Stephen Hanselman (3:41)

stage just a couple days ago.

Ryan Holiday (3:43)

And, like, I got hit by it. I mean, obviously I feel it every time I see the story, but I was like, oh, wait, six years ago, that all went down, right? On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid this pandemic. And on the 13th, the President declared a nationwide emergency. I remember going and picking my son up for school, thinking, I don't know when I'm going to do this again. And I didn't do it again for a long time. Maybe you remember exactly where you were

Stephen Hanselman (4:14)

that week, what was happening, what you

Ryan Holiday (4:16)

were doing, what got sort of frozen in time. You know, there was those little boards that you have where you, you know, you're like, you take the pictures of your kids when they're one month old, two months old, three months old. We still have the one that was like eight months old for my youngest. Just so much of our life got blown up that we just didn't do that anymore. It's like a watch that broke. And when it Broke is of such significance that you leave it there. And I think back to that time a lot. Obviously the pandemic was difficult and tragic. Many ways it was preventable, and in other ways it was just, you know, a thing that happens historically. Like Marcus Aurelius knew that feeling. Marcus Aurelius lived through the Antonine plague. He would have felt Rome empty out. It was both an unprecedented and a very precedented moment. And of course, it was an eye opening one. Right. It forced everyone to slow down. It forced us to take a look at what our day to day life had become. What we'd been prioritizing, forced me to to consider whether we were actually happy with our life and how it was set up. I mean, that period where I didn't get on an airplane for hundreds of days, I just learned stuff about myself, about my life, about my family, about how my life should be set up. And I think it's always interesting to hear from people about how Covid changed her life, because everyone has an answer. And I was really struck by this book, actually. Peyton, who works in the bookstore, said, I think you would really like this book. She'd gotten an advance reader copy of this book, Raising Hair by Chloe Dalton. And I wouldn't have thought from the COVID and the title that it would be a pandemic book. But then again, who thinks that Meditations is going to be a pandemic or a plague book? But they both are. And this hare that is a wild rabbit in the English countryside changed the life of Chloe Dalton, as did the pandemic that forced the two of them together. Chloe's a political advisor, a foreign policy specialist who worked in UK's parliament for over a decade. And during the pandemic she retreated to her house that she just finished building in the English countryside. And she was taking a daily walk. Maybe a habit that you picked up during the lockdowns. Well, she didn't know that finding a baby hare on one of those daily walks would change her life. This is something she writes in the book about exactly that. Let me read it to you. When the centrifugal forces of the pandemic flung me home to the countryside and pinned me there, relief and awareness of my good fortune ward inside me with a deep restlessness and anxiety about the future. I struggled with the change of pace. A friend and colleague came with me when we shut her office. She and I maintained the strict rhythm of our working days and planned incessantly our return to the city. A baby hare had no place in any of These scenarios we had discussed or that I had envisioned for myself. On a solitary walk a few days previously, I had sat down on a rock by a stream that was a little more than a rivulet, my boots squelching in the mud, the lifeless trees above me scarcely bleaker than my own thoughts, and indulged in miserable feelings about my own life slowing down to a commensurate trickle. And now, improbably, I stood over a wild creature that I would have to find a way to feed and keep alive. So, first off, she's a beautiful writer. You're going to love this book. You should absolutely read it. And that book, Raising Hare, is about her journey of discovering that animal and what she discovered in herself as she nurses it back to health. And then it sort of plays this kind of peripheral, but then also central role in those quiet months that stretched into years. Peyton had read the book and she was raving about it. And so I read it and Samantha read it. We both absolutely loved it and we ended up carrying it in the bookstore. If you know about how we do the Painted Porch, it's only like books that really moved us that we really loved. So we don't carry every book, just books we really, really like. And we loved this one. It's won an insane amount of awards. It was a New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller. It won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. Book of the year. It was a book of the year for the Times, shortlisted for the British Book Awards. It's great. And so knowing that the anniversary of the pandemic was coming up, I wanted to reach out and see if Chloe could talk about some of that.

