In the summer of 2025, the mayor of Tulsa signed a proclamation declaring August 7th to be David Blatt Day. It was the sort of honor a city bestows on someone it hopes to keep. Blatt was leaving anyway.
He had come to Oklahoma in 1996 knowing no one, and he left it twenty-nine years later as something close to a household name in the small, intense world of state politics — the man who had built one of the most respected progressive think tanks in the country, in one of the most conservative states in the union, and had somehow earned the trust of people on every side of it.
The mayor came to the going-away party. There was a certificate, a date on the calendar with his name on it.
And then the moving truck.
To understand why a man walks away from all of that, it helps to know a phrase David Blatt lives by, one he offers with a straight face and a small glint: “quitting is for winners.”
He means it. His life reads as a series of deliberate exits, each one made not in defeat but from a position of strength. He quit academia before he ever really started, trusting an uncertain future over a settled one. He quit the organization he founded while it was thriving. And in 2025, at sixty-two, he quit the country he had spent nearly three decades making his home.
At sixty-two, Blatt is the youngest man The Encore Project has profiled — the freshman of a class whose other members are well into their seventies and eighties. He is also, already, fully retired. That combination gives his perspective a particular value: he is standing at the threshold others have long since crossed, looking at the same country from the near side of it, and much of what he sees will feel familiar to men a decade or two ahead of him.
He was born in Montreal, into the city’s Jewish Anglo minority, a boy with grandparents and cousins all within reach and a settled sense of where he belonged. That ended at thirteen. When the Parti Québécois swept to power in 1976 on a platform of French rights and Quebec independence, his father — a unilingual tax accountant whose career suddenly had a ceiling — took a job in Edmonton, Alberta, and the family went with him. It took the boy a couple of years to find his footing in a new school in a new city two thousand miles from everything he knew. Eventually he did more than fit in. By the end of high school he had been elected to student council and named class historian, and in his first year of college he was chosen as one of forty Canadians to serve as a page in the House of Commons.
There was an honors degree from the University of Alberta, a master’s from McGill, and then a Ph.D. in government from Cornell — with fifteen months in Paris doing dissertation research along the way. It was at Cornell that he met Patty Hipsher, a fellow graduate student from Kansas. As he was finishing his dissertation and his American visa was running out, Patty accepted a teaching position at Oklahoma State University. On the first of June, 1996, they married in a small ceremony in New Haven — sixteen people. On the first of August, they arrived in Tulsa to begin a life neither of them could yet picture.
Blatt could not have pictured it because he had no idea what he was going to do. He was fairly sure he did not want to be an academic, which left him with a doctorate and no plan.
Every Sunday he combed the classifieds in the Tulsa World and found, at most, one or two jobs he was even marginally qualified for. He interviewed to do human-resources training at a consumer-finance company. He was invited back for a second interview to sell insurance. None of it came to anything — which he now counts as luck — and eventually a position opened up as a fiscal analyst for the Oklahoma State Senate. He took it.
A career he had never planned began by accident, and the accident turned out to be the making of him.
Over the next two decades he became, in his own words, a trusted policy expert — first at the Senate, then as director of public policy for Tulsa’s Community Action Project.
In 2006, at forty-two, he was the one who drafted the concept paper for a new organization, met with the stakeholders, recruited the board. It became the Oklahoma Policy Institute. And here the quitting is for winners philosophy meets its most revealing exception — the time he almost didn’t take the leap.
He did not put himself forward as founding executive director. The job required raising money, and raising money was not, he was certain, something he could do. So the new organization hired someone else and made Blatt its policy director, the role closest to his proven gifts.
Two years later the organization was broke, the founding director plainly not up to it, and Blatt finally took the plunge he had talked himself out of. He turned out to be good at the job. He turned out, to his own surprise, to be a genuinely capable fundraiser.
If he could give one piece of advice to the forty-year-old who hung back, it would be to have a little more nerve — to try the thing outside the comfort zone. He notes, dryly, that the sixty-two-year-old still needs the same reminder.
He ran Oklahoma Policy Institute for a decade, and he is certain it will stand as the proudest work of his life: a liberal think tank in a deeply conservative state, whose data and integrity even its opponents never questioned. He wrote a weekly column. The press called several times a week. He was, for a while, near the center of the public life of an entire state.
If he could give one piece of advice to the forty-year-old who hung back, it would be to have a little more nerve — to try the thing outside the comfort zone.
Underneath the policy expert has always run a second identity, quieter and older. Blatt is Jewish — an atheist who keeps no kosher kitchen and observes no Sabbath, but who has belonged to Jewish community for most of his life, from a Hebrew day school in childhood to summer camp in Edmonton to nearly thirty years at a Tulsa synagogue. Much of what drove his career, he believes, grew from the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam — to repair the world. It is a heritage he still claims, even as he has come to feel increasingly at odds with mainstream Jewish institutions over Israel and Palestine. The values and the estrangement live in him at once, which is perhaps its own kind of Jewish inheritance.
There is another difficulty he speaks about with unusual candor, because it is the one that has surprised him most. About fifteen years ago his hearing began to fail. He has worn hearing aids for a decade, and still he struggles — unable to follow a play or a film without subtitles, straining to catch what colleagues and students were saying, losing threads of conversation in any crowded room. He describes it as living in a country whose language you never quite learned: there are things you simply cannot do, pleasures that curdle into effort, and a constant temptation to disengage rather than keep fighting to keep up. For a man whose whole life has been built on words and rooms full of people, it is a particular loss, and an isolating one.
