J. Maarten Troost is the travel writer behind such titles as The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages and Headhunters on My Doorstep. He spent multiple years in Kiribati in the Equatorial Pacific as well as Fiji and Vanuatu. On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change, Maarten joins Ross to explain how he came to spend time in the region of Oceania and offer insight around the provocative titles for his books and the egalitarian nature of island culture.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Paid subscribers get this episode ad-free. The ads in the free feed are inserted by Spotify when you press play. They are not in the file I make.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon. com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change, and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see, but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori. com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nori. com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me J. Martin Troost, author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages and Headhunters on My Doorstep, which is part of his South Pacific trilogy, or I guess I should just say Pacific trilogy, and then also Lost on Planet China, One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.
Martin, thank you for being here.
J. Maarten Troost: It’s good to be here. Thanks.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. I’ve read all your books. I think they are very funny and insightful travelogues. I enjoy the genre. I am puzzled by... This word sticks in my mouth. Maybe you can help me. Oceania?
J. Maarten Troost: Sure. Oceania. You don’t like the word?
Ross Kenyon: For some reason, there’s too many vowels in it, or there’s too many syllables for how short it is, and I can never pull it off.
J. Maarten Troost: Oh, for sure. It’s not something that comes up in everyday conversation. Most people just use the Pacific or the South Pacific or something like that. I think Oceana is a, maybe it’s a better literary word than a conversational word because it really does describe sort of life in the islands, which feels more like being on a boat than on a continent.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s a nice little poetic interpretation. I think it’s a good because I have trouble with it and it is a little bit puzzling. That’s how I feel about the entire region because it is just enormous in scope. It’s giant. I’ve long wanted to do shows for... Reversing Climate Change about the region, but I haven’t found the right way in yet. So I was reading your travelogues and I read Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania and Sea People, The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson. And I’m trying to find the way to be doing shows about this region.
I like to do a lot more. So you were a very nice intro into this space and you’ve clearly spent so much time there, but this isn’t like going to Europe. Everyone at this point of my peer group You know, they’ve gone on trips to Europe. It’s easier and easier to travel. Yet this has not happened in the Pacific. This is still a hard place to get to. Yet you’ve spent a huge amount of time there. How did that happen? Why were you in the region? And then also you started in Kiribati, which I doubt many listeners even know where that is.
J. Maarten Troost: No, it is kind of a peculiar story. I think the origination of all this is like after college, I moved to Prague in what’s now the Czech Republic. And someone made a terrible mistake and hired me as a journalist there for an English language newspaper. And so I spent these years in Eastern Europe, you know, traveling to the former Soviet Union and Russia. I covered the war in Bosnia. I was down in Croatia during the fighting there. I was there for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. And all the meantime, I’m living in Prague, the most beautiful city basically in Europe, in my opinion, particularly back then.
We’re still a raw place to be. And then I moved back to D. C. and I finished my last year of grad school, started temping. So you can imagine the difference between sort of like living with mercenaries in Mostar, Bosnia and getting shelled at and going to your temp job at the American Overeaters Association or whatever it was that I happened to be assigned to that week. And feeling sort of like this dissonance, like I’d become accustomed to this really exciting life in a really formative point for me.
Ross Kenyon: This is like that scene in Hurt Locker when he comes home and he’s in the grocery store. That’s you basically?
J. Maarten Troost: It’s basically like that. But I have to say my experiences in Eastern Europe were a lot more fun than whatever that was going on in the Hurt Locker. All right. So it was a little different. I don’t mean to make it sound more dark than it was because there’s just a lot of fun as well. And it was really adventurous. You know, you’re 22, you’re 23. You’re off to these exotic, difficult places that no one wants to go to. Cost of living was nothing back then. So you can actually afford to do it as a as a recent grad.
So anyway, so that was my mindset. And then I came back to D. C. , did grad school again, finished that up, found that tedious experience. Didn’t know what to do, what I wanted to do in my life. Was working stupid temp jobs, which as most of us know, some point in life, we typically all go through something like that. It’s boring, it’s saddening, it’s depressing. You’re looking at the next 60 years of your life going, really, this is it? And then suddenly out of nowhere, my girlfriend, she worked at a non-governmental organization that had offices in the South Pacific.
And their person in Curiebus was, I had to leave for personal reasons, let’s just say. And they need an emergency fill in. So that’s how we ended up in Kiribati. I’d never heard of it either. It was just sort of like, OK, I can go to my, you know, I can get on the metro at 730 every a. m. and go to my tedious temp job and rearrange the files. Or I have this offer here to move to a tiny little island in the South Pacific. So what are you going to choose?
