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It was back in January 2024 that my creative partner, Dave Grein, and I began to explore an idea for a podcast and content series on Substack dealing with “getting old.” Dave came up with the name –The Art 2 Aging – along with our logo.
We got to work. I booked guests, conducted the interviews and Dave did the production work to make each episode sound great. We lined up enough content that we could generate at least a dozen episodes before we launched in mid-May of this year.
To date, we have 30 episodes that have been downloaded thousands of times just from Substack alone.
We’ve met so many inspiring people who have spoken about aging from just about every angle: from heart health to spiritual health; from aging in place to ageism in the workplace. So we want to provide you with a taste of some of the best interviews we’ve done so far as we wrap up the year.
It’s our way of signing off 2024 and looking forward to more (much more) in 2025.
A huge thanks to our subscribers, paid and otherwise. You have embraced our efforts and voted with thumbs up on our content!
Happy Holidays, everyone! See you next year!
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It was that prolific and prescient playwright, George Bernard Shaw, who stated that “youth is wasted on the young.” He expanded on that in later writings: “they're brainless, and don't know what they have; they squander every opportunity of being young, on being young.”
While this may sound petty and rather mean, Shaw inadvertently makes a larger point. Life cannot be comprehended until it is lived.
It’s only then that we begin to glean some sense and reason to living. That’s when we can finally understand what we’ve done, how we’ve done it, how we could have done it better, and see a path forward that begins to deliver what we’ve always been looking for – meaning, purpose, and satisfaction.
Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, Paul Long, exemplifies this formula. He’s been there, done that, and is now, in his late 60s, creating his life on his own terms.
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A chance encounter at a 2016 lecture in London left Dr. Barbara Barrett, a doctor of natural medicine, fascinated by a little known vitamin.
She called it a “jaw-dropping” moment. That’s how blown away she was with the potential health benefits of this vitamin, particularly for older people.
Barbara had also found the focus for her PhD thesis and she dove into the available research with a passion.
This week on The Art 2 Aging, Barbara shares what she discovered about this hitherto little known vitamin.
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The world is growing older. Many of us know that. What we may not fully realize is that there aren’t enough babies being born to keep populations in “age balance.”
So, what happens when people over the age of 65 outnumber those under 18? We’re already there.
What happens to healthcare and long term care for those in their 90s? And that’s a cohort that’s skyrocketing, by the way.
No one knows with certainty but there is one man who has a pretty good idea of what’s going to shake out. Some of it is good but some of it is not going to be good.
Bradley Schurman is a renowned futurist on demographic impacts in society and he answers these questions this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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Psychologists tell us that our formative years are roughly the first seven years of our lives. Those years are when we, as children, are sponges soaking up what we see and hear around us. So it was for Kathie Donovan. So it is for all of us.
We accept what we hear from our parents and early teachers about ourselves without questioning its veracity. If we’re lucky, what we hear about ourselves is positive for the most part.
But often that’s not the case and we grow up with beliefs that we are not good enough, that we lack something that would make us better people. Our lives end up reflecting those beliefs perfectly.
That’s how it was for Kathie, who, despite a highly successful career in television, was a “hot mess” in her personal life.
Until she decided enough was enough.
Today, at 73, Kathie offers courses, seminars, books, and a podcast series that guide us to finding what she calls “sustainable happiness.” If you want to be inspired right now, listen to what she has to say as our guest on The Art 2 Aging.
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What’s your travel dream? Visit every county in Ireland, every state in the Union, every province in Canada?
Why not think bigger? How about every country in the world? That’s the goal of our guest and his wife this week on The Art 2 Aging.
Wayne and Sally Schmidt are in their 60s. They gave up their Groundhog Day life in Australia and embarked on a journey that, to date, has spanned 81 countries and taken seven years.
Their story is one long travel adventure and Wayne lays it all out, along with some great travel tips, in this week’s episode.
Visit their website: traveldinestay.com where you can share vicariously in their adventure.
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Wills and estates.
Alongside life insurance, wills and estates are two things most people don’t want to think about, let alone do any planning around what happens to their assets when they die.
This is why 68% of Americans and about 50% of Canadians will give their heirs lots of headaches at death.
This week, The Art 2 Aging takes a very practical look at wills, estates, estate planning and death taxes.
We have engaged the expertise of a top financial planner in Toronto, Canada to help navigate the ins and outs of all this.
