Why Society Has It Wrong About Getting Older

speaker-0 (00:07.288)
Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Today I’m talking with Rick Moody. Rick has been working on aging for quite a long time. Used to work with AARP and he’s somebody that is quite well known in the aging industry. Rick, I actually ran into somebody this morning that knows you. So I’ll leave that aside. Anyway, it’s always better if you…

Tell us a bit about yourself. So tell us about yourself and let everybody know who you are.

speaker-1 (00:42.646)
Okay, I did not grow up being interested in aging. It wasn’t because I had a good relationship to my grandfather or my aunt or something like that. I had no interest in aging at all. But I had a lot of interest in the search for meaning in life and in science. And it started when I was very, very young. I remember when Einstein died in 1955, I would have been 10 years old. And I continued that interest into

high school where I became interested in poetry and in college where I became interested in philosophy and comparative religion searching for meaning through different spiritual paths and I’ve continued in that direction all my life. After I got a PhD in philosophy, first I studied at Yale then at Columbia, got my doctorate, I discovered that it’s not easy to get employment as a medieval philosopher.

I ended up working for a while for Citibank, Citicorp for several years. then I volunteered for relatively no money to teach in senior centers. And I said, well, these older people are really the best consumers, the best customers for philosophy. And I was right about that. And now being an elder myself, I just turned 91, 81, excuse me.

advancing my age here, 81 last week, two weeks ago. So I’m now qualified to speak about the subject I’ve been studying and talking about for many years. So that’s where I am now. I think the thing that’s different now is that time is running out for me because at age 81, according to the life tables, I have maybe seven or eight years to go.

That’s why I live here in California, to be near my children and grandchildren. And it’s also why I work on climate change, because climate is the world, the earth on which we live. And I want my grandchildren to inherit a world at least as good as the world that I grew up in. And if you can’t tell when the seasons are coming, you got a problem. And that’s…

speaker-1 (03:02.25)
only the most superficial way of seeing what’s going on with climate change. And the other thing that I work on very actively is preserving democracy. We won’t talk a lot about that, but I am deeply involved, very actively involved in resisting forces of autocracy in this country and around the world for that matter. Forces that really would prefer to keep power and not listen to the people. And these are connected because just as aging

means confronting limits, climate means confronting limits, and it’s not possible to respond to the climate crisis without a democratic society, without listening to the people whose lives will be affected by it, including my grandchildren. Well, can’t yet vote, but I can.

speaker-0 (03:49.89)
You mentioned that you started off working, doing work in, or not started off, but you were doing work in senior centers. How’s that changed? I’m just curious if you were to look back then compared to now that you are in those senior years, how’s that changed?

speaker-1 (03:58.115)
Yes.

speaker-1 (04:09.198)
In many ways it hasn’t changed at all because senior centers which were invented around the time of the second world war, around the time I was born, I was born the last year of World War II, the first senior center was created in the Bronx and eventually it became more widely imitated around the country and people said well we have youth centers why not senior centers and so more and more were created.

Unfortunately, even the term and the idea of senior center sounds like you need to be over the hill in order to go into one of them. People don’t like to identify with aging. They resist that very much, particularly Americans. And that’s a big problem because it means we have to speak to people in accordance with their aspiration. And if their aspiration is just to keep things the same, keep your muscles, your brain, your digestion all the same,

That’s a good thing and health promotion is a good thing, but maybe there could be more. Maybe aging could mean something more, something positive. I think, Neil, that’s something you’ve been very interested in, trying to reimagine retirement. I like that idea of reimagining retirement. I like that idea of positive aging. I’ve been trying to live it in as many ways as I can. And I can talk and give you some examples of that if you like. Yeah.

speaker-0 (05:33.74)
Yes, please. Yesterday when you and I were talking, you brought up positive aging and you mentioned a couple of people, which by the way I’ve reached out to. What do you mean by positive aging? And what

speaker-1 (05:48.462)
Among other things, I mean by positive aging, believing that you can learn. And that sounds like a small thing, but it’s not small. It’s actually big. I’ll give you one example. It was not until I had retired from AARP that I took my first voice lessons. I had a woman who was actually the director of our choir in Boulder, Colorado. And she gave private lessons on the side. I, for the first time in my life, I started

taking voice lessons. Now this was unusual for me because I’ve been singing since I was in high school. I was in the All-American Choir, my high school, I was in the choir at Yale, the senior group, not just senior, but the Yale Russian Chorus. I continued being in choruses all along my life. I taught myself to play the piano, then I got lessons.

