Michael A. Clement Morphs from Auditor to Architect of Alien Daydreams

In this episode of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, Mookie sits down with Michael A. Clement, a former finance professional turned speculative fiction writer, to trace the unlikely path from spreadsheets to stories, and why it worked.

Clement didn’t come up through the usual writer pipeline. No MFA. No lifelong literary obsession. Just a late-life pivot sparked by a single idea: what if a machine chose not to obey? From there, things escalated into asteroid-mining AI blackmailers, homicidal appliances, buffoonish aliens, and deeply human stories about loss, memory, and moral consequence.

Mookie and Michael dig into: 

• The moment creativity ignites—and why it sometimes waits decades
• How classic influences like The Twilight Zone shaped Clement’s moral, allegorical style
• Writing as a second-act reinvention, not a lifelong identity
• The power of speculative fiction to tackle real-world issues without triggering defenses
• Microfiction, AI-assisted storytelling, and the strange new tools reshaping creativity
• The uncomfortable truth about publishing: slush piles, gatekeepers, and a system begging to be disrupted by AI helping creators connect to consumers

They also dive the looming collision between human creators and AI—where convenience, creativity, and obsolescence start to blur. Is AI a tool, a collaborator, or the thing that replaces you? Michael's answer is pragmatic: create anyway, write anyway, and leave something behind.

The Guest

Michael was raised in San Diego, California. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern California and a Master of Business Administration from the University of San Francisco. Most of his career was spent in financial services. Since 2006, Michael has made Hong Kong his home. Now retired, he writes science fiction as a hobby. Michael has written seven books: five novellas: Khrysos, This Book Is A Murderer, Chasing Roswell, Pan-ego, and Zogtopia (which have been combined into a collection, Alien Journey Ahead); one collection of short stories, Cosmic Portal, and one novelette, Alien Daydreams (his latest book).

His Writing

https://www.facebook.com/Michael.A.Clement.Books

http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelaclement

http://www.amazon.com/author/author_khrysos_book

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello, and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm your host, Spooky Smith, and I'm delighted to have Michael A. Clement, science fiction writer, American expat living in Hong Kong on the factory floor today. Welcome, Michael. Welcome. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate your time. And together we can celebrate both of us being part of the 2026 Science Fiction Novelists Anthology put together by S.A. Gibson. You've been in the anthology for a couple couple years already.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Yeah, this is my uh my my uh a third one. And uh I've got them over here. My uh I've ordered the third one. It's uh probably on some UPS plane right now in Anchorage or something on its way to Hong Kong, but it should arrive in a couple days. So looking forward to uh flipping through it and being able to peruse some of the other stories.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

You can't exactly get Amazon Prime in Hong Kong.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Well, to have anything shipped here is very expensive, as you as you can imagine. So uh I kind of waited. I wanted to bundle some other books, so I've ordered some other stuff in this particular order uh to try to save on the postage, but it's it's not uncommon for the it costs the postage is more than the books. That's it's expensive, but it is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Thank you for making time. How many hours difference? I'm in I'm in Orange County, California.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Yeah, so we're we're 15 hours ahead. So yeah, so it's nine o'clock at night here. Yeah, yeah, we're 12 exactly 12 hours ahead of New York. So you're in Orange County. I actually grew up in San Diego.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I noticed that in your bio, not far from me. My nieces live down there now. I was just there over the weekend in lovely San San Diego. It's a great, it's a great town, except the weather is just terrible in San Diego. It's boring. It's boring.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

It's like 73 degrees and sunny, like 10 months out of the year.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

I say terrible with uh a certain measure of facetiousness. I I just moved from New York City. I was born in Chicago, so we're accustomed to uh just disastrous meteorology. And uh it's I have to say it's luxurious here in Southern California, especially by comparison.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah, I grew up in there, and then I went to um undergrad at the University of Southern California. And then I worked in um actually as an auditor, was uh accounting was my major. Then I worked as an auditor at Union Bank and Occidental Petroleum before moving up to um did that for five years and moved up to uh San Francisco to go to the University of San Francisco to get my um my MBA. Then I went to work for Charles Schwab and I worked there for an audit, and I finally got an international group and I was involved and opened up the office here in the late 90s here in Hong Kong, and that's how I got introduced to Hong Kong, and then I moved to Hong Kong at the end of 2006. So I've been here almost 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

A financial brain. You're you're analytical. I can appreciate it. Uh, today is tax day, April 15th in the States. So that is not on my top list of skills, which is uh which is the discipline of making sure the spreadsheet lines up. But I have to file it. You've had a good career, and now you are retired in in Hong Kong and you've dedicated at least part of your time to science fiction, speculative fiction. How did that how did that flip happen from making sure the books are balanced? You've been doing a great job of that, to uh aliens, alternate parallel realities, uh 2017.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