Ross Kenyon: Seems pretty easy to me.
J. Maarten Troost: It seemed really easy to me as well. But of course, I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. But that’s ultimately how I ended up in Kiribati. And that’s how things started.
Ross Kenyon: The TLDR of what you were in for is the Macarena, essentially.
J. Maarten Troost: Exactly.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And I wanted to ask you about this too. So the titles of these books are very provocative. And when I see them, they remind me of this sort of like 19th century understanding. So this is the age of industrialization. And then you have these reports. It’s coming back from sailors who are going to Tahiti where the sexual culture is very free. People are just lounging under coconut palms and eating off the land. And it’s this beautiful sort of prelapsarian society. And they would write these things that sort of they have that era’s racism, which is this sort of there’s this noble savage kind of quality to it.
And then it seems like you’re kind of you’re playing with this or like I imagine someone listening and heard those titles and was like, why? Why those titles?
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, no, because I get that. The thing is, is like when you look at the literature of this region, the South Pacific, almost nothing has been written about it in the postwar years. Really, literally almost nothing if you really go through it. And so once you start digging into it and you start doing sort of the background reading that’s available to you. Some of it dates back to sort of Russo and the noble savage kind of, you know, nonsense. Then you have sort of your Paul Gauguin type, you know, stuff where he’s looking for paradise, but he’s a complete scum as a human being.
And then you’ve got some of the James Cook stuff. James Cook stuff is actually pretty good. That’s not so bad. But a lot of it is sort of this, you’re right, it’s this Victorian mindset of sort of these dominant, more advanced Western cultures that Coming to sort of explore and understand the savage people that live in faraway places. And it had my eyes rolling most of the time. And I thought sort of like with this titles, I’d just be making a mockery of that. It was meant completely ironically, just in jest, just in fun.
Basically, what it did is like once I came up with the title, The Sex Lives of Canimals, it made me snort with laughter. And I figured if I could make myself laugh, other people would laugh. And I think it becomes very apparent to anybody who’s ever read my books that, you know, the only idiot in any of my books is me. So it just comes with that. They’re just silly fun titles.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a big incongruity there between the titles and the contents of the books, which a lot of which is self-deprecating of you just trying to live your life and you have these expectations for how things shall go. And as anyone who’s ever traveled outside of your own culture in some significant way, it’s often baffling. Like one of the cultural norms that happens in Kiribati is, I forget the name of this, but if someone asks you for something, you just give it to them. You have to.
J. Maarten Troost: It’s called the babu speak. Yeah, it’s the way sort of on small, difficult islands things work. I will ask you for your fishing net. You’ll give me your fishing net. That creates a certain obligation. So later on, maybe you need to use my, I don’t know, my canoe or something like that and so on and so forth. And it was a way of creating a very egalitarian society. The babusi, you can’t abuse it because it comes right back at you. But it’s just the way the island culture worked, because to survive on these islands, every village needs to work as a team.
It doesn’t work otherwise. And so that was just part of the cultural development that occurred. But it’s an interesting thing to observe when you’re an outsider, that’s for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. And this is just one example of many of things where you go in and you are nothing in your life has quite prepared you for. So sure, these titles sound idyllic and Edenic. And actually, you get there and you’re like, I would kill for a fan that worked. Yeah. Stuff like that. And yeah, so I like the incongruity there. Well, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So I have to at least try to find a way to make it fit in, or my colleagues will get mad at me, Martin.
So what exactly was the arc of your experience? What happened during that time?
J. Maarten Troost: I think it’s partly sort of both my evolution as a writer and also as an observer of what’s actually going on around the world and willing to sort of be honest about things. Even when I lived in Kiribati the first time, for those first few years, we were all well aware of it. I mean, it was an issue and all that kind of stuff. But I didn’t want to highlight it in the book because at that time, it just seemed, in America, and I knew my audience would be mostly Americans, they would just put it through a partisan lens and all that kind of stuff.
And I just didn’t want to go there with people for that particular book. I do recall living there, even at the time, You know, from time to time, the tides would get up really high. I mean, you know, there’s the king tides that come up high. And I remember my second year there. We had tides that would cover parts of the islands. I mean, these islands are only 100, 200, 300 yards wide. There were parts that were inundated from ocean to lagoon, and there was no storm. This was just a perfectly sunny, calm day.
