Ever wondered how to navigate life’s challenges with a smile? Join Gail Zugerman in a hilarious and insightful conversation with Greg Schwem, a well-respected corporate comedian and cruise ship entertainer who has turned life’s gut punches into punchlines. Discover how Greg’s superpower – humor – helped him navigate a gray divorce and a cancer diagnosis, all while keeping his audience laughing. Plus, get ready for some witty insights on online dating, the importance of human connection, and the power of laughter in the face of adversity.

Greg has recently written a book about his personal life called, “Turning Gut Punches Into Punchlines“. 

He is on SIRIUS Radio and Comedy Central and has shared the stage with Jay Leno, Celine Dion, and Keith Urban!

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Welcome to the show. This is a show that provides a platform for older people who are growing older in a positive and productive way to come on stage and dispense their wisdom. You can find out more about our show by going to www.GrowingOlderWithGusto.com. We have a very special guest for the holidays from the start of the new year who happens to be a comedian from Chicago. He is navigating the ups and downs of life by utilizing his superpower as a comedian and using his great sense of humor. His name is Greg Schwem. He spends much of his professional time on stage and onboard cruise ships.

The Chicago Tribune has proclaimed him as “The King of the Hill” in the growing world of corporate comedy. He’s been on Sirius Radio and Comedy Central and has shared the stage with the likes of Celine Dion, Jay Leno, and Keith Urban. We’re going to talk to Greg about how changes later in life don’t necessarily have to be as scary as you might think if you find the humor in difficult, challenging, and unfamiliar situations. Greg has also written a very funny book based on his own personal life called Turning Gut Punches into Punch Lines. There’s a lot to talk about with Greg so let’s get going.

Welcome to the show, Greg.

Thank you for having me. Superpowers, I love that. I don’t think I’ve ever been introduced as having superpowers. That’s a lot of pressure.

Why don’t we begin by having you tell our audience a bit about how you got started as a corporate speaker which the Huffington Post has called you “Your boss’s favorite comedian”?

It’s weird. I quit my job in journalism. I was a newspaper and a TV reporter in West Palm Beach, Florida. I did that for the first five years out of college. I was always a comedian though. I always did it as a hobby. I started doing it in high school. I finally decided after five years in journalism, which doesn’t sound like a lot but it is a lot. It takes a toll on you, particularly with the kind of stories that I was covering which were certainly not funny. They were very depressing. I told a lot of morbid stories. I would do that during the day and then I would go to comedy clubs at night and make people laugh. I eventually decided I liked doing that better so I moved back to Chicago.

I became a club comedian, the guy who goes around to clubs around the country and makes people laugh. Little by little, I started getting approached because of the type of material that I was doing in my standup act. I was doing material about computers, business, meetings, and that kind of stuff. I would have people come up to me afterward and invite me down to their Christmas party, their golf outing, or little stuff like that. That snowballed. The more shows that I did for business groups, the more I got noticed by people who booked those kinds of events on a much larger scale. I was getting approached by corporate speakers bureaus, corporate booking agents, and meeting planners.

It is a word of mouth marketing, so to speak.

I had no idea that this kind of stuff even existed. When you’re a journalist, you don’t get invited to three-day offsite meetings. Your boss does, but not you. Someone’s got to put out the paper. Little by little, I transitioned my whole act. Instead of being a club comedian, I became a corporate humor speaker. That’s really what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years.

That’s an interesting path that you took to that.

It’s very rare. There are few comedians or people who have transitioned into the corporate market. It’s different from working as a club comedian.

Were you a little jokester when you were little?

I was. One of the questions comedians get always asked is, “Were you the class clown?” I always say, “No. I was the class smart ass.” I always say the class clown is always in trouble because he’s always trying to get the other kids in the class to laugh. What I would do is try to get the teacher to laugh. You can’t get mad at somebody when you’re laughing. I figured that out very early. I would sit in the back and pick my spots. I always enjoyed making people laugh and trying to figure out what would entertain them.

You can’t get mad at somebody when you’re laughing.

To segue into a more serious subject, we hear a lot about the graying of America and the graying generation. There’s a rise in what they’re calling the graying divorce. I know that you have experienced this situation. I’m hoping you can give some wisdom to our audience about how your divorce came about and how you were able to use your superpower of humor to get you through a rough patch in your life.

My divorce was no different from a lot of divorces. Gray divorce is defined as people over 50, certainly how long you’ve been married but how old you are physically. It is the only demographic where the divorce rate is on the rise. A lot of it is attributed to couples who stayed together and raised their kids and all of a sudden, the kids are gone. They’re creating their own lives. The couples look at each other and go, “Now what?” There was a little of that involved in mind. There were other issues as well. I certainly realized at one point that it wasn’t going to happen. You could say, “Did you go to therapy or so forth?”

We’ll get into that later.

That’s fine. That’s a whole nother episode.

We’re going to talk about it.

That’s me. It’s scary. For people in this age group, when they make the decision to get divorced, they’re only thinking about the positives. They’re like, “Finally,” probably men especially. They’re like, “I supported my family. I did this. I paid the mortgage. I mowed the lawn. I did all this. Now, finally, I can focus on myself.” That’s very common and it’s natural to think that way. What you don’t think is that you have been married for a very long amount of time. For me, that’s half my life. I was married for 29 years.

When you are in that situation, you become a little bit complacent. I don’t use that in a negative term. You’re like, “This is what I get. This is what I’ve gotten used to, my house and this. I come home and I sit in front of the fire. Every Christmas, we do this. Every Thanksgiving, we do this,” and so forth. All of a sudden, that’s all gone. You have to reinvent yourself. That’s something people don’t think about.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a reason not to get divorced if you’re not happy, but it’s something you should probably plot out. As I talked about in the book, I have not paid bills in 25 years. My ex-wife did that. There were a lot of things. That’s what the responsibilities are. That doesn’t even cover things like, “How do I meet people now?” I’ve had the same friends for 25 years, but I don’t have those friends anymore. How am I going to meet people?

How did you use your humor during your separation and then your divorce? I know you did use your humor to deflect some of these other feelings that cropped up for you.

That’s natural as a comedian. That’s what comedians do. We are always looking for humor in everyday situations. It doesn’t necessarily matter if those situations are funny from the start or serious. That’s also why people always go to see comedians because they want to laugh at something that may be going on in their lives. Nothing makes me happier when I’m on stage or when I’m delivering some material about a particular topic and I see people in the audience nodding in agreement and looking at one another because I know I’ve hit on something here. They’re like, “He’s saying what I’ve been thinking.” It was natural to do that. Laughing is a way to get through the day.

I’ve heard that it’s also really healthy from a physical point of view.

Sometimes, you have to. You can get as frustrated as you want with lawyers and unfortunately the bad parts of divorce, the lawyers, moving out, and restarting your life. You’re going to come into something that’s funny and it’s how you deal with that. I had always planned to write a funny book about divorce. I  thought that would be a good thing for me to do. I’ve written a couple of books before, but to write things down and journal my thoughts and maybe some of it will end up in my standup act on stage. As we’ll probably talk about, there was a little twist in there that’s something different.

I want to talk to you a little bit about online dating. How do you do this passage? What are your ways of navigating these ups and downs of Greg Schwem’s life?

What would you like to know about online dating? Is it about how you do it?

How can you keep a sense of humor while you are finding a date?

Reading other people’s profiles can be very funny. Trying to create your own can be funny. How funny do you want to be when you’re creating it? What are your ultimate goals? I put down that I was looking for people my age. To be honest, when I entered online dating, it was more of a fact-finding mission for me. I knew that I was moving to Chicago, the city. I was moving out of the suburbs.

Before I committed to that, I wanted to meet women my age who were also in the city to find out if they thought it was a good move. Was there enough to do? Was it more difficult to meet people? How easy is it to get around with transportation? All of that kind of stuff. I was very clear about that. In my profile, I said, “Right now, I’m looking for friends. Would you please be my friend, you over 55 ladies?” That’s what it was for the first few months. Once you get a little more comfortable, you think, “I met somebody or I’ve seen somebody. It’s time to see if we can have a new relationship,” which we know from someone who’s been married for a long time, that’s scary too.

Did you ever have any instances where maybe somebody’s profile didn’t match up to what you met, saw, and interacted with?

Everybody leaves something out of their profile. It’s not necessarily that it didn’t match up. I found a lot of humor in women’s profile pictures because that’s the first thing you see. I was amazed at how many profile pictures from women involved them holding a glass of wine. I don’t know why. What’s with the wine? These are all different sizes too. There were some that a fish could swim in the goblet they were holding. I found that to be funny. It’s like, “What are you trying to portray with this particular photo?” That became, for me, an icebreaker. When I would reach out to somebody, I would make a comment about their photo, not a mean-spirited one.

I remember there was one woman who I was a little interested in. She was on a paddleboard and there was this brilliant red sunset. I said something like, “I noticed your profile photo. Are you almost done recording your album?” It looked like the cover of an album or a CD. She thought that was very funny. There were a couple of women who I did meet who, all of a sudden, dropped a little bit of a bomb on me like, “Now that I’ve got him in the Starbucks I’m going to casually mention my sobriety or my ex abusive husband,” or something like that. You got to like, “Now you’re here. I have to deal with that. Am I ready to?”

It’s not easy. That might send somebody, not you per se, but anybody going through a divorce or something like that into therapy. I know that you mentioned in your book that almost everybody these days does have a therapist, including your therapist. I was wondering if you would reflect back on your experience in getting through this gray divorce. How would you do things differently? How did therapy play into it?

How would I do things differently in my marriage?

No, in handling the divorce or getting through this.

I don’t know if I would handle it differently. I handled it very well. If I didn’t eventually go talk to an independent third party, I don’t think that would’ve been a good way to handle it. I was always anti-therapy.

What brought you over that hurdle?

Running out of people to talk to. This is something that another podcast host told me off-air. He had me on his show. He was divorced too. He said, “You realize you’re going to have to make new friends because your old friends knew you as a couple. You’re no longer a couple.” As much as I could say, “These are good friends of mine. We used to hang out at 4th of July picnics,” sadly, with the exception of a few, that is what happened. You can be mad about it or be upset and you can question whether they were ever your friends in the first place but I don’t think that does you any good.

