Into the Bobiverse

Well, let’s go into the Bobiverse and all the things, Dennis E. Taylor. Thank you for coming on the show. I think that I’ve been a fan for, I think, since COVID, I want to say. Before COVID. I listened to your books, I’ve read your books…

I say “listen”, because I mostly listened to the phenomenal Ray Porter voice, your books, but I’ve also not been able to listen, I’ve had to read, too. So I’ve had the Audible/Kindle versions of your books. So I’ve been a reader and fan of yours for many, many years, and I’ve been looking forward to getting you on the show for quite a long time, and just was never, I guess, bold enough to get you here, but now you’re here. So hello.

Cool. Hi.

How does it feel to have somebody be such a fan of yours for many years and then finally get to meet you, like I am?

I’m still boggled by the whole concept of fandom directed at me. I still feel like the computer programmer guy working at [unintelligible 00:06:05.18] You know, when people recognize me, which happens occasionally, or recognize my name or whatever, I’m just completely floored by it.

Yeah. I can imagine that. You seemed – what I liked about your personhood, not so much your authorship, was when I looked behind the scenes at the person who… Which is you, of course… Who made and created all these books, and thought of all these worlds, and was so detailed and all this stuff, is that you are a retired programmer, living in Vancouver, British Columbia… An everyday person. A snowboarder, a mountain biker. I see in the background a stump jumper with a Fox 38 on the front, so good job. At least you have good taste.

Yeah. That’s attached to a Wahoo spinner.

A trainer. Yeah.

Yeah, a trainer. It’s set up for rainy days and winters.

Yeah. But you have a lot of there. But you also have very big mountains, and I’m so envious of the mountain biking that you get to do there… I live in Austin, Texas. We live in the hill country, so we have little mountains, little hills, not quite the same version of your mountains and hills. But I was just really impressed with your normalcy, I suppose, as a person. You’ve got a wife, you’ve got a daughter, mountain bikes, snowboard… But somehow, after you decided to retire from programming, you decided to become an author… Which - I’m not familiar with that full story. That’s just the cliff notes version of what I know. Can you share that? Can you share that journey from retired programmer, enjoyed being a programmer, to this idea that you can somehow write books, and you’re successful and very good at it?

Okay. Well, first off, I wrote before I retired.

Is that right? Okay.

Yeah. I’m a cautious individual. If I was a mountain climber, I’m the person who never lets go of one handhold before I’ve securely got the next one. I was working as a computer programmer at ICBC at the time when I started writing. The writing gig started out as a bet with my wife; or a challenge, I guess. A dare. And it worked out, which was a surprise to everybody concerned.

[00:08:15.28] We Are Legion was published September 2016, and my agent said to me at the time “If you make back the advance - which was $2,500 - if you make back the advance, you can consider yourself to be doing well.” So we made back the advance in the first 10 days, and then it just snowballed. So by February of 2017, I bought my wife a new car. And by June of 2017, I quit. Well, actually, I retired. And went to writing full-time.

Where did the revenue come from? Primarily Amazon, as a primary source, or how did you – obviously through your publisher, but…

Well, primarily Audible. But the thing is, I’m not a traditionally published author, and this has made a huge difference. Most authors publish through Del Rey, or one of the other big publishers… They get maybe two checks a year, and they get a small percentage of the book and audio revenue. And – I mean, it’s enough for a lot of authors to live on, obviously. Scalzi makes great money. Stephen King makes great money. But you have to be up there to be able to live full-time comfortably on the money that you get from a traditional publisher.

I’m hybrid. I have a contract with Audible directly. And other than that, my agent is acting as my publishing house for eBooks and paperbacks, and so forth. So as a result, from Audible, I get the full – it’s nominally 20%, but there is a formula involved… Of the list price. And from Amazon, I get 70% of the list price; less my agent’s commission, but that’s always assumed. Then there’s Kindle Unlimited, which is a pretty significant revenue stream. Anyway, the upside of all of this is that I get a lot more of the revenue from my unit sales than somebody who’s traditionally published.

Did you just luck into that? How did you discover that? How did that happen for you? Was that just like timing?

It’s luck and timing. I came along when Audible was just starting to take off. I mean, they’re big now, but at one point they were – audiobooks in general were still a bit niche… So there wasn’t a huge selection of science fiction on the Audible menu. And when mine came along, all the science fiction fans jumped on it. So yeah, if I’d done this a couple of years earlier or a couple of years later, I don’t think I would have had the same results.

The other thing that happened was I was not able to get a traditional publisher. We tried that route first, simply because it’s what you do. And We Are Legion had a couple of problems. One is that you don’t have an unknown author try to sell the first book of a trilogy. Publishers are very gun-shy about that kind of thing. It has to be a standalone, or you’re just not going to get picked up. So there I was.

And so we had a lot of trouble picking up a traditional publisher, but Audible offered us a contract. And in the end we took it, they published it, and We Are Legion ended up being science fiction book of the year for 2016.

I believe it. I mean, I’m an old school Audible listener. I primarily read books via listening. So it’s always strange to explain that, because it’s not reading, right? It’s listening. And a friend of mine suggested the book, I checked it out, and thankfully - I think maybe also to your credit; not that your book is not worth it, but I think Ray Porter does a great job.

Ray Porter is stunning. I think you were probably very lucky… Many swirls of luck in there for you. Timing, Ray Porter… Phenomenal voice actor, really.

[00:12:28.12] Yeah. Well, I should add there that that’s not luck. That’s basically skill on the part of my editor. Steve Feldberg made the decision about who the narrator would be. I at that point had only listened to Ready Player One as an audiobook. So I was familiar with Wil Wheaton anyway, because you know, Wil Wheaton… And that would have been my first choice for a narrator. He’s well known. He puts a lot of enthusiasm into his books.

He does.

But Steve said, “No, Ray Porter does multiple characters far better. And We Are Legion needs multiple characters with distinctive voices.” So I didn’t argue the point, because I didn’t know… You’ve got to recognize somebody else’s expertise when it’s there. So we did Ray Porter, and he just did this incredible job, and… Bang.

Bang is right. I agree. Yeah, I’m always impressed by Ray Porter. Actually, I discover more books, because I’m like “You know what? I want to listen to more of him acting and voicing books.” And I’ve discovered a couple other… I think it’s Nick Jones, I believe, if I can recall correctly… He’s got a book series that starts with And Then She Vanished. It’s the Joseph Bridgman series. So good.

I love time travel, I love science fiction… I call it plausible science. I don’t know if there’s a better term for it. I think it’s called hard science, potentially. I saw that in your biography on Wikipedia. But I’ve always called it plausible science.

Yeah. Personally, I think there’s hard SF, and then there’s plausible SF, and then there’s science fantasy.

Yeah.

And then there’s fantasy.

And I’m not really into the fantasy that much. I kind of like it. I like to push the edge a little bit. Maybe an example of it where it’s more like maybe non-plausible science fiction would be Edge of Tomorrow, with Tom Cruise. I’m sure you know that story. It’s a pretty well-known story. That’s aliens, there’s an alien invasion… It’s alien blood creating the time travel, and this time loop thing… That’s science fantasy.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

That’s not quite plausible science. I mean, I guess it could be if an alien invasion came, and that was a plausibility for that… But that’s really stretching it.

