2022 in Review With Dan Perry, Founder of the Alliance for Aging Research

Show Notes

It’s hard to believe that 2022 is over. As we step into a new year, it’s important to look back and reflect on the year that we’ve just had. Dan Perry, Founder of the Alliance for Aging Research and member of our Board of Directors, joins Alliance President and CEO Sue Peschin to reflect on the moments that defined 2022.

Episode Transcript

Sue Peschin:

Welcome to This Is Growing Old, a podcast from the Alliance for Aging Research. I’m Sue Peschin, and I serve as president and CEO of the Alliance for Aging Research. We want to wish everybody a happy New Year. It’s really hard to believe that 2022 is over. And as we embark on this new year, it’s important to look back and reflect on the year that we just had. So here to help me do that is none other than Dan Perry, founder and board member of the Alliance for Aging Research. Dan, thank you so much for being here, and welcome back to This Is Growing Old.

Dan Perry:

Well, thank you for the invitation, Sue, and happy New Year to you and all of your viewers. By the way, I’ve enjoyed my previous encounter with This is Growing Old. Love the title and love the program. It’s really clever, just like so many things that you put your hand on.

Sue Peschin:

Thank you, Dan. Well, I’m excited about this. So let’s look back at 2022. What are some moments that defined the year for you?

Dan Perry:

Well, it’s not a single moment, but going into now the third year of COVID and the pandemic, it’s impossible to separate the events of 2022 from that. It is such a powerful impact on everything that we do. There are more optimistic stories to talk about in the health sphere that we’ll get to, but I have to dwell a little bit about specifically 2022 and the impact of this disease. COVID is a big reason why in 2022, we were in the second year of a decline in average life expectancy in the United States. And when the Alliance for Aging Research was being established back in the mid-’80s, the big glaring reality was that while acute infectious diseases had been the story of healthcare in America earlier in the 20th century, by the ’80s, we had reached a point where clearly the aging of the population, the remodeling of our age profile as a nation, fewer children, a lot more older people, that the chronic age-related diseases, cancer, heart, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and so on, that was going to be the big challenge.

And we needed to vastly step up our research into diseases of aging and into aging itself. And that was the premise for starting this organization. We thought that we had left infectious diseases like smallpox and measles, and influenza largely in the rearview mirror. Boy, were we wrong. And COVID has brought that reality to the fore that we now have the life expectancy at birth that we had in 1996. The first time we have gone back, and we’ve gone back not just a little bit, but by a whole year on average. That’s amazing to me. And it used to be that the United States had a longer life expectancy than most of the nations in the world. Our life expectancy now falls somewhere between Cuba and Albania. That’s shocking and needs to be addressed. And it just shows us the impact not only of COVID but of drug overdoses, the so-called diseases of despair, alcoholism, suicide, and God knows gun violence.

We have a lot of work to do. And let me diverge for just a minute because there are new studies that just came out that show where you live in the United States has a big impact on your chances of escaping some of that premature death. And not trying to make a political statement, but this is hard scientific evidence that if you live in red states or red regions of United States, where reaction to COVID was less diligent in following public health guidelines, vaccination rates, masking, combined with parts of the country where minimum wage is still appallingly low, where Medicaid access has not been extended to poor populations, where gun regulation has been a taboo subject, you’re not going to live as longer. Now, that’s an amazing thing that shows that the decisions that are made here in Washington by politicians and by the country in its political tussle, it has a direct relationship on your wellbeing, and even your length of life.

Sue Peschin:

Absolutely. Yeah. And we were lucky we participated… United Health Foundation puts out a senior health rankings every couple of years, and we participated with them in their most recent one, and there was a focus on equity, and there’s a pattern to where the states in the United States, not just politically, but just what’s reflected in the numbers for young people, for older people, for the most vulnerable populations, and certainly for states with poorer communities of color that experience systematic racism and the health effects that come with that. I think one of the striking moments for me too was the turnback on Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision. And it was interesting because you wouldn’t think… We were one of two, I think, aging organizations along with SAGE, the LGBTQ plus group, that put out a statement on that, because really the way that we’re treating our health and the way that the system treats us with our health throughout our lifespan impacts us.

So reproductive freedom has an impact on how we age. And again, to me it’s not a political issue, it’s a public health issue. So all of this is around public health. And the other thing I would say, not to pile on here because I know we’re not starting out on the lightest note, but that’s okay. I mean, it is what it is, as the saying goes, is the Medicare Trustees Report, which pretty much is as boring as it sounds, but it’s a useful thing for folks to take a look at. It is I think a reflection of how we treat each other, and how we prioritize healthcare for our nation’s older adults and for people with disabilities. And the report in 2022 I thought was particularly striking. What made the news was that we could extend the Medicare trust fund by two years. That was the good news.

