 How many years have you been here? What's that? How many years have you been here? Since 2001. No, I don't need a lifestyle. I just want to be moveable. And if I want to be moveable, I got to move everything. What's left on your bucket list? Staying alive. And welcome everybody. It is my pleasure and delight to introduce you, my friend and colleague Brett Pablo. Since you're here, you probably know he is the best selling author of Outsider, which I'm really glad we'll be digging into tonight. But he's also an author of the book, The Escapist, and author of many, many, many, many pieces of journalism in notable publications like The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, You Name It. Some of my favorite pieces of his journalism are his investigative pieces, such as the one in The Walrus about the LRT gong show, something we can all relate to, or another piece he did about a Toronto doctor turned fentanyl drug dealer. And yeah. Or a piece he did on the Future of Journalism, which won him a national newspaper award. So this man is full of great words and stories. So yes, let's welcome him. And I think what we're going to do to start off is Brett's going to read a passage of his book so that we can kind of contextualize Dag, this man he writes about. I'm going to ask some questions and then I'm going to turn it to you. So definitely write down any questions you have. And you will have an opportunity to ask them a threat. So without further ado, let's hear some of your words. Okay. I should have marked the page. Thank you so much for the introduction and thank you for joining me on stage here. So I'm going to read, it won't take long. It's just about a two minute little passage here. It's from the prologue of the book. And I'll just set the scene that this is actually, it's something I witnessed and it was about five in the morning on a November nights on the side of a mountain in the winter. I had been camping out in sub zero temperatures to follow this man who was at the time he was 74. He's he's now 82 years old. So the it begins with with a quote from from this man and it's old people need superheroes to the last of the ubermensch runs through the night alone. He carries no identification, but the scars on his face, hands and body tell of an 80 years struggle to survive on the edge of society. He has been starved abandoned and trapped in a foreign land for nearly 50 years unable or unwilling to get back to the place that made him conceived in war. He is the aged mangled remnant of a darker time and yet he is innocent. As he races past snow covered hemlock fur and pine. The sound of frozen dirt crunching beneath his feet dissipates as he nears the edge of a cliff wall. His are not the only tracks out here, but they are the only sign that a human has been here. He plants his feet in the snow next to the paw prints of a mountain lion that stalks this hillside. He knows she's out here. He has seen her eyes watching him from the shadows while he runs. But the innocent mind has no fear, even when it should. Fingers knurls, fingers knurled, arms bloodied, shoulder shattered, teeth broken, heels battered. The old man keeps driving his body forward one boot drop at a time. He reaches out and wraps his clawed hand around the dormant trunk of an aspen and uses it to slingshot his body away from the cliff's ledge and upwards regaining the mountain lions trail as he makes for a frozen waterfall that few people have ever seen. To those who have seen him, his age coupled with his tottered boots, gloves and duct-taped jacket project an image of vulnerability. His face, masked in a frosted beard, is chopped and weathered by decades of cold and sun. Long-haired and straggly, he looks as ancient as a man would, having lived in a school bus parked in a forest since the start of the 21st century. And yet buried within his aging frame is a strength that seems to keep him safe. So this is this is the beginning of the story of a man by the name of Dag Obey, who is probably my most complicated friend. And well, let's jump into some questions, I suppose. So Dag is clearly a super athlete. I mean, he's a stuntman. He runs marathons. He lives entirely off the grid. He seems to defy aging. How did you find this man? So Dag sort of found his way to me as a myth, as a mythological creature. He was once upon a time and still would be regarded as the world's first extreme skier. He was Norwegian-born and he's been living in a bus for 30 years. And he came up on my radar because he did this thing where he would run 125-kilometer ultra marathons as a 75-year-old and a friend of mine, a colleague I used to work at Sportsnet and a colleague of mine was running in this as like a 35-year-old. And he came upon this man on the hillside who looked, as my friend described, looked like Jesus if Jesus had grown old. And he sort of planted himself in the mind of my friend because there was all these people competing in a race that takes 24 hours to complete. And there's one person doing this that stands out from everybody else because of his age. So my friend started to ask some questions like, who is that man? And he learned like, oh, well, that's Dag. Dag is Dag used to be a stuntman. Dag was in James Bond movies. Dag is the first star of Whistler. Dag lives in a bus. Dag is basically like a Sasquatch. Like people see him, but then they lose sight of him and he sort of disappears, wanders back into the forest. So that friend came back to Toronto and years later at a moment in my career where I was sort of