The water would be glassy smooth, and it would just come up and up and up, and it would cover the causeways and all that kind of stuff. And then when I came back years later, some years later, for my fourth book, And seeing what had happened, the way all the coconut trees near the shoreline had died. I mean, they were just shells. And these coconut trees were 50, 60 years old, but they’re gone because of the salination, the salt water coming in. The way people had to change their gardening habits.
The only gardens that still worked were the ones that were only in the middle of the island. Anything close to either the lagoon or the ocean, nothing would grow anymore. And seeing sort of the tides come up, coral is like, it’s like limestone. It’s very porous. So you can’t really stop it. Like even with a seawall, you can’t stop the water coming. It comes up through the ground itself and actually observing that like a high tide coming in and the water, it’s not just coming from the waves and the water just rising higher.
It’s coming from the ground itself. And just immediately recognizing that, you know, as long as this goes on, this is completely unsustainable. And we’re looking at the death, first of all, of the Athol nations in the South Pacific, Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, other island groups like the Tumoto’s, others. They are going to become uninhabitable, I think, within, you know, the next 20, 30 years.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. And for listeners who may not know, they might be imagining Hawaii or the Marquesas. So you have these giant, tall mountains that are verdant and beautiful. But atolls are, I have a hard time even wrapping my head around what exactly they are, but they’re very low lying.
J. Maarten Troost: Yes, they’re typically not more than two or three feet above sea level. They’re basically the rim of an old undersea volcano. So coral grows on top of that rim of the old volcano and coral seeks the sunlight. And so that’s what builds the atoll. And so it just reaches to get above the water level and that’s it. You know, so there’s no mountains growing here. It’s just like walking around the rim of a gigantic, ancient undersea volcano. And with lots of channels and all that kind of stuff, your tides, they run the day.
You know, where you can possibly go on these islands, it’s all dependent on the tides. Yeah, they’re very, very difficult places. I don’t think there’s any place in America that’s comparable, deeply unique. The environment runs everything. And they are for sure going to be unsustainable.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s pretty grim. Well, when you’re spending time in the Pacific, do people, like, are they waiting for, okay, you’re a writer, so here, I’ll make some literary comparisons to your cinema references. Like Rick from Casablanca. So at the last minute, he goes from being indifferent and saves the day or like kind of like a Han Solo moment. Do you think people on the islands are waiting for the earth to wake up and sort of figure this out? Or are they just expecting to have to immigrate or do adaptation or both?
J. Maarten Troost: In my experience, there’s two schools of thought in the Pacific. One of them is you have to remember the missionaries had enormous influence in much of the South Pacific.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve read both of those too.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, many of the islands are deeply Christian. And they had a very powerful influence on many of the islands. So there is still a segment on many of the islands that really truly believes that God will take care of them. So that there are people who have survived on these islands for hundreds of years. God will look over them and so on and so forth. And then there’s another group of people that see what they see. Accept what they accept and are now starting to make plans for what’s next. Like in Kiribati, you’ll notice that they’ve bought land in Vanuolevu, which is the largest island in Fiji.
So they bought 20 square kilometers in Vanuolevu in the expectation that will be their emergency exodus. That these are, you know, Vanuolevu is a high island. It’s a mountainous island. It’s a very fertile island. And so they bought land there with the expectation that they’ll migrate to Fiji when sustainable life in Kiribati becomes untenable. And then you’ve also noticed them changing things in the way they educate their young. There’s a lot more emphasis on vocational training right now. And that’s to prepare the kids 15, 16, 17 years old so that they can get a job, you know, in New Zealand or Australia or something like that, you know, something vocational.
So it’s really those two different schools that are kind of in conflict with each other. And that tends to be sort of the on the ground reality for what I’ve seen in much of the Pacific.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. So there are, well, it doesn’t sound like there’s too much middle ground. It either sounds like it’s faith or it’s exodus. Is there much emphasis on adaptation and making the islands, you know, floodproof or dealing with the water table with all the salinization?
J. Maarten Troost: Well, I think People have sort of accepted reality for what it is. An atoll is a very finite space. You can’t have just like a landfill. You know what I mean? Like a landfill will pollute your groundwater. You can’t do so many different things that we take for granted here living on a continent because everything affects everything else. And I think people are very mindful of their geography. So we’ll see how it goes. But I mean, reality is reality right now. I mean, when you look at it, We’ve already raised temperatures almost a degree Celsius since industrial times by 2100.
So 80 years from now, on our current projection, we’re looking at almost a 4 degree centigrade increase in temperatures. That’s completely unparalleled. Those islands will be gone. The people will disperse. It is what it is. And not much that can be done about it unless there is some divine power that decides to use his special magical powers to change things. But yeah, no, it’s bleak is what it is.
