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Why We Remember – Charan Ranganath

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Retirement Wisdom · Apr 29, 2024 ·

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Our memory seems like a mystery. Why can I rattle off the stating lineup of the 1967 Red Sox but can’t remember what had for lunch yesterday? Charan Ranganath can explain. He joins us to discuss his new book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Mattersand what we can do to strengthen our cognitive fitness.

Charan Ranganath joins us from California.

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Bio

Charan Ranganath, Ph.D, is the author of the new book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters. He is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California.

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For More on Charan Ranganath, Ph.D

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters

Website

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

The Self-Healing Mind – Gregory Scott Brown, M.D.

The Power of Saying No – Vanessa Patrick, PhD

Successful Aging – Daniel Levitin

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Wise Quotes

On Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

“…I really recommend for people to do new things and get out of their comfort zone. Novelty can be hugely important. It can be anxiety provoking for some people and you’ve got to be careful about that. But one of the things that we know is curiosity and novelty are associated with activity in these areas of brain that release and process dopamine. Dopamine is a modulator that, as I mentioned, promotes plasticity. Some work even suggests that if you, let’s say, put an animal in a box and you let it explore this box that it’s never been in before, its brain gets flooded with dopamine. Then if you give it some task, now it will be better at remembering the things that it was doing for this task. So in other words, that dopamine can have this spreading effect. So I think that is something that will improve people’s memory, potentially. And also I think that kind of engagement is just good for people in general. There’s also just a lot of value in seeing and feeling that you’re learning. It can get very easy to get into a rut and then feel like everything is the same. Sometimes you lose that curiosity as you get older. I know because I see this in my colleagues sometimes and I’ll say, Hey, what are the findings in your lab that you’re most excited about? And they’ll say, Nothing’s new, it’s all the same, we’re all just rehashing the same stuff. And I find that so depressing because it is like my whole business is curiosity and I am a big believer in the power of curiosity.”

On The Mind-Body Connection

“If you want to improve your cognitive functioning, or you want to retain your cognitive functioning over time and you want protect your brain health, consider that your brain is the seed of the mind and it is a part of your body. I think a lot of people have this idea of somehow I am my mind, and then my brain is separate. And it’s not. It is all connected. What this means is that if you’re not taking care of your mental health, your emotional health your physical health, it’s going to affect your cognition and possibly increase your risk for dementia…. If you want to get in to the positives, sleep and exercise are very important.”

On Prioritizing & Memory

“So at a minimum you want to prioritize, right? So I don’t hear people telling me, Boy, I remember this temporary password that I had from 10 years ago. That’s really great. I’m so happy about this. Even if you remembered everything else, you wouldn’t tell me this, right? And you certainly wouldn’t tell me I remembered that you’re happier about remembering the temporary passwords than you are about remember that you have a doctor appointment. So, I think that there’s this intuition that we have that we should be able to remember everything, that any inability to remember is a weakness. I think that intuition is wrong. But, of course, I lose my phone. I lose my keys. So I experience the everyday moments of frustration and of forgetting. And so I can empathize with that feeling. But on average, I think you would not want it in the opposite direction.”

On Habits & Memory

“Having good habits can help you at a day-to-day level, like just minimizing the number of distractions that you have in front of you, which I kind call memory hygiene, turning off alerts on various devices and things like that, not trying to do ten things at the same time….You say that I want be able to do a better job of remembering where I put my keys. And part of it could be put a sign, put sign saying, Hey, put keys here and just develop a habit. You don even need to remember, right? ”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

Retirement Wisdom · Apr 25, 2024 ·

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There’s a lot we can learn – and relearn – from the younger people in our midst. They do many things in a way that’s highly beneficial for older adults. Dr. Hasan Merali is the author of the new book, Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas, which shows us how toddlers bring out the best in humanity and how we can, too. It’s a whole new way of looking at and learning from toddlers.

He joins us from Ontario.

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Bio

Hasan Merali, MD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics, McMaster University and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario.

He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on child injury prevention in low- and middle-income countries.

He has published more than twenty-five peer-reviewed journal articles, and his writing has been featured in Science, The Boston Globe, NBC, CBC, and Popular Science. Dr. Merali lives in Oakville, Ontario, with his wife and their toddler daughter.

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For More on Hasan Merali

Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas

Website

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Mentioned in This Podcast Episode

Chatter & Your Inner Voice – Ethan Kross

Auburn Sage

Who Has the Secret to Well-Being? The Answer May Surprise You.

