Transcription
Chuck, I got another explainer for you.
Awesome.
I wanted to spend some time talking about getting old.
Are you feeling it, bro?
I just had my birthday a few days ago.
Okay. Yes. Happened later.
Talking them up. You know what I don't want to say disturbs me? You know what concerns me?
Mhm.
How much advertising swirls around a person's effort to not look old.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, cuz we live in a youth obsessed culture.
Correct.
So what happens is your value decreases as you appear to be older.
And meanwhile, there's another part of that marketplace that feeds people's urges to look older. Like pre-teens.
Yes.
Here's how to put on makeup and you can look older.
Oh, dude, look at you. This is profound. Go ahead.
No. So, so up to a certain age they're marketing things to you so that you look older than your age,
right?
And then after a certain age, they market things to you so that you can look younger.
This is a grift.
So, I think a lot about this,
okay?
And then I ask myself, how do I feel about getting older?
Right.
Okay. And let me just give you a little backstory. As you know, I used to wrestle.
Yes. captain and undefeated in my high school team.
Very nice.
When I finished wrestling, I also did some dancing. I was a performing member of three different dance companies.
Oh, wow.
And so that probably had the greatest impact on my physiology than anything else. The wrestling gives you muscles and strength and and stamina, but the dancing,
coordination, dexterity.
It makes you aware of what your body is doing at all times. So I know where my center of mass is and what self-awareness that that brings. When I stopped dancing, I said, "Okay, it's time to like get back to work." So I start writing and I write books. I I get my PhD. This sort of thing.
Okay.
So my life kept going. Very important fact here. My life kept going. There are people who come later, they say, "Hey, why don't you go on Dancing with the Stars? Wouldn't that be a cool
Yeah. Yeah. For you to go and dance with
dance with the stars.
Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Okay. And I say, "No, I used to dance. That's a chapter of my life. I'm doing other things now because I thought about it."
So, you look at that as going backwards, taking a step backwards.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes. Not that it wouldn't have been fun,
right? But I'd be reaching for a period in my life
where I was clearly would have been better able to dance
in my dancing prime because I'm not in my dancing prime now. So I'd be less than that,
but I'd be trying to reach for something that's not entirely accessible to me.
Right.
Then I thought about it.
It'd also be a sign that your career is over.
Is that [Music] it's a joke? Okay, people. And then I thought, and I'm making up this story, but it's not implausible. I'm the football quarterback in high school, right?
And I threw the winning touchdown in the final game. Okay,
I won state
and I got a trophy,
right?
It's on my mantle,
right?
And then I graduate high school and I go work at the gas station or whatever. Okay, become a fireman. Something an after high school sort of thing you might do. I'd always be looking at that trophy,
right?
Anyone who walks by the mantel, I said,
"Now you're Bruce Springsteen song, you know."
So, yeah, that was And there's a photo of me, you know. Exactly. Okay. And then I'd realize I'm reliving that moment,
right? Glory days.
I'm not continuing my life. My life is referencing things in the past. I said to myself, I never want to do that. But the only way to not do that is to continue to grow, right?
And you can't grow physically because you're getting older.
Physiology prevents that. So what does that leave?
Steroids.
I'm trying to say a serious thing here.
Sorry, man.
I'm not going to be as physically fit as I was. That's never going to happen. But I can continue to grow the mind.
Yes,
I can continue to learn. I can continue to create and continue to accomplish. I would say the last 40 years of my life, I've had this self-awareness and I've made sure that that was happening all the time. My goal every day I learned something I didn't know the day before.
Very cool.
There's a lot of days in your life. Add that up. Oh my gosh.
Yes.
Very quickly.
But the difference is this. You retain it.
No. Okay, fine. Let me That's a detail.
Okay,
that's a detail.
That's a detail.
That's a detail.
Very humble, but go ahead.
Maybe I write it down. Have you considered that?
Maybe that's my problem.
Maybe that's why I can't remember anything.
Oh, can I tell you something? It wouldn't be long before I would learn more on my own through my own generate self-generated curiosity than I ever learned in school. Cuz what happens when you go to school? You you you can't wait until the end of the school period,
right? Okay. To the end of the school day, to the end of the week, till summer vacation.
We know people, if not ourselves, who threw books in the air
coming down the stairs.
There's a rock anthem celebrating this.
Schools out for schools out forever.
Okay, that's an anthem. Why is that? I'm not blaming the people. I'm blaming the school.
The school is not teaching you to be curious. The school is not teaching you that learning is something interesting and fun and you might want to continue doing it after school.
Right.
That's how I looked at school. When school is over, I say, "I want to go back to school."
Yeah.
School.
They should have had a song called You're going to work in the coal mine. And then maybe they'd be like, "No, I'm going to school."
All right. So anyway,
it doesn't take long before you have more knowledge,
more sort of awareness of the world than what you learned in school.
That's all I'm trying to say. Okay? And all the while you're buying books, you're watching documentaries, you're learning. All right? Every day I want to learn something I didn't know the day before. It's true. Four or five days a week for me, not seven. Seven is my goal,
right?
Some days I'm just on the couch eating popcorn, watching a movie.
Okay.
Okay. What I have found is one day I woke up and I say I am vastly wiser than I have ever been. What do I credit that to? I credit that to continuing to learn, encountering things that I've never heard of, don't know about. I'm at a I'm at a cocktail party. Someone says they're an expert in whatever and I'm all over them with questions about their expertise. All over. If they paint houses, I say, "Well, what's different about the latex versus the the oil base versus this? And how come sometimes you
like $200?"