What really didn’t make a lot of the news reports, because it wasn’t what was led with in the press release for the report. So the reason why that happened was, and the trustees were very blunt about expressing this, is the individuals that were the most expensive to the program prior to the pandemic were the people that were most likely to die from COVID. And because those expensive people died, we were able to extend the program for two years. So the Alliance was basically trying to put some attention on this. And we’re going to do more with it, because I feel like it really flew beneath the radar, that death is a tragedy, it’s not a strategy.

Dan Perry:

Yeah. The studies that I referred to earlier about how where you live and about the politics of different parts of the country have an effect on this, those studies were not looking at older people. Those studies were looking at people from 24 to 65, the vital working age population in this country. Those are the ones that we were losing, as what you’re saying points up as well, people from the active parts of life, times of life. And it should be said, since we’re the Alliance for Aging Research, that historically unprecedented increase in the older population, especially the oldest old, is still in the works, it’s still coming at us.

We’re going to see the 85 plus population in this country double again just in the next 20 years by 2040, triple by 2060, by which time we’ll have some 600,000 people over the age of 100 living in this country. So our task of getting busy with the next breakthrough drug in cancer, diabetes, congestive heart failure, Alzheimer’s, couldn’t be more urgent. That has not gone away. But the problems that we have in keeping people alive long enough to get there is still a great concern, and COVID has really pointed that up. First time since the early 1920s, after the so-called Spanish flu epidemic, that we’ve gone backwards in terms of life expectancy. Who would’ve thought in this country?

Sue Peschin:

Right. Right. So this past year, we marked a lot of awesome highlights for the Alliance. Last year, we had our 50th episode of this podcast, This is Growing Old. We rallied for access to critical Alzheimer’s treatments, and we joined forces with more than a 100 partners to spread awareness around heart valve disease. Are there any achievements that stand out for you as a founder and as one of our board members?

Dan Perry:

Well, one of the things that’s often said about the Alliance for Aging Research is that it punches above its weight. That means while we are still a Bantamweight organization in terms of size and budget and staff, the impact that we have and our willingness, your willingness to stand firm against large scary federal government agencies and insurance companies and all the rest is a source of great pride that I take in it. We hold that wonderful gala every year in the fall to recognize the heroes in health that we see all about us. And leading up to the dinner itself, you hold roundtable forums and bring into the room the heads and the top decision makers in the Food and Drug Administration and in the Medicare program, which decides what we’re going to pay for and what we’re not going to pay for, and this last year especially the agenda was how are your agencies getting ready for a much larger older population. And they come, because the Alliance is not to be sloughed off.

We’re not one of those groups that just sign our name along with hundreds of others. When there was a newer Alzheimer’s drug in 2022, and the Medicare program said even though it had been approved by the FDA, was ready for use, they weren’t going to pay for it under most circumstances. And it was you, Sue Peschin, that gathered up scores of other organizations, staged a rally outside their offices, you took a lot of heat from a lot of people that thought you had gone too far fighting for patients and families, family caregivers, and frankly fighting for the pipeline, the next drug to come along that’s going to be even more effective and more needed.

And that you did that was just phenomenal in my view. And I’ll cite another example, and I hope this doesn’t get too far down in the weeds, but the Alliance consistently stands up against measures that government bureaucrats use to evaluate whether or not it’s worth spending money on a person’s life. This is something that was imported from the UK. It’s called the Quality Adjusted Life year. I mean, it’s kind of a mouthful to think about. That means that we now are going to put different values on different years in a person’s life. And if they’re disabled, if they’re older, if they’re people that have lost out on getting good healthcare earlier in their life, we now have a metric, the government has a metric by which to put a lower value on their life and say it’s going to cost too much to take care of them.

And I’m obviously glossing over a lot of statistical analysis and a lot of deep weeds kind of government talk, but you and the Alliance are consistently hammering away on this, and at the end of the year, right around Christmastime that you released that 12 days of misgiving, of how these measures, these quality adjusted life years and an Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Economics or whatever, ICER, Clinical Research and Economics, how that is really impinging on a person’s, the kind of care they’re going to get, and the kind of support they’re going to get when they’re sick and when they need it. Scary stuff, and yet you have not hesitated for a minute in going there and punching above your weight. Very [inaudible 00:17:14] of you and the Alliance for that.