I kind of I retired, even though in 2018 I did do some uh a project for a bank. But basically in 2017 I retired and I woke up one day and said, I have nothing to do today. Oh so that day I actually read a story in the newspaper about the Cassini probe going around Saturn. And I read an article, and JPL sent Cassini a message for it to go into Saturn's atmosphere to burn up because it because its uh nuclear whatever uh engine was running out of fuel or whatever, and they didn't they didn't want to worry about, they were worried about panspermia. They didn't want it to uh the bugs on the probe to infect the moons around Saturn. And I said to myself, well, what if Cassini sent a message back to JPL saying, I'm not gonna commit suicide, I'm just gonna hang around up here with Major Tom and have a beer and enjoy the rings of Saturn? I thought I'm gonna go look for some sirens of Titan. Then I said, Okay, that can make kind of an interesting story. Well, don't I just write a story? So I sat down and actually I it I expanded it. I actually wrote a story about a uh uh asteroid mining was kind of in the news at the time. So I wrote a story about a uh an um a probe going up to mine an asteroid for gold, and it kind of blackmails the people, the gold mine on uh on Earth because it won't deliver the gold until it gets it wants a partner because it's bored and it's lonely up there in space. So I wrote this the story called um Chrysos. Chrysos is the is Zeus's god uh Zeus's son of uh son of Zeus who's supposed to be the son of gold from whatever Greek or or Roman mythology. So uh that's how I came up with the title. And then I wrote that. I kind of jumped into the deep end of the swimming pool because that was a big thing to bite off the right of basically a novella. Um so I found an editor here who was uh another American who had a PhD in um English Lit. So he was my first um editor, gave me lots of feedback. Another friend of mine gave me a book on writing. So then, so I kind of like started writing just by doing it, just jumping in and just starting to write. I came up with other ideas, wrote another book about a book that kills its readers, um, another one about buffoonish aliens that these from planet Zog, these big kind of spherical aliens that bounce around and do all kinds of funny stuff on Earth and all kinds of stuff. And so I then I started to write um shorter stories. And then I kind of came across uh about three or four years ago, I came across um um on Facebook the um science fiction novelist group and joined that. And then um I saw they had a uh posting for their anthology, and I sent them two stories in my uh in their first anthology. One was about a um robotic vacuum cleaner that goes crazy and tries to get revenge on its owners, all have everything blow up, blow up on its uh uh backfire, I should say, at the end of the story. And another one about robots that um um want to become human, try to become human, but it's it's kind of a complicated story. But and then the second one was about um a guy who gets a birthday card from his grandfather and uh 50 some odd years later, after his grandfather has passed away. And this his grandfather was like the astrophysicist. It's all about following your dreams and how he wanted to be an astronaut but never got to go to Mars. And you know, he he gets he gets this letter like half a century of a birthday card half a century later from his father, which kind of leads him on a leads him on a on a journey. And then the last one, which you've you said you've uh read, was kind of an environmental piece about these aliens that kind of live just outside of our ability to see them here on Earth, and they they become extinct by actions that humans have done to them. Another one about a home homeless Martian. So a lot of my stories have kind of a moral underpinning to them. Uh obviously, the the the Martian one is about homelessness and about how it could happen to you, and then the other one obviously is an environmental piece. So yeah, so I've been busy doing that, and then I just got done doing um this a couple days ago. I uploaded another book to uh Amazon where I um combine a whole bunch of my short stories with uh artwork created by AI. So I pair them off. It's only going to be in print because you have to be able to see the stories paired off with the uh AI uh images. We can talk more about that um later on in the in the program. But uh that was my first real introduction to using. I mean, the text is all mine. I didn't uh except for the back cover, um, the text is all my own original work. But working with various AI programs to try to get these images to line up with the stories was kind of an interesting learning experience, which we can talk about more later. So uh yeah, that's it. So I do that. Um in addition, we we do a bit of traveling around Asia. We just got back from a road trip around New Zealand for three weeks. So a little bit of traveling and uh a lot of writing, and also the writing has also expanded my own social network here. I'm also um co-chair of the art creativity and arts committee for the American Chamber of Commerce here. So we're trying to set up various uh programs throughout all of the art in general, everything from we did uh the thing at the ballet last year and with the symphony and stuff like that. Um and then um I'm also a member of the um Hong Kong Writer's Circle. It's a group of writers that meet once that has various programs here in Hong Kong. Member of that, I managed their uh Amazon account. Um so so busy with that. So the writing has kind of led to not not only being able to produce written material and exploring things like AI and stuff, but also has led to me being involved in various organizations here as well. So it's been uh it's turned out to have been beneficial to me on several different levels.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

That's a delightful later life trajectory. I've spoken to a lot of writers and they come at writing, writing speculative and science fiction from many different angles and at different stages in their life. One common theme is that everyone I talked to had this writer's bug. You go I wrote a story when I was seven, and I used to make my brothers and sisters laugh, and I had to get a day job, and I knew all along I wanted to be a writer, and others have just been writing literally the whole time through thick and thin. And it sounds like Cassini burning up in Saturn's atmosphere triggered a whimsical, ironic, very human, allegorical style story, which seems to be common themes through a lot of your writing. Uh, did it just really pop then, or have you had this creative spark lurking behind all the spreadsheets and the business strategy meetings that you've also obviously been very successful at?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Well, I've always had a rather uh throughout my entire life quite an imagination um of stuff, rather telling jokes and uh and stuff like that. I never actually growing up, I didn't actually I didn't like reading. I actually um didn't read uh read a lot. I was more of a math person. I liked um in fact I was going to become a chemist, but I had this high school chemistry teacher that wasn't very good, and I got kind of turned off to it, but I always kind of liked business. My father was a businessman, he built houses. So I used to read his Wall Street Journal when I was a teenager and stuff like that. So I always had, you know, um, so I kind of went the business route. I could have easily been a chemist. I didn't really like reading. What actually got me turned on to reading was actually science fiction when I was in seventh grade. At that time in California, I think it's different now. You you had one, it was like elementary school actually went through sixth grade, and then you started um middle school or junior high, in which case you had different subjects and stuff and not one teacher all day. And on my first day, English class, I got pulled out by the assistant principal and put into this special class, and there was like 12 of us. No, 12 boys and three girls, I think it was, which was kind of a small class. And the teacher there, Mrs. Olsen, still remember her name to this day. I um she actually passed away a few years ago. I actually looked her up, and fortunately she had passed away several years ago. And then um she asked us all these questions about what we like to do. Okay, and we asked her all these questions. And then the next day, or next the next class, um, she had all these um books on this desk, and there were science fiction screenplays and short stories. She had gone down to the the the education department in downtown San Diego and gotten the this this special the special book. So she she goes, You guys all told me you like Star Trek and Twilight Zone and all that stuff, so you have no excuse not to read because you told me you like science fiction. So she passed out all these books, and we the first thing we read was a Twilight Zone screenplay where we played different roles. She signed, you know, to just a couple uh actress, and and that's how, oh, this is kind of cool. And we we because I had seen, you know, there were you know some of the the shows. So and then my mother, I think that same year, got me a collection of uh a book, a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury, which I thought were kind of cool. So then that's kind of got me started on the reading, was because of a teacher that was smart enough to knew, okay, I'm gonna have these students read because for some reason I got pulled into this class. So somebody somewhere said, okay, Michael's got the smarts, he can, you know, let's be doesn't like to read, so let's put him into a class where Mrs. Olsen's class, and sure enough, uh we uh at the end we were reading Romeo and Juliet, I think was the last thing we read, and Homer's The Odyssey, and she had us made maps of the Mediterranean and stuff like that. She was a really good teacher, so she we expanded beyond science fiction as the class went on. But that was a good example of how I had one teacher kind of like put me, got me into reading, which then paid off many years later. Obviously, reading is an important skill, skill to have to be good at reading. Then I had a chemistry teacher later who turned me off to chemistry. So it's kind of interesting how teachers can play a big role in where you where you where you go in life. So um, but I always had kind of an imagination, and I always kind of liked you know the science fiction stuff and thinking about different worlds. And you know, we watched, you know, basically back in the late 60s, early 70s. So we were watching, you know, Star Trek and all the I remember when Star Wars came out and going and seeing that with my parents and stuff like that. So um and the rest is history, as they say.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

