00:00 You’re listening to the live happier longer podcast, episode 20.
00:15 Welcome to the live happier, longer podcast. We’re your hosts, Molly watts and Angela McDade. We are here to help you build the habits of happier, longer life starting now.
00:28 Hey Angela. Hey Molly. How is it going. It is going well. A beautiful sunny, Sunny day in Oregon. Cold. Very cold but very sunny. Very nice. So today we are talking to Phil Riley. He is a British radio executive and he’s now turned into an author, written a book called the life of Riley and it’s really about kind of the path he chose to change his lifestyle habits that are directly related to life expectancy. Yeah. And he did some real mathematical analysis on that. Yeah. He really dug all the numbers and how to impact your, your life expectancy. But he didn’t do this, you know, he hasn’t always been just this naturally, um, fit or healthy person. He smoked, he was obese. He drank a overdrink. Yeah. He had a stressful lifestyle. Yeah. And he decided to change all that. Yeah. It was a year is life that a lot of things happened that made him really say, I have to turn this around and he has, he did it and we’re going to talk with him about that and hit that journey and how, how we all can do it as well. Here’s Phil Riley.
01:41 Hi Phil. Hi Phil. How are you? This is great. Being able to sync up with our time difference over there and hear out. Didn’t that, where exactly are you in the UK?
01:52 Well, we’re in Leamington spa, which is a very old grand town in the Midlands full of beautiful old Georgian buildings. All I’m in, I’m in one right at the moment is a beautiful early spring day. I mean it’s still February, but we’ve had beautiful weather here. 14/15 degrees centigrade, which is perfect for us. I’ve just been out walking the dog. So now life is good, very pleasant.
02:18 Yeah. Yeah. Gorgeous part of the country. Is it awesome? Yeah, we are. You know, here in Oregon and enjoying a very cold, brisk morning this morning. I don’t know, I couldn’t do the centigrade on that. The Celsius you it, no, it’s maybe one or two. It’s cold. So anyways, it’s cold and brisk care, but at least it’s not raining. So we’re always happy about that when we are here in Oregon.
02:42 Like all Brits, we all complain about the rain.
02:43 Yeah, yeah, yeah. People say to me, Oh, you’re used to the rain. I’m like, yeah, it doesn’t mean I like it. Well we just gave a brief intro into your, into the podcast, talked a bit about your book and kind of you know, what you’re doing with the life of Riley Book and I love the title just to fun. How well did that work out for you? Right.
03:09 Works out pretty well. Although some people did say one all want to read a book about your life. I have to explain, it’s a little bit about my life, but it’s more about health and lifestyle and living longer and it just so happens I’m called of Riley, therefor it worked out.
03:28 Yeah. Well it’s a really interesting, the whole, the whole thing. And we’re going to get to kind of dive into why you did it and really what the, the hope is for for writing it. And what you’re hoping to encourage. I know it was based a lot on the life expectancy numbers in the UK, but I think it’s certainly applicable to the world and,
03:52 and certainly the, the u s certainly I think the west many of the issues that I talked about in the book are very, very common issues across the list. I think some of them just wouldn’t apply in developing nations but in the US, UK, Australia, etc. It’s very similar.
04:09 Yeah, we’re facing the same problems for sure. So some of those problems that you were struggling with in your thirties and forties, and, and I think you say this kind of, you are on a fast track in terms of your career.
04:23 I’ve been a very successful, media professional, have risen up the ranks and was a chief executive of a fairly major company in my early thirties and spent a lot of my time having breakfast, lunches, dinners with people, drinking, uh, a lot, uh, for social reasons. Uh, you know, oiling the wheels of commerce, I think, as they say, right? Not having a lot of time to spend either with my family or, uh, working out and being fit and healthy. And I did find myself slipping, aged around 40, into quite a serious problem. Um, I mean I had been a smoker. I had stopped smoking when I was 33 when my first child was born. So I had gotten over that particular problem early. But it hadn’t stopped me carrying on eating and drinking. And by the time I was 40, I was clinically obese. I had a body mass index of about 33, I weighed over 20 stone. Uh, which in pounds, you’re going to ask me… 280 odd pounds in US terms, 125kg or something. So, you know, I was a big heavy, I’m in, I’m very tall. I’m six foot, you can’t see this, but I’m very tall. Six foot five. But even so when 280 pounds, yeah, I wasn’t built like in American footballer, just a fat guy in a suit.
