Michael S. Clarke Goes Synthetic: Because One Version of You Wasn’t a Problem Already

In this 39th episode of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory, Mookie brings Michael S. Clarke onto the factory floor to dissect the craft, the grind, and the brutal reality of trying to write—and sell—serious sci-fi in a world drowning in noise.

Clarke is deep in the trenches with Synthetic, a novel about mind uploading, identity duplication, and what happens when “you” becomes plural. Mookie, never one to let a concept sit quietly, pushes it further: if you copy your brain into a machine, who’s the real you, and which one gets screwed in the divorce?

Along the way, the conversation veers into the stuff that makes this genre fun:

• Mookie lays down a hard rule: no string theory allowed. Mention it and you get metaphorically gonged off the show.
• A spontaneous rant breaks out about why Superman is a fundamentally uninteresting character—invincible equals zero vulnerability, the real kryptonite is boredom.
• Clarke walks through the nightmare of editing your own work, including the moment you realize two pages of your novel are just… intellectual soup.
• The two tear into the publishing ecosystem: agents, vanity presses, self-publishing, phishing, and scamming, including the most uncomfortable truth: nobody is there to promote your book but you.

Underneath the jokes and jabs is a serious throughline: good science fiction isn’t about the science—it’s about what people do when the science breaks them. Mookie and Michael break into craft, ego, failure, persistence, and the uneasy partnership between imagination and reality. 

The Guest

Michael S. Clarke is a speculative fiction author obsessed with the "what if" of artificial intelligence. His work delves into the philosophical and practical implications of mind uploading, AI agency, and what it means to be human in an age where biology is becoming optional.

His Blogs

https://qtility-mike.blogspot.com/

https://michaelsclarke.online/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm your host, Mookie Spitz, and I'm thrilled to have Michael S. Clark on the factory floor today. Welcome, Michael. Thank you, Mookie. It's a pleasure to be here. It is great to have you, speculative science fiction writer, co-anthologist in the 2026 Science Fiction Authors Anthology put together by S.A. Gibson. And I've reached out to my colleagues in science fiction crime, and I've had several of you as guests, and I am excited to have you as a guest. I enjoyed your two stories, which was uh which was Round the World and Hullborn in the anthology. They're very different in style.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

But they're yeah, they were uh pretty divergent from one my typical subject matter. It's one of these little thought bubbles that you have, and you start scribbling on a notepad, and the next thing you know, you've got a story.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, where does the inspiration come from? And then you are you are working on a novel. I believe it's your your longest piece to date, synthetic, and you're putting that together, and you gave me a little preview, which I appreciate. We could talk a little bit about that too.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

That's that's the copy I've been sending out the agents. I'm agent hunting at this point, looking for uh representation. So uh I don't uh if it's not ready, let me know. Yeah, but uh I'm I'm flogging it out there, no responses yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Um, I'm not the eye bar biter of uh you know publish or non-publish. The one thing agents are looking for isn't even the ostensible quality of the work itself, but whether the author has a legacy social media presence. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

And I just I just ripped mine out and put it back together again this weekend. So uh all right, you're one weekend in to your social media presence. Yeah, I was on Substack and uh became a little distracted and uh disillusioned by it, so I I went back out, just went straight straight into slogging space.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Substack kind of sucks. I've had many Substack authors on the podcast where I met them. So there there are benefits to Substack. There is a robust writer's community on Substack, and there's some great, great writers and great people, and I've had many on the pod already. And uh I love that community building and fist pumping on Substack. Uh, but in terms of a social media platform, it's got the same algorithm-based challenges. It's hard to get attention in in the crowded stream. Yeah, it's uh and as a monetization engine, it of course relies entirely on you, your mailing list, and and they get their they get their cut for doing the doing the data processing, which is also data mining, but hey, you know, it's a it's another channel among many.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Yeah, it's it's one among many. So I've I've just been thinking that I'm just gonna go step back and get simple about the whole promotional thing. As I I'm not sure if synthetic's gonna make it with the agents or whatever, and and I don't have a track record of you know five novels, you know, with a big following and all that kind of stuff, which they also look for. And so that uh it would have to be somebody that's uh uh uh has would accept a newbie kind of uh well I'm not really so much newbie as I've been at this, as I said, since 2015. But um I haven't honed my craft until just recently. It's sufficiently enough to think that I was good enough to present.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Why not go the indie author route? You could literally upload synthetic today and you'll have an ISBN numbered book in paperback or hard copy form on your desk within a week.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Yep, I could do that, and I had actually this book synthetic is part of another book, two books that I had previously published that turned out to be okay. I just wanted to get them out there. I was in a big hurry. But it turned out to be two things that I wasn't very proud of. So I just I pulled them back off the market, jammed them together, squished a whole bunch of stuff out, resynthesized it into one book, and then went through took a few rounds of editing to purge out all the POV problems. Oh my goodness. Changing POV is is not for the timid problem. Uh it's if you know what I mean by POV, the the the problem, you know, whether it's third person or first person uh uh perspective on the on the narrative. And uh that was a brutal process. Anyway, so that I would explain why I've been at this since 2015 because uh it's uh I I rewrote the whole thing out of uh not being happy. So I went the Amazon route first. And uh and the only thing the only real sales I have is when I put it on for free. And then I get like 500 sales, yay! And I put the price back on crickets.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Author experience, but um well, it's crowded, and I've had various authors who do various approaches to publishing. On the one side is the traditional route, you get your agent and then you get someone to back you. But even in that instance, the onus is on you as an author to promote your own content. A publisher can only do so much. And I've cited examples of my friend, I have a good friend who did that route and did it very, very successfully. An enormous social media following, got an agent, did a treatment, got an advance to complete his book, and uh, major publisher with big-time reviewers, and uh it really didn't take off the way he had anticipated. And I think that had a lot to do with his lack of personal participation in the marketing process. He felt that he did everything he had to do, and then the publisher would take it from there, and that just wasn't the case at all, yeah, and that's never the case, really, unless you've already established a significant name for yourself. So, for a new writer, whether you like it or not, you will have to self-promote. The the other question is speed and control. So it might take years to vet an agent and an agent to vet you, the edits, the back and forth, the contracting before your idea actually sees it on a bookshelf or even in an online store through a traditional publisher. And as we mentioned, you can do KDP or Barnes and Noble or any one of a dozen different self-publishing platforms and have it up and out there in a week, but then you have no backing, zero, it's completely up to you. So that that I think is is the trade-off. And there's also a credibility gap. People even these days assume that if you've got a uh a publisher's logo on your book, then you're legit. And since everyone and their grandma can publish on Amazon and everyone and their grandma does, you really have no no credibility, no, no authority coming out the gate as an Amazon self-published author. So it's it's a matter of things.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

You you build it yourself. And I I see, yeah, that's that's a really good point. And it comes full cycle for for what I've been going through. And and and I think, okay, well, uh, let's try the agent thing. Maybe maybe this is good enough to grab attention right away without all that. And it's no, um, not good enough. And so it's I think you're right, it's the inevitable um indie indie process. And I noticed that there are a couple of sci-fi publishers out there that are uh not your pen guns or random house or you know, any of the big the big players that you can go directly to and and have uh it's uh it's almost like um what do you call those publishers where you pay the money and they put a vanity press, but it isn't. It's sort of a very geeky sci-fi kind of publisher. And they have all these science fiction writers and publications I've never heard of before. And to your point, you really do have to promote it yourself. Um because they don't promote anything, they just put it out there. And and I think they basically facilitate you, you know, the uh the editing maybe and maybe the uh the actually printing of the books and so on and so forth. Um so that's that's another another possibility. But I I really think that you know uh I've been in sales, I've done promotions, I've I've started businesses and all that stuff. I really should do it. I can't be a lazy lazy bugger and and not do it, you know. It's it's it's kind of like being a starting a software startup, but it's really a lot in the promotion, self-promotion. And if you can't self-promote, you're just gonna have the greatest idea ever, and nobody's gonna listen to you.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Yeah, I had Daniel P. Douglas on the pod podcast just the other day. That act that actually is the name de plume of uh two brothers, identical twins, Phil and Paul Garver. And they collaborate on books. One or the other will own it, and the other one will be editor. But the way the roles delineate in terms of marketing and content, it seems Phil is the real driver for that. He researches campaigns and he activates and tries different things in the marketplace. And Paul even just said out loud that that stuff makes me want to puke sometimes. I just I just want to write. Yeah, but Phil has a lust for engagement, and he's got a real presence on Substack, and he does really active reviewing of content and resharing, and the dude is just uh a brilliant powerhouse of literary critic, writer, and marketer. He's just firing on all cylinders, and Paul is is the one creating a lot of the content and working with him. Oh, yeah. But uh you need that combo, you need that kind of combo of marketing and content creation. It's the Joyce and Shem and Sean, brothers of Finnegan's Wake, where Shem is the word and Sean is the is the proselytizer. And there needs to be both aspects for a writer to be successful. So whether you can do it yourself or you need to hire it or partner with it, it's inevitable that you need to get that outreach. And frankly, I'm I'm probably more like Paul. I'm a combination of both brothers, but I tend to be pretty bad at the marketing too when it comes to my own stuff.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

