Living life eight thousand days at a time

Peter Bowes: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome again to the Live Long and Master Aging podcast. I’m Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. This episode is brought to you by AgeUp a new financial product that provides guaranteed supplemental income for people who worry about the financial impact of longevity. To find out more, visit Age-Up.com That’s Age-Up.com.

Peter Bowes: [00:00:47] Well, today we’re going to focus on a personal story related to aging. My guest is the writer Lee Gutkind, a prolific author,Lee has written about everything from veterinary science, mental illness, motorbike culture and organ transplants to the art of writing itself. Lee’s new book is My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in his Seventies, a memoir about growing old, how he spent much of his life, well, at least from the age of 40, denying his birthday, in effect, refusing to acknowledge the passage of time up to the present day, where I think it’s fair to say. We’ll find out in a second. The present day where he’s resolved his differences with the aging process. Lee joins me from his hometown of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Lee, welcome to the Live Long and Master Aging podcast.

Lee Gutkind: [00:01:36] Peter, nice to meet you in person and and talk.

Peter Bowes: [00:01:40] Wonderful to talk to you, Lee. And I guess in this week of all weeks, I can’t say Pennsylvania without a reference to the tumultuous events of the past few days, the state that I suppose barring any interventions from the courts. Let’s wait and see there, the state let’s just hope the oldest person ever to assume the U.S. presidency, Joe Biden, at the age of 77 and considering the conversation were just about to have. I’m just curious, leaving aside politics, what are your feelings about that?

Lee Gutkind: [00:02:07] Well, you know, I’m also 77 and and I can’t tell you how often and how annoyed I got when people were doubting Joe Biden’s ability to govern and to work the long hours, not because he was not unfit physically, but because he was just old. And it really, to tell you the truth, annoyed me a lot because, of course, I’m 77. And, of course, as you just pointed out, I have spent my life fighting this whole idea of how people perceive elderly, aging people. And so, yeah, I’m I’m absolutely positive that he will do a good job. And if he doesn’t, it’s certainly not because he’s an old guy.

Peter Bowes: [00:02:55] Do you think it will change any attitudes? Obviously. Let’s wait and see how things go over the next four years. But certainly looking at the campaign, as you say, quite rightly, he was much criticized and especially towards the beginning of the campaign. He did seem to become more and more energized as time went on, didn’t he?

Lee Gutkind: [00:03:13] I think that that’s a one remarkable aspect of aging, is that just because we’re 77 or just because we’re older, it doesn’t mean that we are losing our energy and our ability to work really hard at whatever it is we want to work at. I think one challenge is that sometimes when we get a lot older that we don’t have the challenges or we are afraid of the challenges that we might be able to take on simply because when we are in our 60s, 70s and 80s.

Peter Bowes: [00:03:48] Well, this is something that you write about in your book. Before we dive into that, you’re an immersion journalist. This is what you’ve done all your life. Simply put, immersion, you immerse yourself into the story. How did you get into this sphere of journalism?

Lee Gutkind: [00:04:03] Well, I loved writing. I also hated writing. But that’s what all writers feel. You’ll love it. You hate it. But also, I wanted to know what more of the world I didn’t want to make stuff up. I wanted to know what the world was all about. And there were so many things that I found really interesting. And so I tried to figure out a way to both continue to be a writer and pound away on my keyboard every single day. But on the other hand, I wanted to have new adventures and and as many experiences as I could. And so combining that was immersing myself in other venues and spending lots of time with other people and trying to understand their world and see their world, whether it is veterinary medicine or robotics or baseball umpires or organ transplantation and see what their world is all about and try to understand how they feel about the work they do and what challenges them. The field is called some people used to call it the new journalism, and now it’s either called narrative nonfiction or the most popular phrase creative nonfiction. And essentially that means for a reader that they are learning things they wouldn’t necessarily be able to learn, because the information that people like me that we writers present are embedded in true stories. And I thought, wow, this was this is really terrific. And I was inspired by lots of pretty famous folks like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and Norman Mailer and who did all this stuff. They combined literary techniques, storytelling techniques with fact. And and that’s that’s kind of the life I have led from my first book, which was traveling around the country on a motorcycle and writing about the motorcycle subculture to my last immersion book, which was about the four or five years. And I say years. It’s not like I’ve parachuted in and spent a couple of days here and there with these folks. We spend years with these people in order to deeply understand them. And so my last book was about the years I spent with people who build robots and get them to think.

