Fahrenheit 451

Hello book lovers and fascism haters! The USA Today bestselling author of over a dozen novels, Jaye Wells, joins us in the house today. We're discussing Ray Bradbury's seminal work Fahrenheit 451--many people think this book is about censorship--which it is, in a way--but its original intent was to show the inherent dangers of television. We cover a lot of ground in this episode, including: 

• The current publishing landscape
• The dangers of "frictionless" media
• Destructive capacity of social media 
• A discourse on AI (tl;dr: fuck AI)

Oh, and of course we paired this discussion with a cocktail! The fine folks at The Rum Howler Blog devised a drink based on the Bradbury short story "The Pedestrian," a work considered to be a precursor to this novel. The beverage is quite lovely, lightly sweet, spice notes from the rum and bitters. Can't drink grapefruit juice? I suspect pineapple juice would work well here; orange juice may be a bit too sweet for it. 

The Pedestrian

1 3/4 oz Spiced Rum
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/3 oz grapefruit juice
1/2 oz triple sec
3 drops Fee cocktail bitters
ice
Twist of lemon peel

Place the first five ingredients into a metal shaker with ice. Shake until the outside of the shaker begins to frost. Strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with a twist of lemon peel, and enjoy. 

Transcript

0:02

Hey everybody, welcome to Bard Books, the podcast that mixes band books, booze, and conversation into one delightfully chaotic mix. I'm your host, Kelly Swales, and today we're discussing the book Fahrenheit 451. Buckle in, gang, because it's gonna get lit. Hi everyone. Uh my name is Jay Wells. I am a USA Today bestselling author of more than a dozen novels, uh, mostly urban fantasy, horror, and some romance. I also am an adjunct professor for the Seton Hill University Writing Popular Fiction Masters program. So I essentially teach people at the graduate level how to write popular fiction. Um, so pretty much every part of my career is about popular fiction, and I'm always excited to talk about books. I am super excited to have you on today, and I'm super excited to really dig into this book. But before that, I want to talk about the cocktail that we've paired with our discussion today. It's called Yes. Oh no, no, go right ahead. The Passenger. It's so evocative. This is well, I think it's the I think it's called the Pedestrian. Oh, the pedestrian. Yes. Okay. Yes, and it's kind of a play on the short story that apparently was the precursor to Fahrenheit 451. Uh, we're gonna have uh this is from a blog uh called the rumhowlerblog.com. We'll post a link to the recipe uh on our website as well as on the Patreon, but uh basically it's rum with some bitters and some juices, and uh cheers, Jay. Cheers. I have to admit, I am not a bartender, I am a drinker, however. And I live in New Orleans, so you could almost say I'm a professional. It's pretty good, it's very refreshing. I, you know what? I didn't sip it before we got online because I I kind of feel like that's part of the shtick, right? Like, hey, we made this drink, let's drink it and talk about it. Yeah, that's really good. The recipe called for Feed Brothers just regular cocktail bitters, but instead I used something called bittermans. It's more for like tiki drinks, and I thought that would go go in nice with the grapefruit juices and the and the rum, spiced rum. This is delightful. I think this drink is something we we professional drinkers like to call a porch pounder. Yeah, I I did alter mine a little bit too. I used grapefruit juice cocktail and not regular grapefruit juice, so it's probably a little sweeter than it's supposed to be. And I also used orange bitters and not so, but still really good. And I am delighted because I had to buy a bottle of spiced rum for this. And I'm like, okay, cool. Now I can try a bunch of different cocktails with spiced rum. And this one's delightful. This, yeah, this is delightful. Well, thank you, rum howler blog, because you didn't steer us wrong. I'm very excited to drink this. All right, so let's let's get to let's get to the book. It's a 1953 dystopian science fiction cock or science fiction cocktail. All right. Science fiction novel written by Ray Bat Brad Ray Bradbury. The story centers on our protagonist, Guy Montag, a so-called fireman whose job is to not only burn books, but to destroy the homes of anyone accused of keeping a book. Thematically, the story touches on censor censorship, obviously, the dangers of mass media, consumerism, and controlling a populace by controlling the narrative. In short, this book is as relevant as it's ever been. Generally, the the bans for this novel kind of center around like, oh, hey, there's profanity or there's adult themes, and we can't let our kids read this book. I think that's obviously bullshit. They don't want to read this book because they don't want to think about what happens when we tell you what to read. First thing, Jay, I want to touch on is like the prose style of this novel. I don't know if it struck you or how it struck you. I know that you uh you've said as we were kind of getting ready for recording, you've mentioned that you've read this book several times, and you know, you get different things from it every time. For me, I haven't read, I read this book in high school, haven't read it since, read it again, obviously, before we recorded. And I'm just once again struck by the simplicity of the prose. Like it's written basically at a middle school grade level, but it's so philosophical and metaphorical in its themes that it's deceptively complex. And so I want to touch on that a little bit. Like, do you have any thoughts about that? Oh, for sure. So the first time I read this was junior high, and I loved it. You know, I just it was just exciting, and I also love that it was short back then. It's a few thousand words, which is like nothing for novels now. And then, you know, I read it late, you know, as an adult a few times, and I actually taught a class on writing the novel and used this as the textbook. Yeah. I also use this um a lot of quotes from this book in a class I teach on promises and payoffs in fiction, highlighting Bradbury's prose. So I've studied it quite a bit and I read it again yesterday. I think you know, I am a Bradbury fangirl for sure. His writing is man, it's good. It's real good. Real nice. And and you know, but like the the opening paragraph of this book is a stunner. And uh he's really good at drawing you into the world. He is an expert at using what I call power words to establish theme, add depth to the prose and really land like these psychological hits in his work. And so, like you said, it's deceptively simple. I mean, you can read it like I did in Engineer High and get what's going on, but if you appreciate a well-turned phrase, this will do it. And I when I was going back through my copy, I noticed like this thing is so marked up with lines that I've highlighted and put yeah, I wrote like OMG and like H mark stuff throughout. So it still hits, even though this was probably my fifth time to read it, I still really enjoyed the language. There were several, and and I meant to pull out some like pull quotes to like talk about and I forgot and I didn't because I'm a terrible podcast host. There were several times where I had to stop and reread a sentence because I'm like, God damn, Ray. You know, for a novel written in 1953, this is just it, this just hits. It just hits. Yeah, it's I think I do want to kind of hit on too that it's notable that it's 50,000 words. Um, which, as you know, as a writer, Jay, that like barely qualifies as a novel in in today's publishing landscape, right? Like you would almost, if you were writing this today, I think you'd market it as a novella and really, really hope that like some online magazine picks it up, right? Because it's just like a weird word count length for today's publishing scene. But I think the length belies the importance of the text. I think it's you think it's like, oh, this is nothing like you said, you read it in a day, you know, you think it's gonna be like a super easy read, and it is, but man, there are so there's so much meat on these bones on the bones of this novel. Well, and that goes that really goes back to his use of the prose. I mean, he is a he is an economical writer. Every word counts, and it's not like there's no fat on this. And it's also notice notable that the start is a short story. You know, it started out very lean, and I and I don't think it suffers at all for the length because I I think you don't need a lot of subplots going on, you don't need, you know, he describes exactly what needs to be