one of the things that we had done I think incorrectly in our modernism was to remove we living from the dead and or the dying we do not thrive in isolation it is the community and cooperation between people that makes meaning in life it was taking care of my father and
in the middle of laying my father to rest I just started to write for myself and that was the beginning I didn't have a plan I didn't have an outline I didn't have a reason deep down it just had to do this on the internet everyone's famous for having the answers it's really about the questions true confidence is living in uncertainty Perfection is 100
tax if you reach that state then what there's nothing left we're all connected across time and space the past present and future make up there now you can imagine it's no longer as a line but as a circle we don't necessarily know when we're gonna arrive and when we depart well hello everyone it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another infinite Loops today's guest is one
that I have followed closely after discovering him online my guest today is Edward rooster who is an amazingly gifted writer in my opinion Edward wrote two novels entirely in public the first called box of stars the Second Harvest and he posted this live on his sub stack and Twitter
kind of half history half myth past future what does it teach us about the uh future can we imagine the future Edward you're currently working on a third novel called retrieve and I find your writing to be quite beautiful in a very lyrical poetic sense um almost like a Pastiche or a collage the way you weave things together
and and let's start out if you don't mind with the story the day dad started over or the day dad started off which one is Edward oh the right the day's dad started and thank you by the way for mentioning that I do appreciate that very kind of you oh it's it's my pleasure you you say the that it's the reason you're reading this you say in the past I gave in to doubt fear concern
about what others think to every handmaiden of regret what changed oh well it was um I would say it was taking care of my father it was those two almost two and a half years before he passed away in January the 12th 2021 that changed everything for me it it just changed everything for me it ripped away all those kinds of fears and conceits that I had
and when I joined this writing group I didn't know what I was going to do with myself well with the writing but I knew I needed something to do with something anything and I gravitated towards this experimental group that was started where they wanted to encourage people to write online
and I I just started writing and in the middle of putting laying my father to rest I just started to write for myself without talking about Dad at the time I found out that some of the pieces that resonated the most with people were the ones where I was really thinking of him and feeling all these things about that and remembering everything when people wrote to me about one
piece that I wrote uh that uh this piece I wrote called the uh love is not a single player game the response was gratifying there are people who said to me that uh Philip very kind soul said I this was very comforting to read I can go to sleep I can I can get some rest this is something they
read a bedtime piece of writing I didn't talk about that once I was just talking about love and about life and about life cycle and about things you would you are a master of in your own life at that moment I I said I'll stick around all right again I wrote about the nature of time
and space and someone reached out to me in private and the same writing group and then another cohort and he sent me a video he said I want you to write a book I want you to to to do this and and it was the kindest most generous thing I I'd ever I was so touched that someone took the time and they knew my story because I said a little bit about myself in private back then and
that's when I began in the third cohort over the course of six 30-day periods I would write Non-Stop what became that book box of stars I had not planned on it I had not outlined it I simply said I'm going to start writing and I decided let's start with the first 30 days and I created what turned out to be the outline of the book in those first 30 days and I wanted
to explore it and at the same time I want to experiment that was what changed it was it was just taking care of my father and and seeing him in Decline and it was a Non-Stop period it was just in the middle of covid which was kind of like on the outside it was almost in the background for
me and my mother and my family all this was going on and we did not know why he was in Decline but he was in Decline we found it after the fact that there was something growing in his brain and I I thought the man I thought I could help him recover and come back and I fit well I was going to say failed I just we couldn't do it I tried we tried and we took care of him in the
house after the hospital visit and an attempted rehab we got him out at the last minute from a rehab facility because they were gonna shut down everything in March 2020 that was the last day it was like the last helicopter out and I took care of him in the house I uh we tore down a wall
or bathroom my we learned how to use a transport chair I took care of him ordered a bed everything I learned how to do everything and we needed to and it was just me Mom and him and and the outside world was the outside and was quiet and was just as well I had no other concerns or thoughts and
he grew sick twice and that summer in August and then in the winter and in Winter was very tough because there were a lot of visitation rules that were very harsh it was just me and him and and a lot of indignities were visited upon him by li-fi you got a stroke he caught covet in the hospital in his last weeks of life and when we got him at the hospice because they finally transported in
the hospice there I just I just kissed this Warhead goodbye we were called in and within an hour of being called and being in front of him they had passed away and and I still remember his forehead was so warm the Sun the last his last Sons set his last sunrise warned him that was it so a few weeks later I was in this writing group and I just when we laid him to rest
you know I just sat down and I wrote that piece I remember that day when it happened and I just didn't know what to do with myself and I just saw something on television and it just sparked something and I said I'm gonna write something I'd I'm not going to tell anything about that I'm just
gonna write and that was the beginning and I just kept going because it was something I could do I I didn't have a plan I didn't have an outline I didn't have a reason I just said I'm going to do this somewhere deep down I just had to do this I did not have an articulated uh thought as to why I just simply had to and and that's how the book was born was just
born that year then the following year in 2021 while I was just dealing with everything else dealing with his his Affairs and settling things and and this book came and this book came and it was just about the past about history mythology all these things I was exploring and thinking about but it was also about the future
I decided to write a story about the future and I realized that the characters I created were drawn from me they were drawn from my experiences and when my cohort began to read along some of them were very kind they spent the time to follow a long but 30 days straight and for some of them it was very emotional they could see and read and feel things in these words
and I thought I'd come back again I thought that was it but I came back because I said this is not the end I want to know more about these people I created in this 30-day story I wanted to create a backstory and I wanted to explore history so each of these subsequent 30-day periods for the
next five cohorts were time periods so the first one was called 2x21 because I said let's set it in the future I don't know what century and I also felt like 2021 was a big x a big mystery a big question mark for me and I began to explore through these characters I would focus on one at
a time in the subsequent five thirty day periods some aspect I guess of myself and my memories of my father my my life and so I wrote a series called 1648 I wanted to explore the Dutch the Golden Age of ledgers I called it I want to explore the mass market for art because I was watching everyone go crazy over crypto art and and and about the new wealth and I thought
well there's an analogy there going back in time this the stack of things that emerged from the Renaissance was now being implemented the double entry Ledger the ships that could travel over the world uh uh Mass ownership of art I thought I saw the parallels and what was going on around us at the time in 2021 we've got the blockchain Ledger instead of a double entry Ledger we've
got all these things going on so so let's explore that plus a character of an artist a young woman from a far away place and I made her basically from from the new world from a jovian I said let's let's see what happens we can turn this into Hollywood Story because she was a minor character
in the first art but she became important at the end I said let's explore the backstory and so I did this over and over again in subsequent series uh one I one of which I hope you'll appreciate uh there was 1961 where I wrote about the Cold War the very history of the world the secret war that was taking place after the end of a protracted Forever War which is World War one
and two because to me that's one big war with a period of quiet in between really an unresolved conflict in between that was finally resolved and and then was transmute into something very strange and new and it was great because there were people in the cohort who wanted to help out so I said
there's an old Declassified CIA uh document I wanted to create a template for the essays those you know at the time they were using figma templates to to write on so I said let's let's do that let's have some fun with this so they created these CIA looking docking socket right
into to Post online every day for 30 days and and would repeat this experiment over and over in 1987 it created what looked like brokerage statements because I want to write up about the big 80s and money and that period and the economics and what was going on in the Market at that time and explore another character a a war veteran who transforms her life and becomes uh the