Peter Bowes: [00:06:34] And I’m curious, is there a world that you’ve spent a lot of time with that once you’ve got through that process, you’ve actually thought, well, hmm, I’d like to be part of that world. I know as a journalist myself, you meet people, you see their work, you see their lives and is a part of you that thinks I could have done that.

Lee Gutkind: [00:06:52] I yes. Bo the answer to that is I always had pretty much enough of whatever world it was after four or five years. And I was ready to move on. And and I certainly could never be a transplant surgeon and didn’t really want to anyway. So the joy and the the drawbacks of being this this writer who immerses himself in other things is that you the joy is that you get to you get to learn so much about other people and then the drawback and what the other people do. But then the drawback and you’ve kind of caught it in some respects. The drawback, Peter, is that so you become an absolute part of somebody else’s life and you live that life and those and you hang out with them constantly and they become your friends and they become the people you care about and you become… It’s like you’re living in another world. And then when the book is done or when your research is done and of course the book is done, suddenly there is this gigantic gap in your life. What am I going to do next? And when you find another book and we writers are constantly searching for books, we look for books, what do we see in a newspaper or what do we hear in a coffee shop conversation that might lead to a book? But then when you immerse yourself in another book or in someone else’s life, totally different from like going from transplantation to robotics or baseball umpires to robotics, it’s a big stretch. And you lose all of the friends that you had made over the first three or four or five years, and suddenly you’re in another world. And so you can’t go back to the other world and to the first world. And so it’s like you’re living in increments of four or five years, many different lives, and there’s a great loss to it. So there is a joy, as I said, and a real feeling of accomplishment to capture other people’s worlds. And then and then the loss is when these folks that you were so close to, they go on with their same life and you got a new life to deal with.

Peter Bowes: [00:09:14] And, of course, the world that you’re now immersed in, or at least for your latest book, the one we’re talking about is your own worlds. That must have been a unique challenge. That must have been something that you took on with a certain amount of trepidation, because obviously, clearly, this is a life that you’ve lived from the start and you’ve been immersed in and maybe never thought about writing up until you were, what, 70 years old?

Lee Gutkind: [00:09:38] Yes, certain things happened to me, which I’ll tell you about the year before seventy, for one thing, the year before 70, I lost my two best friends who died. And four or five days before my 70th birthday, my mom, who was my absolute best friend, even though she was 94 years old. She also died and I’m talking to you, Peter, about looking for a book and living for books and also during that year leading up to my seventieth birthday in a little bit beyond, I had been working on a new book. And this was a very popular it seemed like a very popular book, a book that would take my, let us say modestly, my ordinary literary reputation and and skyrocket me. It was a perfect subject. It was about a rabbi who was known worldwide as the Torah Hunter. And what he did was travel all around the world and rescue Torahs that had been stolen and desecrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust and and worked diligently to find their original owners. And he was just a marvelous man. And I loved this guy. And I’m Jewish, but I’m pretty much a failed Jew anyway. And but he kind of led me back into that path. I took Torah study courses and I tried to learn Hebrew and I hung out with him. He had a bookstore in Washington, D.C. and I hung out with him in the bookstore and we even went on adventures together. Well, I found out I’m not going to tell you that much because then maybe you won’t read the book. But all the things that I had hoped for and all of the ways in which I believed him and believed in his mission kind of fell apart and with my book fell apart during that seventieth year. And I thought I didn’t want to do this immersion anymore, this work anymore. And I needed to do something different. And I needed to understand why at 70 years old, having published or edited over 30 books and achieved a great deal in my life, why suddenly I felt so abandoned and so alone and so helpless in many ways as at 70. So I decided that instead of immersing myself into the lives of organ transplant surgeons and veterinarians, it was time for me to learn a heck of a lot more about me and use the techniques in many respects that I had learned digging into other people’s lives to dig in, to take a deep dive, a deep, deep, deep honest dive into my own life.

