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Retirement. It’s Not an Expiration Date.

Oct 31, 2022

Award-winning LA Times columnist Steve Lopez admits he has a dream job. Why then would he be thinking about retirement? Millions face the same decision: to retire and how. Hear what Lopez discovered while speaking to, among others, Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. We’re all on the Corner this time, and you’re invited.
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Independence Day - Steve Lopez

Four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and longtime Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez explores the meaning of work and how it defines us in this captivating book that combines memoir, investigatory interviews, and practical application.


Grappling with his own decision of whether to retire, Lopez uses his reporter skills not only to look inward but also to interview experts and peers to collect a variety of perspectives as he examines the true nature of a person’s time, identity, and ultimate life satisfaction.


In Independence Day, Lopez talks to those who have chosen to extend their working life to its (il)logical extreme--people like Mel Brooks, still working at 94--those who have happily retired and reinvented themselves outside of the constraints of work, and those who would like to retire but can't because of financial constraints. He also turns to professionals on the matter, like two aging scientists, a geriatric specialist, and a psychiatrist, to understand the research-based reasons to retire.


With his trademark poignancy, wisdom, and humor, Lopez establishes a useful polemic for himself and others in planning ahead, as he also evaluates questions of identity, financial limitations, and ultimately what to do with your life when the obituary pages are no longer filled with strangers.



Learn More

Steve Lopez has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001 and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. He is the author of three novels, two collections of columns, and the New York Times bestseller and winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction, The Soloist. Additionally, Lopez's television reporting for public station KCET has won three local news Emmys and a share of the Columbia University DuPont Award.



Ep. 127 Steve Lopez Podcast Transcript

Steve Martorano 

The Behavioral Corner is produced in partnership with Retreat Behavioral Health -- where healing happens. 


The Behavioral Corner 

Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano, and this is the Behavioral Corner; you're invited to hang with us as we've discussed the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner. Please hang around a while. 


Steve Martorano 

Hey, everybody, how are you doing? Welcome again to the Behavioral Corner. It's me, Steve Martorano. I'm the one with the job. You know, I stand on the corner. And if, if luck holds out, people walk by. It's an amazing corner, the Behavioral Corner. And they tell us stuff that we find interesting. We hope you do as well. It's called the Behavioral Corner., so it's a podcast about everything because everything affects our behavioral health -- spiritual, mental, the whole thing. It's all made possible by the financial support of Retreat Behavioral Health, about which more, you will hear a little later. So if you're finding us for the first time, good for you to push the subscribe button. We appreciate that. I'm really excited about our guest today because he has popped back up on my radar after many, many years. And with a new book on a topic I've been wanting to talk about anyway, it's we're going to be talking about warning you ahead of time, about the "R word." Naturally, retirement. Millions of us in the baby boomer cohort are either actively involved in our retirement or we want to be thinking about it and planning about it. And we probably are not doing that. Well, our guest did. Steve Lopez is a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. He's a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and finalist. He's a best-selling author. And he's been a columnist for a number of periodicals Time Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, and where we crossed paths when he was the ACE column this for my hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Steve has won numerous national journalism awards, and he has written three novels. And he also wrote the best selling non-fiction book, The Soloist, which was on the New York Times bestsellers list forever and also made into a terrific movie called The Soloist, which, if featured Jamie Foxx, and playing Steve, Ironman. I mean, with all of his achievements, which you can see are notable. For me, the crowning achievement is that the guy was portrayed in a movie by Iron Man, Robert Downey, Jr. So unbelievable. Steve's new book is called Independence Day: What I Learned About Retirement from Some Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will. We welcome Steve Lopez to the Corner. Hi, Steve. Good to see you again.


Steve Lopez 

Hey, it's good to see you and think about Robert Downey Jr. The poor guy went from being Iron Man, to newspaperman when it comes down that was, eh?


