The New Gilded Age: Are We Repeating the Gold Rush? | Nathaniel Philbrick

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 https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-rush-california-gold-the-civil-war-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world?_pos=1&_sid=661546772&_ss=r, 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 https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/the-rush-california-gold-the-civil-war-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world?_pos=1&_sid=661546772&_ss=rIn the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/nonfiction9?_pos=2&_sid=661546772&_ss=rTravels with George https://www.nathanielphilbrick.com/travels-with-georgeMayflower https://www.nathanielphilbrick.com/mayflower Check out more of Nathaniel Philbrick’s books: https://www.nathanielphilbrick.com/ Follow Nathaniel Philbrick on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natphilbrick/?hl=en 🎟️https://www.dailystoiclive.com/DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing toThe Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content:https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email athttps://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 https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  AI and Gemini for free, or upgrade for $9.99 a month to experience ChatGPT and DeepSake. There's even a voice memo and AI summary feature that can record meetings and sudden inspirations and let the AI instantly transcribe and summarize them for you. The Rayneo I O smart glasses are perfect for professionals, parents, or anyone handling high information density. You can check them out at rayneo.com, R A Y N E O dot com. 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

• 1:23Speaker 00

  his magnum opus, his incredible book about the whaling industry, and Moby Dick, and the real story it's based on. He'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.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got a 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.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  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 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 in Southern California, it kind of is presented to the American people as this kind of ahistorical place, like this modern place. And what's so fascinating about the Gold Rush is, is obviously, that's a long time ago. And the Gold Rush is like, not even the beginning of California history.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  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 metal 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,

• 3:56Speaker 01

  several hundred thousand 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.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  It's interesting, the narratives 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, or if they understand the history of the Gold Rush, 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

• 4:52Speaker 00

  the parts of history they left out before. So obviously, the 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 but just the idea, this sort of internationalness of Sutter's Fort, is it Sutter's Swiss or something, right? I forget exactly, but...

• 5:31Speaker 01

  He was a German Swiss, employing Hawaiians to help build a fort in which many of the workers were native people.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's international from the very beginning.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just, 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.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. As is David Farragut, one of the, you know, the, you know, right up with Grant and Sherman, but on the naval side of the Civil War. And, 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, yet California isn't off by itself. It's, it's very much in the middle of what's happening in America and the world.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Right. He's, 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 US 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's, you know, 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 goldfields, write it up in a report that would be the basis of President

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Polk's announcement that not only is California a new part of America, but we've discovered gold out there. And, yeah, and there is Sherman, right there.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  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 the internationalness of a small percentage of the population at that time is fascinating to me.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  It is. And, and, yeah, you have Sherman, who, you know, has this vast experience. And then you have Peruvians and Chileans arriving. They have the Andes, and they've experienced gold and silver there. But they hear about the Gold Rush. And what do they 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, 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,

• 8:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. I mean, it was that, you know, there was one sort of early account, two years before the mast, Richard Henry Dana, and that had come out well before the gold rush. And, you know, it had been a best seller 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 Bible. 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, no longer applied because, you know, all these people were piling into the state. The previously pretty sparsely inhabited

• 9:47Speaker 01

  interior, except for native peoples, suddenly is thronged with people from, from not only America, but everywhere else.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, the, 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 miner, 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.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you know, the, before the gold rush, there was the China trade.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And so you have a lot of Americans getting on the, and these, this is the trade that invented the clipper ship, you know, the, the fastest sailing vessels anywhere. And so they're going to China regularly. And so you, 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 you know, already these technologies are being invented, whether it's the, 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

• 11:07Speaker 01

  California, the news goes global, almost in a way it news had never gone before. And means that, you know, you, 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.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  To get from New York to, 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, in New Bedford, you've got whalers who know about Tahiti and Hawaii and the Galapagos, who, who have just charted across enormous swaths of ocean. And that kind of contradiction is so fascinating to me.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  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, the first white people to see islands in the Pacific and all of this stuff. The, 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

• 12:43Speaker 01

  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 goldfields. And it was an extreme case, but this kind of thing was happening in towns all over the country.

