The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

Who are you when your role at work changes? Psychologist and author Marisa Franco, PhD rejoins us to discuss her new book Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Attachment. We explore self-worth, identity, relationships, and the challenge of becoming someone new. She explains why our sense of worth often becomes attached to achievement and professional identity, and why major transitions such as retirement can shake that foundation. Marisa Franco offers a different approach: develop a sense of worth that isn’t dependent on remaining who you’ve always been.

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Bio

An enlightening psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and TED speaker, Dr. Marisa G. Franco is known for digesting and communicating science in ways that resonate deeply enough with people to change their lives.

Dr. Franco works as a professor at The University of Maryland and authored the New York Times bestseller Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make – and Keep – Friends and her new book Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Attachment. She writes about relationships for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert for major publications like The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Vice.

Dr. Franco speaks on how to build relationships with yourself and others at corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and universities across the country, including Harper Collins Publishers, Cisco, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The Department of State.

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For More on Marisa G. Franco, PhD

Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Attachment

Website

Her first visit with us on her book Platonic about making friends as an adult

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Open to another take on worth?

(Highly recommend)

Taylor Mali – What Teachers Make (3 minute video)

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Other Retirement Podcast Conversations You’ll Love

Self-Compassion – Dr. Kristin Neff

Shift – Ethan Kross

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Wise Quotes

 On Contingent Worth

“We’re very much taught to have a contingent sense of self-worth: I am worthy if… I’m worthy if I have this job. I’m worthy if I’m in this relationship. I’m worthy if I have this financial stability perhaps. And so that contingent self-worth means that when we don’t have those things, we no longer feel worthy. What I am proposing is a non-contingent sense of self-worth—a sense of self-worth that is there no matter who you are, no matter what happens to you.”

On Identity & Reinvention

“What I counterintuitively suggest is to allow yourself to not know yourself. You can allow your sense of self to be fluid in each moment, and you don’t have to be who you’ve always been, but you can still have high regard for yourself. Whoever I am in each moment is okay.”

On Possibility Within Loss

“If you were to see this loss as an offering in some way, what would make this an offering? Is this giving you more time to spend with your friends? Is it taking you out of a workplace that maybe wasn’t working for you? Is it allowing you more time to engage in an interest or passion that you’ve always wanted to engage in?”

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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.

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 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 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.

Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.

In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 2 million downloads. Business Insider 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.

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The views and opinions expressed by guests on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the host or Retirement Wisdom, LLC. The Retirement Wisdom Podcast covers the non-financial aspects of retirement. From time to time we may invite guests who discuss other aspects of retirement planning, solely for educational purposes. Listeners are advised to consult qualified financial and/or medical professionals on those matters.

What does it really mean to take charge of your health? Lucy McBride MD, believes it involves much more than tracking your numbers. Good health is also about understanding the less measurable parts: what’s happening in your life, your relationships, stress, habits, emotional patterns, and your history.

Dr. Lucy McBride, a primary care physician and author of Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor’s Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health, joins us to discuss how to become a more informed, proactive annd empowered partner in your own healthcare.

We discuss the difference between control and agency, why your bio contains important health data, the “patient personality” each of us brings into the doctor’s office, when health tracking helps (and when it doesn’t) and why the transition to retirement can make structure, movement, social connection, and daily routines even more important.

Lucy McBride, MD joins us from Washington DC.

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Bio

Dr. Lucy McBride is a board-certified internist who has practiced primary care medicine in Washington, DC, for over two decades. She is a native Washingtonian who attended the National Cathedral School before earning her undergraduate degree from Princeton University. She graduated with honors from Harvard Medical School and earned a Master’s Degree in Pharmacology as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cambridge, U.K. She completed her internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Dr. McBride has become a nationally recognized voice in healthcare transformation and patient empowerment. She believes that health is not a checklist or an outcome, but rather a lifelong process that requires awareness, acceptance, and agency over what you can change.