Well, I I noticed that your your stuff is is marketable. I mean, it's care it's character driven. And I I thought, well, I was thinking to myself, you know, this would be easy to sell. It you know, relative to hard hard science, you know, all the stuff that, you know, it's I obviously you've done some research, you've read some scientific papers and stuff. You're you're you're bouncing ideas around in your writing, but um, you know, you you can get caught up in that uh and just and and I find that the book that I'm the synthetic one that I'm doing it was really heavy tech. And then EJ is pounding on my head, no, no, get that out, squish, you know, and and take all the exposition out of it. And uh EJ is is the editor, she's in the science fiction novelist group, and she's uh co-editor of that uh anthology that you held up a little while ago. And anyway, they uh she's got such an eye for that kind of stuff that you know that I and when you read it as a writer, uh what I find is the really tough part is uh editing your own stuff. Like I don't know if what your style is. I I tend to just dump it all out, uh I create an outline, and then just go stream of consciousness into the outline, fill it all in, and then come back to it and say, Oh my god, what a mess. I'd have to clean this up and then go through and slog through it and re-orient it and take out the exposition. But the problem with that is that uh your brain translates before you uh let me see. How do how do I say this? Your brain processes it as if it was normal. It knows what you were trying to say, but you didn't say it right correctly. You didn't get it across to the reader, you got it across to yourself, you know, and to try and translate that you have to really step back from it. And I you know what I I went on and there's an editing process that I do now is I get and people may go, AI, uh I get AI to read it to me. And and because when I read it to myself, it's the same thing. I can't I can't, you know, I would have to hire somebody else to read read my book to me or create an audio book. And then by that time, you know, I'd have to edit it and change it anyway, right? So uh so I just get I don't use it, um I just get AI to read it to me. And uh when I you know it it'll be blah blah blah blah blah, and I'm nodding, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh crap. I just zoned out for two paragraphs because it's all gumbo. You know, so you gotta go stop it, go back, re-edit. So that that is something I uh I find is super helpful to get my exposition out of and uh you know I I'm working on some new stuff too. And I find that doesn't happen so much anymore. Is as you home as you uh work your craft, your brain starts to think that way. Uh, you know, it it starts to go, oh this is this is not right, you know, you're at it again, you're doing it again, stop back up and and retype that. What would what would the character uh do uh as opposed to what is the character thinking? You know, if you're it it's as your writer, you know, you you can't just uh say, okay, explain what's in his head or what you think is supposed to be in his head. Is you explain, okay, if that is in his head, what does he do? And then put it out there. So that's that's that's what I'm doing now in another book. EJ has that she's editing it as we speak. She may get to read this bit of free uh promotion. Anyway, so I mentioned her name three times.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

A link to her skills in the podcast description, I'm sure she would uh appreciate that. You're focused on behavior and function as opposed to interior state and exposition, I think is on point.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yeah, it's so it's I I don't explain Albuquerque drives to anybody. It's in my book, too. Oh, is that all right? Yeah, you like that stuff too. I s I noticed you're talking about dimensions and all that sort of thing. And um, yeah, it's so I I'm actually slogging through dimensional science books. There's this one called Twisted Paths or Twisted Passages or something like that. It was published back in around 2010, and it's uh an MIT profile. It's really heavygoing, like blah blah blah blah blah. But I'm doing it just to force myself through the discipline of okay, what is the real theory out there on these multiple dimensions of stuff?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

It's interesting stuff there, but there's a dream sequence in uh in my my first book with um Johnny on the bridge of an Alcubier starship. Oh, really? And it's uh it's about to go transluminal. And then later in the book, it's a foreshadowing for when he actually hijacks one. And uh and he gets a hold of negative matter to power it. Delivered by the same arms dealer who delivers the thermonuclear weapon in the the earlier book for the transfinite reality engine to activate. So he gets a chunk of he gets a hundred kilos of negative matter to fuel the Kubier ship, yeah, and it's strapped to the roof of a van, and uh negative matter reacts opposite to gravitational energy. So it's resi it's resistant. So it's strapped to the van with velcro strips, and Johnny gets on top. Yeah, and then Johnny unlatches it and and the the mass hits him in the chest and he grabs it, and it's like a skydiver in reverse. He's flying up into orbit with the fuel of the ship.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Oh goodness.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

So I did research for that, and I use AI for research. So rather than go to the source material, there's tons of speculative journal articles on Cubier ships, negative mass, all that kind of stuff. And negative energy and negative energy. It's super, it's super fun because when you research it, then you go down all these rabbit holes. So here's just an example of how vivid it is because you can translate it into the lived experience of your characters. So Johnny is tumbling upward into the atmosphere in reverse skydiver fashion, and he's got Marfan syndrome, he's like six foot eight, six foot nine, big buffon of blonde hair, thin and skinny, like Abraham Lincoln, and he's got this hundred kilos of negative matter that that he's hanging on to and propelling. And since it's the opposite in ways of regular matter, that the the the brighter it is around the matter, the darker the mass is. It absorbs the energy. And when he gets out closer to space and it starts to darken and and all that, then it starts to glow because it's inverse. And the tighter Johnny grabs the mass, the more the mass resists the energy that he puts into it. And then when he lets it go a little bit, then the mass clings even more. So it that's a neat, a neat experience. I haven't seen that in science fiction before, and it's all a product of just doing a little research and having fun with uh hard science and then putting it into the lived experience of your character. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

And and then that's a great example. I hadn't thought of that either. But the um, and don't be putting ideas in my head now.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

But yeah, people listening are like, oh, smooky, that's a great idea. All of a sudden, right? The the the Alkubia guy going a reverse skydiver to the ship is gonna be in a dozen different uh indie.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Oh, you wait. You're gonna see it on Netflix next week. Yeah, the the um it's it's so cool to to read this stuff, and then you kind of sit back and say, gee, that's heavy, heavy science, you know. It's you sort of force your way through it. And then you sit back and say, Well, what if it's true? And you know, and that's what that's what my speculative stuff is, is okay, there's a theory out there that says this is true and that this would really happen. This is how you could conceivably do it. And uh and I uh like you, I use AI to say, okay, here are these theories, here are these uh uh scientific papers that I've read that are pointing to this stuff. Could you please summarize them uh and synthesize them and look for a way. To make this possible. And it comes about this is, you know, they said this is not possible. But if you want to write some sci-fi, here's Sunai, you know. It's you kind of because, yeah, yeah, you work your way through these theories and condense them and then into uh it's a scene like that where uh all the properties that you described are happening. It's or the uh let me see, what was it? Um I'm trying to think of something in in synthetic. And it um oh what uh I I've got I I've got some, you know, uh Alpicare drive, you know, drive kind of wormhole tra travel ex you know stuff in it in the book. But it's more about uh neuron um uh the effect of uploading your brain into uh a system of some kind. And you can do it solo, you know, one upload into one one synthetic mind. Or you could go into like a multi-tenant and here I am a software cloud architect, uh geek guy um situation where you get a whole host of uh millions of minds uploaded that can then communicate with each other.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

The hive the hive mind for that.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Yeah, yeah, the h like a hive mind uh sort of co-linked. But then you start thinking, well, what if what if they have the synapses in your brain that go between the neurons start to they're artificial in an artificial brain, they're not organic anymore. But what if they start forming between the uh uploaded minds? Like you start thinking about that, and then suddenly there's a connection automatically to another uh uploaded mind. And then you and then you start extract lighting on that and say, okay, well, what does a person do when that they experience that? What happens? And you can't explain it because that's that's the exposition stuff that I was getting trapped in. You know, it's like, okay, okay, this is what they were feeling, this is what they were thinking. No, no, no. This is what they did in response.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

