The Daily Stoic - Rising from Ashes | John Vaillant on Building Resiliency From Destruction

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

While in Vancouver on tour, Ryan Holiday met up with one of his favorite authors, John Vaillant, to discuss how destruction and crisis can fuel creativity and change. They talk about the lessons wildfires and other natural disasters teach us, not just about nature but about resilience, adaptation, and the stories we tell to make sense of disruption. John shares what it was like to be nominated for a Pulitzer, how success and recognition can be both motivating and distracting, and why embracing uncertainty is key to any creative process. Follow John on Instagram @johnvaillant_. 📚 Pick up John Vaillant's books Fire Weather, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, and The Golden Spruce at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Usually when I travel, I'm staying in an Airbnb. That is when I'm bringing my kids. We make a whole experience of it. And usually what I do is I pull up Airbnb, I look at guest favorites, I type in, okay, we want this many rooms, this many bathrooms, we want a pool, we want a washer and dryer, whatever it is, and you can find an awesome place to stay in.

And I've been doing it now, crazy me, at least 15 years I've been staying in Airbnbs, basically since it came out. I love Airbnb and you should check it out for your next trip. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free.

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Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think,

to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm gonna grab something off my shelf here. One second. So if you have ever seen anything I've shot in my office,

you might have noticed that on the shelf behind me, there is a little pine cone. Why do I have a little pine cone behind my desk? It's not one I picked up myself, so it's not like a memory of like a hike or a place I used to go or anything like that. I definitely didn't plant this myself. I actually bought it on Etsy.

I don't even know where it came from, but I do know what kind of tree it is. It's a lodgepole pine cone. It's a member of what's called a serotonious species. Basically that means is that it drops this pine cone that's covered in a waxy resin. And that waxy resin has to melt off for the pine cone to open up and to propagate the species.

Now, maybe you've heard this about this idea before, because it's kind of a good metaphor for the idea of amorphati, which the Stokes talk about, because the only way the resin can melt off is by forest fire. It has to be exposed to incredibly extreme temperatures, temperatures not reached in a normal environment for it to grow.

It's the definition of creative destruction. It is the idea of amorphati. I talk about this in a number of my talks these days. Probably have a video about it. Where does that all come from? Well, I learned about it from today's guest. His most recent book is called Fire Weather, and it's about this terrible fire in Northern Canada,

which I hadn't really heard anything about. And he uses it as a way to sort of explore not just how fireworks, not just the changes that the climate is undergoing, but how people respond to adversity and disasters. He also happens to be one of my absolute favorite authors of all time. I pulled up Amazon.

I wanted to see when did I buy The Tiger for the first time, which is one of my favorite books. I have said often that it is the greatest narrative nonfiction book of all time. I have sold tens of thousands of copies of it at this point. We sell many, many copies of it in the painted porch. I also love his other book, The Golden Spruce, which is about this crazy Sitka spruce tree that a sort of a not well man cut down in an act of environmental protest. He's just really good at finding these stories that you didn't know about, but you read them and they just rip your

face off. He's so good at telling them. And when I was in Canada this fall, back in November. I was doing my last dates for the tour I was on. Went the other way, I flew from Dublin to London, London to Vancouver, did a talk in Vancouver, then Vancouver to Toronto. And I got a nice run in that morning in Vancouver, and then I went to the Ramy Films studio in Vancouver. John met me there after some travel delays. He went to the wrong studio,

which I myself had almost gone to. Said, looked it up on Google Maps. I said, oh, this is right next to my hotel. I can walk. And then I said, you know what I'm gonna confirm? And I found out, no, actually it's across town. So we crossed paths, went to different places. It was a who's on first kind of routine.

And then the folks at the Remy studios were nice enough to go pick him up. And we sat down and talked talked and he had just days earlier I believe been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize so we talked about success we talked about stories we talked about politics and climate but most of all we talked about the resilience of nature and humanity and I was really excited to have this conversation, which is a long time coming

because I've been such a fan of his work for such a long time. So here is me talking to John Volant. And if you haven't read The Tiger or The Golden Spruce, I've said this before about books, but it's my thing. I don't know what you're doing with your life. I'll link to both those in the show notes because they're awesome.

We carry them in the painted porch. You just gotta read them. They're bad ass. You just got nominated for a Pulitzer, right? I did. What's that feel like? I've been nominated for a bunch of prizes in several countries and the fanfare for Pulitzer

is much smaller because what they do is they announce the winner and then they announce the finalists on the same day they announce the winner. So there's not most prizes, long list, build up some suspense, short list, little more suspense and then the big reveal. They don't do that. You found out you didn't win.

Yeah, I found out that I didn't win. There's two finalists and one winner. So I'm in pretty good company and I'll take it, you know? But I found out as an afterthought from somebody on Twitter who I thought had a, you know, typed a misprint. So yeah, so instead of being like, hey, you just found out you were long listed or you're a finalist and then you're like, and I'll find out on insert date, whether I am or not, you found out you were long listed or you were a finalist, and then you're like, and I'll find out on insert date whether I am or not, you found out, you were in the box not knowing what your fate was,

or even that you were in the box. I didn't even know when the date, it's actually a really good idea not to know when prize dates are, because otherwise you sweat it, you know? And I had no idea, so, and the National Book Award, I got nominated for that too, and there's a long list and a short list.

And then you go to this huge gala in New York. And so it's, you know, that sort of- You got that on stage. It is massive. Yeah, you know, Oprah is right there. And it was major. And so that felt like, you know, a big national award. And the Pulitzer was this strange afterthought.

Yeah. That actually is more significant in terms of my bio now. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. All your books will now say that. Yeah. It's you as a, it's not this book was, it's you were. Yeah, I feel uncomfortable about that. I really try to keep the focus on the work.