But I never had voice lessons. So I didn’t really know how to listen to myself and I didn’t do that until I started taking lessons with the teacher and one day almost by accident I closed my eyes and I was wandering around in the classroom. was only she was just her and me but I was wandering with my eyes closed and I could almost hear for the first time I could hear my own voice.

And we talk about mindfulness, for example, as an important thing. It is an important thing. The question is, how do you do it? Well, let’s make it concrete. Let’s figure out how to listen to your own voice, how to improve your own voice. You can sing in the shower. I do that too. But you need sometimes to have a teacher. You need sometimes to have another perspective. And if you haven’t got the other perspective, you can become your own perspective by shutting your eyes and just listening.

That’s my example of positive aging for me. Now other people, my own wife, she’s not a singer. She claims she can’t carry a tune, all that sort of thing. Some people say the same thing about drawing, but others have pointed out drawing on the right side of the brain kind of idea. We can do things, but we don’t believe we can do them. And these are self-limiting beliefs. And by the time you get to be

speaker-1 (08:12.654)
60, 70, 80, like me. Self-limiting beliefs become deep habits, and particularly the negative ones. I can’t do that. I’ve never done that. I won’t be able to do that. Those are the inner voices that we have to not listen to. That’s part of what positive aging means.

speaker-0 (08:37.857)
me about your time with the AARP. and also explain, in case there are people that don’t know who the AARP is.

speaker-1 (08:46.092)
I’m glad you said that because I was on a climate march a couple years ago and I was there with a woman who was a ranger, not retired, but she lived in a town in California called Paradise, which had an unfortunate name because most of the houses, including hers, burned down. Terrible destruction, one of the worst fires. Ultimately, climate has an element in this.

said to her, I said, well I used to work for AARP. She said, AARP, what is that? Never heard of it before. And I learned an important lesson from that experience, which is, yeah, we can talk about things like IBM, for example, or UN, and people know what those things mean, but not everybody knows the meaning of acronyms, of initials that we put together. So assume for your own sake, our own sake, when we talk to people, assume that they don’t know what we’re talking about.

and try to help them understand it. So you asked about AARP. I’ll tell you this, AARP is one of the largest, maybe the largest membership organizations in the world. I’m not counting the Catholic Church. There are maybe 38 million members to AARP. And that’s an important fact because these people, the AARP members, are a very important voting block. And AARP,

members, that is older people, vote at much higher rate than younger people. I’m not including the people who are in a wheelchair or homebound or things like that, although even there, mail balloting can solve that problem. But here’s the point about AARP. AARP tries to respond to real problems that real old people have. It’s not a theoretical organization. They did hire me, despite the fact that I have a PhD and a background in philosophy.

because I had spent 30 or 40 years actually immersed in issues of aging, including being a caregiver and things of that sort. I didn’t do much in the way of street demonstrations or things like that. I never did much of that. I did some during the Vietnam years, the mid-60s, I was in those demonstrations, but not at AARP. But AARP did have and does have the capacity to influence policy.

speaker-1 (11:09.474)
And I happened to work for the executive vice president, John Rother, who was in charge of policy. Why they hired somebody like me to be vice president for academic affairs, who knows why they did that? I found it puzzling. But they were very supportive. They even supported the idea of positive aging in every respect. They also supported the idea of working to help meet people’s needs. And during the time when Obama was president,

We had something called the Affordable Care Act. AARP was reluctant to endorse it because they were afraid that many people, many of their own members would not be in favor of it. AARP members are about one-third Democrat, one-third Republican, one-third Independent.

speaker-0 (11:56.248)
Sounds like your population.

speaker-1 (11:58.316)
It’s like a picture of a US population in many respects. That’s exactly right, Neil. And so they were reluctant to do this. AARP is an organization which is often reluctant to take a political position unless it’s really essential. Now, of course, they’ll take a position on Social Security, Medicare, things like that. But with regard to the Affordable Care Act, it sounded too much like universal health care. It wasn’t really universal health care, but it was close.

So at the last minute AARP endorsed it and I’ll tell you something and our listeners something that AARP has never revealed before namely AARP experienced the greatest loss of its membership of anything that happened in its 70 or 80 years of history because people were some people were angry why did AARP have to do it because a third of the members are between age 50 and 64 that is they’re getting older

They have chronic health issues, but they’re not eligible for Medicare. So AARP at the last minute said, we have to endorse this law. And they did. And it passed by, I think, two votes in the US Senate, very close election.

speaker-0 (13:12.728)
I remember John McCain doing the thumbs down on the floor.

speaker-1 (13:18.442)
Anyway, I’m not really here to talk about politics. I’m here to talk about what makes politics necessary and what makes politics possible, both.

