Speaker 1: It is Bloomberg Business Week, and our next guest is
Speaker 1: a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, a frequent a panelist
Speaker 1: on NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me the host, and
Speaker 1: of course of cooking channels My Grandmother's Ravioli spent years
Speaker 1: earlier in his career as a correspondent on The Daily Show,
Speaker 1: as well as on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,
Speaker 1: going There's More, There's more, Okay. New York Times bestselling
Speaker 1: author of Mobituaries, Great Lives Worth Reliving, a companion to
Speaker 1: his podcast of the same name. He's got a new book.
Speaker 1: It's out last week. It's called Rock to Genarians, Late Life,
Speaker 1: Late in Life, Debuts, Comebacks and Triumphs. We have Morocca
Speaker 1: with us, but I'm afraid the interviews over.
Speaker 2: We've run out of time.
Speaker 1: We just did your whole.
Speaker 3: Introduction and we didn't even get to my Broadway credits.
Speaker 1: Not yet.
Speaker 2: I've seen you dance.
Speaker 3: How are you just saying?
Speaker 2: Well, we'll talk about that offline. Welcome Malca. We've been
Speaker 2: you know, Tim and I've had some fun over the
Speaker 2: weekend going through the book. It's really fun. Becused you can.
Speaker 2: I kind of started in the beginning, I went to
Speaker 2: the back. You could just kind of open and read
Speaker 2: some different stories. I want to ask them a little
Speaker 2: bit about your career. You've had many chapters already as
Speaker 2: we just kind of laid out. And I have to
Speaker 2: say a producer of ours brought this to our attention.
Speaker 2: Wishbone the Dog played by Soccer the Dog. Yes, you
Speaker 2: did an obituary about soccer efforts. He was gone. It
Speaker 2: was a show for kids, your first job in TV.
Speaker 4: It was my first job, and it is the toolbox
Speaker 4: I keep going back to all the time. Honestly, I
Speaker 4: don't want to sound too grand about it talking about
Speaker 4: being a storyteller, but really that job was storytelling boot
Speaker 4: camp because we a very small writing staff had to
Speaker 4: take classic novels and break them down into half hour
Speaker 4: episodes as seen through the eyes of a Jack Russell
Speaker 4: Terrier a dog for kids between the ages of six
Speaker 4: and eleven. It was like a writing assignment devised by
Speaker 4: an English professor on acid and it was just the
Speaker 4: best way to learn how.
Speaker 2: We're showing everybody the dog. For those who are watching
Speaker 2: on YouTube and Bloomberg, he was averat dog.
Speaker 1: This is like a commencement address really the idea that
Speaker 1: your first job is the toolkit as you've had this
Speaker 1: amazing career that you continue to go back to over
Speaker 1: and over again. It's remarkable to hear because everybody says,
Speaker 1: you know, your first job, it's not going to be
Speaker 1: your last job, don't worry about it, but it will
Speaker 1: have an effect on who you become.
Speaker 4: Oh and you know my boss there, she gave me
Speaker 4: some real tough love because I sort of thought, oh,
Speaker 4: I don't really know what I'm doing, and so my
Speaker 4: scripts were kind of half baked, and she said, you
Speaker 4: just had to figure this out. And she took a
Speaker 4: couple of books on really screenwriting and she just threw
Speaker 4: them down on my desk. At one point she said,
Speaker 4: figure it out because this is a great opportunity. And
Speaker 4: it was a great opportunity in part peak of six
Speaker 4: to eleven year olds. You can't fool them. And so
Speaker 4: you can't just write a lazy script with characters just
Speaker 4: kind of talking to each other. It has to be
Speaker 4: really lean and dynamic, and the action has to keep
Speaker 4: moving forward or they'll lose interest. So it was a
Speaker 4: really great audience to have to write for What.
Speaker 2: Is it about getting snapshot of you know, people's lives,
Speaker 2: you know individuals, great works, as you did with you
Speaker 2: did with Wishbone. What is it about? Kind of like
Speaker 2: telling vignettes that you love doing because you do this,
Speaker 2: it's obviously in this book.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I mean, it's sort of the same
Speaker 4: thing that drew me to obituaries, which were which was
Speaker 4: the subject of my last book and podcast A good
Speaker 4: obituaries about someone's life, not their death. And I love
Speaker 4: a good life.