Everybody has their own reasons. It might be uncomfortable. It might be that your friends are no longer comfortable talking to you. They question. Getting back to therapy, that’s eventually what got me into therapy because you have all these questions like, “Why aren’t people reaching out to me? What did I do? Am I suddenly a bad guy?” That’s one of the reasons.

Were you able to use your humor superpower as a way to overcome any bitterness that you might have? That is very common among people who either lose somebody because of a divorce or a death.

Bitterness, that word can go a lot of different ways. I have tried very hard to not bring my personal life and any issues that I might have with my ex into either my act or my book. I don’t think that gets you anywhere.

I was saying if somebody, not you per se, but anybody out there tuning in feels they’ve been shortchanged because they were a couple and they’re no longer a couple. Their friends are no longer who they think they were or were they ever their friends. Somebody can get over that by maybe finding a sense of humor in everything.

It’s good but you have to be very careful because your attempts at humor, and this is true on stage too, can be perceived in very different ways. It could come off as sarcasm. It could come off as bitterness. I’ve been a comedian for 30 years. I know how to read the room better than some people. Some people, when they try to maybe either reconnect with their children after a divorce, might think they’re being funny and lighthearted but they might not realize how it sounds to the other person. It’s a very slippery slope. What got me through it is I knew that other people were going through it too. If I could make them laugh and find things on stage and get that nodding response from people, then that was probably more therapeutic for me than going to a therapist. A lot of people helped me too.

You have to be very careful because your attempts at humor can be perceived in very different ways.

I want to say this. One thing I found out about people who are divorced is I realized we’re all on the same team. Whether this was on a cruise ship, random, or maybe I met somebody in a restaurant or something, nobody jumped in and said, “Let me tell you about my divorce. Do you think yours is bad? Wait until you hear this.” I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear the particulars. I always say it’s like your delayed flight. It’s different from my delayed flight. I found that people were not doing that. They weren’t trying to top you or turn the discussion to them. Everybody who I broached this subject with said, “It sucks but you’re going to get through it. You’re going to feel better when you come out on the other side.” That was enough for me.

Divorce sucks, but you’re going to get through it and you’re going to feel better when you come out on the other side.

That is a good way of putting it. That’s very wise. My next topic is also not particularly uplifting, but I really admire you and everything that you’ve been through. Another life hurdle was while you were going through the divorce, y ou heard the C word, which is one nobody wants to hear. You experienced this right in the middle of your divorce. Tell our audience. How did your natural sense of humor get through your diagnosis and your treatment?

It was the double C. It was Colon Cancer. It certainly sent the book in a different direction. I had planned to write a funny book about divorce, and then this happened. I approached it the way that we’ve been talking about, which is about trying to laugh at something and trying to find humor. I am a big observer of people. That’s what comedians do. People say, “Your business is about jokes.” It’s really not. A comedian’s business is people, observing, and listening because that’s what ends up on stage. We have to see something and then we poke fun at it or make light of it. That’s the way our minds are always working.

I don’t think there’s any reason that you can’t let your mind work that way even when you are faced with a disease or an unexpected diagnosis where you’re not sure where that’s going to end up. It came naturally to me. It didn’t mean that I was going into every doctor’s appointment going, “How’s it going, everybody?” I’m not going to be on stage. If I could get the nurses to laugh or the doctors to laugh, to me, that was like, “If you can get them to laugh, they’re going to maybe take more of an interest in your case.”

I remember when my surgeon came in. He was telling me where my tumor was. It was right where there was a bend in my colon. He was like, “We’re going to take out the 90-degree angle and then I’m going to put those two back together.” I go, “How do you take this part and this part and put them together?” He goes, “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” I was like, “I like this guy.” He laughed and I laughed. I knew I was in the right hands.

That’s great.

That doesn’t mean it was a yuk a minute, certainly not with the recovery or anything like that, but I do believe that there is the ability to find humor in any subject.

There’s so much craziness going on in the world. Do you see humor as a coping mechanism? If so, how can you recommend to our audience how they can cultivate that? Maybe somebody’s taking life too seriously.

I can only see it as a coping mechanism, and it always has been. This has become a topic of one of my corporate presentations. The title is Humor is Serious Business But We Should Still Be Laughing. I’ve given that talk to corporations before. What’s happening is we’re so busy trying to answer the question, “What is funny?” There is no answer to that. We need to start admitting that. Nothing is universally funny. To try and put rules on what is funny and what is not is doing us no good at all.

Comedy clubs are doing very well. They ebb and flow, but they do well when we are in a strange time or a very unknown situation of what’s going to happen. Everybody’s a little bit anxious as to what the future’s going to hold so people look to comedy as escapism. That’s why clubs are doing well. I’ve had a real renaissance in getting on stage. It’s not that I ever disliked it, but with all that has happened to me and what’s going on in the world, I’m enjoying the chance to make people of all ages laugh probably a lot more. Remember, we’re coming out of COVID where there was no laughter because there was no place other than the internet and to sit by yourself with your phone in your room and try to make yourself laugh. We went from that to all of a sudden, “It’s okay to go outside now. Let’s start laughing again.”

I’m thinking about your book.

You mentioned the title. The subtitle though is what I really like. It’s Turning Gut Punches Into Punch Lines: A Comedian’s Journey through Cancer, Divorce, and Other Hilarious Stuff.

That is quite a mouthful.

It’s a mouthful but that’s the part that makes people laugh, and that’s what I wanted. I wanted it because it shows what we’ve been talking about. You can laugh at subjects that aren’t considered universally funny.

That’s correct. What was your favorite section of the book? I know I had mine.

It’s divided into three parts. The first part was the reality of, “I’m getting divorced. I have to reinvent myself. I have to move out. I have to find a therapist.” The second part was about reinvention and trying new things. I tried things more for communication. I went to work for Amazon during the Christmas break. I don’t need to work for Amazon. I’m doing okay, but I happened to see an advertisement saying, “We need help for Christmas.” December is usually a month in corporate comedy that is pretty slow. I thought, “I’ll try this.” I drove for Uber to try and get material, meet people, and hear their stories.

The last part of the book is all about the future. My favorite chapter is the last one because, in the last one, I went on a journey. I wanted to engage particularly with younger people because they’re the future. I wanted to know what they thought of things and how they felt about things like marriage, divorce, and therapy. I was talking to people of my own generation for the whole time but I thought, “It would be a good twist to meet younger people because they’re going to be faced with these challenges too. Maybe they have ideas that I didn’t know about.” I looked at a lot of social media of people who were trying to answer the question of what it is to be happy. There’s some funny stuff out there. That’s probably my favorite chapter. What’s yours?

I had a couple. One was entitled Single Rizzable Male. Can you quickly tell some people who might not be in the know about what rizz means?

Rizz was the Oxford University Word of the Year. They had the vote. We’re doing this in late December 2024. I read about what it was this 2024. They voted on this word. In 2023, the word was rizz. Rizz is a take on charisma. The younger generation, if they can figure out a way to shorten anything and spend less time, which in this case, talking, they’re going to do it. Rizz is like an attraction. You give off magnetism. That’s where rizzable came in. That is the chapter that deals with online dating, filling up profiles, and the hits and misses of these people I met. I’m glad you liked that one.

I did. Also, the one about your trip to Denmark and your discovery of hygge.

This is part of the last chapter. It’s very popular. It’s a word for happiness. I was in Denmark. I was in Copenhagen. I saw a tour on TripAdvisor called The Happiness Tour and Learning About the Power of Hygge. I thought, “That’s exactly what  I’m looking for. I want to see that.” There were about 10 of us. Our guide, who was about 38 talked, about hygge.

What it involves is being present or being in the moment and listening to who you are with. You could use hygge as a noun or a verb. He said something like, “Why don’t we go hygge in the park today? If you do go hygge in the park, you leave your phone at home because if you are on your phone, you are not in the moment. You are not as interested in that person who invited you that you’re hygge-ing with.” I found that very fascinating.

What was really interesting was when I was in Denmark, I observed there was a school group on a field trip. I was looking at these kids, probably anywhere from 8 to 14. They had no phones, not one. Can you imagine that in this country? No. They were commiserating with one another. They were listening to what was being told to them about whatever it was they were seeing. I found that to be really refreshing.

What has gotten me through this is communicating, listening to other people, and hearing their stories no matter what age they are. I’m very intrigued with people. It’s people that get you through tough times. It’s not your phone. It’s not necessarily your therapist. Your therapist can be great at dispensing advice, but that’s for an hour. You leave and you’ve got the rest of the day or the evening to figure out what you’re going to do. I have decided that people entertain me and fascinate me and I want to find out about everybody.

Any other experiences that came out of writing your book that you didn’t expect perhaps?

I didn’t expect people to be as forthcoming as they were. I’ve been a solo traveler on business. I eat by myself. You’re in a strange city. I’ve had no problem sitting at bars or brewpubs and ordering, trying to talk to other people, and so forth because that, to me, is more than just sitting there, eating by yourself, and then scrolling your phone every now and then.

I was amazed at how forthcoming people were to talk because that is something that COVID took away from us. COVID seems very far away but it will always be there. It will always be because it changed everything. It changed marriages. It changed how people work. It changed how people get educated. It will always be a part of our lives. That’s another thing when I drove for Uber. It was amazing how much they would keep going if you got people to start talking. I find that to be very refreshing. I wasn’t expecting that.

You seem like an easy person to talk to and easy for people to open up to, which is nice. That is another superpower. I hope this will air and drop before the end of 2024, but if it doesn’t, even for the new year. Any words of wisdom that you can give to anyone who has lost a spouse from their passing away or through divorce in a long-term relationship? Is there anything that they can do as far as keeping their sense of hor and getting through this?

I’m willing to give people the same advice that was dished out to me about how it sucks but you’re going to get through it. Maybe not for someone who has lost a spouse but certainly for people who are getting divorced, you could sit there, curl up in a ball, and say, “My life will never be the same. I lost my companion of this long.” You can do that but at some point,  you have to pick yourself up and say, “There’s something new. What haven’t I done? What have I always wanted to try?” That could be something like a cooking class. It could be a support group. I’ve always said it’s never too late to learn a different skill or educate yourself about something. That’s what I’ve tried to do. It’s easier said than done. Everybody is going to have to do that at their own pace.

