Seeking Wisdom From an Undervalued Resource: Older People

On the new podcast “70 Over 70,” Max Linsky queries Dionne Warwick, Norman Lear and his own father about living well and other “meaning of life stuff.”

Max Linsky, the host of the new podcast “70 Over 70,” about people over the age of 70, didn’t always appreciate older people. He’s embarrassed to admit it now, but he didn’t learn any better until the summer of 2015, when, on two separate occasions, his tendency to be dismissive of elders came back to bite him. Linsky, who is 40, had been interviewing the writers Carol Loomis, 91, and Renata Adler, 82, for his other podcast, “Longform,” which he co-hosts with fellow journalists Evan Ratliff and Aaron Lammer. He had begun both interviews, conducted within a month of each another, envisioning a trip down memory lane — armed primarily with questions that focused on work done several decades earlier. But his subjects gently resisted the script. “They didn’t say this exactly, but the way that I heard it was: ‘You’re trying to write my obituary with me,’” Linsky said, on a recent walk near the old “Longform” office in Brooklyn. “‘You’re talking to me like I’m some other person now, but I still feel exactly as much myself as I always have.’”