SethH Well, I'm very pleased to be joined by Peter Watts to talk about his new short story collection, Fold Catastrophes. So hi, Peter. Thanks for joining me. Peter Thank you. i' Glad to be here. um Also, thank you for I mean. Clearly I'm not here as one of your Hugo winners. So I guess by default that makes me one of your... Peter comfort reads, which is not something I'm actually used to being described as. So this is this is new this is new and welcome territory. SethH Like... Yes. Yeah. I think I'm calling this one more just ah a one-off author interview kind of thing. Although it's not a one-off, I'm actually doing two of these this month. um but But yeah, that is kind of my two different. SethH curricular stuff and comfort reads. Although haven't I haven't really done a proper comfort read episode in a while. Um, Seems like it's about time to bring those back, though. Now that you mention it. Peter I mean... I mean, are there any Comfort Reads out there anymore? Are you still reading Hope Punk? SethH I mean, not every comfort read has to be hope punk, you know, like one one of my comfort reads guests picked something that was about the fall of the Soviet Union and and kind of some of the disasters that occurred. as a result of that. um and uh Everybody has their different comfort. SethH I guess. And sometimes like getting buried in. Peter I suppose the comfort is that it happened over there and not over here, but... SethH Right, right. Peter You're kind of straining for the silver lining there. SethH Reading about other people's misery. Peter Yeah. SethH yeah Yeah, exactly. um So for listen my any of my listeners who who don't know you, how about a quick introduction? Peter um My name is is Peter Watts. i In a former life, I guess prior to the turn of the millennium, I was a marine biologist. um basically specialized in the biophysical ecology of marine mammals. Peter I got. increasingly frustrated with the politics of working on a species where the only people who are willing to ah pay you to do research or what are the were the ones who already knew what kind of conclusions they wanted you to reach. SethH Hmm. Peter Um... And so finally I... you know for as after a After a long and and tangled tenure at the University of British Columbia, which I will not go into details on. i basically quit in a huff and had nothing else to do so. Peter I started writing and I've always, I mean, I've been writing on and off since I was seven years old. but By the time I quit, I only had... two or three stories sort of published in little dick-ass magazines that none none of your listeners will ever have heard of. Peter So when I was unemployed, I figured what the hell it's now or never. And I wrote my first novel and it's it. the rest is kind of history it's it's It's obscure. Peter footnote history, but... you know it's history. So. now i write Now I write relatively rigorous science fiction, which is... SethH And. Peter with the novel stuff tends to be festooned with peer-reviewed citations and references at the end to sort of try and maintain some shred of the academic credibility I once had. SethH So when you say rigorous science fiction, is that is that sort of a different way of saying what people typically call hard science fiction? Peter Yeah, and I probably shouldn't use either of those terms. um I mean, i i kind of like playing in the hard end of the genre pool but SethH Mm hmm. Peter But at the same time, i i think that I don't know if the term is especially useful. I think there's a lot of stuff in in hard science fiction. SethH Hmm. Peter i think I think the hardness of a genre really has at least as much to do with the background of the reader. as it does the author. Stuff that I read in a high, like Larry Niven. struck me when I was in high school as the hardest of the hard Arthur Clark actually SethH Mm-hmm. Peter basically dubbed Larry Niven his his logical successor in Hard SF. and and Niven. I continue to be impressed by his aliens. I continue to be impressed by his... grasp of basic darwinian evolution when it comes to to creating those things but You know, he also had genes that coded for luck. Peter Um, he had SethH Right. Peter he had faster than light travel which you know so many of us do And, and. uh I have written stuff that... impresses the hell out of people with you know a master's degree, but somebody with a PhD in the field that I'm writing about would blow it out their nose. Peter So, so you know really whether it's hard or not depends on on SethH Right. Peter whether you whether you're background allows you to see the cracks, and there are always cracks. SethH Hmm. SethH that's That's an interesting point because you know somebody coming to it with an art major degree is going to have a completely different reaction to it. They might just sort of gloss over it and focus on what the story is doing, not about the nuts and bolts. Peter Yeah. And I mean, that's that's really, I mean... you shouldn't have to do homework to appreciate a good story, right? SethH Sure. Peter I think the point of science fiction is is not to say... you know, here is a blueprint for how the future is going to unfold. i think the The real point is to say, suppose the future unfolded this way. Peter you know What happens then? SethH Right Peter What are the consequences? SethH Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I have an engineering background. And so there was an earlier time in my life where... I was interested in, okay, I'm going to get get out something and and you know write this down and make sure the author got it right. but ah That's not me anymore. Peter Yeah. Yeah. SethH Okay. Peter and And when people do tend to do that, it makes it. Easier for them to trip up. SethH Hmm. Peter Um... like like ah somebody this is not my particular perspective, but somebody who had a, you know, advanced degree in computer science on Reddit somewhere pointed out if somebody if you write a story in which somebody says I hacked into the mainframe they'll say. Yeah, fine. Peter But if they try and go into the details as to exactly how they hacked into the mainframe, anybody who knows anything about computer science is going to take a look at that and say, C++ plus plus doesn't work that way. So sometimes it's better to... SethH Right. Peter Maybe not be. so hard but not so hard to focus just sort of sweep stuff under the rug by saying, I did this and not really saying how you did it. SethH Right, right. You don't want it to end up being like Ving Rhames in the mission first Mission Impossible movie, typing in literally, send jamming signal, right? when A programmer would have just had like a button to press. Peter i mean I had forgotten that. Amen. Yeah, I'm thinking more of Andy Weir talking about a microorganism that has a cell membrane that can stop fast neutrinos. Peter um SethH Wow. Hmm. Peter i mean you you you know, Project Hail Mary was, I mean. SethH Yeah. Sure. Peter I haven't read the the novel. the The movie was great in many, many ways, but SethH Yeah. Peter I wouldn't regard it as hard science fiction and that seems to be the way it's getting sold. SethH Sure. Right. Yeah. And I think You make a good point that the the labels are probably not super helpful. Peter Yeah. SethH And i like the I like the idea of rigorous where like you you you do what you can. Peter That's not what we're here for. SethH End. you know to try and make it believable. But it doesn't have to all. check out if you're a super PhD. Peter Yeah, but sometimes the more believable you make it. The worst. the worse it it actually gets. turns out to be as a story. i ah i was In one of my novels I was I was trying to invent this fictitious apocalyptic microbe. Peter that sort of came out of the deep sea. And... I made the mistake of passing it by an actual microbiologist up at the University of Guelph of my acquaintance. SethH Hmm. Peter And he asked, how does, how does, uh, How does behemoth get past the the lysosomal membranes without provoking lysis? And I was like... I never even thought of that. Peter And it was something that, you know. a handful of people at most would even think to wonder. SethH Red. Peter um unfortunately you know half of that handful. mocked me for playing Dungeons and Dragons when they were all busy trying to get published in Science and Nature. So I wasn't going to let them have the last word. So I wrote like... Peter a page and a half of 532 amino acid listeria lysin analogs that tricks the signal receptor molecules on a little and the novel was chugging along pretty well and then whomp it's like it turns into cement for a couple hundred words and it was SethH Yes. Peter Eh, eh, eh. you know it was Pretty rigorous. B. the microbiologist that originally