is the name of the company, and it’s a mix of helping people.

Jeffrey Gladden (04:21.532)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (04:40.112)
think about why place matters in such a significant way for their, not just longevity, but their correspondingly long health span and wealth span, because living longer by itself isn’t necessarily a good thing. And then on the other hand, helping developers, real estate investors, health systems, create better places for people to thrive across the continuum. So I look at it as…

Jeffrey Gladden (05:06.006)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (05:08.452)
this overall umbrella of where longevity or really healthy longevity meets place? And then how can we help people make better informed decisions and how can we create better places?

Jeffrey Gladden (05:14.053)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (05:18.954)
So your book is entitled Right Place, Right Time, The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life. Did I get that right? Is that? Okay. And so I haven’t read the book, but walk us through a little bit. You know, there’s got to be some elements there, some questions I would think that you would start with to try to figure out what that’s going to look like for an individual.

Ryan (05:28.568)
That’s right, yep.

Jeffrey Gladden (05:47.89)
Right? You’re really what, what we’re talking about here is kind of architecting your own future, not just going into a house because it’s pretty or it’s aesthetically appealing to you. But how do you actually architect space to what I would call support the mission, right, of, of how we’re going to, how we’re going to live. Are we going to live young? We’re going to get old here. We’re going to, you know, what are we going to do here? Right. So is that a little bit what you’re thinking?

Ryan (06:12.18)
Yeah, yeah, I’ll unpack a little bit of it for you. I would say the first thing is this thesis that like I mentioned moments ago that.

living longer isn’t necessarily a good thing if it isn’t necessarily matched with the corresponding long kind of health and financial resources. So we’re, it seems like that’s what many of us are trying to solve for. It’s similar to making the 100, the new 30. It’s implicitly the same idea is longer and healthier, but also financially well. And the good news is, you know, but the research is that your genetics only account for at most 20% of your longevity. It’s much more about lifestyle and environment.

Jeffrey Gladden (06:38.495)
Right.

Jeffrey Gladden (06:49.141)
That’s right.

Ryan (06:52.904)
And so wise decisions there throughout your life impact not only quality of your life in the moment, but provides a good tale to your health and well-being long-term. That’s the overarching kind of thesis. Now, when we say place, when I say place, I don’t mean just the four walls of your apartment, your house, condo, I don’t mean that, that’s part of it, but it’s really a composite of those four walls plus,

block that you live in, the neighborhoods you’re part of, the metropolitan area, or your urban, suburban, rural area, the state, region of the country, region of the world, world. It’s all of those different things make up your day-to-day lived experience impacts your well-being. So you might have four walls, you know, that were for you, Dr. Gladden, but you might find out that you’re not connected to your neighbors the way you used to be.

you don’t have a sense of belonging. A recent study came out around belonging, only said 26% of people have a sense of belonging in their neighborhoods. Or you might find that the politics of your state have changed, it’s not aligned with what you care about in different ways. So place has a number of factors, but going back to this idea of what the agency you have around lifestyle and environment, where you live,

Jeffrey Gladden (07:52.818)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (08:01.126)
I’m gonna…

Ryan (08:20.748)
not only is it important to meet your physical needs and your emotional and psychological, but also it influences indirectly your purpose. It influences your social connection. It influences how active you are, your sleep, you know, and so on. And then also for many people, it’s one of the biggest costs areas of their life, but also one of their biggest assets. So it’s, in a way, it’s like this really big thing that’s like hidden in sight that we don’t talk enough about in my-

Jeffrey Gladden (08:35.071)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (08:41.355)
Well.

Jeffrey Gladden (08:47.37)
See, I think it’s to me, if you’re going to look at something like this, you’ve got to sort of start with the ends in mind. I won’t say the end because we’re not talking about end of life, but we’re talking about what is it that you want to accomplish in a space? Right. It’s like it’s almost like building an office. Like, what do you actually want to do there? Right. Or you could ask yourself, if I’m going to be here, what does success look like? What are the elements of being here that equate to?

success or thriving or, and of course part of that would be actualizing your sense of purpose, being able to actualize your relationships, being able to optimize your, you know, politics, if that’s important to your religious affiliations, if that’s a piece of it too, but then also your physical activity, your health, you know, how do you, if you look at that through that lens, all of a sudden, you know,

There’s architecture around the building itself, but there’s a lot of, to your point, there’s a lot of architecture about what state you put that in, what altitude you put, or elevation you put that at, all that kind of stuff, right?

Ryan (09:54.389)
You nailed it. And I think what typically happens is we fly at too low an altitude to follow your metaphor. Is that we look at our four walls and say, well, does this meet my physical needs right now? Where in fact, if we’re really trying to architect a life that we can thrive over a longer horizon, it may be that your social connections or lack thereof are far more important than your four walls.

Jeffrey Gladden (10:03.207)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (10:15.082)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (10:22.046)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (10:22.168)
but is highly correlated to place and the people that you know or don’t know. So I advocate and I go through this in the book and then there’s a self-assessment on the here.life website that was in the book, but people enjoyed it so much. I decided to create a version, yeah, that people could, and it takes a couple of minutes and you’re able to self-assess your life in the areas.

Jeffrey Gladden (10:39.562)
pull it out.

Jeffrey Gladden (10:47.504)
So what are some of the questions on that assessment, if you don’t mind my asking?

Ryan (10:50.956)
Yeah, well, so it breaks into four categories. So there’s place, there’s purpose, there’s social connection, physical wellbeing, and then financial wellbeing. So that’s five areas. Yeah, those are the five areas. The actual questions within them with place, it would be like, do you feel emotionally connected to where you live? That’s kind of getting at home. Does your current home meet your physical needs or those that stay with you?

Jeffrey Gladden (11:00.382)
I think that’s five. Okay, got it.

