A Bit of Optimism - The Book of Charlie with David Von Drehle

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

What does it mean to live a long and happy life?  David Von Drehle has spent 40 years covering big stories and important figures as an award-winning journalist. But the best lessons turned out to be right next door. David’s latest book, “The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109 Year-Old Man,” is a best-seller about resilience, American history, and what it means to live well.This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on David and his work check out:https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Book-of-Charlie/David-Von-Drehle/9781476773926https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/david-von-drehle/ 

What if you spent an entire career looking for answers, only to discover that so many of the good ones were right next door? Well, that's exactly what happened to David Vondrelli. He's been a journalist for over 40 years. He's written 60 cover stories for Time magazine and is now the deputy opinion editor of the Washington Post. But it was his 109-year-old neighbor, Charlie, who ended up teaching him more about life than almost any other story he's written. So he decided to write a book about

his conversations with Charlie. It's called The Book of Charlie. So I sat down with David to learn what he learned from Charlie and how we can all live a resilient and truly happy life. This is a bit of optimism. David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate you coming. One of our team members, our producer Greg, had read your book, A Book of Charlie, and called me up and said, we have to get David on the podcast. And, you know, Greg is very even keeled. So when he gets excited, we all pay attention. That's great news. I'm thrilled that he liked the book. For those who are tuning in, Charlie, who you wrote about in a book of Charlie,

was your neighbor. Where were you living before you moved to where you are now? Yeah, well, my wife and I met when we were both young political reporters in Washington, DC, and we started a family. And we moved to the middle of the country, suburbs of Kansas City. We had a house full of packing boxes and little kids. And I went out one Sunday morning to get my newspaper off the driveway. I looked up and my new neighbor was washing his girlfriend's car in his driveway across the street. He was just wearing a pair of swim trunks, very buff hair in his eyes and garden hose in one hand, sponge in the other. He waved to me, say hello. And Charlie had just celebrated his 102nd birthday the week before. I took in that scene and I said

to myself, this is somebody I need to get to know. So Charlie's no longer with us, right? You don't think you're going to start a long friendship when you meet somebody who's 102, but we wound up being friends for seven years. Passed away when he was 109. It was only then that I started thinking about what I'd learned from knowing him. And it began to feel like it could be a book. Longevity is a subject now. And the big commentators on the subject, they're obsessive about diet.

They're obsessive about exercise. They're biohacking. Sleep is now a common topic. Charlie, who empirically has more to say on longevity than anybody else who's studying at the age of 40, did Charlie obey all of these things that all of these books are telling us to obey? What did you learn about what it takes to live a long and happy life? Charlie obeyed precisely zero of those that you listed. He was a doctor in his career. He started out in the age of general practitioners carrying leather bags around to house calls back

in the 1920s and 30s. People would ask him, what's the secret to a long life? And as a physician, he would say, secret to a long life is good luck. The idea that this was somehow something you control or hack or figure out, as a doctor, he completely rejected that. Having talked to some of these people who are into this, they've got all the exercise and nutrition figured out, but I was astonished how some of them aren't happy people. And the people who, I mean, the way you talk about Charlie, he was a happy man. Yes. What I figured out from Charlie and what I want to share with my kids, that's really the reason I wrote the book of Charlie, was to pass on some of these

lessons to my kids or make an argument for them, is that happiness is very much a thing we choose. Charlie, despite a lot of tragedy, setbacks, and very difficult situation. He chose to be happy. The story he assembled for himself about his life, choosing between the bright spots and the dark spots, he chose to tell a narrative of happiness. And I think it made him a happier person. What specifically did you want to take from Charlie that you wanted to give to your kids? There's really two big buckets of lessons. The first is philosophical. Charlie embodied the philosophy of stoicism. You know, stoicism has a bad rap. You know, a lot of people use the word stoic to mean unfeeling, unemotional, emotionally blocked. That's completely wrong.