Steve Martorano 

You take something...take something to convince people they would do something like that. I liked that movie. I thought Fox was great. And the story is great. If you don't know if you haven't seen it, go stream, The Soloist. It's a great movie based on Steve's terrific, terrific book. So retirement, okay? You're...we...were in this baby boomer thing where someone wants to ascribe the baby boomers have if you can -- imagine life as a python snake that is just swallowed a gigantic pig. And the pig is moving through the pythons' digestive system. That bulge is what the baby boomers have always represented to American society. A gigantic group of people who changed everything they touched, demanded certain things had dreams, and some came through some debt, but we were a force to be reckoned with. And now, well, it's extra innings. We're...we're getting into the overtime period here, and lots of us are going, "Retirement. Okay, what's that all about?" Steve's a news hound as you can tell from his resume. So he decided not to just jump into his impending retirement blindly and he went about looking for answers. That pretty much got it right, Steve.


Steve Lopez 

Yeah, you know what I'm thinking about now, being devoured by that snake by that Python.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, we all pass through that snake.


Steve Lopez 

We are moving through the digestive system, and we're about to be pooped out. That is the story of boomers. 70 million of us still living and breathing. And you know what, here's a number that shocked me. Maybe I was naive. But when I started the research and first heard this, I thought, Oh my God, I've got to write a book about 10,000 people a day in the United States who turned 65. So, I mean, think about that. 10,000 people every day.


Steve Martorano 

You can actually hear it happening, the creaking of the knees and, and the grunt when you sit down...you know my favorite you talk...by the way in the book, it's a great chapter on what happens when you're older and you're trying to watch television, and you're bombarded with these, here's what you need to be taking to make sure you don't die. One of the great advertising campaigns ever is the one of the I guess it's an insurance company, I never know, where the guy is trying to get younger people not to act like boomers. And the favorite...my favorite one is when the guy sits down in his lounge chair at home and makes a noise like, Oh, I do that all the time. That's not necessary. Don't, don't do that. But in every way, I mean, you those numbers prove my point. I mean, in every way we affect whatever benchmark or moment in our lives, we collectively experience and retirements a big, big deal. Before we get to the kind of weeds of your book, it's just full of so many great stories. People, as you say, who were enjoying it, others who are not so much enjoying it. Just one thing, I don't know whether you -- because I looked around and I couldn't quite figure -- it out this idea of retirement, which can seem like an expiration date. Is that a new phenomenon? And by new, I mean, relatively new. I mean, did people in the 18th or 19th century have a kinda end mark that they looked at? Or did they stop working because they could no longer work?


Steve Lopez 

You know, I didn't look that far back. That's a very good question. I did talk to a guy from Age Wave by the name of Ken Dychtwald. He's in the book that he talked about how, you know, Social Security grew...grew up in part out of, okay, you've been on this job long enough. And we got some young people coming up behind you. Let's move it along. Let's get out of the way and have, you know, and somebody else takes that job, somebody younger and fresher. And Social Security came about, and Social Security was a way to, to keep you in decent shape in retirement. But I don't know going back that far whether people... You know, that "65" became that magic number right, after that where if you worked at General Motors on the assembly line. And 35 years later, you got that gold watch and a sendoff, you know, and you met at the corner tavern, and that was it. But retirement is so different today. And the changes have been accelerated by the pandemic, where now...now you can hold on a little bit, there's part-time and there's flex time, and there's working from home, as you are not here doing and I think there are new options, retirement is changing. And the other thing that's happening is that with the pandemic, you had all these people who decided, hey, you know what I hated my job and I ain't going back to it. And so with the worker shortage, you have some employers reaching...reaching back to those boomers reaching into the mouth, the belly of the snake, and pulling out those old timers and saying, hey, guess what, can you give me a couple of hours a day? So retirement right now is really different than it was when I started working. Yeah, you know, and the other thing that's so different, is you don't stick with one employer. Most people these days move around a lot, you know?