Jeffrey Gladden (11:13.832)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (11:20.184)
Like, and that’s probing a little bit on whether universal design is something that’s significant, you know, in your home. On the social connection, on the purpose side, it gets this idea, do you have something that you can point to that’s bigger than yourself that you can lean into on a daily basis? That would be one of the questions in the purpose area. On the social connection piece, each of those questions has, each of those areas has five questions. But one of them there would be like, how well do you know your neighbors? Or how often do you see

Jeffrey Gladden (11:23.768)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (11:36.738)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (11:49.534)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (11:49.86)
you know, you’re close friends on a regular basis. On the physical wellbeing, one of the questions gets just simply how active are you on a regular basis? You know, some people’s homes, they’re able to walk right outside their front door and do things. Otherwise, for other people, there’s hurdles, or the weather is, you know, complicated. It makes it difficult times of the year. And the last one, the financial wellbeing, something that, number of questions again, but one of the years I pushed the airs, are you financially prepared for 100 year life?

Jeffrey Gladden (11:53.154)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (12:08.758)
Sure.

Jeffrey Gladden (12:18.596)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (12:19.056)
Are you getting outside advice on this? Because it’s pretty complicated these days. So to expect that you’re going to be able to get all the levers right on your own may not be realistic. So the assessment is an effort to work at a higher altitude on place.

Jeffrey Gladden (12:29.755)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (12:36.534)
Right, so I can see that assessment working kind of in two contexts. One would be kind of a reality check, so to speak, you know, where am I today? And the other would be an aspirational context of, you know, where would I like to be? Right. And so, you know, you could probably do that assessment looking at it through both those lenses, and that might actually give anybody a pretty good idea of kind of where the gaps are.

Ryan (12:52.684)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (13:04.702)
which would be kind of interesting in and of itself.

Ryan (13:07.148)
So what it does is, I did this in the book and then created online, similar idea, but what it does online is it, based on your answers, pre-populates a bar graph for you. So you can see visually where there might be gaps relative to what you could potentially be. And then a series of recommendations, depending on where you fall on this. As this has unfolded, Dr. Gladden, part of what’s happened is I now, I’ve beta tested.

Jeffrey Gladden (13:18.287)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (13:26.587)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (13:35.288)
a, based on people’s feedback, a workshop because the assessment is a point in time. It isn’t necessarily like what you think the future is gonna unfold. And so Beta tested a workshop and then based in-person, real estate agents hosted along with wealth advisors, did a virtual version. And then based on that feedback, have Beta tested a course that just wrapped up just before the summer.

Jeffrey Gladden (13:41.585)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (13:46.059)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (14:01.244)
and feedback and the ideas of the course, you have four different sessions, there’s videos, you get to learn from other people in the cohort, and then you walk away with a right place plan. Typically about 10 to 12 pages, okay, here’s, and uses design thinking principles, so it helps you broaden your thinking. It’s not just how to optimize necessarily where I’m right now, but what if I did this? You know, what if…

Jeffrey Gladden (14:11.091)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (14:22.992)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (14:23.68)
Steve decided to move the mountains full time, for example, what would that life look like? Even if that’s not viable at the moment, it encourages, exactly, it encourages this thinking more broadly. And so now the plan is to make that commercially available here in the fall as ways for people that are interested, if you wanna go deeper, if you’re like, okay, I see a gap and I wanna do something about that. And I wanna roll my sleeves up. Cause it’s…

Jeffrey Gladden (14:38.573)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (14:46.282)
Right.

Ryan (14:49.236)
It can be a challenge because you want to, I advocate using design thinking in particular because it helps you think broadly about in what ways could your life be different and then what are some ways to test some of these ideas.

Jeffrey Gladden (14:55.853)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (15:01.686)
Right. So, you know, this, the book title is talks about for the second half of your life, but on some level that almost seems like an artificial demarcation. Right. I mean, why couldn’t this happen early in life? Right. I mean, example being my son and his wife and they have three kids currently. They’re thinking about a fourth down the road here a little bit, but you know, they found a home, they live in Denver, they found a home they love. They’re right next to a park.

Kids have easy access to all kinds of stuff. There’s mountain biking right out the back door or the front door. They’re actually changing the front yard into a garden, but not a particularly traditional garden. It’s gonna basically be one of these integrated gardens where there’s many, many different plants that all kind of feed each other. I forget what it’s called. It’s almost like a food forest. So they have.

fruit trees and they’ve got different plants and all this stuff that’s kind of well thought out. They have a beehive in there, all these different things to kind of, you know, pollinate. Then Chris has built, he’s built a pump track in the backyard for biking. They’ve got a big sandbox back there for the kids and stuff like that. I mean, it’s just like they’re, what they’re doing is they’re actually architecting the life that they want to lead on the planet they want to live in.

Ryan (15:58.927)
Wow.

Jeffrey Gladden (16:21.77)
doing what they wanna do, being close to what they wanna do. And they have a great neighborhood, you know, with a lot of kids the same age, of course, and kids really make friends for you, quite honestly. So, you know, they have lots of friends and I think they’re really architecting like a great life in a great space. Now, that being said, could it be better? Yes, it could be better. You know, I can see ways that, you know, it’d be better if you had some.

couple different things, but I never say that because they’re architecting their world and that’s it’s their world. So that’s fine. But I think, I think this idea of being very, very intentional about, um, thinking outside the box, right? I mean, we think about a house, we think about a yard, we think about trees, we think about stuff, but what if you, what if you just ripped all that stuff open and said, no, I want to live right next to a trout stream and I want to, you know, do this or do that, or I want to, you know, I mean,

All of a sudden, I think it would give people a lot of freedom, if you will, to start to go through this. So my point is that when people have gone through your course, do they start to think in these kind of more out of the box terms? Is that kind of one of the net effects of this?

Ryan (17:30.696)
Yeah, and you have a couple of great points in there, Dr. Gladden. The first one I just want to double click on, and that is the book was written for the second half of life because that was a response to a lot of my work experience. I know a lot of developers and projects and how these things work, particularly in the… I’ve developed intergenerational communities. But when the book came out…

Jeffrey Gladden (17:43.787)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (17:50.294)
Sure.