described. Uh, every, like I said, every word counts in his descriptions. And I I did notice that as well, that there's the like the descriptions are really sparse, but at the same time, it's like I can picture uh Montag in Mildred's home. I can picture Faber's house, I can picture the firehouse that he's he's at with his friends. And obviously, you know, like all art is a mirror, not a window, right? So obviously that's me bringing a lot of my own experience to it. It's like, okay, of course, you know, Faber lives in this house with a lot of books and a lot of dark wood and shelves and interesting knickknacks from you know, all the places he's traveled to or whatever, those are all in his home. But does Bradbury mention that? No, he doesn't. It's just evocative through the words. And I just find that so, so interesting. Well, and a real he's such a craftsman, you know. I just some like Bradbury lore for people who don't know it. He went through this project where he challenged himself to write a short story a day for a year. And he would go to the basement of the library and rent a typewriter for like 10 cents, if you know, a dime an hour. And he would pound out a short story every day. So this man worked in the word minds for years to be able to write prose. And, you know, uh somebody who's really good at their craft understands that you don't describe the room like you do, like it's like it's like a setting. The descriptions reflect who the character is, who's perceiving what they're describing. And so um, all the descriptions are telling you a lot about who Montag is or who the character we're visiting, or you know, the the emotional state of the place and what's being described. So you don't need to know the color of the couch unless the color of the couch is important in revealing something about the character of the world. If I were writing something like this today, I I would be, I would say how like Montag and Mildred's house, it's like they've got like beige walls and beige furniture, and everything's very clean and and tidy, and everything's just so because this is what society demands of us. Whereas Faber's house would be a little bit more chaotic because he's outside of the mainstream. He's he refuses to burn his books and he just is basically a hermit because of this. Yeah, I think I think you're spot on. Yeah. And he leaves enough room so that, like you said, you bring your own um perceptions to it. And you know, because I when I picture Montag's house, I picture the house I grew up in because the first time I read it, I was a junior in, you know, I was in junior high. Sure. For some reason, I picture that house, it fit with what he was describing. You know, so I've imprinted my own experience onto it. And I and I will get into this more, I'm sure when we talk about the the themes and the meaning of the book, um, about what the audience brings to the prose. Um, yeah, that's interesting. I actually uh I kind of pictured my uh ex-sister-in-law's house. Yeah, yeah. Which I I don't know if I I wouldn't have obviously done that when I read that in high school. I probably would have pictured something more like I was that I grow grew up in, much like yourself. But yeah, it's it's always an interesting thing to me where the art changes, or the art doesn't change, you change. So every time you revisit it, you're coming at it as a different person. Yeah, even if it's just a slightly different person because it's been three years since you've read it, you've you're coming at it slightly changed, and so the art changes, or you know, your your perception of the art change. Oh, 100%. When I was in junior high, I was like all about Clarice. Oh, yeah. Um, and then now I'm reading it as Montag because I'm in my 50s, you know. So I I'm coming at it from a different angle because of my life experience. Can we you mentioned Clarice? Let's let's dive into her character a little bit. Because on one hand, I can absolutely see where you're reading this in junior high and you're seeing Clarice is like aspirational and she's like a free spirit, and she refuses to be like pinned in by this fascist world that she's living in or whatever. I'm sure I probably looked up to her whenever I read this in high school. I but now, like reading this in in the um, I don't want to say the post-Me Too era. I think we're still in the Me Too era, but also like the Epstein File era and stuff. Like reading this now, I'm like, dude, you are 40 years old. Why are you gloming onto this 17-year-old girl? Yeah. Uh and I know who she reminds of. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but she reminds me of um, this is a niche reference, by the way. Is in oh, I just lost the name of it. There was a movie with Timothy Dalton. It's like Natalie Portman is in this movie, and she plays the Manic Pixie Dream Girl that is very much like Clarice. I picture when I'm reading it now, I'm picturing her. And and I remember in like critiques of this movie, they were talking about like this grown man falls in love with this manic pixie dream girl. You know, and it's kind of this idea of like, if you were older, we'd be together, and it's kind of gross, right? But right, right. So it just completely reminded me of what like reading it now that that character, it's almost like did somebody read Fahrenheit 451 before they wrote that screenplay? Because it is spot on the same kind of character, you know, she's precocious, um, you know, she speaks truth to adults, like this kind of thing. Um I think it's called Beautiful Girls. Beautiful girls. That's it. Matt Dillon's in it. Okay, yeah, but I've not seen it. Anyway, it's a I mean, it's an interesting, it's interesting, but like the whole but to your point, yeah, like this whole the inappropriate relationship between a 14-year-old girl and a grown man. However, I will say, you know, on the page, it's not yeah, because he's he doesn't creep after her, it's not sexual in any way. It's more just like from an idealistic sort of sort of framework where he's like, oh wait, no, she has completely different thoughts than like my wife or or my friends or the people I associate with. It's like she has this different perspective of the world, and maybe it makes me think of my my world a little bit. Right. Well, but of course, as a mom, I'm like, why is she out after dark by herself? Oh, okay, so I'm not a mom, but as a gen Xer, I'm like, well, obviously she's out after dark. Oh, there you go. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I do I do find it interesting though, where it's like she's the catalyst that makes the protagonist change and then she gets fridged. Um you know, we never learn actually what happens to Clarice and her family. It's just that their house is dark all of a sudden, and maybe have they moved or has something happened to them. But hey, we don't we don't ask questions like that. We just know she was hit by a car. Oh, did I miss that? Yeah, it's pretty subtle because there's like a reference to it. I think um Montag's wife, is it Mildred? Yeah, mentions it, but then later when he's running across the road, the 10-lane road, and the car's coming at him, he thinks, uh, is this the car that hit Clarice? So no, I missed it. But like, yeah, I mean, he completely fridged her. And you know, it's interesting when you read the like scholarship on this book, you know, like Bradbury was a curmudgeon about any sort of criticism about the lack of women in his stories or the lack of you know, minority groups or whatever. And he's like, Well, you know, it's this very like 1950s white male attitude of like, if you want to see those stories, go write them yourself, which is completely glossing over the fact that, like, well, those people couldn't get publishing contracts. Right. Yeah, yeah. Like they have to be able to get it into the room to even have a meeting to you know, the the that's just being written, it's not being published. That's two different things. Right. And I mean, he kind of, you know, this book in particular, like he writes this manic pixie dream girl, and he writes the sort of neurotic, suicidal wife, and then all of her friends are just these like frivolous women. There are, you know, there aren't any women really that are to be taken seriously in his world. Substantive, yeah. No, they're not complex. The men are the deep thinkers and the actors, and that is a huge reflection of the time period for sure. Um it's also interesting because I don't think this is getting into some weeds here, but like on one level, I don't think Bradbury's actually wrong about the idea, and this is so like woven into the philosophy of the story that like books cannot be for all people. Every story cannot apply to all