Author: John Knych

9 minute read

When you query an AI chatbot with questions such as: How does a data center work? Or: Why does my pouty basset hound prefer cheese over sausage? Here is what happens behind the technical scenes: 

Your beautiful and meaningful text is converted into digital data (turning letters into strings of 0s and 1s). This data is sent via Wifi then fiber optic cables at the speed of light to the data center, directed to servers, bounces around amongst the GPUs which run trillions of calculations, tokens/next words are predicted, data is sent back through the fiber optic cable and to your screen where you go, hmmm interesting…

Basically, the query requires some serious computation. Every computation requires hardware. Each hardware cluster needs power. Every watt that enters the machine eventually becomes heat that must be removed or malfunction, fire in the bowery, death. A typical AI chat prompt requires .34 watt hours (or a 10 watt LED light bulb running for 2 minutes) and produces 1,224 joules of heat energy that must be removed (how much heat a sitting human body produces in the span of 12 seconds). With ChatGPT receiving more than 2.5 billion prompts/messages per day, this is enough heat to boil 3.6 Olympic swimming pools of water (850 MWh of thermal energy).

The more powerful the system, the more extensive the physical needs become. The U.S. Department of Energy has stated that in 2023 data centers accounted for 4.4% of U.S. electricity consumption. By 2028 this number could almost triple to reach 12%. To put this in perspective, all residential homes in the U.S. account for 37.3% of electricity consumption. So in 2028 data centers are expected to consume as much electricity as 43 million residential homes, compared to a previous, measley 5.8 million homes.

A.I. queries, depending on mode size, chip efficiency, prompt length, caching, output type, and data center design can use several times to 1000x more energy than traditional search. A typical Google search now prompts an AI overview.  

It’s important to note that the danger of AI use becoming excessive is not one person asking an AI chatbot to create an image of a monkey eating a hamburger. It is that every single digital product becomes an AI product, every company uses AI by default, hordes of self-replicating and self-learning AI agents populate the web (AI bot traffic has already surpassed human traffic on the internet), and the physical system behind it all either grows to meet the incredible demand, or grows to meet a world where AI is not as prevalent as previously predicted. 

If AI becomes the default for almost all of digital activity online, you can imagine why the hyperscalers are frantically building data centers like it’s the Manhattan Project during WWII.

J.P. Morgan forecasts $2.9 trillion spent on building data centers by 2028. 

It is important to note here the geopolitical pressure (and investment) as well: AI capacity is linked to cybersecurity, scientific research, and military planning. If China has superior A.I. models than the U.S. (and the Chinese frontier models are currently nipping at the heels of Anthropic and OpenAI), this will make Americans anxious. This is why the president of the U.S. announced government support of the $500 billion to be invested in Stargate. 

The hyperscalers not only fear geopolitical weakness, but that data center demand will arrive faster than their infrastructure’s ability to serve it. The hyperscalers also dream of AI helping us to cure cancer, produce unlimited clean energy, and to make custom-made watches for select OpenAI employees with prices tags of $180,000.

While in the early dinosaur days of enterprise computing, data centers were considered primarily as internal cost centers, places to support business operations, they are now considered strategic financial assets. 

Strategic financial assets? Why? How? Capitalism, what did you do?

One of the factors behind the shift was the emergence of “Infrastructure as a Service model,” which changed computing resources into billable units. This process, first used profitably by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is what skyrocketed Amazon’s growth and profitability as a company in the mid 2000s. With an excess of data centers and compute, which Amazon created to manage its own website and data, AWS could rent their compute, storage, and networking capacity demand (one of their early customers: Netflix). Using Amazon’s compute infrastructure now generates significant revenue. AWS routinely generates 50-75% of Amazon’s total corporate operating profit.

Basically, with “infra as a service model,” data centers could now be treated like telecommunications networks, power plants, or transportation systems: assets that require enormous upfront capital investment, but have long operational lifespans and produce returns over extended periods of time through continuous utilization. 

What does this “continuous utilization” resemble for data centers? To run a GPU for an hour, it costs a data center a few pennies in electricity. They can charge up to 4 dollars for an hour of GPU time. This is attractive economics. Build it (a 1 GW data center has 700,000 – 1 million GPUs), and let the money come streaming in. No sweat or problem-solving, just click and charge.

At the feverish moment we’re living through, in which hyperscalers are building huge campuses with the expectation that capacity will be filled over time as demand for AI and cloud services grows, forecast models are used to justify this buildout. These forecast models account for long term trends in compute demand (see Chapter 6 on demand) network traffic growth, and regional market expansion. 

AI training and inference require extremely high density of compute environments, large scale GPU infrastructures, and specialized networking fabrics. 

Let’s look at the specifics of these complex environments. Building a typical AI data center takes place in five steps: buying land, construction, installing electrical systems like substations with transformers and switchgears, mechanical systems including chillers and cooling towers, and IT equipment such as servers and networking gear. While summarizing the process, I will use OpenAI’s buildout of Stargate as a case study. 

Step 1: Buy Land! 

OpenAI did not actually buy the land for the first Stargate campus, but rather Lancium (a privately held Houston-based energy-infrastructure and data center developer) had bought the land in Abilene, Texas back in December of 2021, years before Stargate was announced. It purchased the land (around 1,000 acres) for an estimated $4 million (this information is not public, the $4 million was calculated using adjacent land sales). It had plans to build a $24 billion data-center campus, initially 200 MW but expandable beyond 1 GW. Stargate’s ambition is 1.3 GW for the Abilene campus, then a whopping total of 10 GW across all of their campuses. The Abilene location was chosen for three, principle reasons.

1. Cheap land
2. Proximity to abundant wind and solar power generation (excess energy)
3. Highly accommodating local government

Power availability is the most important factor in modern data center site selection.

2.) Construction!

The first step for building a data center is flattening the soil. For Stargate, satellite tracking indicated that land clearing for the first two buildings began around May 2024. Mass excavation/balanced cut-and-fill costs around $31,000/acre. There were 8,500 workers on site daily. So for 1,000 acres, the flattening of soil cost between $40-$125 million. This is less than 1% of the $15 billion project. 

By June 2024, a month later, formal building construction was taking place. They were working day and night, 6-7 days/week, in 10-12-hour shifts. By June 2025, the first GPUs arrived: Crusoe confirmed that the first two buildings were energized within a year. The 12-month dirt-to-live compute timeline was a record for greenfield hyperscale development.

So what was happening within the building? There are three stages for data center building construction:

Shell, Core, Fit out. 

For the shell, steel or reinforced concrete can be used. Crusoe used structural steel for the first 485,000 square foot, single-story building, constructed with steel columns, beams and frames. The shell makes a weatherproof box. A normal building of this design takes 6-8 months, but Crusoe compressed it to five weeks. For the Core, Crusoe used insulated metal exterior panels (IMPs).

The Fit out is where the AI factory gets built. Each Stargate has a central utility hall and four ~25 MW data halls, giving around 100 MW of IT load per building. The entire campus will comprise of eight buildings. At the time of this writing, the shells of the eight buildings have been erected, and at least 4/8 buildings are estimated to be operational.

We should note here that the cost of IT equipment within this phase can often exceed the cost of building and infrastructure itself, especially in AI focused deployments. The buildings also come online incrementally.

Once you have these GPUs installed, you don’t just plug in 50,000 GPUs turn everything, and shout, “We’re rich!” Every system has to be tested beforehand. Engineers test power failure, UPS response, generators’ responses, pump failure, cooling load increases, electrical component failing, network failures, fire alarms, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves (this sound familiar?) Before these tests, you need…

3.) Electricity!

Electricity is often the largest ongoing expense in data center operations. There is always consideration of sites located near existing substations or transmission corridors. Data center architects analyze utility engagement to understand available capacity. 

Climate of the land will also sometimes play a role in the choice: the average temperature will determine the cooling efficiency. This is why a small, cold village in Fife Scotland, Auchtertool, has been fighting against ILI Cato LTD, which has proposed a 600 MW hyperscale AI data-center campus right next to the village. The Auchtertool Action Group has formally opposed the project, generating about 1,600 objections, since the campaigners estimate that at full operation, this AI data center’s electricity consumption could be comparable to roughly half of Scotland’s households.

Which is why hyperscalers often deeply analyze the regulatory environment. This may be even more important than technical concerns like low/high latency to population centers or natural disaster risks. Texas isn’t as cool as Scotland, but the local government officials are more likely to give the green light for infrastructure projects.

Abilene granted Stargate an 85% property-tax abatement for 10 years. It was initially 100%, but the arrangement was subsequently amended and restructured. The 85% number means that $22.6 billion of cumulative property value-years are removed from the tax base over a ten-year schedule.

Texas has a major data-center sales tax exemption: Texas exempts qualifying data centers from its 6.25% state sales and use tax on things including: servers and computing hardware, data-storage devices, electrical systems, cooling systems, software, generators, i.e. all data center things. 

The availability of transformer capacity has become a limiting factor in data center development times. Some of the components have long lead times (the time it takes for a component to arrive when you order it). This is why Amazon is building their next data center using single gas turbines (18-24 month lead time) rather than multiple gas turbines (2-3 years), even though single turbines are worse for the environment. 

The existence of wind and solar in West Texas was attractive because West Texas frequently had more wind/solar generation than the transmission system could economically move to population centers.

In 2022, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) curtailed 5% of all available Texas wind generation and 9% of the available utility-scale solar generation, electricity that could have been generated but wasn’t, because of grid constraints. Abilene sits near a transmission bottleneck between wind-rich West Texas and the rest of the grid.

When the CEO of Lancium selected the location in 2021, he discussed how generators in the region were effectively paying the market to take its electricity (negative-price electricity).

Today, Stargate’s Abilene campus has 1.2 GW ERCOT-approved grid interconnection.

It is important to keep in mind that this excess solar/wind power is not enough to continuously supply a full-scale Stargate campus. Power will be supplied by the ERCOT grid (a mix of wind, solar, natural gas, nuclear, coal, batteries), new solar (Lancium plans to build 1,000 MW of new solar), enormous batteries (Lancium’s plan shows a proposed 1,000 MW – 4,000 MWh battery system), and natural gas (Lancium’s plan shows a 360 MW natural-gas power plant). This pressure on the electricity grid could increase energy bills for Texans.

Wait, why all of these diverse energy sources? Why wouldn’t excess wind/solar energy be enough?

Enormous electricity is needed, not only for running the GPUs, but for backup generators. Due to the sensitive nature of the data (hospitals, military, your cousin’s ex-girlfriend’s baby photos) there are many backup generators, dozens or even hundreds of units, the aggregate capacity of these systems is often equal to or greater than the full capacity load, ensuring that no single point of failure can compromise operational continuity. There are high capital costs to house, fuel, and maintain them.  

Uninterruptible power supply systems (UPS) form an intermediate layer. Typically, these systems rely on large battery banks, because instantaneous power is needed between utility and generator supply. 

The next challenge is distributing power within the data center facility, so patient records and videos of bears eating burritos are maintained. This is done through a hierarchy of switchgear, busway systems, power distribution units, and rack level power supplies. 

Modern artificial intelligence workloads, like asking a chatbot whether Socrates or Phil Collins have had a greater impact on human civilization, may require power delivery in the range of tens or even hundreds of kilowatts per rack. 

Again: power consumption is the single largest ongoing cost in most data center environments, and the efficiency of the electrical systems directly affects profitability. 

Let’s talk about switchgears and substations:

A hyperscale data center like Stargate acts like an enormous electrical funnel. Electricity arrives at extremely high voltage, and a sequence of substations, transformers, and switchgears progressively turn it into electricity the GPUs can actually use.

Electricity arrives at voltage between 138 kV and 345 kV, depending on the site (high voltage allows you to move enormous amounts of electrical power with much less energy lost as heat). A transformer, through electromagnetic induction (AC electricity creates a changing magnetic field in the transformer’s core), induces a lower voltage in another winding.

Switchgear doesn’t normally change voltage, but rather decides where electricity goes and whether a circuit should be connected or disconnected. Inside switchgear you have busbars (massive conductors carrying electricity), protective relays (detects abnormal electrical conditions), and meters/sensors (measures voltage).

Switchgears also allows essential redundancy: if a transformer in a substation fails, a switchgear can isolate it and allow another electrical path to support the load, depending on the facility’s redundancy design. Meanwhile, batteries/UPS systems can bridge the extremely tiny interruption while switching occurs or generators start.

You can never NOT have electricity running through these GPUs.

To sum it up: substation receives enormous amounts of electricity from the grid and distributes it around campus, the transformers convert the voltage to manageable levels, and switchgear acts like the electrical traffic controller and emergency protection.

We’ve come a long way from Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in a lightning storm and Edison’s light bulb.

4.) Cooling!

As previously mentioned, the consumption of electricity by GPUs produces enormous amounts of heat that needs to be dissipated.

There are various ways to cool GPUs, and the different methods have tradeoffs. There’s air cooling, liquid cooling, and emerging thermal technologies.

Cooling via air flow is inefficient. Liquids like water more efficiently transfer heat.

In the news there has been citizen outrage against data centers due to the water consumption that many of these data centers are using to cool their GPUs. 

EESI has noted that large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day.

Stargate will use direct to chip liquid cooling, but rather than pulling water from the surrounding ecosystem, it will use liquid cooling in a closed loop.

This closed loop system is necessary because the Nvidia GB200 systems are packed too densely for conventional room air-conditioning to do most of the cooling efficiently. Crusoe has claimed that their closed system is non-evaporative, meaning that it repeatedly recirculates the same cooling water rather than continually evaporating water through cooling towers. Around 23% of data centers require evaporative/adiabatic heat rejection, or water being constantly pulled from an outside source.

The closed loop system works as follows:

A cold plate sits directly on the GPU. Rather than fans blowing cold air across the chips, this metal plate is attached to the hot components. Coolant flows through tiny channels in that plate. The liquid carries away the heat from the rack. The warmer coolant travels through pipes to a CDU – Coolant Distribution Unit. The CDU contains pumps, heat exchangers, controls, filters and sensors. Crusoe says that Stargate rejects the heat using air-cooled chillers. Outside the buildings, you’ll find enormous arrays of heat-rejection equipment with fans. Thermal imagery of buildings allow observers to identity which Stargate buildings are functional. 

“Of a 2 ton rack of GPUs, 1.95 tons of that is used for cooling,” said Jensen at the 2025 U.S. Saudi Investment forum, “just imagine how tiny that little supercomputer is.” The cooling and electricity challenges are why data centers in space (with solar panels) are so compelling: send those tiny supercomputers up to space once the cost of sending cargo goes down, then have them use the sun’s energy and send the heat exhaust out into the void.

One building on Earth, engaged in 100 million watts of computing, must continuously dispose of 100 MW of heat at full IT load, plus deal with other facility loads. This heat could boil water in 10.3 Olympics swimming pools per day (25.8 million liters).

5.) Installing IT equipment such as servers and networking gear!

Once Crusoe (which has leased the land from Lancium) has finished testing the infrastructure, making sure that everything is IT ready, Oracle leads deployment of the actual IT hardware and software.

Oracle brings in the Nvidia rack systems, position and connect them, cable networking, bring the systems online, and configure the OCI environment and commission the compute. OpenAI consumes the compute for training and inference.

Oracle committed to purchasing roughly 400,000 Nvidia GB200 chips ($40 billion), and will be paid by OpenAI for using those chips. Oracle is not unique in making billion-dollar investments in AI, but is rather 1/5 hyperscalers going all in (including Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Meta). In the next chapter we will take a deep dive into their trillion-dollar bets, and the exact scale of this infrastructure buildout.

*My basset hound’s distinct preference for cheese over sausage comes down to chemical addiction, olfactory stimulation, and stubborn breed psychology.*

9 minute read

Principle source: The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim

Nvidia, founded in 1993, is currently the most valuable company in the world, worth over $5 trillion dollars, which could purchase 70% of the land is Australia, outback real estate containing 40-50 million wild kangaroos. 

This gargantuan valuation stems from their leading production of cutting-edge GPUs (graphic-processing units) used for AI computation. Since Nvidia is the dominant supplier of these GPUs, and there’s a current bottleneck in the supply, they are reigning supreme. 

Nvidia’s GPUs have the ability to perform mathematical calculations simultaneously, which makes them ideal for training and running advanced large language AI models. How did they arrive at this coveted place of cosmic dominance?

Early in the company’s career, Nvidia predicted the future significance of AI. They engaged in investments including enhancement of hardware capabilities, optimization of networking performance, and development of AI software tools. 

The founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang, known to most as ‘Jensen’ has run the company with a maniacal focus for its entire three-decade history, the longest tenure of any tech CEO:

The company culture is notorious for being wickedly intense, fostering independent drivers, and requiring mental resilience from its employees (HR orientation spiel: ‘We don’t waste time finding excuses for why things don’t work. We move on.’) They hire fast, and fire just as quickly if a new employee isn’t meeting the high standards. Constant work (weekends and on holidays), finding the limiting factor, refusal of complacency, the pressure of ‘always being 30 days from bankruptcy.’ The work ethic is contagious. When competing engineers at 3dfx were hired post 3dfx bankruptcy and they expected to find some secret sauce, a superior technological advantage, they were surprised to find the key to Nvidia’s success was simply this: ‘Really hard work and intense execution on schedules.’

One of the three co-founders, Curtis Priem, came up with the name by looking up the Latin word for envy; Invidia. Then they combined it with N, because of the NV1 chip (Next Version) they were working on. 

Source of initial funding? Back in the early 1990s, venture capital in general and especially Silicon Valley was slim pickings. The entire VC sector was just over $1 billion a year ($2 billion today) and Silicon Valley accounted for 20% of it. In 2024, Bay Area VC would make up the majority of VC, investing more than half of the $170 billion in funding that gets doled out every year. 

While Nvidia had no product or working revenue yet, the founders had connections in the industry that were strong enough to justify their lack of revenue streams. 

When Jensen, at age 31, gave his resignation to his boss at LSI, his boss asked, ‘Can I invest?’ Yet he was concerned about the potential market. ‘Who plays games? Give me an example of a gaming company.’ Jensen’s responses are indicative of how Nvidia would become prophetic for generations to come. He said that if they built the technology (superior 3D graphics cards), more companies would be founded, as 3D graphics were only beginning to take off. ‘You’ll be back soon,’ said Jensen’s boss, ‘I’ll hold your desk.’

After receiving $1 million in Series A funding from Sequia Capital (Don Valentine: ‘…I’m going to give you money. But if you lose my money, I will kill you’), and $1 million from Sutter Hill Ventures, Nvidia set out to build a chip that could display graphics at a resolution of 640×480 pixels. Today’s best chips display graphics at 7,680×4,320 or 3.98 billion pixels per second.

One of NVIDIA’s first innovations (to overcome the high cost of memory) was forward texturing, a software process for handling textures. Instead of using the traditional inverse texturing, which was based on triangles, Nvidia would render 3-D polygons by using quadrilateral shapes. Using quadrilaterals involved less computational power, thus lower memory. The drawback to this process was that software developers would have to completely remake their games in order to use NVIDIA’s forward texture mapping. Nvidia bet that, due to the fragmented world of PC video-game graphics, their technically efficient process would win out in the end. In addition, they added to their graphics cards new audio, high-quality wavetable synthesis, which recreated digitized sound from recordings of actually instruments (before this, sound was made synthetically by the company SoundBlaster and sounded silly). They were betting that software makers, which previously worked on software that was run on computers with separate cards for sound and visual, would choose a technically advanced multifunction card, even though it would mean more work to design the software.

More smart moves: Jensen convinced Intel to support the new card, Jensen convinced SGS-Thompson (a European chipmaker) to fund Nvidia’s software division ($1 million/year) to secure the right of manufacturing the NV1 chip. Presented the NV1 chip at Comdex in Las Vegas in the fall of 1994, one of the biggest computer trade shows in the world. 

At the trade show, they met the representatives of Sega. In May 1995, Nvidia and Sega signed a 5-year partnership, where Nvidia planned to build its next generation chip, NV2, exclusively for Sega’s next video game console. 

But the NV1 chip was a failure. In a nutshell, video game players simply wanted the fastest graphics performance for their favourite games at a reasonable price – not an over designed, superior technology with features nobody cared about. Sales were lackluster. Games needed SoundBlaster audio capability, and NV1 didn’t have it. 

‘We were diluted across too many different areas,’ Jensen remembered. ‘We learned that it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things even though it looked good on a PPT slide.’ 

Nvidia had never answered the supremely deep, important question about their product: ‘How would you position this?’

In the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (which Jensen read), the authors argue that positioning is not about the product itself but rather about the mind of the customer, which is shaped by precious experience and knowledge. 

Sega nixed the NV2 deal (but due to a clause worked into the contract by Jensen, Sega had to pay Nvidia $1 million of Nvidia could produce a working prototype), money woes, so Jensen fired 60 members of his staff, taking the company from 100 employees down to 40. 

Everything was riding on the NV3 (they had $3 million in the bank, which would last them 9 more months): they wouldn’t over design, but go big with what the market wanted: 128-bit memory bus and graphics pipeline that could generate pixels at unprecedented speeds…the most powerful chip in existence. 

RIVA 128 (new name, new opportunity) was showcased (after tight deadlines) with flying colors at the 1997 Computer Games Developers Conference. Now, with an impressive, working prototype, they could ask for more money. 

The RIVA 128 was a wild success: the fastest 3D chip for PCs available, within 4 months more than a million units were sold, a fifth of the PC graphics market. In the 4th quarter of 1997: a $1.4 million profit, their first profitable quarter since their founding 4 years earlier. ‘The RIVA 128 was a miracle,’ Jensen said. 

Another crisis during production of RIVA 128ZX: defects caused by residue known as titanium stringers required manual testing of thousands of chips. The money was running out again, and their IPO was delayed due to a financial crisis in East and Southeast Asia.  To survive, they’d have to engage in bridge financing: receiving $11 million worth of loans from their three largest customers: Diamond Multimedia, Creative Labs, and STB Systems. 

Moving forward, Nvidia began to build a commercial moat with various strategems: emulation and backwards-compatible drivers; these allowed them to begin a new accelerated production schedule, matching the PC maker’s buying cycles with “Three Teams, Two Seasons.”

Their IPO in 1999, during the Internet boom, raised $42 million and valued the company at $626 million. Now they could breathe (financially). 

Nvidia coined the term GPUs (via a chip that wasn’t actually GPU, the next generation was) and made the first programmable GPU in existence. 

Xbox deal ($1.8 billion in revenue), Apple Mac computer deal…life’s good.

But setbacks continued. ‘NV30 was an architectural disaster. It was an architectural tragedy,’ said Jensen because Microsoft was withholding information about their Direct3D API so NVIDIA’s software team, architecture team, and chip-design barely talked with one another. In addition, there was a loud fan put on the NV30; sales during the holiday quarter fell 30% vs. the previous year. 

In 2002, a computer science researcher named Mark Harris noticed that a number of other computer scientists were using GPUs for nongraphics applications. These scientists were hacking their GPUs (which were faster than CPUs) to run simulations. They could study things like protein folding, MRI scans, and stock prices. Harris created a website outlining these GPGPUs (General Purpose GPUs) and was hired by Nvidia. 

Jensen saw the opportunity to open up the market for GPUs way beyond computer or video game graphics. He was especially intrigued by the work in medical imaging. 

Inside Nvidia, Harris discovered a secret team working on the NV50, which wouldn’t be released for a few years: it would use extensions to the C programming language, a widely adopted general purpose language, enabling parallel compute, allowing the GPU to perform all the actions of a secondary CPU that might be required via scientific, industrial or technical computing. Basically, people will no longer need to hack the GPUs. Lesson to be acknowledged: deeply analyze people who are hacking your products for particular purposes and lean into their motivations for doing it. 

This new, programming model for chips was called CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and allowed users to leverage the GPU’s computing power. Jensen realized that new software, rather than hardware, would revolutionize the company. 

Now here come the data centers…

Around 2008, about a year after the release of the G80 chip which had CUDA but failed to gain traction, Jensen was giving a presentation to a group of disgruntled, Wall Street analysts. They didn’t like NVIDIA’s shrinking profit margins and short term contraction. Jensen assuaged their concerns by stating that the GPU computing market would rise to $6 billion in a few years, even though it was nothing at the time. Nvidia predicted demand for enterprise data centers powered mostly by their GPUs. 

‘We were convinced that accelerated computing would solve problems that normal computers couldn’t,’ said Jensen. ‘We had to make sacrifices. I had deep belief in its potential.’

The Era of computing had arrived. Everything else, financial concerns included, was secondary. 

Strategic moves: donate to prestigious universities (Caltech, Stanford) and have them use Nvidia hardware in graphics programming classes. Build an academic training pipeline for CUDA via teaching, putting the classes online, and a textbook. Two-day tech summits where Nvidia could talk and learn from scientists. Deep listening and feedback from developers. 

A launch of a new GPU-powered seismic software suite for investment banking and oil prospecting. Widespread solution of AMBER revolutionized how the field of molecular dynamics did research. 

From the beginning of the GPU era, Nvidia invested significantly in deep learning, putting enormous resources into creating CUDA-enabled frameworks and tools. Being proactive worked out when A.I. became common parlance in the early 2020s, since Nvidia was already the preferred chip for AI developers all over the world.

Other AI chip vendors couldn’t compete with Nvidia, since AI developers want to create AI applications as quickly as possible, with limited technical risk, and NVIDIA’s established platform was likely to have much less technical problems. Why? Because the user community had already, over the last decade, ironed out the bugs and discovered the optimizations. 

Moving from Nvidia to other chips like Cerebras, when you have already built AI applications on top of CUDA, is a massive task. Add to this the fact that Nvidia quickly integrated essential AI software libraries into CUDA. 

Amir Salek put it well: ‘The moat is CUDA.’ CUDA opened the doors to the era of general-purpose computing. 

One day Bill Dally met Andrew Ng for lunch. Ng shared his research of combining the enormous dataset of YouTube clips with the raw power of tens of thousands of traditional processors. Dally replied with, ‘I bet GPUs would be much better at doing that.’

Dally assigned Bryan Catanzaro at Nvidia to help Ng use GPUs for deep learning. Now, Ng could consolidate the work of 2000 CPUs to 12 Nvidia GPUs. Catanzaro showed that with some skilled software work, GPUs could create the “spark that ignited the AI revolution.” (According to Dally, and Dally was right.) 

Enter Gary Hinton (later named the godfather of AI, who believes that humanity has a 1/3 chance of being wiped out by it) and his two students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever (Ilya would go on to work for OpenAI, try to sack Sam Altman, then fail): through AlexNet (a program they created) they used NVIDIA’s GPUs in a ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge to support a small-scale deep-learning neural network. AlexNet was fed ImageNet content then “learned” how to build relationships between images and their associated tags. They won the contest with AlexNet correctly identifying 85% of the images. Big PR boost for Nvidia. 

The paper that Ilya and Alex published about their win is not a groundbreaking mathematical formula; it is a “systems paper.” They used accelerated computing to significantly expand the dataset and the model that they were using to solve a problem. 

Despite resistance from some key executives at Nvidia, Jensen embraced deep learning. ‘Deep learning is going to be really big,’ he said. ‘We should go all in on it.’

The entire 20 year history of Nvidia was leading up to this seminal choice. Everything was geared toward bringing about the AI-powered future. The company started to swarm towards machine learning. 

We are now in the year 2024: Jensen says that AI is going to be more important than anything else they could possibly be doing. 

Despite work already being done on the Volta GPU, several years in, they jumped into development of an entirely new type of processor: the Tensor Core, which they integrated into the Volta. Tensors are a type of data container that encodes multiple dimensions of information. Tensors were ideal for AI because they were optimized to run specialized subsets of tasks at even higher efficiencies than typical GPUs. Dally referred to them as “matrix multiple engines” made specifically for deep learning. They were 3x faster than GPUs with CUDA cores at training deep learning models.

“Jensen realized that data center scale computing requires really good high performance networking, and Mellanox was the best in the world at that.”

In the past decade, NVIDIA’s share of the add-in board of discrete GPU market has hovered around 80%. 

But in 2023, despite Jensen spending the previous decade positioning Nvidia as an AI company, data-center revenue, which included AI GPUs, were only 55% of overall sales. 

Then on May 24 2023, the markets took notice. NVIDIA’s 2Q revenue was $11 billion, which was $4 billion over Wall Street’s estimates. It was the largest dollar revenue upside in industrial history, according to Morgan Stanley journalist, Joseph Moore. 