founder of a cooperative because I was looking at the Dows and I was looking at corporations that okay let's what will the business structure of the future be and what will happen how will people reinvent themselves after a long Forever War so I said let's let's create a character who
I named after the names of all the mistresses of Picasso just to make her name interesting Fernanda Maria Therese roke and and she was my favorite character because she was so almost incidental character and I just dived into her her backstory of a Working Class Hero made good who ran away to the military to hide from her organized crime roots and became this
Entertainer promoter but also a mentor to that young woman a young artist in the prior series and I went on and on 1999 I called it the great decentralization the end of the the Cold War the end of the secret war and I wanted to explore what happens to a war hero who has to deal with coming from Mars to Earth as a military attache to start his life over and and just like
we would have to face in the world after the Cold War had supposedly ended and there was this peace dividend being spent and and then near the end I I finished off with a series called uh 1976 to the very origin of the story of a i it was the time of Microsoft and Apple in their infancy
it was the time of Genentech in its infancy it was the time of the first experiments will become the internet the very first test of sending a message from California to New York it was such an interesting period of time that no one talks about but that was an interesting year was the year the Viking Landers on Mars it was the year of David Bowie so I called it 1976 golden years and I wrote
about a scientist who was the Catalyst for the entire story arc who comes upon a discovery he's kind of like a guy who's good enough for Bell Labs but he gets kicked out of school he's kind of like the founders you and I read about that David senra talks about at length in his magisterial podcast
and and so that was the storyline I tied it all together and that was box of stars and I I'm not doing it justice and I'm boring your audience but I'm telling you that was my year the first year and I thought I was done and I spoke to a good friend Jawad meandi referred me to was the author
of three Reflections the founders of Reflections and he's he he forwarded me to an editor friend and I talked about it but I still had to deal with a house that my father owned I had to sell it and he didn't own it all some relatives I hadn't seen in years owned a part of it so I said I can't go with the burden of dealing with an editor right now or doing that work
but I decided to escape from the stress of selling this house and all the tenants and all the stuff let me write a second book so that became the basis of writing the second book which was Now put on the typeshare platform the first book was put on Twitter it was assembled on notion most of
those series have a Spotify playlist key to the time period so you hear spy music in 1961 you'll hear 80s music in 1987 you hear all these things so the Spotify playlists out there for people and I repeated the experiment on typeshare which is a new uh writing platform to test that out and
I wrote the in four cohorts I wrote another book and this time I said in my mind I was talking to the editor I said I have to write a book I can't work on this editing and all I heard was JFK speech in 1962 Rice University Texas we choose to go and I said this this line kept reverberating in
my mind I said I'm going to write a story I'm going to start it in 1962 and leap ahead 150 years to a fictional Town heavyville Texas which would be this kind of company industrial town where they launched rockets and it was overseen by something called the space Cooperative which is kind of like what happens to corporations they merge into some other Corporation you've seen this
so that'll happen to the space industry probably in 100 150 years they'll merge into something new and I thought and that conglomerate they'll face some new uh uh tests and and and I made it like a disaster story it said on Earth because there's a cat seven hurricane on their way but at the same time I thought let's look through the history books there was a an interesting event
that happened in the 19th century called cat the Carrington event it was a coronal mass ejection I said let's play with that and say it's going to hit Mars too and there's all these settlements on Mars what happens if they get hit with this thing and no one's prepared for it and what happens
at the same time that the people in heavyville Texas have to deal with the storm so that was the beginning of a whole story arc and half of it was like a diptych half of it was about the history of the Space Age from 1962 on to the present to to SpaceX while the other half was about these people on Mars in in Arcadia Polynesia because I looked up the maps I said we're the most likely
they're going to be a landing sites let's set the settlement there is use what we know now and let's talk about heavy built Texas and let's introduce other characters in the space Cooperative in headquarters three headquarters in Houston Nairobi and and Wellington New Zealand because I said this
this thing is so large it needs to have three presidents so I said made up this whole fiction of of a strange new structure that run the space Cooperative because I kept thinking going back to my first book about the East India Company the Dutch East Indian company I said let's call
this the East India Company the first of the of the interplanetary age I said this is like the new power on Earth and they're gonna have these concessions which allowed me in the next court to look at what's going on crypto I said we're going to call the story coin the next series will be there is a financial crisis and I said okay how do they manage the books the books have
gone missing what do you mean the books have gone missing I invented a character the sentient Ledger who has been tasked with overseeing the finances of not only space Cooperative but also a business concession that is not unlike the South seat company in the Mississippi company when they
were given the deal to try to manage the debt in exchange the debt for Equity I said let's just turn this into something where they're managing money endless what kind of money I'm going to call it the Atlantic coin it is the euro dollar 3.0 it is soft Power air dropped into the wallets everyone's wallet across the planet like the space Cooperative second business but it's
really a powerful business but now there's a financial crisis because the sentient Ledger has gone missing and there's a whole kind of like Financial Thriller aspect to it and so where did he go he goes on something called the verse where's the verse it's like the net instead of the meters it's the verse to create a whole story and he meets someone who's an artist
not a human artist it's an artist and so she's going to help and recover his memory just like in those Hitchcock Thrillers and that leads to the next part the third of the four part Arc Vibe because I'm looking at all these artists that I'm falling and listening to who are just
doing incredible things with nfts and doing incredible art I said okay let's let's explore that story let's explore the story of Art and while at the same time explore this other thriller story of how this Ledger is going to deal with his past and then I and then I find out at the end what happens to him he recovers his memory he finds out he's not who we thought he was
and there's all these fun bits where he's in a virtual Parisian apartment he doesn't recognize anything it's supposed to be all his stuff and it's all these Clues to who he was and he goes on the run with the artist to this place Miami Marseille it's in the verse and there he finds
himself and just as the mysterious people are about to catch him in the artist he decides to escape one more time to the very beginning of the story to harvest to the fourth and final part of the story which is the moon he uploads himself to the Moon to the very south Poland because right there according to astronomers in the 19th century at the very South Pole because
it's perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic the the light that is uh coming from the Sun onto the moon is almost constant so they call it the Eternal peaks of light so there's a base there and there's a secret project called The Harvest right because this is the arc where I get into
the myths of the Sun and the Moon while covering the story about who this guy is and there's an incredible sentiment inside this giant crater that's right at the very epicenter of the South Pole the moon that's been converted and there he meets his father the man who created him and he
turns out he really was a person so there's a whole kind of thing I'm telling it because no one's going to be listening to this part I've lost the studio audience so it's just you and me talking so we can talk about it I can give you all the spoilers and there I go on a 30-day Rampage and I start exploring dialogue and writing and he's speaking bits of French he discovers who
he really is and someone from Earth who's a friend of the first character from the first part of the art from from tevyville Texas is sent up there to find out what's going on to find out what happened to the money where's the money follow the money all the way up to the moon and it's a whole bit
of intrigue and all the stuff's going on it's a bit James Bondi and and the story is resolved wow and the meantime we get to learn about history we get to learn about history mythology we get to explore these ideas and I get to I guess explore my own psyche along the way I you know it's funny I told you before we started to record that I I let these uh chats go where they go I I have a
structure but I immediately leave it and you've just given me like I don't know maybe a dozen things to to ask you about I I I I I don't even know if I have any answers but I love it because you know on the internet everyone's famous for having the answers it's really about the questions
oh I couldn't agree more the the the questions are vastly more important than the answers but I'm gonna ask you some now and and we'll see what you think I I had originally written uh before talking with you that you reminded me a lot of William Blake The English Mystic um because of his belief in imagination and how it can create uh out of just out of our human
