Episode 45: Transcript

"The four horsemen of the Fiftypoclypse."

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: So it's been a year.

Doug French: Good God. That was my genuine response. I mean, I even knew that's what we were going to talk about today. And I don't know why the way you phrased it touched that off in me, but I just was like, “Dude!”

Theme music fades in, plays, and fades out.

Magda: You know, there's that whole thing where people are like, well, you know, I don't want to spend three years working on blah, blah, blah. And the response is, “well, three years are going to go by anyway. What do you want to have at the end of your three years?” And I think now we're at the end of this, right? Like when you and I were starting this podcast, I was like, wow, this is going to be a lot of work. And it has been, but it's a year. We have all these episodes in the can. We've gotten so much response from so many listeners and transcript readers. And yeah, I'm kind of proud of what we've done.

Doug: Me too. First of all, let's back up a bit, though. What do you mean, I don't want to spend three years? Where did that come from?

Magda: You know, people post these motivational memes and yada, yada, yada. So the idea is that sometimes people get daunted by how much work or how much time is going to go into something, right? They're like, well, “I'm too old to start this now,” or “I don't know if this is going to be success or failure” or whatever. And it's going to take three years or it's going to take five years or it's going to take six months or whatever. And the response to that is: that time is going to pass anyway. What do you want to have done with that time?

Doug: Yeah, you want to have fulfilled your soul. You want to have done something that you like and maybe gotten paid for it. 

Magda: Right. You know, what would we have done with this year? I mean, we could have done a whole lot of other stuff.

Doug: Well, maybe.

Magda: All the time we've put into this. But for me, at least, it has been very clarifying about what are the actual issues with being 50 and in your 50s. 

Doug: Oh, absolutely. 

Magda: That was what we started out with was sort of this feeling that life was coming atcha from all sides. It was kind of like whack-a-mole. 

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: I think that it's more neatly categorized than that. I think it's like four separate whack-a-mole boards, kind of. 

Doug: I guess, well, those are the big four. I mean, everyone has a side hustle of some shit that's off. 

Magda: Okay, well, I mean, do we want to talk about what I think are the big four? 

Doug: You know, I think we do, yes. 

Magda: Okay.

Doug: I know a leading question when I hear one, so please launch. 

Magda: Well, you see me looking down at my notebook because I actually took notes. 

Doug: Yeah, I'm sorry. No, Magda, I don't want to hear anything that you have to say. 

Magda: You've put up with me for this entire year, and now you don't want to hear my analysis. 

Doug: It's our second first anniversary. Which sounds icky to even say, but the fact is it's clever wordplay. Thank you, Oceans 12.

And that's the end of that. So I'm going to refer to our second first anniversary twice. And that was the second one. OK, that's it. 

Magda: All right. That's good. So. All right. Here are what I think are the big four categories of things that are fucking us all up as 50-year-olds. Right. 

Doug: The four horsemen of the fiftypocalypse. 

Magda: Exactly. Number one is our bodies.

The stuff that's going wrong, being in accidents and getting TBIs, perimenopause and menopause. 

Doug: Hip replacement. 

Magda: Hip replacement, yeah, all of that stuff. Cholesterol, right? Like long COVID. 

Doug: Heart disease, yeah. 

Magda: Because some of it's not a result of being this age. Some of it is just a result of having been on the planet for a while.

This seems to be a problem with a lot of people. So of the episodes that we did with other people, not just the two of us, 19 of them.

had some discussion of our bodies. 

Doug: Oh, you have a spreadsheet. This is outstanding. This is great. You've got boxes ticked. That's fantastic. 

Magda: I teach people how to manage well. 

Doug: We got to lean into this. Yes, you got to showcase your talents. That's outstanding. 

Magda: The way that people manage well is by creating processes and leaning on the processes to give them the information they need, which then they interpret, right? Right.

Doug: So I'm going to guess though, that even though this is very well organized, it's not necessarily color coded. 

Magda: No, it is literally four categories. And then I made tick marks under each one. 

Doug: Well, that's not a spreadsheet. I thought we were talking about, you had a whole Excel spreadsheet. 

Magda: Why would I have a spreadsheet for our one year of podcasts? I'll have an Excel spreadsheet for our five year. 

Doug: Because that's what I used to do. When I programmed a conference, I had a color coded spreadsheet of like, this is a speaker.

This is a round table, and everything was color-coded. 

Magda: Yeah, we don't have that many categories. If there's anything I've learned from being married to a database developer, it's that you need to pick the simplest solution that holds the information the way you need it to be held. 