06:00 I decided I wanted to do something about that. So I did start in my forties, early fifties, getting fitter and healthier and I lost some of that way, but it was a bit of a struggle to constantly keep it off and it came back on and I go to my early mid fifties. My career was starting to change into a slightly different stage of career. And I just got to the point where I was starting to think I really could do with trying to lose a bit more of this weight and be a bit more scientific about how I do that. I had a couple of quite dramatic things happened in my life. Uh, three good friends of mine, people that I’ve worked with who’d been part of my career, uh, as it went through all died and they were in their mid to late fifties or very early sixties. They all died of things, which in part you could go and pin back to lifestyle issues.
06:58 Uh, and that was having to get out of the suit and the dark tie quite a lot in the space of 12 months to go to these funerals, was quite upsetting. And seeing your friends and your people who have the same age as you thinking this shouldn’t be happening. Really the people in their fifties and early sixties. Um, then my mother died and she died at age 76 or 77, actually, sorry, uh, she’d been a smoker. And I’ve tried to persuade him to stop smoking and failed and she got an emphysema and that was a very frustratingly tragic early death of somebody that you’re very close to all the after that. I don’t know whether you refer to this in your introduction. I myself had a bit of a scare when I had an accident, uh, essentially in the garden at the house and we were living in at the time and I sliced open my forearm really badly.
07:54 Um, and uh, managed to get back to their house and call for an ambulance, I had my son call for an ambulance, um, and managed to get my arms sewn up, but could quite easily actually have severed the artery of my forearm, so I could quite easily have bled out in the corner of my garden and no one would have known anything about it. So that combination of friends dying early, my mother dying and me having this brush with death, made me just really start to think a lot more about, okay, what is it that you know, that is causing people to die early and what can you do to avoid it? And of course I’ve got this second chance because I thought I came pretty close there to dying. So maybe if I’ve got a second chance, I should think a bit more about what I need to do to give myself as long as I possibly can with this second chance.
08:54 And when we started this business, it was really our, you know, our five daily actions came from me kind of watching my parents take two very different paths towards aging. Luckily my dad is still here, he’s 91 and he’s kind of our poster child for living that, uh, longer. Yeah, longer happier life. And certainly like you, he had a pretty big scare when he was 50. He had a massive heart attack and really should have died and didn’t and then, you know, went on to make changes in his life. And really that’s one of the reasons that we wanted to talk with you is that this isn’t about like people that have just always been, you know, fit and naturally just, you know, it’s always been a certain part of their life. People can and should make those, make those changes in mid life that can impact because they really can and and you did a lot of research into the numbers.
09:56 I did and one of the things that that came out very strongly from that is you can change it almost any time. You will start reaping the benefits almost immediately. If you make all the changes and you’re 60, you won’t get the same benefit as if you’ve made all those changes at 30. But you’ll still get benefits. You’ll still get value added life. And I think even at age 50 or 60 even when you’re in that period when it matters the most to make the change, the important thing is to do something about it and make a quantifiable differences to how you live your life. Because when you get to the age of say 70 if you’ve slipped into that permanent ill health structure. You aren’t as physically able as you were because of those lifestyle changes. It’s extremely difficult at that point to pull yourself back. I’m not saying you can’t but it’s more difficult.
11:26 Whereas actually if you can make those changes 10 or 15 years younger and maintain physical health, well being, then that will get you a lot further in good health. And uh, one of the things I talked about in the book is, it’s not just the difference in longevity between somebody who might live until they’re in their late seventies versus somebody who might live until the mid eighties before this. If you live till 77 but the last 10 years of your life has been spent in and out of hospitals or clinics, taking pills, not doing anything, being ill, then your good quality of life finished when you were 67. But if you’re 85 and actually it’s only the last three or four years when you’re in and out of hospital, you’ve added 15 years of good health. So, the years of good health that you add is the real value added. I certainly think I talked about this in the book at a population level, if you make the changes that I’m suggesting, you make and maybe it’s in the changes that you guys I know, talk about, to make these changes in enough time, you can easily get another 10 to 15 years of good health at the end of your life.