Yeah. But you get drenched in the blood, and yadda-yadda. It’s just a MacGuffin intended to set up a particular situation. They have to have somebody who time-loops, and they have to have a situation where you can’t just give this to every soldier in the army.

Right.

And it can be taken away. So the blood thing.

Yeah. And you had, in that case, a past character who had it happen to her, and she was able to add supposition, and backstory, and… Not supposition, but exposition, where they’re exposing and espousing different facts about the storyline, which is kind of cool.

Yeah. I enjoyed watching Edge of Tomorrow, and I think that’s the thing - you can have non plausible science fiction, or what I’d call science fantasy and enjoy it, if the storyline is good, if it’s well produced, if the script is good, and so forth. You can have hard science fiction that’s terrible.

Yeah. I do want to go one layer deeper and figure out – so there was a challenge between you and your wife, to write. And this is pre-retirement, so you were safeguarding yourself… In what way had you begun to prepare for writing? Had you ever thought about this story? Did you have these stories packed in your brain, and they just had to come out? What’s the backstory there?

[00:16:07.24] Well, I’m not a writer, or I wasn’t a writer. I am not one of those people who’s had these stories in them all their lives, that they just have to get out… You know, they spend 10 years writing the great American novel, or they write because they have to… I’ve been on writers forums, and I’ve listened - well, read - to people who said that “I’ve got this story, I’ve got to get it out. I’m trying to get published”, and it’s like a need for them. And I didn’t have that.

I wrote a story for a grade 11 English, and it was a novelette, and that was the last time I wrote anything. And I mean, that’s dinosaur is still roaming –

30 years between maybe? 35 years between.

Yeah. You’re being generous there. [laughs]

Oh, okay. Well, I did say sir in our pre-call, just to be clear.

Yeah. But I’ve been reading science fiction since I was in grade five… And in the same way that an AI expert system will pick up a pattern just from lots of sample data, I’ve picked up the rhythm (I guess you’d call it) of writing just from having read thousands and thousands of books. So when I sat down to begin writing, I had the basic rhythm. I did make a lot of mistakes, and that’s why I went onto the writer’s forum, because I knew Dunning Kruger. I don’t know enough to know how little I know. So I went onto the writer’s forum, found out about points of view, found out about “show, don’t tell”, and all the other sort of “rules” that, writers should follow. They’re more best practices than rules. And went back and started modifying my writing to do that. But I do the research to figure out what needs to be done. Other than that, I have no training. I just have a lot of years as a reader under my belt.

Well, I’m sure you’ve been told this once or twice before… You can’t tell that you haven’t been a writer your whole life. It’s as if you’ve been born to do this. I love your stories. And just to zoom out a little bit, you’ve got the Bobiverse series, which you said was always a trilogy… Now beyond a trilogy technically, right? Now it’s a sixology, if that’s even – would you say sixology? How would you say? Not a trilogy. Septology?

Quadrology, quintology, sixtology…

Gotcha. Roadkill was an interesting book. Outland I think was first, if I recall correctly, then Earthside, which were both good books… I mentioned in the pre-call potentially in the show that there’s a book that I haven’t read of yours yet… And it’s because I haven’t been able to get through it. And I’m not sure if it’s me, or timing, or… Because I’m just so in love with other stories that you’ve written, and I can’t really get into this one, which is the Singularity Trap. But one of my – I would probably say one of my most favorite books of yours, potentially, potentially more than the Bobiverse series, is Feedback. It’s a short story, to my knowledge only on Audible. You can listen to it in 50 minutes, and it’s just… I want to see that story expanded on. I don’t know what else is there, or if there’s anything in the works. You [unintelligible 00:19:27.00] smile, because you can’t reveal the future as an author to some degree… But man, that is such a good book. Such a good story.

Yeah. I get a lot of pushback from my agent and my editor when I mention time travel stories. They don’t like them.

Well, that’s an absolute shame.

Yeah. I would like to try a time travel story, but it’s not like I’m digging the bottom of the barrel for ideas. So it’s something that may happen in the future, but meanwhile I’ve got a lot a lot of other things to write. The thing that both of them say is that once you get into time travel stories, it’s like Edge of Tomorrow - you have to start coming up with reasons why the characters can’t just go back and keep trying until they get it working. And it becomes another MacGuffin.

[00:20:16.24] It’s like multiverse stories, which are all the rage right now, apparently. I’ve heard a lot of people say - and I agree with them - that you lose interest in the stakes in multiverse stories, because no matter what happens to the character, there’s another universe where they win.

Yeah. I can see that. I think what was interesting about this one in particular, and the time travel, slash – it’s more of a loop, and it is definitely a multiverse… And maybe it does belong just as a short story. Maybe that’s why it’s so good, because it couldn’t unpack the details. Maybe it couldn’t unpack the edges and the fringes, as your editor has said, and maybe that’s wise. I mean, that’s wise feedback.

I think this story is just so unique because it’s – I don’t want to kill too many plots in our conversation for people who will listen to your books that haven’t yet. Maybe we’re going to expose some people to you and your authorship, and the books you’ve written… But this story starts out in science. It’s in a lab, it’s in a university… I think that’s so cool. It kind of fast-forwards right away, because it is a short story. You kind of have to get to the point quickly. You can’t character-develop, and stuff like that. You kind of just jump right into the mix. And before you know it, they’ve already gotten into this time loop, and this thing is already happening. It’s already in motion. And then right about 10 minutes left, 15 minutes left of the book, you’ve got this really interesting plot twist that – I’ve probably listened to this book 20 times, maybe more potentially, because it’s just that good. It’s a good short read, a good short listen… And so I want to listen to something I can enjoy again. And I’ve got 40 minutes over the next couple of days, or a drive… I like to re-listen, because there’s details in this story that I think are just so unique. But that plot twist - I had to listen several times to be like “Okay, that’s exactly when-”, and I know you know, because you wrote the book… When this whole entire story changes, and there’s a flip. And I thought that the way you pulled that off, and just the way that book was written, and was just so cool… And I’m a big fan of time travel.

I do agree that you kind of get stuck in that motion, and I don’t disagree with that… But you know what? That’s what happens. That’s what happens when you’ve got movies like Tenant, which are just masterpieces for Christopher Nolan. That’s an absolute masterpiece of a movie, from a visual perspective and a storyline perspective. Masterpiece. He’ll probably never make a sequel, because why do you need to make one? But - I would love it, one day in the future, when you are done with Bobiverse, and you’ve done all the writing you can there, look back at Feedback and see what you can do.

Yeah. What I liked about feedback was that it was a good alternative explanation for the whole multiverse versus fixed time stream question. It handles all the questions…

[spoiler alert]

…because time simply fixes itself, simplifies itself… Which was the basic concept there. You could make a full book out of that. Somebody who just keeps trying and keeps trying and keeps trying, and just can’t get things back to the way they were… It becomes almost a variation on a genie’s perverted wishes kind of thing. You wish for this, you get that.