Yeah. But I think that's maybe part of the stoic mode, I think. I remember when I hit number one for the first time, my agent called me while I was mowing my lawn. So he calls, it's a two minute phone call, congratulations, it's very exciting. And then I was like, who's gonna finish mowing this lawn?

Yeah, really? It's like me. I know, exactly. There is a funny before and after, and some things change and some things don't, And, but what a wonderful call to get. And I'm still waiting for that one. Well, yeah, it's this thing that you want and you do think you're sort of anointed

or in this rare air. It doesn't actually change anything. It's not like they send the news in the private jet that you get to keep. You know, it's not a MacArthur genius grant where you get the money. It's this thing, and then it doesn't write your next book. Sure doesn't. No, it can almost get in the way

of your own expectations for yourself, others' expectations for you. And it's kind of good to have it be, to really treat it as a momentary thing, I think, and then just keep mowing, really keep mowing. There's a Marcus Trubilis quote, he says, accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference.

And I sort of think about that as that's the attitude to really good news and really bad news. Like you just found out you were nominated, you won this thing, you just found out you didn't get it, you just found out they're canceling the deal. High or low, you just sort of like, okay, you still have to mull along.

You still have to write the next book. Still have to pick your kids up from school. You still just have to do life. Yeah, on the other hand, when something really great happens, it does feel like, well, are you dishonoring it by not just stopping everything and really celebrating? Sure.

And I've had some opportunities to do that, but it's still, I think I still keep thinking about, you know, there's a wooden chair in my office that is empty right now. And the only thing that will move the needle forward is if I go occupy that chair for another couple of years. And so that's pretty humbling. Well, there's a small version of that.

You just wrote a piece for the New York Times. Yeah. Was that today? Came out today. But I don't know if you ever feel this where you write something and it, for whatever reason, it touches a nerve. It's like kind of blowing up.

And then you waste the whole day, like refreshing, like seeing, is it the most read story? What are the comments? What are people saying on Twitter? And I kind of think about that. It's like, okay, so I succeeded. Did what I was supposed to do.

And the reward was that it cost me a whole day. Like I just spent it in this weird kind of buzzing around. What are people saying? And that seems like a strange... On the other hand, I think it's also a way of honoring other people's attention. Because so folks are now engaging with this work that is presumably a distillation of a lot of your up and down time. And then you wrote the thing,

and you worked on it with some very good editors, and now it's out in a prominent place. And so not to attend to the people reading it feels to me like a kind of, that's almost arrogant. To me, it's like, okay, you put this thing out there, face the music, reap whatever rewards there are. And there also may be people who you have really stimulated or traumatized.

And I write about scary stuff. And so people are really dealing with this. And just the conferences and talks I give, there's a lot of emotion because it is so raw and so real and so many people have now been through intense fires or just the anxiety that goes with that. So to me, it feels like this is part of the gig is to be there to, you set this thing loose

in the world in a way. It's like a dog, you know, you're kind of responsible for it. And so. There's a Churchill thing I always love because people don't see him as a writer, but that's how he made his living. And he says, you know, you work on this thing for years. And then he says, then you kill it

and you fling it to the public. And they're like the dog, you know, going to get- Ravenous, yeah, just tearing it to bits. And, you know, and I gotta say Ravining, yeah, just tearing it to bits. And, you know, and I got to say, I really haven't had that experience. You know, what I've had more is this deep engagement and a mixture of gratitude and horror and from a really wide variety of people.

So, you know, bankers and insurance people and housing people, along with readers and writers and environmental people and the usual suspects along with readers and writers and environmental people and the usual suspects. But it's been kind of amazing to see how it is resonating and sort of finding these common frequencies in rooms and minds that I would hope to connect with, but didn't expect to.

I feel like presence is so important, right? Especially as a creative person, you need to be present. And sometimes what I'll find is that the day that I put stuff out, I lose any hope of having presence. Because I'm just like, you're just focused on this sort of external thing. But isn't that natural?

I mean, it's as close as we're gonna get to birth. And it's a pretty big deal. And there is some pain involved. And there is a thing in the world now that wasn't there before. And presumably, as writers, we are trying to phrase things in ways that are fresh and appropriate to the moment and get through the armor.

You know, we're trying to get under, find the places where the kind of tonal and linguistic defenses aren't, and then penetrate in what's hopefully a positive and stimulating way and trying to move the needle somewhere. And so, yeah, I wanna be there for that. I think we should be there for that. No, no, that's true. You gotta take the wins when they're there.

Just like, sometimes people can come up and be like, oh, I love this or thank you. And there's that sort of self-effacing part of everyone that's like, oh, whatever. And you have to learn to like take compliments because what you're doing is dismissing that someone else's earnest feelings because they make you uncomfortable.

That I think accepting, I mean, it feels like this is the high-class problem of all high-class problems, but accepting compliments with grace is a way of honoring the presence and focus of the other person. And it's really, I did a lot of that today, I'm very proud to say. And I think I find myself constantly wanting

to kind of gaze averse and aweshuck sit. And I'm starting, I'm forcing myself now to kind of stand up and look in their eyes and take it. Like it's hard to take in a funny way. And again, I feel, you know, oh brother, you know, hearing myself say that, but it's a real thing to have that kind of intention, especially coming from a stranger focused on you.

And yet they're there, they're wanting to connect with you, you touch them in some way. And then, but you got to think about too, is you really busted your ass on this. Like you might've spent one or two, or in my case, seven years on this thing. And so to have somebody take the time and say, this really touched me.

And so I owe it to both of us to be there for that, as fully as I can be. Well, you build up armor to protect yourself against the criticism and rejection because that's an inherent part of any creative work is knowing that, yeah, you're gonna work for so long and something's gonna take forever to get off the ground or never get off the ground or it's gonna be rejected

or it comes out on the wrong day. So yeah, you build up this kind of, whatever the opposite of self-consciousness is. Like, just like, that's not me, that doesn't say anything about me. And then if you manage to get to the other side, it can then make it hard for you just to appreciate or experience the good part.