The philosophy of stoicism teaches that there's a lot in our lives that we don't control. We don't control other people. I don't control where you're going to go in this conversation, just as you don't control where I'm going to go. We don't control flukes of fate or fortune. What we do control, though, is the product of our own thinking, our own intention, our own will is the word that the classical philosophers used. We can decide what we're going to do with the time that we have or try to do with the time that we have on earth and how we're going to perceive the events of our

lives. Are we going to look for the best in other people? Are we going to look for the worst in other people? These are our choices. So that's one bucket. The other is a historical bucket, which is my kids are going to live through a century of tremendous, unpredictable disruption and change. I'm absolutely convinced of it, and I don't know what it's going to be. But telling them the story of Charlie reminds us that the 20th century was a century of enormous disruption and change. Charlie was born in the days of horses and buggies, and he lived to see people living on the International Space Station. He lived to see tire tracks on Mars. He was born before radio and lived to use and own a smartphone. That's a lot of change, not to mention a couple of

world wars, complete revolution in medicine that entirely changed his career and made all of his early training obsolete. He lived through a global pandemic, not the one we just had, but the one in 1918, when Americans were at each other's throats about wearing masks outside and whether to quarantine. Talk about division. He lived through the 1920s, when the whole Midwest of the country was literally governed by open members of the Ku Klux Klan. All of this transition, not to mention the social revolutions of feminism and of equal rights, civil rights, he saw it all. I wanted to give that as something for my kids to hold on to that said, you can do this. Whenever I meet somebody who is particularly inspiring, I think one of the reasons they're inspiring to me is there's a mirror that's happening, right? That I'm either having

good things reinforced, or I see hope and opportunity in things that maybe get me down or distracted. And that's what makes them inspiring to me. So I'm curious about that mirror. What was it about your world perspective that Charlie challenged? You know, I say in the book that I advanced this theory of mine that as young people, we are complexifiers. We take this simple world of childhood and we discover all the complexity to it. And people are not as nice as they seemed, and the world is not as easy or as just or as kind as we thought or were told in the nursery. If you live long enough, you can turn into a simplifier again. And what you do is you realize that, yeah, the world's complicated, but what you do about it is pretty simple. You know, practice kindness, practice generosity, spread joy, enjoy the wonder of beauty of

the world. All these simple things that sound like Facebook memes or greeting cards. But the reason that they're so familiar, we discover, and Charlie helped remind me, the reason they're so familiar is because they're true. This is what works. The thing that struck me is you had Charlie write sort of his lessons near the end of his life. And you said he wrote it on just a page, right? One on each side. Is that what it was? It goes to your point of simplifying, which I adore. Children are magical because they say how they see the world.

They don't lie. They have a magical innocence. They don't care what people think about them. And then as we get older, all of those insecurities start to set and we start to care what people think about us. We learn to lie. To everything you said, we make the world complex and we think we're so smart managing that complexity. And then as people age and they face their own mortality, if they are lucky enough to reach old age, those are the best people to ask advice from because they don't care what

you think about them anymore. They don't. So those are the best people to ask advice from because they don't care what you think about them anymore. They don't. And the irony is, if all we can do is to be more like a child or more like somebody who's near the end of their life, it's amazing how much happier life gets. If you do a project like the Book of Charlie, I mean, you would love to bring the secret, you know, and hey, you've never heard this before, but here's the way to live a happy

life, long, happy life. But it turns out it's the stuff mom and dad told you, the stuff your neighbors told you, stuff you read in books. It's been figured out. It's the doing it that's so hard. And again, you talked about Charlie as a mirror. Going back to college, I had professors and others explain the beauty of the Stoic way to me and how freeing it is,

how liberating it is. And I would try it, but I just keep slipping back into trying to make other people do things differently. And why are people so rude? Or why is this line so long? All this kind of stuff out of my control. Charlie not only said to do it, he lived it. He would have rejected the idea that he even had a philosophy, but he was a walking, living philosophy lesson. This works. Look at the guy. He's a happy man. I got some advice recently that I absolutely loved. I have ADHD. So whenever I try and control my distractibility and I try and lock onto a new app or system to help me focus and get things done for a day, and I will find them and I'll think they're incredible and I'll do it for two weeks and it'll profoundly change everything.

And then it'll slip away. Yeah. And then I'll find another system and I'll do that for two or three weeks and it'll profoundly change life and then it'll slip away. And I really get down on myself that I can't stick with anything. I can't stick with these systems that are genuinely helping me. I was telling somebody about this and they said, well, so what? For two weeks, it's magical and then it falls away. And then you'll find something else for three weeks, it's magical and it falls away and so what? And then you'll find something else and it's magical for three weeks. And as I'm listening to you, it's magical and it falls away and so what? And then you'll find something else and it's magical for three weeks. And as I'm listening to you, you know, it's like we can't all necessarily live like Charlie all the time.