speaker-0 (13:27.896)
So when I just, while you were talking there, I did a quick look up AARP for those that aren’t aware stands for American Association of Retired Persons.

speaker-1 (13:37.804)
And they don’t use that name anymore either. Because just like Elder Hostel, I used to be chairman of the board of Elder Hostel, they changed the name of that organization too. It’s no longer Elder Hostel, it’s now called Road Scholar, R-O-A-D, Road Scholar. Why? Because people did not like the idea of Elder Hostel. They thought that means hostile elders, angry old people. Or they thought it was Elder Hospice. Or they thought you had to stay in a hostel.

speaker-0 (13:40.898)
Exo-

speaker-1 (14:07.308)
like young people and share your bedroom and things like that. They didn’t know. So this gets us to marketing and marketing is very important and a good thing, not a bad thing, a good thing. It means telling your message quickly and getting right to the point. AARP does that. So does Road Scholar.

speaker-0 (14:25.912)
So I was having this conversation this morning. One of the things I’m not really seeing, and I’m not even sure AARP is doing this, is the advocacy, the changing, yes, they may be focused on the government policy, but not the change of societal views on aging and the elderly. Like, you’re very active.

Yeah. hope to be active. My father was 94, has been very active. don’t, the traditional of retire, go stand on a golf course and then sit in a rocking chair. That’s not aging. That’s not.

speaker-1 (15:07.934)
That’s not a future that most people aspire to. No. I’ve never played golf in my life. I’m not about to start, but it’s not a bad thing for people to play golf. I have very good friends who spend their life on the golf course. that’s really like spend your life on the tennis court. There’s got to be something more for people. And what you’ve pointed to is really the challenge. AARP

aware of that. The national organization, I’ve been going there for 10 or 12 years now, but I’m in touch with them. And what they try to do is to create the positive image, but they also work against the negative image. ARP’s legal office has filed more lawsuits against age discrimination than any enterprise in this country. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they almost always fail. A lot of money has gone into it, effort has gone into it. It’s very hard to

age discrimination and to get compensation for it. So that’s sort of forgiveness for AARP that they’re doing their best, but they’re not really dealing with these deeper questions of the search for meaning. Richard Leiter, who was interviewed by you on this program, is an unusual example. Richard Leiter was

employed by AARP, I don’t think he still is, but he has been, to promote the idea of purpose, living for purpose. What is purpose? A reason to get out of bed in the morning, a reason to keep going. Unless we focus on that, people will be defeated by ageism, by the attitudes of other people. They’ll internalize it, and that’s a real challenge, that’s a real threat. So I think AARP is doing what they can, but not enough.

That would be my answer.

speaker-0 (17:00.718)
Well, that’s, see, that’s one of the other things is, so as part of this channel, when I look at the stats, they break it down 10 year groupings, but when they get to 65, they just go 65 plus and they don’t break it down further.

speaker-1 (17:17.185)
Who’s the they when you say that?

speaker-0 (17:19.274)
YouTube, the statistics they actually provide. And it’s not just that.

speaker-1 (17:27.117)
That’s because the marker of age 65, it was invented a long time ago actually by Bismarck in the late 19th century in Germany, and kind of picked an arbitrary date. Not too many people lived beyond age 65 in those days, so that seemed like a good label, a good point to pick for being entitled to a public pension. And that’s often the way that it works. Now it’s moved a little bit,

in Social Security in this country, in America, because Social Security ran into some problems 40, 45 years ago, still has some problems, but they solved a lot of those problems by moving up the age of eligibility from 65 then to 66. Now it’s up to 67. Conservatives and people who hate the idea of the public doing anything, because Social Security was invented by FDR, the great Democrat,

They might want to move the age up not to 67 but to 70 or 75 or 80. Well, that’s a way of really closing people out of ever collecting. A lot of people, particularly vulnerable people, poor people, people who are sick, they sometimes need to retire earlier. Sometimes they need to collect Social Security at age 62. It’s often not a good idea for people. For somebody like me who’s in good health, I waited until I was 70.

I’m glad I did. But I have friends who talk to me and they said, when should I collect social as early as you possibly can, 62, because they were basically dying or they were suffering from some condition that might kill them before long. So it varies with each person. And we need to avoid generalizations about aging and we need to avoid generalizations about

speaker-0 (18:59.128)
said.

speaker-1 (19:19.726)
what people should do at different ages. Now you gave the example of what happens at age 65. People who actually study gerontology, which is a fancy word for the study of aging, I’m following your idea of let’s tell people what these words mean. The people in gerontology often distinguish between what they call the young old, the old old, and the oldest old. And the young old might be people who are

60 to 70. The middle old might be people 70 to 80. The old old might be people 80 plus. And if we want to pick another category, your father who’s 94, I think he would be the oldest old. There are people who live to be centenarians, but not very many, maybe only 10,000 a year in the United States. So I guess the point I’m making is that

speaker-0 (19:51.406)
you

speaker-1 (20:18.136)
You want to look at these different ages, these different subgroups differently because certain kinds of activities are more appropriate at different ages, on average. And my wife and I are about to go on a trip to Canada, a Rhodes Scholar trip, and we looked up the different activities and some of them are on the bus or on a train through the Rocky Mountains, Canadian Rockies. Well, that’s great. She said, that’s great.