down and out and there's nothing sort of really more desperate than a journalist who doesn't have a story to tell. And I was just sort of a journalist who didn't know what my next story would be. And my friend told me about this man and suggested that I might want to go out and find him. And so that's how I got onto the trail of seeking out Dag. That's incredible. You're actually really known for writing great profiles of people and you often go to great lengths, but not the lengths that you went to profile Dag. What was it about this man that got under your skin to the point where you didn't just write a profile in a magazine, but you wrote a book? I never did write a profile of him in the magazine because he was too complicated. When I met Dag in 2015, I was really fascinated. I wanted to get an understanding of how he did what he did, how it is that a man was living off the grid in a school bus on the side of a mountain. And let me just contextualize that a bit. There's a romantic sort of view that I had of a guy living on a bus with like a wood stove in it that's sort of puffing underneath the trees and the snow. The moment you get close to that bus, you realize how tough an existence that actually is. This is a man who has no toilet. He has no running water. He has no refrigerator for heat. He relies on himself to chop the wood that is going to keep him alive every night in this bus. I was fascinated by how he lived and other journalists had reached out to him and tried to follow him to get a sense of like how he does what he does and how he's pushing the limits of the human body to the extremes to try and continue to run 125 kilometer death races as a 75 year old. It was in meeting him and chasing the sort of how he does this that I realized the actual more difficult question to answer is why. And I kind of fell into this journey of following Deg for eight years by listening to an answer to a simple question that I posed to him that really threw me for a loop. I asked him on our first meeting there. We're up on the hillside. I asked him and I'd been really sort of intrigued by the Therovian aspect of his life. And I asked him if there was anything in this world that he wanted like an object and I expected him to say nothing. And instead he responded and said I wish I had a photograph of my mother and I have always in every piece of journalism that I do anytime I set out to write somebody's story. I always end up asking them about their childhoods because I think that that helps me to understand more about who they are as an adult and in the present by going back to the beginning and learning about their origin story. And so when Deg told me that he wished he had a photograph of his mother I all of a sudden was sort of in this frozen forest thinking maybe I've touched upon something here. Maybe this answer has kind of revealed a little bit as to why he is here because he was living very much sort of an alien existence. And so I asked him the follow up of well what do you know of your of your mother and he said well I I know that she was a Norwegian woman and I said what do you know of your father and he said well I understand him to have been a German soldier. And then I figured out like well he was born very shortly after the invasion of Norway and I don't know much about the history of Norway but I do know some things about the history of ABBA the supergroup and one of the singers Anna Frid was she was what's known as a Liebensborn child. She was Norwegian and her parentage her father was a German soldier and when the war ended her and her family they basically needed to leave Norway for their own safety and go to Sweden and that's how she became she she ended up in Sweden and meeting the rest of the group of ABBA and so I started to wonder if this man was perhaps had a similar story and if that maybe explained why he lived this way. We dig into that a little bit more I mean to drop a bomb of I think my father maybe part of the Liebensborn is a pretty huge thing and you went to great lengths to help him figure that out. Can you talk to us a little bit about what precisely you did to help them track down his past. Yeah so as a journalist I like we are sort of trained to kind of like the same use the same tools as historians right to go into to archives to search through any databases any records that we might be able to find to to answer questions and do do research. So I started to liaise with different archives in Germany to try and track track the name of his father in Norway as well and also also in Sweden because I had suspicions that perhaps they're there you know there were a lot of Norwegian women who after the war and I'll just paint the picture after the war these children were essentially kind of stateless a lot of them were institutionalized the Norwegian in the Norway as a as a country just kind of abandoned a lot of these children those who had been adopted were adopted into German Nazi sympathetic families and after the war those families a lot of those families were standing trial for treason. The mothers a lot of them couldn't sort of filter back into society in Oslo after the war they would be single that they'd have their heads shaved so that they they couldn't just walk the streets that they needed to sort of wear this. So I was trying so a lot of them fled to Sweden so I was trying to trace the names that he had in his mind of who his parents were and see what I could find. It is extremely difficult actually to do this kind of research because ultimately