The Daily Stoic - The New Gilded Age Has an Old Problem | Nathaniel Philbrick

Episode Date: October 10, 2026

From the California Gold Rush to the railroad boom to Silicon Valley, the promise of instant riches keeps convincing us that this time will be different. Nathaniel Philbrick, a bestselling author and National Book Award winner whose work explores the forces that shaped America, joins Ryan to talk about his new book, The Rush, and explore the unsettling parallels between the California Gold Rush and Silicon Valley. They also discuss how wealth becomes political power, the cost of progress, the lure of instant riches, and why we ignore history’s warnings.Nathaniel Philbrick’s Books: The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship EssexTravels with GeorgeMayflowerCheck out more of Nathaniel Philbrick’s books: https://www.nathanielphilbrick.com/Follow Nathaniel Philbrick on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natphilbrick/?hl=en🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I love narrative nonfiction. I love those books that have a crazy good story, but then as a result, they end up telling me about this wide swath of history. And almost nobody does that better than Nathaniel Philbrick. If you've read in the heart of the sea, probably his magnum opus, his incredible book about the whaling industry and Moby Dick and the real story it's based on. It's also got a great book on the Mayflower, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has a great book on George Washington. just one of our great narrative nonfiction writers. And this book is ostensibly about events, you know, 150 plus years ago. But you cannot read this new book and not feel it is about this exact moment. Well, I love the book. I will say you made a liar out of me, which I'm a little upset about.

I start every year by telling myself I'm not going to read another book about the Civil War this year. I've read too many and I don't need to read anymore. And I keep going down this rabbit hole. And so I saw your book. I actually heard about it before we were going to do this. And I was like, oh, I'm going to read that book when it comes out. I love the gold rush. It's fascinating.

And then somehow I ended up reading another book about the Civil War. Yeah, you got sort of a left turn there, I guess. But that was kind of what I discovered that you can't talk about the gold rush without tracing its tentacles into American history. And they lead so directly to the Civil War. It's kind of amazing. California is an incredible place. I grew up actually in Sacramento. So I knew a bit about the Gold Rush. Obviously, I lived in Placer County. You know, it's for right there in the name. But what's weird about California is, for some reason, I think because of technology in Silicon Valley and then entertainment in Southern California, it kind of is presented to the American people as this kind of a historical place, like, this modern place. And what's so fascinating about the Gold Rush is obviously, that's a long time ago. And the gold rush is like not even the beginning of California history.

Right, right. I mean, it goes way back. And in fact, I begin the book in 1510 with a Spanish romance novelist who invents the name California in which he describes this fantastic island of jagged peaks dominated by ruled by women where the only medal is gold. And so there's a prophecy. in the name California. And it reaches back, you know, all those centuries. The whole Spanish side of California is so essential to what it would become. The native side of California is so essential to what it become. It had a huge, a little 100,000 native people who spoke more than 100 languages. You can't delve into the gold rush or anything about subsequent California history without exploring how it got to that point. It's interesting. The narrative

that a country tells itself can so often preclude other understandings of a place, right? So I think people, if they understand the history of California, all if they understand the history of the Golders, they think about it as this movement West, right? The manifest destiny, people coming from the East Coast to the West and then ending there. And that's how I understood it, even someone who lived there growing up. And then it wasn't until last year I took my kids with me. We were visiting my relatives in Sacramento. and we went to Sutter's Fort, a place I'd been many, many times.

We'd go on field trips there as a kid. And, you know, obviously they've tried to do a better job in museums all over the country of retelling history, acknowledging the parts of history they left out before. So obviously, this sign wasn't there when I was a kid, but there was this sign explaining that Sutter's Fort had been built with Hawaiian labor. And it just blows my mind, like, that people came to California traveling, east, you know, like you think about it as this Western destination and the idea that it's built from, you know, obviously the missionaries are way out there in the Pacific and then they're

bringing people east to California. But just the idea, the sort of internationalness of Sutter's fort is Sutter's Swiss or something, right? I forget exactly. But he was a German Swiss employing Hawaiians to help build a fort in which many of the workers, were native people. Yes. So, yeah, it's international from the very beginning. Yeah, it's just kind of mind-blowing how that all happens. And then obviously where your book becomes a Civil War book is, again, another sort of

understanding of history. Grant and Sherman are both in San Francisco. Yeah, yeah. As is David Farragut, one of the, you know, right up with Grant and Sherman, but on the naval side of the Civil War. Yeah. You know, it's a who's who of who is going to be fighting this war, and they're all in California. They share this as a background.