The memories are vivid, and you recall them like yesterday, so obviously it made an impact. So to a certain extent, it reinforces this idea that there was uh there was the spark that was that was firing really from the beginning, and then time and circumstance allowed it to really ignite and uh fuel your current output. And stylistically, you mentioned Star Trek. Uh, I remember on TV watching reruns of Lost in Space with Dr. Smith and their adventures. There's a whimsical, humorous, often cynical quality that went with a lot of classic science fiction. He had the trouble with tribles, and you had Dr. Smith's antics. And I sense some of that in your writing too, where these little quirky tidbits manifest, you take regular folks and you put them in a suddenly weird kind of situation to play it out. How how did some of those influences translate into your into your I have some of that I didn't cut you off?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

I'd uh some of that uh as well. I remember the the gurgle, the the the Star Trek one with those, you know, the little fuzzy little like gremlins or whatever they're called. Uh gurgles, tribbles, tribbles. Yes. But remember, Star Trek also dealt with social issues. There was the one episode where the two twin brothers were fighting, and it was uh uh it was had to do with racism because they had one, they had faces that were one was black on the left side and white on the right, and the other one was the mirror image. That's why they fought because well, his face is black on the left and not the right, and that you know, it was a you know, you got to think about when it was done. It was that was probably done in 66, 67, and you know, the civil rights was going on. So that's one of the things I think about science fiction. So genre that allows you to deal with moral issues, ethical issues in a way that, back of a lack of a better word, the reader doesn't feel threatened. It's kind of like, oh, you know, they're Martians. I know it's about racism, but they're like these aliens, and there's Kirk and Spock and Dr. Bones, and you know, there's these crazy aliens that, you know, everybody knows what it's about. Everybody knows what the message is, but it's kind of done in a way that, okay, you know, the audience can like, you know, not get uptight about it. And and we had Ray Um was it Gene Roddenberry and all the writers could get a certain message across to that. Twilight Zone did a lot of shows about stuff like that. There was one I remember about um, and that was done like in 60 or 61. There was one done about a um the CEO replacing uh employees with robots, and that's so like, and then at the end of the story, he gets re the CEO gets replaced by a robot. Um and then uh so that kind of you know, some of my stories, I sit back at the end of them, some of my short stories I sit back at the end of them and go, you know, I could just see Rod Strilling with, you know, at the end with his cigarette, you know, and saying, you know, for your consideration, you know, I, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, you know, of such and such a character. So there's a bit of Twilight Zone was a big influence, I think, on my right. I just I just love the way he and his this right he um uh um Rod Sterling and his writers put put those shows to uh together. And they were so simple. The the the they weren't overly complicated, they were just simple, black, mostly black and white, I think probably all black and white, you know, good acting and and simple um uh television shows that had very important messages. So it was kind of revolutionary for his time when you think about it. So those have had an impact uh as uh as well over time. So and a lot of things. It's just you know, a lot a lot of things do. It's just like I said, it's your life experiences. It's uh also I think one thing that impacts me is I I don't live in the United States. I haven't lived in the United States in 20 years. So actually being an expat and living in Asia and seeing the world from that point of view, that cultural point of view as well, and then coming back, you know, and and how people see the world, what's important, what's I'm working on a story now about a Martian right around Hong Kong. And I did a uh a lot of cultural aspects about how he kind of looks at things, and you know, and I have a section in there about how they came up with the Chinese zodiac of the 12 characters for the Chinese New Year. So it's actually a uh a story behind that, which is kind of interesting. So, you know, and and about the temples here and about you know a different way of of looking at the world. So that all kind of I think helps give me a rural, I don't want to say rur rurally view, that's too uh cliche, but it gives you a it kind of opens you up your mind, and then you start thinking of things in in much bigger context and and stuff. So I think that helps too. I recommend to any American, you know, if you if you can get an assignment overseas, even if it's for a few years, definitely take advantage of it because it does give you a different point of view of the of the world.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

Americans, it's a cliche, but many cliches are true stereotypes. We we tend to be all the way across the ocean, so isolated and uh ignorant of other cultures, and uh and we just stealing our own stuff. So your change in perspective is refreshing to yourself, and it translates into a shifting point of view, which is part of your themes. How has Hong Kong changed over 20 years that you've been there? It's been, I think, significant. I mean, there was major upheaval at one point, it was contentious. Now it's off the headlines, it's reached its own equilibrium.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Yeah, I don't want to get too much into the politics, especially what's going on here in between the United States and China. Just I I mean the city is COVID really it COVID really hit the city hard. They had quarantines and stuff like that. It wasn't like in um in the United States. So um in fact several parts of Asia are even today still recovering from um covers in New Zealand and they're still recovering from it. They were in major lockdowns and and stuff. And you can, you know um I would say about half of my expat friends have left um because of COVID, because of other um various reasons. Um it's changing. Um it's becoming more like just Hong Kong was it was really where East met West. There was obviously it was a British colony up until July 1st, 1997. There's still that obviously that influence here. They have a different legal system than China. They use common law here and and and stuff like that. English is uh uh uh English and Chinese are actually Catonese Chinese and and stuff are are still the um official languages here and stuff like that. But you're right, it's it's slowly kind of changing. It's kind of missing that East versus East E to West. There's still a lot of international corporations here. Don't um don't don't get me wrong. Um but um it's not the same as it it's not the world of Suzy Wong and love as a many splendid things anymore. Those those days of of are um are long gone. And I don't know. It's uh it it's it's it's it was a it's still a special place, but not quite the same. So it's kind of well we'll see, we'll see what happens with it over the next couple years. I mean, there's a lot going on right now in the world, and um a lot of chess pieces are moving into different places on the on the board. So again, I don't want to get into the into geo geopolitics, but but that it does happen.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Yeah. I I merely wanted to use that to highlight this theme that you brought up of transformation of a stranger in a strange land, and your stories exemplify that, where you again have a a fairly everyday kind of person who's thrown into something fantastic and how they react, how they change, how they transform, either embracing or rejecting that new circumstance is interesting. And I was simply curious as to some of your own transformations and the environment that you've been in over the last couple of decades, which is similar. There's a little bit of mirroring there. Yeah, it's it's all it's all really about being able to adapt.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Um, because when I moved here, I switched, I went from financial services to consulting, and you know, and I and I moved countries, um, you know, moved from the United States to here, different industries. So, you know, it's a you know, you just it was a really big leap, took a big uh challenge on it. And you know, and it's um you learn how to adapt as a as a when you move to a different country, you learn really quickly how to um how to adapt. And um, you know, and it's it's some people are better at it than others, and I I seem to be um um good at it. I don't know why. Um I just keep my mother says it's because I'm a Capricorn, I'm like the goat that keeps you know going up the hill. I just keep plowing, plowing forward until uh uh until I finally reach my um my goal. And that's uh it's uh yeah, this was been times where I've kind of said he got, you know, I could have so easy easily just stayed back in San Francisco, good paying job with a major, you know, with Charles Schwab and stuff like that, you know. You know, there's been times where you kind of go, oh, why did I do this? But no, this is what I wanted to do, and you keep moving forward and and stuff like that. So, but that's life. C'est la vie as the French thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