Ross Kenyon: Very bleak. We’re working with Nori. We’re a carbon removal marketplace and we’re trying to scale up that industry. But yeah, we try to, what we say internally is, you know, don’t look down. The stakes are actually very high if you fail or if we do fail. Have you seen much though in the way of, I’ve heard this described as climate porn or of people going on cruises to the Arctic or Antarctic and it’s like, see it before it’s gone. Has there been much of that happening in the Pacific yet?
J. Maarten Troost: I don’t know. I haven’t seen that in the Pacific myself, but the islands that I’m most accustomed to are really obscure islands that people just wouldn’t go to anyway. The only people I run into are missionaries. So I don’t see that there, but I have to plead guilty to some of that myself. I was in Africa last year, and one of the reasons I wanted to do it was because I wanted to see rhinos in the wild. And so that’s one of the reasons I went to Africa, is I’m doing something like what you’re talking about.
I want to see some of these things before they disappear. I do think that’s something that’s going to happen in the foreseeable future, not in the foreseeable year. Coronavirus is going to decimate the cruise ship industry, that’s for sure. But yeah, no, I think for real, it’s going to be... People going off to see a glacier while they still can. People going off to see an apple while they still can. People going off to see a certain animal because they still can, because they’re so pessimistic now that they realize that, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, you won’t be able to see these places like they were.
The world is changing incredibly rapidly right now, as you know, I’m sure.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t think obviously calling it climate porn is pejoratively framed and is kind of like an insult or a criticism of the behavior. I don’t think it’s I guess I’d have to read more. I don’t know if it’s bad in and of itself to want to do this. If you especially if you’re pessimistic, alternatively, you could go and be inspired to work extra hard to avoid these consequences that will make this type of tourism irrelevant, impossible, etc. So I don’t think I don’t know if you need to. I don’t know if there’s the self crit that is too necessary.
J. Maarten Troost: No, but it is one of those things is like, you know, everything that we do by ourselves, we travel in a certain way, we have an electric car, we don’t use any plastic and so on and so forth. All that we do as individuals doesn’t match up to what is happening at a systemic level. You know what I mean? It’s sort of like we drastically need to drop carbon emissions. And for the past two, three years, our carbon emissions have been going up again. And it’s a hard battle to fight.
And particularly when there are so many nations around the world Who are electing absolute morons to be their leaders. We have that here in the US. We see in Australia. We see it in Brazil. We see it in so many different other countries that we are not creating a like all this is going to have to happen politically. And we’re not creating a political infrastructure where we can really create those systemic changes. That will help mitigate the worst of climate change. And as you know, a lot of things are already baked into the system.
I mean, we can stop everything right now, but things are going to continue for years to come. It’s hard not to be pessimistic, to be perfectly honest. I hope that doesn’t ruin the vibe of your show.
Ross Kenyon: You totally ruined it. No, we try to be optimistic. We work in the field. We want to have a very large impact in addressing this. Making the financial infrastructure to fund that sort of thing happen as quickly as possible. The stakes are very high though. And we see that. And there are definitely times when I will read something that will really bother me. I don’t have a lot of climate anxiety. I try to be productive and focus on what I’m actually doing to address it. But there are definitely times where it gets to me.
It sounds like you get got to more often than I perhaps.
J. Maarten Troost: Well, it’s because I had to do some research into all of this. And it’s like, let’s look at human. Let’s go big. Let’s go real big right now. Let’s look at human civilization. All right. So we’ve been around in our current evolutionary form for roughly 300,000 years.
Ross Kenyon: 300,000 years ago, people were just as smart as we are.
J. Maarten Troost: Same physically, et cetera, et cetera. But let’s be completely honest here. We didn’t do squat until 10,000 years ago, right? I mean, no great civilization, no great agriculture, no great cities, no space shuttle, no supercomputers, no anything for 290,000 years. So what changed 10,000 years ago? And that was the end of the last real ice age. And our temperature stabilized. And in these 10,000 years, our temperature has never deviated more than one degree Celsius. Even during the Little Ice Age, I’m talking global mean temperatures, the entirety of human civilization, from the first farms and the first villages to quantum computing and everything we’re doing now has occurred in a very, very tight climate zone bandwidth.
And now we are talking about changing that bandwidth by three degrees, four degrees centigrade. It changes everything. It changes everything from agriculture. It changes everything from fisheries. It changes everything from, you know, what’s habitable and what’s not. These are, I believe, profound challenges to civilization, and it’s going to go on for decades. And there’s no quick and easy solution to any of this. And then you have to take into account, of course, the modern realities of politics and blah, blah, blah, and economics and jobs and infrastructure and all that kind of stuff.
