Chapter 152: Robin Sloan weaves wonder and weirdness into the warbly world of words

Listen to the chapter here!

Neil:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha Welcome or welcome back to Chapter 152, 52, 52 of 3 Books. We're listening to the only pockets in the world buy and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians.

We are having a long-term hangout here, a 22-year long hangout, right? Because down every single new moon and every single full moon, we drop a conversation with somebody about the three most formative books in their life. We've done that since 2018.

We're doing it all the way up to 2040. I was in my 30s when I started this project. I will be in my 60s when it's done.

It is a worldwide hang. It is for people who want to read more. It's for people that are like, I need a good book.

Where should I turn to? I don't want to get my feeds. I want to get tips from the Amazon recommendation engine or the piles in the front of the bookstore.

I mean, that stuff's great, but you know what? We want to plumb the archives of our collective human minds here. We want to talk about the three most formative books in the world for each person.

Three most formative books for each person, 333 people. That should be a thousand formative books total. That is our goal on the show.

Now let's kick off the conversation. You can always forward over to the conversation itself. No problem.

If you want to jump ahead, I do that too, but there are no ads and no interruptions on the show. So it's just going to be me and you and our community of three bookers hanging out. So let's start off as we always do with a letter.

This chapter's letter before we jump into Robin Sloan, who I'm very excited to have here. This chapter's letter comes from Haya McKinley. Haya writes, Hi Neil.

I just finished listening to chapter 150 with the great prime minister, Jean Chrétien, and I want to write you to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I didn't know that much about Jean Chrétien until recently. I came to Canada as a teenager in 1997 and it wasn't paying much attention to politics.

Last year, when my family and our friends took our annual summer road trip to the mountain biking areas of Quebec, we decided to spend a few nights in Chewinnigan to check out some of their MTB trails, mountain bike trails. On our way, I was reading up on Chewinnigan and that is when I learned that the prime minister was from there. I learned about his childhood of being rouge in the great zoo of Bleuze, the Chewinnigan strangler story, and many other anecdotes from his long, interesting, and meaningful life.

Though we didn't make it to the Jean Chrétien museum, maybe we'll go next time. His spirit captured me and I joined the Jean Chrétien fan club for life. My riding of Burlington, Ontario was one of Mr. Chrétien's many stops on the most recent federal election, where he joined MP Karina Gould, also awesome, on her campaign. How cool was it to see that at 91, he's still out there making a difference in the world? I loved listening to chapter 150. What an incredible privilege and honor to have a candid conversation with such an iconic Canadian.

I had to pause the audio on my walk every minute or two to make a note of a great quote to write down in my commonplace book. I ended with 17 lines and probably need to check your transcript to see if there are any more I missed. I just finished reading the recent book The Correspondent, highly recommend it, and it has inspired me to write more letters.

Thank you for all the work you do on three books for book lovers and readers. I've discovered so many amazing folks from listening, like Lewis Mallard, Ginny Urich, Vishwas Agarwal, and many others. Best, Haya, H-A-Y-A.

Haya, back to Haya. Haya, thank you so much for the letter. As always, if I read your letter on the air, I owe you a book.

So just go to neil.blogspot.com books, pick any book you like. I have a stack in my basement. My wife is very eager to see that stack shrink over time.

Tell me which book you want. I will sign one, personalize it, and mail it out to you when I get your address. I love the letter for a lot of reasons.

It was a real privilege and honor to interview Jean Chrétien Thank you so much for shouting a number of other guests as well, like Vishwas Agarwal way back in Chapter 7. If you want to drop me a letter, please do.

My email address is neil.globalhappiness.org. That's N-E-I-L at global happiness, G-L-O-B-A-L H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S .org. Drop me a line anytime with a reflection, comment, criticism, whatever.

I've read the critical letters once in a while. It's nice to get some criticism in there. Things you could do better, things you could do differently.

Always good to hear from you three bookers. Thanks so much. Drop me a line anytime.

And now let's get into the background on our wonderful, mind-expanding, super genius, super nerdy guest today. How? How did it start?

