4-Quarter Lives

Dr Vijeth Iyengar is the guest in this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Dr Iyengar is Director of Global Aging at the International Office of AARP – the American Association of Retired People. He leads cutting-edge research on global aging issues, including financial resilience, health security, the human rights of older persons, and their social connections, and cultivates rela...

Alistair McQueen is head of savings and retirement at Aviva, the UK’s largest general insurance company and a major life and pensions provider. Aviva also has a significant presence in Canada and Ireland. He leads Aviva’s pensions business, helping six million people save for and live in retirement, as well as representing Aviva in the media and with government. He is also a member of the Associat...

Ryan Frederick is the Chief Executive of Here, a strategic consultancy and consumer platform focused on creating housing options and helping people make good decisions about place in the context of healthy aging. A thought leader, speaker, author, developer and strategy consultant, he has advised organizations internationally, including Fortune 500 companies, global institutional investors, leadin...

On 4-Quarter Lives this week Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Catherine Foot, Director of Phoenix Insights. Catherine is a research and policy expert in ageing and longevity, with over 20 years of experience in the field. Phoenix Insights is a think tank set up by the Phoenix Group (one of the UK’s leading pensions and savings groups) in 2021, to conduct research and stimulate debate on how societ...

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Eleanor Mills. Eleanor is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Noon, which she created in 2021 in the UK as a resource for women at the mid-point – the Noon – of their lives. an online media platform and community for women at the mid-point – the noon – of their lives. As she argues, "Midlife is when those dreams we had when we were yo...

Terri Harrington is one of the members of the first cohort of a new program at the University of Colorado Denver, called Change-Makers. In this podcast series so far, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox has talked with people who have gone through equivalent programs at Harvard and Stanford, and she has been intrigued to see new options opening up at a number of other schools not only in the US but in other cou...

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is delighted to have Professor Claudia Goldin, the newly crowned winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, join her on 4-Quarter Lives. Claudia is Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Gender in the Economy Study Group. Her research uses history to explore the origins of issues in the present, partic...

The guest this week in 4-Quarter Lives is Barbara Waxman, whose work Avivah Wittenberg-Cox came across early on in her exploration of the topic of how to manage our ever longer lives. Barbara is a gerontologist and coach and has combined both these areas in a career focused on helping people become both more effective professionally and at the same time truer to who they themselves are as individu...

In this week’s episode of 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Dawn Browne. Dawn is the People & Talent Director of Fuller’s, a hospitality company that runs some 200 hundred pubs and restaurants in the UK, across London and Hampshire, and employs 5,000 people. In today’s talent-strapped Britain, Fuller’s has been running contrary to the ageism many people accuse companies of. They ha...

Focus on Stage (Not Age) Susan Wilner Golden is the Founder and Director of the dciX initiative at the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, or DCI, a similar program to the one at Harvard (the Advanced Leadership Initiative). Her focus is on the intersection of longevity and innovation and the unique entrepreneurial opportunities that longer lives and the growing $22 trillion longevity econom...

This week’s guest with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox on 4-Quarter Lives is environmentalist and educator Dr. Mary Pearl. Mary was born and raised to be a New York debutante but had other plans. Her mother wanted her to go to Wellesley College for Women, but Yale opened to women just in the nick of time (1972). She then flew the coop again, becoming a biologist and exploring the behaviours of primates in t...

Morag Lynagh is Unilever’s Global Director of the Future of Work, with particular responsibility for new employment models, age and longevity.  As as an employer of almost 150,000 people, Unilever is one of the first companies to recognise that people have different needs and expectations of work throughout their working lives. This has led to the creation of U-Work within Unilever, a new, interna...

4-Quarter Lives initially focused on individuals role modelling the new 3rd Quarter. This episode, however, looks at the impact of longer lives on the one before - that normally insane phase of life from 25 to 50. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox speaks with two men who have consciously stepped back from their full-on and very successful tech careers to live more rounded lives. Cain Ullah is Founder and form...

