Rising from Ashes | John Vaillant on Building Resiliency From Destruction

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

0:37Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Why choose a Sleep Number smart bed? Can I make my sight softer? Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that. Cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your Sleep Number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. It's the final days of our Black Friday sale. Recharge this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort. Now only$17.99 for our C2 mattress and bays, plus free premium delivery.

1:11Prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Check it out at a Sleep Number store or sleepnumber.com today.

1:19Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. 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.

2:10Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I'm going to grab something off my shelf here. One second. So if you have ever seen anything I've shot in my office, you might've 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, you know, 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.

2:49It's a member of what's call this serotonous 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 amor fati, which the Stoics 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.

3:27It is the idea of amorphous. I talk about this in a number of my talks these days. I 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.

4:05I 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.

4:53Went the other way. I flew from Dublin to London, London to Vancouver, did a talk in Vancouver, and 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. So I 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 going to 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.

5:26And then the folks at the Ramy Studios were nice enough to go pick him up. And we sat down and 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 have 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.

6:03I 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 got to read them. They're badass.

6:14You 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 is not a there's not most prizes. Yeah. Long list build up some suspense, short list, a little more suspense. And then the big reveal. They don't do that. You found out you didn't win. I found out that I didn't win. There's two finalists in one winner. So I'm in pretty good company.

6:52Yeah. I can I'll take it. Yeah. But 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 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. I didn't even know when the date. It's actually a really good idea not to know when prize dates are. Otherwise you sweat it, you know, and I had no idea.

7:25So 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 on stage. It is massive. Yeah. You know, Oprah is right there. And it was major. And so so that felt like, you know, a big national award. And the Pulitzer was this strange afterthought that actually is more significant in terms of my bio now. But yeah, it's pretty crazy. All your books will now say that. Yeah. You as 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.

8:04Yeah. 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 going to 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. But what a wonderful call to get. And yeah, 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.

8:41Yeah. 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, it doesn't. No, it can almost get in the way. Sure. 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 Reyes quote, he says, accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference.

9:16And 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. You know, high or low, you're just sort of like, okay, you still have to mull the wand, you still have to write the next book, you 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?

9:47Sure. 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. Yeah. 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?

10:25What are the comments? You know, 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 limbo, yeah. 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.

11:01And 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, OK, you put this thing out there, face the music, you know, reap whatever rewards there are. And there also may be people who you have really stimulated or traumatized. And, you know, 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.

11:41So to me, it feels like this is part of the gig is to be there, to, you know, 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 ravening. Yeah. Just tearing it to bits. And, uh, you know, and I got to say, I really haven't had that experience.

12:13You know, what I've had more is this deep engagement and a mixture of gratitude and horror and, uh, 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. 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, you know, I would hope to connect with, but I 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, you know, like, because I'm just like, well, you're just focused on this sort of external thing.

13:00But isn't that natural? I mean, it's, you know, it's as close as we're going to get to birth and it's a pretty big deal. And there is, there is some pain involved and there is a thing in the world now that wasn't there before. And presumably, you know, as, 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. And what's hopefully a positive and stimulating way and trying to move the needle somewhere.

13:36And so, yeah, I want to be there for that. I think we should be there for that. No, no, that's true. You got to take the wins when they're there. Just It's like, you know, sometimes people can come up and be like, oh, I love this or thank you. And, you know, 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.

14:15And 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 avert and awe shucks it. And I'm starting, I'm forcing myself now to kind of stand up and look in their eyes and take it. Yeah. Like it's hard to take in a funny way. It is. 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 you've got to think about, too, is you really busted your ass on this.

14:55Like you might have 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 criticism and rejection because that's an inherent part of any creative work is knowing that, yeah, you're going to work for so long and something's going to take forever to get off the ground or never get off the ground or it's going to 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.

15:29Like, 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. It means it's almost like having polarizing sunglasses that have to act really quickly because you do not actually know what the person is going to 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?

16:04Yeah, 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 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, you know, I can just keep my leather jacket on all the time. Yeah. Or I could take my shirt off and be exposed and you're exposed when you're short.

16:39And so, 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 it's, 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. Right. 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, assessing the traffic.