Doug: Actually, I will say, I think that's right. I read a piece this morning about how kids are not learning how to write. It's better to write by hand than it is at a typewriter, at a keyboard.

Magda: Right. A typewriter. You are ancient. 

Doug: Thank you. Yes. I grew up in the age of correct type. So many successful writers. I just saw this whole documentary about Joan Didion. So many people really derive better meaning in what they write if they write it longhand. So take that to heart. 

Magda: Well, you know I'm a Haruki Murakami superfan, and I just read his book on writing, which is a collection of essays. And I found out that, you know, he started writing in the ‘70s, and he is Japanese and his first language is Japanese. And he did speak decent enough English that he could read in English and stuff like that when he started writing. But he started writing just longhand in kanji and he entered a competition where he wrote a novella and he just sent them the only copy he had, through the Japanese postal mail. 

Doug: Is he kind of like Nabokov? You know, Nabokov would say like, “if you like my novel, if only you could read it in my first language in Russian, you know, I just, this is my second language. I'm just muddling through.” 

Magda: Murakami really wasn't happy with his first try at this novel. And so what he ended up doing was writing it in English, which was kind of clunky, but it got his ideas out there. And then he basically translated his own novel from English into Japanese. And putting it in Japanese, he was able to flesh out the language and the images and make it really fluent. But I think that's utterly fascinating. And all of that was done longhand in like, I don't know, 1971 or 1978 or something like that. Right.

Doug: See, this also reminds me of all the bloopers from Modern Family with Sofia Vergara. Okay. Because she is not a native English speaker. And so she would go over and just words would not make sense to her because whenever you speak a different language, you have to translate your ideas in your native language into the language you're trying to speak and then act them out. I mean, she's got a very hard job and everybody she worked with knew that. But whenever she screwed up words, especially idioms, it was an absolute riot. I don't know if I'll keep that in or not because we're already eight miles off track. 

Magda: That's why Hungarian has been so difficult for me. Because forming the ideas of how to say something is completely not the same in Hungarian as it is in any other language that I've ever studied, spoken, read, encountered. And so most of Hungarian, aside from the fact that there are hardly any cognates at all, and so it's very difficult for me to learn just basic vocabulary, the idea of “how do I even begin to express this idea in Hungarian?” And Google Translate is absolutely horribly wrong much of the time with Hungarian. 

Doug: I was waiting with bated breath for you to shit on it. 

Magda: It's so wrong with Hungarian. We'll type in a phrase in Google Translate and it'll come out and we'll say it to Gergely and he's like, what does that even mean? And then he'll tell us what it meant in Hungarian. It's like, “oh yeah, no, not even close.” So a very interesting thing is that ChatGPT in Hungarian is actually more accurate than Google Translate is simply because ChatGPT has pulled actual Hungarian language off the web, which is weird. 

Doug: Anyway, I blame Viktor Orban. 

Magda: I think we can blame Viktor Orban for everything. 

Doug: Also think he's working hard to fuck up a lot of shit behind the scenes. 

Magda: Well, oh, yeah. And I find it funny that the guy who's challenging him, his last name is Magyar because Magyar means “Hungarian” in Hungarian. 

Doug: Right.

Magda: If your ultimate patriotic dude with the name of your country as his last name. Hmm.You know, it would be like we were running Joe American for president. 

Doug: No, America Ferrara should join, should run for president. 

Magda: Exactly. Exactly. 

Doug: So anyway, we're going to bring this back onto track. Thank you for starting, by the way, your first of your big four is our own health. I think that's actually important because that's the hub from which everything else springs. 

Magda: Yeah. 

Doug: Because you got to keep your head about you. It's one thing when you're a young parent, you're not worried about an enlarged prostate. Right. You know, it's like when Heather last week was saying, “I'm the primary breadwinner in my house. And by the way, I can't trust my own body.” And that's got to be the primary fear that each of us deals with because one way or another, when the main chassis that we use to get around in life starts to break down by the side of the road, that's the real scary part because you got to learn how to fix things on the fly if they're fixable.

Magda: Yeah. Okay. So the second category I came up with is our parents. I don't just mean parents. I mean elders. Some people's parents are gone. They're not in contact with them, but they have older people. Aunts, uncles…

Doug: Yeah. Relationship with the Greatest Generation. The Greatest Generation. Are they old enough for that? 