asked the question would probably still blow it out his nose because i'm not a microbiologist and and you know i was just making shit up SethH Right. Peter um And see... it stopped the plot dead. SethH Yeah. Peter so Yeah. sometimes it's best not to consult with the experts. SethH Yeah. Yeah. I do like though, I mean, you you have the marine biology. background um and Certainly in this. collection and i think in blindside as well right you you do talk about a lot of sort of biological stuff like the the uh the blind spot between your eyes and um i can't remember what the term was Begin with a C. Peter saccades. SethH Yes, that one. um And. Because a lot of the hard science fiction, you know, is concerned about talking about the effects of acceleration on things and time dilation and all those kinds of things. and And it's less in the the the squishy side of of brains and hormones. Peter Yeah. SethH and um chemistry and that kind of stuff. So it's, I enjoyed that in your, in your work. Peter You know what's really weird? is that my My formal background is in marine biology and I you know wrote a trilogy that was marine biology heavy. And then... I wrote, you know, Blindsight and a bunch of other stuff,-punk stuff. SethH Mm hmm. Peter Which I have. Absolutely. No formal training or background whatsoever. SethH Mm. Peter And the weird thing is... Peter When I was writing out of ignorance I've had far more of a real world impact than I was writing over something which I have three degrees in. SethH Hmm. Peter um It's like, it's like. Peter perhaps being constrained by what I knew about marine biology meant that I couldn't go as far out on a limb. SethH Right. Peter I couldn't be as imaginative. for whatever reason. um I... i know of of you know no no end of people who went into neuroscience because of blindsight i know of neuroscientists who have blindsight in their lab. Peter in in their lab library. I know of, you know. fairly heavy hitters in the AI industry who are inspired by my stuff and I don't know anything about that shit. SethH Hmm. Peter But I don't know of anybody who said I read Starfish and I really want to become a deep sea biologist now. SethH Mm hmm. Peter um it's like like ignorance is inspirational in a weird way. SethH Sure, sure Um, So let's talk just a little bit about blindside because you have available for download on your website. Peter Yeah. SethH um in a number and like PDF and EPUB and that kind of thing, um which is which is really cool. And I imagine that has kind of helped it. proliferate um But but then when you you find it on. SethH In biology labs and that kind of stuff, I'm imagining people are getting a physical book. Peter Yeah, I mean, I mean I'm doing okay. uh i mean i could i could if i had to i could just live off SethH Mm hmm. Peter the royalties from Blindsight. SethH Hmm. Peter um and it's Hey Nessus. Um. And it's What? 20 years old now. SethH Hmm. Peter um Peter So as I mean I don't know how much you know maybe I'd be a millionaire if I wasn't giving it away for free. SethH Mm. Peter But if I hadn't given it away for free, my I probably wouldn't be a writer today. I probably would have, my my career would. SethH Right. Peter totally crashed and burned i basically gave it away as a hail mary because Peter for various publishing reasons that I've never quite fully understood. um it was released with a very small print run there was no real promotion this was kind of a This is the end of my career one way or the other it's I can either I can either sync without a trace or I can sync and at least leave a legacy that anybody with an internet connection can grab a hold of. SethH Yeah, yeah Peter And that... That was what worked. i There was no scenario in which I actually... you know, it becomes my most popular novel. and i and it gets you know routinely optioned and so on and and becomes this little minor inspiration around the place. it's It was basically my swan song. Peter End, end. Ironically. giving a book away for free. increased. hardcover sales like They tripled the next week. SethH Wow. Peter after I gave it away. And I gave it away only a couple of months after its original hardcover release. I basically broke my contract to do that. um with the reluctant cooperation of my editor. Peter It's not like I... SethH Mhm. Peter yeah It's not like I... Totally. I mean, technically I broke the contract, but... tour was kind of on side, at least for a while with that. SethH Nice. um I'm not sure that I'm going to. put this out as video, but I... I notice you you seem to have a giant squid behind your head. Peter oh yeah uh This is a I mean if you if you and if you SethH Let me grab a screenshot here. Peter Let me just... All right. swing this around a bit. If you look at the... Peter This throw cushion here. It's got a combination of squid giant squids and unicorns on it because SethH Excellent. Peter Because my wife, her her nickname is... The bug, or beloved unicorn girl. And my name is the Giant Squid. So there tends to be a... Peter In fact, I don't know if if you can even see that. If you go over there, yeah, probably. I don't want to get too close. That's ah a picture of me in a... SethH Yeah. Peter Polish culture magazine. showing me in a spacesuit being... SethH Attacked by an octopus. Peter well embraced by some kind of cephalopod and Also one of my cats is sort of up there too. SethH Or... Mm. Peter so yeah, it's a the squid is The squid is kind of a recurring motif in my life. SethH So now, as as a marine biologist, are you the type of person who... Kind of going back to talking about the hard science fiction thing, I recently read Whale Fall because the the movie is coming out. is Is that the kind of thing where somebody would send you a copy of it and you'd go, uh, actually. SethH Or. Or would you be able to put that aside? Peter I mean... I... i do not know nobody has sent me the last the last person who sent me um A novel. um for blurbing or review. Peter Turned out the whole damn thing had been generated by AI and it was painfully obvious that it was. SethH ah Peter and This person was like a retired doctor. Um, with you know university affiliations and everything and this thing was just so painfully ai so um I get. Peter you know, I get. I suppose as as many novels for blurbing and review and beta reading as any mid-lister. um I gotta say, I am... Peter The trailer for Whale Fall intrigued the hell out of me. SethH Same. Peter like, like like've I've heard, I've been aware of the book. And I've always been. very skeptical of the premise. I thought it was a bullshit premise. Peter I didn't think that somebody would be able to survive inside out. SethH Yeah, yeah. Peter But... I gotta say... That trailer is kind of making me... I'm sort of on the verge of not caring whether it's biologically accurate or not. SethH Right. Peter Because it just looks like a really compelling. SethH Yeah, yeah. Peter movie. SethH Hmm. Peter um And... Again. marine mammals not cephalopods um well actually yeah i guess the sperm whale is marine i seeking i was thinking of the squid that it was going after SethH Right. SethH Yeah. Peter My understanding is that Um... It would be. difficult if not impossible for your average sperm whale to swallow a ah human sized thing whole Because we're vertebrates. SethH right Peter But... Science marches on. SethH Sure. Peter And this is something this is something I read. when I was an undergrad. And... I don't know how... how rigorously the study, you know, like like nobody went in and did a study to see how many people can crawl through the esophagus of a sperm whale. SethH Sure, sure Peter so I'm not going to, you know, my... my PhD has been stale dating ever since 1991. SethH Mm. Peter So I'm not going to stand up as any kind of an expert, even on the thing I have a PhD. yeah the The thing that I, the thing I'm taking. from my from my academic background is the ability to be relatively rigorous when I think about things and and and map out consequences. Peter i got a I've still got a scientist's mindset. SethH Yeah. SethH Mm hmm. Peter But. my database, my knowledge base is, is like. over a quarter of a century out of date. SethH Mm hmm. Peter So... Amen. Yeah, no, oh. I'll be in line. I'll be i'll be checking that movie out. SethH Yeah, yeah i mean yeah like I know enough about physics to know that the bus does not make that jump in speed, but I can still enjoy the hell out of that movie. Peter Yeah. yeah SethH Um, So one of the things about. sort of a high hard science fiction rigorous science fiction is that um when it presses into the future, it's pretty easy for it to be too, for. current technology to catch up to it, to be, you know. SethH decades ahead of where we expected it to be in