What it means, it's almost like having polarizing sunglasses that have to act really quickly. Cause you do not actually know what the person is gonna do when they come up to you. And so they may have a really beef with you. They may go all fake news on you, or they may burst, literally they might burst into tears. And so you gotta be sort of ready, which apparatus,

how much armor, do I need the armor, or do I need to enfold them in an embrace, literally? Sure. And you have to do that on the fly. So that's a big ask. Yeah. That's a lot. Right, no, no, that's, yeah, I didn's a big ask. Yeah. That's a lot.

Right, no, no, that's a, yeah, I didn't think about that. Yeah, you're having to read this interaction, just like you're having to read the random email that you got. It could be nice or it could be so mean. It would be a shame if, to protect yourself from the arrows, you lost the ability to enjoy. Well, yeah, but it takes a certain kind of fitness

and I think its own sort of courage to stay flexible. And I can just keep my leather jacket on all the time or I could take my shirt off and be exposed and you're exposed when you're shirts. But to be able to modulate that really quickly and responsively and appropriately too. That's the other thing is like, okay, what are the real intentions here?

Or is this person kind of coming in hard, but really they're actually feeling something really intense. And if you kind of weather that first barrage, you'll actually get to a real place of what they're really feeling. And so that's this whole other thing in terms of dealing with other people's defenses. I mean, it's hard being a human being.

And we have to be very quick on our feet. All of us do. Just assessing people on the street, you know, assessing the traffic. I stop periodically and marvel at how quickly we can process and how quickly we can decide this is safe, this isn't safe, this is good for me, this is not good for me. And most of the time, we're right.

And I think a feature of the modern world is just more of those interactions than you could possibly have ever imagined from an evolutionary standpoint. Like what social media allows or doing anything that scale allows is just a totally incomprehensible mass of people to have access to your brain. Yeah, it's, because I was thinking the the alternative 10,000 years ago, you know,

you're walking across the Scottish Highlands and you know, you might see a group of three people on another hillside and you're assessing, but you've got a lot of time and an arrow might come, you know, or a waving hand, but, but there's a lot of time and a lot of space. And you know, you might be after the deer that's over there, but there's a lot of time and a lot of space. And you might be after the deer that's over there, but it's over the hill. You can't see it, so you're tracking it. And then there's the wolfish you that has been, but there's just a lot more room often. And so, yeah, no, things are really compressing.

I, yeah. Yeah. Shopping local might seem like a tough cookie, but truthfully, finding Ontario-made products is a piece of cake. That's why supportontariomade.ca exists. With over 17,000 products listed, everything from cars to cosmetics, it's never been easier to shop local and support Ontario manufacturers of all sizes.

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visibility at indeed.com slash wonder ECA. Just go to indeed.com slash wonder ECA right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com slash wonder ECA Terms and conditions apply hiring Indeed is all you need Well, like the daily stoke email goes out to a million people every day. It's strange how some technologies are just like, you have to put a reply email. There's an email, it goes out, they can just reply.

And so like, that would just be insane to let a million people have potential. So it obviously goes to like a customer service email at this point. But even then, you know, like, I'll write something and then it's like, I kind of don't want to know. I don't want to know whether you like it or dislike it because it's gotta be what I have to say. You can't let that many people have access to your brain. Like you probably shouldn't be checking the comments on your New York Times piece.

I never do. No, I literally, I'm phobically avoidant. And I feel like in that sense, in the books too, you know, it's almost like a message in a bottle. It's washing up somewhere, you know, they might break the bottle and use it to start a fire or they might read it and, you know, hang it on their wall or something in between

and really not my business. And, you know, if somebody really wants to come and engage with me, which luckily some do, and I'm up for that, up to a point. But yeah, I know the comments, the comments are. I've tried to get to a place where my happiness and success with the project is 90, 95% of the way sealed by the time it comes out. And then everything else is extra.

Like New Orleans, they have this word lanyard. It means like the 13th donut. Like it's like just a little, it's just a little extra piece, you know, that you weren't expecting. And so if it crushes, if it gets nominated, if it sells a lot, if somebody tells you that it changed their life, that's all extra. But if it sells a lot, if somebody tells you that it changed their life, that's all extra.

But if it sells zero copies, because it came out the day of a terrorist attack or, you know, the... I dread that. Yeah, or I put out a book and the publisher's like, oh wait, sorry, we're moving the release date. We literally can't print copies because of the pandemic. You know, just stuff happened, right?

And so, or people misunderstand it or it's ahead of its time, like you never know. So that, I mean, that notion, I think about the notion of the sand painting and you devote this incredible energy and devotion, real devotion, you know, spiritual concentration to making this incredibly elaborate, intricate creation. And then you invite others to look at it,

but with the understanding for everybody that in four or five days, you know, it's gone. And that is the gig. That's part of the deal is it goes away. And even though all that work, and so that is a kind of, it's not really fatalistic. It's just, I think it's realistic, but there's a sort of, you know, of zen quality and an honest, really mature recognition of how fleeting

things are and there's a lot of other places for people's attention to go. And so to get a couple of days of somebody's attention or even a couple of minutes of somebody's attention, it's all its own kind of gold, but the act, the ability, two things. One, to be in the safety where you can actually wrestle with the idea and compose it, whether it's into a play or a sand painting or an op-ed piece or a book, or to go and give your talk this evening. The gratitude that is increasingly precious to me

that we have the space and safety to do those things still is really amazing. And then that people come to it and that they're in a calm and safe enough place to engage with it, however briefly. All that, we need to focus on that more in terms of really how much needs to be in place socially, culturally, and infrastructurally to enable that to happen. Things are precarious now.