Magda: No. So parents of Gen X are Silent Generation and Boomers. So Silent Generation is my mom and your parents. It's the people who I think were born sort of right before World War II and during World War II. And then the boomers started in 46. So my dad's a Boomer. I mean, I think there are big differences between Silent Generation and Boomers, but the upshot is our parents are getting old enough to need care in some way.

I counted 15 episodes where the topic of caring for parents or parents' stuff was a main theme. We had a lot more episodes in which people were sort of casually talking about their parents because we had a number of episodes where people just sort of mentioned their parents and their parents didn't need a lot of care. And some of it also seemed to be that as we got older, we were becoming friends with our parents in a way that we hadn't been able to be friends before. And so we were trying to deliberately spend time with our parents. But just the idea that our parents were getting older, were getting sick, were dying, were, you know, having to deal with all of their stuff and this idea of how they felt about their stuff versus how we felt about their stuff. And trying to honor both sets of feelings. It's a lot. People talk about the sandwich generation. I remember saying when I was 40, oh, “I'm in the sandwich generation” because I had these kids and because my parents were making decisions on their own that weren't the decisions that I would have made for them. But I think it's very different. I almost said “acting up.” But I mean, I think that's part of it. I think at a certain point, you're so used to being in control of your own life that when somebody that you're emotionally responsible for, even if you're not responsible for the day-by-day functioning and care of your parents, you still feel emotionally responsible for them, especially if you're an older child or an only child. And I think a lot of times if you're female, you know, like that whole running track that we have talked about for years of being a parent. You have that running track in the back of your mind. And I call it “being Mr. Zero” from, you know, When Harry Met Sally. From When Harry Met Sally. Like “Mr. Zero knew you were getting a divorce before you did.” I always felt like that running track of what needs to be done next for the kids made me Mr. Zero. And at a certain point, you have that running track about your parents. 

Doug: It reminds me of this bike I saw on Instagram the other day. There's a treadmill on the bike.

And the bike generates electricity that runs the bike. So you can get exercise. They're saying that rather than pedal, you can get the fuller exercise of walking while you're riding your bike. 

Magda: Oh, so you're running on the treadmill, but it looks like a bike kind of. 

Doug: Yeah, you're walking. Running, I mean, I imagine some people do. Right. I wouldn't do it. Okay. You got to stay in motion or you're doomed. Right. Absolutely. Wide spectrum of relationships with our parents. Either they're gone and we mourn them, or they're gone but they're still here because they've got dementia, Parkinson's, or they're out of your life because you just cut off ties, which is heartbreaking, or they're here and just ornery. And then you've got Laurie Smithwick, who's got perfect parents. Yeah. Great. So that's the spectrum. Lori, you're at the top of the charts. 

Magda: And then you have Jodie Ousley, who was in a horrible car accident, traumatic brain injury, big physical recovery, all that stuff, and her parents stepped in to help her. 

Doug: Yeah, well, they lived with them half the year in Brooklyn. Have you read her blog, by the way? Her blog is excellent.

Magda: I love her blog. I think it's really beautiful, and I think it's such an interesting window, I think, for anybody who doesn't really know what traumatic brain injury can be like. This is it. 

Doug: Yeah, talk about not being able to trust your body anymore. And she's since left the law firm. She had to extricate herself out of that. So this is like a whole new reality that she's going to live for the rest of her life. It's great because she's got means. She's made some money as a lawyer. She's got a loving partner. She can pretty much do what she wants. But that's an interesting conundrum to have as well. What do you do? And how do you assess what your body can do, what your brain can do? But yeah, I love her blog. I will link to it because everyone should read it. She would have been an excellent parent blogger back in the day, should she have chosen. 

Magda: Okay, so that segues us into our third category, which is kids. 

Doug: Hey, see how we did there? Man, I'm glad we rehearsed this. The rhythm we have. You can't fake that. 

Magda: It's not surprising to me that we had 24 episodes that touched on kids. Some of them were people who weren't actually in their 50s. I mean, we talked to Dr. Erin Hunter, who's not anywhere near 50, and her own kids are little, and she's just a teen and young adult therapist. So she came in and talked to us sort of about what's normal and how kids aren't necessarily launching now the way they used to and that kind of stuff. 

Doug: Yeah, we are not averse to having honorary 50-year-olds on the show just because they are experiencing 50-year-old shit too soon.

Magda: I'm just hoping it doesn't hit her too hard when her kids are that age. Because I think sometimes, you know, if you have an area of expertise in something, and then that happens to you, you kind of feel like, oh, I should be handling this better. And in reality, you should just be handling it normally the way everybody else does, right? So, you know, I sometimes look at my gynecologist who has helped me through perimenopause, and she is much younger than I am. And she is just dewy and lovely and unbothered by all the crankiness of perimenopause. And I just think, God, it makes me horrified that she's going to end up going through this buzzsaw at some point. 