Ryan (17:57.58)
my PR firm, they came back and they’re like, well, actually, Ryan, this topic, the principles you outline, there’s no reason why it can’t apply to people who are younger. And there’s quite a number of gen Zs and millennials, particularly in this world of hybrid or remote working that have more degrees of freedom now. And I said, you’re right. And so the assessment on the here.life website is it’s age agnostic when you go through it.

Jeffrey Gladden (18:16.047)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (18:26.024)
and thousands of people have taken the assessment, people of different ages, so you’re totally right about that. On the second piece around thinking more broadly, it’s a really important point, and I would say that’s a bigger struggle I found for people in the second half of life, because people, there’s a tendency to just kind of get in this rhythm of kind of how you do things. And then in some cases too, it can be complicated because you might have, if you’re coupled up,

Jeffrey Gladden (18:46.786)
Oh yeah. That’s right.

Ryan (18:54.94)
One person might have more out of the box thinking and desire, and the other may not. You know, may have different risk profiles. But when people are able to take a step back, when they’re able to think in terms of experiments, I don’t necessarily have to overnight get rid of my old life and create this new one, but instead find ideas that I can lean into.

Jeffrey Gladden (18:59.998)
Mm-hmm. That’s right.

Jeffrey Gladden (19:18.555)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (19:23.98)
and then have like controlled experiments to see if that big move to buy the trout farm or creek is the right thing for me. Like I think that helps encourage the thinking because then people don’t immediately say, well, I could never do that because hold on, let’s back this up for a second. You could, but what are the things that you’d wanna test out to see if that’s the right thing for you? The other element to this too is,

Jeffrey Gladden (19:33.141)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Jeffrey Gladden (19:48.116)
Yeah.

Ryan (19:52.216)
You know, think about a couple of generations ago, if you were at quote unquote retirement age, say that was 65, what was your assumed duration of life at that point?

Jeffrey Gladden (20:06.494)
Yeah, it’s about six years, five years, six years, seven years, something like that.

Ryan (20:09.948)
now might be, and I did a podcast with Stanford Center on Longevity last week. It could be decades at this point. So it says, wait a second, it could be a long time. And if I architect it wisely, like you describe, not only may I enjoy a number of those early years better, actually, they might improve the odds that I live longer and healthier too. So I totally agree. It’s a…

Jeffrey Gladden (20:17.086)
Yeah, that’s right.

Jeffrey Gladden (20:33.976)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (20:38.352)
kind of a pivot moment, I think, for a lot of people.

Jeffrey Gladden (20:41.034)
Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that, you know, if you have somebody, let’s say you are coupled up and you have somebody that’s more, let’s call it adventurous, out of the box thinker, somebody that’s a little bit more, likes to keep things the way they are, so to speak. I think if you think about this in the abstract before you get concrete, it can actually help. What I mean by that is that if you start to think about, well,

you know, where do we want, if you’re asking very specific questions, I’m speaking to the audience here, right? If, if you’re thinking about this, if you’re taking very specific things like, well, where do we want to live and how many square feet do we want to have? And these very specific kinds of things, it kind of narrows your focus into getting those kinds of answers. But if you’re asking, I think more abstract questions like, you know, what quality of life do we want to have? What ease of access to friends do we want to have? What ease of access to exercise do we want to have?

of how healthy do we want to be? How many minutes a week do we want to be outside? All these kinds of things. If you start to think about it abstractly before you narrow it down, I think all of a sudden, even for somebody that’s a little more conservative in their thinking, you’ll start to realize that, hey, there’s some options here that I wasn’t thinking about, but this could be really terrific, right? So, yeah.

Ryan (22:04.396)
And you nailed it. And I think part of it too, that we fight right now when we are focused on encouraging people to lean into the century life concept is we’ve got these headwinds related to ageism that says, okay, tomorrow I’ll be a lesser person than I am today. That’s part of the normative culture message. And…

Jeffrey Gladden (22:22.547)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (22:31.177)
That’s the normalization of aging in society, right?

Ryan (22:33.524)
It is exciting. However, I do a bi-weekly blog on the here.life website, really around healthy longevity and often where it intersects with place. And one of the topics I did a bit of time ago was on the U-shaped happiness curve, which has been proven internationally. And that is you’re a certain level of happiness in your 20s, and then you kind of, you have this somewhat precipitous decline in the US.

Jeffrey Gladden (22:51.145)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (23:01.496)
to your late 40s, about 50, I’d like to think it may be somehow correlated to teenagers in the house. And then you work your way up. And so people in their 70s and 80s, their self-reported happiness or wellbeing is greater in their 70s and 80s than it was at any point in their life prior. And so part of what that points to then is to say, well, wait a second, if I, you take that image and then you map it to the fact that 90% of, roughly 90% of people

They say they wanna age in place. And age in place, what that typically connotes is you stay in the same dwelling, often a suburban single-family house, and you wanna be there for the duration of your years. The chick.

Jeffrey Gladden (23:45.382)
I think there’s a flip side to that too though. Let me just throw this out there. You can take this, this aging in place. I think part of that is yes, and we want to stay in the same place. But I think the other implied thing is there. We don’t want to be displaced. We don’t want to have to move. We don’t want to have to move from here into some sort of a facility that we don’t want to go to. So I think that’s a big piece of it, right? Is, is yeah.

Ryan (23:49.028)
Yeah.

Ryan (24:08.152)
Yes.

Ryan (24:14.309)
It’s a big piece, but there’s two different pieces to that, Dr. Gladden. There’s one piece is that, going back to one of your core points earlier, that itself means you have blinders on, that you’re not asking the larger set of questions that you just went through. You’re like, well, actually it’s about optimizing this current life. It might be that you have plenty of other better options.

Jeffrey Gladden (24:25.798)
Mm-hmm.

That’s right.

Ryan (24:40.9)
that would be attractive to you, but you haven’t taken the time to sort out what that looks like. The second piece to the point you made, which is somewhat ironic, is that people say they wanna age in place, but the vast majority of people don’t have their houses, just focus strictly on the physical elements of it. They’re not designed to support aging in place. Less than 5% of the housing stock in the whole US is designed to support people that may have some limited mobility issue.