She is the author of Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor’s Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health (Simon & Schuster, August 2026), which offers a five-step framework for patients to reclaim agency over their health. The book has been praised for bridging the gap between conventional medicine and holistic wellness, refusing false binaries and empowering patients to make informed

decisions.

She writes the widely-read medical newsletter Are You Okay?, which reaches over 39,000 subscribers weekly with evidence-based guidance on navigating mental and physical health in tandem. She also hosts the top-rated podcast Beyond the Prescription. Dr. McBride’s work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and USA Today. She is a frequent media commentator, appearing on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Morning Joe, and PBS NewsHour, where she provides evidence-based medical advice and advocates for a more comprehensive approach to healthcare.

Her mission extends beyond individual patient care to transforming the healthcare system itself. She believes that empowering individual patients creates systemic change—and that primary care relationships, enhanced by technology but centered on human connection, are the foundation of sustainable healthcare transformation.

Dr. McBride lives in Washington, DC with her husband and three children.

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For More on Lucy McBride 

Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor’s Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health

Beyond the Prescription Podcast

You can learn more about Dr. McBride here.

You can subscribe to her free newsletter here.

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Other Retirement Podcasts You’ll Love 

Eat Your Ice Cream – Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD

What Matters Most – Diane Button

Inside The Healthcare Heist – Jordan Grumet, MD

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Wise Quotes

On Agency

“People often don’t realize how much agency they have over their health…When we stop fighting unwinnable battles, we then open up brain space, time, energy to then fight the battles we want to be fighting. That’s the birthplace of agency.”

On Your Story & Your Health

“We love collecting data. Cholesterol levels, blood pressure, body mass index, right? All the things we can measure in a test tube. But it turns out the most important data is actually something only you have access to. It’s your biography. Your biographic data matters, I would argue, even more than your biometric data, and your biographic data informs your biometric data.”

On Self-Compassion

“When I was able to connect the dots between her story, which is very relevant, those biographic pieces of data from when she was a kid, and her blood sugar readings, her blood sugar readings that go up when she’s stress eating and she’s not taking care of herself, that’s me handing power to the patient. That’s me saying, “Look, you have more agency than you think.” It’s not that understanding the relationship between childhood traumas and your diabetes, the knowledge alone isn’t enough, but it’s to say that there’s no GLP-1, there’s no shot, there’s no medication that’s going to practice self-compassion for you and for you to make peace with your body and to, and to feed your body the way it wants to be fed.”

On Taking Charge

“The idea of being the CEO of Your Health is being someone who can understand at its core where you have agency and where you do not, and knowing the difference. It sounds a lot like the Serenity Prayer, right? It’s basically the wisdom to understand where you can execute in your life, habit changes, relationship changes, whether the relationships to food or alcohol or other people or your retirement, and where you have to cede control, like you’re aging, you have a genetic predisposition to a disease you don’t like, you have medical conditions that  you’d rather not have. Because it turns out that the best CEOs in the world are people who don’t try to control everything. They also don’t outsource everything to somebody else. They know the difference between where they have control and where they don’t, and then they ask for help. My book is essentially a guide to making sense of your health in a more nuanced way because you do have more control than you think.”

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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.

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 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 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.

Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.

In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 2 million downloads. Business Insider 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.

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The views and opinions expressed by guests on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the host or Retirement Wisdom, LLC. The Retirement Wisdom Podcast covers the non-financial aspects of retirement. From time to time we may invite guests who discuss other aspects of retirement planning, solely for educational purposes. Listeners are advised to consult qualified financial and/or medical professionals on those matters.

Listen in to these highlights from four of our best recent conversations on things likely on your mind in planning for retirement: purpose, identity, curiosity – and experimenting your way into a fulfilling next chapter.

They can spark ideas for what’s next for you. Want to go deeper?