It’s never too late to learn a different skill or educate yourself about something.

When you do those things, you meet people. That’s what it’s all about, right?

Yes. You might meet somebody who’s going through the exact same thing as you and you probably up until then thought you were the only person going through this and were very lonely as a result. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Is there anything else you want to tell us about your book or anything in general?

I do hope people purchase the book. It is on Amazon. People who are maybe living in active retirement communities, I’ve started doing shows in active retirement communities. That demographic loves to laugh and they love to laugh at themselves. Sometimes, we aren’t good at laughing at ourselves. When I do shows for maybe an over 55 group, how easy they are at laughing at their health problems, their sex lives, their lack of sex lives, and everything like that. You might as well laugh at getting old because it’s going to happen.

It’s a gift.

You might as well find something like that to laugh at. I’d be more than happy to come to any place that you think needs some laughter.

If somebody wants to contact you, what’s the best way?

My website. It’s GregSchwem.com. Tell me about your event and I would be more than happy to come and entertain you.

That sounds great. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. For all our readers, please join the show by going to www.GrowingOlderWithGusto.com and share with your friends or whoever you think will enjoy the episode. This one I know you’re going to share because it was great. Thank you very much. Stay connected and curious.

Pilates is the path forward for many people who have been active and are experiencing back and shoulder issues. Shane Rhoads of Movement Med talks to us about his journey and how he became interested in the field of Pilates. This interest fueled his desire to start a business encompassing Pilates and other forms of self-care that help people to “grow older with gusto!” Tune in as he also explores the importance of finding qualified instructors to maximize the benefits of Pilates, especially if you are already a senior.

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Welcome to Growing Older with Gusto. We have another exciting guest who’s growing older with Gusto and helping others to do that too. My personal experience as I’m growing older is the need for Pilates to keep my back in tip-top shape so I can enjoy doing some of the activities I love, like biking, swimming, and playing golf.

Our guest is Shane Keith Rhoads. He’s a professional trainer who turned his background in education into a Pilates, rehab, and medical exercise studio and a business, which he calls Med Movement. The business that he started in 2017 is unique in that he has created an environment for people to experience Pilates and other types of rehab exercises. He has a lot to share about his evolution, so let’s bring him on. Welcome to the show, Shane.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. In talking to you, I know you started in a way that is probably a little bit more unconventional than somebody starting a Pilates studio. Could you talk about how you got into the business of integrating body and mind?

I’ll go backward to tell you where the first light-up moment is. I’ve been in fitness for probably over 30 years. I started when I was a sophomore in college at Goodyear Fitness Center and Corporate Fitness. My major was Exercise Physiology and then Sports Medicine, working with athletes. I was an athlete at the time, so I was enamored with working with athletes. In grad school, I was a strength and conditioning coach for college sports teams and an athletic trainer, the guys who take care of injuries and tape ankles.

I had to put a lot of hours in and I had very limited time. I asked them, “Can I count my weight room strength coach hours as sports medicine hours?” They’re like, “No, but if you become the last-phase rehab guy in the weight room, we’ll count those hours.” I fell in love with working with people in that last transition from injury to full health again. That kept me still in sports. I went into professional baseball after that and had a private business after that. I also did some other things. At some point, I remember reading an article about Pilates.

What year was that, would you say?

1989, I was in school.

The reason I asked is that I’m hooked on Pilates. I know from talking to people that Pilates has evolved from when Joseph Pilates introduced it to the world, from being classical and helping dancers to being part of a rehab program. I was curious.

1996, 1997, I was looking for some new avenue and I came across an article. As I was saying, Pilates was starting to be in the public eye, but more from celebrities doing it, and it was on TV. I saw this article on rehabilitation in the Pilates setting, Brent Anderson and Polestar Pilates. It clicked. It’s like this system and equipment can allow me to do almost everything with someone. It’s a long-term longevity-type exercise routine.

It’s non-impactful. It works on all the mobility and stability you need, and there’s a lot of variety. It’s something you can do for a lifetime. That appealed to me because I can help rehab people, or help them with their medical conditions and get fit. I can keep doing it until they’re 100 years old. We have a client here who’s 96.

When did that client start doing Pilates?

I never asked her. She works with one of the other instructors. It appealed to me in that way. I decided to go full into Pilates and got trained, and I worked at a number of Pilates studios over the years until I started my own business, which you know now as Movement Med.

You’ve talked to me a little bit in our conversations about the integration of people trying to take care of their bodies but also their minds. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

One of the appealing parts of the Pilates environment is there’s a focus on mindfulness and breathwork while you’re learning to move more efficiently and while you’re either strengthening the right muscles or trying to get more mobile. Other forms like yoga do the same thing, but putting it all together is more appealing and more effective.

I’ve been a longtime fan of yoga and I started Pilates a few years back, and it is very different. The breathing is very different because you’re breathing when you’re doing the exercises in Pilates, whereas in yoga, usually, you start out with the breathing exercises and then proceed to do the physical part of yoga.

There are a number of things, but the breathwork will help you learn to calm yourself while you’re stressing yourself if that makes sense.

Breathwork will help you learn to calm yourself while stressing yourself.

It does. It’s a challenge.

You learn properly, so part of the appeal for it is you’re learning how to move more efficiently besides getting stronger. It takes slowing down in your mind to help your brain pick up that, like when you’re learning a dance routine.

That’s interesting.

There are a lot of health benefits to good breathwork as well. Joe Pilates, from the very beginning, one of his first core principles was breath. His statement was that it’s the first and last act of life, so you better get it right.

I like that. It’s a good quote. What about this movement from classic to more rehab? When did that take place? Was that in the past 5 to 10 years?

It’s longer than that. I don’t know if your audience is familiar with Joe. I can tell a little quick story about Joe.

That’d be great.

Joe Pilates was a sickly child with asthma. He became interested in physical culture or exercise at the time to improve himself. He did run away with the circus. At one point, he was in England. This was right when the war broke out. In 1914, he was teaching self-defense to Scotland Yard detectives and went to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. While he was in the internment camp, he decided to teach exercise to all the other prisoners of war, and then he started working in the hospital to help patients, 

Whether it’s true or not, that’s where he got the idea of using the springs because he would use the springs to attach to their limbs and help them start moving sooner, which was way ahead of its time. We used to cast people and leave them there. He came out after the war and went back to Germany where he continued to cultivate his perfect mat routine.

Classical Pilates is very familiar with the Joe Pilates mat routine, which is a full-encompassing routine that covers your whole body. It teaches you fitness, wellness, mobility, and strength. All those exercises in a sequence are supposed to be the perfect routine. The machines, which he got the initial idea for from his time in the camp, were supposed to help you do the mat routine better.

Not to get off our topic, the machines are where the rehab professionals started playing around with because I always tell people that no one can come through my door without having a positive movement experience. We have spinal cord-injured clients from 95-year-old clients to healthy people. You can use this environment or these machines to set up situations where you can have success. You can’t always have that on a floor routine at first. It made a lot of sense.

That happened to me because I started out on the floor. Depending on who was teaching, I either liked it or didn’t like it. I had a love-hate relationship with mat Pilates. When I got onto the machines, I fell in love with Pilates. In the past year or so, I’ve used it as a rehab form of exercise.

It helped you have success in your body. Sometimes when you’re a little challenged on something, you can’t have that positive experience. It’s harder to like. The right instructor is going to bring you along with the machines to get you to a point where you can do those other things and it feels good.

Tell our audience a little bit about why Pilates is the best. To me, it’s a good long-term health approach as we grow older with gusto.

It’s low impact. That’s first and foremost. It’s a focus on all the elements of health, strength, mobility, flexibility, mindfulness, and breathwork that we spoke of. There’s probably not a large cardiovascular element, but I always tell people that what we do here is going to enable you to do what you do out there more efficiently and without pain. You can take up a dance class. It helps you add that into your life if that makes sense.

It does. I know that I’ve experienced building up the heat when I’m doing Pilates. What is that all about? It’s not cardiovascular.

Sometimes you focus hard. It makes everything to start working harder.

There’s so much information out there on how to grow older both physically and mentally these days. How do you recommend to our audience to navigate the fitness world while growing older?

That’s a big challenge for some people because if you understand social media and algorithms, you can go down the wrong algorithm and get fed all kinds of twenty-year-olds doing advanced exercises that you should not even be trying. There are organizations out there. First and foremost, let me back up. Find someone who’s able to help you, who has experience with either working with seniors or working with medical conditions in exercise. Your doctor is a good start, but I’m talking about the day-to-day people to help you.

Find someone who can help you get the full experience of Pilates. Your doctor is a good start, but also check those people whom you meet every day.

It’s not always financially feasible to work one-on-one with someone. Find the right classes and seek out the right types of studios that are more conducive to your age and goals. There are organizations though. You can look up online. There’s the Healthy Aging Association, the International Active Aging Association, the Medical Fitness Association, and the Medical Exercise Association. By putting in the right keywords, you can find good information online for senior exercise or exercise with medical conditions, which is another aspect of what we’re talking about.

I wish there was another word for seniors. I haven’t thought of one yet. If you do, let me know. What else would you like to talk about? I know that there are new things in store for Movement Med. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? What’s next for you?

At Movement Med, we always talk about how we’re trying to help as many people as we can. We first started out with more of a one-on-one personal training type model. This year, we’re launching more small group specialty classes geared towards conditions. We have a Steady Steps program for balance. We have always had a long-time chronic back program that I’ve run, but we’re going to do it in a small 3- or 4-person format. We’re trying to add some online libraries to those so people can be helped at home. We have a Parkinson’s program too.

What are you doing for Parkinson’s?

We’re going to start in the fall with a small group class. For years, we’ve been trying for grants for it, but we’re going to launch it anyway. We’ve made a lot of connections in that community. One of my instructors is diving deep into the Parkinson’s world, and that’s going to be her specialty. There’ll be 3 to 6 people, a small group, and a sequence of education and exercise over time.

