David von Drehle On The Pursuit Of A Good And Meaningful LIfe

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1:32Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:22Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I have a lot of old friends. I mean, obviously I have people I've known for a long time, and I have some very old people that I've known for a long time. But I have benefited very much from the wisdom of much, much older people. I've talked before about my friend, Richard Overton, who when he died was the oldest man in the world. I got to know him here in East Austin. I've talked about my friend, Judge Frederick Block, who I met in the green room of an NPR show in New York City many years ago. He's now in his mid-80s.

3:00He's a federal judge in Brooklyn. I've talked about Coach George Raveling, who I've had on the podcast, one of my absolute favorite people in the world who's influenced me so much, an elder in my life. And so when I saw this book was coming out, I just had to talk to the columnist and journalist, David Vondrelli, who had written a book about a 109-year-old man named Charlie White, his neighbor, when David moved back to Kansas. And I was just super excited. The book is absolutely amazing. It's what I would have dreamed I could have written for my time with Richard Overton. And it's just a fascinating book.

3:44I was really excited to have this conversation. And I think you're really going to like this interview. Fun note, David was familiar with my work, so I sent him a copy of The Daily Dad. And in exchange, he sent a copy to someone I've talked about on the podcast here a few times, my friend Dolores, who is 94. And she liked the book also. So you got a second recommendation here. Check out this new book, The Book of Charlie, 109 Years in the Pursuit of Happiness, a great book of wisdom. David's other book, Triangle to Fire that Changed America is an award winner. And he's a great writer. And when a great writer meets a great subject like Charlie White, hold on to your seats.

4:27And I think you'll see that in this wonderful interview. Enjoy.

4:36You've probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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5:50To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org, code the Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it.

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6:53I loved the book. I thought it was amazing. And it's very close to my heart for reasons I've talked about on this podcast before. But in Austin, when I lived in East Austin, I got to know a man named Richard Overton, who was the oldest man in the world when he died. He was like 112. My son and wife, I was out of town, but he got to go to his 111th birthday party. Oh, my God.

7:25But weirdly, I probably only spent maybe five or six afternoons with Richard. I would stop by his house. I'd sit on his porch sometimes. We had some conversations. But it's one of the most formative experiences of my life, as it sounds like Charlie was for you. Very much so. Yeah. I didn't realize I would wind up writing a book about him, which I think was better just because I wasn't working when I was with him, you know? Yes. And so it was a genuine friendship and just a sense of awe. And there were so many things I liked about him. But one of the best was that he understood he was lucky. You know, he wasn't one of these people who's like, well, do this every day and you can live to be 109.

8:21Yeah, that was something I noticed about Richard. Like Richard drank whiskey every day. He smoked cigars almost every day. And most of the time when I saw him on his porch, he was eating ice cream. So there wasn't any delusions of like, I earned this through my focus on healthfulness. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, and that's, you know, well, we'll get into this in the podcast, but that's stoicism, you know, I mean, that's the essence of it. of not believing that you control things you don't control, but being able to, you know, enjoy and be cheerful about them anyway, you know. I think that's right. So for people who are coming to this cult, you move to Kansas City and basically end up living next to a guy who's then, what, like 102?

9:23and two? That's right. Yeah. We moved here in 2007. Our kids were young. We had left Washington, D.C. and kind of the rat race of the East Coast where we spent, I had 25 great years on the East Coast, but I come from out here in the middle of the country. And it felt like a good place to come and raise the kids. And it was purely by chance that my next door neighbor was living across the street from his father-in-law, his wife's father. And he had just turned 102 years old. And as I say in the book, when you meet somebody who's 102, you don't think you're going to have a long friendship. And so it was just a grace of good fortune that I really got to know Charlie and got to spend a lot of time with him over the next seven years until he passed away at 109.

10:32Was that the oldest person that you'd met in your life up till that point? Definitely, he was the oldest person I had ever known pretty quickly. If I had met anyone in the year, you know, 101, 102, maybe, but no one like Charlie. I mean, the first weekend I was here, you know, I was, we were still unpacking boxes. It was hot August day, and I went outside to get the newspaper from the driveway. I looked up, and across the street in his own driveway is Charlie. He's wearing just a pair of swim trunks. He's got his garden hose and a sponge, and he's washing his girlfriend's car in the driveway. and he waves to me, his hair's flopping over his eye, his chest muscles are, you know, rippling in the sunlight.

11:34And, you know, that's Charlie White at age 102. So I'd never met one like that before, no. One of the things I was thinking about when I took my son to meet Richard was, given where science is going, It may well be that he eventually meets people older than this, right? But he'll never meet a person born earlier than this. Exactly. He was born, I think, 1906, maybe. I forget exactly. But do you think he was, he probably wasn't, given when you were born, he probably wasn't the born, you've probably met people who were born earlier, younger in your life. but it is weird to think that at some point we meet the person who is as far back in history as it's going to go for us.