Old People’s Homes for 4 Year Olds

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Emeralds of Oz – Peter Guzzardi

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Wise Quotes

On Sleeping Like a Toddler

“I think sleep is one of the most important ones, and for anyone interested in wellness or improving their life, I would argue that sleep is the most important one to start with. I think it’s a foundation for everything else to build on. And I like the toddler routine because it is so simple and it works. And so the Toddler bedtime routine is a very easy thing to do. And if we all did it, we would all sleep better like they do, and so what you do is you set a bed time, you kind of stick to it. You got to be regular about that time. Start an hour before. None of this involves any screens, so those screens are completely off. One hour before, you’re either taking a hot bath or shower and what that does actually is cool down your body and your body needs to be cooler when we sleep and so that kind of gets your body into that mode. The next thing you do what toddlers do is they have lotion put on them and certainly that’s something we could all do. It feels good, massage is good but really any hygiene related activity is fine. And then finally I think we’re going to talk about this later too is reading and that is the best way to end your night. It’s no screens. If it’s an e-reader, it is fine, but there’s no other distractions. And it s a way to consolidate all that knowledge we’re getting because if you read and then sleep, you’re going to retain a lot more of it too.”

On Laughing Like a Toddler

“If you look at a graph of age across the spectrum and how much we do an activity, there is the first cliff that we go off is really humor and laughter. And there are a whole bunch of other ones. Reading is another one. Play is a another. And some of them do come back when you’re retired, which is wonderful. You know, for reading, it comes back for example when your 65. But laughter is definitely one of them that we can never reach the same level that we did have when we were toddlers. So toddlers left to themselves and they’re miked up. They’re laughing almost one time a minute. So nearly 60 times an hour. And adults, at most, will get to half of that level. And so this amount of laughter is good for them and us for a lot of different reasons. It’s everyone knows this it’s a stress reliever. It makes us feel good. And one of the things that I mentioned that toddlers are always trying to do is build relationships. And so, you know, one other things we know but we could probably do a lot more of is do some laughter in groups to build those relationships, we get less stress hormones.”

On Engaging with Books

“We kind of want to read all the time when we’re younger, and this kind falls off in later childhood and doesn’t come back until we were in our 60s. And I think this idea of placing that much importance on books is really critical for our well -being. I mean, it’s hard to be around a toddler or preschooler without being asked to read them something almost constantly. And there’s a couple of lessons there. One is that reading is very important for our own learning, but also for cognitive function. You know, looking at the data again, just in adults, if we look at people who read more, they’re the people who have lower rates of mild cognitive impairment and dementia as they get older. I think that’s really the biggest benefit of reading daily and if even get 20 -30 minutes as part of the bedtime routine ideal but any other time is really helpful. And the other big piece is something called deep reading. This has been promoted by a professor at UCLA named Maryann Wolf and she talks about how we are in this culture where we’re doing a lot of skim reading because we read on screens, there’s a lots of online articles, we just looking at the titles and we going through things very fast. But if they really want to absorb a book, we nearly need to get into deep reading. And I think toddlers are the ideal people to emulate with this. You know, I have a three -year -old, so I sit down with her with a book and we get through a couple of pages. There’s a lot of questions about the picture, about the text. We flip back. We have to go through other things, connected the dots. We get to the very end of this book much later than it would take me. And the question invariably is, again, and this way of engaging with the book, really focusing on the Book is really something we need to be doing. And so I would hope that your listeners, when they’re reading, not set chapter goals or amount of reading goals. Really, you want to set time goals and really engage with a book. And that can be in a lot of different ways. It can take notes, highlighting, book club. That’s the kind of deep reading that we’re missing out on and what toddlers and preschoolers do all the time.”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Retirement Wisdom · Apr 22, 2024 ·

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We’re surrounded by uncertainty and we don’t like the feeling of not knowing. But there’s often hidden strength in some things that make us uncomfortable. Maggie Jackson’s new book explores the research that shows that uncertainty is not a weakness, but instead can be a powerful tool for navigating complexity with creativity and adaptability.

Maggie Jackson joins us from Rhode Island to discuss her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure and why we should embrace uncertainty as a catalyst for curiosity – and more.

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Bio

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her prescient writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure has been lauded as “remarkable and persuasive” (Library Journal); “trending” (Book Pal); “incisive and timely-triumphant” (Dan Pink); and “both surprising and practical” (Gretchen Rubin). Nominated for a National Book Award, Uncertain was named a Top 10 Social Sciences book of 2023 by Library Journal and a Top 50 Psychology book of the year by the Next Big Idea Club. The book inspired Jackson’s recent lead opinion piece in the New York Times on uncertainty and resilience.