Will you be doing boxing with the Parkinson’s?

It’s more of the strength, mobility, and balance work that complements. Boxing is popular for Parkinson’s.

That’s what I heard, that’s why I asked. That’s exciting. Do you offer massages?

Yeah, massage, myofascial work, we have a Rolfer as well here at the studio. We did add that this year.

Tell us about that. Tell us why that’s an important complement to everything else that you’re offering.

Sometimes you run into problems you can’t solve and some of your aches and pains with movement and exercise. Although as movement professionals, we like our yoga and Pilates, I would like to think so, sometimes it’s nice to have someone professional with educated hands to help you relieve tension patterns in fascia or muscle tissue. That’s going to help complement what we’re trying to do within the studio.

Sometimes, you run into aches and pains in your body that you cannot simply solve with movement and exercise. In such cases, it is never a bad thing to seek professional help.

Out of all the types of massage therapies that you offer, what would you say is probably the best for somebody who has severe spinal stenosis?

All three of the people here who do massage are clinically trained. They’ve worked in clinical environments. That’s first and foremost. You’re looking for someone who can understand what you’re dealing with, work away from the area of pain, and address upstream and downstream, where those tension patterns are starting. Sometimes with stuff like stenosis or disc herniations, you still have to move. If you become too sedentary, it deteriorates as well.

How do we get your body able to manage that spine and move more efficiently to cause less stress to it? Part of that’s being stronger in the right areas, and mobile in the right areas. Part of that is you have these tension patterns in your fascial tissue or muscle that someone like the massage therapist can help relieve, without regressing or spreading symptoms.

That’s interesting. Shane, is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you might want to add to the conversation?

How long have you been doing Pilates?

Maybe this is my second year full-time. I’m trying to make it consistent. I did do mat Pilates for a while off and on, but it was something I didn’t like, particularly if I was taking it in a group class format. I had to like the teacher to do it. It was a love-hate relationship with mat Pilates. I’ve been doing it regularly for probably two years.

Pilates is growing still. It’s been growing for a long time, but it’s taken on a lot of different, as far as fitness business aspect, a little of different avenues. You have places online where we’re working a lot of one-on-one and trying to help treat conditions or improve your posture and long-term health. You have big group places that are more about the experience of harder exercise and loud music. That’s the hardest thing for everyone to navigate when they hear Pilates, especially when a doctor would say, “Go do Pilates for your back,” and you walk into the wrong place. 

You’re right. I know somebody who said, “I’m having back surgery because of Pilates.” I’m like, “What? Are you kidding me?”

As with anything, you’re hiring the right professionals. With the mat work, the biggest challenge was it was very lucrative for studios to start doing group classes on machines. Except for the pure classical studios, I’m sure they do phenomenal mat stuff, the good instructors wanted to stay on the machines. I had a person who learned from me years ago when I was in San Diego, and all she wanted to do was mat. She became the greatest mat teacher ever. There are people out there who are like that. They are purists. That’s more about getting their background if you’re going to go that route. It’s beautiful work, the mat work. You have to have the right person to bring you along if it’s too challenging for your body at first.

Is there anything like a step-by-step program where you do mat and then you progress to the machines, or you do them together? How does that work in the world of Pilates?

I see it here all the time with my instructors. I see them doing mat work and then also using the machine for areas that you may not be as good or strong to help complement that leg. I think originally, Joe intended the machines to help prepare you for doing this perfect mat routine. That’s probably the best way to do that. You can still find that enamored mat Pilates teacher who’s going to take their time and teach you how to do a perfect mat routine. It’s the same thing in yoga. You come across the same thing in yoga.

That is very true. There’s nothing like a committed teacher who’s excellent at what they do.

If you’re working with someone, you have to like their personality and their approach.

This has been great and interesting. How can our audience find their way to Movement Med?

MovementMEDChicago.com is the best way. On Instagram, we’re @MovementMED, and MovementMEDChicago on Facebook. We’re on Instagram and our website. I don’t do too much on Facebook.

I understand. Thanks for being on the show. This has been interesting. I’ve learned a lot too, and I’m sure my audience will too. Thank you for being on the show. To our audience, remember to stay curious and stay connected. Drop me a comment if you’d like to. You can find us on any podcast platform and our YouTube channel, Growing Older with Gusto. Thanks, Shane. Have a great day. Bye.

The Renaissance was a time of boundless curiosity and exploration, and nowhere is this spirit more alive today than in the world of hospitality, where a new breed of Renaissance Man is redefining the guest experience. In this episode, Gail Zugerman interviews Joao Rodrigues, a true modern Renaissance Man. Buckle up as we soar through his diverse passions, from piloting airplanes for TAP Airlines to building the innovative Silent Living hospitality experience. He’s also the visionary behind Herdade No Tempo, a regenerative farm where he’s cultivating a future focused on sustainability. Tune in and discover how Joao is redefining success and paving the way for a brighter future.

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https://youtu.be/qhM-IedAEmk

How does being an airline pilot, a hospitality creator, and a regenerative farm owner, all connect to the show? We will find out with our guests. I’m Gail Zugerman, host of the show which is dedicated to showcasing the benefits of growing older in a positive and productive way. Our guest is Joao Rodrigues and he is what I consider a Renaissance man.

He’s a pilot at TAP Airlines, a national Portugal airline. He is the Founder of Silent Living hospitality projects in Portugal and elsewhere. He’s also the Founder of a regenerative farm called Herdade No Tempo, where he is building a home community. Aside from all this, he’s a strong family man with five children and a wife and is passionate about life. We have so many things to talk with him about, so let’s dive in.

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Welcome to the show, Joao.

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Thank you. You’re involved in so many projects. I wanted you to begin by having you tell our readers a little bit about yourself. What’s been driving you the past few years?

I’m Joao. I’m in my 50s years old. I see myself essentially as a father of five kids and as a husband. I’m very person-orientated. My family is on top of everything. Everything that I do has a purpose which is looking and giving good examples to my family and to my kids, especially to future generations as well. I started off doing a degree in management and economics when I finished school.

After that, I wanted to become a pilot because I was passionate about flying. My father was a Captain in TAP for several years. I thought there was this connection with aircrafts, the machines, flying, and the world, and knowing lots of different cultures and different countries around the world. I then did my training up in Prestwick in Scotland, where it took me a year and a half roughly to get my airline pilot license then I joined TAP.

I’ve been in TAP for many years. It’s been years since I’ve been a captain. First of all, I was a captain on short-haul European flights. Since the last few years, I’ve been flying long haul, which means that most of the routes of TAP fly to Brazil. Probably to something like ten different destinations in Brazil. We fly to Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Mexico as well as Cancun. We fly to the States to five different destinations. We fly to the States where I will be able to meet when I come to Chicago.

What is your favorite place to fly to?

To be honest, what I like is to have a different roster, which means that you don’t always fly to the same places, which ends up being quite good. Generally, I have two flights to Brazil, one to Africa and one to the States every month. That’s roughly my roster, which is great because I get to catch up with lots of friends that I have all over. Also get to understand different cultures, foods, and music. For me, all of that is nice and important. We also have something which is basically in the Northern hemisphere when it’s winter time, it’s summertime in the Southern hemisphere, which is very nice because you end up always catching a little bit of sun.

Vitamin D. You’re getting your vitamin D.

 After joining TAP, which is if you ask me, “Joao, in which one do you perceive yourself as? Do you perceive yourself as a pilot or as founder of Silent Living or regenerative agriculture?”

I was going to ask you. How did you end up pivoting into the hospitality industry? How did that come about? What drew you to that?

The reason was by accident. Which means that when I sold the company that I had which was doing people-centered innovation. A lot based on anthropology and sociology. I sold my 50% of that company. I sold because I had been working very hard during the last few years. I thought I had something to give back to my family. I decided to build this weekend house in Comporta. In this beautiful, nice area with pristine beaches and beautiful waters as well.

It’s one hour South of Lisbon. Based on that, I built the house. A few years after, the house was finished because I put in a lot of everything that I do. I put a lot of effort into it and I like it. It’s all about the details and making everything work smoothly. The house was then chosen to represent Portugal at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. It made something like ten covers of magazines around the world like Elle Decor, in Italy like AD Spain, and Maisons Cote Sud. Suddenly, it was all over. Wallpaper as well. I decided, “We were not using the house that much. Let’s start renting the house,” because we were already borrowing the house to lots of friends and family. That’s how Silent Living started.

Tell us a little bit about Silent Living. Tell us about the whole concept.

Silent Living is a small hospitality group in which we have several houses located in different areas of Portugal. It’s the idea that each of these houses should represent a local way of living in that area. For example, Casas na Areia, the first project we did. It’s a house that should represent how people live on the beach and close to the coast. It’s a beach house.

We then have Cabanas No Rio that represent. These are small cabins that basically represent how people live close to the river and close to a story of the big river. We have the house in the farm which is Casa No Tempo that should also try to represent how people live in a farm in the Alentejo region. We have Santa Clara that you were able to visit in Lisbon, which is basically also a small hotel with six suites. In which, it was an old palace. We tried to show how people used to live many years ago. Maybe 100 or 200 years ago inside one of these palaces.

I tell my audience, since I have been fortunate enough to have been there. It is exquisite and the gardens are amazing.

Thank you. We have the last house that we also joined to the collection is Casa Na Terra, which is a house on a lake. In each of these houses, we build with local materials. We only have local people working there. We only use local products for breakfast and the other meals as well. There is always this idea of connecting all of these projects to the locality, to the place itself, with the hopeful idea of grounding people and giving them a moment for themselves as well.

How did you come up with that name? I’m curious.

One day, as we started with each of the projects, each of them had their own name. We suddenly decided we needed to have an umbrella name that could basically look after all the projects and that could give a sense of unity to all of this. To do this, what we did was, better than ourselves giving us a name, is why don’t we ask our dear guests that stayed with us? Why don’t we ask them for their contribution to find out what could be our name?

During months in all the houses, the teams were trained. They wouldn’t ask anything to the guests but they would collect the words that guests would say when they first enter the spaces. People would say, “It’s about the simplicity of the architecture. It’s about nature.” A lot of people say, “The sense of home and family.” A lot of people would talk about the silence, “It’s about the silence of the architecture and the space. The way we look after our guests.” Silence was one of the words which was more frequently said. We thought that Silent Living could fit very well as the brand for our hospitality group.