Minds uh you know he's most famous I think for uh his quote if the doors of perception were yes everything would appear to man as it is infinite for man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his Cavern and and yet as I listen to you I I can't help but think
of proust uh in that the the the quotidian is is married to the profound I it sounds like something they're all of a piece yes exactly and it sounds like going back to taking care of your father um I I had uh similar situations with my mother at a young age and and not so much with my dad because my sisters were taking care of him um but uh I I remember thinking at the time
how one of the things that we had done I think incorrectly in our modernism was to remove we living from the dead and or the dying and uh I love that you brought your dad back from uh rehab we we did something similar with my mother-in-law recently and she sprang back to life whereas in rehab we were certain she was dying because I think she was dying I I think you
did absolutely the most wonderful and right thing because when I was there for those three months he was falling apart and and one night during during that time I slept with the phone right next to me right next to my head and and it and it turned out to be the thing to do because one
night they called me he tried to get up from his bed and walk and fell because he no longer had control I learned later on over his right leg right arm there's it that this small tumor that had been growing for years had finally affected his endocrine balance as well as his ability to control his limbs which I learned about by researching the internet and I found there was
a case there was a case about something similar to that and I thought oh this is what's happened and and when we were in the rehab every day I would see other people there and they were just they are you and me and then something happened and now now it's gone and this is totally different direction
that if they were younger they're going how could this happen how could I how could this happen how could I end up like this if they weren't in that position and there was this one poor woman who uh she just didn't understand she was why she was there and she said can you please call
someone so I can go home and I was just dying inside I wanted to do that I wanted to take her home anywhere you know there's this other woman who didn't remember who I was every day but I bring in the newspaper that after my parents are done reading it and we talk we'd have the same conversation every day and I felt something for this poor woman because I remember when the the
person who talks who does outreach they called me after I said what can I do for you can you buy a newspaper for this woman she lives on this floor in this room for her could you please do this for me there's nothing you can do for me but there's something you could do for her and and I don't mean to interrupt you Jim because I I just have to applaud you for
doing that because we do not thrive in a vacuum we do not thrive in isolation which has a Charged meaning if we look back in the last few years but for ourselves for our families it you know it um it casts in sharp belief what is important and unimportant that's what I meant by my fears and conceits all Stripped Away
you know by that period by that time with Dad the the thing that I find fascinating um I agree with you by the way that we do not do well in isolation that's why solitary confinement is often considered the worst punishment in many regards even worse than putting someone to death
uh because I've read multiple sources on how many many of us who are running human OS if we are isolated we begin to hallucinate in as little as just a few hours which really spoke to my idea that we you know we are all all sort of the same thing so to speak and uh it is the community in cooperation between people that makes meaning in life
and and that was a bit when I was thinking about are separating ourselves from the dead and dying we we Stripped Away uh an incredibly vital portion of life in my opinion because the the cycle of the way we have gone throughout all of human history not saying it will always be this way but we're born we lived we died and I'm going to ask you about another one of your stories which I
loved as well uh where you talk quite a bit about that um well you know what I as I said you in the beginning uh I I have a structure but um you talk about we all begin life as time billionaires and and you say we begin with a fortune not all of us get to spend it if Lucky loved laughed cried
tried failed learned earned breathed sweet air that is something that we get to keep talk to me a bit about that because I love the way I I once wrote in my first book that and I was speaking specifically about Investors but I think this is applicable to humans uh the I wrote that the best investors had the ability to unstick themselves from time
the past present and future make up their now and I see that in your work as well talk to me a bit about that it's interesting that you bring and then thank you for reading it by the way um I was one of the earliest pieces I wrote when when everything was just that was you know
in January 2020 and that was on my mind a lot quite a bit the nature of time and I was just thinking about it and uh I I was just I felt such relief and gratitude that I still have some time but I felt such ashamed to regret at not seeing and embracing this a lot earlier a lot and it when and displacing it was what I thought was important at the time
you know long before this and it is interesting that you talk about the about in the investment realm about the ability to to move past the linearity right linearity of time and to to to look at its thing all of a piece again back to that phrase and and it's almost like you can imagine it's no longer is a line but as a circle
forgive the visual reference but I think that's what we're going towards and this idea that this is not some uh disconnected discrete piece that this is all interconnected and one of the most basic structures that does that is a circle versus a line beginning and end there is no there is no discrete uh uh there's no demarcation point right right we don't we don't
really acknowledge or know that you don't we don't feel we don't necessarily know when we're gonna we arrive and when we depart necessarily right right so it's almost all the same and I don't want to get into those Hackney phrases of living in the now and things like that but there's this idea
that uh if if something like what I went through then many people knew and everyone's gone through you suddenly are disabused of the notion that you can compartmentalize this into discrete units if that makes any sense and so for when I was writing that I thought boy if you can go through all those
experiences that's all there is isn't there and you you're so very lucky to be granted that uh to experience that or to it go after that and so I don't envy the people who do certain things in the material realm as much as now as this stuff the experience part you can't you can't uh you can't undo the past we live the past you can only rebuild the future with this in mind
the thing that I found so uh that I that resonated with me so deeply with your work is is what is part of what you just said which is the non-linearity of the real life that we live and we we are forever trying to make it linear make it predictable make it uh
risk-free if you will and and nothing of course is risk-free and when we compartmentalize we can often lose the the thread so to speak and I love the way that your work I don't know if you've read David Mitchell he's my favorite literary uh novelist writing today um and he wrote a great book called Cloud Atlas which if you haven't oh I've heard of
it yes that's that's gone on the list all right if you haven't read it I highly suggested I think you'll love it um because it is told it jumps all over the place it starts in the present goes well into the future goes way into the past and yet as the the novel uh comes together at the end it
you realize that we're all connected across time and space and um many much of his work um speaks to his uh sort of obsession with what's now what's then you know sort of along the lines of Einstein's time as an illusion albeit a persistent one um and and what one of the things I wanted to ask you about was you know I'm wondering
about your background like were you trained as a writer and no no I I thought of Hunter S Thompson who famously typed out the entire book of The Great Gatsby because his reason he gave to people was he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece and and I loved I love Hunter S Thompson I also like Gatsby although I think some of his
stuff is overrated when he was on he was really really on so not trained as a writer what what um in you was it your imagination was it your fascination with going down rabbit holes I think that's something you and I share I think that I think it might be that I I do I have written I have but not to the degree or extent or depth or and with the disregard for
opinion as I have in the last two years I I have written in the past because I went to school like most people go to school and you do those things but I I never thought about it until recently and then you would do some things for some project or other my background was the fur to this thing
I did not I did not have the wisdom to to get an education in that direction I ended up studying economics and the law and which is I might as well just gone and learn about history and studied calligraphy and done traveling around the world and all those other things you know what I'm talking about and yes and you know I uh which Mariah wrote this whole
piece all in the second person referring to that person what the title was you do not have to be perfect because I thought about that a lot about the entire life from 1955 on to the end about that and and um and so my my background there was no formal training that all I've got is just practice and writing and and just this notion that there's a story and when I got enough of it
written I said I care about these people they're imaginary but I care about them I want to know why what happened to them and where did they come from like Casablanca who were you what were you before I needed to know for myself or my own gratification which is the wrong thing to do