Doug: I have never heard a medical professional referred to as dewy before. 

Magda: She's excellent. She's really amazing. 

Doug: Well, and Jackie came on too. Yeah. 

Magda: And Jackie's not anyone near 50. Yeah.

Doug: Right, but it's emblematic of how menopause is such a big part of the discussion now to the point where OBGYNs and other medical professionals are devoting themselves to menopause because there's so much to discover about it and it's something every woman goes through almost.

Magda: Well, I mean, every person who's assigned female at birth goes through it in one way or another. Even if you have your ovaries removed surgically, you're going through menopause. It's just surgical menopause and it happens overnight.

Doug: Yeah, you just don't feel it.

Magda: I mean, I still can get the stories from my mom, but my body is not like my mom's body is. My body is like my grandmother's body was. And I didn't think to ask for any of this stuff either. Now they know that if you give somebody a hysterectomy and don't put them on hormones right after, it's like emotional freefall, basically. Okay, enough of that. Let's get back to kids. And the idea that we have been talking a lot about kids being older teens, being in high school, going off to college. I think part of why we talked so much about kids this year was that this was the FAFSAstrophe year, FAFSAgeddon, like this big problem with FAFSA.

Doug: Oh, yeah, you keep working that.

Magda: I know. I keep trying to come up with them, right?

Doug: I mean, Fafsageddon is bad. Fafstastrophe? 

Magda: Fafstastrophe is bad. 

Doug: There's too much regressive consonants in there. Fafsageddon, I think, works fine. 

Magda: I hope that it gets its shit together and we don't have to talk about it anymore this upcoming year. 

Doug: I'm sure it will. This was an anomalous year, I think. 

Magda: We had a kid who was applying to college. I think next year we're not going to talk about it as much. And I think it's a surprise for a lot of people that they still have to have as much to do with their kids' daily decisions and their daily lives when they're this age as they did when their kids were in, say, middle school. You know, when you have a little kid, it's very hands-on. And then at a certain point, it switches to being mostly mental and emotional work that you're doing. And I think a lot of us thought that that was going to slow down and taper off and our kids were going to

leave the house and then it was just going to be like, “hey, I'm kind of off duty now.” And it hasn't turned out to be that way. I think people are surprised by that. And I think people are wondering if it's normal. I think some people are enjoying it. I enjoy it. I like that my kids still want to talk to me and still come to me when they're having an issue and stuff like that. But I also have a kid that moved across the country and another kid that took a gap year who's getting ready to just leave. And I have this feeling that it's going to be one of those like, “all right, bye mom. Love you. See you at the end of the semester.”

Doug:  Are you sure you're even going to get the V in that? Cause as we've understood, he doesn't even love you. 

Magda: Right. “Luh you.” Then the last category I labeled “General Angst.”

Doug: All right. I don't know. That strikes me as a little vague. But please, move on. 

Magda: The subcategories of that were, “oh, my God, the world is exploding.” 

Doug: Oh, right. Okay.

Magda: “Career and career development and switching careers and who am I anyway,” kind of stuff. And then relationships, friendships, romance, should I get divorced? Should I get married? Am I gay? All this kind of stuff, right? And it feels like, some people go through these kind of crisis points and discovery points when they're 35 or 40 and switch. And so by the time they hit 50, they're just sort of trucking along. And that's great. But then there are other people who were doing other things when they were 35 and 40. And maybe it was parenting. Maybe it was building a career. Maybe it was getting a divorce, something like that. And so now at the age of 50, it's like another signpost where they have decisions to make.

Doug: And it's kind of like you could probably title it running out of fucks.

Magda: Yeah, really. But the problem is you kind of can't afford to run out of fucks. And I think that's why it's general angst. Like if it was just general, like, I don't give a fuck anymore, you could just sort of put up your feet and, you know, plant strawberry plants and be like, okay. Right. Just eating strawberries all summer. 

Doug: Maybe choose your fucks. Maybe like choose the hill you're going to die on. Yeah, exactly. Don't sweat the small stuff, that kind of thing. 

Magda: I think that's what it is. I think it's figuring out where you're going to put your attention. And I know plenty of people who had some sort of relationship drama and are not in a relationship anymore, whether they were ever married or not or whatever, who just at the age of 50 are like, “I don't really want to deal with that. I want to just be by myself. I like who I am. I like who I'm becoming. I don't want to have to be dealing with somebody else's baggage and intersections” and that kind of stuff. Whereas there are other people who are really looking at this like, “wow, I don't want to be alone.” And I think it's interesting to see sort of, you know, like who chooses what. 