12:17 And those are really important years. I had lunch with a friend yesterday who was a few years older than me and he was telling me that his eldest daughter’s just had her first child and he’s just become a grandfather now. He’s in his mid sixties. I’m sure He wants to see that grandchild grow to be an adult, be around for another 18 years to see that happen. So he needs to ensure that his lifestyle allows him to move from his mid sixties to his mid 80s in order to do that. And that’s, I think the real motivations. My dad died in his very early sixties. He saw my two daughters born, he missed seeing the birth of my son, and so he’s missed all of my kids growing up. I feel terrible about that. I’m sure he’d been a great doting grandfather, but he missed all of that and I don’t want that for myself.
13:14 yeah. Our five daily actions that we do. We say, you get the benefit from it right now as well as, you know, so everything that we say, by doing these five daily actions, the benefit happens right now. It, it improves your life right now. But the, the long term effects are, are just so much, like it’s hard to, it’s like most things when you say you’ve got that like the long game you don’t see, you don’t see a lot of effects immediately, but for our five daily actions you actually do. If you’re doing these things, it does improve your life right now. But you’ve got that long term effect as well.
14:01 I mean, I think what’s interesting is that we are now increasingly world where actually from a sort of physical and scientific perspective, we can actually measure some of those things. Uh, I don’t know whether you ladies wear a fit bit or something similar to that because I know you walk a lot. The great thing about having that device is, you can see if you look at your resting heart rate, there’s an example of it. If you’re living healthily, you’re getting a good night’s sleep. You’re walking every day, you’re doing a bit something else, maybe once or twice a week on top. You can see your resting heart rate responds to that and go down. And I think of all the different measures that you can apply to people to say, how fit and healthy are you? How, how, how well you’re doing extending your lifespan resting heart rate would probably be right there at the top from you is the number one measure how well you’re doing. And it’s an easy major to me cause you just need to buy a device on your wrist. And keep track.
15:08 I know, I love that idea. I mean it is, it’s true. And you’re five recommendations. If I, and if I correct me when I, if I step off here, but I think number one is to quit smoking, right? To, uh, to,
15:22 I should say it’s to quit smoking, but if you can’t completely quit smoking, at least move to vaping. Or reduce smoking then move completely the vaping, I would say there’s debate about it in the states, but I think the more enlightened members of the scientific community here in the UK are absolutely 100 percent that vaping is it might not be perfect, and quitting would be best.but vaping is 95% better than smoking.
15:50 Okay. Quitting would be would be the highest recommendation. I think all of us can agree on that for sure. 2. If you’re obese, if you’re overweight, you need to lose weight. Chronic being obese is not something that’s going to help you live longer.
16:05 Being obese is very bad, being overweight is probably not as bad for longevity. So you can be a little bit overweight, but I think you do run the risk, then as you get older you might start to have health problems, so you might get the benefit in terms of extra years, but possibly not be as mobile as fit and healthy. So get as much weight off as possible is good, certainly trying to move down from obese to overweight.
16:36 yeah. And into the over weight or average or normal BMI. If you’re over drinking alcohol,
16:43 if you, uh, if you overdrink the small percentage of people who really do drink to excess, all the ones that suffer the most in terms of mortality.
16:57 Yeah. I saw on your, on your tribes.
16:59 Yeah. And of course what you have, what you have with the, with the guys, it’s mainly men, it’s probably three to one ratio of men to women do are really, really drinking too, uh, too much debt. Almost all. I would say almost all 75, 80% of them are also smokers. So they have this double whammy going on that they’re drinking way too much. And that compound effect of those two things is why you do see people dying in their mid fifties, late fifties, from just drinking too much. And many of them you’ll find they’re also smoking. So that’s, that’s a real, it’s a real double whammy now. I think there’s a bigger debate about drinking in general. There are lots of studies which show that moderate drinking on a regular basis actually has a beneficial effect as far as mortality is concerned. Overall. Yeah. protective, uh, heart disease, it probably isn’t protective for some cancers and therefore there’s a debate amongst the scientific community about whether you should or you shouldn’t and how much. So that’s a nuance, but certainly the starting points is, you know, if you’re drinking a bottle of whiskey every night. Yeah.
