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 Stanford Schools of Business where he acquired a doctorate in business management and Masters in Economics. John writes a Substack newsletter titled Consumer Ageism. And in our conversation, he lays out a number of theories about ageism and the older consumer.

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 and older are marching toward something called retirement, like it or not.

What Marianne Oehser does is help her clients see a path through a forest of uncertainty and to walk that path with confidence. She and her business partner run a company called Next Chapter LIfestyle Advisors. Check out their site.

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? Well, let’s find out.

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 desire and energy to meet each day head on.

Is Tony a model for the rest of us? No. But he is an example of how your mindset can build a life worth living.

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 general practitioners and specialists to take an unbiased look at how natural medicine can complement their own work, especially when there are more and more concrete examples of the effectiveness of natural medicine.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is Amanda King https://www.amandakingnd.com/about, a doctor of natural medicine who works in the field of integrative oncology. What she can achieve with a cancer patient by taking a metabolic approach through diet is impressive.

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 has now published.

His knowledge, love of data and his expertise on aging have been combined into a recent book titled Whealthspan: More Years, More Moments, More Money.

Scott is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

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 repeatedly – or worse, what we’re taught to think – we experience or encounter in our physical, everyday lives.

Such as ageism.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, is Ashton Applewhite who has been called America’s activist against ageism by such noteworthy organizations as The New York Times, New Yorker, and the American Society on Aging. She has been fighting the ageist fight since 2005 through her book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and her blog of the same name. She holds public lectures and hosts Ted Talks.

In short, she uses every available weapon in her war against the limiting beliefs around being older.

A Final Note: Around the 27th of December, I came down with a late Christmas gift in the form of a chest cold which resulted in me “sounding like Tron”, as my partner, Dave Grein told me. I thought I was more like James Earl Jones… Apologies in advance!

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 could generate at least a dozen episodes before we launched in mid-May of this year.

To date, we have 30 episodes that have been downloaded thousands of times just from Substack alone.

We’ve met so many inspiring people who have spoken about aging from just about every angle: from heart health to spiritual health; from aging in place to ageism in the workplace. So we want to provide you with a taste of some of the best interviews we’ve done so far as we wrap up the year.

It’s our way of signing off 2024 and looking forward to more (much more) in 2025.

A huge thanks to our subscribers, paid and otherwise. You have embraced our efforts and voted with thumbs up on our content!

Happy Holidays, everyone! See you next year!