Even I said that’s great, even though I have arthritis in my right leg. But then some of them said, there’s going to be a two mile walk. that’s not so great if you’re suffering from foot problems or things like that. So as you get older, more and more of these problems arise. And that doesn’t mean you’re about to die tomorrow, but it may mean that you have limitations. That’s not self-limiting beliefs. That’s beliefs that recognize

the limits on your body. the body for me, 81 year old body is not the same as the 71 year old body or the 61 year old body. Don’t be pessimistic about this by the way, because

speaker-0 (21:28.622)
I’m just chuckling because when you were talking earlier, for some reason, all of I was thinking to myself, you know what? Yes, I’m 61. I still think of myself in my 30s.

speaker-1 (21:42.774)
You know, you’re like other people. I used to care for Larry Morris, who lived in our house for six years till he died at the age of 97. Like me, he was a graduate of Yale just 50 years earlier. And he said to me, I used to push him in his wheelchair. said to me one day, said, you know, I think of myself as an 18 year old, a 20 year old. That was his, you know, but he wasn’t deluded. He knew how to give up driving at a

certain point and all the rest of it. So I think we want to recognize that we need to face reality. And sometimes facing a reality means recognizing our limits and working within them. I want to give you a three-word definition of aging. People say, sometimes I go to my class reunions at Yale and people on the side, say, okay, Rick, you’ve worked in aging. Tell me what this aging is. They often say, well, when do we have a cure for Alzheimer’s? That’s the most thing they ask about.

Unfortunately, not anytime soon, despite what Bill Gates is saying. What’s the definition of aging? Three words, diminished reserve capacity. Diminished reserve capacity, meaning you still have capacity. I can still run a mile even, but not as fast as I could in the past. I still can.

eat food, all the foods that I like, but maybe it takes longer to digest. I remember things, but I also forget things. So all the systems of the body, the nervous system, the digestive system, the muscles, everything is reduced in its reserve capacity. That is its capacity to respond to a crisis, to something really, really demanding. This is the reason why small companies, small retail places often go bankrupt.

They don’t have enough reserve capacity, enough money piled up in case they need it. right. So those are the three definitions of aging. Now, that sounds pretty bad because it’s all negative. Is there a definition of positive aging? Yes, there is. And it’s also, I’ll give it in three words, decrement, that’s decline, with compensation.

speaker-1 (24:05.708)
Decrement with compensation. Yes, reality. You’re getting more vulnerable. You haven’t got the same capacity that you did, but you have compensation. One compensation is skill and intelligence and the ability to recognize when you need help. Maybe you need to buy one of those devices that you hang around your neck, press the button in case you fall. Falls are a very real risk. Devastation, they can be fatal.

It’s not just a small thing. Gee, I fell. I got up and kept going. You better be prepared for bad consequences if you fall. That could mean other people knowing where you are. My father-in-law, when he was 90, had one of those devices around his neck. He fell. He lay in the garden for 18 hours. He wouldn’t press the button. Couldn’t really explain to us why he wouldn’t press the button. He was conscious.

He did not have dementia. He just didn’t want to do it. And that’s a very important dimension, particularly of men, by the way, that men tend to be reluctant to ask for help, sometimes even to recognize that they need help. Women, because women live longer than men, true, but they also suffer from more chronic conditions all throughout life. And this may be one reason why the mortality rate for

people like you and me, people with the Y chromosome, that mortality rate is greater at every age, even before birth. Okay? So we’re constantly at risk, we men, we males are constantly at risk of not making it through the next year, through the next whatever period of time it is. And before long, it turns out that there are a lot more women than there are men. You look at the number of centenarians, way, way, way more women than men.

