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Before I Know What Happens · After the Signal

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Calder.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is After the Signal.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go a little farther down the road.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm recording this before my son's wedding.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're hearing it afterward.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's unusual for After the Signal,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: and I thought about pretending otherwise,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: writing this as though I already knew what Saturday felt like.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I could probably make a reasonable guess,
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: but that would violate almost everything I've been talking about lately,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: so I'm not going to do it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: As I record this, I don't know how I'll feel standing in front of Chad.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know which moment will catch me.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether I'll think about my father.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I expect I will.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: But expectation isn't memory.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not yet.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: By the time you're hearing my voice,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: something I can only imagine right now will have actually happened.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that seems like the perfect place to talk about the executor's discovery.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because the book is about what happens when knowing changes your responsibility.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: We love knowing the ending.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Human beings are extraordinary hindsight machines.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Once something has happened, we construct the path that led there.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Of course that happened.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: The signs were obvious.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: He should have known.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: She should have seen it coming.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not how life feels while we're living it.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Before the wedding, I can imagine Saturday.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: After the wedding, I'll remember it.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Those are not the same thing.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: One is possibility.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The other is history.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere between them is experience.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Experience has a habit of destroying our cleaner theories.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably good for us.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I started writing The Executor's Silence because I was interested in inheritance.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: What does a father leave his son besides property?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: What can be prepared for someone without controlling what they do with it?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: What survives us?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: By the time I began the executor's discovery, the question had changed.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because Elias Ward now knows more.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing more doesn't make his life easier.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It makes it harder.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's something I've come to believe deeply.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about discovery as though information liberates us.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it does.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes information removes an excuse.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Before you know, you can say, I didn't know.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Afterward, you can't.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But knowing still doesn't tell you what to do.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's where responsibility begins.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Next Tuesday, November 3rd, The Executor's Discovery will be released.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived with this book for a long time.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've written it,
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: rewritten it,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: cut things I liked because they didn't belong,
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: added things because I finally understood what the story had been trying to say.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched characters I thought I understood become more complicated.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Especially Thomas Ward.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe especially because I've been thinking so much about my own father.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: When the executor's silence ended,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas could still be imagined as the architect of everything Elias discovered.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: The father who knew.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: The father who planned.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The father who anticipated.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Discovery asks a more human question.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: What if he didn't?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: What if Thomas was inside the problem too?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: What if he made mistakes?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: What if he waited too long?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: What if some of what Elias inherited wasn't an answer at all?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: What if it was an unfinished question?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's the book I wanted to write.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Not a story about a son discovering that his father knew everything.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: A story about a son discovering that his father didn't.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And realizing that this does not diminish the inheritance.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: It makes the inheritance his.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's what this entire month has been about.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: My father remembered a 10-year-old boy drawing a line about how he expected to be treated.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, I drew a line when I thought my own son was being mistreated.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: My father stood beside me when I married Ali.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then he died.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: He knew Ben was coming, but never met him.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: He met Chad once, and now Chad has begun a marriage of his own.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: None of those events forms a perfect chain.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Life doesn't work like that.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But put enough years behind you and patterns become visible.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not destiny, patterns.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Things passed forward.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Things altered.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Things interrupted.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Things resumed.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Inheritance.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's where my little experiment as the boomer internet influencer has landed me.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The internet loves immediacy.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: What happened today?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: What's trending?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: What did somebody say 10 minutes ago?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: What's everybody angry about before dinner?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Age gives you another scale.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Decades.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: You begin noticing that the things that felt enormous at 30 sometimes barely register at 60.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And things that seemed ordinary become precious.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: A car ride with your father.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: A ridiculous family song.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: A football team of seven-year-old boys.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Your wife's hand.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Your son's name.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: A conversation in Chicago.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to tell a dying man that another grandson is coming.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Those things didn't trend.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: They accumulated.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, they became a life.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I hope I've accomplished with the executor's discovery.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to tell you what to think about Elias,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: or Thomas, or the structure Elias has inherited.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even want every question answered.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to know enough that ignorance is no longer available.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Then I want you to sit where Elias sits.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: What would you preserve?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: What would you change?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: What would you refuse?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: When does restraint become avoidance?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: When does influence create responsibility?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens when good people, acting in good faith, answer those questions differently?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Those are much more interesting questions to me than, who is the villain?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes there isn't one.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there are only people.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: People with history.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: People with power.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: People with incomplete information.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: People making choices whose consequences will be inherited by someone else.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's the executor's discovery.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: When this episode reaches you, I'll know something I don't know as I record it.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'll know what it felt like to officiate my son's wedding.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad I don't know yet.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some experiences deserve to arrive before we explain them.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when the executor's discovery reaches you next Tuesday, something similar happens.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: The book stops being mindless.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And after spending this month telling you where some of these questions came from
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: in my own life, I'm ready to let you encounter them in Elias's.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: November 3rd, the executor's discovery.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not an answer to the executor's silence.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: The next question.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Calder.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is After the Signal.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, strengthen the things that remain.