Even though tax and estate laws may vary from country to country, at a high level the financial concepts and strategies are very similar, if not identical.
This is vital content to know if you own anything, let alone anything of value!
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How many of us are working in jobs or professions that no longer fulfill us?
Plenty.
But most of us don’t see a way out; we need to continue to work for the paycheck, to support our families, to pay our bills.
What we yearn for, while heading off each morning to a job that leaves us feeling empty, is an inner sense of meaning.
James Adams felt that way. He was a senior marketing executive with decades of experience, an entrepreneur in the food industry, and he was fed up.
So in his 60s, he embarked on perhaps the greatest risk of his profesinal life. He quit.
Walked away from his career.
Took up meditation and along the way began to find himself again.
He now teaches it to what he calls “forward thinking companies”.
James is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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The NBA kicked off its 79th season this past Tuesday, for those of you who are into basketball.
In 79 years, the game has come a long, long way. It’s a truly international sport, the seventh most popular game in the world, according to World Atlas.
The NBA itself is international in terms of team rosters with 125 players from 40 different countries outside the United States donning team jerseys this season.
But we’ll bet that the league has only seen one foreign player who is related to the Russian literary giant, Leo Tolstoy.
And that man is Tom Meschery, whose own journey to fame rivals that of his famous uncle and the subject of our encore episode this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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Did you know that 50% of American men between 65 and 74 take statins? How about women? Try 39% of women 75 and older.
There are a further 8 million people in the UK who take statins at a cost of 100 million pounds a year to the National Health Service.
What is going on? Do statins even work? Or are they just another drug to make Big Pharma even wealthier?
Well, this week, we’re going to deep dive into statins to see if they in fact work. To do that, we have brought back a former guest, Australian cardiologist Dr. Warrick Bishop.
And what he will tell you about statins, cholesterol, and heart health may amaze you.
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What does retirement look like for you? Have you thought about what you’ll do with all that time on your hands?
All too often, we are told what a ‘retirement age’ should be and then we are shown images of retired people enjoying long walks along beaches or lounging poolside on a cruise ship – in other words, we are almost spoon-fed stereotypes by marketing and advertising agencies.
Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging begs to differ and she has the research to back up her contrarian views of what retirement is, when it should occur and why. Susan Bell is an Australian market researcher who has done her own in-depth market research and what she has to say about retirement is a breath of fresh air blowing through a room filled with stale air.
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So, you’re 53 years old and you get fired without warning. What do you do? Well, if you’re Gail Mercer-Mackay, you don’t panic. You go to Arizona to play golf for two weeks and do some serious journaling as well.
What Gail discovered (besides still having a slice) was that she wanted to be a writer. Long story short, she did become a writer and founded a content creation company in the process.
Today, the company routinely earns revenue in the millions and at the age of 69, Gail is still going strong.
Hear her story this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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How should we be looking at aging in the 21st century?
There are a lot of ways we could tackle that question.
We could come at it from the point of view of health and medical breakthroughs occurring continually around longevity.
We could examine the question by considering whether or not we shift our thinking around retirement.
Or, like our guest this week, we take on all of the challenges and throw in the elephant in the room – ageism – at the same time.
Helen Hirsh Spence is a retired Canadian educator, TedX Talks speaker, writer and blogger whose excellent website, TopSixtyOverSixty is packed with information on ageing in the 21st century.
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Nearly 30 years ago, a University of Toronto professor named David Foot wrote a book called Boom, Bust and Echo.
The book dealt with how the global population was aging and how savvy investors could profit from the graying trend that would become a tidal wave. In fact, Foot referred to it in terms akin to those of a tidal wave.
The book was a best seller. 30 years ago. Foot wasn’t blowing smoke; everything that he said would come to pass, did.
So, if he knew this and wrote a book about it, why are we still struggling to build enough retirement residences, long term care facilities and find the staff to run them? Why is funding for services for older people in such short supply? Why are employers pushing out older workers in favor of young, inexperienced employees?
Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is the CEO of a Canadian advocacy group called CanAge. Laura Tamblyn Watts outlines the parameters of what is an enormous challenge for governments, the public sector and the private sector as well.
A note: we apologize for the audio quality at the time the interview was recorded.
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Janice Walton and her husband, Dan, were married for more than 60 years. They made every decision, planned every holiday together.
For six decades.
They raised their two kids together, providing them with a safe and secure home environment.