Yeah. You sent a copy of a fire weather to my friend Jeff Waldman who he built this, he had some property in, or has some property in Northern California in the sort of Redwoods. He built this whole sort of series of tree houses and cabins, this whole like off the grid thing. It's amazing. He builds these really cool cabins. If you ever come to my bookstore, we have this tree that we moved a huge tree, like a 25 foot tall tree

that fell down on my wrench inside the bookstore. And it goes up through the second story up to the upstairs. He's this amazing builder. Anyways, in this fire, all that he'd spent like four or five years building this whole place. And then it like that all went up in the fire. And that's why I sent him, I had you send him this book. And I was asking him how he felt about it all happening.

And he was like, oh, it was a, it was a mandala. And I was like, well, first off, you're much more philosophical than I am. But his point, which I've been thinking about was, he was like, doing it was the fun part. Like he's like, I had fun doing it. It was enjoyable. It took a lot of time.

And he was focused on the inputs rather than how long you get to preserve the outputs. And I've tried to think about that as a writer, because you can be so tortured and people almost celebrate being the tortured artist. And it's not an easy job. It's hard to write a book, but if it sucks every day while you're doing it,

then the only reason you were doing it is for the rewards that come on the other side, which means, I think from a philosophical standpoint, you've made yourself very vulnerable to needing a bunch of things to go right. Then if you enjoyed while you're doing it, like they say, painters like painting, writers like having written,

you wanna enjoy writing or else, then the only reason you're writing is for money, fame, attention, adulation, and you might not get it. And it becomes this kind of sort of first degree performative thing that, you know, is a bit hollow and icky, really. And, you know, it took me seven years to write Fire Weather. Basically, I spent my 50s doing that, you know.

My kid was in eighth grade and now she's in college. So that is sort of painful and poignant to consider, but it's also this was a mountain I somehow needed to climb and a set of concepts I had to grapple with just to come to grips with where we are now. And I feel like it's actually really prepared me because the allegory of fire weather and all the signals not being read properly. And then when you look at this election that we're processing right now, I've been there already. And I've been there with the people who called it and saw it and the people who didn't and

ignored it and suffered. And I spent seven years in that space. So I'm kind of lined up to where we're at now. It doesn't make it any easier or, and I don't have any good news, but at least it's like, okay, this is familiar terrain. To me, the central metaphor of fire weather that I've took a lot from and I actually bought one,

what's the species of pine tree you're talking about where the pine cone is covered in that resin and it needs the fire to unlock something? There's a woman, she sells those pine cones on Etsy. She puts them in the oven and it opens. So turns it up to the temperature and then they pop open. And I just love the metaphor of that idea that there's some things

that only extreme circumstances can unlock. Man, I mean, there's such a beautiful message in that. This annihilating energy, you need it to be fire hot in order to make the cone pop open. Those are called serotonous cones. Black spruce is one of them. I think lodgepole pine is also, but there are a bunch of them

that are serotonous and semi-serotonous. So they need heat greater than the sun can provide. In other words, they need a traumatic, unpredictable event to come along and release their potential. And that is a beautiful metaphor and a beautiful way to see random events and even what we're going through right now, some quite extraordinary things

could be growing out of it. It's beautiful and awful also. Like the awful, the beauty is dependent on the awful and the violence of it. And not to get too, kind of trite about it, but we really are, we live in that duality, we're captive to it. And so to make some kind of peace with it. And again,

to have that kind of agility and flexibility to be able to receive it and respond to it. And also, frankly, just to marvel at it. Imagine the evolutionary process that all the hits and misses that it took to have this successful cone that has to be an a raging boreal fire in order to, ah, that's my cue. I think it's my time to shine. And so that's optimism, if ever there, if you need a definition.

Yeah, it's the embodiment of creative destruction, right? That the next generation is dependent on the destruction of the previous generation in some way. And yeah, that this thing that you want to prevent or block from happening is in fact, in some ways what you need to happen. Exactly. And it's painful because it's obviously uncomfortable.

And it's certainly a break from the routine, almost by definition. And I'm thinking a lot about this sort of the seduction of the status quo and the ways that we will pretzel ourselves and compromise ourselves in order to maintain the status quo. And it's just that status quo is not a natural state. Yeah. Well, I mean, isn't that the other metaphor of forest fires, which is you try to prevent them all the time and it accumulates the underbrush and the conditions in which makes the actual thing that you are delaying

more and more awful when it comes. And that's our relationship with change, I think. I think you're exactly right. And there's an amazing image of that. There's a woman named Lori Daniels here at UBC. She's in forestry and she does dendrochronology on lodgepole pines in Southeast BC. And what she found from her cores is you could see when the fires happened. And so you can see when smallpox came through British Columbia because the small, regular, undestructive fires stop. And then there's a 50-year gap, and then

there's a really bad burn. And then there's a 75-year gap and another really bad burn. And so it broke the indigenous burning cycle, which used to be like every five, 10, 20 years, they do a small burn, they would kind of clear out the underbrush. The bigger healthy, stronger trees would survive. They've got thick bark. They're designed for that. And this would open up the ground for berries, for grazing and pasturage, for game animals.

And they had this kind of beautiful cycle that had been going since the ice age. And smallpox broke that. And the fact that you can find that, the date line, the stop is there in the dendrochronology, in the tree rings. It's one of the things I read about. So Mark Striehl's lives through what's known as the Antonine Plague.

And a lot of the evidence they have of how things, of what it affected, they can see in trees. Like this thing 2,000 years ago, this disease spreading through the air so affected certain human behaviors that it's then seen in trees. And yeah, just across the board. How does it manifest in the board?

I forget exactly, but it was crazy to think like, you think this is, the historians are studying this, but actually the historians are having to go to the biologists. To read the trees. Yeah, to get the info. Yeah, God, that's, yeah. So yeah, my friend lives in this ghost town

in the Inyo Mountains in Southern California. And I mean, they have trees there that are three or 4,000 years old. Bristle cones, maybe. Yeah, the bristle cone pines. And it was fascinating because there was like that hurricane, I think a year ago, two years ago, that flooded Death Valley.