The next day, Jensen gave a speech at the Taiwan Computex technology conference. He announced the new DGX GH200 AI supercomputer, which had 256 GPUs in one system, an increase of 32x compared to the previous model. 

Note: NVIDIA’s salespeople had been agressive in creating demand for generative AI, convincing customers that they needed to embrace it or be left behind by their competitors. Jensen labeled AI a “universal function operator” that could predict the future with accuracy. He says that it will work with anything that has structure.

No surprise, you can only gain this competitive advantage through NVIDIA’s technology.

Now NVIDIA’s data center business for fiscal 2024 rose by 427%, to $22.6 billion. This rise was driven almost exclusively by AI chip demand: these products are complex, with 35,000 parts, and Nvidia is the leader. 

Jensen sensed the explosive rise of LLMs. One month before the release of ChatGPT, Hopper chip architect was released (which had been in development since the late 2010s), which included a library called the Transformer Engine. Price tag for the DGX-1, the first GPU server optimized with Tensor Cores and Transformer Engine for AI research? $149,000. Big money.

So when demand for AI explodes in 2023, Nvidia was the ONLY hardware manufacturer prepared to completely support it. 

Note: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices are developing their own AI chips. But Nvidia had proven, in the past 31 years, that it can perpetually stay ahead of the competition. 

NVIDIA’s management has consistently stated that the $1 trillion that was already invested in global data center computer infrastructure over the years, which is is currently powered by traditional CPU servers, will someday transition to GPUs capable of parallel computations necessary for AI. This represents El Dorado for Nvidia. 

(What does Jensen think the future is after AI? Digital biology. But that’s a different book.)

Now, in the next chapter on Data Centers, let us dig into the nature of this El Dorado.

Thank you for reading.

TL;DR: Meta has lost the A.I. race, Zuckerberg’s revealing WSJ Op-ed, encroaching and enormous lawsuits, deteriorating culture

2 minute read

In 2 hours, Meta will release its Q2 2026 financial results, after the market close. In the 4:30pm conference call we will hear:

-Expected revenue and EPS estimates

–Key AI and capital expenditure metrics

The financial world is divided concerning how Meta’s stock price will react, but most investors are bullish. The current price is 592/share. Yahoo Finance claims the stock price will pop/increase. Some investors (such as Guggenheim’s analyst Michael Morris) even predict a future ~$800 valuation.

I am predicting that the stock will fall below 550, perhaps even to 525. In the long run, I am short Meta, predicting that in 4-6 years the stock price will be 250-300. Below are my four, macro reasons:

1.) Meta has lost the A.I. race, won’t be able to catch up with OpenAI, Anthropic, or even xAI, and is burning cash on A.I. infrastructure.

2.) Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg published an essay in the Wall Street Journal entitled The AI Future Is for Everyone. I believe that part of his motivation for this article was to prepare investors to swallow the bitter pill of increased capital expenditures on A.I.. He closes his essay with:

‘Developing superintelligence will be the most profound technological advance we will see in our lifetimes. Meta is committed to building with the principles of individual empowerment [italics added], invention and balance of power. The arc of human history has bent toward putting more power in people’s hands. If these values lead the way, then I am optimistic that we can build a positive future for everyone.’

‘Committed to building’ is another way to say, ‘please let us keep recklessly plowing money into A.I. infrastructure even though we’re losing this race because this is important for humanity.’

3.) Meta says US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties in August youth safety trial. [Rueters]. They already lost an important trial this past spring, being found negligent for the depression and anxiety of a woman who compulsively used social media, awarding her $6 million. That’s not good. The consensus amongst my family and friends is that while social media is useful, it is addicting and toxic, and should be used in moderation. I also see this trend in my business students. The increasing moderation amongst users will hurt Meta’s growth.

4.) I personally know a few people who have worked for Meta. Let’s call them Person A and Person B. I went to college with Person B. They dropped out, came back, and was a fairly narrow, unremarkable troublemaker. A friend of a friend helped him get a job at Meta, and he has worked there for 8 years, surviving the layoffs. Person A is one of the most capable, creative, driven people I know. He was recently laid off at Meta (when 10% of the workforce was laid off this past spring, 8000 employees fired). He shared with me the toxic culture within Meta, which has already been documented. Obsession with A.I.. The crazy emphasis on automation and flywheels on flywheels on flywheels. High-pressure.

Once a company starts keeping the bad eggs and firing the good eggs (Person A is an inventor and was NOT empowered by Meta’s A.I. push), once the culture becomes toxic and unable to valorize the stellar employees, this is a recipe for long-term stagnation.

In the 4:30pm conference call, I predict capital expenditures to be raised to $140-$150 billion, no clear AI monetization narrative, and comments implying another major spending acceleration in 2027. Their revenue will be high (20% increase from the previous quarter). But Mark Zuckerberg will not clearly say how quickly Meta’s massive AI infrastructure investments are beginning to generate measurable returns.

Sell Meta. Social media is useful and connects us, but should not have a market capitalization of ~$1.5 trillion, but rather $800-900 billion.

10 minute read

The film, The Wolf of Wall Street, was almost never made because Martin Scorsese envisioned an extremely explicit, uncensored adaption of Jordan Belfort’s memoir (2007), and Warner Bros did not believe in the commercial viability of such a vulgar, “cocaine on a stripper’s ass” vision. Due to these creative disagreements, Scorsese and DiCaprio went off to make Shutter Island (2010) instead. The Wolf of Wall Street project sat in development limbo for several years, then the deal with Warner Bros. fell through.

Around 2010-2012, an independent financier/new production company, Red Granite Pictures came to the rescue. They acquired the rights and agreed to finance the movie without demanding content restrictions, allowing Scorsese to create the 3-hour, hard-R version that he wanted. Jonah Hill snorted so much crushed vitamin B during filming (instead of cocaine) that he developed bronchitis and wound up hospitalized. Art is everything.

Critics were angered by the film’s glorification of Belfort’s debauched life and crimes. Red Granite, who made such a vulgar, unabashed version possible, was founded by Riza Aziz, who was funded by Jho Low. Jho received a “Special Thanks” in the credits and was a partying, sycophant pal of DiCaprio. To fund the film, Low used money that he was siphoning from a Malaysian government development fund…

The irony of a movie that was supposed to be a “morality tale” (according to its supporters), “an analysis of a man gone awry” (according to DiCaprio), a dissection of the excesses of Wall Street, being funded by a global scammer stealing billions from a state investment fund…is almost too much to swallow.

Jordan Belfort, in an interview in 2022, admitted that he had his suspicions of Red Granite Pictures: “…not that the money was stolen, but that they were milking it from Arab Sheiks…I thought they were taking Daddy’s…the people’s money and spending it like wild banshees…this guy Jho Low, he spent $7 million on Paris Hilton’s birthday party.” Jordan wasn’t far off in his gut-analysis.

“The reason why I knew the money was stolen, or something was up, is that when I showed up to the launch party for The Wolf of Wall Street…before the movie was even filmed, there was this party, a $10 million party…I said to my then-wife…’I promise you this is not gonna end well’…she said ‘Why’…’No one would spend this much money without doing the work for it.'”

Turns out that The Wolf of Wall Street was financially successful, grossing $407 million on a $100 million budget, even though it was banned in Malaysia and Nepal. In 2020, Belfort filed a lawsuit that accused Red Granite of fraud, alleging that he’d been unaware of the illegal source of the film’s funding. He requested to be released from his contract with the company. Frauds suing frauds for making a movie about a fraud with money from a fraud. Is it turtles and frauds all the way down?

So how did Jho Low finance this raunchy, reprehensible Wall Street film about an ambitious scumbag and steal billions from a Malaysian government fund to party like a drunken rock star? If you’d like the full story, I highly recommend the book Billion Dollar Whale. The short and sweet version (or rather: quick and dirty) is below. What sparked this essay is that last month Jho Low, who is currently a fugitive in China, sought pardon from Donald Trump for his crimes. If he is pardoned, we most certainly have entered the financial dark ages, in which a president also proposes to the government to put his face on a $250 dollar bill.

*

Jho Low grew up wealthy in Malaysia, but not uber wealthy, which his ambition craved. He was the youngest of three children and attended the elite Harrow School in London. He was socially timid, smart, and liked to throw parties. While in London he became close with Riza Aziz, the stepson of the Malaysian politician, Najib Razak. He was accepted to the Wharton School of Business.

At UPenn Wharton’s School of Business he threw lavish parties (once a $20k birthday party) and made more connections. He was introduced to Arab oil wealth in his late-youth, which was not only whet his appetite for extravagant luxury, but opened his eyes to the concept of the sovereign wealth fund.

A sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund that invests a country’s surplus wealth in assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, infrastructure, ski trips for Paris Hilton, Basquiat paintings for DiCaprio, private equity, venture capital, etc. The idea is that this “surplus wealth” is often in the form of “vast, finite resources” in the ground like oil. The first sovereign wealth fund is generally considered to be the the Kuwait Investment Authority, established in 1952. Obviously, oil can’t be sold indefinitely, and prices fluctuate, so rather than steadily, unpredictably pile up cash from selling oil, investment funds engage in financial ventures with the money they get from oil, or could get from the oil, that will hopefully still have value even when the oil is gone.

Two, key points: 1) sovereign wealth funds are generally considered trustworthy, since they are backed by governments with oil, land, resources, power etc. 2) These sovereign wealth funds can issue debt, meaning they can receive cash from banks and companies now with the promise that they’ll pay back more cash later (once they mine the resources, for example).

Jho Low REALLY liked the concept of the sovereign wealth fund. He was always aware of (and distantly connected to) the power and status of Khaldoon Al Mubarak of Mubadala, who ran the Emirati sovereign wealth fund.

Jho also understood international finance deeply, its loop holes and shady back alleys. He knew the possibilities of shifting cash from a poorly controlled state fund…and how to divert it into the opaque corners of the an under policed, global financial system. Fun estimated fact: it is believed that money stashed in offshore financial centers since 1970 is about $32 trillion, a number equal to the combined economies of the United States and China.

Basically, Jho would orchestrate the creation of a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and channel money from it into offshore accounts.

Luxury Reveal: Between October 2008 and June 2010, Jho Low spent $85 million partying. That’s averaging about $350,000 a day. He was paying $100,000/month for rent, once had a $160,000 bar bill at Avenue, a club in New York’s Chelsea district, bought Lindsey Lohan 23 bottles of Cristal, flew private jets, bought super-yachts, etc. In late 2009 he had more access to liquid cash than anyone on earth.

How? How does one “create” a sovereign wealth fund and sneakily steal billions from it? Here’s how in 20, simple steps:

1.) Jho Low forms relationships with rich and connected Arabs in college. During a semester off, he goes to Kuwait with his friend, Hamas Al Wazzan (son of a Kuwaiti construction and energy magnate), who sets up meetings with business people and minor royals. When Jho is 22, he has a fateful lunch with Yousef Al Otaiba, a foreign policy advisor to the United Arab Emirates sheiks, and this connection changes his life. People see in Jho a dealmaker, a mover-and-shaker with flexible morals. Image is everything.

2) He brokers/makes a deal happen between Arabs (specifically: Mubadala) and a giant Malaysian Iskandar land development project. He does this by writing to Otaiba (“Otaiba’s name card is the only one you need in Abu Dhabi,” Low once joked). Mubadala signs a contract to invest half a billion dollars in a Johor project of five-star hotels, residences, and a “golf village.”

Jho doesn’t make as much money as he hoped for making this deal happen. The deal is too clean and he is too inexperienced. But this deal is a pivotal moment for him, since it makes him seem impressive in the eyes of Riza’s politically-connected stepfather: Najib Razak. He lets Najib take credit for the deal. Another smart move.

Fraud Lesson #1: The most extravagant fraudsters almost always have a legitimate deal in their past, something that gives them credibility to make risky, nefarious moves later in their careers.

Najib Razak is “fascinated” by the Gulf, where leaders enjoy lives of incredible luxury. Soon after the deal, Jho flies to London to attend Najib’s daughter’s high school graduation party.

Fraud Lesson #2: Frauds foster their powerful connections.

3) Amidst the buzz of the Iskandar land development project, Low hears of two Malaysian construction companies for sale. Maybe he could buy them cheaply and win contracts for the Iskandar land development? But he needs millions and is still a nobody in the eyes of the banks. So he creates companies that LOOK like they are a part of an Arab investment fund. Low sets up a British Virgin Islands company called the Abu Dhabi-Kuwait-Malaysia Investment Company and gives free shares to his friends/contacts Ambassador Otaiba and minor aristocrats from Kuwait and Malaysia. Note: Jho’s father and sister are both experts at creating offshore accounts. His sister, Low May-Lin, was even a solicitor of the Supreme Court of the British Virgin Islands.

4) Receives loans from Malaysian banks for this Arab-look-alike company so he can spend millions of dollars to buy the two construction companies that are for sale.

5) Sets up two shell companies (empty companies with just a name) called the ADIA Investment Corporation and KIA Investment Corporation. They both appear to be related to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, or ADIA, and Kuwait Investment Authority, or KIA, two of the most famous, multi-billion-dollar sovereign wealth funds in the world. But they are more look-alike companies, with no links to Abu Dhabi or Kuwait.

6) Have these look-alike offshore companies take minority stakes in the Malaysian construction firms that Low has just bought. Now it seems, to anyone doing due diligence/checking the legality of a company, that royals from Kuwait and Malaysia, as well as Ambassador Otaiba, AND two sovereign wealth funds, are Low’s partners in plans to develop the Iskandar project. Image is still everything.

7) Go fishing for more money. Find a rich but financially naive businessman to buy the companies, contracts, and land. Persuade this chief minister of a remote, jungle-covered Malaysian island, Taib Mahmud (71-years-old), to buy the construction companies and the Iskandar land. To Taib Mahmud, buying these companies seems like a safe bet because they are backed by Middle-Eastern wealth and have government contracts.

8) After flipping the construction companies (and bragging to friends that he netted $110 million in profit, buying a black Ferrari and taking the new toy for joy rides around Kuala Lumpur), Jho convinces a man named Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin (through Mizan’s sister, who is on the board of the construction companies), to set up a sovereign wealth fund. This is Jho’s ultimate dream. The sovereign wealth fund will be based on Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, which borrows money against the state’s oil wealth. It will be called the Terengganu investment authority. Low had previously offered Mizan free shares in the Abu-Dhabi-Kuwait-Malaysia Investment Company.

9) But how could Mizan, the sultan of Terengganu, set up a sovereign wealth fund and borrow money against the state’s oil wealth with the help of a young, nobody Malaysian? Enter Tim Leissner, a 39-year-old, ambitious, morally-flexible Goldman Sachs investment banker trying to expand operations in the South-East:

A rising star, head of investment banking in Southeast Asia, Tim Leissner (whose colleagues remarked never operated within boundaries) is introduced to Mizan by Jho Low. Leissner had met Low through Roger Ng, a well-connected local banker at Goldman (Jho’s older brother worked for Goldman, which is likely how Jho became connected to Ng). Tim told his friends that he found Low “dodgy.”

10) Tim and Goldman set up the Terengganu Investment Authority, for a fee of $300,000. Terengganu is rich in offshore oil and gas fields. Having Goldman involved gives an air of legitimacy to the project and promises the future raising of enormous capital.

11) Low convinces Mizan to issue $1.4 billion in Islamic bonds (meaning no interest on the bonds, since interest violates Islamic rules), backed by the state’s future oil receipts.

Uh-oh…Mizan doesn’t like this. He is worried about gambling away the state’s oil wealth. He threatens to shut down the whole project. He hears rumors in banking circles that Low has stolen some of the bond money.

A saving grace arrives…

12) Jho watches his close friend, Riza Aziz’s stepdad, Najib Razak, become elected the 6th prime minister of Malaysia in April 2009. In the first weeks of the new administration, Low is an unofficial aid to Najib.

Note: Najib is not only naive, and doesn’t look into the details of things, but is quite corrupt. He has “grand ambitions to turn Malaysia into a developed nation within a few years,” and knows that his country needs capital. Low promises to provide this capital through his “Arab friends” and through the Goldman-stamped Terengganu Investment Authority.

Fraud Lesson #3: Have a radar for corrupt individuals.

13) Two months after his election, Najib announces the creation of 1MDB, a new Malaysian sovereign wealth fund in June of 2009. The 1MDB fund is simply the Terengganu Investment Authority transformed into a federal entity. The 1MDB fund will have to repay the bonds. 1MDB is about to raise a TON of capital between 2012-2013, thanks to Goldman Sachs.

Note: The 1MDB fund is supposed to invest in green energy and tourism to create high-quality jobs for all Malaysians. But Jho also convinces Najib that, in addition to attracting Middle East money and borrowed money from global markets, this fund can be a political war chest, in which Najib can use it to pay off political supporters and voters, restoring his party’s popularity.

14) In August of 2009, Jho takes Najib and his wife on a yacht off the coast of the French Riviera (quickly arranging the meeting through his connection with Ambassador Otaiba), where Najib is under the impression that the yacht belongs to Prince Turki Bin Abdullah, the son of Saudi Arabia’s king, Abdullah Abdulaziz Al Said. The yacht is rented ($500,000/week) and the whole meeting is a staged show.

Note: Turki is 1/20 sons of his father, Saudi Arabia’s king, and has a precarious financial situation. He has set up PetroSaudi International, an oil exploration firm, in an attempt to leverage his royal connections. This company is little more than a shell. On the yacht trip, Prince Turki and Najib discuss the possibility of PetroSaudi partnering with the new 1MDB fund.

15) Soon after the fake yacht schmoozing, on official Saudi government letterhead, Turki proposes a “potential business combination” with 1MDB. The plan is for PetroSaudi to put its oil assets (supposedly rights to develop fields in Argentina and Turkmenistan, worth $2.5 billion) into a joint venture. 1MDB, would contribute $1 billion in CASH (which came from the issuing of the Islamic bonds).

16) Now how to make PetroSaudi look legitimate when it’s actually just a shell? This shell is basically run by three, immoral men: Prince Turki, his partner Tarek Obaid, and the British banker Patrick Mahony.

To make their business legitimate, they pay Edward Morse, a former senior U.S. State Department official and energy analyst at Lehman Brothers, $100,000 (!!!) to conduct an “independent valuation” of PetroSaudi’s assets, which 1MDB’s board had requested before the fund sends its $1 billion investment. Mahony tells Morse he is seeking a valuation of $2.5 billion. ‘Ok. Got it!’ Morse replies. Morse completes his valuation in 2 days, a “technical analysis” of reserves and prices based on numbers that PetroSaudi has provided. His valuation gives a range that went up to $3.6 billion. Surprise surprise.

17) In a presentation to 1MDB, PetroSaudi mentions a strange payment of $700 million that the joint venture will make back to PetroSaudi. The payment is supposedly to repay a loan that PetroSaudi has given to the joint venture. This repayment is strange because it is impossible for the loan to have existed; the joint venture hasn’t even been set up yet and doesn’t have a bank account. Nobody (outside the profiting inner circle) seems to notice this…finance is complicated and these guys seem confident.

18) On September 26, 2009, 1MDB’s new board meet in Kuala Lumpur to approve the $1 billion transfer from the fund to the Swiss bank account set up for the join venture with PetroSaudi.

(Great passage from Billion Dollar Whale: “In the space of a month, since Prince Turki had written Najib with his proposal in late August, a multi-billion-dollar joint-venture agreement had been completed. Such a time frame – to complete due diligence, asset valuations, and other legal checks – was virtually without parallel. Such deals normally take months, if not a year, to wrap up. A 1MDB employee later compared the process to attempting to read the entire works of Shakespeare in an hour.”)

19) Send $700 million from 1MDB to a mysterious account at Coutts in Zurich. Two days later, an employee from Coutt’s regulatory risk department in Zurich sends an urgent email to 1MDB. The employee didn’t know why the full name of the beneficiary of the $700 million transfer, which is required on bank-transfer requests, was omitted. The 1MDB’s fund executive acknowledged that the “mysterious account” was owned by a Seychelles company called Good Star Ltd. Good Star is owned 100% by PetroSaudi International Ltd., so don’t worry about it! Good Star has a single share. It is held by Jho Low.

20) Party

Epilogue: It’s easy, in these types of financial-scam stories, to get lost in the numbers and transactions. So let’s get lost a bit more: Once Low had $700 million cash at his fingertips, he paid $85 million to Tarek Obaid. Three months later he paid Obaid another $68 million. Obaid paid $33 million to Mahony and $77 million to Prince Turki. Low flew to Vegas, first class, three weeks after raking in the cash and went on a spending frenzy. In May of 2012 Goldman raised $1.75 billion for 1MDB by issuing bonds that it sold to investors. In October 2012 there was another $1.75 billion dollar deal. In March of 2013, $3 billion was raised (a significant portion of this was diverted).

So where did all of this money exactly come from? Whose money, raised by Goldman Sachs, was Jho spending?

Answer: The future, financial opportunities of the Malaysian people. All the Malaysian banks and financial institutions that gave billions to 1MBD lost their money when 1MBD failed to pay back the loans and bonds. Not only did they lose these enormous sums of money (which could have been given to real business projects that improved the lives of the Malaysian people) but they likely became much more risk-averse. The future generations of Malaysians will struggle to lift themselves out of poverty, the economy will struggle to grow, because there will be less jobs and less businesses to hire them. Foreign companies will be extremely hesitant about investing in Malaysia. Each bottle of Cristal that Jho popped, each $100,000 night in America, each handful of $1000 chips he blithely tossed to strippers in Vegas, were lost, future opportunities of the Malaysian people.

At least we have The Wolf of Wall Street…shit. If Jho Low were asked to justify his actions, he would likely argue that his partying was done for the purpose of forming valuable connections. These connections would pay off later, he just needed more time, more money, more Picasso paintings for Leo, more playboy bunnies, more investment opportunities. Sure.

I found many parallels between Jho Low and my grandfather, Anthony “Tino” DeAngelis in how they were able to game international finance, but unlike Jho Low, Tino had legitimate businesses beneath the complex web, didn’t party but pumped the money back into markets and businesses, and was charming and personable. Then again, people in Jho Low’s inner circle who would likely describe him as charming and personable. We are biased towards those who help us.

Tino was also the first to engage in a worldwide, financial fraud in the early 1960s, when checks and paper were the means of transactions rather than clicks and emails with attachments. He built his career on real businesses with physical assets and strong relationships with reputable businessmen, where face-to-face interaction mattered. Jho didn’t need to be personable or charming in today’s day and age, nor did he need reputable businessmen. He had digital curtains, instant communication, hints of powerful connections, and a ceaseless, morally-flexible drive. This meant he could navigate and harness the maze of international finance without creating anything of value at all. He could steal from the future in a way that is difficult to conceptualize…

Will Jho Low’s $4.5 billion dollar theft be the largest of the 21st century? Or will we continue to see more international scams of this type and magnitude? How can and should international finance be policed? If you’re interested in these types of questions and stories, stay tuned for Crime and Opportunity: A story of lost and made fortunes, a family secret, and the hidden events that shaped the career of Warren Buffett. To be published (likely) in the summer of 2027. Thank you for reading. Send an email here if you would like to preorder a First Edition with special contents: info@printimeditions.com

Table of Contents/Transcription

Question 1 (Virginie): Could you explain the origin of the quotes and epitaphs at the beginning of the book? The Sally Rooney quote and the passage? (0-4:17)

Question 2 (Virginie): But you did not study anthropology? (Explanation of why the characters studied anthropology) (4:17-6:28)

Commentary (Virginie): In a sense you are an anthropologist of the Millennial generation in Slovenia. (6:28-7:21)

Question 3/Commentary: (John) One of the goals of Printim Editions is to glorify foreign literature. What struck us about your novel was not only your writing style but the fact that you are Slovenian and we knew very little about Slovenian culture. We have a friend whose wife is Bosnian and she said that “Slovenia is like the Ivy League of the Balkans.” Could you elaborate for us Slovenian identify, and how it fits into your novel? (7:21-8:05)

Slovenian Identity – what is it? (8:05-11:20)

Question 4 (Virginie): Could you pitch your book in a few words? (11:20-11:33)

Katarina pitching the novel (11:33-12:35)

Question 5 (Virginie): Is your book a political book? It is better than My Brilliant Friend…the choir is an island, isolated in amongst these political discussion between the characters…do you agree that it is a political book? (12:38-14:38)

Question 6 (John): What is Slovenians’ view of American culture? (17:19)

Question 7 (Audience Member): How would you position this book in relation to other kind of contemporary literature and kind of the literature, kind of culture in Slovenia? (22:12)

Question 8 (John): How did you develop Maks as a character? (25:21)

Question 9 (John): Do you have a musical background? I heard you mentioned before that everyone in Slovenia is in a choir. How did that contribute to your own exploration of this in the book? (30:07)

Question 10 (John): So you’re pulling directly from experience then in a lot of these songs? (31:34)

Question 11 (Virginie): …you’re reading now Brothers Karamazov, I just told you. And if you had to choose between, I mean, two of three important writers for you who inspired you, or who you’re reading and rereading. (33:00)

Question 12 (John): Development of Masa as a character? (36:52)

Question 13 (Audience Member): …if you were to choose which sort of version to read, would you then definitely go for Slovenian, or does something happen in the English one that doesn’t happen in the Slovenian one, and vice versa? And are you planning also to make other translations? Because obviously Slovenians speak a lot of different languages, so I don’t know, Italian, German— are there other plans? (39:46)

Question 14 (Audience Member): I’m really interested about how you work with a translator and what the process of translating the book was like for you. Probably it was the first time you worked with a translator. And as you said, it’s difficult to find people who are proficient in Slovenian language to the extent where— I think there’s a lot of— there’s a lot that’s unsaid in Slovenian, that there’s a lot of contextual knowledge as well for such a small country and culture. So I’m really curious how you worked with the translator and what was that relationship like? (43:23)

Question 15: (John): What is the tradition of Slovenian gate crashing?(45:38)

Question 16 (John): The characters in this novel, especially Masa, don’t understand the degree to which others feel things for them…nobody knows anybody…could you expand on this theme in your novel? (46:46)

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00.26] – John Knych

Hello everyone, thank you for being here for Printim Edition’s third book launch, and a big thank you to Brett and Kalina at Brick Lane Bookshop for hosting this event. We’re very excited to be here to talk with Katerina Gomboc Čeh for her debut novel, first English translation of Nobody Knows Anybody. So shall I ask the first question? Yes.

[00:00:31.27] – Virginie Actis

So thank you, Katarina, and thank you, Brett and Kalina. My first question is about all the references you have in the book, and especially the mix, the interesting epitaph in the beginning of the book. So there’s a quote by Sally Rooney, reference to social work, a reference to, in the book, to Claude Lévi-Strauss, which is a French writer, anthropologist. Well, what I mean, is your book a response to all this, to all these quotes, all these authors, all these references?

[00:01:14.14] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, first of all, I would like to also say thank you very much for having me and for organizing this, and also for deciding to translate my novel, because as someone who comes from a very small nation, we know how hard it is to, to see our work in, in such a big international language and to present it to the new audience. So I’m really, really thankful and I’m very happy to be here. Oh, to be honest, not really. It was not on purpose. So, um, I, I remember I found that quote from Sally Rooney’s novel when my novel was almost finished. It was just 2 months before I sent the finished novel to my editor. And I remember I was on a plane and I read this this novel, which is Beautiful world, where are you or something like that. And I remember seeing that quote and it felt like, oh, that’s the idea of my novel. And it’s so beautiful. It’s so, so nicely put in that quote. So, and I also like to see books with some kind of a quote at the beginning, like They prepare you for something. They show you in which direction the story will go.

[00:02:48.05] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

And maybe also they spark some curiosity. Um, when it comes to other references, as you mentioned, like, um, Levi Strauss and maybe these parts of this, um, book about, um, uh, Rojava. This is just to build the world of— in which Masa and Maks live. I like to have a very clear setting in my literature, like clear year and place. And also, since they’re both anthropologists, I wanted to kind of copy the real way of communicating anthropology students. So referencing to some works, because when you’re a student and you study, uh, like deeply, if you’re deeply interested in your field of study, then these references, the literature you read, they build your world. And I thought that it will be more authentic if I include that in my novel. And I think that it perfectly also builds this, I mean, it tries to be powerful also when it speaks about a world in which we live now.

