Some places feel like they’ve been waiting for you. Others barely tolerate your presence, indifferent to your wonder. I’ve traveled enough—across continents, cultures, and climates—to know the difference. I’ve stood on volcanic cliffs in the Aegean, wandered the souks of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, traced the edges of fjords and desert plateaus, and walked through cities that practically begged to be admired. But admiration isn’t the same as belonging. Most places, no matter how beautiful, remind you that you’re just passing through.
But then there are the rare ones, like here in Le Périgord Noir, that refuse to play that game. They don’t care if you’re ready. They just are. And if you’re lucky, they let you feel it—the hum of the earth beneath your feet, the mineral memory in the air, the collapse of centuries into a single breath.
The Dordogne valley caught me off guard in a way I didn’t expect. In some respects, it echoes my once-familiar mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee—not in landscape alone, but in something deeper, more atmospheric. The Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains hold you close with a soft, green hush, like an old song you half-remember. Their beauty is familiar, almost familial—humid, fragrant, and gently worn.
But here, in Le Périgord Noir, the feeling turns—earthier, older, more elemental. And not just geologically, but civilizationally. This is a land that remembers. Its caves still cradle the ochre-stained breath of Paleolithic hands, and the hills carry the weight of Roman roads, templar and medieval fortresses, and hamlets both vanished and persistent. Time doesn't layer here—it seeps, settles, seeps forth again. You can feel it in the chill that clings to the stone walls of a half-collapsed barn in which a wild duck nurses her eggs, in the way the path bends not for efficiency but because it always has.
The streams smell of limestone and leaf rot, edged with the scent of mushroom caps and waterlogged lichen. Fungi cling to the bases of black oaks, and the sun doesn’t pour through the trees so much as filter—dim, precise, like a cathedral’s light catching dust motes in mid-air. Spruce needles mix with smoke from a distant chimney. Every breath reminds you: something ancient is still alive here.
They call it Noir for a reason—not just the color of the soil or the shade of the truffles hidden beneath it, but for the quality of the light itself. The darkness gathers in the understory, where ferns and moss curl low and quiet, and tree trunks rise like stone pillars out of shadow. It’s a darkness that feels cultivated, patient. Above, the canopy breaks open in sudden, holy shafts—sunlight not as warmth, but as revelation. The contrast plays tricks on your sense of depth, as if the forest is folding in on itself, layering time and silence. You walk through it as if trespassing in a forgotten prayer.
I’d come to the Dordogne to spend the week with my friend, Olivier Pron—artist, world-builder, philosopher by accident and craftsman by blood—the fire already lit, the wine already breathing as we settled in to discuss a new project. The timeless, family home– built around a medieval bread oven–was perched quietly on land that had been occupied without interruption for half a million years, and it was already speaking to me.
The hamlet where Olivier’s family farm sits consists of about five houses, and it isn’t marked by signage or ceremony. It’s not a destination. It’s a slow-breathing fold in the land, tucked just 900 meters from the glittering patience of the Dordogne River. A narrow and crooked paved path winds you into it, though to call it a “road” is already generous. More like a stone-lined vein leading you to the marrow of something older than memory.
The first thing you notice is the minerality—a texture in the air, underfoot, in the bones of the buildings. The soil here resists. Orchards struggle. Fruit trees lean slightly off-axis like they’ve grown wise to disappointment. This is no Eden. The land doesn’t yield sweetness easily. But that’s not the point. This isn’t a place of abundance—it’s a place of resilience. The alluvial soils from the Lentinol—a nearby stream that swells and spills into a 100-year-old lake when it rains too hard—remind you that even modest water remembers its path.
Five centuries ago, this stream—one that today barely warrants a name on a map—powered eight mills. You don’t need a cathedral to anchor a civilization. Sometimes a mill is enough.
And while most of the world has moved on to stainless steel and silicon chips, Le Périgord Noir never quite signed the contract. The rhythms here are older, rooted in muscle, weather, and inheritance. Goat herders still walk the same limestone trails their grandfathers did, guiding shaggy-haired chèvres du Massif Central—hardy climbers with amber eyes and a taste for steep, unforgiving terrain. The sheep—mostly Causses du Lot and Lacaune—graze behind iron gates that haven’t latched properly in decades, their bells a soft metronome under the canopy.