when all of us die or you know we will all die. What you leave behind is is essentially like little records whenever you checked into something like when you crossed a border or when you signed a marriage certificate or when you were when you appeared on a on a baptismal record. So I was tracing chasing like these documents that don't really amount to much to sort of tell you who somebody was in life that can only get me so far. And then ultimately I needed to to go to Norway and bring this man with me who and I should say like when I first encountered him he had no identification. So how do you bring somebody with no identification back to the place where they came from you have to help them get identification and you have to be very conscious of what you're doing because what I didn't what my biggest fear was that I would help him to get to Norway to help solve some of these questions and then and then not be able to get him back to bring him back to back home. I didn't want to bring him out of the country and then strand him in Norway because he didn't have the proper paperwork to come to come back to his bus. So all of this was sort of weighing on me in ways that I've never had things like this weigh on me when I'm doing a piece of journalism. It became very personal very quickly. Yeah, let's talk about that. I mean at some point it's pretty clear when you read the book that you went from having a journalism source relationship to being friends and you know that's a really natural understandable process when you're spending this much time when you're helping him find his mother but you're also a journalist and you're trying to write a thorough fact check journalistic book not a piece of PR. And so how did you confront that tension of having to write a book about somebody that you ultimately really care about? It's very uncomfortable to be a journalist if you have any to try and be a journalist to try and be detached from the people that you're writing about if you start to have to form a friendship with them. It's why we try to you know when we go to restaurants we pick up our own tab we don't we don't want to you don't want to be indebted to the people that you're writing about through the course of this and some of my students are here and like through the course of doing this I kind of fell into this this uncomfortable and kind of dangerous territory with this source where where we became friends. I began to really care for him and worry about him I would find myself waking up in the middle of the night knowing that he's out there running endlessly through through the forest and wondering if he was still alive because at any moment's time he could fall and hurt himself and he did fall and hurt himself several times while I was working on this and become like increasingly battered as a man who's trying to push the limits of what the human body can do. There's only so far you can take that and there are several times where I would go to see him and and he he was physically injured like looked like he'd been almost beaten up but it's because he's fallen down. So so I started to to care for him as a person and consider him a friend and I think I needed actually to cross that line in order to kind of validate the amount of work that I was doing on this to try and help him if I didn't care about him as a human being if I saw him simply as a story I would have given up earlier and you know moved on to an easier story to tell there was also something that happened and then I talk about this in the book and that I was exhausting a lot of myself trying to help answer this question as to his origin essentially to help connect him to his mother who is gone. And in doing so while doing that my mother developed stage 4 breast cancer and died. And so it became like a very personal experience for me when the relationship changed with this man where I'm not just the one reaching out to him. He was reaching back to me to see how I was doing because he knew what I was going through while simultaneously trying to help him on this journey. Let's talk a little bit more about him and his personality this this essence that you became close to me he's kind of complicated as I was reading the book. There was times I found him completely inspirational and there are times that I found him somewhat delusional and tragic and I guess. I wonder how you approached writing about the more tragic possibly delusional side of him. How did you do that with Grace as his friend? It's very difficult when you're. When you're talking to somebody when you're trying to when you're interviewing someone and you're asking them to share their truth and talk about things factually. And they start telling you things that don't check out with what you understand to be real. And this happened several times with Degh especially when we would talk about some of his history some of his his relationships with other people with with his family and his own children and. I wanted to write something that captured his. His view of everything his view of his life and Degh what I will say is that. I view him as someone who has this kind of. Base level survival instinct in him that in order to to sort of survive the way that he does. It requires him to always think positively and project positive possibly on everything so. That lives in the bus that the economics of Degh's existence kind of forced him to live in the bus. He doesn't really have a an out. He couldn't we couldn't sort of he couldn't really just move into society and live in