[00:04:16.24] – Virginie Actis

Yes. And talking about anthropology, it’s not what you studied when you were a student.

[00:04:21.11] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah. Exactly.

[00:04:21.29] – Virginie Actis

Even though you know it pretty well.

[00:04:24.02] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah. Anthropology is— I remember I just said the same thing 2 weeks ago when I was, I had an event in Slovenian town. I said that I chose anthropology because I was looking for a field of study that to the person who studies it sometimes, or in many cases, it feels, um, not useful in a sense, like, um, not only for the person who studies, but also in like, if you are from, I don’t know, like Masa, she comes from a family of people who are more, um, practical. Let’s say like that. And a decision to study anthropology, it’s like, Why do you waste your time and your, like, you also, um, your chance to get an education, which is free in Slovenia, for being anthropologists? Like, why? Um, so this is why I chose it. I found it, um, a great field of study to show, yeah, this feeling of not having a voice of studying something that is only speaking to a small circle. And at the same time, I thought to myself that since she sings in a choir, like to study a choir as an ecosystem, it’s almost like an anthropological work.

[00:06:09.05] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

True. And yeah, I’m not an anthropologist myself and I did research on how to be, how to study that. And yeah, I think that no one said to me that it’s not like that to be anthropologist in Ljubljana, for example.

[00:06:26.28] – Virginie Actis

So you’re aware in the sense that when we read your book, it’s like an insight of a generation, like an anthropologist. You are an anthropologist of a generation of young Slovenian people.

[00:06:41.15] – Speaker 4

Yeah.

[00:06:42.00] – Virginie Actis

And it’s very interesting to see how there is a— I don’t know how to say that in English—

[00:06:46.15] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

mis en abyme, you say that? Mis en abyme in English? Or—

[00:06:50.23] – John Knych

put in the abyss.

[00:06:51.23] – Virginie Actis

I mean, the characters are anthropologists, and you yourself as a novelist, you’re looking at this generation as an anthropologist.

[00:07:03.28] – John Knych

Excellent. I want to thank all of you again for being here, and that at the end of our questions, we’ll leave it to the floor if any of you want to ask questions. So I just want to say that out loud. Um, so Katerina, another, um, so Virgin and I were the founders of Printemps Editions, and one of the goals of Printemps Editions is to glorify foreign literature translations, and what first struck us about your novel was not only the writing style but the fact that you— we didn’t know anything about Slovenian culture, Slovenian literature. And I have a close friend in the U.S. whose wife is Bosnian, and when I told him about this book, he said that his wife said Slovenia is the Ivy League of the Balkans. And I didn’t really understand that, but I I’d like to hear your opinion not only on that perspective, but what is Slovenian identity and how did you try and capture that in your novel?

[00:08:06.05] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Can I start with an anecdote? So when I was a student at the university, I took a class in Croatian, so Croatian language, because I studied Slavic languages. And our professor, she was obviously Croatian. And she once asked us as a practice, as we were learners, she asked us, have you ever been to the Balkans? So if you ask that a bunch of Slovenians, then that’s an idea that, okay, so we are not in the Balkans, right? And everyone was saying, yeah, I’ve been to Sarajevo, Belgrade, Sofia. And then it was my turn and I said, yeah, I’ve been to Zagreb, which is the capital of Croatia. And she was like, that’s not the Balkans. Um, so if Zagreb is not the Balkans, then also Slovenia can’t be because it’s, it’s, you know, um, but so that’s, that’s always a very like, always starts a discussion. Because they will learn you in Slovenian school that Slovenia is a Central European country. But as I think of it, as I live it, I think that’s what makes the Slovenian identity so special and why am I also interested in it to write about it. It’s this special location in Europe because it has an influence from Austria, which is obviously Central European influence, but also from Hungary, which is which is Eastern European.

[00:09:44.16] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

You can also say it’s South European since Italy is on the west, and then on the south there’s Croatia. And also, of course, what makes us a part of this Balkan kind of community, it’s that Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia, which was the country of countries that are now obviously the Balkan countries. And Everything we do, like what we eat, what we, um, we sing, we like our music, cuisine, architecture in, in this, in these cities, um, our culture, literature, everything is a mixture of these influences. This is what it makes it special and it makes it Slovenian. And yeah, you can have a very like people from the, from the real Balkans, they will when they visit Slovenia, they will say you are not Balkan country because you’re so well organized. You wake up early, you work hard. You, you have this, um, like high quality way of life. It’s very clean. The country is extremely clean. Um, but like if you go to a wedding and after midnight, yeah, you are at the Balkan wedding, you know? Um, so it’s, It’s kind of a, yeah, it takes something from each of these cultures around us.

[00:11:10.04] – John Knych

There’s a great, great wedding scene in this book for anyone who hasn’t read it yet of the traditions and party.

[00:11:16.25] – Virginie Actis

Yes, thank you much. Because we jumped right away in the anthropology question, and could you pitch for our guests here In a few words, pitch your book. What would you say about your book?

[00:11:33.13] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

I always struggle with that when people ask me what is the book.

[00:11:37.03] – Virginie Actis

Yes, it’s very difficult to say. Yeah, yeah, because it’s a good book. This is why it’s so difficult, I think, too.

[00:11:43.26] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

So I say that it’s a story about a student of anthropology who comes from a Catholic family but she is in love with a guy who comes from a different background, and they have a lot of discussions about different topics that shape their world. But it’s also— it’s set in 2015, which is the peak of immigrant crisis, refugee crisis, and this also influenced everything. And now that I told that, I remembered I skipped the part about choir, which is also important. So it’s very difficult to pitch it.

[00:12:30.26] – Virginie Actis

Yeah. But no, you’re right. It’s very difficult. But I was thinking when I was listening to you, I was thinking, how would you pitch Madame Bovary? How would you pitch a great book? And it’s exactly the same. You have a line and you have subtle lines that mixes and entangle within one, within another. And that leads me to another question I wanted to ask you. Your book is highly political to me when I read this, because to be honest, in the beginning, when, if you pitch it as a millennial novel, I don’t think it’s really true. I mean, I’m not a millennial and I was really interested in your book. I really I enjoyed it more than some books. John told me when I, when he found your book, when you start dealing with him, he told me, “It looks like My Brilliant Friend.” No, it’s for me, it’s better. It’s, I wish you as much success as My Brilliant Friend. Let’s hope. But it’s for me, it’s better because it’s very subtle. The way you picture desire between these young characters, the way you have these political discussions. At some point they talk about France and the hijab and things, and it’s very interesting because of course it’s, it’s, it’s, we all know what Europe is dealing with, this extreme radical right movement that pervade.

[00:14:08.20] – Virginie Actis

So no, I think your book is political because in a way some discussions are not political at all, and the choir, the choir, how do you say it?

[00:14:19.11] – John Knych

Choir, yeah.

[00:14:20.04] – Virginie Actis

The choir is like an island, you know, completely isolated in this migration things and And at the same time, it’s even more striking what Europe is dealing with. So do you have— when I say it’s a highly political book, would you agree with me?

[00:14:45.12] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

I do agree with you, but I have to say that I always say, you know, there is a tendency among Slovenians to say, I’m not interested in politics. Uh, also like this kind of topics can be really, really— you avoid these topics at the like family lunch or whatever. Um, and every time that we are disappointed in like in a government or whatever, we will say, oh, I, I’m—

[00:15:19.29] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

at the end of the day, it doesn’t— it’s not connected to my like personal life, so I don’t care. But if we admit, we should care, you know, it’s because it does matter who, um, for whom we will vote for. And, um, but I think that fiction is a great way to, to show that. It’s much more stronger than for example, a Facebook post.

[00:15:54.02] – Virginie Actis

Oh wow.

[00:15:55.08] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Though it can reach, you know, Facebook posts can reach more people, but it, it goes away, away very fast. It’s, it can be very, very quickly forgotten. Whereas the book, it stays, and it can also show you different, like, backgrounds. And because now you have, like, the whole character, you know why this person things, why they think that, because they have certain background, for example, something that led them to this opinion. And I also, I can also add that there is one review on Goodreads by a reader. I think it’s, it’s not a bad and it’s not a good review. I think it was like 3-star review saying that it’s a good book, but the author should be more clear on their sights. And when I read that review, I was like, thank you, this is exactly what I wanted. And yeah, I really hope that this is something that people feel.

[00:17:07.23] – Virginie Actis

We feel the mystery. I mean, this is why also it’s very interesting because the character, there remains, there remain mysteries for the reader.

[00:17:15.24] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

And this is her opinion then.

[00:17:19.11] – John Knych

Thank you. This is a very selfish personal question, but so Virginie is French, I’m American, we’re from different cultures, and while reading Nobody Knows Anybody, there are these little references to US culture like The main character listens to— Masa listens to Taylor Swift. Characters are drinking Coca-Cola.

[00:17:42.22] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Um, Lana Del Rey.

[00:17:44.00] – John Knych

Lana Del Rey. That was an opening chapter. Um, and I was curious about how much American culture has spread into Slovenia. And there’s a Facebook— there’s a conflict between a character and a Facebook scam. And I’m curious about Slovenians’ view of American culture And do they reject it? Do they— are they angry with it? Do they accept it? You know, what’s their view of American culture?

[00:18:14.08] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

So I think that you’re the only reader who would call these things details in American culture because it’s so part of our everyday life that we don’t even think of it as American culture, to be honest. Like Facebook, for example, or, um, also as, I mean, someone once, like a journalist asked me once, why do I have this object like a MacBook laptop or iPhone? Why, why do I mention them? And I said, I mentioned them every time, or maybe a brand of a, of a purse. I mentioned them only, uh, when the thing goes about Max, for example. He has a laptop, a MacBook. He has an iPhone, whereas we don’t know what kind of phone Masha has and what kind of computer, because it shows her how she— I mean, it shows first of all his status, and also it’s written through her lenses, so she will not say, “I took my Samsung,” you know, because she doesn’t really perceive that in that way. About Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift, I have to say that yes, she loves Lana Del Rey, but she doesn’t like Taylor Swift. This is a mistake that people usually say about the book.

[00:19:35.19] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

She tries to love her, but she doesn’t. But okay, um, she thinks that she has to because everyone loves it, but she struggles with that. Um, okay, now the the answer to your question. To be honest, at the moment I don’t think the US is very popular in Slovenia.

[00:19:58.14] – John Knych

In the US? Well, the US isn’t popular in the US.

[00:20:01.29] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

But it will always be like that, that if you, if someone moved to the US and they build their life there, they, they work there, they have their family there, become First Lady. That they made it, like their life, yeah, it got better. Um, and there will always be this kind of a— I think that it will stay like this forever, that it will always be seen like an option to live an American dream that we obviously don’t, or probably. But with this, at the same, at the same time, we kind of start to appreciate more things that we took for granted before, like public healthcare, education. Once my friend said, when we had an event like that, she’s also a writer, she said in Slovenia, people will take time for you. They will have coffee with you. They will not be in a rush. They will send you an out-of-office email and they will not send you any more emails. They will disappear for weeks if they have to take a break. And these are all values that we are aware of. Um, but yeah, at the same time, It is everywhere, the influence of the American culture.

[00:21:42.08] – Virginie Actis

Yeah. Now, if I was listening very, very carefully about the influence of American culture, do we have questions in the audience maybe?

[00:21:57.17] – John Knych

Or because we have more questions. Yeah, but if anyone wants to raise their hand and chime in. If not, we have more questions.

[00:22:09.21] – Virginie Actis

Audience?

[00:22:12.22] – Speaker 4 – Audience Member

I have many questions. As someone who has lived here for a long time, who grew up in Slovenia, I have maybe kept out of touch with Slovenian literature for a while, and I’m really— I haven’t read your book yet. I will, in Slovenian. But what I’m really curious about is how would you position this book in relation to other kind of contemporary literature and kind of the literature, kind of culture in Slovenia?

[00:22:46.13] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Okay, so I think that when it came out 2 years ago in Slovenian language, it was a little bit It was something new. A surprise. Because then in a month, another similar book came out from my friend, as I mentioned, also first narrative story about a student at the Faculty of Arts. Similar, like, setting. And there are few other female writers similar age as I am. But we have very different voices, I would say. So I wouldn’t compare us. But yeah, I think that it was a little bit Yeah, I just had a surprise which also brought some suspicion around it. Like, there was even a discussion at my press conference whether that’s literature, because it’s not a typical, you know, like, there is a huge influence to contemporary Slovenian prose from postmodernism. This book is not like that. And then, for example, one thing that I felt was that it was said that it could be autofiction, which is not. But because it was so like a surprise that there is a first-person narrative, a female author, she, like the writer, was also at the Faculty of Arts. That must be her. That’s her story.

[00:24:45.13] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, that would be my answer. So a little bit of a— I think it’s the beginning of something new. Maybe. I don’t know.

[00:24:57.09] – Speaker 4 Audience Member

I expected you to say that because I think, as you said, that’s been kind of the literary culture in Slovenia feels a little bit behind. And I was interested in— you were talking about kind of the first person female narrative being quite novel.

[00:25:14.02] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, yeah, I, I think so. That’s, um, it’s a possibility that it’s like that then.

[00:25:21.01] – John Knych

Also taking place in 2015 or 2016, um, I think is also new in English. Um, on the train here, Katerina, Virginie, and I were talking about Maks as a character and his relationship with Masa and how it gradually develops. Um, my question is about your crafting of him as a character, his personality, because in the beginning for me I found him a little off-putting, but then by the end I was more on his side. Um, how did you create the relationship and did you. Did you really work to have it gradually develop or did it come out naturally? Could you talk about their relationship?

[00:26:11.16] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

So I remember that in one of the first drafts he was just a random guy who was there and she— and because I really, really enjoy writing about— I don’t want to call it kill off, I would say romantic, whatever, if it’s romantic, I don’t know. But I really like that, and I knew from the very beginning that I will not write a book without that motive. But then I realized this is so boring, like every student at some point they fall for someone, they have something like I will not write just a story about two people who randomly met each other. And I missed something, and that I added later, that he is someone that he already knows because their families were close in the past, and then they split because of the different political opinions. And, um, When I started to write that, I kind of got a— I saw the potential to make a character who will be like a— like this guy that I— there’s many kind of guys I met when I was student at the Faculty of Arts who will going to explain you the world. Though you don’t need them to explain the world to you, but they will.

[00:27:50.16] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

And they will be like, they will present themselves like they know everything and they, they kind of understand, um, how the world works. And they’re also very privileged, but they are not aware of their privileges. And I found the potential in him to show that kind of a person. But as you spend time with your character, you start to like them. You know, they’re— I mean, also characters are yours, like you made them. And as you spend time with them, you start to like them as you did, you know, first. Yeah. He, um, he maybe appears annoying, but with time also, since it’s the first person narrative, I had to think how Masha sees him, and she’s in love, so she doesn’t really see his, you know, how sometimes he behaves himself. And yeah, so at the end, I also wanted to show when they have this moment of vulnerability where he opens about his tension with his father. Well, something needs to lead to what will happen next. And vulnerability is a great place to start that. But at the same time, it also shows that everyone hurts. You know, as this song by Ed Sheeran says, “Everybody hurts,” which is a cliché, but it’s true.

[00:29:30.25] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

And yeah, I think that’s important for me to have characters that have a lot of dimensions and they can— you like them, but you don’t, but then you like them again. Something like that.

[00:29:46.24] – Virginie Actis

Even Agatha.

[00:29:48.10] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Exactly. Yeah. I didn’t want to make an anti-hero, but a person who is a good musician.

[00:30:00.02] – Virginie Actis

Yeah, it’s an interesting character, complex.

[00:30:05.24] – John Knych

You have a question?

[00:30:06.23] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

No, no.

[00:30:07.17] – John Knych

Well, this segues into music. So as we mentioned before, the choir is a significant part of this story. Do you have a musical background? I heard you mentioned before that everyone in Slovenia is in a choir. How did that contribute to your own exploration of this in the book?

[00:30:28.23] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, yeah, choirs are like a big thing in our culture. Also, as I know people who are professional in that field, they will say that Slovenia is one of the best countries when it comes to choir singing. And I went to school, it is a Catholic private which focuses a lot on singing in a choir. So I sang in a choir, a girls’ choir, and I loved it. It was great. But it does appear as something— I still remember that it always felt like that good girls you know, sing in this choir, like, and our conductor, he even said to us, like, you need to have high grades because I want to have only disciplined girls here. So it’s not like a, it’s not a very easygoing hobby. It’s a real thing.

[00:31:34.08] – John Knych

And then I also sang in some more choirs and So you’re pulling directly from experience then in a lot of these songs?

[00:31:44.02] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yes, absolutely. I’m also a second soprano, as Masa is, but I stopped singing 7 years ago and I don’t miss it, to be honest. But I think that the same thing happened to me as I said before about the politics, the best way to write about it. It’s fiction. It’s the same thing here. Like, I really love singing in a choir, and I always felt that I need to write something, and I thought that fiction will be a great place to use that motive, um, that it’s quite relatable but at the same time special. Um, yeah, but also there’s many good pieces, um, that I mentioned in this book that I really wanted to show Masha’s, you know, this hesitation between pop music on one side and another side there is this choir-like music and very formal.

[00:32:52.12] – John Knych

Thank you.

[00:32:53.28] – Virginie Actis

Yes, I had a question about your pantheon writers.

[00:32:57.13] – Speaker 4

You say that? Panthéon in English.

[00:32:59.00] – Virginie Actis

Panthéon. Yeah, because you’re reading now Brothers Karamazov, I just told you. And if you had to choose between, I mean, two of three important writers for you who inspired you, or who you’re reading and rereading.

[00:33:18.23] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, so, um, when it comes to this book, obviously I took a lot of inspiration from normal people. But okay, so since I, yeah, I mentioned that reading this year, I reread Brothers Karamazov again. I have this decision that I read something, some, at least one classic piece work of fiction. And usually I always read Russian classics because I studied Russian. And maybe when I was a student of Russian, I only briefly read it and I didn’t have time to really immerse myself into a book. And what I like about— so for example, in the past years I read again Fathers and Sons by Turbinho, and for example, short stories, novellas by J-Ho. And what I like about these writers is that— so obviously I like to write about the physical part of human relationships, like I’m also interested in sensuality and everything that comes with, with attraction. But what I like about it is that these writers, since they were writers in a different era, they couldn’t be so obvious as we can be now, and they had to do it differently. And I always look for things how they did it. For example, in Brothers Karamazov, you always, like, you’re never sure whether for example, Katerina Ivanovna had to sleep with Mitya Karamazov for money.

[00:35:12.17] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

And this question always stays kind of present, and maybe this is why she really wants to get married, because she’s no longer a virgin. And this is one of the possibilities, and it makes it very painful, and you can feel that also, that passion between her and Ivan, for example. And I always, like, I’m always curious how they did it without being so obvious. For example, there is a very beautiful quote in Fathers and Sons where, um, son— so son comes to his father’s home and he, um, so he remarried father with a very like young woman, like 20 years or 25 years, I don’t know, or even more. And she appears with their baby. There is a sentence, “There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a young woman with a baby.” And it’s so like, it’s so different than what Sans claim to be interested in. How this, how, for example, Turgenev showed through this, simple sentence, the physical part of human life. So this is why I always return to that in his works.

[00:36:36.16] – Virginie Actis

This is something you manage in the book because it’s, as I said before, it’s very subtle. You have a very subtle style and things are sometimes non-said, non-dit, unsaid, and it’s very, very, very well made.

[00:36:51.13] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Thank you, Virginie

[00:36:52.09] – John Knych

And I’ll add to that, to the And for those of you who haven’t read it yet, um, question, um, the, the protagonist Masa, you, you don’t really know in the beginning what she thinks about things, what her desire— it’s very subdued, and only through the journey of the book do you start to really see who she is. Um, this question is similar to what I asked you before with Maks, but did you— you said that you gradually got to like Maks and that changed him as a character. Did your writing of Masa also change? You know, did you purposely hold back writing her in the beginning to wait to show to the reader her personality, or was this just naturally came out with the story?

[00:37:44.02] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

I kind of knew what kind of person ‘What is the personality I want for her to be?’ But at the same time, as you write characters, they do become their own people. So they will kind of also show you the way. At the same time—

[00:38:03.07] – John Knych

Well, to add to that, she seems to be kind of dragged, like she has her education exam in the beginning and she has the choir practice, like these obligations. And then she’s invited to go out to the bar where she gets sick and she’s just kind of pulled along. And it’s not until later on that she starts to have more, more decision on what she’s doing. Did you consciously work on that or did it just come out in the story as you wrote it?

[00:38:34.17] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

I would say that probably it was more intuitively. It just came out as it is. But at the same time, I wanted to write a book about a person who would, in the real world, she would be overseen, like not noticed, you know, she’s one of the students that you wouldn’t notice in a classroom when you enter. But that’s, that’s her story. So now she can tell her story. She, she is like highly introverted person. I mentioned something that she struggles with, speaking on a phone, for example. But that’s her story. So now she can— we can give her space. And the idea that it’s like it comes in front at the end is where she says to this new conductor, “No, I am going to sing the second soprano.” So she kind of grew into that, um, confrontation.

[00:39:36.26] – Virginie Actis

Yeah.

[00:39:40.19] – John Knych

Um, anyone on the floor wants to ask something?

[00:39:46.08] – Speaker 5 – Audience Member

Sorry, I also have a similar story. I came to study here and I stayed here, so I speak Slovenian as well. I’m wondering, um, if you were to choose which sort of version to read, would you then definitely go for Slovenian, or does something happen in the English one that doesn’t happen in the Slovenian one, and vice versa? And are you planning also to make other translations? Because obviously Slovenians speak a lot of different languages, so I don’t know, Italian, German— are there other plans?

[00:40:18.17] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

So if you read Slovenian, read it in Slovenian, because I think that’s It’s— yeah, that’s my language and I can show everything that I can do in it. I mean, it’s my first book, obviously, and it’s not like the best thing I’ve ever wrote, but still, um, sometimes it’s so painful to be speaker of such a small language, you know that, because you would like people to see the beauty of it because it’s amazing. Amazing. Like, it has so many layers, so many different ways to describe things, different words, how it sounds, like linguistically it’s very rich. So obviously, Serbian language. And about translation, well, that’s a topic that I don’t know very well because I don’t work in publishing, but so translators from other languages have to buy rights of my book. And to be honest, for writers from Slovenia, we— it’s not easy to sell rights because people are just not that interested. Um, and I hope that it will, uh, come out in— I think that it should come out in as many Slavic languages as possible because I think that it will be relatable for many of them. For speakers of other Slavic languages.

[00:41:46.14] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

And with English translation, we can reach— it’s a bridge to those people because not— I mean, in Slavic countries, you can find translators from Slovenian, but hardly. Like, if you go to Spain, France, I don’t know, Norway, you will not find it. I mean, you will, but very difficult. It will be very difficult to find a translator from Slovenian. And also Jasmin, translator of this novel, he’s Slovenian. He’s, yeah, kind of very close to the U.S. culture because of his background, but still.

[00:42:24.01] – John Knych

And he’s an author who has published successful books that have won awards. Yeah, we were very happy with the translation. Yes, and so to add to your question, you think the richness of the language is is lost in the English? Like there’s less nuance that you expand even more on how the English language either cuts or paints?

[00:42:50.06] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, I’m afraid I will never be able to answer that question because only native speakers know that, probably. Um, I don’t know.

[00:43:03.13] – John Knych

So it’s okay.

[00:43:06.07] – Virginie Actis

Because no, the translator did a wonderful job.

[00:43:09.03] – John Knych

Yeah, because I think it was beautiful.

[00:43:11.05] – Virginie Actis

Absolutely.

[00:43:11.29] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah.

[00:43:14.07] – John Knych

So I have one more question, but I’ll bring it back to the floor. Anybody want to ask a question from the audience?

[00:43:20.01] – Speaker 4

Can I ask a follow-up?

[00:43:21.01] – John Knych

Yes, of course. Yes.

[00:43:23.06] – Speaker 4 – Audience Member

I’m really interested about how you work with a translator and what the process of translating the book was like for you. Probably it was the first time you worked with a translator. And as you said, it’s difficult to find people who are proficient in Slovenian language to the extent where— I think there’s a lot of— there’s a lot that’s unsaid in Slovenian, that there’s a lot of contextual knowledge as well for such a small country and culture. So I’m really curious how you worked with the translator and what was that relationship like?

[00:43:53.09] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Well, I trusted him, to be honest. Like, I really believe that he can do it well. I know that he’s a, yeah, a perfectionist himself, so I believe that it will work well. And when I saw the translation, I immediately found it very convincing. Then we had to— I mean, we had some kind of open questions, let’s say. How to translate certain things. There is a poem that appears, which obviously gives the title. So how we’re going to translate that, because in Slovenian, of course, it has a special rhythm. Um, but I think, I think that it’s better that the translator is Slovenian because he can understand this certain things that are so important for us. Yeah.

[00:44:51.09] – Speaker 4

And he’s a writer too, by the way.

[00:44:52.23] – Virginie Actis

Excuse me.

[00:44:53.02] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

He’s also a writer.

[00:44:54.03] – Virginie Actis

He’s also a writer.

[00:44:54.26] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

That makes a big difference.

[00:44:55.26] – Speaker 4

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:56.26] – John Knych

Yeah, there really wasn’t much back, and what he did was excellent. And this is our fifth book, and very little, really the only, and Katharina was involved with the process as well, was the poetry of the songs where there was some nuance that Katharina wanted to make sure was there. And also too, there are 7 footnotes, so like the little references References, um, like a political reference.

[00:45:24.23] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Exactly. Yeah. This is what you don’t find in the original. For example, there is an explanation like who Janša is, for example, because obviously we all know, but if you’re a reader from non-Slovenian country, then you maybe need this information.

[00:45:38.24] – John Knych

Also gatecrashing for those non-Slovenians. Do you know what gatecrashing is at a wedding ceremony? Do you wanna explain gatecrashing? Cause I thought it was very interesting. The tradition.

[00:45:49.10] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Yeah, it’s a ceremony before the wedding where the, um, the bride and the groom. So the groom comes to buy a bride. I mean, he has to give money for the bride and he has to do certain things to be kind of—

[00:46:11.09] – John Knych

And they’re often like ridiculous, right?

[00:46:12.27] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Like very ridiculous. And they know the price. With it. Uh, they drink a lot of alcohol, obviously. Um, yeah, not many couples decide to have that, but still you can, you can see that, especially in the countryside. But what is interesting here, as also Max comments, that, that they live in this, uh, you know, in Ljubljana, and they have it before the building, like not or some kind of, I mean, front of the building. Excellent.

[00:46:46.11] – John Knych

My last question, another reason why we chose this book to publish is we love the title too, Nobody Knows Anybody. And we were told that, and I’m actually curious whether you like this moniker, that you’re the Sally Rooney of Slovenia, which I’ve read Normal People and I’m not a huge fan. I think this is much, much better. This is more mystery, more intensity. A quick side point, I have a colleague, a British colleague who loves Normal People and I said, why do you love that book so much? And she said, she really broke away with Irish literature that came before. Like no one had read about a young woman in college. So you’re kind of doing the same thing in Slovenia, right? Based on what you said before that literature, Slovenian literature was, there’s never been this type of story before. Um, but my last question, which has to do with the theme of this book— so this is going to get really philosophical for a second, but, um, on our train ride here, I was reading this book called What Is Intelligence? It talks about how we model each other’s minds to understand who we are.

[00:47:53.21] – John Knych

Um, and in this book, you make this claim that we, we don’t really know each other, or it’s— we don’t know the degree to which how others feel about us is a mystery. And Masa, near the end, she starts to realize this, that what she feels for Max, what she feels for her friend, it’s vague, it’s lost. Could you elaborate more on this theme? Like, did that idea drive the writing of this book? Did it just come— did you just realize it after? Could you elaborate on that?

[00:48:31.09] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

I think I realized it after. I was looking for a title. It was very difficult to find a title for the novel. And my— so when I published my first poetry book, it was under the mentorship, under the supervision of another Slovenian poet. When we were looking for a title, she said, go back to your poems and find something that speaks to you. So when I was looking for a title, I did the same thing here. So I looked what it reappears in a novel, and what it did was the poem that they sing. So the title is the quote from— is a verse from that poem. So basically it’s not mine, it’s Svetlana Makarović, which is extremely famous. Poet in Slovenia. She’s also a very peculiar political figure, as we also added in a footnote, right? So, and I think that when I saw that verse, I was like, yeah, that’s what my story is about. And yeah, I don’t know what to add. To be honest.