Jeffrey Gladden (24:45.487)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (24:57.994)
That’s right. Yeah.

Ryan (25:10.592)
So if you’re playing, I’m gonna Asian play so I don’t have to go over to senior living. Well, ironically, you’re actually setting, you might be setting yourself up for an event that happens that gives you no option but yet to go over there, not on the time that you prefer, but based on like a particular trigger moment. So while, back to one of your previous points, while my lens initially was coming at this from the second half of life, this whole idea of architecting your life,

Jeffrey Gladden (25:10.615)
Right.

Jeffrey Gladden (25:29.31)
Yeah, that’s right.

Ryan (25:40.512)
and having place support, what you’re looking for is age independent. And then to add one other point to it, it’s very much linked to like transitions in life, either you create or happen. So any, for example, anytime maybe you are in a different relationship or you have a different job, number of different things that happen, health event, it naturally raises a question, am I in the right place? And so part of what I’m advocating

Jeffrey Gladden (25:43.004)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (26:06.991)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (26:10.328)
There’s planning that people do for financial, for being financially well over long life. As you know, there’s a practice of seeing physicians on a regular basis. So you’re mapping out your health for a long life. I believe everyone should have a place plan that they have some principles, they have where it happens to be, but recognize that things change. Your needs and preferences change. If you have a partner,

Jeffrey Gladden (26:28.45)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (26:39.588)
their needs and preferences change and not to be overlooked, places change. You know, a place may be less attractive, it may be less safe, it may be warmer than it was before. Although part of the exercise is this calibration of synchronizing your needs and wants with place and you’ve got a number of variables that are moving at the same time.

Jeffrey Gladden (26:44.575)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (27:02.13)
I think that’s a good point. I also think that it’s interesting as to what perspective you take on it. For example, let’s say you’re at a given age, and you can be looking at this from the standpoint of how do I create a place that supports me as I get older, which actually is implying as I lose my faculties, so to speak, my capabilities? How do I choose a place that supports me in that process?

So that’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is how do I choose a place that actually enables me to not lose my capabilities or lose my faculties? So it helps me to optimize, to live young for a lifetime, if you will. How do I choose that place? Realizing that in choosing that place, you actually can have your cake and eat it too, because you can also create elements to that are sort of safety net elements.

But now you’re really optimizing your ability to get outside, the ability to ride your bike, the ability to go for your hikes or whatever it is that you love to do, right? Play tennis, whatever it is. And I think this is a really interesting thing. And, you know, I’ve often thought that there would be an opportunity to actually build communities around this kind of synergy where people have a theme like they want to live green, they want to live, you know, they want to eat organic food. They want to…

you know, you know, not have electrical wires running through their backyard. They, you know, they want to have a clean environment and want clean air, clean water. They want to be, you know, ecologically sound, if you will. They want to have access to good food. They want safe places for the kids to play. Um, and they also, you know, I think beyond that, um, instead of having a living room, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms upstairs and a play room, you know,

It’s like architecting a space that actually supports a different style of living, right? Like, where’s the gym? Where’s the music room? Where’s the, where’s the things that keep us young? Right. And so, um, all of a sudden you could, I can imagine working with real estate developers, um, around something like this, where you would actually create communities and allow people to actually move into a different style altogether. So to speak.

Ryan (29:19.72)
Yeah, so I’m working with some of those developers right now. So I’ll give you a couple things on this. One is, back to the earlier point you made, one of the things I advocate in the book and then in the workshop and course is this idea that when you’re redesigning, let’s say you’re redeveloping a house, going through this process, there are a number of things you can do that effectively…

Jeffrey Gladden (29:22.517)
Yeah.

Ryan (29:46.712)
create optionality for your use of the house. And I’ll just pick on the master bedroom and bathroom, for example. You could go remodel your house and say the master bedroom is on the second floor as is the master bathroom. What you could do is you could do that, make the bathroom, look attractive, and a little more usable. Or what you could do is you could think about, well, how might we be able to seamlessly turn our master bedroom into the first floor?

Jeffrey Gladden (29:50.127)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (30:16.164)
how can we, when we’re designing the bathroom, how can we use slip resistant tile that we use, make it comfort high toilets, which is, it looks the same, have blocking behind the wall for grab bars, have a shower with maybe just a lower lip, has a bench that we can sit on, get a lot of things that people want anyway, but it may make it so that as you’re living longer, your house doesn’t force you out. And I think that it…

Jeffrey Gladden (30:44.062)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ryan (30:45.74)
And so I think there’s an element there of, how do you create more optionality in your house so you’re not forced before you may want to move your house? On the second piece, you nailed it. I mean, we’re in a spa right now. The work that I’m doing with here is twofold. It’s one, it’s helping people think more deeply about making wise decisions to architect their life, to live long, healthy, financially secure, and the role that place has in.

Jeffrey Gladden (30:54.879)
Yeah.

Ryan (31:14.84)
That’s the book, the workshop course, et cetera. On the other hand, I call that the demand side. On the other side is the supply side. How do we create better places? And that means that has implications for zoning at the municipality level. It has implications at the neighborhood level with sidewalks, third places. And it also has elements within the actual

Jeffrey Gladden (31:14.963)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (31:26.582)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (31:44.296)
a home, house, that kind of built environment. And I’m working with a couple of developers that have, for example, that have read my book and said, we wanna create this kind of thing that doesn’t exist. So one of them, for example, we’re doing a development in South Carolina where it’s rental cottages that are built in, they’re built in little neighborhoods where you have green space in the middle, you have a front porch.

Jeffrey Gladden (31:47.436)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (31:56.74)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (32:13.784)
You have one story living. It’s attractive, but the design is, the space is done such that it meets your needs, but not more. You have like common spaces to get to know each other and also have certain service delivery meals or at least some meals, et cetera. And over time, if you do need, this is a 55 plus community. If you do need some element of care down the road,

there are ways those services can be provisioned to come to you. So we’ve got this, just the implication of what you’re describing, you can flip this model upside down on the lived experience level, where for the most part, I’m exaggerating a bit, but in large measure, we have single family homes that were in the suburban areas that were designed as if we would never get older. And then we have these senior living communities.