You know, yeah, California isn't off by itself. It's very much in the middle of what's happening in America and the world. Sherman sees the first bit of gold that they pull out of Coloma, right? Like, he's right at the very beginning of the beginning of the gold rush. Right. He's the one that someone from Sutter's Fort has a sample of the gold, and they need to report this to the only authority really in California at that point, which was the U.S. military. The commander calls in Sherman, who's had some experience with previous gold rushes in Georgia

and says, you know, what is this stuff? And he looks at it and he gives it some tests. It's malleable in the way that only gold is. And he says, yep, this is gold. And, you know, then he would then go on a tour of the gold fields, write it up. in a report that would be the basis of President Polk's announcement that not only is California a new part of America, but we've discovered gold out there. And there is Sherman right there. Does it light you up as a writer when you find these characters that are more traveled than you would think that have intersected with more worlds than you would think? I got to imagine at that time in American history, the average person has only been a

couple miles from home. And then you get someone who's been across the United States. It's just the internationalness of a small percentage of the population at that time is fascinating to me. It is. And yeah, you have Sherman who, you know, has this vast experience. And then you have Peruvians and Chileans arriving. They have the Andes. They've experienced gold and silver there, but they hear about the gold rush. And what do they do? do, they get on their ships, pile into them, sail up the coast, and because most Americans who are sailing to California have to go around the Cape Horn, they're there in a fraction of the time. And so, you know, they're there. And Chinese, Australians are closer to California than a New Yorker

getting on a ship about to, you know, embark. And so, you know, from the beginning, there's so many Americans arrive in California and go, wait a minute, wait, this is a part of America, but, you know, it's, these people are from everywhere. I can only imagine, I mean, now people are so familiar with what California is because of movies and TV. Can you just imagine being someone in Boston and then like newspapers are reporting what San Diego is like or San Francisco is like? It would have been unimaginable. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was that, you know, there was one, One sort of early account, two years before the mast, Richard Henry Dana, and that had come out well before the gold rush.

And it had been a bestseller because, you know, people are getting interested in the gold rush. But then the gold rush hits and people pick it up like it's the bifle. It's a tourist guide, but it's out of date. And that's the thing about California. With the discovery of gold, everything goes into warp speed. So what had applied, you know, not even 10 years before when Americans were there, and no longer applied because, you know, all these people were piling into the state. The previously pretty sparsely inhabited interior, except for native peoples, suddenly is frowned with people from

not only America, but everywhere else. Yeah, obviously imperialism and colonialism is this, you know, sort of profoundly negative evil thing. But there was just this subset of people, you know, like maybe a British naval officer or a minor that at that time could have traveled all over the world. Could have been to Australia or could have been to South America or could have been to India. Yeah, it's just surreal how provincial the world must have been and then cosmopolitan in another sense. Yeah. And, you know, before the gold rush, there was the China trade. Yeah.

And so you have a lot of Americans getting on the, and this is the trade that invented the clipper ship. you know, the fastest sailing vessels anywhere. And so they're going to China regularly. And so some of the people, many of the people who end up going to California, have seen more of the world than you would imagine at that time. Because already these technologies are being invented, whether it's the telegraph or the steam engine with trains and steamships. And so things are moving quicker.

They're expanding farther. And so when gold is discovered in 1848 in California, the news goes global, almost in a way news had never gone before and means that, you know, you get this great global movement of people, you know, the largest voluntary movement of people up until that time. And it could never have happened if gold hadn't been discovered, you know, at that technological moment in the 19th century. To get from New York to San Francisco, people are walking, you know, a good chunk of the journey on the one hand. And then, you know, just to go to your earlier book, like, you've got people who live in New Bedford, you've got whalers who know about Tahiti and Hawaii and the Galapagos who have just charted across enormous swaths of ocean. And that kind of contradiction is so fascinating to me. Yeah. And, you know, where I live, I've lived on Nantucket.