science fiction. Have you ever had like a moment when you were working on any fiction where... the science got too close to it and you had to adjust anything. Peter Really what happens more often is that... um I mean, A, yes, but... But more frequently what happens is I write something, it gets out there. SethH really Peter And something that I predicted for 2050 happens like... Bye. three weeks after the book hits the bookshelves. SethH You manifested it. Peter um i i thought i was being I thought I was being so fucking prescient when I... when i um Peter anticipated internet weather systems and storm fronts, basically congestion at various internet nodes and stuff, right? I i basically... thought of that and again it was like a something happened 20 40 20 50. Peter And. paper in science came out about. you know Six months after Starfleet, or after... after Maelstrom was released. Peter on essentially the same thing. SethH Hmm. Peter And it's not because I'm especially prescient. It's because I tend to read the tech literature. So somebody idly speculates about something and I say, that's really great. Let's throw that ahead 50 years and see what happens. But what actually happens is it. Peter things take place in you know you know in a much shorter time scale. I... Possibly the hardest science fiction short story I ever wrote. It actually had differential equations and stuff as part of the text. SethH Mm. Peter went from being absolutely bleeding edge to being obsolete because physics had discovered new things about cosmology between the time it sold and the time it actually appeared in print. SethH Oh wow. Peter um head cheeses in Dartfish. I have... essentially cultured brain cells on a slab. that are used as essentially organic AIs. Peter for various reasons. And again, this is like so a new development that happens around 2045, 2050. And we've got those things now. There's an actual server farm based on a combination of rat and human neurons that's basically gone online in Singapore. Peter They've had like three, four years ago they were teaching. essentially puddles of neurons on ah in a petri dish. They actually called it dish brain. They're teaching it to play. Peter pong and like the next year they had it playing Doom. SethH Wow. Peter um So this stuff is happening. way way and it's it's not just my lack of imagination there's experts in the field there's a A dude that, I believe he was, ah I believe he's from Japan. Peter figured out, um or maybe the breakthrough was in Japan, somebody figured out how to read the voxels off the back of a brain. so that you could actually figure out what someone was seeing simply by looking at the visual cortex. SethH Wow. Peter and And that person said, do you know. Probably sometime in the next 50 or 60 years, we should start looking at the... We should start looking at the privacy implications of this. Peter Because at some point. SethH Sure. Peter people are going to be able to do this kind of thing in real time and it again is uh His time frame was 50-60 years. 18 months later. this Japanese lab. Peter um rip put out a paper. in which they were able to read hypnagogic hallucinations in real time. off the back of your brain with like 60, 65 % accuracy. SethH well Peter So this stuff is just, you know not to mention what, I mean, you've got to strip away 90 % of the hype around the current AI models. SethH Yes. Peter But, but. uh you know they're all talking i mean even if we're not talking existential threats what we are talking the the people who were saying oh it's just a stochastic parrot it's just a fuzzy jpeg of the internet they've grown awfully quietly haven't they SethH Yeah. Peter um like we just SethH Yeah. Peter There does seem to be kind of a Moore's Law for all sorts of... of technical innovations and that makes it. really exciting to live in the moment. SethH Mm hmm. Peter But yeah, trying to, there's an entire book I was planning on writing. and I started mapping it out in 2010 and it was going to be set in 2020. um And it was about intelligent money and... and remote-controlled lobsters and genetically engineered giant squid and End. Peter Like. I basically shelved it. Like that. Yeah. actual developments, things that have actually gone on in the world have have rendered it all completely obsolete. Amen. I can kind of understand why people want to just do... Peter post-apocalyptic we're fighting each other with rocks and sticks now or why they want to throw things ahead 10 000 years to interstellar empires SethH Yeah. Peter uh because SethH Right. Peter Because... trying to you know As Yoda says, always in motion is the future. SethH Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that that makes me think that, you know, the statement, maybe in 50 years, we should start thinking about the ethics of this. Maybe we should build in the ethics. SethH all along um and but You know, not not like scientists are always good at that. Peter Yeah. Peter Yeah, I mean, not that anybody's all that good at it. SethH Right. Yeah. Peter um any scientists or people and we have i mean there's this whole hyperbolic discount right even Even people. in your neck of the woods your little blue progressive West Coast. Peter hippie tree hugger types. you know. people who accept the reality. of climate change and who realize it's an an existential threat when polled, when surveyed. SethH Yeah. Peter when asked if they would be willing to give up the... the Praise the Lord. two lattes a week in order to combat climate change. that's too much for them. SethH Yeah. Peter And these are people who claim to... These are people who claim to be... aware of the nature of the threat. but You have to give up your lattes this week. SethH Right. Peter And the nature of the threat until recently, the you know ecological catastrophe was like five, ten years down the road. And I want my latte today. So there's this... this you know today's inconvenience is always always looms larger in the gut. Peter then than tomorrow's catastrophe and SethH Yeah. Peter There are good evolutionary reasons for that. If you happen to be living on the savannah and you have to grab everything you can and tomorrow you could be eaten by a tiger, the whole idea of of you know failing the marshmallow test. SethH Right. Peter Make sense. when the guy who's going to give you the marshmallow could be dead when it's time to get your extra marshmallow. SethH Yeah. Peter um So there's reasons. there's good reasons for that lack of ability to internalize future consequences. in a particular environment but we are no longer in that environment um and we we are not threatened by our environment so much as we are threatening our environment and SethH Yeah. Peter and yeah it's it's not scientists to blame it's it's the fundamental neural wiring of the human species. SethH Yeah, yeah. we We've been going a while and we should probably talk a little bit about fold catastrophes at some point during this discussion. Peter Okay, sure. SethH um was there Is there like a a unifying theme to the collection? Like how how did it come about that this collection? is coming out now. Peter I have got to ask you a question, because you're like the the eighth person to ask me that, about the unifying theme of collections. SethH Mm hmm. Peter And it's been like a while since I've done a collection. It's been, what? SethH Mhm. Peter It was 2013 was last time. I didn't know that themes were supposed to collections were supposed to have themes. I thought they were just, you just pile a bunch of stories together and like... you know, Peter Harlan Ellison. recycled the same few hundred stories in different themed anthologies right he did a something on on you know SethH Mm hmm. Peter approaching apocalypse and he did something on you know love ain't nothing but sex misspelled but they're always the same stories he just presented them in different But for the most part, it's just, oh. Here's a collection of Asimov's short stories. Peter Here's a collection of Ray Bradbury's short stories. SethH Yeah. Peter And they are... thematically similar in the sense that the same brain generated them all. SethH Yeah. Peter But has something changed in the genre lately that that these things all have to have themes? SethH Oh, I don't think so. It's just, you know, like I was wondering from from a construction. standpoint, if that was in your mind when you were. Okay. generating this collection. Peter I mean... No. i mean i SethH Okay. Peter i have I have developed a facile response. SethH Mm hmm. Peter um to this question because I've gotten it so often. And the facile response is, well, the the but clearly the... the The thing that binds all these stories together is a sense of optimism and hope. SethH down Peter