He wrote me back a few days ago with like, all these super-thoughtful notes about the book—like pages and pages of thoughts—and I was reading through all of it, you know, just like, this mountain of thoughtfulness, and I was like: Okay, I can’t write a fucking email back to this guy. I have to go see him and talk about this shit in person. So I wrote him back being like: Oddvar, can I stop by the seed vault on Thursday? I’m gonna be flying back home from Europe. And he was just like: Of course, yes. I’ll have a room made up for you and your entourage. LOL. He actually said “entourage.”

Patrick’s not happy about it. I mean, I get it, you know, he’s the head of my security detail, and like, yeah, Oddvar’s super-chill, but at the end of the day, like, he’s still a FAN, you know, and fans should always be treated with suspicion. Plus, we probably won’t even be getting cell service on this fucking island, so Patrick’s just like: There’s too many variables to control. I strongly advise against it. But I was just like: You know, Patrick, I respect that, and like, you know I love you and I respect one hundred percent what you do for me, but at the end of the day, this is what I want to do, and this is my decision, so this is what we’re doing.

And I mean, whatever, by the time we get there, he’s gonna love it. All the guys will. I can already picture it: like, Patrick and Curt and Mo just throwing snowballs at each other on the ice, and drinking beer out in the snow and looking off into this endless expanse of nothing and just being like: Wow, guys, we’re at the end of the world. We’re in some James Bond shit. Their inner Viking will take over.

Apparently, tourists aren’t allowed into the Vault. There’s a lot of people every year who head up to Svalbard to catch the northern lights, because, like, it sounds like they’re really beautiful from there, and the tourists are always asking the guides like: Yo, can you take us to the Vault? Can we go check out the Vault? But Oddvar was telling me that your average person isn’t allowed to just waltz in and look around. You need to be somehow associated with the people who work there, or like, you need to be an invited guest.

Something I also didn’t realize is like: This isn’t the only seed vault in the world. Apparently, there a couple thousand of these things that have been set up by different organizations all over the place, and this one is just what they call the “Doomsday Vault”: It backs up the whole system. EVERY seed that you can find at one of those other vaults, like, every single one, you can find a duplicate here. Like, there’s a seed vault in Italy that only has different kinds of tomatoes and basil and whatever, and like, there’s a seed vault in Lebanon that only has different kinds of Lebanese seeds. But this vault, like, the one in Svalbard, has everything. It has ALL the seeds from ALL the different places on Earth just in case any of those regional seed banks get wiped out.