That’s a wonderful way to come up with a name and a branding, so to speak. That’s a fascinating story. How is being in this hospitality or hotel business added to your life and the whole process of growing older?

As I mentioned to you before, I’m very person-oriented. I’m looking after others. It’s one of the best things that we can do in the world. In Silent Living, what we mainly do is look after other people when they stay with us. We generally do it in a very simple and an easy way in which we look after our guests as longtime friends. We do everything to make their experience as special as possible. By saying this, one of the important things for us is also that we get to inspire our guests during their stay.

When I say inspire, it could be either through the architecture, the generosity of our service, or through the beauty of the houses itself or the interiors. All of these things should touch people during their stay and hopefully, promote some changes in their future lives. It’s the idea of leaving a little seat. This I think answers your question.

Where do these people come from most of them? How do they learn about Silent Living?

I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly. My idea is that most of these people know the houses and the Silent Living through lots of articles that have been published in the press. As well as our online website and our Instagram accounts. A lot of people that stay here mentioned they were recommended by a friend. The word of mouth is on the top of the list.

Let’s talk now about your involvement with your farm. How did it all start? How did it come about? What are you doing? What is it all about? It’s so incredibly interesting.

The idea of the farm is an extension of Silent Living. The project of the farm is inside the hospitality group of Silent Living. Although, as I say, Silent Living is a tree. The farm is a huge trench. It’s quite an important part. Why? It’s because it was also the idea. During COVID, I flew very little. I had the time and the space of mind to focus and to try and understand in 1,000 acres how one could inspire other people to basically look after the planet.

Has anyone in your family ever been into farming? Did they introduce you to it? It was quite a big leap from piloting and then hospitality. I would think you’d be so busy. Although, in COVID, I understand. Things shut down.

If I try to investigate a little bit back in my family, if someone did it seriously, it was probably my great-grandparents. Both of my grandparents and my parents love it. They like it but they were never into it. The farm was rented out during a period of many years. Going back to this ideal year that I was telling you a minute ago, it’s all about how men, the animals and nature live in a perfect symbiosis. At the same time, not only produce very nutritious food and very healthy food but also look after the planet.

When I say look after the planet, I’m speaking about retaining carbon in the soil. I speak about increasing the capacity of the soil to retain water and lowering the temperatures. All of this is extremely important nowadays. We do this based on something called holistic management. There is a gentleman in the US called Allan Savory, who’s basically our mentor. He’s been studying desertification in the big savannahs in Africa.

He has found basically a way which is copying what the wild animals are doing in the big savannahs in Africa because they’re afraid of the predators. They keep all together and they keep moving as a herd. It’s this movement as a herd that basically has proved itself to be the best way to regenerate the soil, to build a very extreme resilient soil. It’s the birth for very nutritious food and nutritious trees.

We also have an agroforest in our farm of more or less 2.5 acres where we grow all our vegetables, lots of fruits and where we work a lot with the idea of the symbiosis between the plants. We plant some of the trees very close to each other because they end up helping and protecting each other. Either from bugs or too much sun or shortage of water. It’s zero chemicals. It’s much more than organic or any of that. Basically, it’s this idea on the farm. Whoever comes to visit us will be able to learn about how we do this process.

We want to share it with the world. We want to be a demonstrative hub of how to do all of this. Not only holistic management but also the growing of very nutritious food in our agroforest. Other people can go to their countries inspired by this idea and copy a lot of this and do it. We all together, hopefully, will be able to save the planet. That’s the idea.

What water do you use for both your animals and your land? How do you get it implemented into the farm?

We have several lakes on the farm. It’s through these lakes that we basically retain the water during the winter time that we can then use it during the summertime. The cows are not allowed to go close to these lakes. We protect the integrity of the water. We also have something like four boreholes from where we take the water. We have it in 22,000-litre deposits of containers where we then spread the water through all the farms for all the cattle so that they have fresh water in all of these several places.

You told me that you are also building a community on the farm, near the farm or in that area? Can you talk a little bit about it, please?

The idea of the community is basically interesting people around this idea of saving the planet. It’s a study of the United Nations. I don’t know if you’re aware but it says, “In the next 60 years, there won’t be enough food for everyone on the planet.” There will be a huge shortage of food. At the same time, we also have lots of news coming out telling us a little bit about the problem that we are encountering with climate change.

It’s the idea of creating a community around these problems to solve this. The idea is that we are working on it. There are lots of people that have been visiting Silent Living houses during the years and have asked me as well, “We would love to have a house here in Portugal. Can you help us look for a lot? Can you help us build a house? You have such a good taste. You could help me.” It’s so hard to do that. I decided that inside the farm because we have lots of land, so inside the farm, we could build another 10 or 15 houses spread around in the farm. We basically integrate the houses with nature because the houses are designed around rocks, trees, and lakes.

What are they made out of, the homes themselves?

The homes are made out of something called poor concrete, which is a concrete mixed with soil from the farm like a terracotta. It has the resistance of concrete but then it has the beauty of the soil in the walls as well. It’s extremely efficient regarding temperature-wise. Most in the winter and in the summer. It’s this idea that once you’re going to sell these houses to these future owners, which are basically our partners in the farm as well. We will run the whole house as a hospitality project.

Whenever the owners are not there, what we do is we cater the houses, clean the houses, maintain the houses, and we run the houses. The owners that have the houses now have a revenue on their investment. Not only are they connecting themselves to this beautiful project of saving the planet but at the same time, they’re investing in a beautiful property as well as a beautiful home. They’re getting a return on their investment, which is pretty fair.

What would you say to any individual who’s not fortunate enough perhaps to have a home on your farm? What can an individual do to help with climate change?

One of the very important things is try to find out where your food comes from. Try to buy local, from local producers, in which at least you know it’s organic. That’s the least you should accept because not only by doing this, you’re looking after your health. At the same time, you will be looking after the planet and the future of all of us, which is very important.

Focus on buying local produce whenever possible. This way, you’re more likely to get organic options. It’s the least you should accept for your health. But the benefits go beyond you! You’ll also be supporting the planet and the future of us all, which is incredibly important.

There is a book called Food by an American writer called Mark Hyman, in which he talks about the problems of food in the US. I recommend it if someone can get the book. It’s easy to buy online or at the bookstore and try to learn a little bit of how to eat more healthily. It starts a lot by, if you are not able to grow your own vegetables, then buy your neighbor’s vegetables as close as possible.

Tell our readers a little bit about your boutique hotel and how the food from the farm comes over and what you do in your special dinners that you have because they are special.

We don’t call Santa Clara a hotel. I would rather call it a home. It’s a palace almost 300 years old. We recovered it years ago and we ended up doing this. On the ground floor, it has a beautiful lobby and an entrance. We have our office of the Silent Living then we have a long table where we accommodate fourteen people and where the restaurant goes on called Ceia. Ceia means supper. I will come back to that in a moment.

On the first and second floor, we have the six suites. On the last floor, we have our family home. We have a little garden at the back as well to welcome our guests. Going back to the concept of Ceia. What we wanted with Ceia is basically showcase the work that we are doing at the farm. Ceia is a fine dining restaurant in which the meal starts around half past seven. People get to have a drink before dinner.

Once they get seated, the dinner takes about 2 or 3 hours. It’s eight moments with beautiful, very nice food, very nutritious, and very healthy food that we collect from the farm twice a week that our team here transforms. Each of these moments should showcase one of the issues that we are overcoming in the farm.

It could be carbon, the symbiosis, photosynthesis, or soil. It focuses on all of this and it tries to explain how we do it on the farm. It’s much more than just a beautiful meal with very nice ingredients with a nice atmosphere. You get to know other people during the dinners as well because it’s a long table. It’s a communal table, shared. At the same time, it’s not that you learn but at least you get aware of lots of things that are happening to our planet and how to solve some of them.

It’s a wonderful experience for anybody traveling to Lisbon. I highly recommend it. How do all your interests coincide to give you a greater sense of purpose which you artfully had created for yourself? How would you recommend or if you were giving advice to someone looking to expand their horizons a bit as they go older? Any advice?

I feel it myself as I grow older. One of the things which is limited in our life is time. As time passes by, the more we use, the less we have to be able to use. One of the very important things that we all love to do is use this time very well, which means try. When we’re with someone, forget about the phone and any of the other things that are happening and focus on that person and concentrate on that moment.

Live the moment more than being worried with what happened or in the past or worrying about things in the future. It’s extremely important to live the moment. It’s all about that. It’s the secret life. I believe it’s the secret of living in the moment. Once that moment is past, you look back and you’re okay with yourself because you’re saying, “No, I’ve lived that moment the best I could. There’s nothing else we can do.”

That’s all we can ask of ourselves.

That’s right. I always tell this to my children, “When you do a task, do it extremely well. Focus on that task. Forget about everything else. Don’t be worried about what’s going to happen tomorrow or day after. Live the moment. It’s very difficult to do but it’s beautiful. It adds a lot to our life. As I grow older, if you ask me, that’s what I will try to do. Hopefully, giving good examples, trying to do good things, beautiful things, and leave a good mark. Sometimes more than bringing something new to the planet. Look at whatever we already have here and how we can improve it and make it better.

Sometimes, instead of focusing on creating and introducing new things, it’s more beneficial to look at what we already have on the planet and find ways to improve and make it better.

Thank you so much. As we wrap up for being such a great guest and coming all the way from Lisbon for our readers. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, whether for the farm or staying at one of your other hospitality homes, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

The easiest way is to go online and probably look up Silent Living either through the website or through Instagram. If you send a message both on Instagram or on one of our email accounts saying, “This is for Joao.” You will easily come across Joao. Joao will be on the other side. I will be able to answer everyone.

Thank you very much. For those of you reading, if you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe by going to www.GrowingOlderWithGusto.com. Share the show with your friends. Thank you so much for reading. I always say stay connected, stay busy, and stay reading. Thank you, Joao.

Thank you. It was a huge pleasure.

