About 47 minutes into an "ask us anything" episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, a caller introduced himself as John Regan, from New York, and got in a mention of the Dyson Swarm — a hypothetical array of solar collectors built around a star — before turning to something much closer to home. He has taken care of three loved ones for eight-plus years.
What started his company, he said, was an earlier episode from the spring, when a letter arrived complaining that the show wanted everyone to be an entrepreneur and that the writer felt slighted. Regan took offense on the hosts' behalf: they had been generous with their knowledge and encouragement. He stayed up all night working on his own idea, tugboatcaregiving.com.
Then came his question. He is trying to get family caregivers ready to "ride the wave of the supersonic tsunami" of AI, he said, "but they're exhausted and they're in crisis mode." How do you persuade people in that state to engage with a platform and spend time preparing for the next emergency?
The problem with telling tired people to prepare
Caregivers do get exhausted, a panelist agreed, and most people have met this with parents or grandparents — it can amount to a full-time job. That is the trap Regan is describing: the households that would benefit most from planning are the ones with the least slack to do any.
Save an hour, not the world
Dave took the question first, starting from where AI is already useful rather than where it is promised to be. In the physical world, he said, everything is lagging a little behind — but everybody has planning to do, and planning is a good place for people to get started with AI.
His suggested opening line to a caregiver was deliberately small: I know you're exhausted at the end of the day, so how could we have saved an hour or two today through better foresight, better planning, better use of the time we do have? Then use AI agents — software that can carry out steps of a task on your behalf — to work on that, so people get familiar with the tools and begin to appreciate them.
He added a point about how such a change spreads. A lot of people in industries like caregiving, he said, are looking for a roadmap; if one person like Regan creates the roadmap, the rest will follow it once it exists. That puts Regan's job less in persuasion than in going first.
Start virtual, then voices, then machines
"Start with the virtual stuff," was his summary — planning first. Next came voice: AI-assisted systems on the walls of a facility that people can talk to for self-service. Once everyone is comfortable with that, the argument ran, "they realize, oh, wait, we can robotize things." Physical help was placed at the end of the sequence, not the beginning.
Peter offered the most concrete version of a first step. Prompt a caregiver to describe their day — keep a log, minute to minute, of what they actually do — and enter it into whatever free or low-cost large language model they prefer, the kind of chatbot that answers in ordinary text. Then ask it: what could I do that would make my day more efficient, make my day more joyful? You will get answers, he said, and then you choose one: that one sounds good, I hadn't thought of that.
Nobody on the call reported a result. The hour or two was the question to put to the caregiver, not a saving anyone had measured.
What Tugboat actually offers
Regan's site describes a service built around that same planning idea rather than around hardware. It offers a family technology plan that takes a budget into account, product assessments covering first-year costs and whether an item suits the household, and a Caregiver Navigator that sorts actions into what to do today, what to do this week, and what to prepare before a crisis arrives. The site says the Navigator is anonymous and that nothing is saved.
The walkthrough on the site follows a fictional family: an older adult coming home after a fall. It demonstrates how the tool organizes decisions, rather than recounting a household Tugboat has guided through one.
Regan thanked the panel and signed off — "I'll see you on the 25th" — with the roadmap still to build.
The full exchange is in the Moonshots AMA episode.