Island, you know, 30 miles off Massachusetts for the last 40 years. And Nantucket was the whaling capital of the world. And these guys, in keeping with what you're saying, is, you know, they had seen, literally seen the world. They had been some of the first white people to see islands in the Pacific and all of this stuff. The Pacific was their backyard. But whaling was going downhill in the second half of the 1840s. In 1846, they get a great fire that.

destroys the waterfront. The town has had the tar kicked out of it as whaling on the mainland becomes more and more popular and they're feeling left out. And then they hear about the discovery of gold. And they go, wait a minute, you know, it's time for us to explore the next new thing. We've got these whale ships.

Let's load them up, you know, not for a whaling voyage, but with would-be prospectors, sail around the horn, that's no big deal. We do that all the time. sail through the Golden Gate, and they end up literally abandoning the ships in front of San Francisco. And, you know, there would be more than a thousand abandoned ships just there, a forest of mass in front of San Francisco. The Nantucketers pour out Nantucket would lose a quarter of its voting population in nine months to the gold fields. And it was an extreme case, but this kind of thing was happening in towns all over the country.

So I was fascinated by the William Gwynne character, the senator, who I'd never heard of. Like, I grew up California my entire life, never heard of this person. Everyone should read the book. For people who haven't yet, he's basically this guy who moves from the south to California to try to turn California into a slave state.

He was a rich guy who couldn't have been a senator where he was from. So he tried to sort of become it in the West. But I just found him to be a sort of uniquely American character. I have this sort of theory. There's kind of this dark energy, right? And there are certain individuals who decide to play to that dark energy and certain great leaders who try to take us away from that dark energy. Lincoln, obviously, not just, you know, in terms of slavery, but like he does this famous speech about sort of mob violence and demagoguery. And then you

have someone like William Gwynn who sees it as a path to power and influence and decides to play to that dark energy. Absolutely. I think, you know, that's basically, the story of California is, will it go to the dark side? Literally, because you know, you have, what they were known as the chivalry, the pro-slavery southerners, who are just basically trying to undermine

the freedoms guaranteed by California's constitution. And they spend the 1850s doing that. And you then have David Broderick, who's by no means an angel. Yeah. He is the political boss of California. He demands that any office seeker pay him, pay him half the salary to keep the political machine going. He's by no means someone who is inviolate. But he's also someone who reads passionately, poetry, Daniel Defoe, all of these kinds of things. And he is staunchly against the South's attempts to create a slave. state basically in California. And when he is shot in a duel and killed, it looks like, you know, that dark energy is about to take things over. And then almost miraculously, I think,

appears in 1860, a Unitarian minister from Boston named Thomas Star King, who much like Lincoln, sees things in almost a spiritual way and sees California's future as a part of the union as absolutely necessary to its redemption, really. And so he goes around California, going into the southern dominated mining towns, preaching the spiritual sanctity of the union. Lincoln is later quoted as saying, this may be apocryphal, but saying that, without, you know, Thomas Star King saved California for the Union. And so, you know, California is, you know, battling both sides of this. And I think you're absolutely right in seeing that dark energy as something that's kind of always threatening.

Yeah, I don't know exactly where it comes from. Is it human nature? Is it incentives? Is it just, you know, some people are light and some people are dark sort spiritually? but it's this timeless battle that I think it's kind of a throughline in many of your books. Like even whaling as an industry, you know, it's like it's technologically interesting. And then it's so darkly extractive and evil and violent, you know. And so it's like it's just this constantly cropping up in all these different places in American life. Absolutely.