12:26That's exactly right. Yeah. My grandparents were born slightly earlier than Charlie by a couple of years, but they were gone decades and decades before Charlie passed away. And what attracted me to writing this book, Ryan, was that I wanted to talk basically to my kids about living through change and coping with change. Because I think with great confidence that my kids, your kids are going to live through a ton of change. already have. They're the first people to experience social media as native adapters, but they've got artificial intelligence roaring at them down the track. You mentioned medical change that they're going to see.

13:23And it occurred to me that I really didn't know that much about that kind of change. But the person who would, would be if I could find somebody that went back to the beginning of the century, who was born when there were far more horses and buggies than there were cars, who was born when most people lived and worked on farms, born before air travel, born before radio, born before, you know, there was any sound in a movie theater, on and on down the list. There were 8 ,000 miles total of paved roads in the United States at the turn of the century, the whole country. And so if you got from that, from before radio to owning an iPhone, as Charlie ultimately did, You really had covered a lot of change.

14:23Everything had changed in that world. Charlie practiced medicine before penicillin and lived into the age of robotic surgery. So this was a person who could tell my kids about change and about adaptability and about resilience. And that's what the book tries to do. There's a couple of things there that I think we should talk about all of them. The first is what you just said, which is we think we live in the future, which we do, but the past was always the future for the people living in it, right? And so we feel like we live in this cutting-edge time of disruption and change, but every decade of someone like Charlie's life was a decade of cutting-edge, ceaseless change.

15:12I think that's number one. Number two, we feel like the past is sort of, because we think about generations, we think about things happening in lockstep. In fact, it's really staggered. Like there's people who were born right around the turn of the century that are still with us today or were with us until really recently. I would also say I think what's interesting is like Charlie's experience versus Richard's experience. Richard was a black man born in Texas around the same time. So his experience, like he would have gotten electricity later than Charlie, let's say, right? And he experienced America differently.

15:53So there's that. And then it's just, I don't know, when you get in touch with someone that's lived that long ago, or even if you never met them, you just read about them, you think about them. it, it, it's so on, it unmoors you in a weird way, but then also kind of roots you in a different way because it, it just brings up all these existential and philosophical questions. And, and, uh, I just think it's endlessly fascinating and super, super enlightening. I, uh, I couldn't agree more. Um, I hope that one of the takeaways for a reader of, My little book would be, you know, the United States has always been a divided country.

16:39There have always been fierce arguments. There's always been hate and hatefulness. There's always been rich and poor. There have been all these divisions that we wrestle with now, fears about the future, uncertainty. That's always been the case. And so every life deals with that. Yes, the young people growing up today are wrestling with those things as well, but they are not impediments to a meaningful, useful life. Yes, the world has pain and difficulty in it, but it also has beauty and joy in it. And the choice of which ones we're going to, you know, center our lives around is our own and always has been.

17:35Right. Like when I looked at Richard's life on the one hand, you could look at all the injustice and the discrimination and the pain and the things it took out of him to grow up in the segregated South, almost certainly the child of slaves or the grandchild of slaves. He gets drafted to fight in World War II, you know, fighting for a country that doesn't ensure his own basic rights. That has to come home to a segregated United States, all of that. So you could focus on that, or you could focus on the enormous amount of progress and change that happens in the course of that same life, which you sort of alluded to the idea of stoicism earlier.

18:14One of my favorite exercises from Epictetus is this idea that every situation has two handles. Yes. And we decide which one we're going to grab. And I think when you think about the distance past and you think about the people who are with us today who experienced that past, you can decide to find that very depressing and disillusioning or very inspiring and encouraging. And that's sort of ultimately on us. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I've had a couple of readers come to this book and say, oh, well, it's easy for Charlie White, a doctor, a white man in 20th century America, easy for him to be a stoic.

18:52Sure, his father died young. His first wife passed away under terrible circumstances. Yeah, he had pain, but not that much. What about a slave? What about a person born into slavery? And what I say is. Stoicism is the philosophy of slaves. Epictetus was a slave. You know, Viktor Frankl, the great Stoic of the Holocaust, was enslaved. And whether it's Epictetus, the slave, or Marcus Aurelius, the emperor, what they all understand is that, in a sense, we're all enslaved to fate, to circumstances, to injustices, to things going wrong, to pain in our lives. And all we have control of is how we face that, which handle we grab on that two-handled container.