in the world of the internet you're supposed to serve I get it but I'm serving I guess I'm serving people who have yet to discover it and that's okay in a world of eight billion people it's it's not the two fans it's the True Believers and they'll find you some way if you put it out there uh and yeah I wish that I had gone to school for those things but I did not I just decided to
write and and I found the words or they found me let's not okay let's get corny they found me right maybe it's like maybe it's like Play-Doh maybe it's that's because I got I've been getting over a cold so I couldn't really do any work in terms of writing I spent the whole week just I
wanted to read about Ai and all this other stuff I said no let's not do that so I ended up going to to reading about the Royal Society and and the side of Art and that led me to the enlightenment another book and then that led me to Plato and and Aristotle this this weird kind of jets and sharks
thing that goes on between these two schools of thought since the beginning of time and I remember the single players like yeah we are we have this innate knowing of things uh I'm I don't know I would like to think so if when things work out I'd like to say I did it it wasn't just because I had it but um which then led to uh yeah it's just the rabbit holes and
just going down that rabbit hole and then finally in that book about uh Plato and Socrates we find out about uh Charles Sanders purse and Ludwig boltzmann I said holy cow that leads me right back to where I wanted to avoid computer that AI because those two guys are I feel so bad for them
because they had such terrible lies they were so ignored and discredited and unheralded and yet it was their strange work which opened the doors to so many other things and and the most recent thing being what's going on now in what was a winter until 10 15 years ago in neural Nets right so it's like boom so you know I'm not a technical guy but I've just learned this in the last few
days it's like wow so you know I know it's going to come in some book it's gonna all the stuff's gonna be feedstock at some point for some story but for now it's like I have no formal training except I just like what's that about what's that over there that's it the the um that's I I think
that's delightful uh you know I have written four books but I was never trained as a writer um I I like to write I kept journals since age 18. um but I I have an uh a different view about schooling I think our schooling as it presently is deployed worldwide is absolutely in need of an overall and yes and and I think that we've gone from uh what where we are now where I think
people are essentially told and I'm not going to just blame the educational system I'm no let's talk about this as human society there are two ways let's really simplify it there are way more than two ways but let's talk about two ways that people think that they're educating others the
first is the most prevalent which is people tell people what to think right uh Robert Anton Wilson who's a I'm a big fan of uh he was way ahead of his time he called it uh instilling the correct answer machine in people's brains what whereas I think I think that we are now desperately in need of the ability to teach young people old people for that matter how how to think not
what to think because we are going into a far less finite world you know I was thinking about it and like if you look over almost all of human history most culture was local most people's lives were extremely finite many people didn't go more than five miles outside of the village they were born
in and so they they were born lived and died in a mostly agrarian society and and how could they um think great thoughts right if they were just surrounded by the same group the same beliefs you know all of those types of things you know when you when you look at it um I I wonder like how how did they how did we come to that and the way I think about it is
well we we came through it through becoming right her clitus said everything is always in a state of becoming and before the industrial flux yeah yeah flux right um you know before the Industrial Revolution then this Village this mythical Village I'm Dreaming up right now you know how how do you escape the the dominant belief or or myth of
your particular Village and then you think about it well who had the best distribution system back then the church right so because they had the only real distribution system that could get into all of these Villages they got into all of the villages and and and thus we had this long
long period before the enlightenment before the Royal Society was formed before our breaking off and and beginning to ask these questions but it's it seems to me to be also part of our Evolution as a species uh Phil Stutz who is a psychiatrist that the actor Jonah Hill made a movie about uh
he had a quote in that movie that I really loved and I wrote it down I put it up on Twitter and it seemed to resonate with people and I'm not going to do the whole thing but essentially what he says is true confidence is living in uncertainty the winner is the one who takes the risk and eats the consequences what do you think about that oh yes I think I heard that passage and I
do know what you're referring to that documentary and I think he's spot on I think he's spot on I you know this we have this we have we have this thing called natural intelligence and beyond that we have natural imagination and intuition we have these tools and the things that people are screaming about right now that are
afraid of they will augment it we are not talking about artificial intelligence we are talking about augmented intuition we are at best we are talking about archived inferences right to get into that Charles Sanders thing because we can we can do that as human means we can do the abducted you
know abduction uh I'm getting that wrong but do you understand what I'm saying I'm not referring to deduction induction but that that third School of thinking reasoning that you saw abduction I think he called it ad yeah and and we can do that part we can do the best guess part right and I
love the idea that I want uncertainty because that means we are not confined to a perfect state that has already been predetermined for us we do not have the stress of saying is that all there is no they're the not necessarily there could be a lot more and we're just not giving ourselves time and credit to create and fill that space and carve out that space and then uncertainty we have
with what's happening now for a lot of people we are on the brink and I hate the sun it's like a TED talk thing I'm about to say we are the verge of infinite agency okay for a lot of people maybe 1.6 out of eight you know most people are lucky right yeah and I'm sorry guys if you're
listening it sounds absolutely I should put on the black turtle like and go on a stage and do this thing but what I'm trying to say is I'll come and Edward I'll come if you do that yeah but but what I'm trying to say is that we have the means and I think what I'm doing now is a very tiny infinitesimal version of that right you know you know the the let's go
to boltzmann a tiny Adam with particle all the version of this idea that everyone can do this uncertainty is great because that means we got room we can do something with uncertainty we can do nothing with with certainty that's why I hate Perfection Perfection is 100 tax you're doomed
if you've reached that state then what there's nothing left you're in trouble it's over there's only entropy back to Baltimore so no we have room we have the means uncertainty gives us the room if we embrace our this infinite agency boom we can do things and look at this the idea that you see in in the financial World when they talk about there's no market for this what's the use
case what use case we're creating something out of nothing here and then suddenly it'll seem so obvious 10 20 30 years from now and your children will take it for granted and they'll forget about it and that was carved out of uncertainty so here we go again I I just love this idea that Mr that
was brought up in students I think that is a gift it didn't feel like that it sure as heck doesn't feel like that at times like how someone's knocking on your door where's the rent check but what I'm trying to say is that that's where the room is for something good to happen because if it's already been defined and confined what there's nothing left to refine sorry I just sound
like a fight promoter now but what I'm trying to say now is that is is that yeah do the hair thing but what I've tried to say is is that that is a good thing I'm I'm jumping for joy with alacrity you can hear my voice because I didn't understand that before I didn't and I'm on the other side of
some very bad things so I can look at the good part of the word uncertainty it there is the other kind too the kind where you sleep with the phone next to you and you there's all those things and you don't know what next day each day brings and those little things happening and you deal and it's you know but then when you don't have that when you have the privilege of not facing that
uncertainty is a gift I I agree completely I I might uh uh think though that as far as the the phone sleeping near your head uh when my mom was dying I I uh recoiled every time my phone rang we didn't yeah we didn't have cell phones I so I still do the same thing yeah when the phone goes because it was that plus the house plus everything else it was always something
to fix or something has happened yeah I I I I I don't mean to interject but I remember two years ago it's in it's footnote now but we went to rehab the house was broken into a ransacked how's that for uncertainty a different kind of uncertainty and I get a call as my poor brother
comes upon it and they caught the person and they let them go because you know that's what happens so what I'm trying to say is yeah I'm with you about with the phone and but yeah the the thing I I was gonna interject about the phone though was I don't know that I think of that necessarily as
uncertainty I think of that as like I knew my mom was gonna die yes and so I wasn't uncertain about that I was uncertain about when she would die and it I was incredibly close to my mother and um that's why that the the anxiety and and the despair yeah when I when I heard that phone rang and and I would rehearse it in my mind I was young I was 28 when my mom died 20 yeah 28. and