It’s a hard road to get out of this hole.
Ross Kenyon: God, Martin, you really killed the vibe in here.
J. Maarten Troost: I know, I moved to sunshine here, I know. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You’re supposed to be the happy-go-lucky, yeah, I called you a cartoon character of Jimmy Buffett. Like, come on, man. Be the island guy, the beachcomber I want you to be.
J. Maarten Troost: It’s why I’ve been taking time out, dude. But when you really start looking at it, I mean, we all live our own lives and all that kind of stuff. You know, everyone is capable of having a happy life. But when you’re looking at things at the macro level, And looking at where we’re at now, our response is completely inadequate, completely inadequate. And there’s so much that we can do, as you know, probably more than I, but we’re not getting there. We’re not electing the people that will bring us to these places.
We are not sort of creating sort of the economic incentives in law that will sort of help renewables and help with climate mitigation and all that kind of stuff. It’s a hard one. And we’re going downhill right now. So I hope that changes. I hope that changes very rapidly. I mean, I’ve got kids. I don’t want them to deal with this. So we’re already seeing it every season, wherever it is you live. You’re in California. You’ve got your fires. I’m currently in Washington, D. C. I don’t think we’ve had a snowflake yet this year.
Ross Kenyon: We’re actually, we’re in Seattle. We’re in the coronavirus land right now. We’re feeling it. I’m glad you said all that, Martin, because now I’m about to nail you.
J. Maarten Troost: It’s going to be ugly. I’m up for it.
Ross Kenyon: Assuming that you like this term and maybe you don’t, but you’re a travel writer. Travelers, man, aren’t they the worst? They’re sort of buying stuff. They’re flying all over the world. Their emissions are gigantic. What’s the role of the travel writer in the age of climate change? How is this supposed to work now?
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, that’s a good one. And that’s not something that I’ve ever had a real deep think about. I’ve never thought of my role in writing my books in any kind of moral light. It was sort of I come across some interesting material and have interesting experiences that I think I can create something that will be enjoyable or informative for other people to read. And I didn’t really think much of it beyond that. I don’t put myself on some kind of totem pole to be representative of what one should follow. I’m curious about the rest of the world.
So I spent many years seeing it. I don’t know what the role of a travel writer today is, to be honest. There’s not too many. I think the era has just changed for that genre. Like just hopping on a plane and going someplace new and writing about whatever you encounter. I don’t know if there’s a huge market for that right now. I think everyone is looking for travel as a source of personal meaning. And I don’t think that ever really goes away, you know, and it won’t because you are a traveler.
We’ve all gone somewhere to experience something novel that changes us and hopefully enlightens us and improves us. And that is that’s hard to negate. You know, we’re always going to want to go someplace else to experience something new. But yeah, no, I to be honest, I have no idea what the role of the travel writer is right now. I mean, all I know is that I don’t want to be one of those, you know, stupid travel writers always writing about sunsets or whatever. You have to get some red meat or you don’t.
So we’ll see. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going to go back to that genre, to be honest. So we’ll see.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. Yeah. I’m curious to know what you’ll end up doing next. I think the genre probably has taken a hit because when I, so I spent most of my twenties traveling, people who’ve listened to the show all the way through, they probably heard me talk about this some and, uh, sometimes people If people would build me up too much, they’d be really impressed that I’ve been able to do this. And I was really like, all you have to do is buy a plane ticket and not have a job. It’s not like you have to do anything.
It’s not that impressive. It’s not like I’ve done Contiki or something. I just flew somewhere. And then, yeah, there was something about finding yourself. So I wrote before Nori and before I got into the tech world at all. The last thing I was doing is I was working with a manager in LA on a sitcom pilot. And it was a satire of travel and travelers because I would go places and be often miserable. I would find the company to be very much in that like fulfilling, like faux yogi bullshit and like super, super.
And I’m just like dirty and miserable and oftentimes like kind of ill or like not exercising nearly. And just like having, I’ve spent like a decade doing that. And I wanted to just nail the entire genre of And I ended up getting sucked into this thing anyways, what I’m doing now. But there’s something about that whole milieu that I find really obnoxious. And so what exactly, how do you travel right when basically anyone with even a small amount of disposable income can experience the same thing within like 12 hours you can get anywhere on planet Earth?
