
The Shift with Sam Baker
The Shift is a podcast that aims to tell the truth about being a woman post-40, created and hosted by writer and broadcaster, Sam Baker. Did you ever wonder why you stop hearing so many women's voices once they pass 40? That's where The Shift comes in - a frank, funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always honest look at what it means to be a woman in midlife and beyond. Work, life, love, health, sex, money, identity, body image... What does it all mean when everything around you (and inside you...) is changing? Each week, award-winning author and journalist Sam Baker asks a different woman how she got here, where she's going - and how it feels to be where she is right now. Expect intimate conversation, big laughs, occasional tears and an awful lot of ripping up the rule book and stamping on it... Past guests have included Nicola Sturgeon, Marian Keyes, Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White, Minnie Driver, Philippa Perry, Anita Rani, Tracey Thorn, Isabel Allende, Bobbi Brown, Barbara Blake-Hannah and many more, talking everything from confidence to career reinvention, mental health, menopause and so much more.If you enjoy The Shift podcast, and you'd like to show the love, you can buy me a coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theshiftwithsambakerAnd if you really love The Shift and would like to hear more conversations with women over 40, why not become a member of our community and receive a weekly newsletter, get exclusive transcripts, join The Shift bookclub and so much more, please visit https://theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com/For advertising enquiries, email sales@auddy.co
Latest episodes

Oct 24, 2023 • 49min
The Shift LIVE: Trinny Woodall on how she learnt to fear less in her 50s
My guest for this very special live episode of The Shift is the entrepreneur, CEO, fashion and beauty expert, presenter and author Trinny Woodall.Trinny, as you know, bounded onto our screens in 2001, with her friend Susannah Constantine, when they created What Not To Wear, a groundbreaking TV makeover show that showed women all over - first the country and then the world - how to look and consequently feel better. In 2017, at the age of 53, when many women feel they’re being overlooked and even shoved out of the workplace, Trinny founded Trinny London, an online beauty business aimed at women over 35.Now one of the fastest growing beauty brands in Europe, Trinny London is rumoured to be worth $250million and is beloved by millions of women with 1.2milion followers on instagram, 400k on YouTube… Not bad for a business idea investors didn’t think would work because it wasn’t aimed at millennials…Now Trinny has written Fearless. A book about style, about beauty, about life. About overcoming the everyday barriers we encounter along the way. Because Trinny knows, better than any of us, that those things are intertwined.Trinny joined me on stage at Cheltenham Literature Festival to talk about finally starting to feel better about herself in her 50s (and how she felt "too far from the ground" in her 20s (I love that)), imposter syndrome, learning to fear less, how menopause made her lose her mojo and the power and importance of futurproofing your mind and body. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including FearLess by Trinny Woodall, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 17, 2023 • 1h 3min
Dr Louise Newson: I was "told off" for prescribing HRT
Today we’re celebrating Menopause Awareness month (now there’s a phrase I couldn’t have imagined saying four years ago when I was writing The Shift book and everyone was telling me no-one was interested in menopause or women over 40…) And I’m delighted that my guest is a leading light in the British menopause movement.Dr Louise Newson is a GP and menopause specialist who is passionate about increasing awareness of menopause and perimenopause care for all women. (That ALL is crucial.) As well as her own private practice specialising in menopause, Louise is founder of the Balance app and the Menopause Charity. Plus author of the bestseller, the definitive guide to perimenopause and menopause.Louise joined me to talk about her personal menopause experience (sorry to say, even doctors struggle to get help), the lack of female role models in medicine and what drives her menopause mission. She recalls being ‘told off’ for prescribing HRT, her battle to get women’s health front and centre on the agenda and answers some of your most asked questions. If you’d like to hear some alternative menopause perspectives, try my episodes with Dr Jen Gunter, Mariella Frostrup and Karen Arthur. Listenn to the Dr Louise Newson Podcast here.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Definitive Guide to the Perimenopause and Menopause by Dr Louise Newson, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 10, 2023 • 54min
Agony Aunt Philippa Perry is back!