Jeffrey Gladden (32:47.385)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (33:12.036)
that are homogenous, expect all the services that you want would be there, that people aren’t necessarily drawn to, and how can we create a blend of new product, new experiences, new communities, where you’re gonna have some people that are, you might have some people that are, like you were describing earlier, that are very much invested in, okay, this is gonna nudge me to eat healthier, to be more active, et cetera. I think there is that pathway. But then there’s some other pathways where it’s like actually,

I just want to be able to be around people like me. And I would describe that maybe as the Margaritaville concept, which is, however you feel about it, has been quite successful because it’s brought people in that want to be part of a community that have the shared Parrothead affiliation. They may not necessarily be running a marathon every day, but it’s meeting them a bit, you know, where they are in social connection in particular. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity to…

Jeffrey Gladden (33:46.181)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (33:55.382)
Sure.

Ryan (34:11.404)
As I said, to help people make better decisions about place, but also can we just create more places that are better and more?

Jeffrey Gladden (34:17.822)
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it can go across the gamut of society, whether you wanna sort of be in Margaritaville or you wanna be in a community that’s really emphasizing youthfulness, if you will, right? So you can emphasize comfort, you can emphasize youthfulness, you can emphasize ecologically green spaces, whatever you wanna call it. So there’s lots of different themes, I think, that can go on in this.

Ryan (34:41.539)
Yep.

Jeffrey Gladden (34:45.994)
But I do think the idea of architecting this is important. And I will say this, and you already know this, I know you’ve said this in your book, but we’ve discovered this to be true as well. And that is that, really people’s success in many respects related to their aspirations as a function of the environment that they reside in.

So for example, you know, how many people go to a Tony Robbins, you know, weekend or whatever they do, I have not been, but, you know, then they’re, they’re all charged up, right. And then two weeks later, really, I think the numbers are 4% of the people are actually doing something. And the analysis there is that, um, you know, people go back to an environment that basically pushes them towards habits that they’ve already had. And there’s it’s really difficult.

the environment is not supporting the new mission, the habits are not supporting the new mission, and the next thing you know, two weeks later, they had a couple of sleepless nights because of travel and this and that, and they’re right back to doing what they used to do, right? So really when I think about this, and I think about this for Gladden Longevity clients, is how do we help them architect an environment that actually supports the mission? And so people get really clear on what the mission is, and then you…

you go in and you help them architect that, right? So I think the same is kind of true here also. If people are really clear on what the mission is, and then you have the ability to help architect that space, or we have the ability to help people in our end of the spectrum architect that space, I think that becomes a very conscious decision, but I think it’s absolutely critical, because the other thing that we’ve found is that some people have the ability to take information and implement it.

Right. They can actually create systems and do things. Other people have no real desire to do that. Let’s say they may have a capacity, they may not even have a capacity, but they certainly don’t have the desire. And they need somebody to come in and actually, you know, go through the pantry, go through the kitchen, go through the bedroom, go through the gym, the office, you know, and architect this thing into how do you succeed here? And I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about. And I think this very conscientious…

Ryan (36:38.104)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (37:05.498)
approach to architecting spaces to support the mission, I think is, you know, I think is spot on really.

Ryan (37:13.077)
You say earlier, how in the world, Ryan, did you go from studying electrical engineering to being in healthy longevity in place? I do ask myself that question from time to time, but I would say one of the through lines is systems thinking. That’s part of what you’re describing. It’s like, okay, you’re going to have, we have headwinds.

Jeffrey Gladden (37:28.982)
That’s right.

That’s right.

Ryan (37:35.332)
that make habit forming really challenging. And your Tony Robbins example, I think is a really good one. Like people are well-intended, but then they get back to their prior systems and their systems let them down. And James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, is really a system book. And so I see place as being complimentary to what you’re talking about because…

Jeffrey Gladden (37:41.878)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (37:51.859)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (37:59.06)
It is, it fits into those systems. Like what do you want your life to look like? And it can happen in high altitude ways, going back to that metaphor. Like, okay, if you don’t have any good friends where you are and you’re having a hard time making friends, it may not matter how much you love your four walls. You simply may be in the wrong place. But also can go to lower altitude places. Like, okay, I’m just spending too much time watching television at night.

Jeffrey Gladden (38:03.03)
That’s right.

Jeffrey Gladden (38:19.114)
That’s right.

Ryan (38:27.98)
Well, maybe one idea is to take that TV out of your bedroom, for example. So I think that there are, like, I talk about it in some ways as a life hack. How can you think about place as a life hack that just makes the things you wanna have happen easier? Like, I know that some interesting research around just catching the habits of your friends. If your friends’ friends are obese, you’re more likely to be.

Jeffrey Gladden (38:33.177)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (38:48.042)
That’s it.

Ryan (38:56.632)
be obese. If you’re friends, friends are depressed. You’re more likely to be depressed. I’m not saying you should let go of all your depressed friends. That’s not what I’m saying. But what I am saying is that intentionality matters. We’ve been, my wife and our family, we were in the San Francisco Bay area for about a decade. We were in the greater Baltimore area for about a decade and we moved to Austin four years ago. And it’s interesting to see how we’re different.

how our friends circles are different, depending on the places that you put yourself in. And not just at the metropolitan level, like down to the neighborhood level. I remember we were looking to find a house here in Austin. We were in an apartment initially, cause we were trying to find the right neighborhood. I biked around, cause I wanted to know what the feel was by neighborhood, even by block.

Jeffrey Gladden (39:29.59)
Yeah.

Ryan (39:48.32)
as it played out. One of the things that I do on a regular basis, it’s hot here in Austin, especially during the summer, and there’s something, an open water pool called Barton Springs, natural water, fish and turtles in there. And I, it’s no coincidence that I can bicycle from our house, go for a hard 30 minute swim and then bike back. And that’s an hour. It’s like, that’s, we made a conscious decision about place that enables that.