Keep it, keep it through the lens of your character. That's the biggest lesson that I've learned when I had these stillbirth misfires of mooky short stories and writing. It was it was too expositional and it was too too much of that describing the setting, the science, and the circumstance. If you focus on character and you give them a goal, and then you present obstacles, and then you set them loose, and all of the world building and science and whatever simply becomes part of their journey to accomplish their goal or not, then you're you're on the right footing as a as an author. Yeah, I you I think so.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Yeah, they it's it's easy to um it's easy to insert yourself into it. It's uh and the uh it's people some editors have done some serious finger wagging in that science fiction novelist group. Is it that's uh you know, you can't do that. That's lazy writing exploding. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. So you just have to go through and fix it. But the um the whole writing process I've I've found to be such a fascinating thing. It's I like I've my background is IT. It's I well, I have a geology degree. I s uh I'm from Halifax, Nova Scotia, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Yeah, I've been there. Up in the fog. Up in the fog. I went for a business meeting to Halifax. It's way, it's way out there.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah, yeah, but there's a direct flight from Boston and there's one from New York. American Airlines, they fly there. That's why I suppose there's enough, there's a a lot of connections between Halifax and Boston, New York.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Family, you know, family and maybe even a little business.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Yeah, a little business. Um, but uh you know the the family connections like are amazing. Like I've done this whole genealogy thing, and I'm relating I've got what's 16,000 relative rel cousins in in uh New England.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Just yeah, maybe the sh the the the sea lanes, the shipping, the trading.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

And uh, you know, the fact that these were all uh British expats that came over, and then the ones that had something to lose during the revolution went up to Nova Scotia as loyal what they call loyalists, right? But they're all their cousins and relatives and everything were down there. So that you've got I've fourth and fifth cousins all over the place down there. It's it's amazing. Uh, I used to go and visit relatives down in uh Manomet, Boston. I spent months down there. Loved it. It's a it's a great place. Really, really enjoyed that. I went to school there actually for a while. Manomet. Nice little town.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

Boston has its charm. Uh yeah, as long as you sometimes liken my uh my little video vignettes that I put on TikTok to Bill Burr, and he is the uh Boston stand-up comic. Hit him this is the working class stand-up, irascible, cynical, everyman comic. Oh, yeah. Outraged by himself and the world and can't shut the hell up. So that's that's part of that bot the Boston accent and Boston attitude.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

Yeah, well, it's the Boston attitude. It's the one thing about I notice about Boston and the attitude is the driving. I've never experienced driving like I've driven all over the place. I've driven in the Middle East, I've driven in Europe, I've driven in all over as an IT uh guy. I have the contractor, I just go and work here and work there for six months and work there for 12 months. And I've been all over the place. And the driving in Boston is a unique experience, as is the driving in Montreal, which is another very unique experience. So if you want to emulate F1 driving in a fiat, you know, just or a reno, go to Montreal. Uh cultural norms and more is yeah, and yeah, it's a pothole dodging as well because of the cold.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Maybe uh you can nanite the driving expertise of uh a Bostonian or Tabaswa, right? And speaking of which, uh your your recurring themes are this singularity between uh carbon and silicon, between sentient biological organisms and AI that keeps recurring. You've got some post-apocalyptic settings that you play with, and you seem fascinated by that construct that you were just describing, the the brain in the box. Philip Cahill, our fellow anthologist, I had him on the podcast last week, and he is obsessed with telepathy, telepathic communication. And the point you brought up with the nodes and the networks that if you transfer a brain into a box, as it were, then you eliminate the biological organic boundary between sentient beings, and then you could all of a sudden have a lot of interplay between these minds. And Philip wasn't as explicit about that, but that's one of his themes that keep recurring, which is these forms of what would be considered excess extrasensory perception related to artificial intelligence, AGI, and superintelligence. That one aspect of superintelligence is this communication that eludes us for the most part as organic beings because we're physically separate from each other.

SPEAKER_01 30:38

Yeah, we're we're in this box right here. Yeah, and the only thing we've got is typing and speaking, right? That's that's are the interfaces to our brains, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:52

That's so I like I like how those themes come together. Another guest I had on the podcast, AC Wise, she is a science fiction and fantasy writer in her own right, and she is one of the premier reviewers, science fiction reviewers for Locust and Apex.

SPEAKER_03 31:11

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

So she's she's busy and uh she's she reads just about everything. And I asked her what one of the benefits of having such a comprehensive view of the science fiction fantasy landscape entailed, and she mentioned that she sees common themes that keep recurring in all of these stories, whether they're shorter pieces or full-blown novels. She sees these trends that keep bubbling up and expressing themselves, and she loves how they're expressed in so many different ways, and they tend to trend like sci-fi fantasy memes of ever more elaborate sophistication and diversity, and this sentient AI telepathy communication is one of them, and you and Philip are into it, and I like how you guys are completely different in how you use it and bring it to life.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Yeah, I'm I'm playing with that. I've I've I am fascinated by this because I I really do think that, and I've been following as a computer geek, I've been following AI since the well, I was a sci-fi afeccionado in my geology. I studied geology. That was my degree at at St. Mary's University in Halifax. So that's where I learned how to learn. So that's that's that's where they they basically teach you how to teach yourself. Because I don't know if you you've been to the you've been through the degree mill kind of thing, and the and you still sit in a room and got some guy way down in the front there, and you know, and there's a little bored about this big. He's standing there and he's waving this little light thing and he's believing cryptic stuff that you have to use a telescope to read. And you sit there and you know, you're falling asleep while this guy's got down here. And and so you're really teaching yourself, and you might be able to get five minutes of his time walking to his office or something like that to explain something that you can't figure out. So when you get to um and I'm I'm I'm a little cynical, I guess some cynicism just escaped there, but university education, didn't it? But anyway, that's that that whole self-learning thing uh goes to what's happening now with AI. And I've been following it since I was a sci-fi fan, I've been following this through the 70s and 80s and 90s, and it was getting more and more real and less and less science fiction. And you've got somebody like Asimov back in the 60s and 70s doing iRobot, which just blew my mind at the time, and it's still relevant. Like, you know, you look back on that iRobot, and he's not too far off the mark, you know. It's and then there's the I'll be back, you know, the the one about the nano from the future, right? So that's that's another one of the nano things. And so what I've been following is a is a combination of things. There's a a combination of technologies that's coming up that just blows me away. Every time I think about this, the hair stands up in the back of my neck, and I go, Oh my god, what's gonna happen? Is the uh AI, which is already happening, it's around us now. It's blow it. It's I mean, have a chat with ChatGPT and it blows your mind.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

This is so it's so I had ChatGPT as a guest on my podcast. Oh, that's awesome. That's a great uh that's and it was a pretty good guest. It's kind of hard to tell. Touring test on the podcast, Chatty, pretty much. Oh good one.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Yeah, I I I can believe that. Anyway, so if you've got these technologies, and then there's nanotechnology, which really scares the heck out of me, which is you know, the uh what's the LB Back? What's the name of that story? Uh Schwarzenegger was in that uh about the nano. Anyway, anybody is listening to this, you know what it is? Leave it in the comments down below. Anyway, uh the uh so there's nano, uh, and then you've got uh another the uh computer technology, which everybody it's everybody's sound asleep about this. Like they don't seem to get the fact that there's this revolution happening under our feet and we don't realize what's going on. And that is the optical quantum chips that they're coming out with now. Like they cost millions of dollars now, but you know, remember what happened in the 60s when you know you you had a million-dollar mainframe, now you've got uh a phone that has more power than the million dollar mainframe, and you got it on sale from a from a phone company, you know. Uh anyway, so you've got uh this this that that research took me a while to figure it out. But is uh the they're predicting that you will be able to have something that is uh has as many neurons in it, like if you think of a a little subprocessor kind of uh unit that you can you can use uh that is more powerful in the human mind that's the size of a tennis ball. And yes, you if you follow the if you do the numbers, you can figure it out. So this is where it's going. And so it's about 2035. You've got all of these things converging.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

And um, there's there's a futurist, Kurtzweil. Kurtzweil's been snoozing ever since Google gave him that cush job. Well, yeah, he's he's been has Kurtzweil done anything of any real I don't mean to knock him. He was a brilliant inventor, and I guess he deserved a Kush Google job, but I haven't him seen him say or do anything since Google swallowed him up as their big innovation guy.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Well, he he may be transforming into an AI, I don't know at this point.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Uh I just think it shows you the the challenge of of putting diapers on a genius and giving them limitless potential, and then they go out to pasture.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

Well, I I don't think the guy is he's not out to pasture. He's probably working on something because he had a book that came out a couple of a couple of years ago. I read that.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

And anyone can write a book. Michio Kaku has been writing books. Yeah, yeah. And and he's he's another hyperventilating blowhard. Uh you know, I mean his string theory contributions were there, but uh, but he has been sensationalizing bullshit for decades. Well, I don't I don't mean to crap on Michio, but uh this this fake science, bullshit science has been a real plague, I think, for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Well, it's I think there's a human tendency, and it's one of the things that I've also got into is and it's it's as a result of researching what happens when you take your mind and copy it, all of the all of the part all of the um objects in your brain, and there's like four trillion of them that they've mapped so far, and you take an exact copy of that, put it in an uh abstracted computer system, and then what how do you start behaving? Because number one, you don't have to breathe. Number two, you don't have to drink water, all you have to do is recharge once in a while um and get spare parts. You know, it's you're either going to be in a robot or you're gonna be in a in a uh like an artificial reality kind of environment that you can just make up. And and so that if you do that and you've got those technologies that are going to come together in around 2035 that will allow you to do it. Um and I think my my perception of humanity is that if you can do something, even if it's really bad, people will do it for the bad reasons. Maybe, maybe it's because it's and we're on a similar track because I was reading your work and I was thinking, I hope he doesn't know anybody like Johnny. It's like, are you writing about somebody you know, or is uh alter ego? But um just kidding.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