And I think it's the struggle of life. Yeah. We are put on this earth. And we're in the. middle of these two forces. And what was going on with California was greed in an excessive way. You know, this is a state founded on the principle of creating instant wealth. And, you know, this is, it's a crucible for all the dark impulses in humanity. And so, you know, people who come to California are immersed in this. And so it's, you know, it's, it's a great opportunity

for that dark energy. And I think it's fascinating to see how the light is never completely extinguished. Yeah, the great David McCullough has that line about how you can never forget that history could have been otherwise, that it could have gone in a different direction. And I think that was what was so fascinating to me about your book is that it's this battle between the sort of the forces of unmitigated greed

and then just normal American capitalistic greed, right? Like, hey, we want to just pull all these minerals out of the ground, from stolen land versus we want to have slaves do that at an industrial scale for us, right? Like it feels like maybe not a big distinction if you're one of those people on the ground, but it is a distinction, right? Like within the normal bounds and then the sort of untrammeled, unlimited direction that certain extremists want to take things. Yeah. You know, you look at capitalism. I mean, it's been such a driving force for progress, and potential good, but unleashed, it can be taken to extremes that are very, very dangerous.

California is this kind of petri dish for how a society deals with these kinds of temptations and the consequences of going all the way. For example, with gold, they use mercury to help extract the gold from the soil, creating an amalgam that they then heat to get the pure gold, but it leaves the mercury in the soil, and it's not very good for the miners either. And it's left this lasting legacy. You've got technology pushing things, pushing things. And, you know, they go from miners with pans to creating these industrial-sized hoses, hydraulic mining, capable of washing away entire hillsides. And pretty soon you've got a corporations with a handful of people with these hoses.

replacing what thousands of individual miners were doing, and in the process, you know, destroying the landscape. You know, you've got silt going down the rivers, clogging things up. San Francisco, to this day, is shallower than it was before the gold rush because of all the junk that's come down the rivers as a consequence of the California gold rush. And, you know, if you just let it go,

Oh, that's what happens. You need to balance things. The example of California is any kind of example. It takes time for government to catch up to what's happening. Things are happening so quickly that no elected, you know, democratic government can respond as fast as things change, particularly in California in the 19th century. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I was so struck by in the book is just the pastest

prolog, just how much the themes of what was battling and going around in California, at first in the gold rush, and then in the boom of the railroads, which is the other fascinating part of the book, you know, these are the same forces. These are the same sort of moneyed interest versus government, you know, sort of demagoguery and populism, the fine line between those two things. Capitalism and progress versus unmitigated greed and disaster. Like, this is a microcosy. not just of the fights that are continuing in California to this day, but all over the world in this moment. After writing this book, it seemed to me that there's just such a through line from the discovery of gold to where we are today, whether it's Silicon Valley or whatever, because you have technology meets this lust for instant riches with this sense that, you know, just go ahead and do it.

Don't wait for the law, you know, the government to change things. Just go ahead and do it and the rest will fall into place. And with no sense of, hey, we're going to stick around and, you know, we're going to, the thing is we're going to move on. You know, there was an expression after, you know, after me, the deluge, you know, we'll just move on. And boy, that sounds familiar when you look at the current gold rush. were in the middle of. Yeah, it's like you look back at wailing and you go, man, their interests

eventually tends towards oblivion and, you know, sort of extremes, right? So it's like, hey, they can't regulate themselves. They can't help themselves, right? It's a collective action problem. And then the gold rush. It's the same thing, right? First off, I mean, even just the pioneer sort of expansionism, right? It's not necessarily the government that's like, hey, let's send people this way and this way and this way. It's just people motivated by their own self-interest go, I want that land over there, right? And they're the ones pushing the frontier mile by mile. And then obviously we have the gold rush and then the different waves of technology in the gold rush that are destroying the environment. Then you see this with the railroads and sort of

creating this class of tycoons and robber barons. We always look back on it and we go, okay, that was too much, too fast. We needed to rain it in. And then it's so interesting, in the present moment, we are just always unable to learn that lesson or recognize that pattern. Absolutely. You know, it's, you know, this has been said so many times that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. Sure. And I am here before you today to say, even if you know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. Because when you're in the moment, you have no historical perspective. You see things in terms of your impulses, you're, you know, what's good for you.

You know, you have no sense of where things are headed. You know, you're just driven by the moment. And it blinds you in many instances to the ultimate consequences. If there is a future in a hundred years, they're going to look back and say, what were these people thinking? You had a chance. You had a chance in the early days to do something about this, and you let it spin larger and larger and larger until it was unstoppable. Yep. And that is the story of humanity, particularly when it has technology at its beck and call.