Steve Martorano 

I kind of thought the same thing that it probably that this notion of it as an endpoint, so to speak, or a distant point in the future that was codified, probably grew as a result of the Social Security Act for a lot of economic reasons. But it shows you the power of the government. They've taken something that probably didn't exist as a firm idea, and codified it. And then it became a benchmark, and then it became, okay, that's the finish line for good or bad. But it's really not like that, as you said, and you went out to find out how it's being experienced in so many different ways. As usual, you know, you talk to such great people. I was struck very much by two gentlemen at the beginning of the book, one is a Jesuit priest, and the other is a vintner who makes wine. And they both had kind of similar views, because you were asking the question, What should I do? Should I just hang it up? Because there are so many things going on. I want to do or I think I wanted to tell us about Father...is it father... it was Father Boyle. Right?


Steve Lopez 

That's right. That's right in the conflict for me, and I found that it was a conflict for a lot of people. As you approach retirement age and I'm, I'm past you know, that traditional retirement age, I just turned 69. And so what I was thinking was okay, I've done this for 50 years. I really, really, really love what I do. I feel lucky and privileged to be able to parachute into people's lives tell stories can keep learning things, you know, it's like I've been in graduate school for 50 years getting a, you know, getting a master's in life in the Behavioral Corner. I'm working on a Behavioral Corner myself. And it's a lot of fun, and it's very fulfilling. And I thought I love this. However, I've got a heart issue. You already talked about the creaky joints, I've got two knee replacements. And my parents were on the same calendar, I should say, I'm on their calendar, the same heart issues, the same joint issues at the same age. And they began to have a cognitive loss. And I thought, you know if I'm...if I'm on their calendar, I don't have that many years left, where I remember my wife's name. And am I going to be one of those people who hang on to a job? I like it, you know, it's not like it's digging ditches. And it's not physical labor like Mel Brooks told me, so why not just keep doing it? But what if I'm one of those people who when I finally pulled the cord, you know, I'm too humbled to go anywhere and do anything? So that conflict, not how do you know when it's time to retire? Financially, but spiritually, and who are you going to be when you retire? So you're right among the people that I asked were peers and Father Greg Boyle, and Randall Grahm, who started Bonny Doon Wine and became known around the world as the Rhone Ranger because he blends these Rhone varietals there my age. They're almost exactly my age. And I thought, you know, they're on my calendar. Let me see what they think. So I went to see Father Greg. Now, let me tell you quickly about Father Greg, a Jesuit priest for this week, 50 years. This is his Jubilee, a 50-year celebration as we speak. They're having a big banquet for him this week in Los Angeles. So he, for decades has run what's called Homeboy Industries, where he helps to redirect and resurrect the lives of young men and women who have been in trouble, they got into trouble born into violence and trauma and all sorts of difficulties. And, you know, they're coming out of that, and they're trying to try to do something positive, and he's got job training, and he's just a compassionate, older soul, who really saves lives. I mean, it's unbelievable. He should be seated now, like Sister Mary Scalia, was cut from the same cloth. A Philadelphia nun who was another hero of mine. And yeah, so I went to find Greg, and I was doing a story on him. He won some big award. And that's it, Father Greg, every everything about retirement. And he looked at me like that was a little crazy. And he said, Well, you know, look at the work that he gets to do and look at the work that I get to do. Why would we? Why would either of us ever think of retiring, he said to me, you know, this is fulfilling. And life is about finding something that makes you feel relevant. You're giving back, you're tethered to a loving God, or reaching out in public service to those who need it. You cannot do better than that in life, and I will retire in the graveyard and not before. And I thought, well, you know what? He's about social and economic justice. And it's one way to describe the work that I've done for 50 years. And I thought if he's still at it, you know, how feeble Am I that I'm thinking about, you know, leaving class and going out to recess for the rest of my life. So then I was interviewing Randall Graham, the winemaker at this vineyard. He's trying to create with stocks from Europe, and he's trying to create a climate change resistant grape that is a new California grape, that when you drink, it says this wine is from California. And he's very, you know, he's, he's got a romantic notion about wine and winemaking. And he's also exactly my age. And there I am interviewing him. And I'm thinking to myself, now, this is something I care about the planet is on fire. It's not it might not be around when my grandchildren come up. And I can write about climate change in a way that people can relate to. And in California, there's 30% less fog along the coast. And that has an impact on the grapes. And one day, there may not be Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. And this guy is ahead of the curve trying to create a new, great, that's more heat resistant. And I'm talking to him and he's bringing out the wines, and we're sampling them under a tree on his vineyard, just the two of us and the fog is coming in off the coast. Because this is one of those days when there is a little bit of off. And I'm asking him, Randall, you're the same age as I am everything about retirement. He says you know, are you really thinking about anything? Yeah. And he said you are getting paid to sit with me under the tree drinking wine right now. What the hell are you going to do in retirement that's better than this.