But the idea that we can, you know, have a gratitude practice in the morning, even if it's only for a month or two and then it falls away, and then maybe six months later, we bring it back. Like, that's okay. And I think you said it, right? Because there's nothing particularly new about what Charlie said. The Stoics talked about things that Charlie said. Viktor Frankl wrote about, it's our point of view, it's our attitude to the world that we can control if we can't control the circumstances. And you're telling it in a new way through the eyes of Charlie. But I think

the reality is it's just a reminder to go do the things that we all know that we have to do. But to your point, we don't do them and then feel bad about not doing them. And the answer is, is do it when you think about it. And if you forget, then you forget and do it again the next time you think about it. Another way to frame up this thing is the sort of Zen concept, which I think you're driving to, which is so essential. And that is we live in the present. There's a lot of talk about, and it's true that we've got an epidemic of depression and anxiety in our contemporary society. Well, what's depression really except regret about things

in the past? And what's anxiety really except fear of things in the future. Well, we can't touch the past. We can't touch the future, which is why those emotions are so frustrating. What we can do is live in the present moment. I love the way you describe depression as regret over what's happened and anxiety is thinking about what hasn't happened in the future. You have the courage to talk about your own depression in a public forum. Have you always had the courage to talk about your own depression, or is that something relatively recent? It's not a topic I would have discussed in my 20s, but I've copped to it for the past 20 years. I'm 62 now. There's a lot of great and successful people who wrestled with depression, as we call it now, melancholy. It was when Abraham

Lincoln had it. My previous most recent book was about Abraham Lincoln, which was call it now, melancholy, it was when Abraham Lincoln had it. My previous, most recent book was about Abraham Lincoln, which was on my mind, but he would have said that the cure to it is just putting one foot in front of the other, not letting yourself get to that spot where you're paralyzed by it. I believe that life is balanced, right? For everything that we get in life, it comes at a cost. And for everything that we struggle with, there's opportunity within that struggle. And it's always balanced. The greater the struggle, the greater the opportunity, the greater the benefits, the greater the cost, always. What about Abraham Lincoln's struggle with melancholy do you think made him the president

that he became that he probably wouldn't have been able to be had he not struggled with depression? Well, my book, Rise to Greatness, was a look at Lincoln in one year of the war, 1862, which it's my theory that's the critical year of American history. And the way that book started was I was reading a biography and it was chronological. And I got to the end of that year and I looked up from the book and I said, my God, how did he live through that? Because it was an emotional rollercoaster, both the public events, but also privately. His favorite son died, his wife lost her mind, every imaginable thing, people pushing on him from every direction. I'm like,

how did he get through that? The way he got through it was this secret he had learned 20 years earlier when he almost committed suicide from depression, which was just do the next thing in any moment, even when you can't see the whole picture, even when you don't have the entire answer, just figure out what's the next right thing to do and do that. The steps iterate. They build on each other. You learn from the thing that you did, the step you took. You learn for the next step and you get through difficulty by going through it. There's no around. There's no over. There's no wishing. You got to go through the thing. And I very much believe that that was formative for Lincoln. And indeed, he talked about it. He would say, I have no idea

what this all adds up to. I can't begin to picture how this all goes. I can only try to do the next right thing. I find this such a fascinating point of view because when we're in a good place, I find this such a fascinating point of view because when we're in a good place, the theory is to focus on the distant future and work towards the vision. What I love is that when we're struggling, keeping our eyes on the vision is, it's damn near impossible. And what I love is in the times of the hardest struggle is not to quit and not to lose focus on the vision, but it's just this idea of one step before the other. quit and not to lose focus on the vision, but it's just this idea of one step before the other. It reminds me, I ran the New York City Marathon. At mile 22, my left quad decided it had had