um but but the other type of uncertainty that we were speaking more about in terms of you know that that playground if you will the optionality the optionality I like that and for for our imaginations for our stories for our ideas right might come when it's not about optimizing it's
about options exactly exactly and and that's another part of your writing that I really really like so much it seems to me I read a lot and it seems to me that there's a there seems to be kind of a formulaic style of writing and and this is well before chat GPT by the way um that that is sort of like paint by numbers is the way I think about it I'm mixing my metaphors
there I I but I get your meeting but and and I really hate it and and like when I see it it just bums me out to be honest because it's kind of like and that's why I hate the term content I I like yeah that is not a favorite word a mutual friend Tom Bevin yes the pain of our mutual existence it's truly truly and Thomas gets that exactly right
um and and these terms of Arts that get taken over and and you know just to make yourself known you you end up using because it is the vernacular that everyone is using to describe something that we don't think of the same way but if you're going to get them to think that way you use their
words and that kind of the tyranny of words that leads into that kind of uh idea I hate labels but the this your writing is so the opposite of this it is so alive in the way that I read it and and and I became obsessed with reading your work just because of the I I just sensed in it the joy of Discovery and the joy of creativity not just Discovery right Discovery but then creation
um and and I kind of think that that's the way these great stories get written like Cloud Atlas I don't know whether you've read American Gods by Neil Gaiman oh that's another one and go ahead I I just to think of that makes me feel a little sheepish because I know retrieve I only have three
elements of retrieve and it was all because of Tom bevin's group they came up with these monthly symposiums one was called the beach so I I wrote an entire piece set in a submarine and I studied I looked online how do you talk on a sub so the entire dialogue is all terse language like
in being in a sub and with with the appropriate music I found some from a film at Astra just to set off the tone of it and and I remember when I said where am I going with this and I said the next chapter was a three-part intro prologue and the next part was set 66 million years ago and I said well there was an accident and goodbye dinosaurs which is their next theme
so I'll probably have to write something for them soon but because that's their monthly theme believe it or not Tom bevin's people are we're mad men and but it's perfect for me because that's where I'm headed my story and the third part is I said I only had one line but the entire thing retrieve and the scene of outer space drawn through
lexicon I found lexical I drew I forget and it was where are The Three Graces and so I refer to that because when you talk about American Gods I said yeah I've got this whole thing where I'm going backwards in time the first two books the book one and then book two goes backwards it's the same story some of the same character last names but it's back which is closer to us and now this
third one will go further back to begin the story and it will talk about those things my own kind of origin story because the whole thing about myths I can't stop writing about it so I'm just going to go in a different direction I apologize for the interjection and the tangent no that's that's as I
told you before we started recording and my my uh my Olympus here is the movie My Dinner with Andre which is a marvelous movie that very few younger people have seen I think it was made in 1981 with the actor that they would probably recognize from Prince's bride Wallace Shawn um who played benzini in The Princess Bride if I recall correctly never start a land war
in Asia right um I watched that when it came out um and I was young I think it was done in 1980 or thereabouts and I was just transfixed because it had this lyrical sort of desultory um stepping stone approach to a conversation and the way it unfolded I just thought was really terrific um you know it the reason I brought up American Gods though is because
um of the mythology tie in I I think that um if for those who haven't read American Gods or seen the TV series the book is much much better as usual but um the the the the quick and dirty is that there are the old gods you know um Odin at all uh who are dying and they're dying
because Humanity no longer believes in them and and Gaiman makes it it's really a wonderful book um because it becomes a battle between the old gods Odin uh Etc and the new Gods media um computers um Etc and and he essentially sets up a world in which everything really is born of human belief and and those myths get written and adopted you know kind of like Jung's idea uh of ideas uh
humans don't have ideas ideas have humans and and I just see a lot of that in the structure of your work as well but I also see I just finished a book uh by David Shields called reality hunger um and and he's an essayist who who spends the majority of the book deriding what novels have become
um and but another thing made me kind of think of you he quotes Emerson in the book and Emerson said he was looking for a new type of work writing literature I think Emerson called it and he called it uh after a device that was popular during his uh his time which proved to be a hoax by the way
uh which I think is charming because it's a minute uh he he Emerson said he wanted his the new literature to be a pan harmonicon and and buy that and I'm quoting Emerson here everything is admissible philosophy ethics poetry humor fun mimicry jokes as against the certainties of the older novel structure that kind of got put in place in the early 19th century
where science right the world was certain we lived in A Clockwork universe everything was deterministic everything was known and therefore humans organized their lives around that of course having no idea of our Quantum future um do you do you like where do you get your inspiration from just is it from life is it found art you know the the part with your father and you're
going through his things right those were real things and they sparked real thoughts but then you use them as a jump off into this wonderfully uh mythical imaginary world is there a process that you know about or is it just spring I wish I wish it was structured I wish it was something
that was by Design like uh what's the you heard of what's it called we lipo yeah yeah I wish it was something so I wish it was our design was architected or whatever you would call it I wish it was so deliberate it was those 30 days those first 30 days and 2-1 texts you know 2x21 just writing trying to figure out a story where I begin sort of in the middle or
near the end I realized and then I go work My Way backwards and forwards there was no um as I said I had no formal training that it was just the sheer idea and also it was just a gratitude of having some people reach out to me in those first few pieces and tell me they like
these ideas that I was just putting out their riffing that's my favorite verb for riffing and they s their reaction was so moving to me touching that someone would take time to tell me that they enjoyed it and it it meant something to them and that's what kept me going and sometimes every time I do a cohort I need someone to say oh I'm reading this along and there's other creators
who are doing well in their fields and they would they would read some of these things along I was like this is what keeps me going so maybe it is a belief that feeds me keeps you alive it's someone paying attention one person reading along for 30 days on the long Lonely Road through that Valley
and said okay I can keep going to the other end of this thing I I wish I had a problem process there is no outline to speak of except what was created in those first 30 days or what was in my head when I started uh the book that became Harvest that second book that that JFK speech it was just I
wanted to I guess I had enough practice that I had an internal idea okay I'm gonna start with this one thing and focus on this one area of History mythology and then write this other thing about these characters and figure out where I want to go or what question I wanted to ask I didn't even like Carrington that you know the coronal mass ejection let's bump it up and what happens what if
and I had no idea that I was going to write about Ascension Ledger and an Atlantic coin or about an autonomous artist in the verse or about Miami Marseille you know I just wanted to I was having fun because by then I was like okay they're gonna escape and how they're gonna they're gonna jump
in the verse on a virtual Riva boat you know those beautiful Italian speedboats and they gotta go off like in a movie you know I had a sound track in my mind I said let's pretend this is a movie and I'm writing these scenes and I said okay it's the guy and the girl in the Reba in the virtual world
and they're about to go to Miami Marseille because those are two water-based cities where Underworld things happen I said let's let's figure out so so so that leads me to another thing I think I thought about you and it's wonderful that this is just uh happening naturally you your writing is also quite cinematic and and I and I think and you and you talk about Marseille and
um uh you know that being the the sort of the water and of course I immediately am thinking of Christopher Nolan right I don't know if you're a fan of his work I am oh yeah I um there have to be an influence because what are we but children of the media of our times whatever it is and I imagine that that is an influence but it was not
deliberate but I do tell you at times when I would make a soundtrack I would hear Tunes randomly I said oh it's this it's this person or it's this place and I'd add it to the soundtrack and so yeah there is some visual landscape that's unfolding in my mind as I'm writing it's not on
purpose it's not by Design it's almost kind of like those books like what happens here turn to this page or something like that create your own adventure I I write fiction kind of as a hobby and um I had this one that I just found in an old Journal I completely forgotten about it um and it was it it began as uh a man and his wife were at a party here in Manhattan and
