[B]OLD AGE With Debbie Weil

Today, Debbie brings her producer Julie-Roxane back on the show. Or rather, the opposite.  Julie-Roxane takes control of the mic to interview Debbie about her experiences of reinventing her life, starting at age 14 and continuing up to the present as she turns 70. Together they explore what life reinvention really means and how it works. It's not that Debbie is a perfect model for life reinvention...

One of the things Debbie is starting to think about is where and how she and her husband Sam might want to live as they get older - a lot older than their current 70. Like many Boomers, they are repelled by the idea of a retirement community. This week on the podcast she turns to Skylar Skikos to learn about new options. Skylar, 40, is a philosopher at heart and a financier by trade. He’s a real e...

Today, Debbie talks with Richard Leider about aging with purpose, the fallacy of "finding" your purpose, and how to practice daily.  Richard is considered a pioneer of the global purpose movement. Yes, the "purpose movement" is a thing. The topic of  finding meaning and purpose has come up repeatedly on this podcast.  It's key to a life well-lived, we’ve been told. But how DO you live a life of pu...

Today, Debbie brings her 43-year-old niece, Emily Moore, onto the podcast to talk about life and death and her recent grueling course of chemotherapy to eradicate breast cancer. Emily teaches English at Stuyvesant, one of Manhattan's competitive-entry public high schools. She’s also a published poet (one of her poems was published in The New Yorker ), and has a PhD in English. She lives in Brookly...

Welcome back to the [B]OLDER podcast (formerly The Gap Year Podcast). Today, Debbie Weil brings author, entrepreneur, and renowned business thinker Dorie Clark on the show, a perfect way to kick off Season 4. Dorie is a 42-year-old business consultant whose life and work resonate strongly with Debbie.  She was a Philosophy major in college, graduated from Harvard Divinity school, worked as a journ...

The Gap Year Podcast is back for Season 4 and our topic is "making the most of growing older." If you’ve been following the podcast since Season 1, you know that this topic has always been at the core of the podcast. But how do you make the most of growing older? What does that even mean? After three years of podcasting and 65 episodes, I’m very close to turning 70. It’s increasingly apparent to m...

Debbie Weil is interviewed by her producer Julie-Roxane Krikorian about turning 70, mortality, productivity, her halting efforts to age gracefully, and Season 4 of The Gap Year Podcast. This is the last episode of Season 3. We'll be back in the fall with Season 4! As a way to finish this season on a special note, Debbie turns the mic over to her producer, Julie-Roxane. JR gets Debbie to reveal her...

Today, Debbie talks with with Steven Petrow about his new book, Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old: A Highly Judgmental, Unapologetically Honest Accounting of All the Things Our Elders Are Doing Wrong .  The title says it all, as does the format of the book. The list of stupid things to avoid is offered in 43 bite-size chapters. Steven is an award-winning journalist and author who is best kno...

Today, Debbie Weil talks to good friend and bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks about writing.  This episode will appeal to listeners even if you're not a word nerd or put writing a book at the top of your bucket list.  Tom is a military history columnist for the New York Times and author of seven books, the last five of which have been New York Times bestsellers. His best known book is "Fiasco: th...

Debbie Weil brings her husband, Sam Harrington , back onto the show. A retired physician, Sam is NOT a  believer in midlife-crisis camps nor in navel gazing, which is what he told family and friends Debbie was dragging him across the country to do. It took a lot of arm-twisting to persuade Sam to get on a plane and fly to Mexico’s Baja Sur, even after they had both been twice vaccinated and even a...

When will the Covid 19 pandemic end? That’s the question on everyone’s mind. Today Debbie talks to one person who just might have an answer to that question.  Nicholas Christakis is a nationally-recognized expert in three fields: medicine, sociology and public health. He’s a distinguished Sterling Professor at Yale, a researcher on the topics of social networks and human goodness, and a bestsellin...

Debbie talks with Jeff Hamaoui , Modern Elder Academy Co-founder and Chief Education and Innovation Officer, about getting through the "messy middle" (a real term) of transitions. This time of global transformation is also a time of existential transition for many of us. What comes next - and when? And how? Especially if you are in midlife or older. The messy middle of any life transition is not e...