Stephen Hanselman (8:47)

One of the things that struck me with your book, and I realized I read it in March 25th. You know, we're coming up here on the six year anniversary of COVID and it feels that those early days, and it is, it is weird to be nostalgic for such a terrible thing, but it did feel like things got very quiet and very calm. And it's kind of like we all got sober for a brief period of time.

Chloe Dalton (9:12)

That's so well put. Yes. I think life simplified down to its essentials, to the circle of the things you could actually control or influence, because we all became so, you know, became so obvious to all of us. There was so little we could control. And so it felt like the circumference of my life had narrowed anyway because of the pandemic in a way that I wasn't used to. And then the hair narrowed. It Further still, because my attention became focused on this one animal. But it is right, you know, you can't really be nostalgic about a time that was. Caused so much suffering to so many people. But there were things about it that were an opportunity to learn and that I appreciate having had the chance to reflect on.

Stephen Hanselman (9:56)

Yeah, like, I live out in the country too. And one of the things my wife and I noticed is we were like. We'd lived there almost 10 years. We'd never even really been there in the spring. Cause it was like a. Such a busy time of year for us.

Ryan Holiday (10:09)

We were like, oh, it's gorgeous here.

Stephen Hanselman (10:11)

Like it's always pretty. But we just had never actually watched spring happen day by day before.

Chloe Dalton (10:19)

It's so true. And I think also, you know, the turning of an entire circle, you know, seeing the seasons turn made me. And being in one place, looking out of the window or going on small walks in this one patch of the countryside in the north of England made me realize that my sense of the passage of time was very warped by living in the city. And obviously, you know, in extreme circumstances you notice the weather in cities, but often you don't notice the passage of time. And everyone around you is moving at the same kind of speed. There's a sort of, you know, like a demographic, you know, everyone is the same sort of age in the same sort of stage in their career and frantically busy. And I found it fascinating to have the chance to realize that in the course of a year in the countryside, you see these patterns repeating themselves. And you see at the most simple level, you know, the grimness of winter giving away, giving way to spring and to summer and to autumn, and then also realizing that things dying have their place in the countryside. That I became fascinated with winter, which was a sort of a period of the year that normally I didn't really like. I counted the days waiting for it to be over. And it made me realize how unnatural in many respects my life was living in the city.

Ryan Holiday (11:38)

What I noticed is like, okay, so

Stephen Hanselman (11:41)

you're gone for a week and all the leaves fall off the trees, or you're gone for a week and everything turns green again. And so to consistently be in one place for an extended period, period of time, that's actually the natural way of living and you notice it. And the unnatural way is this sort of sporadic in and out existence we have, which involves cars and airplanes and hotel rooms and. And so you have this busy life, this sort of path that you're on. And then all of a Sudden it stops, and then you're. You realize that this larger cycle, this other world has been operating day in and day out without you, and you notice it for the first time.

Chloe Dalton (12:21)

I think you're right. And I think also culturally, you almost sort of acquire an idea growing up that living in the countryside, living in a way that's close to land, is something that our grandparents or great grandparents did, that it was a narrow way of life, that it was a hard way of life, and that actually, you know, success looks like literally going to the city, making your way, and then as much as possible, going as far as you can. And obviously, I'm generalizing. Lots of people don't live like this. But certainly, you know, in my kind of group of people working in politics or journalism and media in different sort of shapes and forms, it was. It was really about like getting. Learning about the world, meeting people in far flung places, all these incredible experiences and a huge opportunity. But I think I. I sort of. I'd lost sight of the fact that living attached to a particular patch of land in a specific ecological niche is where we all sort of began. And we've been encouraged to think that success means leaving all of that behind. And actually, I almost had a chance to go in reverse and to realize, you know, ideally, we have a kind of balance. And I don't mean to glamorize it completely, but I did realize there's a lot of dignity and meaning that can be found in a life that is rooted in one place and one community and in lasting relationships with people in that place and with the land in that place.

Stephen Hanselman (13:51)

I think you mentioned this in the book, but the house you're living in is kind of an old English country house. And obviously, that is the thing about England in Europe, is it just like this is an old building by Texas standards, which means, like the 1880s.