Jeffrey Gladden (40:00.403)
Yep.

Jeffrey Gladden (40:11.433)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (40:16.604)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (40:17.272)
that’s a heck of a lot easier than if I have to drive a half an hour, you just don’t do it as much. So it manifests itself, I said high altitude ways, low altitude ways, but fits nicely into that systematic thinking you were describing or an architect in your life.

Jeffrey Gladden (40:32.074)
So let me ask you this, what is it in your home in Austin, what have you architected there that’s different than what you had in either Baltimore or San Francisco, apart from being close to Barton Springs, which is great. I love Austin, I love that town. I love all those walkways along, I think it’s the Colorado River that runs through town.

Ryan (40:45.653)
Uh, yes.

Ryan (40:55.756)
Yes. Yeah, that’s right.

Jeffrey Gladden (40:58.098)
Yeah, but you can bike there, you can run there, even in even in the summer when it’s warm, it’s shaded. If you get out early, it’s still super pleasant. I don’t know. There’s just a nice energy to it, right? You just feel good when you’re there. So.

Ryan (41:03.308)
Yes.

Totally.

Ryan (41:10.108)
Yeah, well, so we, I, yeah, I guess I eat my own dog food. And I talk about a little bit in the book, like the methodology and the principles I described in the book is what we really used as it turned out when we relocated and what were the things that mattered to us? How could we find those? It impacted the neighborhood we were in, impacted really the school system for our kids.

Jeffrey Gladden (41:19.571)
Okay.

Jeffrey Gladden (41:36.214)
So in what way did it impact the neighborhood? Tell me about it.

Ryan (41:39.48)
We wanted to be in a place that, and obviously affordability is an issue, so we have to kind of triangulate all these things, but we wanted a place that had high degree of walkability. Didn’t necessarily mean walkability to stores, although that would be ideal, but more you could just see people out and about. It was easiest to kind of walk out from your door and kind of see people, and people got to know their neighbors as part of that consequence.

Jeffrey Gladden (41:58.116)
Okay.

Jeffrey Gladden (42:05.334)
So you’re in a neighborhood with sidewalks, I take it, where people walk between homes, is that kind of thing?

Ryan (42:10.472)
We don’t have sidewalks, but we have generally wide streets, and there’s limited traffic. A lot of different trees, just people walk around a lot as a piece of it. Another piece of it is, my wife makes fun of me, but this house has a master bedroom on the first floor.

Jeffrey Gladden (42:14.868)
Okay.

Okay.

Got it.

Jeffrey Gladden (42:31.158)
You’re okay.

Ryan (42:32.72)
The way the house is designed, we have three kids, it’s gonna, well, this is going to college next month. It works well for a family of five. I think it’s gonna work well as a family too. The way the design kind of layout is in all of this. We also wanted to be in a place where we were close to downtown, but also closer to other, to our grocery store, doctors, pharmacy, et cetera.

Jeffrey Gladden (42:42.157)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (43:01.064)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (43:01.828)
There’s this concept of the 15 minute neighborhood or 20 minute neighborhood, 15 minute city that people are talking about. Where can you go that either can walk, bike, e-bike, take public transportation? We can e-bike, for example, to pretty much anything.

just the way we’re located. And e-bikes, by the way, I don’t think people talk enough about, we talk about these cars and Tesla and these different things. There were more e-bikes sold last year than there were e-vehicles for cars. It’s like, they’re amazing. It all of a sudden opens up people’s worlds in a way that was more challenged, especially if there’s hills and so on. So yeah, we’ve done it, we did a remodel. So we’ve done it at the detailed level. We have, for an art situation,

Jeffrey Gladden (43:20.139)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (43:31.07)
Yeah. E-bikes are amazing.

Ryan (43:47.596)
We don’t have a TV except in our den. So we wanted to make sure we did things that were conducive to social connection.

Jeffrey Gladden (43:54.73)
So tell me about your remodel. What did you remodel?

Ryan (43:59.468)
I like to joke it was the kind of pandemic version of remodel. I thought it was just started and it was only one room and then it kind of hit everything. Apparently that was less of a surprise to my wife. But yeah, what we did is it was a house where house in Baltimore was from the eighties. House here in Austin is from the eighties. Baltimore is 1880s, Austin is 1980s. So.

Jeffrey Gladden (44:17.867)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (44:23.476)
There were some things that we did to make it more attractive from the outside, from the inside, made bigger windows. We did more insulation, thinking about energy costs and so on, a lot more windows to have the outside in. We blew out one of the main rooms, so it was a space that was more conducive for gatherings. We have a long table that we introduced in that room.

Jeffrey Gladden (44:34.364)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (44:48.1)
that we’ve used for a number of different homes. So we can gather, it works fine for five, but it works great for 14. We created an island that we can cook on together as a family, but also has chairs that are there for people to use. We created dedicated, we carved out some spaces. So we have dedicated workspaces for my wife and I. So it is a number in terms of the, I said that on the first, we created a guest room on the first floor that would.

Jeffrey Gladden (44:48.147)
Uh huh.

Jeffrey Gladden (44:53.901)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (45:08.018)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (45:16.16)
that has universal design principles, some of which I described earlier. So it’s easier for our parents to come visit us. We have a landscape architect we worked with. We created a pathway in from our driveway. So there’s no stairs as one option. So you could come in, take advantage of what our house is about and really have no stairs to manage at all. So it’s a number of different elements, Dr. Gladden, impacting the remodel, but the idea that…

Jeffrey Gladden (45:32.693)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (45:38.341)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (45:45.552)
you know, location, some point, we optimize for location first, and then dealt with the actual housing.

Jeffrey Gladden (45:53.85)
Okay. So I’m getting that there isn’t a home gym in there or that kind of stuff, right? In your garage.