groups. And so to be like, well, Fahrenheit 451 isn't good because it doesn't have any people of color, it doesn't have any women, it doesn't have any queer characters, you know, that kind of thing. That's a real slippery slope as a writer for people to come in and say, well, this story uh doesn't have value unless all of these people see themselves in it. It's valid, but on the other hand, it's exactly the stuff that he is warning against because in the book, you know, Beatty is talking about how this happened, how we ended up having firemen who go and burn books. It's not the government who comes in and takes the books, it's the people angry because that all books are not for all people, right? It specifically says that, you know, like the the dog owners aren't represented, and the you know, the female tennis players and the Mormons and like all of these people felt like if they weren't specifically referenced that the book was problematic. I'm using modern language, I'm not using bradberries. Like that's a tricky conversation to have these days, right? I mean, we have this huge cancel culture, and there's a lot that a lot of conversations that have needed to be had for a long time that are changing the landscape. However, there's also arguments to be made that the influence of mass media has made us too sensitive to friction. And this is one of this is one of his points when you read what he's written about this book, it's that like mass media has to apply to everybody to work. And if you think about the average, I'm sorry, I'm going completely. Oh no, I am I am superheroed. So if you think about it, I'm already in my head, I'm already in my head thinking like what other book can I read with Jay? Okay, so if you think about the average audience for the worst TV show, right? Sure. You're still in the millions. Yeah. If you look at the audience of one book that does like a massive bestseller, you're still usually still in the thousands. I was gonna say you're talking tens of thousands, maybe hundred thousands. Yes. I mean, there are exceptions. There are some, you know, legacy series that have millions of fans, but still less than a TV show or a movie would have. And the thing is, TV and movies are so expensive to produce that you have to guarantee it will have a huge audience. So the edges are sanded. We try not, you know, yes, there are controversial films and TV shows that come out, but it still has to have a mass appeal. Whereas with books, they are cheaper to produce and they can be quote unquote successful with a smaller audience, right? So you can find these niche audiences with books. And what he's saying is look, as we become more and more addicted to mass media stories, we become less tolerant of stories with friction, which you would find in a book. And and stories that we perceive aren't for us, right? Yes. And as an author, this is tricky to talk about, right? Because I, like all authors today, have had to give a lot of thought to how am I representing people in my books? Am I being inclusive? Am I presenting the world as it actually looks? If I'm creating a fantasy world, you know, am I including um representation? You know, look if I can make any world I want to make, am I only making it white and straight? What white, straight, and middle class, right? Exactly. Right. So, but the problem. Too, on the other hand, is I feel like there's been this huge overcorrection in some instances because you know we're telling authors you have to have a lot of representation, but don't write about people that aren't you. Right. So as an author, you kind of feel like you're on this tightrope of I want to be an intentional writer, I want to write thoughtful work, I want to be representative of the world, but I also don't want to get fucking canceled. Or get it wrong, or get it wrong. Uh I was I was just going to kind of add to what you're saying. Whenever I sold my a book to a small publisher, it was, you know, young adult, you know, 14, 15-year-old protagonist. She was, she was white, but you know, grew up, you know, basically not quite on the streets, but you know, poverty level, that sort of thing, whatever. And gets basically inducted into this really super exclusive hidden school for for smart kids, essentially, uh, that want to take over the world. And the small publisher loved it, but they're like, hey, you know, we need to be, we want to be mindful and we want to be more inclusive. What do you think about making your protagonist a Mexican girl? And I'm like, okay, well, that could work, but I don't have that experience. And it's like, I know that I can write a Mexican protagonist, sure, but it the way it's it's a young adult story, and since I and some of those experiences would have overlapped with what I was familiar with, I'm like, man, I don't, I, I don't feel comfortable writing a Mexican protagonist because I don't, there are aspects of that upbringing and growing up as Mexican in a disadvantaged area that even that I don't have, right? So I'm like, oh yeah, that's I I hear what you're saying, and like in theory, I'm on board, but man, I'm not gonna do justice to that story. So I'm not changing her. Well, and and part of the problem too is that you have to look at the structure of the publishing industry. You know, it's like the reason it matters whether a white author is writing somebody of a different race is because people of that race are not, they don't have space at the table. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like there's Mexican people, but Mexican people don't get to write about me. Right, or anybody, really. Or anybody, yeah. So, and and so like it's but and but it's just like that's a microcosm of the larger society, right? Um Absolutely. And so when when Bradbury's talking about censorship, like I said, it's not the government, it's we are there's a lot of self-censoring happening from the audience shutting down because they don't want the friction. And so we've created this sort of panopticon in society through social media and all this stuff where things are being, you know, nuance is lost, and it's just like, nope, shut it down, cancel it. We're not doing that. And versus we're self-policing. There, you know, there was an example of a novel recently. Um, oh, this is tricky. But like, this is fascinating to talk about in light of this book because I think that there's this sense of like, oh, do I need to censor myself so I don't get in trouble? Sure. But there was an a novel by a best-selling author where a a side character's nationality is mentioned. Okay. And it is a very problematic nationality. Okay. And the book isn't even out yet. And people were enraged that she chose this nationality for this character. Because they said, Well, if you even mention this country, she obviously supports this country. Oh. Because she made a choice, right? I think that's incredibly dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. And that's actually an aspect I I just want to bring us back around to four Fahrenheit 451. I think this is incredibly dangerous because to your point, and and this is an aspect I didn't quite latch on to, but you're absolutely right. And it's true of like book bands or movie bands where it's not the government telling you for the most part, it's not the government saying, hey, this movie can't exist, or hey, this book can't exist. It's people in your community going to the school board saying this book can't be on the shelves at the high school. The mass media environment has sort of, I don't want to say brainwashed, but maybe brainwashed is sort of what I'm looking for, but sort of convinced everybody or people to be like, no, we can't include that. That doesn't fit with our worldview, that doesn't fit with the society we want to create, it has to be gone. It has dangerous ideas, it has to be gone. Like I said, for the most part, it's not the United States government doing that, it's people. However, having said that, who controls the government? It's not the people, it's money. Oh, 100%. Well, and I mean, it's like it's all of it. It's all of it. It's all of it. It's all of it. And so it's like because here's the thing like the media is controlled by money, and we have now have these incredibly powerful tech billionaires who are pushing things on us to control how we consume and what we consume and what we think. And rereading this book yesterday, I think the last time I read it was like six or seven years ago. Okay. And just in the amount in that amount of time, I was reading this book going, oh my god. Like it is it is so much worse now. It this book applies so much more now than it did even six years ago. Yeah, like I was reading it last week just so I can