Sue Peschin:

Thank you, Dan. I am very-

Dan Perry:

And it’s clever too, 12 days of misgiving.

Sue Peschin:

Thank you-

Dan Perry:

And every day putting it in real concrete terms. I love the analogy that you made at one point saying, “Imagine if the person that’s selling you a car is going to change the price based upon whether you have a bad knee, because maybe you won’t be driving that car nearly as long. So we’re going to adjust the cost of that car to you.” That’s bringing it to where people can get their hands around what is otherwise a pretty foggy government concept.

Sue Peschin:

Well, thank you, Dan. I want to say a couple… First, thank you. And then I want to say a couple of different things about what you ran out. I mean, first of all, I feel so lucky that I was able to take this position under your generous wing for a number of years, to fill your much bigger shoes, although it’s impossible to fill, and really to be able to walk into something that already had a very incredible credibility base and a lot of support and recognition, and to be able to do a lot of impactful, meaningful, fun stuff that you had to start from the ground up. So that’s that. Also, having a very supportive board gives me a lot of security, and gives all of us as a team a lot of freedom I think to take risks. Not all organizations are like that.

Not all organizations have that type of support on the board. A lot of people just like to stay in the safe zone. And for all of you who serve on the board in a volunteer capacity, give us your time, also many of you who give us support financially in addition to your time, it’s an incredible feeling of security to be able to do that. And so it allows us to speak the truth, and not worry about that piece of it, so that when the blows come, we know that you all have our back. And I’m starting to feel like the group that is saying, “CMS, get off our lawn.” But that’s okay. I mean, I think we have a lot of good partners.

I really appreciate all the praise that you through my way, but I get to come out and say all this stuff, but there’s a lot of people right next to me in the organization, and we have a ton of partners that we rely on. And first and foremost, we have incredible individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease, and their family caregivers, that inspired us beyond description really to keep doing this, because it’s still happening. There’s new products that have come in the clinical pipeline. And the stance that CMS is taking won’t just impact Alzheimer’s, it’ll impact cancer and gene therapies.

I was just listening to a program that’s called CERSI that is organized by Stanford and the University of California in San Francisco along with the FDA, and there were experts there from CMS and from UCSF in Boston saying, “Yep, oncology drugs, gene therapies that are coming, this’ll be a model moving forward.” And a lot of it is about just rationing. It’s a denial of the population changes, and it’s a stance of restriction, rather than of how do we create equity, how do we create solid care in abundance in our country, instead of a lack.

Dan Perry:

And ultimately rationing is profoundly counterproductive, because you’ve got this population, they’re not going away, they’re either going to be healthy and contributing and part of society and paying their taxes and buying a new iPhone and all of that, or they’re going to be in hospital or long-term care settings at tremendous expense, tremendous burden and wear and tear on themselves and on their family members if we’re left with 600,000 centenarians, for instance, with nothing better than what we have today. If we see a tripling of that most vulnerable 85 plus… And we will. In the next 40 years with today’s medicine, as good as it is, we’re in deep trouble.

And yes, I will praise you to the skies, but it’s not just empty praise, Sue. What I have said is just recounting what happened in 2022. It happened the year before, and it’s happened every year that you’ve been at the helm of this organization. And it’s particularly courageous because the Alliance is a smaller, less, does not have a big university endowment behind it, does not have gazillionaires that are pumping it up, does not have products that people are buying and that you’re riding on a cloud cushion of money. And it’s irony, because in my experience, it’s usually the smaller, more vulnerable not-for-profit organizations that do take the risks. You get the big ones, the big marquee names, and I won’t mention them, but they tend to just go along to get along, and they don’t stand up when the government is making things difficult for their own constituents that you do.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. It’s hard, I think, when you’re a big organization, and a big part of your goal is perpetuating the organization. And I think from our perspective, and I know from the board’s perspective, it’s really perpetuating the mission for us. We’re in it for the infinite game, but it’s more about the mission than-

Dan Perry:

Yeah. Not the brand name.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. Than the building. So that’s true. So with that, I am so impressed by the people we get to meet each year. And you talked about Heroes in Health, and in 2022, you give out each year thankfully the Dan Perry Award, and we had our first in-person ceremony since 2019. So what was that like from your perspective?