17:15I 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 at scale allows is just a totally incomprehensible mass of people to have access to your brain. Yeah. Because I was thinking the alternative 10 ,000 years ago, you're walking across the Scottish Highlands and you might see a group of three people on another hillside and you're assessing, but you've got a lot of time.

18:03And an arrow might come or a waving hand, 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, then there's the wolf issue that has been, you know, and, but there's just a lot more room often. And so, yeah, no, things are really compressing. I, yeah.

18:31We just took our kids to an outdoor performance, the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then, they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

19:08Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, Empathetic Kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

19:49And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

20:32There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

21:10And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

21:37Well, like the Daily Stoic email goes up 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 got to be what I have to say. You can't let that many people have access to your brain.

22:11Like you probably shouldn't be checking the comments on your neurocognitive piece. 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, no, the comments, the comments. 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.

23:01And then everything else is extra. Like New Orleans, say this word lanyard, it means like the 13th donut. Like it's, 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 zero copies, cause it came out the day of a terrorist attack or, you know, the, I dread that. Yeah. Or the, I put out a book and the publisher was like, oh, wait, sorry, we're moving the release date. We literally can't print copies because of the pandemic.

23:36You know, just stuff happens, 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, and so that is a kind of, it's not really fatalistic.

24:17It's just, I think it's realistic, but there's a sort of, you know, Zen quality, you know, 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, you know, that's, it's all its own kind of gold, but the, 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.

25:08And 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, you know, 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 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.

25:46He 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 ranch inside the bookstore. And it goes up through the second story up to the upstairs. He's this amazing builder. Anyways, in this fire, 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 just sent him this book. And I was asking him how he felt about it all happening. And he was like, oh, it was a mandala. And I was like, well, first off, you're much more philosophical than I am.

26:19But his point, which I've been thinking about was he was like, doing it was the fun part. 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 a 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.

27:03Then if you enjoyed while you were doing it, like they say, painters like painting, writers like having written, you want to enjoy writing or else, you know, then the only reason you're writing this for money, fame, attention, you know, 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.

27:41But it's also this was a mountain I somehow needed to climb and a set of concepts I had to grapple with to 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 and I don't have any good news, but at least it's like, okay, this is familiar terrain.

28:30To me, the central metaphor of fire weather that I 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, I love the metaphor of that idea that there's some, there's some things that only extreme circumstances can unlock. Man, I mean, there is such a beautiful message in that. You know, this annihilating energy, you need it to be fire hot in order to make the cone pop open.

29:12Those 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. You know, some quite extraordinary things could be growing out of it. It's beautiful and awful also. Exactly. Like the beauty is dependent on the awful and the violence of it.

29:50And not to get too, you know, 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, you know, to really, I mean, imagine the evolutionary process that, you know, all the hits and misses that it took to have this successful cone that has to be in a raging boreal fire in order to, oh, that's my cue. I think it's my time to shine, you know? And so that's optimism, you know, if ever there, you know, if you need a definition.

30:34Yeah. 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've been thinking a lot about this, the 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.

31:16Yes. 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 Lodge Pole Pines in Southeast BC. And what she found from her cores is you could see when the fires happened.

31:58And 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, you know, 5, 10, 20 years, they'd do a small burn. They would kind of clear out the underbrush. The bigger, healthy, you know, 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.

32:39And 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 dateline, the stop, is there in the dendrochronology, in the tree rings. This is one of the things I write about. So Mark Shrelis 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. Isn't it? 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.

33:14How 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. 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 four thousand years old. Bristlecone. Yeah, the bristlecone pines. And it was it was fascinating because, you know, there was like that hurricane, I think, a year ago, two years ago that flooded Death Valley.

33:48Right. 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 bristlecone pines knows that things like this have happened before. Think of what they've seen. Yeah. 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, you know, in four years. Yes. All our things about hundred-year floods, hundred-year fires.

34:21No, 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, you know, 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 the resistance of change. Exactly. Like the Queen Elizabeth, I mean, lives through so many insane events.

35:06Like 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 going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change. And the paradox of like, yeah, that's what a controlled burn is. If you want to keep this the same, you've got to be willing to engage in some change. It's almost an artificial stability. Yes. It's a stability in a larger sense, in a big picture stability instead of a small picture stability, which is what we were like.

35:43I want it this way. It should be this way. This is what we're doing. 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. 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. Because 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.

