The Art 2 Aging

We’re going to continue the financial planning for retirement theme that we started last week in our interview with Darren Coleman from Portage Cross Border Wealth Management. When we talk about retirement, we’re really speaking about a period of time in someone’s life that could span 30 or more years. This week, our guest is Susan Latremoile who, along with her partner, Marianne Oehser, runs Next...

In our first episode of POV from The Art 2 Aging , marketer, advertiser and self-confessed storyteller, Dave McCaughan tackles longevity, specifically the idea of trying to live to 100. He argues that it’s time to think about trying to become a centenarian in a more balanced way. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit t...

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...

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. This is a public episode...

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...

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like...

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 fir...

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 S...

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 a...

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?...

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...

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 g...

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...

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 repeated...

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 co...

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 live...

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...

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...

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...

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 countrie...

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...

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 dec...

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 t...

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...

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...