John Bateson is an expert on the Third Age Consumer, the period of healthy ageing after retirement and before age restricts consumption. Few people can have his breadth and depth of knowledge about the growing consumer interests and needs - and business opportunities - among those in their 3rd and 4th Quarters. Now a visiting Professor of Management at City, London University, he publishes a newsl...

In this last episode of 4-Quarter Lives ’ first season, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. A sociologist and Harvard Professor of Education, with a teaching and writing career spanning five decades, Sara was one of the first academics to examine and focus on the third quarter of life. Her book The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the Twenty-Five Years After 50...

Bernard Franklin is Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s guest this week on 4-Quarter Lives . He is a great example of how programmes such as Harvard’s Advance Leadership Initiative give the opportunity to review where we are in life, reconsider how our skills and experience can best be used, and recharge batteries after an intense and at times bruising career and life. Fatherlessness & Its Impacts Bernard gre...

Dr. Paula Rochon – Founding Director of the World’s First Women’s Age Lab. In this week’s edition of 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Dr. Paula Rochon, Founding Director of the world’s first Women’s Age Lab, based in Toronto, Canada. If there is one thing most people intrinsically know about older people, it is that there are more women than men in the mix and that they tend to li...

Joining Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for this episode of 4-Quarter Lives is Eduardo Chadwick . From Chile, Eduardo is President of his family’s vineyard which stretches back five generations. He took the vineyard from the brink of bankruptcy to world renowned winery and is now looking at how he will pass on the legacy he has created. A Family Affair Born in Santiago, Chile in 1959, Eduardo shares how his...

Carole Carlson joins Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for this episode of 4-Quarter Lives. Carole has been a coach with Harvard Business School for some 20 years, and has been accompanying participants in its Advanced Leadership Initiative since its founding. She is also the Director of the Heller MBA Program at Brandeis University – and a Senior Lecturer there. A busy portfolio of roles and impact. Unleashi...

‘Look Like a Lady, Sound Like a Truck Driver’ Surgeon Dr Pat Roberts joins Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for this episode of 4-Quarter Lives. Pat had such an impressive first career, that deciding what to do afterwards was always going to be a challenge. She knew she wanted to be a surgeon from the age of five – and was one of the rare women of her generation to make it – not just through but all the way...

David Sinclair is Chief Executive of the UK’s International Longevity Centre . He has worked in policy, advocacy and research on ageing and demographic change for over 20 years. In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore different countries’ approach to seismic demographic shifts, the pandemic’s mass retirement and how companies are responding, shifting attitudes to dying with dignity legislati...

In Conversation with Kevin Robinson, Harvard ALI Fellow ‘22 Joining Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for this episode of 4-Quarter Lives is Kevin Robinson . Born into modest beginnings in a black American family in Detroit, Kevin was the first of his family to go to college. Through what he describes as ‘luck’ and ‘a few smarts’ he rose through the world of law, as a public prosecutor at local, regional and...

Joining Avivah Wittenberg-Cox for this episode of 4-Quarter Lives is Yvonne Sonsino. Yvonne is one of the pioneers in the longevity space, with a 40-year career focused on the financial, actuarial and corporate sides of the ageing equation. She is global co-Leader of consulting firm Mercer’s Next Stage consulting division, and works with companies across the global to develop longevity strategies...

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s guest this week is Isabel Saint Malo. After two decades working as a Panamanian diplomat at the UN, on Latin American and Caribbean issues, she ran for office and became Panama’s first female Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. Rejecting calls to run for the top job as President, she focused instead on the issues she cared most about – notably youth employment and a...

In this first episode of 4-Quarter Lives, host Avivah Wittenberg-Cox talks with Paul Irving. Paul is the archetype of the stories this podcast would like to share. First, he’s a role model of Third Quarter re-inventions. He went back to school in his late 50s, after a successful 30 plus-year career in the law. He moved from Los Angeles to Cambridge to go through Harvard’s Advanced Leadership (ALI)...