36:30Nothing's even vibrating. And, you know, 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, Wessner, 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.

37:07And 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 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, you know, pick it up. You know, 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.

37:54But 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. Like the weather wasn't that great. You know, we had to get off the horses a lot because it was super steep, all this stuff. And yet it felt completely, I just, 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.

38:47You'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, 20, we were like, we don't need this anymore. And we've never used them in any serious capacity since. I know. But, you know, we may be reacquainting our relationships with horses. You know, there's interesting times ahead. And the, you know, our relationship to energy is changing profoundly. And 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, what, what is realistic to expect of planet Earth with this many people on it.

39:31Interesting. Well, 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 recommend 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 the horror of that juxtaposition, I don't think is going to 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.

40:08And 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 going to 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, you know, it's cold, it's thin gruel when you get down to it.

40:49And 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 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, you know, that is a kind of mechanized insanity.

41:26And so we really do need to have these balancing energies from the old world. Yeah. Like good food, a comfortable bed, and just, again, as I said, the creature comforts. Yeah, there's a Daniel Boorstin 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, etc.

42:05You can create systems and structures and organizations and institutions. But we've also lost a lot of the sort of 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 complement 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. 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.

42:55But 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 human knowing, like the real street wisdom of being in the world and knowing where you are and how to negotiate it. Or even just some of the hard-won 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, 2 ,000 years or 1 ,700 years of sort of meditations and thinking about this sort of period of Greek and Roman history.

43:50And then when you let someone come in and obliterate a lot of those, and that personality trait, we might go, you know, this is a, this is a function of social media or reality television or whatever. It's like, no, that personality is our, 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, but if you have generations of people that have no longer read those texts, had those conversations or, or added new stories or ways of understanding, uh, that you just, you, 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.

44:35Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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? Yeah. No, it's another order. We could all be annihilated. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's really another order. And 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.

45:24and they stack up the way certain types of kind of silicate molecule does. Like the way, 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 back end tends to lift up in typical cars, not electric cars. But it's still mimicking this other, you know, and just the fact that we're even talking about this.

46:04This 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 is it's almost surreal. Yeah. 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 going to talk about something else instead.

46:42Well, and I really have a lot of empathy for those folks because I think a lot of us, you know, 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 going to become, you know, 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 going to do is become an activist because I'm just trying to sleep through the night without a nightmare.

47:21And so it actually, those, these events actually narrow the average person's bandwidth. It's very unusual that, 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, right? 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?

48:05Or 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, 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?

48:46We're actually living in a world that's going to be imposing more and more limits on it. And so I can see why someone would want to hear the person who says, no, there aren't any limits. They're the ones imposing the limits and I'm going to set you free again. And there is, you know, a kind of, you know, pretty low on the brainstem, low chakra impulse to resonate to that. But anybody actually paying attention, you know, 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 that also implies I'm actually going to have to take some responsibility for this, too.

49:26And 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, you know. 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.

50:23And 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.

50:50my study of history it's like look societies will face sort of vexing problems you're athens in the you know peloponnesian war and then there's a plague you have different kinds like you can either have that sort of rational leader who is like here's this tough problem here's what we're to do about it. 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. 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.

51:32And then, you know, how much of that is cyclic too? You know, you got Hoover on the one hand and then Roosevelt on the other, you know, who ended up, you know, facing courageously this incredibly difficult problem and actually becoming the most popular president ever in terms of, you know, reelections. And so it, you know, 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?

52:13Do 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'm forgetting 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.

53:01And there was a brilliance to that, that I think we're lacking the counterbalance. 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, you know, almost irrelevant, but we haven't had, who's the countervailing force? Yeah. Yeah. No, that person has not shown up yet. And, and, uh, it's going to be something new and maybe, you know, coming from an angle that we're not used to, uh, uh, yeah, no, it's gotta be.

53:39But, you know, Bernie certainly looks like a soothsayer now. And it's painful, really painful. And, yeah, 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 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.

54:15And I was thinking of the golden spruce when I thought that. Yeah, there is that energy and the people who are drawn to it. And, you know, I'm from the East Coast and, you know, swam off of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. And the water's really blue and the sand is really pale. And it's a completely different feeling here. And, you know, getting on the ferry to go to an island for a holiday, but we go around the bend from the ferry terminal and they're 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, you know, a celadon green or a gray.