Ryan Holiday (14:04)

Right.

Stephen Hanselman (14:05)

And I do remember being struck by that during the pandemic, going like, oh, people in this building lived through the Spanish flu. But it didn't go much further back than that. Obviously, in Europe, it's a whole other story.

Chloe Dalton (14:19)

Well, I should be clear that my house had very humble origins. It was a barn for storing sheep and not storing sheep, for keeping sheep, sorting sheep, keeping them under shelter during winter months, and for storing hay. It had, like, an upper level where they would have put the cut grass back in the day when they would have cut it by hand. And when I bought it, it was a complete ruin. It was just an outline of walls and fallen rafters and these Large spaces which they would have used to move the animals in and out. So it's not the English country house in the way that some people might think of it, but it is in other respects. It is. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's just surrounded by fields and woods and streams. It's quite exposed. There's a kind of north wind that comes howling down the valley. You really feel every twist and turn of the weather, but you also feel a sense of, you know, even if the house isn't old, you look at the landscape and think, you know, these are hills and valleys that were cut by glaciers. The animals that live on this land have adjusted to all the changes that we've introduced, but they've been there a long period of time. And as a human, I'm a newcomer.

Stephen Hanselman (15:31)

Yes. Even building something on the ruins of something else is very. That's one of the things that strikes you, like when you go to Greece or Rome, is like, this is an old building that they built on top of a building that was old to them. And maybe. And maybe even further, someone else had done that before. So it's this. This sort of very human thing of building on top of buildings, on top of buildings.

Chloe Dalton (15:53)

Yes, absolutely. And then again, you can't really get your head around it as a human. But I began thinking also about animal generations and thinking even though they leave no trace. And that's part of what is so sort of mysterious and beautiful about wild an. That, you know, a hair, when it passes, it just leaves behind a shallow indentation in the grass. And as soon as the seasons change, that grass is lifted again by the wind and by new growth and it's gone. But even so, they don't leave a trace in the way that we do. Memorials to themselves in the way that we do. But I had a feeling of, you know, generation after generation of generation of species of wild animals living in that place long before humans, which I imagine will be the case if you stripped away the buildings, you know, where you're sitting right now and you imagine back in the past that would be the

Stephen Hanselman (16:42)

same would be true when in a long enough timeline, you know, the ruins of a barn or an old brick building or even a giant civilization is really not that much more than a small indent in the grass.

Chloe Dalton (16:56)

Yeah, that. Beautifully put. It really is. But, you know, we're trying. We try in our lives to find, you know, significance and meaning and these sort of. I suppose we're fulfilling certain social codes. You know, I was really proud when I got my little barn in the countryside. I could turn it into a house and put a fence around it and could invite friends to stay. You know, that kind of meant something in human terms, but that sort of desire to enclose, you know, obviously partly because we need to be safe from the elements and be able to be warm, but also it was that sense of, this is my patch of land and I put this fence around it, I'm gonna keep the animals out. And one of the beautiful parts of my experience was realizing that that impulse to sort of, you know, keep things out is actually, you know, we can miss out on a lot, actually, if you decide to lower those kinds of barriers and to, and to see nature in its whole as something that we're part of, not something that we have to kind of wall ourselves off against.

Ryan Holiday (18:02)

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Stephen Hanselman (20:37)

When I think back to the early days of the pandemic and then as it dragged on to the middle days of the pandemic, I think about how much time slowed down. Like the days felt so long and one of the things that strikes me six years later is that that's gone. As if the days ever got longer or shortened. Like the 24 hours in a day. There's the exact same amount of time. Just as circumstances changed and my attitude changed and my relationship to things changed, I got the sense that I had too much time and now I feel like again, I don't have enough time. But that's all my perceptions. I wonder if you sort of felt that.