Peter Bowes: [00:12:35] And did you start with the title My Lost 8000 Days? First of all, how did you get to 8000 days? And was that a starting point for you?

Lee Gutkind: [00:12:44] No, that was an ending point. I always make. I always laugh when my students tell me. I just hears ‘I’m going to write this book and here’s the title.’ Well, I always ask them or ‘I just wrote the first chapter of my book and and so I feel really good.’ But the fact of the matter is, you can’t know what title of a book until you finish the book and you don’t know which chapter you have written until all the chapters are written. And so, no, I struggled for almost all my books. I have struggled for chapter for for titles for a long time after the book was done. And so this came to me. My last 8000 days came to me way after the book was done and we were going back and forth, my publisher, my editor and I saying, ‘well, here are ten titles.’ And then he would write back and say, ‘here are ten more titles.’ But I read an article in The New Yorker magazine about the MIT Age lab and the work they were doing. And one of the guys who worked at the Age lab explained to the writer that we live in periods of 8000 days. And so more or less, your first 8000 days is when you are young and you get the voting age around twenty one and then and then the second gets you to around 40 or maybe a little bit beyond mid 40s mid-life crisis time. And then the third is when you get to about if you’re still alive and you get to about 65 retirement age, for many people, you have lived a third, eight thousand days. And and this was the good the sort of good news to me was that if those folks who lived till 65, three, eight thousand day periods, they have at least a 50 percent chance of living another eight thousand days. And so there I was and I thought that I was in the middle of my last eight thousand days. So that’s how I figured out the title. But it came way after the book was done and. As I said, finding a title is trouble.

Peter Bowes: [00:15:03] So at the same time is writing a book and I guess going through the the same kind of practical process that you would go through in terms of gathering the research, talking to people, in other books, immersing yourself into their lives. You’re immersing yourself into your own life. You’re doing the the practical work to ultimately write a book. But you’re also going on this personal journey as well, and maybe fighting personal demons and the challenge of being lonely at that stage in your life. You’re doing two huge things at the same time that are clearly converging with each other.

Lee Gutkind: [00:15:39] That is true. And the research part, the years I might spend with roboticist really came to an end when I started this book because the research was done inside myself. And so to be clear, maybe if I’m writing about someone else, I will revise my book or each chapter of my book six, seven, eight, 10 times. When you write about yourself and you find something, some part of your life, a story that you want to tell and you sit down and write it, it really is only the beginning of the story. It’s like it’s very much like seeing a therapist. You go and have an hour. Well, these days you have 40 minutes with a therapist and then pay for the hour and you tell a story. You tell them things that really bother you or excite you. And then you walk out of the office and you take a walk around the block or go you go home. And usually that story stays with you. And when you go back the next week or whenever it is you return, you may very well tell that story again. Or the fact that the first time you told the story the story, it made you think all through that next week about the things you forgot, the ways you felt, the other people who were involved. And so when you go back to the therapist, the second time the story is is richer and deeper and more complicated. And this is the process that I went through writing this memoir. It wasn’t that I wrote it five times and it wasn’t that I wrote it ten times. Every time that I wrote a story, I put it away for a while and then thought about it until I could come back and find deeper levels of meaning and deeper levels of feeling. And slowly but surely, just like seeing a shrink, I began to understand much more clearly what happened to me during any period of life, why that happened to me and maybe, maybe, Peter, that the blame that I might have pushed on other people could have and often been turned inward. And so that was the process. The deep dive was not into a surgeon. It was into myself. And and the way to discover is to continue to tell your story, look at your story, analyze your story and wait for that story to take you to other story. 

