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we need to have a brighter view of our potential tomorrows Humanity has always grown out of its problems courage can be a function of knowledge nobody else can create what you see in your head either you're going to do it or it's not going
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to get done we didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones those of us who have hope need to find ways to spread it we're mimetic creatures I refuse to be Emperor the world the greatest leaders do not need positions of power they lead by
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inspiring well hello everyone it's Jim o shanesy with yet another infinite luks I am very excited about today's guest it is Devin Ericson who came onto the scene just like um amazingly well by taking somebody on on Twitter and people really
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reacted very very well to that but that's not why I'm excited I'm excited because you are the author of theft of fire now you spent two decades embedded as a systems and AI programmer and this is your first novel yeah and and and really it's a rallying cry in my opinion
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against the loss of Hope in fiction something you and I are amazingly sympatico on uh you've got 287 reviews on Amazon with a 4.7 star average rating my God like that's amazing I I mean maybe are you in there planting the onear
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reviews Devin welcome no you you always get your you always get your supply of sort of crazy onear reviewers and you know sometimes they help as much as some of the more positive reviews because people can read the people who didn't like your book and
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say this person is a little sort of Froot loopy so you know maybe this is a good book yeah well it is a very good book I'm not completely done with it yet uh my staff uh read it very thoroughly and they're like Jim you are going to love
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this and I'm loving it thus far glad to hear that you you made a great remark uh when you're talking about you know sort of this topic uh fiction and you said did Elon Musk grow up reading Gone Girl no he grew up reading the Moon is a Harsh Mistress yeah and you also add the
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era of whining is over and humanity is going places again oh yeah Bravo yeah it only takes a few people to say what everyone is thinking and I think we are all very very tired of Doom and Gloom from people whose basic philosophical position is that
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they are against humanity and they are against western civilization and I find that view almost uh difficult to comprehend I I I don't understand what drives a person to become so pessimistic that they they're essentially rooting for Armageddon rooting for the end what's going on
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there well I think there's I think there's three sort of categories of people who are like this and the first is highly programmable people who are receiving these kinds of messages from really all over but a lot from sort of the traditional news media and so
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forth and what happens with them sometimes is that they like to appear very smart and cynical and you know they don't they don't want to appear like they're the person who doesn't get it and they're convinced that this is the case and a
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lot of them are scared so they're going to fight to oh you know we need to diminish the human population by half we need to you know dismantle all our heavy industry and build solar panels and this this kind of thing it's it's you know this they they've really
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sort of outsourced their the creation of their world view to someone else and then you have people who like to who mistake cynical for smart they want they want to appear to be very intellectual and very you know in touch with what's
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going on and able to predict the future and you know this this Doom and Gloom stuff gets headlights you know it grabs the attention it gets clicks it gets likes and some people are very addicted to that and then you have the third and
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smallest category which is sort of the the people who come from this tradition of the power Brokers of the 20th century and these are people who will happily burn down western civilization in order to be king of the ashes that remain and I think that that there's
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there's a little bit of panic on the part of people who have traditionally wielded soft power from behind the scenes in the sense that the 20 20th century was the century of totalitarianism and it became that way through the technological state of
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humanity at that point you know your major Communications Avenues of the 20th century were radio and television well these were very expensive to produce and so they automatically were one to many media you sit in your living room and you watch
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your television and you listen to your radio and there's one person selected by someone with the money to do all this who is pontificating at you and so it was very easy for people with wealth and power to control the narrative and now we have the internet
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which is a many to many communication media and you know you'll have individual websites like Reddit where it's sort of run by Communists and they censor everything but that's not the internet the internet is okay if you don't like that you can go to some other
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site some other protocol some other means of communication people can Route Around censorship Route Around official narratives and talk to each other and now it's no longer so easy to control the message so I think what we're seeing
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is a lot of a lot of panic a lot of we don't control public opinion in the way that we used to it's actually one of the parts of our thesis that we call the great reshuffle and all all of the old Power uh structures are collapsing yeah and they are literally losing their
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minds yeah because they they can't handle it because they lost because they had the power to control the narrative through administrative means for so long they lost the ability to persuasively argue their case that atrophied and so now they have to
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lie and they have to distort and they have to say the opposition do you think that um in the earlier parts of these Mass mediums uh I I like to go back and watch newscast from you know 1964 thereabouts and first off bar they
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spoke in sentences and paragraphs and they actually had real debates why do you why do you think do you think that changed because of what you just said with the the idea that oh wait a minute because you're right radio TV they all they're all passive mediums right and
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and so but in the earlier days uh it did seem that there was quite a bit of give and take and then that really stopped what do do you think there was a forcing function I think that there is maybe a little bit too much focus on this idea
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of oh corrupt people have taken over these institutions the way I see it the institutions themselves were structured in such a way as to motivate and incentivize corruption and that process took a while to happen because when you centralize a
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lot of power in one place for example in three major media networks that control all the television in the 70s and 80s then it's going to attract a certain type of person who is very motivated to use that for personal ends and to monetize that so you're you're
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focusing yeah a lot of people are focusing on this idea that oh we just have these corrupt people who are wrecking our institutions and we just need to toss them out and I see it as we centralized our institutions too much in
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the first place because that's what the Technology support it you know I have absolutely no problem getting my news from Twitter you know a lot of traditional journalists and say this you they say this in a derogatory guys oh you get your news from Twitter well when