One of the biggest "gaps" for Debbie this past year was the absence of Island Women Speak , the multi-generational women’s storytelling event she has produced and directed on Deer Isle, Maine. For the past three winters, on a cold January night, seven local women representing seven decades from 20s to 80s have bravely stepped on stage to tell revealing five-minute stories about their lives, in the...

Today, Debbie talks to Rene Colson Hudson , executive director of the Healthy Island Project on Deer Isle, Maine . The two of them delve into something that many are grappling with right now:  pandemic fatigue. Or burnout or the pandemic wall, or whatever you want to call it. Debbie recently asked the question on her Facebook page: "Are you suffering from pandemic fatigue?" She was surprised by th...

Today, Debbie Weil has a conversation with Maine’s Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum. Whether or not you're a fan of reading or writing poetry, you won't want to miss this episode. Stuart tells stories in his soothing, often humorous style, including what led him to decide to become a poet and how he fell in love with  Maine. They talk about listening to poems read aloud and how that slows time down...

Today, Debbie Weil brings her husband Sam Harrington , a retired physician, back on the show to talk about fasting. One year ago the couple completed a five-day fast using a ProLon kit of dried soups and crackers. This year, after packing on the pounds during the stay-at-home pandemic holidays, they decided to repeat the fast.  And this time, Debbie took notes to record the experience.  If you’ve...

Today, Debbie talks to Encore.org 's Marci Alboher and Aanchal Dhar about intergenerational  collaboration: how it works for them as a GenX and Millennial pair and how connecting different ages can address some of the biggest issues this country is facing right now, from pandemic loneliness to the political divide to the climate crisis. Marci, Encore's Vice President of Narrative Change, is 54. Aa...

Today Debbie Weil talks to Diane Feldman , an old friend and a veteran political consultant, to get her take on an issue that Debbie has been chewing and stewing over: the deep political divide in this country. After running The Feldman Group, a Democratic research & polling firm in D.C. for almost 30 years, Diane shut down her firm two years ago and retired to Jackson, Mississippi. Debbie's first...

This podcast is about making the most of the collective gap year that we’re all living through right now. It's a topic that applies to anyone, of any age, but our focus is on those in midlife and older.  So today, to kick off 2021, Debbie talks to the perfect guest, Ashton Applewhite . Ashton is an author, speaker and activist on the topic of ageism, which can be defined as discrimination on the b...

Today, Debbie Weil brings Dr. Sam Harrington , her physician husband, back on the show to wrap up the year 2020. After 8 months of living with COVID as a backdrop, they sit down together to reflect on what lies ahead.  First, the vaccine: how will it be distributed, to whom, and in what order? Is this the right order? How should we value human lives? Can the new Biden Administration improve the me...

Today, Debbie Weil brings DJ DiDonna on the show to talk about sabbaticals, first cousins to gap years. DJ  is a graduate of Harvard Business School, co-founder of a socially-conscious financial tech company , and now, an expert on sabbaticals. Like a lot of young entrepreneurs DJ was burned out after working flat out for seven years. So he took two sabbaticals: one to make the famous, 900-mile Sh...

Today,  Debbie Weil  brings  Paul Jarvis  on the show. An online tech veteran, Paul is an author and a designer of data analytics software and online courses aimed at freelancers. He lives on Canada's Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest and has worked with Silicon Valley startups, pro-sports athletes, Fortune 500 companies, and the world's biggest entrepreneurs (like Marie Forleo ). But what...

Debbie Weil chats with her niece, Phoebe Weil, about her experience living through COVID. While the audience for this podcast is those in midlife and older (50-plus), there is a lot to be learned from someone younger about what it’s like to handle the disappointments of the pandemic. Someone who’s been missing out on some of life’s most memorable milestones. Debbie knew just the person to tell  th...

Debbie Weil talks to John Mankiewicz , a veteran screenwriter as well as executive producer for TV and film. She asks him what he's working on and what kinds of stories may come out of this era of COVID and the pandemic.  One of his ideas is a show based on people driving around L.A. in their cars, who find themselves unwittingly connected or involved in a frightening conspiracy. You’re undoubtedl...

Debbie Weil talks with Daphne Merkin , a highly acclaimed novelist, essayist and literary critic. She is known for writing boldly, without shame or modesty, about depression, obsession, money, sex, family, and religion. Her 2017 memoir, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression , which was 16 years in the making, got a front page review in The New York Times by Andrew Solomon , another accl...