There are many reasons for this. Some of them are not even known why Y chromosome gives such… It could be that, you know, the people with the double X chromosome, have twice the number of…

speaker-0 (26:17.708)
can hear people right now is because we’re married to the women. that’s yeah.

speaker-1 (26:22.028)
Well, people can adopt these scientific facts and use them to blame others or blame themselves. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in decrement with compensation, and I’m looking for the compensation. By compensation, I do not mean rationalization. That’s another name for denial. I’m just like I was when I was

speaker-0 (26:45.92)
You’re the compensating… While you were talking, I was thinking in terms of as we get older, our physical capabilities go down. But our knowledge, our wisdom, our skills go up in the opposite direction. So that knowledge, that wisdom, it compensates for the lack of…

speaker-1 (26:48.706)
Yeah, you go.

speaker-1 (26:57.4)
They do.

speaker-1 (27:04.054)
Exactly. That’s right.

speaker-1 (27:12.61)
That’s right, and it’s not true for all people, of course, because there are some people who, you know, are vigorous tennis players in their 90s. And there are plenty of people, and I won’t give names of politicians, who are 79 years old, who are fools. And maybe they’ve always been fools. But fools do not become wise just because they get old.

speaker-0 (27:36.366)
But experiences accumulate and you be learning from your own experiences.

speaker-1 (27:45.112)
They can. And one great gerontologist, when asked to describe what is aging, he said, it’s habituation, and it begins as an infant. At first, the infant sees the rattle or the bell and, that’s interesting. How great, tracks me. Not the second time. I’ve seen that before. Third time, they don’t even notice it. And that happens throughout life. And in some ways, it’s OK. I used to live in Manhattan.

After a while, after living in Manhattan so many years, I never noticed the noise on the street. I just became customary. yeah, cars are honking their horn, people are running their engines. So what? I just kept right on sleeping. That’s habituation and it can be good. And we do need habits, of course. If you learn a foreign language, it has to become a habit. Otherwise you’re confused. You’re always looking for the right word.

Habituation can also be another way of saying it’s not wisdom. It’s thinking you’ve seen it before. Some old people feel that, yeah, we’ve seen that before. yeah, we’re having a war in Iraq. This is just like Vietnam. Just like Vietnam.

speaker-0 (29:00.32)
It’s a Donald Rumsfeld saying of not knowing what you know.

speaker-1 (29:05.39)
Not knowing what you know precisely. And not knowing what you don’t know. The fool.

speaker-0 (29:11.226)
I know people laugh about that, but I saw it in a different context and I understood exactly what he’s talking about. And that was actually a very smart way of doing things. And I teach that to people nowadays. Yesterday, you mentioned something else. Saging.

speaker-1 (29:14.217)
anything.

speaker-1 (29:35.288)
Yes.

speaker-0 (29:37.366)
Sage as in wisdom, that sort of stuff. Explain to me again what sageing is.

speaker-1 (29:43.886)
Saging is a term that was invented by a rabbi, Rabbi Zalman Schachter. He actually used to call himself Zalman Schachter Shalomie because he was a kosher butcher at one point, schlachter, which means to kill or like a meat, and shalom means peaceful. he became… How did he get to be a guy promoting saging? Because when he turned 65, actually, important year, he realized that

you know, he’s getting older. And he might not be the same in the future as he was in the past. So he went on a little trip. He went on an expedition into the forest out in New Mexico, not the forest, the desert really, and just was alone for two or three weeks, looking into himself and asking himself, you can call it prayer if you want to, whatever you want to call it, looking into the question of who am I, where am I going? Who have I been? Where do I…

Who am I and where do I want to be? And when he came out of that retreat, which is what it was, a spiritual retreat, he said, I think I understand it. We need aging to be different than what it has been. It must be saging and not just aging. And that’s why he literally wrote the book From Aging to Saging. I was in a restaurant once with Reb Zelman and we were talking about aging because, you know, he would go around, give talks on things.

And I was asking him, what do you think about this? And he said, this aging business is really very simple. He said, the only question is, are you saved? And I thought, well, he’s a clergyman. What does he mean by this? He says, no, no, I don’t mean it in a theological sense. I mean it in a computer sense. Are you saved? Have you downloaded your life experience for future generations?

Like when we save things on the computer, right? We press the button and periodically if you don’t do that, you know, like I did the other day I forgot to save it and then we lost the power for a while. So I lost what I was working on. Well, we need to save. We need to save ourselves. Saving means taking care of future generations. what Zellman was very preoccupied with was how do we help those who come after, those who come later than us. That relates to what I do on climate change.

speaker-1 (32:10.402)
Now course climate is only one of the areas in which we’re concerned about future generations, but it’s an important one because a lot of what is called philanthropy really involves taking what you accumulated in your life and making it available to future generations for the time when you’re not here. And that’s what genuine philanthropists do. They don’t do it for ego.

