I’m an ordinary guy who’s somehow managed to live several extraordinary lifetimes in one. But it hasn’t been easy.
At 70, I’ve been single, married, divorced, remarried, widowed, and married again. I’ve had three near-death experiences (that I know of), have had half my teeth replaced because I ground them down. I’ve had numerous concussions, broken, fractured, and dislocated bones. I’ve done battle with hepatitis, malaria, typhoid, giardia, and Colorado Tick Fever, the worst of the lot — unless you count insecure attachment.
I’m a world traveler with absolutely no sense of direction. I’ve been to 50 countries but still need a GPS to find the place I go to get my hair cut (and then get back home again). I’ve navigated the mountains of Tibet in a snowstorm but get lost in my own backyard.
I’ve been teargassed in Bolivia, detained in Cambodia, had my passport confiscated by the Peruvian Navy, and faced down an anaconda in the Amazon.
My education includes four years of high school, three years of college, one year of graduate school, and over forty-five years of continuous self-education. I’m an inveterate sesquipedalian. I have an insatiable brain and a curious mind that’s a real pain in the ass sometimes. But we’re workin’ it out.
My career résumé reads like that of someone who couldn’t decide what he wanted to be when he grew up — which is true: janitor, ice cream scooper, cook, laborer, ranch hand, corporate executive, financial advisor, mediator, real estate developer, house-spouse to two physician wives, and a serial entrepreneur — experiences that led me to redefine success and failure. (I’m a very successful failure!) Now I write books and focus on changing how we live by focusing on how we educate. And I do podcasts — though I expect you already figured that out.
I never had kids of my own. There’s a reason. But I did briefly attend lamaze classes when I was 16 (there’s a story there). For 18 years, I was a solo “parent” and guardian to a disadvantaged, cognitively compromised man eight years my senior. My college nickname was “Dad.” Does that count?
For a few years I was a full-time caregiver to a 90-year-old with dementia, helping him transition peacefully from this life. Through that and other experiences, I’ve had a front-row seat at the aging and dying process, gifting me valuable perspectives on living.
As a kid, I was a black-belt Catholic altar boy who figured out how to optimally monetize weddings and funerals. I played the trumpet at the 1964 World’s Fair, earned my Eagle Scout badge, and bugled taps at the funerals of local boys killed in the Vietnam War.
I sleep with a stuffed dog named Ralf — the offspring of a reparenting program I went through nearly 40 years ago. Ralf travels with me on some of my adventures like rafting through the Grand Canyon. We both had a hell of a good time.
Through multiple careers, travels, crashes, recoveries, and a few bouts of psychotherapy, I’ve learned that our greatest lessons are the gifts of our greatest challenges, that life’s not linear because everything’s interconnected, and, thus, little is truly as it first seems in real time. Understanding and accepting these truths and a few others allows us to actually create serendipity — for ourselves and others.
Nobody taught me any of this — but I figured it out.
That’s what this podcast is about: sharing what I’ve learned through trial and error so maybe you don’t have to learn it the hard way, as I did. Life today is far more challenging and precarious than it was when I was coming up. And much of what we’re taught and led to believe is actually backward. Literally, backward! And, then there’s all the stuff we’re not taught — left to figure it out on our own.
Well, you’re not on your own. You’re here with me to explore All We Need to Know. I’m nobody’s guru — I’m just a kid from New Jersey, now in the body of a 70-year-old man, with stories to tell, the insights of lived-experience to share, and a heartfelt desire that you will be healthy and safe, that you will live peacefully with a sense of ease, that you will experience deep joy and fulfilment, and always feel loved and at home — all exactly as you are.