Well, it was also interesting that it was kind of accidental. There was a reason why – they did the math, they thought it could happen, and they devised this, I don’t know, device, that could do this time travel. So I suppose if you think about time, it was always going to happen. But from a listener’s perspective or a reader’s perspective, it seemed like they hypothesized this could happen, it was an experiment, and then it happened. It wasn’t like they were like “Well, there’s this magnificent time machine, and I’m going to get in it and go back to a time, and I can change things…” It’s almost as if they stumbled into this rewriting of history that they could not rewrite, because as you said, time fixes itself.

Yeah.

I thought it was cool.

Yeah. It’s an “oops” story.

There you go. “Oops” story. I like that better. Well, let’s – I wanted to give you some praise for feedback before we got deep into Bobiverse, because we can go super, super-deep with Bobiverse and all the things there. I think that’s a really cool, unexpected, short read. So if you’re listening to this and you want an easy 40-minute, 50-minute listen, read Feedback. You’ve got my praise on that.

Break: [00:24:41.06]

Okay, so let’s go into Bob, We Are Legion, or We Are Many… That was kind of hard too, I guess, initially. “We Are Legion”, and in parentheses “We Are Bob.” I was not sure what to expect. As I mentioned, a friend of mine suggested this, so I was not sure what to expect.

That’s actually a fairly common reaction.

Is that right?

Yeah, I get a lot of people who say “Despite the title.”

Ah… Well, I wasn’t sure – and I don’t even know if you really explained the idea of legion in the book. I almost feel like it doesn’t fit, in a way. I’m cool with it, because I’m a fan, but in retrospect I’m like “Does it really explain We Are Legion”?

Well, We Are Legion is a misquote of “I am legion” from the Bible, where the person contained multitudes of demons. “I am legion” didn’t feel quite right, so I went with “We are legion.” And since Bob replicates like crazy, that part makes sense. But then I wanted it to – because Bob is an everyman. He’s a nerd… He’s just a guy. So I didn’t want a title that came across as too pretentious. So quoting or misquoting the Bible - a little pretentious, so I put “We are Bob.” It brings it down a little bit.

Okay.

That was the idea. As it turns out, it makes at least some people think that it’s sort of a Douglas Adams kind of flavor of science fiction, which I don’t know if you’d call that absurdist or farcical, but his stuff tends to be a little more [unintelligible 00:29:30.25] red dwarfish, rather than plausible science fiction.

Yeah. Well, I do think this is very much in the plausible science fiction… It reminds me a little of Vanilla Sky - again, another Tom Cruise movie where I guess he froze his head, and the whole thing was a dream, but that’s not the case here… But Bob was successful as a software developer. He created a company… This is all early in the book, so this is not plot twisting your story, or ruining it in any way. I’m sure we’ll ruin some plots here, and I will put maybe a spoiler… We have a spoiler horn we’re going to throw in somewhere… So I’m sure we’re going to do it. So listeners, if we get there, I’ll do my best in post to make sure we throw that horn up… Because I don’t want to ruin your work, but at the same time, I’ve listened and read all of your books, so I’m deep in all these things. But I love how even, like you said, he’s an everyman. You kind of get into that pretty quickly too, where this initial event to spark the whole entire story happens within the first few chapters. Like, it’s pretty sudden. He has success, he sells his company, he’s walking across the street, something happens, and then the whole entire story arc blossoms from there.

Thankfully, he went to the cryogenic center and did some things to enable himself, and that’s how it all happened, but there you go. How do you come up with – since this was the first and you hadn’t written any more, how do you get to this big story? How did you even – did you map it all out first? Did you begin to write and it was iterative, like software? How did you get there? It is very iterative, and it also benefits a lot from suggestions, from editor, and publisher, and – well, agent, in this case.

[spoiler alert]

For instance, you’re talking about how quickly Bob dies… That’s not the way my first draft went. I spent considerably more time setting it up. And my agent basically said “It is too much before you get to the point.” So we discussed it a little, and I shortened it down. And once you get to where he gets killed, that’s when things really start to roll, and that’s when if you’re going to hook a reader at all, that’s when the reader’s hooked. So Ethan’s point was “Don’t take too long to get there.”

[00:31:59.02] I do agree with that sentiment, because you think you’re – because you are not sure what the book is, and you’re either listening or reading, and you’re humming along with the character development, and then bam. Something unexpected happens. So it’s at that point the question mark comes about, and you have to stick around until the question mark becomes an answer. And so you’re like “Well, this person died, and these things happened…”

I think even the stuff in the lab, where he realizes he’s a replicant, and - that whole discovery process was great, because you kind of set… Bob was a uniquely-positioned character to be good at being a replicant. And you know this, because you wrote the book. Gosh, I’m gonna keep telling you this as if you know these things, Dennis… Because he had this software background, he’d – I didn’t know this, this was written out there, but I was always thinking “Bob is such a MacGyver.” In every scenario he reminded me of Mark Watney from The Martian, and there’s even people who have said “If there was a lovechild between Andy Weir and Ernest Cline, it would be potentially you.” I don’t know how you feel about that quote, but I don’t disagree with it, because I’m a fan of both those authors as well. Mark Watney is an Andy Weir character, from The Martian, and MacGyver is not at all from either of those authors, but from the older time, back in the eighties, I think potentially nineties… But MacGyver could get out of any situation. He always had a way. And that’s the thing with Bob, is Bob was uniquely positioned, maybe even from a mental state, to be a good replicant. Can you expand a little bit on the difficulty of being a good replicant?

That was the whole point of the book, was to make Bob a replicant, stick him in a ship, and shoot him off into space. So everything that happened in the plot had to further that destination. So to start with, he has to be a software guy.

He has to have a physics background. He has to be a nerd, and he has to be a bit of a MacGyver. But you mentioned earlier about the process of writing being iterative. And that’s true. I don’t have the whole thing mapped out right off the bat. I don’t know how many authors really do. You can have a map for the book, but it’s still the 10,000-foot view, and there’s still a lot of detail down there that you have to wade your way through when you’re actually writing it. So a lot of stuff got added in. For instance, the VR - which actually has turned into a major part of the whole concept of the series… The VR was an add-in.

Really?

Yeah. What I discovered once Bob got into space - and I had gotten as far as him being in Epsilon Eridani, or Eridani, depending…

Mm-hm. I would have said Eridani.

Yeah, pronunciations are something you don’t have to deal with when you’re reading. But once you start getting into audio, it becomes important. I’ve always said Eridani. Ray pronounced it Eridani. And I went and looked it up, and actually either one’s good.

[spoiler alert]

I had gotten as far as they were in Epsilon Eridani, they’d blown up Medeiros… Bob had cloned himself several times, and they’re all sitting around, talking. And I realized that what I had was a book with a bunch of invisible talking heads. If you ever made it into a movie, it would just be a background of stars for most of the book. There was no visual. There was no visual, no physical action other than the spaceships. So I thought “Well, put a VR in there, so that he can at least have a virtual reality.” And then once you add the VR, of course, you can do anything if you have complete control of the VR. So now you have baseball games, and pubs, and moots, and offices, and a cat, and a butler, and stuff like that. So that was an iterative addition.