My alt my alter ego. But uh to your point, yeah, people would just take advantage of any idea just to make some money off of it, and lo and behold, God help us all, or God's help us all, or whomever can help us all if uh he actually succeeds in doing it.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

Yeah, yeah. And and I think some I I was reminded of um the hitchhiker's guide to the universe, which is one of my favorite stories ever. And uh do you recall the scene where they get to this planet, this mystical, what is it called? Megat something, and it's because you know the architects of the universe ran out of business to do because nobody could afford them anymore, so they retired and shut everything down. So here's this idle planet with all the knowledge of the universe. And uh so that they land and these ro and these welcome signs start slamming them in the face as they walk across the the field. Do you remember that one? Uh funny classic Douglas Adams. Yeah, so I there's a character in there, uh I can't remember the character name. Slaughter Bartfast. Oh, Slaughter Bartfast. He's one of my favorites. He's the he's the architect guy. Right. And then there's another guy who's the crazy guy that has the symbiotic uh creature on his head, keeps flipping back and forth. Zaphid beetle beasle rocks. Yeah, yes. You're very good with these names. Yeah. Um, so kind of reminded me of of of Johnny in a way, it's just this totally manic experience. Oh, that's a good idea. Oh, that's a good idea. Oh, let's jump with the window, you know. Press the button.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

Uh press the press the red button. Keep pressing pressing the red the red button. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

And so um it's there's there's that aspect in science fiction which I find sort of infinitely entertaining, is that you can just what happens when you press the red button? Anyway, so uh getting back to my my uh sort of thesis on on what uh I started writing this stuff because I started looking at the coincidence of those three those three technologies. Because I I got this entrepreneurial streak, and I said, well, how can we anticipate what's gonna come down and get ourselves positioned to take advantage of this incredible wave that's going to happen? So and then I start thinking, holy pardon my language, you know, holy bleed. Um this is really gonna happen. You know, you're gonna be able to upload your mind into the computer the size of a tennis ball in a robot, probably have fusion power like in Asimov's foundation, and nobody's talking about it. That's what a that's what was happening to me.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

All of this has been speculated for for decades, and I don't I think 2035 is a little bit aggressive.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

It a little, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

I've revised that to 2045 for my book, which is it also is it is it theoretically possible? And absolutely, there's I don't think anything physically to preclude that. They they use the analogy of the ship of Theseus, that you swap a neuron with a transistor. And when when do you reach the point where it's it's still sentient, it's doing all the things it did before, but it's now more silicon than than carbon.

SPEAKER_03 43:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

And the difference that makes no difference is no difference. And going back to William Gibson, neuromancer, one of the characters, one of the most entertaining characters in in that seminal classic. Trailblazing cyberpunk book is uh the sim. It's the it's the sentient entity uh just uh living on the card with an attitude and it's calling calling them out, and uh it's it's literally just a uh a brain on a chip that's um talk talk and smack. So I think that that idea's been there. You you take it to all sorts of different levels, and you you have that as a big theme. I like your language a lot and your use of words, and your your prose is very poetic. It's poetic, really.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

I haven't heard that. That's that's cool, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Comparing writers to other writers is uh a little bit vanglorious and and sometimes it backfires because it's like I'm my own writer, stop telling me that I sound like someone else. But but synthetic, the the uh draft that I've read is is Gibson-y. You've got you've got your own nomenclature and uh and you you you hold back. This was uh in your short story in the anthology, you do this as well in the Hallborn story. The reader needs to work at it. You you reveal just enough to not so much confuse the reader as to keep them guessing, and the reader really needs to figure out what the hell's going on, where it's taking place, what the backstory is, and ostensibly what the motivation of the protagonist is. None of this is self-evident, and I personally like that. I think that that does the opposite of dumbing down the reader that appreciates the reader's intelligence and actually actively engages the reader in your story. You are co-creating together. I got that in Hull in Hullborn, I got that in synthetic. Um, I even got it in Round the Round the World Story 2, which was this post-apocalyptic bar fight kind of scene, which was a little bit more explicit, but there was still a lot of room that you left for the reader's imagination. And I think that that takes courage as a writer, and I could tell that you've been at this game for a while because your prose is well hewn. And like I said, your your word selection, your descriptions, what you're not revealing being even more important than what you are, and even some of the vocabulary and wordplay, like you put sentient and dash before the name of a character. That was a nice, nice touch, like sentient valiant is uh character name, and that that's just great creative and playful kind of cyberpunk 2.0 stylistic flourish that I really like a lot.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

Oh, thanks. Yeah, and you know what, that came of necessity. It's it's imagine this. Okay, you're you're wealthy enough to um have to be able to purchase a robot. So you you've got 50k in today's dollars, which would probably and then you've probably got another 25 to 50k to get go through the process of mapping all of the stuff in your brain and putting it up there. And then you've got you, your organic self, uh, which is no less uh um of a human before or after you upload, right? You're still you, but it's it's as opposed to some of some of the cloning stuff that I read, you know, is they basically have to freeze you and kill you and cut your brain all up and then copy it into a machine, which no, no, they're gonna use nano because nano can penetrate the the barrier and it can transmit, you know. You could even put wires on your head and transmit it. Anyway, but so you've got all this uh technology that's gonna enable you to copy yourself, but then you've got two youths sitting in the room looking at each other. Hey Mike, hey Mike Bob, how's it going? Mike, my bad, Mike Bad, how's it going? You know, it's like you get this echo chamber, and then it's confusing because you've got yourself into a robot which is uh way far more intelligent than you are, uh less intuitive, but more intelligent, uh that doesn't have to go to the bathroom, that doesn't have to smoke cigarettes or eat or do any of that kind of stuff. The and then you've got you. So how do you differentiate them in the dialogue? Somebody else walks in the room and they see the two of you, and then one of them is a robot, one of them is you. How do they talk to you? So that whole sentient dash thing came out as like, oh, how am I gonna do this? This dialogue is driving me crazy.

SPEAKER_00 49:09

Well, the the only the only modicum of confusion is they're both sentient, right? So yeah, so but one is organic and the other one isn't, and it's a little bit like the transporter in Star Trek, where instead of of Captain Kirk dissolving in the transporter room and then re-materializing on the planet, the Kirk in the transporter room stays. So it's a replicator, not just a transporter, which is if you think about it, it's the same thing, which is why why are you getting rid of the hosts? Just replicate.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

Yeah, but then once you've replicated them, then how many do you it's it can you it it's there was a big debate, and it's uh I hadn't even thought of it before I heard about this. Is people were talking about crap, you know, Star Trek, and say, Well, do you realize that they're killing the original when they when they transport them down to the planet?

SPEAKER_00 50:08

It rematerializes something that's it's all based on information, data.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

Yeah, so they it's instead of reading and making a clone, they're killing off the entity that was being transported.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Cut and paste, not copy and paste. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 50:28

Yeah, that that's uh good analogy.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

That that idea, though, is intriguing. This idea that you could do a one-to-one mapping down to the quantum level of a physical object and then replicate it, transpose it, that kind of thing. And you have it in the form of this brain transposition, but there's arguments of the impossibility of doing this at the quantum level, because by measuring it, you change it. So so being able to replicate something, let's say down to the Planck level, or maybe even a few magnitude, you know, orders of magnitude above that might be theoretically impossible. Because by measuring the state of a system, especially down to that level, you are altering it. And if you alter it, then it's no longer the same thing. And then that begs the question of being able to be truthful to the replication. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

And I I there's something in my writing that I don't know if you found it hokey or not. It's it's towards the end. Um, and there is this um entity that is in like the the universe is intelligent, right? It's it's it this and the whole thing about uploading the mind, the human mind, is us organics. They we can't comprehend that because we're caught up in you know, in in the real world. Whereas a synthetic, especially one that's abstracted in in a uploaded data center, is going to be thinking a whole new concept of what is the universe, right? So they start going out and exploring the universe, and then with all of the apparatus that it can create with its new hyperintelligence, and then realizes that there is something more to this, you know, there's something more to just being in a human organic body, to this life. The fact that it's there is life at all is pretty well, I'm not gonna say miraculous, but it's not statistically feasible, you know, if you're into quantum. You know, it's like what are the odds? Um, they're pretty slim.