J. Maarten Troost: That’s different. It’s sort of like when you’re going out as a travel writer, I remember being in China and having some really sort of awful experiences. I remember being encountered by this gang in Hangzhou, China. They were slapping me on the back of the head. I remember that story. That was terrifying. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if I’m about to be knifed. There’s a thousand people on the street and no one’s helping with anything. They’re just stopping with their dead-eyed faces staring at me. Everyone’s removed. No one’s engaged.
Donut’s going to go on. This really sucks. It’s a little terrifying. But all I know is that I get five pages right here. I’ve got five pages. All right. So that’s the thing is sort of like as a travel writer is like even when you’re experiencing the suck, you know, you get some material. You know, a book was just full of la-di-da experiences. I mean, I would not find readable. So I’m aware of the reality of all that. And again, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s different. It’s not Seattle. It’s not DC.
It’s just you’re experiencing something novel, which is for me, something I greatly enjoy.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s getting easier to travel, but that’s not to say that it is like, there’s a, there’s a Larry David deep in my heart.
J. Maarten Troost: In all of our hearts, deep down, in our dark space.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, he’s there. Yeah. And you can, and any of like the big Travel writers like Bill Bryson has made an entire career out of just niggling over the smallest little social interactions, just complaining. Or Paul Theroux can be a cantankerous kind of guy. And I love that. But I also compare that to something like Instagram. And that medium just rewards this sort of false idea of what travel is. I don’t know what it is about images versus words there.
J. Maarten Troost: The big difference though is... People like Paul Theroux, people like Bill Bryson, they have a voice. You know what I mean? They have cultivated, they have worked very, very hard at their craft, and they’ve developed a voice that resonates with a lot of people. And that’s not anything you’ll ever find on Instagram. You know what I mean? It’s just, that’s a different, totally different medium. What those writers are doing is they’re connecting with something deep inside the reader’s brain or heart or soul or You don’t even have to go far away.
I always think one of the best travel articles I’ve ever read was David Foster Wallace, supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again. He goes on a little seven-day cruise through the Caribbean. From a travel writing genre, that’s a big fat nothing. You know what I mean?
Ross Kenyon: That’s not impressive.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, it’s sort of like I got nothing there. You know what I mean? It’s a freaking cruise. Hundreds of thousands of people do it every single year. It’s going to be awful. Not my thing, whatever. He writes such a great thing about it. And then I think about sort of like John Jeremiah Sullivan. He’s a writer, sometimes writes for the New York Times magazine. He wrote an article about going to Disneyland and he’s a pothead. So he’s always trying to look for places to smoke in Disneyland. I can’t believe the New York Times published this, but they did.
And it’s really good travel writing. So you don’t have to go far. You don’t have to do anything exotic. What people connect with is a writer’s voice. And that’s so different than, you know, the pathetic Instagram stuff, which I don’t even follow and don’t do anything with. Right.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s something that’s terrible about going to Pisa and seeing thousands of people all holding it up at the same time.
J. Maarten Troost: But you know what? The thing is, with a good writer, you can make that good material that you can all connect with. But that’s not – the Instagram stuff isn’t trying to do that. The Instagram stuff is trying to – it’s more about a look at me. I’m bragging. This is where I’m at. It’s tedious. It’s tiresome to see. It’s not interesting. Whereas a good writer will bring out the human in almost any setting. That’s what I’ve always been kind of attracted to with the writing.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great point. I have often said that I like meeting people who are passionate about anything. I love it if I’m at a party and I’ll find someone like pick a boring hobby that you would never want to do. And if that person is really into it, I’ll be like, Okay, I can kind of see why you would like that. Yeah, I get in that headspace. So I think if you can do that with any location, yeah, you don’t have to go somewhere exotic. Like a lot of the travel books I’ll see.
I saw one recently about someone biking the Silk Road. I was like, wow, that’s amazing. Or like a lot of them are like endurance based or like weirder places that are off the beaten track to do. But also I could probably just, you know, if I was a good enough writer, just write a great book about cruising around Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. That would be good. Yeah.
J. Maarten Troost: You absolutely could. You absolutely could. It’s all about sort of cultivating the voice. It has nothing to do with the location. It’s all about the voice and whether or not people sort of, you know, click with it. And there are some people who are very, very, very good at it. And I will read just about anything from them. And yeah, but I do see that, you know, for a while in the travel genre, it was like whoever could do the most extreme thing. That doesn’t appeal to me. It’s all about, I can tell within 10 pages whether or not I’m going to like something, no matter where they are.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Well, what can you say about what you might be doing? You’ve alluded to the fact that it may not be more books. I know you’re writing articles now. What are you looking forward to doing? I divide my time right now.