suddenly it went non-linear that's awesome in other words they were having the normal boring so how are you how are things all of the things that we really these are just filler phrases and we're not communicating really in my opinion we're just we're we're almost robotic in what do you do oh and you must like that anyway it's domestic content yeah
so so suddenly he starts shouting in ancient Chinese at someone he sees across the room all right now you've got the non-sequitur what just happened and and that character suddenly immediately you witness him change and his face changes and these two people hate each other
and they begin to run right at each other to attack one another and they end up going out a window and they're having this huge battle and they're shouting ancient Chinese of course no one knows this someone's recording it we didn't have cell phones when I wrote this so somebody had a
tape recorder but but I liked those kinds of ideas and and you know that had a whole um you know the the storyline there was we were constantly reborn and some of us kept our memories from our previous life and and these were two who'd been fighting each other over all of the sands of time um but it it's it's like do you do you have because again we're getting back to a bit
of the myth does I are our myths the ones we're writing now are we writing enough of them I I'm very taken by your idea about Kennedy saying you know what we're going to the moon and Robert persig who wrote uh Zen In The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had another thing where he said he said listen everything you see comes out of the minds of men and women
there there is no Steel in nature that came out of our minds and and like I was in Africa once and and I had this feeling of like I was looking at something that really didn't come out of our human minds and then and I was having you know my little moment saying oh and this is what it really looked
like and everything and then of course my guy disabused me of that telling me how oh no no no no all of that even though it appears wild right now in the Serengeti that was much of that tended by by uh a human husbandry my point being is where do you get where does your material spring from
oh the feedstock and it's I would imagine it's the same as everyone else it's our common knowledge it's the whole sorry Ben Hunt it's the whole it's the whole things that we are the common language that we all share in terms of the media in terms of our entertainment our literature uh it our disc course right and any particular interest that I have mine are
I have a Fascination for history not everyone loves it but history and mythology and there's this idea I think about memory I think when it comes to stories it's the people talk about the long game for me I am captivated by the long meme yeah okay and and I feel like it's almost like the that cool setting for the story it's like this scene of Domesticity
and then that which provides a great sharp contrast for what happens right after that that's what's great about the opening you don't see that coming again also what just happened right it's like the Matrix when it begins this way what just happened and that's what you want to see
happen you want to see that tension and so for me it is all it's this the common language of our entertainments and our experiences from our time it's uh Stephen Johnson speaking of novels Stephen Johnson had this interesting chart of marvelistic genres and Trends and they seem to last coincidentally about the length of a generation roughly 20 25 years and the Styles would change
over time in terms of the novel right what was the popular novel at the time and I suppose there are some of that there's some truth to that for me it can't I cannot it's not in a vacuum there's all the stuff that's happened that we grew up with when we talk about film when we talk about music
so I suppose there is some inspiration for that for me it's just my particular mixture of that when I go to the buffet table I'm going to get certain things more than others when I plug it when I put it together on the plate than someone else but it's all from the same Source isn't it
in in many risk respects that um one of the things that you let happen in in your writing and I think it's why it appeals to me so much is that it it I I I'm a fan of what's called found art um we oh yeah we collected a painter who is British and she literally we we uh she was unknown when we first bought her work so she was quite reasonably priced but it turned out so we bought
the entire collection and it was like 14 pieces that were unoffered um and and when we spoke to her first off I got a call from the artist um and we've been given my uh number by the dealer and she was literally crying and it turned out when when I heard her story she had not been successful
as an artist and had to keep a job and my buying for again a very reasonable amount of money her entire uh collection that was on offer but from the dealer let her quit her job right and and it was wonderful because she told me all about how no those you know I I asked her about one of the pieces somewhere in black and white somewhere in column and I was asking her about um uh the
woman uh featured in one and I asked was that your mother and she goes no that was a magazine cover that I found and Drew over and I and but then she said but in a way I turned her into my mother and and yeah you've said that you know you seem to me to be incredibly open to the random to
accident to Serendipity um and and was that a result two of the kind of letting go after you had this very emotional and yet uh meaningful experience uh tending to your father tending to his things after he'd gone was was that the kind of strip away because you have another story basically about the snowball and the Avalanche right and uh um and and I was fascinated by that
because the snowball the snowball is what everyone has given you know their life advice right meaning right uh you know be modest yeah you have a good habits be persistent but much of life like for example many of the great discoveries uh uh over in quantum physics in particular and formulas
um were really like Quantum leaps Avalanches yes uh explosions have changed and those require adaptability and resilience talk to me about that uh because I I definitely see that in your work oh that's so I I all I can say is at the time when I was writing the first early pieces I I was just kind of finding my way through through writing about time and and then later on space in
every meaning of the word it was the reactions of the readers the friends I was making that gave me a little bit of a nudge to go further I did honestly did not know how much I would write or if I'd write anything at all uh but it was just enough to know that I was there and that it meant something that it registered and I decided to I guess indulge in what was what
I was visualizing because you as you have alluded to there's a visual there's a visual I guess there is a visual there's a strong visual component to what's going on when I write yeah and so I began to see and hear things some of it was music so that's why you get those Spotify playlists for
for so many of these collections made for each of these pieces I would hear things or see things and said okay well we're going to turn that into into something because I can have a feeling for a character or a scene from from what I'm hearing or what I'm seeing whatever I suppose yeah there is a
bit of a found I would make preview images you've seen them where and the mood board each of those was a component where I'd say okay in 1961 I would take find black and white pictures of the Berlin wall and and things like that now create a collage image and enough of that uh what's the name of that Italian actor who did let's summarize that that's it that's that's the picture for me
of 1961 and so yeah there's a bit of a found art element to it the visual and I did the same with each of those I would create those images just before I would write like the first one was just Neil Armstrong's suit huh and a museum I said that's a powerful image right yeah and I said that's enough for me to work with right there and I would do that likewise and just I suppose there
is that uh I would see some images that's enough retrieve I was writing some of the pieces I said create a field for me of stars I was I think I was going through Lexica to do it and I said this is it I have enough here there's a scene of the Stars there's a scene of the Sun or of a star I
said the sun feels something Grand and ancient at the same time I said that's just enough for me to go on and the line where are the three greases because I kept thinking about the ancient past the really ancient past and that was just enough that was just enough a one line one image a sound
and you you you also write quite a bit about the future right you wrote a piece called looking back from the future which you think of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward oh yeah uh which was a utopian novel for those who don't know Edward Bellamy's work um the the full title of the novel was uh Looking Backward 2018 to 1887. and it was
essentially a story of a uh a young man the protagonist Julian West falls asleep in the late 19th century and he wakes up in the year 2000 in America America is a socialist Utopia um and it sold millions and millions of copies and they formed societies around this and you know he got it wrong but he got a lot of stuff right in other words so he bought things from cooperatives
where the middleman was taken out well Costco Sam's Warehouse right and he he he got sermons and music being available through Cable telephone well that's radio and the telephone um but what what did you learn when you wrote you're looking back from the future but how well how much how oh how
what really mattered was not as much as I would have thought at the time it's much smaller right the and I don't want to use that word essentialism I I just I don't want to talk about things like that and say Marie kondo I I simply want to say that uh I don't want to be reductionist I don't
I want to get into that I'm not coming off as an ascetic I'm simply saying that there's a filter there it's a it's a useful tool as a filter right I don't know if it's regret minimization like you've heard but it's more like what is it that that matters actually and that's the stuff that registers when you sit when you put pen to paper or when you put your fingers on the keyboard and
