The Current - Margaret MacMillan on the shifting international order

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan talks about what’s at stake when power rules. As the US intervenes in foreign states, and starts alienating long-trusted allies, what message does it send about what could happen in Ukraine, Taiwan and Greenland. MacMillan says warnings from history show we may be on the cusp of a  new world order.

What does it take to become one of the most popular mystery novelists in the world? For Louise Penny, that road wasn't easy, but she got through it with the support of her husband and a lot of humor. When I was like five years into writer's block, and now he's still supporting me, right? He stopped asking me how the book was going. It was a little bit like my mother when I reached 35, 36 and wasn't married yet. And she stopped asking. Check out that conversation on bookends with me, Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. At the start of a new year, we often set resolutions, goals for the year ahead. What if you decided instead to commit yourself to something you might never actually achieve? An impossible goal. Solving one of the world's great mysteries,

uncovering a mythical treasure, writing a book that won't be published for 100 years. For some people, this isn't just a notion. It is their life, day in and day out. And it is their stories that make up Mark Medley's new book, live to see the day, impossible goals, unimaginable futures, and the pursuit of things that may never be.

Mark Medley, good morning. Good morning, Matt. You say in the book that you have long been interested in the strange ways that people spend their lives. Tell me a little bit about where that comes from. I think what it is is one of the reasons I became a journalist. is because it gives me the opportunity to interview people about the way they spend their days and the careers they pursue, the things they want to do.

And, you know, I'm a reader. I'm somebody who really, really is interested in story. And so I think that is where it comes from. I mean, you're also really curious. It's interesting. On the back of the book, there's a blurb from Susan Orlean, the great Susan Orlean magazine writer and extraordinary journalist who specializes in what she calls hidden in plain sight stories in some ways. I mean, the book starts with one of those, right?

A ballot, you go vote, and there's all those names on the ballot, and you know some of the names, but there are people whose names are on the ballot who will never, they're not going to lead the country, they're not going to lead the province, they're not going to be the mayor of your town. Indeed. I mean, this story, basically, the book goes back to, dates back to 2008 when I was a reporter at the National Post and there was a federal election. And instead of, you know, profiling one of the frontrunners, I pitched my editor the idea of profiling what I called a no hope candidate, somebody who might get 50, 60 votes and never be. be heard from again. And Liz White, uh, it was the name of the candidate that I profiled. She was the leader of what's now known as the Animal Protection Party of Canada. And she agreed to let me kind of trail her on the campaign for a week. You know, we went knocking on doors. We went to debates. I hung out with her as she strategized at her party headquarters. And, you know, I was right. You know, she got a hundred or so

votes when all was said and done. But I continued to follow her career afterwards. And in the years that followed, she would run every single election. And after maybe a decade of watching her, it struck me that there might be something there, that she was doing this. She was spending her time and money and energy, chasing something she knew from the outset she was never going to achieve. So I thought maybe there was other people like Liz, so I kind of set out to find other Liz Whites out there in the world. The book is, I mean, I said in the introduction, it's stories of people who commit themselves to something that they might never actually achieve. How do you understand? what ties those stories together.

What are these people trying to do? Well, I think it was pitched as a book about impossible goals. So somebody like Liz White, who knows she's never going to go to Ottawa and yet has spent the last 20 years in pursuit of that. It developed as I conducted my research into people who were also spending their lives in pursuit of goals that might be achievable, but they knew from the outset they weren't going to be the ones to achieve it. So, for instance, there's a chapter about interstellar travel.

And so, you know, I went to Tucson to this convention of, you know, rocket scientists and engineers and physicists who are pursuing ways to get us to the stars. And yet they know full well, we're not going to develop the technology in our lifetime and their lifetimes, but it's going to probably happen one day. And so it's the book is kind of a melding, a marriage of these two things. On one hand, it's fully impossible goals that, you know, have a near certainty expectation of not coming to pass. And then on the other hand, there are things that probably. will come to pass one day, but you and I are never going to see them happen. You write about how these people's stories are in many ways like the stories of people who are building cathedrals. Projects that, I mean, if you've ever been to the Sagrada Famia, for example, in Barcelona, this thing that was built over hundreds of years. And the folks who started building it were never going to be around. Tell me a bit more about that and how that idea helps put into perspective what these people

were doing. It's interesting. One of the first interviews I did was with a fellow named Seth Shostak, who's a senior astronomer at SETI, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And he compared his search, his quest, to building cathedrals. And I hadn't heard that analogy yet. But I was struck how many times I heard it over the years, probably a dozen times from people in a variety of fields, that what they were doing were building the foundations of a cathedral, even though they would never be the ones to celebrate mass in it. And to me, I mean, there's something very noble about that,