And... And, you know, this is not perhaps the first thing that springs to most people's minds, but when you actually look at the the scientific literature. SethH Mm-hmm. Peter Right? All the studies I've read converge on global societal collapse starting around the middle of the century. um you may remember like back in the 60s the club of rome came out with uh you know the limits to growth. Peter and everybody shat on it. and it was derided because you know it was done on what today would be the equivalent of a texas instruments calculator and it's had simplistic assumptions but for the past SethH Hmm. Peter 20 or 15 or 20 years people have been going back and revisiting that with more up to date data and more sophisticated models. And they keep coming to the same conclusion. SethH Hmm. Peter Which is that? mid-century. things go seriously pear-shaped we lose somewhere between 40 to 70 percent of the human population by the end of of the century. Peter I read a paper in Nature that came out I guess in 2022. um that was based solely on deforestation data. wasn't Looking even at things like Putin invading Ukraine or that sociopathic orange shit stain that Peter keel installed in the white house and the things that he's done to the environment this was just based on on deforestation trends and their models said that the best case scenario was a less than 10 % chance of avoiding an absolutely catastrophic collapse. Peter so in the real world If you like to play Xbox. Do it now. Because you've got maybe 20 years before we lose that infrastructure. SethH Mm. Peter My stories. Show us building, you know having having orbiting stations around the Sun At the end of the century they can build artificial black holes. My stories show humanity in space 65 million years from now. SethH Right. Peter my you know, they they take place against a background of environmental devastation, but I still have. Really future tech. stable infrastructure. Peter existing at a time When all the peer reviewed literature seems to be saying. that we're fucked. that civilization will be. that that we will be living back in the 18th or 19th centuries. Peter And. That's not just optimistic, that's delusional. SethH Right. Peter my my stories and They're darker. perhaps than other people writing in the genre, but that just means they're more delusional than I am. SethH Right, right Peter It doesn't mean it doesn't mean that I'm not being really over optimistic. SethH Hmm. Peter um So that's that's my facile SethH Sure. Peter um response, but the actual response is that that um Jacob Wiseman from Tachyon. wanted to publish something. Peter for from me and i was doing other stuff so i said um Hey, wow. i've got you know i've got 120 000 words worth of short stories since the last thing i did why don't you do that and he said Collections of short stories don't sell that well, especially when they're not unified by a theme. Peter Um. so you know we'll put out ah a collection but you know let's make a part of a two-part a two book deal where the other thing is like another sunflowers novella. Peter And I said, okay. So that's how that happened. I gave him 18 stories. SethH and Okay. Peter He threw away the ones he didn't like. um So if you're looking for an overall theme, maybe you should be talking to JQ about that. Amen. that that's that's how it happened i mean All my stories have... a certain subtext i guess SethH Yeah, I mean, i I would say that reading through it in the last couple of weeks, you know, there's there's a lot of little... Peter Bye. SethH tendrils that seem to connect you know they seem to be in conversation with each other where you'll have one story talking about an emergent. sort of human super computing cluster kind of thing and then another one later on you kind of see oh here's the beginning of that from the earlier story Peter Well, some of those stories are set in the same universe. SethH Yeah, yeah. Peter there are There are three stories out of the 11 that are actually set in the Blindsight universe. SethH Okay. Well, the kernel, I definitely knew, but... Peter And. Yeah, the kernel zeros. um SethH Hmm. Peter uh the the SethH Amen. That was a good one. Peter the I have forgotten the name of my own character. Siri Keaton's dad, Jim. two more Jim Moore. Yeah, he has a cameo appearance in Zeros. He's a lieutenant. at the beginning, at the end of zeros. Peter He is, of course, in Peter and uh the kernel. And he's the protagonist's foil in The 21 Second God. SethH Okay, okay. i think i I think I might have to go back and reread them to recontextualize that. Peter So all of those stories. Peter Yeah, yeah, I know. So they they all take place at different points in that future timeline. SethH Yeah. Peter um but but i mean So there is that thematic similarity. SethH Yeah. Peter Um, and you know another theme is that is that human supremacy sucks and that we are essentially just mammals. um debt. Peter use our big brains not to control our instincts but to come up with ever more convoluted rationalizations for why we should indulge our base instincts. SethH Right. Peter But that's, you know, "'twas ever thus," right? and and Kurt Vonnegut did it better than I ever did with his novel Galapagos back in the 80s. SethH Yeah. SethH Yeah. Yeah. Um, the Kind of going back to what we were talking about, about ethics, right? That that was one thing that I really enjoyed in The Kernel, where... SethH And it wasn't necessarily. ethics so much as um, legality of things because because they're at at this point in the story he's talking about how There are laws about what you can do with hardware and and AI and that kind of stuff. But in this story, there's this sort of. you know, meat clusters that are that are happening and the laws don't actually apply. to that because it doesn't fall under the category of hardware. Peter Yeah. Yeah. SethH or tech. Peter Yeah, that happened that was explicitly addressed at the end of the 21 second God as well SethH Yeah. Peter Again, same same universe. SethH Mm-hmm. Um, So, I mean, I guess ah talking about that, where you know there's a lot of... news coverage of ai and like every political commercial i've seen recently is about data centers um do you think we're heading towards more like the the idea of the the brain interface um i mean you mentioned it earlier with the cells the the pretty simple thing that was playing Pong and Doom. Peter mm-hmm SethH Um, Ultimately, like are are you ah on on board with the idea of the singularity from... uh purely kind of mechanical ai or do you think that we're gonna shift into kind of biomechanical Peter Well, I mean, if there's if there's a... if we do take seriously the environmental impact of these data centers. SethH Yeah. Peter if we don't want them. um you know hoovering up all our aquifers and generating all sorts of waste heat and doing all these things. SethH Mm hmm. Peter that that have devastating environmental impacts. Peter brain cells. living organic neurons. which let us not forget is at least roughly the template for large language model neural labs the transformer architecture that hinton came up with SethH Right. Peter is is Peter supposed to be mimicking. I mean, it's it's a very crude caricature of an actual neuron clearly, but but it's still the same basic principle. SethH Yes. Peter And... Peter The energy demands. of an organic computer of that sort. are literally a million times lower. SethH Hmm. Peter than the energy demands of a comparable. supercomputer cluster. Similarly, It takes a million times. less in terms of sample size. Peter for an organic brain to pattern match. an organic, you know, ah an organic brain can can detect patterns with as few as like six to ten samples. Peter Whereas it takes literally thousands and thousands for an AI, a conventional AI to do that. So both in terms of of how much it costs per calculation. and in terms of the value. Peter the bang for the buck for each calculation. SethH Mm hmm. Peter um Meet computers are... Orders of magnitude. better. then then then silicon. Peter But you know that you you take that the next step it's like we should just throw away computers and use our brains you know we should all become like mentats from from the dune universe um SethH Right. Yeah, yeah Peter So there is. there are clearly other issues involved. Brains can be messy. neurons can make. I mean... The... one of the biggest problems with large language models is the opacity of their logic. SethH Mm. Peter um that that you feed something in something else comes out. And the interneurons... have wired themselves in a way that is not generally amenable to analysis and actual organic brains. Peter R. orders of magnitude worse in that regard. SethH Hmm. Peter Amen. Peter