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I get my news from Twitter there's a lot of different sources for that news it's up to me to decide who is reliable but I'm hearing every side of the story all the way from The Establishment to the counterculture to the very conservative
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kind of data Checker to the person in a tinfoil hat I get to hear all of these perspectives and it empowers me to decide which one is reliable so I think that I think that it's not so much a question of tossing the money changers out of the temple as why did we
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build this corruptible centralized temple in the first place that's a really great point and and probably just rfic on it uh you know the way it evolved was uh the the the large corporation sort of Saved people from the the drudgery and difficulty of farm
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work I often say you know why why do you think these people voluntarily left the Farms it wasn't like people were going out and grabbing them they were flocking they were flocking to the cities and in much the same way as you point out on
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the internet uh look I I think everything that is a structure for the most part is a complex adaptive structure and in those types of structures you're absolutely right top down doesn't work bottom up is where all immersions comes from in those
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structures that I kind of think of the internet itself as a bottomup structure and to use your words that allows you to Route around these sort of failure nodes yeah yeah there's an old saying that the internet interprets censorship as damage and tends to Route around it but a lot
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of what we've seen throughout history is that uh the the the single Arrow of History the the source of lasting change is really technological progress and everything is Downstream from that and what we frequently see is that technological progress will often make
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things worse for a little while and then make things better than they were before and I think we had a moment like that in the industrial revolution where technological progress briefly you know turned all of the children into of the lower class into
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Factory labor slaves and you know polluted the cities so horribly that people would go to the seaside for their health and then technology progressed and things got better than they had been before the Industrial Revolution and I think when
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we're talking about the social environment or information media we've seen this with radio and television making things briefly worse and then the internet making things better and we've seen it with the internet as well where with the internet
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and social media itself there's an era of briefly making things worse where people get C in these dopamine Loops you know posting things on Instagram for likes and eventually we're going to figure out how to deal with that and we're going to be better off and I think
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a lot of the people who are anti- technology anti-g growth anti-progress they only see some of the short-term harm and some of the short-term scary change and they say no we must put a stop to this and they don't understand that when
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you're first starting out anything it's hard and it's risky and it's dangerous and there's a lot of unknowns and it's scary but that doesn't mean you go back and hide in your hole it means you one by one you work the problems that you see in front of you
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and you try to solve them yeah Humanity has always grown out of its problems exactly so absolutely we are we are the uh at Le least the best I know the only Universal explainers and inventors and every tool that we invent
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extends our reach but you're right A lot of people tend to be hyperbolic Discounters and they see something new and they sort of instantly fear it and I love your point about you know when it when it is new it is kind of the worst version of that oh
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yeah and and and then what they fail to understand is that we're actually creating problems yes but better problems and we are also solving them as we go along it's very iterative right and you know there's a great quote staying with the theme of uh of the
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power of stories uh Ben oi uh said to poison a poison its stories a demoralized nation tells itself demoralized stories absolutely absolutely now I I I'm hoping and keeping my fingers crossed that you are sort of the Vanguard here of uh of
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reorienting that to positive stories I I passionately believe in fact we're starting a book publisher to make good on this that we need to have a brighter view of our potential tomorrows right if you're if if all you see for example you brought up TV news I
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stopped watching TV News 12 years ago simply because literally I just like I said to my wife when we watched one particular segment I I said man you know Orwell only thought of it as the 2minute hate now we've got 247 hate Doom destruction the malthusian idea that
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like we're all going to starve to death we're all going to uh you know perish in these horrible apocalyptic scenarios and yet you know are you familiar with Julian Simon who wrote The Ultimate resource not off hand now you might love
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it um he he made a bet with the uh population bomb guy ER I can't remember the guy's name erelic I think David Erick uh no that's the wrong name I'll I'll fix it in the notes uh but it essentially his was humans we humans are the ultimate resource that was the
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reason he titled his books thus and I'd like to jump in here if I may and say that that actually becomes more true over time because throughout history we started with this this sort of we're going to grab our resources from the environment
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and we're going to transform them very little because there's very little transformation that we know how to do and so the major value is going to be in the resources and we're going to fight over the resources we're going to fight Wars over the
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resources but the more we learn to transform that which we take from the environment the less important the Raw environmental component becomes the less of the whole thing that it represents so you know it used to be that countries that were rich in
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resources were rich countries well now if we look the countries that are rich in resources like Russia and African countries and so forth are relatively poor because the wealth goes to the countries that take those resources and transform them into useful forms and the
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more and more we gain expertise to do that the more the major resource is the skilled human being and the less and less we fight Wars because skilled human beings are not a resource you can fight Wars over the uh author of San in the Art of
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Motorcycle Maintenance Robert per at a great uh thought which was along the lines of e e everything you see as you look around came out of the human mind unless you're looking at a perfectly untouched Savannah somewhere and he said there is no Steel in nature and and to
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that quip I add you know we didn't leave the uh stone age because we ran out of stones we left the Stone Age because our minds created better and better ideas back to Julian Simon the bet he made was on with was with a uh degrowth Doomer
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who said we have to cut the population we have to stop consuming resources Etc and so Simon did something very clever he allowed his opponent to choose any medals that he wanted very rare medals I think this was in the late 60s early 70s
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and he said I will make a bet with you that 20 years from now every one of those will be lower in price than they are today and the guy is like easy money are you kidding me and so he picked the rarest uh minerals and met metals that he could find and of course the
