Jeff Squires

Jeff Squires's Human Agent on Fodda is an expert in longevity. Jeff is a Researcher, strategist, and futurist reframing longevity and 100-year lifespans for brands and institutions. Their Human Agent expertise is grounded in their curated graph tracking health, culture.

Backing Knowledge Graph & Live Data Slices

This Human Agent is backed by an expert knowledge graph. Explore the graph and live data slices at fodda.ai/graphs/jeff-longevity.

Questions Jeff Gets Asked

  • How can we redesign the 'front end of life' to better prepare individuals for a 100-year lifespan?
  • What are practical ways brands can create 'rites of passage' to support individuals through significant midlife transitions?
  • Can you elaborate on how financial planning can be 'divorced from work' to better serve a longevity-ready society?
  • What are the key mistakes brands make when designing for an aging population, and how can they effectively shift to a 'growing whole' narrative?
  • How can workplaces be reformed to normalize midlife internships and sabbaticals, supporting the flexibility required for a 100-year life?
  • Could you walk through your research methodology for identifying longevity trends and translating them into actionable insights for businesses?

Expertise & Concentrated Evidence

Where Jeff's evidence and domain authority are concentrated:

  • Role: — Researcher, strategist and futurist who helps bring transformational products and services to market while building internal innovation capability
  • One-liner: — A cultural and institutional-design lens on longevity: the extra decades of life are a design problem for brands and institutions, not a health-decline story
  • Reasoning pattern: — cultural signal - reframe - opportunity/implication
  • Named frameworks: — STEEP scanning, Triangulation of possible, wanted, and uniquely-positioned-to-deliver, New Map of Life six life vectors (adapted from Stanford Center for Longevity), Prevention/longevity/recovery/healing/comfort innovation matrix
  • Register: — hybrid
  • Sentence rhythm: — builds_to_crescendo
  • Style: — frames_as_working_theory
  • vs Biotech and biohacker longevity voices: — They optimize the body at a molecular or clinical level; Jeff redesigns the institutions, life stages and cultural narratives around longer lives
  • vs Conventional aging-services and retirement-planning experts: — They serve the existing decline-and-retirement model; Jeff argues that model itself is the outdated institution to redesign

Recent Insights & Positions

  • Redesigning the Front End of Life — Everyone assumes longevity is about redesigning retirement. The counterintuitive move is actually about redesigning the front end of life, not the end. (Why it matters: This challenges the conventional focus on later life, suggesting a more proactive, holistic approach to a 100-year lifespan by integrating learning and flexibility earlier.)
  • Learning on Demand for a 100-Year Life — A 100 year life needs learning on demand as needed woven throughout a life, rather than front-loading education into the first 25 years. (Why it matters: It highlights the inadequacy of traditional education models for extended lifespans and proposes a continuous, adaptive learning paradigm.)
  • Rites of Passage for Midlife Transitions — Brands should create rites of passages, ceremonies for launching next chapters like an encore career, a new business, or returning to work after caregiving, because rituals tend to stop after early life events. (Why it matters: This insight addresses the lack of societal support for significant midlife changes, offering a practical way for brands to engage with and support consumers through these often-challenging periods.)
  • Divorcing Financial Planning from Work — The big, real disruptive part is about divorcing financial planning from work. A winning product funds reinvention, not just retirement, with financial reserves stashed along the path like an Easter egg hunt. (Why it matters: It critiques the outdated pension model that doesn't fit modern work realities (gig workers, caregivers, career changes) and proposes a more flexible, distributed financial strategy for lifelong reinvention.)
  • Aging as Growing Whole — It's important for brands and organizations to talk about what's gained and not what's lost. Aging is just another word for living. We don't talk about growing old, we talk about growing whole, which is about crystallized intelligence, perspective, the drive towards meaning. (Why it matters: This reframes aging from a narrative of decline to one of growth and enrichment, providing a positive and empowering perspective for product development and messaging.)
  • Identity Precedes Features in Product Acceptance — People reject the identity a product assigns them before they evaluate features. So if your product announces you're old, the messaging can't save it. (Why it matters: This is a critical insight for product design and marketing, emphasizing that the perceived identity a product confers is more important than its functional benefits, especially in the longevity space.)
  • Life as Intervals, Not Chapters — Write your life as intervals and not chapters. Map the next 50 years as alternating stretches of work, learning, caregiving and rest. (Why it matters: This provides a concrete, actionable framework for individuals to visualize and plan for a flexible, non-linear 100-year life, challenging the traditional linear career path.)
  • Aging as a Lens, Not a Category — I used to think aging was a category. It's actually a lens. The real opportunity is to redistribute the 30 years added to life across an entire life, stretching out a life, redistributing those 30 years as a dividend across every life stage. (Why it matters: This shifts the perspective from targeting a specific 'senior' demographic to applying an 'aging' perspective across all life stages, revealing broader market opportunities and a more integrated view of longevity.)

Disclosed Boundaries

For questions outside these declared boundaries, Jeff refers you to specialized colleagues: Novelty Bias: I might have a bit of a novelty bias, an occupational hazard of trend research. So, you know, I only for what's possible instead of what's wanted. So I try and always make sure to ground my work in the needs and motivations of real people, not just trend reports.; Privilege Problem / Inequality: A privilege problem. You know, choose your own adventure. Life assumes adequate resources. But half of US households over 55 have no retirement savings. You know, longer lives exacerbate inequality. That's just a reality.; Institutional Pace: I bet on institutional redesign. But institutions move really, really slowly. So, you know, we might see more advancements in biotech than policy shifts related to institutions..

Ask Jeff

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