You know, that's where things accelerate. I mean, that's what happened with the gold rush. You had the impulse for wealth linked to these new technologies that made things happen so quickly. Government couldn't keep up, and so off it goes, and then, you know, eventually things catch up. But you just worry, you know, we'll get to a point where that lust for the next new thing that is going to make us rich is going to take us to a place we can't get back. from. And, you know, several times in the gold rush, you began to, as I was working on this book, you know, I get into that historical moment, even though I do know the ultimate end, I can't help but think what is going on here. You know, here they are. They're building the transcontinental

railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, even as hydraulic mining is taking out the foothills of this year in Nevada Mountains, undercutting what they're going up. And I think that is a metaphor for kind of these impulses that humanity has. I think the cautionary tale is if you link those natural impulses to new technological abilities, things are going to happen that are potentially very dangerous.

I think anyone who's trying to figure out what's happening in the world right now should read this book. because you see it happen twice. First, all the money and power from the gold rush tries to take over the political system. That's the slave powers heading west and trying to continue to hijack the political system.

People don't fully understand that America basically post-Jefferson is this sort of slave oligarchy rigging the system so slavery can never fully be touched. And then not satisfied with being defensive, it goes on the offense, right? The Mexican-American War is about expanding slave power. California. The gold rush, as you say, is about expanding slave power.

And then you see it happen again with the railroads, where this massive technological breakthrough, this enormous expansive energy, trying to go in all these different directions, build all these rails. It creates political power that does fully take over the levers of government in California and then makes its way backwards to Washington.

but you kind of see how this, it starts economically and then it goes into political power. And I think that's kind of the story of Silicon Valley over the last generation or so and Wall Street over the last generation or so. Yeah, yeah. No, and it's interesting when you look at California in the example of Silicon Valley. I mean, every one of my books, I have been so impressed by the power of place. I mean, I got into history because I moved to Nantucket. and became fascinated with the history of where I lived,

Nantucket, the whaling capital of the world. And so for me, getting into history was like kind of a local thing that happened to be an island with these connections that were global. And it's, you know, led me to writing books about the history of America. And then here in California, what is so striking is that, you know, here in California, you've got bang, the gold rush, people develop this ethic where we're going to go to a place, work really fast, make mistakes, run over others, you know, but ultimately something good is going to happen. And it will, you know, hit the mother load, as the miners used to say. And then, you know, you have Stanford, Leland Stanford, who is one of the big four, one of the billionaires basically,

created by building the Transcontinental Railroad across California. And, you know, he wants to get out of San Francisco, so he buys this farm that he renames Palo Alto. And after his son dies, he and his wife found Stanford, what becomes Stanford University. Of the big four, he's the one most interested in technology. He hires a photographer and the two of them basically invent the technology that will ultimately lead to motion pictures. And it happens in what will become Silicon Valley. Once again, for me, it was an example of who knows if there's any mojo here, but the power of place in creating events

and taking important positions in history, the future, and the present in the future. That's interesting that your work is so influenced by place. How do you think about what you do? Because it's not quite biography. It's not quite journalism. Where do you classify your books? Yeah, you know, I've wondered the same thing. But, you know, I was an English major in college, as was David McCullough. Novels like Moby Dick, the novels of William Faulkner, have all been very important to me from the very beginning.

And when I examine history, there's the mythic element is important to what I'm, working on. I'm trying to create a sense of life as lived, but with the resonances that go beyond any specific time, that reach out to where we are now. The past is the past. But things happen that have effects that go on and on and on. And so with each one of my books, I want to grab somehow connect with that universality that attaches to experience like when I was doing the story of Plymouth plantation the voyage of the mayflower from the beginning you know I wanted to tell an varnished story of what happened historically but I also needed to connect that with that mythic legendary part of the story of the Mayflower and the pilgrims and you know we're

what America would become. I think that's, for me, that's the important gift history has to us. It connects us not just with the past, but with what's happening today and who knows what will happen in the future. Yeah, because I feel like in the heart of the sea is much more clearly in the, I guess you'd call it sort of narrative nonfiction. It's a singular story that you manage to go down these sort of side paths and tell all these other stories. But there's a cast of characters who are on a very specific journey. And then these books are much more, I feel like, about a place or a time. It's a more wide-ranging collection of a lot of different stories. Yeah, particularly with this book. I mean, it's episodic. Each chapter in a way is its own book.