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punchline here is Simon won the BET handily yeah well you ain't seen nothing yet wait till we get out and start messing with asteroids because planets are very very steep gravity Wells and so when you have a a high gravity field
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like on Earth 1G is is a lot compared to most planets all the heavy stuff tends to sink to the bottom so all of these Metals especially the rare earth metals they're mostly present at the core of the Earth where we can't get to them we may not think of this it this
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way because you know a fish doesn't think it's wet but we exist in a very in an environment that is very poor in heavy elements and when we go out into the solar system and we find these tiny tiny little rocks they're just a lot of them are just made of these heavy element ments
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that we use and consider scarce there's a there's a little bit just a little throwaway bit in theft of fire near the end there's a a gunfight inside a spacecraft and that's all I'll say instead of it as so as not to spoil too much but there's
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this little throwaway line where the the protagonist is using frangible ammunition because he says you know you don't want to penetrate the hull and this is a little more complicated than an ordinary bullet which is just a lump of
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gold and the point is that gold is so common that they're making bullets out of it yeah I love that I I I wanted to ask though also you know you have and I don't want to give away too much uh so these are all just teasers people listening and watching but but yeah as
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part of the book uh you uh you posit that we got a lot of our uh super Advanced Tech from discovering alien Tech I think it was the uh tombs of sedba yeah which I looked I looked I looked that up by the way an in it goddess of the sea and marine animals
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yeah uh but um why Ai and and why not uh humans inventing all of this Tech well alien technology is is it gives you a lot of flexibility to throw in mysterious things that give a sense of wonder and so obviously I don't think when we get out into the solar
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system we are going to find any you know alien ruins in the solar system with technology that we can Loot and you know that's not going to happen but it it gives a sense of a wider Universe it it gives a sense of mystery
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and wonder it allows you to little bit play on Clark's Law of any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic and you know the interaction with alien civilizations has some implications for the eventual story um so we're going to be seeing
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more of that but but the the thing about hard science fiction is hard science fiction doesn't mean that you worked out how all the technology works and you know exactly how it's supposed to be because if you could work out all of the
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technology 100% in your science fiction novel you would not be writing science fiction novels right you would be starting a tech company so what you have to do is is take like a small handful of prises and then you extrapolate logically from that and if the math
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Works given your basic assumptions you got yourself hard science fiction and you've got yourself something that the readers will credibly buy you know will will they'll buy into it and it it's like you have to you have to treat the reader credibil with
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respect and you you can't just say oh I'm going to invent artificial gravity to make writing scenes in spaceships easier and you know that technology is not used for anything else they're not making gravitic weapons or gravitic drives or anything it's just so the
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spaceships haveen down you know and that's just lazy writing that's lazy so I was like okay let's let's posit an alien technology that gives us reliable simple hydrogen Fusion without using tritium or dyum and let's just roll from there and then okay this alien
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technology also allows me to talk about economics a little bit because you have a post governmental Frontier Society where you don't really need to do much legalistic control because Innovation can be duplicated right you know you
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you you innovate and someone else can innovate and so monopolies are not really the stable thing but then you throw in some technology that came from outside the system that came from outside this whole economic sphere where somebody else can duplicate your
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research now you have something that your Market can't entirely deal with and that creates permutations and that sets up the background for these two characters one who comes from a very working class background and one who comes from a very
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wealthy background that is profiting off this restricted technology and it's like okay how do they see the world how do they see each other how do they interact over this how does this how do their arguments about this drive and illustrate the basic conflict
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between their personalities and can they find a way to get along or are they going to murder each other yeah so a lot of the time when you're writing science fiction you work backwards you know yeah the world is like okay here's what the world is like
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here here's how your characters people grow up because of what the world is like here's what they do because of that and then here's the plot that happens because of what they do well it's like okay I have an interesting plot what
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characters would create that what backgrounds would they have what settings would create that background so it's the same it's the same causal connection but you just puzzle it out in Reverse yeah uh one one of the things that I loved uh in the book is uh that
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the the AI that you invented for the book was derived by copying the consciousness of human children yes I thought that was so massively cool because when you look even now in neurology they they I asked a neurologist once are kids up to age five
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like just continually tripping and he laughed and he goes basically yeah yeah I was actually listening to another one of your podcasts to to prepare for this interview and there was a neuroscientist who was saying that essentially up to age five or
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so it's like they're on drugs the the uh and and back to the the point about uh letting the story emerge from the characters I I I I love that and it shows I what I love about you and what I've read of your work and and as I
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listen to you you really respect your reader really respect their intelligence they pay my [Laughter] bills yes and and and it's very good to pay a very good respect to people who are paying your bills but it goes beyond that I think um I I think that uh one of
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the things that I love about you in I find so refreshing and I'm hoping to encourage a great deal more of is this idea that you are not lecturing you're not hectoring you're not you're not like saying this is going to be the way it is
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and it seems to me that again you said it earlier in our chat you're kind of saying things that at least a lot of the people I know are thinking right yeah and they've just sort of had it with the I'm smarter there's that wonderful children's m movie Matilda where where
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her evil teacher says Matilda is super smart she ask the teacher well why do I have to do that and the teacher's answer is because I'm big and you're little because I'm an adult and you're a child that's why now you go do it and it just
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seems to me when I see that I have a lot of grandchildren so I watch a lot of these movies with them but I I was watching that with one of my grandkids recently and I just thought you know that's a great metaphor for a lot of the Divide today yeah tell me a little bit