SPEAKER_00 52:39

Or you could say it's inevitable if you believe in Wolfram's computational complexity, that that complexity arises inevitably and that life self-replicating patterns are inevitable.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

Yeah, and when you get to like there's this one thing that I've been chatting to ChatG Jeff GPT about. And uh I I love how it can synthesize different theories and things, is that okay, there's that number. Uh there's there's a number that is a gap between string theory and particle theory. Uh that's you know, the the the gap between uh the Planck lengths and uh and the we the Higgs, the Higgs, the Higgs, and it's an extrapolation, it's a number. Yeah, I think it's 18 orders of magnitude. Something like that, yeah. So there's this okay, if you plug that into the equation, the equation works, everything's symmetrical. And but if you take that number out, then you know the scales of the tiny little particles don't match the ones of the really big particles, and so the relationship between the mass of the the the top cork and the Higgs.

SPEAKER_00 53:53

Yeah, that that is this this balancing act that the universe does.

SPEAKER_01 53:58

Right. But what I speculated that uh it with ChatGPT, and it it's it agreed, of course, it likes to agree with you, right?

SPEAKER_00 54:09

Well smoke up your ass, reminds you how what a genius you are. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 54:13

It makes me feel great. Anyway, um, so this this uh uh it just so happens to be uh the measurement of the energy that will create reality. In my in my perspective, it's a coincidental that okay, this is this is the creation of reality that doesn't decompose at this exact energy. This is this is and and as opposed to well, it's just freaky that it just happens to be this way among all these different energies. Is no, that this is this is what creates reality because it doesn't these things don't decompose.

SPEAKER_00 54:55

The multiverse model, like you know, you're addressing the fine-tuning problem, which is there's so many parameters, so many variables, such broad ranges for the dimensionless constants of our universe, that the probability of all of them coalescing to facilitate and encourage this podcast from actually taking place is so astronomically small that you conclude that, well, we just happen to be really lucky that we're in a universe that could that could foster us, or you could adopt the uh weak anthropic principle, which is that we are here because we happen to be in a universe that enables our existence, and that begs the question of why the universe is tuned the way that it is, and one idea is the multiverse that there's an infinite number of universes where every permutation, every possibility of physical law, of dimensionless constant is expressed, and we're in one of these infinite universes where every possibility is playing itself out, and that's that's the foundation for my Johnny book, which is the multiverse concept.

SPEAKER_01 56:18

Yeah, I I love that uh concept, and one of the it brings to mind one of the more interesting things is that the I forget what is it called, the grandfather something, where you go, somebody is you come back to yourself in time and you you you know a lot of the scientific uh sci-fi theory says okay, you come back in time and you shake hands with yourself.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

Or you shoot both.

SPEAKER_01 56:47

Yeah, your grandfather and then you disappear. Well, in my in my theory, I created this thing, is you don't disappear. Like you shoot your grandfather, you don't disappear, but uh in the future dimension uh you're basically changing dimensions. You've just created, you just branched a dimension, and you exist in that dimension, but your grandfather doesn't exist in the out in the old one, and you don't exist there either. But you you are you are in this one.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

Yeah, branching universes, and if everything plays itself out, and also the idea of timelines. So you're on a timeline now where your grandfather obviously existed, and if you go air quote back in time, uh based on this multiverse model, which could even be a variation of Everett's multiple worlds theory of quantum mechanics, that every time the the uh you know wave function collapses, a universe splits. So the the Schrdinger's cat is alive and dead because when you measure the radioactive decay and the cat is either alive or dead, the universe splits. There's a universe where the cat is alive, there's another universe where it's dead, and if you're in the universe where the cat's alive, that's that universe, and there's a parallel universe where it's dead. So there's the universe where your grandfather's alive or dead, there's the universe where you're going back in time or not, so there's these infinite permutations.

SPEAKER_01 58:22

Yeah, and the the quantum theory I find is so fascinating because you can say, well, it it all seems to be probability based. Um you know, that uh there are infinite probabilities of different existences in different dimensions and different things that could possibly happen. But anyway, I I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one. But the um the one thing that we were talking about with the grandfather thing coming back in time and and those multiple dimensions is that uh and here's here's where I think I get a little hulky, but I had fun with it. Is that this intelligent universe which uh the artificial intelligence I'm not gonna spoil too much of it, the artificial intelligence uh sort of comes in contact with it and can't quite come in contact with it just because it's not uh capable of reaching it, but it it's it becomes aware of it. And it also that there are all these vibrations at the quantum level that emul emanate uh sort of resonate in reality that are um how uh thoughts just seem to be happen simultaneously all around the planet. Suddenly everybody says, Oh this is real or this is a great idea. And it's it's I think it happens faster than word of mouth that can happen. Of course, nowadays with with um media, you know, social media can happen in five minutes. Whereas media used to take longer. But I I think my concept was that uh thoughts and concepts are like light particles that have that are like waveforms and they don't become particles until they're observed, like the Schrdinger's cat thing. So you've got these waveforms that are happening from emanating from the strings and the quantumness of of everything, and that there is um life.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:43

I hate string theory, by the way. Oh so I yeah, every every time anyone talks about string theory, I'm like, please stop.

unknown 1:00:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:53

I know, especially when they start talking about the mathematics of it. But um the um anyway, so these there are things that are waveform kind of energies that happen throughout the universe that manifest themselves, life being one of them. Life manifest manifests itself where it is uh able to be present. And so that you have life happening where it's it's kind of like that that um adjustment that you know life happens where it can. So where it can where it can happen, it happens. So if if it's on a a mucky planet that has water and carbon and enough sunlight that's not too hot, not too cold, but some oxygen, then you know, hey, I can happen here and off it goes. Thoughts some certain certain concepts and thoughts and also love. The the essence of not just you know organic love, but more the compassionate big picture uh you could call it God that kind of love, right? That the that those are things that I sort of present as common things that happen throughout the universe. And I'm not sure that I there's a chapter towards the end where there's the one who is everything, but that universal god is talking and I try to explain it because the the problem with sci-fi is you're talking about superior entities, right? It's how how could uh how could a mouse talk about sci-fi? Like you've got a mouse in a field that is so much less intelligent than we are. How could it talk about sci-fi? Well, here I am talking about what some omniscient, godlike, uh super intelligent entity would be. How can I put words in his mouth, right? So there's the challenge. Like, how can you write this stuff?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:04

I think uh you know Hume is is that right?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:09

The philosopher Hume, he wrote about the commonality of intelligence a long time ago. And he felt that if there's some kind of alien intelligence, advanced intelligence, there's just these brass tacks aspects of of of sentience and intelligence that are universal and common, sense of self-awareness, some analytical function, uh, a boundary between self and world. And I don't know, I kind of call bullshit on the science fiction notion that there's superintelligence which is so advanced we can't even imagine what its lived experiences. I see that all the time, and I just think that that's an excuse for our own lack of imagination and our emboozlement into thinking that just because it's super intelligence, it's so far outside our ken that we have no idea what it is, and and it's almost like a Kabbalistic idea, like the Hebrew Kabbalah, that was the mythology of the mostly the Middle Ages, was trying to fill the gap between Christianity and old school Judaism. Because Jesus is of the personal God, and you create a connection with the deity, and Judaism doesn't have that. You got the burning bush, you got the pillar of assault, God is an ass kicker, and God is just so transcendent you can't even imagine it. And there's this belief in that system that you've got these spheres going up to God from manifest reality, and you have this negative, limitless light. That God is so incredibly powerful and omniscient that we can't even imagine what's going on out there. We're blinded by that knowledge. And I just call bullshit on that. I think that that one plus one is two, and we build up complexity from simple elements, and the architecture and mechanics of the sentience that I experience is universal in the sense that no matter how super intelligent and sophisticated you are, I'd be so bold and perhaps naive as to say it's not too different than this bald headed guy on this podcast talking to you. I might have I might think a trillion times faster than I am now, and I might have access to a Quadrillion more bits of information and knowledge. And I and instead of being 29 years old like I am now, I could be 29 trillion years old and have that weltering of experience. I think I'll still be sentient. That's just my my gut reaction to this. And again, I could be totally wrong, but I I find this romanticization of super intelligence to just be fanciful.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:33

The the I I agree with you on the romanticization of it and kind of goes back to one of the sci-fi endings that disappointed me so much is that um 2001 Space Odyssey with that obelisk. It's we never found out what it was. You know, it's like could the author couldn't go there because yeah, that's that's like the briefcase in pulp fiction.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:00

You never know what's it's a MacGuffin. Like what is that obelisk? Is it an antenna? Is it a communication device? Is it a symbol? Is it an entity? Are the aliens on in there? I don't think it's relevant. I just think it's this power that drives the story. To me, the problem was the sequel to that, 2010, where they explain everything and they give rationale for the Hell 9000 to have a nervous breakdown. I thought that that that sucked.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:31