[00:49:50.05] – John Knych

Um, well, I don’t want to give away the ending, but you know, there’s— Virginie: “Don’t!”

[00:49:57.07] – Speaker 4

Yeah.

[00:49:57.21] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Actually, can I, can I share another anecdote?

[00:50:00.18] – John Knych

Sure. Sure.

[00:50:01.05] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

When I had a launch event, uh, just after the book came out and there was a time for questions, there was a reader, uh, she, um, raised a hand and she like when it was her turn, she stood up and she said, but at the end of la la la la la, and she told the end to the whole, like, because she took it so personally. And that others in the audience, I said, oh my God. I mean, nothing like that happens. Like, it’s, it’s not, but they were just like, did you just tell the end? Um, and then she came to me and she said, I’m really sorry. I didn’t know that, uh, people who come to to this kind of event, they haven’t read the book yet. And I was like, it’s perfectly fine. They will read it now, you know, because it’s okay to spoil sometimes. So yeah.

[00:50:54.27] – John Knych

Well, we won’t spoil here. That’s a good, that’s a good place to end. Thank you very much, Katerina.

[00:51:01.20] – Katarina Gomboc Čeh

Thank you very much.

[00:51:02.14] – John Knych

Yes. And thank you all for being here. If anyone wants, um, Katrina to sign your books she can do that.

4 minute read

There are billions to trillions different proteins in Nature (20,000 protein gene recipes in the human body) and each has a specific fold or shape. The shape determines its function. Proteins’ 3-D structures create specific binding sites that only fit certain targets, like a lock and key. Knowing their shapes is like conceptualizing the building blocks of Nature, of biological entities. 

Proteins are made up of amino acids (between roughly 100-1000, 300-400 = average per protein). What determines the particular shape of a protein, how it folds, the Lego piece it becomes, are the chemical interactions between the amino acids. For example, two chemical reactions between amino acids include hydrogen bonds (positive-negative attraction, like a magnet) and hydrophobic effects (molecules avoiding water and clustering together). 

The incredible complexity of amino acid chains’ chemical interactions has made the conceptualisation/capturing of proteins’ shapes extremely challenging. Before DeepMind/A.I./AlphaFold, scientists used a painstaking process called X-Ray crystallography to do this, allowing researchers to accurately pinpoint the shapes of only 100,000 protein structures out of the billions in Nature. 

X-Ray crystallography, which takes weeks to months to years per protein shape and costs $50,000-$500,000, depending on the protein’s complexity, works like this:

1.) Grow a crystal (purified protein is placed in special conditions, molecules arranged in a repeating crystal lattice…the repetition is essential since it amplifies the X-Ray signal when it hits it).

2.) Shine the X-Rays on the crystal (electrons in the atoms scatter the X-rays, creates a diffraction pattern/spots on a detector). Note: there are only 16 synchrotron facilities (which provide much brighter, more tunable, more precise X-rays than typical machines) in the U.S. and they cost $100 million to $1 billion to build. 

3.) Record the diffraction pattern (thousands of measurements are made from different angles).

4.) Mind-boggling math and compute (Fourier transforms, solve the phase problem to recover missing information, produce an electron density map/a 3-D cloud of where the electrons are).

5.) Build a protein model (fit the amino acid sequence into the density map, adjust and refine the model until it matches the data). 

Scientists went through with this labor-intensive, capital intensive, mentally-taxing, complex process (sometimes thousands of crystallization trials, proteins are fragile, flexible, and hard to crystallize) because knowing protein shapes is super helpful and allows us to:

1.) Design drugs that fit exactly into target proteins 

2.) Block harmful proteins or activate beneficial ones 

3.) Understand diseases (misfolded proteins are responsible for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Sickle Cell Disease, etc.)

4.) Predict Biological Behavior (like will my left nipple keep burning when I drink grapefruit juice) 

5.) Biotechnology and engineering (improve industrial processes/enzymes in food production or detergents)

If we could create a database of all proteins’ shapes, this would open many, many doors for medical, industrial, and biological breakthroughs:

Enter David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper:

Scientists like to reduce the complexity of Nature into simple, mathematical terms. But biology was perhaps too messy and emergent to be captured in terse mathematical statements (264, The Infinity Machine). Scientists also don’t like black box tech and prefer transparency in every step of the research method, but to Jumper, opaque models that gave you an answer were better than transparent ones that failed (264, The Infinity Machine). 

264: The effort to understand biology through the axioms of physics was a dead end…

Enter Uniprot Dataset and A.I.:

While protein shapes are a hassle to capture, discovering the sequences of amino acid chains is much, much easier. A simple chemical process (Edman degradation) had allowed researchers to not only document the 20,000 human protein amino acid sequences, but also millions of amino acid sequences of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria. 

In addition to analyzing the available protein shapes, AlphaFold would deeply analyze this Uniprot Dataset. Of course humans are not plants nor fungi, but we share the same, basic biological building blocks, so “understanding” fungi amino acid sequences could give the A.I. some opaque, predictive power. Basically, DeepMind borrowed ideas from structural biologists: amino acids that appeared in nearly all the chains in a particular kinship group were assumed to play an important role in the resulting protein structure. Some amino acids had evolved in pairs (267). This long, evolutionary history had hidden patterns and fundamental rules that A.I. (like it had done for the game, Go) could discover, which humans would likely never have grasped, even after centuries of analysis and crystal X-Rays. 

But here is the incredible, goosebump-inducing breakthrough: The standard approach, for scientists interacting with the Uniprot Data set, was to create a contact map of predicting which acids in an amino acid sequence would touch each other in the folded protein structure (268). This is good, but AlphaFold could do better:

AlphaFold predicted the exact distances between each amino acid. The shift from a clunky and crude contact map to a precise distance map, or distogram, was like going from black and white to a full color TV (268). 

Then, using a transformer (the ‘T’ in ChatGPT), the AlphaFold model ingested the entire UniProt database, teasing out the meaning in the evolutionary patterns (274). AlphaFold also trained itself, feeding the model’s own protein structure predictions back into its training set.

AlphaFold saw the patterns. The protein shapes were discovered. Pop the champagne. 

DeepMind catalogued the shapes of all 20,000 proteins in the human proteome, 83% of which had not been mapped by crystallography (277).

In the summer 2021: AlphaFold plotted 350,000 protein structures, from yeast to fruit flies. By July 2022: AlphaFold had folded around 200 million proteins in total (277).

Applications include proteins digesting plastic in the oceans, crops resisting disease without pesticides, and accelerated drug discovery (277). 

The protein mapping field was astounded: most scientists believed this feat was never going to be accomplished in their lifetimes. The average chain of amino acids could theoretically be twisted into 10^300 possible shapes – trillions upon trillions of forms. Yet AlphaFold discovered the correct shapes of folded chains, without the help of superpositions or quantum computing. 

In 2024, John Jumper, Demis Hassabis, and David Baker won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Unfun fact, I asked ChatGPT: when did Demis Hassabis and John Jumper win the Nobel Prize, and it firmly denied their winning the prize:

Competition, conspiracy, or hallucination? 

So yes A.I. has its dark side, addicting us on social media, creating slop, shouldering out artists, gripping the mentally unstable via chatbots and prodding them towards heinous acts, providing us with a tempting, potentially-degrading, mental crutch, upheaval in work, occupational-existential-abysses, and persuasively expressing false knowledge, but we should also try and remember and champion the breakthroughs, shift and adapt (because let’s be honest: it’s here to stay), and harness the discoveries. 

https://youtu.be/-3s5qXikghs

[00:00:00.00] – John Knych

Hello everyone, thank you for being here today. We are with Ed Ashton to discuss After the Fall. Ed has been with us before. He talked with us about Mal Goes to War last year, and After the Fall is his 7th novel. And Ed, usually I begin with asking the author about the origin of their book, but I want to throw a curveball at you. So you mentioned last talk that you used to work for the CIA, correct?

[00:00:32.24] – Ed Ashton

I can neither confirm nor deny that.

[00:00:34.18] – John Knych

Yeah. Well, so you appreciate background check questions. So my question is, John, the protagonist of this book, his knowledge of putting wooden blocks under crossbars to fix the collapsed bed, then Six and John’s woodcutting scene, does this stem from the own work you’ve done on your own deck and your own construction?

[00:00:54.11] – Ed Ashton

I have done a surprising amount of construction work. I’ve, over the last 10 years, I’ve built 7 decks, which is more decks than most non-deck-building people probably build in a lifetime. So yeah, I, that I try, I try to get little bits and pieces of my life into my books because it’s, you know, it’s fun to talk about stuff that has been obsessing you recently. And so yeah, there probably was a little bit of that coming in. 

[00:01:22.06] – John Knych

Thank you. Yeah, it felt, it felt real when they were building that bit. I thought, You’ve done it. 

[00:01:24.06] Ed Ashton

Yeah, yeah, that is drawn from true life. Yes.

[00:01:30.12] – John Knych

Excellent. Thank you. Okay, on to Brandon.

[00:01:34.13] – Brandon

Yeah, Ed, thank you for being here.

[00:01:37.10] – Ed Ashton

So really, thank you.

[00:01:38.15] – Brandon

Really appreciate when authors come on and talk to us. So my question is, you kill off most of humanity in this book and turn them into pets. So what made you want to do that? And kind of what the origins of the book are for this?

[00:01:55.19] – Ed Ashton

I should start off by saying I do not actually want to kill off most of humanity. That is not— that’s not a personal goal of mine. In terms of the origins of the structure of the story, where it came from, this actually originated with something that happened to me, like most of my books. Something that happened to me or something that was obsessing me at the time. I had a dog named Max, and Max was my absolute best friend in the world for 17 years. He went everywhere that I went. When I sat down, he came and flopped himself on top of me. When I went out— when I live in a cabin in the middle of the woods— when I went out for a walk, he was right on my heels. He went everywhere that I went. I loved him. As much as anybody can love anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you get me. Yeah. And we lost him 2 years ago and it was absolutely gutting. It was one of the hardest things that’s ever happened to me. And it got me thinking about the relationship that I had with him because I knew how it was from my end, but I didn’t know how it looked to him.

[00:03:07.21] – Ed Ashton

You know, every, because there’s such, in a relationship like that, there’s such an imbalance of power. Every choice that is made is my choice. Max didn’t actually get to choose. When we were, when we were going out for a walk, he didn’t get to pick where we went. He didn’t get to pick when we went. He might have preferred to go some other way and, and smell some other stuff, and he was stuck going along with me. And it made me question whether you really can truly have love and, or even friendship, when there is no equality at all, when there’s such a huge imbalance of power. And that’s the, that’s the main question that I, I really wanted to explore more with this book.

[00:03:47.15] – Brandon

Thank you.

[00:03:48.04] – John Knych

Fascinating. Thank you, Brandon. Thank you, Ed. Yeah, so Nick has never read this before. For dog lovers, I mean, you just captured that, Ed. I mean, I love my dog too, and there are tons of subtle moments that captured that. Thank you. Onto Noemi.

[00:04:06.21] – Noémie

Yes, thank you, John, and thank you, Edward, for being there with us today. As John mentioned, it is your 7th novel. How would you say your writing evolved since your first novel? Has anything changed for you in the way you write or in the way you process maybe characters, different events? Or is it exactly the same thing and you haven’t changed as an author, which I doubt, but maybe it is possible.

[00:04:29.03] – Ed Ashton

Oh, good Lord, I hope that’s not true. I think like, like anything else, You know, no matter what level of skill you think you have, you always can improve and you always get better. I always think my father was a professional musician. He was a jazz musician, and he used to tell me the story of the, of this elderly violin master in his, in his 90s, and he practices every day for 2 hours every day. And one of his students asked him at some point, you’re 97 years old. Why, why are you still practicing 2 hours every day? And he says, because I think I’m improving. Um, and I, I think that, that no, like I said, no matter where you are in your professional development or your personal development, if you’re not trying to improve and trying to get better at what you’re doing, you’re, you’re probably doing it wrong. And I definitely can see, uh, you know, looking back from my first novel, which, which came out in 2015, to this one, I can see steady improvement in my skills, in my ability to capture a character, in my ability to really structure a clean plot.

[00:05:39.06] – Ed Ashton

I can see improvements from each book to the next as they go. I mean, I just— the audio edition for my debut novel, Three Days in April, actually just released last year, 10 years after the print edition came out. Don’t ask me why that worked out that way. But I went back and listened to it. And like one thing I noticed in that book, readers are— the characters are constantly raising their eyebrows. Like nobody raises their eyebrows as much as my characters in that book raise their eyebrows. I’m just listening to that and kind of cringing inside as I hear that. And that might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. If you reread this book, you will find virtually no examples of eyebrow raising, and I consider that to be a big improvement in my style and in my work. And there’s lots of other little things, and they all seem small and subtle, but they add up to a much, much better book, in my opinion.

[00:06:38.14] – Noémie

Thank you so much. I will note on my own novel, no eyebrow raising. This is an improvement. I will get into that. Thank you so much.

[00:06:48.01] – John Knych

Thank you, Naomi. Thank you, Ed. On to Brian. Hey, Ed, good to talk to you again. Um, so I have not been able to actually get a copy of After the Fall in Taiwan yet. Um, I’m trying to avoid Amazon.

[00:07:03.20] – Ed Ashton

Um, yeah, I think, uh, it should be out there in June if I understand the schedule.

[00:07:10.04] – John Knych

Okay. Yeah, cool. Well, then I will keep an eye out. Um, But I do still have a question. Last time when we talked about Mal Goes to War, there was a lot of discussion of like AI and development of technology and kind of the ethics of its use. And you brought in some things about, you know, your other work and how you engage with new technological developments. I was wondering in this novel, is there an element like that where, you know, you’re engaging with something More, more from real life. Um, obviously you already talked about the relationship, uh, that people have with, you know, pets, with their dogs. Um, but is there, is there anything else in this one, um, that I should expect of like, uh, maybe different technology or different things in societal developments, uh, political issues, things like that?

[00:08:02.18] – Ed Ashton

Um, this is not, um, this is not a tech wizardry book. There’s not. In fact, one of the things that I did deliberately as a choice, considering that they’re sort of alien invaders, I made the Grays substantially low-tech. Their society is not a tech-based society. And I said that was a deliberate choice. This book is about the characters, and in particular, it’s about the relationship between between John and Martok, who are the two main characters. And that’s what I wanted to talk about. I did not want to get distracted with, you know, tech this and ray gun that. I like that stuff. I put that kind of stuff in other books, but that is not what I wanted to talk about in this book. So this is a distinctly low-tech version of science fiction, I think, is a way to think about it.

[00:08:56.15] – John Knych

Awesome.

[00:08:56.23] – Ed Ashton

Thank you.

[00:08:59.24] – John Knych

Thank you, Brian. On to Jen.

[00:09:03.21] – Jen

Hi, thanks for being here. Um, I think that kind of leads into my question, um, talking about just the intention of focusing on their relationship. Um, so you leave the nature of the fall itself pretty vague. Um, was that an intentional choice because you were just focused on the characters? Was there more at some point in there about what actually happened, or that you just wanted to you know, and we’re just going to set that aside and focus on John and Martok.

[00:09:33.09] – Ed Ashton

That was, that was also a deliberate choice, and that’s one that I thought about a lot. I know what happened. I had to build that, build that stuff up in my own head so that I could understand sort of what the effects would be and how, how I ought to build the world around it. But the thing that I deliberately wanted to leave out and leave vague was whose fault was it? Because one of the points that I was trying to explore is, is there any profit in trying to figure out something awful has happened and it happened hundreds of years ago, generations ago, not due to the fault of anyone living today? Is it really profitable to go back and try and figure out, well, you know, whose fault is it and who should we blame? I didn’t want that to be a focus. And so I— and I also wanted to talk a little bit about, um, propaganda and how all of our views are shaped by what we hear and what we’re taught, and which may not be the whole truth. So John, uh, has one view of what happened, and that’s what was drilled into him by the Grays in, in the Krysh.

[00:10:43.04] – Ed Ashton

And he believes it was 100% humans, they ruined the world, and the Grays came in and, and basically saved the survivors. From extinction. They’re heroes. They rescued us. Six, having been raised by feral humans, has a completely different view and a completely different story that the Grays came in and did this to us. They destroyed our thriving society to enslave us. And I wanted to leave that question unresolved because at the end of the day, you have to deal with the world as it is. And going back and saying it’s your fault or it’s my fault is not, uh, it’s not productive, it’s not useful, and it doesn’t help you deal with how we can move forward together. I mean, the humans and the Grays have to work together now. They’ve got this ruined planet that they need to deal with, and if any of them are going to survive, they have to work together. And that was kind of the point that I wanted to make there.

[00:11:32.06] – Jen

Yeah, thank you.

[00:11:35.09] – John Knych

Thank you, Jen. So I assume, Nick, you don’t have any questions since you haven’t read it. Uh, up to you now. Pass. Um, the Ed, I messaged you this, but the character of Martok is just brilliant. I’m going to try to not spoil anything too much for Brian or Nick, but Martok is the owner of John, and when I finished the book, what struck me was, as you mentioned before, there’s this power imbalance, but Martok is still— I loved him. I liked him and connected with him. So my question is, did he come out fairly naturally as a character in that you knew sort of his foibles and his— how he was, or did you really have to grind and sort of craft him to sort of fit that power imbalance but also the the empathy that the reader would care about Martok and want him to do well.

[00:12:41.23] – Ed Ashton

Yeah, I mean, I’ll say up front, Martok, I think, may be my favorite character of all the ones that I’ve crafted for my different books. I really like him too. I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to the audio edition, but John Peralla absolutely nails him. He voices him absolutely perfectly, like exactly the way He actually— I had a call with John after he did the audio, and he said that he expected he would get some hazard pay for this one because the voice that he did for Martok hurt his throat and he had to stop. He had to sort of stop narration every, you know, 20 minutes or 30 minutes and like drink some chamomile tea or something and go on. But I appreciate the effort he put to that because he just, he said, just absolutely perfect. And yeah, it was a very deliberate crafting of that character. The Grays in general are kind of menacing. They’re scary, they’re extremely powerful and can be really callous and brutal, particularly in how they relate to humans. And I needed to sand those rough edges off from Artok to make him to make him relatable.

[00:13:59.12] – Ed Ashton

And so I had to take this incredibly powerful, dangerous creature and also make him kind of a buffoon and like a good-natured buffoon who’s really sort of trying his best to do what’s right as he sees it. And that, you know, that did take a lot of work. That was, like I said, I probably put more effort into crafting this character than I have almost any of my other characters as well, because to take someone again, sort of dangerous and menacing and make them at the same time sort of lovable is— it was a challenge and I knew it would be a challenge going in, but I feel like I feel like I hit my mark on this one. I really do.

[00:14:39.06] – John Knych

Definitely. Thank you. On to Brendan. Back to Brendan. Pass. Back to Noemi.

[00:14:50.23] – Noémie

Yes, sorry. Was there one scene, maybe a character that really took you by surprise when you wrote it? Or maybe it was an intense part of the creation and writing process, maybe in this book or another one, whichever you prefer.

[00:15:10.04] – Ed Ashton

Yeah, that happens to me all the time. You know, when we talk about different types of writers, there’s this kind of ongoing debate between, you know, plotters and pantsers. And we don’t, I think we don’t like the term pantsers. We prefer to be called discovery writers, right? I definitely fall into the latter category. I’ve described my process for creating a book as more like walking down a dark country road in the fog and you think there’s a house at the end, But you don’t know, it might be a bear. You, you don’t really know what’s, what’s gonna wind up down there. And I usually don’t get a clear view of how everything’s gonna wrap up until I’m 50 or 60,000 words in. That’s, that’s just how I, that, that, that’s just how I work. I, I would love to have everything plotted out and know exactly how my book’s gonna wind up and exactly how my characters are gonna work at the beginning. That seems like a much nicer, funner way to, to, to write a book. But I just, like, I’ve tried, I can’t do it. When I, when I try to put together a, like a detailed synopsis of a book up front, everything just seems really dumb.

[00:16:18.03] – Ed Ashton

Everything I write down just seems really dumb and pointless. And, and so I, you know, I, I write and I trust my brain is gonna get me where, where, where it needs to go. And it, it usually does. And so there, there always are little bits and pieces that I’m going along and I’m like, wow, I, I would not have thought that I was gonna drop that in right here, but I guess I did. And Like, it works. It works. That just happened with the book that I’m drafting right now. I’m in the middle of drafting a book that’s due in December, and I’m about a quarter of the way in, and I just dropped in a new character who I had not considered was even going to exist when I started drafting this book. But I needed someone right at this point, and I needed a specific type of person, and It just sort of came to me and I dropped him in. And as soon as I did, it felt right. It’s like, oh yeah, no, something in the back of my brain was planning for this person to be here all the time.

[00:17:12.06] – Ed Ashton

It didn’t tell me about it, but it was clearly they were planning for it. Because as soon as I dropped it, you say, oh wait, I foreshadowed that 3 chapters ago. I didn’t consciously do it, but it was like when I go back and I look, I see, okay, I see the hints that this is going to come. So yeah, that work is getting done in like my cerebellum or something. And then it doesn’t get revealed to my conscious mind until it needs to come out. But it makes the writing process fun because I’m kind of reading along, discovering the book as I go.

[00:17:46.12] – Noémie

I guess the lesson must be to trust the process or something like that.

[00:17:51.01] – Ed Ashton

It can be scary to do that sometimes, particularly when you’ve signed a contract and you’ve already cashed the advance check and, you know, if you don’t deliver, they’re going to want their money back. Uh, it can be a little scary to trust that your brain’s gonna come through for you. But, um, and like I said, if I could have a detailed outline upfront and know exactly what I was gonna do, I’d be a lot more comfortable in the way that I work. But I just, that’s, that’s not how my process works. So yeah, at this point, and it works great. Yeah. This, I mean, this is my 9th novel that I’m working on now. Um, my brain’s come through for me on all the last 8. And so I, yeah, I just have to trust it’s not gonna let me down.

[00:18:28.20] – Noémie

It works so far.

[00:18:29.19] – Ed Ashton

So yeah, so far, so far so good.

[00:18:32.08] – Noémie

Thank you.

[00:18:34.18] – John Knych

Thank you, Noemi. I skipped Logan. Logan, if you have any questions, you can jump in or we’ll continue around the horn.

[00:18:44.15] – Ed Ashton

Yeah.

[00:18:45.03] – Logan

Hey, Ed, sorry I jumped on late. I’m putting out some fires at work this morning. So one thing I I did have a little trouble visioning throughout reading the book was, what do these characters look like? Um, you know, I, I went into it viewing them as kind of a dog-human hybrid based off of the COVID and the concept of the humans are the pets. I pictured a pet as the human, but, um, as I advanced through the book, I realized that my perception on that was probably wrong. What, what do you picture like Martok looking like physically, or what would that character look like in a movie or show, I guess?

[00:19:31.05] – Ed Ashton

You know what, I— we’re often taught to show, not tell, so I’m going to show you, not tell you, if you’ll excuse me for just a second.

[00:19:45.09] – John Knych

He’s living with a Martok. Or maybe he drew it. There you go.

[00:20:00.09] – Ed Ashton

That’s the Martok.

[00:20:02.24] – Logan

By the end, that’s closer to what I was expecting.

[00:20:08.09] – Ed Ashton

Usually when I’m doing sort of an alien creature, I start with some sort of terrestrial model I don’t, I try not to just sort of, you know, like take a tiger and make them walk on two feet and say, that’s my alien. That seems kind of lazy to me, but I have to start with some sort of model. And the model I started with for the Grays was the elephant. I modeled some of their behavior on elephant behavior, certainly some of their features and the way that they’re built. In particular, the, the concept of absenting I built around the concept of male elephants going to musth, if you’re familiar with that, with that process. Um, sort of this thing that happens around breeding season where rogue male elephants just absolutely go berserk and, and will murder anything that gets in their way. They’re famous for just like tracking down rhinoceroses and just murdering them for no reason. Just literally they will just go and murder a rhino for no reason. Uh, it’s a, it’s a hormonal issue. Um, you know, elephants are very sensitive, very intelligent creatures, but when they go into musth, they just turn into these sort of unstoppable killing machines.

[00:21:21.10] – Ed Ashton

And that’s, that’s kind of, uh, was, was my model for the, you know, for the phenomenon of absenting that I described with the grays. So yeah, I borrowed pretty heavily from the elephant for these guys. The COVID art is probably not helpful in terms of people’s expectations for what everything looks like in this book. I’m not really sure. There is a theme of wolf versus dog as applies to humans, and I think that’s what the COVID artist was going for there. But I think it led to an expectation that when the Grays come in, that they’re actually like dog people, and that was not what I was going for at all. So interesting.

[00:22:07.02] – Logan

That’s awesome.

[00:22:07.18] – John Knych

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, good, good question, Logan. Yeah, because I, I, I also pictured them differently in the, in the book than, than the COVID So that make— that makes sense. Uh, back to Brian. Back to Jen, or pass?

[00:22:33.09] – Jen

Um, that makes me wonder, how, um, how does that process work with choosing the COVID and the artist? And, um, do you have, um, like final say over that, or can you give ideas, or do they just come sort of present things to you and say, do you like this, do you like that?

[00:22:51.08] – Ed Ashton

So what typically happens for me, and I think this varies for different authors and different publishing houses and depending on how much particular pull you have. Like, I’m sure John Scalzi gets a lot more pull on what his covers are gonna look like than I do. But they will solicit some suggestions or ideas for me upfront. I just, they just asked me if I had any vague ideas for what my next book’s cover ought to look like. Which I just turned in about a month ago. But then they don’t necessarily take those suggestions into account. They tend to sort of go their own way. They’ve got their own department. You know, they have a graphic design department who does their cover work, and then they’ll come back with sometimes 2 or 3 different concepts and ask me to look at them and say, do I prefer one or the other? Would I, you know, are there any changes I would make? For this particular one, they just came up with the one concept. They sort of presented it to me and it was substantially different than the way that the COVID looks now. I did have some objections to the way that it was originally designed and they let me make some tweaks around the edges in terms of what the background looked like and the color scheme and things like that.

[00:24:12.05] – Ed Ashton

I have a I have a close friend who’s a professional artist who helps me review these sorts of things. She’s obviously a much more visual person than I am. And she had some really good suggestions and they took some of them and they ignored some of them. But at the end of the day, as the artist, you don’t actually have any control at all. They can do absolutely anything that they want. I don’t think they try to be mean about it, but, you know, if I come back with, no, I want you to do this entirely different concept, that’s not going to go well for me, that that’s not a fight that I can win. So I try to work with them to mold things where I can. But in general, you know, the COVID winds up looking pretty much like what the original concept was that they gave me.

[00:24:57.03] – Jen

Okay, that’s interesting. Thanks.

[00:25:01.06] – John Knych

Thank you, Jen. Ed, there’s a line in the book where Martok says, But great gains must always keep company with terrible risks. This is simply the way of the world. And that quote made me think of Mickey 7. So I think you all know Mickey 7 made into a movie, huge success. And Mickey 7 is on that journey because of a bad bet. And you have mentioned in a previous talk, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve had in your life, like you’ve been climbing before and you’ve been hanging by like two fingers, um, like close to death. So my question is very philosophical, but what are your thoughts on, on risk? Because the opening of this book, Martok is taking a big risk. Mickey Seven, that whole story is from a bet. Uh, what’s, what’s your relationship with risk and, and how, how do you live with it? How do you think about it?

[00:26:00.01] – Ed Ashton

So yeah, first of all, I think it is fair to say that I was an extremely stupid young man. I would like to think that I’ve gotten smarter as I’ve gotten older, but my approach to life has been generally to, to be pretty conservative about a lot of things in terms of like my finances and how I you know, sort of how I’ve managed my career punctuated by enormous sudden risks where I saw opportunities. And I think, I think that’s, if you, if you’re continuously taking enormous risks, you’re going to wind up, you’re going to wind up dead. There’s a, I don’t know if you saw, if you saw the movie documentary Free Solo. Um, you familiar with that?

[00:26:55.15] – John Knych

I didn’t see it, but I saw the, uh, it’s, um, climbs El Capitan, is that right?

