The Long Strange Trip Episode 2: Finding Purpose Beyond Work with Alan Newman

About the Episode:

Retirement isn't just an ending; it's a new beginning. Join me, Josh Patrick, as Alan Newman and I explore the winding paths of reinvention during life's later stages. Alan's journey from rural medicine to yacht timeshares and direct mail to manufacturing is anything but ordinary, marked by consistent reinvention. At 72, he faces the challenge of slowing down, grappling with brain fog, and reevaluating his priorities. Together, we reflect on how our relationship with work evolves over time, emphasizing the importance of community building and mental shifts as age brings new perspectives.

We also venture into the emotional aftermath of leaving significant roles at Seventh Generation and Magic Hat, where the loss of a supportive community reshaped Alan's outlook. From planned transitions to the unexpected struggles during the pandemic, Alan's story reveals the continuous need for reinvention, even in retirement. As we navigate these experiences, we also share a captivating journey through the legacy of the Grateful Dead, inviting you to reflect and share your thoughts. Open dialogue enriches our collective journey, and your feedback is invaluable as we continue to explore these shared human experiences.


Transcription:
Josh Patrick (Host)

Welcome to the Long Strange Trip. I'm Josh. I'm the host of the show. We're going to dig into six areas together Finding real work-life integration instead of that brutal 95-5 split too many business owners live with. We're going to approach retirement as an actual reinvention rather than just stopping work. And we're facing death honestly and avoiding PTSD around death. We're also building resilience when life throws us curveballs. We're sharing wisdom across generations and, finally, we're understanding the patterns that show up in all our transitions. I'm not coming at this as an expert with all the answers. I'm a fellow traveler figuring this stuff out in real time, especially now as I navigate my own dual cancer diagnosis at 73. Welcome to the Long Strange Trip. I'm glad you're here.

00:58 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Actually, from my old podcast, his name is Alan Newman. I've known Alan gosh since 1983, I think we went to a New Age seminar together and he and I and another fellow named Bill, a cult.

01:14 - Alan Newman (Guest)

A cult. Call it what it is it's a cult.

01:16 - Josh Patrick (Host)

It was a cult, yeah, and we had three people get together myself and Alan, a guy named Bill Shubar and we started a group called the Mountain Group and the Mountain Group was a peer-to-peer of business owners and we managed to stay together for about 27 years and we finally figured out that you know, I think we're done telling how to do better stuff, but we could actually get back together again. But, at any rate, let's bring Alan on. We'll start the conversation. Hey, alan, how are you today?

01:47 - Alan Newman (Guest)

You know, josh, I woke up, my feet hit the ground and I'm still breathing.

01:52 - Josh Patrick (Host)

And you didn't fall over. You didn't fall over, so all is good, not today.

01:57 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Not today. It's a sore topic.

02:01 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Yeah, well, I can appreciate that Falls are no fun. At any rate, let's talk about retirement and reinvention. When you think about retirement, I mean you've been in business for a gazillion years, you've had more businesses than almost anybody I know, and you sort of recently stopped, or it appears you stopped. So what does reinvention mean in retirement for you?

02:30 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Well, you know, Josh, when I look back at my life which I only do now, never did it earlier. I reinvented myself. How many times you know? I had a career in rural medicine.

02:48

I had a career in the yacht timeshares, you know, in the Caribbean back in the 70s I was in direct mail, I was in manufacturing. You know each one of these was a reinvention that I have learned. What was different about this and how do I apply what limited skills I have to the current process? And I always wondered. I went to five schools in five years in my academic career and I always wonder whether that experience really created the personality of reinvention, Because every time I went to a new school it was a new experience. I had to make new friends, I had to develop a sense of camaraderie with the group and I guess I became more comfortable than most with reinvention.

03:46 - Josh Patrick (Host)

This one was the hardest, so what made this the hardest?

03:58 - Alan Newman (Guest)

you know there was a thread that led through all the other ones about building community. Um, you know whether I always saw businesses.

04:14

I was building communities and if the community had a similar psychographic profile and there was a group of them who would follow whatever I was curious about and that was easy for me. I had a lot of new skills, from direct response to a lawyer to this to that. But you know those were easier than going from constantly busy, always looking forward, to slowing down, being willing to accept that age brings on some fairly significant body and mind changes that I never. I didn't changes. That I never. I didn't know that I was old until I was 72 up until 72.

