I wanna start out with farming. Yes. You grew up on a farm. What's the importance of farming? Well, I think it's the the balance between physical and mental. And so that if you're farming,
it's not just rote labor but you're thinking, how, how
much money am I losing today? How much money or I'm coming
in today, what's the value of my labor as far as the
year end, bottom line? Or how can I improve the
pruners in the vineyard with me? Should this person be working with air? Should, you're thinking all the time but then you're working
all the time, physical. And if you, if you're too
physical, then you become rubish. And if you're too intellectual,
you become a feat. So it's a perfect balance. It was, and it's practical. Very. And it, it makes
you very self-reliant because there's nobody else
but you, you, you keep saying am I gonna get a paycheck this week? It depends on the weather,
it depends on labor. It depends on things
that you can't calibrate. You know you don't know why certain
plums ripen at certain times. You, you think, you know,
but then it surprises you. So there's always the
unpredictable that kind of creates a humility that
you can't control things that you're kind of a tragedy. There's a tragedy there
that you cannot control but you have to prepare for it. 'cause you never know
when you're gonna lose a crop or something on tour. It'll happen. In my family, one generation
up, everybody was a farmer. Everybody. And by the time
they've all died or retired and I think, what are their 14 children and the two families above
me, one was a farmer. Yeah. And that's what's happened. What does that change the country? It has the, the founders, 17
76, 90 5% of the constituents the people living in
the united, what is then was then going to be the
United States were farmers. And by the 1920s it was about 45%. Now it's 1%. I think Jefferson said
when people are all piled up in the cities, it's
not gonna work anymore. And Tocqueville seemed to think that the reason in 1832
that things worked with you had all of these autonomous people and they were not like European peasants. They weren't suber
subservient or they didn't they were not surfs or they were not hard
scrabble indentured renters or something, but they were autonomous. I think that's really,
that was very important. It doesn't mean that it can't
be transferred, that autonomy. You can have independent truck drivers you can have small business people but you need a lot of
people who are not dependent on the government or a big corporation. And that type of confidence
that accrues from that, they're they're very good citizens and they're practical
and they're common sense. The, the difference with farming was it had
a natural component. You can really see it with
things like climate change or scientific research, quote
unquote, or government policy on nature written or
directed or promulgated by people who don't have
anything to do with nature other than just venture out on
the weekends or something. And if they're not living with nature they don't really understand it. And especially if they don't
make their living predicated on harnessing nature,
but not harming nature. It's kind of a partnership. But they romanticize nature
because nature, they're they're not dependent on nature. It, of course, we live
better by many measures than we'd lived when
everybody was a farmer. Are you suggesting there's
a cost we have to pay in order to live like that? I don't know. I, I, as I, I turned 70 yesterday and I had a grandfather
who, I live in his bedroom and he lived in the bedroom
of his great-grandmothers. They're six generations. He died in this room when he was 86. And his wife, my
grandmother, I took care of. She died at 93. They had three daughters. They died at 49. My mother died at 66 and
her sister died at 60. And then I had a sister-in-law
that died at 49 another her sister died at 54. And I had a daughter that died at 26. And they all grew up in this farm. And then they went out stressful jobs. And they, my grandparents
stayed there and they got up they had a routine and I don't think they ever
went more than a hundred miles but they went to New Mexico
one time in their life. But they had a, a, a
certain cyclical idea. And so you, they would say
things today that seem absurd. There's a south wind blowing,
you better be careful. The birds are in the trees. This is the phase of the moon. And they were attuned to, they lived by nature and the cycles and
they had diaries on almanac. They kept for 50 years. And you could look at the
day and they would pretty much tell you what you
had to do that day based on what they had done that
day, 40 years in a row. So I think that must
have had something to do with longevity. But they did pay a price in the sense that they were
constantly apprehensive about they had to live one more day. They didn't know where
the income was coming in the razor edge as far as the margin of profitability
and unprofitability. But there was something
about staying in one place. And I think some of the worst times I've
had, it's getting into this the nearest president no better
than I do the flying here or the flying there and
getting detached from being one one place and stationary. And I think it's not good for people. So one piece of advice for young people might be spend some time throughout your life doing something real. Yeah Do something real and cultivate family. I, I think that's important that don't just say that that's my sister so that we're close or
that's my best friend. So we're close. It's sort of farmers, they
tend to maintain relationships or friendships a long time because everybody knows what they are or are what they do,
where they're going to be. And they're not gonna move suddenly and you're gonna lose them. So that, I think that was important. Hmm. My, to me, a farm growing up my father was the first one to go to college in either family. And so we lived in the city that I should say Pocahontas, 6,000 people. But I would go to the farm and to me the farm was a playground to all my aunts and uncles and my parents. The farm was work, work, work, work, work. And they missed it. And they didn't both. Yeah. But they had something
real, a connection. They'd worked in the fields