• 13:28Speaker 00

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• 15:38Speaker 01

  Country.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  So I was fascinated by the William Gwynn character, the senator, who I'd never heard of. Like, I grew up California, my entire life, never heard of this person. So 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, 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, in the West. But I just found him to be a sort of uniquely American character. I, 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

• 16:21Speaker 00

  who try to take us away from that dark energy. Lincoln, obviously, not just, you know, in terms of slavery, but like he, 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.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think, you know, that's basically the story of California.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Is, will it go to the dark side, literally? Because, you know, you have, well, they were known as the, as the chivalry, the pro-slavery Southerners, who are just basically trying to undermine the freedoms guaranteed by California's constitution. And they, they spend the 1850s doing that. And you then have David Broderick, who's by no means an angel.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  He, you know, he is the political boss of California. He, 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, 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, you know, a slave state basically in California. And when he is shot in a duel and killed, it looks like, you know, the, the, that dark energy

• 17:51Speaker 01

  is about to take things over. And then, almost miraculously, I think, appears an 1860 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, you know, Southern dominated mining towns, preaching the spiritual sanctity of the Union. Lincoln

• 18:31Speaker 01

  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, is, you know, battling both sides of this. And I think you're absolutely right in, in seeing that dark energy as something that's, it's kind of always threatening.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  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 are are light and some people are dark sort of spiritually? But but it's this timeless battle that I I think it's kind of a through line 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 and so it's like it's just this constantly cropping up in all these different places in American life.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think it's it's the it's the struggle of life.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  We are put on this earth and we're in the middle of these these two forces. And what was going on with California was greed in an excessive way. But, you know, the this is a state founded on the principle of creating instant wealth. And, you know, this is it's 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 it's a great opportunity for that dark energy. And I think it's fascinating to see how the light is never completely extinguished.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, the 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 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 from stolen land versus we want to have slaves do that at an industrial scale for us, right? Like, it it 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 untrammelled, unlimited direction that that certain extremists want to take things.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, you know, you look at capitalism. I mean, it's 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 is this kind of Petri dish for, you know, how a society deals with these kinds of temptations and the consequences of going all the way. For example, with with gold, they use mercury to help extract the gold from the soil, creating an amalgam that they then heat to to get the pure gold. But it leaves the mercury in the soil, and it's not very good for the miners either. And, you know, and it's left this lasting legacy.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  You've got technology pushing things, pushing things. And, you know, you 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 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 the silt going down the the rivers, clogging things up. San Francisco, to this day, is shallower than it was before the gold rush

• 22:24Speaker 01

  because of all the junk that's come down the rivers as a consequence of the California gold rush. And, you know, and if you just let it go, 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. It, you know, it's 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.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things I was so struck by in the book is just the the past is prologue, just how how much the themes of what was battling and going around in California, 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 interests versus government, you know, sort of demagoguery and populism, the fine line between those two things. Capitalism and progress versus unmitigated greed and and disaster. Like, this is a microcosm, not just of the fights that are continuing in California to this day, but but all all over the world in this moment.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  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 this lust for instant riches with this sense that, you know, just go ahead and do it. Don't wait for the law to, 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 after, you know, after me, the deluge, you know? You know, we'll just move on.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  And, boy, that sounds familiar when you look at the the the current gold rushes we're in the middle of.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like you look back at whaling and you go, man, their interests eventually tends towards oblivion and, you know, sort of extremes, right? So so it's like, hey, they can't regulate themselves. They can't 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 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 they're the ones pushing the frontier mile by mile. And then and then obviously we have the gold rush and then the different waves of technology in the gold rush that are destroying the environment.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Then then you see this with the railroads and sort of creating this 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 rein 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.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, it's it's, you know, this been said said so many times that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And I am here for you today to say, even if you know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. Because the, you know, the if you when you're in the moment, you have no historical perspective. You see things in terms of your your impulses, your your, 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 and it blinds you in many instances to the ultimate consequences. If there is a future in 100 years, they're going to look back and say, what were these people thinking?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that, you know, that that is the story of humanity, particularly when it has technology at, you know, 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 the 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 you just worry, you know, we'll get to a point where that that lust for the next new thing that is going to make us rich is is going to take us to a place we can't get back from.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And, you know, and 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.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  This year in the Nevada mountains, you know, undercutting what they're they're going up. And I think, you know, that is a metaphor for kind of these impulses that humanity has. I think the cautionary tale is if you, you know, link those natural impulses to new technological abilities, things are going to happen that are potentially very dangerous.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  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. Because 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 it not satisfied with with being defensive, it goes on the offense, right? The Mexican-American War is about expanding slave power. California and the gold rush, as you say, is about expanding slave power.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  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 roads, 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.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, and it's interesting when you look at California and the example of Silicon Valley. I mean, I've 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 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