18:22 And is that, yeah. Are you familiar with, um, have you done or seen any of the research on blue zones?
18:28 Yeah. Yeah. Many of the blue zone stuff, red wine is,
18:33 yeah, they, they talked about that the happy hour. And it’s about not only because of the wine and also the social yeah. Is a glass of wine. It’s not five. And it’s not five cumulatively on Friday or Saturday if you haven’t drank them during the week.
18:48 Uh, this is, uh, I think I alluded to it in the book. It’s my biggest problem because I really do enjoy a glass of wine. And once I’ve taken the cork out of the bottle, I find it very difficult to put it back in. So I have to try very hard to live with myself and not drink. Um, some of the week now be drink two or three days a week and that’s my, everybody’s got a cross to bear and that’s mine.
19:15 So we hit, um,
19:17 Smoking, drinking, obesity.
19:20 So sedentary lifestyle.
19:22 Yeah. Well there’s two more. One Is, um, I, uh, adopted a policy of eating less and eating less frequently. Okay. Funny enough. In the book I talked about only having breakfast and dinner actually since I wrote in the book, because I wrote the book about three years ago. I’ve moved on myself from that, to a more uh, scientifically structure, intermittent fasting type approach where I tend not to eat breakfast now I tend to either just eat one meal a day, two, three days days a week, or if I’m going to have something else, I’ll wait until early, mid afternoon to have something, a snack, and then have my main meal early in the evening, six or seven o’clock at night. Yeah. So I’m concentrating my food intake into a smaller five, six, seven hour period allowing a longer period of fasting
20:23 yeah, we talked to, we’ve actually had, we’ve talked about intermittent fasting on the, on the podcast as well. And I know that, uh, you know, there’s, there’s links to just that, the whole process, not, not only because of the calorie reduction, but has been shown to increase longevity just though the whole,
20:44 Well the autophogy Yeah. It’swhen your body’s gone without intake food intake for a while, it starts going, now could I need to clean everything up? I need to move to plan B for a while and being in that mode. It clearly is very helpful. Then the fifth thing which ties into your Number 1 is, s, uh, I originally in the book talked about walking every day, trying to do two miles a day every day. Um, I originally in the book I had another chapter about doing other activity on top of that, but my publisher at the time said, no, take that out. So people don’t want to be bored witless when you’re talking about going into a gym. So I took that out, but I do think that as well as walking every day there’s a massive evidence, particularly for older people that going to do resistance training, lifting some weights once or twice a week.
21:47 Just I go in and on, maybe I’m in there for 20- 25 30 minutes, and I’m doing some big stuff, some squats or dead lifts with heavyweights, and I’m just doing one set and I’m doing until I can’t do it again and then I’ll move on to something else that I maybe have 10 different sets of things I was going to do and I do one set and when I can’t lift the thing again, I can’t lift it again and I’ll do that maybe twice a week and then it takes me two or three days to recover and then I’ll go back and do the whole process again. Yeah. I think for older people it’s really important. So few people do it, I must be the oldest person in my gym by a mile. Wow. Yeah, that’s a real worry because all the evidence shows that your bone density decreases. Yeah, 1% or so for every year. So if you’re not doing anything from your 50s by the time you get into your 70s, your bone densities shot by 20/25% down. And that’s why you have so many frail, infirm, older people who are more prone or susceptible to falls. And then the damage that the fall does, that’s where my mum had fractures, she damaged her spine in a bad fall, and she just wasn’t strong enough to recover from that. So all of these things are added to together. It all helps.
23:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The compound effect of all of them. But yeah. And that’s, it’s, it’s so true what you say. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that we focus on daily action, of our daily action. Number one is move. And we focus on that as at we always say it’s number one for a reason because not only does moving around help you prevent a loss of mobility as you age, just simply moving every day, getting out and moving around the cardio aspect. Um, you kind of touched, I mean, there’s, you know, yes. Just walking again will help you prevent the loss of mobility. Um, you know, taking it up a notch and actually, you know, get your heart rate going. Not only does it help you in terms of weight loss and that resting, that resting heart rate, but it also has been proven to help with your brain.