19:55And

19:59I sound confident in talking about this now. This is a philosophy that I've worked on for my whole adult life. And I get it, and then I lose it, and I forget it, and I find my way back. But what I have absolutely come to conclude is that you don't gain a day of life, and you don't gain an ounce of happiness by focusing on the things outside of your control. It is remarkable that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius would be at such polar opposites of the social and legal spectrum. And yet they have more in common than they don't, right? They both wake up and exist in a world that is fundamentally outside of their control.

20:46Epictetus doesn't choose to be a slave. Marcus Aurelius doesn't choose to be the emperor. If you had to pick which one of those you would want, you would obviously pick Marcus's hand than Epictetus's, but they're still hands that are dealt by circumstances and time and fate. And ultimately, the philosophy in life is about deciding to play that hand. And we could see how Epictetus plays his hand remarkably well, becomes one of the great philosophers of all time. But Marcus, the expectations that come out of that hand are also so high, right? And so, again, one is probably more fun than the other, But they are both constrained fundamentally by so many of the same things, the ultimate of which being that they're mortal human beings who don't control when they depart this life.

21:38And I think we have to understand that all of us are in that same boat fundamentally, which is we wake up and most of what happens is not up to us. And we have to zoom in and focus on what is up to us. And our ability to do that or inability to not do that largely determines the success or failure of that life. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It tells us that human beings have more in common with one another than divides us, which I think is an important thing for us to remember right now, that if either one of us, you or I or a person walking down the street were to make a list of the 10 most important things to us.

22:27I bet six, seven, eight of them would be the same on every list, you know, family, health, you know, loved ones. We want to make a difference in the world. We want to improve our little corner of it. And so the philosophy recognizes that. and it's got such a bad rap in the sense that it's gloomy, it's defeatist, and that's, as you know, just the opposite of what it is. It's highly effective because it focuses you on the things you can actually affect. it's I think a super cheerful philosophy I mean you know you've got Epictetus being tortured having his leg broken and smiling the whole time you can't get much more cheerful than that you know I think about Mark I think about Marcus Aurelius here you have a guy he loses his father early on he gets thrust into maybe the worst job in the world which is being the the head of the Roman Empire.

23:44He deals with war, flooding, a pandemic or a terrible plague, a coup attempt. He buries eight children. You know, it's one thing after another. And when I think about this idea, the stereotype that he's depressing because meditations has some dark themes in it, I go, how did this guy get out of bed every morning? You think of the immense human fortitude and strength to get out of bed, to greet each day, to try to do one's best, to not become a nihilist or a cynic or even an asshole, is a feat of supreme human endurance. And when I think about you, take someone like Charlie, right? Like I'm in my mid thirties and I'm tired, right?

24:35Like I'm frustrated. I'm jaded about things. You think about what it takes to live for 109 years, even with just ordinary frustrations and the difficulties of life, putting aside heartbreak and loss and pain and all of those things to just continue to keep, just to keep going and to not give up and to not say, I'm done. I don't want to do this anymore. That is the, that is what real optimism is, not wearing rose colored glasses. Right. That's exactly right. It's not, you know, I, I described Charlie's optimism, you know, and it is not a blindness to things that are wrong or to things that are bad.

25:28It's simply a selection, a choice of one's own stance in regard to those things. Are you going to be controlled by them?

25:41Let's say I had a bad morning this morning, and this afternoon I'm going to meet a new person, an interesting new person, Ryan, and talk to him. Am I going to let the morning ruin my experience of this new person, you know? That's my choice. I get to decide the stance that I'm going to, from which I'm going to greet the world. And that's what Viktor Frankl tells us after his study of the Nazi annihilation camps, is that that's the only thing. That's the last thing that we have is how we stand when we face the world.

26:33Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

27:18We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

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28:40Yeah, you talk about Hemingway briefly in the book. He's obviously a reporter there in Kansas City. And I'm fond of his line. It's in A Farewell to Arms. He says, you know, life breaks all of us, but afterwards we can be strong in the broken places. And you think about just the sheer number of breaks that would happen in the course of a life that's as long as a century. Not just You probably break most of your fingers. You break most of your toes. You slip and fall. You would accumulate literal breaks in your physical body over the years. But you would have heartbreaks. You would have loss. You would have disillusionments.

29:21You would have hope would leave you from time to time. But the only way you could continue to keep going would be through an immense amount of endurance and also courage. There's a line from Seneca where he says, sometimes even to live is an act of courage, like to wake up each day. And this is a guy who lives through the First World War, the Spanish flu, the World War II, just one thing after another. Yeah. You know, I've got him, he gets through medical school, which was fun to write about, just to see what doctors learned in the 1920s. A little terrifying. But, you know, he finally gets through all that.