• 30:08Speaker 01

  got bang, the gold rush, people develop this ethic where we're going to go up 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, it be the, you know, hit the mother load as, as the miners used to say. And, you know, 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's, he, he wants to get out of San Francisco, so he buys this farm that he renames Palo Alto.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  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, in creating events and taking important positions in history, the future and the present and the future.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  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. What, where do you classify your books?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I 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 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, you know, reach out to where we are now. The past is the past, you know, but things happen that have effects that go on and on and on.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  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 a 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, what America would become. I think that's, for me, that's the important gift history has to us.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  It, it, it connects us not just with the past, but with what's happening today and who knows what will happen in the future.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I feel like in the heart of the sea is is much more clearly in the, I guess you'd call it sort of narrative nonfiction. It's a singular story that you, 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.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, particularly with this book. And I mean, it's episodic, each chapter in a way is its own book. It could be. And, 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, 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 Gwynn and Broderick that is kind of the engine of the narrative.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  But each chapter was its own narrative. And that's what I just saw. And I mean, it was a challenge to put them all together.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  And find them, I'm sure.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  It was. And to find the ones that would, I would take me there because you, I could see it, you know, this is where I 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, you know, that it, you know, 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.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  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 Sea, 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, 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?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Endurance.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  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 was, 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, 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.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  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, and, you know, 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 with a topic, you know so much that you're not thrilled and excited with everything about it because you know it, you know? And so when I start writing, I go back to those research journals and get a sense of what really excited me.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  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 can't make this stuff up and it really happened. And it means, you know, it's, it's just so much depends on who we are by what happened back in the past.

• 37:38Speaker 00

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• 39:05Speaker 00

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  ironwall.com/dailystoic. You fill out a quick form and you can request a free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before the threat reaches their front door. Ironwall.com/dailystoic. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link is in the show notes. 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 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

• 40:33Speaker 00

  to survey every record and book and journal and 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.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  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 it's hard and it takes many, many drafts. You know, it's not always an enjoyable thing. You know, you just, 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

• 41:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  I mean, maybe the 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? Like, because ultimately, still, somebody has to make the choices. What story are they telling? Who are the characters that are interested, they're 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 make connections and track down things like, I need material on this, but I don't know if it exists. And then I gotta go find if it exists. And then I gotta personally go through it. Anything that could speed that process up might be a good thing.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, you know, I was talking to a writer just a couple of 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 in transcribing documents, letters and papers that are very hard to read. There's AI tools being developed that can,

• 43:23Speaker 01

  you know, read those and provide a transcript that's very reliable almost instantly. And so archives across the 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.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  I've heard David McCullough talk about, or he talked about how he would get lit up reading these, the handwriting of the people he was writing about. And I think Doris Kearns Goodman 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, like, just slaving over trying to make sense of somebody's horrible handwriting. I'm not sure if that's what I want Nathaniel Philbrick to be spending his time on. I'd rather him be be working on the next book. If we could get some of that time back, that might be good.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  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, it could be a use for good. 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.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  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. You know, I remember reading something where Updike said, you know, where he had made the transition from writing on a typewriter to a computer and saying to his, his editor, it's different. You know, something, 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.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  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 has only known a keyboard will always, you know, that will be limited to that.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  So I had 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 it, if the character I'm writing about might have said something like, I'll, I'll, 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

• 46:29Speaker 00

  being, and he's also getting up there in years, he missed things that would have been found if he was able to search.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  It'll be different.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  And I don't know if that's true. I guess some kinds of books are.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Not the good ones.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  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, 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 had created a human culture. They're just going to be able to search it and tell a machine, you know, what to do.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  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, that's what it's all about.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  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 had this thing around. And, 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, you know, once that stops, I think humanity is in a cul-de-sac.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  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 every, everyone is a must read in our house. So thank you very much.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. It's just been so much fun to talk with you.

• 48:46Speaker 02

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