Doug: There's plenty of people who fall on both sides of that, especially if people are reinventing themselves, the idea of committing to someone else's baggage, especially if you're with someone who's age-appropriate, they've got their own baggage too. It's a lot to assimilate. Even if you're not with somebody who's age-appropriate, I mean, people have crises all the time. Like I completely fell apart when I was 25. Like, wow, I was in horrible condition when I was 25. And then like 35 was awful for me too. And 42 was horrible. I mean, I think this goes back again to, remember that Ames and Ilg, famous child development researchers, came up with this idea of equilibrium and disequilibrium. And it seems to, in human beings, cycle every three and a half years, which also means it's cycling every seven years. So, of course, 42 is going to be a horrible year of, well, I don't know. Do you call it horrible? It's just disequilibrium. You're not fluent like you used to be in whatever your regular life is.

Doug: That's a good point to tack on because anybody who read Friday Flames this past Friday, I just went through and found a handful, I don't know, eight, nine, ten of my favorite just kind of quotes from some of the episodes we did. And the one from Laurie was, “one of the things our culture needs to do is recognize that change is the constant.”

Magda: Yes. 

Doug: There's a level of seeking equilibrium that just doesn't jive with how disequilibri-ish our existence is, and recognizing that stasis is actually abnormal and embracing that any change is an opportunity. And that's probably why she's the second most-listened-to podcasts we've ever done because of how optimistic she is, how determined she is. She's the person you kind of want to have as a sister and shout out to her as well, because she's had two very big weekends. Her twins graduated college on back-to-back weekends. She's been posting a lot of stuff about that. So good on you girls.

Magda: You know, I have some theories about that whole change thing, and I think a lot of it is generational. Like, Boomers were told to go out there and do what they were going to do, you know? And then Gen X was kind of told, like, oh, you can't do anything. We've done everything already. You guys are just losers. Like, I mean, the emblematic movie of our generation was supposed to be Slackers, right? 

Doug: I thought it was The Big Chill. I thought it was more along the lines of... 

Magda: The Big Chill is for Boomers. You are Generation Jones, right? Like you're that little bridge generation. You know, the Xennials are the bridge between Gen X and Millennials. You're the opposite. And you're the bridge between Boomers and Gen X, you know, because think about who was in The Big Chill. It's people who are definitely older, whereas Slackers was people who were supposed to be our generation. And I think we were given the message that we were supposed to be making things stable because we weren't going to be able to make any progress. 

Doug: Right. But it was also about the compromise of adulthood because they were all activists at University of Michigan in the ‘60s. And then now they're all professionals. 

Magda: Okay. If they were in college in the 60s, they had nothing to do with Gen X.

Doug: No, that's true. It skews a little older, I think, but the message is universal. 

Magda: I'm going to take a poll in the Facebook group and ask people if they think that The Big Chill is a Gen X movie or not, because I think you think it is, and I think other people do. 

Doug: No, no, no, I don't. I'm rescinding that. I'm saying that the message in it is about, it's kind of like what we talk about, because it's a movie about realizing you got to a certain point in your life and you had no idea that this is what your life was going to be. Like when Glenn Close says, “some of the things I say, I can't believe I'm saying.” 

Magda: It's a movie about being 40 is what it is. Yeah. I don't think it has anything to do with a specific generation, except that they were in that generation of Boomers that were told that they were supposed to go out and make things happen. 

Doug: And now they're all 70. And so, yes, they're all definitely Boomers. 

Magda: Yeah. So those were my four categories. Our bodies, ourselves. Parents, our parents themselves, our kids themselves, but us in relation to our kids, really. Like we didn't talk about the kids. We just talked about the parenting tasks of the kids. And then general angst. Do we want to talk about what we want to do in the coming year? 

Doug: Well, you should ask me first what I thought. 

Magda: Oh, what did you think, Doug, about this? Did you make a rubric? Did you make tick marks in your bullet journal? 