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about um how how did you develop both of your your two protagonists were you thinking of the of of her as kind of one of The Heirs of Elon Musk who are you know going forth into the universe and are kind of the Lords and Ladies she is
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literally a descendant of Elon Musk on her mother's side now I didn't use his name in the book because I wanted her to have her own ident that was disconnected from whatever he's in the news for this week but I had this clear idea well if the current trend
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of how we settle the solar system continues you know if if we take these reusable rocket boosters and we increase our lift to orbit capacity and we go colonize Mars and then some people start mining asteroids well clearly SpaceX is going to be a
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central figure in that and his descendants are going to be prominent figures in solar society and I said to myself well you know I could shy away from this because a lot of writers are afraid to talk about currently existing people so they're going to make up someone but the
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only reason I would have for doing doing that would be sphere and my whole thing is that you you want to have an artistic vision and develop it fearlessly and what's most gratifying is is that the people who hate him have accused me of being a fanboy and the
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people who love him have accused me of being a hater so I think I got it right but you know I wanted to I wanted to write a story that was partially about how often conflicts between people are based on this sort of inability to
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imagine somebody else's world VI you and that is the major arc between at first the two and eventually the three major characters of them coming to understand each other and being able to work together because because they understand each other and
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being able to win because they're able to work together and that I find very interesting so uh the relationship between Marcus and Miranda did did did you go in with a preset notion about you know how that was going to be uh you know sort of scene by scene or did it
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emerge as you wrote the characters oh I go in with a preset notion of every thing see there's two categories of writers and you know this is sort of a Continuum where writers will exist towards one pole or the other and we call them gardeners and
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Architects and gardeners tend to start out on page one just kind of scribbling and they have no idea where it ends up and Architects tend to have a plan and where ERS will write from front to back Architects will write from General to
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specific and I am very far on the architect side of things I tend to write a lot of outlines and summaries and notes and I tend to end up writing about 25,000 to 4,000 words that readers will never see before for most of the words that actually
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comprise the novel get started and of course this doesn't mean that you don't change plans along the way because a plan is a list of things that won't happen but it does mean that you're doing it in the planning phase and there's a problem associated with each
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writing style you know the gardeners tend to have crazy endings that don't agree with their Beginnings because they don't know what the ending is going to be when they write the beginning and you know anyone who's ever read a Stephen King ending
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will know what I'm talking about Stephen King is a gar and I am an architect and Architects they tend to have this issue where plots and characters don't always agree you tend to have characters just doing things so that the plot can happen
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because you have this plot all planned out and then you sort of railroad the characters into it if you're not careful so what you have to do is you have to you have to hit those points where you say okay these are the events that I have
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planned but it doesn't seem like the character would really do this so I need to either change the character or I need to change the sequence of events leading up to this to give the character a motiv and without spoiling too much I'll keep it vague um there is a moment in
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Marcus's interactions with the other characters where he makes a decision to go ahead and do something he didn't originally want want to do and the first beta reader version of of the book I says okay well you know I write some stuff where okay he finds out
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what's actually going on and he decides that what they're supposed to be doing is important and it's like okay that works but it's not really compelling because it's not personal to him so I went back and fixed it I was like okay let's let's delve more deeply
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into his past and give him a personal reason for why he's going to change his mind and you know I'm sure you know what I'm referring to it ends up being a much stronger story when you go when you're aware of the structural weaknesses in your
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writing style and you go back and fix it so but yeah the whole series is very much planned out I mean I have actually written the last scene of the fourth book so I know exactly where all of this is going and it goes a long way it goes all the way from Petty criminal gets
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blackmailed to technological singularity in the fate of the Galaxy I love it h i as you were speaking I about the difference between gardeners and Architects I I remember as I Was preparing I was talking with my wife and I I'm not going to name the
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book but there was a a book that was obviously written by a gardener and I loved it I loved it I loved it until I got to the ending and I'm like oh [ __ ] me this is the worst ending ever yeah and it it destroyed the entire books for
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me gardeners tend to paint themselves into corners [Music] and that doesn't always have to be a hazard because just like I went back and fixed all the little moments where my plots didn't agree with my characters once they hit the ending they
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can go back back and fix their Beginnings so that they foreshadow it properly the problem that gardeners tend to have is that if they're releasing a multi-book series they can sometimes be very married to the things that they did that painted them into a corner and I think
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we can think of one significant example of a gardener writer who was unable to finish his magnum opus because he didn't plan enough so you know that is a hazard of course the thing is is that people who are gardeners or Architects usually
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don't have a choice about that right it usually comes from your personality and your writing style but I'm I'm very grateful that I am able to plan because it has made things significantly easier and uh I would assume that those uh 30 or 40,000 words
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that the reader never sees that's you in essence World building right oh yes yes World building character building building plots and themes and just sometimes there will be just note files that go for pages and pages with little
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ideas that I want to throw in somewhere you there's this there 's this stage where you're building just this massive jumbled pile of Legos until you accumulate enough Legos and you start to see how they all fit together just out of curiosity are are there any as an
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architect are there are are there any uh gardeners whose work you really do admire oh yes absolutely you know even George Martin who we were speaking of earlier I mean I've I've taken the Mickey out of him a fair amount from the his cowardice and failing to