Who doesn’t love a good James Bond thriller? In this episode, our guests, after spending over 50 years in the high-tech business, decided they wanted to return to their passion. What is their passion? Their passion is spy movies. Dan Silvestri and Tom Pivvato did their research and they discovered that most sites are dedicated solely to James Bond movies. They kept exploring and found out by examining other spy movies that had been made that so many of them are interrelated. Their curiosity led them to discover things about the origins of spy movies, common themes, scenes that you see within different movies, and the influence each spy movie has on others in this genre. They started a podcast called Spy Movie Navigator, and this podcast is designed to enhance your viewing experience when you watch different movies. It was created as a landing pad for people interested in spy movies, from the classics to current releases. There’s so much to talk about in this episode so tune in!

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https://youtu.be/6Ez6fNzjH-o?si=ICE3OxN6tKHvFYCf

Who doesn’t love a good James Bond thriller? In this episode, our guests after spending over 50 years in the high-tech business decided they wanted to return to their passion. What is their passion? Their passion is spy movies. They did their research and they discovered that most sites are dedicated solely to James Bond movies. They kept exploring and found out by examining other spy movies that had been made that so many of them are interrelated.

Their curiosity led them to discover things about the origins of spy movies, common themes, scenes that you see within different movies, and the influence each spy movie has on others in this genre. They started a podcast called Spy Movie Navigator, and this podcast is designed to enhance your viewing experience when you watch different movies. It was created as a landing pad for people interested in spy movies, from the classics to current releases. There’s so much to talk about in this episode so let’s get started. Welcome to the show, Dan and Tom.

We’re very happy to be there.

Gail, it’s fantastic to be here. Thanks for inviting us.

I’m excited to talk to you and learn more about this passion of yours. First of all, tell the readers what ignited your passion for delving into the genre of spy movies.

I’ll go first on that one. First of all, we have a website called SpyMovieNavigator.com and the podcast show is called Cracking the Code of Spy Movies! It went back to high school. I was at St. Ignatius High School, and my friends and I decided when Goldfinger came out that we were going to cut classes and sneak downtown and go see Goldfinger. It was the third James Bond movie ever out. We had a system in the class where the teachers took a roll call and they put the names on a piece of paper. They clipped it outside the door and then someone would come and pick it up.

If your name was on the list, you were in the class. If it wasn’t, you were absent. A friend of ours, our mission was to go downtown and see Goldfinger. Our inside guy was going to put our names on the lists for each of our classes and everything was going to be great. We went downtown and saw Goldfinger. It was terrific. I went back to school the next day, and we were in detention. Our friend chickened out. We were in detention for about a week, but it was worth it. That’s got me started on the spy movies and James Bond in particular.

How about you?

For me, it was back in spy movies and the Columbo TV show. Columbo’s not a spy, but it got me going on the genre of it. However, when I looked at things like The Spy Who Loved Me, which was the first Bond movie that I saw in the theater, it was like, “This is different. I like this type of movie.” That helped me with that. Why we started delving into them other than being fans is that we were on a trip and we were up in Piz Gloria, which is this mountaintop retreat that was used in the movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s gorgeous up there, and it’s like this remote little thing on top of a mountain.

Where is this located?

It’s in Switzerland.

It’s 10,000 feet up.

It was above the town of Mürren. Dan and I were sitting in the bar that night and we’re like, “We liked it so much. There’s got to be other people who would like this.” We started looking into, “Can we do something around this?” I was thinking at that time about retirement and looking for something to do, and we were like, “Can we do something here?” A few years later, here we are and having a heck of a good time.

Tell us about what are the origins of spy movies. You mentioned Columbo. I would think of Columbo off the top of my head or Goldfinger. I think it was one of the first James Bond movies I saw. What are the origins of spy movies? As you did your exploration into this genre, what did you discover?

When you look back on spy movies, everyone thinks of James Bond. Ian Fleming wrote all the novels and stuff starting in 1953 but if you look back on spy movies, they’ve been around for decades before that. You go back in the history of spy movies, you look at the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock movie, The 39 Steps. Many people consider that to be the first official spy movie. There were a few before that. It was a silent movie too, as well.

I was going to ask about that. If there were any silent movies.

I’ll talk about one of those. It’s one that I like better than Dan does.

As I said, there were a few others before that. The 39 Steps though was the birth of the more modern concept of what a spy movie is. A lot of the elements that we see now in spy movies from that point forward came from the roots of these older spy movies like The 39 Steps in 1935, Secret Agent, which was also a Hitchcock-directed movie in 1936 and others liked. Those began the real spy movie genre back in the ’30s.

What was the Doris Day movie where she sang Que Sera, Sera?

The Man Who Knew Too Much.

It was both a 1934 version and a 1956 version of that. He was in the 56th version of that but Hitchcock did both of them.

I also think that influencing spy movies, World War I and World War II played a big role.

In what way?

It’s because a lot of the early spy movies were around spying on your war enemy. There was a lot of influence there. The first spy movie that I know of is something called Spione. It’s a German silent movie by Fritz Lang. It being silent is nice because they can put up English subtitles there, which is nice.

What year did that come out?

That was a 1928 movie. You can find it online on YouTube. There’s a version out there by BluRay Classic Studios. It’s a pretty good print of it. There are some that are tough prints, but that one’s a pretty good one. We see many of the tropes used in that movie used in future movies even though this was a silent movie. You also have The 39 Steps that Dan talked about. By the time he got to that, the formula was there in terms of getting us into what a spy movie should look like or what the industry thinks it should look like.

Tom mentioned the spies, World War II, and the World Wars. There’s a movie coming out now. It’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and that is based on a real World War II Operation, Operation Postmaster. We already saw it.

When you first started getting together and getting your ideas together, how did you discover that certain spy movies or themes are interrelated? What was your take on that? Why do you think that is?

I think a couple of things. Spies, like Ian Fleming, for instance, he was an internal intelligence officer for the British. He was a naval intelligence officer. He knew a lot of stuff that was going on. As a matter of fact, he was involved in many of the operations that were executed in World War II. The concept of what goes into real spying worked its way into the movies for sure certainly because of Fleming and how he popularized spies. However, it’s the real-world element I think that influenced what went into spy movies.

Absolutely. Also, trains, Dan.

Every spy movie has got to have a train.

The early spy movies all had train scenes, and now almost every spy movie has a train scene in it. Many with a fight on the train which is pretty interesting.

The greatest fight of all on the train was From Russia with Love.

You see something like that and it influences the next movie out. Also, other things like there’s a mole in the organization. Hitchcock called it MacGuffin, where you have an object that people are going for. What it is doesn’t matter. It’s the mission of getting that whatever it is, that MacGuffin. Hitchcock started that and everybody started using that.

It’s another tool that Hitchcock used. I was going to ask you. You saw that in other spy movies. Does he always appear in every movie?

Yes, he did.

In some form.

Yes.

Did other people copy him or not?

Yes.

They did.

A little bit here and there, but not as much as Hitchcock, I don’t think.

Is Michael G. Wilson a producer or owner? He’s one of the two guys that owns Eon Productions.

He produces the James Bond movies.

Since he started working on them, I don’t know one that he’s not in. I think he’s in all of them.

He’s not in all of the early ones, but he’s in certainly the later ones.

He started working.

He does that. He makes a little cameo. It has been done. Hitchcock though, when he did it, he started putting himself in earlier in the movies because people were so distracted looking for him that they weren’t paying attention to the movie.

I think one other influence that I wanted to make sure I talked about here is real-world spy stuff. Real-world espionage tasks. Things like something called a brush pass where you two people pass and they hand something off. It’s so fast you don’t even see it or a dead drop where they put something somewhere or a predetermined place and somebody else comes by later and picks it up. As things change in the real espionage world, some of that stuff ends up hitting into the real spy movies. The real-world espionage world is influencing what we see on screen.

Do you think there are ebbs and flows to the audience’s interest in this genre? Does it change according to world events? You mentioned world events do play into the development of these spy movies. Does what’s going on in the outside world have any impact on the interest in the genre?

I think, absolutely especially in Eon Productions, the people who produce the James Bond movies. They are constantly looking at what’s going on in the world for their movies because they’re out of Fleming material. Fleming wrote about thirteen novels and short story collections. They’re out of Fleming material for the most part.

They’re always constantly looking at what’s going on in the real world, what’s the influence of that on the global perspective of country versus country, and so on. Also, spy versus spy. That makes a lot of sense for them to do. Also, the people who are familiar with it, they’re going to be more interested in that. It’s smart business to do it, but it’s certainly a good source of information for them to do the screenplays and write new material.

I also think the whole ebb and flow thing comes into play with things like the Cold War. There were a ton of spy movies and they had to shift after the Cold War “ended.” How espionage was done is still all there, but it’s not as big of a thing in people’s minds as when we were very heavily involved in the Cold War. As the world events happen now, I’m going to bet we’re going to see more Russian and Asian spy conflicts happening here and that will be a very big influence on the industry.

That leads to the next question that came top of mind. Are spy movies in different countries different than ones that originate in the United States or do they play off one another? Do they copy or is there something common depending on which country they’re produced in?

We did one on Raazi, which was produced in India. Again, I think you have a subset of themes that are in spy movies, and it’s oftentimes country versus country for one reason or another. In this Indian movie, it was the Indian-Pakistani War during that timeframe. Again, they’re going to frame it from their Indian perspective and what a spy organization looks like for India versus Britain, the United States, or whatever.

However, that was a very interesting movie because now you’re seeing their perspective of their battle basically with Pakistan. They did a fair job of presenting both sides evenly. It’s going to be different from each country, but it’s going to be their perspective that brings it to the film but still this subset of tropes, standards, and things that happen in the real spy world that are going to be used over and over again.

Also with India, though, Dan, there’s a different formula in India for doing a movie. Most of the movies that are over two hours long get an intermission. It’s Bollywood-based, there’s a dance break in the middle of the movie with a song. Even if you don’t have the dance break, they’ve got musical interludes where they advance the story without dialogue. It’s just whatever the lyrics to the song are and not the actors talking.

