The Art 2 Aging

Tony McGrath is 68 years old. He’s probably spent half a century working. He’s held senior positions in the banking industry, the insurance industry, he’s created and sold several start ups and he has no interest in stopping to put his feet up.

Why would he? He’s having too much fun!

Tony is our guest this week in what is a wide ranging conversation about age, growing older, and still finding the desire and energy to meet each day head on.

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

For most of the 20th century there existed a chasm between natural medicine and mainstream medicine, dominated as it is by the big pharmaceutical companies of the world.

It’s like an ongoing mythical war between Heaven and Hell, good and evil, however you view it, and whichever side you take.

But two and a half decades into the 21st century that may be shifting. There is a growing willingness by general practitioners and specialists to take an unbiased look at how natural medicine can complement their own work, especially when there are more and more concrete examples of the effectiveness of natural medicine.

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

Scott Fulton is a planner. He believes in the merits of planning, especially when it comes to planning for one’s later years around financial assets and health. Scott’s an expert on aging, too; he’s the past president of the National Aging In Place Council where he studied the lives of millions of older Americans.

That work has helped shape a strategy that Scott lectures on, gives talks about, and has now published.

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

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

Where does ageism begin? In the home? In the workplace? In the media?

Well, the simple and not entirely flippant answer is that ageism begins in all those places.

But its actual genesis is within the minds of each of us.

Hermetic philosophy puts it succinctly: “As within, so without.” Everything that we experience – everything – began as an idea and an idea is a thought.

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

Such as ageism.

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

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

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

It was back in January 2024 that my creative partner, Dave Grein, and I began to explore an idea for a podcast and content series on Substack dealing with “getting old.” Dave came up with the name –The Art 2 Aging – along with our logo.

We got to work. I booked guests, conducted the interviews and Dave did the production work to make each episode sound great. We lined up enough content that we could generate at least a dozen episodes before we launched in mid-May of this year.

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

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

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

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

Happy Holidays, everyone! See you next year!

It was that prolific and prescient playwright, George Bernard Shaw, who stated that “youth is wasted on the young.” He expanded on that in later writings: “they're brainless, and don't know what they have; they squander every opportunity of being young, on being young.”

While this may sound petty and rather mean, Shaw inadvertently makes a larger point. Life cannot be comprehended until it is lived.

It’s only then that we begin to glean some sense and reason to living. That’s when we can finally understand what we’ve done, how we’ve done it, how we could have done it better, and see a path forward that begins to deliver what we’ve always been looking for – meaning, purpose, and satisfaction.

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, Paul Long, exemplifies this formula. He’s been there, done that, and is now, in his late 60s, creating his life on his own terms.

A chance encounter at a 2016 lecture in London left Dr. Barbara Barrett, a doctor of natural medicine, fascinated by a little known vitamin.

She called it a “jaw-dropping” moment. That’s how blown away she was with the potential health benefits of this vitamin, particularly for older people.

Barbara had also found the focus for her PhD thesis and she dove into the available research with a passion.

This week on The Art 2 Aging, Barbara shares what she discovered about this hitherto little known vitamin.

The world is growing older. Many of us know that. What we may not fully realize is that there aren’t enough babies being born to keep populations in “age balance.”

So, what happens when people over the age of 65 outnumber those under 18? We’re already there.

What happens to healthcare and long term care for those in their 90s? And that’s a cohort that’s skyrocketing, by the way.

No one knows with certainty but there is one man who has a pretty good idea of what’s going to shake out. Some of it is good but some of it is not going to be good.

Bradley Schurman is a renowned futurist on demographic impacts in society and he answers these questions this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Psychologists tell us that our formative years are roughly the first seven years of our lives. Those years are when we, as children, are sponges soaking up what we see and hear around us. So it was for Kathie Donovan. So it is for all of us.

We accept what we hear from our parents and early teachers about ourselves without questioning its veracity. If we’re lucky, what we hear about ourselves is positive for the most part.

But often that’s not the case and we grow up with beliefs that we are not good enough, that we lack something that would make us better people. Our lives end up reflecting those beliefs perfectly.

That’s how it was for Kathie, who, despite a highly successful career in television, was a “hot mess” in her personal life.

Until she decided enough was enough.

Today, at 73, Kathie offers courses, seminars, books, and a podcast series that guide us to finding what she calls “sustainable happiness.” If you want to be inspired right now, listen to what she has to say as our guest on The Art 2 Aging.

What’s your travel dream? Visit every county in Ireland, every state in the Union, every province in Canada?

Why not think bigger? How about every country in the world? That’s the goal of our guest and his wife this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Wayne and Sally Schmidt are in their 60s. They gave up their Groundhog Day life in Australia and embarked on a journey that, to date, has spanned 81 countries and taken seven years.

Their story is one long travel adventure and Wayne lays it all out, along with some great travel tips, in this week’s episode.

Visit their website: traveldinestay.com where you can share vicariously in their adventure.