So... I don't know in terms of. Peter In terms of environmental impact, yeah I'd go for the meat server farms. But I don't think, I mean, the thing about silicon is it's... blindingly fast. SethH Yes. Peter Amen. it it can you know, the the whole classic, you know, we can solve a problem in 20 minutes that would take you know, a team of mathematicians with pencils 400 ,000 years to do. Peter I mean... that's legitimate too if you want to get there fast. SethH Yeah. Peter Um. End. Because we are a tribal species and because the tribes are trying to kick the shit out of each other since time immemorial Getting there fast or at least getting there before the other tribe um always seems to be a ah predominant factor as you know. Peter Anybody who clicks on a ah news link can can tell you these days. SethH Mm hmm. I really enjoyed in the collection, where you have a little afterword for every story. um And I think in the first, is Gut Feelings the first one? I think it was. SethH um Peter Yeah. Yeah. SethH where we you had some comment in there where You weren't sure whether they realized. what position your story was taking about... Google logos. Peter That wasn't good. SethH and Peter That wasn't gut feelings. SethH Thanks. Peter That was... It's a 21-second god. SethH It was okay. Peter The 21 second gut. SethH Oh, yeah, the metaverse one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peter Yeah, I have... the the um and funny story about the metaverse it wasn't the metaverse when i originally wrote it it was literally based on Neuralink. SethH Mm. Peter I'd seen a few. Elon Musk. um Talks right and he said that what we have to do is we have to eliminate the IO constraint We want to be able to communicate with the internet and with other brains as seamlessly as your neocortex. Peter communicates with your brain stem. And as I looked at that and I thought... this dude has no fucking clue SethH Hmm. Peter about the biology of brains. you know if If we are the brainstem communicating with the neocortex, do you think the brainstem is still conscious? There's plenty of species out there that are. basically brain stems. And yes, They are conscious, reptiles are conscious. Peter fissure conscious. No doubt about it. But when you grow a neocortex over top of it, You're basically relegating the brainstem to something that takes out the garbage. Um. Peter End. the experiments that have been done on split brain patients. the natural experiments with conjoined cortically. Or... phallically joined rather um twins in in bc SethH Hmm. Peter that's the Hogan twins, right? These are kids who are literally joined at the thalamus. And they... everything we know about biology is that when you people seem to think that that Peter when you get a hive mind. It'll just be, you know. we also sort of close our minds and blissfully communicate with our thoughts. End, end. Peter And it'll be like... a great chat room in the sky or something. SethH right Peter And what's actually, I think, going to happen from what biology for biology tells us? is that well as as it says in that story you deprecate from soul down to subroutine the temporal lobe doesn't have its own SethH Yeah. Peter its own consciousness If you split a brain in half, each half of that brain SethH Yeah. Peter because all of a sudden it's it's been isolated. will develop will run its own system will develop its own um personality uh ramachandran SethH Mm-hmm. Peter was on record as as having interviewed a split-bane patient where one half of the brain was an atheist and the other half was a Christian. SethH Wow. Peter and And he said, Um... He could never understand why this hadn't shaken theology to its core. SethH Yeah, yeah Peter because what happens when you die is like one half of your brain go to heaven and the other half of your brain like like why isn't anybody talking about these kind of results SethH Right, right SethH Yeah, yeah Mm hmm. Peter but But no, Elon Musk wants to eliminate the I .O. constraint, not realizing that the consciousness doesn't multiply, consciousness expands. SethH Yeah. Yeah. Peter And as long as the latency is less than 400 milliseconds, It's a single consciousness. SethH Mm hmm. Peter And so that was my... That was... my impetus for for writing the 21 second God And I did not want to get sued. The the original drafts were like... Peter Neuralink was explicitly named. And after a while I decided I didn't not want to get sued by Neuralink. So I came up with the name Meta. Peter Because I thought it was like such a generic tapioca pudding type corporate name that no real corporation with any kind of proper advertising staff. Peter would ever settle for something that bland. SethH Mm hmm. Peter And so I wrote it. I liked. three months later. The Zuckerborg changes its name to Meta. SethH Yeah. Peter Um, So it looks, the thing is that story looks dated because of my use of brand names. but it wasn't a brand name when I wrote the damn story. SethH Right, right Mm hmm. Peter And that story... has gotten like Like... the actual co-founder of Neuralink. and the founder of mid journey these people have reached out to me um But I don't think they know what the story like. Peter These are people who want to build I like like Peter the the uh co-founder of Neuralink like wanted to like go up for coffee with me and Till I sort of said. I'd love to go for coffee with you. You sound like a really cool person. You do know that this story that you like so much. Peter is my take on everything that's going to go wrong with Neuralink if it functions exactly as advertised. SethH Yeah. Peter And we kind of fell out of touch after that, which is a shame because I would who would have liked to have that coffee. So yeah, I know people it's, it's. SethH Yeah. Peter It's weird. It's like... the It's the platonic ideal of the target audience. SethH Mm hmm. Peter when you were you were writing cautionary tales. and they are being read and appreciated by the people who are doing this. building the technology you're being cautionary about. Um... Peter But the cautionary elements don't seem to be sinking in somehow. SethH Mm-hmm. Peter Um... SethH Well, even you go back to a book like Colossus by D .F. Jones, in that he has Dr. Forbin saying that you know scientists should really read and understand Frankenstein. um because you know we we we need to keep in mind that when we're creating something Peter Yeah. Yeah. SethH It could go wrong. Peter Although I mean the the thing with Colossus was it did not go wrong. it it went right. SethH Yeah. Peter It went right in a terrible way. SethH Right. Yes. Peter but it's you know it was a a classic case of misalignment a classic case of the monkey's paw prevent war. SethH Mm-hmm. Peter Okay. SethH Yes. Peter Yeah. SethH Yeah, we can do that. Peter Yeah. um And you know that's what everybody's running into now. um SethH Yes. what was it you do you want the piece of unburied death or or or this other piece that i can offer you Peter The, the. Peter Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to say I'm glad the... SethH Yeah. Peter Somebody else remembers that movie. SethH Oh, it's a great movie. Peter It came out the same year as 2001. SethH Yeah. Peter It was very low budget. Um... You could tell like the... the big board tactical displays and stuff were were crap. SethH yeah Peter but it was a Peter It was a movie that was not afraid. to have a downer ending. SethH Yeah. Yeah. Peter and And Eric Braden was great in it. SethH Oh, he's terrific, yeah Peter apparently eric braden apparently he made his name in soap operas i did not know that SethH Yeah. I didn't either. Peter um But. but uh yeah no it was uh It was understated It was kind of chilling it You know Colossus when it spoke kind of rattled off like it was full of relays from the 1950s or something. SethH Yes. Very much. Peter So there was a bit. SethH Lots of teletype in there. Peter it yeah Yeah, it was a bit anachronistic. um But. It worked. SethH Mm hmm. Peter And i i believe it's a I believe that it is an underrated movie. SethH Yeah, I agree. And going back to the 21 second God, I really like this this passage in there, just the way it's. It's ah structured and says, someone disabled the lag and unleashed a globe-spanning corpus callosum that connected 15 million brains as intimately as the hemispheres in one connect to each other. SethH There was no we in these those moments any more than there are two people in my head right now. That kind of goes back to what you were talking about, about the split brain. Peter Yeah, yeah SethH patience that was I thought that was beautifully, beautifully written. There is only the 21 second God. Peter Well, thank you Yeah, yeah. SethH Oop. Peter A shame that... out of like a 