[00:36:03.20] And that’s one I would definitely concur with being a wise choice, because I think you get a chance to show off a lot of what made Bob a great replicant, which was you show off a lot of the unique nerdisms, if that’s even a word. Like, they’re playing baseball.

Badly. They’re replicants.

Badly, but they do it for fun. And somehow that’s like their pastime. And they’re all Bob, which I thought was just like – the entire premise of that is such an anomaly in storylines anyways. I don’t know where else it’s happened, honestly, where you have the main character be many of the same character, but derivatives and whatnot… And there’s obviously – what did they call it…? “They…” What did you call it whenever they drifted? What was the drift word?

Replicative drift.

Yeah, there you go. Replicant drift. So –

There was a Michael Keaton movie…

Multiplicity.

Multiplicity, yeah. I actually never watched it, but it was the same idea where he kept cloning himself.

Yes, I will give you that… I think you did it in a much more unique way. Like, I didn’t understand, or I was not aware of von Neumann probes… So you exposed me to new plausible science fiction, that one day might be real. And I’m just thinking “Wow, how did we – is this the future?” Is the future of eventual humanity one person or several people are replicants of nation states fighting against each other, and they escape and fight in space, and eventually save us and take us somewhere else, and terraform a different earth… Like, this is – it’s crazy what you’ve created, honestly. It’s really, really wild. But I love that – back to the VR… Because I’m not a big fan as a human, as an individual today, of VR, I guess… It hasn’t quite come about. And then even early iterations of the Bobnet and VR were iterative, too. Like, the early versions of VR, there was – even as a replicant, Bob acted like human Bob. It was still Bob. It was just in a different manifestation, basically, or a different form, where he was like “Well, let me create this virtual reality for the Bobs to enjoy, and do moots, and go to the pub, and play baseball…” And eventually, that got more and more unique, and each Bob had their own background, or different settings, and I think the cat was involved, and like the taste of the beer was iterated on… All these little unique things that you don’t really think about, that you can truly enjoy in a book form - that was there, and I thought it was really cool.

Well, I think one of the reasons that the VR works in the series and isn’t a problem - it’s a situation similar to multiverses. There’ve been a lot of movies where people get stuck in a VR, and they have to fight their way out, or something like that… And you always have this problem of trying to justify real stakes. “Oh, if you die in the VR, you die in real life.” Uhh, you know…

So when you have a movie or a story where the VR is the main combat arena, if you will, and you’re trying to give people a reason to care about, or the reader a reason to care about what happens in the VR, that can be difficult, because it is by definition virtual. So in the Bobiverse books, the VR is a supporting structure, but it’s not plot-determinant. It doesn’t save the day. It doesn’t cause life or death situations. It’s a way for Bobs to communicate, and all the real action, all the real stakes-based stuff happens in the real universe.

Right. It’s like the town square for the Bobs. Right? It’s a way for you to show the interaction in between Bob that is Bobs, that is not simply communication from one probe to the next. Because they can do that too, and they do that.

Yeah.

But they tend to have their moots, as you’ve called them… And I didn’t even know what a moot was. I was like “Okay, this is a thing. It’s a real thing.” Moots are - I don’t know; meetings, basically. I never called it a moot before. I just called them meetings.

[00:40:22.00]

“I held an air horn over my head and pressed the button. A loud [unintelligible 00:40:24.22] filled the room. All conversations ceased, as every head turned towards me. “Hey, everyone. Welcome to the first Bob moot. I’ve built a matrix here at the Skunk Works that is more than big enough to handle everyone in the Bobiverse in VR.” Bobiverse? Really? Garfield gave me the stink eye. I laughed. Just thought of it. I think it’s pretty good, actually. Bobiverse. Bobnet. This galaxy may not be big enough for our ego…”

That’s really cool, the way that you’ve mapped that out, that they can just like have this place to show their character, and to I guess show their continued humanistic character in a non-humanistic form. They were still human in who they were as Bob.

Yeah. And it allows me to throw in a little physical humor once in a while, too.

Well, Admiral Ackbar, I think, was…

Ackbar.

Yes. I think even like that, it shows – as an author, it shows your exposure to different science fictions out there… Because that’s kind of interesting, how this character from Star Wars doesn’t have any emotion… Even that. Bob is always wondering if he’s an AI, if he’s evolving, if he’s becoming sentient, if he’s just like this manifestation of Bob, or a different… Like, he’s talking to himself. I think early on he was like “Am I just talking to myself, or is Ackbar really becoming real?”

[00:41:50.14]

“I leaned back, put my hands behind my head and stretched. It felt good. More importantly, it felt right. If I didn’t think about it, I experienced the VR environment as if I was a real person, in a real room. Okay, shut it down, Guppy. Push the latest source through the deobfuscator and we’ll run through that when it’s done. “Aye, aye, sir.” I raised a virtual eyebrow. I had a sneaking suspicion that Guppy was actively developing a sense of humor. He behaved like a dead fish most of the time, but every once in a while there was a moment of snark.”

So let’s go a little deeper, because the book is multi-booked obviously. And I think – what made you make Bobs, or the Bobiverse, or however you want to phrase it, become these guardians? Because it doesn’t seem like at all OG Bob’s way. OG Bob was a developer, a programmer. He wasn’t being a guardian of the galaxy by any means, but somehow they felt like they had a mission, in a way. A responsibility almost, to save the day.

That’s what it is. It’s just a sense of responsibility. Bob as a human being was somebody with an overdeveloped sense of, I guess you’d say morals, of responsibility. So as a replicant, he finds himself in a position where he can either save humanity, or shrug and go off and do his own thing. The only thing that he feels he can do is save humanity.

That was unexpected though.

Yeah… With Bob I had to tread a fine line between a character who set his own destiny and a character to whom things happened. You don’t want him to be hapless. You don’t want him to be just a foil and the universe is blowing him around, and stuff like that. But you also don’t want him to be completely in control of his destiny. Otherwise he’s too much of a Gary Stu.

I don’t know who a Gary Stu is.

Oh, sorry. Well, Mary Sue is the traditional term for a character who’s just too good.

Okay.

You know, who always gets their way, and always knows the answer, and stuff like that. So with a male character, the Gary Stu term has sort of evolved.

[00:44:15.22] Okay. Gotcha. I didn’t know that term. So there’s definitely some things in there that you are aware of, that I haven’t caught. Now, so you wrote the original book, We Are Legion, We Are Bob, as a trilogy. You’ve described it being iterative. How in the world do you write an iterative book, that is evolving as you write it, in a way, and know it’s going to be a trilogy? How did you know it was going to be a trilogy? What made you – I mean, you had to think about something beyond book one…

So the way it works with trying to get a publisher is you have to query your book to either publishers or agents. I would recommend agents myself. So you send out - these days it’s email, which is a lot simpler. In the old days, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, you would actually package up your entire manuscript, mail it to an agent, with a postage paid return envelope inside so they could send it back, and they would either say yes, or no, or whatever. These days you can use Query Tracker, which is a website that lists agents and what genres they look for, and how you query them and stuff like that.