05:00

I never dawned on me that I was old. I would look in the mirror and go who's that old fart? But besides that I just learned don't look in the fucking mirror yeah, you can say whatever you want, yeah, yeah.

05:18 - Josh Patrick (Host)

So what changed at 72?

05:25 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I started to feel my age age. I started to notice that I was not as excited to get up in the morning and take on the challenges that I knew were there were in the past. That's what I probably. I also started to experience brain fog. You know, all of a sudden, there were times I spent my life reading legal documents. You know it's what you don't. If you're going to be an entrepreneur and you're going to be you have to be. You have to be able to deal with lawyers and legalities. And I got to the point where it was tough. I could not read a legal document and there were times in the day where my brain just didn't function.

06:22

I used to be able to follow six, seven projects going on at any given time. I knew where we are against our goals and those projects. I knew where we were against our budget. This is effortlessly I just they were my projects and they were like children and I knew who they were. And then I had a lot to do to follow one project and even then it was a struggle and so it started around 92. I'm sorry, around 72. And that's really when the topic started to come up.

07:01

I had a good friend who you knew well, who was also experiencing the same kind of problems and we were both starting to struggle with. We were so used to creating something in our minds and then executing it and all of a sudden we were both reminded that the mind was still happy to create, but the execution was getting tougher and tougher, and that was the sign, and then it just continued to get more difficult.

07:38 - Josh Patrick (Host)

You know, same thing happened to me in 71, 72. I was saying I was going to do this business, get consulting clients, get this sort of stuff, and I knew what I had to do, but I just didn't do it. I mean, I did all the planning, did all the stuff, but when it came time to actually do something I just didn't.

08:01 - Alan Newman (Guest)

It took me four years to figure out it's time to move on. Yeah, it was. I stayed active until about 75, and at around 75, I realized for reasons that I think you're aware of I really don't want to talk about at the moment because it's not my story to tell I realized that I couldn't do this anymore. And I really. I had a stepfather Julie's stepfather and I were good friends.

08:33

He was an entrepreneur, we shared a lot of commonalities and in his last five years I watched him struggle with getting older, getting stuff, dealing with the physical and mental issues that age brings, and he fought it the whole way. He made himself miserable and he made everybody around him just as miserable as he was.

08:59 - Josh Patrick (Host)

And I watched and I said you know, I don't want to do that, and so I'm actually kind of proud of myself, yeah, so what do you want to do?

09:15 - Alan Newman (Guest)

What do you want to do?

09:16 - Josh Patrick (Host)

I want to be comfortable aging and still find ways to use my brain use my creative drive and recognize that I just have to learn to find other ways to fill time, because I can't do that all the time.

09:38 - Alan Newman (Guest)

So I've taken up travel more, more motorcycle riding. You know more reading and I'm relatively. It took me two to three years by the way, to get from and but I think you know, at age 78, 79, um, I'm kind of comfortable um I've kind of accepted this is the way it is.

10:03

I have found some things that I can still do. As you know, I am active in a local business and I was really struggling to really do the management portion, and so we just brought in somebody to really take over the management, and somebody who I worked with for 40 years, and so she and I have a very good relationship and we think exactly the same and, as you know, I'm working on a podcast with similar but different goals than what you're doing, and I'm finding that I can still do things as long as I don't have to execute, as long as I don't have to be responsible.

10:48

That's the draw I can still execute, but I can't be responsible for the business any longer. I can comment, I can weigh in, but I can't take the responsibility to make sure all things are being done the way I want them to do, which is really, in my opinion, what entrepreneurs have to do.

11:21 - Josh Patrick (Host)

So it sounds to me like you have had an interesting experience with transition, especially this one. Especially this one because it's taken a long time, and Bill Bridges calls this the messy middle. My friend Susan Bradley calls this passage, but it's the time and I was in the same place for three or four years, but most of the time I didn't realize I was there, and I think that's true for many of us is that if we can actually name where we are in a transition, it makes it go easier and smoother. At least that's my theory.

11:49 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Well, you always have a theory and, as you know, I never have theories. Yeah, and, as you know, I frequently disagree with your theories. Yes, I know that. So you know, in some ways, the most difficult transition I had was leaving Seventh Generation. I had built a community of owners of businesses who were trying to change the world through business, and because Seventh Generation was one of the businesses.