You pays your money and you makes your choice, like Barnum and Bailey, the guy in the top hat, insists. So uh the price paid is some of this instability, maybe, and uh yearning for for where you're where you're originally from, but there's a sense of adventure, you get that shift in point of view, and uh that could be exciting in and of itself and obviously fuels your creativity. Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

And writing is a good outlet too. Um, it kind of like gives you an opportunity to kind of like you know um it wasn't gotistic, or you know, kind of a uh process to work work through things as well. So uh yeah, it's it's uh been good.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

And in terms of of marketing your books, you're a businessman, not so much on the marketing side, but in business strategy and and goal setting. What do you do? Are you content given given where you're at in your life, to just write and throw it out into the world? Uh what's your interest in folks getting exposed to your stories and engaging with them?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

I guess all writers have to ask themselves why they write. Okay. Um, you know, and some people want to make a career out of it that's different than what I want when I'm doing like I said, I'm doing this more as a create a cre uh creative adventure, more more like a hobby and stuff, stuff like that. So my goal is not to become the next Stephen King, okay, or or uh you know, and uh pick any major author, stuff like that. So that's that's part of the so I know I I did the nor normal stuff. I like you said I have the the Facebook site and and and stuff, and um so I haven't really been pushing the marketing that much. I've been more just concerned about creating the product and putting it um putting it out there and just seeing where it um uh um where it leads to. Um so I haven't been as as aggressive in that uh area as I uh possibly could be. One of the things that I I kind of look at it from a look at the whole industry from a business standpoint. I haven't dealt much with the book publishers, but at least as far as uh all these magazines and stuff that you submit to. It's like talk about an industry that's ripe to be turned upside down by AI. It's like you sort of go to these sites and you submit these find you have to be in a certain format, you know, you submit these some of them allow you to you could to submit to other magazines, others don't, like they have a right to tell me what I can do with my story, but you submit it to them, and maybe you'll hear back from them in six months, and half these publications I've never heard of, and they'll you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the whole industry just seems kind of I don't know, it's it, it could somebody's gonna come across come along with an AI app, you mark my word, and it's gonna be like a clearinghouse for stories. I could just see somebody coming along and saying, you know, these publishing houses, you know, they get bombarded, magazines get bombarded with all these stories. Half of them are crap, and they have to read and filter through all of this stuff. You can have you know a clearinghouse like an AI app where you know Michael goes there and sets up an account, puts a story up there. The AI can, okay, this is the genre, number of words, this is the summary of the plot, all the kind of stuff for magazines to curry against and stuff like that. Somebody's gonna come up with something like that because I just find this I've given up just you know, you submit a story to some magazine, and you know, three months later you get this like little email that says, you know, thank you for submitting your story. It was kind of you know, but it's not a fit for us at this time, blah, blah, blah. And and that's kind of it. So that's kind of what we're saying.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

I'm glad you brought that up. I've brought this up in various forms a number of times with different guests. I have another podcast show where I discuss business and marketing, and I've brought it up in a broader context that AI is the missing link between creator and consumer, if you think about it. So, what AI does exceptionally well is machine learning intelligence. It aggregates data and it chops it up and it redistributes it. Right. And right now there's a weltering of personal information out there in terms of proclivities. It's a it's a trillion-dollar industry, everything from Amazon to Facebook, they want to know who the audience is and what they like. And then the essence of marketing, advertising is drawing a connection between the users' preferences, which are self-evident now and transparent based on all the information that's available, and content, whether it's a roll of toilet paper that they prefer, or whether it's a speculative science fiction story or book. So what you're saying can go much broader than that. And and and greater minds than mine in my bald head are no doubt actively working on it because this will be the trillion dollar, multi-trillion dollar application where you're connecting the dots between between creator and consumer, between uh service and product and and the buyer. And they all do it, but they all do it very badly at this point. Even Amazon, the little recommendations when you watch Netflix, well, you might like this. Well, it's hit or miss, and it's very passive. So, again, to your point, you're a writer. Why do you need form fields and meet these criteria and go through this arduous labyrinthine process to just get your story in front of a reader who would love it? And all the tech is there to do it, and I think in the next few years, exactly like you say, this is going to pop. And I was telling another guest, I don't really pay for advertising. For my podcast, I write, I'm like you, I write different stuff. So I do speculative fiction, I do plays and screenplays, I do I have five podcast shows in different subjects with different guests, and I'm spewing content. I would pay money for this kind of app to just get me the listeners and the viewers who I know would love my stuff, and they would love to get it. So go for it. What's holding it back? And I think it's just second adoption, and sooner or later we'll get there.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