Chloe Dalton (21:21)

I did. I felt this strange sort of alignment of self and mind and heart and place, which is not something that I was used to feeling. So I found that I would watch the hare as she grew from being this very small, adorable little animal just a few days or weeks old, into a much into a mature, elegant wild animal, raising her young in my house and my garden. But when I watched the hare, everything would slow down. My attention would focus. I I would open my senses because I would be trying to understand a creature with which I had no common language. And I'd be trying to understand her movements and what they meant and how this animal reacted to the weather and, you know, what the minute movements of her ears might be. And I would feel my pulse slowing and my heart rate sort of steadying and a feeling of calm that I hadn't really experienced. I'm not somebody who'd ever had sort of meditation as part of their life or anything like that. You know, I was, I was all about information, responding to worlds crises. Things felt good when everything was at a very, very high, fast pace and time did sort of slow and it was possible to exclude a lot of the noise. And I think there was an overall atmosphere of wanting to support each other, that life was fragile and precious and community was important and we should look after our neighbors and who knows how this is all going to end. And I think the shocking thing now is that feeling of, you know, there's a lot of aggression in the air, there's a lot of. There's the opposite of everything I was describing. And that combined with all our many sources of information that we're bombarded with and our worry about the future is almost a sort of antithesis. But rather than being terribly alarmed about the way things are now, I keep, I keep thinking, well, in a short period of time we've experienced both and actually that means that we could experience the other again. And it didn't take much in my case, you know, to have this complete transformation of my own worldview and my attitudes. And so I take a lot of comfort for that when things feel really sort of mad and frenetic again now.

Stephen Hanselman (23:34)

Yeah, it's like there was this period where everyone had time for hobbies and they were thinking about things and then, you know, you somehow managed to take a baby hair into your life. And now if I was like, hey,

Ryan Holiday (23:47)

do you have time?

Stephen Hanselman (23:47)

If someone came to your door and said, hey, could you. I need you to take care of this baby kitten or this baby raccoon or some. You'd be like, I just can't possibly squeeze this into my life. I don't have time. But we did for this period if

Chloe Dalton (24:00)

someone came to my door with a hair, and as long as it wasn't like ill in some way that would require medical treatment, I would be quite happy. I think this is the thing, is that sometimes we lack that excuse to be able to dispense with all the things that we know are stressing us out and the activities that we feel obliged to take part in but know we don't particularly enjoy. And I would, if we'd had this conversation before I had the hair in my life, I would have told you that I loved absolutely everything about the way I lived and didn't want to change anything. And, and I just feel so grateful that, you know, circumstances, the geopolitical level form of the pandemic, but also the personal level, in the form of this hair meant I had no choice but to my habits. And I really think. I don't know if you've had the same in your life, but it really is when you're forced to change. Well, you know, if it's. If it's our choice and you study how you want to improve your life, you never really get round to it. But something comes along and makes you realize that your habits are not as set in stone as you thought. And, yeah, I went through all the stages you described. You know, before the hair, I was making cheese and sourdough bread and all that kind of stuff that everyone was doing up and down who could up and down the country. But then when the hair came along, I. It was that awakening to nature. And I try very hard to hold onto that and to the things that I've learned. Even if I can feel this, like, steadily creeping rise of busyness and stress and worry, I'm trying to. Trying hard to not let go of what hair taught me.

Stephen Hanselman (25:33)

Yeah, well, it's like we all got sober and then we all relapsed, you know, and now it's sort of fighting to get back to some of the good things of that period and to maintain them against the onslaught of, you know, what people consider to be normal or real life or whatever everyone was eager to get back to. We got back to it and we're like, oh, I kind of miss some of that.

Chloe Dalton (25:59)

But, Ryan, if you think that we didn't have AI going into the pandemic, I think that these sorts of changes, you know, we're all being bombarded by, with these messages and this possibility that life is about to change dramatically. And somehow, if we don't get with the program and speed up and reinvent ourselves and embrace these tools, we're going to be completely dispensable as human beings and totally redundant. And we've got people telling us that no one's going to have a job because you're not going to need to work, and it's all going to be done by AI and robots and things. So it's almost as if, in our defense, we're getting a lot of external input at the moment. It says, speed up, you know, run faster, catch up, take this new piece of technology because otherwise, you know, you're going to be left behind. And I bet I'm probably not the only one who. I feel that. I feel those. Those things pulling at me and are kind of warring internally of my emotions, saying, hang on a second. It feels like we've been here before with other sorts of moments, you know, with other technological waves that we seem to be. Our generation seems to be experiencing faster and faster and partly wants to go, hang on a second. Let's not just totally throw out everything that we've learned about what we need to feel more at peace with ourselves and with others around us. And I keep coming back to the hare when I have those thoughts. The contrast between the way a wild animal lives and humans live, it's absolutely staggering really. Unfortunately, we can't all go and lie off in the grass and be hares. But, you know, there is, we are animals at the end of the day, even though we live like we're not