54:56And I thought, man, if I fell in there, I would disappear in a second. And 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. Yeah, absolutely. And it's it is compelling, but it's also especially for an Easterner. I don't think I'll ever fully reconcile to it. Yeah. Anytime I 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 like a three-week trip.

55:38And 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 ocean's world and in that animal's world. And you are a very tenuous, precarious visitor. But I was, you know, on a good vessel with a really competent sailor. And it was, you know, some of the most exhilarating days of my life. And 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 downwind and just you're fully, you're just, you know, you're a leaf being blown along on this planetary wave of energy and super humbling, super exhilarating.

56:33And 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. 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, you know, with a cliff. And, you know, you don't think of them as having a tone, but they will hit something.

57:15It's 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. You know, this is big wave, big storm energy and many ton objects being flung against immovable surfaces and intense things happen. Are those just those just fell off like a logging boat? What are those? Yeah, those are all logging booms.

57:51You 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.

58:26Yeah. It's like I've never like. Yeah. 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 optioned for film even before it was published. You know, 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 Tiger's. 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.

59:05And it's amazing that movies get made and that one didn't, you know? 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 bestseller. It got kind of a funky review in the Times that really bothered me as some reviews do. And then it got, you know, really glorious reviews And it went and it's in 17 languages now, which is, you know, really gratifying. And it just keeps chugging along. And so, you know, people who are, you know, 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.

59:45And the Golden Spruce is like that, too. You know, that just kind of keeps chugging along. And that's interesting to keep finding, you know, new half generations, discovering it, people giving it to their kids, people giving it to their parents. You know, that is that is, you know, one of the most beautiful outcomes, you know. Yeah. It's like it's like a book or a project can kind of get to like an escape velocity. And once it crosses over into like, you know, like a bookstore, the nonfiction classics, you know, like this is working. You don't read a lot. This is a good place to start. And those are, you know, those are the best recommendations.

1:00:21And that is, you know, 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, you know, or, you know, I'm giving this to everybody for Christmas. And, you know, that's, those are the books I read, you know, are the ones, you know, if you recommended a book to me, I would absolutely read it, you know. Whereas, you know, I read reviews and it's like, okay, you know, 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.

1:00:52Have you read Night of the Grizzlies? I haven't. That's the only one I've found that's like even close to it in terms of like that weird, like because narrative nonfiction is an amazing genre, but usually they're about like shipwrecks or, you know, 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. Oh. The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek. Okay. By Sid Marty. And he's an Albertan old school horse mounted park ranger. Okay. So he's probably 80 years old now. And there was a grizzly bear in Banff, you know, the holiday town, that was hunting and killing people in 1981.

1:01:34And it got a surprising number of people, and the hunt for it was protracted. And bear, 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, you know, we do it too. You know, 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.

1:02:15Yeah, 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 roots. 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, you know, a really good reason to stick around and try to keep all this together is, you know, we are catching up to these mysteries and these miracles.

1:02:55And it is what a joyful enterprise to be discovering these nuances, like what Laurie Daniels did with the tree rings in B.C. or, you know, what's happening in Herculaneum. Well, 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 is their whole library's got mummified too. So they have these tightly round scrolls, and they can now X-ray them.

1:03:35And AI is able to fill in. So they 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 was this one stoke named 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 in there, but this is super hopeful. No, this is, you know, that there really might be traces of it.

1:04:13Incredible 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 is an amazing book, but it's also an incredible story. So you could have been a horrible writer and still 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 doing? Brother, that I have deepest admiration for is taking these kind of static subjects or these, you know, that are not charismatic, you know, that won't eat you.

1:04:49And engaging us, you know, total strangers and ignoramuses on that subject, you know, in the thrill of it. And that is, you know, a beautiful kind of transcendental act of transmission of my passion into your mind and so that you're feeling it too. And that is, you know, that is, yeah, that's real communication. And I really think it is transcendent. No, you're right. Yes. So. Yeah. Like, oh, I'm going to make the history of Cod interesting or something. And you're just like, how, 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.

1:05:29And I think we did it. Right on. Sweet.

1:05:38Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

1:06:05Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

1:06:59And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.