30:13And, you know, he's a doctor. His dream comes true. And I'm like, look at the calendar. It's 1929. You know, The Great Depression hits him in the face. And he struggled all through that decade to pay the bills. Doctors, I came across a wonderful study that was done contemporaneously in the 30s that identified doctors and health care providers, hospitals, as the hardest hit industry in the entire depression. Because they had to keep working. You know, the demand, there was no less demand for their services. They were obligated morally to provide their services, but people didn't have any money to pay them.

31:01And so wham, you know, just when you think it's going great. When think about his, even his profession, right? He is fundamentally seeing people at their worst, their most vulnerable, their most fragile. and you could imagine the accumulation of that could wear a person down or break them, right? And somehow you have the opposite occur. Yeah. He said, the thing I loved, he said it right up to the end of his life, the greatest privilege in the world was to be a doctor because you did get to see people at their worst. Because you did, you were welcomed into their families, into their homes, into their lives in an intimate way that no other profession could experience.

31:54And that's a perfect example of this frame of mind that creates, I started to say creates happiness. Charlie said at one point to me, I'm not sure I've ever been happy. You know, he had a contentment. He had a satisfaction. He felt he had lived a useful life, purposeful life. And he was cheerful and he was full of joy. So happiness, you know, maybe it would help a lot of people who struggle with this endless, unsatisfied search for happiness just to set that idea aside and think about some of these other definitions of a well-lived life. Let's talk about history for a second, because I think it's almost undersells it to think, okay, this is when this person was born, and this is what happened during their life.

32:58I find it fascinating to think about who was old when they were young, and how quickly you get back very early in history, right? Like the oldest living veteran, because that was the thing about Richard is he was the oldest living veteran. So I tried to think, you know, based on what I could find, who was the oldest living veteran when he was born? And it was the Blackhawk War. Yeah. Right. Which Lincoln fought in as a boy. And, you know, you think about how many handshakes it takes from people that were alive at the same time. Like, you know, he shook Barack Obama's hand and then Barack Obama shook Queen Elizabeth's hand, who shook every living dignitary in the world's hand.

33:48When she was very quickly, you're like, oh, I'm to the time of George Washington. Yeah. You know, not that many people. It's really remarkable. I wrote a column when my mother turned 90 years old. It was about four years ago. And I said, you know, my mother was alive when Oliver Wendell Holmes was alive. And Oliver Wendell Holmes was alive when James Madison was alive. He was the longest lived of the founding fathers, I think. So, yeah, that's just a couple of potential handshakes. and you're back to the founding fathers. In Charlie's case, there's a wonderful discovery I made. When he finished high school, he was just 16 years old.

34:37He and a couple of buddies decided to drive from Kansas City to Los Angeles in a Ford Model T, and this was before there were any roads. And so they're basically just banging their way across fields and deserts to get there. And they go through Dodge City, Kansas, which Charlie loved the stories of the pioneers. And so I looked this up and I was like, holy smokes. When they were driving through Dodge City, Kansas, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were both still alive. They weren't figures from ancient history. One was working in Hollywood and the other was working in New York. And so the point is absolutely right.

35:26And it drives home this idea that history is a thing that's lived, not studied. And as a history buff, that means a lot to me. Yeah, I mean, Oliver Wendell Holmes knew Ralph Waldo Emerson. And it also humanizes it very quickly because you realize these weren't these abstract figures, but that Emerson, let's say, was a person who was alive, who had friends, who had friends of friends. And suddenly that ripples out to a degree where you're like, oh, this person met this person and this person met this person. And these people that changed the world were real. You know, the great man of history theory can feel sort of very inaccessible and enormous.

36:18And then you realize, oh, no, these were just human beings that walked the earth around the same time as, you know, people that pat you on the head when you were a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Another of those statistics that hit me when Charlie was a young boy in Galena, Illinois. Where Ulysses S. Grant was from. Exactly. He was, I said Galena, it's Galesburg in Charlie's case, but I had Grant and Lincoln on my mind. Charlie was closer to the Civil War than my kids are to the Vietnam War. and so the Civil War was not an abstract idea. There were people walking around the streets. There were old guys with arms missing and legs missing and who had done it and been there.

37:15And then I was sitting in a room with him showing him the book I published 10 or 12 years ago about Abraham Lincoln and a year of the Civil War And it would hit me, you know, we're coming from two different places to a story about the Civil War, you know. Civil War is a story about people he knew. That's where I am. Yeah, it really happened. Yes. Right? Like, it really happened. And there are the scars and the trauma and the loss to prove it. And so quickly, history becomes this thing that exists in books and not, as you said, something that people lived through and those people's children are still alive.