Well, I got a text one night from Michael Bungay Stanier. He's the author of The Coaching Habit and a number of other books. And he was our guest back in Chapter 48 where I interviewed him at his home on the front porch of his house at the beginning of the conversation.

I still remember our car was tearing up the wrong way on a one-way street. Anyway, he texted me and he said, have you read Robin Sloan's new book? Mate, it's so good.

Well, I take Michael's recommendations seriously. So I picked up Robin Sloan's new book, Moonbound, and it completely blew me away. Reading this book was like riding some kind of rainbow speckled rocket ship where I had experienced the rare combination of having no idea what was going on.

Well, also couldn't wait to find out what was happening next. The book is full of talking beavers, talking swords, strange video games, and ever expanding worlds with wizards who maybe aren't really wizards. And oh, the entire book is narrated by a microscopic AI type chronicler who's been in many different lives across millenniums, but who now sits in our protagonist's left shoulder.

The book felt like some kind of jacked up Star Wars meets Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, our guest in Chapter 58, by the way, featuring Willy Wonka and Mad Hatter types with little moments of poignancy and reflection dashed in to let us see and see around our endlessly twisting lives together. It is a big, loud, symbol crash of a book. So after I was done, I reached out to Robin to invite him on the show.

Robin Sloan is a writer, printer, and manufacturer that's his new three-word biography, which we will discuss in our chat. He has three excellent and mind-expanding novels, including, of course, Moonbound, which I mentioned came out in 2024. Just came out in paperback, by the way.

And as well, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. I think that's his biggest and most popular book. If you go by Goodreads reviews, there's just way more people have read that.

That came out in 2012. That was a big New Times bestseller. I have bought it and read it since to prepare for the chat.

And it's also excellent, although very different. Still mind-expanding, but starts in a bookstore. It goes to places of wizards and wizardry and secret societies.

It's really cool and really fun. He's a genius to put these things together. And can't forget Sourdough, which is a book that came out in 2017.

Robin splits his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley of California, where he, guess what, makes California extra virgin olive oil. Yes, did you know they make olive oil in California? I admit I did not.

I always pictured it coming from Greece or Italy. But no, in olive oil, they make in California, they make olive oil, including Robin, who actually is the miller of the olives. His wife runs the company.

He runs a lot of parts of it. It's amazing. He also makes zines.

He sells them on his website and he sends out a nerdy and mind-expanding newsletter precisely every 29 and a half days. You can sign up for all that stuff at robinsloan.com. That's r-o-b-i-n-s-l-o-a-n.com.

I highly recommend you get his newsletter. He's a really fascinating dude. So strap in as we discuss social media, by the way, Robin used to work at Twitter, interestingly, about a decade and a half ago.

AI ethics, childhood obsession, books as technology, olive oil, myths, identity, and of course, the brilliant Robin Sloan's three most formative books. Let's flip the page into chapter 152 now. Okay.

Hi Robin.

Robin:

Hi. Welcome to be here.

Neil:

Thank you so much for coming on three books.

Robin:

It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Neil:

The occasion of course, being the paperback release of Moonbound. I understand paperback is your preferred format.

Robin:

Yeah, you know, it is.

It's, it's hard to choose favorites in the vast and glorious realm of books, but you know, as a reader, I just think a whippy, slim, tight little paperback at the, at the paperback price point is about as ideal as it gets, particularly for a novel. I should say, I think it's the best way to read fiction.

Neil:

This is one of our questions we always have in the show, but you, when you announced the release of it, you also talked about the cover, how, how they switched it from cover color to monochrome.

Robin:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, I always think it's interesting the way covers evolve over time.

Of course, when a book's been around for years and years and years, you have the opportunity to see many different designers kind of, you know, take a spin at it, which is awesome. Even in the transition from hardcover to paperback, sometimes, not always, but sometimes there's that opportunity to kind of shake things up and, and, you know, present a fresh, a fresh face to the world. And yeah, the interesting thing about book covers these days, you know, in the internet saturated 2020s, this has been widely remarked upon, is that it seems that many of them, for better and for worse, are being designed for Instagram, right?