together as little kids. Yeah. I have a ambiguous relationship because I saw it bankrupt a
lot of people in my family. But on the other hand, I live
there and so if I walk out I'll see a horseshoe in the dirt. If I'm digging or I'll
see a remnant of somebody or I'll see a, a a barn that I remember somebody
being there when I was five the exact same place. It's kind of haunt honcho. You're in a, a house and you can think of every room or every
window where somebody from the 19th century,
they even talk different. They had different accents and they had different vocabularies. And you can remember all of that. And you do kind of dumb things. I have eight, eight
buildings on around my house. There's an no shed, there's a barn. And they should have
been all been torn down. They were built 1870 to
1880 with eucalyptus poles. And so I found myself the
last few years flying all over the country to speak, to get money than to rebuild these things
that there's no purpose for other than my grandfather
would say, I'd really like to have these buildings
in good shape one day. Well, now they're all in good
shape, but I don't use them. The thing, the place looks beautiful but it's only because I wasn't farming. If I was farming, they wouldn't be there. They would've been bankrupt. So Great. So the classics,
you have spent a lot of time studying the ancient world and you know, the languages. Yeah. Well that's hard. I've heard you say it takes
2000 hours to become competent in ancient Greek. I, I came up with that number
because I used to teach a lot of minority kids for 20 years in classics. And I had to make the
argument to their parents. So I would say, you know there's 52 weeks a year and
you're going to have to spend if you did 10 hours a week,
it wouldn't be enough. It'd be 500. But you can, it's gonna be 2000 hours. You can do it in two years, three years. But ultimately you're gonna
have to spend that amount of tower to learn Latin Greek. I, I went to an kind of
an ossified classical believe it or not, Stanford
was the, or with Harvard in those days was the
classical philology department. It wasn't ancient history,
it wasn't archeology it wasn't art history. It wasn't comparatively,
it was just pure language. And we had to learn how to read and write. And Greek and Latin take dictation in Greek and Latin, take courses in Mandu. It was very narrow. And I remember my brother
was kind of a smart, a a smart alec, very brilliant guy. And I came home and my father
said, what did you learn? And he said, he's like
Samuel Johnson's dog he can walk on two legs. It's very interesting, but we
don't know the purpose of it. He thought that was what Greek was. He said he can write Greek and Latin. And then my dad said,
well, that'll do you good. I want you to go and wire a raisin dehydrator
at two 20 and rebuild it. And I said, I'm not sure I can do that. And he said, if you can spend
all this time reading Greek you should learn how to do that. And he didn't give me any instruction. He just said, go do it. And then I can see your
education is valuable. That's great. So I had to How did the interest in that dawn in you? It was just an accident. I was from a farm and I went to University of
Santa California, Santa Cruz. It was kind of a hippie. It just opened. It was supposedly the place
everybody wanted to go. My father picked it because
all three of us got in. He thought it would be cheaper and we could all live
together in a rental house. And I was in a class and there was this wonderful
professor named John Lynch. And I did pretty well in a western sieve. And he said, would you like
to study Latin and Greek? And I said, no. My mother had grown up on the farm and she was a
lawyer, a judge at that time. And I thought, wow, I wanna be a lawyer. And then he said, you're
doing pretty well. Why don't you go take Yale,
go to Yale Summer school and take Greek after your freshman year. And I said, I'm only 18. And he said, well, everybody's
in their late twenties if you survive that
intensive Greek program. And it was pretty traumatic for me. I'd never been out of California. So then I started doing pretty well. I came back and I, it was
he, that whole classics group at uc, Santa Cruz had come from Yale. And they were philologists,
believe it or not. So when I graduated, he was always telling now you can go to Greece. So my parents would come home and said what are you gonna do with this? And I said, I don't know. I am pretty good at it. And they always give me money. So then I applied to graduate
school and she said, well she was a Stanford chauvinist. My grandfather had mortgages,
his farm, and sent two of his girls to Stanford to
get BA's and advanced degrees. And she said, well, we're,
we're a Stanford family. I said, I'm not gonna go there. And, and then I asked this, my my mentor and he said, yeah, they they have a really good
philology department and they'll pay your entire
way if you could get in. So they had examinations had taken. Then I was 25 and I looked at the job market and there was no jobs for a white male that
knew Latin and Greek. So I came home to take
care of my grandparent my grandmother for a summer. And the next thing I knew I stayed five years farming full time. And then some point I
didn't have any money I wasn't doing too well. And there was a campus at Cal State Fresno I'd never really been there 30 miles away. And I walked in and asked if
I could teach a Latin class. And they said they'll think
about it for three years. First day I got there, I parked on campus and the secretary said I had tracked mud in 'cause I was irrigating
and going back and forth. And then the next thing I did I went out to the parking
lot and there were the police were there
around my pickup, said Mr. Mr, what's your name? And I said, Hanssen. He said, what are you doing? You have a shotgun in the window and that's against the law
to have a state campus. Is the, is the firearm loaded? And I said, yeah, I shoot Things that on the farm, I don't
remember, win a coyote. And they didn't believe
that I was a faculty member. And the very nice guy got
to know him really well. He said, I didn't see any of this. Put the gun, tuck it better down and never bring it on campus again. That was my first day at
Clint campus, got busted. That was 20 years. I stayed there. So it got better.
