The most personal episode of the series. Every quote below plays the exact moment from the broadcast — just tap it.
“This is my therapy”
Dr. Rob makes the episode personal in the first five minutes: he is a senior himself, recovering from a mild stroke two months earlier. The broadcast you are watching is, in his words, the intervention.
As a senior, I'm giving you an example: this is my therapy for overcoming a mild stroke that I had about two months ago. This is a reaffirmation that I'm still alive and contributing.
Steve Peters, reflecting on twenty-five years of Arizona broadband advocacy, lands the through-line of the whole series.
It has to be more than just getting people connected. They got to have the resources, they got to have the training, they got to have the equipment and services to be able to use the technology effectively.
Senior Planet: 870,000 engagements
Ryan Kawamoto of Older Adult Technology Services (OATS) from AARP walks through Senior Planet — founded in 2004, an AARP charitable affiliate since 2020, free and open to non-members, with 40 to 70 free virtual classes a week, four physical centers, 750+ partner sites, and a free tech-support hotline. He tells the story of a homebound woman locked out of her email — and therefore locked out of her grocery delivery app — whom staff got back online, and fed.
Just know that our Older Adult Technology Services mission is to harness the power of technology to change the way we age.
And then the instructors are so patient and so kind that the seniors just don't want to leave.
One dollar a minute
For Mother's Day, Kelly Mukherjee interviews her own mother — Dr. Li-Jin Chung, who spent more than thirty years at AT&T Bell Laboratories with over a dozen patents, including in the voice-over-internet technology that underpins the very call they are on. She remembers what it cost to talk to her mother in Taiwan.
It costs about one US dollars per minute of conversation. So each time when we connect, we just say, “Mom, I'm fine.” Then I hang up right away, because the cost of the communication is so high.
At 79, she now runs a Google Meet study group five mornings a week at 8:15 — about ten members, most of them over 75.
It said, “Happiness is when what you think, do, and say are in harmony.” And it is really what you were reminding us — that life is really truly about harmony. It's not about being digitally connected.
The myth, and the next show
I think we were just talking today too about how it's really important to disprove the myth that older adults can't use technology. And I think this conversation has really highlighted the fact that that's not true.
Dr. Rob closes by naming the flip side of everything they just celebrated — and books the follow-up on air.
So technology makes it easy for people to do things, but also easy to be a victim of fraud. I'd like to invite, especially Ryan, but the team back to think about a separate show about dealing with fraud, seniors and technology.