[00:26:59.18] – Ed Ashton

The— yeah, he free soloed up El Capitan. Um, that guy’s— he’s, he’s gonna die at some point. He’s gonna die in a really bad way. And he, like, he’s fully conscious of that because when you do free solo climbing, you, you only get one mistake. Once you make one mistake, that is the last mistake you ever make. And you wind up as— and there is in that documentary, there is a montage of his contemporaries and his friends doing what they call falling through the shot, which is, you know, they do these climbs with, you know, teams of cameramen and photographers from drones and from and hanging from ropes to document the whole thing. And if they mess up, they fall through the shot, they fall, and you just see their body shooting down through the shot. And then, you know, 1,000 feet down, They’re, they’re, they’re a wet spot on the rocks. And that is how free solo climbers end their lives. Like, uniformly, that is, if you take up that sport and you decide this is what you’re going to do, you are accepting that your life is going to end in a fall to, to, at, at some point, whether it’s, whether it’s now or tomorrow or 10 years from now, that’s what’s going to happen.

[00:28:11.21] – Ed Ashton

Uh, and, and he’s accepted that. And I am not that. I am not accepting that, but I have, you know, for instance, my, in my, in my professional career, I started out after I completed my doctorate, I worked for the government for 5 years and that’s a very safe career. You can, you know, you can, you can do that. And I mean, maybe not right now so much, but at the time you could do that. You could sort of lock in and guarantee you’d have a nice pension at the end of the day and you’d be solidly upper middle class for the rest of your life. And 5 years into that, I quit my job and I founded my own company. I jumped out with literally $75,000 of funding that I had gotten, that our team had gotten, which was enough to fund us for about 3 months on a very shoestring budget. And I quit my job and I sold my house and I moved 500 miles away to do this. And that could have ended really, really badly for me, but it was also a huge opportunity and it actually worked out great.

[00:29:18.13] – Ed Ashton

We actually wound up succeeding and I’m still, I’m still working with the same group that I put together 26 years ago. So you can afford to do that sort of thing once or twice. And if you win, it’s great. And if you lose, hopefully you’ve done it when you’re young enough and you have time to recover. So that kind of punctuated conservatism, I think for me is a good approach to life. It’s a good way to maximize opportunities while at the same time make it reasonably possible that you’re not going to end by falling through the shot, which is, which again, is not how I want to end my life.

[00:30:00.24] – John Knych

Fascinating.

[00:30:01.15] – Ed Ashton

That may have been more than you were asking.

[00:30:02.23] – John Knych

No, no, that’s great. That’s great. No, that’s— it’s when— so I’ve read all of your books, and when you— an author, I think, reaches beyond 5 books, you start to have your sense of who the author is. So that’s just always been a curious thought, and you answered some of my curiosities. Thank you. Back to Brandon, if you have a question.

[00:30:29.04] – Brandon

Yeah. So what you said about, uh, the elephants and the grays, that’s really interesting. And, and now that you’ve said that, I think, uh, it really fits. The elephants and the grays really fits with the story, I think. So you did a good job with that. Um, and I like elephants myself, so I’m just curious, why did you choose, uh, elephant to base the grays on? Do you have a fondness for elephants, or what, what motivated you there?

[00:30:56.14] – Ed Ashton

Well, I thought they fit what I needed in terms of both sort of physical presence and behavior. I want, you know, an elephant is a creature that fully dominates its environment. Nothing challenges an adult elephant. There’s, you know, other than a human with a rifle, nothing challenges an adult elephant. They fear absolutely nothing. They, as I said, sort of in terms of their behavior, they are mostly very sort of peaceable and gentle. But if provoked, or again, if when they’re in this state of must, they are absolutely terrifying, absolutely terrifying monsters. And that’s what I wanted from the Grays. That’s what I wanted from the Grays in this. I wanted them to be something, you know, sort of the sort of creatures that could, could be nursemaids in a crash and could take care of little baby humans and raise them safely. And, but then every once in a while, just absolutely be completely terrifying. Uh, and you know, if you start with a model of something more like a predator, they’re terrifying all the time. And if you start with a model of something more like, uh, you know, like a capybara, they’re always adorable.

[00:32:15.24] – Ed Ashton

How can they be scary? Elephants. Elephants for me really fit that model of can be adorable but can also tear you into tiny shreds.

[00:32:24.12] – Brandon

So is there a, is there a difference in creating like alien aliens? Kind of like I think the alien from Mickey 7 were more alien aliens.

[00:32:34.10] – Ed Ashton

Yes.

[00:32:34.22] – Brandon

And is there, is that more of a challenge than kind of basing them on, on a preexisting animal?

[00:32:42.01] – Ed Ashton

It is if you want to have them be sort of interactive characters. In Mickey 7, the Creepers are more of sort of an abstract force that has to be dealt with. Moving forward in Antimatter Blues and in the third Mickey 7 book, which I just turned in, there’s a little more character interaction with the Creepers. But certainly in the first book, they’re really more of an abstract force. For that, you can be much more alien. I think of, um, have you ever read The Ophiuchi Hotline, John Varley? That’s a classic. If you haven’t, it’s old school, but if you ever get a chance, it’s a short read and it’s really, really fascinating. But he has aliens in there, um, who literally live outside the space-time continuum. Like, they can move through all four dimensions. They can move through time in the way that we move through space. And they are so alien from us that they really can’t even be understood as the way that we understand life forms. And they similarly don’t understand us as life forms. They’re just thoroughly, completely alien. But as a result, you can’t actually have a character that’s one of those things.

[00:33:58.09] – Ed Ashton

I needed something for this book where I could have an identifiable character that the reader could relate to. And for that, I needed something that was a little more like us in something that really was recognizably sort of part of our terrestrial family.

[00:34:15.01] – Brandon

Awesome. Thank you.

[00:34:19.01] – John Knych

Back to Noemi, if you have a question.

[00:34:22.08] – Noémie

Yes, it’s a bit adjacent, but have you read a book lately, and as you were reading it, you were like, oh my God, I wished I did that. I wish that Who wrote that book? Did you have one like this recently?

[00:34:36.20] – Ed Ashton

That, that, that happens to me all the time. I’m a, I’m a voracious reader. I, I go through, I go through books like water and it is very, very common for me to read something and say, not that I wish I had written that, cuz most, most of the time I recognize immediately that I couldn’t write that. But I do sometimes wish that I had the, the capability to write in that way. So I, I just finished Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, for instance. Absolutely brilliant. All 4 books in that series are really must-reads in my opinion. I’ve met Adrian. He’s an absolutely brilliant person. He has a really unique mind, and that’s what allows him to craft the books the way he does. As much as I admire them, I could never write a book the way that he does. I just, maybe I’m just a more simple fellow than he is. Just the intricacy that he, with the way that he crafts his plots is sort of awe-inspiring to me. And like I said, I wouldn’t try to imitate him. I would not try to write the way that he does. But I can hugely admire the work that he does.

[00:35:51.11] – Ed Ashton

The closest I’ve come to, I wish I had written that, probably would be Red Shirts by John Scalzi. Scalzi and I do actually write in very similar ways. I was on a panel with him at Tucson a few weeks ago, and he started talking, you know, you were talking before about how you didn’t have a clear idea of who the, what the characters looked like as you’re going through the book. And John started talking about how he gets grief about that, about how he doesn’t describe the physicality of his characters very much. And I just leaned into the microphone and said, John, I have never felt as seen as I do right now. We sort of fist bumped across the podium because that’s, you know, we both, I think we both fall into that kind of category of really kind of plot and character driven and not so much like into visual description and like long paragraphs of exactly what the room looks like. But Red Shirts is a book that the way that it’s written, His style is not dissimilar to mine. The way that it’s plotted is not dissimilar to the way I plot a book.

[00:36:54.14] – Ed Ashton

If I thought of it, I could have written that book, I think, and I would have been really happy because then I’d have a whole bunch of Hugo Awards instead of him. But that’s probably the closest I’ve come to saying, man, I wish I had thought to write that.

[00:37:09.04] – Noémie

Jan Szajkowski is an easy answer for us, right? We actually had a talk with him yesterday. About the Tradition of Strife. So yeah, absolutely. It was my last— well, fuck, that was amazing book as well.

[00:37:22.02] – Ed Ashton

Absolutely a brilliant person. I had dinner with him about a year ago and my wife was there and she afterwards, she was like, that was fascinating because like the conversation bounced back and forth. We’re talking about like Bronze Age Greek history to the biomechanics of how mantis shrimp work to the astrophysics of interstellar propulsion and just ping-ponging around these things. She’s like, “I’ve never seen anyone who really kept up with you on that sort of thing before. That was really, really fun.” She didn’t say a word the entire dinner, I don’t think. She’s like, “That was really fun to watch.” That’s great.

[00:38:06.24] – John Knych

I want to jump in there for the circuit because You mentioned before, Ed, that you’ve read all the Children of Time series. Were they partly inspiration for the spiders in After the Fall? Because it’s another mysterious element, right? There’s— we don’t know why the fall happened, and then there’s these antagonistic mysterious spiders that are extremely powerful. Were you pulling from Children of Time, or no, was that just a No, no.

[00:38:37.10] – Ed Ashton

Um, if you’ve, you know, you’ve read all my other books, you may have picked up on the fact I’m really scared of spiders. Spiders, spiders creep me out really, really badly. I was actually, I was bit by a black widow when I was 9 years old, and I spent 4 days in the hospital, and that left a, that left a mark on me. Um, I think, and, uh, you know, whenever I want to reach for something, just absolutely viscerally horrifying. Um, for me, it just always winds up looking like a spider. That’s, that’s just, um, that’s, that’s just my own neurosis playing out in my books, I think. Because if you look back at my other books, there’s some kind of spider-like thing that shows up over and over and over again. Going back to Antimatter Blues, um, although all the way back to Two or Three Days in April, there’s, there’s always something.

[00:39:28.07] – John Knych

Got it. Yes, no, the way the characters describe, like, yeah, when the spiders come, it’s— there’s fear. There’s definitely fear.

[00:39:36.17] – Ed Ashton

Yeah. Yep. That is sincerely felt. That’s coming right from my gut.

[00:39:42.08] – John Knych

Excellent. Back to Brian, if you have a question. No, I’ll pass. Thank you. Back to Jen.

[00:39:55.14] – Jen

Um, I was wondering if the book were ever adapted into a movie or a TV show, is there something that you would be especially excited to see on the screen?

[00:40:08.00] – Ed Ashton

I mean, I would be excited to see everything on the screen. Um, I’d love to see what they did with the, with the Grays. I would love to see how that sort of got— I’ve actually talked to my agent about this. My film rights agent was pretty excited about this book. He thought he might be able to get some people interested in. I don’t know how that’s going. I hope it’s going well. But he was thinking it would probably work best as an animated feature, which would make the sort of character development pretty easy in terms of putting the Grays in place, but I could see it being done live action as well. But yeah, that’s, you know, like, Um, when I, when I read, um, when I read Project Hail Mary and found out that was going to be a movie, that was one of the first things I thought was, how are they going to animate Rocky? What’s that going to look like? Um, and it was really interesting what they did. You know, those were puppets. Um, there was no green screen that was done. That was all, uh, practical effects. And, and Rocky, Rocky and the other Aridans were puppets.

[00:41:10.10] – Ed Ashton

And I wonder if they would do the Grays as like people in suits Or as green screen animation or something like that, CGI. I really don’t know. I’d be really curious to see how that came out.

[00:41:25.22] – Noémie

Yeah, me too.

[00:41:26.11] – John Knych

Yeah, fingers crossed. I’d love to see a movie from this.

[00:41:31.02] – Ed Ashton

Oh, it’d be fantastic. I think it would be pretty easy to shoot too. There’s only a small number of settings. You just get an abandoned cabin in the woods that you can use for your main set. Yeah, I think it’d be pretty straightforward. A lot easier to shoot than Mickey 7 was, for sure.

[00:41:48.22] – John Knych

Easier to shoot, but I had the same thought, Ed, with Project Hail Mary. How are they going to do Rocky? For your book, it would be how would they capture the subtle pet-type relationship that you do in the book? All the little verbs and adjectives like padding, the humans padding across the room, the humans John huddling up against Martok’s bulk. Those little moments would be hard, I think, on film.

[00:42:15.06] – Ed Ashton

Yeah, but I think it’s doable. I think it’s doable. You got to take the verbal signaling and turn it into visual signaling, which is— that’s what moviemakers do. That’s their business. So I think it could be done. Excellent.

[00:42:30.17] – John Knych

I’m going to jump into the roundtable again. You mentioned in a previous conversation, not this one, I think the one with— you did with Brockport on Mickey 7, that when Mickey 7 was made into a movie, you were able to talk with Bong Joon-ho, and he asked you what’s the one moment you really want to keep from your book. And if I remember correctly, it was chapter 9 of 19. What would be the moment or scene in After the Fall that you would not want a director or screenwriter to mess with?

[00:43:06.10] – Ed Ashton

The one moment— well, actually, there’s two. I mean, the climactic scene, I think, really is what wraps everything up there. So I mean, that would— but nobody would touch that if you’re going to do the book. That’s what that would be in there. But there’s a scene I describe in there where it’s kind of like the dark night of the soul for John and Martok. Where Martok is actually contemplating, like, ending it all. He’s contemplating, like, walking into the lake with John and just being done. And John basically brings him back. And to me, much like Chapter 19 in Mickey 7 cemented the relationship between Mickey and Asha, I think that scene is what really shows you where the bond really is between Martok and John. And I think that would have to be in there.

[00:43:54.11] – John Knych

Thank you. I jumped in front of Logan. Logan, do you have another question?

[00:44:00.20] – Logan

Yeah, so I audibly clapped here in my office whenever you said that there’s another Mickey 7 book that’s been delivered. It wasn’t something I was expecting. I, you know, as active as I am on BookTok, I don’t follow too much the news behind things on that, so I’m not sure if that was public before you said it here. Um, I— you’ve written a handful of standalones, you now have this soon-to-be trilogy. Do you, do you prefer these expansive worlds and series, or do you like kind of taking this— you know, After the Fall isn’t an outrageously long book, but the world is so well built out and able to see visually through the book. Which do you prefer, kind of these shorter standoff, you know, you write a book, it’s done, the story’s over, or do you like more the series where you can continue with these characters and see years and years of development through the different books?

[00:45:07.16] – Ed Ashton

Well, I mean, they each have their charms. The, the advantage of a standalone is that you get to meet new people, you get to meet new characters. Every one is a fresh challenge. You can, you know, you have a blank canvas in front of you, you can do whatever you want with it. And there’s a lot of freedom to that. And it can be an exciting process. It can be a frightening process. Because again, you don’t necessarily know you’re going to get to a good place at the end, or at least I don’t. With, with a series, The sequels are, I would say, easier to write. The writing comes more easily because you already know the characters, you’re already familiar with them. Like, I know exactly when I was writing this, this most recent book, the third Mickey 7 book, I already know Nasha, I know Mickey, I know Birdo, I know how they sound. I didn’t have to worry about working on their characters or their voices and figuring out exactly how they ought to handle diction and intonation and things like that. I already knew all that stuff. And so I can just, you know, I can just go.

[00:46:11.10] – Ed Ashton

I also don’t have to worry in a series so much about worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the hardest part of writing a science fiction novel, trying to get the details of sort of where you are, when you are, how do things work here, what’s the new tech, what’s the new social mores that the reader’s not familiar with. Getting all that out there without it being like an embarrassing data dump is really, really hard to do. And in a series, you do all that in your first book, and then hopefully you’re not doing any more of it in your sequels. If you’re inventing new lore in book 3, you’ve done something really wrong. That’s, yeah, I don’t know if you follow like The Fourth Wing, but that was one of the big criticisms of the sequels of The Fourth Wing is that You know, Rebecca Yarros is, um, still inventing lore in book 3 and book 4. And that’s, uh, you know, that, that can be kind of— now she’s, she sold a million books for every one of mine. So I’m not criticizing Rebecca Yarros in any way, but, uh, you know, if, if you’ve done things right, from my perspective, you get all the worldbuilding done in book 1 and then book 2, book 3, um, really you can just get to sort of the characters and the adventure and, and that’s, To me, that’s a lot more fun to write.

[00:47:25.01] – Ed Ashton

Like I said, world building, I love what wound up on the page in Mickey 7, but it was hard. It was, that was really, really hard work. And you have to do that all over again every time you put it, put out a standalone. So there, you know, that’s a challenge. And I also have to factor in what my publisher wants because I don’t just get to write whatever I want, right? I’m, Signing contracts with Macmillan and my editor gets a big input into what I’m gonna be delivering to them. And there’s a basic assumption in publishing that each book in a series will sell a fraction of the previous books in that series because, and you know, this makes perfect sense, nobody who didn’t read the first book is gonna read book 2. And some of the people who read the first book hated it and will not read book 2. So you’ll always sell fewer book 2 than you did book 1, fewer book 3 than you did book 2. And so you have to have, before they’ll greenlight a second, a third, a fourth book in a series, you have to have a certain sales level of the first book.

[00:48:31.21] – Ed Ashton

And so that’s, you know, obviously with the movie and Mickey 7 being translated into 24 languages and so on and so forth, that’s not a problem. I can, I think I can probably write as many Mickey 7 books as I want at this point. But with the other books, it’s a negotiation with your editor as to whether, well, let’s look at what the sales numbers were for book 1. Do we think that’ll support a sequel? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s, to me as an author, it’s a little bit easier to avoid that negotiation and just write another standalone if that’s what the publisher wants. So that was a long answer to a short question. I don’t know if that got to what you were looking for.

[00:49:06.01] – Logan

It did. And I actually do have a follow-up on it. Which of your standalones would you like to revisit in the future?

[00:49:14.09] – Ed Ashton

I would love to write a sequel to The Fourth Consort. I deliberately put a little seed for a sequel. You know, it’s a standalone book. It’s a complete story in and of itself. But I did build a little seed in there at the end for a sequel. I already have plotted out a sequel to that book. I’ve provided that pitch to my editor. He has not bitten on it yet. But I still have hopes that he will at some point. I think that could be a lot of fun. I really, really loved, you know, I told you Martok’s probably my favorite character. I think Dalton Greaves is my second favorite. I really loved working with Dalton. He was a really fun character to write, and I would love to get to revisit him and revisit that world.

[00:50:01.16] – John Knych

Thank you, Logan. Thank you, Ed. In a previous talk, Ed, we had a talk with Peter Hamilton and One of the readers, Chris, asked a great question which I said I want to ask Ed this. It’s another left-field question. If you could have— sit down and have a beer with any of your characters, who would it be? Would it be Dalton or would it be Martok? Just for an hour to talk, who would it be and why?

[00:50:31.17] – Ed Ashton

I don’t think it would be Dalton because Dalton’s enough like me that it would be boring. Dalton is the closest I’ve probably ever come to a self-insert into a book. I mean, if you look at Dalton’s biography and look at my biography, there are some alarming similarities there. So yeah, that would probably be a dull conversation, honestly. I think it might be, you know, if I were to stretch back Gary from Three Days in April is a really, is a really interesting guy. I wouldn’t mind. I think I could probably have a good time hanging out with him. I might end up dead at the end of it, but I think, I think it’d be an interesting conversation in the, in the interim.

[00:51:18.23] – John Knych

Excellent. Back around to Brandon, if you have a question.

[00:51:24.09] – Brandon

Yeah, I have kind of a comment followed by a follow-up question. So this is like one of the coolest books I own, and this is a broken binding edition. I love it. Thanks for signing it, by the way.

[00:51:38.02] – Ed Ashton

Yep. You know what, what’s annoying though? I never got a copy of that one. That is— I think that is the only edition of Mickey 7 that I do not own a copy of.

[00:51:47.06] – Noémie

Huh.

[00:51:47.24] – Ed Ashton

So I don’t know what happened. They were supposed to send me some and they just never did.

[00:51:52.11] – Brandon

Huh.

[00:51:52.19] – Ed Ashton

Wow.

[00:51:53.20] – Brandon

Yeah, my question was going to be like, how much How much involvement do you have in, in this? This is— so it’s the Broken Binding Edition. Did you have any involvement with this?

[00:52:03.20] – Ed Ashton

Um, the same that I do with all the editions. Um, there was an approval process on the COVID I absolutely love the COVID on this one. I had no notes on this one. I was like, no, that is— that’s absolutely perfect. Um, and they gave me, they gave me approval on the, um, the artwork on the interior of the book as well. Which I also thought, like I said, absolutely spectacular. I thought they really— I’ve seen a number of depictions of the Creepers in various ways. I think the artist here really got it as close as anyone has to how I imagined it and how I described it. I was really pleased with that. Yeah, there you go. That’s basically what I was thinking. He really nailed it. It was impressive. So I, you know, I thought that was fun. I did have to sign a zillion copies. I think they were— I think they printed 6,000 of those, if I recall correctly. That’s a lot of signing. I don’t know if you ever signed your name 6,000 times in a row, but, you know, if you want the experience, try to just like say the word Chesapeake 6,000 times in a row and see what it sounds like after about 2,000 or 3,000 times through.

[00:53:15.02] – Ed Ashton

I actually had to stop every 20 or 25 minutes and remind myself how to sign, what my signature is supposed to look like before I could get back into it. It was, that was, I know like Brandon Sanderson once supposedly signed like 24,000 copies of one of his books in one night. I don’t know how you manage to do that without winding up in a hospital afterwards. That was, that, that was just doing these. It took me, it took me a week to get through all 6,000 and, and it was, uh, it was a challenge.

[00:53:48.00] – Brandon

So does a Broken Binding reach out to you or is that just something between them and the publisher to, to get those published?

[00:53:54.08] – Ed Ashton

They, they work, they work through the publisher. Um, and then the, the publisher works through my agent to get back to me. So I, I never had any direct contact with the, the folks at Broken Binding except basically like approving the artwork and so forth.

[00:54:07.16] – John Knych

Thank you. Yeah, I’ve stumbled on videos of Brandon Sanderson, like doing a, doing like a talk and signing at the same time.

[00:54:16.14] – Ed Ashton

It’s a, he’s an interesting guy. Yeah, he is. He’s a super interesting guy. Yeah. I, I, I, uh, I mean, you, you can tell that just by the volume of work that he produces. I mean, how many hundreds of thousands of words a year does that man crank out? It’s, it’s, it’s absolutely astonishing. So I can— that’s another person that I can admire while at the same time knowing I could never do what he does. Never. The way that he writes, the volume of work that he produces, even if I didn’t have a day job, I could never do that. Absolutely impossible.

[00:54:52.03] – John Knych

Yeah, he’s prolific. All right, let’s do a last question. We’ll go around the horn. Noemi, do you have any last questions?

[00:54:59.11] – Noémie

Yes. Apart from not raising the eyebrows of your characters, if you could go back in time to the first draft of your first book and give young Edward Ashton an advice, what would it be?

[00:55:12.09] – Ed Ashton

You’re not as clever as you think you are. That’s, that’s the big thing that I would have said to him. There’s a lot of stuff in there that I thought I was being really funny and clever, and looking back on it, I I am very conscious of John Scalzi’s admonition that the failure mode of clever is asshole. And you need to really, when you think you’re being funny and you think you’re being clever, you need to really interrogate yourself to make sure that you’re not just being a jerk. And I don’t think I was a jerk necessarily. But there are certainly, there are some things in, particularly in that first book that I would have that I would have toned down.

[00:55:54.06] – John Knych

I think it’s a really funny book. It’s, I laughed out loud. It does.

[00:55:58.11] – Ed Ashton

I think it does hold up and I like it. But like I said, you can tell there are tells in there that I was still a baby writer when I, when I did that one. It’s looking back, like I said, there are things I would have done different. And any artist 10 years on who looks back at what they did 10 years ago and says, no, that was perfect. I wouldn’t touch it. You’re not growing then. You’re not growing as an artist, and that’s not where you want to be.

[00:56:24.15] – Noémie

That’s interesting. Thank you. Growth, I think, is the main thing, the main theme today.

[00:56:30.13] – John Knych

Thank you, Naomi. Back to Brian, if you have a question, or Jen. Brian’s good. Jen. Nick, you’re good. Brandon, you’re good. You have one last question?

[00:56:45.17] – Brandon

Uh, nope, just thanks for, thanks for joining us.

[00:56:48.06] – John Knych

Yeah, or Logan, one more, one more question. I didn’t want to skip you.

[00:56:52.16] – Logan

Yeah, it’s all good on my end. Thank you a lot.

[00:56:55.15] – John Knych

Um, I have one last one, Ed, before we, uh, say thank you and goodbye. The— I mentioned this idea before that I thought the, the human as pet trope just could have been so easily bungled. Like, it’s— going into it, I was very curious to see how you would, how you would do it.

[00:57:11.00] – Ed Ashton

I knew I was walking a tightrope with this one. Yeah.

[00:57:13.19] – John Knych

So my question is, with that tightrope, was it a similar process to you creating Mark Talk in that you really had to revise, you know, try things, the editor says no? Like, were there some moments that the editor said that’s too much, or were you able to create it in a fairly efficient way? Because to me, it never felt like too much. But I can see in the writing process you might have had like a scene or an idea that might have crossed the line, or did that never happen?

[00:57:47.09] – Ed Ashton

Not with my editor. My editor, who I love dearly, he’s a fantastic person, but he has a pretty light touch. And I think part of that is because I’m so hard on myself. And I have a group of critique partners who are very hard on me, as I asked them to be. My middle daughter in particular is absolutely brutal. She is a very keen reader. She picks up on things that I would never in a million years pick up on, and she has no hesitation to say, like, you sound like an idiot here, or this really is not what you want to do, or this particular thing that you put in there is going to really piss off this particular segment of, you know, whatever audience you’re trying to reach, and you need to take that out. In this particular one, she was, in fact, there are a couple of scenes in there where she was like, you’re gonna get animal rights people really upset with you if you write this scene the way that you wrote it. And I completely rewrote a couple of scenes in order to to allay those concerns. Reading back through it, she was like, she was 100% right, 100% correct.

[00:59:10.16] – John Knych

Violence against the Grays against the humans or the humans against the Grays?

[00:59:17.16] – Ed Ashton

Just in the way that the relationship between Martok and John, some turns that it took in the initial drafts. She was just like, “No, the PETA people are going to absolutely eviscerate you on this.” So I don’t want to get anybody mad. I don’t want to get yelled at on the internet any more than anybody else does. I mean, as a writer, you’re gonna get yelled at on the internet sometimes by random people. Particularly after the movie came out for Mickey 7, I got a lot of hate mail. I got a lot of really, really aggressive, nasty hate mail after that movie came out.

[00:59:55.21] – John Knych

About what?

[00:59:57.13] – Ed Ashton

About the fact that Mark Ruffalo was doing an impression of Donald Trump. And if you’re a fan of Donald Trump, you’re really mad and you can’t get Bong Joon-ho’s contact, but you can get mine. And so they just absolutely let me have it. And like, I’ll accept that. I’m not gonna get mad about that.

[01:00:17.16] – John Knych

Angry that you wrote a book and that someone else hired someone else who did a bad impression.

[01:00:24.04] – Ed Ashton

Well, these people never read the book. They probably never even saw the movie. They just probably read something about the movie that it was making fun of Donald Trump, and they’re like, who can I yell at about this? And like I said, if you go looking, you will never find Bong Joon-ho’s contact information. But if you’re a little bit diligent about it, you can go to my website and you can get through to me. And so they did. And so they did. But I’ll accept that kind of heat, but I don’t want to inadvertently or unnecessarily, um, torque off any particular segment of the population because number one, I don’t actually like getting yelled at. Um, and number two, I don’t want to alienate groups of readers. I mean, that’s not helpful to me.

[01:01:09.16] – John Knych

That’s, uh, well, and I don’t think you’re— I think any— I posted this before, anyone who’s a dog lover will just just love this book. Like, I think, um, I didn’t feel any, any violence or hate.

[01:01:23.00] – Ed Ashton

I think that’s, that’s the way it came out in the end.

[01:01:24.22] – John Knych

Yeah.

[01:01:26.17] – Ed Ashton

After I, after I had gone through many, many rounds of revision, I’m really happy with where it came out. But like I said, there were a couple of rough spots in that, in that first draft that my, that my daughter really honed in on in a really effective way. She’s a smart kid. I mean, she’s, she’s 27 years old. She’s not a kid. But she’s very— she’s a very smart woman.

