The Encore Project Podcast

In this episode, Bill Leighty, Founder of The Encore Project, reflects on a series of unplanned drives he and his wife took through the Oklahoma countryside during the first year of the pandemic — and what those slow, aimless afternoons taught him about the difference between covering ground and truly being somewhere.

Bill Leighty once built an entire room for his photography — a family-room wall of black-and-white prints, track-lit like a gallery. Today he owns more photographs than ever, and looks at almost none of them. In this episode, Bill traces what got quietly lost — and what didn't — when memory moved from walls and albums onto a phone screen.

In this episode, Bill Leighty, Founder of The Encore Project, explores what happens when a lifetime of finish lines gives way to a retirement with no scoreboard at all. Drawing on philosopher Kieran Setiya's idea of telic and atelic living, Bill reflects on why, at eighty-one, he's found himself racing a different kind of clock entirely — and why that urgency has become fuel rather than...

In this episode, Bill Leighty makes a confession: he’s known about his hearing loss for years, went to Costco to try hearing aids, lasted twenty uncomfortable minutes, and walked away telling himself they didn’t help. He hadn’t given them a fair chance — and he knew it. In this honest, research-backed conversation, Bill shares what the Johns Hopkins data on hearing loss and dementia finally convin...

In this episode, Bill Leighty reflects on a friendship that shaped over a decade of Tuesday evenings — and what happened when distance quietly took the ritual away. 

Bill Leighty reflects on a framed magazine cover in his home office — proof of a mayoral run he almost made — and what deciding not to run taught him about self-knowledge, ambition, and finding a different way to make a difference.

Bill Leighty reflects on a man he's watched for years at Southern Hills Country Club — a man of real standing wearing a twenty-five-year-old sport coat — and what that quiet drift taught him about dressing, grooming, and staying engaged with the world as he ages.

Bill Leighty reflects on why he never saved the way his father told him to — and what he's learned about the far more common, far less romantic retirement regret: not saving enough.

Bill Leighty reflects on an unresolved estrangement with someone he loves, and what he's learned about forgiving someone who hasn't asked for it — and may never reconcile with him at all.

Bill Leighty spent five years as the lone dissenting vote on Tulsa's planning commission. In this episode, he makes the case for why more retirees should volunteer for a city board or commission — seats that go unfilled while high-visibility posts stay competitive. 

A photograph of his late uncle mid-jump off a river bluff sends Bill Leighty back forty years, into grief he thought was long settled. In this episode, he explores what the research says about how grief actually moves through men — and why sadness and gratitude are never really in competition. 

Bill Leighty has spent a lifetime saying he's 'retired from real estate' — but by his own definition of the word, he's never actually retired at all. Neither did his father, who worked a landscaping business right up until illness stopped him at eighty-two. In this episode, Bill reflects on the generational reality behind why so many men never had a traditional retirement to lo...

Bill Leighty has been married to his wife Bonnie for fifty-four years. In this episode, he shares how the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 — which forced them into round-the-clock togetherness in their downtown Tulsa condo — unexpectedly renewed a marriage that had quietly drifted into routine, and why a simple Sunday ritual from that spring is still alive six years later.

In this episode, Bill Leighty takes us back to Vinnie’s patio — a backyard in Tulsa where real estate men gathered every weekday at five o’clock for a decade, grilling steaks, telling stories, and doing something the researchers now know is as essential to survival as exercise: belonging somewhere. It’s an honest story, including the parts that weren’t easy. And it leads somewhere unexpected — to...

Bill Leighty was sixty-two years old the first time he left the United States. What happened in Rome — a scammer at the bus terminal, a sidewalk dinner, an extraordinary evening on the lawn of the Augustinianum at the threshold of the Vatican, and three magical days at Lake Como — didn’t just change how he travels. It changed where he lives. In this episode, Bill shares the trip that rewired every...

This episode explores the psychological dimension of financial transition in retirement — why men who are objectively secure still feel financially anxious, what the research says about paycheck identity and purpose, and one founder's honest account of betting his savings on a mission that hasn't paid him a dollar yet. If you've ever lain awake wondering whether you made the right c...

Most men have done the legal work — the will, the trust, the beneficiaries. But there is another kind of preparation that most men leave unexamined: the spiritual texture of their departure. In this episode, Bill Leighty reflects on what it means to leave with dignity, humility, and the faith you actually have — and why saying what you want before you can no longer say it may be the most important...

There’s a word Bill Leighty doesn’t use about himself: retired. In this episode, Bill traces the thread that runs from a fiery Op-Ed in a Tulsa newspaper to a planning commission chamber to fifty years at the lectern — and finally to The Encore Project. It’s a story about the voice you’ve always had, and what happens when you finally stop singing in the margins. The Editorial Team at The Encore Pr...

In this episode, Bill Leighty tells the story of the moment he sat down at his computer, typed a complicated question into ChatGPT, and watched everything change. He was in his late seventies. He had no tech background. And he had just discovered that the barriers he assumed were permanent were made of paper. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project believes this is one of the most important conve...

In this episode, Bill Leighty shares something he rarely talks about — five decades of living with degenerative disc disease, COPD, arthritis, and the other quiet companions of a life lived hard and well. This isn’t a medical episode. It’s a conversation about how a man decides, early and then again and again, not to let his body write the story. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project presents t...

Bill Leighty made a quiet promise when he joined Tulsa's Planning Commission in 2005: be a team player, be reasonable, cause no trouble. Within a year, one meeting and one video changed everything he believed about how cities should be built — and set off a reversal that eventually reshaped his politics too. In this episode, Bill reflects on what it cost him to change his mind at sixty-five,...

 In this episode, we explore one of the most common — and least talked about — patterns among men in their later years: the habit of holding grief inside until it finds its own way out. Drawing on both personal experience and current research, this conversation examines what happens when the brave front becomes a way of life, and what it quietly costs the men who wear it. 

Bill Leighty was never afraid of technology — he bought an IBM PC Junior in 1984 and realtors called him for tech advice. His father, a decorated WWII Navy fighter pilot, was terrified of it. In this episode, Bill traces that contrast, from a word processor demonstration in a 1980s Tulsa office to the day AI changed everything about how he builds The Encore Project, and asks what it really means f...

In this episode, we explore one of the most overlooked creative acts available to men in retirement: writing their own story. Not for publication, not for applause — but for the people who come after, and for the clarity that only comes from putting your life into words. From a Kansas railroad depot in the 1950s to the research on legacy writing and cognitive health, this conversation makes the ca...

In this episode, Bill Leighty reflects on thirty-eight years of volatile real estate income and the strange psychological adjustment of trading commission-based uncertainty for fixed retirement income. He shares why he's spent three years building The Encore Project without taking a salary, what the research actually says about starting a business later in life, and a hard truth about why men...