The style is different, but the concepts are going to be very often similar. If you take a look at the Chinese movie Cliff Walkers from a few years ago where you take Pathaan, which was another Indian movie. It’s us versus them, whoever them is, whether it’s a country or another organization and we’ve got to stop them from doing something bad. That’s very common across all of the movies that I’ve seen across all the different nationalities.

In Raazi, when they were smoking, they put a flash-up on the screen saying, “Smoking kills.” They do some things differently.

What other influencers would you say play into the spy genre?

I think you have a lot of things. We were talking about the real world that influences what goes in but you also have spy movies that influence other spy movies. Those are the kinds of things that I think we look at. This one we did was on The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. We looked at maybe 4, 5, or 6 other movies that you can reference within that movie that you could say, “This kind of thing was going on in this movie or that movie,” and so on. I think that’s a big influence. What happens in one spy movie, if it’s successful, you will see it over and over again like the train concept that Tom was talking about in future spy movies. That’s a biggie.

One example of things coming from the real world was from the Goldfinger movie in 1964, when James Bond in the pre-title sequence comes out of the water in a wetsuit. He’s going to go into this area and blow up some stuff he needs to blow up. He’s in a wetsuit, but he unzipped it and he’s in a tuxedo so that he looks like he fits into his atmosphere. You’d think, “This could never happen in the real world, and this is just fantasy stuff.” However, it did happen in the real world in World War II.

There was an operation in the Netherlands where a specially made wetsuit was made for this diver. He was to go in and extract a couple of prisoners from this German mansion, and he was going to fit in because he had the tuxedo on and be able to walk right in and do this. It happened in real life. It’s that kind of stuff constantly they’re looking for. Tom and I look for that in these movies and bring that out because a lot of people would not pay attention to that kind of thing. We’re bringing these different elements out to the movies, but they’re big influencers in what happens in the movies.

I think the times matter a lot too. When we talked about the Cold War, there were a lot of things. If you think about something like Star Wars, it wasn’t a spy movie, but it had a very direct influence on the James Bond movie Moonraker. Bond used to smoke cigarettes. He doesn’t do that anymore. The womanizing has been brought way down and now, the next thing we’re seeing in spy movies is the topic of artificial intelligence.

Many people don’t know what it means so in the movies that makes it be anything they want, and totally ridiculous. I think it’s going to be overplayed. We saw it in the last Mission Impossible movie, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I understand that stuff a bit. The other thing is you see influences on what was successful in another movie, maybe not on a specific, “We were on a train and had a fight,” but action sequences have gotten bigger and bigger.

They keep trying to outdo the last movie with an action scene and stunts. It’s raising the budgets to an almost unsustainable level. I think it’s going to be interesting to see how that calms down because if you look at something like The Ministry that we talked about or Raazi, there are not as many of those big action scenes in them but the industry was trying to one-up each other for quite a while there with the stunts mainly in spy movies and that’s not really about the espionage. That’s just about how a spy movie is made.

That’s what’s going on now, and it’s been going on for several decades. It’s the battle between espionage for spy movies. We’re talking about espionage and real espionage life happens in From Russia with Love versus action movies, which many of the Mission Impossible movies are. The producers are constantly looking at what selling and they’re making those adjustments. If action is selling, their spy movie is more action-oriented than espionage-oriented. That’s a constant battle, and it changes over time. It also changes from country to country. It is a battle for the producers to try to figure out what to do next but it has been a battle between those two elements, espionage and action for decades.

They say timing is everything and I know that the James Bond series has been constantly popular with every generation. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Is that sustainable or is there any other competition to James Bond that has been as successful?

I think James Bond, it’s been around since 1962 for movies. It was in 1953 when Ian Fleming started writing Casino Royale. It’s been around for over 60 years. Is this sustainable? It looks like it. They’ve done a good job so far. Will it continue to be sustainable? Everyone’s waiting to see what their next decision is because Daniel Craig is no longer James Bond. That’s been since 2019. That’s been out and nothing’s been done since. People are wondering what’s going to happen next. It’s a challenge, but I think they’re going to continue to try to produce it. They do get new and younger people interested. They must or else the older people are not going to be around to watch the new movies.

It’s interesting how all the different generations enjoy it and flock to those movies.

If you ask somebody who their favorite James Bond actor is, it’s likely to be whoever they saw first in the role. I mentioned that these things change over time and adapt to time. If they were putting out some of the womanizing stuff that happened in the early Bonds, they might not get the audiences now. Their ability to adapt is extremely important.

It’s a must for the money or just to be successful.

If you look at other series that have tried to take on Bond, you had Bourne, which was a very good probably first two movies, and then it tapered off. You had Mission Impossible, which is still very strong although they’re at a critical point now with Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise playing Ethan Hunt. Now, the nice thing with Mission Impossible is the team members come and go so they could easily say, “It’s not Ethan Hunt. We’ve got a new head of whatever the team is.” With the Bond movies, it’s harder for them to do that. They have to say, “Here’s a new actor and we’re going on our merry way.”

Mission Impossible is the franchise that has any chance of competing with the James Bond franchise. You look at that by Box Office numbers, and they’re the only ones who compete globally versus James Bond. James Bond is a global phenomenon, and so is Mission Impossible. Many of the other franchises that are trying. They even tried Harry Palmer in the mid-’60s, and that was based on Len Deighton’s books and so on. They did three of them and that was the end of that. It’s very difficult to do, but Mission Possible probably is in the best position to challenge the Bond franchise.

With streaming, there are a lot of companies trying. Netflix has put out a bunch of things that they’ve said, “This is our answer to go after Bond. We want this to be a series like Bond.” You had the Kingsman.

We are watching A Gentleman in Moscow right now.

This series happens, but nothing stuck as well as Bond.

Let me ask you this. How did your background in high tech play into, if in any way, your passion for the spy genre? Did it have any influence or was that something that was different for you when you wanted to pursue that?

I’ll let Tom talk about that because his background is high-tech. Mine is sales and marketing. I have a sales and marketing angle too.

For me, I got hooked on Bond in high school.

Gentlemen, we are running out of time, I’m sorry to say but tell me quickly how did this interest come after retirement and how has it helped you? You’re growing older with gusto, you’re passionate about this, and you have so many interesting things to talk about. In one sentence, tell us how this interest has helped you after retirement.

Everyone wants to retire and when they get there, they’re bored. I think before you retire, you need to know what you’re going to do. If you’re going to be traveling half the year, great. If you’re going to write a book, great. Tom and I are doing this because it keeps your mind and body moving. It keeps you thinking and it keeps you moving forward. You have to have something to do after you retire. This is a productive entertaining thing. We’re in the entertainment business so we’re trying to entertain people.

For me, all I would add that is my wife gave me the guidance before I retired that I needed to have something specific to do. She was right and this ended up being a perfect opportunity for me. I get to keep my technical skills going a little bit with what I do. I enjoy doing the spy movie, so it gives me something to keep driving for.

How can our readers find you and find your podcast?

We have a website, SpyMovieNavigator.com. Our podcast show is called Cracking the Code of Spy Movies! It’s also a YouTube channel with the same name. We’re in every major podcast app like Apple, Overcast, and everything. Every one of them, we’re in. You could go to your podcast app, look for Cracking the Code of Spy Movies, and start listening. We appreciate it.

Thank you, readers. I’m sure you enjoyed this episode. Please share it with your friends, and remember to stay curious and stay connected.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Gail.

Dan & Tom get together through a mutual interest in spy movies. This catapulted into their developing spymovienavigator.com and Cracking the Code of Spy Movies. Passionate about spy movies leads to a third act for Dan & Tom. They took a deep dive on the subject and created Cracking the Code of Spy Movies.

Struggling to care for aging parents while juggling your own family? Today, Bina Coleman discusses the challenges of being part of the sandwich generation and the importance of finding support groups and resources. She also talks about the future of Parent Projects, a company that helps families stay organized and communicate with each other about caring for elderly loved ones, including the use of artificial intelligence to help families better care for their aging parents. Don’t miss out! Learn how to make caring for your aging parents a little easier.

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https://youtu.be/znWIZXCDGQE?si=j7SRklwvmjVtgt0S

Hello and welcome to the podcast, Growing Older with Gusto. My name is Gail Zugerman, and my husband, Charlie, likes to joke that his name is Gusto. But actually, this podcast is created to show people in younger generations how to grow older in a positive and productive way by having guests on the show who are doing just that or helping others to do just that. Today, we have an episode about the sandwich generation, and I don’t necessarily mean those of you who grew up eating subs or hoagies or Philadelphia cheesesteaks, whatever.

So, our guest today is a younger woman named Bina Coleman, who’s going to tell us how she started her business out of seeing a need in the marketplace for balancing a full-time career, raising young kids, and having elderly parents who had health care needs of their own. It is a juggling act, one that’s been addressed by the media, but Bina Coleman saw an opportunity, and she’s very busy with her own life. She lives outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and she managed to find the time to create her original business, which was called Compassionate Callers, and it’s recently morphed into Parent Projects, which she’ll talk about. But it’s a business targeted to those people who need support with numerous activities that are busy, and her business was set up to really help people who are in the sandwich generation have peace of mind and know that their elderly parents are living a good older life while they maintain theirs. She also has a degree in gerontology and over a decade of experience in the field of elderly care.

So, I’d like to get started; she has so much to tell us. She has a great story. So welcome to the show, Bina.

Thank you for that introduction. It was very good. It was a great introduction. It’s all true. There are so many of us.

Right, so start us out. Tell our listeners about your story, about your background, and your personal experiences that led to the development of Parent Projects.

I grew up here in Phoenix, and my parents actually owned the first four franchises of Home Instead Senior Care. I was in sixth grade, so in 1996, they were literally one of the first home care agencies in Arizona or Phoenix, and now there’s over 500, I want to say. Growing up, this is all we heard: the elder world, the seniors, the caregivers, so my brother and I just knew this world when none of our friends did.

When it was time for me to get my degree, it was kind of a no-brainer to do gerontology, though it’s extremely niche, and there’s not many of us. But fast forward, I am married, I have two little kids; they’re still little. So, even back when my father was living in a memory care facility and then passed, they were even younger. But I truly became a sandwich generation caregiver because I was working full time. I was doing sales for home care, home health, and hospice, and I was also visiting my dad, like I said, in a memory care unit.