Doug: I didn't do a bullet journal, but I was combing through, rereading transcripts in particular because I do think having listened to them, I do get more out of reading a transcript, which is why I'm so glad we provide them week to week. What I focused on more than anything, I think, is inventing yourself, reinventing yourself, seeing this as an opportunity. I think the main through line we have to absorb is, at this point in our lives, is to recognize what our responsibilities are, what our options are, and then thread the needle to make the most of one without compromising the other and finding that equilibrium between what we still have to do and what we're open to do. Even those back-to-back episodes when Elisa Camahort Page was on saying, “look, I was told all this stuff as a young woman in terms of like, what my 50s had to be. I had to be fabulous. I had to be this. I had to be that. And I'm like, I don't feel like conforming to what someone else thinks I should be anymore.” And that I think is a good theme for a lot of us at this point. We're just out here saying, I've got a limited time left. I have some resources. I have some ideas and I want to activate them and I want to realize them. And then right next to that one, Michelle Fishburne came on and talked about going off to become The Happy Nomad. 

Magda: Yes.

Doug: That's a really appealing concept to me, I have to say. If there were nothing else going in my life, the first thing I would do is get rid of everything and get into a vehicle and just drive. 

Magda: I don't doubt that. I think that's actually true about you, that you would just get in a vehicle and go drive. 

Doug: And then I'd fly over to Europe and then I'd just get on a train and just ride trains. 

Magda: Okay, so what do we want to do in the coming year?

Doug: Well, first of all, I didn't see coming the episode that we did about our own wedding.

Magda: You didn't see that coming? You're the one who suggested we do it! 

Doug: I know. But when we started this, I didn't think we were going to make this very much about us because our history is so old. You know, we haven't been married for a very long time. We've been friends for a long time. And that's the story, I guess. But as far as having that particular discussion about what it was like on our wedding day, that just occurred to me because the anniversary happened on a Wednesday. And I figured, oh, we can't not talk about that. Just like last Friday was the actual first anniversary. If something lines up in that way, you know, maybe give voice to it. And again, it's funny because, you know, a couple of people have said, “Is this like a vanity project? Is this, what are you doing with this?” And I'm like, which is hilarious. 

Magda: It's turned into a vanity project, I think. 

Doug: But I have no vanity. 

Magda: I think it is a little bit. 

Doug: I would be very happy to go to recede into the hedges with Homer. And so I think going forward, I mean, we're going to enjoy the fact that we can talk like this, but the kids are off doing their own thing. I feel much more like a friend to you than I ever did as a spouse. And so I think going forward, there'll be less about us and our wedding and our marriage because it seems like we might as well just talk about the Prussian Revolution.

Magda: I don't really want to talk about the Prussian Revolution. I don't know much about the Prussian Revolution. 

Doug: Let's discuss about the discovery of the cotton gin. You know, like, fine, it happened. But it's not very forward-thinking. The whole death cleaning thing, which has overwhelmed my household now, it's really improved my overall view of the future just because I've acknowledged all the things that mean something to me in the past, kept some, ditched others. 

Magda: Uh-huh.

Doug: And so I feel very front forward facing for year two. What about you? 

Magda: Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. I think we don't need to talk about our story too much anymore. And our daily lives are frankly completely uninteresting. So… You know, some of the projects that we're doing are interesting, right? Like, I love that you have become sort of the information coordinator for everyone who rides a bike in Washtenaw County. I think that's very cool. But I just feel like I don't really care about talking about the details of our lives at all. I really want to talk to people about being 50 and uncover all of the stuff that's happening with people so that we can figure out how to move forward collectively. Think about the episodes that we've done that have been most helpful to me and most useful to me and that I hear constantly from other people are super-useful. The episode we did with Emily Gavin talking about how to interact with a loved one that has dementia.

Doug: Oh, yeah. Improv comedy. 

Magda: Even people who didn't have people in their lives with dementia said it was just so interesting to hear how she was framing things in that. 

Doug: Yeah.

Magda: And then Heather Petit's episode about long COVID. Wow. Right. That to me was so useful. And I've been hearing from other people and what they said was fascinating about it was that it was specific enough to her that it became general. So that's what I would like to focus on. 

Doug: That's an interesting way to phrase that. In the end, we're doing this for the sake of the collective experience. And we're a part of that, but we are very tiny, tiny, tiny, small part of that. So even when we have standalone conversations like this one, we're going to have a topic. Like I think we got a lot of feedback about FAFSA when you and I were talking about that based upon the research we had done. You know, it was informational. Just like I have become a junkie for retirement preparation now. I'm going to all these seminars. I'm on every retirement preparer's potential client list. You know, I've been signing more clipboards. And, you know, I'm tempted to use an assortment of aliases, noms de plume. But the thing is, what I'm learning about how Byzantine your finances need to be to save them from being double taxed, to make sure that people get what they deserve and as much goes to your family as possible, because it's one of those industries that is so huge because it's inevitable to everybody. And anybody who descends on you kinda wants a piece, and you really got to have your armor up to keep them at bay to make sure they get no more than they deserve. 

