Catherine Foot is Director at Phoenix Insights, a new longevity think tank launched in 2021, which reimagines how we work, learn, save and live in an age of longer lives.  She previously was Director of Evidence at the Centre for Aging Better and prior to that was Assistant Director, Policy, at the King’s Fund.

Our conversation traces Catherine's early interest in older people, aging with dignity and thinking about what it means to live longer, fuller lives.  She relays an anecdote around thinking about a life span like a play to which a 15 minute addition has been given and challenges us as to how we would amend the play with that in mind.  Would we simply add another 15 minutes to the end.. without a plan or would we add some minutes to different stages of life. Would we add a few minutes to our work lives, to our volunteering and to the phases that pre-date the end of life.

This thought experiment is a trigger to "talk" more about age - the topic of a recent campaign at Phoenix Insights around the later years in life and how to make them count.  It is a powerful and important movement. 

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Veronica O’Keane has recently retired from her position which was as a professor of psychiatry and consultant psychiatrist at Trinity College Dublin.  She has over 30 years of experience in the field and has published numerous research papers, especially on mood disorders and on perinatal depression. She is the author of the book A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are and  The Rag & Bone Shop, How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us.  She lives by the sea in north Dublin and is a passionate open sea swimmer.

Our wide-ranging conversation starts with what drew Veronica to psychiatry and her path through medicine.  We speak about the evolution of psychiatry over her career, and the integration of it with our growing understanding of neuroscience and neuro-imaging.  We speak about an age of enlightment of sorts that the area is entering given the ability for neuroscience to further explain the mysteries of the brain.

We dive in then to some of the specialist areas that Veronica focuses on, some of which are the subject of her books, such as the science of memory and how it evolves, as well as the way that studying the extreme expressions of an illness can help us to understand more mainstream versions of it. We speak about the development of the brain as we age and some of the abstraction that we can develop, which is, in effect an advantage.

A lifelong advocate for women in medicine, Veronica speaks about her own experience as a practitioner and the position of women in the healthcare system and how much improvement still needs to occur.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Charlotte Gibson is a coach, actuary and pensions consultant.  She is a senior manager at ISIO and the founder of The Rewirement, which is focused on redefining retirement through coaching .  She previously worked in management at KPMG and prior to that was an Actuarial Analyst at AON Consulting.

Our conversation focuses on modern definitions of retirement and how they are evolving.  We discuss the different life experiences that are now commonplace and question whether the traditional model of retirement applies. We explore the difference between retiring "from" something and retiring "to" something and look at why many people benefit from coaching to aid and frame that transition.  

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Gareth Miller  is Head of Change at Artemis Investment and has had a long career in asset management, in particular delivering enterprise-wide change and transformation within the asset management sector. He leads the flexible working workstream at The Diversity Project. 

Our conversation starts with Gareth's path into asset management and some of the twists and turns along the way.  As is often the case in a volatile financial services industry there were some setbacks and cancelled projects, requiring pivots and agility along the way.  This agility served as a training ground for Gareth's work around flexibility and the importance of facilitating it in the workplace as the key to better employee engagement and

In the discussion we trace the importance of flexible working and what it means - looking at the different ways it can be executed. We look at how this can be particularly beneficial for older workers and how Covid acted as the accelerant that was needed to propel it into the mainstream.

Gareth mentions groundbreaking work by Jenny Segal in his podcast and Jenny featured on an earlier episode of the Fiftyfaces Podcast which you can find here:  https://www.fiftyfaceshub.com/jenny-segal-speaking-and-motivating-with-images/You can also find more information on this short video: https://www.fiftyfaceshub.com/jenny-segal-the-power-of-culture-at-work/

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Steve Butler is Chief Executive at Punter Southall Aspire, an investment consulting group.  He was previously the founder of Camradata, a business author and a visiting industry fellow at Oxford Brookes Business School.  He has a particular focus on areas such as #futureofwork, #olderworkers, #inclusiveculture, #intergenerational, and #retirementplanning and writes extensively on the topics on LinkedIN, which is where we met.  He is pursuing a Doctorate in Business Administration which is examining the effect of Covid 19 on different generations in the workplace.

Our conversation starts with Steve’s upbringing in England’s idyllic New Forest and how his university career endured some twists and turned, but ultimately led to an appreciation of the importance of hard work. He found he was naturally inclined to the people aspect of a business development role within financial services and thrived there, in roles that also took him to Latin America.