Dan Perry:

I’ll speak for myself. And I really am confident I’m speaking for the hundreds of people that were there. It was a great vibe in that room. And these are people representing organizations and government officials and people in healthcare companies that know the Alliance, are loyal to the mission, who come back year after year, and they’ve been on ICE since 2019. And to have them all come together in that beautiful setting, International Institute for Peace, which I guess we’re outgrowing, but it was a very, very special evening. And for me personally, to recognize some of the outstanding people that you have chosen to receive the Founders Award. And if I may, let me just speak for a moment about this past year. Gary Puckrein has been a friend for a long time, and I think what he has done, another founder of an organization, to bring into existence the National Minority Quality Forum, is really a gift to good health policy making in the nation’s capital.

And I was so glad to be able to recognize him with that award. As you know, the National Minority Health Quality Forum gathers detailed data on health outcomes and healthcare delivery in communities of color down to the zip code level, gathers that together, crunches the numbers, takes it to the members of Congress of those districts and say, “This is what your decisions are doing either for or against your own constituents.” It’s a powerful tool to hold accountable those that might otherwise brush off thousands and millions of Americans, because they can’t afford high price lobbyists to fight for them in Washington. So Gary is doing the Lord’s work for sure, and it was great. And then to cap it off, if you remember his acceptance remarks-

Sue Peschin:

It was incredible.

Dan Perry:

… He owned that room. When he starts off talking about we are the only sentient beings in the fathomless universe, and quotes Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein and then says, “This is so precious, so sacred, and what are we doing when we are trying to serve life, but we’re talking about costs and reimbursement.” And he says, “Nuts. Remember how sacred is the wellbeing of humanity, and serve it and get off this green eye shade kick of trying to slice and dice the numbers all the time in terms of cost and reimbursement.” He had that room in his hand, and it was lovely, just wonderful to be there. Very proud of Gary. He’s a great guy.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah, he is. And he’s just incredibly inspiring. I want to encourage folks, even if you were there, you should watch it again. We have it up on our YouTube page. Just search Alliance for Aging Research on YouTube. You can look at all the different speeches. And they’re kind of marked by time, so you could fast forward if you so desire. I loved the dinner last year. It was just great to see everybody. It was like a homecoming. Just was very warm. And I felt very lucky, because I had family there, my kids were there, but I was also very touched by the FDA commissioner, Dr. Califf, coming. He came both for our roundtable, as well as to present the award to Dr. Janet Woodcock, who is another person that I just can’t say enough about, and have incredible admiration for her as a public servant, as a leader, as just an inspiring woman to me.

And that was lovely too, the exchange between the two of them. And then Representative Barragan, I thought she just has been an incredible leader on this Alzheimer’s disease issue, because she’s experienced it in her own family. And I do want to let folks know that we have not forgotten about Dr. Ruth, and we’re going to go see her in a couple of weeks. We’re going up to New York. We finally have a date, and I can’t wait.

Dan Perry:

Oh good. Good.

Sue Peschin:

Yes. We’re bringing her lunch, and she’s very excited. So that’ll be super fun. And we’re going to send around a video to everybody. And people should save the date. Our 2023 date is Tuesday, September 20th. So definitely mark your calendars.

Dan Perry:

Not to be missed.

Sue Peschin:

Yes. Yes.

Dan Perry:

And Sue, again, it’s a tribute to the stature that you have cemented for the Alliance, that you get a current and immediate past commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and America’s best known sex therapist all coming to you, even though with Dr. Ruth, you’re going to have to go to her. Still, it was a beautiful evening and a wonderful way to bring together a very valuable community of people who all are motivated by really a very high calling to serve the wellbeing of their fellow Americans and fellow human beings.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. And I also do want to give props, we had CMS there. People show up. I mean, we call things as we see them, but we have good solid relationships, and it’s always done with respect and candor and with an opportunity to dialogue and work together to fix it, because that’s what we’re about. We’re not just about throwing stones. So next month-

Dan Perry:

Those who just throw stones don’t get that kind of respect. You earn it from your allies and your adversaries alike.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. Well, we all work together to earn it for sure. So next month the Alliance and more than 100 of our partner organizations are going to mark Heart Valve Disease Awareness Day on February 22nd. And we know that you had a personal experience related to this topic last year. I want to thank you very much for being open to talking about it here. So how does Heart Valve Disease Awareness Day hold extra meaning for you?