enough. Instead of thinking, oh, I've got four miles to go, I was thinking, okay, you've got one mile to go. That was too painful. Or even just get it to that lamppost was too painful. All I wanted to do was quit. But I could just put one foot in front of the other. That was achievable. I could do that. That tiny, tiny little step was achievable. And I just kept doing that until I didn't have to run anymore. And so as you talk about Lincoln, it's like the thought of having to manage these overwhelming challenges and just getting battered personally and professionally, the thought of having to manage these overwhelming challenges and just getting battered personally and professionally, the thought of having to end the race or get to the finish line or win a war or whatever it is,

achieve something, it's too much. But even if you can't get through the next day, you can get through the next hour or the next 10 minutes. And the idea of making life bike-sized chunks is very interesting. It's one present moment after another. On the flip side, the sort of positive version of exactly the same phenomenon is in the book of Charlie. I tell the story of his role in the first open heart surgery performed in Kansas City. And the question was for them, we know what we're trying to do, but if we do it, the patient's going to bleed to death because the heart-lung machine didn't exist yet. So how do we prevent the patient from bleeding to death?

We need to cool them way down. The body temperature drops into the 80s from the 90s. The blood thickens. It gets really slow. So how do we cool a body down? We don't really have that mechanism. Charlie had a little farm, had a couple of horses. And one day he's watering his horses and realizes that a horse trough or a

horse tank, you know, that they drink their water from was just the right size to, he could put a patient under, they drop them in this, fill the thing with ice and they cool the patient down in an ice bath inside a horse tank. Well, you know, is that the perfect solution to the question of the future of heart surgery? No, it's a crazy solution, but it worked. It was a step they could take. I mean, Silicon Valley calls this incremental and iterative design, IID. You take these incremental steps and you iterate from each one of them. You learn from them so that your next step is better informed. And that's the way you make progress. You don't

sit under a tree waiting for an apple to fall on your head. What I hear when you say that is unfortunately counter to the way a lot of people work today, which is Charlie was out on the farm feeding the horses. Yeah, right. And the idea that ideas, I mean, even though it's apocryphal, an apple didn't fall on Isaac Newton's head, but let's just go with it. He was still sitting under a tree pondering, and it was the external thing

that had nothing to do with what he was doing that gave him the idea. And the idea that putting down our phones and taking the world in, and going for a walk, and going to museums, and traveling, and visiting our world in and going for a walk and going to museums and traveling and visiting our friends and doing things that are outside of our routines are where the ideas happen. And Charlie had this problem that he didn't, had he just sat in a room with a

bunch of physicians trying to think of it, they wouldn't have come up with that idea. My wife loves me very much and is always trying to make my life easier. And one way she does is by getting people to mow our lawn for me, which is a sweet thing to do, except that 95% of my best ideas come while I'm mowing the lawn. That's how thinking happens. And I think that's going to be something that particularly younger users of technology are going to figure out more and more. I'm very hopeful about my kids' generation who have already a more jaundiced eye about the early idealism around digital technology. It needs to be a tool for us and not the shaper of our lives. Given your work with the Washington Post and Time Magazine, I have to ask your views on the future of the world. I mean, it seems like we're in a period of extreme stress and flex all over the world. You know, the rise of the strongman in many nations, internal strife in many nations.

Very few of us can predict with any kind of clarity where our country and where the world is going. It seems everybody's pessimistic and sees the other side politically as the thing standing in the way of things going right. What I'm reminding myself of these days is the aberration, kind of a return to the mean, was that little window of time in the 90s after the Cold War ended and before this new century really got underway, when it looked like sunshine, roses, and lollipops for the rest of human history. China was going to become a free market democracy. Russia was going to become a modern enlightened state. And the internet was going to be nothing but good. And the stock market was going to go

up forever. That doesn't describe any period of human history ever. It's always complicated. There's always conflict. I believe that the big picture is going to keep going the way it has for centuries, which is the average human life is going to become healthier, longer, more prosperous into the future. Do I exactly know how that's going to happen? No, but I don't see any reason to believe that after happening this way for all this time, it's suddenly going to stop happening now. The reason the world's going to get better is because the human race is basically Charlie. He is an ordinary human being who figured out how to make his life useful and how to make the world around him a little bit better place. And when you add up all those efforts of all those Charlies, things basically go in the right direction.