a house. You can view that as. Unfortunate or you know a victim of circumstance or you can view it the way that he does which is what a gift. To live in the forest what what it treats to like I have I have what more could I possibly need than a bus I have a fire like I don't have a bathroom why would I need a bathroom I have I have the forest I have all of this here he just he takes everything and he makes it positive and. And I loved that elements of him because it is the world in which he lives but it is extremely hard to. To sort of square the corners of that when you when you talk to other people like his children when I spoke to his children who explain sort of why they don't live in the bus why he is there by himself and sort of the world that he had and the family that he had and why essentially they do not speak to him now. So in writing it. And being friends with him it's difficult it was difficult because I wanted it in it wasn't meant to be a takedown of him but I wanted to be honest to how he sees his life but also the way that everybody else sees it and understands it and so he wants to be inspirational and he is inspirational but at the same time he is tragic and he has all these things and so it was a fine it was a delicate balance I guess is what I would say. Well let's talk a little bit more about reporting the book because one of the nice things about being a journalist is that you can be a journalist anywhere. Except where there's a terrible microphone. So like you just need a laptop you need a cell phone but you kind of need your sources to answer the phone calls or to be able to answer the phone calls and here you wrote a profile of a man who lives off the grid in the mountains on the other side of the country during a pandemic. Can you tell us more about actually how you managed to even speak to him on a regular basis. Great question so this was kind of like trying to report a story and when I talk about reporting I see obviously making these writing these kinds of things there's two sides that you have to report it which is like going to the source doing the interviews gathering the information and then you come back and you write it. So the reporting side of this I through the process of this journey I basically concluded that I was I might as well have been reporting a book a hundred years ago and that I could not telephone this man to ask him questions I couldn't email him. The only way to ask him questions was to go to him so I would have to I'd have to try and line up a meeting place in the forest often are on a road by basically putting out feelers to send messages to the local pubs near where he lives or to some of the people near by him to try and leave a message for him to let him know that I am reaching out to him so I'm trying to come out and do a reporting mission. Sometimes I would hear back from him. Sometimes I wouldn't sometimes what I would have to do is just buy a plane ticket fly across the country rent a car drive into the mountains and either locate him at one of his fire pits or go to his bus and he gets up at four in the morning every day and he goes and he runs and tell about noon. So I knew that if I go to the bus in the afternoon and I knock on on the window there's a chance he will be there and if he's not there then I just kind of have to hang out long enough until he tell him materializes. So it was every it was like it was just a total analog reporting mission and I again like teaching journalism at Carleton it's it's often difficult I think for students to make that first leap to even like telephone people and try and ask them questions. I just have this all on my mind like it is it is incredibly difficult to report something like this to have to go to go to them every single time and then to try and fact check all of this also it just it was just incredibly an incredibly long experience. I think I think I went out there about 15 times to do to do this reporting. That's a lot. That's that is a lot and that is and that is costly. That is costly it is it just it just became what I did on my reading weeks over the over the holidays some long weekends. Yeah. So reporting was rife with difficulties. What about writing how did that go was it at least simpler or more straightforward. The writing of the book was was I wrote the book three times. The first time I wrote the book I wrote it largely in a palliative care wing in Ottawa where my mother was dying and I got about halfway into the book and then and then she died and I was sort of reading some of it to her because she was fascinated. She was always fascinated by what I was doing by my work and the stories and the people that I that I met and and and wrote about. So I was trying to race to get it done so that it could be sort of the last thing that that I shared with her and I didn't get it done. And because of that I kind of broke after after she passed I was sort of halfway through the text and when things are going well for me as a writer I can clock a thousand words a day if things if everything is going well like wake up in the morning and I sit down I have my structure everything ready and I can get a thousand days. So to write a book you need a hundred days like that a hundred thousand words days. Those are exhausting. After my mom passed I was having days were like I'd get a sentence like it was just I was just I just couldn't do it anymore and I just had memories of of where I was and I'd go back and read and try and fix up what I had previously written and it was just