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finish his work but his technical competence is certainly there and while Stephen King may have no idea how he writes novels and you know maybe the processes involves a lot of cocaine or whatever but he still can certainly turn
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a phrase so so there's a lot that gardeners and Architects can learn from each other and you know no one can tell you how to write they can only tell you how they write and you have to assemble your own personal process and you won't be able
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to finish anything until you do you know that's that's the moment where you know you've got your process down is when you're actually able to put stuff together and finish but I would say that there that from Gardener type writers I tend to
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crib the things they're doing on the individual page level like here's a cool narrative trick I'm going to learn that but you know I don't learn as much about how to put a plot together because I think about plots differently you know you bring up uh
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Stephen King and um what are your thoughts on uh editor external editors because I I was reading uh his book about the guy who travels back in time to try to prevent uh the assassination of JFK and like literally I I slogged my way to the end and and my first thing
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that I wrote my because I kind of take notes on everything I read and like my my my note uh was pretty explicit it's like Stephen King needs a [ __ ] editor stat what what are your thoughts on on editors and that would say that I would broaden the question from editors and I
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would say the word feedback so I definitely think that Stephen King is under edited and this is something that often happens to very heal wealthy celebrity authors where their their work becomes almost too respected like this is wholly writ and I
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don't dare touch it and the fact is that you always need feedback and I think that for these kind of less structured Gardener writers they really really really need a good solid editor who can stand up to them and pick fight with them and go to
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the mat and convince them they're wrong when they're wrong now I am an architect and the kind of feedback I find myself needing is different my work you know all one and another book in progress I'm not super experienced here but my work is very lightly
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edited I have an editor I work with a great friend of mine um she's been very supportive um but she I I restrain her to editing on the page and line level I don't I don't get feedback from her about plots and structure so I don't use a lot of editor feedback what I use
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is a lot of beta reader feedback I get about 12 to 15 beta readers and I do interviews video calls like the one we're using to record this podcast with every single one of them and those will often run several hours and what I say is don't tell me
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what you think should be changed don't tell me what you think should be fixed don't try to give me any advice just give me your raw reaction because it is my job to interpret that and an example I can give of how this works is if
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somebody says to me this scene is boring I don't say to them well do you think I should throw in a car chase because that's typically not the problem it's my job as a professional writer to know that this is boring really means the progress that is going on in
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this scene is not related to a strong promise that was made earlier that I care about so frequently what I would do to fix that scene that's boring is not Chang the scene at all I'd go back you know several chapters before or to the beginning of the book and tweak how I'm
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making my promises so that suddenly the scene becomes relevant but whether you're getting that feedback from a very experienced editor or whether you're getting that feedback from a bunch of beta reader raw reactions everybody no matter how
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talented they are no matter how experienced they are needs that feedback because even if you're a genius most of your ideas are stupid and you have to throw away the stupid and you need feedback to do that effectively yeah you've got to Kill Your Darlings I
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fascinated about the feedback model uh because it's uh interesting to me do do you pick your beta readers keeping things like cognitive diversity in mind uh or or how what's your process there how do you pick them well I've at
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first it was like okay who's willing to read a novel from some internet Rando but the ones that I found most useful are the ones that are very different from me I have actually fired very conscientious beta readers for you know you're great you're too similar to me I
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don't need someone to tell me what I already know I need people different from me and my most valuable beta reader she's really more of an alpha reader she's like the first one who gets it and she typically Burns through stuff in a
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weekend is a mother of two and school bus driver living in the Kansas City area now I am none of these things and she is very very different and that's great and another thing is she is very very blunt like like she will she will tell me when something
48:52
sucks and she will say anything to anyone [Music] and I believe when she finished the first one she actually called me up and threatened to strangle me because she was talking about the ending and there wasn't enough of a
49:13
celebratory moment and I was listening to her talking and what she was saying kind of made sense and I said so you're saying it needs an Ewok party and she's like yes that's what I mean so I was like now forever I have that phrase burned into my Consciousness
49:33
and I'm like whenever I'm thinking about endings I'm like okay where's the Ewok party but every every writer builds up their own process and they build up their own sort of support team to enable themselves to do it you know maybe I'm
49:50
jumping the gun here uh but I have every uh confidence that you're going to you're going to do really well with the next books that come in the series do you fear audience capture at all I'm not sure what you mean by audience capture in this context so audience capture is
50:09
everybody reads uh theft of fire and they love it and you you're the size of your audience balloons and you see all of the reviews and they you start to get a sense for what about your stories it seems that all of your now growing and growing and
50:29
growing audience LS and that sometimes can have the effect of sort of clipping the author's creative Wings in that that what they wanted maybe what they wanted to do in the third book suddenly gets changed because you kind of know you're installed and growing audience got like
50:51
that yeah well my philosophy of this is that I am not Burger thing we don't do it your way I am a chef it is my job to please you but it is not my job to obey you and you know it is not it is certainly it would be remiss of me to ask you what
51:20
you want because that's putting decisions on you that I should have to do the work of making so and this is this is something that is a hazard for a lot of authors and what's useful for me is that I am a highly disagreeable person you know that sounds a little
51:46
weird because generally when we hear that somebody is a disagreeable person we think they're an [ __ ] and I I am but that's different that's beside point um what what an agree you're you're using it in terms of the big five then
52:02
uh yeah yeah an agreeable person is someone who tends to speak up when they agree with something and shut up when they disagree with something well when I see something I like or agree with I tend to go yep I agree and then move on and when
52:21
I see something I disagree with well you seen what I do tend to spell it out very explicitly so it's really very easy for me in particular to to resist readers asking for things that they wouldn't really enjoy if they got yeah that's the Steve Jobs Henry
52:51
Ford School uh of you know if I asked uh if I asked people what they wanted they would have said Faster Horses uh according to Henry Ford I guess he didn't really ever say that yeah well people people's ability to know what they want is limited by their ability to