So I was querying We Are Legion. But while I was doing that, I was continuing to write. And well before I finished the first book, I knew there would be at least another book. By the time Ethan called me to offer me an agency agreement, I was already most of the way through book two, and I knew there would be a third book. So it was already in the works, I guess is basically what it comes down to.

Gotcha. Which I find a little fascinating… Remind me who Ethan is. Is he from Audible, or is this your agent?

Ethan Ellenberg is my agent.

Okay. And so your agent gives you a contract, but then you also have a direct contract with Audible. Do those compete in any way? Does Ethan… Ethan always gets a cut of what you do, right?

Yes. And Ethan arranges the contracts. That’s what the agent does basically, is everything other than writing. He takes care of all the other stuff so that all I have to do is write and interact with the editor, and think up new ideas. Ethan has managed to get me published in I think at least a dozen languages now.

That’s intense.

Yeah. A lot of stuff going on. He’s working on a Kickstarter campaign right now to get my books published in paperback form, pre-printed, rather than print-on-demand, which is what Amazon does. The print-on-demand books - I mean, they’re okay, but they’re basically laser printed. So if you can get them done the traditional way, with an offset printer and stuff, the quality is higher, you can smell the ink… They smell like books. And anybody who’s a book reader, a physical book reader knows what I mean about that. So he’s working on that…

Because I’ve never been beyond Audible with your books, I guess I didn’t realize at all that your books weren’t printed. They’re not printed?

Well, print is available through Amazon, but the way that print-on-demand books work on Amazon is they’ll print, I don’t know, maybe a dozen, some number at a time, they’ll keep them in a warehouse, and then send them out as they’re ordered. And when they’re getting low, they’ll print another dozen, or whatever the number is. But they’re essentially print-on-demand. It’s not a large run, and it’s done with, like I say, a laser printer.

[00:47:58.07] That’s interesting. Well, good thing for Ethan being such an advocate. Does that relationship – is there a lot of autonomy in there? Do they get to do a lot of things without asking you? Like this language thing, or this Kickstarter thing - are these things your ideas? Do you collaborate quite well? How is that relationship for you? We collaborate well. Ethan doesn’t do anything without checking with me, because he is my agent, rather than – yeah, I’m not even sure if a traditional publisher would do things without checking with the author. I don’t have the experience in that area, so I don’t know. But it would be one level more removed, if you will.

Audible is my publisher, is what it comes down to. I’m different than most authors in that most traditional publishers are - you tend to think of them as text publishers, with a side of audio. Whereas Audible is audio, and they don’t care about the text.

Interesting. Is that why – because I’ve seen before… I think I’ve seen you tweet about these things, and I guess now it might be something different, because it’s X… Folks have asked you about the Bobiverse series becoming a movie, which thankfully we just talked about VR, because it makes it more possible to actually visualize some of this exposition between the Bobs, basically. Is that why it’s uniquely challenging for you to go to just being in the movies, so to speak, like having a movie deal?

I had a movie option four years ago, maybe five now. Endeavor signed us up for We Are Legion. But they were never able to effect a deal with any publishers. I want to be careful here, because I’m doing a lot of supposition, and I don’t want to insult anybody, but I think that basically they’re a holding company kind of thing. They look for assets, products, whatever, that they think can make a good movie. They sign people up, and then they go looking for a producer, and financing, and stuff like that, and try to bring everything together. Perfectly legitimate business, and a laudable way to do things, but it does require a lot of extra work.

They were never able to bring things together. They did have a script towards the end, and they shopped it around, and they just couldn’t get anybody interested. There’s the trouble where you are looking for other people to pony up the cash, and the resources, and stuff.

Lord Miller, who signed us up not all that long after Endeavor’s contract expired, they’re associated with Universal. They have huge backing. They’ve done a lot of their own stuff. My mind’s going blank, I just keep thinking the Lego movie, but there’s a lot more than just the Lego movie. They’re a major producer. So they don’t have to do a lot of that extra legwork, to find a writer, to find a script, to find a backer, to find a production company. They’ve got it all. So if they decide they’re going to do a movie, they’re going to do a movie.

Well, that’s good to have. Considering science fiction book of the year 2016, all the success - as a backer in terms of content, you’ve proven that you can go beyond the trilogy to the fourth book, and now the fifth book coming out soon. I’ve got it on preorder, so the moment it’s out, I’m going to start queuing it up, obviously. I think Heaven’s River was a unique twist to all the books… Not bad. I think it went really deep in the Quinlan world. It was different, let’s just say. It immersed yourself. The whole thing was about Quinlans, and the Quinlan world, which was unexpected having been through three books with you already. But I think it was a good twist, because you eventually got to this – well, I always thought Bob was AI. I never really thought of him as replicant until I was preparing for this conversation with you, because I was thinking, I’ve mentioned your books several times in our podcasts… We talk to nerds. We talk to software developers. And so they’re going to be primed for your books. So I don’t mind mentioning them.

[00:52:14.24] I’ve even said, “I’m eventually going to get Dennis on this show, so just wait and see.” This has been years in the making, basically. But I’ve never thought of Bob as not artificial intelligence, but I guess he’s more replicant than he is AI.

And in book four you begin to expose - spoiler, by the way…

[spoiler alert]

…you begin to expose this idea of this pursuit of what you call in the book “true AI”, which was unexpected. All that to say is that - like, wow, I would just imagine at this point you must be buddies with Andy Weir. He’s got to have your phone number, and you probably are text buddies or whatever… Just be like “Andy, how did you get The Martian into a movie? Can you help me? Or can you make the connections?” Wouldn’t that just be the way to go?

Well, The Martian I’m not the slightest bit surprised it was turned into a movie. It’s incredibly visual. It’s got great stakes. What I really like about The Martian more than anything else is that there’s no bad guy. And I say this quite often. This is man versus nature. Nobody in the book is evil, or in the movie for that matter. The stakes are all versus circumstance.

Ingenuity.

Ingenuity, yeah. It’s what some people call engineering porn. It’s problem solving, serial problem solving, and he makes a point of that at the end of the movie. But I love that kind of story, and I try to make that a part of the Bobiverse whenever possible as well.

I think you do have some enemies, though. You’ve got some bad guys. Medeiros is the first one, or first several, I suppose maybe just generally on Earth, prior to Bob leaving. This is in book one. A lot of infighting, a lot of – I would not say world war. Everyone’s against each other. There’s a lot of things happening that really turn the nations against each other… There’s this race to create a replicant and leave Earth… I forget exactly what’s happening to Earth, but something really bad’s happening. And then obviously Medeiros is that first replicant in space. There’s the first battle, so to speak… So you have not avoided it. Then you have the others… Then you’ve got – was it… Remind me who Bob was the god of. It wasn’t the Pavlonians. Who was that?

