a2a - the art 2 aging (Strategies for Healthy, Joyful Living)

In this short trailer episode, we lay out our content strategy for the weekly episodes in the future. We have lined up experts from the medical profession, including cardiologists, integrative medicine practitioners and even energy healers. Our scope is broad, informative and thought-provoking.

How do we stay positive about our lives as we get older? Can we stay positive or is it too late for us?

It’s a tough assignment made tougher by the fact that the majority of us have spent a lifetime trying to control the events we experience, attempting to bend life to our will.

As we get older, though, the years of hitting our heads against brick walls adds up and our optimism in life slides or goes into an outright tailspin.

What’s the use of trying anymore?

Well, it depends on how you’re trying.

Dr. Paula Petry, PhD knows firsthand how useless head-banging is. She also knows firsthand how beneficial it is to let go of trying to control outcomes.

The story of how she got there is remarkable. A daughter born with spina bifida. All the doctors telling her that Alexandra would die shortly after birth. Saying “no” and taking her baby home to look after her for 12 arduous years, fighting for the best care, the best specialists, and the best social programs for all developmentally challenged kids in her home state of Florida. In the process, losing her marriage, suffering financial hardship – the pile of pain and disappointment kept growing.

But, at some point shortly after her daughter transitioned at age 12, Paula began to awaken to new ways of experiencing life and she hasn’t looked back.

Today, at the age of 71, Paula is an energy practitioner, educator, speaker and author whose message you will hear loud and clear in this episode of The Art 2 Aging Podcast.

There are people in this world who refuse to accept the idea that they have limitations placed on them.

Especially those people who are what the rest of us would consider “old”. And we applaud them.

Fred Woolman is one such person. And you’ve got to hear his story to really appreciate that he doesn’t give a damn what the rest of the world might think he “should” be.

Click the link to listen to the interview.

There comes a point in the lives of many adult children when they are faced with the challenge of changing roles with their parents.

The child becomes the parent and the parent becomes the child who needs their grown offspring to help them as they get older.

Laura Tamblyn-Watts, the CEO of CanAge, an advocacy organization for seniors in Canada, has written an important book to help adult children deal with challenges they’ve never faced before.  We talked with her recently

Dr. Warrick Bishop

If you know  anyone who has seen a cardiologist, it was probably because their general practitioner was alerted to a potential problem and referred them to a heart specialist.

That’s often the pattern, particularly among older adults. In fact, those over the age of 65 are more prone to heart problems as the heart muscle begins to wear out.

Trouble arises when we take the heart for granted long enough that symptoms occur in the first place.

But what if there was a way to minimize potential heart problems or avoid them altogether, regardless of age?

Dr. Warrick Bishop believes that can be the case. Warrick is an Australian cardiologist who  has written a number of best-selling books on heart health. More than that, though,  Warrick is a doc with a difference.

He’s a preventative cardiologist. His primary aim and his sole approach is to prevent heart attacks from happening in the first place. And his website is where you can find his books, courses and membership to the Healthy Heart Network. Knowledge is power!

To listen to our interview with Dr. Bishop, click the link at the top of the page, subscribe for free, and enjoy the episode.

This week features a captivating story of a man named Tom Meschery.

If you’re a fan of the NBA, then you’ll likely remember Tom.

The Mad Russian. Number 14 for the Philadelphia and Golden State Warriors and the Seattle Supersonics. Teammate of Wilt Chamberlain.

When it comes to life stories, Tom has an amazing one. It starts with overcoming adversity as a child, rising to become a star in the NBA, staggering under the weight of a terminal illness at 65, finally meeting the love of his life and now writing mystery novels that sell well at the age of 85.

It could be a story  sprung from the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter. But it isn’t. Because it’s true.

Tom was born Tomislav Mescheryiakov. His parents were Russian; his father an officer in the White Russian Army.

At the outset of the Russian Revolution, the family fled to Manchuria. But when the Japanese invaded China, Tom, his mother and sister spent the war in a Japanese internment camp before being allowed to emigrate to the United States.

Click the podcast link above to listen to this fascinating story.

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Here’s a shocking fact: 98% of  dementia sufferers are being cared for at home. That’s shocking because it means that the caregiver is likely a family member, often a spouse or adult child.

Dementia victims suffer greatly and so do their caregivers, especially family members.

That’s why what Allyson Schrier is doing is so amazing. Allyson’s husband was diagnosed with a form of dementia when he was only 47. He never worked after that and Allyson became his caregiver.

She knew nothing about dementia, how it manifests, how it impacts the sufferer or how it was going to impact her and her kids.

But Allyson was not someone to throw up her hands and quit. She took the bunch of lemons that life had handed her and turned them into lemonade.

How she did that is the subject of our episode this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Tiny electrical currents, known as microcurrents, which can generate rapid healing within the body, allowed an NFL Hall of Famer to play in the Super Bowl only six weeks after breaking his leg and tearing his Achilles tendon. Terrell Owens was that player.

Microcurrent healing was in wide use in the late 19th century. And while it worked,  it was never carefully studied or documented.

With the birth of the pharmaceutical age in the 1920s, what we now call frequency medicine faded from sight.