Her acclaimed book Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of our tech-centric, attention-deficient modern lives. With a foreword by Bill McKibben, the book reveals the scientific discoveries that can help rekindle our powers of focus in a world of overload and fragmentation. Hailed as “influential” by the New Yorker and compared by Fast Company.com to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Distracted offers a “richly detailed and passionately argued … account of the travails facing an ADD society” (Publishers Weekly) and “concentrates the mind on a real problem of modern life” (The Wall Street Journal). The book is “now more essential than ever,” says Pulitzer finalist Nicholas Carr.

Maggie Jackson’s essays, commentary, and books have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Philosopher, on National Public Radio, and in media worldwide. She wrote the foreword to Living with Robots: Emerging Issues on the Psychological and Social Implications of Robotics (Academic Press, 2019) and has contributed essays to numerous other anthologies, including State of the American Mind: Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide: Arguments For and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Penguin, 2011). Her book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, was the first to explore the fate of home in the digital age, a time when private life is permeable and portable.

Jackson is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including a 2016 Bard Graduate Center Visiting Fellowship; Media Awards from the Work-Life Council of the Conference Board, the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and the Women’s Press Club of New York. For a National Public Radio segment on the lack of labor protections offered to child newspaper carriers, she was a finalist for a Hillman Prize, one of journalism’s highest honors for social justice reporting. Jackson has served as an affiliate of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto; a Journalism Fellow in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland; and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. Her website has been named a Forbes Top 100 Site for Women three times.

Jackson is a sought-after speaker, appearing at Harvard Business School, the New York Public Library, the annual invitation-only Forbes CMO summit, the Simmons and other top women’s leadership conferences, and other corporations, libraries, hospitals, schools, religious organizations, and bookstores. A graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics with highest honors, Jackson lives with her family in New York and Rhode Island.

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For More on Maggie Jackson

Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure

Website

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Strategic Quitting – Julia Keller

The Emotionally Intelligent Retirement – Kate Schroeder & Nick Wignall

The Mindful Body – Ellen Langer

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Wise Quotes

On Tolerance of Uncertainty

“So, tolerance of uncertainty is a personality trait. It’s basically, in a nutshell, if you’re intolerant of it, you are fearful of the unknown, you see uncertainty as a threat. If you’re more tolerant and open to uncertainty, then you actually see uncertainty as challenging. So we’re not talking about Easy Street, but challenge versus threat makes all the difference. In fact, scientists and clinical psychologists now see an intolerance of uncertainty as being a root vulnerability factor, a risk factor basically for most mental disorders. So basically when you’re fearful of the unknown, you shut down, your thinking becomes rigid, the opposite to that kind of arousal and wakefulness and good thinking that I’ve been talking about.”

Why Uncertainty Can be a Gift

“Quite simply, humans and many other organisms need and want answers. So therefore, we’re built to basically have a stress response when we are uncertain. So just to unpack that a little bit, when you meet up with something new or unexpected or ambiguous, your body and brain kind of spring into action. And contrary to uncertainty as a mindset being synonymous with inertia, for instance, actually uncertainty, in effect, wakes you up. Scientists call this arousal. So the stress response leads to your palms sweating, you’re in a traffic jam, you are not sure if you will get to the meeting with the boss, your cortisol levels rise, but at the same time, your brain becomes more receptive to new data. Your attention sharpens, and scientists call this curious eyes, which is a wonderful term, and working memory improves. So there are a raft of cascading effects on the brain, literally because you’re uncertain. That is, you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge, and you recognize that maybe it could be this or it couldn’t be that – that you don’t know. This is not ignorance, but it’s that uncertainty is really a kind of almost a stimulant. In fact, doctors in sticky situations show, or report, this heightened attention as well as they tend to look ahead to muster resources to contend with a problem or situation. And CEOs in crises who are ambivalent actually outperform their ultra-decisive peers. They’re more inclusive, they’re resourceful. So here’s a incredible positive aspect of human thinking that we denigrate and have long ignored. So it’s quite interesting. The unease of uncertainty is actually a gift.”

On the Value of Pausing

“Pausing is really important for memory making. So if you’re learning different things, and say you are doing two different lessons on a software to learn French because you going to Europe next summer, pause just for a few minutes between those two different lessons, and your memory for the vocabulary will be about 20 to 25 percent more. This is true even when people show some memory loss, which is pretty stunning. Pausing also allows the brain to catch up with experience in other ways, to not just encode memory, but to sort of sift memory. So you’re actually able to insert the memory and you relatively, simplistically speaking, you’re able to store memories in places where you emerge with insight….a night’s sleep will do it too. So this is really important for meaning -making. It’s not doing nothing. And that’s one way in which learning about this kind of uncertainty, the suspense of uncertainty the space of the uncertainty has changed. I used to race from thing to thing when I was working – interview to interview and reading scientific papers and juggling….Everybody knows that feeling. Now I pause in between things just for a couple minutes, and I find that that actually has an incredibly potent impact.”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Retirement Wisdom · Apr 18, 2024 ·

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Are you ready for the second half of life? Allen Hunt believes we should be more precise and instead concentrate on preparing for the fourth quarter of our lives once we hit our sixties. It helps us focus with a heightened sense of urgency and it can inspire us to be more intentional about the things that matter most.

