Too Busy to Die

I’ve never done anything the way you’re supposed to. I failed algebra twice because I got the right answers the wrong way. Then spreadsheets came along, and I turned into an algebra genius by accident. Turns out you learn fastest when you’ve got a reason to.

I showed up to face eight bankers in suits wearing shorts and sandals. I took over a catalog nobody wanted, because the alternative was the garbage can, and renamed it Seventh Generation. And I started a brewery after barely drinking three beers in 15 years. Confidence and no skill: nothing scared me off.

I always assumed I’d work until I had a heart attack. Then, at 74, I bought a music club in the middle of a pandemic, which seemed like a good idea at the time. After that went south, I asked myself for the first time, “S**t, does that mean I have to retire?”

We also cover the near-death experience that took away my fear of dying, and the party I’m planning six to twelve months after I go. It ends with a funeral pyre. It’s currently illegal. I’m working on it. Slowly.

The clock is still ticking. Use it well.

I first saw Rusty DeWees in Judevine, in a little theater at Fort Ethan Allen, and thought, holy s**t, there’s real theater in Vermont. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Rusty wanted to be a Greyhound bus driver like his dad. You had to be 27, so he drove dump trucks while he waited. Instead he ended up in New York as the right-hand man to an auction-house legend. Within six weeks of pumping gas, he was having lunch with Gloria Vanderbilt at the 21 Club. He calls those six years his PhD in entrepreneurship.

On the six-hour drives home to Vermont, he started writing stories. They became the Logger. When friends told him not to make a video, he made 1,000 anyway and sold 12,000 by Christmas. His plan was simple: there are 600,000 people in Vermont, and if he shook every one of their hands, he’d have a career.

Three years ago, Rusty was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. He played a dozen full Logger shows during chemo, and nobody in the audience knew. We talk about all of it: why he never thought about retiring, what changed after the diagnosis, and why the answer is still “don’t stop getting up in the morning.”

The clock is still ticking. Use it well.

When Steve Conant was 12, he dug a post hole and hit a brass bar from an old scale. He polished it up, and that was it. The love was sparked.

Steve went on to build what he called “the best brass shop in the world.” Then L.L. Bean ordered 12,000 thermometers from a company that didn’t have a thermometer division. And he helped turn Burlington’s South End into the creative mess we all love.

His “retirement” is the Soda Plant, a building full of young makers he gets to watch learn their own hard lessons. I once begged him to let me be his partner on it. He said, “Alan, not a chance.” He was right.

We talk about turning junk into money, why he’d still want a workshop in the old folks’ home, and why he has no fear of death. His plan for afterward? “I think I’ll be fertilizer.”

Use what’s useful. Ignore the rest.