Peter Bowes: [00:18:16] And to return to my conversation with Lee Gutkind. In less than a minute. You’re listening to the Live Long and Master Aging podcast. This episode is brought to you by AgeUp, a new product that helps fill in the financial gaps that are often created once you’ve mastered aging and achieved an exceptionally long life. Small monthly payments to AgeUp stuck over time to create a secure income stream for your 90s and beyond. Contributions to AgeUp are shielded from market swings. And once payout’s begin at age 91 or above, they’re guaranteed to last for life. AgeUp is backed by MassMutual and so by Haven Life Insurance Agency. You can find out more at Age-Up.com that’s Age-Up.com.

Peter Bowes: [00:19:02] We’re talking with Lee Gutkind about his new memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in his 70s. Lee, at what point during this process you’re writing a book about yourself and you perhaps discovering new things about yourself. You’re reassessing your friendships. At what point did you realize, and I’m assuming you did at some point, that this is really helping me and that I am changing my attitude towards aging is changing for the better.

Lee Gutkind: [00:19:30] A couple of things. For one thing, the more I put myself out, that is to say, dragged myself from my house and pushed myself, and I’m saying that carefully, on new people or re-engage with people that I kind of knew sort of the more positive response I got. And it was really this is nothing to most people who are friendly, but to me, a guy holding back, I began to try to notice details of other people that I might be seeing every day, like the folks at, the baristas at Starbucks where I went every morning and they would give me what I always got, a venti dark coffee and they would have it ready for me and they would say hello and they would say goodbye. And I would say that to and and it was just, you know, business. But I began talking to them, not pushing them, but I began trying. I’m just trying things out. Peter, I didn’t quite like in a business situation as I am immersing, I am a really friendly guy. And whenever it’s business or is the writing business or the teaching business, I’ve been teaching for a long, long time, I can come out and play that part. But from a personal point of view, I had a I had a really difficult time. And so I just began trying to notice things that I thought might be important to them. I turn what was friendly back and I wanted to try life out in a different way. And again, it’s not as if I was ever unfriendly or rude or anything like that. But I would leave my keyboard and I would walk up the street right after, let’s say I wrote for an hour and my book was bouncing around, always bounces around in my head. And I don’t usually talk to people for any length of time because I don’t want to interrupt what it is I am creating or composing on paper. And so I would do my business, get my coffee, got to have my coffee, I am a writer and then go back and avoiding anyone on the street that I might know so that I can continue to live in my head in my book. Now that’s pretty good for a writer. That’s what we really tried to do. But on the other hand, I began to realize it’s not really good for a writer who wants a life. And so I pushed aside as hard as I could this feeling that I’m living in the world in the head of a writer. And I just kind of tried to stop it and reach out to other folks just to see what would happen. And what happened was people want you to be friendly even if you’re old. They want you to be friendly. They don’t want you to be pushy and too friendly. But I learned that I could kind of make an impact, just a slight impact on other people’s lives. When I when I looked at them and I talked to them and I acknowledge that they were there. And in fact, what happened was the more I did that, the more they acknowledged me back. And it was very it’s not that I didn’t know this, Peter, I’m not a jerk, but I just years ago just stopped doing it. And so I started doing it because I needed to make some sort of connection. And what happened was, as I said, people acknowledge me back. And the more people I began talking to move to, the more that they talked back. And I discovered some pretty delightful folks. It’s not as nice as if I spent the next two hours hanging around Starbucks, but a few minutes doing that really made a difference. And the difference came also, by the way, in which I began to think about myself. When I walked up the street for my regular Starbucks, I was hunched over. I could I mean, not really hunched over, but I was within myself and I and I began to feel literally that I was standing up straighter and that my and then I was smiling more than ever before. And after I had an interaction with someone, if I felt low, if I don’t get depressed very often, but if I felt low or or just not feeling too right, a two minute interaction, a one minute interaction made me feel so much better. It was just it was delightful to do that. And then instead of hiding at home, thinking about my friends and my mom and watching Law and Order TV incessantly, I kind of stepped out. I’m a I’m a bar guy. I love sitting at bars. And this time, not only did I go back to a few places that I once went to a long time ago, I began talking to people while in those bars and restaurants, and there were other people I discovered who were similarly looking for company. And again, I’m 70 years old or 77 years old. It’s it’s not like I’m looking to. To make a score, I’m just looking to score some company and all of this happened to me in a very brief time, in a couple of years, I had put together lots of new friends and special places where I would go to meet people for dinner, people that I didn’t know before, two years before. And it just turned out that I am now living a pretty delightful and satisfying life after being in my total writers mode for so long. And it’s been really satisfying to have that happen because not only do I have more people to deal with and to be and more worlds to be a part of, it just makes me feel good. You’re talking to me. I used to say when people said to me in my writer mode, what does this make you happy? And I would say, I don’t believe in happy. What’s happy? So I’m not quite sure what happy is, but I’m sure feeling a lot better now.