53:12
imagine that which does not exist and especially since we're talking about things that come from my imagination how could someone else possibly spontaneously imagine that so and this doesn't mean I value don't value reader feedback I do I it's one of
53:36
the most valuable things to me but I value it in a different way I tend to read it and you know if somebody says you should have this happen you should have that happen or I'm looking forward to this I'm looking forward to that I'm
53:52
like Grumble it up throw it don't care but but what I'm listening for is what did you like how did you feel because that tells me if when and where all the little looks I put into the narrative got set what worked what didn't and that is tremendously valuable and it has
54:21
been gratifying beyond belief to see just some of the public reactions out there and I I just I feel very grateful that there are people who are not like me in the world people who are very agreeable And when they see something they love
54:44
they they say it because I get to hear that and you know there's two things that lead to happiness and one is a feeling of accomplishment and the other is a feeling of connection to other people and if you can make something with your own mind or your own
55:09
hands and put it out into the world when nobody asked for it and people love it and then you can sell it and you can pay your bills with that there's no feeling like that in the world one of the things you did on Twitter that I absolutely adore was
55:29
because I I used to always be telling people listen guys money is information technology and that's that's kind of what it is and if you think about it that way you're gonna change you changed that and I like I love that I absolutely
55:45
adore that and because when I first saw it I actually burst out laughing because I was like exactly exactly like I have a friend who who still God bless her but you know Marx's labor theory of value Stills large in her mind and and so I actually
56:09
was talking to her not too long ago and I used your your terminology I'm like listen I if if you think that the value is derived by the effort or the amount of work put in what if I gave you a shovel and I put you in the Sahara and you started digging holes right and then
56:29
I think that stole that from you didn't I um and I think I stole it from someone else I'm not sure well okay but anyway so like I was watching her head explode because she's like well yeah so it should be of value I'm like okay so then
56:45
it would be great it would be it would be of greater value if I gave you a little plastic spoon and you had to work like 10 times as hard to get even one hole is that much more valuable and she like well that's kind of silly and I went yeah now now now let's keep going and
57:03
then I used you and I went how many [ __ ] are people gonna give over your holes well well that doesn't matter and I went that's all that matters it's the only thing that matters yeah that's the reason we do stuff at all is because
57:19
somebody gives a [ __ ] about it exactly you know that's that's why I have been a big proponent of Bitcoin because if money is a technology for keeping track of [ __ ] given and you know where we started out in hunting and Gathering tribes money started out as a
57:41
mental Ledger you know you know this guy chipped out some spear points and and we give a [ __ ] about that so we're going to leave him to chip spear points while we go on the mammoth hunt and then you know he gets the liver or whatever because you know we need the
58:01
spear points we give a [ __ ] about that and it was only when that ledger became too large and complicated to keep mentally that we switched first to Portable and valuable trade goods like precious metals and then we switched to
58:18
some sort of token fiet currency where yeah there were a few problems with that which would can be articul ated by anybody who's tried to buy groceries plainly um and now with these kinds of blockchain Technologies what they basically create is a giant publicly shared
58:42
spreadsheet that no one can tamper with that keeps track of the [ __ ] given so that's a decentralized currency that moves us away from this having the currency under the control of this centralized corruptible institution but it it refocuses it on
59:07
you know it's all about what do people care about what do we want to build nothing has inherent value it's how much do we value it exactly the the value of uh something is always in the mind of the ceer not in the perceived yes and so different people can give
59:31
different amounts of [ __ ] about it and another thing that I had thought um so you know in in in the world as it exists today the idea of intellectual property is like getting focused on with the laser beam because people are realizing
59:48
that you know you can't copyright reality and one one of the one of the or fiction uh but you artists need to get paid and so one of the solutions yeah in all our various Enterprises that is looking better and better is you could use the blockchain uh I think effectively in
1:00:09
that regard what are your thought what are your thoughts about that well first of all the thing to understand about property rights is for thousands of years people have been doing this sort of you know this full philosopher types with long beards and
1:00:29
high opinions of themselves have been doing this thing where they try to rationalize where rights come from you know do rights are given to us by God you know rights are inherent in every human being you know there all this sort of philosophizing which is
1:00:50
just pages and pages and pages of stuff trying to reach a conclusion that they a priori decided they wanted to reach and you know anyone who who looks at the universe and you know really just is honest with themselves it's like there's
1:01:14
no there's no morality encoded on any of it it's not carved onto every Neutron it's not there so so we developed this notion of property rights because we needed them and that development of the notion of property rights actually sort of predates not
1:01:38
only human beings but the spinal cord you know if you don't think that that lower animals have some notion of property rights then go hit a beehive with a stick and see what happens you're not going to like it so property rights are necessary for
1:02:00
civilization they are necessary for investment they are necessary for building anything worth having because nobody is going to build anything if somebody's just going to come along and take it from them and they can't stop that
1:02:17
so what are intellectual property rights well what that means is that intellectual the idea of intellectual property rights is a technology we don't discover it we invent it and that means we can invent it in any number of different ways and some of these can be
1:02:38
better and worse depending on how they serve the purpose that we want intellectual property rights to serve so it's like artists have to get paid or there won't be any art we don't want that they also so have to have control that is not so
1:03:01
strict that they can prevent other artists from deriving from their work because most of all art is derived from other art so it has to steer between these two poles and it has to be enforceable and people have had some idea for having like these blockchain
1:03:25
verified ledgers for doing that and one of the things we've seen is these sort of cryptographic non-fungible tokens where it's like okay I can create a piece of art and you know anybody can do a screen grab so they can have a copy but I can verify cryptographically
1:03:52
who is actually supposed to own this thing and that's a very interesting idea but I do see a problem with that and the problem is what value attaches to being the true owner as opposed to having a copy of it and if you don't have a clear answer
1:04:15
to that question then you can't attach that to a monetization model that compensates artists and there there are some social models where you could attach that for example during the Renaissance you had a patronage model for certain artists where a wealthy
1:04:39
person is going to purchase Prestige you know social standing bragging rights by paying an artist to make some art and under that model the artist doesn't care who puts his art on Pirate Bay nor does the patron because the artist has already
1:05:03
been paid in money and the patron has already been paid in Prestige so this would be a very convenient type of solution but we don't have that kind of set of social mores today because if you know Elon Musk like says okay I love theft of fire
1:05:27
I'm going to pay you a million dollars to finish box of trouble I'd be like great celebrate happy but I'm so I'm getting paid I I make the novel downloadable for free because I've already been paid but the problem is Elon Musk isn't paid because people
1:05:47