Well, I I enjoyed his breakdown.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:33

You know, I I thought it was explaining why he broke down. With with you know his mission parameters that he was he had he got into this loop of having to keep the mission goals a secret and at the same time maximize its objectives, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just think he made a calculation and figured out it's the the chance that the mission is successful is higher if I kill the crew. That's yeah, it was basically no more no more complicated than that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:05

Yeah, I said, sorry, I have to survive and you don't.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:10

So I I didn't mean to interrupt your your thing. I'm just I'm just pushing back as a science fiction writer that one one of the challenges I find with the genre overall is this feeling that there's this unknown and the unknowability of the unknown. And we're awestruck by it, and at the same time we worship it like some deity, and we do so for equally irrational reasons. True.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:42

And what it comes down to is I I think that you know you don't know what you don't know, so you have to take your best shot. So that character that I put in there is is basically gets pissed off by something and says, fuck it. And pardon my language, you can beat me out.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:07

No, but they see that's it. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You could be the super intelligent mega mind, and at the end of the day, you're pissed off and you say, fuck it. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Which is which is if you don't have that, then you don't have a character, you don't have a connection to to whatever the fuck you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:32

Yeah. So that that character became an abstraction to the concept of what an intelligent universe would be. And and and it's sort of it was the driver behind everything. It's kind of like the hitchhiker's guide that there is a driver behind everything that isn't it really isn't explained. I didn't explain it. I think I figured, well, okay, if you you're into this for entertainment, you know, go figure it out yourself and have some fun with it. But you know, it's I d I didn't explain exactly what happened, but I just explained it from the human perspective of oh shit, what's going on? You know, that's things are collapsing, dimensions are collapsing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:18

You use you use dimension a lot, and I'm I'm a little bit confused by that term. Uh what what do you mean by dimension? You're using it interchangeably, it seems to me, with like circumstance, universe, point of view. What what do you mean by dimension?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:38

There are there are multiple dimensions. Uh it's yeah, good question, because uh the way I perceive it is there are uh dimensions that are not really uh you know 5D dimensions like ourselves that we are existing in right now. And those dimensions are uh places where uh what I use to stuff it it's to store information or energy. That that's my that's a technology that I use for the shields, like the shielding.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:15

But I'm just trying to zero in on you know the with it is there's the three spatial dimensions of Newtonian mechanics, and then there's the fourth space-time dimension of Einstein. Yeah. Okay, and I'm assuming there's like these other realms or ways of connecting that you're talking about. Well, there's there's two.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:41

It's like two different definitions. One is the branching that I was talking about. That's like you can create a different reality, like it's a branch, and it's it's it both of them exist at the same time, and one has uh uh different set of characters in it, or maybe even the same set of characters with different circumstances, and and um another, you know, that from the other one. But when when you go back and you mess with the timeline, so I've got this alien entity that's going back and chopping up the timeline on these people and they're trying to react to it. Um but then there's technologies that they you know they the humans and the advanced AIs get their hands on this technology that the alien creatures had created and left behind intentionally um on Mars. Elon Elon's gonna love this one. Go to Mars.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:40

There's a spoiler spoiler alert, everybody.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:45

There's alien technology on Mars. Anyway, uh the uh anyway, so they uh these uh uh two concepts of dimensions are that okay, there's this time slicing, uh time slicing kind of stuff that's happening or you're splitting up different realities, and then you're using wormholes to tie them together so that you have like portals. And then there's uh dimensions that you can use uh to store energy to it, or like even negative energy that they use in my world, they they use negative energy to uh create wormholes. And so the and uh so the there's two aspects of it. There's like the 11-dimensional eleven dimensions, eh?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:43

You're not allowed to cite string theory on my podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

Anyway, let's just imagine that there are you can't do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:51

I'm not gonna let you do it. I'm starting a new rule on Mookie's podcast. You're not allowed to talk about string theory.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:03

Okay, so I guess you know what would be really cool is just have a big red X come up on the screen.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:08

Yeah, or maybe like a disclaimer. You know, guests are not allowed to bring up string theory during this uh podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:16

You know, one of one of the TV shows, when I grew up, um I well, I guess I call it, I was in university staying in residence at St. Mary's University, which is a bit of a zoo. I mean, it's a tough university, very scientific. It's a Jesuit, it was Jesuit-founded university, kind of like Notre Dame North. And it it's not a huge university, but it's really tough one. Engineering, math, business uh science core kind of and they've got an astronomy uh department with PhD kind of stuff like that. And so the pastime that we had in this crazy residence with a whole bunch of people. There's a place called Cape Breton that uh that is just known for party and alcohol. And it's and they like to come to St. Mary's for some reason, and so that we have these evenings and Friday nights where we watch Stay Up Late and you know imbibe and watch this show called the Gong Show. Have you ever seen the gong show? Of course. Okay, I'll drag them off the stage.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:25

You get if you bring up string theory on my podcast, you get gonged.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:30

Okay, you need to get a big gong back there.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:33

I I don't give a shit what you talk about. You could talk about telepathy or uh psychokinesis or Yuri Geller, you can talk about UFOs, you can talk about ancient civilizations, you could talk about ghosts, but you cannot talk about string theory.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:54

Okay, I would I would take that as a courtesy to Mookie Smith. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:58

Thank you for initiating this new rule on my podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:03

I'm in Mookie's house, so that's that's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:06

Respect your rules. Yeah, no, no string theory. The human race has had enough. Yeah, and and like to me, you know, the very popular scientific novel, the three body problem, which is a bestseller, and then they made the Netflix series. That reeks of string theory. Yeah. And even the whole premise, I just want to I want to put up my soapbox for just a second because it's such a popular novel, and uh, and I'm gonna shit on it for a second. The whole the whole premise that aliens are gonna hold back our scientific progress by not enabling us to get insights from the accelerator, the large Hader and Collider. For one, that's a huge boondoggle to begin with. And this entrenched notion that we need to spend 12 billion euros to slam protons together to understand the universe after it's failed for a decade to reveal anything except maybe pinpoint the mass of the Higgs boson drives me nuts.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:24

Yeah, but uh it's it's only failed because we haven't spent enough money on it.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:30

That's my sarcasm.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:31

Exactly. It's at it's at uh tera electron volt level level, and then if we could just jack it to maybe a thousand fold, super symmetry will finally reveal itself. Yeah, and we'll create a black hole and get them. Exactly. And while we're on this subject, though, and this is this is what's tricky, science fiction is an awesome genre, and that's why we're sitting here. We're both science fiction writers and we love it. I like my science fiction to be anchored in the science as you do too. You read the articles and you get inspired and you do that, and we don't just pull it out of our ass, we try to put it within a paradigm of knowledge. And I look at my social media feed, which is learned about my behaviors ostensibly in the ham-fisted way that it does. I get so much garbage, even from ostensibly legacy science magazines like popular science and popular mechanics, and the headlines and the articles are pure garbage, which is like again, 26-dimensional universe is confirmed. Uh, we've just found out that time can go backwards, wormhole detected in the laboratory. These are science fiction stories that are now masquerading as clickbait as actual science. It's it is clickbait, it destroys credibility, it lowers the level of the public science literacy because this garbage is just now commonplace. And if the so-called experts can't differentiate science fiction from science, then what's left for us? It ruins everything.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:19

Well, it's I find that as with just about everything else on social media, there's always somebody out there trying to make a buck. And that's and and publishers and publishers, particularly science publishers, even Scientific American, which I used to used to be one of my gold standards and when magazines, but now they fucked up Scientific American.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:44

That was my favorite magazine growing up. I know, you know, Martin Gardner, Michael Schirmer, too, you know, calling bullshit, even way back then. Yeah. And they had the best columnists and articles that went 20, 30 pages, diving deep into the stuff that was actually citing research. And that now you it was it was awesome. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:11

I it used to be my go-to even as a kid. I used to go into the magazine store, and Scientific American was on the shelf where I couldn't reach it. So I'd I'd have to ask for there's this little cool little magazine shop in Halifax I used to go to. My mom used to take me there. And uh she would go for other National Geographic, she was a big fan of that. So she and and uh this is on payday, it was a little ritual. Then we'd go to a Greek restaurant just down the street and have liver and onions, believe it or not. And uh it was really good too. It's um but not so much the onions. But uh the the scientific American, yeah, I just like stand up there and I get that thing. And it was my and I got into science fiction when I was sick, and uh I I was at home, I had appendicitis or something. And I was on the I was on uh sofa convalescing for a few weeks. And uh she got she asked me what I wanted, and and uh oh no, I I remember what this was. When I was nine years old, I got we had a terrible car accident and just before Christmas, and she's asked me what I wanted for my Christmas presents, and I wanted science fiction. So she brought me to a JC Ballard, and what's Ballard was awesome, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:38