Right. And people were like, this has never happened before from a climate change perspective. And it is a very dangerous sign of climate change, but it's like the bristle cone pines knows that things like this have happened before. Think of what they've seen. All the anomalies. Yes.

And just what we're living in now is in an age of compressed anomalies. Yes. And it's not comparable. And I think that's a real gear grind for people to... Yeah, but we did this. This happened a thousand years ago, but yeah, but this has now happened twice in four years. Yes. And all our things about 100 year floods, 100 year fires. I know. No, no, no, no.

Yeah, it's different now. And so that's a big recalibration, and just for the human psyche. I mean, I think so much of dealing with where we're at right now is about a shift. There's all this practical infrastructure stuff that our cities aren't ready for, et cetera infrastructure stuff that our cities aren't ready for it, et cetera, but really our minds aren't ready for it.

And so that kind of catching up of our notion of even what's possible and our imaginative capability is really being stressed and pushed right now. Well, yeah, that's our insistence on the sort of the status quo and a resistance of change. Like the Queen Elizabeth, who I mean, lives through so many insane events. Like you look at the beginning of her life

to the end of her life, I think something like half the countries on earth at her death did not exist at her birth, right? And the motto of the royal household, which I think is an interesting motto people could take, it was, if things are gonna stay the same, then things are gonna have to change. And the paradox of like, yeah, that's what a controlled burn is.

If you wanna keep this the same, you've gotta be willing to engage in some change. It's almost an artificial stability. Yes, it's a stability in a larger, in a big picture stability instead of a small picture stability, which is what we were like, I want it this way. It should be this way.

This is what we're- Yeah, I've got plans. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, but we struggle with the acceptance of change because we've, I think for the last 200 or so years gotten really comfortable with the idea that we control our environment. Yeah, that's a brutal wake up. And we used to know we didn't, you know?

And then we forgot. And I think liquid fuel really reinforced that illusion. Gasoline. Yeah, gas and oil. And we really kind of leapt into this. Cause it's magic. It's totally magic. I mean, just when you think about what you can do in a car and what the car is doing

for you, I've been flying a lot lately and I can just sit next to this person and chat away, drink my coffee, nothing's even vibrating. And when you think of what's going on physically outside and just the incredible energy being exerted in a way that's so beautifully engineered, you barely feel it except when you land. And it's miraculous and should be celebrated, but it also is diluting. And that's, you know, we're dealing with a reckoning

right now around that, that is rugged. Yeah, I was watching that Kevin Costner, Westerner on my flight from London yesterday. And it's just like, it's absurd. We used to go around on horses. We used to ride around on the backs of animals, which is just so preposterous. And, but at the same time, not miraculous, right?

Like it's silly and weird, but like somehow it gives you a frame of the world that traveling around in a plane or a car just obliterates. What is so chilling in a plane or a car just obliterates. What is so chilling in a way and bizarre is how quickly we recalibrate. So I spent five weeks on horseback in the Northern Rockies once and my butt was sore for a week and then I settled into it and then I settled into the speed and then your whole experience of the world just changes. And I never felt, God, pick it up.

I just settled into it and it all made sense at that speed. And it was a totally different speed that I'm used to traveling at. But I'm a modern human, a petro-human who was able to go back 200 years very easily and very comfortably. And it wasn't a big romantic thing. The weather wasn't that great. We had to get off the horses a lot because it was super steep, all this stuff.

And yet it felt completely, I really could have just kept going. It just felt really right. It felt sustainable and not in the modern sense, but just, you know, I was strong enough to do it. The horse was strong enough to do it. There was, and it really was, it was, it was an, it felt like an equally viable reality.

Well, that's what's so mind blowing is when the explorers brought horses back to America, just the quickness with which indigenous people who had not had them for thousands of years were like, we know how this works. You're like, oh yeah, this was just how it was supposed to be. There was just a brief period where you didn't have the horses. And then, yeah, basically by 1920,

we were like, we don't need this anymore. And we've never used them in any serious capacity since. I know, but we may be reacquainting our relationships with horses. There's interesting times ahead and our relationship to energy is changing profoundly. I don't know if you get into degrowth much or Jason Hickel,

but he's got a lot to say and a lot worth considering in terms of just carrying capacity and what is realistic to expect of planet Earth with this many people on it. Interesting. Well, that was, I think, I love your book, The Tiger. We've talked about this before. But I always thought the almost haunting line in that book, which I haven't picked up in many years,

I've recommended it all the time, but I haven't reread it. But you say something, you're talking about someone and you're like, now for the first time in human history, someone could starve to death while watching satellite television. Yeah. And that the horror of that juxtaposition, I don't think is gonna be limited to Siberia.

No, no. And that, yeah, we've never been here before. I mean, we are, whether we like it or not, brave explorers. And Homo sapiens has never been here before. Our society hasn't really. I mean, we've been through breakdowns. You know, we have the equipment, experientially, physically, to deal with this.

That doesn't mean it's gonna be comfortable or pretty, but our ancestors have seen it all in a lot of ways, but there are some new bits and pieces, like the fact that, you know, that whole cyber piece of where you could have access to some of the most sophisticated media ever conceived, and yet still be wasting away at the soul level too. I mean, that's the other thing is it's cold,

it's thin gruel when you get down to it. And you really need to have, that goes back to this idea of needing to have, think of what we need to have in place in order to have this conversation. And in order to have an actually positive and wholesome time on your computer, you still need to have good food.