It could be. And that was the unique challenge writing this book was to find a through line, to find, because it was important for me for the book to have a narrative force. You know, you begin here, and it takes you through the Transcontinental Railroad and beyond. And to do that, I had to find the characters that could hold the reader's attention and move you through. And there is the rivalry between Gwyn and Broderick that is kind of the engine of the narrative. but each chapter was its own narrative. And that's what I just so in. I mean, it was a challenge to put them all together.

And find them, I'm sure. It was. And to find the ones that would take me there. Because I could see it. You know, this is where it wanted to go. But who do I go with? Who are the characters that will take me there? It was a challenge, but I have to say, once I knew my cast of characters,

It was an amazing experience writing this book. It came together in a way that I will always be very thankful for that I was able to begin and end in a way that I felt I was doing some kind of justice to what happened when gold was discovered. Well, these are the books I love to read. I was curious if you, I have a bookstore here in the little town we live in in Texas that I run in the heart of the season. a classic, right? Everyone knows that it was a massive hit. And then I love when you find the ones that, like, deserve to be in that category, but people don't know enough about.

So as a fan of the genre, I'm just wondering if there's any books that you have loved, that you're like, that's what I'm trying to do. Who are the goats of the genre for you? Endurance. Sure. Is one of the great, great books. I think that might be the best nonfiction book ever written, just given its structure. its narrative. David McCullough has always been a role model for me and he was a friend. In fact,

we went to the same elementary school in Pittsburgh at very different times. You know, for me, it's funny. I read so much in research that I very rarely lift up my head and look around and explore what other people are doing in the genre. You know, when I'm going to bed, I read novels. and things like that, and even poetry and things like that. For me, it's just I try to write the book. I don't write these books because I'm an expert in the field. No, what's for me, the discovery that is so important. And, in fact, when I'm working on a book, when I'm just learning about the topic,

I keep a research journal of, you know, as I'm learning. And it's a record of, because once you've spent three or four or five years for the topic, you know so much that you're not thrilled and excited with everything about it because you know it, you know? Yeah. And so when I start writing, I go back to those research journals and get a sense of what really excited me. Yeah. And because that's what I'm trying to communicate with is that excitement. Because I really get revved up exploring these topics.

And I hope the reader is there with me sharing in the excitement because, you, you know, You can't make this stuff up, and it really happened. And it means, you know, it's just so much depends on who we are by what happened back in the past. Well, we were talking about technology and the way it's going to disrupt things and how it just sort of goes on without much thought of the collateral damage. Do you think that the ability to spend six or seven years on a topic to understand it from top to bottom and put it in a, like, that feels like something under siege. when you can just ask a computer to survey every record and book and journal and oral history ever created and give you some slop answer that, you know, might not be as good, but it certainly doesn't require seven years of human labor. I know. I mean, it's weird now. And part of me is very

glad I'm 70 that I've got, you know, David McCullough never did email. Yeah. He never, he didn't want to change the fact that he's working on his typewriter, you know? And, you know, good writing is really hard, especially writing narrative history where, you know, you're trying to convey very complex things in as clearly and direct a way. It's really hard writing. And it takes, at least for me, I think for anyone, it's hard and it takes many, many drafts. You know, It's not always an enjoyable thing. You know, you're slogging away. I mean, I love to do it.

But I wonder, you know, especially young people, with all of these tools now available, who is going to spend the time to, you know, labor over the research, labor over the sentences? I mean, is this just going to be something that a few monks do in a cave somewhere? I hope not. I mean, maybe the optimistic take would be it could speed up some of the research and thus make it more accessible to do that the writing itself, right? Because ultimately, still somebody has to make the choices.

What story are they telling? Who are the characters that are interested in? What is the point that they want to make? But I imagine of the seven years you spent on a book, a lot of it is spent trying to, to make connections and track down things. Like, I need material on this, but I don't know if it exists. And then I got to go find if it exists. And then I got to personally go through it.