38:07I was just thinking about this recently, another sort of American history quirk like this. Douglas MacArthur's son is still alive. And Douglas MacArthur's father was a Civil War hero. So that's three generations. Not just three generations, but I was reading recently, because it's here if he popped up in the room, in the news, Douglas MacArthur's son, Arthur MacArthur, lived in a building in New York City that they wanted to turn into condos or something. and the developer had to pay him a bunch of money to get him to move out. And you're just like, it goes from the Civil War, one of the most consequential events in American history to old man in building in New York City getting in the way of developers.

38:56And it's like, this is the guy that fled the Philippines with his father in a boat when we didn't know if America would survive. And now, again, he's in the way of a condo that one of my friends might live in. Exactly. Get him out of here. I think the reason this is important, and I hope that Charlie's story kind of brings it to life in an easy, accessible way for people, is that history was as contingent as our lives are now. It was not determined. The outcome was not known. It could always have gone other ways and did go other ways for people whose stories might be lost. You know, and the when you flatten history just onto the page of a history book, what it does is it takes the teeth out of it.

40:01It takes the danger out of it. It takes the terror out of it. And so all of a sudden, you know, the Great Depression becomes, you know, a page and a half in the high school textbook. And it seems bad, but they also, you know, made The Wizard of Oz, so how bad could it have been kind of thing. And what I really think, I don't mean to sound condescending, we all need to focus right now in this time that feels very strange to a lot of us on the fact that the future always seems strange and has a menacing tinge to it. And, you know, yes, January 6th riot was scary. Yes, the, you know, Internet is intimidating.

41:00But holy smokes, two world wars in 40 years, that was pretty bad, you know, with the depression in between. Well, that was something I took a lot of heart in during the pandemic. You know, this idea, OK, everything has two handles. So when you would talk to people who have lived through the depression or landed at Normandy, as my grandfather did, or you talk to someone like Richard, who the First World War, the pandemic, the great influenza, racism, et cetera, obviously these things were not fun. And obviously they did not choose to go through them and they fought with everything they had to stop them, to cut them short.

41:42But when you ask them about those experiences, they never say that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I was never the same. I regret every minute of it. In fact, these are formative moments that they understand changed them, that taught them things that are central to who they are and how they see the world. And I'm sure there are people who saw as terrible. And those people are probably not walking around anymore. But that how you will say, see the last three years of the COVID-19 pandemic or the recession or the political unrest, you choose whether that was good or bad for you. Like so many of my parents, I knew these parents of kids around my kids' age, they were calling 2020 the lost year.

42:40And I thought that was just almost disgusting. You don't hear someone like Charlie refer to the Great Depression as the lost decade, right? It was just an experience that they had, a thing that they got through, and ultimately something that although they don't look at fondly, there is some sort of beauty and meaning and significance in it. And it's the truest thing that we can learn is that life is this tapestry of easy and hard, good and bad, joyful and sorrowful. And we narrate a story for ourselves out of that. I really think that's true. and the story we tell ourselves then, and this is the important part psychologically, it then turns around and forms us in a way.

43:46And so, you know, I'd always end up laughing, you know, in Charlie's Den because he'd tell some, you know, just really difficult story, about the camp he was sent to as an eight-year-old boy after his father died in a freak accident. He was so depressed, Charlie, as a little boy, he wasn't eating, so his mom sent him off to camp. And the camp turned out to be this strange sexual molestation thing going on. And Charlie's narration of it would be like, That was the weirdest camp you've ever heard of, you know? And it would just be kind of another lark, you know, another story along the way. And we tend to say, well, some people are happy.

44:45Some people tend to be cheerful. I can say as a person who is probably, you know, my basic lying down attitude toward life is on the depressive side, you know, that if I tell myself the right kind of story about my life, that I'm the luckiest person I've ever met, I genuinely believe that, it makes me feel better. It does. It works. Well, Mark Cirillo says our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts, right? And so I don't think he's not saying the law of attraction. If you think good things, good things happen to you. But if you decide to tell yourself that what happened was for the best, that there wasn't anything you could have done to make it otherwise, and that ultimately it made you better, then that becomes true.

45:42Yes. I absolutely believe that. I mean, I've got, you've mentioned Emerson a couple of times. My undergraduate mentor, Bob Richardson, is probably the defining biographer of Emerson. And he also is the person who really introduced me in a meaningful way to stoicism intellectually. And I had graduated from university where I met Bob. Bob, the book is dedicated to Bob. And I had incredible stroke of luck. I won a fellowship to study overseas at Oxford. And I got over there and I felt homesick and it was rainy and dark and I didn't get all their jokes and the beer was warm. And, you know, I sent home one of these self-pitying, depressed letters to Bob.