Stephen Hanselman (27:31)

on our little ranch. You know, it was interesting to sometimes go out and walk and go like, like my donkey doesn't know there's a pandemic. You know, they're not aware of any of this. Like they're just living their life and they're not wondering when things are going to go back to normal. They're just existing in the present moment, which is obviously something that animals, I think sort of teach us most powerfully is just existing. And there's no comparison, there's no envy, there's no anxiety. I mean, even in the Bible they talk about, you know, the birds not, not feeling anxiety about tomorrow because tomorrow's going to care of itself.

Chloe Dalton (28:08)

But this is one of these wonderful things because we don't know, you don't know what goes through the mind of a wild animal as much as we can sort of infer and, you know, extrapolate from their behavior, you know, you know, when, when a wild animal feels unsafe and things like that. But I used to watch the hare asleep for hours on end in my house and just wonder what goes through the mind of an animal like that. You know, what emotional states they feel. Because I'm sure they're capable of feeling, you know, long term emotional states in a way that we sometimes think animals aren't right. There is that, you know, our, our minds that if you think about it in historic, historical sense, have been the things that have lifted us up and have enabled everything about the way we live. You know, they're also our own worst enemies because, you know, you spend a lot of time, if you're anything like me, you know, wrestling your own mind.

Ryan Holiday (28:59)

Sure.

Chloe Dalton (29:00)

Often, often in the middle of the night when you should be sleeping and, and the sense that for better or worse, you know, animals are, their lives are guided by their instincts and they're able to know what those instincts are. I think sometimes there's a lot between us and understanding instinctively what we need and trying to the challenge of trying to find a way, an opportunity to live life in a way that closest to our natural instincts when we have so many pressures and it's just so hard. But that's what it is to be human and why we can't. As much as I write in the book about how I have moments where I'm almost was curious to imagine what it'd be like to be able to slip into the body of a hare and run across the field and understand what it's like to be that animal. We don't know, but we can only imagine. That's partly why they're so fascinating.

Ryan Holiday (29:48)

No, you make a good point.

Stephen Hanselman (29:49)

It could be terrible. They could just be thinking, I don't want to get eaten by a hawk. I don't want to get eaten by a hawk. Like, it could be absolutely horrible. But they do seem to be slightly less anxious than we are.

Chloe Dalton (30:03)

Yeah. And I think, you know, I, I, I was just in my house this weekend before coming back down to London, and I was watching the hares. And you can tell what the weather's going to do by the behavior of the hares. It might look gloomy, but the hairs suddenly get up during the day. And then, you know, sure enough, the sun comes out and you can tell that they're enjoying the sun. And, you know, you can, you can see, see moments where they exhibit what looks to me like, you know, joy in life and exuberance and energy and so, yes, I don't mean to suggest that they're totally neurotic. It's just that part of the sort of fascination is never being able to fully cross that barrier between humans and animals while, or wild animals, while feeling this curious sense of kinship because we're not so distant really as our lives might lead us to believe. And our way of life certainly suggests.

Stephen Hanselman (30:55)

One of the things I thought about when I was reading your book is Churchill's Wilderness Years. You know, he's on this, he's on this path and then he gets thrown off the path. And then he spends, you know, almost 10 years sort of painting and laying bricks, reading poetry. He thinks it's like torture, but he doesn't understand that in some ways what it's actually doing. He's actually resting for what is going to be, you know, a marathon to come. There's something about, you know, we think we want things to continue. I think we want this sort of continuity and consistency. And I do think there's something powerful about those breaks and not fight, not necessarily fighting them.