These are not ornamental flocks. They are meat, milk, and lanolin—stone-footed workers of the land. The pigs, mostly black-skinned and barrel-bodied, root through oak leaves for acorns, their diet shaping the marbled fat locals swear you can taste in every cured slice. Cattle, thick-necked Limousin and auburn Salers, move slowly through fields bordered by low dry-stone walls. They were bred for this—for hauling, for meat, for enduring long winters without complaint.
It isn’t just livestock. There are still true butchers here—not charcutiers in white tile boutiques, but people who know the anatomy of sustenance by feel. Fishermen still know the bends of the Dordogne blindfolded, where catfish nest and perch dart under fallen logs. Beekeepers don’t speak of honey as product, but as weather, memory, and mercy—thick with walnut blossom or light as acacia, depending on what the hills decided that season.
Even beneath the soil, the past is patient. Old quarries still yield the golden limestone that built half of southwest France. Truffle hunters work with muttering dogs at dawn, seeking the black diamonds that hide beneath the roots. And though there are computers in homes, satellites overhead, and the occasional drone above a vineyard, none of it alters the fundamental truth: this is a place that never traded its pace for efficiency. It remembers how to feed itself. And how to wait.
Artists, of course, are here. How could they not be? Places like this demand translation—through brush, chisel, lens, loom, ink. The land hums in a register that begs to be interpreted, and the people who stay long enough start to listen. You’ll find sculptors working with local limestone in courtyards overgrown with vine, ceramicists glazing earthy reds in half-ruined barns, blacksmiths coaxing iron into hinges and hooks no machine could replicate. Woodworkers still plane walnut by hand. Textile artists dye wool with oak bark and lichen. Even the beekeepers, bakers, and foragers move like quiet choreographers, each action part of an unbroken lineage of making.
The houses—thick-walled, slate-topped, soot-stained—weren’t built to impress. They were built to endure. One squats in shadow, shutters drawn like eyelids mid-prayer. Another tilts into the afternoon light, its golden stone façade stitched with rusted iron fixtures that predate the camera by a century or two. You get the feeling they’ll outlast the next four generations without asking for much in return.
There’s a rhythm here. A humility. The air smells of woodsmoke, yes—but also wet stone, boiled chestnuts, and cold iron. And it carries the sound of lives not amplified: a rooster’s static crow, a hinge whining its opinion, the deliberate scrape of a chair across tile. Even the ducks eye you sideways, as if to say, you’re late.
It’s the absence of performative noise masquerading as progress that defines this place. It doesn’t sell nostalgia. It functions—not as a monument, but as an ancestral memory still in motion. This village isn’t frozen in time. It’s layered with it: 500 years of architecture stacked atop 400,000 years of human presence, whispering in tongues only the patient can hear.
This is where Olivier spent the summers of his youth. Long before he was conjuring worlds for film studios or sketching speculative futures, he was running barefoot through these woods, jumping into streams, climbing crumbling stone walls, and disappearing into caves without telling anyone where he was going. The days stretched wide in that distinctly rural, pre-digital way—built from smoke, mischief, and unstructured time. A Goonies-era childhood, but real. Dirt under the fingernails, nettles in the socks, and an unspoken code: you don’t come home until someone calls your name from the window—or until the first bat screeches out of a cave.
He introduces me to a few of the friends who were part of that season of his life—no need to say much. Their shared memory hangs in the air like dust caught in sunlight. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s continuity. They know the bends in the river and the bends in each other. There’s a tempo to their interaction that hasn’t changed. The jokes are quicker. The silences are full. Their children are joyful.
You get the sense they didn’t just grow up in this place—they grew up with it. And it never let them go.
Olivier leads me reverently into his late mother’s atelier, a quiet space still steeped in the scent of clay and smoke. Here, she once fired raku and other ceramics, including a series of figures inspired by the Paleolithic red ochre aurochs of Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume—creatures she shaped with such precision and soul they seem to nearly live and breathe. There’s something in the linear spike of a horn, the taut energy in a painted flank, that echoes the original artists: anonymous, ancient, yet unmistakably human.
Despite daytime highs climbing to 33°C in the valley, the woods and streams here carry their own microclimate—cool, shaded, immune to the heat’s urgency. The house, built from ancient rock and settled deep into the hillside, holds onto that coolness like a memory. By late at night, even in July, the temperature drops to 10°C, the kind of chill that sharpens the air and makes firelight feel earned. And this is where we sat, on our first fire-lit summer evening, trying to describe a future already alive beneath our feet.