Speaker 2: STU love reading obituaries especially, Yeah, but go ahead.
Speaker 4: No, he's a good obituary sort of like the trailer
Speaker 4: for an Oscar winning biopic. It has a sweep, a drama, romance,
Speaker 4: the highs, the lows, the triumphs and tragedies. And my
Speaker 4: father was a real romantic and a very optimistic person,
Speaker 4: very boyant, and so he loved to read growing up
Speaker 4: in the Washington, DC area when there were two daily papers,
Speaker 4: he just he would say, oh boy, the oh it's
Speaker 4: just my favorite section of the paper. So I just
Speaker 4: love a person's story.
Speaker 3: It's hard. I'm not sure how was to put it.
Speaker 1: YEA, yeah, do they also though, teach us about how
Speaker 1: we want to live our lives completely completely.
Speaker 4: I mean, there are times that I've been a competitive
Speaker 4: oh bit writer, Like you're sort of reading an oh
Speaker 4: bit and then you go, oh my god, he did
Speaker 4: all that by the time he was twenty five.
Speaker 1: Right, not to make it all about the person who's
Speaker 1: not dead, but.
Speaker 4: Right, I know, but it's hard to not to sometimes
Speaker 4: and then you're like, oh my god, he want a
Speaker 4: prison at thirty five.
Speaker 3: I'm doing fine, there's this metric going.
Speaker 4: But I mean, in this case, I mean, my co
Speaker 4: author and I wanted to tell stories of people who
Speaker 4: accomplished great things late in life because obviously old age,
Speaker 4: advanced age is very much in the news, a very
Speaker 4: hot topic, not just in politics, but as the population ages.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's I would say for myself, like
Speaker 2: I think as I've gotten older, history in general is interesting,
Speaker 2: but also I think about the older folks that have
Speaker 2: been in my lives, Like I love hearing about their
Speaker 2: stories and kind of what they had to go through.
Speaker 2: Having said that, sometimes having it's the folks that you
Speaker 2: write about. Sometimes it's their first chapter, sometimes it's the
Speaker 2: second chapter. Sometimes it's the third chapter. Kind of talk
Speaker 2: to us a little bit about that, right, It's not
Speaker 2: sometimes their first.
Speaker 4: Act, right, or sometimes it is, well exactly, it's a variety.
Speaker 4: It's I mean, it's debuts, comebacks, and sort of it's
Speaker 4: capstones a lot of architects. It's one of these amazing
Speaker 4: things that architects just keep getting better and better. And
Speaker 4: I think there are a couple of practical reasons. If
Speaker 4: you're doing a commission for a big, expensive building, you
Speaker 4: want somebody with experience, right, You don't want necessary probably
Speaker 4: don't want a young starter architect, and more Architects of
Speaker 4: advanced age also are likely to have a staff doing
Speaker 4: a lot of the grant work by that point. But
Speaker 4: all of these people have in common that they don't
Speaker 4: accept this very strange, pervasive and kind of insidious message
Speaker 4: that your third act of life is a time to
Speaker 4: kind of wind things down. I'm not sure where that
Speaker 4: came from. And also, I mean, we're going to continue
Speaker 4: living longer and longer, I mean, if we're fortunate and
Speaker 4: have good health, decent healthcare. There are also people that
Speaker 4: don't look backwards. They're very in it, not doing victory laps.
Speaker 4: They're not sitting at home playing highlight reels of their
Speaker 4: you know, great achievements. And that's Okay, if you want
Speaker 4: to do that, if you you know, if you want
Speaker 4: to do that and hang out and just reminisce.
Speaker 3: But that's not what these people in this book do.
Speaker 1: I want to get to some of the stories in
Speaker 1: just a few minutes, but before we do that, talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about the organization of the book, because
Speaker 1: it reads in a really interesting way.
Speaker 4: I have learned from the best at CBS Sunday Morning,
Speaker 4: which is a forty five year old arts and culture
Speaker 4: show on on CBS. My executive producer, Rand Morrison believes
Speaker 4: very much in mix show mix like you have to
Speaker 4: and part of that is surprises. So you go from
Speaker 4: I'm proud that the book includes Henri Matisse and Clara
Speaker 4: Peller that whares the beef Lady and a tortoise.
Speaker 1: Mister, you're going to get to miss Trafic.