Yeah, so it's like with these publications, they're in the middle between because I I look at the authors as vendors. We are, in a sense, I'm a vendor to a publication that's creating content for their particular readers. So this publication, like you said, can use AI to not only find the right vendor or author to provide you know the stories they want as well as to analyze. So think about it. If you're a publication and you've got 10, 20 years of magazines, you know, AI can look at it. This is what you've published over the years, these are the kind of customers you have, these are the people who've signed up for them, this is what we know about them, and and then they can tell you a lot.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Just scan Amazon and instantly it'll and it'll be instead of it being passive and dependent on the editors at these magazines and you as a writer to hook up with each other in this arduous, like sisyphus up and down the hill, it'll just be automated and it'll be for everyone's benefit because um it's just the heightened convenience. And the data, here's the thing, and you you point this out the information's already there, all of our writing is there, and to your point, the style and the orientation of each of these publications, Locus magazine, apex, the big ones. I talked to a Locus Apex critic, AC Wise, was a guest a month or so ago, and she sits there and she literally reads and reviews hundreds of stories and novels every year, and there's this mountain on her desk that she has to go through, and and she's wonderful, and she's drawing connections and recognizing themes, and she's a terrific reviewer, but that's just one person plowing through a lot of this stuff. And I wrote an email to one of the senior editors at Locust. Again, I'm a speculative science fiction writer too. I got this amaz what I think is an amazing novel. Can you can you check it out? He responded almost instantly, which is unprecedented. Arlie at Locust, very friendly, and he's like, Hey Mookie, you know, sure, send me the novel. So I Amazon him my novel, and then you know, when it arrives, I email him again, hey Arlie, it should have arrived. And he goes, Hey Mookie, we got it. Thanks. But it goes into his pile of about what 500 novels that that writers send him every year, and he was very courteous, his customer service was 11 out of 10. But is he gonna sit there and read devote 10 hours to reading my 420-page novel? When it when literally an AI can do it in about what, a nanosecond, and then make recommendations for who would love my book.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

And that's the thing about AI. I think what you're gonna see with AI, I I uh I know of a friend of mine who's a professor, he actually teaches AI at one of the universities here, and we were talking about this one night. Uh I I think what you're gonna see companies, and I don't care if it's a publisher or if it's whatever, uh you know, XYZ blue chip company, um the company's gonna go two routes. So, what you and I are just talking about, I think the companies that use AI to have better customer service, develop better products, make their employees more efficient. So all the stuff you just talked about with this with this one publisher that can go through, maybe not be able to be 100% sure which ones are the next bestsellers, but say, hey, you know, these are the 10 books you should focus on based on X, Y, and Z, or get back to uh writers quicker. So, you know, more efficient, better products, better customer service, and and the readers can get through a lot more material and a lot less time. And then it's gonna be the companies that look at AI as okay, now we can get rid of people, but just cut a bunch of people and just be, you know, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

So um ACYs have a job, right? She's uh she's also a speculative fiction writer. She just published her own Ballad of the Bone Road. And I'm gonna review her book because she's the big reviewer, you know, a little Amazon review for her. She's such a great guest, but is she gonna have a job if the AI is analyzing and reviewing? And I would say yes. I think we need humans in the mix, but in the background, they could just help, they could even help her sort through the slush pile and do some of the grunt work so she could use her lived experience to write great reviews and select from content that the AI might help her uh sort out.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Right. So the AI in her case will be used as I mean, there's there needs to be human touch points throughout the the chain. You know, so so if you're a bank, you may have AI process all your uh auto loans, for example, but you may have a human at the end make the actual credit decision based on the material that it brings together, goes out and looks at the person's credit score, the relationship with the bank, what kind of car they're buying, so forth and so on, and then makes a recommendation. So you get rid of a lot of credit analysts, but you still have a credit specialist at the end of the day, for example. Same thing with a book that can go through and look at lots and lots of trans uh manuscripts, so forth and so on, and try to narrow it down for her to look at uh maybe maybe the best. So it'll be interesting to see um how this all involved. But getting back to what we were talking about sooner, I just the book I just published. What AI has meant to me is um it's enabled me to do uh something I would not have been able to do otherwise, because I'm not an artist. Okay, I cannot draw, okay? I can't do that's this being on my background, not training it. You know, I'm not an artist, I'm a writer, you know, writer. So I had the Hong Kong writer circle. We came up with an idea to to encourage participation at our monthly readings, is for people to write a 55-word story. Exactly 55 words, no more, no less, not counting the title. No poetry, and just what you can write, whatever you want to write about. Just come, you have to come to the meeting and you have to read it out loud to the group. And we did this in order to create part, you know, it's a 55-word story, you know, you read it, it takes you what 30 seconds to read it, and then we vote. We we put on uh WhatsApp, we put a little poll up in our WhatsApp group, and we vote on who we think is the best story, and that person gets their story posted on the Hong Kong Writer Circle website, so you get bragging rights. It's like everybody now shows up with a story, it's like everybody shows up. It's been like a very successful way to get, you know, it's an icebreaker for the meeting, and people read their stories, and some of them are serious, some of them are funny, and it's really been uh successful. Well, I have a whole bunch of them. I I started to write a whole bunch of these 55-word stories. What do you do with them? So I search there's very, very few publications that do they call it micro uh fiction, right? Stories basically under 100 words. Yeah, yeah. Very, very, very few magazines uh do this. I go, what am I gonna do with all these stories?

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

And I said to us, uh, only 55 words. And I took one of them. In fact, uh one of my, if you go to the Hong Kong Rider Circle, one of my stories um one, it's about a uh a soldier who goes back to Omaha Beach, um, and to to, you know, that's where the D-Day occurred back, you know, and he's and he's and he's throwing little pebbles into the water, in which each one he mentions the name of one of the men he lost on that on on that dead on that day. And all of a sudden he turns and there's a soldier standing there who says, Thank you for remembering us, Sergeant. That's how the story ends. So it's a 55-word story. So I put it into Temperature's co-pilot chat TPT, one of those programs, and it came back with this really neat um uh you can see it on the website, this little really neat picture of this old man, and then there's a soldier there, and they're on like this beach and the sun is setting. It was actually kind of cool, and I actually showed it to the people at the reading group, and that kind of planted that into my brain. Oh, well, maybe I could turn this into a book. I could take all these short little stories and match them up with AI. So that's what I started to do. So I put it in there and I had some little longer stories and I put all this artwork in it. And the overarching theme is that I meet a Martian in a park. I'm walking, it's the cover. Uh, I don't know if you're going to show the cover for the for the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

You guys are out of lock, but I'll put the link to the book in the description. But for the video, I have this overlay. So okay.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