But in the mid 1990s, those tiny electrical currents shot back into prominence through the work of a chiropractic doctor named Carolyn McMakin. And she was responsible for Terrell Owens being able to play an impossible and spectacular game in the 2005 Super Bowl.

Today, Dr. McMakin is the undisputed global expert in Frequency Specific Microcurrent technology or FSM for short. Her treatment protocols are now standard with many NFL teams, as well as NHL and NBA teams. Why? Because it WORKS.

She is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Everyone talks about the “stages of life”: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and then, the Big One – old age.

The problem with thinking in stages is that it has the effect of segregating life into different compartments. That’s exactly how marketers and advertisers think. They segregate the population into market segments.

Makes sense for them but here’s the problem: when marketers who are in their own stage of life as adults think about those who are in that stage called “old age”, they fall down in their messaging attempts.

Because someone who’s 38 or 45 can’t think – or feel ­– like someone who is 65 or 75. So, they fall back on stereotypes and inevitably get it wrong every time.

That’s where Dave McCaughan comes in. Dave has been in the marketing and advertising business for decades and he has made the aging cohort a study for the past 30 years.

In this week’s episode of The Art 2 Aging, Dave describes how marketers have gone wrong and continue to go wrong with their marketing efforts to the older population.

There may be one question that all of us, old and young, grapple with. We may not articulate it clearly but it goes something like this: does Life have a meaning?

The inherent folly in that question is based on an assumption that Life has the same meaning for all of us. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. How could your life mean the same to you as my life means to me?

Now here’s another question: what holds us back from finding meaning in our lives?

This week on The Art 2 Aging, we tackle both those questions in an interview with Peter Merry, Managing Director and Chief Innovation Officer at Ubiquity University in the Netherlands.

Peter discusses how we can discover that individual life meaning that gives each of us purpose, especially as we age into the senior years. And believe it or not, he does so by referencing quantum science.

How do we measure victory?

Armed forces do it by defeating the enemy on the battlefield and in the air.

Sports teams do it by outscoring their opponents.

Athletes do it by setting world record times.

Politicians do it by winning elections.

You get the picture. But what about personal victories?

Okay, so what do we mean by personal victories? Well, why not ask Gary Buzzard?

For years, Gary wanted one thing more than any other: to call himself a writer.

Unfortunately, Gary listened to his ego voice and allowed it to defeat him, pin him down and make him swallow his dream.

But he wouldn’t let go of his goal. And the universe listened, creating a series of episodes and situations in his life that finally got him to the point where Gary shouted, “Enough!”

In his late 70s, Gary reached his goal and he now calls himself a writer. So does everyone else, for that matter. And, they add, a damn good one, too.

Here’s the story of how a man achieved his dream – despite his age.

There is so much happening at the forefront of health and wellness right now that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

What science has discovered about the human body is that it is not chemically based but electrically based. This means your body is electrical and responds to electrical energy. In fact, the body can be healed electrically.

So, this week on The Art 2 Aging, we’re going to do just that: start to uncover a few universal secrets within the human body.

Our guest is Dr. Steve Small. Doc Steve, as he refers to himself, is someone you’re going to  want to listen to.

Steve is a doctor of functional medicine who practices what he calls Quantum Integrative Medicine. He practices in L.A. and his patient list is quite literally a Who’s Who of Hollywood.

What he has to tell you about frequency, vibration, and energy and how your body responds is going to blow you away. More than that, Doc Steve explains why the human body is electrical and how it can always be kept in a healthy state through the use of tiny electrical currents flowing from a hand-held device that is revolutionizing wellness.

Steve’s message is NOT just theory. Rather it is information you can really make use of. And it is in all likelihood the future of medicine.

Cell senescence. Oxidation. Inflammation.

These three terms represent what often happens to our cells as we grow older.

Cell senescence refers to cells that lose their fuel and slip back into idle. They aren’t dead cells but they’re basically useless cells that can become cancerous.

Oxidation is a process in the cells that impacts the cell’s electrical charge in a detrimental  way and inflammation in healthy cells can lead to chronic diseases and ailments if left untreated.

The effect on our bodies is called aging.

Since we can’t see what’s going on in our cells, a surefire way to avoid any of these three issues is through the use of targeted supplements.

Our guest today is Dr. Barbara Barrett, a doctor of natural medicine who is an expert on supplement use. Her recommendations for supplement use will be an eye opener for those who listen to this episode of The Art 2 Aging.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Where does ageism begin? In the home? In the workplace? In the media?

Well, the simple and not entirely flippant answer is that ageism begins in all those places.

But its actual genesis is within the minds of each of us.

Hermetic philosophy puts it succinctly: “As within, so without.” Everything that we experience – everything – began as an idea and an idea is a thought.

So, what we think repeatedly – or worse, what we’re taught to think – we experience or encounter in our physical, everyday lives.

Such as ageism.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, is Ashton Applewhite who has been called America’s activist against ageism by such noteworthy organizations as The New York Times, New Yorker, and the American Society on Aging. She has been fighting the ageist fight since 2005 through her book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and her blog of the same name. She holds public lectures and hosts Ted Talks.