Speaker 4: You had to get to miss the first time fout
Speaker 4: there at ninety take that al Pacino. But like, but,
Speaker 4: but so, mix is very important. I think everything I
Speaker 4: think when you turn the page, you want to be.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm big into delight like you know on
Speaker 4: my open I would just wanted to be like Morocca,
Speaker 4: who delighted audience has died today. He was one hundred
Speaker 4: and sixteen.
Speaker 3: But like, but but so that that's a big part
Speaker 3: of it. So it's not chronological.
Speaker 4: We just we just wanted it to have a decent
Speaker 4: mix so that you know, it's I almost give it
Speaker 4: in terms of protein and carbs. Like some stories have
Speaker 4: import and kind of grandeur, like married church Terrelle the
Speaker 4: civil rights leader at the age of eighty six, led
Speaker 4: sittings segregated, watching DC lunch counters. But that's a good
Speaker 4: like felling nutritious, I mean really story. And then you
Speaker 4: want something just kind of busy and fund Carol Channing
Speaker 4: Finding Love at eighty two.
Speaker 2: You know, well, we've got about a minute and then
Speaker 2: we'll come back and talk some more. You said you
Speaker 2: want a surprise and delight, Like, is there one name
Speaker 2: in particular that you think, like, I feel like you
Speaker 2: just gave us some names that could surprise and delight,
Speaker 2: But is there one name in particular that you think
Speaker 2: people might be surprised to see.
Speaker 1: In this book?
Speaker 4: Oh, surprised to see beyond mister Pickles, beyond mister Yoda.
Speaker 4: Oh well, John Henry the Thoroughbred. Maybe I mean I'm
Speaker 4: going to non humans here.
Speaker 2: I love that you did a bunch like horses.
Speaker 4: Horses right, because we had to pick yeah because in
Speaker 4: horse years, you know, or Snowman, the show jumper at
Speaker 4: eleven might as well have been one hundred in human years.
Speaker 4: I also think there has to be an element of warmth.
Speaker 3: You need warmth.
Speaker 4: And the story of Frank McCourt, I think is just
Speaker 4: I mean, I become moved just even thinking about someone
Speaker 4: who spent his life struggling with how to tell his story,
Speaker 4: thinking that his story wasn't worth telling, being ashamed of
Speaker 4: growing up poor in Ireland, and then finally getting this
Speaker 4: story out of him because in his own wards, he
Speaker 4: would have died howling if he hadn't.
Speaker 2: It is fascinating. There's just so many different names. There
Speaker 2: are names people will definitely know, there are names that
Speaker 2: people might not. How did you go about figuring out
Speaker 2: who you wanted to include?
Speaker 4: Well, I didn't want to go I hate to start
Speaker 4: with what I didn't want to do, but I didn't
Speaker 4: want to go to entertainment heavy. There are actors Rita
Speaker 4: Moreno whom I've interviewed before, and.
Speaker 2: Who's a pistol?
Speaker 4: Who is really a pistol? I mean she's amazing at
Speaker 4: ninety two, Morgan Freeman, because I love the Electric Company
Speaker 4: and they both were on it and they kind of
Speaker 4: have intertwined lives. By law, we had to include at
Speaker 4: least one golden girl. I think we would have been
Speaker 4: arrested if we didn't. And Estelle Getty was a story
Speaker 4: to tell because she had her television debut at sixty two,
Speaker 4: really after a life of kind of raising her family
Speaker 4: and doing every little.
Speaker 3: Bit of off off Broadway theater she could.
Speaker 4: So, I mean, it just seemed right that she should
Speaker 4: have this amazing, iconic role at the end. But we
Speaker 4: wanted to make sure that there was a real range
Speaker 4: of people.
Speaker 3: So one of the things.
Speaker 4: I'm interested is sort of people who are obviously respected
Speaker 4: but kind of famous in sort of worlds, if you will.
Speaker 4: So I called my friend Scott Erlik, whose family worked
Speaker 4: in winemaking for many years, and I said, who is
Speaker 4: someone in the wine making world that's just remarkable for
Speaker 4: his longevity and he's without skipping a bat, he said,
Speaker 4: Mark Urgitic is the guy, a Croatian immigrant, an immigrant
Speaker 4: promost in Yugoslavia, and he was alive at the time.
Speaker 4: He only died last year. Right before our publication, So
Speaker 4: he was active up until the age of one hundred.