You need to have actual love in your life. You need to have a safe and warm place to spend the night. So there's a whole bunch of the old creature comforts have to be in place because when you think about the alternative of somebody isolated and friendless in a basement going down the rabbit hole, that is a kind of mechanized insanity. And so we really do need to have these balancing energies from the old world, like good food, a comfortable bed, and just, again, as I said, the creature comforts.

Yeah, there's a Daniel Borsten quote I think about all the time. He says, we know everything the ancient world didn't know and none of the things they do know or they did know. And the idea being that we've sort of massively improved on this sort of technological level. We've solved so many of the vexing problems, including many of like the collective action problems

that they didn't understand. Just how people can organize, governments can do things, et cetera. You can create systems and structures and organizations and institutions, but we've also lost a lot of the fundamental wisdom that they understood about humans, human nature. The scam of modern technology is it presents itself as a replacement and it shouldn't be. It is a compliment to what already exists. And so now we could go down that street and ask directions and most people don't know where they are. And so, because it's here. Yeah. And so this willingness to give our power away and really lose skill and lose knowledge to become dumber,

it's terrifying. And you know, we're reaping the really dark fruits of that right now. But that, I think that notion that it presents itself, it sells itself to us as you don't need that anymore, because now we've got this. There's an app for that. And that is costly at the real street wisdom of being in the world and knowing where you are and how to negotiate it without the machine.

The hard- one insights about humans and certain types of humans. It strikes me that a big problem we're having politically in America is that we had a pretty good system that had a pretty strong sets of sort of legal checks and balances, but also cultural and normative checks and balances that were there for a reason, that were based on, you know,

2000 years or 1700 years of sort of meditations and thinking about this sort of period of Greek and Roman history. And then when you let someone come in and obliterate a lot of those, you, and that personality trait, we might go, you know, this is a function of social media, reality television, or whatever.

It's like, no, that personality has always existed and you can read the Federalist Papers and they're talking about what we would do if that person tries to do X, Y, or Z. And so just, but if you have generations of people that have no longer read those texts, had those conversations, or added new stories or ways of understanding that have no longer read those texts, had those conversations, or added new stories or ways of understanding that you just,

you are uniquely vulnerable to, you know, the same thing Shakespeare was talking about and Plutarch was talking about, and, you know, the Greeks and Romans were talking about. Yeah, no, there are these limitations to human nature and there are these characteristics and tendencies in certain extreme examples of us. And so it does feel like an echo.

And yet the idea of the echo being enhanced by social media and by- When the stakes being raised by nuclear weapons, existential threats like climate change, it's not just a bunch of guys walking around in togas and the worst thing they can do is a civil war. You know what I mean? Like just-

Yeah, no, it's another order. We could all be annihilated. Yeah, yeah, no, it's really another order. And I just, so surreal that, you know, on Twitter X recently seeing this diagram of why automobiles stack up the way they do after a flood and they stack up the way certain types of kind of silicate molecule does. The reason why clay is slippery is because the

molecules in it line up in this sliding way and the way when you see cars piling up on a street in Valencia, it's actually a similar formation, but it's for a different reason. And it's because basically the engine is generally in the front and there's a gas tank in the back. And so there's a little bit of an air bubble. And so the backend tends to lift up in typical cars, not electric cars, but it's still mimicking this other,

and just the fact that we're even talking about this, not electric cars, but it's still mimicking this other, and just the fact that we're even talking about this, this is not a conversation we would have had five years ago. Like that's how new the world is, and that's how fast the change is, that we're discussing that, the way cars float and pile up, it's almost surreal. And yet it's happening over and over again.

When it feels like there's a type of person that has the intellectual capacity and the curiosity and the concern about empathy, even to care about other people to go like, we should figure out what's happening here. We should talk about this. And then there's another type of person that says, I'd rather that not exist.

So I'm gonna talk about something else instead. Well, and I really have a lot of empathy for those folks because I think a lot of us, writing about disastrous fires and what it does to people, and I think a lot of us kind of in the still safe world thought, well, as people go through these disasters, they're gonna become believers and activists on behalf of climate action.

And I think it's actually more like what happens after a school shooting. It's, I've just been through this trauma. My kid doesn't sleep anymore. I get heart palpitations when I smell smoke or hear a siren. And the last thing I'm gonna do is become an activist because I'm just trying to sleep through the night

without a nightmare. And so these events actually narrow the average person's bandwidth. It's very unusual that a full blown activist comes out of an event like that. Mostly it's people, I just want my old life back. And how can you blame them really, especially when it's been taken from them? That's what just happened. We had these four rough years because of we had a supply chain and logistics crisis coming out of a global pandemic.

We had inflation coming out of a pandemic. We had all these things, right? And people decided just as they did during the virus to go, instead of focusing on the thing that's happening and why that happened, I'd rather be mad at the people who are trying to do something about it, right? Or trying to inflict some sort of, by nature of what they're doing,

inflicting some sort of consequence on it, for it on me. Right, so 70 odd million Americans were like, I really don't like how the last four years are. Let's put back into office the guy who was entirely responsible for why the many of those things in the last four years happened, right? So there's this like, Hey, I don't like, uh, you know, all these changes I'm having to make because of, you know, what's happening in the world of climate. So let's just get rid of the things

that are making me do that instead of, oh wait, why are we doing those things again? We're actually living in a world that's gonna be imposing more and more limits on it. And so I can see why someone would wanna hear the person who says, no, there aren't any limits. They're the ones imposing the limits and I'm gonna set you free again.

And there is a kind of pretty low on the brainstem, low chakra impulse to resonate to that. But anybody actually paying attention, if you're kind of being brave and honest with yourself, you can see that all of this stuff is bigger than our political system and bigger than an individual leader and that, but that also implies, I'm actually gonna have to take some responsibility for this too.