The decision to leave the United States, David is careful to say, was primarily his. It grew out of the worsening political situation — he watched it with rising alarm and a deepening sense that there was nothing he could do to change its course. It was not a decision Patty would have made on her own; her mother, in her mid-eighties, still lives in Wichita, and Patty had never lived anywhere but America. But once she agreed to go, she went all in — leading the work of getting the Tulsa house on the market, scouting rentals in Edmonton, throwing herself into a new life without looking back. Without her, David says plainly, it could not have been done.
They chose Edmonton in part because David’s brother and his wife live there — and because it was where David’s own parents had settled, and where they are buried. There is a strange arithmetic in that. For thirty years he lived thousands of miles from his mother and father while they were alive; now they are gone, and he lives less than a mile from their graves. He lost his mother eleven years ago, three weeks after a phone call telling him she’d been diagnosed with cancer and three weeks before it took her. For years afterward he missed her most on Sunday mornings — the standing half-hour call when they caught up on their lives and the state of the world. She would, he notes, have loathed Donald Trump’s presidencies with every fiber of her being. Moving home without his parents there to be part of it, he says, made the whole thing a different experience than it would otherwise have been.
The move itself was a bureaucratic marathon — the sponsorship forms, the documents, the bank accounts and licenses and insurance, all of it more expensive and more bewildering than they had expected even with a Canadian citizen, an immigration attorney, and fluency in the language on their side. What stayed with him afterward was not his own exhaustion but a question: how does anyone without those advantages ever manage it at all?
There is one worry David carries that dwarfs the rest, and it is not about himself. His adult son, on the autism spectrum and now in his twenties, still lives with him and Patty, and has shown only limited ability to live independently. David worries about the present and, more, about the future — about what the years will hold for a child who is also a grown man, and who will need looking after in a world that is not built to do it gently. It is the plainest fear he names, and the one he speaks about most simply. Among the lessons he has drawn from being this particular father is a hard-won evenness: when things get very bad, they are likely to get better; when things get very good, they will probably get worse. This too shall pass. Try not to surrender to either despair or euphoria. People are what they are, himself included, and are unlikely to change — so the work is acceptance.
Retirement, when it came, did not arrive gently either. It came in two stages: first when he stepped down from Oklahoma Policy Institute in 2019, and then completely when he and Patty moved north. The hardest part was not the loss of the work. It was the loss of mattering. He had gone from a man the press called weekly, whose opinion an entire state cared about, to a man who is, in his own unsparing phrase, completely anonymous and irrelevant to public life on either side of the border. He does not much miss the spotlight. But every so often he feels a flicker of nostalgia — not for fame, exactly, but for the simple sensation of people caring what he thought. He still holds forth on Facebook, where some still seem glad to hear it. For the most part, he has made his peace with no longer mattering.
Read: The Man Who Never Retired — one man’s answer to the same question, from the other side of it.
The hardest part was not the loss of the work. It was the loss of mattering.
What he found on the far side of that surrender surprised him. Without the fifty-hour weeks, without the responsibilities, the days opened up.
In Tulsa he drove everywhere; in Edmonton he walks, cycles, takes public transportation, drives only when he must. He and Patty have become a one-car family. He is more active than he has been in years, in better shape, and he has discovered that every form of travel slower than a car puts you back in contact with the places you move through and the people you pass.His days now have five or six moving parts — daily exercise, a couple of days of volunteer work each week, an hour of reading, an afternoon nap, dinners and crosswords and concerts with Patty, regular get-togethers with friends from his high school and college days — and together they are enough to keep him engaged without ever tipping into overwhelm.
Asked what he would tell someone struggling to find meaning later in life, he does not reach for anything grand. Age, he says, offers a chance to take honest stock — to sort out what you genuinely find meaningful and joyful, to lean toward those things, and to let go of the rest: the habits and routines and possessions and even the relationships that are only taking up room without giving anything back.
He has taken to describing his life in the terms of the game he grew up with. The first period ran to age thirty-two — childhood, university, the prestigious programs, the doctorate, a young man passing through Montreal and Edmonton and Ottawa and Paris and half a dozen cities besides. The second period began the day he married Patty and moved to Oklahoma, and it held for twenty-nine years: one marriage, one house for the last twenty-six of them, one improbable career built from a blank slate. Both periods, he says, had their ups and downs, and both turned out better than he ever dared imagine.
Now the third period has begun. He is in a new city that is also, in a way, his oldest one, retired from the public life that defined him, close to two graves and starting, once more, from something like scratch. He hopes this period proves as surprising and as satisfying as the two that came before.
And he hopes — a lifelong hockey man to the end — that sudden-death overtime holds off for a good while yet.
David Blatt was born in Montreal and came to Oklahoma in 1996. He served as a fiscal analyst for the Oklahoma State Senate and as director of public policy for Tulsa’s Community Action Project before founding the Oklahoma Policy Institute in 2008, which he led for a decade. In 2025 he and his wife, Patty Hipsher, moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he now lives in retirement.