Peter Bowes: [00:26:01] And with all of this in mind, has covid been difficult for you? The enforced solitude to some extent that it’s forced upon all of us.

Lee Gutkind: [00:26:10] Remember, I have enforced solitude in my life for a long time. And so and so I miss my students. I miss talking to them face to face. And I miss those of people I used. I had a regular dinner group of four or five people on Tuesday nights and I had the highlight of my week was often this this group that I met at a place called Casbah in Pittsburgh for Happy Hour. I mean, it was really an hour, just 60, 70 minutes and people would go home. But I miss those quick, warm interactions when you can reach out and touch someone’s shoulder and say, let me tell you something, here’s what I did yesterday or or how you’re feeling. And now now we do. Zoome OK, but I can’t touch anybody shoulder. I can’t tell anybody a secret. We have nice conversations and I appreciate it and I will continue doing that. But that’s what I miss. But I’m still here. I am looking at you through my computer. I have sat here except for a few walks around the block for since 6:00 a.m. this morning and and I’m used to it and but I’m also I’ve been trying to talk to people with masks. We’re all kind of hidden, you know, like the Lone Ranger with our mask. And so I’ve been reaching out to folks just saying hello or telling them they have nice masks. And I walk around a little bit. I’m a runner. So I run and I recognize these people and they recognize me. And we are at and we remain at a social distance and we still communicate. And I think it helps it helps me. And I think it also helps those folks as well.

Peter Bowes: [00:27:58] I’m sure you’re absolutely right. We’ve talked almost exclusively about the the social side of aging. What about the physical side of aging? Did that concern you greatly at the beginning of this journey as a 70 year old looking into yourself? And has your attitude changed?

Lee Gutkind: [00:28:15] My here’s how I my attitude has changed. I’ve always been a very, very active person. In my sixties. I biked across Tanzania and climbed Kilimanjaro. And I’ve always, um, I was a marathon runner, so I’ve been active for a long time. But what’s changed is how, again, I relate to other people and I just want to zigzag here a little bit. Yes, I have been very active and I stay in shape. But it almost always seems that even though I am active and stay in shape, people do not think that then I’m capable to be as physical as I can be. Sometimes when I’m running, people will wave at me and say, ‘good going, my God.’ Okay, I know they’re being nice, OK, but but I sometimes don’t want to be nice back. What do you think? Just because I’m 60 or 65 years old, I can’t run five miles. Forget it. It annoys me to death and and a few other things that annoy me if you know you didn’t ask. I am tired of being asked by perfect strangers or people I haven’t seen for a long time if I retired or when I was going to retire. I mean, what is it with that? Just because you’re sixty five and you can retire, why should I and why should they ask. It’s it’s demeaning to me.