right that you know it's like this analogy that you know you're you're planting a tree but you're never going to sit under its shade not a lot of people will do that right like we like to see the fruits of our labor we get up in the morning and we have a list of things that we want to accomplish before the day is done and the people in this book know that you know forget about today forget about next month they're probably never going to do it yet they do it anyway how do you understand what motivates them i mean i think it's a lot of things it's obviously these people have the patients of Job, they have boundless depths of perseverance. They enjoy what they do. I mean, you know, one of the reasons the people have followed the lives they've led is it brings them

immense amounts of joy. You know, they love getting up in the morning and pursuing the hunt for, you know, lost fortune or mystery ape or interstellar travel. And so even though they know they're not going to do it, you know, the journey is more important than the destination. Can we talk about, I mean, you go on this journey and traveling around. You spent a lot of time in Arizona in the desert. This is one of my favorite landscapes in the world. What is it about that landscape that you think is conducive to sort of that way of thinking? It's interesting that.

There's multiple chapters that are set in Arizona, and it wasn't meant to be that way. I mean, you get there. I hadn't spent a lot of time in Arizona. And it's kind of a landscape that I think draws dreamers in. You know, you have the huge sky, you have the endless desert. You have a lot of time to kind of sit. with your thoughts and think. And so it just so happened that, you know,

one of the people I met has been searching for the lost Dutchman's mind for most of his life outside Phoenix. The interstellar convention that I went to was set in Tucson. It just so happened. And then there's a chapter about planetary defense. And so I spent a lot of time at an observatory

outside Tucson with a man who's kind of watching the skies for an asteroid that might one day kill us all. You spent a lot of time, and this is part of it, You spent a lot of time thinking about space. I did. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I'm somebody who grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars. I didn't think this book was going to turn into a space book. And, you know, there's only a handful of chapters that do. But I think it only makes sense, right? Like space is this infinite frontier that we've only started scratching the surface of. There are a lot of impossible goals out there to pursue. So it only makes sense that I think space factors in this much. You also say the greatest question we can ask ourselves is if we are alone.

And I mean, that's part of one of the stories here is people listening. for that call that has yet to come from outer space? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the questions that I've been asking since I was a kid. I look up at the night sky and you see all these stars and you wonder, am I the only one out here? I mean, one of the stories I tell in this book is about Jill Tarter, who was the co-founder of SETI. She told me a story about how she would walk on the beach in Florida with her father

when she was eight, nine years old and look up at the sky and think, is there another little girl walking along the beach looking at, you know, a star in their sky, which happens to be the earth. So, you know, it is kind of the greatest question. One of the great questions we can ask ourselves and one that we don't know an answer to. So it kind of fits the mold of the possible quests. Do these people think that that quest is possible? Do they think that the call will, the phone will ring and they will get that call or

some person will get that call down the line? Well, going back to Seth Shostak, who I mentioned, I mean, he is probably the most optimistic SETI Hunter that is out there. When I talked to him for the first time in 2019, he bet me a donut that, you know, we would We would have proof there was contact by the time I finished the book. When I visited him again, you know, five years afterwards, he made me a similar bet. I think he'd forgot about our first bet. You're still waiting for the donut.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for the donut. No, I mean, most of the SETI hunters know it's not going to happen in their lifetime. Seth is, I think, an outlier in that respect. But they do it anyway. In some of these, I mean, this is about patience. And I want to come back to that in a moment. But it's also about this idea of faith and perseverance. What is the link between?

The people that you met in doing this and the broader idea of faith. I mean, we could talk about religious faith, but just the broader idea of it. It's interesting. For a book that includes a reverend as one of the main characters, religion doesn't factor that much in, but faith does. And when I was in Arizona, when I was in Tucson at the intercellar convention, it struck me, you know, I was in a room with other kind of adherence to this, to this community, listening to men, predominantly men, talk about the ways we would.

one day reach the heavens. And it reminded me of, you know, being in church as a kid. You know, there are all kinds of faith, right? There's faith in, you know, seeing a better world. There's faith in an afterlife. There's, you know, you can, it runs the gamut. I think in this case, it's just kind of the faith that the lives they are leading are the right lives, that, you know, what they do has value. And even if they don't accomplish it, it hasn't been a waste of time. All right, what are we talking about? A new year means a fresh start. Okay, make a list for the year and take charge of your life in 2026. Look, I'm not talking about your to-do list.