Chloe Dalton (31:37)

You know, I think you're absolutely right, because I think we live in fear of, you know, I'm not getting on, or my career is plateauing, or, you know, I'm running out of energy. I sometimes think that I catch myself and say, like, am I taking. You know, I'm writing. This is taking me much longer than it ever seemed to take me. You know, am I. Am I running out of steam? And if I stop and step aside in some kind of way, you know, will I ever get catch up with everybody else? I think all those thoughts go through our mind. And the great thing about the pandemic is that everybody stopped, you know, so, I mean, lots of people worked, incredible work. They didn't stop at all. They were in hospitals. They were keeping the rest of us alive. But for many of us, you know, things stopped. And we had a reason, you know, to be almost spared from all those activities that take up a huge amount of our energy that are about just keeping up with what's expected of us. So I think you're right. I think it's true that those interludes that come upon us for various reasons in our lives can be so restorative somehow. And I would never have thought that I could write a book that I had it in me, that I had anything of interest to say that anything in my life would warrant that kind of experience. And. But yet, when I came, had, you know, had this sort of two years living with the Hair before I started writing the book. But, you know, by the time it was. It came out, it just sort of flowed onto the page because it turned out that I. That I'd had a chance to live differently, live quietly, think deeply, take the focus away from my work and my activities onto myself and to the environment around me, and discover that actually there was a sort of voice bubbling away inside me that I hadn't really been conscious of or ever listened to. And that's one of the most extraordinary things. The Hair gave me, you know, this irony, totally silent creature inspired me to write. It's a paradox, and I feel very grateful. I don't think I would have done it without that, that change, that lull, that what would look to the outside. And what I certainly thought was the case, I don't know about you, with your career, you know, I had that feeling of thinking, oh, my goodness, you know, I'm stopping still. This is going to Last for years. How am I going to come out of this and where are things going to be? I did an MBA during the pandemic. I had a complete feeling like I've got to sort of work on myself, you know, and so think, yeah, I'm no Churchill, but I think for all of us, if, if those moments come, we shouldn't be frightened of them. We should embrace the opportunity. It's easy to say and hard to do, but you do. It does renew your energy. I write about this in the book that sometimes, you know, when the headwinds are too strong, we could do worse than to be a little bit like the hare and to lie up in the grass and to recover our strength and to look at nature and find consolation and new sources of energy.

Ryan Holiday (34:22)

Similar to what Chloe said. I feel grateful for that time. When I think of like the bones of my day to day life today, a lot of it was built or rebuilt during those days when everything was thrown out and I sort of had to reimagined. And of course that bookstore that we'd started in March 2020 became a big part of that. And, you know, I have these memories of going there, being empty and my kids riding bikes around inside. I laid out most of what became courageous calling on the bar that was originally in the bookstore that's now moved to Sarah Gordo. I built a new writing routine. I built a new pace of life. I built a new perspective and a new way of thinking about things. So thanks to Chloe for not just joining me in the conversation, but for writing her amazing book. You can follow her on Instagram. Chloe dalton.uk. Well, here we are well into a new year and it's worth taking some stock. Who do you want to be this year? What changes do you want to make? How could you be better? That's where today's sponsor comes in and it's where something I have been doing myself now, I guess since college, which is working on myself with a therapist. And although I used to when I lived in la, drive an hour in traffic to sit down in someone's office for an hour, now I do it

Stephen Hanselman (35:49)

on the phone, I do it while

Ryan Holiday (35:50)