12:36 - Josh Patrick (Host)

That really, I think, demonstrated how we wanted to try to change the world, becoming more environmentally conscious.

12:50 - Alan Newman (Guest)

You know, I could pretty much get to almost anybody who I cared about in either a direct phone call or one introductory phone call and when I left Seventh Generation, nobody answered my call.

13:14 - Josh Patrick (Host)

And to me that was shocking.

13:15 - Alan Newman (Guest)

That's a very difficult thing and it happens to almost everybody. Yeah, that was when it happened to me. In the other transitions I didn't have the level of visibility, I didn't have the kind of community that I had when I did with Seventh Generation, and so the fall off was much greater. And that's when I learned Don't read your press records, you know, seriously, we all put our pants on one leg at a time, and that's when I realized that I'm not, I'm not special, um, that I'm just a guy doing what he's trying to do, and it really made me look at the world differently when I did Magic Hat which you know was a very successful craft brewery certainly on the East Coast and through a lot of the other countries and I never, ever took that for granted

14:20 - Josh Patrick (Host)

and I never felt that I was special, I thought.

14:24 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I was just a schmo. Who? Figured out to apply business 101 to a category that was filled with people who really didn't understand that you know.

14:34 - Josh Patrick (Host)

they were mostly engineers and beer lovers? I was neither, and I was just some guy trying to figure out how to apply business practices to a craft brewery. So let's take a step back to seventh generation. How long did it take you to reach equilibrium after you left seventh generation?

14:58 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Two years.

14:59 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Two years. It took the start of planning for Magic iPad.

15:05 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Okay, once I had a new project, and I'm starting the planning and I've got something you know and we mentioned this briefly earlier before we went online you know, in my lifetime I don't ever remember looking back. I always was looking forward.

15:27 - Josh Patrick (Host)

And when, seventh, Generation ended, there was not a lot to look forward.

15:31 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I was licking my wounds. I was learning that I was a different person to the world than I had been, and once I had something to look forward to again building the beer business, all of a sudden, the back disappeared once again, and I'm now focused on how do I do this in a way that will give me satisfaction and will create something in a way different than what came before me.

15:59 - Josh Patrick (Host)

So let's fast forward to when you were 72. Were you looking forward with with that transition? Yeah, yeah, you know, I knew I had a five-year contract with boston beer.

16:15 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Yeah, um, I knew that was coming to an end. Um, I had a bunch of consulting um gigs, people who were contacting, contacting me to do consulting gigs. So the transition after. Boston Beer. The reality is my last year at Boston.

16:35 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Beer was very challenging for me and this was challenging for me, it was also challenging for them.

16:43 - Alan Newman (Guest)

So when the day came, that the contract was over it was a relief, not a problem, both 7th Generation and Magic Hat didn't end that way. I was not prepared for the ending. I was prepared for the ending of the five-year deal with Boston. Beer and I had people who wanted me to do projects that I found interesting, so I just rolled right along and then I rolled right into Arts.

17:16

Riot in the pandemic, and that's really when I hit the wall, both age-wise. Yes, there were a lot of contributing factors to the failure of my history at Arts Riot. But had I been 65 and not 72, I probably I'm arrogant.

17:42 - Josh Patrick (Host)

You know everybody's greatest weakness is also that their greatest strength is clearly arrogance.

17:48 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I'm arrogant enough to think I could pull this thing off. You know when I got a call from boston to be here and say hey, you want to start five businesses in five years didn't ever dawn on me to question well, why would I ever question? Sure I have a question? I said, sure, let's do that. So really it was a change. The change was age-related. Right around the time I was in.

18:14 - Josh Patrick (Host)

I was probably 75 then.

18:17 - Alan Newman (Guest)

And. I still believe arrogantly that I couldn't, even though the pandemic was problematic, even though I had a financial partner who was creating major problems, even though permitting was dragging because of pandemic and all sorts of issues. I'm arrogant enough to believe if I wasn't that old, I would have pulled it off, because that's what business is really about. How do you make work, um, regardless. And I didn't have it. And that's again when time when Gage Vandervoors died and I realized that it's time for me to settle down.

18:53 - Josh Patrick (Host)

And then it took me two years to kind of get accept that you know.

19:00 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I did two business plans. You know I'm still struggling to be who I was realizing that I can't.