Magda: As usual, you are attacking this subject with the perspective that people are attempting to harm you. 

Doug: Oh, absolutely. Yes, because they are. We'll file that in the General Angst category. 

I mean, the good news is I'd rather be in that place and be wrong than be in the, oh, everything's fantastic and look into my balance and there's four cents. It feels as though that level of motivation helps me because it keeps me focused and motivated. And I own that. But that's the point, right? You'd find something about yourself. You recognize an aspect of your character. And if you can take a bad thing and turn that into a positive, I feel as though I'm turning it into a positive in that way. Right.

Magda: Okay. 

Doug: When you went through that with Uncle Tim, you didn't feel as though all the lawyers and everybody who wanted a piece of that estate wasn't looking for their own. 

Magda: There were not a lot of people that wanted a piece of the estate, right? The lawyer that we had doing it was not a great lawyer, but we knew that. And we also knew that it wasn't like he was trying to cheat us. It was just that he thought he was a great lawyer and he wasn't a great lawyer. So it wasn't malice. It was just incompetence and arrogance. And then, no, we just picked providers that were fantastic. Like the realtor that we had to sell my uncle's house lived across the street and she knew the neighborhood incredibly well. She is a very, very kind person who has really good boundaries. She does a lot of cat rescue work. And so, you know, like she loved my cats and she thought the kids were great and she really understood everything. When my brother and I said, “we do not want to sell this house to anybody who's going to rip out all of the beautiful custom work that my uncle put into it.” You know, she was required by law to give us every offer that came in. She said, this person just wants to buy this and then rip everything out and turn it into a rental. And in the end, she found, in a very short time, the perfect buyers for the house who walked in and immediately looked at a feature that wasn't completely obvious and noticed it and thought it was beautiful. 

Doug: Again, let's just be clear. People can earn my trust, but they’ve got to earn it. And this is a fundamental shift in my overall view of humanity, just because, and again, you speak about the way our culture and our society is kind of fragmenting. There's so much more emphasis on the individual and on the opportunistic nature of things. There's that great line from Ready Player One where they say we'd reached the point where we stopped trying to fix problems and just started instead planning how to outlive them. 

Magda: Mm-hmm.

Doug: And I do think that's kind of what's coming along now because there's so much opportunity for obfuscation that you can kind of get away with stuff, especially given the limited attention span that we have now. You do need to kind of put your armor up a bit more than you used to, or at least I'm more aware of that. I had a very trusting sense in much of my younger life, and I believe I've been penalized for that. 

Magda: Who have you been betrayed by, aside from me?

Doug: Oh, well, let's not talk about that. 

Magda: I mean, that was a joke. 

Doug: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to talk about it. It's not betrayal. People have to do what's right for themselves. Betrayals happen all the time. Some of them malevolent and some are just, look, I have to do what's right for me. And what's right for me is not right for you. And you have to discern between those two and recognize when you let something go or when you're like, lawyer up. I do not believe in grudges. I don't believe in drinking poison every day and hoping the other guy drowns. So would you care to guess what our top five most popular podcasts are? 

Magda: Well, I know that the episode with Mike is somewhere in that top five. 

Doug: Yes. Number one was our first one. 

Magda: Oh, okay. 

Doug: Yeah, because that was like, oh, okay, they're doing that. But yeah, we made a splash, which was good. And the one with Mike was number three. 

Magda: That's cute. 

Doug: Yeah, it totally is, which is why I want to have him back on.

Magda: What's he going to talk about now? Standing desk? 

Doug: I mean, it's hard to improve on microwave grilled cheeses. Would you care to guess what any of the other three is? You told me one earlier, but I don't remember what it was. Oh, Laurie Smithwick.

Doug: Yes. Laurie was number two. All right. So we're looking for four and five. Yeah. And I'll give you a hint. There are both guests that you brought in. 

Magda: Woo-hoo! Good hit rate. 

Doug: Damn right. We know who the engine and who the baggage is. As in any group project. 

Magda: Right. We're going to get off this call and Doug's going to go spend like 30 hours editing this episode. 

Doug: While we record another one. 

Magda: I don't know. Okay, just tell me. I think the never guess is a rhetorical flourish. I don't think it actually means the person's supposed to guess. 

Doug: Well, I am nothing without rhetorical flourishes. Right. Well, number four was Dr. Erin Hunter. 