I used to work for a guy when I was at Hunter College, we used to get money from a guy who owned 10 % of the stock in MCI, which was, again, for those who don’t know those words, was a technology company, a computer company, you might say, a telephone company. And he had all this money, but he only gave money to people on one condition, that they never told people where the money came from. And if they revealed it,

he would stop right away giving them any more money at all. He was very tough about that. He was a tough businessman. He was not at all interested in having people know about him. He was interested in having them do what needs to be done. He was practical in that sense. The guy, I don’t know the other guy’s name, but he created the companies in airline

terminals which sold things, sold not free but low tax, you know what I’m talking about. He created this whole model and eventually thousands of them exist all over the world. He became a billionaire but he said, okay, I got all this money and I got it in a way by accident. I was the right place at the right time. I’m giving it all away. By the end of his life,

He had given all of his money away. He was living in a single room hotel somewhere. He had almost no money left at all. That’s not necessarily something everybody should do. If you have a little money, in my case I have a little money, I’m concerned. I want to make sure I leave it to my children. I want to make sure I leave it to other causes. Philanthropy requires a lot of work. It requires a lot of attention. In the case of this fellow, he

speaker-1 (34:36.853)
He knew what he wanted to do and he knew that he had to give it away. And I think that’s an important dimension of aging, learning how to give away things, learning how not to be concerned about, know, okay, I’m Rick Moody, I’m Harry Moody, I’m nobody really, ultimately. I mean, it’s great that somebody knew who I was. I’m glad that they, you know, read my books and all the rest of that, but…

speaker-1 (35:07.052)
The great poet, I’m gonna forget her name now, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts. I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too? She was a woman who all her, I’ll look it up. Anyway, she never published any of her things in her lifetime. You’re looking it up.

I’m glad you’re on your computer. Amherst, what’s your name? Emily Dickinson. OK, now this is a great example. I do not have dementia. I know perfectly well who Emily Dickinson is. I visited her house several times in Amherst, Massachusetts, because my daughter went to college near there. And I know who Emily Dickinson is, but I didn’t remember her name.

speaker-0 (35:39.662)
Emily Dickinson.

speaker-1 (36:04.622)
should not worry too much when they forget names or when they forget things like that. It doesn’t make any difference. We have the ability, remember decrement with compensation. We have a decrement. Couldn’t remember the name. So we have a computer, we have Google, we have all kinds of ways of searching for things. And other people, like in this case, you, there’s a kind of

cognitive sharing that goes on and certainly in a long marriage I’m in one of those marriages I’ve been married my wife and I’ve been married 56 years One forgets something the other remembers it works both ways Okay, there was also a case that some of my wife’s things. Okay, you’re developing dementia

speaker-1 (36:58.766)
I’m not worried about it. I’m really not worried about it because I compensate in some way or other. Anyway, let’s continue our discussion. You’re the guy driving this, not me. I’m just the respondent or whatever they call people like me.

speaker-0 (37:16.022)
Okay, so you’re now in your later years. Yes. You’re very active in the climate side of things. Now I noticed like there’s a group up here called the Raging Grannies. That was very active. I know them well.

Do you see a lot of activism? Is that a capability? And why did you get involved in the climate change side of things as opposed to something else?

speaker-1 (37:50.572)
Well, I’m not… For one thing, I’m involved in a lot of other things. For example, I’m very concerned with immigration and with helping poor people and with teaching English as a second language. I’ve done all of these things. But there are limits to what people can do, and there’s a limit to what you can become knowledgeable about. And I am not an environmentalist or a biologist or an ecologist or anything like that. I have a background in philosophy.

then later in gerontology. But when I was looking at nature and things like that, this is about five years ago, and I did start out as an eagle scout when I was 15 years old in 1960, so I was more concerned with nature in those years. But as I grew older I began to see this is something which we can connect with everybody about because people know about weather,

can fuse weather with climate, of course, but they can learn about it and they can be mobilized about it and there are things we can do about it. The other reason why it’s important is because the time frame for doing something about it is pretty narrow. We have to do something about it in the future, the near future. By near future I mean five or ten years from now. Otherwise we’re in…

what one president called deep doo-doo, where we don’t have a… And in some, by the way, in some cases, even if we stopped all the fossil fuel use today, on this very day, from now on, not a single fossil fuel, coal, oil, gas, all those finished, no more. Supposing we stopped it and miraculously everything was done through nuclear energy, solar power, wind.