19:11 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Does that answer your question? Yeah, it does. And this is where reinvention sort of comes in. Is that folks who successfully transit through retirement or retirement might be 75 and not 65 these days, but it does come. And it seems to me that reinvention is a big part of that. And, you know, with you doing the podcast, especially on the topics that you're talking about, that's sort of reinvention to me. You know, for me it was. You know, I was just, I was just kind of floating through nowhere. I knew what I was supposed to do, I just didn't do it. And then we went out to lunch and, by the way, alan is responsible for the Long, strange Trip he was talking about a project he was thinking about and I said, my God, that fits in perfectly with where I've been wanting to go. So no, I did not steal, I'm not trying to push it, I'm not trying to go into competition with Alan, because we see the world from a really different viewpoint.

20:15 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Bring it on.

20:17 - Josh Patrick (Host)

I never saw competition. Do you know the?

20:20 - Alan Newman (Guest)

name of mine, by the way.

20:21 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Can I plug mine? Yeah, go ahead.

20:24 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Too Busy to Die.

20:26 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Okay, that's a.

20:31 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I wanted to call it Happy Endings, but it didn't work Well you know that's.

20:36 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Maybe there's a. I was surprised on the Long Strange Trip that it actually wasn't, that I could use it because it wasn't copyrighted or no, it's a different category and when I saw you do that, I went.

20:52 - Alan Newman (Guest)

That's the perfect name for Josh's podcast.

20:55 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Yes, it is In my site in my sub stack and all that sort of stuff. So you mentioned before we started going live that you, instead of looking forward, have been looking back. What's that about? Hmm?

21:20 - Alan Newman (Guest)

You know, when it started, I would get annoyed with myself.

21:32 - Josh Patrick (Host)

What, am I looking?

21:33 - Alan Newman (Guest)

back at. You know, it was a foreign experience for me and it made me feel old, you know because, that's what old people do. They tell the same stories over and over again.

21:56

And I have a long list in the N-word, the never category, one of my N-words was you know, I'm never going to sit around talking about my ailments and I'm never going to sit around telling the same story over and over again. But there are not a lot of new stories to tell. But there are not a lot of new stories to tell and I find myself doing those. So it took a while for me to get to kind of enjoy thinking back at what I had done, because I had a ball.

22:27 - Josh Patrick (Host)

I mean, let's be really clear, I never thought about retirement because I love what I did and my advice to people, and I just gave it to somebody this morning who's in it deep right now.

22:41 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I said enjoy the hell out of this, Because one day you won't be able to do this. I don't feel like I enjoyed it enough when I did it, because the truth is I loved doing it. There's not a single thing that I did, that I didn't truly enjoy myself and done myself to entertain, and so I had to get beyond the N-word to appreciate what it was.

23:12

And that was a bit of a struggle, but I'm now very flexible. I'm not going to say the same story over and over again, but in thinking back, you know, to some of the things that I enjoyed doing and the relationships that I had great relationships. I created some interesting opportunities for people and I created some interesting opportunities for people and I started to appreciate those kinds of things in a way that I never did when I was actually joining them. Does that make sense?

23:44 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Yeah, it does, because when you're doing it you're too busy to sit there and examine and 30-year-olds 40-year-olds as a rule are not especially introspective. I hate to know why you're like this, matt, and 30-year-olds 40-year-olds as a rule are not especially introspective. I was just trying to figure it out.

24:02 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Yeah, and it took 100% of my attention to figure it out, and so, thinking back, who had time?

24:09 - Josh Patrick (Host)

for that? I certainly didn't. As we talked before, my children paid the price for that, um, and I think that that's not unusual with first generation business owners. You know, I think the second generation may be doing different. And the thing that I'm curious about, I need to find some woman first generation owners that come on the show and see if men do business differently than women. Oh really, well, I don't know the answer to that. I've had people say yes and I've had people say no. They do it exactly the same way.

24:51 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I don't think so.

24:52 - Josh Patrick (Host)

I don't think so either, but I think there's a mix that are in there. There are women. I mean we know some. You know when we go back to the Mountain Group there were some people in the Mountain Group that the women were really hard asses. They were way more hard ass than we were.

25:13 - Alan Newman (Guest)

You know, the reality is, and this is something that I learned and worked hard on at Magic. Pet. All male, all female. They both suck. You really have to have a mix, and that's what we're striving for.