24:08 There’s lots of evidence now that some of these degenerative brain disease is caused by the plaques plaques, then the thing that will help move that bring your body into the right state and exercise is one of those critical components of it.
24:31 Yeah. But I love, and I love what you said about about weight bearing exercise too and weight resistance. We, um, on on an earlier episode of our podcast, we had a 67 year old Phyllis bodybuilder. She said, well, she’s a weightlifter, has been a bodybuilder weight into weightlifting, literally all her for her adult life. And um, she’s just amazing. And she’s had two hip replacements, two hip replacements in the last three years. Yeah. And she’s, she’s, but she’s able to, you know, she was able to recover from those relatively quickly and all really because of her, you know, of her, her physical, physical fitness level. And her weight and her strategy with weights specifically as opposed to cardio.
25:17 I know I should say I am the world’s worst person in the gym. I mean I’m a tall, thin lanky guy, I can’t lift the weight that some of these other people are lifting. My technique is passable, but it’s not great. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re lifting 200kg. What matters is that you’re in there and then you’re lifting, you’re doing something active but pushing your heart rate and putting some stress on your body because that is what we’ll cause it to repair, rebuild and that’s what you need?
25:56 Yeah. And that, that’s one of the other things that we say as well. You can start from nothing and just build on it. So like you’re saying, you might not be as good as those other guys, but you can start and every time you do it you are going to get better at it. You know, you’re always, there’s always room for improvement and if you are continually improving then that’s, you know, that you are going to gain the benefit from it. Yeah. And it’s the consistency really. We’ve, we’ve done a lot of lot of sharing lately in the last few weeks on just the consistent, the power of habit and that whole, the, the compound effect, as Angela mentioned before about, you know, it doesn’t have to be just like you said, those 20 minutes every couple of few days. You know, it doesn’t have to be every day for an hour in the gym, you know, it’s, but it’s those every, every few days built up over weeks, over months, over years that ultimately will result hopefully in your, you know, living to a ripe old age.
27:07 I think the one thing I would say and say, not, not take issue with you, but maybe look at it from a different perspective from my perspective is if I were to rank my five secrets, they’re not secrets really, but if I were to rank my five things in order, I would put the alcohol and the smoking as number, what numbers one and two, they’ll kill you and they’ll kill you very early on. For me, the purpose of my book was to say, well, what are the things that you need to eliminate to get to this long age? And in what order do you need to eliminate those. Okay. Even if you did nothing else, even if he was still carrying way too much weight and you never got out of it, got off the Sofa, actually, you live a longer life, right?
27:56 You’re right. So, but the thing is once you’ve dealt with those first and then the next ones are obesity and the lack of movement and then delete, get rid of those four and you’re getting to this tribe five, this fifth tribe and living until your late eighties and early nineties that’s, that is the average lifespan of somebody that isn’t a smoker, isn’t the drinker, is normal weight and who takes regular vigorous physical exercise. They aught to on average, expect to live to their late eighties or early nineties right. So many people die before that, that tells you a lot about how few people are actually following all those rules, how few people are actually taking that much care of themselves. It’s really sad.
28:46 Yeah. Yes it is. And we talked to you a little bit about our five daily actions really focusing more on the, on the brain and on the mindset that is created. Certainly, you know, it’s, yeah, if you aren’t, if you’re doing these, you know, if you’re really taking part of some of these very negative lifestyle habits, like smoking consistently, you know, over for years and years, if you’re really in the excessive drinking, you know, those, you’re, you’re, it’s probably affecting your, uh, mental. Yeah. Your, your, you know, your mindset as well. It’s not like it, I think you tell a story, you told the story there on a podcast about, you know, seeing yourself in a mirror and kind of that realization like, good, this is me. And not even recognizing yourself. And I think when you’re doing those negative lifestyle habits, you’re sort of, you know, you’re buffering kind of it, you’re not really, you’re, you’re, you’re trying to push away the reality of how negative those things are impacting your life.
