The Encore Project Podcast

The morning after Sherry died, the garden still needed tending. The tomatoes didn't pause. Her roses still demanded deadheading. The daylilies she'd placed with such care kept opening anyway, indifferent to the fact that she was gone. Rick Stiller stood in the early light — a retired commercial photographer with a gray ponytail and fifty years of Tulsa behind him — and tried to figure ou...

 In the summer of 2023, Bill Leighty was seventy-eight years old, exhausted from a road trip gone sideways, and sitting on a bench in a park in Gillette, Wyoming, wondering what came next. Behind him were thirty-eight years in residential real estate, a lifetime of self-employment, a nonprofit he'd founded, a planning commission he'd chaired — and the unsettling recognition that none of...

For a lot of men, retirement is the first time in decades that geography becomes genuinely negotiable. The job kept you in one place. Now it doesn't. And for many, the most honest answer to the question of where they actually want to be points toward the people who matter most — children, grandchildren, siblings, the family they've been too far from for too long. Moving closer to family...

 Getting to a doctor's appointment used to mean arranging a ride, sitting in a waiting room full of other sick people, and burning half a day on something that might take fifteen minutes with the physician. For senior men managing chronic conditions, or those living in rural areas far from specialists, that friction was often enough to make skipping the visit feel reasonable. Telehealth chang...

The pitch for every new gadget sounds the same: it'll change your life. Most of them won't. But for older men navigating the practical challenges of this stage — staying connected with family, monitoring health conditions, keeping the house running smoothly, holding onto independence — a handful of devices genuinely earn their place. This episode is a no-nonsense tour of the tech that ac...

Most men spend decades telling themselves they'll travel when they have more time. Then the time arrives — retirement, an open calendar, no one to answer to — and they find reasons to stay put. This episode makes the case for actually going. Not because travel is glamorous, but because the evidence for what it does to aging men is hard to argue with: it reduces stress, keeps the brain engaged...

There's a version of solo travel that sounds like a young person's adventure — backpacks and hostels and no itinerary. That's not what this episode is about. This is about what happens when a man in his sixties or seventies finally has the time, the resources, and the absence of obligation that makes real travel possible — and chooses to go it alone. Not out of loneliness, but out o...

 Retirement removes the structure that most men have organized their lives around for forty years. The career is gone. The daily routine, the professional identity, the sense of forward motion — gone. What's left can feel surprisingly loud: unresolved regrets, health anxieties, the loss of people who mattered, questions about what any of it was for. In this episode, we talk honestly about wha...

The assumption that a career change at fifty requires going back to school — or that the window has already closed — is one that holds a lot of men in place longer than it should. The job market has changed significantly, and the industries that are actively hiring don't necessarily care about a diploma. What they do care about is judgment, reliability, communication, and the kind of problem-...

 For decades, work kept you away from home nine or ten hours a day. It gave you structure, identity, and a reason to walk out the door in the morning. When retirement removes all of that, you and your spouse are suddenly together in a way you may never have been before — and not all marriages are built for that kind of proximity. Old tensions resurface. Roles shift. Financial stress gets louder wi...

 Dating after sixty — after a long marriage, after divorce, after loss — is a different experience than it was at twenty-five, and not just because the terrain has changed. The fear of rejection lands differently when you're older. It carries the weight of past hurt, the self-consciousness that comes with an aging body, and a quiet anxiety about time that younger men don't feel in quite...

 For most men, career is identity. It's not just what you did for forty years — it's how you introduced yourself at parties, how you understood your own value, how you structured every week of your adult life. When retirement removes all of that at once, the question that surfaces isn't logistical. It's existential: Who am I now? In this episode, we take that question seriously...

 Of all the anxieties that come with retirement, one sits at the top of the list for most men: running out of money. It's not an irrational fear. People are living longer, inflation is real, and the market doesn't care what stage of life you're in when it decides to drop. In this episode, we dig into the question head-on — how long will your retirement investments actually last, and...

Retirement has a way of handing a man time he didn't have before — and with that time comes reflection. For a lot of men, that reflection arrives with some weight attached. The roads not taken. The relationships that frayed and never healed. The years spent on the wrong things. Regret in later life is nearly universal, but it doesn't have to be the last word. In this episode, we look at...

Most men spend decades thinking about what they'll leave behind in financial terms — the house, the savings, the estate plan. But there's another kind of inheritance that outlasts all of it, and it costs nothing to start. In this episode, we explore what it means to leave a spiritual legacy: the values you pass on, the stories you tell, the way you live in front of your children and gran...

 The brain is not exempt from the same rule that applies to every other part of the body: if you stop using it, it starts to go. Research backs this up pretty clearly — cognitive decline accelerates when the mind isn't regularly challenged, and the risks associated with dementia are measurably lower among seniors who stay mentally engaged. In this episode, we get specific. Not vague advice ab...

 Most forms of exercise get harder as you get older. The knees complain. The hips protest. The joints that used to be invisible make themselves known in ways they never did at forty. Swimming is different. When you're in the water, buoyancy absorbs the impact that land-based exercise puts on your body — which means you can get a serious cardiovascular and strength workout without the wear and...

Most men have thought about writing a will at some point — and most have put it off. But even the men who have gotten around to it often don't know the difference between a will and a trust, or why that difference might matter quite a bit to the people they leave behind. In this episode, we cut through the legal fog and lay out what these two documents actually do, how they work differently,...

 Most men over 50 have told themselves at some point that it's too late to learn an instrument. Too old, too busy, fingers too stiff. In this episode, we push back on all of that. The research on piano and the aging brain is genuinely striking — we're talking about measurable improvements in memory, focus, and cognitive flexibility, along with real reductions in stress and depression. Be...

Before you retired, someone probably asked you that question — what are you going to do all day? It's meant to be a joke, but for a lot of men it turns out to be a real one. The structure that defined your working years is gone, and the open calendar that looked like freedom can start to feel like a problem. In this episode, we take an honest look at why hobbies matter more in retirement than...

Some dates on the calendar carry more weight than others. Birthdays. Wedding anniversaries. The day someone died. For men who have lost a spouse, a close friend, or a parent, these dates don't get easier automatically — they arrive like a wave you didn't fully see coming. In this episode, we explore why anniversaries hit so hard even long after the loss, what the research says about the...

Grief has a way of taking more than the person you lost — it can quietly strip away the things you once loved doing. The woodworking bench you haven't touched in months. The fishing pole still in the garage. The garden that went unplanted this spring. For senior men, this kind of retreat is more common than anyone talks about. In this episode, we explore why loss tends to pull us away from th...

For a certain kind of man, the dream retirement doesn't involve a fixed address — it involves waking up somewhere new, moving on when the mood strikes, and trading the costs and obligations of homeownership for open road and open sky. RV retirement has grown dramatically in popularity among senior men, and for good reason. It offers freedom, financial flexibility, a closer connection to natur...

Financial freedom isn't just a number in a bank account — it's the point where your money works hard enough that you don't have to. For senior men navigating retirement on a fixed income, getting there requires more than good intentions. It requires a plan. In this episode, we walk through a comprehensive roadmap built specifically for older men: how to assess your current financial...

The right app on your phone can make the difference between a trip that flows and one that unravels at the first gate change. For senior travelers, digital tools have quietly become some of the most powerful assets in the travel toolkit — not just for booking flights and hotels, but for navigating cities, breaking through language barriers, tracking your health information, and staying safe in unf...