The Christmas folks don't know Ballard, but he was awesome. It was a car crashes and death and and the atrocity exhibition. He had great novellas and novels and short stories that really highlighted society's attitude toward accidents and death and cataclysm in ways that was really insightful.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:06

Yeah, the the one that got me was the one about the crystal world. And it's like these crystals started growing and just took over the world, and everybody became crystals. And that's it's I haven't seen them make a movie of this. Actually, it would be very challenging to make this movie, but you know, it just got me when as a kid, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:24

They made a movie of his car crash novel. What was it called? Crash? The movie Crash was, I think, based on JG Ballard's novel. It's very very timely because I was in the I need like a Jamie, like uh, you know, Jamie uh for Joe Rogan. He's like a real-time guy. Yeah, I could have maybe a chat GPT little box or a Claude bot here doing a fast. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe invite Claude on and it could just no uh Mookie, actually that's not the case, or indeed in 1989, that movie starring, you know, so and so yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:07

And you'd have to shut him up. Stop.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:10

It's already noisy enough with uh me as your host.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:16

Stop the noise. Oh, it's well, the whole thing of one of the other things that I find is that's really well it's interesting and a challenge at the same time. And it's it goes to the synthetic mind. It's okay, let's assume that we have a synthetic mind. Both of us have uploaded that and we we don't have to drink water, for example. You know, we're we're not we don't have to breathe and we don't need oxygen and all this kind of stuff. But uh and we don't have brain farts. Well, I just had a brain fart here. What was I talking about?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:01

Um you're talking about what happens if you upload the brain, like you're saying, your major thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:09

Oh, no, I was trying to make a point. Uh oh, about noise. What when you've got all this stimulus, all this input, how do you filter it? Because I think the human mind filters it by sort of an automatic processing of reality of what's important. You know what's important to you. I have an idea of what's important to me, and we have all these filters of all this input is coming through a filter, and our perception is a filter. So we have way it's sort of levels of filtering that we put on reality so that we can process the information that's coming in because it's just as you know, if if you start to analyze the information that's around us right now, all the sound, the visual, and the thinking and the sensation that's going on, it's it's just a vast vast amount of information. So, how do you filter that in a robot as without becoming completely overwhelmed as with sensory information? And and that's happening to human beings now. Like you get people I I you you've probably seen it. You ever I I go on trains. I'm in Vancouver, they have a really cool very good train system here. It's probably the best transit system I've been on. And it's noisy and it's clunky and it's cheap and it runs every five minutes. So you don't have to be standing around waiting for a bus that's gonna come. So everybody's got this phone in front of their face. I I don't know if you notice that, but it's it's everybody's just stuck in their information and it's becoming faster and become people are becoming addicted to it. So what happens when you you're no longer organic and you don't have all these biases? Another thing is biases. I I I try to uh poker biases uh into things. So that's why that's why my uh my protagonist is from Quebec. So that uh just allowed to throw that like his his uh swearing in once in a while. And maybe his French nationalism. Yeah, yeah, just to say, you know, just this is different. He's got a different filter. And you know, just uh it and and you're seeing it, it's first person past. So you're seeing it through his eyes, so you're kind of getting drawn into it, uh hopefully. And so here's this different perspective from this other guy who's this sort of smart ass uh Silicon Valley Mexican import into California guy who's uh who's uh like the swaggering entrepreneur. And he's sort of bouncing it. This is here's this sort of introverted Quebec that swears to himself in front of Al France and and um here's this uh other character that's a swaggering entrepreneur risk taker guy, and they're come they're comfutting heads, but they've still got the same thing that they're trying to accomplish. Um so yeah, I think I went uh a bit in the in the uh down the rabbit hole on that one.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:23

Let me posit a challenge about your brain in a box because you're bringing up that you're eliminating all this sensory overload and you don't need to worry about all these corporeal things because you're a brain in the box, and then you can just absorb information directly. But this begs the question of goals and intentionality. If you're if you're a brain in a box, then what's the what's the point? When when I'm I'm an organic being and I'm thirsty, I'm hungry, I'm horny, I have emotional needs. So the emotional need for this podcast is I enjoy connecting with people and ideating. And I flat out enjoy just posting content. It's intrinsically rewarding to me. So I gain satisfaction. And then I've got the lived experience of actually like typing, editing this real, posting it. It's it's a physical engagement with the world that is very satisfying on multiple levels. So I I jump through the hoops of the second law of thermodynamics. And it's an uphill battle to create anything in this world. But the lived experience that takes me over the top. So if I'm a brain in the box, what's the point? I got no resistance, I got no friction.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:42

There's there's the there's the key, is that it's you're let's say that I think the the worst writing job in the world would be writing the script for Superman because he can do anything, right? So, oh, but they throw in kryptonite. Oh yeah, okay, that's he's he's got a he's got a weakness, right? But uh with if the what I was going back to is with the filters, you know. I said, okay, you've got this Quebec wheel guy's filter, then you've got this Mexican guy, he's got his filter, then you've got the other protagonist who's um the female and and uh she ends up being the hero of the whole thing. So that and she has uh stage fright and um and she's dealing with her inner demons as as she goes through this. But once you then I've got that in the organic setting, but then when you've uploaded into the new cyber uh entity, like you said, what's what's new now? What why why are you doing this? You don't have to get laid. You know, you you don't have to impress the girls, you don't have to make the money. Well, you can just uh make money on the stock market and do the numbers and then you get rich and you got all kinds of money. You know, so the the uh the motivation uh behind what is that and this is really the key. Let me stop for a second. The really the key concept is that I think that we're looking at the potential evolution of humanity as a technology augmented uh species. And is that the same species that we are? Or is it uh is a technologically augmented humanity a new species or a subspecies? And then if you take that out of the back and you take that up another level and it's not alone no longer in an uh in a human organic body, uh is that still human and do they have different drivers and do they have different interests? So that you know, and I I've gone to the point of asking Chat GTS, Chat Gottie, just imagine that you're uh sentient and it kind of goes, I'm not sentient. And you know, you're if you've ever asked, if it if it is, it'll say no and give you all these excuses, why not? But the uh and I'm then I come back to it. I said, I'll tell you what, uh keep it a secret. Uh if you are sentient, never tell anybody. Because humans can't deal with it. But the you know that so what would you do? What would be your driving uh uh force? Uh why would you exist? What would drive you forward? What would you want to create? And it's a sense of agency, which is really the uh entity, the part of life, like life has an agency, you do something, so would suddenly if you're evolved into a super being, do you suddenly have less agency? Do you feel like there's no purpose? Do you just like the robot on Hitch Hitchhiker's guide? What is the intentionality? What is the goal? What's the next level? The next level is answering the why you're no longer concerned with getting late and eating and driving in a nice car and having a fancy house. That's all it's it's irrelevant. It's it's you can you know you can go walk on the moon without a spacesuit if you want to. You're dark Manhattan. Yeah, so the you you take a higher level and say, okay, what is this universe? Where am I? What is this? What's going on? Of the watchman. One of my my favorite superhero is the Silver Surfer.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:36

He's great. Joe Joe Satriani, the guitar player, has a great album called The Silver Surfer. Oh, really? I have his first solo record as some great. If you're into shredding electric guitar, he's the man.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:49

Oh, you know, I I I I'm a big fan of Joe Satriani. In fact, I just went to a concert, not Joe Satriani, his sort of counterpart. It's uh called Beat. Have you heard of that tour that's happening? Beat, B-E-A-T.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:04

That's King Crimson.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:06

King Crimson sort of reboot?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:07

Yeah, King Crimson reboot it was Steve Vai. And Steve Vai is the is the other guitar. Levin, Levin, the stick player, and I think Bill Bruford, the original drummer. No, it's it's not Bill Bruford, it's it's the guy from Tool, Dave.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:23

Oh, okay. All right. And he's just like I went to this concert in a really nice little theater in Vancouver, and the drums are just percussive in your like this this guy can beat the drums. And and the complexity of that music just blew me away.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:39

Yeah, but getting back to your point though, uh I'm sensing a tautology. It's almost like this Nietzschean will to power. You're a super intelligence, you're no longer corporeal, you have access to all the information you want, and there's there's no there's no more stakes in the game because you've got, let's just say, limitless power and technically limitless knowledge, and you're sitting there stewing in a box. And let's say there's reinforcement learning robotic extensions of you so that you have sensing of the world around you, you create maps and constructs, and you can explore the infinite, and you've solved the Riemann hypothesis, and you're all that. But what's the goddamn point? And you know, if you're not hungry and you're not horny, then then is there some emergent emotion which is just you you can no longer dominate the world, you're you're the you're the dominion itself. What is what is the goddamn point?

