Together, Ismar and Frank have a combined age of over 120 years. How did and does the world look from that perspective? In the first of a series of podcasts, “120”, they review the major events that occurred in their lives and came to some interesting conclusions. Welcome to 120, with Ismar and Frank.
Transcript:
Frank Okay, 120 years, Ismar, you and I, we have all of this experience. What about sharing our stories of our childhood when we were a little bit younger than we are now because we’re not old? How about sharing some of these stories when we were kids with others in the community based on their questions? What do you think? Shall we do it?
Ismar Yes, yes, of course, but maybe it’s different when we analyse other people’s age because we have a different impression. When I was young, I suppose that everyone over 40 were very wise.
Frank Was very wise. Well, do you feel wise now? Aged 61?
Ismar Then when I turned 40, I asked myself, why am I not a wise man? Maybe it will happen when I will be older. Maybe when I will be 50 and when I was 50, it didn’t happen.
Frank It didn’t happen.
Ismar Then I became suspected that wisdom doesn’t follow necessary people’s age. Today, I’m 60 and I still consider myself an ignorant man.
Frank That’s tough.
Ismar But of course, I had many different experiences when we compare with younger people that we have in our community.
Frank Okay, and do these experiences make you wise or do they make you experienced?
Ismar I suppose that they can make us experienced but not exactly wise. In fact, the definition of wisdom, I think it’s quite difficult to do it.
Frank Well, I’m actually struggling. What is a wise person?
Ismar Because sometimes a person is wise, some aspect of life is some science, for example, or some fields, but not in general because I don’t know what happened, but today we don’t have people at least I don’t know that we consider a lot like Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, Einstein. We don’t know. We don’t have this kind of people today and I don’t know what happened.
Frank We are less wise than Plato, Aristotle and all the other Greek intellectuals. As I get older, I get this feeling that I know even less than I should do and I have more questions. But that’s not really the issue here. Maybe we just should let people from the community ask us questions and we can tell from our experiences and they can evaluate whether we are wise or not.
Ismar Okay, let’s see what will be the result.
Frank Yeah, so we just are two middle-aged young men sitting a couple of kilometres apart who are going to tell about their experiences that they had in the last 60 years. Times two is 120 and we have a bonus because our mothers are still alive. So, we can actually go back further. Your mother’s 85, mine is 86. So, we can actually add to the 120 years, we can add another 171 years. So that gives us a total of 291 years of life experience amongst our four people. That sounds pretty good. So if we get stuck, we can go to our mothers and say, mama, what happened then and then? And then they can tell us and then we can tell the community.
Ismar By the way, do you consider yourself a wise man?
Frank It would be very unwise for me to answer that question.
Ismar But I consider you a wise man, maybe one of the wisest persons I have met in my life.
Frank I couldn’t possibly comment on it’s very cold outside but I’m getting very hot all of a sudden. No, I don’t think I’m a wise man. I might have some experience. But let me tell you something else, Ismar. When I prepared this yesterday, I had a look at some of the things that happened during our lifetimes in Brazil and in my childhood in Australia and in other countries. And I was really, really shocked by how little I knew about these events. And I’m going to show this to you because if you remember some of these events, then you will definitely be wiser than I am because it’s frightening. So, I’m going to share my screen and you can tell me what you know about these events that happened in Brazil.
So I asked ChatGBT, I asked, list events that happened during the lifetime of Ismar and Frank both in Brazil, Australia and around the world.
Ismar Excuse me, I take my glasses.
Frank You take your glasses. Tell me when you’ve got them on because I can’t actually see you at this point.
Ismar Then I’ll be able to read what you have found about Brazil.
Frank So now, in your lifetime, Ismar, eight things happened. Construction of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, inaugurated in 1960. Do you remember that?
Ismar It was inaugurated one year before I was born.
Frank Okay, so you don’t remember that, but okay. Now, the military coup and subsequent military dictatorship, 1964 to 1985, so you were in your teens and in your young adulthood when your country was under a military dictatorship. Do you remember any of it?
Ismar Yeah, in 64 I was three years old, I don’t remember, but I entered at school when I was eight in 1969, the year that the American arrived at the moon. But in that time that I moved to a city to study from 1969 till 1985, I suppose that in many aspects my country was much better than today. We practically didn’t have homeless.
Frank You had less homeless people, yeah?
Ismar Yeah, we didn’t have many people begging and practically we didn’t hear about some violence, for example, stealings, homicides, or maybe about trafficking drugs. We didn’t hear something about that.
Frank So it was a stable environment, and you could get educated in a good environment, yeah? So, you started school in 1969, did you?
Ismar Yeah. How old were you when we started reading?
Frank So the problem we’re going to have in this conversation is most that everything is a little bit more complicated in my life because I was born in Germany, but I spent the first four years of my life in Japan and then in 1966 we moved to Australia. We arrived in February 1966, and I think in April 1966 at the young age of five I went to school but apparently, I could speak a little bit of English but not very much but I don’t actually remember the first year in school and so I don’t know how I could communicate. There is a story that I told my teacher that I loved her, somehow, I managed to do that and that seemed to be the most diplomatic thing to say to open the doors to my future education.
I don’t know what the woman looked like, I don’t know who she was, what her name is, I’ve forgotten everything about it, but I started school as a five-year-old barely two months in Australia in 1966 and reading came much later, I can’t actually remember when I started reading.
So we move on down the list, it says here in 1992 the impeachment of President Fernando Coelho de Mayo.
Ismar Yes, I remember.
Frank You remember that, do you?
Ismar Yeah, yeah.
Frank The introduction of the Plano Real which stabilised the Brazilian economy, that happened in 1994.
Ismar It was a great moment because some years ago we had more than 80% of inflation a month before Plano Real and the government put our currency, they changed the name, I don’t remember the old name but nowadays the currency is still Real and when the Plano Real started, when Real is valid the same as one dollar, it was very good.
At the same time, a scary moment for Brazilians because we didn’t understand what was happening with our economy.
Frank Yeah, okay, so that was tough times. Then we come to 2002 and we have the election of Lula da Silva which just happened again earlier this year for the second time.
Then we had the largest corruption investigation in Brazilian history, Operation Car Wash in 2014. So, do you know anything about that?
Ismar Yes, I think it was a great thing but many people today, mainly politicians, want all the time to put it in a bad concept because corrupted politicians got in a bad situation and they didn’t like that, then they tried all the time to put it in a suspicion.
Frank Okay, all right, so these are things I know nothing about but for some really strange reason and don’t ask me why, I was fascinated by the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff maybe because she absolutely refused to go and it was such a dramatic time in Brazilian politics but for some reason I was absolutely fascinated by this event. How did you see it from your perspective?
Ismar I don’t know who created this sentence. For the king’s friends it’s possible everything and for his enemies the real set of laws if possible to condemn him, to condemn their enemies, then I really think that in that time we had a bad moment with Dilma Rousseff, it was terrible, since the Plano Real till that time it was maybe our worst moment about the economy, about the social environment and I really think that she deserved to lose his term of president but I suppose that it happened because she didn’t have some important people, some decision makers beside her because if she had some special people beside her probably it wouldn’t have happened.
Frank Okay, so this is now seven years ago, what’s she doing now? Is she still in a public figure or has she disappeared out of public view?
Ismar Believe you are not, maybe today in China she is being put in the position of BRIC president, BRIC bank president, she will manage around I suppose a hundred billion dollars. I suppose she’s not prepared for such position.
Frank Okay, so she’s still around. And then the last event that happened that’s mentioned here was the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and because I’m using ChatGPT here it only goes to 2021 so it doesn’t go any further than that. So that’s what happened in your lifetime in Brazil and some of these things are totally new to me. Now we’re going to have the Australian version and when you say, am I a wise man or not? I would have to say no because, okay, I was not very old when a lot of these things happened, or I was no longer in Australia.
So like I said, we arrived in Australia in 1966 and sometime in 1966 they introduced decimal currency. So, what they had, they had the English system of pounds, shillings and pence and I think it was 12 pence made one shilling and 20 shillings made one pound.
So that was the currency and then in 1966 the government said this is too complicated, we need to have 100 cents in one Australian dollar. So we in 1966 had a currency conversion or a currency change, probably a little bit like your Plano Real but I don’t remember any of that because I might not even have actually been in Australia at that point in time.
Then we had a Prime Minister called Harold Holt who went swimming in the sea in 1967 and never came back. His body was never found but I was again too young to know anything about that.
In 1976 there’s something called the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the state of Northern Territory. So, Australia has six states and this one is called the Northern Territory which is in the north of the country, in the middle of the island and they had the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, totally went past me even though in 1976 I started becoming interested in politics.
But I think what was for you Dilma Rousseff was for us the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Governor General Sir John Kerr. So here you have to know Ismar that the Queen of England or now the King of England is the head of state for Australia, but he is represented by a so-called Governor General and at that time it was Sir John Kerr and he is not elected, he is chosen by the monarch and he will say you are my representative in Australia.
So, this unelected person dismissed an elected Prime Minister, but I can’t remember why. Then in 1983 I had left Australia, I left Australia in 1979, Australia won the America’s Cup which is a yacht race in 1983. In the year 2000 there were the Sydney Olympics. Then in 2008 the National Apology to the Stolen Generations, no idea what that was and like I said I was no longer in Australia and in 2017 the legalisation of same-sex marriages in Australia but I was long back in Europe by then.
So the difference here is that you remember some of these things in your country. I remember very little or wasn’t even there about my childhood in Australia.
Ismar I suppose that to us you have lived in some more country than me because I haven’t really moved from my country.
Frank Yeah and I changed the search format a little bit. So, then I went and said okay so what happened around the world during our lifetime? So, we were both too young to experience the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 but I think at least my mother would say that was quite a dramatic period. I can say that under Cuban Missile Crisis, of course that’s in your part of the world in the Western Hemisphere but again you were too young.
But for me the Vietnam War played an important role between 1955 and 1975 because I wrote a huge essay about the Vietnam War and I still have it. So, after all these years in 1976 I wrote this huge essay, 1975-1976 and I still have it to this day. So how did the Vietnam War figure in Brazil for you? Was it part of anything that you were talking about?
Ismar In that period I was a teenager, I didn’t read the newspapers or watch news on TV but I heard something that the veterans were making trouble to America, only that, but not some details about it.
Frank I think we both remember the moon landing in 1969, don’t we?
Ismar Yeah, this year, 1969, was very important for me because that was the year I moved to the city where I was born, and I was eight. I remember that we didn’t have TV, but my grandfather had; and we can watch something about it. It was very, I think, like a surprise, something scary because it’s possible that we can go to the moon. Oh, is it really true? There were some kind of just questions.
Frank We didn’t have a TV either but I was eight and we went to some friend’s house and we watched it on TV and the beauty of this was that it was actually at a very good time. So the moon landing was at eleven o’clock in the morning where we were living in Australia so it was a good time for that to happen. And we didn’t have to go to school, yeah, so everybody could stay at home and watch this thing happen here.
Okay, we move on. Watergate and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. You remember that?
Ismar It was the same of the Vietnam War?
Frank It was connected with the Vietnam War but basically Richard Nixon, there’s a building in Washington DC called the Watergate building and Richard Nixon did some illegal work in this building, namely he tapped so he put little microphones everywhere to listen to what the Republicans were doing and that was of course illegal and that’s why he decided to leave office in 1974. That’s sort of a vague memory, yeah.
Ismar In that time I didn’t read the newspaper, I didn’t know about it but only after that I knew that Richard Nixon was dismissed from American president.
Frank Exactly, so I heard it on the radio but you know that was it, nothing important. Okay, then we come to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now I was actually living in England at that time, but I was in Germany the evening the wall came down on the 9th of November 1989. I was in Germany so that was a momentous event for all of us, yeah. How did you hear about it or did you take it on board in any way?
Ismar Yeah, we considered in that moment it was a very great event because probably the world will be freer and it was a signal of communism failure and many people who weren’t like adepts from communism were very happy because of that and the Germans and Westerns will be more attached to their life and not to live under pressure.
Frank Exactly, so that was a momentous time. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, well I was actually a little bit preoccupied with other things in 1991 because that was the year my daughter was born from my first wife so I was too busy changing nappies to worry about what was happening in the Soviet Union.
And then comes the day I think a lot of us will remember, September the 11th 2001. What were you doing in the morning of that day?
Ismar I was at my job and my ex-girlfriend called me and asked me if I knew about it and at the first moment, I didn’t believe on that and I think it was a very important event in a negative way because after that the world became more afraid from almost everyone and everything. We don’t have the same freedom as we had to visit some other countries. It’s more difficult to visit the United States and even many other countries because afterthat we have many other terrorist events.
Frank That day changed history. It was three o’clock in the afternoon when it happened and I was in Germany and I had an American girlfriend at the time and I had my language school.
I had a language school in Germany; and I had about 30 teachers and a lot of them were actually Americans. They were married to American soldiers stationed in Germany and you can imagine that really changed.
I had to say a lot of the teachers phoned me and said, Frank, we can’t come today because if we leave the base, they were living on American military bases, so if we leave the American base we can leave but we won’t be able to come back in. So that’s changed a lot and so that was an interesting period.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008. I can sort of vaguely remember that but not very much. What about you?
Ismar I suppose that an important point was about his African descendants because he was the first black president of the United States but in general I suppose that people expect a lot from him and at least now in this exact moment I don’t remember something special that he did. Then when he received the Nobel Prize of peace, I’m not sure that he really deserved it.
Frank It’s an interesting point. He received it very early in his first term and it does beg the question, what did President Obama actually do for his country? I’m sure there are a lot of things but I think his wife seems to be more famous than he is because Michelle Obama still did a lot of work doing what she did, and a lot of people remember Michelle Obama but not what Barack Obama did.
The Arab Spring Uprisings in 2010.
Ismar I think it was a very interesting point even because after that many other varieties happened all around the world and I also believe that social media helped people to do such a thing. I think it was very interesting. Although many people died and I’m not sure that we are freer than before, I’m not sure. Maybe in Brazil I suppose we aren’t more freer than before.
Frank I think that’s a really important point because if you link that with the terrorist attacks in 2001, I think you and I Ismar, would say that during our childhoods in our early 20s into our 30s, we experienced a greater feeling of freedom, less fear, less anxiety than the generations born after us, especially the millennials and the very young people who are now in their teenagers, the so-called Generation Z because in 2001 onwards things were very, very different to what happened before. Even during the Cold War, we had more freedom.
Ismar I completely agree with you that in that time we were freer than after 2001.
Frank And then of course, it’s hard to believe, but it happened in 2019, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that’s already now four years ago, and of course the lack of freedoms that we had to endure with all the lockdowns and so on.
For me there is a red line that from September 9th 2001, we lost a lot of freedom, and I think that’s something that maybe some people can ask us.
Ismar I suppose that about the pandemic, probably many other people thought the same as I thought in some moment. I thought, could this moment be the start of the end of our species, humans and humans? I asked myself for some situation.
Frank It’s a frightening question. I suppose a lot of us had similar questions, because when the thing started, there was no vaccination, there was no vaccines, there was nothing. Nobody knew anything about this virus. It came from somewhere, apparently in China, but that has yet to be 100% confirmed.
Ismar We have people dying, I don’t know how about Europe or France more specifically, but today not so many as before, but we have some people dying from COVID.
Frank The statistics are no longer published, so we don’t really know what’s happening, but I’m sure that it’s not a pandemic now, it’s an endemic. I’m sure it’s still floating around in various versions, but of course we now have other events, especially here in Europe with the war in Ukraine and the cost of living that COVID has moved back in importance.
I was getting very depressed when I looked at this list because there were a lot of things that I didn’t or I can’t possibly talk about, because I wasn’t really aware of it or not interested or too young or something like that.
Ismar But Frank, there is an interesting point to consider, because in our adolescence, we had to have money to buy a newspaper or magazine to have information, and today you can have them, most of them free on the internet. And I didn’t have money to buy books, newspapers or magazines, even if I wanted.
Frank That’s a very interesting point, Ismar. Information has become free to a large degree, and the quality of information, in my opinion, the quality of information has gone down, and the quantity of what goes for news, and that includes social media, has gone up.
And I suppose you could actually ask, are we any wiser? I don’t think we are. I think we are even more stupid because we have a lot of news, but we don’t know what to do with it.
And as kids, you had, I mean, when I was, I didn’t have a television when I was a kid. We didn’t have one. And I think we had maybe four channels, three private ones and one state one. So the Australian Broadcasting Commission was like the BBC in the UK. And then we had three private channels, I think it was Channel 7, Channel 9 and Channel 10. Those were the four TV stations we had. There was no internet, no satellite, no nothing.
And then you had one or two newspapers in the town that you lived, and that was it. And then we had radio. We listened to the radio. I listened to shortwave radio. I listened to German news pod broadcasts that came from Germany. That’s what we had. We didn’t have all of this.
Ismar In that time, most of news that we had, we knew it was from radio, at least for me, because when I lived in a farm till my age, my father turned on his radio every evening.
Frank Yeah. Yeah. And to this day, I still prefer listening to the radio than I do watching television. Not that when television for me is I have, I can watch the French channels on the internet. We don’t have a TV per se, but we can watch the channels on the internet plus whatever satellite channels I can pick up, but I don’t like it. I prefer listening to the radio.
Ismar And what I suppose that I don’t watch TV regularly for more than 20 years, even nowadays, I don’t have TV at home.
Frank Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just, I just find it, I find it boring. Yeah. Um, so, and of course we can listen to, to internet radio. So, you know, my wife being English, we listened to the BBC an awful lot. Um, and, uh, so that’s where the, you know, where the information comes from.
So we move on.
We had, what did we have in Asia during our lifetimes? We had the Chinese cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976. Can’t remember that.
Um, the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. So that was in my backyard, quasi Australia, India being a little bit closer. I can vaguely remember that, but not really much.
Um, the Iranian revolution in 1979, I was just in Germany at that point. I’d just come. No, I was halfway. I was sort of in between. I was about to leave Australia and go back to Europe in 1979.
Ismar I remember a bit a little.
Frank You remember a little, yeah. Yeah.
Ismar The boss, I suppose, was Yatorak Komeini. Yes.
Frank Yes. Yeah. He was, uh, and he lived in Paris and he flew back to Tehran. Uh, the Tiananmen Square protests. I was living in England when that happened and I remember I was applying to work for a hotel. I was still in the hotel industry at that time. I was applying to work for a hotel in China and then the Tiananmen Square protests happened and that kind of stopped anything in that direction.Uh, do you remember those, the protests? Do you remember?
Ismar I don’t know even what it is.
Frank Okay. So Tiananmen Square is a square in Beijing. You might have seen this picture that a person, a Chinese person stood in front of a line of tanks and provoking the driver of the tank to continue driving and he, if the driver of the tank would have done that.
Ismar I remember it. I remember it. A very courageous or a crazy guy, maybe with a rose on his hand, yeah?
Frank Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And he played with his life and single-handedly stopped an army of tanks moving further into Beijing.
Okay. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 in Japan, um, doesn’t ring a bell much, uh, the hand over of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China. I actually watched that live.
I was in, where was I? I was in Germany in 1997 and I watched that, uh, on television, um, on CNN, I think it was. We had CNN or the BBC world news, um, on television and it was five o’clock in the morning or late at night.
I can’t remember, uh, when that happened and I saw the Chinese tanks roll into Hong Kong. So, I remember that very well. Did that, um, send any signals to you in Brazil, Ismar?
Ismar It’s not significant, but, uh, some people who I could talk, uh, we said that maybe it will be worse for Hong Kong people. They would have less freedom.
Frank Which is now, uh, happening. The Indian ocean earthquake and the tsunami of 2004.
Ismar I remember it. And I suppose that was the first time I heard the word to tsunami because after that we had some others.
Frank Yes. We, um, I don’t think anybody knew the word tsunami, um, unless they were in the Asian Pacific area. Um, I had a friend who was involved in some rescue operations, um, but it’s sort of, again, it happened.
And then we have the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, which..
Ismar I remember it and something that I don’t know if it’s really true, but I read that there people who find, for example, some values, uh, object, they hand them in to the police and I thought it was something very interesting.
Frank Yeah. It, um, um, I think that was connected with a tsunami as well. So that’s, that’s an interesting, so I don’t actually remember the, I don’t remember the 2004 earthquake, but I do remember the, the earth, that there was an earthquake and a tsunami that, that was connected with, um, with Fukushima.
Ismar So that was another dissonant. I’m not sure about it,
Frank I think it was, um, so then we go to Europe, the construction of the Berlin wall that happened just a few months after I was born. So I have no recollection of that, uh, the Prague spring and the Czech Republic of what was then Czechoslovakia. Now the Czech Republic, which, um, no idea, can’t really remember that Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a little bit,
Ismar but just a little, yeah, just a little bit,
Frank um, Chernobyl. I was in England at the time when the nuclear plant, uh, leaked radioactive material into the atmosphere and sent a cloud of radioactivity across Europe, uh, in 1986. Did you, did that make any news in Brazil?
Ismar Yeah, it was very frightening because, uh, we didn’t know what could happen all around the world. And even when we knew that we had some, uh, uh, food from Russia, some people didn’t want to consume.
Frank Yeah, that was a no-go here.
Okay. The signing of the Maastricht-Treaty and the creation of the European Union. Well, that we live, that, that had a deep, deep impact, um, uh, in European politics, because basically it opened all the borders to a huge common market. And I was living in Belgium at the time, so not far away from Maastricht. Um, so that certainly was memorable.
The Bosnian war and the breakup of Yugoslavia, um, that was interesting because we had a left-wing green government at the time, and they of course were pacifists. They didn’t want to be involved in any war. And then they had to support, uh, they had to support, uh, the, the fighting, the NATO armies down in Yugoslavia. So that was, um, that was, uh, difficult.
The introduction of the Euro in 1999. Yes, we certainly remember that.
Uh, yeah.
Ismar Something interesting that we discussed here in Brazil, because some people, some, uh, commentaries told that probably Euro, as the time went by, will replace, uh, the American dollar in international negotiation, but it didn’t happen. Many people waited for that.
Frank Um, the same reports this side of the Atlantic, um, but no, it hasn’t happened. Uh, and then of course in 2008, nine, 10 and 11, we had the so-called Euro crisis in, uh, in Europe where, um, it was a result of the banking crisis and some, some, uh, financial instability in a number of countries. Basically, it was Portugal, Greece, particularly Greece, Spain, and Ireland.
Um, they had to be, they had to be, um, supported, uh, or the economies had to be supported. So that was, that was very, very dramatic.
Uh, and then in 2005, uh, there was a terrorist attack in London. I was already living in Germany again at that time, but I was in London the day it happened. And I remember phoning my parents saying that I was okay, that I wasn’t actually involved. So that was, um, something that happened. So, a lot of things in Europe, but again, it was all a bit, a bit abstract.
So, I then decided to take this to a personal level. And so I asked the question, uh, what was the significant moment in a human’s life? So Ismar, can you remember
Ismar the most important moment in our life is when we were born?
Frank Yeah. Can you remember that day?
Ismar No, of course not. I don’t remember anything before my six.
Frank Yeah. Do you, uh, do you know what time of the day you were born?
Ismar Excuse me?
Frank Do you know what time of the day you were born?
Ismar Yes. 9 PM.
Frank You were born at 9 PM. Oh, that’s, that’s nice. I was born at 5 AM. Yeah. Um, first words, can you remember when you started speaking?
Ismar No, I don’t remember.
Frank Can you remember when you started walking?
Ismar No, neither.
Frank Okay. This is not looking good.
Ismar Do you remember first word and first steps?
Frank Nope, nothing. So, so this is not looking good. Ismar, we are 120 years old together and we don’t actually remember very much of our lives. Do you remember your first day in school?
Ismar Not the first day, only the first year.
Frank Okay. You’re ahead of me on that one.
Ismar Um, do you remember your puberty time?
Ismar Yeah, I remember something. When I went to get a girlfriend, I was very shy in general. Girls didn’t want to talk to the boys. I remember that.
Frank I remember, uh, in Australia and also in, in Germany, I used to take some dancing lessons and you could always, and to be fair, you know, the girls could choose, uh, could choose the, their dancing partner. So, so, so, you know, the girls would go to a man and say, or a boy and say, would you like to dance with me? And I never was asked by the girls who I wanted to dance with. It was always the fat, ugly ones who came to me and asked me to dance with them. So I think that was a traumatic experience in my puberty. Yeah.
Um, graduating from high school and university, Ismar, remember that, what did you do?
Ismar I remember, I remember when I was graduated at high school, uh, I didn’t want to go to the university because I want to go to the Brazilian navy.
Frank Navy
Ismar And you, do you remember? I well, again, so I, this is again where it becomes complicated because I actually have two of these things. So I have two certificates from high school, one Australian one and one German one, uh, the Australian one. I think there was a, there was a, a party, a ball, a leaving party, a problem party type thing. And there was a bit of an unhappy situation with the woman. I, or the girl that I was accompanying, um, to the, to the prom.
She sort of wasn’t my girlfriend. She was just a person that, that I took with me and, uh, she sort of then dumped me in the evening for somebody else.
Um, I can’t remember the German version. I don’t actually know what we did. I think we just got our certificates and then continued, um, continued, um, walking, you know, that was it. Yeah. So it was all very low key.
Uh, your first job is well,
Ismar yeah, to have my first job was like a drama because I went to work, uh, much before I did it, but it was very terrible in 70 to get a job. If you, if someone didn’t help you, it was very hard to me to have my first job.
Frank Okay. Uh, my first job was with Kentucky fried chicken. I was an afterschool job every Saturday afternoon. I would, um, I would go to, uh, a part of Sydney, a suburb of Sydney, uh, start work at 5 PM in the evening and finish at 10 PM.
And I would come home smelling of chicken fat and chicken cooking, et cetera. So I was 17. I was 17. Yeah. So there’s a couple of interesting stories there.
Ismar The same age I started.
Yeah. But it was, but it was an afterschool job. So I still went to school. Yeah.It was just something that I did on the weekends. Okay. Falling in love, our first girlfriends.
I’m sure there’s a couple of memories there, whether we’re going to share them with the others remains to be seen, um, marriage.
Ismar I didn’t get married. I only have a three long-term partnership and two of them were great experiences, but the first one was very bad.
Today, if it was possible, I wouldn’t have to have it. I wouldn’t like to have it.
Okay. I am in my second marriage, uh, so my first wife, we have a daughter, uh, but I have no contact to my daughter. She doesn’t want to see me. That’s again, a bit of a, a bit of a long, bad story of my life. Um, and I’ve been married to Mary now for, since 2005. So almost 18 years. So we’ve known each other for a very long time.
Um, so you don’t have any children Ismar
Ismar not, no, I have no kids.
Frank So um, so when, uh, there’s no one to carry on the family name is there in your family?
Ismar Say again, please.
Frank There’s nobody there to carry the name to the next generation, your, your name into the next generation.
Ismar No, I have none to follow my, to follow you, my heritage.
Frank Hmm. Okay. Uh, then we talk about becoming a parent. Yes. So I have that experience. And I remember when my daughter was born, that was a, um, I was there. That was quite an experience.
Career achievements. Did you have a good working career?
Ismar Uh, I think it wasn’t bad, but it was completely different as I planned when I was a young person.
Frank Hmm.I think, I think we can, we can safely say that happens to a lot of people. Um, my father worked for the same company for over 40 years, something that’s unheard of today. Um, yeah. What about, what about your father?
Ismar My father didn’t have exactly a profession because, uh, initially, uh, in my first years, uh, he was a farmer. Yeah. He was a, uh, a little farmer till, uh, he died when I was 16, but he, he was a very multidisciplinary person. She didn’t know how to make, to know many things.
Frank Hmm. Okay. Were you close to him?
Ismar No, no, I’m completely different.
Frank Okay. But, but where did you have a good relationship with your, with your father?
Ismar Uh, in some, uh, years, yes, but, uh, when I was teenager, our relationship got bad. I don’t know exactly why he was very angry and, uh, he punished me a lot.
Frank Okay. So he was very strict with you, was he?
Ismar Not exactly. He was, uh, he gave me much freedom, but the, I suppose he didn’t have a very good emotional control.
Frank Hmm. Hmm. Okay. Tough.
Ismar Yeah.
Frank Retirement. So Ismar, you’re one step ahead of me there. Uh, you have been retired for many, many years. Um, when did you retire?
Ismar Uh, I got my retired in 9 years ago and that’s interesting because we have, uh, a vision and idea about what retirement is and after that it’s completely different. That’s the most of things that happened to us, but some points that I think is great that the, I try to do something different because I had some co-workers that got depressed because they, they didn’t look forward to do something to occupy themselves and fortunately I didn’t have this problem and I’m still interested in doing something completely different from my job.
Frank Hmm. Yeah. Are you enjoying retirement?
Ismar Yes. I really appreciate because I have some income and I don’t have to work some hours for that and as much as possible, I can do some activities that give me pleasure. Hmm.
Frank Okay. So, um, that’s, that’s a good part, um, becoming a grandparent. So that’s something you don’t really have much experience of, but you have nieces and nephews, so you have a large family. So maybe that would be a different story.
Um, and I am sort of half a grandparent because Mary has a daughter, uh, from a previous relationship. So, and she is married and they have children. So I’m a step-grandparent and my own daughter doesn’t have any children yet. Question of time.
So Ismar, you are 60, 61 years old. You are fit as a fiddle. You jog half a marathon every week. You punch and pull, and lift iron and you are a fine specimen of health.
Ismar Oh, I can’t run a half marathon. I maybe, uh, one or two kilometers. I run maybe twice a week and I practice pilates. My mom, I think it’s good for, for her health. Then I take the advantage of taking her to practice. I practice at the same time.
Okay. Some years ago, I, I worked out on a, on a gym in Curitiba, but now I’m just doing that. And I walk as well, maybe twice a week, twice or three, three times a week.
Frank That’s good. That’s good. Uh, I had a heart attack in 2015. That wasn’t a big one, but it was enough to, to make me aware of health issues. So I certainly look after my health much more than I did in the past.
Um, so we come to the sadder parts of life now, the loss of loved ones. So, um, close friends or family members who have passed away, um, anything there that you can share with us?
Ismar I lost my father when I was 16, I suppose. I don’t know if it was the same for everyone, but when we grow up without a father or mother, I suppose it become harder that if I had him for longer, it could be more, more comfortable. I suppose only about the material aspect, but in general, and even for my mom, because she became a widow, uh, we don’t, uh, quite young. She was 39 and a brother, my, my father’s brother, the oldest one, uh, passed away last August. He was 90, 91, and it was terrible because once more, I could realize that the life has an expire date that we don’t know when it will happen. And now my mom is 85 in general, she’s in a good condition or maybe not in a good amount, but in a reasonable condition, according to her age, but it’s terrible that every day I, I think I have my mom for one day more.
I don’t know, every day it’s something that, uh, it’s, uh, that I don’t know what will happen because, uh, from 85, it’s something very unpredictable.
Frank It is. It is. I lost my father in 2019. So that’s four years ago. And I was actually, he died, um, in my parents’ apartment and I was at the bedside when he passed. Um, it was an interesting, interesting experience, interesting observation. He died of cancer.
And I remember when he told us that he had cancer and he said, my timeline is to the end of the year. And everything from that point onwards is black. And, um, he took some chemotherapy and, you know, it was, it was all working, but, um,he basically wanted to get Christmas and new year 20. So Christmas, 2018, Christmas, um, new year, 2018, 2019.
He wanted to take with that, that with him in his life. And then in early January, 2019, he, he just basically refused to get up out of bed and he died on the 20 on the, uh, on the 9th of January, 2019. And it was, um, it was, uh, in an interesting, painful six months.
And of course, we’re both in our sixties and we sort of can see the end of everything on the horizon. And it was my mother’s 86th birthday on S on Easter Monday. So today is, uh, Wednesday. And so two days ago, my mother turned 86 and her timeline, her horizon is, you know, one to two years, she says, maybe I’ll still be around this time next year.
She is a very fit woman for her age. She still does a lot of driving from aA to B. Uh, she gives brain training courses. She plays bridge. She is a very active woman. So I think, uh, she will be with me for quite some time yet, unless she has an accident or something, but, uh, Ismar the end of life, the, the next stage looming in the, on the horizon. Do you think about it or do you, are you aware of it or do you just, um, push it away?
Ismar I suppose that life is good, at least for me, from my aspect of you, but unfortunately in life, we have some bad moments. We have some, some pains. We feel some pains. We suffer from some disease, and I think it’s the bad part of life. And of course, we are aware that one day we have to leave and, uh, I’m saying about me and I, I mean, asking sometimes, Oh, I will, uh, achieve some of my plan before I have to leave. And maybe it’s one point, one of the points that, uh, uh, worries me, uh, a little, yeah. Yeah. Not to not leave enough that I would like to do something that I would like to do.
Frank What’s what’s what is it that you want to achieve the biggest, your biggest, biggest plan, your biggest dream that you want to achieve?
Ismar No, they aren’t a big plan in general. They are big only for me. As I asked you at the beginning, when I was younger, uh, I would like to, to be a wise person. Then I suppose that my big plan would be a wise man. But I think it doesn’t depend only us. I suppose maybe it depends on the nature because we have to have maybe some specific characters to be a wise person.
And my opinion, probably I didn’t receive that. And probably I wanted to get to be a wise man.
Frank Tell me when you’ve done it, tell me when you have reached the wisdom and tell us how you did it.
Ismar Okay. I will tell you.
Frank So this of course is a, um, this was a reflection of our combined 120 years. If you look at the generations that come following us people in their forties and thirties and a little bit younger, uh, do you understand them? Do you, do you find them strange? Do you shake your head or do you think that, um, that’s a wonderful group of people that are going to take over from us when we are no longer around? How do you see the future?
Ismar Sometimes I meet some very smart person. It doesn’t matter about their age, even some young people that I admire, but in general, most of them excuse me for the adjectives that I use the most of them I consider ridiculous.
Frank There’s a challenge. So, we can ask the, we can ask the young ones to, to, um, to convince us of the opposite.
Ismar Yeah. Maybe there are, there is a reaction probably they will consider me a ridiculous person as well.
Frank Okay. So, so in all fairness, why do you find them ridiculous?
Ismar People think more about themselves. I’m saying about my country. They, they, they don’t worry about community. They don’t worry even at least, uh, for others, they, of course, I’m, I’m saying general, as I said, there’s that I admire they, they want to take advantage of minimal things. And I think it’s something terrible. For example, violence in the, in the, in 15, 15 days we have, we had three attacks at school, four attacks.
Frank That’s sad.
Ismar Yeah. One in Manaus.
Ismar One in Manaus.
Frank Oh dear.
Ismar One in Manaus.Yeah. But today we had one, uh, in the state that is, uh, closer to Brasilia, uh, it’s called Goyas, but no one died, only some hurts.
Frank Yeah. I think, I think that is a trend that, that we can observe that at least from, from also from my perspective, we seem to have become a more violent society, uh, less tolerant society than, um, than when we were young.
And it makes me feel so old to say that, but, um, and maybe it’s because we have so much more media that this sort of thing gets reported that if we have a saying that if a bag of rice falls over in China, which is a totally insignificant event, it gets spread across all media outlets, social media outlets, um, around the world. And it’s hyped up to, to, uh, to, um, enormous levels. And I just think that we have become much more violent.
The problem is that it’s our children who are doing this or the generation following us. So you can’t blame them. It’s it’s, it’s our upbringing. It’s our, it’s our, um, the way we live, what we’ve done in the last 60 years that has led to this kind of development. So, you can’t blame the young generation. We’ve got to blame ourselves, but do we do that? Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. Um, it’s, it’s a difficult question and maybe that’s something that we can talk about with, with other people as well.
Ismar But maybe as I said that I consider most of people ridiculous is because for example, they don’t know how to educate their children. And we have the result that we have.
Frank Yeah.
Ismar Parents here, they don’t have authority, uh, with their, their kids, in my opinion, the most of them, they don’t have authority.
Frank Well, I suppose you have to ask yourself, are they home to exercise the authority? How many parents, how many, um, adults, both parents go out to work in order to support a standard of living? My mother didn’t have to, she could work, but, uh, she did work a little bit, but basically I can’t remember too many years when my mother wasn’t at home when I came home from school. And I suppose it was the same with you. Did your mother work when you were a child?
Ismar No, my mom didn’t. She used to work outside, only at home. I had to reflect about it since the decade 60 on, women started working outside in many professions more and more. And I suppose that our society, the level of our, our people as sitting in terms of ethic is in terms of virtues. I think we became worse and worse.
Frank There’s a logic in that. I may not actually agree 100% with you, but, uh, there is a logic in that. Um, and I suppose we have to ask ourselves if, um, if women didn’t work, would we enjoy the standard of living that we have today?
Would we enjoy all the comforts and so on that we don’t, that we have today? And uh, I have to, my mother actually said something very wise, and I think that’s probably the best way to close this.
My mother once said, it’s not women who have to become emancipated. It’s the men who have to become emancipated because the women can go out and do what they want and, um, and, uh, be, be, follow a career and, and follow a healthy working life.
Um, that’s the men who’s, who tend to cling onto the old values of someone being at home 24 seven at the beck and call.
So, um, and in the case of, of, of, uh, of Mary, Mary jets around the world, looking at hotels.
She’s gone for weeks on end, and I don’t have the right, nor do I want her to stop doing this. Yeah. It’s, um, uh, it’s her, it’s her life. She can actually do what she wants with it. I don’t really have the right to interfere. Maybe that’s why I’ve become a bit wiser. Yeah.
So, Ismar, we throw the questions out to anybody who wants to ask us, uh, setting a few ground rules. Is there something that you do not wish to talk about in, um, uh, that remains strictly private and confidential so that people don’t even think about asking you such questions?
Ismar Uh, I think they can ask me as well, wherever they want. I think no problem. If he, I have something to say, to tell them, I will tell, if not, tell them, Oh, I don’t know something about it. Sorry.
Frank Yeah. The same, the same goes for me.
Ismar I suppose that they will become very curious to ask us many questions.
Frank I hope so. I hope so. So, um, is my, I will release this podcast later in the week and then we can see what happens and see if, um, if we get some interesting questions from, from people to ask us and to share our, our community, um, uh, our lives with, but I suppose we could actually extend this to other people and say, join us and tell us about your experiences, not, not, you know, so that somebody else can join us and say, well, how was it when, when you were young? Yeah. Or so on. So we just talk about this fantastic thing called life. Shall we do it?
Ismar I think it’s an endless, uh, endless, uh, subject. Yeah.
Frank It’s an endless subject. Yes. Yes. And maybe we can gain some wisdom from these discussions ourselves as well. So is my, shall we hand it over to the wider audience and see what happens.
Ismar Okay.
Frank Let’s, let’s do this. So, we throw the ball out of our room and see where we go from there.