29:56 Yeah. It’s the catching sight of yourself in the mirror when you’re not expecting, wow, that really fat person is me. And that was happened to me and it was quite a shock. My eyesight’s not that great and i was in a very long hall in a hotel and I saw this really fat person walking towards me down the far end of the corridor and when I got halfway down I realised it was me, and that was one of the things that made me think, I’ve got to do something about this. Now I just see a tall, slightly skinny bloke, ambling towards me.
30:35 Well, and, and would you say, I mean, has it been kind of a natural outcome, do you think of making these lifestyle changes? Of course you’re, you know, you’ve also, you’re, are you fully retired now? Semi retired.
30:49 So I moved into a stage of my career where I am on the boards of a couple of companies and I’ve just come off one, that business was sold just a month ago. I’ve just started a, I’ve just launch the new business with a partner. Um, so podcast in the podcasting industry, not particularly in the health podcasting aspect, but more, more other areas. And so that’s given me a bit more time. It allows me to plan my day and think about what I’m going to do a bit more and if I want to go to the gym in the middle of the day. I can do that. Uh, so I can, I can plan a bit more my time. Although in the end, I think everybody has to plan their time for themselves. I know most people could a job to do and they’ve got to fit in their life around their work and kids and family. But you still, you still got to think about looking after yourself with all of those things because if you don’t, then everything else is going to fall apart. If you don’t look out for yourself, the job will fall apart, your family will fall apart. So find the time to ensure that you’re in good shape.
32:05 Yeah. And I think it’s prioritizing and taking, taking the time to actually figure it out that you have to, you have to do that, you know, if you’re don’t, I think it’s that realization how you spoke about when you were, you know, working all the time and it was breakfast, lunch, dinners. You were spending a lot of time doing things that, yeah, it’s all good fun, right?
32:34 The media business. It was great, meeting fabulous people. A very enjoyable time. The business was booming, so I’m not complaining about that. It’s just you take your eye off the ball.
32:47 Yeah. And you just go on that train where you’re, where that’s just what you do and it’s not until you take the step back and go, I have to also do this.
32:58 I mean I hadn’t been inside the gym or put on a pair of trainers or ridden a bike or done anything for the best part of 15 years and I got to the age of 40/41 and just thought I really need to do something here. I’ve sort of dabbled a bit with swimming and running when I was young. Not Very, not to any degree, you know, it wasn’t a sport fanatic, I’d run round the park occasionally, but I’d just stopped doing that and I really thought, Okay. I need to do…We had a mountain bike in the garage, which my wife had bought two mountain bikes and we’d never been on one weekend that just got on the bike and went out for a ride. It’s came back maybe 10 miles off, came back completely and utterly exhausted. And Luckily for me, the chap who lived in the house next door came round later on in the day and knocked on the door and said, I see you’ve been out on the bike I’m a cyclist if you want to come out with me, I’ll take you out. And uh, and that was great because that then every weekend for the next 10 years, he and I got on our bikes and and went out for a ride. You do need other people to help you. You need friends and partners. People who are going to be supportive. There’s nothing worse than trying to change your life when no one else is interested.
34:26 Yes. So I was, what I was going to ask you is that the kind of in the, like I said, so your lifestyle has changed a little bit in terms of not having to, um, be at an office every day, or involved in that kind of thing. But would you say that all of the lifestyle changes that you’ve made and and kind of where you are in your journey of your, of your own health, has it created an attitude of optimism for you as you age?
34:52 I, yes, I think it has. I don’t feel, I mean you mentioned the retirement word.I don’t feel as though I’m retiring. I just feel as though I’m thinking about new things to do in a different way. And I’m combining them more with other things because I’ve been lucky enough to be reasonably successfully in what I’ve done so we can hold to go away, not holidays and do stuff like that. Um, so I don’t think a lot of people I’m sure will get to my age. I’m 59, I’ll be 60 shortly and they will think, Gosh, only four or five years to go and I could retire either. I don’t like that, I think. Great. Okay. Well how will the next project last or when’s that going to end, will it be a project after that? So I’m just rolling onto the next thing. Not particularly thinking about, uh, how that will, how that will end for me.
