We live in the most information-rich moment in human history. More data has been created in the last two years than in all of recorded history before it. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that can answer virtually any question within seconds.
You can Google almost anything.
The population of medieval France. The half-life of uranium. Why your left knee clicks when you climb stairs. The answer to virtually every question you’ve ever had is now available within seconds, delivered to you at lightning fast speed with almost no effort.
But try this.
Ask your phone what your grandfather smelled like after a day of working in the yard or an afternoon smoking his pipe. Ask it what your grandmother’s hands looked like when she was making a scratch cherry pie — the way they worked the rolling pin and spread the flour, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world and knew it. Ask it what the setting sun felt like on your face those magical Summer evenings fishing with your Dad.
It won’t know. It can’t know. Because that knowledge doesn’t live in a database.
You can’t Google that.
It lives inside you. Specifically, it lives inside you because of the profound impact made by the older people in your life — and every single day, without ceremony or announcement, some of it disappears forever.
Before the Written Word, There Was the Voice
For most of human history — the overwhelming, humbling majority of it — there were no books. No scrolls. No servers. There was firelight, and there were voices, and there was the circle of elders.
The Aboriginal Australians encoded navigation routes, water sources, and astronomical knowledge into songs — epic narratives carried across thousands of miles of landscape, sung from one generation to the next. The griots of West Africa served as living libraries: human beings who memorized centuries of genealogy, law, and cultural wisdom and carried it forward in their bodies like walking talking encyclopedias. The ancient Greeks didn’t just read Homer. They heard him — performed aloud, rhythms and repetitions engineered specifically so memory could hold on and pass it forward.
These were not primitive substitutes for writing. They were sophisticated, elegant systems for ensuring that what mattered most to us as humans — as families, as communities, as a species — would survive.
The circle of elders is not a relic. It is the original architecture of human knowledge. And, we need it more now then ever before.
We didn’t abandon it because it stopped working. We got busy. We got distracted. We started mistaking information for wisdom. And now, quietly, the circle is going dark — one elder at a time, one untold story at a time — while we isolate and doom scroll.
Eighty Years and Four Words
This past week on our podcast, I sat across from an 80-year-old man named Jack Hager, and I am still turning the conversation over in my head.
Jack grew up in the turbulent 1960’s. Left home at 14. Served in the Vietnam War and came back carrying more than a young man was built to hold — the wreckage that followed was long and ugly: organized crime, drugs, alcohol, the slow unraveling. He eventually found his way to prison, and in prison, he found faith. He has spent the decades since devoted to scripture, to service, and to a kind of hard-won peace that only comes from a man who has genuinely looked at the worst of himself and decided to build something better from the rubble.
When I asked Jack what he would tell his younger self, he didn’t pause long.
“Don’t hurt people.”
Four words. Eighty years. The entire weight of a human life distilled into something a child could understand — but that took a lifetime to truly learn.
I’ve been thinking about those four words ever since. Not because they’re complicated. Because they’re not. Because the simplicity of them is the point — the kind of simplicity that lives on the other side of tremendous suffering, not before it. That is earned knowledge. Hard-purchased, blood, sweat and tears true. The kind that only comes from living it, surviving it, and being generous enough to hand it across the table to someone else.
Jack is a griot. He may not know that word. But that is exactly what he is — a living archive of experience that no search engine will ever index, no algorithm will ever surface, no AI will ever replicate.
That’s the part that stays with me. How easy it would have been to keep the conversation surface-level. How natural it feels to ask people how they’re doing instead of what they know. How rarely we say: I want to understand your life.
What do you wish you had asked someone years ago only to find out… it’s too late?
My Grandmother and Her Quiet Magic
When I think of the most formative influence on who I am becoming, my mind goes to my grandmother. “Mommo”.
I spent my childhood at her side: University of Tulsa basketball and football games, car rides around town checking off our “good deed for the day” list, mornings baking in her small kitchen and evenings curled up listening to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. She was the fixed point of my early universe — warm, constant, entirely herself.
She had what I can only describe as quiet magic.
She didn’t announce herself to a room. She didn’t need to. She had the rare gift of making you feel, simply by being near her, that you were exactly where you were supposed to be. She told stories and cranked out cookies the way some people breathe — naturally, without performance, as though these things were simply waiting inside her and she was kind enough to let them out. A memory from her own childhood here. A small, precise observation about a neighbor there. Nothing earth-shattering on its own. Everything essential when taken together.
What I didn’t understand then — and understand completely now — is that the time I spent alongside her was not just love. It was transmission. She was handing me something: a way of seeing, a set of values, a proof of what a good life could look like — wrapped in the ordinary language of an average day spent solving a jigsaw puzzle or playing cards at an old folding table.