You know, an Instagram-able book cover. And not only that, but also the demands of the internet in general, you know, if you're, if you're browsing a bookstore online or, you know, a collection of books online, the cover is this little thing. It's like this little, you know, squished icon in the corner.

So the design has to, has to read, you know, well, and kind of do the work in those situations. That does create an opportunity, I think. And the great paperback designer for Moonbound, whose name is Alex Myrto, took that opportunity, which is to zig where everyone else zags.

So on the paperback shelves now of, of all the bookstores, there's going to be this wash of, of color and, you know, this riot of bright, you know, warm shades and hues. And then there will be the, the brand new Moonbound paperback, which is basically black and white. Except of course, like all of my books, it, it has a little bit of a secret, which is that when you turn the lights off, the cover glows in the dark.

Neil:

No way.

Robin:

Yes. Yes.

Neil:

Oh my God.

Robin:

Yeah, it's fun. Yeah.

Neil:

It's funny. I was out for dinner last night with Michael Bungay Stanier. He's, he wrote the book, The Coaching Habit.

He was our guest in chapter 48. He's the one that texted me originally and said, do you know Robin Sloan? Have you read Moonbound?

I think he'd be perfect. And he was just telling me last night that they just discovered that platypuses are iridescent. Like they have the, the bioluminescent and that nobody knew that they had this before.

Robin:

Awesome.

Neil:

And so there's another overlap. I loved, I loved Moonbound.

I put it in my best of 2024 reads. It just really blew me away. So big minded, so interesting.

I kind of, I wore this shirt because it was sort of my most Moonbound-y.

Robin:

It's Moonbound-y. Yeah.

There's a whole universe. There's a whole like ecosystem unfolding on your shirt there. Absolutely.

Neil:

I was trying, I was trying, it's compliments of Dan the Tailor, who's another past guest on the show. And yeah, that's what the book did to me. It just really opened me up in a lot of different ways.

I had a lot of opening questions for you. One of course was how many particles are there in the universe? 

Robin:

Yeah, that is, that is a good question.

Two to the 75th. It's, it's lower. The number, I love, I love, of course you're, you're referring to the question I sort of posed to myself in a recent newsletter.

The thing about those big numbers from, you know, physicists have got all sorts of them. They've got, you know, you know, the number, yeah. Number of particles in the universe, number of galaxies in the universe.

They're all big numbers, but they're sort of weirdly not as big as you almost would hope they would be. You know, a physicist would be like, oh yeah, well, you know, 10 to the 75th. Oh yeah.

That's a, that's a bigger number than could fit in, you know, the entire known cosmos and, and 10 more. And you're like, oh man, that, that makes me uncomfortable for some reason. 

Neil: 

Yeah, exactly. It's funny that you said 10 to the 75th because I did ask Claude and, and, and he said, or they said 10 to the 78th. Okay. So, you were like off by only three zeros.

Robin:

Not too bad. Not too bad.

Neil:

Very close. And I was of course hinting at your newsletter, which comes out every 29 and a half days. Yeah.

Yeah. Or close, close to it. Yeah.

Robin:

Does 29 and a half days mean anything to you? Any, any, any, ring any bells? 

Neil:

It's not, well, my first instinct was it was the year divided by 12.

Robin:

No, it's the, it's the phase of the moon, more or less, more or less. Yeah. The cycle of the moon runs pretty close to 29 and a half days.

And, you know, I really, a while back, years, years and years ago, I did a little, little mini newsletter for maybe half a year. And I guess just because nothing can ever be simple because I can never do things the normal way. I sent it on prime numbered days, you know, two, three, five, seven.

And it was fun because it didn't, you know, a lot of people obviously do, do things on a normal calendar. They send their newsletter on Tuesdays or they publish their podcasts, you know, every other Thursday or, or whatever it is and more power to them. But I find that sort of frankly, unpredictable and more organic pace, weirdly fun.