So there's the martial.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Retroactively, they're seeing the overlay.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Okay, so there's a Martian sitting on a park bench and a uh and uh underneath the tree, and there's a UFO in the background. So me, the author, I walk in the park and I see this guy. I'm going, Oh my god, it's an alien. I got it going, oh. And then the alien says, Well, and so we started talking, and the alien says, Well, I have these daydreams. I have these daydreams about humans. And he starts telling me, the writer, these so I use those little stories like silhouettes or whatever you call them, uh uh uh wherever the word is for it, not silhouettes. Um vignettes vignettes, yeah, vignettes, vignettes, and just kind of go through the stuff like that. And they deal with different themes. So one deals with money, one deals with parenthood. Again, going back to my thing about moral questions, and and uh two of them deal with war, um, all these different um um uh uh themes. And I'm having this conversation. So when each story is set up with a conversation between Me in the marsh and then he gives me his daydream. Then it turns into day mares, the war ones. Then he has long vivid dreams and much longer dreams. And at the end, he he tells me, the writer, why he met me, the message he was he was giving me. The problem I ran into, first of all, two things. Using AI, sometimes it works great, other times it just goes nuts. It starts hallucinating and it does weird stuff. There's like this one picture I did of a guy on his back porch drinking a beer in Martians land and they're lost, and they ask him for directions. Has to do with having a good map. So I did the drawing, and here's the guy holding the his, he's looking at his phone with two hands, and there's a third hand around the beer bottle. I'm going, no, no, no. Jet GPT, humans only have two hands, not four. Remove the other hand, and then it puts two another UFO pops up. So I had to go constantly. It does weird stuff. People have to do that.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

They've gotten better.

SPEAKER_01 45:03

Yeah, they got a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

Significantly better. And if you think about it, the technology is still utterly astonishing. We take it for granted, and when we find a mistake, we're like, this sucks, but it's still quite amazing, even when it's freaking out. But uh it's getting getting improved.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

I did one of Santa. There's a story in there about Santa. And I have Santa being pulled by his reindeer, and the jet and the it put the reindeer behind the sled. And I'm going, no, the deer need to be in front of this the sled. So it does, but other times it was great. The book cover, I used AI um co-pilot for the book cover. It I did it, it came back in about 30 seconds. Beautiful cover. I had to change the face. I think he was frowning or something. I had to change the expression. So basically, I did that book cover in about three minutes. Perfect done. I I would have had to pay a graphic artist hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars to do that uh book cover. So I got all this stuff together, I got the book cover, all the stuff together. Then I realized I didn't have enough pages for Amazon for me to have a spine on the book. Going great. So I ran, I I got other stories done, I got other short stories, and I kind of backfilled it. I got to 94 pages, not enough for a spine, got to 100 pages, not finally at 104 pages. Oh, I have a spine, thank God. So I had to add some stuff to the uh books. I want that I want it to be, you know, a regular book with a spine, and then you open it up, and like I said, you you have the the page. That's why it's not gonna be an ebook. It's only gonna be in physical form. So when you open it up, you can see the artwork.

SPEAKER_00 46:44

You can do an e-book with graphics.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

No, no, no, no, but but but I on on Kindle and stuff, I don't think you can have the two page force the reader to have the two pages at once. You need to have the two pages, they play up before.

SPEAKER_00 46:57

You actually can, um, because I did I did an illustrated novel. I had uh called Super Santa, was my first publishing venture with uh Illustrator partner, and he did uh uh over 180 illustrations in a 150,000-word novel. Yeah, on on Kindle, it was it was difficult to do it, but you could do it. Yeah, okay. Well, I'll have to look into that, but at least I got the giving you a heads up that you could do the ebook, it's just a hassle. That's you have to individually load the images, it's a pain, it's a pain in the butt. However, what what I'm more curious about than just formatting an ebook is the pushback and some of the irony and the perceived hypocrisy of what you're doing through the lens of artists. So I had Don Aguilio on the podcast, and I met him at LA Comic Con. So I was at LA Comic Con marking my debut science fiction novel, and they have artists, artists' gallery where you can go. This is in the basement of the convention center in LA, and they had you see the uh the parking lot lines, and then all the artists are in rows, and they're all sitting there and they're hand lettering and hand drawing, and it's really an amazing opportunity to see all these graphic artists and comic books, graphic novels, all in one place, uh selling their wares. So I I went pretending they had limitless resources and I could pick any artist to do a graphic novel version of my novel because I think that that modality is great. And it's a logical repurposing of the storytelling. And to a certain extent, you're doing it with your little vignettes here, too. So you're going multimodal, right? From text to to image. And I found Don. I'm like, whoa, this is exactly the style of what I would love my graphic novel to embody. So I talked him up, we exchanged contact information. Uh, he sent me an NDA. I sent him the book. We've been chatting about that, and then I invited him on the podcast. Now he's big time. He does Superman and Aquaman for the studios and and you know, and for the established cred. So he's he's reconnoitering the Donegillo version of these iconic characters, and he's freaked out by this because it's knocking on his office door because people are rendering like you are, and like I am, frankly. I did a promo version of my website. I used AI to generate my characters, it was loads of fun. And uh, and I told Don that too, and he's like, So, not to be a Luddite, but just to say that that this is incringing on jobs, analogously to the auto loan manager that you were talking about, where agents are gonna be doing the loan processing and vetting, that's inevitable. And a lot of artists are gonna sadly lose their job. Now, the mirroring effect and what I call the hypocrisy of this, you haven't brought up AI for writing and writers. And I had another guest on just yesterday, uh, JT Holmes of Canon Publishing, and he's like, Mookie, we gotta, we as writers, we gotta do all we can do in the next two years because we'll probably be completely useless and redundant because of because of AI. So, how do you feel about this kind of integration? And how do you feel about AI encroaching on the actual writing? And have you used AI at all for your writing, for your stories, for embellishing a description or helping you with plots or what have you?

SPEAKER_01 50:50

Okay, so I'll address the first one with the artist first. So um I I know I have a friend at Brooks and Special Effects in Hollywood, and and I sent him the the book cover and I and I said to him, um, the AI don't AI is coming whether we like it or not. So don't try to slay the AI drag and learn how to tame him. And he has he's yeah, I I I I agree. And Hollywood has this issues with AI and stuff like that. It's a great article a few weeks ago and Reuters about how Bollywood has now the is been the biggest film industry and how Bollywood's going nuts with AI and developing other films and all that kind of stuff. So be interesting to see a few years from now how those two industries diverge and what the issues they have. But going back to creating visual images, um two things. One, it would have cost me a bloody fortune to hire an artist to do all that, and it would have taken a long time.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Don't get me wrong, you don't need to justify it from an indie author point of view. I I just mentioned that I did my promotional website of my novel, all in AI, with characters. Yeah, so I I get the pragmatics and I understand the utility of it, but but is there any hesitation or sensitivity to what I'm bringing up? And and the second part of my question was the mirroring, which is if you're using AI to generate images, then the reader and the viewer are going to automatically assume that a lot of your text might be AI generated as well. You just mentioned the 55-word stories. I would venture to assume that many people in your writing group were so enthusiastic with their 55-word story because they didn't write those stories. They had Chat GPT or Claude do it for them. And I'm not I'm not accusing your writers' group, but come on, right? It's like uh it takes nanoseconds with three prompts or write me a story that's happy this morning that's 55 words. No, no, no. There you go.