like really like get my wrap my mind around this and think about our conversation today. And I know I texted you, I was like, God damn, Jay, this book, this book. And let's let's talk about that mass media slash consumerist angle, because that really, really stood out to me. And I think it stood out to me in a way that it wouldn't have when I read it in high school. Because, like I said, back then I was growing up, I didn't have a whole lot of money. Um, like my parents never owned their own home, that you know, that sort of thing. We were definitely, you know, we played jump rope with the poverty line. So that consumerist angle didn't uh pop out to me. But since then, you know, I've I've been married, I had the house in the suburbs with the yard and the pretty landscaping, and I've had this, and I, you know, went to college and did all of this, and you accumulate this life that's you're like prescribed to have, right? You have to have married, get married, and have kids and have a house, and here's all the things that you have to do. But this is like what you're being sold through mass media, right? Like the media that we're shown, it's there's married couples, they have a nice house, you know, Instagram, TikTok, social media. Everyone's got this great pretty life that you're supposed to want. So in Fahrenheit 451, when Montad goes home and immediately like he gets off a hard day's work of burning books and burning up people's houses, comes home, and Mildred's like, hey, we have like two walls of televisors that take up the entire wall that just pump in shows all day, but I think we really need a third wall, right? We know they had three and she wanted four. She wants to be a little bit more than that. That's what it was. Yeah, in the fourth wall. Right. It's just so interesting to me that whatever they have is not enough. Like, look, we have to have more stuff, and then and then we'll be cool. And he's like, but you know, listen, I only make X number of dollars a year, and this is what these cost. And do you understand what you're saying? That just really struck me because with everything going on and the world turning to shit or whatever, like so many of the white people that that I grew up with, especially, it's like, you know what, they're they're totally okay ignoring this as long as they have like the latest, newest Stanley Cup color. And I'm being a little bit reductive, but that's basically what it is. It's like we don't care what's happening as long as I can still buy my shit. 100%. Well, and you know, in the book too, I was struck by in the shows, they would look to the audience to provide a line, or they'd they'd have your name programmed into the thing. I also thought about she wore that seashell all the time when she wasn't looking at the things. And I thought about us wearing AirPods all the time. Um you're always connected. Always connected. And then, you know, you were talking about the consumerism didn't affect you as much when you were in high school. Well, we didn't have influencers then, and we didn't have 24-hour news then. And you know, like the media has grown and grown and grown and infiltrated all of our lives. And, you know, this is especially there was a big jumping off point during COVID where we're all stuck at home. That's when TikTok took off. And that's when the billionaires made more billions. And like I mean, they were already. And everything is Amazon links. And it's to the point where it's like, you know, I have a 23-year-old son, and uh the uh a dependency that his generation has on filming everything, staying connected, having the latest thing, uh, they don't want to leave the house. I mean, of course, this is generalization, but it's like the social skills really got stunted with COVID. Oh, absolutely. For adults, for people who are adults already, too. And so we're in this, we're in this kind of time where we're all still traumatized from the pandemic. We've been inundated with these media messages, and that's how you get somebody like Trump elected. Oh, 100%. Yeah. He literally had a reality TV star become president who had no experience and you know not even no experience, but blatant disregard for what the job he was running for. Yeah, there's a lot, yeah. I keep thinking about this other Bradbury story called The Velt, which appears in his book, The Illustrated Man. And it's set almost in a in a very similar world of Fahrenheit 451, where it's about this small, this family, there's a boy and a girl parents, and they live in a house that's all automated. Everything's automated for them. They don't have to figure out what to have for dinner, it's clean for them. And the kids have a nursery with screens all around, and the parents go into this room and they expect it to be like bunnies and rainbows, which is what they had programmed, but it's actually the African savannah with this like group of like very hungry lions who are like tearing into prey that the kids are watching when the parents aren't around. And they bring in this, you know, psychologist who's like, Yeah, you got to turn off the screens. Because the problem is the more you're fed this stuff easily, and again, I'm going back to this word friction. You know, we need friction for growth. Kids need it, adults need it. And when there's no friction, you get bored very quickly. So you see this escalation and interest in violence and what we want to consume and what we'll put up with. And I think Trump is a reflection of that. And I think the porn addiction that's so rampant is part of that. It's that people are so freaking bored that that then the media comes in and is like, okay, we'll keep ramping it up. I'm I'm not familiar with that Bradbury short story, but it reminds me of just generally YouTube and how the younger generation and I don't want to pigeonhole this, but it's it's like a lot of dudes, right? Like they're watching like gaming stuff or they're doing this, and that's basically their media is YouTube. But if you're not paying for premium, you're getting the commercials, and what are the commercials for? You know, it's like, hey, ICE is great. Hey, I'm sorry you don't have a girlfriend. Women are bitches. Like, here's how you, you know, irradiate your balls and suddenly get women. I don't know. But you know, but my point is it's like here's like this big manosphere coming in and filling this void. And it's like we've got eyeballs, they're gonna be here. Sure, we're starting out with like cartoons or whatever, but we're just going to slowly start feeding you this. And before you know it, now now you're red pilled, and women are all terrible and owe you sex. And well, and I think we have a we have a real meaning meaning crisis in our society that people people don't have purpose, you know, in a way. And I know I sound like I'm ancient, you know, like kids these days, but like, you know, like when when all of this stuff is handled for you, like the the idea of it is that like technology is supposed to make your life easier. You're supposed to like have more time, right? To pursue the things that that make you happy and passionate and that you feel purpose out of. But instead of doing that, we're consuming more and more and more and spending more and more and more, which is what these companies want us to do. Right. And so we we we become bored and then we become suggestible. And then it's like, well, I don't have a purpose, so I'm just gonna, but I'm unhappy. I'm supposed to, you know, I look like I'm happy because I have everything taken care of. I'm actually very unhappy because I have no meaning in my life, so then I'm gonna blame the immigrants, or I'm gonna blame the gay people, I'm gonna blame the trans people for my unhappiness. Right. And of course, you know, the leaders are fomenting that and leaning on it because a scared populace is way more suggestible and controllable, controllable, yes. So, anyway, so back to the Bradbury. I mean, this is all we've been talking about, Bradbury, this whole time, actually. But, you know, a lot of people are like, this book is about censorship, and it's like Bradbury's come out very clearly on this and said, no, this is about the dangers of television, yeah. They're creating a populace full of morons because people don't want to think for themselves. Not not just, I would push back I'm using his word. He sure, sure, sure. Yeah, and I I think I would push back on him slightly. I I hear what he's saying, but he's also saying that in based on like a 1953 kind of idea, right? It's like here's this new technology, the the television, and it's and you know, it's not like television's not inherently bad. I think anything that puts you know more art in front of more eyeballs is a