And then what I've also been noticing is that you have natural cycles, you know, and in the American political system, you have a natural cycle from, you know, Democrat to Republican, you know, for better and worse. But then you get almost like a rogue wave, you get another cycle, a long-term cycle dovetailing and meshing with that. And so now we have this climate situation, this kind of planetary restriction and imperilment dovetailing with a regime change

that might naturally go back to Republicans, but it's a different kind of Republican. So you have a kind of once in a generation or once in a century political figure meshing with a natural cycle, but enhancing it, if you will, exacerbating it, intensifying it, the same way I think a rogue wave does.

And they're not common, but they're every now and then. It's almost like, I think you need chaos theory to understand it, which is above my pay grade, but you get these different wave cycles, and then every now and then they'll line up and something really colossal and often quite destructive happens. When boxer Muhammad Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam War, citing his faith as a member of the nation of Islam, his decision sparked a firestorm and cost him his heavyweight title. But Ali refused

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Or you get, which is a timeless thing, you get a demagogue that says, let's blame the problem on someone else, let's explain the problem away, let's, you know. Collect. Yeah, exactly. There's, so it's like you have this energy of this issue and you can go in one or two directions. And there's something, yeah,

there's something timelessly human about being attracted to that. And then, how much of that is cyclic too? You got Hoover on the one hand and then Roosevelt on the other, who ended up facing courageously this incredibly difficult problem and actually becoming the most popular president ever

in terms of re-elections. And so, taking the harder path is actually the most rewarding in many cases. And it's just, but we have to relearn that, it seems like. Maybe every generation has to relearn that. But we tell ourselves weird stories historically, so we don't always learn the lesson. Like we don't see Roosevelt as responding

to a climate crisis, but what do you think the dust bowl was? Do you know what I mean? We also don't see him as this like astute politician. You know what I mean? Like we tend to think of Roosevelt or Lincoln or Washington as these kind of moral leaders, which they were, but they were also astute readers. What Roosevelt did so effectively was understand

the sort of demagogic impulse in Huey Long and that one radio personality, I forget his name. But he was like, oh, what are they promising people? And this is where we get social security. This is where we get a bunch of the big building projects. He understood how to work different coalitions and sort of take destructive energy and feed it. And there was a brilliance to that

that I think were lacking the counter-ball. If you can take some of these figures, and Trump's not the only one because you're seeing in all these different countries, you have to credit them with a kind of political genius and a political and media genius. Whether it's deliberate or kind of an intuitive thing is almost irrelevant, but we haven't had, who's the countervailing force? Yeah, yeah, no, that person has not shown up yet and it's gonna be something new and maybe,

coming from an angle that we're not used to. Hopefully. Yeah, no, it's gotta be. But, you know, Bernie certainly looks like a soothsayer now and it's painful, really painful. And yeah, and a lot of hard lessons are being processed at the moment. So weird segue,

but I went for a run this morning along the water and it hit me because I've always had a weird feeling about Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest. I feel like there's a menace to it. Like the ocean, like everywhere else you go to the ocean and it seems nice and inviting. And there's something about Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest where it's like,

the ocean doesn't want you here. This ocean will kill you. There's something strange about it. And I was thinking of the golden spruce when I thought that. Yeah, there is that energy and the people who were drawn to it. And I'm from the East coast and swam off of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard.

The water's really blue and the sand is really pale and it's a completely different feeling here. Getting on the ferry to go to an island for a holiday, but we go around the bend from the ferry terminal and there are just these blank mountains covered in trees, and the ocean is this kind of steely gray. It's not blue at all. It hues toward green, or a celadon green, or a gray. And I thought, man, if I fell in there, I would disappear in a second. If I got washed up on one of those beaches, I would just be swallowed, and no one would

ever hear from me again. And you just don't feel that way on the East Coast, partly because it's so populated, but there is a different vibe. Absolutely. And it's, it is compelling, but it's also, especially for an Eastern or I don't think I'll ever fully reconcile to it. Yeah. Anytime I see like see somebody on a kayak

and then there's orcas around, I'm like, I want no part of going in that water at all. It's really intense. I did a circumnavigation of Vancouver Island, which is a three-week trip. And we went down the outside and big water and big wind and whales every day and albatrosses and sheer waters. And it really felt like you were in the oceans world and in that animals world,

and you were a very tenuous, precarious visitor. But I was on a good vessel with a really competent sailor, and it was some of the most exhilarating days of my life. And it's so beautiful and being close to these animals and the energy of it, the kind of unfettered dynamism of the Pacific is so glorious to be in and to feel that everything is vibrating as you're running down wind and just you're fully,

you're just, you're a leaf you know, you're a leaf being blown along on this planetary wave of energy and super humbling, super exhilarating. But I do, I have a joyful, you know, this was not a storm, we had really good weather, but you know, a storm, I'd be telling a different story right now, but when it smiles on you, boy, you feel exalted. Yeah, because as you walk along the beaches, you see these just enormous logs that have washed up. I know.

And you're like, oh, it tossed these around like they were toothpicks. They really do. And apparently out on the West Coast around Tofino and the West Coast of Vancouver Island, sometimes these logs will come in end-wise and they'll collide with a stone, with a cliff. And you don't think of them as having a tone, but they will hit so hard that they will vibrate and they actually make a tone

because there's so much force. And the idea of hitting a tree hard enough to make it resonate is very hard to imagine. But apparently as it hits the rock, people talk about that. You need to have a direct hit, but it's just a kind of energy that none of us is really used to and certainly could not survive. This is big wave, big storm energy,

and many ton objects being flung against immovable surfaces and intense things happen. Yeah. Are those just, those just fell off like a logging boat? What are those? Yeah, those are all logging booms, you know, these big collection of cut logs that are dragged up and down the coast by tugboat.

It's a pretty unique phenomenon. If you're not in the Pacific Northwest, you simply won't have seen them. But there are these huge rafts of logs that are, you know, fenced in by other logs bound together with cables and then towed at excruciatingly slow speeds by tugboats up and down the coast and these will break up and break loose and all of a sudden you've got a hundred, you know, quite large logs just rolling around. It's a real menace to shipping, especially smaller. Yeah, because I saw there was just a tractor on the beach this morning, just picking them up and moving them.