10 000 word story you only found one paragraph that you thought was beautifully written SethH Well, I can't write down the whole thing in my notes. Peter I guess I need a better editor. SethH so SethH Um, there Let's see. I really, okay, a story I really enjoyed was Defective. Um, I was curious. um if there was any influence at all in the naming of the advanced species, the Agni, if there was any reference back to Rendezvous with Rama. SethH and the naming of things. Peter No. SethH all the way down to the Hindu pantheon. Peter No. Yeah, no, no, I... i yeah I was just looking SethH Or was it just a fiery gaze? Peter Yeah, no, i was yeah no i was just I was just looking for a cool kind of a name. and and I mean thank you for reminding me because I... I had totally forgotten where I... dredged agony up from i do this a lot with my stories it's like i'm looking for a cool name SethH Mm. Peter I don't know anything i will I will go online. I will find a number of things. Hey, this really works. SethH Yeah. Peter on And. i appear erudite because i'm invoking the hindu patheon but in fact it was just SethH Very nice. Peter I googled, you know. Gods that do this. SethH Mm hmm. Peter um And. You know, when I wrote that, this was... This was back in... Time when Google wouldn't. take um gods that do this and immediately start feeding me ads for various types of gods and and little icons. Peter So it was still it was still useful back then. SethH Right, right SethH Yeah. Peter um so yeah no i mean i haven't I read Rendezvous with Rama once. When I was in high school, So it was basically the year it came out. SethH Mm hmm. Peter And I have not read it since. And I have forgotten. a great deal of it. i you know Of course, I remember the... the basic premise. And I remember individual scenes. I remember people sort of sliding around on a skating rink that turned out to be the sewn panels. Peter And I remember the little spider robots that came out and as as maintenance bots and stuff. And you remember somebody... I remember one of the characters belonging to a kind of a new age religion and that that postulated that Jesus Christ was an ancient astronaut. SethH right Peter um And I remember that it just went away again at the end. which seemed kind of anticlimactic, but also... a very good point that like you know why should they care about us it was a SethH Mm hmm. Peter um SethH Yeah, yeah. and Peter but that's all yeah no i don't i don't i Right now even now that you've reminded me. I do not remember an Agni reference in that book. SethH No, there wasn't an Agni reference. there was just They were cataloging cataloging near-Earth objects and that kind of stuff, and they ran out of Roman names, they ran out of Greek names, they ran out of Egyptian names, and they were down to the the Hindu pantheon, and that's why Rama. Peter Right. Peter Oh, okay, okay. SethH was named what it was. So I was curious if it was just this little oblique. reference back to it. but that's That's totally fine. Peter No, no. i Not that subtle. SethH But i this story, there's the... The idea of if you're going to... Uh... interact at all with an alien species what should your posture be and in in this story you know there there are the majority of people seem to be thinking Anything that's going to sort of colonize our sun, you know, and potentially cause it to go nova eventually because they've been kind of tracing it back through unexpected novae in different places. um SethH that. Our posture has to be, well, we have to destroy them. because we can't assume that they're benevolent. um Which is, it's a... pessimistic look on things. Peter I don't think so. In the first place, it's not Nova. It doesn't go Nova. it it the The star cools down. That's the problem. SethH Okay. Okay. Peter And this is based on an actual archive preprint. SethH Mm. Peter um literally called, you know, Can life exist in us inside a star? SethH Hmm. Peter um And. Peter These things aren't even necessarily matter as we understand it. They're basically micro fractures in space-time. SethH Hmm. Peter But this paper, I mean, and for all I know it's bullshit because I don't. i you know I'm no expert. but What a cool idea! SethH Mm hmm. Peter Right. That these little things could actually. and that you could you could develop these little monopoles and dipoles could develop self-replicating things that act like chemistry, right? Peter And one of the things that they said is that if this happened, these are some of the symptoms you could see the star would become. cooler and dimmer. faster than it should. because of the impact of the and i have I have no idea what the mechanism was, but that's what this paper said. So I went i ran with the paper. Peter So yeah, what you've got are these things that are cooling the sun. End. I don't think... I mean I wasn't trying to get across the sense. Peter that people thought that these things were hostile. I thought it was pretty clear. I mean, basically, they're a bunch of they' are a bunch of unwanted immigrants. right SethH Right, right, yeah Peter They've polluted their own star. They're using wormholes to try and find another star. They might not even know we exist. They might not even know the planets exist, right? They exist in the interior of stars. SethH Yeah. Peter so They may have some kind of a weird hypothetical understanding of the possibility, but they probably have never seen it. I don't think there was ever a a um Peter I don't think there was ever a... any kind of explicit belief that these things were hostile. SethH Hmm. Peter It's just that They're looking for a place to live. And when they live in our son. we could die. SethH Right. Right. Peter And you know something? That's not that unusual. I mean... Given that we seem to be wiping out ourselves on this planet anywhere between 60 and 130 ,000 species a year, nobody really knows. was the That's the range of the estimates I've seen. Peter um It's not all that implausible to think that... But I mean Hell. Your president has just... um the start of the process to have the endangered species act modified so that it's okay to wipe something out. SethH Right Peter as long as you don't plan on wiping it out. So now the endangered species says basically you can't go out with a rifle. SethH Wow. Peter with the intent you know with the the the the explicit intention of wiping out a species. But... If you want to set up a golf course and that involves... Peter cutting down the last habitat of this species. That's okay. SethH Right. mar Peter because you're not you know it's collateral damage as opposed to I mean... It's... just when you think that Trump couldn't get any more stupid. SethH Mm hmm. Peter but Or, you know, just more malicious. I don't know. It's a... the I don't know if the language exists for the kind of evil that... you know insofar as evil exists in a deterministic universe. Peter Anyhow, I digress. SethH Yeah. Peter The point is... SethH Yeah, I mean, the the line between... Peter The point is we are doing that. We are doing that to other species all the time. SethH Yes, yeah Peter We do it routinely. Sorry, snail darter. Sorry. SethH Right. Peter stellar sea lion, sorry spotted owl. you know, nothing personal. It's just business. We got to live here. SethH Right, right. that Yeah, the line between harmful and hostile. doesn't really matter to the species that's getting wiped out. Peter Exactly, yeah. SethH Hmm. But, you know, the... the I love the fact that you just used the term BFG for for the technology that they're trying to do. Peter but Yeah. SethH to invent, because why not? Peter Yeah. Yeah, my stories never shy away from profanity. SethH although there There was one really... Peter Casual profanity is good. SethH Right. yeah yeah um the uh the one the one really there was just a really sad moment and in the book when you know the um Andre, the the main character. I'm assuming that's... SethH or on j if it's a I don't know Peter Andrzej or something. Yeah, it's it's a polish it's a Polish word. SethH Yeah. Yeah, Polish name. Peter Believe me. SethH Yeah. um who who can kind of alter his brain chemistry to... uh communicate with other species right to to kind of put himself in that down down to you know the flora and fauna of earth and Peter mm-hmm SethH uh He says at some point, or muses, that he he was in contact with the last orca. when it when it died. And that that just made me incredibly sad. um Peter Yeah. SethH me and it kind of goes back to what you're talking what we're talking about about to species collapse and and extinctions and and all that kind of stuff that we are doing we are the beings in the ah And... Peter Yeah. SethH colonizing the sun. and and causing Trouble. Peter I mean, the the