Steve Martorano 

He said something that hit me as hard as obviously you. And Mel Brooks, you get to in the book to talk about your time with Mel Brooks, who's never going to quit either. And they both said the same thing but in remarkably different ways. I mean, Graham says, You're...you're nuts. Look what you're doing. You wouldn't. What do you'd rather be fishing? What are you crazy? And Mel Brooks, I'll never forget this line. He went. Now that wasn't a hoax. It was Norman Lear who said, You got up this morning. Came to do something that you're good at and interested in. And you're talking to Norman Lear. I love that. But he said you wouldn't be here under any other circumstances. Are you crazy? And weird is 100?


Steve Lopez 

Yeah, he just turned 100. When I interviewed him, it was I think he was 98. And you're right. He said just that he said, you know, he also said he was quite a philosopher, he said that life is about hanging in that...in that balance between what's over and what's next. And he said, Imagine yourself swinging in a hammock between yesterday and tomorrow. And if something pulls you out of that hammock, you wake up, and you can't wait to get to something, then that's life. That's all that's you already got the prize. That's all you want to know, you want to think about? And that's all you want to shoot for. So why the hell are you thinking about what you're going to do next month, next year, if you wake up and you got an idea for a story, and you still got a typewriter, a pen and pencil, go and do it, just live in that moment and enjoy what you're, you're privileged enough to be able to do.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, the hammock was a great, great metaphor. And I thought of that as well, I think about it in my career, someone described, what I do, and you certainly is that we were lucky enough to be drawn to a kind of secret doorway, that if you're clever enough and lucky enough, you can open the doorway and pass on through to the other side of things. The other side of the police barricade the other side of celebrities when they're not on, you know, that world we all most people experience vicariously, journalists like yourself, columnists, to a lesser extent, somebody like me, and I was in the music and sports business, I got to go into the locker rooms. So I got to go backstage, I got to meet a lot of people finding that doorway. So in terms of your book, which is about retirement, it raises the question of, well, let's be honest about this. There are some jobs that are harder to walk away from than others. And you talk to many people who echo those sentiments about staying there and keeping to do. You spend a lot of time in someplace called Leisure World where you got a lot of older people living together, and you got a lot of different views. First of all, what is Leisure World? And what sense did you get from them? There must have been a lot of people there who went. Thank God, I don't have to go to work more.


