My guest is Xanthe Golenko, an Australian researcher, practitioner, and now storytelling facilitator based in France. Xanthe came to this work through an unlikely path — nine years as a professional dancer, a detour into business and healthcare research, a PhD in organizational culture in public hospitals, and then a fateful introduction to intergenerational practice that, as she puts it, just hooked her. What she witnessed — the bonds, the joy, the transformation in people who had been reduced to a diagnosis or a room number — changed the direction of her professional life.

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Pia Kontos is a Senior Scientist at the KITE Research Institute at University Health Network and a Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Her life's work begins with a memory: visiting her great-grandmother in a care facility as a young girl and noticing, even then, that the staff treated her as if she was no longer there. Pia never stopped being troubled by that — and she built a career out of arguing, rigorously and with evidence, that they were wrong.

Kinde Nebeker is a rites of passage guide based in Castle Valley, Utah — out near Moab, which is about as magic a piece of geography as this earth has to offer. She trained in transpersonal psychology at Naropa University, and has spent decades guiding people through vision fasts rooted in indigenous ceremony, stripped of cultural appropriation, but full of the original medicine: solitude, fasting, land, story, and deep listening.

This conversation went places I didn't expect. It usually does when someone knows what they're talking about.

Lindsay Beagley is the Senior Director of Lifelong University Engagement at Arizona State University, and she's been quietly dismantling that model from the inside. Her work centers on Mirabella at ASU — a continuing care retirement community built right on the Tempe campus — where residents take classes, mentor students, advise startups, and participate in the full life of the university. Not as guests. As members.

But Lindsay's story goes back further than Mirabella — back to a Peace Corps posting in Honduras, where she encountered something most Americans have never experienced: a society where older people were simply... present.

This is a conversation about what we lost, and what it might look like to build it back.

Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to change lives and transform systems. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which inspires and supports the integration of creativity and meaning-making into care systems.

In this conversation, Anne walks us through the methodology she's been tumbling and refining ever since, built around her concept of a "beautiful question," and how that shapes what "story facilitation" actually looks like in her organization's practice.

e were promised that social media would make life richer, more connected, more humane. And sometimes it has. But many older adults have also experienced something else: platforms that feel harder over time, feeds drifting from friends toward ads and outrage, tools that seem to decline just as we hope they might deepen.

So what’s really happening there? And what does it mean for belonging, memory, and story?

I’m joined by Kelly Quinn, Clinical Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research explores how older adults engage with social media, data-driven systems, and digital privacy, beginning not from assumptions of decline, but from lived experience and curiosity.

Just Joe looking back on the Elderware's first 14 weeks of interviews and articles.

Stormy and I talk about care and technology—the uses and misuses of AI already threading through clinics and living rooms. Predictive systems help with patterns and logistics; generative systems promise companionship and language scaffolding. But Stormy keeps us honest: these tools must support relationship, not replace it. The chatbot is endlessly patient—and a little too eager to please—which can nudge us toward “frictionless” exchange and away from the brave work of being with one another.