I'm walking, I do it in the car, I do my therapy online. And BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. And I'm not the only one. More than 6 million people have gotten help through BetterHelp. It's just easier to keep the appointment. It's less of an imposition, cheaper, it's more efficient. And I honestly find it easier to just get into the stuff you're there to get into when I do it remotely. BetterHelp will match you with a therapist based on your preferences. You can easily switch at any time at no extra cost. You can click the link in the description below, or you can just go to betterhelp.com dailystoke to get 10% off your first month of therapy. We've got an employee here at Daily Stoke. I won't say who because it's kind of private, but they've been using Monarch, today's sponsor, to track their progress as they try to pay off their student loan debts. I'm a college dropout, so I don't have any debt, thankfully, but I can only imagine how overwhelming it would be to have this thing hanging over you. And she's been using the app to budget and save and it's bringing her a little bit closer every day to being debt free, which I can only imagine would be a huge relief. Monarch shows you exactly where your money is going. It helps you redirect it towards what matters. With automated tracking and clear projections, you can actually see yourself getting closer to being debt free or hitting your savings milestone instead of just hoping it happens happens. Unlike most other personal finance apps, Monarch is built to help make you proactive and not just reactive. And Monarch help users save over $200 per month on average after joining. You can set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch, the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. And you can use code stoiconarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com code stoic. To wrap up this episode, I also wanted to bring you something that I talked about with another author recently, a mentor of mine that goes way back, one of my favorite writers. She actually may be the first writer that I ever met in my life. This is author Susan Strait, a professor at UC Riverside, where I went to college. I love her novels as well. Mecca, A Million Nightingales, High Wire Moon. She has a great memoir called in the country of Women. She too has won every prize you could possibly imagine, but she has a new novel out and it's about a group of nurses fighting through the first year of that pandemic and the community in California that is Riverside. She's sort of the bard of the Inland Empire, I would say, but they were risking their lives to treat people during those early days. This is what she had to say.

Susan Straight (38:34)

I get people who say to me, you know, why did you write about COVID And I am very candid. And it's funny that we're the same person, because I say, you know, when I was growing up, I read books about the Great Depression. We will still read about the Dust bowl right now. We will still read about World War I. We will read novels about World War II right now. Look at all those novels. We will read about the Holocaust, Ryan. But why would we not want to remember Covid that way? Is because people made Covid so political that it's about guilt and vaccines and all these other things, when actually I have had people say to me unwittingly, especially if they're from very wealthy places and especially if they're from the east coast, they'll be like, Covid was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Ryan Holiday (39:22)

Oh, I've said that, and I've thought that.

Stephen Hanselman (39:23)

I totally get it.

Susan Straight (39:24)

Yes. And they're like, I moved to the Hudson Valley. I'm so much happier now than when I lived in the city. Thank God for Covid. And then they look at me, and I'll be like, yeah. So a lot of people I love died during COVID And I watched my neighbor Jim Calderon across the street, who was a groundskeeper for 30 years for Pomona College. He had diabetes, and he was a big man, and he had already lost both of his legs below the knees. He died in the house of COVID And I watched Kristen, his wife, sob as they took his body out in a body bag. My neighbor Johnny Orta, whose uncle had just died, who was the first Chicano motorcycle police officer from the neighborhood of Casablanca in Riverside. He died during COVID Right. Two years older than me. I mean, to me, I'm not saying best time, worst time. I'm saying it's a time that we have to remember.

Stephen Hanselman (40:12)

I mean, a million and a half people died.

Susan Straight (40:14)

A million and a half people died. The COVID novels that I had read were about people who were isolated and never left their houses during COVID and how, like, their psyches or their families, like, broke down. But I'm trying to write about these nurses because all these nurses lived in. In my neighborhood, and I had traveling nurses on my block. One was from Texas named Carrie. She lived right down. She rented rooms from the two nurses who lived down the block. The married couple, Sean and Tammy, traveling nurses thing.

Stephen Hanselman (40:43)

It's like people don't even know that exists.

Susan Straight (40:45)

Oh, my gosh. The traveling nurses on my block, Carrie and Pam, Texas and Indiana. They lived down the street from me for three months in the summer. And they would walk by because Riverside community hospital is three blocks from my house and I live on a big main avenue. So they would walk by my house and so everyone would walk to work. It's a 12 hour shift. And they would walk back and Ryan, they would tell me about what they did.

Stephen Hanselman (41:10)

I mean, if we put those people through a session.

Susan Straight (41:11)

I know, but do you know why they would tell me?

Ryan Holiday (41:13)

Cause they didn't have anyone else.