46:39And he came back with a long letter basically saying, yeah, that's how you're supposed to feel. It's not supposed to be easy. You're not going to be changing and growing if it feels comfortable. And he quotes Marcus, you know, life is being a soldier, you know, buck up. And it changed my life. And as I say, I've learned it, I've forgotten it over and over again, but I've been on a path to better mental health ever since. Yeah, I think that quote from Marcus is, at least in the translation I like, it's, life is warfare and a journey far from home. And I think it's beautiful to think he's being metaphorical, but he's also being literal.

47:27For him. Most of his reign is spent very far away doing terrible things. And he understands that that's what life is. He doesn't have this expectation that it's supposed to be, you know, sunshine and kittens. He accepts that's what it is. And he says, you know, how do I find good and happiness and meaning and purpose inside of that? That's the job. Exactly.

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50:36I'll send it to you. But one of the pages I have in there, I was struck by this passage in Senator Ben Sasse's book, The Vanishing American Adult. And he's talking, he says, you know, if an alien came down to earth, one of the things that would strike them weird about our society, he says, is how age segregated we are. That basically young people spend time with young people, old people spend time with old people. And I think one of the beautiful things about this book and about some of the relationships I've had, I like to joke, like, I know this other guy, he's in his 90s, and I say he's my oldest friend, right?

51:18Which is true in both senses. But I've gotten so much out of these relationships with people who are from totally different generations, totally different circumstances from me. and it sounds like you did too. Talk to me about why people have to actively unsegregate themselves as far as age goes. You know, it works in both directions. And I learned this lesson both from Charlie and from my mom, who lived to be 90, which is not that unusual anymore, but is really quite a good long life. In both cases, they outlived most of their initial original set of friends. In Charlie's case, he outlived round one of friends, round two of friends.

52:10And what they both understood is that, A, how important society and friends are to our mental, physical, spiritual health. But that that's an active project. And especially as you age, making new younger friends so that you don't run out of them, it takes work and you got to put yourself out there. And it doesn't happen accidentally. But then same thing on the other side of the coin. I guess when I met Charlie, I was 46. He was 102. There was no obvious reason why I needed to walk across the street every few weeks or few months to sit down and spend an hour with him, except that he wasn't, yes, his age was interesting, but he was also a fun guy to sit and talk with.

53:19He was interested in me as much as I was interested in him. He had perspectives that I didn't have. He had a view of the whole thing and what it means and sort of how he would talk freely about mistakes he'd made, about things he didn't get right. And he wasn't regretful or rueful, but it was useful for me to hear an intelligent person talk about where he made the wrong call or why or how he stumbled into a mistake. So it's just like, you know, you don't want to just eat fast food hamburgers. You don't want to just have friends your own age. Same thing. Yeah. I think one of the things you realize when you spend time with little kids or really old people, it's a nice reminder that not everyone is operating on the same wavelength or has the same energy as you.

54:29Right. They care about different things. They know about different things. They don't know about certain things. They don't sweat certain things. And because it's so easy to kind of take your worldview, your level of anxiety or stress or concern or ambition or sexual desire, just all the things that are rumbling around inside of a person. And then you meet someone who's 90 or you talk to someone who's nine and you're like, oh yeah, we're not all feeling this way. This is made up or this is inside me. And it doesn't it's it's not permanent necessarily. It's not predetermined necessarily. And, you know, what can you learn in either direction and try to change who you are if if they seem happier or less worried or stressed out than you?

55:18I'm glad that you put little kids in there as well, because it's modeling in both directions, I think. You meet a happy older person, at least in my case, and part of what I'm looking for is making mental notes. How do you do this? How do you get older and do it with grace and dignity and style? But then I love to spend time with little kids. And part of it is to remind myself of the things I used to do better than I do now, you know, like spontaneous joy, like the free play of imagination, like wonder. You know, wonder is an easy thing to lose, and it's such a joyful part of life. We found Charlie's family, after he died, found in his nursing home that he had sat down very near the end of his life and sort of written out his philosophy of life.

56:36And it's all these little two and three word commands. They're all, they all have a verb and a noun. And I call it the operating code for a purposeful, meaningful life, because it's kind of like little bits of computer code. And one of them that spoke to me is enjoy wonder, you know, and little kids get that. But God, how many of us in the middle of our lives lose sight of just being blown away by stuff. In Discipline is Destiny, I talked a lot about Queen Elizabeth, who I find fascinating, obviously also lives to be very old, sees an enormous amount of change. What I found so fascinating about her, you know, she's I think she sits across from 13 different prime ministers in almost every case, although she had no real formal education, you know, is is supposedly just this figurehead.