I'm talking about your watch list. Cross off Family Feud Canada, St. Pierre, and this hour has 22 minutes. There's no excuses. Dream big people. Enjoy all your favorite shows on CBC TV or stream anytime on CBC Gem. Mike drop. But believing, I mean, in religious faith, in spiritual faith.

I mean, that's kind of the ultimate impossible dream in some ways. You don't know. Exactly. You don't know what the answer is, right? Exactly. And yet, you know, if you are religious, you believe anyway. There's an uncertainty that can make people really uncomfortable in that. Do you know what I mean?

We like to know the answers to things. What to you is intriguing about that idea of people who are living with that uncertainty? I mean, to me, it's like I am very envious in some cases of the people I profiled in this book because they've embraced the uncertainty. They've embraced the possibility of failure. You know, again, going back to what I mentioned before is like, we like to wake up in the morning and we like to know what we're going to accomplish. One of the reasons I think I became a journalist is because I have a self-imposed debt or

have a deadline. You know, when I was a report, I'd get into the newsroom every day and I would write a story and it would appear, you know, the next day's paper or a couple of days later. The people in this book, you know, they don't know exactly when they're, when they're, their goals are going to be accomplished. It's that uncertainty, though, that helps drive them. And it's the, you know, the failures, if you want to call it that, that they encounter along the way that that leads their lives down these kind of interesting, unexpected path. And, you know, to me, at least, I think I could use a little bit more uncertainty in my life. You say that, I mean, this is part of

how you changed in writing this book, that the patients, the people that you profiled showed made you question your own values. What did you mean by that? I mean, for me, I didn't know. I didn't know. if I was going to finish this book. I sold it right before the pandemic. I knew it was going to require a ton of travel. And, you know, for the first two years of the pandemic, when it was very hard to leave Canada, I'd just go down to my basement, conduct interviews over Zoom, over Zoom, do some research, write, you know, sentences here and there. And yet I despaired. I wasn't sure if I was ever going to actually accomplish this impossible goal that I had set out for. But that has taught me, though, that it is still worth doing, right?

Like, I do not, I would not have done anything differently, minus the pandemic during the process of working on this book. And I think it has made me, you know, see the world and see what I want to accomplish in the years I have left in a different way. Can you talk about the people who wrote stories? I mean, you're talking about writing a book that you hope will be read. Yeah. The people who wrote stories that they know will not be read for another 100 years.

This future library project of Katie Patterson. Yeah. The day I joined the Globe and Mail, I got an email that Margaret Atwood had just agreed to donate an unpublished manuscript to a project called the Future Library, which nobody had heard of at that point. Katie Patterson, who is a Scottish kind of theoretical artist, had launched this project that every year a different notable artist author would donate a manuscript and it would be put in a vault in the Oslo Public Library and they wouldn't see the light of day for 100. years. So I went to one of the ceremonies in 2022, I believe it was where, you know, Karlovic Gnorskard, David Mitchell, and others donated their manuscripts. And it's like a remarkable thing. Margaret knows, you know, David knows that they are donating books that nobody's ever going to read. And being an author now, I know it's not a small thing to give away a book that you know

readers in your lifetime aren't going to experience. Why would they do that? I mean, part of this is about understanding, I mean, these books are printed on paper and understanding the life cycle of a tree that will produce the paper that would allow you to have the book printed. But why would they do something like that? I mean, you know, the way Margaret put it to me was it's like a time capsule, right? Like, you know, as children, we like to put things from the present day, bury them, dig them up in 10 or 20 years just to see how the world's changed. But, you know, it's also a very, very hopeful project. The reason I think so many of these people are participating is because, it insists or it suggests that there's going to be a world in a hundred years and there's still going to be readers, right? It would be a really pessimistic thing to kind of throw your hands up and say, well, there's no point donating this manuscript because nobody's going to be, you know, we're all going to be reading AI generated books in 100 years. So to me and to a lot of the participants, it's just a hopeful act. And yet you could understand why some people might throw their hands up.