[01:01:47.05] – John Knych

Excellent. Well, I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I really enjoyed this talk. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. And hopefully they make a movie from this. Looking forward to reading the third installment of the Mickey 7 series.

[01:02:04.24] – Ed Ashton

Should be out in February next year.

[01:02:07.06] – John Knych

Awesome. And are we the first to know? Is that—

[01:02:10.17] – Ed Ashton

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to anybody yet. So yeah, I think you probably are. I mean, my editor and his team are all well aware. But yeah, I think you may be the first people in the general public to be aware.

[01:02:22.17] – John Knych

Great. If you give me the email addresses of the Trump people, I can email them back with the news.

[01:02:29.08] – Ed Ashton

I will be sure to do that. Yes, I’m sure they’ll be very excited.

[01:02:32.17] – John Knych

Yeah, just forward it.

[01:02:33.08] – Ed Ashton

I’m sure they read Antimatter Blues and are just queued up for this new one.

[01:02:36.16] – John Knych

Yeah, yeah. I’ll send them a link to the chat and say that you—

[01:02:40.14] – Ed Ashton

Appreciate it. Thank you.

[01:02:41.17] – John Knych

Yeah. All right, everyone, have a great day. Thank you, Ed, and happy reading, happy writing.

[01:02:48.13] – Ed Ashton

Yep. Thank you.

[01:02:49.06] – John Knych

Bye-bye.

[01:02:50.10] – Noémie

Thank you so much.

[00:00:03.03] – John Knych

Hello everyone, thank you for being here today. We are with Adrian Tchaikovsky to discuss Children of Strife, the fourth book in the Children of Time series. And Adrian, it’s super special that you are, you are here because you were our first speaker two years ago, and you talked with us last year about Shroud. So thank you for being here again. We love your writing, we love your books, and the first question I would like to ask you is about the origin of this book, the ideas, but more specifically, how much of the ideas for this book came while writing books 1 through 3, and how much came after you finished with Children of Memory? Because there was a little reference, I think, in Children of Time to the creatures in this book in the ocean. So I’m curious to know how much was germinating before and how much came after you finished the third book.

[00:00:55.09] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah, so the vast majority came after. I mean, in this series in particular, the books are relatively standalone and they’re just building on what has gone before. But you’re absolutely right to say the stomatopods, the mantis shrimps, got a mention early on. And I’ve been sort of trying to work out how to fit them in. And at one point I think there was probably going to be a mantis shrimp character in one of the previous books, but I couldn’t find any real point for them to be there. And, you know, obviously if you’re introducing a whole extra species, you have to devote quite a lot of the book to explaining what they’re about. And so, yeah, they’ve just sort of been languishing on the sidelines until we came to this book where, A, I thought, well, if I’m going to do another one, I should just make that their book. And then, as often happens with my books, that’s half a book sort of sitting around, and then the other half with what the humans are doing and what, you know, Hartmann is doing on his sort of illicit terraforming spree is the other half.

[00:01:56.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And because of the, the, because of the book’s themes, um, those two halves then thankfully complement each other quite nicely.

[00:02:08.09] – John Knych

Thank you. On to Brandon for the next question.

[00:02:12.24] – Brandon

Yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate that. So You mentioned the mantis shrimp. My question is, how do you come up with new species to uplift? And the mantis shrimp was the newest one. So why the mantis shrimp? And how do you go about choosing which new species to add for every book?

[00:02:37.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

So what I’m looking for in a species is something that is going to benefit from being made smart, which might sound a bit odd, but intelligence isn’t necessarily a benefit. It’s very resource intensive to make something intelligent. And, you know, if you just need sort of quick twitch reflexes to survive, then being, you know, spending an extra 5 seconds thinking about the philosophy behind that is not going to help you escape being eaten. And so, but there are certainly circumstances in which the smarter you are, the better you’re going to do. And one of the things we see with most of the creatures I’m dealing with is they’re kind of in the middle of the food chain. So they need a full suite of skills to predate on things and also a full suite of skills to avoid predation. And with the, with the Portia spiders, it’s actually frequently the same thing ’cause they’re often preying on things that will kill them very easily. There’s also a social aspect which didn’t come up with the octopuses or the porcids particularly because they’re not naturally social species. But mantis shrimp, whilst kind of solitary, they live in very closely packed environments and they’re very, very capable of killing conspecifics.

[00:03:55.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

So you have something there where the better they are at handling their own species on a social level, the better, the more successful they’re going to be, which is an enormous driver of intelligence. And so, I mean, one of the things you see in Children of Time is the nanovirus just hits everything, but only certain things really get that evolutionary boost because those are the things that benefit from being smarter. So you meet a tarantula, I think, quite early on in Children of Time. And it’s mentioned that, you know, this has also become basically bigger from the nanovirus, but it hasn’t really got much smarter ’cause being smarter doesn’t particularly benefit it. In the same way that it does for the porsheds. So that’s what I’m looking for. I mean, one of the things Peter Godfrey-Smith, who wrote the octopus book I used as a lot of my research for Children of Ruin, wrote another book called Metazoa in which he mentions mantis shrimps. And I got from that that they were much more cognitively complex than I was aware of. And then because I was aware of them as just generally cool creatures with a lot of fun capabilities, I decided, right, I’m going to do the research.

[00:05:04.10] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ll work out what they can do and what I can do with them for the book.

[00:05:09.24] – John Knych

Awesome.

[00:05:10.22] – Brandon

Thank you.

[00:05:13.05] – John Knych

Excellent. On to Noemi.

[00:05:15.17] – Noémie

Well, you kind of responded to my question, but, um, my question was, did you contact or use a lot of outside resources to build upon the species, but also all the terraforming stuff? Um, does it come from particular research that you did, or did you contact anyone working in a field, for example, where does it come from? Because it’s at times very specific, and I just wanted to know that because it’s very fascinating to me. And thank you for being there again.

[00:05:43.22] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Oh no, you’re very welcome. So I— my preferred method of research is to find someone who knows about the subject and get them to tell me the very specific things I’m interested in, because that is by far the most efficient way of getting information. In this case, there is indeed a world authority on mantis shrimp behavior, and he retired about a week before I started researching the book, and I could not for the love of get hold of him. So I had to read 40 years of his research, which was not a waste of time because I then picked up a lot of things I didn’t know I wouldn’t have known to ask about. So that then enriched the, you know, the description of the mantis shrimps in the book. For the terraforming stuff, whilst I’ve got a, you know, I’ve done a certain amount of background reading over various sci-fi projects, I mean, other than wildly theoretical stuff, obviously we haven’t terraformed anything, and certainly not in the sort of weird, weird ways that are going on in Children of Strife. So it’s very much at that point, it’s just as long as I’m not doing something that is patently impossible as per the laws of physics, I pretty much got a free hand.

[00:06:56.01] – Noémie

I see. Thank you so much.

[00:06:59.02] – John Knych

Thank you, Noemi. For those who are arriving who have never been here before, if you don’t have a question, no big deal, just say pass. I have tons of questions, and I’m sure Brandon, Noemi, and others, others do as well. But moving on to Jen, if you have a question.

[00:07:16.13] – Noémie

I do.

[00:07:17.05] – Jenn

Yeah, thanks for being here. One thing I really loved Sorry, I’m getting over a cold— was how the book keeps coming back to identity and instincts, but through these very different characters. The manna shrimp is wrestling with his instincts, and Portofabian is sort of this blend, and Alice and Mirror just have their own thing going on. Is that something that you planned on going into this? I’m going to examine identity and instinct, or did it just sort of evolve organically as you were writing the story?

[00:07:53.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I think it’s sort of a natural fallout of the sort of things I’m writing about. So while, you know, the initial focus is let’s do the, you know, the evolutionary biology thought experiment. And if you’re doing that and if you’re putting yourself in the point of view of these various non-human characters, you really have to get into that territory if you’re being true to the topic, I think. So it’s sort of a natural outgrowth of the thing that I was initially interested in.

[00:08:27.00] – Josh

Yeah, thank you.

[00:08:32.02] – John Knych

Thank you, Jen. On to Josh.

[00:08:36.15] – Josh

Circle back around to me. I was going to ask something slightly unrelated, so I’ll go towards the end.

[00:08:45.11] – John Knych

No problem. On to Chris, if you have a question. Um, uh, no problem. Um, on to, uh, Yiding, if you have a question. Again, you can pass if you don’t.

[00:08:59.20] – Yiding

Um, I do have a question. Uh, first, uh, Adrian, thanks for being here. Um, so it’s been a while since I’ve read, uh, the previous book, Children of Memory. Um, so I might be misremembering, but it seems to me that like you have a slightly different approach, uh, approach to the, the simulations between the two books, uh, because the first book was very much about how there’s a reality to them, that they’re so complex that even though the character— the people in the simulation are are not real, they are actually real in a sense. But in this one, there’s a lot of focus on how they are not real, that they are essentially just simulations. I’m wondering, does that reflect a change in your own view towards this stuff in the intervening years?

[00:09:56.08] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I suspect that it’s inevitable that the the growth of language models and the various borderline fraudulent claims made about them has rather soured me on certain things in that general area. I think the big difference that’s here within the text is there is a significant shift between real and true. So the problem that Alice and her co-researchers have, if indeed there are actual co-researchers, um, is that they’re looking for truth. They believe— and this is, this is something that is mentioned in, in Memory— the idea that there is a deeper level of the simulation that preserves the terraformers. And so you can learn about the terraformers from that, and there is a deeper layer beyond that that preserves the makers of the machine in the first place. And that’s from Alice’s experiments does not appear to be the case. And instead, because of the reactive way that the simulation responds to people entering it, which we, again, we saw a certain amount of with Children of Membra in the way that Kern and Miranda kind of screwed everything up by just being there. If you are looking for a thing, then it will give you a thing that looks like the thing you’re looking for.

[00:11:29.06] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And at this point, I am, yes, very much thinking about how, you know, ChatGPT or similar language models are built in with this infinite confidence and zero actual knowledge so that if there is no answer, it won’t tell you there’s no answer. Or if it’s not sure of the answer, it won’t tell you that. It will just tell you an answer because it is programmed to create answer-shaped objects in response to question-shaped objects. And this is the problem that Alice is having with the simulation and, you know, that becomes sort of iterated to ridiculousness by this idea that you keep looking and you keep finding more and more levels and societies of people that couldn’t possibly exist and so forth, just because you want to find them, and the simulation knows you want to find them, and the simulation does not want to disappoint you. So a bit of both, basically.

[00:12:29.21] – John Knych

Fascinating. Thank you, Eding. Thank you, Adrian. Um, Scatha, I don’t know if you can hear me, if you want to ask a question.

[00:12:37.20] – Speaker 8

Good morning. Um, hi, Adrian. I’m a super fan girl of your work. I’ve started reading, uh, Children of Ruin. Yeah, was number one.

[00:12:50.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Uh, number two.

[00:12:52.20] – Speaker 8

Number two, Children of Ruin.

[00:12:55.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Memory Strife.

[00:12:57.02] – Speaker 8

That’s right. And they’re so intense because your writing makes you have to be really committed to your world. Um, but I find everything I’ve read, it’s very, um, Every one of your stories has left me with a different worldview. So big compliments to that because it’s changed how I think about the existing world I’m in. I really like your writing, that’s all. And Children of Strife, I felt like your— I felt your commentary to current affairs within the story, but it wasn’t overt or like it wasn’t heavy-handed, but I felt like I could hear your reflection of some of the things that are happening in the world. And I love where we ended up. I felt it was despite so much, your work to me remains very hopeful and uplifting. And I had just finished everything you did of the Tyrant Philosophers, which is a segue, but oh my God. Okay. Anyway, so I don’t know if I have any questions other than, are you going to do another one after this, I guess would be my next question.

[00:14:21.16] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

So, yeah. So this, like a lot of series I do, it’s more a sequence of books rather than an actual kind of traditional plot arc, which is something I’ve done about 3 times. It’s more usual for me to write a book and then want to write more in the settings rather than particularly pick up on an ongoing plot. So it’s possible there will be another one. I’ve got about half a book of idea currently kicking about at the back of my head, but it needs its other half before that’s ever going to be anything.

[00:15:01.20] – John Knych

Thank you, thank you, Skatha. Back to Chris, if you’re there. If Chris— or you can type in the chat. Chris, do you have a question or no? Oh, yep.

[00:15:12.03] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah, yeah, thanks, Josh.

[00:15:23.19] – John Knych

You have a question, Chris, or no?

[00:15:25.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

No, I’ll be all right. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll just enjoy the Enjoy the video. I mean, I’m happy to talk about other, other books or anything like that if you wanted to. It’s all right, Adrian. It’s, um, I’ve literally just finished Children of Strife, a great book, but, um, I’m a bit, uh, doped up on pain medication at the moment, so I’m just gonna enjoy, enjoy the, uh, the questions answered.

[00:15:52.19] – John Knych

Okay, thank you, Chris. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting Chris to be here. He just had a car accident, but I’m good. Surprised me saying I wanted to still be part of it. So thanks for being here, Chris, and feel better. Okay, a lot of good questions. Thank you, everyone. Yiding, I want to piggyback off of your question. Adrian, my favorite quote in the whole book is near the end when you said the self was more than just patterns of neurons in the brain. It was the gut and the rush of blood, 1,000 different hormones telling you how you felt, a microbiome of passengers making their demands and fighting their battles. Hadn’t felt a computer was a good model for a human mind. The— has your sense of the possibility of uploading consciousness into computers, has that also changed in the same way that you said your view of simulations has changed? Because in Children of Time, the upload is a, is a big plot point. And in some of your other books, correct me if I’m wrong, but Cage of— Cage of Souls, um, there’s a, there’s an element of uploading consciousness. Has that evolved for you, this idea that, look, no, the human identity is also these biological interactions that we just can’t ever put in a computer?

[00:17:06.14] – John Knych

Or is it still possible someday?

[00:17:08.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, I think it, I think it is conceivably possible to, you know, I mean, I guess you’d be looking at something like a full-on simulation. Rather than just the traditional kind of mind upload stuff. I mean, I have, since writing Children of Time, I’ve certainly, there was a thing I was involved in about, what, 5, 6 years ago, which involved a whole bunch of scientists talking to a whole bunch of novelists, and a number of them were talking about brain uploading. Whether it’s ever going to be possible in any way seemed to be about a 50-50 split between them, which was quite interesting. But One of the things I also picked up on was at around the time I was writing Children of Time, the, the, our understanding of like the microbiome and the other and the, its interactivity with, you know, ourselves and our cognitive processes was just kind of coming in. And I’ve read up quite a bit about that since. And it does seem, I mean, I think there is this traditional science fiction thing about the brain in the jar, which I guess we’re talking like 1960s, ’70s sci-fi, you tend to see that turning up quite a lot.

[00:18:24.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And that very much is the model for the idea of an uploaded consciousness and a computer. And the problem is most of those models, and they are quite old, a lot of them, they are based on the idea, well, it’s the brain. And now we know that an awful lot of what is us, as per that paragraph, because obviously, you know, that’s explicitly what I’m talking about, is going on throughout the body. And so if you were able to upload, it would— I don’t think it is necessarily flat out impossible, but I think it would need a much more holistic approach to what consciousness is than simply, say, duplicating the you know, the electrochemical signals in the brain, because you would get something out of that, I guess, but it wouldn’t be a self in any way because we are much, much more than just what’s going on in the brain. I mean, and this, this isn’t— this actually ties in to a lot of the, uh, the Children series themes. Um, a lot of the creatures I’m talking about which have this extremely complex set of behaviors like the portia spiders or the mantis shrimps and certainly appear to have an internality from the way they behave.

[00:19:46.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And obviously that’s not a thing we can ever necessarily know, but it’s, you know, from outward show, that does appear to be the case. They have very little of what we think of as a brain and we for a very large, a long period of time in science and medicine, we’ve kind of assumed that our enormous brains are basically the be-all and end-all to intelligence. You know, it’s when you, when you, when you— the idea of brain in a jar is quite understandable from that point of view. But looking at what creatures can do with much, much smaller brains, you have to conclude, well, maybe our brains are actually not terribly efficiently laid out. I mean, certainly it appears like bird brains like the corvids in memory, bird brains seem to be much more efficient than human brains pound for pound. The human, it’s just the human brains are much, much bigger. But, and it’s no, I’m not, I don’t want to go anywhere near the old idea of, oh well, we only use 90, you know, 10% of our brains or anything like that, which is absolute nonsense. But it may well be the case that our brains have evolved in a way that, you know, they could have been half the size and just as good.

[00:20:54.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

If they had been more efficiently formed, because evolution doesn’t necessarily find the best way, it just finds a way that works. And so I’m completely rambling now, but you can see the— yeah, I certainly, I am. There’s been some fascinating stuff about uploading and also just about human consciousness that means I would probably have to approach that Avrana Kern section in Time a little more, a little differently now. I I’d still be able to do it. I’d just have to kind of fudge it in slightly different ways and make reference to these things as part of it. I guess there is no way you, no reason why if your upload system is sufficiently good, you could not sort of simulate the various other parts of the whole.

[00:21:54.08] – John Knych

Fascinating. Or use a planet, right? You use the life on a planet to do it too. Uh, all right, back to Brandon.

[00:22:02.10] – Brandon

Uh, yeah, I want to go kind of a little bit off of that previous question in a little bit different direction. So Kern in this one is kind of a copy of, I guess, a copy of a copy. So my question is At what point does a copy become its own? Let’s call it a person. Is it in your— what is, what is your view of this? Is it as soon as it copies, it’s a, it’s a new person, or does it have to gather a certain amount of memories before it becomes a distinct entity, or do you think it’s the exact same as the, as the copy?

[00:22:41.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, like, I think that I mean, they’re the difference between is it a new person and is this a different person? So I think as soon as you have a copy and it’s not sort of constantly in contact with the original, it must be a new person. It can still be a new person who that is initially exactly the same. And once it has any kind of different experience, then that must lead to a divergence. Of person because we are influenced by everything that’s happened to us. And what seems to have been happening in the, with Kern is that you have these individual copies that kind of go out and become different and then essentially become gestalt Kerns based on the combination of all the experiences, which is of course very similar to how the Noden entity works. In that if you get a bunch of nodon cells from diff— that have been— that have had different experiences and bring them together, there will be a library of all those experiences and still be a singular kind of consciousness. So, so it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s essentially a kind of a, uh, convergent evolution of consciousness between the artificial and the, um, alien.

[00:24:01.19] – Brandon

Thank you.

[00:24:03.15] – John Knych

Thanks, Brandon. Uh, Josh, we’ll jump— I know we skipped you before. Do you want— are you still contemplating, or, uh, should we keep going around the circle?

[00:24:13.24] – Josh

Um, I have one I could jump in on quickly. First off, lovely to chat to you, Adrian. It’s, it’s really cool to see you here. Um, thanks for doing this. Um, you mentioned a few years ago you were talking to a bunch of sci-fi writers, were to a bunch of scientists. Um, were you—

[00:24:34.15] – Jenn

was it about—

[00:24:35.10] – Josh

I think it was a different one where the Ministry of Defense asked a—

[00:24:39.11] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

that was much more recent. Yeah, yeah. So that, that one led to the stories that are in the recently published Creative Futures, um, collection, which did, did not in fact win the British Science Fiction Award but was up for it. Um, The other one, I believe there was supposed to be a collection. I don’t think it’s come out, and I suspect it probably never will because it was all, you know, it was all being organized by one writer, and writers are not terribly good at organizing things. But it was a fascinating thing to be involved in, and you know, you’re basically just getting a lot of sort of free insight and ideas from all of these scientists, and there was a story written for that. I’m just, I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day.

[00:25:22.22] – Josh

Fair enough. So was that with the defense one, or was that—

[00:25:28.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

No, the defense one all happened, and quite possibly may continue to go on for that matter. And, you know, like I say, that book came out. This other one was some years beforehand, 3 or 4 years beforehand, and was mostly focused on that kind of, uh, man-machine interaction.

[00:25:54.07] – Josh

And in terms of when you’re in those— that kind of setting, uh, what’s the kind of split between, let’s say, more hard sci-fi writers, people who put a lot more kind of into the, the here and now, how it might happen, versus more kind of, um, I don’t want to say soft sci-fi, but more kind of Maybe less rigorous to the science. Yeah, out there kind of thinking, I suppose, is the best way.

[00:26:27.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Which, so for the one I did way back, I’m trying to think who else was even on that. I think that was more geared towards I mean, the thing is with that sort of story, at the end of the day, writing a story that is trying to faithfully reproduce the really quite arcane technical stuff you’ve learned from these people who are right at the cutting edge of the field is almost certainly going to fail because you end up with a story that is absolutely crammed with fairly indigestible stuff. So what tends to happen is those technical details will get internalized by the writers and the writers will, what the writers are going to write about is what will this change. So you’re not necessarily going into the technicalities of precisely how it all works. You’re interested in if this became a technology that was readily available, where would it be applied? Who would have access to it? How would, what knock-on effects would that have? And so, you’re dealing with that boundary between the technical hard science fiction and the social hard science fiction. And in both cases, you’re still— it’s still hard science fiction because you are working with the constraints of what the world allows.

[00:27:53.04] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

But honestly, I mean, certainly from my point of view, the social side of that, i.e., what is the impact of it, is far more interesting than just how it works. Certainly for the Ministry of Defense stuff, which being more recent, I can remember rather more about, there was quite a widespread, but I don’t recall there being anyone there who would only have been interested in the technical stuff because really what they were interested in was what should we be worried about in the future that we are not currently looking at? It wasn’t a full-on military thing, but it was basically what, where are the shocks coming from? And they had various sort of themed sessions. So there was an environment-based session, there was an economy-based session, and that, you know, and sort of a social technology-based session, that kind of thing. And different writers are in on different ones. Cool.

[00:28:47.21] – Josh

And you said the first one was Creative Futures?

[00:28:50.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Creative Futures is the Ministry of Defense one. I will be putting up shortly on my website, they’ve just posted up one of my stories from that collection as free access online. So if you do want to go and have a look at the one, certainly the one I wrote that they were most interested in, and the one that honestly seems, you know, the world has kind of moved rather more towards it since I wrote it than I would have liked, then yeah, that one is now freely available. I’ll stick a link up via my website shortly.

[00:29:22.17] – Speaker 8

Cool.

[00:29:22.24] – Josh

Yeah, no, I’ll definitely check that out. Thank you.

[00:29:25.01] – John Knych

Thank you very much. Thank you, Josh. Back to Noemi.

[00:29:30.09] – Noémie

Yes, it’s not much of a question, but more of an observation that can lead to a question. But I couldn’t help but see some similarities between this book and Alien Clay in the sense that nature is almost like a conscious entity or character on its own in this book. And, you know, like the nature changing everything it touches and not defiling because that’s not what it is, right? But it has such a strong characterization in this book and as it had in Alien Clay in some ways. And I wanted to know, was it planned for you in the beginning to have this almost body horror kind of thing? I mean, it’s something that horrifies me, that also fascinates me. You know, that’s very Jeff VanderMeer kind of science fiction as well, like the changing, the modification of nature on the body. And I’m lost in my question, but I hope that you see what I mean. Like, it’s very similar to Alien Clay in some ways, this nature as an entity, as a character. And I was wondering why this almost changed between Children of Time and Children of Strife. It’s such a different way of characterizing nature and yeah, nature in general, for lack of a better word.

[00:30:45.22] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah, I mean, you can kind of see what’s going on on the planet in Children of Strife as what if Alien Clay, but rubbish. And it’s, you know, I guess some of it arose organically in the kind of the creative process when I was doing the world building stage of things. With other bits, it’s very much you’ve got this group of people and they are terrible, terrible people and they get, by pure serendipity, they come across what should be the most amazing thing ever. And they ruin it. And that’s kind of what’s going on there. So it’s really, it is, it’s the idea of, well, you know, it doesn’t really matter how incredible your innovation actually is if the people who have their hands on the tiller are just appalling people with no real imagination. And so that’s what’s going on with Strife. I mean, it’s, I suspect that this idea of the interconnected ecosphere is something I’ll almost certainly come back to in other books as well. It’s just something that’s very much there in my head. You’re muted, John. Here we go.

[00:32:09.00] – John Knych

Thank you. Thank you, Noemi. Back to Jen, I believe, if I got the— The order correct?

[00:32:16.06] – Jenn

Sure, thanks. Um, I was just wondering about the challenges of returning to an established universe versus creating something, uh, new. Like, um, when you come back to this world or, or any of your series, um, how do you make each book feel distinct but part of the whole? Are there specific challenges that you face there?

[00:32:41.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

There’s always the problem of, well, like, you know, you can just end up doing the same thing over again, which you just have to sort of consciously watch out for so as not to repeat yourself. I think where you are writing just new stories in the setting like I’m doing here, that makes it maybe a little easier because you’re always going off in a different direction with a different group of characters, and so you’re not going to end up doing that kind of middle of the enormous fantasy epic thing where everyone’s just trudging around between towns fighting goblins or whatever they’re doing. There’s, with this series in particular, there’s a bit of an extra pressure because it’s very much my flagship series. It’s, you know, Children of Time was the book that sort of put me on the map as a writer. And so if I am writing a new book in this in this setting, it’s got to be a solid one with a lot of good ideas in it and something interesting to say, which is why, you know, I don’t do a lot of these. You know, I could theoretically basically just churn one out each year with a different animal and you have to say, hey, it’s tapirs this year and it’s capybara the next and whatever, and that would get old quite quickly, I suspect.

[00:33:52.06] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And as well as that, the books need something sort of on the philosophical level. So I mean, that’s basically what I’m waiting for. For any, any, any, any fifth book will definitely need something with that kind of, um, sort of heavyweight aspect to it to come along and add to the, uh, you know, the fun creature stuff I’ve already got.

[00:34:17.04] – Jenn

Thank you.

[00:34:18.22] – John Knych

Thank you, Jen.

[00:34:19.24] – Yiding

Um, back to, um, you have, um Yeah, okay, so I’m wondering about the process of creating all these made-up names because you do that in sci-fi and fantasy as well. And I just feel like after you’ve written so many books, like, does it get to a point where it’s harder and harder to come up with names that actually sound good? Like, what is your process for creating all these nonsense names essentially?

[00:34:50.08] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, there are multiple processes. So if I’m doing a very deep worldbuilding thing, like with the Terran Philosophers, then the names are going to be culturally specific. So with each particular group of people I’m talking about, they’ll have a particular sort of feel to their names. And as long as they all fit in within that, and that’s very much something I sort of, I pioneered for myself doing the Shadows of the Apkka. There are loads of different cultures of that, all of them have naming merchants. And so you end up with the situation, you know, you hear a name, you’re like, I kind of know where that character is likely to come from because of the name that they’ve got. And then that hopefully gives you something that sounds, feels very organic and in setting, even though, you know, I mean, arguably are not all names Nodson names. I would say, yeah, we don’t even where names have, I mean, certainly Certainly in Western cultures, even where names have a meaning, that meaning tends to be quite deeply buried so that it’s not what we’re thinking of when we come across a name. In the Children series, certainly in the later books, the names tend to— I tend to play with references so that a lot of the names in Children of Memory are inspired by Norse mythology because that’s what I was doing then.

[00:36:12.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And the names in this book also have a literary inspiration, which is probably fairly obvious when you get only a little way into the book. And it’s, I mean, really, that’s, I’m kind of doing that purely for my own amusement. But you, I guess the third part of the answer is, as a writer, you get a sense for what sounds right as a name. And, you know, you’ll play around with variants and, you know, change vowels and consonants and so forth sometimes until you I mean, yeah, that’s the one that fits. And therefore, hopefully you don’t end up with anything that actually, you know, the readers just burst out laughing at because it’s inadvertently hilarious or anything like that. And you have a sense of, well, if the name is like this and this is kind of the connotation you’re getting from those sounds or those particular, you know, just that particular set of letters on the page. It’s definitely a part of the craft, is coming up with names that sound right.

[00:37:21.22] – Yiding

Interesting.