Speaker 4: And I love the fact that he was really the
Speaker 4: reason this amazing immigrant story that American specifically California wines
Speaker 4: when you know, became contenders the Judgment of Paris in
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy six, when American wines and French wines were
Speaker 4: competed against each other in a blind taste test in
Speaker 4: Paris organized by kind of a wag of a British
Speaker 4: promoter who expected it to be a runaway French victory,
Speaker 4: and both the red and white Americans. The white from
Speaker 4: Gurkic's winery won, shocked the world to change the world
Speaker 4: of wine. And I just loved his story. And and
Speaker 4: he's somebody who had persevered throughout his life but enlightened
Speaker 4: to his life bringing wine making in a very elevated
Speaker 4: way back to his homeland of Croatia. So it had
Speaker 4: a beautiful full circle.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you also stumble on names when you're reading the
Speaker 1: book and you say, wait a second, I've always seen
Speaker 1: a Roget's thesaurus on a bookshelf or as a college student,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. There was a guy named Rose
Speaker 1: and he was old when he wrote it.
Speaker 4: He was, he was, and I keyed into him because
Speaker 4: I love making lists myself, and you know, I know
Speaker 4: the capital of every country in the world, and I
Speaker 4: used to do strange things.
Speaker 1: Don't make us quizy, I know, I know.
Speaker 3: Please where do I go? Where do we don't throw
Speaker 3: out a random country name? Please don't do that.
Speaker 4: Okay, she would, she's she's thinking Brunei and the capital's
Speaker 4: bandar seri bega want so off?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 3: And Tim, Now you ask, what's the capital of Djibouti?
Speaker 1: Jabooty?
Speaker 3: The capital jibutis jawbooty. Trick question, That's okay, okay, but okay.
Speaker 4: I used to do make crazy lists and like I say,
Speaker 4: waterways near state capitals, that's one. But anyway, Peter Mark
Speaker 4: Roge did the same thing as a child, I think
Speaker 4: for different reasons. I did it because I was just
Speaker 4: maybe sort of curious and strange, which are synonyms, right,
Speaker 4: And he did. He had a lot of tragedy and
Speaker 4: his like personal loss, and one of his biographers believe
Speaker 4: it was a way of coping. But he returned to
Speaker 4: these lists that he had been working on at the
Speaker 4: age of seventy three and published the rog Stosaurus, and
Speaker 4: until the age of ninety he kept refinding it and
Speaker 4: working on it, and so that's sort of an unfinished business,
Speaker 4: which is something I like. A lot of these stories
Speaker 4: are people in a sense returning to childhood in more
Speaker 4: obvious ways, with Frank McCord and lore Ingalls Wilder, who
Speaker 4: brought us to the Little House books by writing about
Speaker 4: their quite literal childhoods. But then people like the concert
Speaker 4: pianist ruts Lynchinska. As a child, she was called the
Speaker 4: Shirley Temple of classical music. And this is a woman
Speaker 4: who at the age of nine she had subbed for
Speaker 4: Rockman and Off Okay, and I interviewed her when she
Speaker 4: was ninety seven pace she had an album come out.
Speaker 3: I interviewed for CBS. But what I found was a
Speaker 3: woman who had been really.
Speaker 4: Tormented by her father as a child prodigy and had
Speaker 4: the piano was a punishment, and she was just so
Speaker 4: enormously talented, and he was brutal to her. She wasn't
Speaker 4: She literally was not allowed to play with dolls or
Speaker 4: go outside and play with other kids. And much later
Speaker 4: in life she returned to the piano on her own
Speaker 4: terms and learned to love it for the sake of itself.
Speaker 4: And I found that so beautiful.
Speaker 2: I don't even know that there's no easy segue here,
Speaker 2: but the founding fathers of comedy. I mean, we have
Speaker 2: some guys who have been making us laugh for decades. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I know some have passed away, and I think
Speaker 2: about Norman Lear, but you dig into what they've been doing.
Speaker 4: Well, Norman Lear, mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner, who were
Speaker 4: all good friends. And I got to know Norman moderately well.
Speaker 4: I would say he was a friend by the end
Speaker 4: of his life. And together, when you think of their
Speaker 4: body of work, they are largely responsible for at least
Speaker 4: a big part of what we actually laugh at. I mean,
Speaker 4: Carl Reiner with the Dick Van Dyke Show, really did
Speaker 4: help create the modern situation comedy. And you know, and
Speaker 4: then Norman Lear made sure that it actually said something.