57:41In most of the cases, she knew more than the person she was sitting across from. She knew more about life. She knew more about the government. She had more briefings than they had. And yet, and part of this is her job, but I think King Charles will have much more trouble with it. She had this remarkable amount of restraint. So all of her experience and knowledge didn't translate, as it so often does, into condescension, know-it-all-ism, you know, control. And I tend to find that in the very old people that I admire, Richard, the same thing. I would try to get him to tell me stuff, to give advice, and he'd be like, I don't know.

58:25Or, you know, it all depends. You know, it is remarkable the humility that you find in the people who, on paper, should have the most authority or the most experience or the most entitlement to try to tell you what you should be doing and how it should go? T.S. Eliot, who is not the greatest human being who ever lived, but is a favorite poet of mine, says in one of his later poems, the only wisdom is humility. Humility is endless. and uh i i that's always spoken to me um and i do think that um uh there's this desire to save people especially that you love from mistakes that you can see are in front of them and that uh and i always said to my kids when they're growing up the greatest gift you can have in life is the ability to learn from other people's mistakes and not just from your own.

59:30Any fool can learn by experience, they say. But what I'm learning as I get more humble with age is that, no, the making of the mistakes, That is life. That's an essential part of it. It can't be removed from it. And it's how human beings are shaped. And it's not clear what kind of a person would come out at the end of a process in which they never made a mistake, never suffered pain, never got scraped up, never bumped their heads. but it wouldn't be a person that you and I would want to sit and talk all afternoon with. Yeah, both her prime ministers and her grandchildren attested to her style, to Queen Elizabeth's style, which was that she almost never told people what they should do, they said, but she was really good at asking questions.

1:00:35So she knew what she thought they should do or she sensed a problem, but she had both the restraint And I think ultimately the wisdom and then also, let's say the savviness to realize that the way to get people to do things or to learn things is to get them to discover it for themselves. And that's a harder way to do it than the sort of lecturing grandparent or the strict grandparent or the strict parent or grandparent. But the ability to sort of go, are you sure? What about this? You know, I don't know. you know, the sort of the trailing off statements, those are actually the things that I think instruct us the most because we know or we have some idea.

1:01:21We just need someone to help us see it. Absolutely. And, you know, if I had a time machine and could go back to the beginning of raising my kids 25 years ago, there's so many things I'd do differently, but But that would be probably number one. More questions, fewer explanations. You know, my kids have had to sit through more five-minute answers to five-second questions than any human being should have to sit through in their lives. I met Queen Elizabeth once very briefly, and I've never met a more self-disciplined person in my life. And to do that role and to do it so well and to do it for so long, you mentioned earlier Marcus Aurelius having the worst job in the world.

1:02:31I think that was on the list of worst jobs in the world, too. You know, I assume that Marcus Aurelius had real power. Yeah, yeah. The Queen is purely a symbolic figure. And I imagine there were probably corners of her life that, you know, resembled the crown where she actually sort of got to be Elizabeth Windsor, a nice lady from Windsor. But almost every minute of every day, she was the Queen of England. And it didn't matter what she wanted as an individual. But this was her fate. This was her duty. And she completed that. There's something hugely dignified about it. And I was glad she lived as long as she did because people came to recognize that in ways that they didn't back in the 70s and 80s.

1:03:31when there was so much resistance to the monarchy. Well, it was a very privileged hand that she was dealt, but it also came with a lot of strings attached. A lot of strings. And she played it as well as a person can play it, and she complained about the strings as little as a person could complain about the strings. And you do that long enough, it makes you a success, And it makes you someone, I think, worth holding up as a person worth studying and learning from. Absolutely.

1:04:11And she was no more in control of her fate than any of the rest of us. This is the thing, you know. She was the eldest child of the King of England. And that was her fate from the day she was born. and it was sealed and it was not up for appeal. And certainly after her uncle had abdicated the throne, she was not going to let that happen again. And so there she was. And so when we talk about privilege, when we talk about ease, yes, but is what I want to say about that. The stoic philosophy still kicks in because she was no more in control of her life in many respects than the most impoverished or oppressed person in England.

1:05:10And that is not necessarily the most PC thing to say right now. But I think as individuals, I'm trying to speak in my book to individuals and not to groups, not to – because that's how we have to live. We only have our own lives to live. So I want to tell you one of my least favorite expressions in the whole world. And it's, if you're not a bleeding heart liberal when you're young, you're an asshole. And if you're not a conservative when you're older, you're an idiot. I hate that expression because to me, the implication there is that your heart should harden as you go. Right. That you should give up these foolish notions of caring about people, about justice, about equality, about fairness, about love, about empathy, that you should lose that as you get older, that the world should take that out of you.