term defective sort of works. It carries a lot of weight. It works on a number of levels. SethH Yeah. Peter um It's literally... these things are made from defects in space-time. SethH Yeah. Peter So it literally is what the aliens are. They are defects. But. there's you know, there's also just what we are as well. SethH Yeah. Peter and everything about our behavior. so It's kind of a pun I guess. SethH Mm hmm. Yeah. um I just want to talk about a couple of the other stories. when' We don't have to go through that. what they're all about. People can pick up the collection. um and uh and check that out themselves but the the wisdom of crowds was was a really interesting one um or it took me a while to figure out exactly what what is is this really happening um because essentially it's crowdsourcing a missile strike or or an object strike you know so 30 kiloton yield and whether it's just an impact or if it's a Peter Yeah. Peter Oh, warhead. SethH explosive. Peter Yeah, yeah. SethH Yeah. Um, End. like people would do this like i found it very realistic that if this popped up you know people would think it's a hoax and just go yeah sure i'll do it um you know kind of like the richard matheson story with the button right would you push the button if somebody who doesn't know is going to die right um Peter Yeah. Yeah. yeah SethH and And I feel like we've proved that over and over that, yeah, we would we would click that. um but it It had that tie into, I don't know if, is this. one explicitly in set in the universe of of blindside or or any others. Peter No, i was I was actually approached by... A Slovenian art magazine. They were doing um a theme on. Peter and I've forgotten the name of the artist. um but his work. And this this happens. more often than you might admit. Peter been been commissioned to do stuff on Jenny Holzer and and Arthur Jaffa and like all sorts of people he would not think have anything to do with Um... Peter with science fiction as a genre. SethH Hmm. Peter but but uh Yeah, this little magazine um was they were putting on this this display they wanted this story to be part of that and the theme that the artist was playing with was hypersonic missiles SethH Mm. Peter And the background material started off with an Alice Cooper song on space pirates. SethH Wow. Peter Um, Like, it was it was weird. It was right out of left field. So I was basically, I had to write a story. And the only real constraint was it had to involve hypersonic missiles somehow. Peter So that's how that came up. um A lot of my... SethH How long... Peter Sorry, go ahead. SethH how long ago was the story published i could look in the book but i know it's downstairs Peter I don't know, maybe... maybe 27 Or something I can go grab it myself if actually i can just i can look it up right here Peter The Wisdom of Crowds 2019, special 11th edition of Soom Journal for Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory, published as part of the exhibition Marco... Peljahan. Here we go again system 317 a situation of the resolution series for the pavilion of Slovenia at the 58th international art exhibition SethH Mm. Peter There you go SethH I mean, i there's a couple of things in this where I think we're we're kind of prescient. Some of them are just like, well, yes, this is exactly the way things would happen where a... a female astronomer. SethH amateur astronomer claims you know posts online that oh i saw the missile and then gets flamed by a bunch of people because she's a brown female and how can she be commenting on science um and that one we have seen over and over um so i know that's that's definitely true but then um Peter Yeah. SethH The idea of the prediction markets and selling of the votes, I feel like is especially the prediction markets has really blown up. just the last couple of years. um Peter Yeah. I had no idea what prediction markets were when I wrote back that story. SethH I didn't even know about them. Peter It was just a... SethH Oh interesting. Peter It just seemed to me that the i mean um basically the the model I was using was... Ticket scalpers. SethH Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that that kind of does make sense. and And the idea that somebody would sell their vote, because you know you could it's kind of like the problem of the... firing squad, right? Where four of the rifles shoot blanks and one of them shoots a real bullet, you know, and and you don't you don't know if you're the one who actually delivered the fatal bullet. SethH And in this case, you don't know if you're going to be the one whose vote is going to count the most or is going to to to choose the target and what kind of guilt you might have over that. Peter Yeah, yeah SethH um But this one also kind of ties into that emergent. um networking of minds right in order to to draw inferences that weren't weren't obvious And so that's why I was wondering if it tied into the other stories. Peter Yeah. Peter Yeah, no, it's, it's I mean, it's thematic. God damn it, there's a theme after all. SethH ha I gotcha. Peter yeah Peter Yeah, no, I mean, thematically, yeah, there's a similarity. um I mean, I was you know i was kind of gobsmacked myself at this whole the whole wisdom of crowds thing apparently it's it's a deal it's like you know count the guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. Peter And and, you know, a thousand people. SethH Right. Peter Guess. And... They converge on the actual number. SethH Hmm. Peter Somehow. It's... it's ah It's a weird phenomenon. as there's there's constraints, like if you happen to have a jellybean expert. Right. That's kind of skews the results. Peter You've got to avoid groupthink. SethH Yes. Peter Everybody has to come to their conclusions independently. You can't have. which is why the sample size was kind of a series of stratified um randomly selected and used a bootstrap mean to determine the Yeah. Peter I be used to. I used to be a lot more conversant with statistics than I am now. um but I remembered some of the jargon, so... So, yeah, that was. Yeah, that was the The point, it's... Peter And again, like it's... My coolest stories the things that are coolest about my stories. I don't invent at all I just read something and say holy shit. This is amazing and I try and write a story around it SethH Yeah. SethH Yeah, that's very as somebody who doesn't... doesn't have that kind of creative. thing. i'm I'm always impressed by that. what what can turn into a good story. Peter ah My whole point is I'm not being creative. SethH Right, right right. Peter I just read something else and and, you know, like I steal all my ideas. SethH Sure, sure, sure Peter I mean the one idea, the one idea that I had Um... that was kind of of original was the blind sight. punchline about um consciousness being maladaptive. Peter And. i fought tooth and i was not I was writing Blindsight when I started writing Blindsight. It was with the explicit. understanding that i was going to actually come up with a cool new use for for consciousness SethH Mm hmm. Peter It was like... you know Screw all those philosophers and neuroscientists who've been working the problem for thousands of years. I, Peter Watts, harbor seal biologist, am going to crack the consciousness nut. Peter um And. And. I kept trying to think of something that. only consciousness was good for the consciousness was essential for and I was writing the book and... I kept coming up blank. and it was just it was it was fairly late in the game when i suddenly realized wait a second It would be a way cooler gut punch it would be a really a much better thematic punch line. Peter If consciousness served no purpose, ta-da! SethH Yeah. Peter And, and. That was kind of a... you know, I was kind of. painted myself into a corner and that was my own cool idea. SethH Yeah. Peter for rum. for getting out of it and then as it turned out you know after the book came out there were people starting actual scientific papers started saying hey we don't think consciousness might be not be good for anything. Peter So I kind of, I kind of. I kind of bullseye that one. um SethH Nice. Peter But everything else, everything else I just steal. SethH Yeah, but being able to latch onto something and and... you know turn it into a story is is definitely it's it's part of the craft right Peter they're They're paying me for it, so I guess so. SethH Um, Yes. Exactly. Um, So game theory, if I'm not mistaken, is the the one brand new story. Peter Yes. SethH Yeah. um And I don't know how much you want to talk about that one. um if you If you want to leave it. Peter As much as you like. SethH for a surprise um i i just i love the idea of the life in a simulation that you know is a simulation. and And what is the... SethH um, What