Steve Lopez 

Well, Leisure World is a giant retirement community just south of Los Angeles. And it's the several thousand people living there. And what I did was I came up with this idea to write a column for their community newspaper, saying that I was thinking of retiring and I wanted to...I wanted to go to school based on their experiences. So anybody who had any advice or any stories to tell, please, you know, email me, call me whatever, and a bunch of them. A bunch of them jumped up. I mean, look, we've got 50 million retirees in the United States right now. A lot of them have time to talk again. So I enjoyed, you know, we became pen pals. And it was good to reach out to such a big group. Because I got the full range, everything from isolation and depression among those for whom retirement was not working out. People who were so thrilled in retirement that they wish they had done it sooner. There was a little bit of everything I remember calling one woman had had trouble getting ahold of her. And I thought, let me give it one more try. And she picks up the phone. And I heard all of this chatter, like two-way radio chatter, and I said, Where are you she, my husband and I are on our boat off the coast of California. We're just cruising around. And it's almost cocktail hour. We're going to enjoy the sunset. We just ran into a bunch of fishermen who handed us a beautiful piece of fish fresh catch. We're going to grow that, and they have our our cocktails, and what the hell are you doing still working? She said You know what, don't wait to do it when you're young and healthy enough to enjoy it because too many people wait too long. So there was that, and then at the other end, you know, people who there's one guy who said, he said you know what things come up that you don't anticipate and you should anticipate them because it's just life, but your grandchildren need more orthodonture you know, you know, your your your roof blows off in a hurricane, your garage floods, your wife gets sick. You know, you suffer sorrow and loss. And you find out that retirement is a lot like life. Things keep coming at you that you gotta you got to deal with. So don't idealize retirement as this, you know, you're just going to cruise all day for that woman on the boat who knows what, you know she might have been heading for an iceberg, I don't know. But that was the full range. It was a full range of experiences at Leisure World, and I really loved that those people shared their stories. One woman said You know what she said, Don't do it, do not do it. She said I'm still working as a freelance writer. And I'm going to do it as long as I can. Because when I look around, all I see are people who are kind of, you know, bored and how long can you play shuffleboard before, that gets old, so I got the full moon from the function Leisure World, it was really, and it was great. And I'm one of those people, Steve, who was the last person I talked to you. That's what I that's what I believe. So I kept zigzagging, thinking one day, I'm gonna retire the next day, I'll never retire. And it took me a while to get to my own decision. 


Steve Martorano 

That's one of the great things, and it makes the book. Even more, fun as you bounce between the pillar and post going well. Wait a minute, she's on a boat. That means I love that the book is book is called Independence Day: What I Learned About Retirement from Some Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will. Steve Lopez is our guest. Again, it's made up of a series of visits, Steve makes two different people just to pick their brains about this thing. And one portion, I want you to talk a little bit about, if I were going to tell people what it was about, I would say, well, it's like the beginning of a joke. A therapist and a rabbi walk into a bar. I tell us about those two fellas that you went to see.


Steve Lopez 

Yeah, I thought that you know, write a book like this. You can't do it before you visit with the rabbi, a priest, and a bartender. I didn't get to the bartender. So that's my sequel. I'm gonna do a book, you know, musings on retirement from a bartender, who I'm sure it's heard every story that there is the rabbi, her name was is Naomi Levy. And she's an author who wrote a book called Einstein and the Rabbi. And she's, she thought very much in that book, about the soul issues as she described it. And she told me that what I was asking myself was, was what's in my soul. And she said to me, she said, Steve, you are in the city of LA, and the city of LA is in you. And you know, as long as you live in this place, and see things and feel things, it may be you're gonna always need to write about and feed your soul because that's who you are. And she said too many people underestimate the value of structure in their lives. So she told me about a congregant who came to her and said, I don't know what it is. I feel fine. Monday through Friday, on the weekends, not so much. I feel lost. And, and she's she said, that structure. That's you need structure on the weekends. You thrive on structure. I began thinking and talking to Rabbi Levy, who said retirement is not for everybody. I began thinking more in terms of what's really in my soul and what would I do in retirement to feed my soul. And I wondered in talking to, you know, one reason I want to talk to Mel Brooks and Norman Lear is that they create things, and I thought, if you have creative energy, I got to wake up, turn a blank page into something that makes sense, at least half is that creative energy, oxygen, and without it might I suffocate? And so I talked to the Rabbi about that. And the rabbi had great advice. And one thing she said was if you're sitting there idealizing like you're gonna, I don't know, you're gonna, you're gonna serve on a nonprofit board that's committed to a cause you care about? Are you going to learn to fly an airplane or whatever else? It might be wise to carve out a little time pre-retirement to make sure you liked those things. You ought to consider sampling the dream. And I have done that. I'll tell you about that in a little bit. But the therapist said, as I described to him my situation, and I presented it as this big problem, this conflict, this, this unanswered question, what am I going to do? And he said, Well, I don't. I don't really see a problem here at all. And I said, What do you mean? He said you're lucky enough you're one of the few people lucky enough to be in the job that you love to do. And you get a lot out of it. And you know, you can, you can write forever. So if it's not what you're doing right now on a regular daily schedule, maybe it's, you know, some, maybe you cut back a bit, or you switch from daily journalism to writing books. But he said you're asking the therapist how to solve a problem. That's not maybe it's not a problem.