the rest is just kind of all the things we worry about those are the details and they're not to be worriedly worried about they're going to happen or they're not going to happen I don't know I I don't carry around a coin we all have a coin of the mind we don't need to be reminded of that one right right Memento we don't need that we have we go through enough life we carry a coin in the mind
we don't need to shut ourselves away from other people we have a cabin in the mind we we can work with what we had in front of us here and that's what I I would say that's what I carry from that and fought privately when I think about that yeah and and uh you know when you talk about where all
the children of the dalius um oh the the future is fashioned by hand our stories are messages for the future uh Wilson called that time binding um so my my question there is which by the way I 100 agree with you I I do believe our stories and our myths if you will like Kennedy saying we're going
to the [ __ ] Moon well Mr President we have no way of doing that and yet you found that story for my account what remember 1916 uh that was sort of the origin story of that and then of course you can go beyond that and say well and you know you can go all the way back to the pre-socratics uh uh philosophers like heraclitus yes anticipating taoism uh and modern physics if you will uh um
and and that's what I love about this I think we should do more of this not less and you are doing more which is one of the other reasons I love reading you but how do we avoid becoming Icarus I would say and it's kind of weird because I think I see two Trends see a lot of fiction
and see a lot of reaching for utopian fiction or or what we call the utopian figure I would say dystopia is kind of like a bit a little bit of that is like a little bit of the bad stuff a little bit of the poison a little bit of the vaccine that drives us towards Utopia yeah I'm not saying everything's Mad Max I'm simply saying we do those
things to remind ourselves of what we don't want yeah that's a good cautionary tale at at least at minimum but also it's just that part of our hard wiring because we owe mankind most of mankind has not always had it so good so unfortunately the things that that that's just a reminder maybe that's part of our chemistry too we need a little bit of that adrenaline I I like I like that
distinction because you know like if you've read any of Renee Gerard um genetic theory the thing that bums me out about him is like I get it and I read about my medic Theory not to be distinguished or not to be confused with meme medic uh right it's uh what Dawkins banged on about but mimetic
which is essentially copying others copying their hopes and dreams and making them our own but he always ended up like he he was so apocalyptic and and it was when I re read him and and read people writing about him it's just like you know we fear our own human nature uh we're gonna become way
too powerful and that's gonna create our Rune and that's your that's your uh what you just mentioned right it's our cautionary tale I but I I I think sometimes that that takes over if you will right it will it it can Eclipse our Pursuit let's use this in this field of thick desires the thing would you love doing this thing or this thing or this place or this person even if no one
else loved it right that hobby that Pursuit right who do you model for for the thick desire right it can Eclipse that and it should not I think if that's what if I'm reading your question correctly or you're framing correctly you're concerned accurately that that is can that get in the way of doing that and I yeah we see a lot look at Instagram holy cow so you know I I you know that's
a different kind of thought leader that's uh I took a few letters out of that word but but anyway uh uh you know I I I I I I think to to connect it back to what's driving me with the writing I think yeah I found my thick desire by accident it wasn't by master plan it was just through this
having this space to do something different than what I was doing for two and a half years it was something unexpected and I just I just grabbed on and I found this which which I find wonderful you also talk about the need for having an editor um and I had my I was lucky as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation I've written books
and I was lucky because my wife graduated summa [ __ ] laude in journalism oh wow I had a built-in editor I was ridiculously lucky um and and she fixed it and I remember and I wonder if you had the same experience um when she first began taking tearing my manuscript apart and killing
my darlings I was really angry and we got into like a killer fight we were taking a train into the New York City and like it was all it was me saying you know I was really mad and she was just shooting back at me and of course she made what I was writing vastly better and and and I accepted
that did you go through anything like that no I have not had an editor but I'll tell you what I've done since I stopped when I finished book number two in November right two days before Thanksgiving I gave myself I must finish this and then I put it down for a little while and I picked up book number one and I said it's on scrivener let's do this and I started going through it I said
that's gone that's gone I was like feeling good I felt like I gotta meet Cleaver here I felt so good to kill the Buddha to chop away at this thing I said that's Exposition I don't need this that's gone let's add some dialogue here because book two was more dialogue oh let's play with this now
with it it was another round of I'm gonna have fun with this let's add dialogue here this is the do-over that you can't do in real life you can do this in a written work you can do over you can you can get the girl you can go see about a girl right it'll happen right you know what I mean I do I know it comes together because you did the work you chop this thing out
you you remove this you rewrite this entire passage you come up with all that's the thing because the first book had a McGuffin that's the box of stars is the allusion to the MacGuffin yeah which is I I called it in the very first one of the first P pieces I call it the manifold it's
this thing but I don't describe it I just use the word and it's the it's the scientist Cadmus whose name I got from Greek myth the inventor of the alphabet he's a great mind who gets kicked out of school in the 1976 years but he creates the manifold and I come up with a reason to say why it is why does everything happens because of this thing but I wouldn't have gotten that if
I wasn't willing to go and let's chop away and go back aha here it is through the thicket of cop chopping away at these little like Vines of my ego to get to this thing that I really needed that really served the story and that felt really good that was cathartic to just like oh okay this
is where we're going it felt good to chop away Exposition because I said even I'm sick of reminding myself of the same thing over and over and over let's get rid of this stuff here that felt good and so I don't have an energy because uh we're finding attributes I have a loved one really needs to help and editor money is gone so I'm gonna do this and I'm okay with that because
I'm not looking forward to I remember listening to murakami's autobiography which was inspirational to me how he had these secret kind of dog fights with his editor maybe not as bad as yours and the Train on the way to the city but it was pretty rough for him and he you know and he's a pro right
just like you and so I I guess so I'm I'm gonna be looking at myself in the mirror or castigating myself that'll that'll be how I do my my inner my inner monologue will be a fight right they won't be Plato's dialogues it's supposed to be an argument a knock down drag out fight that's what else will happen but you gotta have fun with this because in the long run it won't matter
who cares what what matters is and I'm going to say these three things I'll say three things at the end of our talk that I think are the ultimate message to me in their mind and to everyone else but I'll say it now I did my best I gave my all I was here I love it I mean well let's put that
in Latin that sounds pretty good yeah it would sound good I had six years of Latin and all it really taught me was uh how to get to the origin or derivation of of English yeah same thing with me that that part that made the SAT easy yeah it really did and so it really did serve its purpose yeah well the last thing I wanted to cover is something that's near and dear to my
heart and that you've uh talked about quite a bit which is generative AI um and and you you've talked about and look at it I think in much the same way I do at least directionally um in terms of it is going to allow us to unlock doors that have been barred to us I'm I'm paraphrasing you here um and and let us tap into Rich veins for an embarrassment of rides of the
mind and I think that was you because it's elegant and and lyrical uh talk about that for for a bit I have to say when when I saw those what was being released East I was like what just happened and to me I because of book one when I was writing a lot of the stuff I was writing I was writing about
in one sequence in in the 1987 series I wrote about how people you know the birth of the internet it was a monochromatic text landscape right and yeah people were soon going to be granted new bicycles right Bicycles of the mind to go off-roading outside of the manicured walled Gardens and what were they at the time CompuServe AOL stuff like that right yeah
and what I I saw this I said something's happening here a new bicycle of the Mind is being assembled I know that there are issues I understand that but if we can get a little Chris Dixon here be right own right we want we want dominance on the market we want prominence for our work
well we shall need provenance for it too and what is going to happen with that other currently not quite down at the hills but so much challenge field is this idea a provenance right proof of not provenance it all Rhymes and when we combine that with this when you create your work you'll be rewarded for it because it's about this idea of natural
imagination augmented intuition it is about archived inferences that we make our work our humanity is the thing that we can get rewarded for now with these tools it will take time there's a lot of landmines here there's a lot of issues here I get that as I'm reading through the papers