[00:37:23.19] – John Knych

Thank you, Yiding. This question also has to do with craft, Adrian. In previous talks, you’ve mentioned, one, that you enjoy the process of writing. Sometimes writers talk about it being you know, just a grind, but for you it’s joy. And two, you’ve mentioned in previous talk that you, you world, you love world building, that that just comes naturally to you, and that in some books you’ve built the world and then you’ve put the story in. So my question to you is somewhat left field, but when I read this quote about Radhina Kott where she said, you know, the perfectly natural rewards she felt when messed and merging with an entire responsive biosphere. She was the world. She was the mother goddess who ate her bug children. Those scenes where you describe like the ecstasy of being the world and building the world, is that how you feel about the worlds that you build in that you become them in a sense? And do you ever as a writer just get lost in them and sometimes think like, I just want to be in this book and not be anywhere else.

[00:38:34.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah, I mean, I think I’m at least drawing on that, yeah, when it’s going really well in the writing process or in the, you know, and you have a real sense of the world you’re writing in as a real place that exists and the people in it as people with their own kind of independence, which varies from book to book. I’m kind of drawing on that. I mean, this is what I mean with the idea that they, you know, they, the 5 of them get given this incredible gift by the way that their system sort of shakes out and then basically aren’t in any way equipped to do anything worthwhile with it because of the sort of people they are. And yes, I think as a writer, you are generally aware that in order to write books, you’ve got to be a terrible person. You know, or at least there must be a terrible person in you because setting up plots and kind of drama and so forth involves you having horrible things happening to the imaginary people that you have created. And that’s, you know, that is fairly universal in narrative. And so you’re kind, you know, you are aware that you are the person that writes the chapter where this dreadful thing has happened to someone and they’re utterly distraught and the readers are going to be terribly set, and you kind of just go away rubbing your hands and cackling because you’ve done a good job.

[00:39:52.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And so to a certain extent, I am satirizing myself and my profession with the way that they carry on once they have this world at their disposal.

[00:40:05.01] – John Knych

Excellent. Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s— I wondered that, whether it was sort of like a self-reflective process. And then one really quick question before we go back around the horn. You describe Radina Kott as like a as a court jester. Do you also sort of describe, like, did you— how much do you relate to Radina Kott in, in a sense?

[00:40:26.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

So, uh, I mean, so Radina Kott is a character archetype I use a lot, and it’s an archetype that can be used as a positive or negative sort of character. Um, I don’t think it’s a me archetype particularly. I mean, if I am any of those people on the space station, it’s Pil, because he’s the bug guy. I have been called out on that on Blue Sky, and kind of, yeah, okay, that’s a fair cop. But there, Redina is the sort of character I really enjoy writing, just because she is kind of witty and clever and funny in a way that I’m not, but I always felt kind of would would be quite fun to be.

[00:41:18.05] – John Knych

Thank you. All right, back to Brandon.

[00:41:22.06] – Brandon

So in this, I, uh, for— I have a question for your writing process for Children of Strife. So in this one, you have the 3 different time periods, the ages. So did you write these in the order that they’re presented in the book, or did you write each of them separately? And just how did you kind of put those together?

[00:41:41.17] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah, I mean, I decided I basically had to write them in chronological order as they happened in the universe. So all of the part one, all of the, all of the, you know, the Terraformer era stuff, then all of the Arkship era stuff, then all of the current stuff, because I needed to know in detail for each subsequent group what they were going to find, which is not the way I normally go about things. It’s the way I’ve gone about things for this series particularly. So I did it for Memory and for Ruin, but it does considerably lengthen the writing process because once you’ve written those individual eras, you then have to work out how are you going to fit them together. And what that can often mean is you need to rejig precisely what information the reader is getting at different points so that they’re not being spoiled too early by revelations or that they’re not being denied information that they actually do need to make sense of it. And so, because of that, the writing process for Strife took me about twice as long as it normally would for a book, just because I was spending so long going backwards and forwards and juggling them about.

[00:42:51.13] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And I had to go off and get beta readers just to read it because at that point you’re very close to the narrative and you need someone who has read the previous books but not this one who can say, “Yes, that makes sense,” or, “No, it doesn’t.” So would you say this one had more revisions than you normally do then? Yeah, I mean, certainly like the backend part after the, you know, essentially the 3 first draft manuscripts were individually produced was just an order of magnitude more complicated than it normally is.

[00:43:25.15] – Yiding

Thank you.

[00:43:27.16] – John Knych

Interesting. Back to Noemi.

[00:43:31.14] – Noémie

Yes, I mean, it was kind of the question I wanted to ask Brendan, so good one. My question also was for this book in particular, because it is a fourth of a series, did you have to go back and read the previous ones because maybe you missed something or maybe a character name, something very silly that you don’t necessarily remember, or did you just go with it and then maybe the beta readers went back and said, hey, maybe this is not something that was in the previous book, so you needed to explain more, go back before? Like, what was your process for— obviously a series is a bit different than a standalone, so did you have to go back and read the previous books before you did this one?

[00:44:10.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Yeah, not so much with these, because really, other than Kern, there’s relatively little content I could— I did go back and read some bits of memory where I was specifically talking about the simulation, basically just to make sure I was not wildly departing from that. But overall, the points where it links to previous books are very general. There are certainly other series where I do, where I have had to do that. So for example, I’ve just written a third expert systems book and I absolutely had to go back and do the other two. And for the 5th Tyrant Philosopher’s book where they’re going back to Ilmar, I did then go back through City of Last Chances just to get all the little details that would’ve fallen outta my head between them.

[00:45:01.10] – Noémie

That makes sense. Thank you so much.

[00:45:04.05] – John Knych

Great to hear there’s another expert system coming. Back to Josh. Or you can pass.

[00:45:15.05] – Josh

Go ahead and pass.

[00:45:16.24] – John Knych

Back to Jen, or, or you can pass.

[00:45:20.24] – Jenn

Um, everyone’s hit on my questions that I had left, so I’ll pass it along.

[00:45:25.11] – John Knych

On to, uh, Yiding, unless you want to pass.

[00:45:29.18] – Yiding

Yeah, I do have a question. Um, so, so the, uh, the, the chapters involving the, uh Radhina Kott and her peers, they’re very entertaining. And at the same time, these are very, very awful, insufferable people. So I’m just wondering, what is the trick to writing such insufferable people, but in a way that’s still very fascinating for the reader?

[00:46:01.08] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, I think it’s adding that humor, basically finding the angle for humor, which in this case is just— it’s Cot herself is a character who lends herself to humor because she does not take things seriously in the same way that Hartmund or Dorcheson does, which means, you know, if you were getting those same scenes narrated through the eyes of one of the other characters, it would probably be rather grueling as a reading experience. Because they are all horrible people, and Cot is not necessarily that much less horrible than the others, but she is at least entertaining as a narrator. And so, I mean, it’s something, weirdly enough, it’s something I learned from a lot of the better grimdark writers. So Abercrombie or Parker, say, that they are often, when they are writing about the grimmest possible stuff, they are often being extremely funny with it, and that makes the— it leavens the reading experience in a way that if they hadn’t done that, the books would probably have been really quite hard to read. And it also means that, you know, when the terrible thing does happen, you get an extra gut punch because the reader has been put off their guard because of the tone.

[00:47:21.03] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

But I genuinely believe that if you’re going to get really bleak, you also want to get funny. And this is why, you know, service model ends up like it does, for example, because it’s basically talking about the complete collapse of an entire civilization, but through the eyes of a rather bewildered robot. So it’s funny.

[00:47:40.15] – Speaker 8

Thank you.

[00:47:43.01] – John Knych

Thank you, Yiting. Good questions, everyone. And I feel like we’re doing groupthink because they’re segueing into things I want to talk about. This question relates to what Yiting just said. The group of insufferable characters, and also what Skad said before about how she sensed it was somewhat social commentary, your take on these characters. Because at one point you write, they could have all probably clubbed together and revived Earth itself, crowded and toxic as it was, but then they’d have to share it with the proles. My question is, were you in writing these characters also pushing your views on today’s world where we have people who have enormous power and technology and influence who are, we could say, some might say monsters? Or was your writing of these characters just, you know, their own, its own circus? You know, was there a subtle social commentary going on here or no?

[00:48:43.00] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, I don’t think the social commentary I’m doing there is subtle by any means. I, you know, there have been a number of my books that have gone in this direction. There’s Bearhead and there’s last year’s Hungry Gods. And it’s, yeah, we are entering a kind of an existential phase of human history where an unprecedentedly small number of people have an unprecedented amount of power. And they have that power because they are the worst possible type of people who’ve stopped at nothing to get it. And yes, I mean, I think that the quote that you’ve read out there about, I think if you look at sort of certain oligarchs’ ambitions for Mars or something like that, this is just the reason they don’t want, they would rather set up a, what would be probably a terrifyingly grim colony on Mars rather than rejuvenating Earth is they can’t own Earth in the way that they would be able to own Mars. and I feel that it’s not unreasonable to call that out as a writer, but also it’s just, I can put that sort of thing in my books or I can scream it out the window.

[00:49:58.07] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And if I scream it out of the window, people will get annoyed.

[00:50:03.10] – John Knych

Thank you. Um, all right, so maybe one last round of questions. I have, uh, like two more, but, um, if then any last questions, uh, Brandon, do you wanna, wanna ask another one?

[00:50:14.14] – Brandon

Yeah, so I’ve heard you talk about the one big lie in science fiction. So my question is, what’s the one big lie in Children of Strife?

[00:50:24.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think that I couldn’t point to the precise bit, but it would be somewhere within the, the kind of terraforming to godhood pipeline. I think that at that point I’m working with a science that is sort of so hand-wavy and so out there that there are, you know, if you were to put it under a microscope, you’d probably find some bits where it didn’t quite join up. But because that is the thing, you know, as you say, you can, you get away with the one big lie. That’s, you know, it doesn’t necessarily matter because it works narratively.

[00:51:19.10] – Brandon

Good answer.

[00:51:20.01] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thanks.

[00:51:21.14] – John Knych

Thanks, Brandon. Back to Noemi.

[00:51:24.01] – Noémie

Yes. Was there one part of the book or one scene maybe that really stood out to you? And what did you feel like when you wrote that part? Specifically one, no spoilers, of course, but Was there one that really stood out for you, maybe like a horizon scene like we say in movies, like this, the reason why you wrote the book essentially, maybe?

[00:51:47.20] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

So not that, but there is like a serious and a non-serious answer to this question. The serious one is there are some scenes with, especially when I think it’s the scene when they have just left Earth on the ark ship. And before the key crew go into suspension, which kind of brought a lump to my throat because I knew what these people were going to hit, were going to hit. But it was just— I had been— before I wrote that arkship section, all the bits on Earth, I didn’t really understand actually how genuinely creditable and courageous and actually noble that whole business was, you know, and that, you know, it is a— it is also a quite grim setup they’ve got on Earth. But just having the, you know, Captain Kasimir and her crew just having that level of sort of camaraderie and solidarity, I thought I really— I felt like, yeah, I got that scene exactly as I had wanted it. The non-serious answer is there’s There’s a sequence where Kato the mantis shrimp on a hovercraft leaps backwards off a giant jellyfish shooting pterodactyls with a machine gun. And I’m just like, how are my publishers going to let me get away with this ridiculous scene?

[00:53:12.23] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

And somehow it came through the editing process unscathed. And so—

[00:53:16.08] – Noémie

That was a great scene. So I’m happy that I let you do that. Thank you so much.

[00:53:26.00] – John Knych

Good question, Noemi, thank you. Yeah, I just had an idea for these talks, which none of you have to do if you don’t want to, but it’d be nice if at the end of each talk we like share the scene or moment that moved us the most in the book. So you don’t have to do that. I have mine when it gets back to me. But Jen, do you have a question or a final sort of scene you liked? Pass? Back to Josh.

[00:53:55.01] – Josh

The first scene that comes to my head is probably actually from Firewalkers, which is probably, what, 5, 6 years ago now? More than that. There’s a point right at the end where— I think it’s right at the end. Where they kind of finally get up onto the ship and looking around this ship that’s basically been— had everyone on it murdered, sent into space. And just a reflection of the whole story up to that point and the anger that led to that decision from people was quite impactful.

[00:54:41.02] – John Knych

That’s the one that—

[00:54:41.21] – Josh

always sticks in my head. I think it’s probably because it was the first book I read from you.

[00:54:45.14] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thank you. I like that. Yes, 5 years ago.

[00:54:52.01] – John Knych

Thank you, Josh. Back to Yiding.

[00:54:57.18] – Yiding

Are we still doing questions?

[00:54:59.10] – John Knych

If you have a question or just a moment that you enjoyed in the book.

[00:55:04.07] – Yiding

I do have both. In terms of moments, I liked all the codas, the very last few chapters, each coda for each character or group of characters, they, they really got to me. I got like, I got a bit choked up at some of them. Yeah. Uh, but my question though is, okay, so I love the, the whole concept of the crew of the Dissenter, and that seems to be something that you’ve played around a lot with in recent books. Um, like in the Entire Philosophers, you have the, the mass units of all those healers, and you had the, I think they’re called the Heretics in your, in the most recent book in the series. So is that something that really speaks to you lately, this idea of like this eclectic group of very different people, a bunch of weirdos who have to work together?

[00:55:47.19] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I think it’s just— I don’t think it’s anything profound. I think once you’ve got a group of characters like that, it just means that they are far more interesting because of their differences and because each one of them has their own little peculiarities and it gives you a richer dynamic between them. And it’s just more fun to write, to be honest.

[00:56:11.12] – Yiding

Makes sense.

[00:56:13.16] – John Knych

Thank you, Yiding. My last moment I enjoyed and question I want to ask you, Adrian, I was talking with Brandon a little bit about this before you arrived. I was kind of looking down at Cato throughout the beginning of the book in that he spoke in this jagged poetry. He’s punchy martial guy, and I kind of thought he was a little ridiculous. But a small moment that just deeply moved me was near the end when it was shown that his language— there’s actually these huge epic, like these epics that are expressed in the language between the stormopods, but that the translator just wasn’t able to capture it. I just, I love that moment. I mean, I love translation, and I love that idea that As a reader, I was just like, yeah, this is a military punchy mantis shrimp. But in fact, there’s just a lot more that the translator just couldn’t get. So I like that surprise, and it made me think about, yeah, what’s being unsaid. So yeah, Adrian, I love that there’s just wonder and awe in all your books in sort of what’s possible with creatures, with evolution. But my last question, and this is another left-field question, Like Gustave Flaubert said that he believed he was not living in the right time period.

[00:57:33.16] – John Knych

I think it was Gustave Flaubert. Do you believe that you’re not— do you feel that about this epoch, this time period that like as your identity, do you sometimes yearn for having been born in a different time or no?

[00:57:50.04] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I mean, I don’t. I am lucky enough to be born in a time of unparalleled scientific advance and knowledge where, you know, shortly before my birth, we went to the moon. We are exploring the depths of the sea. We are understanding things about the cosmos that no one in the past has ever known. You know, we have a grasp of the evolutionary history of life on this planet that just didn’t exist at any other time. My regret is that it looks like it’s going to be too short, and at the point where we’re discovering so much about life on this planet, we’re also destroying so much about life on this planet. And so it feels as though there was, at some point within my own lived history, there was a sort of a golden moment of balance, and now things are tipping the other way. But maybe that’s what everyone thinks when they get to my age.

[00:58:47.15] – John Knych

Maybe, well, we’ll see. Okay, that’s all I have. Anyone have any final questions? I really enjoyed this talk.

[00:58:58.03] – Brandon

No question, but I have to agree with Adrian on living in this time period. It’s a good one. And I love the mantis shrimp too, so thanks again. Thanks again for joining us today.

[00:59:13.10] – John Knych

Thank you, Adrian. And everyone, I’ll post this. It’s recorded, so appreciate everyone being here. Enjoyed the talk, and thank you, Adrian.

[00:59:22.24] – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Excellent. Thank you very much for inviting me.

[00:59:24.18] – John Knych

Everyone have a good day.

[00:59:26.09] – Noémie

Thank you for being here. Have a good day.

[00:59:28.01] – John Knych

Bye.

[00:00:02.300] – John Knych

Hello everyone, today we are with Alyssa Carson to talk about her book Ready for Liftoff so Alyssa, we always start these talks with asking the author about the origin of this book because on pages 70-71..I like that in the book you had little space details, but also recommendations, and your personal stories. So did you write this book all in one go, in response to people asking you how to become an astronaut, or was it a piecemeal research collection process?

[00:00:37.460] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah, I mean, I would definitely say it was more of a long term process just because I mean I think the idea had been there for so long. You know, really, the book came from so many Instagram DMs and anytime I’d go and talk to students, they would ask me questions like: How do I do that? How do I become what you’re doing? You know I always had the mentality of you know you can do exactly everything that I did or nothing that I did it and end up in the exact same position because the space industry is so broad and there’s so much opportunity. And so it’s kind of hard to guide that discussion with every single person. This is what I did about what do you want to do? What are you interested in? And so I think for a while it was just you know maybe having like generals like quick not about you know responding to those Instagram them and it’s like how can I expand on that and then really a lot of this came from there was almost like I guess more of like a book that ended up going up on Amazon.

[00:01:44.030] – Alyssa Carson

And then this was just and much more like that so it’s just gonna have a long time coming of getting the ideas down to the next generation with with their own dreams.

[00:01:56.780] – John Knych

So now when someone has had to become an astronaut. You can just say: it’s in my book.

[00:02:01.790] – Alyssa Carson

That is there or at least obviously have the discussion, but obviously a more in-depth guide is in the book.

[00:02:09.740] – John Knych

So tj who just arrived you done this before it’s the roundtable discussion. So I will go to Alex if you’re there if you want to ask Melissa a question or if not you can pass. It is not there. So moved to Greg. Greg a question for Alyssa or would you have to pass? Can hear you? And that’s the past. OK. Passe PJ again. So don’t worry, I have questions. So I do your questions or I would like to pass.

[00:02:46.970] – TJ

Me, okay?

[00:02:47.720] – John Knych

Yes.

[00:02:49.520] – TJ

I nice to meet you. I was just wondering. What is the most common question you’ve been asked when you do things like this and how is that changed over how many years?

[00:03:00.320] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s no you just like you know. Obviously curiosities of lake worth it. The dream comes from and how I guess like a kind of progress to what it is which so much. I also don’t even have the answer to you so much of this is even so far past what I had anticipated a lot of it. But I think that. And then general like it’s about going, you know about trying to pursue a dream in the space and the science industry. I think it’s just such a intimidating field or only intimidating. You know from the perspective of young kids and signs are already intimidating in the classroom, and so they think of it as a career than that even more of an intimidating conversation. So I think that I tried to bring as much fun and curiosity, and that levels of the conversation to anything about space because all that is still there and Really important. To not let me be your the thing that kind of her away from space, so.

[00:04:10.130] – John Knych

You also was one of the readers who should initial interest in your book and to talk with you. So thanks for making it. So I know Virginie. Virginie doesn’t have a question Send me a message.

[00:04:21.620] – Virginie Actis

Excuse me. I’m at my work at the university and I know where I have to teach, but I’m very happy to to listen to his work and to thank you so much.

[00:04:34.130] – John Knych

Love actually is related to what you just said Alyssa about maths and science being intimidating for how many people who who want to become an astronaut for all that is one of my favourite part of your book was that you had a very measured and reasonable perspective on the element of luck in being chosen as an astronaut And you even were very honest and saying you struggled with physics and so you put into astrobiology. So my question is what do you? What you see yourself working as as you wait for each application round of being in astronaut. What what kind of profession? Do you Do you dream of doing next to being astronaut?

[00:05:13.910] – Alyssa Carson

Right? So I mean, I think that for me, I got interested in astrobiology originally, because it was a little bit more broad of field. I felt that already was a little challenging and after just felt like I was even more deep into only physics and so I was very very fascinated with the idea of maybe staying within the field that was a lot more conducive to just kind of jumping between the different seasons where they applied the most, and so that’s really where I fell into astrobiology and I really really loved it. I think from a kind of my early years of working and life science research getting involved in I think research became a huge interest of mine, and I mean I guess that speaks through which is why I’m kind of doing a PhD these days. So I guess the research is just full-fledged taking over, but you know I think that it is researcher is such a cool area where you can kind of jump around a little bit. You know, whenever I was doing my undergraduate research. I was like this is cool.

[00:06:19.400] – Alyssa Carson

It’s astrobiology related, but then when I was looking at a PhD program. I was like well, I’m kind of interested in something a little bit different and so I still had you know the other. It’s all within astrobiology research. I had the opportunity to find it from things that were much more focused on the plan to the origins of life, and so even know it’s all within the realm of astrobiology. It’s still was kind of give me that ability to kind of change my mind if my life research interest kind of change, so that I thought was just such a lovely place to be and I thank you, especially as you like your interest kind of change and I think that that is something important, especially with the space industry. It’s so ever evolving. So you must have to have the ability to evolve with it and kind of your interest, as you know it is so yeah. I mean, I think outside of applied and becoming a astronaut. I’m just very happy to be working with in the field of astrobiology, obviously from the academia and the research side.

[00:07:22.600] – Alyssa Carson

Now you know, PhD potentially working for industry will come and see you know. She is very scary place to look at right now, but here there is just saying within the research field or working in the industry, but for the most part staying in research.

[00:07:40.870] – John Knych

Great. Thank you. Yes! Post PhD. Hopefully get it just continue researching right I hope. The I’m a trop hate you a very big question and you can take it over you want so in this reading group. We are the safety and the lots of speculative fiction and something that I have been taking a lot about recently and I think author readers to when if we go to more how well we search for life and in the beginning of your book. I thought you have a very good job of responding to criticism for why we should not go to more and one of your response, which I agree with is that probe and robot, just don’t they can’t look for life in the same way that that human could so could you share for us and especially for people who don’t know about astrobiology If you were to go to share with your current skills and knowledge sept. How would you begin to look for life and more? You know how much it would be geology? How much would it be using the tech?

[00:08:43.740] – John Knych

What’s what’s it like looking for life on Mars for you.

[00:08:48.210] – Alyssa Carson

So I mean and again for a lot of the more robotics, which is more has been in the area of interest for a very very long time. And you know there was the making machine that went to more that had like a small look for life on it. And it’s not very well respected. And you know it really kind of LED to the shift of the mindset of life. OK? Why are we looking for life? First? Let’s understand the planet. Let’s learn about this geology first which I think was a very good shift and why we’ve had so many missions go to Mars and now we have a much. We have climate model. We have so much information. More is now the next most added to earth. So we have so much more information there and I think that the more you have learned about it. I think a lot of the potential for life is also in the past right. We think is used to be a lot more suitable for life. Obviously, today doesn’t really look nearly as Welcoming for any type of life, but I think right now that would be that if there were to be a possibility of life or maybe.

[00:09:59.250] – Alyssa Carson

It’s not on the surface where is exposed to radiation exposed to these things and so this is such a tricky place to get to you and not really a place that we have really explored too much. You know you like the perseverance, Rover has been drilling, but I mean, it is where we are really gonna have to start looking more for any potential for life. And so that’s where it’s really challenging. Whether that you know is able to do more of that or if that’s just maybe we have to wait to go there to do more of like study in the field of astrobiology is also such a push and pull, because there is you know you know how do we search for life on Mars? But then also bring people there as well because the planetary Protection aspects of it right. You know we don’t want to think we found life and more than someone just touch the rock, you know and we bring our own organismes and our own bacteria. There is so it’s definitely challenging. You know. I think that there are some regions of Mars that maybe we have a little bit more potential for life and maybe others.

[00:11:07.390] – Alyssa Carson

So I think those who have been a little bit more. You know I guess Sacred and always have not been there because even the rover and think that we stand and we still think are the planet at least a small small degree of something. You know it’s hard to get it perfectly sterile, you know Rover and all the way it is so I think that those areas of concern are also there. So it’s just gonna be a little bit of yeah. I think the challenge is where you gonna have to go and this for actual study of potential life on Mars.

[00:11:44.110] – John Knych

Thank you. Alyssa. I’m Keep away if anyone has the questions you can just raise your hand or send send a message in the share. This is at the end of your book. You talk about you know like when will the first women walk on the moon. Would you rather be the first woman to walk on the moon or part of the first crew to Mars, and why is interesting.

[00:12:03.640] – Alyssa Carson

I mean, I think from my perspective at this point. I’m just thrilled to be a part of the space industry and any way shape form. I don’t think I’ve really had you know much of a desire to I have to be the first to do you know I think maybe some of the things that I did when I was just kind of you know that many people had the viewpoints of becoming as I think I did because since I had it. And you know if you ask so many of them where you know they were already where they were already seen in their fields. They may be so that they are like that sounds kind of cool. Let me do that they had and When they were, but they didn’t have that you know I’m choosing now at the super young age and I’m just gonna work solely towards that. That was I think a little bit more of a new idea or concept about going about wanting to become an astronaut. And I mean for me a lot of my interest surrounding Mars really just came from when I was a kid.

[00:13:04.140] – Alyssa Carson

You know hearing about the mission to the moon. I was like well, you know the moon is taken. What’s next? You know I felt in my my brain. I thought that was the right. I thought I wanted to grow up and become astronaut. When they are not my only option was to go to Mars. I thought that would be really the next place to go and that that thing would be like to be able to go there. So that’s really where are lots of that came from I mean, I think a lot of research background and areas of my current research is about my hair and potential life on Mars. So I think you know a lot of you know what I do is very connected to and away, but you know I would never turn down the mission to the moon either. So I guess I’m gonna leave it at that.

[00:13:49.920] – John Knych

Thank you. Back to who has the question.

[00:13:56.190] – TJ

Of this. Is very expensive. And I was just wandering why or what’s the most defensive reason in your opinion? Why is over the funding in two things that are time sensitive want it right now.

[00:14:16.740] – Alyssa Carson

You know it’s a great question and I think that you know it’s a question that comes up in the space industry. No matter what you’re talking about whether it’s money for our mission to Mars money for your telescope. Money for you know. It doesn’t matter. What is the mission is right? There is always going to be the conversation of the money that you know maybe a different area here on earth and I think that you know The space industry does do so much and it’s so easy to view this as you know where the money is up there and then were never seen it again, but really NASA does have one of the largest returns of investment from the money that it does spend. And I think that it’s all spend wisely or as wisely as I think it can be. You know there are chosen for you know. Scientifique importance or. Whether it’s you know another mission to Mars another mission to something something to something something to the author and so all you will have all these scientists and researchers that one kind of a little bit of that, but you know I think that the amount of technology and science gained kind of is as important as a lot of this other stuff because you know really we have so much technology because of NASA and the space industry and all that technology comes back here, right?

[00:15:40.380] – Alyssa Carson

It’s not just going on those and never seen again and I think that that is really one of the best benefits about the space industry is that it the most forces us to think outside the box to an issue. It may be an issue that we have for living in space as we have here on earth, but working on it from the space perspectives. Just kind of us to think outside the box and so I think of like a mission to Mars if we’re working on trying to send human tumors and put in the money and in humans. There are so many technology that have to be invented in order to make that happen, you know whether it’s learning how to grow food and more learning how to build it from radiation. You know all those same ideas that we’re using to protect human and and keep them. I’m here. I think a lot of that can be translated by the problem. So you know if we’re figuring out how to grow food and our hopefully that the same thing we should be able to grow food and someone is here on earth and more with agriculture, and so I think that it is kind of play to both sides.

[00:16:36.450] – Alyssa Carson

I don’t think choosing space means I think that it is for the purpose of all that here and kind of expanding our knowledge. I think I know the harder things are the the question of just our general curiosity right so much of maybe deep space, I would say you know it’s so much of just you know we want to know more about light from the big bang and so much of the knowledge. We’re going from like the James Webb space telescope, right a lot of that it’s just like night. Curiosity. Have you know? Are we alone? Where do it All comes from? Where is it all going? And I think it’s kind of some of those. But maybe those who could are you are a little bit more subjective. Obviously that technology of the telescope is still there, but but yeah.

[00:17:23.160] – John Knych

Thank you, Thank you Alyssa. The tiger in the beginning of the book. Also raw ideas about water filter, GPS and insulin pump. We’re all NASA’s inventions which I didn’t know before reading that those came from NASA.

[00:17:39.210] – TJ

Come up in the book.

[00:17:40.710] – John Knych

Non non non non! Non non non non! Because the argument some people say we are what is not giving us right? You know that and this is the cause justified so Alix has a question, but also real quick before we go to another. TJ appreciate this. We had to talk two days ago and it was brought up that human and more on chocolate than all space space travel probes combined and that like the transport bretelle.