No, the Deltans.

The Deltans. Which I thought was interesting, too. You’ve found other life out there. Obviously, there’s other life out there. I think – well, I say obviously… We think “obviously”; to this day, as real-life humans, we have not found, in quotes, other intelligent life, that we’re aware of, or that we’ve been made aware of. You may have more insight because you’re an author who writes science fiction. Maybe you have different access to information in the world, but I don’t think so. But the Deltans was cool. Discovering them, and Bob being a god over them.

You mentioned Ray Porter and his ability to voice things… I think the Pavlonian voice was really interesting, in how it was like a very – I don’t want to [unintelligible 00:55:20.12] because Ray does such a great job, but he does a great job of that meeting with the Pavlonians when the Bobs are trying to give back their original planet, and they’re like “No, that’s a monument.

That’s the museum now.” That whole meeting that took place… I think it was the beginning of book three where that takes place, if I recall correctly. It’s cool.

[00:55:44.26] Yeah, the whole multiple species thing… I set that up at the beginning of book one with a little bit of exposition on panspermia, because I wanted to establish early on that there was going to be a large level of biological compatibility across different planets. And I don’t mean sex. We’re not talking [unintelligible 00:56:06.27] half human stuff. But you can eat the animals on Vulcan, and the Pav can eat human food, and stuff like that.

So it’s set in book one, early on, and then it becomes a theme all the way through that most of the life that they’ve encountered is carbon-based, liquid water-based, has proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and is able to eat each other. It sets a certain tone. You can have a different universe, a different background, where life is so fundamentally incompatible between different planets that they can’t even breathe each other’s air without picking something up.

Which was the case - and I don’t know if you read this book yet or not. We mentioned - or at least I have - Andy Weir a couple times… The book Hail Mary. There’s an incompatibility between the two main characters in that book. I don’t want to plot twist or ruin it for anybody, but there’s a visit, let’s just say, to somebody else’s planet, and it’s not easy to live there without some version of technology to make it possible.

Yeah.

Are you a fan of that book?

I am. Yeah. I read – well, I listened to it. And…

Ray, he did a great job.

Yeah. A lot of people say that they had a little trouble with the book at the beginning, because they just kept hearing Bob. But that happens with Ray. What can you do…? He’s so identified with the character to Bobiverse fans.

Break: [00:57:45.20]

Speaking of Ray then, I guess, what kind of relationship do you have with Ray Porter? Are you guys buddies? Do you guys hang out? Have you had dinner? What’s your relationship with him?

We’ve met once. We had dinner, actually, in LA. I was down there for the XPRIZE a couple of years ago, and we called Ray up and said “Hey, we should meet.” And we did. We exchange emails occasionally. We almost ended up on a panel at Comic-Con in San Diego, but COVID hit that year.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean… Buddies? No. We know each other, we have great mutual respect. I wouldn’t have anybody else do the Bobiverse books if I had anything to say about it. But yeah, that’s about the limit.

Gotcha. See, I would think that - and maybe this is the fact that you’re… In the early part of the show you mentioned you’re not sure how to handle this fandom towards you. You’re not quite a superstar, you’re just a normal human being, but I would imagine that you might be a little closer to Ray Porter, because he is so iconic for - and even as you said, when they were listening to Andy Weir’s book, Hail Mary, they were hearing Bob and Bobiverse echoes in it… That Ray Porter is so tied to the Bobiverse series. I agree, I think he’s done a phenomenal job. I mean, maybe would have I enjoyed the books as much if he didn’t voice it? I think still yeah; I think I would still enjoy it. But I think there’s something special. There’s a new ingredient that forms, a new element that gets formed when you put your writing and his voice together. There’s a whole new thing that happens, because you’ve got great writing, you’ve got great storylines, but he’s also a great voice actor. And as you had said before, many different voices, which he does quite well.

Yeah. Well, people who read the Bobiverse still like the Bobiverse, but people who listen to the Bobiverse really like the Bobiverse. That’s the difference. Yeah, in terms of voices, we did exchange some emails when he was getting ready to voice the first book, and he asked me “How do I visualize these people?” So we talked about Homer, and we talked about Colonel Butterworth, and - Admiral Ackbar was pretty obvious… And a few other characters like that. And Ray just nailed it. He absolutely nailed it. And it’s those distinctive voices that really make you sit up and take notice.

Yeah.

I should add that, of course, one of the reasons why we’re not I guess what you’d say closer buddies –

Better buddies? Yeah.

…better buddies is that I live in Canada. So travel down to California is - it’s a significant undertaking. It’s not like we live in igloos or anything, but I have to go to the airport, which is not fun for anybody on the planet, and fly down. It’s a two and a half hour flight. I do it a couple of times a year for various reasons, but… Ray has huge scheduling things, too. He spends a significant time in England, for various reasons, on projects and stuff… So trying to connect would be difficult at the best of times.

[01:05:54.28] Well, I alluded to potentially having Andy Weir on text. How possible would it be - or I guess, how motivated are you to see this non-trilogy trilogy turn into maybe a multi-movie movie? I don’t know how to describe it. To be on the big screen. How motivated are you by that?

I’m not sure how you intend the word motivated. I mean, I’m motivated to like the idea, because it means lots more exposure and lots more money. I mean, there’s no downside… Unless somebody did a terrible job. But not with Lord Miller. You’re not going to get that with Lord Miller. It’s going to be a good job.

Now, in terms of multiple movies, the contract allows for multiple movies, but doesn’t specify multiple movies… Which I interpret to mean “Well, we’ll see how the first one goes.”

Well, you mentioned being a listener of Ready Player One, Wil Wheaton… I’m a big fan of Wil Wheaton. I’m a big fan of Ready Player One. And it took me a little bit to really enjoy Ready Player Two, as an example of a sequel, “Let’s see how it goes.” Because I can’t imagine a movie version of Ready Player Two. I’ve listened to the book before I watched the movie, thankfully… Because the movie is good, but it’s standalone, unique good, rather than you’ve literally just watched a movie version of the book. I think the book goes way deeper, way more into the details… Obviously. That’s what books do. But I think they’re two separate works of art, based on a similar storyline. And then you have Ready Player Two, and I guess where I’m going with this is we’ll see how the sequel goes, because Ernest Cline has gotten a lot of pushback on Ready Player Two. A lot of just – I don’t want to expose it too much, but a lot of things in there that was uniquely different than Ready Player One. And I didn’t expect that story to be the part two. So I’m not sure we’ll ever see a Ready Player Two based on Ready Player Two the book, as a movie, based on that… As a reader, as a fan.

Right. I have not read or listened to Ready Player Two, so I can’t comment either way on the story itself… But the thing about Ready Player One is that it was a standalone story. It came to a very satisfying conclusion, and we’re done. And the problem always when you have a story that ends that well, “…and they all lived happily ever after”, is how do you generate a new conflict for the next story? How do you generate a new storyline?