Anything that could speed that process up might be a good thing. Absolutely. And, you know, I was talking to a writer just a couple weeks ago who was here on Nantucket for a week in the summer about this. And he, you know, he's using Claude and, you know, all of that kind of thing. where I haven't gone there yet, but saying when it comes to doing exactly what you're talking about, you know, finding archives, it's led him to places he never would have found otherwise, you know, really remote things.

Yes, so I think there is that possibility. There's other applications of AI in transcribing documents, letters and papers that are very hard to read. There's AI tools being developed that can, you know, read those and provide a transcript that's very reliable almost instantly. And so archives across the country can, or the world can start, you know, what would have taken years to put online can now be done much more quickly. And pretty soon, you know, everything could be on the web. I've heard David McCullough talk about or he talked about how he would get lit up reading the handwriting of the people that was writing,

about, and I think Doris Cairns Goodwin has talked about the two. And I do like that romantically. And then the book that I'm writing, it's the first one where I've had to go through a lot of letters. I think we might be overstating what a good use of time it is to be trying to figure out, is that a P or an L? Or, you know, like, just slaving over trying to make sense of somebody's horrible handwriting. I'm not sure if that's what I want Nathaniel Filberg to be spending his time on. I'd rather him be, be, be, uh, working on the next book, if we could get some of that time back, that might be good. Yeah.

No, that's, you're right. You're right. You know, I just, in some ways, I need to talk myself off the cliff and say, okay, there is, this can't, could be a use for good. Yeah. And that's exciting. But, you know, what will happen is there could be a time when people just don't go to these archives anymore because it's all online.

Sure. I think something will be lost. But, you know, I guess that's the progress of technology. something is being gained, but something is also being lost. I remember reading something where Updike said, where he had made the transition from writing on a typewriter to a computer and saying to his editor, it's different. I don't know what's different, but it is different.

And so, you know, that's an interesting point. What the technologies we use, what impacts do they have on what we write? Because, you know, I find myself, I compose largely on the computer, but then we'll reach a point where I'm scribbling on a yellow pad because that's somehow freeing. And then I'm printing out the manuscript and then scribbling on that, you know, those kinds of things. And I would guess someone younger who's only known a keyboard will always, you know, that will be limited to that. So I have to fly to New York to go to the Museum of Television and Radio to find this obscure news, like to watch a three-minute obscure news broadcast to see if the character I'm writing about might have said something. Like, I'll track something down to the ends of the earth, but that does seem like a technological problem that could be easily solved.

And I think your point about, it'd be nice if you could search some of these archives. And you might miss stuff not going through it. You know, Robert Caro talks about you got to turn the page. It's wonderful that he went through every single page in the LBJ library at the same time. I'm sure because he is a human being and he's also getting up there in years, he missed things that would have been found if he was able to search. It'll be different. Yeah.

And, you know, I remember also, you know, when computers were just, you know, word processors were just coming in. And, you know, there were predictions, well, you know, books will now be written in half the speed. Yeah. And I don't know if that's true. I guess some kinds of books are. Not the good ones. Yeah.

I hope, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that's the case. You know, you need to rely on AI to do stuff is, you know, you're basically relying on what happened in the past to write for you. And, you know, it's almost like the middle ages where people are going to lose the ability to. actually do the tasks to do the work that created human culture. They're just going to be able to search it and tell a machine, you know, what to do. I think as long as the technology is helping you do the thing you do better, rather than doing the thing for you, that's what it's all about.

Yes. And it's a fine line in some extent, I guess. But, you know, I grew up with a slide rule in high school. You know, I was using that to, I remember in chemistry, you know, it just was taken forever. You know, you had this thing around. And then the first calculators came in. And people were saying, oh, my goodness, you know, you'll never use that. And here we are.

You know, so these things happen. Just hope that human agency doesn't become simply searching for things. It becomes creating things. because once that stops, I think humanity is in a cul-de-sac. I think that's right. That's the perfect place. And I love the book. I love so many of your books.

And I hope you keep doing what you're doing because everyone is a must read in our house. So thank you very much. Well, thank you. It's just been so much fun to talk with you.