35:54 Yes. Yeah. Again, it’s your outlook, it’s like, what does retire mean to you? You know, like my husband, so we are still in our forties and my husband’s looking at retiring from his current job. Yeah. Um, you know, 55, that’s he looks to be done. Can I have the corporate life? Yeah. Ideally that would be nice. Like our kids at all through college and all of that. But then it’s like, what is your next chapter? You know? Yeah. You know, so it like at 55, you can’t be, you know, hanging up your shoes and seeing that it, you know, there’s, there’s got to be more to, you know, who is next. It might not be the corporate life and some, but you have to find that next. What is going here? What is your, yeah. Getting up for every day.
36:47 Yeah. And the truth is, particularly the people that have been reasonably successful as you work up the funnel of the corporate world, and you get the top, you’ll quite likely to end up almost being spat out at the end. That’s the nature of the way of things. Not Everybody can remain in the corner office as the director of the company until they’re in their mid to late sixties. That just doesn’t happen.
37:17 And not everybody wants it more over.
37:19 No, not probably stopped being full time three years ago and moved to this more less structured, uh, multiple roles, lifestyle. And that’s I think something that a lot of people will initially find difficult because it does mean that you’re not having to get up at six 30 or five o’clock in the morning. Some mornings, we got to work. Uh, but I think it does require you to think, right, I need to get up today because I’ve got those things to do when you want to have those things in your diary. I work as a trustee on our local charity and that gives me a great deal of satisfaction. Uh, I’m a chairman of a board of a very small company that a friend of mine runs. I take great delight in going and telling him what he’s doing wrong.
38:14 I’ve got this new venture, that lifestyle that I live with a friend and he’s 15 years younger than me, so he’s full of the joys of spring and he’s, you know, get busy getting on with stuff. But to keep up to speed because this guy is so enthusiastic. So a driven. So that’s, that’s great to have those things going on. If something else pops up on you’re taking it on its merits.
38:36 Yeah. Well, so final words, we’re going to put all of the links here in our show notes to the books, your website and about the book so people can learn more about it. And, and I think it’s a great tale, a cautionary tale and a, and an optimistic tale for creating lifestyle habits and changes that can help you live a longer life. If you could tell people, you know, what would your advice be? Just in a, in a nutshell, what do you want people to know in terms of your yourself and what you hope to accomplish with the life of Riley?
39:13 Well, going back to something we said earlier, it’s never too late to start and the biggest cohorts of people that we could change are the people that you’re talking to who probably aren’t the drinkers and the heavy smokers because frankly if you were into heavy drinking and smoking, you’re not listening to our lifestyle podcast.
39:35 right?
39:38 It’s the people of late Middle Age, who forgot what it’s like to get out of breath. Uh, forgot what it’s like to exercise a bit and just need that bit of a nudge to say, actually if you went to have two or three miles a day and you did go and join the gym and do a little bit more those things and you lost a bit of weight and you were a bit more careful about what you ate and drank, Actually your life would be transformed. The big thing. Nothing, and this is a selling point for people, is if you get to your mid sixties and you can think that you’ve done enough to give you another 15 to 20 years of active, healthy life, that’s a great gift. Not only you’re giving yourself, giving your children and their children your grandchildren. You give your grandchildren, the gift of you being an active grandparent, it’s got to be one of the best things you could possibly be hope.
40:41 Yeah, I love that. I couldn’t agree more, so
40:48 I haven’t got any grand kids myself. I’m hoping that our children at some point will eventually.
40:49 no pressure, no problem
40:52 Hopefully I’m around to get the myself.
40:54 Well Angela and I both have four kids, so we are stacking the odds in our favor. That’s what we, that’s what we think, right? Yeah, Phil it has been a real delight to talk with you. We appreciate you taking the time and I can’t wait to have people connect with you and learn more about the life of Riley and wish you every success. Thanks so much Phil.
41:14 Thank you.
41:17 Thanks for listening to the live happier, longer podcast. Now it’s time to move, learn, share, and let go. Five daily actions to make the rest of your life the best of your life. See you next week.
41:34 So just a quick word before you go, if you haven’t already, click that subscribe button on our podcast. We would love you to do that and we would also appreciate any feedback you have for us. Positive ones would be excellent. What will take anything you have to say and for a free copy of the fight for life planner, head to five for life planner.com and download your free pdf today.