Right. Well, I don’t want to ruin the book for you… I think – I don’t know how frequently you queue up new books, but I will say as a reader and listener of Ready Player One, to me, it’s a must-listen. You have to. If you’re a big fan of Ready Player One as a book, to me it’s a must-read, must-listen. And I’d even say must-read, must-listen maybe twice, maybe three times. It’s a really good storyline, it’s got a lot of cool stuff in it. Specifically, I think the way you think about and the way you introduce true science into your books, that make it somewhat plausible… I wouldn’t say that the Bobiverse is truly plausible science fiction. I think it’s plausible science fiction fantasy, let’s just say. There’s some fantasy in there, and there’s also some plausibility in there. I think with Ready Player Two, the unique things that happen there is how they go into the OASIS, or back into the OASIS through a whole new interface that I think is worth exploring. As someone that’s in your position as an author and a thinker in this way that benefits financially from creating new worlds, and thinking very vividly, I think it’s a must-listen for you. So I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s just, it was different enough where it was like “Wow, I didn’t expect that to be the next layer of it.” And there’s just a lot of cultural things that happen in it that make it a little bit strange, let’s just say.

[01:10:08.07] But that being said, I would personally enjoy watching any of the Bobiverse, anything from the Bobiverse as a movie, at least once. Even if you only have a standalone movie, and it’s only good enough to be a single movie, fine by me. Just take my money, alright, Dennis? Just take my money right now. I’m going to pre-buy the 4K Blu-ray, because I like to watch 4K Blu-rays in my home theater. I’ll pre-buy it today. And I’ll wait five years. No problem.

Okay.

What’s next? When’s the movie out? I’m joking with you. What’s next? When’s the movie out?

Well, here’s the thing. Lord Miller is currently wrapping up production on Project Hail Mary.

Is that right?

Yeah. Ryan Gosling…

I’m equally excited about that. Equally.

Yeah. But I should add as an aside here, one of the things that happens when you as an author sign an option deal with a Hollywood production company or holding company or whatever, is they sign you up, and then you never hear from them again. There’s no communication. My agent is always talking about this. It’s like a black hole descends on everything and you cannot get anything out of them.

Lord Miller is a little more communicative than that. With Endeavor, we just never heard anything. The point is that a lot of what I say when I’m talking about the movie deal and such is supposition on my part, with no insider knowledge. But I think what’s happening is Project Hail Mary was signed before me. I’m pretty sure that’s true. And they’ve been working on that movie. And as it’s wrapping up, they’re going to be starting to work on mine. So I’m next.

Alright. I did happen to look up Phil Lord on IMDb, just to kind of get a background on some of the past work… Very excited about Hail Mary. You mentioned The Lego movie… Two that stand out to me that I’ve definitely watched and thoroughly enjoyed as adaptations, or what I would call brand new visuals to a well-known, well-played out, well-done character line is Spider-Man. So you’ve got Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse I think are absolutely phenomenally cinematically done adaptations of a over and over and overdone storyline that I think brought brand new visuals to the Spider-Man world. And so if that person is a producer of that, and part of that, then I have high hopes for Hail Mary, and obviously high hopes for The Bobiverse in their hands.

You mentioned - tangentially, I suppose, you mentioned a black hole, or maybe happenstance. When I look at the cover of Not Till We Are Lost, which is the Bobiverse book five book coming out - I mentioned I’ve got it on pre-order; releases September 5th this year, 2024. It’s in my pre-orders, I’m ready, I’m queued up, I can’t wait… I see what looks like a version of a black hole, potentially like we saw in Interstellar. Are you a fan of that movie by any chance?

Yeah.

Okay. Obviously you are, right? You’re steeped in all science fiction. Tell me about that. What are we not seeing? What can you tease about book five, given the black hole on the cover, your accidental mention of a black hole, which I’m just gonna use it as a good segue… What can you say about book five?

Okay. I will say this…

[spoiler alert]

That is Sagittarius A star.

Okay.

And they arrive a little bit ahead of schedule.

And that’s it?

That’s it.

That’s it. Okay.

[01:14:01.17] Well, if you think about it, 26,000 years –

It’s not a black hole? It looks like a black hole.

Sagittarius A star is a black hole. It’s the central black hole of the galaxy.

Okay, gotcha. It’s where they were heading after they finished blowing up the other’s home world. And it’s a 26,000 light year trip at sub-light velocity. So arriving a little ahead of schedule has to tell you something’s going on.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. I’ll have to go and piece back your breadcrumbs to make that make sense… And I guess on that note, I just – we didn’t talk about the software you’ve written behind the scenes. I know we don’t have much time left, and I want to ask you a couple more questions about different things you have going on… So just paraphrase and cliffnotes as much as you’d like to, but you’ve written some software behind the scenes to help you piece together this timeline… I think it was super-wild and tantalizing how you were able to play with this idea of time. I think even from the perspective that the bobs are all computers, essentially. Replicants. So they’re no longer in human form. They speak in milliseconds, that took one millisecond… I thought that was super-cool, the way you even brought that into the storyline… You spoke in time as if it was milliseconds, not like - we as humans experience long seconds, long minutes, long hours… And you mentioned this timing it would take to get to the star. Well, to a human that’s “Well, just forget it, because I’m dead by time.” Even a quarter of a percent of the trip is taken. As a Bob, as a replicant, as a von Neumann probe, you don’t really care about time, because you have all the time, theoretically, in the world.

Yeah. Also it’s flexible. I mean, I don’t specifically go into it in book five, but Ick and Dae could very well have just set their frame rate down really, really low, so the whole 26,000 year trip takes 10 minutes to them…

Precisely.

…if they wanted to.

Which I think is cool, because they can sort of fast-forward. It’s like you’ve taken properties from the book or the movie Click, from Adam Sandler, which - I don’t know if you’ve watched that movie, but… Just fast-forward through the thing, right? I think that’s a cool property, because it gives you flexibility as an author to fast-forward or slow down time and you have full control. I think that’s pretty wild.

Well, let’s zoom out from the Bobiverse, which I think we can probably talk literally at length about… You lightly mentioned it during our conversation so far about XPRIZE. I think it’s potentially wild that you are part of a working group. I’m not sure what this really is and what you’ve done there, but it seems like - wow, you’re a retired programmer, now a successful author, as well as a retired programmer… What in the world are you doing around XPRIZE, and the energy requirements of AI? You obviously think a lot about artificial intelligence as an author, because it’s part of your storylines, at least in the Bobiverse… What is the XPRIZE working group for you, and what are you doing there?

Well, I was invited to become part of the Science Fiction Advisory Council back in, I think, 2019. And I’m always a little nervous about giving years, because I’m usually a year off either way. It might have been 2018. But anyway, I was invited to become part of the Science Fiction Advisory Council, and invited down to the XPRIZE conference, which happens at the end of October down in California. The location’s changed a couple of times. And it was fun. It was interesting. It was an introduction to something that I really didn’t even know existed… But it was basically a one-off, because for one thing, COVID got in the way, and we had a couple of years there where nothing was happening.