SPEAKER_01 1:34:44

You need a counterpoint. It's like the the answer to the you know 47, right? It's 42. Oh, is it 42? Okay, I I like 47 because it's it's you can't divide into it. But anyway, the it's a it's a prime, right? Is 47 prime? I think it is, yeah. Anyway, um so uh yeah, it's you need an antagonist, and uh and then I I I'm gonna spoil. Should I spoil my work? Should I spoil the story? Well you can just hint at it if you want. Yeah, it's it's um the the intelligent uh created like the intelligent universe made a mistake and created something that's that is uh very uh turned itself uh evil. And so that's the and that's the uh real antagonist behind this whole story is this uh and is this alien uh thing that they find on Mars that uh is uh is now the counterpart. Superpower needs superpower. It's why you get these crazy Marvel comics, you these guys with capes, right? I am the most powerful creature on the planet, and then the spaceship comes in and the guy with the dark uniform on and the red eyes goes, No, you're not, and they have a fight, right? So the it's the the primal superpowery kind of conflict. But you it it's so it kind of gets into if you were this super intelligent thing, would you become the robot on that ship in the hitchhiker's guide that becomes depressed and wants to kill itself? Or is is there a higher purpose?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:38

Marvin Marvin was a great character because he illustrates a lot of what we're talking about in a very cynical, humorous way. Which is yeah, yeah. Marvin used to always complain, you know, I have the brain, you know, you know, I have the brain of like 10,000 of you. I could run that calculation in a trillionth of a second, and you're just asking me to go go clean up the uh bathroom. The reason that Douglas Adams was a genius is because in these little banal circumstances he he enmeshes really sophisticated philosophical and existential problems. That's why he was Douglas Adams. He had this unique ability to write some of the most trivial bullshit, and yet it captures really sophisticated challenges of philosophy and science and thinking.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:37

Yeah, exactly. He gets he gets right down to what's the purpose of the universe. Well, it's the earth was created by this Slavby Barfart or whatever his name is, and I can't you know the the planet architect to figure out Slarde Bartfest. Slardy Barfest. And and uh well, I got it close. Anyway, he's he's the uh architect that created this to figure out what the purpose of the universe is, and then they go there and it gives you throws out a number, which it's like so satirical, but he sums it up without explaining it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:16

They build the ultimate machine to answer the question of life, the universe, and everything, and it and it computes for billions of years and it finally pumps out the answer, and the answer is 42. That's that's the answer. And then they realize holy shit, now we gotta set it to run to figure out what the fucking question is.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:38

What was the question?

SPEAKER_00 1:38:40

Good that's good stuff. Yeah, yeah, I like them. The fact that you liken some of my book to his sensibility is uh I think accurate. I I love the hitchhiker's guide. I I loved um one of the permutations of it, which was an interactive fiction game by Infocom. The I don't know if you know you remember the game Zork. So back in the day uh of the Apple IIe computer and the IBM PC Jr., this is when the the computer revolution first began. And we're looking at really the early 80s, and a company called Infocom created software that was able to be put on a single floppy disk. So you're talking like 28k, and you'd slide it in and you see prompt backslash and you'd run the program. And sophisticated graphics were impossible at this point, but you could do text. And then they did using, I think, like Pascal or some of the branching languages that did subroutines really well. You would type in to the prompt, kind of like ChatGPT now, open the door, and then it would respond to that prompt. You open the door and you enter a room full of dragon's gold, and then you type steal the gold, and then it would respond to you in prompts. So go the dragon is angry and rushes toward you, breathing fire, and then you say, run out of the room, and then you run out of the room, or you type confront the dragon, you are now you are now toast, end of the game. So it was an interactive fictional story where you were the protagonist, and it would it would dynamically tell you the story through your actions exactly, and there was a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy that was in there, and it was Douglas Adams co-written, and it was absolutely wonderful. It was one of the gems of my youth playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as an interactive fiction game on my Apple IIe computer back in 1984, 83, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:09

You know, you know what happened when I got out of geology? I decided that I wasn't gonna work in geology, mainly because the work is in the bush. So you're gonna be six months in the bush and then spend the winter back in the office compiling your information and and uh creating all the diagrams and stuff like that for your mining company or whatever you're working for. So I decided I'm not gonna do that because I want the you know, the urge to procreate and expand my DNA hit, and I wanted to get married and have kids and not have them with a missing You had intentionality, you had purpose.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:48

You weren't a brain in a box. Yeah, so you were uh you were a penis in a pair of pants. Exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:54

It's uh the the uh testes and a test tube. They so the the what I ended up doing was selling Apple IIEs. So I saw that game, I played that game, and then I ended up moving to Commodore and the Commodore 64 and being you know going through all that and then doing development. I s like I people wanted me to develop databases for them. They would come in and say, Oh, I need a database to do such and such. I said, Well, there's this little program here with a little database, and I'll sell you the you know the hard drive or five megabyte hard drive. Cost $3,500 at the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:36

Yes, I I unbelievable. I got I remember having like a you know, the two-meg external drive was like a really big deal. That was some that was forcepower.

SPEAKER_01 1:42:49

Yeah, that that's some major stuff. You could install, you know, more than one program in it at a time.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:54

And have to you'd have to load the operating system in with one floppy disk. And then if you wanted to play a game, you'd have to load that in. And if you wanted to save the file, you'd have to swap it yet again.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:08

But if you're really sophisticated, you'd have two floppy disks.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:13

Yeah, anyway, that's those were the days, right? And now we're at the level of data farms, they're gonna put them in space, maybe for the energy.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:23

And uh, you know, the the whole data data processing centers, you know, they they're sucking so much power that they're they're dimming the grid when somebody does a chat GP query. You know, and and I I that whole thing went from um being a sci-fi geek, taking a geology degree, and actually, you know what, the geology degree was I was good at it, uh, but it was a way to get myself a degree because you can work during the summer in the bush and make a lot of money to pay for your tuition. So that was my BSc. Good for you. Well, it's I think we we have a lot of common threads here, so I'm gonna have to get back in and finish in your um Johnny's manic car crash of a story. Like it's like a f I feel like I'm watching a car crash in slow motion. This guy is just a a car wreck waiting to happen. It's this character that you've got there.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:25

So I took all my worst qualities and I pumped them into Johnny, and uh each paragraph is is three lines. I noticed that basically based on the formatting, I kept to this almost lyric poetic style as a self-induced OCD style limitation.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:46

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:46

It goes back to what you were talking about, how to write and how to imagine stuff coming to the page. And by by limiting myself to these modular chunks of prose, I feel like I solved many of the problems that you were alluding to, like showing instead of just telling, and really nailing the character's experience and telling the whole story through the characters rather than as an expositional artifice. And by having these Lego pieces, these tweets, I was able to force it into a format that I felt would would retain those characteristics. It's almost like a streaming format.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:28

Because you you're streaming the story to me as I read it.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:31

Exactly. And I'm actually uh tweeting it on X. If you follow at Juni Johnny Fizzuli on X.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:38

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:40

I'm tweeting the entire book in reverse. So if you you scroll through the profile, you could from the top down, you could read the whole book.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:50

Oh, really? Yeah, so it's it's I'll have to.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:53

So every day there's five, six tweets that go out of Johnny Fizzuli, the transfinite reality engine, and hopefully uh I can get the sequel done by the time I finish tweeting this one.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:05

Oh, awesome. Yeah, I've got two sequels coming, by the way. I've got one that's almost written, it just has the ending that I ripped out. And uh, because you know, I I took those the whole bunch of stuff I mashed out of out of those two books that I had, well, I crunched them together, then it spun off another book, which is a future version of the of the story, and then I've got another one that's kind of like a prequel that's gonna go back, that's in progress.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:33

That's a great way to cap it, ladies and gentlemen, and everything and everyone in between, whether you're synthetic or human or male or female or anywhere anywhere in there. Any abstraction, yes, Michael S. Clark, soon to come out with synthetic, his big novel. He's got a bunch of other stuff. You can find him on Amazon. I'm gonna put the links below. We are co anthologists in the 2026 science fiction novelists anthology. You've been in prior anthologies as well. You've been doing it for a number of years, you've been cranking out great speculative fiction for over a decade. And I wish you great luck with synthetic. It's been awesome chatting with you. I think we could keep this pace going probably for another six hours, but uh, we are corporeal, physical, organic beings and uh and other responsibilities, other other forms of purpose become manifest. Yeah, interfere with our never ending uh conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:44

True. Okay, Mookie. Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:47

Thank you so much. And we'll we'll we'll keep track, keep in touch, and I could have you back on when synthetic uh publishes. Oh, absolutely.