[00:18:18.270] – Alyssa Carson

Is actually not that when you when you when you look at it in terms of the government. It’s pretty insane actually how much we are were able to do with the with the body that there is.

[00:18:28.680] – John Knych

What it is interesting. What is watching you would like before you go to the I think and in our minds. We will see that the climate change like next to space travel like those two things are our both intellectual and it’s like why don’t we put the energy into note roasting our planet right. That’s why it’s interesting topic. But I’m babbling. Alex question for you are questions for Alyssa.

[00:19:00.370] – Alex

Thank you for me the link. Alyssa. Thank you for being here. I haven’t read the book yet. It was the last minute thing. I’m gonna make sure you get the book, but I have done my research and I follow you for some time. I think we have some mutual friends with the house as well and maybe a couple of their places out. There has a person myself pursuing astronaut Tennessee with the us military. I know that this whole trip here Tomorrow is our moon. We’re gonna be working at the team one of the things that I look for in special operations are People not things most of the time for the trip to more. What type of personality? Are you looking for in your teammate that you would like to take one thing. You will want to give your teammate is for his personality and director of yourself that you can bring to the team. And what things are you looking for is well?

[00:19:58.090] – Alyssa Carson

Interesting and I mean I think for right now the concept of the right cause we’re not there yet. And and in setting up that mission entirely. But I think that you know it’s going to be are going to need to be a diverse team right. You’re going to need a few people with military background background and you’re gonna need you people like we would have much more science background for the amount of time that you’re one more likely someone maybe with the medical background for you know it’s so far away from earth and such a long terme. Longer than a lot of the other ones that we have so really just such as I think diverse groups. There are some of the most important factors is one really being able to work as a team and obviously by the team environment and I think it’s so important to be able to step up and you have your role and what you’re in charge of. And also the ability to kind of let go from things that other people are in charge of. I think it’s really important at that point, you know you have experts in so many different fields and so being able to rely on your teammates for those things I think it’s really important skillset, you know being able to be like you know so and so that’s their job, they are in charge of it and I’m putting my life in their hands for.

[00:21:19.360] – Alyssa Carson

For whatever that they are in charge of. So I think it’s just really trying to be the best version of yourself to contribute to the team. And I think that that’s what I would hope everyone on the team would be doing is that they’re really trying to show up by the best of themselves to put in there are part of the work and then we can kind of light, come together and be something that super successful and I think that you know it’s so many things and in the space industry. I mean somebody that we’ve seen previously, you know you, they were heavily on each other and so you know somebody that are always saying. You know it’s just exactly like a little family that you start building, you know the extreme environment and how much you have to have in each other. So yeah. I think just trustworthy hard-working people. This is the core of it.

[00:22:09.040] – John Knych

Thank you. Thank you.

[00:22:10.240] – Alex

Thank you. Thank you John.

[00:22:13.090] – John Knych

The. This question is relevant for how you since he pursuing being in astronaut. You would also that in as you put your dream you and many closed doors for you. So you feel everyone in it wasn’t read the book. So also want to be in astronaut since he was six years old and is going to take over a thousand hours of flight to have you have done a lot of work to prepare yourself which has been the most frustrating closed door that you’ve encountered in your path to being astronaut where you had been the most difficult to bounce back.

[00:22:49.960] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah, you know I think that one thing that I think is challenging. I think a lot of people you know I’ve had it all figured out since I was seven, but you know I think along the way it’s been very challenging to really kind of figure out exactly what I’m doing and how to get there. You know. I think that’s so much of my journey. Seems you know very like in a way, but really it’s just been having the kind of bounce and kind of go with the flow as things have come up. You know I think that might have been evolving. I really didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do For a long time and I think that was also very challenging and a little scary going into knowledge to begin with. I felt like I was really choosing astrobiology. I knew that that was an area of interest, but you know I still really don’t know what it looks like and you know spending so much time in academia. You are most of what you know a professional endeavour will eventually be like and so sometimes I think that that’s really hard to achieve your mindset back and forth between you know what it’s all leading up to you and what it really looks like so I think that it’s been one of the most challenging things you know, I think that there is such a balance to it all of you know, Obviously working for your dreams and you’re also having that normal life and those being a bit of the balance.

[00:24:18.760] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah. I think you know when I was. I think I had. You know what I wanted originally is like where I wanted to go to college and things like that. And so many of those shifted And you know whether that was like a fool flame in the door or it like the door slamming closed or just you know. But it was just kind of it now, let me know what I was going to do even recently I guess with starting a PhD program. You know I didn’t have the idea of person with her PhD at this time. And I don’t even know how I think that so much of this just comes from not really having a good understanding of you know what your options are, but I had no idea that I could go straight from my underground and start of PhD programs and so I started applying master’s programs. And then you know I was starting to hear back from like you know. We’re not gonna take you just are here and it’s not worth our time. And so you know it was just kind of a child of light Weight Do what am I doing case?

[00:25:21.340] – Alyssa Carson

My my plan that I had is all kind of falling apart. You know it’s not exactly what I was thinking was just the straight and easy and so yeah. I think there’s just really, you know. I think this is really are just maybe what I had in my head is kind of shifting and just been able to write and figure out. Okay? Let’s take a step back what I want to do what makes the most sense and then kind of go from there. So I think that it’s been just part of life. Honestly. I don’t think it’s really just for you. No one thing to be coming out of my dreams. Specifically. I think that just kind of part of life and being able to kind of move it with some of those changes.

[00:26:03.460] – John Knych

Thank you. Yes! And for those who have it read the book another thing I like in the book was that you and I never seen this before you learn how exactly what the requirements are by NASA for even applying and when I know that you need the master of PhD in the STEM related field, I need a thousand hours of flight time. I think and you need to pass the physical tests, so that was that was interesting. Here’s a much lighter. Question. So in the book you write that nothing is as comfortable as a good meal and that astronauts are allowed to have one comfort meal that like they bring to space with them. What is your comfort meal that you would bring if you were going to more and. And you?

[00:26:46.720] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah yeah it’s okay. Well, it’s hard time that you get to what they want right. So they get the pitch. Maybe I feel good idea that they really like and then it’s up to the smart people to bring this with the space right. There is there are few things that are just kind of how you are able to figure out.

[00:27:09.340] – John Knych

The right bread is a no-no because of the crown and the.

[00:27:11.980] – Alyssa Carson

Right exactly what it’s like I really big one, so they used tortilla. So I mean there’s there’s compromised there, but you so there’s a lot of time where I will kind of fish and idea I know Samantha Cristoforetti en italien astronaut. She went to the International Space Station and she was like I need espresso. She is she was very having her and so they started figuring out how to make an espresso machine work and microgravity and so it’s kind of like these little fun. I guess projects that they work for some of those things, but yeah, I mean I think comfort food wise, I mean, I obviously would love to have some of my Louisiana root up. There is possible. You know whether that’s a gumbo or something like that would be awesome to have in space. I think I like in general, so I wouldn’t really mind anything like that, but I think any of like Louisiana food, whatever would be the easy. I would be open, I would be open. So you know if I can’t go to how can we do like a jambalaya?

[00:28:15.940] – Alyssa Carson

Can we do like something that that kind of was, I think that is very very home and not living in Louisiana for so many years now I mean, I still every single time. I’m like I gotta go get my my few things that I’m I’m so used to having so I think I would be no different in space.

[00:28:36.370] – John Knych

So I won’t be standing on the gantry about to enter the rocketship, you’ll be there and they go now. I’m done. I’m I’m leaving.

[00:28:44.680] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah yeah yeah yeah. I’m gonna make sure it.

[00:28:50.590] – John Knych

So back to top of a more of heavy. And I have questions about like so you’re getting your PhD. So is tj tj in the difficult process of of earning, Ph. D. And you wrote that be coming in astronauts and I’m getting the master of PhD in the field is its resource intensive. It’s it’s time intensive and you wrote that resources by means of foundation’s scholarship and grants are available to recommendations for those who want to research at the Martian relevant project because full disclosure, I’m I’m starting to research how to create a new reactors that could be used on Mars because we have crusty Nessa made crusty in two thousand eighteen, but it only made a kW of power. We need a lot more energy to do anything and more. So I think that’s a field that needs to be explored to do that have there be something on Mars to know of any of our scholarships that people can apply to if there interested in being an astronaut or doing the world in project.

[00:29:57.860] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah, You know I think I think that it’s so specific to what you’re working on. I think that you know for me and my field I have worked with NASA astrobiology division looking for any opportunity. There will be applied to grant a few times. The NASA It is really really cool opportunity to you. It’s a very long pitch of your your whole ideas and then they select several of those projects every year. So I know that that’s really good resources. Yeah. I think it’s really just keeping an open if you are familiar with the roses roses essentially where they put it kind of all of their potential and they kind of divide it out depending on so you know for most of my stuff. It’s a lot of Planetary. Protection habitable world kind of looking more specifically and like those. So yeah. You know money is coming go. I think I’ll go with with funding and it’s like resources, especially from our research side. Cause it just gonna do you know what they think is kind of the most important thing to be had, but it’s really For those things and I think generally like whenever you know you’re like an interested in space.

[00:31:26.330] – Alyssa Carson

I mean for me growing up. I was always kind of looking for any sort of scholarship where things you know when I first and learning to fly. You know here in about the night in which was like the women’s organization, and it seems you know the scholarships that they offered and so I think it’s you know. There’s so many I guess like new scholarships. So I think you know whatever your topic is especially for young as well, you know and in high school and things like that there’s a lot of those like words that you can really kind of start looking for and getting funding for so yeah. I mean that would just be my advice is just trying to get specific to your topic because then you more align with what they are looking for right, if you know. You know specifically for you know from the NASA astrobiology, then I would have a better than just applying to a more like Usually just try to keep it as possible and then especially with the research, you know crafting this when there’s not being able to get crafting.

[00:32:30.260] – Alyssa Carson

Maybe when there isn’t as much.

[00:32:33.470] – John Knych

Thank you. In the beginning of this conversation Alyssa, you mentioned how with your field of research Astrobiology you’re preparing for being able to identify what is life and more but another field that I’m curiosity, you know if you are researching microbes meaning I read a book called becoming more. I recommend it to all of you to be scared. Salomon just came out and take a month ago and I really looked at the challenges of going to Mars and living there and one of them where there’s a lot of mystery these microbes like the microbes in the ass. It’s like the equivalent of someone who is in that there is all you know you have a lot of people living in the small spaces. You have microbes, But you knew it was very interesting. One hundred thirty three that some other bacteria is over three times more high-school and space and astronaut that have had virus and they go into space. There there reactivated. So what do you think we should do for research? Going forward to understand microbe, and what is just your general knowledge and where we are now in.

[00:33:37.850] – John Knych

In microbe.

[00:33:40.640] – Alyssa Carson

All my research is entirely own microorganisms and environment. So yeah. It’s now more specifically. I guess I guess first from just the general microorganisms and their ability is so obviously, I think if we’re looking at any life on Mars microorganisms are much more likely actually looking at potential life in our solar system because we have other areas of interest as well beside, you know we are also very curious about titan, which is the moon of Saturn were very curious about Europa and some of those moon of Jupiter and that’s all just in relation to the potential of microorganisms growing and in those environment, and that’s just because they really can adapt very easy and so what I’m kind of something specifically in relation to its in connection to methane production because essentially some of the rover that we’ve had on mare have detected trace amounts of nothing, but in terms of our satellites. There is no methane in greater atmosphere, which makes sense causes from our knowledge. We think that if there was. So it’s very hot to find something, especially in the surface.

[00:34:57.590] – Alyssa Carson

So I really big ideas that something there must be some sources generating that since it should not be there any longer in terms of this kind of timeline, and so we’re thinking, there’s something generating it subsurface and then it’s been excreted. Maybe as the rover drove over it kind of shift and is. Coming out and so obviously, there is multiple possibilities. There is there are geological process that can generate methane and then I’m just taking it from the perspective of the potential of and there were to have been microorganisms there generating is that even possible and so I worked with which are really common on earth. There are one of our products here and there is purely anaerobic. So they don’t grow and oxygen subsurface here on earth or in the ocean is well and so we put those in the environment to see you know can the pressure can they how do they react with materials and minerals so that kind of where my area of research comes in, but the idea of also the human perspective of it. You know. It’s a really big topic, right now, you know I go to the astrobiology conference and there every other year in two years ago.

[00:36:18.780] – Alyssa Carson

There was a really fascinating experiment that I’ve been doing up on the International Space Station and to really have a good idea of how resilience? Maybe some of these are and they actually had. And when he went on the space walk to like the outside of his glove, which is exposed to the vacuum of space and start getting like that information is still coming out. You know things are still kind of being grown and up and so I think it’s definitely just keep in mind and I think that the International Space Station has been such a great tool to be able to test things in micro microgravity environments that kind of getting a little bit more knowledge on them. And I think maybe you not going back to the moon and more of those conversations are coming up even more with the idea of a kind of Planetary protection in the field has kind Grown and years, so I think. Yeah. I think there’s a lot more research to be done there and we’ll see where it goes fascinating.

[00:37:20.840] – John Knych

Yes, I knew that the microbe adapt, but they also evolve in in this book I read I mean they have found microbe on the ice that are like I’ve never encountered them before. So they will see if our body can can handle them. But I mean human body is very adaptable to so that’s kind of the beginning possum training possum training. Can you talk about that? And the most difficult part of that it is I think in the book that it was, it was here.

[00:37:55.700] – Alyssa Carson

So now today, I think I wish I now there are there will be more official they got accredited and stuff through the university that I’ve been working under but when I first found out about them. They were called possum. And there are many areas of focus and the beginning was a lot of rounds like and clouds, which was like a type of clouds that really only form and like very northern like the northern hemisphere. And so there’s a lot of research that they were doing there and I actually found out about them. It was so strange. I went to a campe over the summer. And you know the counselor at the time. She was just the college students and riddles and I started riddles and I was just about my interest in space. And my you know you know more interesting and kind of the inside and she was like well, you know, there’s this program at my university. I have no idea what they do or anything about them, but maybe reach out to them. And so I got in contact with them and learn more about what they were doing.

[00:39:02.340] – Alyssa Carson

And you just turn it is such an amazing opportunity, amazing people. They are really taking the idea of citizen science and expanding it so much obviously. Now they have so many awesome classes and programs where they are they teach, but also be able to be involved in some of the citizen science research. So what have been able to do microgravity flights and I’ve been able to do work with the final frontier space design. You know we’ve done underwater simulation. We’ve done so many different things. And I think you know working with them and have been involved in some of these things. I think again really just showed me. How cool some of this stuff can be and it was all for you know the scientific purpose right there were all for like research purposes and so I think that that was kind of some of those things that really have like this is cool that we can just kind of go do this really fun thing and then like actually be learning something about it or even like with the final frontier. You know it’s cool that we can kind of Turn on and where the space out and then actually provide variable data back to the space of company.

[00:40:13.400] – Alyssa Carson

So I think they were only one of the ones that really I think inspired a lot of this research knowledge, but there’s just in some organisations.

[00:40:22.970] – John Knych

Thank you back to TJ who seize years in.

[00:40:29.390] – TJ

Jumping back to previous questions are there any particular concern ou traite concerning antibiotic resistance or maybe exciting research where you have you want your passionate about how things are always be back to us with the space industry? What is going on with any research in that area and maybe what it could do for help helping fight problems here as well.

[00:41:02.180] – Alyssa Carson

You know I think that it’s been a really fascinating Affecting the human body and how the effects of the body that they did was the twins study with the with the Scott Kelly, the twins, they were two brothers and they’re both astronaut and then one lived on the International Space Station for each year and the other one day on earth for years and there’s a lot of research from coming from that you know random things like you know how the space affecting our eyes and how the space affecting this and that. And so I think that that that’s really when I think a big part and almost any astronaut honestly that’s from space. I mean there’s such intensive, you know prix medical and then post medical things from you know just the effects of going into space and coming back and so yeah. I think you know a little bit of knowledge of it. You know I guess I just know more of like the headlines there. But you know I do think that it is definitely in the field and again if you know talking.

[00:42:11.040] – Alyssa Carson

To the moon is coming to play, even more right because the time you’re in space. The more, the more of what ever is happening, right? You know you’re you’re getting You’re getting from just to microgravity for the lungs and even something like a man has gravity which is great, but it is not as much gravity here and if you’re still gonna have those things to your body and so I think of those who are kind of those that we need to have some sort of human tumor. And yeah, I mean, I guess that’s really why it’s like working out. It’s like when there is part of their day on the International Space Station. It’s just try to keep the body as like that is possible. And then I guess in terms of you know from the Microbiologie. I think that you think about it has always been a little bit of a concern as well, you know I’m going back to when we first, I went to the moon. We’re like and after they came back from the moon and put it in life trailer.

[00:43:18.720] – Alyssa Carson

They had like the moon. So I think that it’s always been a topic. That’s been relieving. Even if you know it’s not what you know. It’s always been kind of at the front of this mission.

[00:43:34.140] – John Knych

You DJ think you are back to house.

[00:43:41.100] – Alex

Yes, Alyssa, must be the one that you’re my head are all personality questions or more sometimes oriented type questions versus the technical I’ve been doing this for a very long time since six years old. Mais didn’t know what then it probably are used to it now. Over the years doing this for so long. It’s like driving a car you know you have you don’t have to think about it. You just do it. But with the types of training that you do all of the different skills takes it. You have to stack and maintain for when it does come time for you. I can see your selection board and so on and so forth worth keeps you going every single day with something that makes you excited every single morning to wake up and do this type of work it gets. Alyssa Carson. Excited is at the drink a cup of coffee. Do it with the special sauce. What’s the special sauce that you use or it is there is a special sauce with this something that intuitively Orly with you or something.

[00:44:47.640] – Alex

I have developed. What is it?

[00:44:49.290] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah, you know, I think there’s multiples directions. There I mean when I think one thing that is being motivating me out the years. I mean, I think I’ve just kind of always had this and that like For space anything space instantly much more how much more interested in the conversation and learning about it. You know I would have topics in school and I was like you know. This is it cool, I guess, but then you know learning about it from the space space perspectives and space that was like what this is so much more interesting. So I feel like I’ve always been a little bit more space topics which I think he’s kind of laid really helps. You know a lot of my there is far as like I guess just like motivation, especially in like learning new skills and things like that I think you know growing up. I was always trying different things right. Cause I didn’t know what I wanted to do you know that I want to be. What did I want to do that I want to study robotics?

[00:45:46.470] – Alyssa Carson

I want to be an engineer. I had no idea right. There was so so many possibilities and so I feel like I can do it myself or you know I was interested in trying some a little bit of these different fields. And you know I started doing that I think what I started to appreciate even more than this is how much I was learning about myself and I think you know when I started to learn to fly. I think that was a great example of you know, you know I went to my first flight listening and I had it and I said well this just for me. I’m not going to do it and then my dad me to go and one more time to really make sure. He’s like if you don’t like it again, then like you don’t need to do it. You know if you don’t have to become it. No one is like making you do that. And so I went again and then I came back and I was like this was the coolest thing ever. And so I think a lot of the time.

[00:46:36.300] – Alyssa Carson

I’ve been put in these situations where I have almost pushed myself. And then now I’m so grateful for the opportunity, you know and whether you know I’m not necessarily being professionally these days. But you know I feel like I learned so many skills and so much about myself through the process that I think I appreciate so much and I think that that’s just kind of made me. Well, let’s try something else. You know how can I kind of push myself? And what? What can I learn about myself and these new skills? So you think you know some of those initial opportunity may have been difficult to jump into. But I think it might take away. I’m like well that was really amazing. I should try something else like that just cause I feel like it’s just growing as a person.

[00:47:18.750] – Alex

And I had something that that was really awesome response. There are just something to add to that question was the negativity going around the world. I try not to pay attention to those things I do is trying to focus on the mission and be good to the people that around me. What it looks like we have here in your background. I’m pretty sure you try to do this. Not only you doing all the training all the time. So that keep you focus with the people that you surround yourself. Those are great people as well. Do you have to have a filter the psychology of priming that you don’t like people go to a Starbuck the study right here they go to the library and study the used the psychology of prime is you How how is your environment to you to stay focused on everything you’re doing.

[00:47:59.170] – Alyssa Carson

It for sure. I mean, I think that I’m only have a lot of those personality like if you know my house is probably at that time like where you know you kind of like melt into your environment and away and so I think that that all that is it just is important that you know I think for me. And you think it’s always been important that kind of surround yourself with people that support you, and I think that’s been super big. I always try to encourage students to have some some person supporting you, you know whether it’s a pair of friends. However, it is going up. My dad was so supportive of all of my space, you know endeavour, and I was so lucky to have that because you know if he was constantly bin like now, we’re not gonna go to this thing than you know that would have been very kind of keep, you know without being dragged down and so yeah. I think to myself what people that kind of support of my interest in my fascination, and you know it’s been also interesting just getting into the community of it.

[00:49:05.490] – Alyssa Carson

All is well. You know I think that the space industry is such a community. The astrobiology field is such a community going from Louisiana, where space was like not a very common area of interest, and then when I went to underground moving to Florida, and you know living on the space coast and seeing rocket launch every other weekend and you know what kind of surrounding your environment that is uplifting to your goals. I think I’ll make it really big difference. So I think you know whether it’s been intentional or not, it’s been definitely a part of that and and in my dreams from from that from the background.

[00:49:45.090] – John Knych

Thank you. Thank you Alyssa. But I’m not sure if you’re there. But also you can answer this. Are you the space enthusiast as well because breeding clearly always supportive of Alyssa and her path and I think you were even a little surprised that at such a young age. Alyssa Showed this this passion for space where you have you always been interested in the Apollo mission and all of that or have you kind of learned that as also has learned that.

[00:50:14.790] – Bert Carson

I mean when I was a kid. Obviously, you know we were going to the moon and you know the moon landing and that kind thing and I was very interested in all that I actually have a lot of old space items, whatever that I’ve kind of mixed in with with Alyssa stuff. Why I didn’t do it? I don’t know and especially since I I went into the video world. I could have just as easily went to work for this video. So I guess it was there is a young kid. But I guess the last you know and then yes, I have learned a lot more about spaces and everything through here. I see all the time like I did I didn’t push you into this is pulled me in. But she three four years old can me asking about more. I’m like sure you can do that you are becoming astronaut and honestly I want to be a princess and two weeks later by the frog, and you know whatever I never thought she would stay focused and you know and and and because of that that’s where she is.

[00:51:23.020] – Bert Carson

That’s why she is where she is at today is because of the hard work that he’s put in every day to go after this dream wonderful.

[00:51:32.350] – John Knych

Thank you. So I promised. Alyssa. One hour. So I have one more questions to wrap it up. But I was gonna say I was the reader who just pop in and then left I think he is at work. So if anyone has one more questions, you can ask it but it’s kind of a specific question, but I want to make sure it up with you, so I’m also interested in in a growing plant in space and I believe that there’s a dirt of knowledge about this. I tried to look on the Amazon Google Ads and they really want that many books about growing plants and in space that are really that I think are our extensive who wrote on page forty seven that you grew plan at the Florida Institute of technology in the box would have you learn about growing plants and space and where you keep researching it. Where? Where do you think The field is at you?

[00:52:24.000] – Alyssa Carson

So the lab that I worked in Florida tech was all about plants and growing them. My like contribution to the project were a little bit more from the microorganisms Scythe, just because we were working with plants growth. Promoting bacteria. So that you had to the plant to basically help them grow better and we were trying to understand a little bit about them and to those with the plant in the space. I can’t help them grow better. You know if you’re using that is food supplies. You know you are wanting to get the most yield possible, but our lab are we had somebody amazing people that we’re gonna have so many different projects, but the guy in charge of the lab worked with light and light growing is definitely find some of the information about it, but he. HAS like a collaboration with to be like ketchup on Mars. It was kind of like a cookie thing, but he was trying to grow plants using like different and stuff. So I think also has been there. You know I think we’ve got a lot of one of the hardest part as you know, we don’t have a single sample from Mars and so all of the ideas surrounding.

[00:53:42.360] – Alyssa Carson

You know growing growing plants. There is a little right. You know we have the regulate. We have you know the Knowledge that we’ve gained from some of the missions, but we don’t have a single sample directly from Mars, right? And so it’s something that can be challenging when you’re doing some of these studies. But you know I think that it’s never going fields. You know I was very happy to come to contribute to some of the staff and the lab, especially from you know my my microbiology side. Yeah, I think today. Maybe I don’t keep up with it as much. And when I was switching to you. I was kind of at the moment very excited to leave the plan behind. I was in the interested and I get a little bit of a shift just like research and I felt like and here so much about that I was so ready to go to shift Gears, but but yeah. I think that you know it’s something that we’re continuing to say I think hydroponic are just getting better and better.

[00:54:38.530] – Alyssa Carson

I mean people can have you know full-fledged gardens like in the house now? So easily with those systems. So I think it’s just getting.

[00:54:49.600] – John Knych

Great Yes we had Kim Stanley Robinson in the previous talk and he got a book called read more and he said you are there is there is it’s like poison in the soil and more, and you know we have to watch the poison out. Or, or or gros plan. Just not even in soil it all might be interested to see if we have we overcome that all right. Does anyone have any other and other questions? This is really. I know I only have one more, but I mean mentioned in the interview that optimistic projection for human tumor. Ten years of this, the political will find it. Do is that you’re to believe you have human on Mars in ten years or are you just can’t open to? Be out because you are very much involved in the community.

[00:55:40.300] – Alyssa Carson

Yeah yeah. You know I think I think it’s you know. I think we have to have optimism in space. I think it’s hard to go to work towards. A large mission without optimism. You know some of these things are so difficult and sometimes it’s hard. You just want to have to like something. I think that honestly my personal opinion with the mission to Mars. I think one of our great and keep in us. I think we still have some about logistics of this, and I think the big thing is back at the moment is time. I think that with the current technology mission of you. Now is taking six months to get you more staying on more for the month of time. And I want to come back. I think it’s too much too long, especially in comparison to what type we currently have the ability of doing and what we are currently looking at doing with the moon and things like that, so I think that’s the biggest kind of issue. I know that you know I have been working a lot When you get that time line from Earth, tomorrow is from the six weeks, which I think would be a huge victory in terms of like a mission to Mars.

[00:56:55.000] – Alyssa Carson

So you know I’m not quite as much from the engineering side. So I don’t know how challenging a lot of that stuff is how long it’s gonna take for that technology to be at that point. But I know it’s been a thought for a while and so I think for me. That’s it. That’s my hope is the time line can be a little bit more. I guess realistic to what we’re used to doing. Then I think it becomes a lot more possible and again that kind of has its optimism. Where we’re gonna be able to figure that technology out and and make that possible. But you know, I don’t think that that kind of from my perspective would be one of our mission possible. So we’ll see. I mean, I think that the everything going on right now with us and getting to the back to the moon is like a great first step, I know that you know what In conversations in the idea of presence to the degree on the moon. You know twenty twenty nine. So what it means that may be able to add in addition to.

[00:58:00.580] – John Knych

Thank you and I think Jared Eizykman said nuclear propulsion might be aware that will will do that she said she had one last final quick question so that her.

[00:58:11.050] – TJ

Other than you think of course. If there’s one book that you are recommended for everyone to read contexte, you know what would you and.

[00:58:19.930] – Alyssa Carson

That’s interesting. Well, I don’t know I actually would say what’s going on my mind more. Recently is hail Mary with like the movie coming out, so that has just kind of naturally bin on my mind a little bit more. So yeah. That’s really my first thought I know that also same author It’s very very very popular and very well respected her very good things. So yeah. I mean those are kind of mainly the ones and my mind so would be my recommendations.

[00:58:54.550] – TJ

And that reminds me of plants in space book of the motion, so that the only one I can think. Thank you.

[00:59:04.120] – John Knych

Thank you so much, Alyssa. Really enjoyed this conversation it recorded so our readers can can watch it out their own time. Best of luck in your life and career and and for those of you who have got the book. I just saw on the chat that I said he just go to an Amazon Word to read and and inspiring two. I mean you after I read it. I want it to become an astronaut. So I think that’s the kind of that the goal to inspire. So thank you.

[00:59:33.070] – Alyssa Carson

Thank you so much for reading and and for having me to talk about it.

[00:59:37.570] – John Knych

Great. Have a good day everyone. Bye bye.

[00:59:40.120] – Alyssa Carson

Bye.