1:06:18And I have found, I saw this in Richard, is a wonderful woman. I know her name is Dolores. She's in her mid-90s. I talk to her every day. You know, the openness there and the love there and the concern about what's happening in the world in the sense not of, as I think so easy to do, why are things changing? I want them to be like they were when I was growing up, but concern about what decisions that are being made and how they're going to affect young people, right? how the environment is being left, right? What the criminal justice system looks like, you know, how expensive things are, et cetera.

1:06:58To me, if you don't care more about those things as you go, if you don't become more open as you go, it doesn't matter how long you lived, you went the wrong direction. I believe that. And my version of that dichotomy in the book, I say near the end that the experience of knowing Charlie and of seeing the way ultimately he boiled 109 years down to one notebook page of notepaper this big of, you know, the operating code for his life.

1:07:45When you're young, you are a complexifier. Maybe I invented that word, but But you know, we start out very innocent as children, but then we begin to see that the life, you know, the world's just not that simple. You know, we start saying things like, yes, but on the other hand, you know, it's not that easy. There's lots of give and take. There's handoffs. There's compromises. Life just gets more and more complex. But if you live long enough, and in Charlie's case, it was a long, long time, you become a simplifier again. And you begin to understand that, yes, the world's a complicated place, but the way we live our lives, the way we ought to live is not complicated.

1:08:46It's pretty simple. And it is things like do justice, walk humbly, love mercy, you know, to quote a favorite Bible verse, or do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. These simple things that almost sound like greeting cards or Facebook memes, actually are, they endure because they're true. These are the things that matter at the end of the day. So I do think that a happy life involves change and growth from youth to age, and that there are virtues in all those passages, but that ultimately the goal is to get to this simple understanding of what really matters and to embrace that. Well, and I think it's important to point out that it doesn't just go that way on its own.

1:09:47The journey from simplicity to complexity back to simplicity, not everyone makes those jumps. I find it kind of a sad statement that the most archly conservative voting bloc in the United States is the oldest voting block, right? And the hardest to get to consider change or reforms, especially for things in the distant future. You would hope that the oldest voting block would be most concerned with the future because they have what's theirs and they want their grandchildren to get the same thing. But that's actually, tragically, sadly, I think an indictment. It's not how it goes. Well, I don't necessarily want to go off on my own people and on the biggest, you know, group of readers and, you know, of columns and books.

1:10:43But I will say that I have hope that that's going to change as the baby boom passes. I don't think my generation has shrouded ourselves in glory and self-sacrifice and long vision.

1:11:10There's a lot of selfishness, a lot of me, me, me that I don't see in your generation or in my kids' generation. So I'm not sure that's going to be a forever thing. I hope it's a bubble that's working its way through. Through the actuary tables. Yeah, and I call on all my fellow baby boomers to get our heads out of our, shall we say, navels, and maybe look around and think about others as much as we can with as much kindness as we can muster. Well, that's a beautiful sentiment. I absolutely loved the book. the book of Charlie. As we wrap up, I thought I would give you another quote from the Stoics, and the Stoics are in this book delightfully early.

1:11:59But one of the Stoic ideas or concepts that I was thinking about as I was reading this book, it comes from Seneca. He says, make sure at the end of your life, you have more to show for it than just a large number of years. So his point was that the point of life isn't to live to a large number. It's to have a large number of life that corresponds or perhaps surpasses that number, right? There are people who have died at 50 that lived 109 years. And tragically, there are people who lived 100 years that maybe got 20 or 30 good ones in there. That's right. And I love that. And it's a perfect note to end on.

1:12:48I think Charlie really attempted to do that. And I think he did it in a meaningful way. You know, they had his funeral in a big church. There was nobody from his early life around to be there. And yet the place was packed. And that's not the only measure of a well-lived life. But it's one if people care when you go and people notice and if they care for the right reasons. You know, he wasn't famous. He hadn't been mayor or governor or, you know, he wasn't the richest man in town or any of that. But he was loved and deserves to be remembered. Life is, you know, the measurement in years is the worst measurement.

1:13:44it's the measurement in purpose it's the measurement in lives touched kindness I think more and more about kindness the older I get and you know are people on balance glad that you were alive did you leave this place better than you found it yeah exactly exactly Always leave the campsite cleaner. Yeah. I love the book, and thank you so much for taking the time to write it and to talk to me about it. Well, thank you for your interest. You've got a lot of fans in Kansas City, Ryan. And for you to show this kind of interest in my book when you've got one you have out yourself is really, speaking of kind, a very kind gesture.

1:14:35My pleasure. My pleasure.

1:14:42thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes that would mean so much to us and would really help the show we appreciate it and i'll see you next episode

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