Listen to any of the full conversations:

What If Retirement Is the Wrong Goal? – John Coleman

Change Your Questions, Change Your Life…in Retirement – Marilee Adams, PhD

Letting Go to Become Who You Truly Are – Deborah Santana

How to Flourish…in Retirement – Daniel Coyle

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Guest Bios

John Coleman is the author of Good Money: Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose. He is the author of five books, and he or his work have been highlighted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the LA Times, Christianity Today, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review, among other publications.

Marilee Adams, PhD is the Founder and CEO of the Inquiry Institute, and author of Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, now in it’s 5th edition and it has been translated into 26 languages.. She is an award-winning author, executive coach, and leadership consultant whose work has shaped how leaders think, communicate, and make decisions for more than four decades.

Deborah Santana is the author of Loving the Fire: Choosing Me, Finding Freedom. Her work has been featured by Vogue, Oprah, and NPR, among other national and literary outlets. She is the founder of the Do A Little Foundation, which supports women and girls in the areas of health, education, and happiness. Her work explores identity, social justice, spirituality, and the power of collective voice.

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times best-selling author of nine books, including Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment, The Culture Code and The Talent Code, Winner (with Tyler Hamilton) of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize, he is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, he also works a special advisor to the Cleveland Guardians. Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife Jen, and their four daughters.

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Other Retirement Podcast Episodes You May Like

Best of 2026 – Part One

Best of 2025 – Part Two

What If I? Best of 2025 – Part 1

The Very Best of 2024

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Time to take stock of what needs your attention planning for the non-financial side of retirement?

Take this free 5-minute assessment.

It’s not a report card. It’s a tool to help pinpoint what matters most to you in the years ahead.

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Catch up to your money. It’s often ready for retirement before you are.

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What helps wellbeing endure as our lives change?

Matt Bloom has spent much of his career studying human flourishing. In this conversation, he brings his insights into retirement and combines it with lessons from his own transition from professor to writer, volunteer and what he calls a “wise elder.”

We discuss why wellbeing is built through small daily practices, how adopting a new identity can change your behavior, why many need to become more intentional about friendship after leaving work, and how volunteering and shared-interest communities can create both connection and meaning.

Matt also explains how older adults can become “guardians and shepherds” of relationships and shares Map Your Days, a simple practice that takes five minutes a night and that, in 27 years of teaching MBAs and executives, he says has never failed to teach someone something they didn’t know about their own life.

Matt Bloom joins us from Colorado.

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Bio

Matt Bloom is the author of Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy. He is a writer, speaker, entrepreneur, and emeritus professor of management at the University of Notre Dame. Bloom holds advanced degrees in psychology from Cornell University (PhD) and the University of Kansas (MA), and is an award-winning teacher who earned top honors for courses he taught to undergraduates, MBA students, and corporate executives. At Notre Dame, Matt taught classes on innovation and design thinking, organizational change and leadership.

As a professor in the Mendoza College of Business, Matt studied well-being for nearly three decades where he led the WorkWell research project. Initially, he and his team of ten researchers  focused on the well-being of people in the helping and healing professions: international aid workers, global health professionals, educators, clergy and ministry workers, physicians, and other healthcare professionals, among others. He later broadened his focus to include both well-being at work and in life more generally.  The team also launched a first-of-its-kind mobile application to capture daily experiences from several hundred research subjects.

Prior to becoming a professor, Matt was a financial advisor at Shearson Lehman Hutton, a consultant at Arthur Young, a psychiatric orderly at The Kansas Institute, and a paramedic for the Douglas County (KS) Emergency Medical Service.

Some of Matt’s favorite wise well-being practices:

Extended backcountry hiking (5+ days). And, yes, there are no showers or bathrooms

Baking hearth bread using natural leavens, mild sourdough starters

Scuba diving on coral reefs and wrecks in the Caribbean

Catch-and-release fly fishing on small mountain streams

Poetry reading using a process he adapted from lectio divina

Reading novels. Among his favorite authors are Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, Richard Rosso and Abraham Verghese

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For More on Matt Bloom

Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy

Website

Ritual app: Download for iOS or Android, or start at ritual.io.