Allen Hunt joins us from Atlanta.

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Bio

Allen Hunt is The Fourth Quarter Guy. He helps people discover how to become the best-version-of themselves in the Fourth Quarter of life.

A four-time #1 Amazon best-selling author, Allen collaborated with Matthew Kelly to write No Regrets: A Fable about Living Your Fourth Quarter Intentionally. In that fable, they share the ground-breaking secrets of the Fourth Quarter: the 5 Keys to Living and Dying with No Regrets.

Those 5 keys then led them to create The Fourth Quarter of Your Life: Embracing What Matters Most, a workbook to help people do just that: Discover and plan how to intentionally live their fourth quarters with confidence, boldness and passion.

Allen earned a Ph.D from Yale University. He enjoys hiking, literature, spirituality, history and good food. he and his wife, Anita, live in Georgia. They have two daughters, two sons-in-law, and seven grandchildren.

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Website – The Fourth Quarter Guy – Allen Hunt

You Tube Channel

No Regrets: A Fable about Living Your Fourth Quarter Intentionally

The Fourth Quarter of Your Life: Embracing What Matters Most

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Wise Quotes

On the Fourth Quarter of Life

“And so when you turn 60, you really are three-fourths of the way through, and you’re in that fourth quarter. And as I’ve kind of accompanied folks on that journey, I’ve realized your perspective really changes at that point in different kinds of ways. Your values may not, but your perspective and your point of view does. And certain things become more important. Other things begin to kind of recede into the background. And like my co-author, Matthew Kelly, and I say, death is the one unavoidable truth. And in the fourth quarter, you begin to realize that at some level. And then once you actually really realize that and accept it, then you can truly begin to live. It’s almost liberating once you realize, and this thing is going to, there is a termination date. ”

On Regrets

“How do you redeem those regrets and turn them into dreams? You know as we talked with hospice nurses and as we worked with people who were preparing to die and listen to some of their regrets one of the greatest regrets people expresses I really wish I had expressed my feelings more. And so if that’s a regret that you anticipate that you might have or that you have up to this point so okay how can I how can I turn that into a fourth quarter dream instead of letting that regret kind of hang on me like a wet sweater. And one way to do that is to think about three simple statements I love you, I forgive you, or please forgive me. And who do you need to say those things to? And begin to think about who do you need to thank? Who do you need to express love to? who do you need to forgive and who do you actually need to forgive you? Who do you need to say I’m sorry to and begin actually acting on that. And you’ll you’ll not only begin to avoid regrets, but you also begin to experience a freedom from the past and a lightness and a liberty in the in the fourth quarter.”

On Being Intentional in Your Fourth Quarter

“…intentionality matters in every aspect of your life, whether it’s your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual life. And so just to put together a simple one step, this is the next step I’m gonna take, and then see what God begins to do in your life as you do that, whether you go on that pilgrimage or you develop a daily habit of prayer, or just sitting in silence and being in the presence of God. Take one step, be intentional, and it will be a powerful, powerful force in your fourth quarter, it really will.”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

Retirement Wisdom · Apr 15, 2024 ·

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A lot of our day-to-day behavior comes from habits. They create useful short cuts. But while they’re efficient, many lack something important – meaning. That’s where rituals come in. From the civic and religious rituals that commemorate key milestones and special events to our morning routines, they add a valuable emotional dimension to our lives. Michael Norton, author the new book The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, has studied rituals and joins us to share what’s he’s learned about how we can be intentional about rituals, both ones we’ve inherited and new ones we create.

He joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Curious?

Take the Habit or Ritual Quiz

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Bio

Michael Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has studied human behavior as it relates to love and inequality, time and money, and happiness and grief. He is the author of The Ritual Effect and the coauthor—with Elizabeth Dunn—of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending. In 2012, he was selected by Wired magazine as one of “50 People Who Will Change the World.” His TEDx talk, How to Buy Happiness, has been viewed nearly 4.5 million times. He is a frequent contributor to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Scientific American, and has made numerous television, radio, and podcast appearances.