Steve Martorano 

 It's kind of a wake up moment when they tell the shrink what's on your mind. And it's a problem, and they look at you and go, what are you crazy? 


Steve Lopez 

Exactly. 


Steve Martorano 

Yeah. And the rabbi's notion of the sole thing and structure is really, I know, for me, that makes a lot of sense. Because I have led in terms of career-wise and pretty unstructured things I, I wanted to get into broadcasting at a very early age in High School. And I did that. But in terms of plotting it, it didn't work out that way. For me, I just it seemed like a good idea to go work in Boston. And it was, and I went to work in Boston. And it seemed like a good idea to live where you are now out on the West Coast. And so I did that. But there was very little structure in that. And the other thing I remember when thinking about, well, retirement, boy, you don't have to do anything. Somebody once said to me, you know, it's hard to do nothing. You never know when you're done.


Steve Lopez 

You know, that reminds me of another character in the book. Her name is Nancy Schlosberg. And Nancy was a. She's in her 90s. She lives in Florida. She was a professor, most of her career in Maryland, I think, where she was a psychologist and actually specialized in transition into retirement. And when she retired, she wasn't prepared for her transition. She found that it wasn't what she had expected. And she hadn't thought it through. And surprise, given her background, she lost her husband, and she moved to the town they used to visit together on vacation, Sarasota. She didn't have a social network there because she was relatively new to town. And so here's the psychologist who's an expert on transitions, who felt lost. And she began interviewing, you know, fellow retirees and then wrote a book about it, and then wrote another book about it. And now, her career has been resurrected. She now does seminars on what to think about pre-retirement. And, you know, she told me something that she said, You need to embrace ambiguity. You can sit there and try to figure out exactly what your retirement is going to be. But like those people at Leisure World found out, retirement can be just like your work years, where things come at you that you don't expect, that maybe you don't want, and you lose somebody. But she also spoke about trying to figure out a way in retirement to matter because she thinks retirees will find that they tap into this human instinct to need to matter. And it could be to your dog or your cat. It could be to the grandchild who needs orthodonture, and they can't afford the bill. It could be to the mentoring that you're doing with young writers or colleagues, but doing something you care about makes a much happier retiree than if you sit on the couch. And hey, it's this cruise time. I don't ever worry in the world.


Steve Martorano 

Yeah, it gets, you know, fast. Well, look, the literary conceit of this book, of course, is this fellow Steve Lopez is looking at potential retirement. So he's going out to try to figure out from other people what their experience can teach him. And so I don't know whether you want us to tell you what decision you made. I think it'd be fairly obvious you're not going anywhere. But the real what for me is what the book is about, it's it can be helpful. It certainly can show you well. I shouldn't do that. Or maybe I shouldn't do this. It's a great kind of how-to book. How to approach something that I think none of us certainly wasn't thinking about in any timely fashion until it was staring me right in the face. And then it was like, oh my god, now what? So pick it up -- Independence Day. It's first of all, it's filled, filled with Steve Lopez, and it's just great stories, tall numbers barber shop, which we we we can't even get into and the people he runs into up and down his travels. All of which by the way, I want to do this before we go was the setup the history. His journey of discovery was set against the backdrop of his youngest daughter who is going to leave off for college, and that's the empty nest thing that is hard for everybody. Certainly hard for Steve. Also, after years his daughter Caroline, you're off to college. So it's valuable on many fronts. But I gotta tell you just this one thing. When I put the book down at one point, I went, I wonder how Caroline made out at the school she chose, and she's a tennis player. And I went to the school's website, and I opened up the athletic page, and there's your kid. Big as you can be right on page one at her school playing tennis, and I went, that's nice. I got a kick out of that.