Magda: Okay, that doesn't surprise me at all. 

Doug: Yeah, “Hit the pause button on the ‘shoulds’.” And number five was Elizabeth Mosier. 

Magda: Oh, yeah. I took so much out of Libby's discussion about using the methods and the structures of the archaeology project that she had been volunteering for to deal with managing her own parents' items and stuff.

Doug: Yeah, well, that sticks with me too. Anytime you can walk the line between data and emotion, kind of like what Heather was saying about monitoring her own body in the same way. Investigate your body like a journalist. In Libby's case, poke through your parents' stuff like an archaeologist. Yeah. That has value. And that's part of the fiftypedia library I was hoping to make. And that's, I think, if we look at the first year, I had really two goals. I feel so much more equipped to deal with what's next now than I did a year ago, just from the shared experience. And especially the feelings they shared, how scared they were and how their successes, how their breakthroughs dissipated some of that. That's been really inspirational to me. Now, do you feel as demystified or did you always feel, having gone through it with Tim, that you were a little farther along the schedule? 

Magda: I think I felt like I was a little bit farther along in some of the things than others, right? Like, obviously, after I went through it with Uncle Tim, you know how to do it once. And then sort of had another, like, mini going through it when my parents sold their house and moved to another state and, you know, stuff like that, I think the more you do it, you just know how to do it and how to approach it. But I still got a lot from the approaches of the other people who were doing it, like, you know, certain ideas, certain constructs. And then there are things that I haven't done before that we had people talking about. And that was really useful to me.

Doug: Conversations in general too. I mean, when we talk about the idea of objective reality or subjective reality, I think what social media has shown us is that we live in much more subjective reality. And what social media allows us to do is impose our subjective reality on other people. 

Magda: Mm-hmm.

Doug: And recognize the lens through which we're all seeing our existence. And it's very different depending on whom you talk to. 

Magda: And doing a podcast allows you to impose your subjective reality on everyone else. 

Doug: Except I'm asking questions. My opinions, what I think, means zero. Again, no vanity. I'm in the hedges. What's more important is these conversations, though, enforce the idea that amid all of the subjective realities, there is a kernel of objective reality. The whole idea of how we connect and how there are certain things we all want to do right by our parents, right by our children, right by ourselves, right by our partners. And that's coming through to me as well, that even though our experiences are so different, there's that nub of we're all trying to do our best. And I'm getting to know people that we're just kind of acquaintances at best. And the other thing, too, is I really wanted to see if we can get into five figures with downloads in the first year. And we did. So I'm two for two, frankly. 

Magda: That's fantastic. Yay, us!

Doug: One of the things that occurred to me too is like every person that we've talked to, there's been a theme to their conversation. It's like been the main topic we want to talk about. Like we talked about a lot of stuff with Bill Brain, but the crux was he had his hair replaced. And I wanted to talk about what that whole experience is like. But I've never marketed our podcasts as such. We've made the guest the headliner as opposed to the topic the guest is talking about. And I think there needs to be a bit more clarification as to what we're trying to achieve and the topic we're going to discuss.

Magda: Yeah, I think that's a project for year two. 

Doug: And most of all, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for starting the blog way back in the day and for having it evolve into whatever this is. Being a parent has been one of the essential aspects of my life, and you provided that. So you know I'll always be grateful for that, too. 

Magda: That sounds a little bit grisly, but I'm accepting it in the spirit in which it's intended.

Doug: “Grisly”?

Magda: That “thank you,” Doug. “You provided that” like I was the handmaiden bearing your progeny. 

Doug: Oh, all right. Well, I mean, this is the thing. I don't want to dwell on our past relationship too much anymore. It feels especially creepy because the other big news is in the past year you've gotten remarried. That's why I'm so glad we had Mike on so we can clarify that you two are a couple and I'm a guy.

Magda: But also it would help if we stopped talking about things like, “You made me a parent,” that kind of stuff. 

Doug: All right. I'm a parent because of you. How about that? Is that better? 

Magda: It's apparent that you're a parent. 

Doug: All right. Well, we're going to end on that genius bit of wordplay. And thank you for listening to Episode 45 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been the past year and what we learned and what we want to do with it. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com.

Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and newsletter every Friday. We are a listener-supported enterprise, and thank you for all the listeners who have supported us this past year. That really means a lot more than I can even put into words at this point. If you're listening to us on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review, and we will see you next week for the first episode of year two. It'll be episode 46. Until then, have a great week. Bye-bye.