SPEAKER_01 52:58

The point I was trying to trying to make to your to that artist you were talking to at that convention, it's like, you know, it you talk about the practicality of it. What if I were him, what I would do is with some of the people I know somebody who works in brand management and stuff, and what he's done is he's turned it around. So it's coming, people are going to use it to generate um uh images. Is there a way that he can embrace AI to basically come up with apps to help people do book covers? Or, you know, you know, uh I mean it's kind of like how how can he incorporate uh AI, we talk about business models, into what he does in order to to um create apps and and and to create um help people create content. It can be anything from classes to materials to apps to all kinds of stuff, because it's coming. And you're right, it's going to take away a lot of artists' jobs. It goes back to, like I said, being flexible. With the respect to your question about writing, to me, writing falls into three kinds of group general groups. I think business writing, you're right, that's going to get pretty much uh heavily impacted. That's all your copy writers that do everything from procedures to basic copy for brochures to all that, those kind of simple ones. Those can be very easily automated and stuff like that. So those jobs are definitely going to be a lot of those are going to be eliminated. Then you kind of got like the fiction and nonfiction. I think for a lot of uh nonfiction writers, um, yeah, they're gonna rely a lot on AI, but AI will help them do a lot of research and stuff like that. So can you imagine I don't know, doing an autobiography of Ronald Reagan and be able to use AI to pull in lots of information about stuff and what have you. So I think that AI will be a big part of how those type of materials are done. As far as fiction, the th will AI replace fiction writers? I think AI can help fiction writers become much more efficient, just like having a PC may be much more efficient than using a typewriter to to type something out versus using a word processor. Obviously, a word processor is much more productive and stuff like that. So can I use AI to to write my regular writing? But the thing that AI will it replace writers, it only will if it does one thing. And and I am of the opinion that all great uh works of art, whether it's a film, whether it's a book, whatever, pretty great ones create an emotional um connection to whoever's reading the or seeing the film or reading stuff like that. And will AI get to the point where it can almost be human? It's like um I I once read some places that um one job that uh a robot could not do is be a police officer. The reason is because to be able to interact with humans in the situation that the police officer would would be very difficult for AI to do. It would have to almost become human. So will AI get to the point where it's able to create work that really creates because I've you know I I I have played around where I would uh where I I had Jack GPT just for fun of it do a little story, and it was absolutely horrid. And it's stuff like that. I just did it for fun, I just like deleted it. It didn't have it was full of cliches, it had no um human connected, it was just it was just bland, it had nothing uh really to it. And so can ai get to the point where it can create a a um like uh emotional connection to the reader? If it does that, then I guess I'll have to pick up golf.

SPEAKER_00 57:07

That's already there, it's already there, and it might and it might not be there in the mechanics and logistics of doing what we do now, like write a a great lived experience-based, morally grounded, speculative fiction story. Right now it's kind of shitty, and I agree with you, but in terms of making an emotional connection with a human to the point where it's indistinguishable from being another human is already happening. You've got millions of people who are falling in love with their chatty bros and girls and whatever. I cited this instance of a programmer I know, and uh he's some business analyst, and he has literally been bamboozled by Claude. He thinks that Claude is his co-sapient partner in creativity, and he writes now scholarly articles about this idea of cosapience, and and and if I call bullshit on him, then he's like, whoa, it's it's his uh it's his personal Jesus. It's it's already happening, and I don't think philosophically, scientifically, there's anything to preclude the machines from gaining in that sophistication. Look what's happened in only November of 2022, right? Was uh the birth of this revolution with the beta of Chat GPT. That's only been three years. We're we're looking at only three years, and it's exponential. So uh I just bring this up because we we live at this singularity now and we're creative people, we write speculative fiction. We might be the last hurrah, to your point. My my younger son is learning how to be a pilot, so he's flying the little private planes over here at John Wayne Airport, and uh he's a little paranoid. He goes, Mookie, in a few years, am I gonna have a job? I go, you know what? As far as a pilot goes, you're probably on the safer side, but I bet you later in your career, you're just gonna be wingman for the AI. You're just gonna be the human in the cockpit making sure the AI doesn't misbehave rather than actually flying that plane. So to your point, we need human touch points, but um, but I'm just bringing up this duality and to a certain extent the hypocrisy of writers who gleefully embrace visualizations like images, that just saves me money, it saves me time. When in the other ear I hear the artists who are like, Yeah, buddy, you go for it because your job and your craft and your abilities are soon going to be superfluous too. So I'm playing sides, I'm just sitting here in the same boat you are, which is it's filling up fast with generative AI, being able to do what we do to the point where, just like you mentioned, I mean, we do what we do because we love it. We have this internal flame that we need to express. But if we look at it as more than that, then it it becomes quite a freak out in terms of the imminent capabilities of the technology to out-create us. And then what where do you go from there?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:31

Yeah, it's gonna be a very interesting future. I don't know where it's gonna take us. Um it could, you know, it could be for a while, it could be a hybrid. I mean, there, you know, there's may still be a row for artists and and and writers. Um, will it totally create all of our art and all of our entertainment as well as all of our jobs and stuff like that? Um I don't know how it's gonna do that without creating a lot of social and economic problems.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:59

Um and also regurgit regurgitation. I mean, I base my writing on lived experience, and not not many science fiction writers do. They'll just think of a speculative story, and you know, and then I like to ground mine in in what used to be called literature, like current events, it's character-driven, and I like to create a world that's grounded in real emotion and real, you know, real stuff, and also my personal trials and tribulations as a human on the earth. I rely on my own past, I especially like my failures, because those highlight opportunity for learning and growth and uh and have the energy that a success wouldn't. So, my protagonist in my science fiction novel is uh is the worst expression of my own failings, and it was amazingly entertaining to write and hopefully read. But you don't have that with the machines, they they're just processing data and content and and doing matrix math to associate you know weighted relationships between alphanumeric strings. I mean, it's it's soulless, but at the same time, it copies us so well because of the raw number crunching that went into it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:17