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For More on Michael Norton

The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions

Website

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Tiny Habits Can Lead to Big Changes – BJ Fogg

How to Live a Values Based Life – Harry Kraemer

The Portfolio Life – Christina Wallace

The Second Curve of Life – Arthur C. Brooks

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Wise Quotes

On Rituals & Emotions

“I think one thing that I like about rituals is that they’re a bit domain general, in the sense that we don’t just use them in one domain. So imagine the only thing we use rituals for was to tie our shoes before a big race or to try to calm down before a big event. We for sure use them there. But then we use them in all these other domains of life as well. We use them in our marriages, we use them with our kids and families. We use them at work. So we really think about this idea of rituals allow us across many domains of life to change our experience in one way or another. We’re often looking for an emotion when we engage in rituals. Like if I’m doing something with my wife that we do on date night, we’re doing the ritual in order to feel closer. If I’m tying my shoes, I’m doing it in order to feel calmer. So we have these ways of using rituals to try to get us to an emotion that we think at least would be helpful in that moment.”

On Rituals and Retirement

“And I think that can help us then have a better demarcation between what we were and what we’re going to be. I was a full-time employee. I was a parent, now I’m retired, or now I’m an empty nester. How are we helping people transition from one to the other? Because it’s a huge transition. When we go through any of these transitions in life, we have, when we look at rituals, there’s many different types.”

On Inherited Rituals

“We have just two broad categories are rituals that we receive or inherit. They could be family rituals, they could be cultural rituals, they could be religious rituals that we get from our parents, from our grandparents, from our faith. And those rituals play an enormously important role in our lives. And we know what they are, and we know how meaningful they are when we do them. Weddings and funerals exist for a reason.”

On Taking an Inventory

“I think the last thing that anybody wants to hear is add 10 more things to your life. That’s not a good selling point. If I said it’s very helpful to meditate for five hours every day, well that’s great, but who has time to meditate for five hours every day? So I often think about it less as about adding a whole bunch of rituals all over the place, and instead starting to just actually looking at your current behavior, kind of taking an inventory of what you currently do. Do you have something that you do in the morning? Is it always coffee and then newspaper and then chat with and then dog? Or are you all over the place? And those are places where you can start to see that sometimes you’re doing things already that have some of these propensities. And by the way, if you don’t think you have any rituals, ask your spouse, ask your children, ask your coworkers. They’ll be very happy to tell you all the quirky things that you do. And I like that idea of starting there, of just already recognizing this role that they play in our lives.”

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Why We Remember – Charan Ranganath

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Taming The Molecule of More – Michael Long

Grace in Motion – Susan Hartzler

What If I? Best of 2025 – Part 1

Older or Elder? – Marc Cooper

Your Identity Beyond Your Job Title – Laverne McKinnon

Grandmapreneur – Connie Inukai

The Stress Paradox – Sharon Bergquist, MD

The Heart of Grandfatherhood – Ted Page

Detach: Ditch Your Baggage – Dr. Bob Rosen

Retirement Regrets – Noah Sheidlower

Holistic Retirement Planning – Lane Martinsen

Empty Nester – Dr. Rachel Glik

Shift – Ethan Kross

The Art of a Balanced Life in Retirement – Dr. Marybeth Crane

Spring Training (for the Rest of Your Life) – John Kaag

What’s Your Cause? – Ed Hajim

Stop People Pleasing – Hailey Magee

TALK: The Science of Conversation – Alison Wood Brooks

Tiny Experiments – Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Layer Upon Layer – DavId Horton, MD

Our New Social Life – Natalie Kerr & Jaime Kurtz

Lessons Learned in Retirement That Can Help You – Judith Nadratowski

Golden Years – James Chappel

Big Goals – Caroline Adams Miller

The Purpose Code – Dr. Jordan Grumet

How to Winter – Kari Leibowitz

The New Happy – Stephanie Harrison

Season 7

The Very Best of 2024 – Retirement Wisdom

Your Money Matters in 2025 – Larry Kotlikoff

Spiritual Aging – Carol Orsborn, PhD

Slow Living – Stephanie O’Dea

Best of the Retirement Wisdom Podcast 2024 – Part 3

The Pursuit of Wisdom – Ben Lytle

Best Of – On Gratitude

Turning the Page in Retirement – Stephen Riggio

Is Semi-Retirement the Best of Both Worlds? – Liz Weston

The Second Fifty – Debra Whitman

The Art of the Interesting – Lorraine Besser, PhD

Changing Lanes to Make a Difference – Jennifer Jacobs

How to Use Your Head to Save Your Brain – Mitchelll Clionsky, PhD