J. Maarten Troost: Kids go to college and all that kind of stuff. I do some consulting for some of the big multilaterals here. And I’m hoping to get a TV show launched. I have a writing partner for that, and we’re starting to go through the process for that. Kind of have the story figured out. That’s what I would really like to do for the short term.
Ross Kenyon: A narrative show, not a documentary?
J. Maarten Troost: No, no, no. It’d be a fictional thing. Totally fictional. Something completely new. It’d be a lot of fun, I think. It’d be collaborative, which is very appealing for me. It’d be topical. It’d be funny. It’d be dark. I mean, it’d be perfect. So, you know, I’m hoping to see if I can get that worked out. That’s where I’m at right now. I just decided to take a time out from writing books for a little while. So maybe in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Yeah, that’s good to know. I would love to watch anything you made for television. I wish you lots of success with that.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, thanks. I hope this one works because it’d be so much fun to work on. I believe we’ve got something solid with this one. But we’ll see how it goes. New York Publishing and Hollywood are two entirely different beasts. And I’m familiar with one and I find the other difficult to read. So we’ll see how it goes.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Martin, maybe you could help me plan out some future shows for this. You don’t have to name drop if you don’t want to, but who should I be talking about? I’d love to talk to people who are actually from the various islands in the Pacific. Like what type of work on climate change in the region is good that you know about? And I’ll, of course, do research on my own and keep programming here, but where should I be looking?
J. Maarten Troost: For me, my contacts are more with, you know, I know somebody that works on coral reefs in Fiji. He’s been doing it since I lived in Fiji, so for a long time. He’d be good to talk to. He’s a lunatic, but he’d be good to talk to. There’s another guy who used to be an ambassador to the United Nations and the U. S. from the Solomon Islands, who is very much on top of things as well. So those would be good people to talk to. You know, that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.
But yeah, the South Pacific is going to go through some difficult times, unfortunately. And the unfortunate thing about it, too, is that Pacific Islanders, for the most part, are the most chilled people ever. You know what I mean? It just saddens me so much that they’ve got so much catastrophe coming in their future. Because for the most part, they’re good people who haven’t figured out about what’s important in life.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and they’re also the least responsible or among the least responsible for climate change.
J. Maarten Troost: No, the absolute least responsible, completely. They have nothing to do with it at all. And the fact that they’re going to be the first to really suffer from it is most unfortunate. And then the other thing is like each of these nations, really not even nations, each of these islands has such unique cultures. And to see that, you know, disappear in a fairly rapid way, We’ll see how it goes, but who knows? You know more than I do. Maybe we’ve got some carbon sucking machine that’s right around the corner that’ll fix everything.
I know people are working on all sorts of solutions, so we’ll see.
Ross Kenyon: We’ll keep plugging on that and we’ll see. And if you’re listening out there and you know of good stories that are happening in regions that we haven’t yet covered in nearly enough detail, please let me know. You can reach out at podcast at nori. com, podcast singular. Yeah, I guess, Martin, is there anywhere that you want to steer people to? You want them to buy your books or is there someplace online where they can follow you?
J. Maarten Troost: I’m just skulking from the online world. It’s one of the big things that’s changed in the publishing industry is like when I first started, You could quietly write your book, you know, get your material. Then publication day comes and you do like a month of publicity. You know, you get to travel and talk to people and all that’s very nice. And, you know, do some radio or TV and blah, blah, blah. And you feel like a real, you know, really special for a few weeks. And then you’re left alone and you can go back to just doing your damn thing.
You know what I mean? That’s kind of how I started. And then over the years, things changed. And now it seems to me like writing books has become more an extension of developing a brand for yourself. You know what I mean? It’s like I see so many of my writer friends that have to spend so much time cultivating their Instagram and Twitter feeds and they have to deal with the garbage that is Facebook. And I just took a, like I said, I’ve taken a long time out from all of that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I had to track you down. What’s that? I had to track you down. I was like, okay, who’s Martin’s agent at least? I will find, I will get him.
J. Maarten Troost: No, you found my agent, so that can be done. But I’m inactive on Facebook, but I will from time to time check whatever messages appear on there. So I guess that’s the easiest way, but I’m not active on it. Yeah, I know. I’m being a total recluse. But that’s all right.
Ross Kenyon: That’s fine.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. When it’s time to go back into the sun, I’ll go back into the sun. But that’s all right. I don’t mind being in the shade for the time being.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. There’s links in the show notes if you’re listening and you’d like to follow up with Martin’s work. I feel very similarly too. And so we just launched a Patreon for the podcast. And I’m not like on Twitter. I’m not really that accessible. You could email I’m happy to talk to people who want to make the effort, but I don’t want to just be like, Someone can tweet at me and I’m like, now I have to respond or something. I don’t know. I feel like a recluse.