Dan Perry:

Well, I told the staff and the board that I took one for the team by going in and getting a, if got the name right, trans-arterial valve replacement. Anyway, a new plug in the wires in the heart. It was really a very straightforward, and for me, easy to tolerate procedure. I didn’t have any complications, and it is something that creeps up on people my age and younger. And if it’s not diagnosed and treated, the outcomes can be pretty grim. And so I was persuaded, even though I didn’t have any of the symptoms, the shortness of breath and the dizziness and all of that. But in doing diagnostic procedures when I saw my regular physician, and then a cardiologist, they were saying, “Your progress is going in the wrong direction when it comes to the amount of blood that’s getting into the heart and getting out of it, so you really should do it.”

And I was in and out in a day, and no really serious side effects afterward, and everything was back to normal in about a week. Some little bruising where they put the plugs in to me, but nothing at all really. So I applaud the Alliance, I always do, for getting the word out. And I’ve followed your webcasts with the physicians and the caregivers and the patients, and you really have created a tremendous community around this issue of heart valve replacement, and more credit to you.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. Well, Lindsay Clark, who is, as you know, our VP of health education and advocacy with Caitrin Warner, who works with her, they are just doing an amazing job. Lindsay has led this effort for a number of year. And the amount of partners we have from Cleveland Clinic to WebMD, I know the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at NIH usually engages with us, the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, a lot of big deal groups, and it’s very impressive to see what they pull together. It impacts tens of millions of folks each year, hear the messages, and I’m so glad you’re doing well and that you were able to-

Dan Perry:

Getting ready to travel to South America in a short time.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. And so now you can play the piano, I’m assuming.

Dan Perry:

No better than before.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. So it doesn’t do that. It’s not that innovative.

Dan Perry:

It isn’t. And while it wasn’t my experience, my cardiologists and those that I’ve heard through those that you bring together, they feel like they’re 20 years younger. They can do all of these physical activity that they couldn’t before. I didn’t have those negative symptoms going in, so I didn’t have them coming out, but it’s just good peace of mind to know that I’m good to go for at least another 10 years with this little piece of plastic that’s stuck in my chest.

Sue Peschin:

That’s good. I mean, I will tell you that for a lot of people with severe aortic stenosis… And what we’re talking about is, everybody, we’ve got four valves in our heart, and over time, age is really the biggest risk factor. They can wear down. The structure of the heart is literally what it is. So we hear a lot about cardiovascular disease like the heart attacks and vascular components of disease. But heart valve disease is really about the valves pumping in and out of the hear, and when they get older and they get strained, it causes problems for folks. And a lot of people have symptoms, some people don’t. In your case, you didn’t, but you can still have pretty severe disease. And luckily… It used to be everybody had to have open heart surgery, and that’s still an appropriate option for a good number of people, but there’s also less invasive options today, like transcatheter aortic valve replacement, which is what you had-

Dan Perry:

Thank you for saying [inaudible 00:38:22].

Sue Peschin:

Absolutely. And then there’s also technologies for other types of valve replacement today for the mitral valve and others, tricuspid. So that’s all good news. And I want folks to tune in on February 22nd. Go to valvediseaseday.org to learn more about the day and the activities we have coming up, and all the great materials that they have to educate. People who have had previous cardiovascular disease, if you have hypertension, diabetes, that puts you at higher risk. And that’s going to be a bit of our focus this year, is those folks that are at higher risk. We tend not to talk about how this can be a follow on issue, and we want to get to folks as early as possible, so that they can have the same benefit of early intervention.

Dan Perry:

Well, now that I’m a member of the club, I’ll definitely be tuning in.

Sue Peschin:

Excellent. So my next question is, are there any lessons from yesteryear that you’re taking with you into 2023? And I’m trying to decide if yesteryear is still a thing. Are we staying yesteryear?

Dan Perry:

Probably not. Got a little creaky sound to it. A little bit like lone ranger, I think. I think the biggest… And forgive me for going back to COVID, but one of the biggest things that we’re left with post-pandemic when we do get out of this is the recognition that misinformation and disinformation about health has emerged into a new powerful, all pervasive realm to get in the way of good public health guidance. And from the beginning, the whole pandemic was badly politicized, fell into the trap of red state and blue state, and left and right, and how you responded to it and what precautions you took was all guided by who you were going to vote for for president. A terrible legacy on our standing as a unified nation. It wasn’t that long ago that health and medical, research medical progress was universal value regardless from conservatives to liberals and everybody in between.

Everyone felt the benefits when we were going from the ’30s on when we established social security and Medicare and Medicaid. The National Institutes of Health grew rapidly to become the premier institution in the world for medical science and advancing medical interventions and technology. That’s all taken a hit. I mean, you’ve got a big chunk of people in the Congress, one of the first things they want to do is investigate how we responded to the COVID-19 virus, and they want to point fingers and they want to find fault. Who was it that recommended this school will be closed, or that masks will be required? And they want to upend the whole thing. This is a terrible aftertaste or aftereffect to the COVID experience. And I think Francis Collins has talked about this as well, doing research, how did communities and subpopulations receive this misinformation and disinformation?