In short, she uses every available weapon in her war against the limiting beliefs around being older.

A Final Note: Around the 27th of December, I came down with a late Christmas gift in the form of a chest cold which resulted in me “sounding like Tron”, as my partner, Dave Grein told me. I thought I was more like James Earl Jones… Apologies in advance!

Scott Fulton is a planner. He believes in the merits of planning, especially when it comes to planning for one’s later years around financial assets and health. Scott’s an expert on aging, too; he’s the past president of the National Aging In Place Council where he studied the lives of millions of older Americans.

That work has helped shape a strategy that Scott lectures on, gives talks about, and has now published.

His knowledge, love of data and his expertise on aging have been combined into a recent book titled Whealthspan: More Years, More Moments, More Money.

Scott is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

For most of the 20th century there existed a chasm between natural medicine and mainstream medicine, dominated as it is by the big pharmaceutical companies of the world.

It’s like an ongoing mythical war between Heaven and Hell, good and evil, however you view it, and whichever side you take.

But two and a half decades into the 21st century that may be shifting. There is a growing willingness by general practitioners and specialists to take an unbiased look at how natural medicine can complement their own work, especially when there are more and more concrete examples of the effectiveness of natural medicine.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is Amanda King https://www.amandakingnd.com/about, a doctor of natural medicine who works in the field of integrative oncology. What she can achieve with a cancer patient by taking a metabolic approach through diet is impressive.

Tony McGrath is 68 years old. He’s probably spent half a century working. He’s held senior positions in the banking industry, the insurance industry, he’s created and sold several start ups and he has no interest in stopping to put his feet up.

Why would he? He’s having too much fun!

Tony is our guest this week in what is a wide ranging conversation about age, growing older, and still finding the desire and energy to meet each day head on.

Is Tony a model for the rest of us? No. But he is an example of how your mindset can build a life worth living.

A sport that was once played by just a few people rocketed out of the gate during the pandemic. Today, some say it’s the fastest growing sport in the world.

We’re talking about pickleball, the quirky game with an even quirkier name.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is Carl Landau, a pickleball afficionado and author of the book, Pickleball For Dummies.

So what makes this such a popular game? Well, let’s find out.

Retirement coaching was a profession we’d never heard of before speaking with our guest this week, Marianne Oehser.

But retirement coaching didn’t suddenly pop into existence just like the Beatles didn’t suddenly leap onto the music scene with their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

The profession is the natural offshoot of an aging demographic in which tens of millions of us in our 60s and older are marching toward something called retirement, like it or not.

What Marianne Oehser does is help her clients see a path through a forest of uncertainty and to walk that path with confidence. She and her business partner run a company called Next Chapter LIfestyle Advisors. Check out their site.

Why do some restaurants keep the lights so low that you need a flashlight to read the menu? And why do hotels insist on tiny labels on bottles of soap and shampoo, labels so small you need your glasses on to choose the right one?

These are just two examples of consumer ageism.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is John Bateson, a former private equity CEO and professor at both the London and Stanford Schools of Business where he acquired a doctorate in business management and Masters in Economics. John writes a Substack newsletter titled Consumer Ageism. And in our conversation, he lays out a number of theories about ageism and the older consumer.

The fires that swept through Los Angeles for weeks in January, propelled by fierce winds, cost thousands of people their homes. Damage totals will likely exceed 30 billion dollars but the greater damage is the loss of family gathering places, the loss of communities and the sense of fear regarding an uncertain future.

Wayne Lehrer lives in the hills of Santa Monica and he experienced the fires firsthand. Wayne has written a book called The Art of Conscious Aging and it contains a blueprint not only for how to live a great life beyond 60, but coincidentally, how to recover and move on from devastating loss and grief.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is Christine Matheson-Green and, at the age of 73, she has launched a project designed to capture life stories in memoir form and preserve them for posterity. She has been a journalist, educator and published author. But there’s even more to this firebrand of a lady than just that, as you will hear in our conversation.

An important conversation this week with Sheila Callaham, founder of Age Equity Alliance. Sheila talks about the urgent need for employers to recognize age equity in the workplace for their own benefit, how the elimination of DEI policies in the US negatively impacts older workers and how many of the policies of the Trump administration will lead to hardship, poverty and homelessness for many who are currently over the age of 50. You need to hear this.

From life in a Japanese internment camp to a ten-year career in the NBA and now living as a poet and fiction writer at 87, Tom Meschery has had a remarkable life. We profiled Tom on The Art 2 Aging last June in an episode, titled “Overcoming The Odds”. But now, Tom has written his autobiography so we caught up with him once again at his home in Sacramento to find out more.

Retirement gets a lot of attention these days and with good reason. Baby boomers have been starting the third chapter of life for the past 15 years or so and the so-called Gen Xers are following suit right now.

Our guest this week is Darren Coleman, he’s been a financial advisor for more than 30 years, runnning Portage Cross Border Wealth Management and he hosts the Two Way Traffic podcast. Darren is going to uncover ideas about retirement that few people stop to consider. And those ideas have very little to do with financial planning.