It's like, I've never, like, there's nothing like it. There's just something. I think we're having King tides right now also, and so that's really moving, really shifting everything on the tide line. So was the Tiger a hit when it came out or was it more of a slow burn? The Tiger, you know, it got option for film

even before it was published. So Plan B, Brad Pitt's company and Aronofsky, they got onto it even before it was in print and jumped on it aggressively like Tigers and tried for 12 years to turn it into a film and all different combinations and making a movie is really like constructing a house of cards and it's amazing that movies get made and that one didn't, and so it just never happened.

But the book itself, no, I would say it's a slow burn. It didn't, I think it was a national best seller. It got kind of a funky review in the times that really bothered me, as some reviews do. And then it got really glorious reviews and it went in 17 languages now, which is really gratifying and it just keeps chugging along. And so people who are too young to read a book like that

are now old enough to read it and are discovering it. And so it feels like it's kind of just in the flow and the golden spruces like that too, that just kind of just in the flow and the golden spruce is like that too, that just kind of keeps chugging along. And that's interesting to keep finding new half generations discovering it, people giving it to their kids, people giving it to their parents.

That is one of the most beautiful outcomes. Yeah, it's like a book or a project can kind of get to like an escape velocity. And once it crosses over into like, like a book sort of the non-fiction classics, like this is working. You don't read a lot, this is a good place to start. And those are the best recommendations.

And that is that power of the word of mouth of like a lot of people say, oh yeah, I know I've given this to like five people, or I'm giving this to everybody for Christmas. and that is that power of the word of mouth of, oh, like a lot of people say, oh yeah, I know, I've given this to like five people, or I'm giving this to everybody for Christmas. And those are the books I read, are the ones, if you recommended a book to me,

I would absolutely read it. Whereas I read reviews and it's like, okay, that sounds interesting, I should probably look at that sometime. But if I have a personal connection with the recommendation, then it's this beautiful human exchange on top of this cool adventure to go on. Have you read Night of the Grizzlies?

I haven't. That's the only one I've found that's even close to it in terms of that weird... Because narrative nonfiction is an amazing genre, but usually they're about shipwrecks or war stories or whatever. It's the only other one I found that's about an animal, I think. I got another one for you.

The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek by Sid Marty. And he's an Albertan old school horse mounted park ranger. So he's probably 80 years old now. And there was a grizzly bear in Banff, you know, this is the holiday town that was hunting and killing people in 1981. And it got a surprising number of people and the hunt for it was protracted.

And bear these, at least this bear was exactly as smart as the tiger was. Like they're both higher mammals and they dial in and adapt to their new hunting territory and their new food. I mean, it's amazing how quickly they calibrate and we do it too. We can readjust, but we think of animals as being a lot cruder, but actually they're pretty fine-tuned and their ability to rework and manipulate their new surroundings to suit their needs is frankly chilling. Well, I guess there's the man-eaters of Savo.

Yeah, yeah. That's sort of a classic. You know, they just, I was just reading, they managed to get hairs out of the teeth of the lions because they're in the field museum. And they were able to do DNA testing and see they could test their diet and what they'd eaten in a whole other level. Wow. Like last month they did this.

Wow. That's like they're getting the DNA from the mummies in Pompeii and finding out these groups. They thought it was a family. Or that they aren't family. Yeah. What were they all doing together?

And super, no, this, I mean, that's a really good reason to stick around or that they aren't family. What were they all doing together? Super, no, that's a really good reason to stick around and try to keep all this together is, we are catching up to these mysteries and these miracles. And it is what a joyful enterprise to be discovering these nuances, like what Lori Daniels did with the tree rings in BC or what's happening in Herculaneum.

Yeah, they thought it was like a mother shielding their child and now it's like a man with a boy and so maybe not such a heartwarming little insight into Greek history. Or maybe they just ducked into the door together. I was like, let's say it's a good Samaritan situation as opposed to a, you know. But the other thing that they're searching there in Pompeii

their whole library's got mummified too. So they have these tightly round scrolls and they can now X-ray them and AI is able to fill in. So they've already know what part of one of the texts says. So there could be whole philosophical works that we don't even know existed, or they could match up with titles we know existed. There's this one so-called name, Chrysippus, who wrote like 700 essays

and only like five sentences of them survive, but they could be in that library. They really could. I mean, whenever I think about the library at Alexandria, just my heart just sinks. Because when you think of what was at Alexandria, my heart just sinks. Because when you think of what was in there, but this is super hopeful.

No, this is, you know, that there really might be traces of it. Incredible book recommendation. I'm forgetting her name, but this author wrote this book called Papyrus. And it's all about the history of writing on paper. And it's largely about that period of, I love when you, I mean, look, The Tiger's an amazing book,

but it's also an incredible story. So you could have been a horrible writer and still it would have been pretty good. But then when you're like, how did you just make the history of papyrus fascinating to me? What are you? Brother, that I have deepest admiration for

is taking these kind of static subjects or these, you know, that are not charismatic, that won't eat you, and engaging us, total strangers and ignoramuses on that subject in the thrill of it. And that is a beautiful, it's kind of a transcendental act of transmission of my passion into your mind and so that you're feeling it too. And that is, that's real communication. And I really think it is transcendence. No, you're right.

Yes. So yeah, like, oh, I'm gonna make the history of Cod interesting or something. And you're just like, what are you doing, you wizard? I know, truly. Yeah, I know. Some notes to what are you doing, you wizard? I know, truly, yeah, I know. Some notes to be taken. Well, this is amazing.

Thank you so much. And I think we did it. Right on. Sweet. ["The Last Supper"] Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

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