something like that. What would happen? Well what would happen would be that the oceans would still keep rising, the glaciers would still keep melting, because a lot has been built into momentum, into inertia of the atmosphere and the oceans, just by what we’ve done for the past couple hundred years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act, but it means that we have to recognize that some of the things that we’ve done

speaker-1 (40:14.112)
are already in place and will create problems. So that on the one hand there’s mitigation, fancy word meaning stop it, don’t do it, cut back, and then there’s also adaptation. We have to adapt to it. And if you’re living in a state like Florida, for example, I was born in the state of Florida, my parents lived, retired, and died in the state of Florida. State of Florida…

doesn’t have a great future in terms of its size because the ocean is rising and some of it’s already have a big impact on housing.

speaker-0 (40:52.91)
little story. I’m in Vancouver, which is a port city. In fact, my where the specific place that I live is a block from the beach on a spit of land where at the tip of the spit of land is Point Roberts, Washington. Anyway, so every morning I take my dog for a walk down along the beach. One of the things I’ve been watching and I’ve lived here for 25 years now.

speaker-1 (40:56.822)
Yes it is.

speaker-0 (41:22.094)
One of the things that I keep seeing is the high level, high water mark. Yes. Keeps pushing the sea water, sorry, the seaweed further and further. And it tells me, it actually gives me a visual line.

speaker-1 (41:36.046)
It’s a great example. It’s a great example.

speaker-0 (41:38.924)
The beach itself, like the houses are like probably 200 yards from where the water’s edge is because there’s a bit of a tip off. This is where the water’s usually been going. But it’s starting to get to this point here. And when it gets here, it’s going to run the distance to the houses.

speaker-1 (41:59.416)
Don’t buy one of those houses.

speaker-0 (42:01.078)
Well, I’m a block away. So one of the things that has a compensation, the city that I’m in, anybody that along there that wants to do any modifications to the houses are required by bylaw to put up a retaining wall. Yeah. So it’s building a breakwater. The problem is, it’s not mandatory for everybody to do right now. So every time somebody does something, a new breakwater is put in place.

But there’s gaps. There’s this house that nobody is doing anything with. So sure, this one house is fine, but the water will go through it and come around through the front. it’s the monitoring of that seaweed. I guarantee you, you’re going to start to hear about flooding in my area, probably in three, four years, simply because I’m just watching where that seaweed is that’s deposited because of the high water mark.

speaker-1 (43:02.03)
You have given a very powerful example of what’s coming. And when people ask me about climate change, I say to them, well, I can boil this down into four words.

speaker-0 (43:17.346)
Here.

speaker-1 (43:18.752)
Now.

speaker-0 (43:20.374)
you hope.

speaker-1 (43:23.8)
Here, now, and you is what you’ve been talking about for yourself. Hope refers to action. What can I do about this? And some of the things that you can do fall into the area of mitigation that is trying to prevent it. But I already said that even if we eliminate fossil fuels, we’re not going to stop the tides from rising. So where does adaptation come in? Comes in the Netherlands, because the Netherlands have been working on this since about the year 1200.

common era, maybe 1300. Much of what we call the Netherlands is reclaimed land, and they have been for generations thinking about and working at not just breakwater, but figuring out how to adapt to rising levels of the sea. And some of it involves moving places and people, some of it involves bridge building and attempts to

alert to when storms are going to come. There are many things that the Netherlands have been doing, so much so that New York City, where I spent much of my life, when New York City had some big hurricanes 10 or 12 years ago, what did they do? They brought over people from the Netherlands to advise them, how do we prevent the subways from flooding in the future, things of that sort. So I think that when we think about these issues,

we need to be looking at places, and by the way, it’s not just sophisticated places, rich places like the Netherlands. Bangladesh has done some of the most impressive work in terms of adapting to rising tides. You can look into this and find out what they’re doing. In some cases, it means building on boats that rise up. The Netherlands have done that, and so have they done that in Bangladesh.

It’s not just the case that we have to try to escape and run to some other place. Not everybody can run to some other place. People need collective action to adapt to things that we cannot stop. That’s what I wanted to say. But I’m glad you mentioned the example of the seaweed moving, because if people don’t see it with their eyes, then they may say, well, I just saw it on a chart or somebody said it.

speaker-1 (45:46.132)
or scientists are predicting, then they won’t believe it. They won’t believe it.

speaker-0 (45:52.376)
So last thing, we’re doing quite well here. You said early on, and I see this with my father all the time, you keep referring to you’re getting older. I’m 80, 94.

speaker-0 (46:13.248)
Is there a mental aspect where that comes into play all the time? The reason why I ask that is I’m starting to become of the opinion that you live as what determines how long you live is your brain, is your mind.

speaker-1 (46:31.438)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (46:32.872)
your physical body, we’re getting to the point where you’ll have the medicines, you’ll have the reconstruction capabilities. Medicine is going to be able to do various different things. But how far you go will be determined by your mind. Is that what you’re seeing?

speaker-1 (46:52.6)
I see, again, big differences. I see some people are likely to see what’s going on and adapt, decrement with compensation. Other people will just be in denial. And they may be in denial until the day that they die, just like there are people who are smokers and die of lung cancer, but I had a friend like this who just kept smoking to the very end. So I’m reluctant to generalize about it.

