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