and it will seem to paraphrase some Hobbs more dreams than science but I think we are headed in a direction where people will be rewarded for being a human in ways they didn't expect I know right now it looks bad and I know I've seen it I've seen it on Twitter I've seen it all that stuff but I I
believe from looking at history from looking at the papers the early papers the history of The Cypher punks I see this kind of repeating itself in this Arena too for people these new tools these new bicycles of the mind and it's going to be just something nothing less than remarkable when it's
rolled out for people they're going to have these tools the ux will get better the tooling will get better on both the the rails right the financial rails but also for the building and creating and making and sharing and putting things out there we will get past the Carlotta Perez part of the
market where there's a rugging and there's the disappointment and all of that stuff we're going to get to the next phase when we may very well end up taking for granted things running in the background but they are running in the background on our behalf that is what I'm excited about here right and the tools and text it's kind of amusing it's funny you read the Stephen from stuff about
the limitations right of the attention model but there's something to be said for combining that super fast shape-shifting statistical stencils in that space with his work on symbols right on information through symbols because he's a mathematician with Wolfram research I'd say that there's something there too and that's going to come together so right now that are playing with
it they're putting the gun roll links out there they're selling it but the next generation is going to be all these incredible tools that will build upon transposition transcription translation to use the AI where Trend transformation right Transformers I'm very excited if you can hear
my voice this is because I think it's coming but it's not going to be smooth but it is coming the merger of these two weird fields that venkatesh were all talked about that uh Peter Thiel was cautionary about saying one field was Communist and one was liberal well that almost sounds like
Plato right community property in Aristotle you know we're bringing them back here right we're closing up with those guys again it also I say to you that these models that this is going to be nothing less than remarkable uh uh amen preach brother I I agree with everything you just said um and and the part that you said that I always try to repeat because you know I'm talking my
book here I'm the chairman of stability AI which is a truly open source AI platform foundational model company and and the part that you said that is there's gonna be a lot of fuck-ups and we're gonna have a lot of mistakes and we're gonna have to uh we've got we're gonna have a lot of stuff to
figure out but it's worth it because we are now going to be able to use these incredible tools and I love the way you put it they're there on behalf of us they are there for us people confuse the technology with the use of the technology we are the humans using that technology to extend our imagination to extend our reach and like that's the part of this that I find so incredibly
exciting and it seems you do as well I just think we're going to be able to look into liminal spaces where simply because of the speed of computation these uh programs are able going are going to be able to look where we can't look right now but we'll learn how to um uh incorporate those findings into our own imaginations into our own extension of our stories and so I am uh incredibly
excited um well cautious about all the things that we're going to have to overcome right I mean it's like fire right man discovered fire and guess what happened we cooked our food and we created the prefrontal cortex and lots of great stuff happened but lots of really shitty stuff happened too do
you realize that you could burn homes you could burn people you could burn cities and so we didn't Outlaw fire we created fire departments we created fire alarms we created fire extinguishers we created fire doors and warnings and a lot of that is going to go on in the extension of these models
um the the thing that I passionately believe and which is why I invested in an open source company as opposed to a closed source is I believe that this has to be must be open source for a lot of reasons um some of them having to do with creating better models if you have cognitive diversity you're going to get to a better models because people think differently and we live
in different reality tunnels and all of that we don't benefit from combinatorial diversity exactly but also because I do not want my grandchildren I currently have four we're expecting a fifth I do not want my grandchildren to grow up controlled by a panopticon controlled by a few people and I believe that Discovery all of these tools will only see their greatest fruition
if they are made available to all of us because I don't know your creative skills through and through you don't know mine I don't know um you know what some artists might do with this or what a scientist you mentioned Wolfram I have no idea so the ability to have these generative new ideas
these New Creations it's got to be open um and and I fear you know we saw what happened like you know the the early uh social media sites uh in in AI speak um they maximize the objective function for Revenue and I always ask well why don't we maximize the objective function for
human happiness or creativity or imagination we can we can't optimize for Creative facility and I think that's what we need to do and I think that is what is happening um but um yeah there's going to be a lot of rancor along the way because we're going to get back to um this idea of getting on the other side of perfection Perfection doesn't exist it's it's
a chimera in my opinion and if you're forever trying to be perfect you'll really create nothing and you know Kafka he wanted all of his work burned when he died and and that was because he felt that it just wasn't it was crap it was [ __ ] it wasn't perfect and thank God people interceded
and made sure that his work did get published um I guess final thoughts are are are are you um what's next after you're done with with your next novel I I know that I will be editing books one and two I will look forward I'm eager to write book three retrieve which was a title drawn from all these technical terms about Computing and uh I look forward to continuing writing
I look forward to making more acquaintances and friendships in this space uh will I ever find the 100 True fanatics we'll see you know well True Believers I can tell you one thing Edward I will do my best to amplify you to those true fanatics but I also I also want to make sure that other people are doing likewise too I want them to do the thing they care about
exactly I love I love that line from Halt and Catch Fire computers aren't the thing it's the thing that gets you to the thing these are these are instrumentalities for ourselves for our fulfillment for the time we have and I'm grateful that I made a choice for this and that
I'm doing my best and I repeat uh the three lines I did my best I gave my all I was here that'll be what I just that'll be my final message where this conversation but also for my life I love it well uh we have a vertical called uh uh infinite films and I definitely will be getting in touch with you at some point when that comes online uh because I I think that uh
I would love to see all of it I would love to see your incredible imagination your lyricism and poetic style come to life in as many different formats as it can as long as it can be done well um I just love it because I think that's the big part of what I write this is a base layer it can
be rendered into anything that's what I realized I'm looking at everything it doesn't matter what what I can master in terms of the tools there are new tools coming there are new Studios emerging this is this is what this is this is the rise of the one man or one woman one person studio
with these tools yes and I just think it's going to be an incredibly exciting period not without difficulty but exciting and uh and and kind of we've named it perfectly generative we are going to unleash uh billions of generative imaginations which I just think is such a fantastic thing uh which is why I'm so excited about it well at the end of all of my podcasts I I invoking uh
Inception I guess uh I I say that we're gonna make you the emperor of the world for one day you can't kill anyone you can't re-educate anyone you can't do anything harsh or Force anyone to do anything what you can do however is take a magic microphone and speak two things into it and whenever the next
morning is for wherever our fellow humans are waking up they're going to wake up and each of those two things that you spoke into the magic microphone they're gonna think they thought of or had a dream about and they're gonna say you know what I'm gonna start doing both of those right now what do you what do you got for me what are you gonna accept believe in yourself believe in others
um perfect I love it listen Edward this has been so much fun I can't wait to see um uh the rest of your work I love your work I think it's really really fresh and great and it just really makes me happy um to see such creativity uh and uh when I when I find it I I just uh I I tend to go on and on and this has been a wonderful conversation
um where where can people find you online I know we can find you on Twitter and and you have uh your sub stack but any any other locations uh the entirety of everything I've written is on mirror okay because also Edward rooster.ease but you can probably find me on substack primarily as well
as typeshare under Edward rooster everything's Edward rooster perfect wasn't by design it was just because I'm lazy well you and I are also very simpatico there I I am extraordinarily lazy but that makes it easy for us because we always try to find the easiest way to do something
um so thus we have O'Shaughnessy Ventures because it was easy and I'm lazy [Laughter] listen this has been a true treat for me thank you for taking the time uh and I hope if you're ever in New York don't be shy please uh uh get in touch and I'd love to buy you lunch or dinner thank you it's been such a pleasure and honor oh the honor was mine thanks Ed