DON'T LET THE OLD MAN IN
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DLTOMI is a podcast brought to you by Pod O’Sullivan, where he has real and candid conversations with experts, celebrities and ordinary men about navigating midlife. The ups, the downs, the surprises, the opportunities, the secrets and how to do it on your terms, gracefully or even disgracefully!
Pod will explore ways to take charge of your health, to divorce well, to reinvigorate your sex life, to find ways to lift your spirit, to join new communities, to make sure you have enough money for retirement, to laugh, to cry if needed, to change perspectives, and most importantly, to ensure your second act is even better than the first.
Pod O’Sullivan has been fascinated with transitions and personal reinventions for most of his life. His career has seen him in the medical industry, in sales and marketing, consulting industries, being self-employed, being an entrepreneur who successfully sold businesses, being an educator at Sydney Business School, an author, an Executive Coach to 100’s of CEO’s all over Asia, a podcaster, the owner of a failed tech start up and now the co-founder of The Wisdom Vault and host of this podcast.
Migrating from Ireland and England to Australia taught him many lessons. Divorcing with two young kids threw a few more his way. Remarrying and creating the ‘Brady Bunch’ with Carole, his two children and three new daughters, topped off many great life lessons. Pod knows the harsh reality of life’s ups and downs and firmly believes that mid-life, whilst tough on many levels, lonely on other levels and downright confusing on even others, can also include the best stages in life. He is here to explore and find those!
Latest Episodes
Don’t Let The Old Man In now has its own website – Click here for all the latest Episodes and Resources.
The Lego businessman who stopped trying to fix midlife
Midlife identity is something most successful men never question until the job, the title or the kids’ need for them quietly falls away. Steve Pratt spent decades in television and podcasting, co-founding the world’s first branded podcast agency while playing the part his children nicknamed the “Lego businessman”.
After selling the company he set out to fix midlife the way he’d fixed everything else. It didn’t work. So he spent a year running midlife experiments on himself instead, and in this episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In he tells Pod O’Sullivan what he found underneath the costume.
When in doubt, reach out: Nicholas Epley on talking to strangers and making friends in midlife
Talking to strangers is one of the quickest ways to feel happier, and most midlife men avoid it. We keep our heads down on the train and tell ourselves that making friends in midlife is harder than it used to be. Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and author of A Little More Social, has spent more than 15 years testing whether any of that is true.
In this episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In, he tells Pod O’Sullivan why social connection is a choice, and why we so often choose to avoid it.
Ian Westmoreland discovering purpose at age 59 and a half, and finding gold in the cracks!
Men’s mental health in midlife rarely gets talked about until something breaks. For Ian Westmoreland OAM, the turning point came on a Sydney train at 59 and a half, and it led him to walk away from a senior IT career and build two charities: Mentoring Men, which offers free life mentoring to men across Australia, and Kintsugi Heroes, which shares real stories of people overcoming adversity.
In this episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In, Ian talks about finding purpose after a corporate career, why men need to be heard rather than fixed, and what stage three melanoma taught him about gratitude, legacy and the meaning of success.
Why identity change and burnout looks different in men: Dr Kat Page on good work
Dr Kat Page is an organisational psychologist and the author of Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out. She has spent two decades asking one question (what makes work good for us?) across mining sites, hospital wards, universities and boardrooms.
In this conversation, Pod and Kat talk about burnout as a systems problem rather than a personal failing, why burnout in midlife men so often looks like cynicism, what real recovery takes and what it means to give yourself permission to be human in a culture built around coping.
Twenty-two years on breakfast television taught Mark Beretta countless life lessons. Here is what he shared with me.
Mark Beretta spent 22 years as the sports presenter on Sunrise, Australia’s number one breakfast television show, before stepping away from the desk in December 2025. He is also a ten-time Australian water skiing champion, a Major in the Australian Army Reserve, a board member of the cycling charity Tour de Cure and, most recently, an ambassador for the Butterfly Foundation, where his focus is the rising rate of eating disorders and body image pressure among young men.
In this episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In, Mark sits down with Pod O’Sullivan to talk about reinvention, the year he lost his father and watched his mother’s cancer diagnosis unfold, and the small habit, learned from his dad, that has shaped every chapter of his working life.
Are you in the ‘Grey area’ when it comes to drinking? Here is how you know if alcohol still works for you
Most men in midlife who feel like alcohol has more of a hold on them than it should are not addicts, and they know it. They just know something has shifted: the second glass most nights, weekends starting earlier than they used to, a low hum of guilt they cannot quite name.
This episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In sits down with Sarah Rusbatch, bestselling author of Beyond Booze and one of Australia’s leading voices on what she calls grey area drinking, to talk honestly about the space between a normal drinking habit and a real problem, and what it takes to change it.
How to Die Well: Oliver Christen on His Mother's Final Gift
Oliver Christen spent 24 days beside his mother as she chose exactly how she wanted to die. In her mid-80s and no longer able to live with the independence she valued, she decided to stop eating and drinking, a practice known as a death fast, and asked her son to walk the journey with her.
Oliver joins Don’t Let The Old Man In to talk about what those final weeks taught him: how his mother let go of her identity piece by piece, from her soap opera to her cross-country ski races, and how doing nothing became the hardest, most loving thing he could do.
Are you being trapped by your own capability?
Erin Buttermore knows the paradox better than anyone. The more capable you become, the more evidence you seem to find that you are about to be found out.
In her first appearance on Don’t Let The Old Man In, she reframed imposter feelings as the price we pay for growth, a line that stuck with many of you for months.
This time, Erin returns to explore what happens when that growth doesn’t stop.
Elite Coach Andrew May on why burnout is not the problem you think it is: but rebuilding capacity in midlife may well be
Andrew May has spent 20 years in the engine room of elite performance: mental skills and leadership coach to the Wallabies, the Manly Sea Eagles and world champion boxer Tim Tszyu, and the adviser several ASX chief executives call before anyone else.
In this episode of Don’t Let The Old Man In, he makes the case that most men have burnout backwards. It’s rarely a psychological collapse. More often, it’s a capacity problem: not enough recovery, not enough measurement, not enough honesty about what the body is telling you.
Beyond Achievement: Dr. Suzy Green on Meaning, Mattering and the Second Half of Life
Dr Suzy Green helped bring positive psychology to Australia twenty-five years ago, teaching the country’s first university course in the field at the University of Sydney.
In this episode, she sits down with Pod to talk candidly about what happens to men once achievement stops being the thing that drives them.
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