The conversation didn’t begin so much as arrive—slow, unhurried, like mist rolling off the hillside after dusk. We sat by the fire, the stone walls absorbing our silence. Outside, the woods whispered their own language; inside, something ancient was beginning to speak through us.
Olivier stared out the window, eyes tracing the line where forest met sky.
“You don’t carry a place like this,” he said. “It carries you. You feel it. In your feet. In your chest. Not from the books—but from the ground.”
He wasn’t romanticizing. This wasn’t nostalgia dressed up as insight. The Dordogne is more than a picturesque region of foie gras and castle tourism—it’s a cradle of human continuity. Four hundred thousand years of it. Neanderthals, Celts, Romans, Visigoths, Templars. Layer upon layer of story, not archived but embedded.
And you feel it. Not in your head. Not as information. But viscerally—like memory passed through the soles of your feet.
⸻
Cave Villages and Ancient Metropoli
We talked caves first. Of course we did.
From the caves here in the Dordogne to those other caves we had so recently visited—the Nabataean caves of Petra in Jordan and Mad’ain Saleh, or Hegra, in Saudi Arabia.
Here, nearby caves were carved into limestone cliffs just minutes from where we sat. Caves that were homes before the word home had architecture. Some of these structures still bear art older than the last Ice Age.
I leaned back, wine in hand, the fire snapping gently behind us.
“You know, Olivier,” I said, “how much the caves here weirdly remind me of the once inhabited caves of Petra and Al Ula, remember?”
He nodded slowly, eyes narrowing in recognition. “Yeah. Petra especially. Not just the monuments, but the parts they don’t show you—the warrens of carved dwellings winding through the side canyons.”
I sat up a little straighter. “Exactly. Everyone gawks at the treasury façade like that’s the point. But it’s the thousands of homes carved behind and around in the different wadis—the kitchens, cisterns, living spaces, goat pens—that floored me.”
I looked at him. “That wasn’t just a city—it was a cave metropolis.”
Olivier let the phrase hang in the air, then gave a small shrug. “That’s one word for it. Petra did have amazing scale. Systems. Community. Not just carved temples—but carved life.”
I turned, gesturing toward the darkness beyond the window.
“So what about here?” I asked. “Did the cave settlements of the Dordogne ever reach a scale anything like Petra?”
Olivier didn’t answer right away. He leaned forward, hands resting on his knees.
“People—well, hominids, to be more precise—have been here in the Dordogne for at least 400,000 years. At least. That’s the oldest traces we’ve got. Tools, hearths, occupation layers.”
He paused, taking a sip from his glass.
“But if you’re talking about something like village structure—hamlets, shared infrastructure—you’re probably looking at maybe 12,000 years ago. Who really knows?”
“So Ice Age receding,” I said, smirking. “Humans staying put for once.”
“More or less,” he laughed. “You start seeing settlement patterns that suggest shared labor, not just survival. Trails linking cave mouths. Evidence of livestock. Maybe even primitive zoning.”
“So,” I said, “Kind of Neolithic suburbia?”
Olivier chuckled. “Exactly. Less monumental, but maybe more intimate than Petra. And designed to endure.”
But unlike Petra, which was forgotten for millennia, the Dordogne never vanished.
It’s been occupied, nonstop. From paleolithic hearths to Renaissance châteaux, the land kept living—people adapting, surviving, making, sheltering.
“These weren’t just hominids,” Olivier said, waving off my earlier academic hedging. “They were early societies. The cave paintings—they’re not fantasy or religion. They’re documentation. Maybe ritual, maybe not. But definitely: record.”
He stood up, crossed the room to a low shelf, and pulled out one of his mother’s ceramic pieces—a stocky aurochs, shoulders and flanks thick and stout, its horns curved like sickles.
“There was a bear,” he said, “scratched into stone, cartoon-like. So modern it could be in a children’s book.”
“My mother was obsessed with those images,” he said, turning the figure in his hands before handing it to me gingerly. “She recreated aurochs and horned creatures in clay, always trying to get the line right. The movement. The breath.”
“You see the angle of the horns?” he added. “That’s not abstraction. That’s memory. Embodied memory.”
We sat with that for a moment, the fire casting long shadows on the walls.