How did they process it? The irony was that, in the early stages of the disease, of the pandemic, it was communities of color, largely black Americans that were resisting vaccinations, long in glorious history of distrust of the white medical establishment, but over a period of time, they caught up, and it was white Americans in those red states that were most resistant, most obdurate about following good public health guidelines, and we’ve got the death and the morbidity statistics to show the effect of that. So that’s something that’s been left in our lap, and thank you to social media and the misuses of the internet for having all of this conspiracy cockamamie ideas about public health floating around, standing side-by-side with authoritative, verifiable evidence-based medicine. So that’s the biggest takeaway that I can think of and challenge for 2023, and many years to come.

Sue Peschin:

Yeah. I mean, I definitely agree with that. I do think that coming back together in social situations with each other, I think it was so missed, and I think that some of the ranker that just festered and grew bigger than you ever thought imaginable was because of that. It wasn’t that we missed going to the movies or couldn’t go to the usual places that we went to, it was because we sort of missed each other. And I’m an introvert. I’m not a particularly social person. I know you are too, Dan. So I think there’s a tendency sometimes, a lot of us, we’ve kind of fallen into that where it’s a little bit more pleasant to stay to yourself. And I actually think that we need to push ourselves a bit, because I think that we have become so divisive.

It is this us and them culture that we’re in now that is, it’s so unsettling. And from a health perspective, we’re never going to tackle these things until we kind of break through that. We have to care about each other regardless of what our political views are, or even the kind of darkest pieces of us in terms of just not being familiar with each other. I think so much of what happens is, we just haven’t had exposure to each other. We’ve had exposure to this horrible virus, and we really need connection. We need to understand what each other is about and just see each other as human beings.

Dan Perry:

We’ve also had a lot of exposure to social media, which is a construct that we know prioritizes the angriest postings, the angriest tweets, and they rise up, and it’s money in the bank for some of these social media companies to keep us stirred up, keep our eyeballs stuck on some wild conspiracy theory that’s been put in front of us. So I think we’re up against some pretty big forces that profit from that kind of disintegration of our national character, and so I worry about that.

Sue Peschin:

I agree. And think it perpetuates the whole stay by yourself mentality too, because there’s a lot more that you can do when you’re just in a room by yourself. You say things, as they always say on social, that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face type thing. All right. Well-

Dan Perry:

We know that one of the recommendations that’s sometimes overlooked toward healthy aging, is to build a broader social network and to add friends and keep the ones that you had, and expand that and spread it out. And now that it’s somewhat easier for people to see one another without this intermediary of the Zoom that we’re on right now, you should go ahead and seize that opportunity. You’re quite right.

Sue Peschin:

Absolutely. All right. So let’s turn to resolutions. This is our final question. Do you have any resolutions for the new year?

Dan Perry:

Sue, I’ve seen enough New Year’s come and go that I don’t make resolutions, because I’ve seen what happens. And I think it’s kind of an easy out for people to say, oh, I’m going to make a New Year’s resolution, and then they know it’s going to be gone in two weeks. I would rather just think of good ways to live in order to support physical, mental, social health. And so this very thing that we’ve been talking about of trying to engage people even in casual conversations over in the grocery line or at the gas station, or just to be a friendlier person to people, and to think of the people that you haven’t seen in a long time that you care about and that are right here and not far away, and pick up the phone and say, let’s get together for lunch, or let’s create a book club. I’m going to kind of focus on that. That’s not a New Year’s resolution. They’re too fragile. But it’s just sort of a promise for the time ahead.

Sue Peschin:

I love it. I love it. And in my opinion, that’s a great way to wrap up. Dan, thank you so much for joining and for doing this with me. I always love talking to you. I know we talked for a long time, but hopefully people enjoyed it.

Dan Perry:

I hope so. Again, I think it’s a great program, and I appreciate being brought back. I guess I didn’t stub my toe too badly the last time.

Sue Peschin:

You did great, and you’re welcome back anytime. We’re going to lean on you again, and it’s great to have you and great to see you. So thanks everybody for joining us today, and please check us out on Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you check out our podcast. And I want to give a hat tip to Matt Thompson, who organizes our podcast, does a great job with production. Thanks Matt, and everybody have a great day.