Peter Bowes: [00:29:44] I smiled when I was reading your book towards the end of the book you talk about and you’re looking, you’re assessing your current situation and you talk about your career aspirations. And that just made me feel good that someone in his mid 70s is talk and writing about having career aspirations.

Lee Gutkind: [00:30:01] I mentioned to you before, there are all kinds of challenges that remain for us. If you don’t want to bike across Tanzania, you can bike from one neighborhood to the other. If you don’t want to climb Kilimanjaro, you can climb a couple of sets of stairs. Here in Pittsburgh, there’s a classroom called the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. And it’s terrific to go there now because of Covid, but it’s terrific to go there and see. It’s 36 stories high and the stairs are very steep. And it’s really terrific to go there to see people my age pushing and pulling themselves up the stairs, old the way 36 flights to get to the top elevator back down again and trying it again. There are so many challenges around aspirations, physical or career aspirations that we can still do despite our age. One thing I started when I was much later in life, maybe a half dozen or so years ago was power hot yoga, and that really excited me. But it also made me feel kind of more nervous and intimidated because there I was at 70 years old, taking this very active class or contemplating it along with people who were one third my age. And it was it was quite intimidating to try to do that. And frankly, people looked at me kind of oddly, the only guy with gray hair. But it was a challenge that that I took on and found very comforting and very supportive and found lots of people. And this kind of changed the way I felt about things when I realized that I was being admired for being able to keep up with 18 year olds and 25 years old. And it made me it kind of changed also this feeling of being undervalued because I was old, I could do it. They saw I could do it. They admired it. And when I couldn’t do a few things, that was quite all right, because there were a lot of other people around who couldn’t do it, too.

Peter Bowes: [00:32:15] Yeah, I think that’s great. Just in closing, what would you like your readers, the readers of this book to go away with? What is the message?

Lee Gutkind: [00:32:23] The message to me is that we need to continue to find ways. We people who are older need to continue to find ways to move forward in our lives. No matter what pressures and what concerns we have, we will remain younger and we will remain younger in our own minds. If we can continue to find ways to do things different, do different things, and always think that no matter how old you are, you are always going forward. You are not going backward. You are going forward to live another day and to live another year. And in my particular case, to live as many of the 8000 days I have left.

Peter Bowes: [00:33:16] And you no longer tell people that your aged 47.

Lee Gutkind: [00:33:20] No, that was a transition that you read in my book. And it was it was the right thing to do, because even now I’m doing a lot of interviews for this book. And the people who interview me will say, wait a minute, in your book, you say you’re 77 years old, but I just looked you up in Wikipedia and there you say you’re 75 years old. And and then another book, you’re 70 and you’re 73 years old. And so I’ve spent my life lying about my age. And so 47, I was pushing the limits there. I just said that to make people stop asking me how old I was.

Peter Bowes: [00:33:57] Lee it’s a hugely entertaining it’s a hugely Eye-Opening book. It is a fascinating read. It is a page turner, as many people say. And I’m really grateful to you for this conversation. Thank you very much indeed.

Lee Gutkind: [00:34:10] And I’m grateful to you for letting me talk with you for so long about my book. So thanks so much.

Peter Bowes: [00:34:15] I really enjoyed it. Lee’s book is My Last Eight Thousand Days An American Male in his 70s. Tremendous read. I’ll put all the details into the show notes for this episode. You’ll find them at our website LLAMApodcast.com that’s LLAMApodcast.com A reminder that you can now listen to us on multiple podcasting platforms, the newest one being Pandora. You can search for us at Pandora.com, or download the app and of course, you’ll find us at Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Google podcasts and Amazon music. The LLAMA podcast is a HealthSpan Media production and if you enjoy what we do, you can rate and review is at Apple podcasts, you can follow us on social media @LLAMApodcast. Direct message me @PeterBowes. Many thanks for listening.