“One thing about the Dordogne,” he added quietly, “is that it hasn’t sold its soul.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, there are tourists,” he said. “But no neon signs. No b******t T-shirt stands. No attempt to paste on medievality.”
“Because it never left,” he gestured around the room, pointing to a 16th century medieval armoire — An ancient family piece.
He went on. “You go to a sound-and-light show here, it’s in a thousand-year-old fortress. A Renaissance fair here doesn’t feel like pageantry. It feels like continuity.”
“You do a Renaissance fair in the U.S.,” he said, “it’s fantasy.”
A pause.
“You do it here—it’s context.”
That landed. It’s the difference between a theme and a memory. Between culture on display and culture still inhabited. And when they fire real trebuchets across a medieval field, you don’t think, Wow, look at that re-creation.
You think, Oh right—they built this.With math. With proportion. With muscle and metallurgy and golden ratios.
And today, we still find ourselves behind the craftsmanship curve.
Olivier went on to describe the Compagnons du Devoir—a medieval brotherhood. A national guild of master craftsmen whose methods have barely changed in centuries.
“You enter young. You live communally,” he shared. “You apprentice under masters across France, moving from city to city, learning your craft the hard way—by doing it.”
Masons shape arches. Carpenters build staircases by hand. Blacksmiths forge hinges and locks from raw metal. Roofers, tilers, stonecutters, and joiners—each trade passed down with exacting care.
After years of work, you produce a masterpiece. A real one. Built, not theorized. It’s judged by peers—not for prestige, but for precision. No shortcuts. No spectacle. Just deep skill, patience, and pride.
When a cathedral needs restoring, or a centuries-old beam needs replacing, they still call the Compagnons. Because they never stopped remembering how to build.
“They’re hired all over the world to restore cathedrals,” Olivier said. “These guys know proportion better than any AI model ever will.”
He said he wished someone had told him about them when he was young. He’d have been a blacksmith, maybe. Built with his hands instead of pixels and light.
And yet, here’s the irony: digital perfection is making handcraft more valuable than ever.
As our conversation continued into the night, we shifted, in a strange twist of fate, to how Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality were oddly elevating new material realities. AR sharpens the contrast—makes us hunger for tactile truth. We’re moving past mass-produced “perfection” and into an era where imperfection perhaps signals care, time, soul.
“Luxury is returning to its roots,” he said. “Not in diamonds, but in story. In texture. In the myth of the maker.”
He told me about Vincenzo Cotiis, an artist whose resin furniture mimics marble so convincingly you’re fooled by weight and texture—until you tap it. His pieces sell for hundreds of thousands of euros, not because they’re heavy, but because they’re conceptually anchored. Like the cave paintings, and like his mother’s ceramic aurocs, Cotiis’ works carry weight in intention, not mass.
You want a table that’s just a table? IKEA’s got you.
You want something that unsettles your perception? That makes you question materiality? That reminds you that illusion is a craft? Then you’re back in the domain of the artisan.
We sat with that familiar ache—creation without ownership. Olivier, an artist. Me, a writer. Both of us storytellers by trade. Paid to conjure worlds, but never named as their keepers. We carved but didn’t sign. Designed structures that others would furnish.
Olivier built whole planets for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I once helped design futures that now appear in glossy smart city brochures. Neither of us own any of it.
“You must be rich,” people say to him.
“You must be influential,” they say to me.
We both shrug. It was work for hire. We got paid. The rights belong elsewhere.
Like my great-uncle John, who painted book covers for John Steinbeck and Aldous Huxley and the original Horatio Hornblower novels—art for legends, but all under contract. All labor without legacy.
But the impulse to create? That isn’t something you can assign a copyright to. It’s not a career. It’s a compulsion.
“It’s not a choice,” Olivier said. “It’s in your bones. In French we say, une compulsion. It’s the same word. You have to get it out.”
******
Toward the end of the night, we circled back—not to nostalgia, but to purpose. Shared purpose, both global and personal—as artists, writers, and thinkers. To what it means to make anything at all in a world increasingly shaped by machines.
Not just stone or shelter. Not blueprints or governance.But meaning. Shared, built, durable.
“Urbanism isn’t a word,” Olivier said. “It’s behavior _ its vivre emsenble. It’s how people live together. Build stuff together. And that’s been happening right here for 400,000 years.”
He nodded toward the hearth.