J. Maarten Troost: It’s a complete rabbit hole. And I think that’s been, let’s continue with our negativity. I think the internet, think of what we were thinking about the internet 10, 15 years ago, how promising it was. We’d have these phones that we would have all the knowledge of the world available to us. We could be connected to everybody. I mean, right now there’s more than 5 billion people that have smartphones. The androids that most people use are very affordable. Everyone’s connected or whatever. Look at this garbage environment we’ve created. We all have to navigate our own space and all that kind of stuff.
But when you think about the misinformation and the way the algorithms kind of Accelerate antagonism and conflicts and all that. It’s disappointing. And I choose not to play right now. So maybe one day.
Ross Kenyon: When I was in LA, like one of the things I would hear in meetings too was people want to know how many followers you have. And I’m like, can I just be a screenwriter? I also have to have a personal brand and have insightful stuff to say every day.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, you do. I know. I’ve dealt with that myself. And yeah, you do. It’s unfortunate, but is what it is.
Ross Kenyon: There’s people out there who, I don’t know, like for instance, David Sedaris is amazingly generous with his time when he’s on tour. He will like hang out after every reading until I think every fan who wants to say hi has said hi.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, he’s great. I’ve seen him myself. He’s a really good dude.
Ross Kenyon: But does he do that online? I think he just does that in person and then online.
J. Maarten Troost: I’ve seen him in person. I went to one of his readings.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah.
J. Maarten Troost: And he will stay and he’ll meet with everyone. And the other thing that I like about him is because he has such a big platform is he will always sort of mention writers or works that he’s come across that he wants to promote and all that. He’s an incredibly generous man. No, I think David Sedaris is a great guy.
Ross Kenyon: But I also, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone share anything out from it. Like, is he like active on Twitter at all? Or is he just like, he like does like the analog version of what everyone’s expected to be online now?
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah, I think he was maybe of the last generation who could get away with this, where he could just, he could write his books. I guess he publishes every two or three years, something like that. He’s on tour a lot. I know that. He spends a lot, a lot of time on tour. And he just does it that way. But like I said, I’m not a big social media guy. So I don’t know what he does online.
Ross Kenyon: I just looked, I don’t even think he has one. So my instinct was correct. Like, yeah, I think maybe it is that’s the last generation. Like, I’ve been thinking about writing a book or like, or doing more creative endeavors as Nori grows. And we focus on creative media more and more. And I’m like, ah, but then I had to do all this other stuff. Like, I don’t know. It trips me up more than the actual writing of a book. And I know how hard it is to write something that is long and arduous itself.
J. Maarten Troost: Yeah. The big difference is sort of like when I’m working on a book and I’m writing something and, you know, is this the right thing? Is this the right direction that I want to go? Is this the right thing to say? Or is this too much? Is this just too much? You know what I mean? Is this going to be a trifle offensive to people? I will have lots of time to go back and reconsider and figure things out and make whatever it is I’m trying to do the best possible.
Twitter for me is a dangerous beast because I am impulsive. I have my thoughts. I can tweet them out. I can destroy my life in seconds. And we all know how many people that’s happened to. We all have our idiot friends or we’ve seen it happen where somebody tweets something out and poof, they get fired, their career is over and all that kind of stuff. That would totally be me. Absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: You’re being like, have you read John Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?
J. Maarten Troost: I’m familiar with it. I have a friend of mine who reviewed that book. So he was talking to me about it. You know, we’re human beings. We all have stupid thoughts. And the fact that we have a little thing in our pocket now where we can share our stupid thoughts is an incredibly dangerous thing for some of us, including me. Yeah, not a good medium for me. Not for now, in any event.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, in the show notes, we’ll put up the place where you can buy your books. And I don’t know. I guess we’ll just have a lacuna there instead of something that’s more...
J. Maarten Troost: I apologize. I know. I’m like, you know, I’m a publicist nightmare right now. I’m just, you know, doing things a little differently right now.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s good. I feel you on this one. I think we are kindred. Martin, thanks for being on the show. I think this is a good place to call it.
J. Maarten Troost: Great. It was my pleasure. Thanks for the chat. I really enjoyed it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, tell your friends. I hope you don’t mind that this was a little bit of an elliptical episode. We did a little, I mean, there’s some solid climate change moments in there, but I like that we were able to talk about creative stuff. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher.
It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon. com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