Ryan (46:00.056)
There is, yeah, we have it in our garage. So we’ve got a treadmill, we’ve got a TV that’s set up with Apple TV that my wife right now is in, she’s going through an aerobics kick. So she’s got, you know, jazzercise in particular, she’s doing that stuff. We’ve got free weights, we’ve got a punching bag. So yeah, there’s some, but we’re also really close. You know, there’s, like you point out, there’s the pool, but there’s also, we’re close to the green belt. So we can just bike to the green belt.

Jeffrey Gladden (46:10.527)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Ryan (46:29.472)
and do running or hiking there, and that’s accessible to us.

Jeffrey Gladden (46:29.704)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah, I think this is nice. So you’re really, what you’re talking about really is kind of a combination of efficiency and ease of use, right? So it becomes effortless and efficient. I think the more that we can make spaces that are both efficient and effortless in their support of the mission, I think this is really, really good. So you can, when I was designing cath labs and I ended up.

helping to design a heart hospital that we built and things like that. One of the things that I would focus on was how many steps does the family have to take to get from here to there? How many steps do I have to take from the cath table to be able to speak with the family? How many steps do I have to do? How many steps does a staff have to do, right? So you start to think in terms of efficiency and effortlessness and when you get that flow right,

All of a sudden, everybody enjoys being in that space. And so I think, and certainly if you had an injury, you know, to be able to be on the first floor and get to the kitchen easily and get back, you know, or whatever, all that stuff starts to really add up. So as the audience is listening about this, I think if you wanna, you know, think about what do you really wanna do in this space? Do you wanna support your youthfulness? Do you wanna have it on the back end?

you know, be adaptable if something were to happen. And then how do you make it, you know, effortless and efficient, uh, to support the mission, I think those would be the things to start to think about, at least those are the things that I would start to think about. So.

Ryan (48:08.292)
I think you’re totally right. I mean, part of it is knowing the human condition and part of the human condition is that we’re lazy. And so the more that we can create easy things to happen that nudge you to who you wanna be anyway, and that happens on a regular basis, it’s that old principle of getting 1% better every day. And that’s just kind of doing the right stuff. And if you make it hard, you’re just less likely to do it. And so, and I think that…

Jeffrey Gladden (48:14.228)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (48:19.254)
That’s right.

That’s right.

That’s right.

That’s right.

Jeffrey Gladden (48:33.119)
Yeah.

Ryan (48:35.212)
and it comes in these different forms. It’s actually in the house, it’s in the neighborhood, it’s the, do you describe like the ethos? Austin’s not the right place for everyone, but for though, but for people that do wanna be part of the energy, part of the entrepreneurial vibe, it’s easier when it already exists as opposed to trying to create it in a place that it doesn’t. And so it’s, and again, if your life wasn’t so long, you wouldn’t care as much about it, but when you’ve got

Jeffrey Gladden (48:49.344)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (48:55.198)
Yeah, that’s right.

Ryan (49:03.672)
this longer life and it’s impacted by these decisions, like you literally could be a much different person who lives longer, healthier, by just making this wise decision about place and having the compound returns over time than being a spot that’s the wrong place for you and having to fight against it all the time.

Jeffrey Gladden (49:15.626)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (49:24.694)
I think one of the other things that’s important to me is I think about this, and I think about the places that I currently live in, is that I want them to be inspiring, right? I wanna look out a window and be inspired by what I see. That’s very, very important to me. So I think also as the audience is listening to this, there’s also a sense of aesthetic that goes into this, right? Make it beautiful, make it inspiring, have a view. If you have a view and the windows aren’t pointed that way, just if you’re remodeling,

make it inspiring so that when you get up in the morning, like for me, when I get up and I journal, the first thing that I do is I journal and then I meditate and things like that. But I sit in front of a view that’s just like, oh my God, it’s so inspiring, right? And so, you know, it just makes, I just wanna be there, right? And so if you can encourage all that aesthetic joy that comes from being in a beautiful thing that’s inspiring, that’s really, really cool, so.

Ryan (50:23.22)
It is, and I think there’s, most people aren’t going to physically move and most people shouldn’t physically move. But one of the key things, you can make your current place better. And one of the things that we’re doing right now is we value travel. And so we’ve traveled a number of places as a family.

Jeffrey Gladden (50:36.73)
Oh, for sure.

Okay.

Ryan (50:47.32)
and a little project from my daughter before she heads to college next month is we’re creating a space, we’re just calling it the People and Places. It’s the game room, but it’s really People and Places. And we’ve got just these amazing pictures and adventures, and we’re gonna showcase these. And so, yeah, and so there’s a wall that we have pictures of our family related to this, we have maps on another wall, we’ve got, you know.

Jeffrey Gladden (50:56.38)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (51:02.818)
Oh, I see. Okay, so this is family trips that you’re documenting.

Jeffrey Gladden (51:12.372)
Mmm. Fun.

Ryan (51:13.936)
maps and flags of places we’ve been, and it fits that same idea of you’re walking into something that speaks to you emotionally. It reinforces this sense, because house isn’t necessarily home. And how can we encourage and evoke this emotional and psychological attachment?

Jeffrey Gladden (51:17.014)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (51:38.006)
So, uh…

Ryan (51:38.972)
in a good way and that can be a view for sure, but for those that either aren’t drawn that way or don’t have a view, there’s other ideas I talk about, even simply like the idea of introducing color to a room, rearranging your furniture, those smaller, less expensive ways can reinvigor, can reinvigor a spot.

Jeffrey Gladden (51:43.039)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (51:50.202)
Oh yeah. Yep.

Jeffrey Gladden (51:55.474)
Yep. Oh, for sure. Yeah, an accent wall can do magic, right? Or actually a beautiful piece of art or, or even a TV that plays art for that. I mean, you can have any art piece in the world on your wall, right? So yeah, there’s many ways to create that inspiring thing, but I think it’s important not to get so functional that you miss the, the aesthetics and the inspiration of it all, right? You’d like to be inspired. You know, when I think about your, your

Ryan (52:07.294)
Yeah.

Ryan (52:10.637)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (52:23.71)
game room that’s really kind of a room documenting your travels and things. I wonder, is there also an element where you actually plan your next trip in that room? Like we’ve been here, but we kind of want to go there.