Speaker 4: And this is an undeniably culturally Jewish thing and that
Speaker 4: needs to be celebrated and acknowledged for what they did
Speaker 4: and what they have given us. So much of what
Speaker 4: we laugh at and think is funny comes from them.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And you know, mel Brooks
Speaker 4: is still going mel Brooks is very different than the
Speaker 4: other two because I think mel Brooks there was a
Speaker 4: grumpiness about him. A lot of what drove him was
Speaker 4: anger at injustice, the horrors of the Holocaust. I mean,
Speaker 4: making fun of Hitler, knocking him off his pedestal was
Speaker 4: a real driving force of what behind what Melbrooks.
Speaker 1: Did for example.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, yep, it's really remarkable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have to ask you about those who misspent
Speaker 2: their old age.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a whole chapter here about folks that some
Speaker 1: of whom are household names, some aren't, who misspent their
Speaker 1: their old age. One of those, you argue, is Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 4: Rudy Giuliani. You know, this chapter is comprised of people
Speaker 4: that you think all you had to do is do nothing.
Speaker 3: Just enjoy the.
Speaker 4: Laurels, take those victory laps, just you know, first second,
Speaker 4: and finally, just do no harm. And Rudy Giuliani, there's
Speaker 4: certainly his mayoralty can be addressed, but I don't think
Speaker 4: it's debatable that the city was in key measures better
Speaker 4: off once he finished his mayor than it was in
Speaker 4: the beginning. You know, I think when he became Person
Speaker 4: of the Year for Time, it wasn't just an acknowledgment
Speaker 4: for how he handled the aftermath of nine to eleven.
Speaker 4: I think it was also for how he had shown
Speaker 4: that a city could be governed, which is something that
Speaker 4: had been in some doubt. I think that a city
Speaker 4: like New York could be governed. And then his behavior
Speaker 4: since then, and with the twenty twenty election and the
Speaker 4: Georgia election workers and there's a reason he is bankrupt.
Speaker 4: I don't know if he's legally bankrupt. You can correct
Speaker 4: me on that if he's declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: But there's a lot of stuff still going on in
Speaker 2: terms of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he really could have just done nothing and been okay.
Speaker 2: How about okay, we've just got about a minute or
Speaker 2: so left here. I mean, going through this and all
Speaker 2: the reporting you've done as a journalist and these stories, like,
Speaker 2: does any of it make you think differently about how
Speaker 2: you want to live?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: And I think this is happening anyway. One of the
Speaker 4: unexpected things of getting older. I'm fifty five now is
Speaker 4: that I'm actually and I'm happy to report, fretting less
Speaker 4: about the future, which I think would I didn't expect
Speaker 4: that to happen. I think I would think that the
Speaker 4: less time you have on the other side had the
Speaker 4: more you'd reread. I'm not, and I think that that's
Speaker 4: a characteristic of a lot of these people. So I'm
Speaker 4: a little freer to act.
Speaker 3: I'm less, and I think in a way it's you
Speaker 3: might as.
Speaker 4: Well act now because people's memories are short, and when
Speaker 4: you're gone, your children, your loved ones will remember you,
Speaker 4: hopefully for at least a little bit of time, hopefully,
Speaker 4: but you might as well act now, enjoy life, and
Speaker 4: be in the present because it goes by quickly.
Speaker 2: No, you're right being the present, and don't be afraid
Speaker 2: to do new things right even as you get older.
Speaker 4: And I'm also trying to speak more deliberately in sentences
Speaker 4: that can be diagrammed instead of just run on crazy
Speaker 4: sentences where I'm just filling space.
Speaker 1: Want to let you go, Capital of Slovenia, Lilub Diana.
Speaker 3: Okay, just making sure that's it just sounded like a
Speaker 3: made up aside.
Speaker 1: Just keeping just keeping you on on us here.
Speaker 2: We might be emailing.
Speaker 3: It was I was actually just slurring, but okay.
Speaker 2: Well, Raka, thank you so much. Inspiring and really thoughtful
Speaker 2: and just fun to read. Roctagenarians with Jonathan Greenberg, Late
Speaker 2: in life, debuts, comebacks, and tribes. Thank you so much.