good thing. But the flip side of that is okay, oh wait, now we have to pay for it, we have to advertise. Oh wait, no, you have to buy this thing. You know, oh wait, this is hey, guess what, CBS? We're saying that you you can't see this, so we're going to change everything. Or when Disney bought a bunch of properties, they sort of, I would say, censored some of their properties so to show to show them on their channel. Two two examples I have is the movie Um Adventures in Babysitting. That line, don't fuck with the babysitter. It's now don't mess with the babysitter. Really? Yeah. If if you watch it on Disney, like the the streaming service, they don't say don't fuck with the babysitter now. And another movie that is under their purview, which is uh 70s movie called The French Connection. Yeah, it's a Gene Hackman movie. He plays a super racist cop, and he says the inner n-word in a derogatory way, like two or three times in the movie, they've taken it out. Uh so I'm like, okay, wait, you don't get to do that. That's the point, is that he's this racist asshole. Of course, he's going to say the n-word, and of course he's going to say it in that way. Changing it, it's like to your point, it makes it less friction-y, less, oh, and less unpleasant. We don't we don't need to think about that. We don't want to see this world reflected to us in this way, so we're just going to change it. And it's about censorship, but it's not just about the censorship. It's like the reasoning behind the censorship that we got to talk about. Yeah. And he also talked about in in addition to the language stuff, there's also this idea of the digesting. Uh, I don't mean like you eat something, but like you you um do the cliffs notes version of a story, right? And that when you cut out that when you try and make it easily digestible because people don't have the attention span, you lose a lot of the nuance. You lose a lot of the ability to interpret things for yourself and think about whether you agree with it or not, you know. And I think, you know, as an author, I mean, I love movies, I love TV. I've been binging, you know, Widow's Bay, and you know, like there's a lot of great TV. But the thing is that when you take a book and then you translate it into a visual medium, you are uh condensing it. Oh, yeah. Some people do a really good job of that, you know, they they stay pretty true to the themes and whatever, but there is nothing that replaces you alone interacting with a piece of fiction. You are like we talked about imagining what Montaug's house looks like. You can't do that if you're watching a movie because you're your Montaug's house is the house that they show you. And that's like kind of a mundane example, but there is a very important transaction that happens between authors and readers. We bring our own context to things, the the author, you know, like Bradbury said, Oh, it's not about censorship, and people are like, it's clearly about censorship. Well, it is, and it isn't. It isn't because that's not what he intended, but it is because people in the society read it and they're like, no, this also applies to this. And authors can have blind spots. I don't know. I mean, I and I don't mean to be like the books are always great, they're not always great. You know, there are there are really problematic texts out there, but I think that if you live in a free society, you have to accept that, yeah, there are dangerous ideas out there, but ideas actually aren't dangerous. It's the humans who take it and act on it that are dangerous. And it doesn't hurt you to read a point of view that's different from yours or a take on something that's different from yours. In fact, that builds empathy and it builds life experience and it builds context for other people that you interact with. Books without context or art without context or media without context is like the dangerous thing. Like we'll get we'll get to it whenever we we start a wrap-up. But but basically, uh a question I always ask everybody is like, hey, should this should this particular top or book that we're talking about be banned? And of course, my answer is always going to be no. But that comes with like caveats, right? Like it's like mind comp. You should be able to check that out of the library, absolutely. But you have to have it within the context of who is this guy who wrote it? When was he writing it? What is it, what was his um intention in writing this? You know, you can't just be like, oh, here's a here's a book and here's a textbook on how how to do what I did, right? You have to look at it through the lens of when it was created, who was who was doing the creation, who are you as a viewer, who are you as a reader reading it. And you only get that through reading a lot of stuff, right? Well, you get you get it that way, and you also get it from school programs that emphasize critical thinking skills. 100%. And you know, like you know, you see today, you know, people online are talking about Lolita. They're like, oh, it's a it's glorifying pedophilia. No, it is not. Like it's uncomfortable for a reason, you know. It's a this is not glorifying that guy, but people don't have the ability to close read. Um, they haven't read enough. They haven't, you know, like like a lot of societal problems, like it's it's it's problematic on a lot of different levels. You know, the the source of the problem is from a lot of different places. And there's just a fundamental, there are a lot of people who don't want us to think critically. There are a lot of people who don't want us to question things, or you know, they don't want us um pushing back or being creative, thinking of new ways to do things because again, we're less controllable that way. We aren't cogs in the wheel just producing the new widgets. Yeah, and that's why fascist governments go after academics first. Yep, 100%. Hey, they're the elites, they're indoctrinated. That's why they're going after books. And I mean, like you said, I mean, yes, it is people from the community. A lot of those people, you know, sometimes those um censorship drives or whatever, those pushes are inspired by political action groups or whatever. Oh, yeah. Well, they got to have money to do their thing from somewhere. Well, well, and we've seen, you know, we've seen bills um introduced in different states and I don't maybe Congress, I can't remember specifically, that are trying to outlaw uh certain kinds of conduct. Content in novels and like sexual content in novels. And they're they're couching it as you know sort of anti-porn legislation. But really the the wording is so open that then suddenly like any book with a queer character falls under this. Oh sure. Well, and any any I'm I'm just going to assume that any book that centers a woman's pleasure is probably not what kids should be reading, right? For sure. Yeah. You're just only supposed to you're only supposed to bang for a when your husband wants you to, and B for procreation. So why else, why would you need to read anything else? Sure. Yeah. And why would you even need to read, lady? Why would you even need to read? And that I I do obviously we we've been dancing around this for a little bit, and I do want to actually specifically bring it up where if the books are gone, and that this has already been a recurring theme in the small number of titles that I've done for this podcast so far. It was in Parable of the Sower, it's in Handmaid's Tale, where we control not only what you read, we control who gets to read. And if you're not like the class in power, or if we don't want you to, like you're saying, think or think critically or know anything about the world around you, we control what you can read, or we control if you can even read. And the idea that today we're what is it, like 20% of adults don't read at a certain level, and like the median reading level for Americans for 54% of Americans is the sixth grade reading level, and then we wonder where why we're at where we are today. It's like, yeah, because you're not reading books, you're not thinking for yourself, you've never been taught how. You know, no child left behind fucked us. And I'm just gonna say that just point blank because we're teaching kids to the test and not teaching them to think or read or encouraging reading. Sure. Well, and then also uh back to the screens. There was a big report that came out recently. I'm sorry, I can't quote it or the name of it, but they they've studied the the decline in intelligence in the current like school age kids can directly be traced back to when screens were introduced in the classroom. Holy shit, really. And yes, and like it's the first generation that will not be smarter than the one that came