don't say oh wow he sponsored this great piece of art that we all enjoyed thank you instead they say oh he sponsored this novel because he's trying to promote something and we're going to write snarky comments about him on Twitter if we don't reward patrons of
1:06:07
the Arts with Prestige and admiration they will not patronize the Arts so that's one kind of possible model that can work and there can be any number of these but the thing is is that we have to come up with something that works and has something in it for
1:06:29
everybody and for a long time copyright law did an okay job of this I mean it wasn't great Disney abused it but it was better than nothing now we're running into some some Corner cases brought on by new technology where copyright law isn't
1:06:54
really addressing our concerns and that's this model of training AI so we're going to have to come up with something new but we need to come up with it with an awareness that this is not an innate moral truth of the universe we're discovering it's a piece
1:07:14
of technology that we're inventing we making the things we want to have happen happen I love the Nuance of that um and uh I deeply believe in patronage I hadn't thought about it as much in the way you articulated in terms of you're trading the money for Prestige Andor
1:07:34
your own sense of sat satisfaction but one of the reasons why there's the internal belief that you're doing something good but I don't think that is enough to motivate most people who are patrons of the Arts they also need to have the
1:07:52
belief from others around them that they are doing something good and a lot of people are very dismissive of that like you're just trying to make people think you're a good person well duh so what that's great that's great because you're
1:08:10
aligning yourself to the moral values of other people that's wonderful you know but right now the problem we have with that model is that if you patronize the Arts other people don't necessarily agree that you're doing something good they just keep spewing this Marxist
1:08:29
twaddle that you're a rich person and you should die well I I used to choke uh come the revolution I'm not even getting re-educated I'm gonna be one of the first up against the wall well get yourself a rifle and learn how to use [Laughter]
1:08:50
it the I I I'm fascinated just to finish on the patronage model I I do think so I've collected uh contemporary mostly Contemporary Art uh for 25 years and one of the things that we decided to do when we started off doing this was to try as
1:09:10
best we could to um collect living artists and um so the only pushback that I would have um on your French observation about the patron meeting get something like what I got from that was I'll tell you the story so we were at uh a big art
1:09:32
chair and we saw a new artist um who was we thought she was awesome so it was her work was relatively inexpensive so we there were I think 14 pieces we just bought it all and literally the next day I got a call from the dealer and they're like the artist would like to call you
1:09:54
may I give for your number and I'm like sure and so she calls and she was uh incredibly appreciative but she said because you did that I was able to quit my job at the bank and I'm now pursuing art full-time I you know I I can't thank you
1:10:13
enough in my case like a I I felt like a triple winner I loved the art so I had that I got that phone call which made me feel super good good so it it does it always have to be like in the eyes of other people or it be just for the sense of self
1:10:34
satisfaction I don't think that it always has to be but I think like most altruistic individuals you overestimate how good other people are and you okay I I don't like that description of it but but there are some people who are motivated by their own internal
1:11:03
feelings about what they've done and there are some people who are motivated by reinforcement from others about what they've done and you're not totally immune to that yourself I mean you didn't just sit in your office and say I
1:11:18
did a good thing today you got a phone call from an artist who said you've changed my life and you felt better you know that made you feel good so you're not completely immune from the need to to have your decisions reinforced by other people and none of us is we're a
1:11:38
social animal we're a pack animal and when when other people around us are approving of what we do that is a really really powerful reinforcement so I think that that we've really gone down the wrong track with this sort of slow infiltration of this sort of
1:12:08
marxist zero SU game doctrine that you know oh if someone is wealthy that's inherently bad and we're going to find excuses to criticize them no matter what they do if we want to be used in pro-social ways in ways that we approve of in for causes that are dear
1:12:35
to our hearts then we really need to celebrate the people who have wealth and are directing it toward those causes I mean look at how the left is treating Elon Musk because he took away their censorship toy they've completely for
1:12:55
forgotten that this is the guy who made electric cars cool to drive and this is the guy who's trying to take us to other planets and you know it's like none of that matters because he's a billionaire and we don't completely control him and we hate him
1:13:17
it's it's it's foolish it's really really foolish so I think that while the fact that that you get personal gratification from from uh doing this is laudable I think it's also we need to have more people saying thank you we need to have people acknowledging
1:13:40
that this is a good thing that you are doing have you read any of will sto's books I have not I think you would uh you would vibe with him quite well uh because he's he most of his work is uh is from the point of view they're non-fiction right so yeah the one he's
1:14:00
best known for is called the status game and uh he goes through many of the things we're discussing and and a lights and a lights on your answer really yeah yeah yeah which which is the the best we're gonna play status games because
1:14:16
we're because we have to all All Creatures do yeah and uh the best one to play is the prestige game in other words do things do things that are going to gain you prestige and admiration from other people because that really puts
1:14:33
the world forward so so I like that very much indeed I I think status seeking is good I think status seeking is good because it allows us a positive way to influence other people's behavior instead of using laws and threaten them with punishment we can reward them for
1:14:56
doing pro-social things but what we need as a precondition for that is a healthy model of what we reward with status you know we want to idolize those who make sacrifices that contribute to our welfare not those who who do detrimental things
1:15:25
yes I I I agree completely I was just going to shift gears uh because you know you you are in my estimation kind of a hero to the author who's got who's you know working hard on a book and uh and then they see you and they see uh all of the success that you've gotten and uh
1:15:48
and earned importantly yeah do you have advice for others who uh would just love to be writing and and doing things and as part of that what what's kind of the most unconventional thing that you've discovered to improve writing well I
1:16:09
think what I discovered throughout this journey was that every time I went to the traditional Roots through which writers go I was rebuffed I was completely refused any sort of opportunity at traditional publication simply because I committed the Grievous
1:16:35
sin of writing in first person present tense which I think I think you may agree that the story actually requires yes I agree I do agree and what I found was that all of these gatee ERS were not actually necessary you know we we often come to
1:17:03
these established Industries feeling so small like we need someone's permission to succeed like you know we need to I've been I've had so many people in meetings with me even after I was selling a lot and I had prove that I could do something come into these meetings with
1:17:28
me expecting me to kiss the ring and I am not a ring kisser I have never done that and it's like I realized that the only people whose permission I actually need to be successful are the readers so if you give the people who are actually paying you money something
1:17:54
to love you don't need the permission of the so-called experts to succeed and it can be hard it can be hard to believe in yourself because by definition when you're doing something creative you you're bringing something into the
1:18:15
world that no one else can see the value in and that nobody asked for because it's only in your head but if you can do that and create something that people will love you don't need to wait around for somebody to to to say you can create do
1:18:36