I’m delighted to welcome back one of my most popular guests ever, Philippa Perry.Philippa is an artist, psychotherapist, agony aunt and TV presenter, but she has become best known for her smash hit book, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read which sold over 2million copies and spent 41 weeks in the bestseller lists. Thanks to that book, and her agony column in The Observer, she has become known as “the voice of sanity”.Last time we spoke, I remember saying Philippa should turn her particular brand of wisdom to the other relationships in our lives…Well, now she has. In The Book You Want Everyone you Love to read (and maybe a few you don’t) Philippa brings her no-nonsense wisdom to everything from how we love, to how we argue or don’t (if you’re me).Philippa (and her cat Kevin) joined me to talk about how physical ageing sucks, why it took her until she was 50 to realise a thing didn’t have to be perfect to be worth doing and how she learnt to ditch the shoulds. She also talks about prioritising enjoyment, How to change the stories we tell ourselves, and why learning to please yourself can make your relationships better.If you enjoyed this episode you might also like my conversations with Julia Cameron and Sarah Knight. Find out more about Philippa's tour here.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Book You Want Everyone You Love To Read by Philippa Perry, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 3, 2023 • 59min
Grace Dent on balancing a Gen X body image with eating for a living
Today’s guest and I have lived parallel-ish lives. Growing up “ordinary” her in the north, me in the south, Grace Dent and I both spent our childhood eating baked beans, angel delight and funny coloured school custard, we both “thought we were IT” apparently and we both got our first break on the weekly real life magazine, Chat and somehow wangled our way into glossy magazines. But there our paths diverged because Grace Dent went on to become “one of the nation’s best loved food writers” quote unquote and the woman who brought true potato love to Masterchef.As well as being a Masterchef regular, she is the guardian’s restaurant critic, fortnum restaurant writer of the year, host of the Comfort Eating podcast and the author of two memoirs, the bestselling Hungry, and now Comfort Eating, about what we eat when no-one’s looking. It would be understating it to say I over-identified.Grace joined me to talk about how the hell of secondary school never leaves you, deciding it was time to get sober, balancing her problematic gen x body image with eating for a living, why she moved home in her 40s to care for her mum and dad and The actual crime of being 50If you enjoyed this episode you might also like my conversations with Kate Spicer and Marina Hyde. Find out more about Grace’s podcast, Comfort Eating with Grace Dent here.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Comfort Eating by Grace Dent, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sep 26, 2023 • 1h 5min
Stacey Duguid on coming back from midlife collapse
Before I got to know today’s guest, Stacey Duguid, I thought she was a bit scary TBH. Fierce in all the ways. And then I got to know her - when I was editor of Red and she worked on Elle - and discovered she wasn’t. At all.Because Stacey, like so many of us, is just exceptionally good at putting on a front. And that front served her well, until it didn’t. She was 45 when everything collapsed. Or, more accurately, she put a grenade under it. The thing she’d been trained to want ever since she was tiny: the house, the husband, the children, the career, the happy ever after. All blown to smithereens. Now 49, a single mum and a successful journalist, very much back from the brink, Stacey has written In Pursuit of Happiness, the most brilliant book about a midlife collapse and ultimately recovery. I know you are going to love it.As candid in person as she is in print, Stacey talks frankly about the pain of divorce, searching for a self you’ve never met, self-blame, “hotness syndrome”, perimenopause mayhem (and I mean MAYHEM), making peace with her mother, rediscovering her creativity, midlife sexuality and… toyboywarehouse.com.If you enjoyed this episode, you might like my conversations with Rosie Green and Natalie Lee. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including In Pursuit of Happiness by Stacey Duguid, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sep 19, 2023 • 1h 5min
Sara Pascoe: what happens when a weirdo grows up!
This week’s guest is the comedian, writer, and all-round screen hogger, Sara Pascoe. Host of The Great British Sewing Bee, presenter of Last Woman on Earth and ubiquitous panel-show presence. She has written and starred in her own sitcom Out Of Her Mind (before TV realised women could write sitcoms too!) And she’s also the author of two brainy non-fiction bestsellers, Animal and Sex Love Money. Sara came and sat in my kitchen with Sausage the cat (who was still a bit poorly after his encounter with Ecoli. Thanks for asking) to talk about her debut novel, Weirdo, the tale of a woman desperate to seem like a ‘normal’, well-adjusted grown up...We talked about everything from cat-love, the rhesus monkey theory of motherhood, Happy Valley, Strictly and her short-lived teenage rebellion, to IVF, the importance of sharing salary info, how she learnt to stop doing things resentfully and why she won’t be sad to be done with menstruation!If you enjoyed this episode you might also like my conversations with comedians Josie Long and Cariad Lloyd. Find out more about Sara & Cariad’s Weirdo’s bookclub here.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Weirdo by Sara Pascoe, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sep 12, 2023 • 56min
Natasha Walter on being a middle-aged activist