And so, I got questions about that. No matter what your expertise, I'm all over you with questions. How do they relate to astrophysics? I don't know. Generally, they don't. But what is wisdom if not seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought?
Wow. Okay. Okay. And where do those thoughts come from? New juxipositions of information, knowledge that empower you to arrive at a new idea, a new understanding, a depth of understanding that would not have previously been possible cuz you didn't have enough information there. If all your information is what you learned the last day of high school or what you learned the last day of college when you threw your hat in the air celebrating that you no longer had to learn,
right?
You become oified in those moments.
Absolutely.
And as the world keeps changing, you want to resist that because it doesn't match what the world was at your heyday, at your peak,
right?
Graduation day. So I became convinced that people who want to clutch to a world that they remembered it's because the change cannot be absorbed within them because they have not given their brain the capacity to grow with the world to grow with society and what I mean by growing is if you learn more you're growing
absolutely
period
period
period so two years ago I wrote a book star messenger
yes
cosmic perspectives on civilization.
Mhm.
I could not have written that even 5 years earlier.
Right.
It didn't even occur to me to write that. I I hit a threshold. It's like, oh my gosh, there's so much I've thought about that I care about that I think about. I got to write it down. And I started writing it down. I said, there's wisdom here. I think there's wisdom. Maybe I'm delusional, but whatever it is, it's more wise than anything I would have written just a few years earlier. Okay. So, so there's nothing wrong with getting old
provided you have wisdom to show for it every day that I can't do that incremental extra push-up. I have something wiser in my thoughts.
A brain up.
Brain up. Push-up.
I'm doing brain ups instead of push-ups.
So, no, I don't need to look younger. I'm I gray I actually I'm grayer than what I what you see here.
Yeah.
Okay. So, I do tint my hair. Am I trying to look younger? No. I'll tell you what it is. What? Can I tell you what? Go ahead.
Can I tell you what? Go ahead. My gray is coming in unevenly on my scalp, right?
So, it looks like I have a mangy skin disease, and I don't want to distract you when I talk to you.
See, I do it just cuz I like looking good. I'm not going to lie. Now, if my hair came in white, cuz I'm graying the temples. I'm graying in the temples only right here and then some back here. But it comes in instead of white, it comes in it looks like the color of rock salt. Otherwise, I would celebrate it because I like it when I see dudes with the like stark white or silver. Oh man, that would be cool.
So, I'm just saying the goal I hold for myself as I get older is to make every day worth it because every day I'm alive, I'm one day closer to death. That's true for everyone, of course, but when you're on the on the other side, it's a little closer.
The finish line gets a little more real.
Is that the finish line now?
Oh my god,
that's the finish line.
Oh, I'm running out of runway.
So, I'm not going to land this plane.
That actually gives me a bit of urgency. If I knew I'd live forever, what hurry would I ever be in to accomplish anything?
So true.
Plus, knowing I'm going to die actually gives that much more meaning to the days that I have left. True.
Yeah.
And if you'd run the arithmetic on that, knowing you're going to die gives meaning to your life, then living forever means living a life of no meaning at all.
Meaning at all. Everything you say makes sense. I'm at a point now where the aging process is starting to take its toll. And the only thing I really care about is what is what is happening to my prostate? I just don't get it, man.
TMI TMI alert.
I mean, this is insane. Seriously. TMI alert. So, so the funny thing is at this age I see
younger people
Yeah.
in their 20s or 30s, right?
They are certain they know what's going on in the world.
They're so stupid.
No, stop it.
My god. I'm going to tell you right now, if you're in your 20s, you are the biggest dumbass ever. I'm just letting you know, the only 20 year olds who are smart are the 20 year olds who know that they're stupid and they want to listen to somebody twice their age. If you ain't that.
But I hear that. Socrates is in your camp.
Yeah. What does Socrates say?
But the only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.
Yes. Exactly.
No, but I I would buffer that and saying true wisdom is knowing what you don't know.
Exactly. And Right.
Okay. That that is being aware
that
you don't know something.
Right. The Listen, the awareness of your ignorance is the path to knowledge.
Correct.
Yeah. Right. And so,
and that's what you were saying about learn something new every day. You just keep every day. Yeah. It's very cool.
Every day. And every every week, every month, it was like I have a new insight. Yeah. Into the world.
It's very cool.
And fortunately, I have platform to share it for those who may benefit from it. So, Chuck, let me end on a little proverb. I don't know what you call these things. Okay.
Told to me by a fellow graduate student when I was getting my PhD.
Okay.
Uh he's from India. So, I don't know where he got it. Is it Hindu? I don't know. But
here it is. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool. Shun him.
Okay.
He who knows and knows not he knows is asleep. Awaken him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is hungry. Feed him.
Okay. He who knows and knows he knows not is wise. Follow him. Wow. I know one cuz I know that you know that I know that you know that I know.
Okay, I think we're done here.
I liked it.
Yeah,
that was a little that was a little close to home.
Yeah. All right.
I'm getting old.
Yeah. And one of my likes in life is I like the wisdom of age and the enthusiasm of youth.
That's a mic drop. We good. This has been another exploratory explainer. I don't know what we're going to call these things, Chuck, in the future. All right. All right. Just a little bit of insights into getting old and being proud of it, owning it.
Yeah.
There you go. As always, keep looking up. [Applause] [Music]