We were lucky enough to place them in a beautiful place in Scottsdale, so that was wonderful, truthfully. But, you know, I’d show up with both kids and just think there’s something missing in this continuum of care for everybody, memory or not, or whatever maybe they’re going through. I thought there’s something missing, and that’s where Compassionate Callers actually really came from.

What a valuable service. Really, it’s amazing. Keep going; tell us about the services.

So, I’ll tell you about Compassionate Callers and then kind of how it merged. Compassionate Callers is a business where we’re able to call people up to five times a day, seven days a week, and that could be for anything. I mean, truly, just because it’s so easy, it really did start with medication reminders and meal reminders, but really morphs into just anything you can imagine. Like I said, it’s not just for people who have memory issues or anything like that because one of our clients was a younger man who was very depressed, and getting him out of bed was something, that’s why we called him. So, there’s just a lot of reasons why these up to five phone calls a day, seven days a week can really make a difference in somebody’s life, and that’s what we were doing with Compassionate Callers, and this was Monday through Sunday. So, let’s say an adult child lived out of state, and they were worried their mom wasn’t even getting up or wasn’t eating lunch; we stepped in and took over those calls.

I met the founder of Parent Projects, and we really hit it off. We really felt we were working towards the same goal and innovative. We wanted the best for everybody in the family situation.

I just have one question going back to when we were talking about Compassionate Callers. When you called, and when you had your calling service, and let’s say somebody was out of state and they had hired your company to do that. Now, did you have the ability to go actually to where they were living and help out, or call somebody, another resource, to help them? How did that work?

It’s a great question. So yes, I’m based in Phoenix. It was a nationwide service because nothing was “hands-on.” So, they truly were dedicated phone calls. However, with your other part of the question, resources are my favorite thing in the world. Anybody who needs any resource, I feel ‘I know who to reach out to,’ or ‘what kind of person.’ If I don’t know someone in that industry, but I know you need a placement agent in Alabama, “All right, let’s find you a placement agent in Alabama.” I like to really give those resources out because there are so many available that people just don’t know about, and I think that’s the biggest hindrance of really caring for the aging population or anyone. It is how to use and utilize the resources that are out there, and so I love people to know about them.

The biggest hindrance to caring for the aging population or anyone is how to use and utilize the resources that are out there.

So, Parent Projects is a wonderful service. You can log on to parentprojects.com. You create a whole project, as in the name, it can be for a loved one, your aging parent, your aging great aunt, whatever the situation. Let’s say that you just feel overwhelmed, you don’t understand when this doctor appointment is, or you want to upload stuff, we have it all for you. You can be organized. You can upload all insurances. You can have a calendar to mark all doctor appointments or any kind of appointments.

Parent Projects: Parent Projects is a wonderful service that helps you be organized, upload all insurance, and have a calendar to mark all doctor appointments or any type of appointment.

The reason why I love that so much is because let’s say there’s a sibling in California, one in New York. They’re obviously not going to be together too often, unfortunately, right? But this allows them to get on the same platform and really say, ‘Okay, look, it’s marked in the calendar that mom has an eye appointment on the 16th.’ All right, great, we all know that, and we’re able to say to her then, ‘How did your eye appointment go? Who’s taking you to your eye appointment?’ Really get down to the brass tacks of that singular appointment just by looking at the platform that you guys have together. So, it’s a wonderful service.

That’s great. What are some other services that you found to be most helpful to people in what we call “the sandwich generation?” I mean, that one that you just described is great. Even in Europe or China, or wherever they live.

Absolutely. I think it is so needed even if you do live next door to them. I assume you’re going to have your own life too, and you can’t always be on top of it. Some other resources that I found when I was going through my own care journey with my dad were support groups, truthfully. I happened to find one, and I encourage everyone if you’re in this situation. Mine was for kids or people under the age of 40 who had a loved one, most likely a parent, with dementia. And that, to me, was the best support group I could have joined. It was virtual because, luckily, there aren’t too many people under 40 who are dealing with that, with a parent with Alzheimer’s or dementia. But also, just because we were all over. Some were in Oregon, some were in California, so that to me was the best thing I could have done. It was once a month, but that is truly what I highly recommend to everybody. Find yourself a support group if you can. Yes, friends and family are amazing, but going through and talking to people who are going through what you’re going through and being able to laugh and cry and scream, you can’t put money on it. It’s just priceless. That would be one of my biggest resources I would encourage people to do.

Very well put. I think that is very crucial and important. I mean, we all have friends and family that are supportive, but in order to really have empathy and have experience, it’s good to speak with people who walk the walk and have that learning, so to speak. So, tell us a little bit about your recent merger. Is there anything that’s different that you have experienced or found in merging your business, as a businesswoman?

It’s a cool experience. Parent Projects is a very tech-heavy company, which I’m personally not. It’s just who I am. It was really wonderful to be able to use and utilize their tech for Compassionate Callers, and that’s what we’ve been doing and why it’s on the back burner right now because we want to make it as robust and great as possible. One of the biggest positives is that we’re able to do these amazing things with technology so that when we do roll out Compassionate Callers again, it’s going to be everything I could have ever dreamed of. Up to date, technology forward, there’ll be schedules and calendars and notes, the whole thing. I think it’s a really good merger between us because on their end they’re very tech forward, so I bring the gerontology degree or point of view to their company.

It sounds like you’re more people-oriented, like you want to handle the families and talking to them, and explaining.

Exactly.

What are some other ways that you’re projecting your business is going to go? Maybe in five years. What do you think? Think about the people that you know where you live and people you interact with in other parts of the country. Any thoughts on where you might want to see it?

I do know that Parent Projects, we’re also doing a Compassionate Concierge service, which is very cool. That is where you can literally book someone like me. I’m going to have a team, and you just book me for about 45 minutes. We discuss what’s going on, and those resources I talked about, you get them right off the bat. We’re really looking at this like a concierge service for anyone that’s feeling overwhelmed, they don’t know where to start. Most people don’t. I feel like when I talk to people like you, Gail, because you and I are in this every day, it’s so like, ‘Oh, you do this?’ and it’s so second nature. But a lot of people just don’t know what to do. So, you book an appointment with a Compassionate Concierge through Parent Projects, and you get some direction. You get ideas. You get suggestions. You get those resources. So, that’s something we’re really, really going to push soon. So, you’ll see stuff on that.

Parent Projects: Parent Projects is doing a Compassionate Concierge service where you can book someone and discuss what’s going on.

Then, the other thing, we’re very AI forward, I should say. I don’t know how much you know about AI.

A little bit.

That’s how I feel. I know it. The Parent Project people, they are very smart with it. Where again, I’m just not that tech friendly. But I do know we’re using that service and technology to better everyone’s experience with the whole aging process. So, there will be more to come on that as well. So, there are exciting things to come.

So, can you give me just one example of how artificial intelligence is going to impact your business and help it?

Yeah, actually. So, if people have projects like what I spoke about. You go on, you sign up, you have these projects. You can journal, or you can say how your parents are doing for the day. And then, the AI technology starts to track it and to really understand, ‘Oh, maybe every day around five, they have a fall.’ Or that’s when they’re getting the most confused. If you’re journaling this, that AI technology then, that I was able to find resources, is able to say, ‘Hey, look, you might need a hands-on caregiver between the hours of four and nine every night.’ They are able to see patterns that are happening due to the journaling or just doctor appointments or whatever is going into this project and say, ‘This is probably one of the services that you could use.’ So, it’s fast information. If someone doesn’t have time to book an appointment with Compassionate Concierge, eventually, the idea is that this AI technology will say, ‘Well, this is what you’re going to need anyway. So, why don’t we just at least get an assessment started?’

Very interesting. Okay. Well, any other things you want to talk to us about, and the listeners, that you feel is important for them to know?

I know. I feel like I probably gave people more questions. So, I was going to say, just reach out to me through Parent Projects. I’d love talking to people.

What’s the best way for our listeners to reach you, Bina?

It’s [email protected].

Very good. Thank you so much. This has been interesting, and I’ve learned a lot too, and I’m sure our listeners have. So, thank you all for listening. Please go to our website, www.growingolderwithgusto.com, and subscribe if you’ve enjoyed this episode, which, how could you not? And also, you can share this episode if you’d like with other friends or family members that you think would benefit from this. So, thanks for listening, and remember to stay connected and stay curious.

A degree and background in Gerontology coupled with over a decade of experience in the field of elderly care was the springboard for Bina to observe a crucial gap in the continuum of care. She was a part of the sandwich generation herself a few years ago, and felt compelled to address this need, leading to the inception of Parent Projects. In her personal journey, she found herself balancing a full-time career, a family with young children and regular visits to her father in a memory care community.

Her father’s early-onset dementia diagnosis in his late 50’s and his subsequent passing in his early 60’s made her acutely aware of the challenges faced by the sandwich caregivers and their families. Bina was determined to spare others from the overwhelming stress she experienced during that time.

Parent Projects emerged from this personal journey, aiming to provide much-needed support to individuals who are juggling busy lives, full- time jobs and numerous responsibilities. Their service steps in to make those crucial calls on their behalf, offering the peace of mind they rightfully deserve. Their mission is to alleviate the burden and stress of caregiving, ensuring that families can focus on what matters most while Parent Projects provides essential support.

Host Gail Zugerman interviews Burt Fendelman a practicing attorney in NYC dedicated to aiding collectors, heirs and others evaluate art work and collectibles for the purpose of understanding the tax implications of gifting or selling of their treasures.

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Burt Fendelman is a gregarious and energetic 86 year old living in NYC.

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Our guest Wendy Green is host of the podcast “Hey Boomer” created to help baby boomers find a purpose, stay engaged in the world, and increase their confidence to recreate their lives or see their dreams come alive.

Based in Greenville, South Carolina, Wendy started her podcast after a long career in training and development with the desire to continue to stay relevant, and to make a difference in peoples lives.

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Her physical challenge did not deter her from becoming a clinical psychologist, writing four books, and getting involved in several philanthropical ventures.

While determined to lead the good life herself, she has also managed to clear a path for others by making sure that people with disabilities have access to everything they need.