My guest today is the journalist and human rights activist, Natasha Walter. She is the author of two generation-defining books about feminism - The New Feminism, published in the late 90s and Living Dolls, published just over ten years later, a shocking polemic in which she questioned her own previous beliefs that equality was on the way to being a given and old fashioned sexism was just that, old-fashioned. Oh, how we laughed. Her new book, Before The Light Fades is very different and yet has a lot in common with those books. A memoir of grief and resistance it follows Natasha, now in her 50s, on a journey into her mother’s past after losing her to suicide in her mid-70s. What she finds not only makes her question what she thought she knew about her mother but also what she wants for her future self.Natasha joined me to talk about getting to know your parents as people, rejecting her mother’s feminism and why we MUST keep talking across the generations. We also discussed What feminine rebellion looks like, Doing civil disobedience in her 50s and Why she’s so over organising other people. Oh and thanks to Natasha’s mum I have a new mantra: You HAVE shoes!If you enjoyed this episode you might also like our conversations with bestselling novelist Kate Mosse and broadcaster, therapist and agony aunt, Philippa Perry. * You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Before The Light Fades and Living Dolls by Natasha Walter, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sep 5, 2023 • 53min
Maggie Smith on her midlife reappearing act
Like most of the rest of the world, I first discovered today’s guest Maggie Smith (no, not the legendary British actress, the American poet) when her poem, Good Bones went viral on social media thrusting her into the news on both sides of the Atlantic, featured on primetime TV and was read at an event by Meryl Streep. It’s the kind of exposure people dream of, but in Maggie’s own words “my marriage was never the same after that”. And I know that sentiment is something that will resonate with so many of you.Maggie’s new book, her debut memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful is about the collapse of that marriage, but it’s also about the start of something new, how in losing their shared history and knowledge of the future, she began to build a new story - her own. Maggie joined me from Ohio to talk about putting herself back together after sudden success destroyed her marriage, being a service provider in your own home, how she got herself back after years of bargaining herself away and why we keep having the same conversation about women and ambition. We also compared our Strong First Daughter Energy and she introduced me to the concept of an emotional alchemist.If you liked this episode you might enjoy my conversations with Dani Shapiro and Curtis Sittenfeld.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aug 29, 2023 • 48min
Helen Rebanks is flying the flag for invisible women
My guest today is the farmer, business woman, cook, conservationist, mother and now writer, Helen Rebanks. She has been cooking and baking, professionally and domestically, for more than 30 years, and with her husband, has turned the farm that has been in their family for generations into a global beacon for regenerative farming. (No, I didn’t know what that was either - in short, it’s farming in nature-friendly ways.)Now she’s put all her experience of food, farming and nurturing into one beautiful book, The Farmer’s Wife. A moving and honest account of the daily grind of life on a farm, as a woman whose work too often goes ignored.Helen joined me from the Lake District, where she lives with her husband, four children, Six sheepdogs, 2 ponies, 20 chickens, fifty cattle, 500 sheep and 110 different species of flowers and grasses (!) to talk about the reality of being a farmer’s wife, paying tribute to our foremothers and the invisible work of wifedom (yes it’s that domestic load conversation again). She also explained why she’s passionate about sustainability and being part of the climate solution, What it means to live a good life and The messy dirty joyful stuff of life.If you enjoyed this episode you might also like the episodes featuring Marina Benjamin and Tamsin Calidas.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Farmer's Wife by Helen Rebanks, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aug 22, 2023 • 45min
Dawn Butler is living proof that well-behaved women seldom make history
My guest today has made history – more than once. Dawn Butler, MP for Brent Central was only the third Black woman elected to parliament, when she became an MP in 2005, aged 37. She was the first Black female whip and then the first Black woman to stand at the dispatch box four years later. You might know her, though, as the person who was ejected from the House of Commons for saying what so many people were thinking and using her parliamentary privilege to call Boris Johnson a liar. But before all that Dawn was a computer programmer - no small achievement for a black woman who grew up in the 70s. She also worked in a job centre and then for the GMB union. In short, she is not your common or garden privileged career politician. Now 53, Dawn joined me to talk about what drives her, putting her mission down on paper for her new book A Purposeful Life and how being diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago caused a total rethink. We also discussed menopause, learning to be still in the moment, why she has no time for women who pull the ladder up behind them and the power of a lime green suitIf you enjoyed this episode you might also like the episodes featuring Nicola Sturgeon and Sabrina Pace-Humphreys.* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including A Purposeful Life by Dawn Butler, and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.* And if you'd like to support the work that goes into making this podcast and get a weekly newsletter plus loads more content including exclusive transcripts of the podcast, why not join The Shift community, come and have a look around at www.theshiftwithsambaker.substack.com• The Shift (on life after 40) with Sam Baker is created and hosted by Sam Baker and edited by Juliette Nicholls @ Pineapple Audio Production. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate/review/follow as it really does help other people find us. And let me know what you think on twitter @sambaker or instagram @theothersambaker Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices