Born in 1934, the 18th of 19 children in the small blue-collar town of Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Jean Chrétien has risen to become the "grandfather of Canada" and a definitive force in global politics for over 50 years.
Chrétien was one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers in Canadian history and led three successive majority terms as leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 2003.
He famously said no to joining the US in the Iraq War (solidifying Canada’s independence on foreign policy), signed the Kyoto Protocol (committing Canada to its first-ever international environmental agreement), established the Oceans Act (helping Canada become the first country to prioritize ocean health), creating the Clarity Act (to establish terms for secession movements after leading the 'No' side to victory in the 1995 Quebec Referendum), and leading Operation Yellow Ribbon which helped 40,000 Americans in the air and traveling through Canada on September 11, 2001 and beyond.
Let's put on a suit and tie and fly up to Ottawa, Canada to sit in the office of the 91-year-old leader—who still does meetings back-to-back three days a week!—and discuss the secrets of healthy living into your 90s... Canada on the global stage... how to get along with almost anyone... humility as a virtue... lessons from 63 years of marriage... thoughts on Alberta secession... the definition of liberal... how he said no to the Iraq war... and, of course, the Right Honorable Jean Chrétien's most formative books...
Huge thank you to Bob Wright, Bruce Hartley, and Monsieur Jean Chrétien for making this happen.
A rare and special conversation with a rare and special man.
Get ready to soak in so much wisdom.
Let's flip the page to Chapter 150 now...
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
A lot of people will say that I stole their ideas.
If you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up.
Don't tell me do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
You can have a referendum on anything.
You can have a referendum tomorrow on is the moon square.
But what will be the effect of the referendum?
(00:24):
And it's not just a tool for blackmail.
When I was in politics to be called a liar was the worst insult you could have.
And in the United States they said in the first term of Trump he lied 14,000 times.
And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said...
(00:48):
From one old guy to another old guy.
Stop this nonsense.
Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him today...
It would be the same thing, but he would not enjoy it.
Or he would ignore me.
I've never seen an ego that big.
(01:08):
Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state, okay?
It really should.
Perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.
Destroying what took 80 years to build since the war.
And proud of our value.
And we became the envy of the world.
I want to die standing.
(01:29):
Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome to chapter 150, 50, 50 of 3 Books.
Born in 1934, the 18th of 19 children in the small blue-collar town of Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Jean Chrétien has risen to become the grandfather of Canada.
The definitive force in Canadian politics for over 50 years.
(01:52):
From leading the Young Liberals Club at Laval University in 1956, to winning 12 straight federal elections, to serving as minister under Lester B.
Pearson, helping to create the Canadian flag,
to serving as many different ministers under Pierre Elliott Trudeau,
helping to establish national parks, create stronger indigenous relations,
help develop two official languages, repatriate our constitution,
(02:15):
create the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and of course, then after all that,
serving as our prime minister for three consecutive majority governments from 1993 to 2003,
helping to define and shape and kind of change the trajectory of our country,
eliminating the federal deficit completely, right?
Saying no to George W.
(02:37):
Bush and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, helping to win the 1995 referendum for Quebec to stay in Canada as part of the country.
He left office with the highest approval ratings of any other prime minister in history,
and today we are flying up to Ottawa, Canada, and sitting in the office of the 91-year-old leader
and getting ready to discuss the secrets of healthy living into your 90s,
(03:00):
Canada on the global stage, how to get along with almost anyone,
humility as a virtue, lessons from a 63-year-old marriage,
thoughts on Alberta secession, the definition of a liberal,
how he said no to the Iraq war, and of course,
the right Honorable Jean Chrétien's most formative books.
Let's flip the page into Chapter 150 now.
(03:25):
Good morning, Mr. Chrétien.
Good morning.
Thank you so much for being up for chatting with me.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
You were my first prime minister when I turned 18 in 1998, and you continue to be my favorite.
Very generous.
Thank you very much.
We've been so inspired by you for many, many years.
(03:46):
I wasn't sure what I should call you because at the front, I noticed everybody inside here calls you monsieur, just monsieur plain, because there's a right honorable.
What do people address you as?
Oh, it depends.
Some call me prime minister like they do in the United States, for example.
(04:07):
Former president, they still call him president.
You call me the way you want.
Oh, okay, okay.
There is no protocol in Canada about it.
There's no protocol in Canada.
Okay, so Mr. Chrétien, I will go with if it's okay.
And we're here.
We're in your office.
You're in a suit.
I'm in a suit.
We're overlooking Parliament Hill, the beautiful Rideau River.
(04:28):
And it sounds like when I got here, you are busy.
You are back to back to back meeting me.
I'm only 91 years old, so I have to earn my living.
You're busy.
You're very busy.
And I love this because one of the chapters in one of my books I talk about is this idea.
I call it never retire.
So for me, you're a big inspiration.
I want to die standing.
(04:49):
I want to die standing.
I thought maybe before we get into some of our opening questions, I could just read you some of today's headlines from this morning to see if you have any thoughts on them.
These are today's headlines.
I'll tell you the source it's from, the headline, and just ask for your open opinion if you have one.
And you can say pass if there's no opinion.
(05:09):
You know, I'm not following.
I didn't watch the news this morning or last night because I was outside.
So I'd rather pass.
Go ahead on something else.
Okay.
Okay, great.
I'll skip the headlines then.
And what I want to say at the beginning was that, you know, I was reading many of your books.
(05:30):
I want to talk to you about Canadian priorities.
On page 42 of your memoirs, My Years as Prime Minister,
which was written 18 years ago in 2007,
and of course is about your time as Prime Minister 22 to 32 years ago,
you wrote on page 42 that your three biggest priorities as Prime Minister
were, quote, to reduce our horrendous deficit,
(05:50):
to reassert our independence and protect Canada from being seen
as the 51st state of the United States,
and in the face of separatist threats and sense of alienation
in other parts of the country, to keep Canada united.
That sounds...
Very much of actuality.
Yeah, it sounds like today.
Talking about a 51st state some 18 years ago.
(06:12):
Yeah.
You know, it was always there as a threat.
You know, there was a lot of debate in the United States more than 100 years ago about taking Canada over.
There was discussion at that time.
There was even a war.
We were with the Brits, as I said this week.
(06:34):
You know, we won.
We burned the White House.
And that is a reality.
We have our reason to remain independent.
We're proud Canadians.
We want to be good neighbors, but we don't want to be the 51st state.
And I was thinking like that in those days, like I'm still very strong on that today.
(06:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
And then on the separatism thing, you know, you're very famous for presiding over the 1995 Quebec referendum or the no side one and introducing the 2000 Clarity Act, which set a higher bar and threshold for future referendums.
Today we have conversation about Alberta lowering the threshold for having a referendum.
(07:16):
Yeah, but they can have a referendum.
But they have to read the Clarity Act too.
You can have a referendum on anything.
They can have a referendum tomorrow on is the moon square.
You know, we're in a society of freedom.
(07:36):
But what would be the effect of a referendum?
The referendum will have to meet the requirements that apply to all the provinces of Canada, as I have established in the Clarity Act.
And I said in Calgary last week, that perhaps the premier should read that act.
(07:57):
The question has to be approved by parliament.
There's no separation, just say I'm going.
It's just like a divorce.
You know, you have obligation with the other partners.
And the Clarity Act is dealing with all the problem and the health that they will have to overcome.
(08:18):
And it's not just a tool for blackmail.
There's a reality behind it.
And I'm very proud that I passed the Clarity Act.
Because the word means something.
And the word clarity, you understand the meaning of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the question will have to be clear.
(08:38):
The majority will have to be clear.
We'll have to take all sort of element that are all mentioned.
What will happen with the natives?
And what will happen with this and that?
And what about the minorities in that community?
What kind of guarantee they will give to the minorities?
You know, I'm telling you, it's better not to start on that.
It's going to be a hell of a long negotiation.
(09:00):
For nothing.
Yeah, exactly.
And I heard you.
Because, you know, this year they have produced more oil than they have ever produced.
And, you know, and when I was a minister, you know, if they have tar sand, it's because I'm, me and Don McDonald, minister of energy at that time, I was a president of a treasury board who made a deal.
(09:25):
Because they had started the tar sand and they went bankrupt.
And it is with the money of the government of Canada and the government of Ontario that they restarted the process.
The price of producing, you see, was 40 bucks, and the market price was 20 bucks.
(09:48):
But we had the wisdom to see that there was a future.
So we invested money into that.
So they've made more oil this year than ever before.
Justin Trudeau, member of the Liberal Party, famously bought them a pipeline.
Yes, and they never said thank you.
They never said thank you.
(10:08):
$30 billion.
$30 billion, right.
And he gave them the permission to build a pipeline to go to Texas.
And it was blocked in Dakota.
You know, he did everything that was requested.
And I asked them when I'm there, how many miles, yards, feet of inches of pipeline that Mr. Harper built in 10 years?
(10:37):
Zero.
Mr. Harper is the conservative prime minister.
A friend of mine said that to him in public.
And he has to say it's true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's record-breaking production.
There's new pipelines and the approval for others that haven't got built because of opposition in the U.S. And there is the idea that if there was a separation, where would they go?
(11:04):
Yeah.
Do you think it would be easier to build a pipeline in Canada if they are no more part of Canada?
No, it would be harder.
And to get out of Canada, they are landlocked.
They have to go through B.C. or through Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and so on.
(11:24):
In the Northeast, the North is Canadian too.
And if they want to have a pipeline in the state of Washington and Oregon, I wish them good luck.
So they could not have a pipeline in the Dakotas, imagine there.
Yeah.
And so what do you say to Western discontent in general or the idea in the Western provinces that the country is governed and led by the heavy population?
(11:48):
Yeah, now the prime minister is from Alberta.
Harper was from Alberta, you know?
So for guys who are complaining, it is myths that they love to keep.
(12:09):
And they think that complaining has been successful, so they will keep doing that.
Mm-hmm.
Because good news is not news, and bad news is big news.
Of course.
Before I came to meet you here today, of course I told people that I was coming to meet you.
My wife calls you the grandfather of Canada.
(12:32):
You have stirred together the country like nobody else.
A woman I met in an Indigo bookstore in Calgary, Elaine, said, I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Mr. Jean Chrétien stayed at the hotel where my mom's salon was.
He took a family photo with me and told me I was a very peppy girl.
He is a wonderful person.
Nice.
And a family friend said that she met you while she was doing a sit-in protest in the principal's office at Queen's University in the late 1980s, and you actually specifically came to visit and speak to the students there.
(13:02):
I probably did.
And my therapist told me he loves Jean Chrétien.
My friend Kevin said I'm a fan.
He's a great statesman.
So you've really spirited this country together in a very unique way.
I've been around since 1963.
And I was a president of the Young Liberals at Laval University in 1956.
(13:23):
So it's a long time I've been around a political debate.
Yeah.
And I enjoy it, and I still talk about it and participated in many, many ridings in the last election.
Yes, been busy.
And, you know, I made speeches that were noticed at the leadership, and I wrote a letter to Trump as my personal gift for my birthday on the 11th of January and so on, and attracted apparently a lot of attention.
(13:57):
And so I'm happy.
When you're useful at 9-1-1, you feel good.
Absolutely.
What do you see as the job of the prime minister?
What is the prime minister's...
He has to do his best, you know.
You know, politics is made of problems.
Most of them, you don't know the problem before the day that the problem occurs.
(14:19):
So you cannot have all these visions and so on.
Your job is, when you have a problem, to find a solution.
But I say that to fill a hole, sometimes you create two more holes.
So we're shoveling all the time.
Yeah, exactly.
But in terms of solving problems that come up, I get the sense, both through your books, but also in our conversations, none of which lasted, I think, more than 22 seconds, because I could see on my phone, we had an 8-second conversation, a 15-second conversation.
(14:51):
You get a lot done.
You get a massive amount done.
And over the course of your time as prime minister, it's very easy to count.
You signed the Kyoto Agreement.
You passed the Clarity Act.
You did Operation Yellow Ribbon.
You created more national parks.
It goes on and on and on.
The Canadian flag, you know.
(15:12):
Do you feel that people have a problem getting stuff done now?
Is it harder to get things done today?
It was not easy.
It's never easy in public life.
Parliament is there.
You are the so-called loyal opposition, but they are more opposition than loyal.
And they do their job.
(15:32):
It's what they are there.
And you have to live with that and convince them and make it attractive enough that it will pass and defend it in the public and convince the public that it's right.
And there is always a risk that you will be defeated in an election.
And a good sign of a defeat, you go back home and your wife is happy.
(15:53):
So, you know, it is.
I was lucky.
I was never lost in an election.
So I was a 12-time elected member of parliament.
I was 30 years in the cabinet, of which 10 as the prime minister.
I was three years leader of the opposition.
And I survived that all.
(16:14):
But I was lucky and probably hard-working too.
Absolutely.
I can sense that you're hard-working.
You're very hard-working, even today with back-to-back-to-back.
So I'm trying to go quick here.
You were very kind enough, Mr. Chrétien, to give us a couple books that shaped you over your life.
And when I spoke to you on the phone, a couple that came to mind included a book that I'd like to explain to our listeners.
(16:37):
It's called The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
It was published in 1943 by Reynal and Hitchcock.
It's got a white cover.
I have it there beside you, the second one down in that pile there.
And, you know, it says The Little Prince in a black script.
There's this little boy, you know, blond boy with pink cheeks and a green outfit standing on a tiny gray planet with a few flowers poking out of it and some stars, a moon, and a plant in the background.
(17:03):
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900 in Lyon, France.
He died in 1944 at age 44 when his plane was shot down over the Mediterranean Sea off of occupied France.
This is a simple story of a pilot forced to land in a remote desert.
And then he meets a small boy, The Little Prince, who shares stories with him.
Dewey Decimal Heads can put it under 843.912 for French fiction in the library.
(17:29):
Mr. Chrétien, tell us about your relationship with this book.
But it was a book about good values, basically.
that go into the basic in life.
And I'm like that.
I'm not apparently very complicated.
(17:50):
I do my job, go back home, rest.
I'm not, you know, strong on being with the big shots and being seen.
I have a very quiet life.
I've been married to the same girl for 62 years, and she was my girlfriend for five.
(18:13):
And that is, you know, my life was my family and my work.
And I was happy with that.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I looked into his politics out of curiosity, and they changed throughout his life, as many people's do.
(18:33):
He was focused, as you said, values, human dignity, personal responsibility, the importance of community bonds.
He believed in an aristocracy of spirit rather than in birth or wealth, with the idea that true nobility comes from service to others.
So on page 11 of your 1984 memoir, Straight From the Heart, you wrote, My family has always been rouge, liberal in the free-thinking, anti-clerical, anti-establishment tradition of the 19th century.
(19:04):
I thought I might ask you to open that up.
Maybe tell us how you define liberal and conservative today.
But, you know, it's evolving over years.
But fundamentally, the liberal party is a centrist party.
(19:26):
It is.
We're not doctrinaire.
We implement good ideas.
We borrow good ideas and implement them.
You know, in my career, a lot of people would say that I stole their ideas.
But I said an idea is an idea.
(19:47):
I would say to them, if you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up.
Don't tell me do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
You know, an idea is an idea.
Nobody is the owner of an idea.
Yes.
And, you know, I'm curious, and I look at the left and I look at the right, and if there's something good there, I pick it up.
(20:11):
Yeah.
But basically, I, you know, people were always asking me, was this a liberal?
Because in Europe, a liberal is more or less a center-right politician, but strong on human rights.
In the United States, it is a left-wing politician.
(20:32):
The right in the United States, the liberals are the left.
When you say, you know, you see the debate in the United States and they refer to socialists, the communists, and the liberals are all in the same bag for the right.
So for me, I say that I have to explain it this way.
(20:53):
A liberal in Canada is when the right says of you, you're a left-winger.
When the left says you're a right-winger, you're a good Canadian liberal Chrétien.
You know?
The radical center.
The radical center.
And a country is a moderate country, so you're necessarily moderate if you want to reflect the mood of the nation, the aspiration of the nation.
(21:20):
And you read and heard all my speech about the values of Canada.
And proud of our values.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And we became the envy of the world.
Yes, yes.
You often quote a study that was done last year citing that Canada is the number one country in the world that people want to move to to start a new life.
(21:41):
There was a poll about three months ago, four months ago.
Yeah.
We're asking people, if you are asked to start again your life, where would you like to go?
Canada was the number one.
Mm-hmm.
Do these party lines matter as much anymore, calling yourself by certain identities?
A lot of younger people today, of course, are growing up in this environment where it's harder to see any sort of long-form speeches or to kind of hear long-form statements or read any kind of, you know, bills that are going through.
(22:12):
They get information in very small sound bites.
You hear the extreme gets amplified.
But we live in a revolution at this moment of technology.
And what will be the result of people having all their information on this machine?
Within seconds, very short.
A lot of people don't give a damn about truth.
(22:35):
And how to sort it out, it will be a big problem for the past.
You know, when I was in politics, to be called a liar was the worst insult you could have.
If someone will accuse you of lying, cannot prove it in the House, he was suspended.
(22:57):
And in the United States, they said in the first term of Trump, he lied 14,000 times.
Wow.
According to the Washington Post.
Right.
And, you know, and the people say, oh, they even invented the word, the alternative truth.
Right.
Alternative, yeah.
So, yeah, come on.
When you live in a society like that, you have to sort it out.
(23:18):
And eventually, the need for truth will be such that you will find a mechanism to sort out the truth and the lies.
But it's going to be complicated.
Very much so, yeah.
And it's like, and you know, it will be complicated.
It's just like, you know, good news and bad news.
(23:41):
Good news is not a news, but a bad news is a news.
So in California, apparently, there was a group who formed a newspaper and it was only with good news.
And, you know, they had one bad news.
You went bankrupt.
So, good news is not news.
(24:03):
It's true.
I know.
I've been trying to play in the good news world for a long time.
It is difficult to be there.
We naturally don't want to think that way.
You mentioned Trump.
You mentioned 14,000 lies.
You mentioned that you wrote him a letter on your birthday.
And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said, from one old guy to another, I would say, stop this nonsense.
(24:24):
Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him, today, summer 2020.
I would repeat the same thing.
But he will not enjoy it.
Or he will ignore me.
You know, because it's him.
Nobody can't for him.
It's him.
Never seen an ego that big.
(24:45):
And the people comply.
You know, to be accused of lying in my days, it was a worse insult.
For him, he does not give a damn.
Is the alternative true?
Come on.
When you live with that, I cannot understand that now he's dropping in the polls, but that they voted for him as president.
(25:11):
But they did.
And perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.
He is destroying what took 80 years to build since the war.
So if the American empire is on its way down from your perspective, what fills that gap globally?
(25:35):
I don't know.
Probably, you know, in 25 years, the big nation will be China.
They might have competition from India because they have the number.
And we'll have to adjust.
You know, others survive under the American empire.
(25:56):
There was a British empire.
This has disappeared.
There was Napoleon.
He's not there.
Will not come back.
You know, so it's a reality.
You have to live with reality.
And I believe that we will be in good position because of the wealth, the land, the water, the resources, quality of our society.
(26:20):
We'll survive quite well.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Speaking of the land and the resources and the quality of our life, in page 14 of your memoir, you say, the mantra of my life has been, when I look in the mirror, I despair.
But when I compare myself to others, I am consoled.
(26:42):
What did you mean by that?
But I know all my weaknesses better than anybody.
Ah, okay.
And I know that.
I have witnesses.
I tried to overcome that, and I did quite well.
But I know that I'm not a genius, that I'm just a human being.
(27:06):
And when I get up in the morning, I say, Jean, you have to do your best today.
Mm-hmm.
And I like to go to bed and say, I've done my best today.
Mm-hmm.
And I sleep well.
Well, that's interesting you say, I'm not a genius.
I'm just trying to do my best.
You're famously from Shawinigan Falls, a famously blue-collar town in Quebec.
(27:28):
You often talk about, in your memoirs, how you like to keep connected with the people and go to the bar or go to the places downtown, kind of talk to people.
Even as you were prime minister, you would do this, and you maintain connection.
Of course, Antoine d'Expery does this with the 40 million people that have bought The Little Prince.
He has an accessibility.
(27:48):
It does seem that global leaders now are above us, beyond us.
They're usually millionaires or bankers or billionaires.
They're no longer accessible.
Nobody would have ever seen Jean Chrétien being sworn in with the richest man of the world.
Right.
I know some of them, and I don't brag about it.
(28:12):
Normally, I should be the establishment.
I've been 40 years on the Hill.
I've been elected 12 times member of parliament.
I've been 30 years in the cabinet, as I said, 10 of them as prime minister.
I've been minister of all the big, important departments.
(28:34):
I was three years the leader of the opposition.
My daughter is married in a very rich family, and nobody thinks when they see me as the establishment.
My greatest success in the mind of Canadians is I am still the little guy from Shawinigan.
Amazing.
(28:55):
How?
How did you keep that?
I remained myself.
Ah.
You know, I know people.
Everybody knows the queen gave me the Order of Merit, for example.
I was the first Canadian in 50 years that received that honor.
That is a choice of the monarch herself or himself.
(29:16):
And that, you know, and I accepted that with pleasure and humility, because apparently I've done my best for 40 years, as they said.
And there was only three other Canadians since 1902 who had received it.
And never brag about it.
(29:37):
You didn't even know.
So, but it's a reality.
Well, I only know because of all the letters in front of your name, partly.
Yeah, but nobody even knows what that means.
I know, unless you Google it.
But I will also say, another thing I looked up before I interviewed you was the average exit poll approval rating of every Canadian prime minister ever in history who's been prime minister for longer than six months.
(30:02):
And you, my friend, are number one overall since they started tracking approval ratings, which is in about the 1950s or 60s.
So before this, they didn't do that.
But from then until now, your exit polling, which was 45% approval rating after three consecutive majorities from 1993 to 2003, was the highest of all time.
Brian Mulroney was the lowest, and Justin Trudeau was the second lowest.
(30:25):
Not the huge range in the middle.
I didn't know that.
Thank you for...
You know, I...
Somebody was...
Look at that.
Apparently, of all the prime ministers in my elections, I am the one who had received plus 2.3% of the vote in my election.
(30:50):
I was the number one of 17 elected prime ministers.
Brian was the last again.
And that is...
You know, on the honeymoon, as they say.
You know, I never went below the day, the vote I had the day of the election.
(31:11):
They claim that a honeymoon is all over when you go in the poll lower than the vote you had in the election.
For me, I never went lower.
In between, you know, when I was having more.
When I quit, according to Gallup, I had 60% of approval rate and 59% intention of voting.
(31:35):
So I could have won easily a fourth mandate if I had enough.
Three was more than enough.
And 40 years in public life.
You made some promises to Aileen, I believe.
Yes.
I said to Aileen that I was to quit before 70.
And I quit.
I was 69, 11 months and one day.
So you had three weeks left that you gave her as a bonus, a little extra vacation.
(32:02):
Your second formative book, Monsieur, is Ernest Hemingway's famous book, The Old Man and the Sea.
This was originally published in 1952, just four years before you were president of the Young Liberals at Laval.
Originally in Life Magazine, but then they published it in a book the same year by Scribner.
My cover is just a shimmering blue sea, but there's many covers with a man in a boat holding a fishing line, holding a huge marlin.
(32:29):
Ernest Hemingway is the Nobel Prize winning writer who lived from 1899 to 1961.
And of course, the story is about an old Cuban fisherman and a supreme ordeal, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
This one goes under 813.52 for American Fiction.
(32:52):
Mr. Chrétien, tell us about your relationship with The Old Man and the Sea.
He never gave up.
And he got his fish.
I never give up.
I am persistent.
And it's very important when you know what you need, you try to get it.
(33:16):
And it was a beautiful book, beautifully written by Hemingway.
He was a great writer.
Yeah.
It's one of the two books, you know, I'm happy.
I remember these two and I'm happy I chose these two.
Yeah, they're beautiful.
There's a lot of simplicity in that.
Absolutely.
It's all simple.
Clear, like the Clarity Act.
(33:39):
I like to have, if I had a quality, apparently I was able to go to the nub of the problem easily.
Some people get, that's kind of the way you're thinking, they get embroiled into the details of everything.
(34:01):
For me, I try to go to where is the problem.
And if you know exactly what is the problem, you can find it.
The problem is if you want to cover everything, you get mixed up.
And it is, for me, the way I was acting.
If you can get the nub of the problem, the rest fall in place.
(34:26):
But some can do that, some cannot do that.
It's a way of thinking, I guess, that some are very preoccupied to have everything before they move.
For me, I knew that if I was convinced that where I had to go, what I had to do, I knew that a part would fall in places.
(34:54):
But some get stuck in the parts and it takes time and becoming decisive and so on.
Is getting to the nub of a problem a skill you can learn?
Yes.
How would you recommend you learn it?
You have so many problems.
When you're in politics, you know, they always come to see you for problems.
(35:17):
How do you prioritize the problems?
How do you know which one is the most...
You look at the problem one by one and you realize that something is not important, so you give it to somebody else to solve.
And when it's very important and it is your responsibility, you know, you take it and you work on it.
(35:38):
Mm-hmm.
Speed.
And this is getting to become a bigger issue in this era of confusion with media as we were talking about.
Now, the title, of course, is The Old Man and the Sea, so I thought I would just ask you about both of those phrases, old man and then the sea.
On the old man, I don't mean to call you an old man, but you were born the 18th of 19 children in 1934.
(35:59):
Of course, nine survived infancy.
Today, you're 91 1⁄2.
You're still going to the office.
That's where we're talking right now.
To what do you attribute your cognitive and physical longevity?
Well, in my family, we have probably good genes.
Mom lost babies one year or one week.
(36:21):
In those days, they had no medication of today.
My brothers who are in medicine all say that most of them would have survived today, but at that time, they were losing a lot of kids of sickness.
But the rest, the nine who survived, the first trio live an average of 85.
(36:48):
The second trio live an average of 97.
I'm part of the third trio.
We lost one last year at 95, and we are two.
Me, 91, and my brother, 89.
To build the 97, both him and I, we have to survive until we are 98.
(37:14):
We would succeed.
To beat the average.
My father died 93.
Wow.
It is part of our genes.
There is a big genetic component, of course, and I think any doctor would point to that.
Discipline.
We are a family that we're all hardworking.
(37:35):
That came from mom and dad, and very disciplined.
How do you define discipline?
Discipline.
Not drinking, not smoking, not doing this, and having an orderly life, and so on.
You know, I think that we did not have a divorce in my family.
(38:02):
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And, you know...
Eating well?
Eating well, good food, not in too great quantities, and, you know, discipline.
Discipline was very important to be on time.
I'm a maniac about that.
You know, if I'm five minutes late, I am upset.
(38:24):
Dad used to say, it is the politeness of a king to be on time.
And that I'm always on time.
And that discipline really rings a bell for me because last year on this podcast, I interviewed 87-year-old Ralph Nader, and he said very similar.
No drinking, no smoking, eating good food, having small meals, walking, being tight, you know, communing.
(38:50):
He used that phrase, communing with nature.
I just heard you say at the beginning, I heard you say you were in the garden last night.
So there's some basic, simple elements here that seem to weave in with genetics.
You know, it's simple life.
Yeah.
And, you know, when I'm at my lake, I swim and walk, and I'm going there two days.
(39:14):
I will be 10 weeks there.
Still working on the phone, but not much.
And enjoying life, but quiet life.
The quiet life.
I like this.
Okay.
That's on longevity.
And then on the sea, there's the old man, there's the sea.
Canada, of course, has the longest coastline in the world and is one of only two countries in the world that borders three oceans.
(39:38):
The other is Russia.
I guess, technically, you could also count the U.S. if you include Alaska touching the Arctic Ocean.
So it's just two or three countries that touch three oceans.
You were the Minister of the Environment and Fisheries.
You have many great accomplishments from this period, including the 1997 Oceans Act, which made Canada the first country in the world to adopt an approach to ocean management, emphasizing conservation and sustainable use of marine resources.
(40:05):
So I want to ask you about the oceans today.
Two sides.
One is the environment side.
Just the state of the oceans appears to be at risk globally.
Seems like a petrifying big problem with the plastics and the dumping for so long.
But we're aware of it.
Before, we're not paying attention to that.
(40:28):
Now we're starting to pay attention to that.
So it will diminish.
You know, we'll find ways to dispose of the plastic.
We're moving there now.
You know, you see some ads on TV where the Coca-Cola and Pepsi claim that they use only recycled plastic.
(40:48):
But I'd say it's true.
So when, you know, they're recycling, that means that it's not going into the ocean.
Right.
Perhaps we will replace plastic someday by something else.
It's a problem.
It's very useful.
We use it every day 10 times a day or more.
But in the old days, we had cellophane.
(41:11):
You remember that word?
Yes, yes.
But cellophane was not plastic.
Cellophane was made out of wood.
It was a natural product.
Now we don't use it.
It has disappeared probably for all sorts of technical reasons.
I'm not an expert.
But it was.
It is transparent.
It was covering the pack of cigarettes and all that.
(41:34):
It was thin and not very strong, but doing a good job.
And something someday will appear.
I'm an optimist person, you know.
If we're making so much progress in so many fields, that someday we will make progress on that.
(41:56):
Yeah.
I bet you that optimism is a big part of the longevity too.
And then you mentioned, of course, our water.
We have 20% of the world's fresh water.
We have 2 million lakes, more than the rest of the world combined.
You're going to go swimming in one in a couple of days.
The northern passage appears to be opening.
Ice is melting.
Prime Minister Mark Carney just declared that the six-year goal of joining NATO's 2% defense, he will reach it this year.
(42:21):
He said, only one of our four submarines is operational.
It's time to get some new ones.
So I would like to understand your view about the oceans from a defense point of view or from a...
You know, the north, we have the passage.
When I was Minister of Northern Affairs, the Americans sent the Manhattan.
(42:47):
They didn't have the Canadian flag.
I was a minister.
I went there.
I went on the Louis Saint-Laurent icebreaker and I called the captain and said, I'm going to your ship in an hour and expect to see the Canadian flag.
It was off the coast at Pond Inlet.
When I wanted to prove that it was international water, when I said, it's better for you to have the Canadian flag, he put out the Canadian flag.
(43:17):
It was a gesture of recognition.
And today, if they are afraid that the Chinese or the Japanese or everybody will use it, they have nothing to do.
Just say that it's Canadian water.
They solved the problem.
The minute it's Canadian water, it's no more international water.
(43:39):
But if we have to develop the North's passage, we'll have to build icebreakers and that will come earlier than expected because of the climate change.
And it is the shortest way to Europe from Japan or from China to go to the eastern side of the United States and to the middle side of the United States.
(44:02):
It could probably eventually use Churchill to go to right in the middle of the United States.
And this is the way to go to Europe.
So it's a hell of an asset.
They don't need to say it's Canadian water.
It helped us to develop it.
(44:22):
Who's they?
The Americans.
Ah, if the Americans say it's Canadian water and then help us develop it.
That will help.
Mm-hmm.
As opposed to trying to...
And we can manage it the way we managed the air defense with NORAD.
Mm-hmm.
Since generations.
Nobody talks about NORAD because it's working very well.
(44:44):
It's like an umpire in baseball.
We only talked about them when they miss a call, not when they get them right.
Yeah, that's interesting because, you know, you talk about the Japanese, you talk about the Chinese.
Of course, Trump has made overtures towards Greenland.
Of course, he's made overtures towards us as a 51st state.
Comments have riled up even as early as this morning on the Toronto Star.
(45:05):
That comment is still there.
I must be a dreamer, but I always still imagine the idea and concept of world peace.
Do you feel like there are some steps globally we could be taking to better inch ourselves towards more peace in this era of many wars happening today?
(45:26):
You know, we have to realize that we are a middle power.
We can play a role, but we can't carry the weight because we're not a big power.
So we use our best.
You know, like me, I said no to the war in Iraq.
(45:49):
Yes.
So everybody was scared in Canada.
Yes.
And I did that.
Now everybody approved me, but it was not easy.
No.
How did you do that?
I said no.
But George W.
Bush at the time, of course, was a friend of yours.
You had had him up here many times for the Summit of Americas in Quebec.
Yeah, but it's not a question of him.
(46:11):
It's a question of country.
He was making the wrong decision, and I was not to do the same.
That has nothing to do with friendship.
You know, when you're a president of a country or a prime minister, friendship is important.
But you serve the interests of the nation, not the interests of the friendship.
(46:33):
But England was going along with them.
This is post 9-11.
Tony Blair lost his reputation in England for that.
Like for me, you know, when he wrote a book, he gave the proceed to the veterans, and he could not go and sign book.
There was too much protest.
Never had that problem.
(46:53):
But he made the wrong decision, and I made the right decision.
He wanted to be with the Americans, and I could not say yes because I thought they were wrong.
Mm-hmm.
You said there was no proof of weapons of mass destruction, and the United Nations has not supported it, the decision.
That's what I said.
And I said, I told him, you know, I read all these documents, and you don't have the proof.
(47:19):
I said in one of my books that there was not enough proof to convince the judge of the municipal court in Schoeningen.
That there was a proof of weapons of mass destruction.
And it turned out there was none.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Though they did take out the leader at the end of this war.
But, you know, there was a war with Iran at that time, and Iraq was the proxy of the Americans against Iran.
(47:46):
Remember that?
That lasted for 10 years.
Mm-hmm.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
And there was no winner at the end of it.
Mm-hmm.
And this is the state we live in today.
I know you don't want to talk about today's headlines, but, of course, Iran and Israel are renewing a battle today.
(48:08):
And I think it was 175 people this morning were killed in Gaza from Israel.
There's just a tremendous amount of human lives lost on a daily basis.
It's terrible.
You know, we have Gaza now.
And we have Ukraine.
And we have Iran.
Mm-hmm.
(48:29):
And, you know, I think that, you know, the bragging is sometimes irresponsible.
When Trump was telling the Americans the day after I would be president, the war would be terminated, it was all BS.
(48:54):
But people, when a guy who had been president, we expect he would be a responsible guy.
It was just BS.
It was not to happen like that.
I know that file very well.
I was there with Putin and Yeltsin and the G in NATO and all that.
(49:14):
I spent a lot of time and effort there.
So, you know, you have to be truthful.
(49:37):
Mm-hmm.
How do you see it playing out?
I don't know.
If I could, I would be very happy.
It is going to be very tough for the Americans and for the rest of the world.
You know, the Americans are not isolated.
What they do affects everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK.
I appreciate your honesty and your openness to speak so candidly.
(50:01):
And, you know, you don't pull any punches.
And this is what some people love about you.
You've stayed yourself and you are honest and clear, which is a big part of your legacy.
I want to talk quickly about marriage.
Ernest Hemingway had four wives in his life.
And each of his wives he married the year he divorced the last one.
Of course, you had one, your wife, Aileen Kretchen, who you credited as your top advisor.
(50:26):
And you often joked was running the country with you.
Or you made comments all the time.
I have to go ask Aileen.
And you spent 68 years together, including 63 years of marriage.
What advice do you have for a long and happy marriage?
You know, she was my first girlfriend.
As I say, I hit the target the first day.
(50:52):
And we had very compatible characters.
And we're happy together.
You know, we knew she, we knew our responsibility.
I was making joke.
I said, if you, you know, I said on a TV program one day that the recipe.
(51:14):
Oh, it's easy.
You have to put water in your wine.
And if it's not working, you gave her the glass of wine and you drink only the water.
And she was receiving phone calls from her friends.
And you're so lucky, you know, but it is, you know.
For me, she was running a household.
Not me.
(51:35):
If she wanted to have a wall yellow, it was yellow.
That's it.
You know, I said, do it.
Sometimes it's with the kids.
I was always on her side and not developed, you know, but sometimes she, she was very, very good.
But we could discuss that.
But in front of the kids, we were united.
(51:57):
And, and we'll make the adjustment.
Anyway, we have problems with our kids like anybody else.
But we, that never interfere in our marriage.
We were trying to solve the problems together.
And you would, I'm assuming, go home and have her as a sounding board and a person, a trusted advisor beyond the world of politics.
(52:20):
Oh, but she was quite aware of politics without talking about it.
You know, I was involved in politics.
I was a kid.
When we married, I told her before our wedding that, you know, someday I will try politics.
So she knew.
And she was very young.
(52:41):
I was making speeches, 21, 22 in the villages and so on.
And she would come with me.
But she never, she would always say that there's only one person on the stage.
It's my husband, not me.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
And inspiring.
And I hope I get to 63 years of marriage.
(53:02):
I'm not even a quarter of the way there, but leaning towards that, looking towards that and have a beautiful, lovely wife, Leslie.
So I want to ask you quickly about the Canadian flag.
And then we'll kind of wrap things up here.
As I know you have a very, very busy day and you're moving meetings around as we speak to get around this.
I appreciate that.
So we have you wearing a red tie today.
(53:23):
I know you often wear red.
It's the color of liberals.
But also the color of the Canadian flag, which stands about four feet beside you.
You were instrumental as a big part of creating this flag.
I was a member of parliament.
There was a hell of a debate because the conservatives wanted to keep the union jacked.
And we wanted to have a distinct big flag.
(53:46):
And when Mike Pearson talked about it the first time in front of the legion in Winnipeg, he was booed out of the room.
And it was very emotional.
We went through that.
And now it's accepted by everybody.
And we're very lucky.
It's extremely distinctive.
(54:07):
Your flags are as distinctive as Canada.
Yeah.
You know, in my belief, the colors are not complicated in the heart of Heraldic art.
Simplicity is supposed to be the key.
So it's red and white.
There's only two colors.
And, you know, the Japanese have a very simple flag.
(54:33):
The Swiss have a very simple flag, only two colors.
And that's supposed to be the goal you should reach.
But it's complicated with the number of countries these days and so on.
But the Canada flag is very distinctive, very easy to spot, you know.
(54:54):
And it's become a good sign of a lot of people.
Myself and the other former premier, as the people show up, the Canadian flag, we did that in February.
You remember?
That's right.
And I see a lot more flags now than before.
That's right.
I have one hanging in my window.
(55:14):
You often end your books and your speeches with a three-word phrase, viva la Canada.
Would you open that phrase up for me as we close this conversation off?
I'm grateful for your time.
What does viva la Canada mean to you today?
What is the case for Canada?
What is our reason for being and what does viva la Canada represent?
(55:38):
Because we have achieved what other countries have not achieved.
We have two official languages.
We respect the native rights better than any other country in the world.
We have welcomed people from all over the world.
(56:02):
You know, and when you become a Canadian, you know, we respect the diversity.
You know, if somebody is, you know, 50% of the population are first, second or third generation of immigrants.
Right.
And the French-Canadian now represent probably 21, 22% of the population.
(56:23):
The British island, no more than 27, because 50 are immigrants, one way or the other.
And we are immigrants too, but my family arrived in 1660, so a long time ago.
And we live in unity.
We don't have ghettos, very obvious discrimination.
(56:47):
There is always bad characters and people who are racist, you know, that's human nature.
But it's not a value that is broadcast, not a value, but a problem that is broadcast.
We don't, we're not proud of that.
We try not to be racist.
(57:07):
And we're rich.
We share.
We have less very rich people per capita than United States, but we have a lot less poor people.
You know, we have healthcare that you don't have to pay.
It makes a hell of a difference.
You know, I make the joke.
(57:28):
I used to make, you know, our goal when we established that in 1967, in my speech, I would say, and like others, nobody will lose their home anymore, Canada, because somebody is sick in the family.
And it's true.
It's paid.
Sometimes it's difficult to get in, but it is, you know, a question of too many people use it for nothing too.
(57:54):
And there is, it's difficult.
It is, people are going home and it is the biggest demand of financial resources of their country.
But generally speaking, if you're very sick, they take care of you.
There's a lot of people who have to wait for knee replacement and that type of thing that are convenient, but not vital.
(58:17):
And I remember a joke I was making that I had a friend of mine who was in Florida.
He had a heart attack and he went to the hospital.
And when he got up, he's got his bill and he had another heart attack.
You know, Canada does not happen.
(58:39):
You know, I was interviewed one day by a board in Washington of a big Washington Post.
And they were arguing that perhaps their system is better than ours.
And there was one guy there.
He said, I got sick.
He was an American in Toronto.
(59:01):
He said, I called the desk.
Within minutes, I was in an ambulance.
I was rushed to the emergency.
They saved my life.
And he saw me after that, he came to ask the question, who will pay?
(59:26):
It's not that like that in United States.
You have to explain which company is paying for you with tons of questions.
You know, in Canada, you have just your credit card of health.
You put it there and you're in.
(59:47):
So there is some administrative problem.
It's a very difficult public service.
But on the whole, it's doing quite well.
The Right Honorable Mr. Jean Chrétien.
This has been a real lifelong honor.
And I'm very grateful to you.
(01:00:07):
Viva la Canada, sir.
Merci beaucoup.
Fini?
Fini.
Done it in an hour.
(01:00:31):
Hey, everybody.
It's just me.
Just Neil again.
Turned on a tiny bit of French to close things off.
I was caught off guard because he was starting to, I think, compliment me in French.
And my brain was like, do I know what he's talking about?
And I was just like, Fini?
Fini?
But then actually we kept going.
And so if you stick around to the very end of this chat, I'll throw in a little suffix, a super, super bonus suffix that he shared with me at the end on the record.
(01:00:59):
About a conversation he had with Tony Blair down in South Africa, which is pretty eye-opening as it relates to world events.
But we'll stick that at the very end of the end of the Podcast Club, which doesn't come yet.
For now, I will say that was quite the trip.
It was quite the trip going up to his office.
And I got there an hour and a half early.
(01:01:19):
And nobody was there.
And it was dark.
And I was like, am I just at the wrong spot?
But when somebody let me in, they're like, oh, he's here.
He's been in meetings since 8 o'clock.
He's got a meeting at 8.
He's got a meeting at 8.15. He's got a meeting at 8.30. He's got a meeting at 8.45. And I was like, oh, well, what about my two-hour podcast?
They're like, two hours?
What do you mean two hours?
Like, we don't do meetings longer than one hour here.
(01:01:41):
We pretty much don't do that.
He's never done an hour-long interview ever, they said.
Ever.
So I was able to explain my case and that I thought approval to do this.
And they were able to fit me in and move another meeting around.
But it was like a busy day for him and for me, but just flying up there and interviewing him.
(01:02:05):
And he was very passionate.
He's very sharp, as you can tell.
I mean, he's 91.
And I hope I have that kind of cognitive faculty and functioning when I'm up there.
Fingers crossed for all of us.
But that's why these role models are so important.
He is serving as a living icon who still breathes this deep national Canadian spirit that people like me soak up.
(01:02:30):
I just put out a new book called Canada is Awesome.
And I'd love you to check that out.
It was partly inspired by his January speech.
So there's a lot of quotes from him that I just love and I captured and I wrote down.
So many.
We can start anywhere.
But how about just, I want to die standing up.
(01:02:51):
That's a great metaphor for, you know, what I call in chapter four of The Happiness Equation, the idea of never retiring.
Wanting to always do something, be doing something with purpose, with passion, with connection, with commitment.
Right?
The four S's, social structure, stimulation, and story.
He has absolutely all of them in spades.
(01:03:13):
This one, a lot of people say I stole their ideas.
I say, if you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up.
Don't tell me to do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
I thought that was great.
A wonderful line.
I asked him what he would tell Trump about, like, would he say stop this nonsense?
And I tell him the same thing, but it's him.
He will ignore me because it's him.
(01:03:34):
Never seen an ego that big, which I thought was interesting.
I mean, not surprising, but interesting.
In my day, to be accused of lying, it was the worst insult.
Isn't that true?
That, you know, we went from this era of telling the truth to an era of what's the truth almost overnight.
(01:03:55):
He quotes that.
I think it's a New York Times piece that had counted every line.
You know, the president had lied 14,000 times over one term.
Another great quote.
A liberal is when the left says you're on the right and the right says you're on the left.
Just the idea of finding the quote-unquote radical center.
The Right Honorable Jean Chrétien, what an honor and privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you, to spend some time with you, to have your wisdom pervade the airways across the universe through this podcast.
(01:04:26):
And thank you so much for giving us two books that are neither going to be added, but both going to be asterisks.
Because The Old Man and the Sea, that's number 933 on our list already.
I had this coming down.
I was like, oh, we're going to add it to the 500s.
But no, Jonathan Fields picked it in Chapter 26.
Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York picked it in Chapter 63.
(01:04:46):
And Doug the Bookseller also picked it in Chapter 99.
So this is like one of the rare triple asterisks on the show.
Meaning that more than one person picked it.
Because we want the top 1,000 to be 1,000 different books, right?
Over at 3books.co/thetop1000 if you want to check it out.
And then his second book, The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince, chosen in Chapter 96 by Dave Cheeswright, former CEO of Walmart International, and by Maria Popova in Chapter 138, creator and founder of what was then called Brain Pickings and is now called The Marginalian.
(01:05:18):
So Mr. Chrétien shares space with a lot of other luminaries on the show and has asterisked our list heavily.
Thank you so much to him, to Bob Wright for helping to arrange this, for Bruce for putting up with me and barging into the office and making space for me, for all the people at the wonderful firm that he's a part of that helped make space for me.
(01:05:39):
I really appreciate your kindness.
Thank you all of you for listening.
And now, are you still here?
Did you make it past the three-second pause?
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
This is the club where I talk directly to you.
You talk directly to me.
We play your voicemails.
We read your letters.
Let's start off as we always do by going to the phones.
(01:06:02):
Hi, Neil.
This is Claire.
I'm calling from Nova Scotia.
I started listening to your podcast years ago when you first began and I was doing a lot of driving then, so it was not all the time.
And then I kind of forgot about it up until now and was on another road trip and picked up where you have now left off, listening to some of the most influential, wonderful people that I love to read, Maria Popova, David Eggers, Holy Smokes.
(01:06:32):
So congrats on how it's grown and how you've maintained it ad-free.
Thank you so much for what you're doing for the book world and book lovers.
What a cool, special thing.
Oh, I've got to go.
I just got a paper cut.
Okay, bye-bye.
Thank you so much to Claire from Nova Scotia for calling us at 1-833-READALOT.
(01:06:53):
That's R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
Claire, I can totally relate to falling out of a podcast and falling back in.
I will be here for many moons, either way, commute or not.
And I'm so glad you mentioned Dave Eggers and Maria Popova because those are two of my favorite guests because they don't do interviews, right?
Dave Eggers just doesn't do interviews.
Maria Popova just doesn't do interviews.
(01:07:14):
But they are book people, and they were attracted to the ad-free nature of the show.
Both of them mentioned that to me offline, that because I don't monetize the show, i.e. I lose money on the podcast, they were attracted to it because then their IP or the things they say won't be used to sell more ads, which they're both personally against.
So, you know, the marginalian doesn't have any ads.
(01:07:34):
It's the same kind of idea.
And Dave Eggers is kind of a values-first guy, too.
So, it's hard sometimes to be that way, but I like it, and I just don't want to be spending my time reading ads.
So, I've even disabled ads on my YouTube channel, which, by the way, Google makes it very hard to do.
You have to, like, go in and email Google and disable the stuff.
I don't like ads.
So, there aren't going to be any ads on the show.
(01:07:56):
I'm very lucky to be able to do that, I know.
But thank you so much for pointing it out and appreciating it.
And if you are listening to this, call me, 1-833-READALOT.
Let me know one of your formative books.
Let me know one of your dream guests.
Let me know something that stood out to you from a guest.
What's something that Monsieur Jean Chrétien said that you agreed with or you disagreed with, that you were hoping we would get into, or you wish that we had covered?
(01:08:19):
Like, it's good to just feed stuff back.
1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
And don't worry, if you butcher it, if you put your foot in your mouth, just call back.
Call back 12 times.
Some people do that.
I won't play anything that makes you look bad.
I just never will.
That's not my goal.
And if I do play your message, as I just did with Claire, I will send you a book.
Signed book, any of my books.
(01:08:40):
You pick the book.
Drop me a line with your address.
Claire, there will be one in the mail for you soon.
All right.
And now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter.
All right.
This chapter's letter comes from Emilio Arcatola.
Hi, Emilio.
I started listening to your podcast a couple years ago as I wanted to get back into reading.
One of the first chapters I listened to was chapter four.
(01:09:03):
Ever since hearing that podcast, which, by the way, was with Sarah Ramsey, my favorite bookseller, I want to visit Book City and more local bookstores when I travel.
I will be traveling to Toronto in a couple of weeks and was wondering if you had any recommendations for book lovers and food lovers.
Huge thank you for sharing your thoughts and conversations with me and the world.
From Emilio.
First of all, thank you, Emilio, for the letter and for coming to Toronto.
(01:09:26):
Yes, I've got lots of recommendations.
Another story is a great one.
That's where Sarah worked after Book City.
But here's the thing.
Type Bookstore on Queen Street West is probably the best independent bookstore in the city, although we have a tremendous amount of varied bookstores.
So Tite Bookstore, Queen Street West, for sure.
The Monkey's Paw has the world's only bibliomat, which is a vending machine that dispenses books.
(01:09:48):
It has the world's only.
It's actually mentioned in Atlas Obscura because of that.
And the owner, Steve, he calls himself a book antiquarian.
And he is the incredible curator of, I think it's called Old and Unusual Printed Matter.
That's the tagline in the window.
He's got old maps.
He's got, like, you know, field guides for bird books in the 1800s.
He's got children's literature, like original Roald Dahl hardcovers.
(01:10:11):
It's an amazing bookstore.
And you really feel like you're part of the ages when you're in there.
And then, of course, I would be—I can't not mention BMV Bookstore.
BMV.
That's where the podcast logo of Three Books was taken, the first one, where I'm standing reading a book in a bookstore.
BMV stands for, hilariously, Books Music Video.
(01:10:32):
I guess that's what they called it when they started the store in 1997.
And now it's a four-story building, four stories of books that have, you know, new, used, remainder books, collector's books.
It's just a world unto itself.
I mean, the top story, three stories up, is just a room with just graphic novels and, like, old vintage magazines from, like, the 50s and 60s and 70s.
(01:10:54):
They've got vinyl in the basement.
They've got an incredible DVD collection.
They still have that.
The literature is amazing.
I'm always finding, like, old and interesting covers or interesting books.
They've got a knack for doing it and doing it well.
In terms of food, my favorite restaurant in Toronto is probably Rasa, R-A-S-A.
And I also really love Bar Raval, R-A-V-A-L.
Those will be a couple to get you going.
(01:11:16):
All right.
And now it's time for the word of the chapter.
And for this chapter's word, let's go back to the one and only Right Honorable Monsieur Chrétien.
You're a good Canadian liberal.
President of the Young Liberals at Laval University.
The Liberal Party is a centrist party.
Yes, indeed, it is liberal.
(01:11:39):
Liberal.
Liberal.
Liberal.
According to Merriam Webster, that is somebody inclined to be open to ideas and ways of behaving that are not conventional or traditional, i.e., broad-minded, comma, tolerant.
Second definition, of relating to or favoring a philosophy of liberalism, especially political liberalism, and social liberalism, which also means an inclination to be open to new ways of behaving.
(01:12:04):
We already talked about that, Merriam Webster.
You're being circular now.
What about you, Google?
What do you say?
Ah, Google says...
Liberal.
Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own.
Open to new ideas.
Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
(01:12:25):
Now, you know, we use that word a lot in Canada because, of course, there's the Liberal Party, but as Monsieur Chrétien pointed out, that definition is varied around the world.
So, why don't we go back into the history?
That word actually comes from liber, which means free in Latin.
(01:12:45):
Then, liberalis, from a free man.
The original sense was suitable for a free man, hence suitable for a gentleman, i.e., one not tied to a trade, surviving, for example, in liberal arts.
Another early sense of the word was generous, giving rise to the now obsolete meaning free from restraint.
Okay, there's a lot of definitions of that word.
(01:13:09):
For me, the word liberal is defined, really, and as a person, it is prime minister, right, honorable, which means he won the Order of Merit, first guy in 50 years to win that from the actual queen herself, Monsieur Jean Chrétien.
The definition with his red tie, always in a suit, his passionate fiery speeches, my very first prime minister, and like I said, my favorite.
(01:13:32):
I am so honored to have been able to have that conversation with Monsieur Chrétien.
I hope you found it enjoyable.
Thank you so much, all of you, for being here, and until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.
Keep turning the page, and I'll talk to you soon.
(01:13:54):
You know, when I announced the war in Iraq, I know one of the big reproach, you know, that I had received was I did not make a statement.
The question was asked by the leader of the opposition.
(01:14:18):
I expected that.
I had replied.
I think I used less than one minute, so they said I should have explained that and blah, blah, blah.
No, when you say no, you say no, that's it, you know.
It's a no.
Why you have a no?
No, it's a no.
(01:14:38):
You know, I didn't have to explain.
It was controversial at that time.
Half of the population was yes, and the other half was no, but they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
Which made it an easy-ish decision.
And I had a discussion with Tony Blair at a Commonwealth meeting in South Africa, where he was urging me to go along with them.
(01:15:10):
And I said to him, he said to me, he was not using weapons of mass destruction.
He said to me, we have to get rid of Saddam Hussein, he's a terrible dictator.
So I said, Tony, if we are in the business of getting rid of dictators we don't like, I'm not very enthusiastic about the regime of Mugabe here next door in Zimbabwe.
(01:15:44):
And I said, he is a member of the family.
Why don't you look at the problem within the Commonwealth family first, rather than going elsewhere?
Oh, he said he's a terrible dictator and so on.
And I said, yes, you know, he said to me basically, in reply to a question, he said, yes, but there is a big difference, that was his reply, between Mugabe and Saddam Hussein.
(01:16:22):
And I said to him, oh yes, Mugabe has no oil.
He became white.
I think I hit the target.
The nub.
The nub, I imagine.
(01:16:53):
Goodbye
A lot of people will say that I stole their ideas.
If you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up.
Don't tell me do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
You can have a referendum on anything.
You can have a referendum tomorrow on is the moon square.
But what will be the effect of the referendum?
(00:24):
And it's not just a tool for blackmail.
When I was in politics to be called a liar was the worst insult you could have.
And in the United States they said in the first term of Trump he lied 14,000 times.
And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said...
(00:48):
From one old guy to another old guy.
Stop this nonsense.
Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him today...
It would be the same thing, but he would not enjoy it.
Or he would ignore me.
I've never seen an ego that big.
(01:08):
Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state, okay?
It really should.
Perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.
Destroying what took 80 years to build since the war.
And proud of our value.
And we became the envy of the world.
I want to die standing.
(01:29):
Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome to chapter 150, 50, 50 of 3 Books.
Born in 1934, the 18th of 19 children in the small blue-collar town of Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, Jean Chrétien has risen to become the grandfather of Canada.
The definitive force in Canadian politics for over 50 years.
(01:52):
From leading the Young Liberals Club at Laval University in 1956, to winning 12 straight federal elections, to serving as minister under Lester B.
Pearson, helping to create the Canadian flag,
to serving as many different ministers under Pierre Elliott Trudeau,
helping to establish national parks, create stronger indigenous relations,
help develop two official languages, repatriate our constitution,
(02:15):
create the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and of course, then after all that,
serving as our prime minister for three consecutive majority governments from 1993 to 2003,
helping to define and shape and kind of change the trajectory of our country,
eliminating the federal deficit completely, right?
Saying no to George W.
(02:37):
Bush and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, helping to win the 1995 referendum for Quebec to stay in Canada as part of the country.
He left office with the highest approval ratings of any other prime minister in history,
and today we are flying up to Ottawa, Canada, and sitting in the office of the 91-year-old leader
and getting ready to discuss the secrets of healthy living into your 90s,
(03:00):
Canada on the global stage, how to get along with almost anyone,
humility as a virtue, lessons from a 63-year-old marriage,
thoughts on Alberta secession, the definition of a liberal,
how he said no to the Iraq war, and of course,
the right Honorable Jean Chrétien's most formative books.
Let's flip the page into Chapter 150 now.
(03:25):
Good morning, Mr. Chrétien.
Good morning.
Thank you so much for being up for chatting with me.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
You were my first prime minister when I turned 18 in 1998, and you continue to be my favorite.
Very generous.
Thank you very much.
We've been so inspired by you for many, many years.
(03:46):
I wasn't sure what I should call you because at the front, I noticed everybody inside here calls you monsieur, just monsieur plain, because there's a right honorable.
What do people address you as?
Oh, it depends.
Some call me prime minister like they do in the United States, for example.
(04:07):
Former president, they still call him president.
You call me the way you want.
Oh, okay, okay.
There is no protocol in Canada about it.
There's no protocol in Canada.
Okay, so Mr. Chrétien, I will go with if it's okay.
And we're here.
We're in your office.
You're in a suit.
I'm in a suit.
We're overlooking Parliament Hill, the beautiful Rideau River.
(04:28):
And it sounds like when I got here, you are busy.
You are back to back to back meeting me.
I'm only 91 years old, so I have to earn my living.
You're busy.
You're very busy.
And I love this because one of the chapters in one of my books I talk about is this idea.
I call it never retire.
So for me, you're a big inspiration.
I want to die standing.
(04:49):
I want to die standing.
I thought maybe before we get into some of our opening questions, I could just read you some of today's headlines from this morning to see if you have any thoughts on them.
These are today's headlines.
I'll tell you the source it's from, the headline, and just ask for your open opinion if you have one.
And you can say pass if there's no opinion.
(05:09):
You know, I'm not following.
I didn't watch the news this morning or last night because I was outside.
So I'd rather pass.
Go ahead on something else.
Okay.
Okay, great.
I'll skip the headlines then.
And what I want to say at the beginning was that, you know, I was reading many of your books.
(05:30):
I want to talk to you about Canadian priorities.
On page 42 of your memoirs, My Years as Prime Minister,
which was written 18 years ago in 2007,
and of course is about your time as Prime Minister 22 to 32 years ago,
you wrote on page 42 that your three biggest priorities as Prime Minister
were, quote, to reduce our horrendous deficit,
(05:50):
to reassert our independence and protect Canada from being seen
as the 51st state of the United States,
and in the face of separatist threats and sense of alienation
in other parts of the country, to keep Canada united.
That sounds...
Very much of actuality.
Yeah, it sounds like today.
Talking about a 51st state some 18 years ago.
(06:12):
Yeah.
You know, it was always there as a threat.
You know, there was a lot of debate in the United States more than 100 years ago about taking Canada over.
There was discussion at that time.
There was even a war.
We were with the Brits, as I said this week.
(06:34):
You know, we won.
We burned the White House.
And that is a reality.
We have our reason to remain independent.
We're proud Canadians.
We want to be good neighbors, but we don't want to be the 51st state.
And I was thinking like that in those days, like I'm still very strong on that today.
(06:54):
Yeah, absolutely.
And then on the separatism thing, you know, you're very famous for presiding over the 1995 Quebec referendum or the no side one and introducing the 2000 Clarity Act, which set a higher bar and threshold for future referendums.
Today we have conversation about Alberta lowering the threshold for having a referendum.
(07:16):
Yeah, but they can have a referendum.
But they have to read the Clarity Act too.
You can have a referendum on anything.
They can have a referendum tomorrow on is the moon square.
You know, we're in a society of freedom.
(07:36):
But what would be the effect of a referendum?
The referendum will have to meet the requirements that apply to all the provinces of Canada, as I have established in the Clarity Act.
And I said in Calgary last week, that perhaps the premier should read that act.
(07:57):
The question has to be approved by parliament.
There's no separation, just say I'm going.
It's just like a divorce.
You know, you have obligation with the other partners.
And the Clarity Act is dealing with all the problem and the health that they will have to overcome.
(08:18):
And it's not just a tool for blackmail.
There's a reality behind it.
And I'm very proud that I passed the Clarity Act.
Because the word means something.
And the word clarity, you understand the meaning of it.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the question will have to be clear.
(08:38):
The majority will have to be clear.
We'll have to take all sort of element that are all mentioned.
What will happen with the natives?
And what will happen with this and that?
And what about the minorities in that community?
What kind of guarantee they will give to the minorities?
You know, I'm telling you, it's better not to start on that.
It's going to be a hell of a long negotiation.
(09:00):
For nothing.
Yeah, exactly.
And I heard you.
Because, you know, this year they have produced more oil than they have ever produced.
And, you know, and when I was a minister, you know, if they have tar sand, it's because I'm, me and Don McDonald, minister of energy at that time, I was a president of a treasury board who made a deal.
(09:25):
Because they had started the tar sand and they went bankrupt.
And it is with the money of the government of Canada and the government of Ontario that they restarted the process.
The price of producing, you see, was 40 bucks, and the market price was 20 bucks.
(09:48):
But we had the wisdom to see that there was a future.
So we invested money into that.
So they've made more oil this year than ever before.
Justin Trudeau, member of the Liberal Party, famously bought them a pipeline.
Yes, and they never said thank you.
They never said thank you.
(10:08):
$30 billion.
$30 billion, right.
And he gave them the permission to build a pipeline to go to Texas.
And it was blocked in Dakota.
You know, he did everything that was requested.
And I asked them when I'm there, how many miles, yards, feet of inches of pipeline that Mr. Harper built in 10 years?
(10:37):
Zero.
Mr. Harper is the conservative prime minister.
A friend of mine said that to him in public.
And he has to say it's true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's record-breaking production.
There's new pipelines and the approval for others that haven't got built because of opposition in the U.S. And there is the idea that if there was a separation, where would they go?
(11:04):
Yeah.
Do you think it would be easier to build a pipeline in Canada if they are no more part of Canada?
No, it would be harder.
And to get out of Canada, they are landlocked.
They have to go through B.C. or through Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and so on.
(11:24):
In the Northeast, the North is Canadian too.
And if they want to have a pipeline in the state of Washington and Oregon, I wish them good luck.
So they could not have a pipeline in the Dakotas, imagine there.
Yeah.
And so what do you say to Western discontent in general or the idea in the Western provinces that the country is governed and led by the heavy population?
(11:48):
Yeah, now the prime minister is from Alberta.
Harper was from Alberta, you know?
So for guys who are complaining, it is myths that they love to keep.
(12:09):
And they think that complaining has been successful, so they will keep doing that.
Mm-hmm.
Because good news is not news, and bad news is big news.
Of course.
Before I came to meet you here today, of course I told people that I was coming to meet you.
My wife calls you the grandfather of Canada.
(12:32):
You have stirred together the country like nobody else.
A woman I met in an Indigo bookstore in Calgary, Elaine, said, I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Mr. Jean Chrétien stayed at the hotel where my mom's salon was.
He took a family photo with me and told me I was a very peppy girl.
He is a wonderful person.
Nice.
And a family friend said that she met you while she was doing a sit-in protest in the principal's office at Queen's University in the late 1980s, and you actually specifically came to visit and speak to the students there.
(13:02):
I probably did.
And my therapist told me he loves Jean Chrétien.
My friend Kevin said I'm a fan.
He's a great statesman.
So you've really spirited this country together in a very unique way.
I've been around since 1963.
And I was a president of the Young Liberals at Laval University in 1956.
(13:23):
So it's a long time I've been around a political debate.
Yeah.
And I enjoy it, and I still talk about it and participated in many, many ridings in the last election.
Yes, been busy.
And, you know, I made speeches that were noticed at the leadership, and I wrote a letter to Trump as my personal gift for my birthday on the 11th of January and so on, and attracted apparently a lot of attention.
(13:57):
And so I'm happy.
When you're useful at 9-1-1, you feel good.
Absolutely.
What do you see as the job of the prime minister?
What is the prime minister's...
He has to do his best, you know.
You know, politics is made of problems.
Most of them, you don't know the problem before the day that the problem occurs.
(14:19):
So you cannot have all these visions and so on.
Your job is, when you have a problem, to find a solution.
But I say that to fill a hole, sometimes you create two more holes.
So we're shoveling all the time.
Yeah, exactly.
But in terms of solving problems that come up, I get the sense, both through your books, but also in our conversations, none of which lasted, I think, more than 22 seconds, because I could see on my phone, we had an 8-second conversation, a 15-second conversation.
(14:51):
You get a lot done.
You get a massive amount done.
And over the course of your time as prime minister, it's very easy to count.
You signed the Kyoto Agreement.
You passed the Clarity Act.
You did Operation Yellow Ribbon.
You created more national parks.
It goes on and on and on.
The Canadian flag, you know.
(15:12):
Do you feel that people have a problem getting stuff done now?
Is it harder to get things done today?
It was not easy.
It's never easy in public life.
Parliament is there.
You are the so-called loyal opposition, but they are more opposition than loyal.
And they do their job.
(15:32):
It's what they are there.
And you have to live with that and convince them and make it attractive enough that it will pass and defend it in the public and convince the public that it's right.
And there is always a risk that you will be defeated in an election.
And a good sign of a defeat, you go back home and your wife is happy.
(15:53):
So, you know, it is.
I was lucky.
I was never lost in an election.
So I was a 12-time elected member of parliament.
I was 30 years in the cabinet, of which 10 as the prime minister.
I was three years leader of the opposition.
And I survived that all.
(16:14):
But I was lucky and probably hard-working too.
Absolutely.
I can sense that you're hard-working.
You're very hard-working, even today with back-to-back-to-back.
So I'm trying to go quick here.
You were very kind enough, Mr. Chrétien, to give us a couple books that shaped you over your life.
And when I spoke to you on the phone, a couple that came to mind included a book that I'd like to explain to our listeners.
(16:37):
It's called The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
It was published in 1943 by Reynal and Hitchcock.
It's got a white cover.
I have it there beside you, the second one down in that pile there.
And, you know, it says The Little Prince in a black script.
There's this little boy, you know, blond boy with pink cheeks and a green outfit standing on a tiny gray planet with a few flowers poking out of it and some stars, a moon, and a plant in the background.
(17:03):
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in 1900 in Lyon, France.
He died in 1944 at age 44 when his plane was shot down over the Mediterranean Sea off of occupied France.
This is a simple story of a pilot forced to land in a remote desert.
And then he meets a small boy, The Little Prince, who shares stories with him.
Dewey Decimal Heads can put it under 843.912 for French fiction in the library.
(17:29):
Mr. Chrétien, tell us about your relationship with this book.
But it was a book about good values, basically.
that go into the basic in life.
And I'm like that.
I'm not apparently very complicated.
(17:50):
I do my job, go back home, rest.
I'm not, you know, strong on being with the big shots and being seen.
I have a very quiet life.
I've been married to the same girl for 62 years, and she was my girlfriend for five.
(18:13):
And that is, you know, my life was my family and my work.
And I was happy with that.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I looked into his politics out of curiosity, and they changed throughout his life, as many people's do.
(18:33):
He was focused, as you said, values, human dignity, personal responsibility, the importance of community bonds.
He believed in an aristocracy of spirit rather than in birth or wealth, with the idea that true nobility comes from service to others.
So on page 11 of your 1984 memoir, Straight From the Heart, you wrote, My family has always been rouge, liberal in the free-thinking, anti-clerical, anti-establishment tradition of the 19th century.
(19:04):
I thought I might ask you to open that up.
Maybe tell us how you define liberal and conservative today.
But, you know, it's evolving over years.
But fundamentally, the liberal party is a centrist party.
(19:26):
It is.
We're not doctrinaire.
We implement good ideas.
We borrow good ideas and implement them.
You know, in my career, a lot of people would say that I stole their ideas.
But I said an idea is an idea.
(19:47):
I would say to them, if you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up.
Don't tell me do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
You know, an idea is an idea.
Nobody is the owner of an idea.
Yes.
And, you know, I'm curious, and I look at the left and I look at the right, and if there's something good there, I pick it up.
(20:11):
Yeah.
But basically, I, you know, people were always asking me, was this a liberal?
Because in Europe, a liberal is more or less a center-right politician, but strong on human rights.
In the United States, it is a left-wing politician.
(20:32):
The right in the United States, the liberals are the left.
When you say, you know, you see the debate in the United States and they refer to socialists, the communists, and the liberals are all in the same bag for the right.
So for me, I say that I have to explain it this way.
(20:53):
A liberal in Canada is when the right says of you, you're a left-winger.
When the left says you're a right-winger, you're a good Canadian liberal Chrétien.
You know?
The radical center.
The radical center.
And a country is a moderate country, so you're necessarily moderate if you want to reflect the mood of the nation, the aspiration of the nation.
(21:20):
And you read and heard all my speech about the values of Canada.
And proud of our values.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And we became the envy of the world.
Yes, yes.
You often quote a study that was done last year citing that Canada is the number one country in the world that people want to move to to start a new life.
(21:41):
There was a poll about three months ago, four months ago.
Yeah.
We're asking people, if you are asked to start again your life, where would you like to go?
Canada was the number one.
Mm-hmm.
Do these party lines matter as much anymore, calling yourself by certain identities?
A lot of younger people today, of course, are growing up in this environment where it's harder to see any sort of long-form speeches or to kind of hear long-form statements or read any kind of, you know, bills that are going through.
(22:12):
They get information in very small sound bites.
You hear the extreme gets amplified.
But we live in a revolution at this moment of technology.
And what will be the result of people having all their information on this machine?
Within seconds, very short.
A lot of people don't give a damn about truth.
(22:35):
And how to sort it out, it will be a big problem for the past.
You know, when I was in politics, to be called a liar was the worst insult you could have.
If someone will accuse you of lying, cannot prove it in the House, he was suspended.
(22:57):
And in the United States, they said in the first term of Trump, he lied 14,000 times.
Wow.
According to the Washington Post.
Right.
And, you know, and the people say, oh, they even invented the word, the alternative truth.
Right.
Alternative, yeah.
So, yeah, come on.
When you live in a society like that, you have to sort it out.
(23:18):
And eventually, the need for truth will be such that you will find a mechanism to sort out the truth and the lies.
But it's going to be complicated.
Very much so, yeah.
And it's like, and you know, it will be complicated.
It's just like, you know, good news and bad news.
(23:41):
Good news is not a news, but a bad news is a news.
So in California, apparently, there was a group who formed a newspaper and it was only with good news.
And, you know, they had one bad news.
You went bankrupt.
So, good news is not news.
(24:03):
It's true.
I know.
I've been trying to play in the good news world for a long time.
It is difficult to be there.
We naturally don't want to think that way.
You mentioned Trump.
You mentioned 14,000 lies.
You mentioned that you wrote him a letter on your birthday.
And we're familiar with your liberal convention speech in January where you said, from one old guy to another, I would say, stop this nonsense.
(24:24):
Today, if you sat down and had a beer with him, today, summer 2020.
I would repeat the same thing.
But he will not enjoy it.
Or he will ignore me.
You know, because it's him.
Nobody can't for him.
It's him.
Never seen an ego that big.
(24:45):
And the people comply.
You know, to be accused of lying in my days, it was a worse insult.
For him, he does not give a damn.
Is the alternative true?
Come on.
When you live with that, I cannot understand that now he's dropping in the polls, but that they voted for him as president.
(25:11):
But they did.
And perhaps we're living the end of the American empire.
He is destroying what took 80 years to build since the war.
So if the American empire is on its way down from your perspective, what fills that gap globally?
(25:35):
I don't know.
Probably, you know, in 25 years, the big nation will be China.
They might have competition from India because they have the number.
And we'll have to adjust.
You know, others survive under the American empire.
(25:56):
There was a British empire.
This has disappeared.
There was Napoleon.
He's not there.
Will not come back.
You know, so it's a reality.
You have to live with reality.
And I believe that we will be in good position because of the wealth, the land, the water, the resources, quality of our society.
(26:20):
We'll survive quite well.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Speaking of the land and the resources and the quality of our life, in page 14 of your memoir, you say, the mantra of my life has been, when I look in the mirror, I despair.
But when I compare myself to others, I am consoled.
(26:42):
What did you mean by that?
But I know all my weaknesses better than anybody.
Ah, okay.
And I know that.
I have witnesses.
I tried to overcome that, and I did quite well.
But I know that I'm not a genius, that I'm just a human being.
(27:06):
And when I get up in the morning, I say, Jean, you have to do your best today.
Mm-hmm.
And I like to go to bed and say, I've done my best today.
Mm-hmm.
And I sleep well.
Well, that's interesting you say, I'm not a genius.
I'm just trying to do my best.
You're famously from Shawinigan Falls, a famously blue-collar town in Quebec.
(27:28):
You often talk about, in your memoirs, how you like to keep connected with the people and go to the bar or go to the places downtown, kind of talk to people.
Even as you were prime minister, you would do this, and you maintain connection.
Of course, Antoine d'Expery does this with the 40 million people that have bought The Little Prince.
He has an accessibility.
(27:48):
It does seem that global leaders now are above us, beyond us.
They're usually millionaires or bankers or billionaires.
They're no longer accessible.
Nobody would have ever seen Jean Chrétien being sworn in with the richest man of the world.
Right.
I know some of them, and I don't brag about it.
(28:12):
Normally, I should be the establishment.
I've been 40 years on the Hill.
I've been elected 12 times member of parliament.
I've been 30 years in the cabinet, as I said, 10 of them as prime minister.
I've been minister of all the big, important departments.
(28:34):
I was three years the leader of the opposition.
My daughter is married in a very rich family, and nobody thinks when they see me as the establishment.
My greatest success in the mind of Canadians is I am still the little guy from Shawinigan.
Amazing.
(28:55):
How?
How did you keep that?
I remained myself.
Ah.
You know, I know people.
Everybody knows the queen gave me the Order of Merit, for example.
I was the first Canadian in 50 years that received that honor.
That is a choice of the monarch herself or himself.
(29:16):
And that, you know, and I accepted that with pleasure and humility, because apparently I've done my best for 40 years, as they said.
And there was only three other Canadians since 1902 who had received it.
And never brag about it.
(29:37):
You didn't even know.
So, but it's a reality.
Well, I only know because of all the letters in front of your name, partly.
Yeah, but nobody even knows what that means.
I know, unless you Google it.
But I will also say, another thing I looked up before I interviewed you was the average exit poll approval rating of every Canadian prime minister ever in history who's been prime minister for longer than six months.
(30:02):
And you, my friend, are number one overall since they started tracking approval ratings, which is in about the 1950s or 60s.
So before this, they didn't do that.
But from then until now, your exit polling, which was 45% approval rating after three consecutive majorities from 1993 to 2003, was the highest of all time.
Brian Mulroney was the lowest, and Justin Trudeau was the second lowest.
(30:25):
Not the huge range in the middle.
I didn't know that.
Thank you for...
You know, I...
Somebody was...
Look at that.
Apparently, of all the prime ministers in my elections, I am the one who had received plus 2.3% of the vote in my election.
(30:50):
I was the number one of 17 elected prime ministers.
Brian was the last again.
And that is...
You know, on the honeymoon, as they say.
You know, I never went below the day, the vote I had the day of the election.
(31:11):
They claim that a honeymoon is all over when you go in the poll lower than the vote you had in the election.
For me, I never went lower.
In between, you know, when I was having more.
When I quit, according to Gallup, I had 60% of approval rate and 59% intention of voting.
(31:35):
So I could have won easily a fourth mandate if I had enough.
Three was more than enough.
And 40 years in public life.
You made some promises to Aileen, I believe.
Yes.
I said to Aileen that I was to quit before 70.
And I quit.
I was 69, 11 months and one day.
So you had three weeks left that you gave her as a bonus, a little extra vacation.
(32:02):
Your second formative book, Monsieur, is Ernest Hemingway's famous book, The Old Man and the Sea.
This was originally published in 1952, just four years before you were president of the Young Liberals at Laval.
Originally in Life Magazine, but then they published it in a book the same year by Scribner.
My cover is just a shimmering blue sea, but there's many covers with a man in a boat holding a fishing line, holding a huge marlin.
(32:29):
Ernest Hemingway is the Nobel Prize winning writer who lived from 1899 to 1961.
And of course, the story is about an old Cuban fisherman and a supreme ordeal, a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
This one goes under 813.52 for American Fiction.
(32:52):
Mr. Chrétien, tell us about your relationship with The Old Man and the Sea.
He never gave up.
And he got his fish.
I never give up.
I am persistent.
And it's very important when you know what you need, you try to get it.
(33:16):
And it was a beautiful book, beautifully written by Hemingway.
He was a great writer.
Yeah.
It's one of the two books, you know, I'm happy.
I remember these two and I'm happy I chose these two.
Yeah, they're beautiful.
There's a lot of simplicity in that.
Absolutely.
It's all simple.
Clear, like the Clarity Act.
(33:39):
I like to have, if I had a quality, apparently I was able to go to the nub of the problem easily.
Some people get, that's kind of the way you're thinking, they get embroiled into the details of everything.
(34:01):
For me, I try to go to where is the problem.
And if you know exactly what is the problem, you can find it.
The problem is if you want to cover everything, you get mixed up.
And it is, for me, the way I was acting.
If you can get the nub of the problem, the rest fall in place.
(34:26):
But some can do that, some cannot do that.
It's a way of thinking, I guess, that some are very preoccupied to have everything before they move.
For me, I knew that if I was convinced that where I had to go, what I had to do, I knew that a part would fall in places.
(34:54):
But some get stuck in the parts and it takes time and becoming decisive and so on.
Is getting to the nub of a problem a skill you can learn?
Yes.
How would you recommend you learn it?
You have so many problems.
When you're in politics, you know, they always come to see you for problems.
(35:17):
How do you prioritize the problems?
How do you know which one is the most...
You look at the problem one by one and you realize that something is not important, so you give it to somebody else to solve.
And when it's very important and it is your responsibility, you know, you take it and you work on it.
(35:38):
Mm-hmm.
Speed.
And this is getting to become a bigger issue in this era of confusion with media as we were talking about.
Now, the title, of course, is The Old Man and the Sea, so I thought I would just ask you about both of those phrases, old man and then the sea.
On the old man, I don't mean to call you an old man, but you were born the 18th of 19 children in 1934.
(35:59):
Of course, nine survived infancy.
Today, you're 91 1⁄2.
You're still going to the office.
That's where we're talking right now.
To what do you attribute your cognitive and physical longevity?
Well, in my family, we have probably good genes.
Mom lost babies one year or one week.
(36:21):
In those days, they had no medication of today.
My brothers who are in medicine all say that most of them would have survived today, but at that time, they were losing a lot of kids of sickness.
But the rest, the nine who survived, the first trio live an average of 85.
(36:48):
The second trio live an average of 97.
I'm part of the third trio.
We lost one last year at 95, and we are two.
Me, 91, and my brother, 89.
To build the 97, both him and I, we have to survive until we are 98.
(37:14):
We would succeed.
To beat the average.
My father died 93.
Wow.
It is part of our genes.
There is a big genetic component, of course, and I think any doctor would point to that.
Discipline.
We are a family that we're all hardworking.
(37:35):
That came from mom and dad, and very disciplined.
How do you define discipline?
Discipline.
Not drinking, not smoking, not doing this, and having an orderly life, and so on.
You know, I think that we did not have a divorce in my family.
(38:02):
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And, you know...
Eating well?
Eating well, good food, not in too great quantities, and, you know, discipline.
Discipline was very important to be on time.
I'm a maniac about that.
You know, if I'm five minutes late, I am upset.
(38:24):
Dad used to say, it is the politeness of a king to be on time.
And that I'm always on time.
And that discipline really rings a bell for me because last year on this podcast, I interviewed 87-year-old Ralph Nader, and he said very similar.
No drinking, no smoking, eating good food, having small meals, walking, being tight, you know, communing.
(38:50):
He used that phrase, communing with nature.
I just heard you say at the beginning, I heard you say you were in the garden last night.
So there's some basic, simple elements here that seem to weave in with genetics.
You know, it's simple life.
Yeah.
And, you know, when I'm at my lake, I swim and walk, and I'm going there two days.
(39:14):
I will be 10 weeks there.
Still working on the phone, but not much.
And enjoying life, but quiet life.
The quiet life.
I like this.
Okay.
That's on longevity.
And then on the sea, there's the old man, there's the sea.
Canada, of course, has the longest coastline in the world and is one of only two countries in the world that borders three oceans.
(39:38):
The other is Russia.
I guess, technically, you could also count the U.S. if you include Alaska touching the Arctic Ocean.
So it's just two or three countries that touch three oceans.
You were the Minister of the Environment and Fisheries.
You have many great accomplishments from this period, including the 1997 Oceans Act, which made Canada the first country in the world to adopt an approach to ocean management, emphasizing conservation and sustainable use of marine resources.
(40:05):
So I want to ask you about the oceans today.
Two sides.
One is the environment side.
Just the state of the oceans appears to be at risk globally.
Seems like a petrifying big problem with the plastics and the dumping for so long.
But we're aware of it.
Before, we're not paying attention to that.
(40:28):
Now we're starting to pay attention to that.
So it will diminish.
You know, we'll find ways to dispose of the plastic.
We're moving there now.
You know, you see some ads on TV where the Coca-Cola and Pepsi claim that they use only recycled plastic.
(40:48):
But I'd say it's true.
So when, you know, they're recycling, that means that it's not going into the ocean.
Right.
Perhaps we will replace plastic someday by something else.
It's a problem.
It's very useful.
We use it every day 10 times a day or more.
But in the old days, we had cellophane.
(41:11):
You remember that word?
Yes, yes.
But cellophane was not plastic.
Cellophane was made out of wood.
It was a natural product.
Now we don't use it.
It has disappeared probably for all sorts of technical reasons.
I'm not an expert.
But it was.
It is transparent.
It was covering the pack of cigarettes and all that.
(41:34):
It was thin and not very strong, but doing a good job.
And something someday will appear.
I'm an optimist person, you know.
If we're making so much progress in so many fields, that someday we will make progress on that.
(41:56):
Yeah.
I bet you that optimism is a big part of the longevity too.
And then you mentioned, of course, our water.
We have 20% of the world's fresh water.
We have 2 million lakes, more than the rest of the world combined.
You're going to go swimming in one in a couple of days.
The northern passage appears to be opening.
Ice is melting.
Prime Minister Mark Carney just declared that the six-year goal of joining NATO's 2% defense, he will reach it this year.
(42:21):
He said, only one of our four submarines is operational.
It's time to get some new ones.
So I would like to understand your view about the oceans from a defense point of view or from a...
You know, the north, we have the passage.
When I was Minister of Northern Affairs, the Americans sent the Manhattan.
(42:47):
They didn't have the Canadian flag.
I was a minister.
I went there.
I went on the Louis Saint-Laurent icebreaker and I called the captain and said, I'm going to your ship in an hour and expect to see the Canadian flag.
It was off the coast at Pond Inlet.
When I wanted to prove that it was international water, when I said, it's better for you to have the Canadian flag, he put out the Canadian flag.
(43:17):
It was a gesture of recognition.
And today, if they are afraid that the Chinese or the Japanese or everybody will use it, they have nothing to do.
Just say that it's Canadian water.
They solved the problem.
The minute it's Canadian water, it's no more international water.
(43:39):
But if we have to develop the North's passage, we'll have to build icebreakers and that will come earlier than expected because of the climate change.
And it is the shortest way to Europe from Japan or from China to go to the eastern side of the United States and to the middle side of the United States.
(44:02):
It could probably eventually use Churchill to go to right in the middle of the United States.
And this is the way to go to Europe.
So it's a hell of an asset.
They don't need to say it's Canadian water.
It helped us to develop it.
(44:22):
Who's they?
The Americans.
Ah, if the Americans say it's Canadian water and then help us develop it.
That will help.
Mm-hmm.
As opposed to trying to...
And we can manage it the way we managed the air defense with NORAD.
Mm-hmm.
Since generations.
Nobody talks about NORAD because it's working very well.
(44:44):
It's like an umpire in baseball.
We only talked about them when they miss a call, not when they get them right.
Yeah, that's interesting because, you know, you talk about the Japanese, you talk about the Chinese.
Of course, Trump has made overtures towards Greenland.
Of course, he's made overtures towards us as a 51st state.
Comments have riled up even as early as this morning on the Toronto Star.
(45:05):
That comment is still there.
I must be a dreamer, but I always still imagine the idea and concept of world peace.
Do you feel like there are some steps globally we could be taking to better inch ourselves towards more peace in this era of many wars happening today?
(45:26):
You know, we have to realize that we are a middle power.
We can play a role, but we can't carry the weight because we're not a big power.
So we use our best.
You know, like me, I said no to the war in Iraq.
(45:49):
Yes.
So everybody was scared in Canada.
Yes.
And I did that.
Now everybody approved me, but it was not easy.
No.
How did you do that?
I said no.
But George W.
Bush at the time, of course, was a friend of yours.
You had had him up here many times for the Summit of Americas in Quebec.
Yeah, but it's not a question of him.
(46:11):
It's a question of country.
He was making the wrong decision, and I was not to do the same.
That has nothing to do with friendship.
You know, when you're a president of a country or a prime minister, friendship is important.
But you serve the interests of the nation, not the interests of the friendship.
(46:33):
But England was going along with them.
This is post 9-11.
Tony Blair lost his reputation in England for that.
Like for me, you know, when he wrote a book, he gave the proceed to the veterans, and he could not go and sign book.
There was too much protest.
Never had that problem.
(46:53):
But he made the wrong decision, and I made the right decision.
He wanted to be with the Americans, and I could not say yes because I thought they were wrong.
Mm-hmm.
You said there was no proof of weapons of mass destruction, and the United Nations has not supported it, the decision.
That's what I said.
And I said, I told him, you know, I read all these documents, and you don't have the proof.
(47:19):
I said in one of my books that there was not enough proof to convince the judge of the municipal court in Schoeningen.
That there was a proof of weapons of mass destruction.
And it turned out there was none.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Though they did take out the leader at the end of this war.
But, you know, there was a war with Iran at that time, and Iraq was the proxy of the Americans against Iran.
(47:46):
Remember that?
That lasted for 10 years.
Mm-hmm.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
And there was no winner at the end of it.
Mm-hmm.
And this is the state we live in today.
I know you don't want to talk about today's headlines, but, of course, Iran and Israel are renewing a battle today.
(48:08):
And I think it was 175 people this morning were killed in Gaza from Israel.
There's just a tremendous amount of human lives lost on a daily basis.
It's terrible.
You know, we have Gaza now.
And we have Ukraine.
And we have Iran.
Mm-hmm.
(48:29):
And, you know, I think that, you know, the bragging is sometimes irresponsible.
When Trump was telling the Americans the day after I would be president, the war would be terminated, it was all BS.
(48:54):
But people, when a guy who had been president, we expect he would be a responsible guy.
It was just BS.
It was not to happen like that.
I know that file very well.
I was there with Putin and Yeltsin and the G in NATO and all that.
(49:14):
I spent a lot of time and effort there.
So, you know, you have to be truthful.
(49:37):
Mm-hmm.
How do you see it playing out?
I don't know.
If I could, I would be very happy.
It is going to be very tough for the Americans and for the rest of the world.
You know, the Americans are not isolated.
What they do affects everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK.
I appreciate your honesty and your openness to speak so candidly.
(50:01):
And, you know, you don't pull any punches.
And this is what some people love about you.
You've stayed yourself and you are honest and clear, which is a big part of your legacy.
I want to talk quickly about marriage.
Ernest Hemingway had four wives in his life.
And each of his wives he married the year he divorced the last one.
Of course, you had one, your wife, Aileen Kretchen, who you credited as your top advisor.
(50:26):
And you often joked was running the country with you.
Or you made comments all the time.
I have to go ask Aileen.
And you spent 68 years together, including 63 years of marriage.
What advice do you have for a long and happy marriage?
You know, she was my first girlfriend.
As I say, I hit the target the first day.
(50:52):
And we had very compatible characters.
And we're happy together.
You know, we knew she, we knew our responsibility.
I was making joke.
I said, if you, you know, I said on a TV program one day that the recipe.
(51:14):
Oh, it's easy.
You have to put water in your wine.
And if it's not working, you gave her the glass of wine and you drink only the water.
And she was receiving phone calls from her friends.
And you're so lucky, you know, but it is, you know.
For me, she was running a household.
Not me.
(51:35):
If she wanted to have a wall yellow, it was yellow.
That's it.
You know, I said, do it.
Sometimes it's with the kids.
I was always on her side and not developed, you know, but sometimes she, she was very, very good.
But we could discuss that.
But in front of the kids, we were united.
(51:57):
And, and we'll make the adjustment.
Anyway, we have problems with our kids like anybody else.
But we, that never interfere in our marriage.
We were trying to solve the problems together.
And you would, I'm assuming, go home and have her as a sounding board and a person, a trusted advisor beyond the world of politics.
(52:20):
Oh, but she was quite aware of politics without talking about it.
You know, I was involved in politics.
I was a kid.
When we married, I told her before our wedding that, you know, someday I will try politics.
So she knew.
And she was very young.
(52:41):
I was making speeches, 21, 22 in the villages and so on.
And she would come with me.
But she never, she would always say that there's only one person on the stage.
It's my husband, not me.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
And inspiring.
And I hope I get to 63 years of marriage.
(53:02):
I'm not even a quarter of the way there, but leaning towards that, looking towards that and have a beautiful, lovely wife, Leslie.
So I want to ask you quickly about the Canadian flag.
And then we'll kind of wrap things up here.
As I know you have a very, very busy day and you're moving meetings around as we speak to get around this.
I appreciate that.
So we have you wearing a red tie today.
(53:23):
I know you often wear red.
It's the color of liberals.
But also the color of the Canadian flag, which stands about four feet beside you.
You were instrumental as a big part of creating this flag.
I was a member of parliament.
There was a hell of a debate because the conservatives wanted to keep the union jacked.
And we wanted to have a distinct big flag.
(53:46):
And when Mike Pearson talked about it the first time in front of the legion in Winnipeg, he was booed out of the room.
And it was very emotional.
We went through that.
And now it's accepted by everybody.
And we're very lucky.
It's extremely distinctive.
(54:07):
Your flags are as distinctive as Canada.
Yeah.
You know, in my belief, the colors are not complicated in the heart of Heraldic art.
Simplicity is supposed to be the key.
So it's red and white.
There's only two colors.
And, you know, the Japanese have a very simple flag.
(54:33):
The Swiss have a very simple flag, only two colors.
And that's supposed to be the goal you should reach.
But it's complicated with the number of countries these days and so on.
But the Canada flag is very distinctive, very easy to spot, you know.
(54:54):
And it's become a good sign of a lot of people.
Myself and the other former premier, as the people show up, the Canadian flag, we did that in February.
You remember?
That's right.
And I see a lot more flags now than before.
That's right.
I have one hanging in my window.
(55:14):
You often end your books and your speeches with a three-word phrase, viva la Canada.
Would you open that phrase up for me as we close this conversation off?
I'm grateful for your time.
What does viva la Canada mean to you today?
What is the case for Canada?
What is our reason for being and what does viva la Canada represent?
(55:38):
Because we have achieved what other countries have not achieved.
We have two official languages.
We respect the native rights better than any other country in the world.
We have welcomed people from all over the world.
(56:02):
You know, and when you become a Canadian, you know, we respect the diversity.
You know, if somebody is, you know, 50% of the population are first, second or third generation of immigrants.
Right.
And the French-Canadian now represent probably 21, 22% of the population.
(56:23):
The British island, no more than 27, because 50 are immigrants, one way or the other.
And we are immigrants too, but my family arrived in 1660, so a long time ago.
And we live in unity.
We don't have ghettos, very obvious discrimination.
(56:47):
There is always bad characters and people who are racist, you know, that's human nature.
But it's not a value that is broadcast, not a value, but a problem that is broadcast.
We don't, we're not proud of that.
We try not to be racist.
(57:07):
And we're rich.
We share.
We have less very rich people per capita than United States, but we have a lot less poor people.
You know, we have healthcare that you don't have to pay.
It makes a hell of a difference.
You know, I make the joke.
(57:28):
I used to make, you know, our goal when we established that in 1967, in my speech, I would say, and like others, nobody will lose their home anymore, Canada, because somebody is sick in the family.
And it's true.
It's paid.
Sometimes it's difficult to get in, but it is, you know, a question of too many people use it for nothing too.
(57:54):
And there is, it's difficult.
It is, people are going home and it is the biggest demand of financial resources of their country.
But generally speaking, if you're very sick, they take care of you.
There's a lot of people who have to wait for knee replacement and that type of thing that are convenient, but not vital.
(58:17):
And I remember a joke I was making that I had a friend of mine who was in Florida.
He had a heart attack and he went to the hospital.
And when he got up, he's got his bill and he had another heart attack.
You know, Canada does not happen.
(58:39):
You know, I was interviewed one day by a board in Washington of a big Washington Post.
And they were arguing that perhaps their system is better than ours.
And there was one guy there.
He said, I got sick.
He was an American in Toronto.
(59:01):
He said, I called the desk.
Within minutes, I was in an ambulance.
I was rushed to the emergency.
They saved my life.
And he saw me after that, he came to ask the question, who will pay?
(59:26):
It's not that like that in United States.
You have to explain which company is paying for you with tons of questions.
You know, in Canada, you have just your credit card of health.
You put it there and you're in.
(59:47):
So there is some administrative problem.
It's a very difficult public service.
But on the whole, it's doing quite well.
The Right Honorable Mr. Jean Chrétien.
This has been a real lifelong honor.
And I'm very grateful to you.
(01:00:07):
Viva la Canada, sir.
Merci beaucoup.
Fini?
Fini.
Done it in an hour.
(01:00:31):
Hey, everybody.
It's just me.
Just Neil again.
Turned on a tiny bit of French to close things off.
I was caught off guard because he was starting to, I think, compliment me in French.
And my brain was like, do I know what he's talking about?
And I was just like, Fini?
Fini?
But then actually we kept going.
And so if you stick around to the very end of this chat, I'll throw in a little suffix, a super, super bonus suffix that he shared with me at the end on the record.
(01:00:59):
About a conversation he had with Tony Blair down in South Africa, which is pretty eye-opening as it relates to world events.
But we'll stick that at the very end of the end of the Podcast Club, which doesn't come yet.
For now, I will say that was quite the trip.
It was quite the trip going up to his office.
And I got there an hour and a half early.
(01:01:19):
And nobody was there.
And it was dark.
And I was like, am I just at the wrong spot?
But when somebody let me in, they're like, oh, he's here.
He's been in meetings since 8 o'clock.
He's got a meeting at 8.
He's got a meeting at 8.15. He's got a meeting at 8.30. He's got a meeting at 8.45. And I was like, oh, well, what about my two-hour podcast?
They're like, two hours?
What do you mean two hours?
Like, we don't do meetings longer than one hour here.
(01:01:41):
We pretty much don't do that.
He's never done an hour-long interview ever, they said.
Ever.
So I was able to explain my case and that I thought approval to do this.
And they were able to fit me in and move another meeting around.
But it was like a busy day for him and for me, but just flying up there and interviewing him.
(01:02:05):
And he was very passionate.
He's very sharp, as you can tell.
I mean, he's 91.
And I hope I have that kind of cognitive faculty and functioning when I'm up there.
Fingers crossed for all of us.
But that's why these role models are so important.
He is serving as a living icon who still breathes this deep national Canadian spirit that people like me soak up.
(01:02:30):
I just put out a new book called Canada is Awesome.
And I'd love you to check that out.
It was partly inspired by his January speech.
So there's a lot of quotes from him that I just love and I captured and I wrote down.
So many.
We can start anywhere.
But how about just, I want to die standing up.
(01:02:51):
That's a great metaphor for, you know, what I call in chapter four of The Happiness Equation, the idea of never retiring.
Wanting to always do something, be doing something with purpose, with passion, with connection, with commitment.
Right?
The four S's, social structure, stimulation, and story.
He has absolutely all of them in spades.
(01:03:13):
This one, a lot of people say I stole their ideas.
I say, if you don't want me to steal your ideas, shut up.
Don't tell me to do this and do that and complain because I've done it.
I thought that was great.
A wonderful line.
I asked him what he would tell Trump about, like, would he say stop this nonsense?
And I tell him the same thing, but it's him.
He will ignore me because it's him.
(01:03:34):
Never seen an ego that big, which I thought was interesting.
I mean, not surprising, but interesting.
In my day, to be accused of lying, it was the worst insult.
Isn't that true?
That, you know, we went from this era of telling the truth to an era of what's the truth almost overnight.
(01:03:55):
He quotes that.
I think it's a New York Times piece that had counted every line.
You know, the president had lied 14,000 times over one term.
Another great quote.
A liberal is when the left says you're on the right and the right says you're on the left.
Just the idea of finding the quote-unquote radical center.
The Right Honorable Jean Chrétien, what an honor and privilege and pleasure to be sitting with you, to spend some time with you, to have your wisdom pervade the airways across the universe through this podcast.
(01:04:26):
And thank you so much for giving us two books that are neither going to be added, but both going to be asterisks.
Because The Old Man and the Sea, that's number 933 on our list already.
I had this coming down.
I was like, oh, we're going to add it to the 500s.
But no, Jonathan Fields picked it in Chapter 26.
Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York picked it in Chapter 63.
(01:04:46):
And Doug the Bookseller also picked it in Chapter 99.
So this is like one of the rare triple asterisks on the show.
Meaning that more than one person picked it.
Because we want the top 1,000 to be 1,000 different books, right?
Over at 3books.co/thetop1000 if you want to check it out.
And then his second book, The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince, chosen in Chapter 96 by Dave Cheeswright, former CEO of Walmart International, and by Maria Popova in Chapter 138, creator and founder of what was then called Brain Pickings and is now called The Marginalian.
(01:05:18):
So Mr. Chrétien shares space with a lot of other luminaries on the show and has asterisked our list heavily.
Thank you so much to him, to Bob Wright for helping to arrange this, for Bruce for putting up with me and barging into the office and making space for me, for all the people at the wonderful firm that he's a part of that helped make space for me.
(01:05:39):
I really appreciate your kindness.
Thank you all of you for listening.
And now, are you still here?
Did you make it past the three-second pause?
If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
This is the club where I talk directly to you.
You talk directly to me.
We play your voicemails.
We read your letters.
Let's start off as we always do by going to the phones.
(01:06:02):
Hi, Neil.
This is Claire.
I'm calling from Nova Scotia.
I started listening to your podcast years ago when you first began and I was doing a lot of driving then, so it was not all the time.
And then I kind of forgot about it up until now and was on another road trip and picked up where you have now left off, listening to some of the most influential, wonderful people that I love to read, Maria Popova, David Eggers, Holy Smokes.
(01:06:32):
So congrats on how it's grown and how you've maintained it ad-free.
Thank you so much for what you're doing for the book world and book lovers.
What a cool, special thing.
Oh, I've got to go.
I just got a paper cut.
Okay, bye-bye.
Thank you so much to Claire from Nova Scotia for calling us at 1-833-READALOT.
(01:06:53):
That's R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
Claire, I can totally relate to falling out of a podcast and falling back in.
I will be here for many moons, either way, commute or not.
And I'm so glad you mentioned Dave Eggers and Maria Popova because those are two of my favorite guests because they don't do interviews, right?
Dave Eggers just doesn't do interviews.
Maria Popova just doesn't do interviews.
(01:07:14):
But they are book people, and they were attracted to the ad-free nature of the show.
Both of them mentioned that to me offline, that because I don't monetize the show, i.e. I lose money on the podcast, they were attracted to it because then their IP or the things they say won't be used to sell more ads, which they're both personally against.
So, you know, the marginalian doesn't have any ads.
(01:07:34):
It's the same kind of idea.
And Dave Eggers is kind of a values-first guy, too.
So, it's hard sometimes to be that way, but I like it, and I just don't want to be spending my time reading ads.
So, I've even disabled ads on my YouTube channel, which, by the way, Google makes it very hard to do.
You have to, like, go in and email Google and disable the stuff.
I don't like ads.
So, there aren't going to be any ads on the show.
(01:07:56):
I'm very lucky to be able to do that, I know.
But thank you so much for pointing it out and appreciating it.
And if you are listening to this, call me, 1-833-READALOT.
Let me know one of your formative books.
Let me know one of your dream guests.
Let me know something that stood out to you from a guest.
What's something that Monsieur Jean Chrétien said that you agreed with or you disagreed with, that you were hoping we would get into, or you wish that we had covered?
(01:08:19):
Like, it's good to just feed stuff back.
1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
And don't worry, if you butcher it, if you put your foot in your mouth, just call back.
Call back 12 times.
Some people do that.
I won't play anything that makes you look bad.
I just never will.
That's not my goal.
And if I do play your message, as I just did with Claire, I will send you a book.
Signed book, any of my books.
(01:08:40):
You pick the book.
Drop me a line with your address.
Claire, there will be one in the mail for you soon.
All right.
And now, let's move on to the letter of the chapter.
All right.
This chapter's letter comes from Emilio Arcatola.
Hi, Emilio.
I started listening to your podcast a couple years ago as I wanted to get back into reading.
One of the first chapters I listened to was chapter four.
(01:09:03):
Ever since hearing that podcast, which, by the way, was with Sarah Ramsey, my favorite bookseller, I want to visit Book City and more local bookstores when I travel.
I will be traveling to Toronto in a couple of weeks and was wondering if you had any recommendations for book lovers and food lovers.
Huge thank you for sharing your thoughts and conversations with me and the world.
From Emilio.
First of all, thank you, Emilio, for the letter and for coming to Toronto.
(01:09:26):
Yes, I've got lots of recommendations.
Another story is a great one.
That's where Sarah worked after Book City.
But here's the thing.
Type Bookstore on Queen Street West is probably the best independent bookstore in the city, although we have a tremendous amount of varied bookstores.
So Tite Bookstore, Queen Street West, for sure.
The Monkey's Paw has the world's only bibliomat, which is a vending machine that dispenses books.
(01:09:48):
It has the world's only.
It's actually mentioned in Atlas Obscura because of that.
And the owner, Steve, he calls himself a book antiquarian.
And he is the incredible curator of, I think it's called Old and Unusual Printed Matter.
That's the tagline in the window.
He's got old maps.
He's got, like, you know, field guides for bird books in the 1800s.
He's got children's literature, like original Roald Dahl hardcovers.
(01:10:11):
It's an amazing bookstore.
And you really feel like you're part of the ages when you're in there.
And then, of course, I would be—I can't not mention BMV Bookstore.
BMV.
That's where the podcast logo of Three Books was taken, the first one, where I'm standing reading a book in a bookstore.
BMV stands for, hilariously, Books Music Video.
(01:10:32):
I guess that's what they called it when they started the store in 1997.
And now it's a four-story building, four stories of books that have, you know, new, used, remainder books, collector's books.
It's just a world unto itself.
I mean, the top story, three stories up, is just a room with just graphic novels and, like, old vintage magazines from, like, the 50s and 60s and 70s.
(01:10:54):
They've got vinyl in the basement.
They've got an incredible DVD collection.
They still have that.
The literature is amazing.
I'm always finding, like, old and interesting covers or interesting books.
They've got a knack for doing it and doing it well.
In terms of food, my favorite restaurant in Toronto is probably Rasa, R-A-S-A.
And I also really love Bar Raval, R-A-V-A-L.
Those will be a couple to get you going.
(01:11:16):
All right.
And now it's time for the word of the chapter.
And for this chapter's word, let's go back to the one and only Right Honorable Monsieur Chrétien.
You're a good Canadian liberal.
President of the Young Liberals at Laval University.
The Liberal Party is a centrist party.
Yes, indeed, it is liberal.
(01:11:39):
Liberal.
Liberal.
Liberal.
According to Merriam Webster, that is somebody inclined to be open to ideas and ways of behaving that are not conventional or traditional, i.e., broad-minded, comma, tolerant.
Second definition, of relating to or favoring a philosophy of liberalism, especially political liberalism, and social liberalism, which also means an inclination to be open to new ways of behaving.
(01:12:04):
We already talked about that, Merriam Webster.
You're being circular now.
What about you, Google?
What do you say?
Ah, Google says...
Liberal.
Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own.
Open to new ideas.
Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
(01:12:25):
Now, you know, we use that word a lot in Canada because, of course, there's the Liberal Party, but as Monsieur Chrétien pointed out, that definition is varied around the world.
So, why don't we go back into the history?
That word actually comes from liber, which means free in Latin.
(01:12:45):
Then, liberalis, from a free man.
The original sense was suitable for a free man, hence suitable for a gentleman, i.e., one not tied to a trade, surviving, for example, in liberal arts.
Another early sense of the word was generous, giving rise to the now obsolete meaning free from restraint.
Okay, there's a lot of definitions of that word.
(01:13:09):
For me, the word liberal is defined, really, and as a person, it is prime minister, right, honorable, which means he won the Order of Merit, first guy in 50 years to win that from the actual queen herself, Monsieur Jean Chrétien.
The definition with his red tie, always in a suit, his passionate fiery speeches, my very first prime minister, and like I said, my favorite.
(01:13:32):
I am so honored to have been able to have that conversation with Monsieur Chrétien.
I hope you found it enjoyable.
Thank you so much, all of you, for being here, and until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.
Keep turning the page, and I'll talk to you soon.
(01:13:54):
You know, when I announced the war in Iraq, I know one of the big reproach, you know, that I had received was I did not make a statement.
The question was asked by the leader of the opposition.
(01:14:18):
I expected that.
I had replied.
I think I used less than one minute, so they said I should have explained that and blah, blah, blah.
No, when you say no, you say no, that's it, you know.
It's a no.
Why you have a no?
No, it's a no.
(01:14:38):
You know, I didn't have to explain.
It was controversial at that time.
Half of the population was yes, and the other half was no, but they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
Which made it an easy-ish decision.
And I had a discussion with Tony Blair at a Commonwealth meeting in South Africa, where he was urging me to go along with them.
(01:15:10):
And I said to him, he said to me, he was not using weapons of mass destruction.
He said to me, we have to get rid of Saddam Hussein, he's a terrible dictator.
So I said, Tony, if we are in the business of getting rid of dictators we don't like, I'm not very enthusiastic about the regime of Mugabe here next door in Zimbabwe.
(01:15:44):
And I said, he is a member of the family.
Why don't you look at the problem within the Commonwealth family first, rather than going elsewhere?
Oh, he said he's a terrible dictator and so on.
And I said, yes, you know, he said to me basically, in reply to a question, he said, yes, but there is a big difference, that was his reply, between Mugabe and Saddam Hussein.
(01:16:22):
And I said to him, oh yes, Mugabe has no oil.
He became white.
I think I hit the target.
The nub.
The nub, I imagine.
(01:16:53):
Goodbye
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.