But I do think that we have the capability of changing and not all changes have to be big. Some of them are small changes. gave the example of that device you hang around your neck. I’m by the way, I’m not even sure that those things are the best thing for everybody or they even work for everybody. But I am sure that social connection, not technology, social connection is important. And if people do not invest their time,

in making new friends, connecting with young people. Larry Morris connected with me when I was 40 or 45. So that I was there, I don’t think he did it deliberately, but he did it because he cared, he connected with people. And not everybody does connect with people, but if you do, that can pay dividends, both in terms of your own family and in people beyond the family. So…

Bowling alone is not the answer that we want. We want to bowl with other people. You know, that’s a book that I actually met the guy who wrote that from Harvard. And he concluded that it requires social collective action, not necessarily government, but what’s called communitarian steps. And there are things you can do like that. Get to know your neighbors. I’ll give you one example.

in the place where I live, right where I’m sitting right now, a year or so ago, we’ve been here for four or five years, we moved here from Colorado to California, we know the people upstairs, one evening we heard a loud thud, just we didn’t know what it was, and so my wife and I looked at each other and I said, doesn’t sound right, let me go upstairs, so I went upstairs and I found a man,

speaker-1 (49:18.918)
First a woman answered the door, she didn’t want to let me in, but I said, well, I heard this sound and I could see through the door somebody, her husband, lying on the floor. And so I said, I think you need some help. So she said, okay. As it turns out, she was somebody who was Iranian, who also lived in France, and I spoke French and Persian. So I was able to go in there.

She said, no, don’t pick him up. He’s fallen out of his wheelchair. Don’t pick him up. That’s what made the sound. But I did pick him up, not because I was reckless, because I knew I could lift him. And I could talk to him in Persian at the same time as I was picking him up. It turns out his name was Moody. Same name as me. It’s written differently. It’s written M-O-O-D-I, something like that. It’s written in a…

Arabic alphabet. And because of that, I may have saved his life. In any case, I saved him from a trip to the hospital, which is also can be a very dangerous thing for people. So he survived. it’s something which, if you don’t know your neighbors, and I’ve had other similar experience with people, not quite as dramatic as that, but where people need help.

So I go down and I help them. That’s just my nature. I spent much of my life working with social workers. So maybe I kind of became a social worker myself. I think we all need to do that sort of thing for other people who feel better about ourselves. We feel like we’re connected with other people. It’s very important to do this. And our society, the market doesn’t do it by itself. I’m not against the market, but I don’t think it will solve all of our problems. And Adam Smith, by the way, who

created what we think of as the marketplace idea. He took that view too. said, no, economic exchange is part of the picture, but it’s not the whole story. There’s something else that’s required. And he pointed to that something else. And that something else is connection among people. And it’s possible. We can do better. I think we can. I know we can.

speaker-0 (51:43.074)
Last thing I always ask all my guests is if you’re going to give a piece of advice to somebody that’s getting into their retirement years, what would that be?

speaker-1 (51:55.758)
Don’t postpone. Do it now. Don’t wait for the future. You may not have a future. If you love somebody, tell them that you love them. If you need to lose a little weight, start right now. If you need to drink water, drink more water now. I started it just a month or so ago. There you go. See? I knew that that was a good idea a long time ago. It’s made a big difference in my life. That’s what I would tell them. I would tell them, I would tell them don’t.

Don’t fall into self-limiting beliefs. Don’t fall into habits. Do things a little differently, even on a small scale. You can do it. That’s what I would tell them. You can do it. You’re not helpless.

speaker-0 (52:39.02)
Rick, thank you very much. This has been really useful. Thank you.

speaker-1 (52:42.552)
Neil, you ask good questions. You’re a great listener. You’ve got a great program here.

speaker-0 (52:48.28)
honor to be part of it. And everybody, I will put information about Rick down below in the descriptions, some links to things that he’s involved in. And don’t forget to click like and subscribe. It helps the algorithm.

speaker-1 (53:03.82)
And tell them it’s, some people call me Harry R. Moody too, because that’s my legal name for books.

speaker-0 (53:09.972)
I will, that will be in the description. Thanks.

speaker-1 (53:12.032)
Okay, great. All right, Neil, I thank you for inviting me.

speaker-0 (53:16.43)
Thank you much.

speaker-1 (53:20.226)
Bye bye now.