extremely painful. So my publisher gave me time and space to recover from that and and then I finally did finish draft one of the book and I handed it into my editor and and she she gave it back to me and she was like this is this is a you know this is great they tell you what you need to hear like this is great books can this is going to work everything's going to be okay and then they sort of flip it over and you see like it's just they've really gone into it. And what she basically said to me was that it wasn't working because I wasn't in the book the book was entirely the story of Dagg and she helped me to understand that the book it's the answers that he is able to provide are not what was driving the narrative it was the questions that I was posing and so she sort of opened up this gates that we keep closed often as journalists which is you know you don't put yourself in the story unless you have to go into that story and she just opened up the gate and said like you got to be in the story everywhere because without you he's not getting back to Norway without you he's not solving this this riddle without you there is no book and so so then draft two of the book I just I completely rewrote it and put myself in the story. And then in draft three I kind of brought my mom along with me because because she sort of belonged in it because the writing of the book was also sort of part of the book in the end like that I'm writing the book in the book which is very weird. I've never I've never gone that layer of like an inception in these kinds of stories. So what does Dagg think about the book? Has he read it? What does Dagg think of the book? He and so we're not allowed to share these things with like contractually I wasn't allowed to share the book with him before the book was done. So the moment that my publisher gave me two copies of the book I booked flights to Kelowna. I rented another car. I headed up the mountain and I brought it to Dagg and I said I'm I'm going to stay for five days. I know he's a fast reader. His bus is filled with books. I was like I'm going to stay for five days so that we can talk through it. What I didn't want to do was just disappear on them, right? Like just the book comes out and I never talked to him again. I've never been that kind of a journalist. I always go back and talk to the people after the story comes out because they've given, you know, they're fully exposed in my stories. So in those five days, every day I would go back to the bus in the morning and I would bring him a coffee and I would ask him how he was doing with the book and he couldn't get into it. He couldn't read it and he got his the first thing was he was it was the title. He was like, you know, outsider, outsiders are it's kind of a negative like outsiders are you know, in the in the media when we talk about outsiders we're talking about people who have done something bad like outsiders in society and he was like, I'm not an outsider and I understood what he was saying and then and then he got to the subtitle which is an old man a mountain in the search for hidden past and he was like an old man. I'm not an old man and I looked at him and I was like I don't think you should read the book but what so I mean I don't know if he has read the book what I do know what he what he did was he I inscribed the version that it gave to him and ultimately he took the he's a journal or he keeps journals every day what he does is he after his run he goes back to his bus and he records in his journal the story of his day and he looks back a year and he reads what he did a year earlier and then he tries to make sure that today is as good as the day that he had a year ago. It's actually a really interesting way to live in his journals he he laminates things all the time and so he took the the sort of inscription that I gave to him and he laminated it and put it in his journal and then he took the book and he ran down to the local coals which is the only place to buy a book near near him and he brought the book to them because he wanted to make sure that they knew that his friend had written the book and and they're they're like yeah we know it's it's sold out he was like oh then what happened is he started to get he wasn't sure what to make of the book because he like there's a lot in there this whole life is in there and he started to get people would recognize him because of the book and there's some people have sort of started to figure out where he is based off of the descriptions in the book and there was one day he was out for a run and there was a man standing on his trail on one of his trails and dad ran up to him and the the man wanted to tell him how moved he had been by the story I think if I have this right I think the man had been had had survived cancer and was trying to be more active and just wanted to share how much day story I meant him. And so dead called me to tell me that story but he was you want to know he was interested in how other people were reacting to the book. The last time I saw him I was about a month after the book came out and I went to pick him up to knock on the the window of his bus and say Matt Galloway on the current wants to talk to us about the book. If we if we can get to a CBC outpost Bureau I guess what they call and he was like oh yeah cool. So we went to Kamloops to call in and talk to Matt Galloway on the current and at that moment he still had not read the book and that he had had it for sort of a month. So I think I think it is extreme. I don't