Ryan (52:35.932)
So we have a map that we’re putting up that has, it’s a world map and we have different pins. And so our plan is to, okay, well, where’s someone else? Where’s some place that we haven’t meant to though? Or we’re encouraging our middle son just came back from three weeks in Buenos Aires. He’s a rising junior in high school and he was awesome. He was just immersed, got to meet, become friends with locals there. And so it’s not just like our…

Jeffrey Gladden (52:38.814)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (52:48.214)
beautiful.

Jeffrey Gladden (52:53.715)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (53:00.829)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (53:03.88)
our whole family traveling, it’s like components of, where do you wanna go? And so I think it, in that case, I would just, our intent anyway, it hasn’t been delivered just yet, our intent is to inspire bigger thinking and through place.

Jeffrey Gladden (53:04.618)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (53:18.718)
Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful. Well, it’s really been a lovely conversation with you, Ryan. I really appreciate your perspective on this. I think for the audience, I think, you know, many people take their place for granted, so to speak. It’s the house is the house. It is what it is. But I think rethinking it from the standpoint of how does it support, you know, a mission of youthfulness and how does it support a mission of, you know, maybe something does happen to us?

where we need to be supported in different ways, right? And then if you’re not happy where you are, I think architecting your future in a different way than maybe the way you did to get where you currently are is kind of a cool thing.

Ryan (53:59.616)
Yeah, I look at it and for some reason, it’s this really big decision that’s in some cases, just hidden in plain sight. Like we just look past it. I believe that if you’re focused on trying to optimize a healthy, long, financially secure, socially connected life.

Jeffrey Gladden (54:13.365)
Yeah.

Ryan (54:21.308)
start with place. And Dr. Glad, you might, I hear your point, you might actually start with, what do you want your future to look like? What does that majesty look like? And it’s similar. How can place enable that? And sure, maybe you want to exercise more or you want to be a little bit healthier. True. But place helps inform a lot of that. And so I think if more people see the power of place…

Jeffrey Gladden (54:22.889)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (54:32.01)
That’s right.

Jeffrey Gladden (54:35.551)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (54:45.198)
Exactly.

Ryan (54:50.9)
recognize it doesn’t mean that it’s this huge thing that you can’t overcome. There are baby steps in this, some of which we outlined in our conversation, that this nudges you to ultimately a better life for you. And then if we can at the same time create better places, so there’s better, more alternatives for people for what they’re looking for. I think ultimately individuals benefit, but I think our society at large benefits as well.

Jeffrey Gladden (54:58.134)
That’s right. Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (55:20.208)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. So if people want to get more information, where do they go to learn more about what you’re doing and get a copy of your book and all that kind of stuff?

Ryan (55:29.396)
Yeah, a couple of things. I would encourage people to visit the HEAR website, which is HEAR.life, the HEAR.life website. There, you’ll see a prompting, if you’re interested, take that assessment. I think the assessment’s a great first place to start. Like, is this, where am I in my, this snapshot in time, kind of where am I? And then there will be increasingly opportunities, if you’re interested.

Jeffrey Gladden (55:48.184)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (55:52.502)
Yeah.

Ryan (55:57.696)
lean into a workshop or a course, there’s a blog that you can sign up for to get content every other week and this kind of subject matter. That’s probably, I think a good place for people to start. But what I’m envisioning here, Dr. Gladden, is that if people are optimizing for a longer, optimizing for healthy longevity, place is part of the equation.

Jeffrey Gladden (56:06.205)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (56:22.964)
And so finding ways in which some of this content and tools can be webbed into more physician practices, wealth advisors, life coaches, it’s just in the water. Like I see this being something that can have a really big step function for people to just lean into this because it matters so significantly.

Jeffrey Gladden (56:36.74)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (56:42.292)
Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (56:46.398)
Beautiful. Steve, any comments?

Steve Reiter (56:50.07)
No, I mean, this is something that I kind of went through myself a year after my wife died. I needed to remodel the entire upstairs because it was just I needed to make the house mine and tore out all the carpets, put in some hardwood floors, got new furniture, really made the house for the boys and I. And in particular, when you say modeling your home, I got a big ass couch.

Jeffrey Gladden (56:57.45)
Hmm

Okay. Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (57:10.841)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Gladden (57:16.516)
Mm.

Steve Reiter (57:16.522)
So that way my boys could have their friends over and a big TV so they could play video games. And I would often, Dr. Gladden, this last school year, every Friday night during the school year, there were at least a half dozen teen boys over at my house and they were jumping between my sauna and my cold plunge. And I was coaching them on the cold plunge. And then they’d take breaks and do video games and they’d ride the carol bike and lift weights on the tonal and.

Jeffrey Gladden (57:22.176)
Nice.

Jeffrey Gladden (57:37.822)
Nice.

Jeffrey Gladden (57:42.186)
Beautiful.

Steve Reiter (57:44.702)
That’s what I wanted to make my house after Elizabeth passed. And so Ryan, you talking about this makes me kind of think, OK, at whatever point I eventually remarry, I definitely want to be thinking about this, modeling a house for the kind of life that I want to have.

Jeffrey Gladden (57:46.918)
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah.

Jeffrey Gladden (58:03.154)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan (58:03.276)
Yeah, Steve, that’s powerful. I think that it’s awesome to see how you’ve modeled it the way you have. I think that part of this is for some people, right now, for everyone to do it yourself exercise. Right, okay, here’s what I think, and I think there are, some people are able to do that. It’s harder for others. So the more that we can just make it easier for people to say, okay, what is, how should I think different about, how do we execute? I think…

Jeffrey Gladden (58:25.598)
Mm-hmm. That’s right.

Ryan (58:30.948)
more people will create better places for the life they’re designing.

Jeffrey Gladden (58:34.198)
Mm-hmm. Very cool. Thanks so much.

Ryan (58:39.736)
Yeah, thank you, Dr. Gladden. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Reiter (58:42.402)
All right, I’ll hit stop on this.