It's not just AI. I mean, it's the beginning of January. The world already feels like the axis is kind of, you know, we're tilting a little bit and wobbling maybe on the axis. Yeah. And yet there is the sense of optimism and hope that runs through this book. How do you understand that in terms of the stories that you gathered from the people that you meet? It wasn't necessarily meant to be that way. I mean, I think it is coming out at a really interesting moment. If this would come out back in 2022, 2022, 2003, when I first thought it might, it would be landing differently. But, you know, this is a reminder that as bleak as the world seems right now as, you know, as dire as the headlines might read that there is going to be a day after

tomorrow and a month after tomorrow and a year after tomorrow. And we need to remember that, that we can, you know, we can, we can despair at what's happening in the world, but, you know, we have to remind ourselves that there's going to be a world that exists after we're gone. And I hope that people remember that, you know, even if, you know, today doesn't look great that, you know, tomorrow's going to be better. And that is what, you know, I think a lot of the people in this book feel. It's also the work that these people are doing feels a bit like an antidote to the times we live in right now, where things happen like that. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. That there is a long game that's played. And I just wonder whether you worry that our appetite for that. We live in a time of everything being measured

by the second instant gratification. But also if you put money in, that you need to see a return on investment. What is the argument against that? What is the argument to invest in something that you will not see a return from immediately? Because we have to stop thinking about just ourselves. We have to think about the people that are going to come after us. And even if the research that is being done today isn't going to necessarily benefit us, it's going to benefit somebody. There's an entire chapter in my book about planetary defense.

And this is a subject that I knew nothing about when I started. Giant asteroids. Giant asteroids coming out. Exactly. Like Armageddon come to life. And yet there's a very, very small, dedicated group. of scientists who are studying this and are concerned about this. And, you know, we are very confident that it's going to, you know, we know, we know

that there's not a civilization asteroid out there that's going to, you know, hit the planet anytime soon. But they're all convinced that it's going to happen one day. It's happened in the past. It's going to happen again. And so they are devising ways to protect the planet. They know it's not going to benefit them, but it's going to benefit somebody down the road. And there's something to be said about, you know, thinking about, you know, your descendants.

Heather Newton, who's one of the people who's leading the conservation of the Canterbury Cathedral in England, says, this is a quotation from your book, we are caretakers. It's really important that we understand that, that we don't try to overstep our role, because we are just in terms of the history of the building, the blink of an eye, and what we do will in the end probably be replaced, superseded by someone else's efforts, but that's okay. I mean, there's a humility that's at the center of that. What, to you, is powerful about what she says there? I mean, you need to be humble to do this kind of work. You need to remember that, you know, you might have the baton right now, but you're going to hand it on to somebody else after you. You're not necessarily going to be the one. You're not necessarily going to be the one who crosses the finish line. It's a mindset that I think not everybody possesses, not everybody wants to possess, but it's those kind of people that ensure, you know, this continuity as far as the world goes and ensures there's going to be, you know, a better day tomorrow. How did your sense of optimism change while you were working on this book? I'm a fairly optimistic person, but it made me think about the long term in ways that I hadn't really grappled with before. You know, I have two young kids, and I obviously think about the world they're going to inherit, you know, what the earth is going to look like when they're my age. But I've started thinking more about, you know, my grandchildren, if I have them and their grandchildren and trying to picture not just a world still existing, but like a world that is full of hope and a world.

world that's still full of beauty and a world that still kind of allows these weird quests to be pursued. And so, you know, I think the act of writing this book definitely made me more optimistic. And meeting those people who have committed themselves to something larger than their day-to-day existence? Almost every interview I conducted, I left feeling good about the world. I felt good about what they were doing. You know, even there's people who are doing or pursuing goals that, you know, other people might, you know, roll their eyes at. There's something to be said about doing these kind of like delusional odd quests the world's the richer place because of their their pursuits you end the book with this passage you say looking for gold in the

a Arizona desert listening to the stars for a faraway voice paddling across a quiet volcano lake looking for creatures that don't exist writing a book these are all acts of faith undertaken without promise without guarantee this is a good way to live what does that mean this is a good way to live. I mean, I think I was talking specifically about myself because one of the things with this book is I started it in my late 30s and I was starting to have those conversations. You know, not quite a midlife crisis, but, you know, what have I, what have I accomplished and what do I still want to accomplish? And I'm somebody, again, who, you know, I'm quite rigid in the goals that I seek in my day-to-day life. And suddenly I was exposed to all these people who had thrown out completion out the window who were running these races where they knew they weren't going to. cross the finish line. And it kind of struck me that maybe I'm going around about going about

things the wrong way, that, you know, I need to embrace risk. I need to embrace uncertainty. I need to run these races not thinking about the finish line. And so it is a good way to live. I mean, again, it's not for everybody. I don't even know if it's necessarily for me, but I'm going to try to kind of like take the lessons I've learned and and live with them in mind. Mark Medley, thank you very much. Thanks, Matt. Mark Medley, as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. his new book is Live to See the Day, Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.