25:30 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Yeah, we're not really doing an investigation into diversity, but, my God, companies that are diverse way outperform companies that aren't. It's that simple.

25:41 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Yeah, I agree with you on that.

25:43 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Yeah, you know, when we started adding women to our management team, our business got very different very fast.

25:54 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I always had a balance of male-female management. I may have been a little bit over on the female side to balance the testosterone a little bit.

26:14 - Josh Patrick (Host)

The thing you know.

26:15 - Alan Newman (Guest)

I spent 17 or 22 years, or some amount of time, in the beer industry and I spent a fair amount of time building a relationship when working with a guy named Jim Cook who runs a business called Boston Beer Company, who I believe is the smartest person I've ever known. And I used to follow what he did and that's how I learned to run a beer business. And one day I noticed that he had a bunch of female beer salespeople and we had zero. And I said I called him I called him.

26:55

I said Jim, how do you do that? And he said well, you know, alan, you don't have any because you're looking for the qualities that you know sell beer, and they're all men. It's a male dominated field if you want women, you have to start interviewing differently, look with different qualifications, look at different training. And he said the first couple are really tough, you know, to get a woman willing to come into this male-dominated world. The whole beer industry is male-dom dominated, which is the reason why female salespeople were very affected.

27:38

And he was absolutely right. And so we started changing the way we looked at resumes, we looked at the way we started interviewing, we looked at the way we presented, the way. We started making changes to the way we did some things and when I left we were at least 40% female sales team. Once we got three, it became easier. The first one was too young not to know that this could be a problem and it wasn't.

28:19 - Josh Patrick (Host)

She was great.

28:20 - Alan Newman (Guest)

The second one came in, she probably didn't pay attention, but the third one, I noticed that women were taking us more seriously. In that role because we started to build a female side to the sales department and that only made our sales department far more effective in my opinion.

28:46 - Josh Patrick (Host)

So, alan, unfortunately, as usual, time goes by too fast and we have to end it here. You know, as usual, alan and I tend to have these really wide-ranging conversations and staying on one topic is just about impossible. So if you're expecting to hear about retirement and reinvention, you heard a bunch about that, but you also heard a bunch about just normal. What did we learn over the last? You know my 73 years and Alan's what 78 years now.

29:17

You know you know my 73 years and Alan's what? 78 years. Now, you know, I know 79, but you know, josh, the whole concept that you're trying to do again.

29:25 - Alan Newman (Guest)

You and I frequently disagree on this. Yes To me. One of the things I learned earlier is I have a wife. I have a wife, and you know you kind of separate business from reinvention. To me I don't.

29:43 - Josh Patrick (Host)

Well, when you're in business, it's all one and the same Reinvention. This is just my sort of thought process around reinvention. It happens when you stop working. Many people stop working and they go off into the sunset thinking they're going to travel and play golf and have dinner parties and six months, four months, down the road they're saying what happened to my life. And those are the folks I'm talking about. Really for reinvention, you have been reinventing yourself for 45, 50 years, maybe longer.

30:18 - Alan Newman (Guest)

Probably longer Moving from New York to Vermont, yeah.

30:24 - Josh Patrick (Host)

So the truth is, for you, reinvention is more about transition. For the standard retiree, who we think about as a standard retiree, it's not transition, because they're not even transitioning, they're stuck. And where they're stuck is an ending. They have an ending, that's happened and they don't know how to move on. At least that's my experience. Again we frequently get to the same place in a different way.

30:59 - Alan Newman (Guest)

And I think we would probably do that with this conversation.

31:01 - Josh Patrick (Host)

We would do this one for another hour.

31:03

Yeah, and unfortunately unfortunately, we really are out of time, so we have to end it here. So I'm going to say thank you for for for hanging out with us today. This is Josh Patrick. We're with Alan Newman. You're at the Long Strange Trip Yay, grateful Dead, and I hope to see you back here soon.


Thanks for spending this time with me today. I really appreciate you being part of this journey. I'd be grateful if you'd leave an honest rating and review. It helps other people find these conversations. Lets me know what's landing with you and what isn't. If you love the show, give us five stars, and if you hate it, give it one star, and I'll just cry a little bit. Keep asking the hard questions, keep being honest about what's difficult, and remember we're all just trying to figure this out together. I'll talk to you next time on the Long Strings Trip. Thanks for stopping by.