Once COVID was over, I got an invitation from the XPRIZE people to come down, and they changed the format a little bit. It was no longer a Science Fiction Advisory Council so much as individual science fiction authors, among a lot of other people, who were being invited to give input on generating new XPRIZEs. It’s an amazing cross-section of people; industry leaders, deep technological experts… And in my case, wild-eyed blue-sky thinkers, I guess.

[01:18:32.04] But I went down last year and had a great time, again, and they’ve invited me again this year, so I must have done something right…. And I think I supply the unhinged imagination part. It’s the only thing I can think of. Because I certainly don’t have the expertise that some of the people there have.

It sounds interesting to get to do that kind of thing, and I suppose to be an advisor. It’s like one step removed from being an advisor on let’s say a show called Silicon Valley or something like that, where you’re giving input into the psyche and the world of Silicon Valley, or into the input or how you might hypothesize solving AI, the energy used to power today’s world’s AI, which - it’s just a tremendous amount of energy being used. And then you’ve got to wonder, is it for the positive or is it for the negative long-term for humanity? In today’s terms, we have to quantify that. I think that’s what you’re talking about, right?

Yeah. Are you thinking specifically the energy use, or of the whole AI as an existential threat thing?

Definitely not as an existential threat… I think more - the way you described it to me in our email was that it is a working group, working on a prize for a new technology to reduce the energy requirements of AI. I think there’s a lot of speculation. I think there’s a lot of well-knowns out there of where AI can take humanity, but at the same time, it’s been compared that our brains are quite effective, and use way less power than a seemingly similar AI, which is not truly AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, or even true intelligence. It’s manufactured intelligence, really. How much energy usage goes into it. So I imagine this working group you’re doing is evaluating and hypothesizing and supposing how this will play out with the energy requirements to power today’s and tomorrow’s AI.

Yeah. Well, the problem is right now they’re generating LLMs, large language models, which is what the current AIs are. They’re generating them using brute-force techniques. “Let’s throw more computers at it. Then let’s throw more air conditioners at the computers. Then let’s throw more electrical substations at the whole thing.” And that’s why the power requirements are getting so big because every time they want to improve or increase the power of their AI, they just throw more computers at it. And yeah, they’re energy-hungry. They’re big.

The human brain uses an entirely different technique. It’s not software. It’s hardware. Everything’s done in what Rudy Rucker would call wetware.

True.

But the energy generation is so much less. The analogy I like to use is if you use a computer to generate a video of a person rolling dice, just a couple of dice in your hand, shake, roll, and you get something; the amount of power required to generate a video of that happening is not insignificant. It’s probably a couple of kilowatts. But the amount of power released if you actually do that, even if you include the energy of the human hand rolling the dice - it’s a couple of calories.

[01:22:00.14] Yeah.

And that’s because it’s done completely on hardware. There’s no software emulation. It’s more efficient. So if you’re going to reduce the power requirements for an AI, you have to get rid of software. You have to get rid of the emulation. That’s my opinion anyway.

Yeah. Interesting. And this is the working group you’re on. And you’re there as an advisor, or as a big sky idea guy kind of thing, as you said before…? That’s your role in this working group, is to think, not so much to implement?

Yeah.

Thankfully, right?

Well, I’m on two groups right now, actually. I also got invited into the health group on consciousness, on measuring and detecting consciousness, which is another really neat concept to deal with. But the one correction I have to make is that the XPRIZE working groups aren’t there to come up with solutions. They’re there to come up with prizes and goals, and let other people come up with the solutions and win the prize. So we’re not trying to think “How can you do this in hardware?” We’re there to say “How can you come up with a way to generate AI using 10,000 times less energy? Go!” And the prize is $50 million if you do it.

Wow.

So that’s really what we’re trying to do.

Gotcha. And because we’re short on time - otherwise, I’ll go deeper - we’ll leave that there. I do want to give you a chance to mention two upcoming things. You’ve got The Fly, which I was surprised by, as the title, or at least the working title… Because there’s obviously a very well-known, potentially plausible science fiction movie from, I think, early ’90s. I could be wrong.

The Jeff Goldblum one?

Yes, sir. Yeah, Jeff Goldblum. And it’s a phenomenal rewatch. I mean, if you haven’t rewatched it in like a remastered version, it’s well done.

I need to say that my book is nothing like that.

Okay, good.

There’s no connection at all. In fact, Steve suggested that I change the working title to “The fly, but not that one.”

Okay. Good working title, I’m not sure about a good final title. But I suppose parentheses are in your way.

Yeah. Definitely not the final title. One possible title that Steve suggested was Flybot.

Yeah. When you’re done with book six of the Bobiverse, and since we’re mentioning the working title The Fly, and this other one, which is a working title of 10,000 Worlds - these are non-Bobiverse books - when you’re done with book six, are you going to be roughly in your mind as much as you might be done with the Bobiverse series, and you’re free to sort of like roam new ideas?

Yeah, there’s too much happening for me to cut things off at six. Book five opens things up exponentially.

Great news.

If you think of book four, Heaven’s River as having focused down on one aspect of the Bobiverse universe, book five goes in the opposite direction. It’s a huge expansion of potential situations, let’s say.

Okay. Good.

Yeah, it’s the Bobs looking outwards.

Well, I’m glad you mentioned that, because again, I presumed six books, a sixology, however you want to describe it… I’m probably wrong… I was assuming that, and I was really hoping that it was not the end, so I’m glad you said that, because it does seem like there’s just so much you can explore, and hopefully you can do it well.

Yeah. I use as a working number 10. 10 books. But I’m not limiting myself to it.

Okay.

If it organically heads in that direction, fine. I do have an ending in mind for the series, and I’ll put that at the end of the appropriate book, but only if it organically grows in that direction.

Good. Okay. Well, Dennis E. Taylor, it’s been fascinating to talk to the author of the books that I love very much. I’m excited that you tested this out, this challenge with your wife many years ago, to explore this… I’ve definitely enjoyed all of your work, and will continue to enjoy your work for, hopefully, years to come. It’s great to meet you virtually, slash in person. Thank you for making time to sit down with me, a podcaster to thousands and thousands of software developers across this entire globe… I’m sure they’re all going to become fans of your work, if they haven’t already been so far before. I’ll drop this link, obviously, in the show notes, but DennisETaylor.org is where you can go to find his personal site. He’s on X/Twitter, of course. You can check that out. That’s where I pay attention to your random tweets. You don’t tweet too much, but I always enjoy little daps of where you’re going to go with the Bobiverse series and the different things you’re doing.

Again, I enjoyed Feedback. If Ethan can bless some way, shape, or form, your editor can bless some way, shape, or form your future backing to expanding on that, or if you have any ideas, I would be a pre-orderer right then and there. I’m fascinated with time loops and time travel. I think the way you’ve architected the Bobiverse series has been very well done… So I’m a big fan. Thank you so much for making time. Anything else to say in closing? Anything left that I haven’t said yet at all?

No, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Absolutely.

Well, very well then. Dennis E. Taylor, thank you so much for making time. It’s been awesome.

Alright. Thanks for having me on.