[B]OLD AGE With Debbie Weil

Debbie Weil brings Frank Weil , her almost 90-year-old father, back on the podcast to give us his perspective on the 2020 presidential election, even as votes are still being counted. Her Dad is a prolific blogger at FAWideas.com , where he regularly offers his thoughts on Democratic politics, including cogent tirades about you-know-who, whom he regards as incompetent, amoral, and dangerous. So wh...

In this episode, Debbie talks to Kathleen Billings , town manager of Stonington, Maine , the small coastal village on Deer Isle that she and her husband now call home. Debbie wanted to talk to a local leader about the challenges of this election and pandemic year and Kathleen was the perfect person. She is matter of fact, deeply knowledgeable, and forthright. Kathleen, 56, has been Stonington’s To...

Today, Debbie talks to Kerry Hannon, author of the new and well-timed Great Pajama Jobs: Your Complete Guide to Working from Home . Kerry is the author of 14 books and an expert on career transitions, entrepreneurship, personal finance, and retirement. She writes regularly for The New York Times , MediaWatch, Forbes and other media outlets, including NextAvenue.org . Kerry answers the question: wi...

Today Debbie speaks with Juliette Kayyem , a longtime national security and terrorism expert with over 160,000 followers on Twitter. She has an extraordinary resume of public and private service, starting with the Dept. of Justice as a young lawyer, and then joining the National Commission on Terrorism in 1999 and helping to write their report, published in June 2000, recognizing the growing terro...

Note: The Gap Year Podcast is looking for a sponsor! If you are interested in reaching a smart and thoughtful audience of midlife, and older, listeners, contact Debbie Weil .  More about the show here . Debbie brings Alyson Hoggart, one of her oldest and most special friends, onto the show. She and Alyson have a transatlantic friendship of many decades. They are age mates, with almost identical bi...

Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley legend. He’s worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, he’s written 15 books, and until recently, he was traveling all over the world for speaking engagements. He's also the creator and host of the Remarkable People podcast. He was a guest on Season 2 of this podcast. On today’s episode, Debbie and Guy unpack the last few months. They talk about how the pandemic has changed...

Production team: Host: Debbie Weil Producer: Far Out Media    Sponsors Next For Me Encore.org Modern Elder Academy   Contact us: By email: thegapyearpodcast(at)gmail.com On Twitter   Music credit: Lakeside Path by Duck Lake 

Debbie brings her husband Sam back on the show to reflect on this remarkable year of 2020 and to wrap up Season 2 of the podcast. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she has published almost twice as many episodes as the usual every other week schedule. Debbie shares with Sam how creating and producing the podcast has kept her sane. She finds comfort in knowing that this podcast was a way to main...

Debbie brings Chip back on the show to discuss the future of travel, what travel means for many of us, and what the substitutions might be. Chip is a New York Times bestselling author, a thought leader at the intersection of psychology and business, and an influential hospitality entrepreneur. Recently he has become a rockstar of the mid-life transition movement, as the founder of Modern Elder Aca...

Blanche Colson got in touch with Debbie Weil after listening to a previous episode with entrepreneur Peter Corbett on the topic of mortality, death and becoming a hospice volunteer. Blanche knew Peter through the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and wanted to tell her own story about her evolving relationship with death.  Blanche retired after a career in school administration in Eugene,...

Debbie Weil interviews the one and only Seth Godin. Seth writes one of the most popular blogs in the world, read by more than a million people. He’s been blogging abut marketing for almost 20 years but his topic is really life : how to live well and fully. He blogs every day, seven days a week. Suffice it to say that when Seth talks, or writes, people listen.  It's hard to put your finger on exact...

Debbie Weil talks with Genevieve McDonald , the Maine State Representative for the remote coastal district Debbie now calls home. In addition to completing her first term in the Maine State House, Genevieve is the mother of two-year-old twin girls. She is also Capt. McDonald, lobster fishing out of Stonington, ME. Last year, at the age of 37, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Ma...

Debbie has a conversation about writing with friend and college classmate Anne Fadiman . Anne is an illustrious - and revered - essayist and author, perhaps best known for her first book, the prize-winning The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, an account of the unbridgeable cultural conflicts between a family of Hmong refugees and their American doctors. She’s spent her whole career as a repor...