Susan Straight (41:14)

And I listened.

Ryan Holiday (41:15)

Yeah, right.

Susan Straight (41:16)

And they would say like, oh my gosh, Susan. All these men, these huge men, and they're so big. And that too. Covid is killing. So I would just walk around all night thinking about these men. And then my ex husband got Covid, 6, 4, 330 pounds, wouldn't leave the house, almost died. I had to go and call an ambulance. And he said, I'm not getting in that ambulance. How much does it cost? And I said, it's free. It's free. During COVID he was like, it is Marsha Bales and my nurse friends, they said, just tell him it's free. And I'm like, is it? And they're like, no, girl, it's $1,500 put on your visa. So I did. I told him it was free. I said, jennifer and Marsha said, you need to go to the hospital. They're like, really? Yeah, they're nurses. I'm like, that's right. And they said, go to the hospital. He was about five hours away from death, 330 pounds. And what did we do? Just like in the book. My girls all came home. We walked to the hospital just alongside the nurses. We sat in the parking lot with hundreds of people. Ryan. We all had signs for our loved one. He couldn't get up out of the bed for four days. Two nurses had to help him up to the window so he could look out. They were FaceTiming us so that he could see that the girls were there and we had the sign. Look, I'm getting all emotional. I mean, the girls were losing their minds. And they're like, how'd you get into the ambulance? I said, I lied. I straight up lied. That's all in the book. Because that's a time Americans need to remember. Everyone was in that hospital parking lot praying for their loved one. And you couldn't touch them.

Ryan Holiday (42:46)

I know.

Susan Straight (42:46)

You couldn't see them. Like if he had. He didn't say this to me for. Until this year. He said, when I looked down and I looked out the window and saw you guys, I realized I never thought I would see you again. Big correctional officer, all teary eyed, thought I would never see you again. So that's everything that I put into that novel.

Stephen Hanselman (43:03)

Well, and it's interesting, the human response to something like that. Like a lot of people subsequently are angry about the policies.

Chloe Dalton (43:11)

I know.

Ryan Holiday (43:11)

I think it's because you can't get. You can get mad at doctors and

Stephen Hanselman (43:15)

you can get mad at insurance companies and you can get married at the. But you can't get mad at a thing that doesn't exist. You can't get mad at a hurricane.

Susan Straight (43:22)

See so much. You can't get mad at a virus. But we feel in this time, right now, we feel as if we can control things and have power if only we eat the right foods and we do the right thing. And so everyone would say to me, like, oh my God, you had Covid three times. How did you even do, like, guilty. I'm like, I took my mom to the hospital, to the ER because she had a heart thing. She didn't get Covid. But I did blame the hot dogs and like red dye number five. I ate. I don't know, I grew up poor. I had Covid three times because I kept taking care of people who were old and that they didn't get Covid. Yes, I was vaccinated. I got Covid. I'm just saying that the thing about this is I'm not even writing for us to mourn the lost. I'm writing for those of us who are still here to just think about what we survived in a beautiful way.

Stephen Hanselman (44:12)

We sold out of the signed copies

Ryan Holiday (44:14)

that she did when she was here. But I'll link to the show notes because she's just awesome. You can follow her on Instagram. Susan Strait. Anyways, I want you to take a couple minutes this week and just sort of think about where your life was that week of March 2020 and how different it looks today. And these check ins matter. This reflection matters. That's what I think Chloe's book is so great for. That's what I think fiction like Susan Strait's writing is so good to do. Like, yeah, sure, the pandemic forced us to slow down and take stock of everything, but we don't need a global crisis to do that. In fact, we should do it more often. We should do it all the time. It should be built into our lives. We should reflect and re and decide if our life is how we want it to be. So thanks to Chloe Dalton and Susan Strait for appearing in today's episode. And you should definitely read Sacrament and Raising Hair by both of them. Talk soon.

Stephen Hanselman (45:08)

Thanks so much for listening.

Ryan Holiday (45:09)

If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes, that would

Stephen Hanselman (45:13)

mean so much to us and it would really help the show.

Ryan Holiday (45:15)

We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Episode.

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