worked on at any point in your career that you absolutely loved being a part of, you loved doing it, that if everything you worked on, if every project you worked on from this day on was like this one, you'd be the happiest person alive? Wow. What a great question. The thing that jumps to mind was a very sad story, but I was very pleased with the outcome. After the massacre at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. My editors at Time Magazine, Nancy Gibbs, had a really ambitious idea to have a couple of reporters move to Charleston, live there for months, and basically connect with and earn the trust of every family that had been victimized by that killing. Because if you remember that story, the killer was arrested and at his arraignment, a number of families got up and expressed

forgiveness. And the whole country, the whole world was moved by that. It really, for a time, altered South Carolina politics and American politics. The Confederate flag came down from the South Carolina Statehouse, something I didn't think I'd live to see. And the question became, what is this power, forgiveness? What does it mean? Who can forgive? So deep, deep interviewing, intensive interviewing by my colleagues. And then I shaped that into the longest story that ever ran in Time Magazine, all about Charleston, about forgiveness, about the American past and how the past is never totally gone. That was a very satisfying piece of work to be a part of. So you've worked on some remarkable projects in your life.

What was it about that story per se that you want to talk about it now? The sources were so open with us. The pain was so real. People really searched their souls. And the subject was so important because, well, thank God we aren't all victimized in the way that these families were. We're all called on to forgive. We all need to seek forgiveness. These were two key points in Charlie's one-page philosophy of life, ask forgiveness and forgive. Keys to happiness. And the chance to really unpack those ideas was super rewarding. Can you tell me an early specific happy childhood memory? It doesn't start out happily. It ends happily. I was, I think, three years old, two or three years old. And I got into a literal hornet's nest or wasp's nest. And I was being attacked by a swarm

of these stinging insects who could, given my little body weight at the time, they could have killed me. He got all stung up. But it was such an expression of love and care that obviously I still treasure it 60 years later. That's not quite as upbeat as you may have been looking for. No, no, that's exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you for sharing that. When you talk about Charlie, when you talk about South Carolina, when you talk about your brother,

somebody rushes in to protect us or show us the way or forgive, to do something for someone else, something that will cause them great pain. Like when your family gets murdered by a gunman and days later, you have the mental strength to forgive that person, to put yourself in such extraordinary pain because it's the right thing to do. What your brother did to rush in, to put himself in such extraordinary pain because it's the right thing to do. What your brother did to rush in, to put himself in such extraordinary pain because it was the right thing to do. It seems that you are incurably drawn to stories of love, incurably drawn to stories of service. The way you talk about Charlie is this man who lived a life of love and service. His life may not have been easy and life isn't easy,

but like your brother and like those families in South Carolina, he kept showing up. And we've talked about it a couple of times, the sort of the small steps. It's the small steps that add up to make life great. It's not these great leaps of innovation and vision that all of us aspire to. And I think especially young people of any generation think that that's the thing that makes for happy life or productive life, but it's not. It's this series of lots and lots of little steps, little acts. And the little acts are in community, Simon. This idea of the big vision, of the grand idea, it's so solitary. I appreciate your insight and you're telling me something that I had never quite

identified in myself. And I'm grateful for that. Thank you. It's true. I do believe that happiness and community are inseparable and that caring for others and knowing that there are going to be times when you're going to need to be cared for as well. That's where the meaning comes from in this life of ours, that we're not intended to be alone, solitary, isolated, separated. We're meant to be kind to one another and to care for one another and to put ourselves on the line for the people and the place that we live in. It's what I walk away from this conversation, which is it seems the purpose of life is to care for others and allow others to care for us. That simple philosophy is the fabric of community, to care for and allow others to care for us. This is an active community. You and I, we met 58 minutes and 21 seconds ago, and we're at this place of connection.

I know there's going to be a highlight of my day and my week, and we could only have done this together. And there's patience and time, right? Because when we started, we were strangers, and now I kind of want to give you a hug. We were strangers. Yep. And now I kind of want to give you a hug. Podcast hug.

David, such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. I really do hope to shake your hand and give you a hug one day. I'd like that. And I appreciate the message that you're putting out to the world, whether it's through the lens of Abraham Lincoln or through the lens of Charlie or through the lens of all the other things you've written, I think your perspective really matters. And I'm really grateful that you came to share it with me too. Well, thank you very much, Simon. And thanks for your interest. And thanks for a deep conversation in the middle of my day.

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsynic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.