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More Retirement Podcast Conversations You’ll Love

How to Flourish…in Retirement – Daniel Coyle

Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You – Teresa Amabile

The Good Life – Marc Schulz, PhD

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Wise Quotes

On the Value of Small Steps

“Our wellbeing rises and falls mostly as a result of little things that we do day by day…We live our values mostly in the little things that we do.”

On Relationships

“Quality matters more than quantity.”

On Elderhood

“We can really be the guardians and shepherds of family relationships.”

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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.

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 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 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.

Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.

In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 2 million downloads. Business Insider 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.

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A lot of the conversation on retirement runs one way: stay busy, stay productive. Dr. Denise Taylor thinks that could quietly cost some people their best years.

Denise is a Chartered Psychologist and later-life researcher in the UK. She spent 25 years coaching people through career transitions, then, at 61, went back to school herself, completing a professional doctorate on how people reconstruct meaning after full-time work. Her research subjects were all at least two years past retirement, deliberately, because the first two years tell you very little. What she found in them became the backbone of her new book, ThriveSpan: Walking Gently Into What Matters Now.

The extra years we have gained, she argues, arrive roughly between 60 and 80, while health usually still holds. Spending them duplicating the shape of your working life is a decision, and it’s not right for everyone. Her alternative is not reinvention, which she calls exhausting, but recalibration: a reset in which you subtract before you add.

She is also candid about her own path. Leaving a twenty-year marriage. Four days and four nights alone in nature with no food and no tent. A doctorate that started the October before COVID. Four acres of woodland that taught her, at last, how to stop moving fast.

We discuss why purpose does not have to be a cathedral, why she stopped dyeing her hair on principle, what her research says about curiosity and being of service, why you should imagine the future you do not want, and why saying no is the most underrated skill in later life.

Retirement is different for everyone and we have choices. Denise argues against a continue to work narrative, and she argues strongly. If you’re a listener who loves their work, or who needs the income, shear her as offering choice rather than a verdict.

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Bio

Dr. Denise Taylor is a Chartered Psychologist, later-life researcher, and widely published author whose work explores how we can live well as we age.

With more than 25 years’ experience supporting career and life transitions, she has written extensively on work, identity, ageing, and meaning in later life. Her work has been featured by the BBC, ITV, and national newspapers.

Her previous books include Career Coaching for Midlife and Beyond, Rethinking Retirement for Positive Ageing , and Find Work at 50+. Her doctoral research into meaning after full-time work won the Research by a Career Development Professional award in 2024.

ThriveSpan: Walking Gently Into What Matters Now offers a reflective, psychologically grounded approach to later life, integrating research, lived experience, and the restorative influence of nature.

Denise writes the Substack newsletter Ageing Reimagined and is a regular contributor to the i Paper.

She lives in Gloucestershire, where time spent in her woodland continues to inspire both her writing and her approach to later life.

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For More on Denise Taylor

Substack – https://ageingreimagined.substack.com/

ThriveSpan – https://denisetaylor.co.uk/thrivespan/

Website – https://denisetaylor.co.uk/

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Other Retirement Podcast Conversations You’ll Also Love

Inspired Retirement – Nathalie Martin

Re-Visioning Retirement – Susan Reid, PhD

Joyspan – Kerry Burnight, PhD

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Wise Quotes

On Recalibrating

“You don’t have to reinvent yourself. You can just slow down a bit…now time is more my own.”

On Purpose

“When I’m talking to people about purpose, they want this massive thing, like building a cathedral. You can have purpose just by smiling at somebody walking down the street.”

On Being

“If all you are is a human doing, then you’re not really thinking about who am I as a human being?”

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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.

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 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 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.

Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.

In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 2 million downloads. Business Insider 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.