“Not just in the tallest buildings or biggest bridges. But in stories by the fire in the mouth of a cave. In the choices about where to place fire and food and light.”
It was about the unfinished work—the kind artists and writers still carry. The kind that doesn’t scale, doesn’t automate, and doesn’t vanish every few years.
Olivier smiled into his glass.“My brother, Guillaume, reminded me recently of the old motto of the Compagnons du Devoir—Soyez de ceux qui construisent l’avenir.”
I took in the phrase along with a slug of Bordeaux, translating it slowly through my rusted French.
“Be among those who build the future,” he added, raising his glass. We clinked.
Dordogne isn’t ancient—it’s ongoing. Not a relic, not a memory, but a living reminder that story is still made by hand—even with new tools, always in the spirit of the cave painters and the mothers who shaped clay and raku with love and fire.
The future doesn’t wait. It settles into the soil and waits to be unearthed once more.
About this Episode:Much of the b-roll footage in this episode was created during a 10-day summer visual storytelling workshop, where we approached the ancient landscapes of Le Périgord Noir as one of our speculative film locations. This 27-minute rough-cut documentary podcast essay emerged as a thought exercise—an experiment in blending layered, site-based exploration and multi-pass narrative mapping with reference photography and AI-generated imagery and animation. Using platforms like Midjourney and Runway, alongside traditional tools like Photoshop and Premiere, we explored how these technologies can extend the craft of narrative worldbuilding beyond what a camera alone can capture—into terrains that are imagined, remembered, or not yet built.
Just a few years ago, documentary style scenes like these would have demanded complex 3D builds in Unity or Unreal Engine. Today, we can evoke them in a matter of days. For example, reimagining scenes from Olivier’s childhood—storming castles and exploring caves in the Dordogne with friends during the 1990s—allowed us to rapidly prototype and storyboard with surprising emotional and visual fidelity.
We chose these technologies not out of convenience, but as part of a deliberate experiment in expanding the visual vocabulary of storytelling. Traditional footage—whether historical, speculative, or symbolic—is often limited by access, cost, or the narrow archive of what’s already been documented. Generative AI, by contrast, allows us to render what doesn’t yet exist or was never captured: vanished streets, imagined ruins, mythic figures, speculative architectures. These tools let us bridge eras, sketch concepts still in gestation, and test narrative tone before a single frame of film is shot. They’re not substitutes for archival or live-action work, but a conceptual layer—a kind of visual dramaturgy in motion.
In our evolving practice of visual storytelling, artists like Olivier and I use AI not as a shortcut, but as a new kind of chisel—one that demands its own discipline. We embed ourselves as narrators inside both ancient worlds and cities yet to be built, using AI-powered tools to collapse temporal boundaries and prototype possibility. These technologies allow us to simulate histories that might have been and futures that could be, not merely for spectacle, but for meaning—each frame, each artifact, each architectural line becoming part of a larger cognitive canvas. This process requires discernment, iteration, and narrative structure. We’re not simply generating images; we’re shaping coherent worlds with their own internal logics, guided by the same rigor a stonemason might bring to carving the keystone of a cathedral.
That level of craftsmanship—deliberate, cumulative, and steeped in discipline—reminds us of les Compagnons du Devoir, the medieval guilds whose apprentices traveled across France for years, mastering their trades through repetition and reverence for tradition. Our “tour de France” is digital, but no less demanding.
The ethical blind spots of AI are real: bias embedded in training data, the potential erasure of cultural specificity, the uneasy tension between originality and mimicry, and the risk of aesthetic homogenization masquerading as progress. But there is also opportunity here—to reimagine access, authorship, and the act of worldbuilding itself. We don’t seek to replace artisanship; we seek to evolve it. To graft our lineage as storytellers onto a new scaffolding—one that still requires human hands, human questions, and human intent.
This evolving approach to worldbuilding also reframes the role of the audience—not just as passive viewers, but as co-interpreters. When scenes are rendered from memory, myth, or imagined futures, they invite an active gaze: to decode, to project, to question what is being shown and why. AI-generated storytelling opens new terrain for ambiguity, symbolism, and layered meaning—blurring the lines between historical document, speculative fiction, and emotional archive. In this sense, authorship becomes less about control and more about creating frameworks through which others can explore. The audience steps into the storyboard, not just to witness a world, but to move through it.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