I didn’t have a recorder. I didn’t take notes. I didn’t ask nearly enough questions. I was just a kid, absorbing it all without knowing I was absorbing it.
But here I am. Still carrying her. Still hearing her voice in certain quiet moments. Still reaching, I think, for just a fraction of that quality she had — the unhurried, luminous certainty that time spent together is not time wasted. That you matter. That this moment, right here, is worth honoring.
No algorithm taught me that.
She did.
And I was lucky — lucky that I was young enough to be present without the distraction of a phone in my hand, lucky that she was patient, lucky that our time overlapped at all. Not everyone gets that luck. Which is why, for those of us who still have elders in our lives, the window is not a given. It is a gift. And it’s quickly closing.
The Questions We Don’t Think to Ask
Here is what I’ve learned from my time spent interviewing people and listening to what moves them: most people have never been asked the questions that matter most. Not once.
- Not: What are you most proud of?
- Not: What do you know now that you desperately wish you’d known at thirty
- Not: What’s the thing you almost did — and what stopped you?
- Not: What do you want people to remember about who you were?
These questions unlock rooms that small talk never finds. And the people who hold the answers — the ones who’ve lived long enough to have scars and perspective and something real to say about the shape of a life — they are waiting. Most of them don’t offer it unsolicited. Not because they’re withholding, but because no one ever told them their experience was worth asking about.
Deep listening is its own form of respect. It says: your life matters enough for me to be quiet. It requires putting the phone face-down and making actual eye contact. It requires resisting the urge to relate, to redirect, to fill silence. It requires letting the other person find the words for things they may never have put into words before.
That is not a small thing to give someone. And what comes back — what they hand you when they feel genuinely heard — is irreplaceable.
Neuroscience, as it turns out, agrees. When we hear a real story told with emotional truth, our brains synchronize with the storyteller’s. Not metaphorically. Literally. Researchers call it, neural coupling— two minds briefly becoming one. This is what the griots knew. What Homer’s audiences understood in their bones. What my grandmother was doing every single time she pulled me close and started with: “You know, when I was young…”
She was handing me her brain. The best parts of it anyway. For keeps.
What Gets Lost When We Don’t Ask
Every day, somewhere, an elder dies with a story no one ever thought to ask about.
A woman who survived something that would have broken most people — and never told her children how she did it. A man who made one decision in his forties that changed the entire direction of his life — and the reason why died with him. A grandmother who carried a particular kind of joy, or grief, or wisdom, in the specific details of her specific life — and it evaporated, quietly, because the people who loved her were always planning to ask next time.
There is no algorithm for this. There is no archive. There is no recovery.
When the voice goes silent, the room it held goes dark.
Jack Hager is 80 years old. He has four words that took a lifetime to earn. My grandmother is gone, and I am still discovering the rooms she opened in me — still finding, in my own quiet moments, evidence of the transmission I didn’t know was happening.
You have someone like that in your life. Maybe several.
The question is whether or not you’ll ask before it’s too late. In less then two generations, there will be no one around who remembers that person. Too often, their story fades into the background of life – a branch on the family tree with no real identity.
Their story deserves to be heard and passed along.
What Are You Carrying?
Let’s remember. Each of us is an elder in the making – preparing to be handed the torch in our sunset years. So, what wisdom are you sitting on?
Not the polished, ChatGPT generated LinkedIn post kind. The real kind. The kind that lives in the specific details of your specific life. The thing your father did that you swore you’d never do and now catch yourself doing. The moment everything changed and you didn’t know it yet. The lesson that cost you something real.
That is the knowledge that doesn’t get passed down automatically anymore. It requires intention. It requires us to turn toward each other — actually turn, put the phone face down, make eye contact — and say: I have something to tell you.
We are, all of us, elders in training. Every year we live, we accumulate something that the younger version of us desperately needed. The question is
- Whether we’ll be generous enough to offer it.
- Whether we’ll sit in the circle.
- Whether we’ll point at the sky.
A Simple Call to Action
So here it is. The thing I’m asking you to do.
Think of one person in your life — older, further down the road — whose story you’ve never fully asked about.
Call them. Visit them. Sit with them.
And then ask — not a polite surface question. A real one.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known then? What are you most proud of? What’s the hardest thing you ever survived — and what did it teach you?
And then be quiet. Let them find the words. Let them point at the sky.
Because here is the truth at the heart of all of it: the stories that matter most are not in any search engine. They’re not in any database. They live in the people sitting right next to you — in the lines of their faces and the particular way they pause before answering a question that finally reached them.
They are waiting to be asked.
And the window, always, is shorter than we think.
Have a story worth telling — or someone in your life who does? I’d love to hear it. Drop a comment below, or hit the Start a Conversation button below and connect with us.
The circle is open. There’s always room for one more.
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