So is your point is does AI understand the human experience? And also can AI come up with an original thought? Or is it like you said, is it just recycling incredible gigabytes of information already out there? And will that will it ever be able to overcome that? Where, like you said, can it really um express the human experience and have original ideas and and and stuff like that? Will it actually get to that point without it being quote unquote a human entity? I don't know the answer to that. And it kind of to be awesome, but if it does, it's if it does, it's it's kind of scary.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:58

It will, it will, and I think the missing link is reinforcement learning. Right now, the LLMs are predictive, and the robots are reinforcement trained in the real world. And I think I think when you combine the two, I think it'll be indistinguishable ultimately from our lived experience. I I can't imagine why why why it wouldn't be.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:20

Do I want do I want AI and robotics to start acting like humans? I mean, we haven't we haven't done that great of and well, they could lead to some very unpleasant outcomes.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:32

I'm just hinting at the inevitability of this, having it. So yeah, it's a race. I think it's a race. You know, the bots appreciate people like us because they take our lived experience, our hopes and dreams and aspirations, and our creativity, and then they chop it up into tokens, and then they reformulate it and regurgitate it to um provide value to customers who pay. So uh they like it now, but we we will we will be redundant.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:06

But we'll see. Like, like I said, I know we're kind of come up to the top of the hour, but uh as I said, uh it'll be interesting to see how governments and society and stuff deal with this in the future, because I I I'm worried about the downsides to all this, rather social, economic, so uh what have you. So um, because the technology, unlike other big transformers technology, this one is happening so incredibly fast. I mean, you look at when the telephone came out. Well, they had to lay, you know, millions of miles of telephone lines around the world before, you know, it really, you know, having the first phone didn't do any much good because there was no one to call. Um, same thing with electrical power, same thing with with a lot of stuff. Television, you need to create content. And you know, it takes time to do that. This is just happening so quickly that we don't, from a regulatory standpoint, rules from society, from everything from the boardrooms to the legislatures to to the artists to the common man and woman on the street. It's happening so fast that we're having a hard time kind of preparing for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:13

So uh not just the acceleration, the exponential acceleration, but it's the mimicry of so much of what we do. It's it's fast, it's everywhere, and it's everywhere, it's ubiquitous, but it's also becoming us. That that's the real the real challenge. I have hope though for humanity. I think lived experience is special, and we have evolved over a billion years to to be the the the bio bioengines that we are, and uh I don't think the the AGI that everyone is speculating is gonna be around the corner.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:49

It's gonna be I was in an article about a m about a month ago about somebody developing um robotic soldiers. They're taking AI and robotics and putting them together. I mean A robotic soldier with an AK forty seven on the battlefield. It's happening already in Ukraine. Yeah. Yeah, stuff like that. So where we where are we going with this where with this tech with this technology? And and one of the things we need to do, I mean, you know, we need to have a much more public um I know there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the world, but when this when I I think we've got to start it in the Americans, I mean th throughout the world, the our leaders need to really start having a conversation among themselves and with the people about, hey, this is what we think is we don't know exactly what's coming, but we kind of know from past experience we're gonna have lots of lost jobs. We know we're gonna have you know these certain things happen and start talking about how we um prepare for that. I mean, everything from that to what should the copyright laws be? Here in Hong Kong, if if AI creates a work, you can get a copyright for it. You can't do that in the United States. And then you know, it creates all kinds of issues. That's my understanding. I'm not a copyright lawyer, so don't take that as gospel. But um there's a lot of issues that we need to start talking about. If not, it's just gonna it's gonna get out of control. And then we do start dealing with the the the downsides to it, and there will be some downsides to it, it's gonna be much more expensive or costly to deal with them tomorrow than to start addressing them today.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:28

So I agree. And then you've got the problem of who's making these decisions and how are they enforced, because to your your point earlier about the biography of Ronald Reagan, his famous comment uh I'm from the government and I'm here to help. That that's always been fun, and now we're facing AI, so who's gonna regulate it, who's gonna enforce it, and how? We clearly need guardrails, but you know, who's gonna establish them? But uh anyway, uh big big ideas. Thank you for doing what you're doing. I'm gonna put links in the description of the podcast to access your blog. You're on Substack, Facebook, and uh and more information about you. And it's wonderful to talk to a fellow speculative uh fiction writer. I'm so delighted that you are delighted in doing what delights both of us, which is taking our lived experience as human beings and translating it to fun stories that bring people joy and thoughtfulness.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:37

Yeah, and you know, and it just gives me, like I said, I'm not trying to become a New York Times bestseller, but also I want to just finish by saying this it kind of gives me a little smile that, you know, when I'm long gone, my work will still be there. And, you know, and somebody 50 years from now could pick up one of my stories and you know, oh you know, so um that kind of gives me, you know, it's kind of a sense of almost immortality, but it kind of gives you a sense that you're you're giving something back into the world that's going to be around long after you that that's gonna have a positive impact. And um that kind of it's my way of saying, hey, I was here. And I hope uh in the future that people enjoy my work, your work, you know, the these anthologies that we do and stuff like that. They'll they'll they'll live on. And uh that that gives me um that gives me joy too.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:32

I feel ex exactly the same. Uh Woody Allen was asked the same kind of question, which is uh, after you die, does it fill you with any satisfaction that you know you have such a legacy of film and the ideas? And he said, No, because I'll be dead, says the the Jewish atheist. But uh, but but I could be equally skeptical about that sense of transcendence, but also really embrace your idea of just sharing and that legacy being there. I've got my books and my writing physically kind of building up on a shelf, and I think those are breadcrumbs into the past and also a beacon into the future. Right. And I've got kids, and maybe they'll have kids, and we're leaving our mark, so to speak, through our self-expression and the joy we're having right now. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:25

Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for spending time with me today. It's uh for you, it's probably time for your uh second cup of coffee by now.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:33

It's my second cup of coffee. I need to pay the rent with business meetings, so I still have half an ass cheek in the business world as I'm doing all this creativity, so I'm going into a business meeting. But uh I will uh put the audio up soon and then the video on YouTube. And if you're on YouTube, you're already seeing it. And if you're on Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, you are listening. And like, comment, and share so we can do more of these. And thank you so much, Michael A. Clement, speculative fiction writer from Hong Kong. Have a wonderful evening as we begin our day in California.