We move then to what drove him to found Camradata and the problem that that was designed to serve – the provision of investment data at a time when few data sources were consolidated in that way.  The business caught a wave of when analytics and peer group analysis were burgeoning, although Steve does describe the scrappy start-up stage quite vividly.We move then to his current focus at Punter Southall Aspire and his particular focus on ageism and busting myths that persist about older workers, their preferences and their strengths. Covid and the shift to remote and hybrid working has had an effect on this as well as other demographic groups.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Laura Walker is an award-winning researcher, author and experienced practioner whose book “Dancing with Fear and Confidence: How to Liberate Yourself and Your Career in Mid-life” was published in November 2020.  She runs her own business which blends consulting, writing and coaching.  She previously held director level positions for businesses across six sectors including retail (John Lewis partnership), pharmaceuticals (GSK), insurance (Aviva), oil and gas (Centrica), defence (BAE Systems), Luxury goods (Burberry). Our conversation starts with Laura’s varied career journey and how she developed an interest in the psychology of mid-life.  She starts with her early interest in psychology, which arose when she and her sister (as identical twins) participated in some studies during their childhood.  In her career she made a number of moves, some due to opportunistic openings, and In this discussion she describes some ups and downs of that journey. Moving then to her current focus – the psychology of middle age and the dance of fear and confidence that many have to do, we bust some myths about middle life – the first being that it typically a time of “crisis”.  Other myths include beliefs about the desire to retrain and adapt as well as the willingness to contribute well into mid-life and beyond.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Tony Watts, OBE, is MD at Hartley Watts Communications, a director of EngAgeNet.org.uk, Director of RetireEasy.co.Uk, co-founder of the Age Action Alliance and co-author of The Midlife Review. He built his career as a writer, communicator, campaigner and strategist in the areas of PR, journalism and marketing and is now focusing increasingly on later life issues.  We trace the many chapters of Tony’s extraordinary career, in which he spent time as a speech writer, magazine editor and activist, and examine the thread of activism for older people that has been a constant throughout.

We ask what society is missing as it readies itself for a growing body of retired seniors and where funding is inadequate and preparation is poor. Tony describes the ebbing and flowing of government interest in this area, and how funding for it can be volatile and unpredictable. He talks about having to rebuild a campaign from stratch after funding was pulled and the momentum that he had to regain to do that. Overall, Tony is convinced of the treasure and value that older people present to society and continues campaigning tirelessly to achieve more recognition for this.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Debbie Marshall is managing director of the Silver Marketing Association, a membership B2B organization connecting and informing businesses and individuals with an interest in marketing to older consumers.  She previously founded the Silver Travel Advisor, an information website that provides travel advice and reviews for the mature traveler and is a Chair of the Board of Trustees of Dementia Adventure as well as holding other Non-Executive Director Roles.  We start by tracing Debbie’s roots in marketing and the gap in the market that she perceived when she realized that older consumers were spending a lot of money on travel but rarely getting a service tailored to them. When she successfully sold the Silver Travel Advisor she turned her skills to marketing more generally, again focusing on the diverse needs of older consumers. Debbie reveals some common tropes around age that are often exploited in marketing – whether in the birthday card market or in the media as a whole and why she believes that calling these out is the way to eradicate them and the biases that they reinforce. We speak about the impact that targeted marketing can have and the potential growth of the market as the wealth and empowerment of older consumer grows.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Alistair McQueen is Head of Savings & Retirement at Aviva UK plc, where he has spent over 23 years. He has been instrumental in raising awareness of the importance of older workers, and initiated the >45 mid-life review for Aviva’s staff and is an advocate for the importance of diversity within financial firms.

Our conversation starts with Alistair's own journey into pensions, his long career at Aviva and how his interest in protecting the talent within Aviva particularly among older workers originated.  We describe in detail the elements of the mid-life review and its focus on Wealth, Work and Wellbeing and how well-received the initiative was.  It was impactful too - leading to more employee engagement, lower absenteeism and higher rates of retention of talent. The practice has actually been perceived as so effective that it is likely to now be rolled out on a national level.

Age discrimination an area that currently sits in the shadows of some of the diversity debate, and this series is an effort to bring it out of there. Let’s ensure that all of us can look forward to a future of dignity, purpose and security.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.

Last year we launched a podcast with Steve Butler of Puntall Southall Aspire which shone a light on ageism as one of the last acceptable forms of discrimination.  This received such a groundswell of a response that we wanted to dig deeper into this area to develop a special next chapter series around the problems of ageism, the importance of having access to meaningful productive work as we age and some of the barriers – both invisible and visible – that exist in society to this. Tune in for insights from psychology, marketing, work, activism and psychiatry.  This series looks at the unique challenges of mid-life and the growth of interest in the psychology of mid-life and beyond and hear from Laura Walker who focuses on this area and has written a book about the intersection of fear and confidence.  We look at the obsession with age and some of the  deeply entrenched biases that exist around age in popular culture hearing from Debbie Marshall, who has specialized in marketing to older consumers for years.

We hear updates from Steve Butler about recruiting habits that tend to discriminate against older candidates and from Alistair McQueen about the Mid Life Review that has been offered to staff at Aviva. Tony Watts shares his life's passion and work at Age Action Alliance which earned him an OBE, while Professor Veronica O'Keane shares the medical basis of the wisdom of old age.

This is an area that currently sits in the shadows of some of the diversity debate, and we want to bring it out of there Let’s ensure that all of us can look forward to a future of dignity, purpose and security.

This podcast series was made possible by the kind support of Darwin Alternatives. Darwin Alternative Investment Management Limited offers innovative, alpha-driven investment solutions that are uncorrelated with traditional asset classes and feature business areas which have not previously been considered by investment funds. The firm aims to create new opportunities for investors to further diversify their portfolios and achieve stable absolute returns.