Debbie Weil brings her husband, Dr. Sam Harrington , back on the show for an update on their evolving state of mind about the continuing pandemic. Like everyone else, they are settling into social distancing for the long haul. This is their new normal, at least for now. After two months of self-isolating in their little apartment in New Haven, CT they drove back to Stonington, ME, the remote coast...

In this episode Debbie talks to a real adventurer, a 63-year-old woman who spent 2019 on a self-organized global gap year. Kim Klaft quit a well-paid position as a nonprofit executive to travel and volunteer in 25 countries. Over the course of one calendar year she worked in soup kitchens, food banks, homeless shelters, orphanages and in hurricane relief efforts (see her list below) as she moved a...

Debbie talks with Peter Corbett, a retired CEO who moved to Brooklyn from DC, sold his tech company to J. Walter Thompson (part of WPP), and completely changed his life.  Peter was a young guy in his 20s when Debbie knew him back in DC's tech heyday . He was well known in DC’s tech community as the founder and CEO of iStrategy Labs as well as the convener of popular tech meetups. iStrategy Labs wa...

Debbie Weil talks to Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, PhD , the science director of UC-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center . This was a conversation the two arranged many weeks before the pandemic. It turned out to be perfectly timed. The center studies the psychology, sociology and neuroscience of well-being and teaches skills to foster a resilient and compassionate society. Kind of what we need righ...

This week on the show, Debbie brings back Julie-Roxane Krikorian and Alasdair Plambeck. Last time they were on, this young couple was living in a tiny caravan in southwest France. A few months ago, they decided to ditch that life and move to Guatemala. J-R, as Debbie calls her, is the producer for this podcast. Both she and her husband are entrepreneurs doing location-independent work as podcaster...

In this episode host Debbie Weil has a wide-ranging conversation with online legend Derek Sivers . Debbie has been following Derek’s work for close to a decade and was thrilled when he agreed to come on the show.  They focus on one of his current obsessions - slow thinking and slow living - but they also talk about much more.  According to his About page, Derek has been a musician, a producer, a c...

Debbie Weil interrupts regular programming to address the Coronavirus pandemic and how this evolving situation is impacting older Americans. She is joined by her husband Sam Harrington, a retired physician, and a recurring guest on the show. They talk about how they are navigating uncertainty and unknowns differently (Sam as a physician, Debbie as a non-physician but with a new hunger for charts a...

Debbie speaks with Sean Bailey, founding editor-in-chief of Horsesmouth , a New York-based company that creates educational programs on retirement planning, Social Security, Medicare, college planning, cybersecurity, and more for industry professionals. The focus of their conversation is financial planning around a gap year. Sean shares some basic practicalities: you have to create a budget, you h...

Debbie brings her husband, Dr. Sam Harrington, back on the show to talk about end-of-life and how that relates to the topic of reinvention. They talk about the inevitability of being forced to reinvent yourself in the last stage of your life when you gradually become disabled by disease and old age. It's a reinvention of mindset, if not of action.  It’s also a glass half full vs. glass half empty...

Debbie talks to Kathy Davies who teaches design thinking at Stanford and is the co-creator, with Susan Burnett of the Designing Your Life for Women workshops. The workshops grew out of the bestselling book, Designing Your Life , by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They talk about how design thinking crossed over from product design to designing your life, how the workshops for wome...

Debbie chats with a friend, Sonja O’Donnell , about the sabbatical gap year she took traveling around the world with her husband and their then 13-year-old son in tow. Both teachers, they had stepped out of highly-structured lives as long-time faculty at a prestigious secondary boarding school in Massachusetts. Their approach to a gap year was highly organized and purposeful; they were determined...

We kick off 2020 with a conversation with Silicon Valley legend and all-around wise guy, Guy Kawasaki . Not surprisingly, he is funny, and opinionated in addition to being wise. Guy worked with Steve Jobs at Apple as the original evangelist for the Macintosh computer. Then he went on to a career as an author, speaker and investor. He has written 15 books, a number of them New York Times and Wall S...