Steve Lopez 

I love, Steve that you did that. I'm going to tell her. I'm gonna tell her.


Steve Martorano 

Tell her I tell her a stranger to me. I was proud of her. I thought she just told the old man or the athletic director who put her on that page. See, I told you this was going to be okay.


Steve Lopez 

Yeah, and you know, Steve, that was...that was part of my consideration was the double void. Do I want to retire same time that my daughter is going to be leaving the house? And can I manage that? I don't know because I am a softy. But how about in the end? It's Mel Brooks. If he quits, what he's doing can be a life coach because I ended up taking his advice. 


Steve Martorano 

Yep. 


Steve Lopez 

On a hybrid plan. Keep working a little bit but carve out a little leisure time and get well.


Steve Martorano 

You got to have enough time to be able to see your daughter play, play tennis. Steve Lopez The book is called Independence Day: What I Learned About Retirement from Some Who’ve Done It and Some Who Never Will. It's great reconnecting with you. I couldn't be happier that you were able to do this. Good luck with the book. And good luck with your semi-retirement.


Steve Lopez 

Thanks. Thanks for having me. And I look forward to seeing you again in person somewhere sometime.


Steve Martorano 

Well, if you're on the road for the book, and you're in, you know, you're here. I know you've got a lot of time since you're calling us from your home in Southern California. And you freed up a lot of time because the Dodgers are playing golf, and the Philadelphia Phillies are playing in the World Series. 


Steve Lopez 

Yeah, thank you very much.


Steve Martorano 

How about a column on a team that wins 111 games and get's blown out by the Padres? You guys should be ashamed of yourself.


Steve Lopez 

I am ashamed. I have no excuses. But you're assuming I'm a Dodger fan.


Steve Martorano 

You're a Phillies fan, and you'd be a giant fan, too at some point because you're a Bay Area guy. Steve, thanks so much. And we need to stay in closer contact just in general because I love talking to you.


Steve Lopez 

Anytime. Thanks a lot for doing this. I appreciate it, and don't retire. You're good at this.


Steve Martorano 

Well, thanks. Appreciate that. No, I'm not going anywhere. My wife manages to put up with me so it's good. Steve Lopez, thanks so much. And you thanks as well don't forget push the...push the damn subscribe button please just you know, I know you know, follow me and like me and all that stuff. I love it. But push the subscription button. Take care of bye bye.


Synergy Health Programs 

Millions of Americans are negatively affected daily by their mental health. Retreat has served the community for over ten years, offering comprehensive mental health programming through our mental health division, Synergy Health Programs. To learn more about Synergy, please reach out today at 855-802-6600. 


The Behavioral Corner 

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Recent Episodes

The Behavioral Corner Special Announcement
By Behavioral Corner 04 Apr, 2024
The Behavioral Corner Podcast is made possible by Retreat Behavioral Health. Learn more .
The Road to Recovery. Jim Duffy’s Journey to 39 Years of Sobriety
By Behavioral Corner 09 Feb, 2024
On the next Corner, host Steve Martorano welcomes Jim Duffy, a beacon of hope and living proof of the possibility of long-term recovery from substance abuse. As the Business Development Manager at Retreat Behavioral Health, Jim shares his remarkable story of overcoming addiction and achieving an impressive 39 years of sobriety. The conversation highlights the critical importance of reminding those struggling with substance abuse that recovery is not only possible but also achievable.
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