Dan was the love of Janice’s life when, overnight, their world went pear-shaped.
He began to experience signs of dementia. Janice found herself thrust into a role she was ill prepared for – that of a fulltime caregiver.
Then, Dan needed surgery. And after the surgery, his mind began to spin away even faster, to the point where Janice had to find a memory facility for him.
The facility was hit with Covid during the pandemic; Dan became infected and died.
Suddenly, for the first time in her adult life, she was alone.
This is a very personal story but one that is not unique. It’s the story of a spouse hurled into the role of caregiver with no roadmap as a guide.
To try and deal with her grief, Janice began to write. A lot. Today, at the age of 85, she is the author of one book and a newsletter, Aging Well, on Substack.
Janice shares much of her story this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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Baby boomers have grown up with technology. We’ve seen enormous change over the past seven decades. It’s staggering what has transpired since the days of telephone “party” lines in homes, rotary dial phones, two or three TV channels via an outside antenna – the list goes on.
So, it’s always odd to hear someone who is NOT a baby boomer make the assumption that older people are clueless about technology. We’re not.
But what can baffle us is the complexity of technology today. Which baffles many who are much younger, too.
It is difficult to stay on top of authenticator apps, IPTV apps (and how to configure them), two or three step ID security systems, modems, ethernet, etc. The technology is always changing and tricky to master.
Ezra Schwartz is a UX developer with more than 30 years experience designing interfaces that are clear and simple. His major complaint with technology – the industry in which he makes his living – is that apps and software platforms have become so complex that they are leaving many older people on the sidelines. He’s our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging and he explains what’s wrong and how to fix it.
Correction: Ezra Schwartz is a UX designer; he is not a UX developer. Our apologies to Ezra!
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A company called Rest Less has released the results of a survey it did on self employed individuals in the U.K.
Rest Less has a simple mission: help those in their 50s and older to find jobs. What their survey discovered is that a record number of individuals over 60 have become self-employed. This represents nearly a quarter of all of those in the U.K. who work for themselves.
It would be a real stretch to say that all those self-employed over 60 are dying to work for themselves. More likely, they are forced to because they can’t find a job with a company. And that’s likely because age discrimination, more commonly known as ageism, is keeping them on the sidelines.
This week, a conversation with Janine Vanderburg, a veteran consultant who has taken on the task of battling ageism in the workplace, trying to tear down the prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination at work that does such damage to those over 50 and also to the companies that reject their applications.
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Most of us blunder into retirement without any realization about how much our lives are going to change. We’re entering unchartered waters.
Or, as our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, Wayne Lehrer, would say, we are entering our third act without the knowledge of how to make it extraordinary.
That’s why Wayne looks at life as a play in three acts.
Act 1 is our personal development up to age 20.
Act 2 is when we begin striving for success, accumulation, wealth building and family.
Act 3 likely begins around age 60 and it could be the most challenging one of all.
Wayne has worn a few hats in his life: IMAX film maker, theme park designer, sculptor, and writer.
And as he wound his way through his own three-act play, he came to realize that it wasn’t until he reached Act 3 that he began to understand what the play was really about. Listen this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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This week on The Art 2 Aging, we resume our conversation with Jim White. If you’re Canadian, then you will know what President’s Choice is. As well as PC.
Well, that’s Jim White.
And if you’ve ever eaten a muffin from Starbuck’s, then you have consumed a Jim White recipe.
You have probably enjoyed food and beverage products from Costco, Walmart, Wegman’s, Safeway and many other food retailers throughout the U.S. that have Jim’s moniker all over them.
Jim has enjoyed enormous success in the food and wine industries and he’s done so with very little fanfare.
Today, the final part of our interview with Jim as he relates how he moved from food to wine because, as Jim would put it, he’d never done it before and it sounded like fun.
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There aren’t many entrepreneurs who can boast that they are responsible for not one but two case studies at the prestigious Harvard School of Business.
Or that they created the best selling cookie in Canada.
But Jim White can.
Jim is a 78 year old guy who lives with his wife in Napa Valley. He was born in the U.S. but became a Canadian citizen and lived in Canada for many years.
During his time north of the border, Jim had careers as a journalist, photographer and food critic, all of which led him down several amazing paths, making him a very successful man in the process.
Today, at 78, Jim is not slowing down one bit.
Jim White is our featured guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.
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