The Encore Project Podcast

In this episode, Bill Leighty makes a confession: he’s known about his hearing loss for years, went to Costco to try hearing aids, lasted twenty uncomfortable minutes, and walked away telling himself they didn’t help. He hadn’t given them a fair chance — and he knew it. In this honest, research-backed conversation, Bill shares what the Johns Hopkins data on hearing loss and dementia finally convinced him to face, and why eighty percent of men who could benefit from hearing aids aren’t wearing them. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project found this one of our most relatable conversations yet. 

Bill Leighty spent five years as the lone dissenting vote on Tulsa's planning commission. In this episode, he makes the case for why more retirees should volunteer for a city board or commission — seats that go unfilled while high-visibility posts stay competitive. 

A photograph of his late uncle mid-jump off a river bluff sends Bill Leighty back forty years, into grief he thought was long settled. In this episode, he explores what the research says about how grief actually moves through men — and why sadness and gratitude are never really in competition. 

Bill Leighty has spent a lifetime saying he's 'retired from real estate' — but by his own definition of the word, he's never actually retired at all. Neither did his father, who worked a landscaping business right up until illness stopped him at eighty-two. In this episode, Bill reflects on the generational reality behind why so many men never had a traditional retirement to look forward to, and what it means to keep building instead.

Bill Leighty has been married to his wife Bonnie for fifty-four years. In this episode, he shares how the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 — which forced them into round-the-clock togetherness in their downtown Tulsa condo — unexpectedly renewed a marriage that had quietly drifted into routine, and why a simple Sunday ritual from that spring is still alive six years later.

In this episode, Bill Leighty takes us back to Vinnie’s patio — a backyard in Tulsa where real estate men gathered every weekday at five o’clock for a decade, grilling steaks, telling stories, and doing something the researchers now know is as essential to survival as exercise: belonging somewhere. It’s an honest story, including the parts that weren’t easy. And it leads somewhere unexpected — to a front row at St. Rita’s Chapel, and to what Bill believes every man needs to find before it’s too late. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project is proud to bring you one of the most personal conversations we’ve had. 

Bill Leighty made a quiet promise when he joined Tulsa's Planning Commission in 2005: be a team player, be reasonable, cause no trouble. Within a year, one meeting and one video changed everything he believed about how cities should be built — and set off a reversal that eventually reshaped his politics too. In this episode, Bill reflects on what it cost him to change his mind at sixty-five, and whether that same capacity for openness is still alive in him at eighty-one. 

In this episode, Bill Leighty shares something he rarely talks about — five decades of living with degenerative disc disease, COPD, arthritis, and the other quiet companions of a life lived hard and well. This isn’t a medical episode. It’s a conversation about how a man decides, early and then again and again, not to let his body write the story. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project presents this as one of the most honest conversations we’ve brought you — and one of the most useful. 

In this episode, Bill Leighty tells the story of the moment he sat down at his computer, typed a complicated question into ChatGPT, and watched everything change. He was in his late seventies. He had no tech background. And he had just discovered that the barriers he assumed were permanent were made of paper. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project believes this is one of the most important conversations we’ve brought you — not because it’s about technology, but because it’s about what happens when a man refuses to stop building. 

There’s a word Bill Leighty doesn’t use about himself: retired. In this episode, Bill traces the thread that runs from a fiery Op-Ed in a Tulsa newspaper to a planning commission chamber to fifty years at the lectern — and finally to The Encore Project. It’s a story about the voice you’ve always had, and what happens when you finally stop singing in the margins. The Editorial Team at The Encore Project is proud to bring you this deeply personal conversation.