are the consequences of that? What is what does that world look like? So that it was a very enjoyable story for me. although it A bit of a downer. Peter Again. Comfort. Comfort reads. SethH Comfort reads, exactly, yes. um And, and, you know, like it it brings up a lot of interesting theological questions, right? Like if, if, because, because it it centers on a priest. SethH who who has, you know, has found out. this information. um and uh is struggling with the... I like the the way the prayers in it are structured. SethH um because it's it starts off with father in heaven and ends up father Below or I can't remember the exact wording of it um Peter father in the basement. SethH In the basement. That's right. um The idea. Peter Yeah, I mean, just fun fact, fun fact. SethH of Yeah. Peter I come from a pretty strong religious background. My dad was out. My dad was a... a prairie minister. SethH Hmm. Peter in the Bible Belt of Alberta. and Saskatchewan. He founded something called the Baptist Leadership Training School and served as its... its principle for 22 years. Peter Then he... Then he went he was promoted he went who got a job as the General Secretary of the Baptist Convention of Ontario in Quebec until he retired, at which point he got a CSIS file. CSIS is... Canada's little dick ass. um Peter small potatoes version of the FBI. I guess it's a sort of domestic security. thing, largely known for leaving classified. documents on the top of the of their cars and then getting in away and driving away with those. Peter having forgotten to like. ah SethH Hypercompetent. Peter Anyhow. Anyhow, yeah. Anyhow, ceases some. had a file on him as a potential subversive because he volunteered for Amnesty International. which was back in the Mulroney years anyway considered to be a SethH Yeah. Peter subversive or a terrorist organization or something so yeah so i was i you know SethH Interesting. Peter I basically grew up steeped in the whole religious. ethos stuff. SethH Mm hmm. Peter So that's where a lot of that is coming from. SethH Yeah, just like the in this, the... ah the people in the situation are like, but the admins could just fix everything. with with the push of a button. um and and then the you know the the counter argument is well maybe they're waiting to see what we'll do in this situation if we'll fix it um but you know those are real theological conversations i've had with people before too Peter Yeah. Peter And then... and then there is that the absolute existential fear that. if we're in a simulation and it's some kind of an experiment maybe the fact that we know that we're in a simulation ruins the experiment. It'll just shut us down. SethH Right. Right. Peter So we have to do whatever we can to keep. the things that are creating us from realizing that we know that they know that we know. um SethH Right. Right. Peter yeah no there's a lot of i was afraid that parts of it might be a little too episodic because I wanted to cover so many bases. SethH Hmm. Peter and really it it should just come down the the the through line should just come down to this priest and his victim. SethH Mm-hmm. Peter and that kind of duel in the confessional. But. SethH Yeah. Peter But there were so many other things I wanted to explore. um You seem to like the story, which I'm glad. SethH Yes, yeah definitely. Peter But I was afraid when I was writing it that I was trying to jam. you know too many kitchen sinks in there SethH Oh, it's a great hook when when you know her fist comes through the confessional wall. at the very beginning. Peter Yeah Yeah. SethH Yeah. Peter Minnie's the time I've wanted to smash a confessional wall and I'm not even Catholic. SethH right Um, Okay, so... but Fold Catastrophes is going to be published in... The US it on the 22nd of September, is that right? Peter Wait a minute. that's Yeah, that's tomorrow. SethH That's tomorrow. Peter Um. SethH Yeah. Peter Yeah, I mean, people people have already got it. SethH Mm hmm. Peter it's It's out for a while. That seems to be kind of standard. procedure in the industry it's got an official publication date but sometimes it shows up in I mean, there aren't bookstores anymore, but back in the days when there were bookstores, you could go and you could see it on a bookshelf. SethH Mm-hmm. Peter um you know up to a week or two before it's supposed to be SethH Yeah. Yeah. Peter Yeah. SethH but we we We have a Barnes & Noble, and actually there's a little independent bookseller and in in my city as well. Peter Good. SethH Mostly used books though. Peter good those things need to those things need to survive. SethH Although I think it's a used bookstore. So. Hmm. Peter I mean... SethH I know there used to be there used to be a nice a nice little bookshop. Peter Better than nothing. SethH But that's kind of the way it goes, isn't it? Peter Yeah. Yeah, I mean... There does seem to be a groundswell against flock surveillance. and there does seem to be a groundswell against AI. SethH Yeah. SethH Mm hmm. Peter Um. The the big guys don't always necessarily win i mean maybe they'll eventually hammer us down but people are fighting back just again on along some of these axes. so So maybe the bookstores will come back. i seem to a recall reading something in the past few months about how actual brick and mortar bookstores are making a bit of a comeback. SethH Mm hmm. I think the the Barnes & Noble that came back in in our... city is is doing all right. um It's larger than a bookstore. Peter I'm glad to hear it. SethH But... Peter And it actually sells books it's not just like SethH Yeah. Peter three rows of magazines and books and then scented candles and cat calendars everywhere else. SethH No, I mean, they they do have some of that stuff in there as well. But I go in there. and but If I'm going to buy a have book in print, I usually will will' go in there. um Enter. Peter Good. Glad they still exist somewhere. SethH Yeah, they do. So. Um, But but yeah, so you should be able to find fold catastrophes wherever Fine books are sold. and um Peter or even you know wherever crappy books are sold it's SethH True. Peter you know Yeah. It's like, I'm not proud. I'll i'll pimp it anywhere. SethH Yeah. ah no i think it's a tremendous collection i really enjoyed it even though i got the stories the titles mixed up on on a couple of them um but uh but yeah it was a very enjoyable collection to read through. Peter Thank you. Peter That's really nice to hear. SethH Yeah. Peter Again, enjoyable. Not what I'm necessarily going for. but SethH Right. Enjoy the comfort read of old catastrophes. Peter Yeah. SethH Um, Before we sign off, where where can people find you? Peter I mean... You want my home address? I'm not gonna give you my home address. SethH I'll bleep it don't worry Peter I mean, they can, I mean. I try to avoid social media whenever possible. SethH okay Peter I i have a ah ah Facebook presence because I got tired of people saying Um... Hey, did you hear what that asshole said about you on Facebook and not being able to check it out? SethH Mm. Peter But I'm not on anything else and I basically only use Facebook to link to my blog. Um. SethH okay Peter So my website is rifters .com, R-I-F-T-E-R-S .com. um which you know, has all sorts of backstories. It's got my backlist for free on it. It's got some sort of world building stuff. Peter And it's got a blog which I used to blog regularly on cool scientific ideas, but which I have... allowed been very delinquent about lately in the past two or three things posts have just been pimpery about. Peter Fold catastrophes and I feel kind of silly about that or sad about that because I should be I should be posting things that are more substantive but I'm really busy and SethH Hmm. Peter Unfortunately, the blogging is the first thing to... the first thing to go. But you can get some sense of me. SethH Understood. Peter on my website and other than that That's about it. The blog goes back. The board goes back to vote. 2009 or something so So even though I haven't posted much recently, you can get a... fairly decent view of Bye. Peter bitter and vitriolic thoughts on things. SethH Hmm. Peter by just going back over the blog, I suppose. That's the most I can give you, I'm sorry. SethH No, that'll work. That's good enough. where yeah Where they can find your work and your your website is is... Great for that. so Peter Yeah. SethH All right, Peter, thanks so much for doing this. It was ah it was a real pleasure. I really enjoyed the the collection as well. Peter i was I'm glad you enjoyed it. um I really enjoyed it. The cats did not enjoy it at all because it's past their feeding time and they're really letting me know that. but They can wait. Peter They're spoiled. SethH Excellent. Alright. Bye.