if someone came if some if a journalist came and wanted to write a book about me one I would be very cautious with this journalist and then I don't know if I would want to read the book either no matter what I would be interested in hearing what other people thought about the book but I don't know if I could read a book about myself and so it doesn't surprise me that he hadn't and and if he still hasn't it doesn't I get it. I have a couple more questions but soon we're going to open it to everybody in the room. So if you have your question feel free to line up near the mic. When do you think you'll see Dag again? Do you like like what's next? I hope to see Dag Dag still means a lot to me. I I hope to see him before the year is out. I think of him most in the winter because the winter I think is the most difficult for the life that he lives. I do ski I grew up skiing and this book and his story kind of had me fall back in love with that sport and so I hope to go out that direction to see him and and to ski as well. The I've been trying to ski some of the places where I wrote about in this book because it's where he went and so I'm still trying to sort of go and be in the places that I've written about and and I hope to see him. I do reach out to the people nearest to him especially during the forest fires this summer. Had some people asked me if I knew how he was doing during the fires and I was slow to respond because I didn't really know I didn't want to say he's doing great if he wasn't but he was in an area where they were on. They were told to be ready to leave to evacuate and I just sort of assume that if he was ever in this zone that needed to be evacuated. I really do believe that he would just leave when the animals leave like he's living such this natural existence and his whole his whole wish for how his story ends is that he doesn't want to end up in a in a retirement home. He wants to live in the forest until he dies and then just lie down in the woods and become food. And knowing that about him. I just had faith that if it ever came to a point with the this around his immediate surroundings were on fire that he would have already left that he would have left when the squirrels left. I guess that's just a face that I have in him. I do believe in his ability to survive. There will come a time when I will go out there to see him and and I won't be able to find him. But I don't believe that it's that time yet. My last question is you know what is your lasting take away from this how has written writing this book affected how you will write your next book. Well I hope that the next book that I write is is about somebody who has a telephone and and email and is easier to to get in touch with. But I don't know if it will ever be as as personally moving and experience as this one was. I think that when I met Dag I was some 40 years old now. I was 32 years old when I met him and I was an extremely competitive journalist. And I was never happy. As a journalist because I never felt I only ever felt as good as my last story. Which only sort of helps you. In the moment and in the moment that that story is in the really far back there. You're in trouble if you're living this way because then you're only going to feel as good as your next story. So I was kind of stuck in this peak in Valley. Kind of really really like big highs and low lows and when I met Dag. Some were along this journey with him. I've sort of let some of that go over the seat of your journey and I and I think that it's got to do with something that he explains to me as I was kept probing the story of his past. He kept sort of telling me like this is important stuff like where we came from. But it's like it's like we really need to concentrate on where we are right now what we're what I'm doing what we're doing right now and make sure that we're making the best of this moment. I was always like yeah I know but I need to figure out why we're here. And I think that that was more me projecting onto him because I've always been one of these people who focuses a lot on the things that have happened and like where I've been and what I've done. Sort of maybe think on it too much and at the same time sort of dream of this future and where I might be going and how I might get there. And the thing that I'm kind of least conscious of is where I am right now and what I am doing and he through the eight years that I've that I've known him he's always been been focused on where he is and what he's doing in the present and he there was this lion that he said to a runner in a in a in the death race and think the context of it if I have it right and I might have it wrong but my understanding of it is this he came upon this runner who was really struggling and when he sort of stopped with that runner and said look at your feet. It doesn't matter where they were or where they're going. It matters where they are right now. And then he just kind of kept running himself. It just kind of screwed up and and I think there's something there that that I I want to hold on to because I think that message for me is important and so to go back to your question of like then like whatever I might do next. I hope that I appreciate the journey of whatever book I do next if I do a book again for what it is in the moment and live it and enjoy it as opposed to sort of struggle through it and until it gets to this point where it's fully shaped and I'm happy with it because it's the journey is the it's torturous but it's also sometimes it's all there is.