before it. And so then you add on the whole thing of like if we're on screens all the time, like this is like I'm putting my tinfoil hat on, but absolutely what I do for a living. So I wrote this story, this series of novellas called Meridian Six is the first one. And it's essentially it's a post-apocalyptic world where vampires have enslaved the entire human race. And they are not subtle metaphors for fascists, okay. I was gonna say absolutely on board. I say they they are Nazi vampires, okay? And so, but the way, but the way I explained that they took over was that all they had to do was gain control over the world's servers through the through the cloud. Yeah. And suddenly all of the ebooks that because we don't own our books anymore, they're all on servers and they can take them back, all the music, movies, everything, they cut off our access to the stories and to each other because we don't know how to interact anymore unless it's virtually. And that's how, and so the um the like leader of the resistance in this world is a librarian who created like this book silo underground, you know, so he can he like has some books completely inspired by Bradbury. But it's the thing, like the more we've relied on the mass media and the more we rely on social media, and the more we rely on, here we go, AI, the less resourceful we are for ourselves mentally. I call AI the digital lobotomy. I will say that till I'm blue in the face. It is a digital lobotomy, it will make all of us dumber. 100%. But the people who control those things now control what we know, and control all the jobs and all the money. So if we don't course correct pretty quickly and we don't like, oh well, I wanted to make this point earlier because you're talking about like the TV is inherently bad, you can turn it off or whatever. But the thing is, like what we're dealing with now are apps and things that are designed to be addictive. Yeah, I love social media, I'm on threads every day, you know. I love shooting the shit with people, I watch you know, reels and all of that stuff. And there's a lot of really wonderful connection that happens there. There's a lot of good information. The problem is that it's so hard to walk away from it. Yeah, it's designed to be addictive and go read a book. It's so hard to put it down and go take a walk or go to you know meet some friends or whatever in person because why not? We can just zoom, we don't need to be in person, or we, you know, we can just type and you know, bullshit on threads or whatever. You know, Bradbury was basing this on television, but it has gotten even more Yeah, because we all have our computers in our pocket pocket. We've got the algorithms determining what we see, we've got you know, AI being pushed as if it's inevitable, like we're supposed to like comply in advance just because they want this to happen. Meanwhile, like what we're supposed to support something that's gonna put us all out of work, really? That that A is going to put us all out of work and B doing it by stealing all of our shit. A hundred percent. You know, like fuck IP laws, I guess, because it's just all ours now, and you can't do anything about it. And also, we're gonna put a data center in your neighborhood, you can't do anything about it. Yeah, you're right. We do absolutely have to course correct. And I kind of want to bring up the idea that how much like our I'm gonna say like newer movies, not necessarily theatrical re releases, but like movies that are like Netflix exclusives or just on HBO or whatever. Like when you watch those movies now, they're geared toward a younger audience that has their phone in their hand while they're watching it. And you know this because like these major plot points that happen, they repeat repeat them three fucking times because I know you're not paying attention because you're playing a game on your phone while you're watching this. I mean, I will I'm guilty of that too. Oh, sure. I will rail about this shit all day long. Oh, we're rotting our brains, whatever. Meanwhile, I'm looking at shoes on Amazon while I'm watching you while I'm binge watching a show, you know. And it so it's really difficult, right? Because it's like, yeah, I know it's bad, but also I am human and these things are designed like knowing how your brain works doesn't absolve you from your brain actually working, right? Right. It's like, yeah, okay, well, these are designed to be addictive, and guess what they are? Well, it's like my therapist would be like, just because you can intellectualize the problem does not mean you're solving the problem, you know? And so, like, Okay, okay, therapist. I know, like seeing me. I don't pay you for this. I don't pay you for the three anyway. So, yeah, it's a tricky thing. And but I do feel, and let's talk about hope for a minute, because we need that. I feel like we're gonna see a real pushback. We, you know, we do see, and I mean, I understand that there are echo chambers online, and the most of the people that I am talking to are also writers or huge readers and you know, critical thinkers point of view. Yeah, most, you know, Gen Xers, you know, like whatever. However, like I think people so I'm single and I am dealing with dating, and dating apps are ass. They're terrible, they are not helping people at all. They've got so gross, they're so gross. But anyway, but the point is that like we people are feeling more isolated than ever. Oh yeah. And now we have this AI bullshit coming on, and I just feel like at some point, and you know, we're inundated with this uh shitty political news all the time, and this like terrible human being that none of you know, like we don't want to see or hear from ever again. Right. And so it's kind of like at some point we're gonna have to be like no, we're gonna walk away from this for a while. And I'm starting to see things like there's a bookstore here called Baldwin and Company in New Orleans. In New Orleans, sorry. They are opening a cocktail bar in the store so at night people can come and read and have a cocktail and like talk to other people. You know, I'm starting to see these like people thinking outside the box in ways to create these third spaces where people can come and socialize and find people who have common interests. Because we need that. We have to have more of that. I'm gonna take this opportunity to toot my own horn a little bit because whenever you were talking about the the short stories and and and world building that you were developing, it reminded me that I'm developing, I've written a short screenplay, a short a screenplay for a short film, working on developing the feature, but the general crux of it is the government has kind of come in and said, hey, if you make art, you have to use AI. When I first started kind of thinking about this idea was like last summer, and it seemed, yeah, maybe a little far-fetched, but not really. Uh, I was, I'm still building it as a near future dystopia, but now I'm like, you know what, we're not that far from like, hey, like, say Warner Brothers saying what's like, yeah, we'll fund your film, but you have to use AI at some point. Either you have to, it needs to be written by AI, you have to use an AI actress or whatever. So it's not that far-fetched. Um, but the idea is there's a theater troupe in Chicago that essentially goes quote unquote underground in order to produce theater that doesn't have any AI. Like there's no AI in marketing, there's no AI scripting, there's no, we're just producing theater. And of course, shit ensues and ice happens and and everything. But to your point, it's that idea where we're craving community in a way that is not being provided for us now. And kind of tangentially to that, I really feel like we're on the cusp of a it's been happening for a while, but I think we're we're on a cusp of a new level of of engagement with it where we're going to go back to analog media. Oh, yeah. You know, obviously, like the vinyl nerds have been there for a while. Obviously, like us book people, we've been there for a while. But the idea that not only can you actually own this piece of art, but it can't be changed after the fact. Like you can't take the n-word out of this because I owe actually own it on a DVD and I can play it on my player that's not connected to the internet, so you can't stop it from happening. So I really feel like we're going to have a huge analog resurgence as a pushback against this not only technology, but this artificial intelligence that they're saying that is inevitable and you have to have it. Yes, I agree with you 100%. And as Gen Xers, we can lead the charge because we lived in an analog world. Thank you very much. But I will say this also I don't want to give anybody any ideas. Okay. But if I was an evil billionaire who wanted to push AI, I would be pushing the idea that AI can create frictionless media. They kind of are doing that, aren't they? It's you know, like you can use AI to create you don't have to work for 10 years to be a writer. You can put your idea and into chat GPT and get 70,000 words, and it's going to be milk toast, but it's going to be publishable, and it's not going to piss anyone off. Yeah, I guess it is already happening. I just think, man. I I hear what you're saying, but fuck all that stuff. I am so pissed off about all of it. I am so angry at the president of Barnes and Noble saying that they're gonna give shelf space to shitty AI books. Who's gonna pay for that? Why would you pay for something that you could create by yourself at home? What, because you're good at putting in a prompt? Like because I'm good at putting in a prompt, you're gonna give me 12 bucks. That's so stupid. It's it's dumb, but it's also at some point, Jay, it might be the majority of the art that you can buy. Why would you, from from like a business standpoint, I'm gonna put on my my evil billionaire hat, right? Why would I pay you, an author, five thousand dollars for this book that you took a year to write, whenever I could put that same prompt or a prompt into Chat GPT, get a 70,000-word book that these idiot assholes that have never read a book in their life are gonna gobble up because they don't fucking know better. I can save the five grand. I don't have to pay you. I can just do this, take all the take all the water from Memphis, Tennessee, because who gives a shit about those people and give you this, and I'm gonna just take all the money. Yeah, I think though that what'll happen is that those people who don't care where it comes from will get very bored very quickly because it's unsustainable, yeah. This is something that I am really leaning into with my students when we're talking about AI because we're having lots of conversations about it. Oh, I bet you are, yeah. Yeah, I teach a business of writing, business of being an author class, and yeah, I had to whole add a whole module about it to basically scare the shit out of them. Yeah. You cannot replace good craft. You can do a facsimile of good craft, but you can't replace the chaotic, you know, sort of magic that comes from an imperfect human being. The alchemy that they can create. Oh, alchemy is the right word. Yes. You know, we transmute uh these life experiences into these wacky stories. You know, Becca Syme, I don't know if you're familiar with her. She knows she's wonderful, she does it has a lot of great classes. Um, she just recently was giving a talk about, you know, you know, authors are terrified because there's so much supply. Right? The field is just saturated. Yeah. But she said the the thing that we're missing is that demand is still not being met. You can have a trillion AI books coming out, but if the readers are not finding what they want in those books, they will not buy them. And what readers want is stuff that humans can create, which is full of id and and um hypocrisy and hypocrisy and and contradiction and you know, quandaries and you know, human themes. Because the thing is, like whether you're writing about aliens or vampires or like ice planet barbarians, I love that series by the way. That's what I did. If you're writing about those things, you are always writing about being human. 100%. And a fucking computer cannot recreate that. They can pretend to, but deep down, we are so wired to connect to each other through story. And we can tell if a story is bullshit. You will have people who buy books that are just you know phoned in, they consume it like Doritos. Like sometimes you want a Doritos book, fine. But uh the stuff that's memorable, the stuff that is talked about, the stuff that people keep coming back to is stuff that has emotion and heart and empathy and all of these things in there that you can't create with a formula. No, yeah, I'm a hundred percent on board in agreement. And I I want to circle it back to a point I wanted to make about Fahrenheit 451, which is the idea that, you know, like when Montaug's in the system, he doesn't know these people exist, but once he becomes outside of the system, once he becomes quote unquote woke, shall we say, and he's like, oh wait, no, there's another world out there with not, you know, the the actual world that Ben Franklin lived in, not the world where Ben Franklin was the first fireman, right? You know, there's these books and all this learning and all of the all of this stuff, and oh wait, there's these people, there's these rebels that live outside of cities, the hobos, yes, who all have taken it upon themselves to read this literature and read these books and memorize this stuff, and they are just living vessels for this old literature, and so whenever the world turns around again, we can write these down and still have these texts, right? I I had mentioned it in the episode that I did with Maurice Bradis on Parable of the Sower, and I had pontificated that maybe one of the reasons these types of books get banned isn't necessarily for the content. Obviously, Parable of the Sober Sower race comes up a lot in that book. You know, it's it's features a black protagonist written by a black author. Let's face it, that's the main reason that that book gets gets banned. But also, I'm going to throw this out there that I think there's it's not a small component of this that these books get these type of books get banned because it shows us a roadmap out. It shows us how to have hope. It shows us how we can fight against this regime, whatever this regime is. And just so and it just so happens now it's Trump leading a Christian fascist, techno fascist ideology, right? But it gives us a roadmap and it gives us hope, and there's a way out of this. Yes, I just wish that we would take the lesson when the stories come out and prevent prevent ourselves from getting there. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, yeah, they've been warning us for years that this was coming, people wouldn't notice. I will say one thing though, and this is, you know, I'm gonna pick at Bradbury a little bit. When you when they when the hobos start talking about the books that they've memorized, oh that guy's Leviticus, that guy is, you know, Marcus Aurelius, whatever. Every book that is mentioned is written by a white dude. And also they're all white men that are that are the stewards of, you know, there's no like women hobos that are Yeah, we're the lady hobos. Obviously, they have to have lady hobos. Come on, who's who's cooking their hobby? They talk about repopulating the world. You're gonna have to have some lady hobos for that. I was being facetious when I said who's cooking their shit, but yeah, like come on, like you want to have a robust society moving forward, like where are your women ladies? I want to write a lady hobo story now. Absolutely. Can we can we do that together? Yeah, for sure. Anyway, so I mean, I yeah, I love that idea of them giving us the road out. Unfortunately, like the road out here is the one that I think we're all afraid of, which is everything's gonna have to come tumbling down. Oh no, it all has to be broken. And here's the thing I've mentioned it a few times online, but it's like, oh, I don't think people are ready to hear this. This is not just an American problem. If this is happening all across the globe, we have to have like essentially a global revolution, and it's not gonna be pretty. It is not gonna be pretty. And it's guess what? We all have to get real fucking uncomfortable and be real fucking comfortable with being uncomfortable, and then maybe, and then maybe we can like have a better thing for everybody. It's interesting because you know, like a lot, you know, obviously a lot of people have talked about leaving the country. Sure. Um, I you know, I did my research to see if there were options. It's a little hard when you're older and self-employed, but whatever, it's fine. But I got to the point where I was like, well, where am I gonna go? Like maybe there's some places where things would be delayed a little bit, but if the if the most powerful country in the world goes under, everybody is affected. The entire world economy is affected, you know what I mean? So it's like status quo here. And how fucking privileged is that to think that you just get to opt out of the discomfort of the moment? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, hey, I can just leave. Well, yeah, you can, but like I was saying, this is all global. Like this is, and to your point, if we're the most powerful country in the world and we go under, everyone's kind of fucked to a certain degree. There's no place that's going to be like happy in the next decade. It's we all have to like roll up our sleeves and create the world that we want. And then also speaking of hope, I just want to say in this world, the Fahrenheit 451 world, and also in our world, I mean, things have always been bad. I mean, he wrote this in the aftermath of World War II, right? Exactly. Yes, I think he actually started thinking about it in 1946. So literally right as that was ending. Yeah, we had the Great Depression, we had World War I, there's a civil war. Like all these times where things were pretty dire, books were still getting written. People were still thinking, there's still education happening, there's still people who give a shit. And are trying. And I think, you know, it's it's easy to get disheartened right now. But, you know, as people who are thinking people and people who are reading people, and frankly, people with platforms, like it's incumbent upon us to say, you know, like, no, like we're not just gonna say, well, I guess we're just fucked. It's let's just let it all just like disintegrate. Right. You know, like we have to have these conversations and we have to say, you know, read this book, because this book gives a lot of really good ideas about like what we're seeing happen. And I think that's one of the great things that speculative fiction does incredibly well, whether or not, I mean, this is not like a super subtle metaphor for 451, right? Speculative fiction looks at things slant. You know, they they use these metaphors that are a little bit, it's not looking directly head-on. You know, you're he's not saying TVs are bad, let's destroy TV, you know, like it's it's more subtle. And there are other books like Parable of the Sower, Handmaid's Tale, lots of examples. And even ones that aren't specifically political, like that, that are still addressing political issues, that they aren't looking at it head on. And so it allows us to have conversations about the book that are also about what's going on in a way that doesn't feel as threatening and as controversial and as combative with people. And so I think that there's an opportunity through reading books like this that we can have discussions with people that open up dialogue that isn't possible in other scenarios. I would agree with that. I would also throw out there are some movies that do that. Like I I feel like I say online at least twice a week. It's like you motherfuckers have never watched Blade Runner and it shows. Well, even if you look at like my genre, Urban Fantasy, you know, the the original writer, big names of urban fantasy, it got diluted a little bit as it became more popular. But you know, Charlene Harris was not writing about vampires, she was writing about queer people coming out of the closet. Like the vampires came out of the coffin, it was a metaphor for queer people. Like there are a lot of really crunchy topics being discussed in popular fiction that are important, but they, you know, it's not as confrontational because there's this layer of like, no, this is just entertaining. This is nothing new. Uh, I'm going to screw this up because I am not a biblical scholar, but one of my favorite classes in college I took was apocalyptic literature. And it was written by obviously a biblical scholar. He did like a sabbatical in in Israel and and and stuff. Uh, and we went over the the book of Daniel and the book of Revelations. And uh the book of Revelations was basically written about, I think the Roman Empire, or basically it was whatever they were writing about, they were writing about like this tyrannical government, but in a way that people could read it and also it could be published, right? Hey, we're not talking about, we're not talking about Trump. We're totally talking about Hitler, guys. This is this is the book about Hitler. It's not about our government, but anyone reading it's gonna be like, okay, this isn't about Hitler, it's obviously about the guy currently in the White House, which is basically the way the book of the Revelate Book of Revelations was, right? So to your point, this isn't new. We've had to kind of circumvent the ruling class in order to get our message out there for millennia. Well, sure. And it always drives me nuts when you hear people who support Trump being like, I really love the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. What message are you getting? Do you are are you part of the Empire? Like, what the people who are like, I like Rage Against the Machine. It's like, dude, we're missing some contact. You know, like let's work on our media literacy, please. Yeah, could you could you could you listen to these lyrics? Right. Oh my god. All right, so I think uh we've ended on hope, which I think is a good wrapping up point for our discussion. The last question I'm going to ask, which obviously is a no, is should this book be banned? And obviously it should not be banned. So I want to get your thoughts on that, and also like any any final thoughts that you have about our discussion, about the book, about the world, about anything. Obviously, no, it should not be banned. I wanted to share like a couple of quotes from this book that absolutely are good to take away. One is, and this was this was said by Granger, who's sort of the head hobo, and he says, you have to stuff your eyes with wonder. Like that's a that's a phrase I would have tattooed on my body. And I think that that gets to the crux of what we're dealing with, which is you have to get out and interact with the world, interact with each other, and experience other things and and be amazed by the world we live in and get out and interact with it to live a life, yeah. You know, to have an actual life, and expose yourself to different things, yeah. Yeah. You know, the other thing he says is there's more than one way to burn a book. We can't just, you know, and we've talked about this this whole time. It's not just government bans, it's people feeling like they have to censor themselves so that they don't get crucified in public. And that is applying to a lot besides books in our society, you know, like people are afraid to make a fool of themselves in public because it'll get put on TikTok or whatever. It's like we're so afraid of making mistakes or looking silly, you know, that we're not interacting with each other and we're not filling our life our eyes with wonder anymore. And I think that that's a it's dangerous, but it's also just a shame because there's so much amazing life to live away from screens. If we're lucky, we get 80 years. Yes. Is it wouldn't it be a shame if we spent those 80 years not doing anything or only doing what we're told? And only being consumers, you know. And only being consumers. And and there's like one other one other quote I want to share. It's like I I'm paraphrasing this was like, there are creators and there are burners. Uh like you're one or the other. And and I think what all of this consumption does is it turns us into uh people who are unable to create. Like you're you're you're equating the cons consuming with burning. We can't, yeah. I mean, we can't we can't think of things in a different way or take chances or you know uh put beauty into the world because we're so busy consuming. Yeah. This is, you know, it's hard for an author to pick a favorite book, but I would say this is in my top five, and it's consistently in my top five. Um, not only because it's so well written, I again, Bradbury Band Girl, but it just continues to be such a rich source of lessons. Yeah, yeah, and relevant. Obviously, however long it's been, what, so many years after publication, it's as relevant today as it was then, if not more so, which I think is really remarkable. Yes. You know what, Jay, I want to thank you for joining me today. I have immensely enjoyed our conversation, and I'm already thinking about ways that I can get you back in my snare for another episode. I'd love that. I mean, it's been so fun. I've been looking forward to this ever since you brought it up, and I appreciate you letting me come on and just bloviate about this book because I could do it all day long. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, hey, we're gonna do it again. Awesome. I'd love it. All right, I'm gonna thank all of our listeners out there for hanging out and uh make sure to check out our Patreon page. Subscribers get a sneak peek at our lineup and can listen to the podcast before the rest of the world can. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And hey, tell your friends about us. This is Kelly Swales, and you've been listening to Bard Books. Catch you next time.