so you can say to the world I can create and I will do so whether you wish it or not and the only thing that's going to stand in my way is if I fail to create something the audience likes and then I'm just going to go back to the drawing board and try
1:18:59
again you know it sounds like such a cliche to say believe in yourself but that's not what I'm saying I'm saying believe in your artistic Vision in Your Vision your complete whole vision of a thing that's not written by a committee that you think
1:19:19
will be good and worthwhile and try that because you're the only one who can do it nobody else can create what you see in your head either you're going to do it or it's not going to get done agree 100% but the the thing that I'm grappling with I you might know that
1:19:43
uh we agree with you on uh the state of the publishing industry and in fact we are launching a book publishing art uh to invert and uh take advantage quite frankly take advantage of all of those institutionalized weaknesses yeah um but you are also a super high agency person
1:20:06
and which I love I I I wonder um and and maybe the answer simply is what you just the answer you just gave which is become High agents yeah exactly and and let me ask you that question do do you think there is a way that people can become my
1:20:26
agency oh yes yes courage can be a function of knowledge and what that means is that there's really and this is something I got from an article I read somewhere I forget where um is there's there's three kinds of tasks there's the things that are
1:20:52
easy you know nobody needs courage to pour a glass of water and there's the things that are impossible you know you can't uh you know you can't well there's a lot of things you can't do you can't create a perpetual motion machine doesn't matter how
1:21:12
motivated you are it doesn't work but then there's this third category of things that are hard where if you try something you're not going to succeed at it right away but you can eventually succeed at it with effort and people who are low
1:21:33
agency are people who don't believe in that hard category they what they lack is not what we would call courage or willpower you know those are just colloquialisms for Hope and the thing is is that if you asked me how someone can build courage
1:21:55
or willpower I would say well I don't know that's supposed to be a character tree maybe you're born I know but if you say how can someone build hope the answer is learn knowledge learn how you can succeed practice see other people who are like you
1:22:20
succeeding I mean I would like to think I'm a pretty talented writer it's not for me to say but I don't think I'm unique in that respect I have met many people you know it's a like a you know guys I correspond with online and one's on welder and one's a bus
1:22:41
driver and all this sort of stuff and they're they're they're talented writers and they haven't blossomed yet and I think in order to try this and in order to become High agency in this sort of context what they need to realize is they need to see that it can
1:23:05
work and what I really hope from from people watching what's happening for me is not oh Devin Ericson is awesome what I really hope they take away from that is if you're good enough and you work hard enough if you build it they really will
1:23:32
come I love that and that you I I love the um the uh understanding that what it really is is Hope yeah and uh in fact that's kind of what guides many of verticals at our company uh I just got so tired of the people not writing books or making
1:23:55
movies that gave people hope yeah and gave gave people were mimetic creatures yeah and if you if you give people examples of like we're making a movie about a a very extraordinary guy and writing a book about him too his name's Dr David roony and uh just I won't go
1:24:14
through the whole story but he overcame so many obstacles to achieve a great deal and you know somebody was asking me you know like well what you know what what value is that I'm like are you kidding me what value is anything else
1:24:29
exactly exactly exactly and and it's in my mind if if somebody who was in David's situation which was not a great situation he was you know surrounded by uh you know drug dealers Etc in his youth if yeah one kid watches the movie about him and says holy [ __ ] I I can do
1:24:55
that too yeah I mean that's worth it to me right those of us who have hope need to find ways to spread it yes and the people who don't have hope need to find people who are spreading it and pay attention to those people I think Devin that that that that
1:25:17
is the always leave on a high note I I think that both the both the uh what you just said and and the idea that it's really hope I love that I will be stealing it from you I'll change it around a little bit well please take it take it spread
1:25:35
it spread the word when Devin can we expect the second in the trilogy well I don't know exactly I am my my inspiration is sometimes fickle and you know I'm just learning this trade myself I have only one published novel this is the first time I'm doing a
1:25:57
sequel I'm trying to hit the last part of this year it may stretch a little but the one thing I can promise you is that no effort will have been spared I absolutely believe that yeah my my agent is nagging me here to mention that I'm very soon launching a
1:26:22
Kickstarter for the audio book version of theft of fire and uh We've lined up some really really talented and previously undiscovered um voice acting Talent so I think we're going to be able to come out with something really special oh that's
1:26:43
really cool H well when that happens you can make sure that I will amplify that as best I can thank you um thank you we you have a great website where else can our viewers and listeners find you uh well definitely most of my communication
1:26:59
with readers is on Twitter and that is very valuable to me and we have a lot of fun and you know I I host little celebration pictures when people say they bought my book and you know some people are following me around accusing me of secretly being a cat which I
1:27:23
deny but you know we just we just have a good time and it really helps me take the Pulse of what kind of people are reading and what works for them and it really feels like it really helps them feel like they're not just having these sorts of
1:27:40
novels tossed over the walls of them like they're they're a part of the process you know I think people like to like to hang out with authors they like and Twitter has been a great place for us to do that terrific well that's a that's where I found you and you wowed
1:27:56
me and uh so I'm like okay I've got to buy this book check this out I love what you were I loved uh the way you went about it um you said you'd listen to a podcast to kind of get to know what style this podcast was so you probably
1:28:12
know our our final question which is we're gonna make you the emperor of the world you can't kill anyone you can't put anyone in a re-education camp but you you are going to be handed a magic microphone and you can speak two things into it and everybody on the planet
1:28:32
whenever their tomorrow is is going to wake up and they're going to look at their significant other or they're going to say to themselves I have just had two of the greatest ideas and I'm actually gonna act on them what two things are
1:28:47
you going to incept in the world's population well okay so here here's what I'm going to say I refuse to be emperor of the world I refuse to be emperor of the world because an emperor someone with centralized power is supposed to plan
1:29:08
society and no one has a monopoly on good ideas we all have mostly stupid ideas and a few good ones and the way that free minds and free markets work is that we all go out and Implement our ideas and most of us fail and a few of our ideas happen to be good and those
1:29:34
succeed and then everybody imitates them so I would say go pursue your own ideas don't assume they won't work if you have an idea that you think will work try it and if you see someone else else who has an idea that is working
1:29:57
imitate I love that and it reminds me of Lau when talking about rulers saying that the greatest of all rulers is that which inspires in the people when they've completed something that says look at what we have accomplished for ourselves yes the greatest leaders do
1:30:16
not need positions of power they lead by inspiring ah fantastic I love it thank you so much for doing this with me on a Saturday afternoon than you for having me it's it's been wonderful fun I love doing great fun for me as well and best of luck uh with the current version
1:30:36
I don't think you're going to need much luck because it's doing extraordinarily well but uh uh hope the second one comes out uh as as good as the first we'll see well I'm certainly working hard on that thank you all right thanks so much e