And it's almost like a game you play, you know, with yourself and, and with the calendar. So, so yeah, the 29 and a half days. I would have known that.

Well, you know, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to stack up all of our, our sort of cosmic factoids in this conversation, the number of particles of the universe, the length of the phase of the moon. Yeah. Yeah.

Neil:

Well this lens, you know, for three, three bookers, this is what we do. We drop a new chapter on the exact minute of every single full moon and it was new moon, but now I'm doing classics on the new moon. So I have like a little bit more of a safe thing, but I never actually put it into a day calculation for it to ring a bell for me.

I just like, look, I go to time and date.com. I look up the, I look up the moon schedules and I just go precisely on that, which has been terrible for Apple podcast algorithm. You know, when I first came out with this podcast, it was like, it, I was releasing pockets, you know, Tuesday at three 38 AM.

Robin:

I think that's fantastic. I so support that. It's great.

It's great. Yeah. We're working, we're working on deeper calendars here, you know?

Neil:

Exactly. Um, now you, you, uh, you know, I was listening to a podcast called the difference, which you were on in March 2025. Um, and they called you novelist, olive oil, entrepreneur, AI experimenter, and musician.

And then as if on cue leading up to this conversation in 2025,  you changed your bio online. Yeah. So tell me about the change, what you now identify yourself as.

Robin:

Yeah, right.

You know, isn't that the kind of the, the meta, the meta observation I think is interesting, which is that like in years past, ages past, there wasn't maybe quite as wide a latitude to describe yourself, you know, and, what you do or what you think of yourself as more often people were described, you know, it was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to wait for somebody to write about me in a newspaper or magazine. And I'll hope they say what I want them to say, you know, what I wish they'd say.

But it wasn't really up to you. And now in the era of people being able to sort of hang their own shingle out online and, and that could be a website. That's mostly the case with me.

It's for me, my home is really my own personal website, but it could also be a social media profile, right? There's always that little space that will bio you cram in a few words. And it's just interesting that it kind of, to me, those, those words that you put into those spaces are descriptions, but I think they can also be aspirations and they have been for me historically.

You know, I remember very, very vividly with almost a, a sensory clarity, like where I was and, and, and also how I was feeling years and years ago when I changed my Twitter bio back in the days when Twitter was really, really the place to be, to include the word writer. Um, and that's weird to remember now, cause that's been such a part of my life and a part of my working life for so long. But there was a moment where I was like, Oh boy, I'm not really a writer yet, but I want to be, and I hope nobody makes fun of me.

Of course, nobody did because there's nobody else cares really, except for you. So yeah, that's all to say. I did,  after just being, you know, Robin Sloan, a writer for, for really a long time.

Neil:

So when, when did you change it on Twitter? 

Robin:

Oh, I mean, that would have been, that was, I mean, that was 2008, I think. 

Neil:

And you worked for Twitter the year after that?

Robin:

Yeah. It wasn't even a Twitter employee yet. That's how cool Twitter was.

I, at that time I cared about my bio on the website and then I went to work for the company. But then quickly discovered that I was not cut out to work in a tech office. So yeah, the, the new description, you know, it's writers still part of it, but I, you know, for years now I've been spending a lot more time making things.

And that includes making olive oil, it includes printing. And I found just a real kind of both practical satisfaction and, and frankly, some real creative energy in, in kind of going beyond just making the words and handing them off to someone else. So yeah, the new, the new self-definition, which, which does have a bit of aspiration in it is, you know, Robin Sloan, a writer, printer and manufacturer.

And, uh, I'm pretty happy with that. I'm pretty happy with that as a vision. Yeah.

Neil:

Right. Absolutely. Writer. Of course, we know you as the novelist behind Moonbound, Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore, sourdough and, printer because you produce zines and meaning that you actually write them, print them, mail them the whole deal. 

Robin:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Create creation, you know, production and distribution, I guess I do everything except carry it to people's front door.

Neil:

Okay. And then manufacturer, that's the olive oil. 

Robin:

Yeah, that's, that's the olive oil.

And I guess I would say it also, you know, in a way I almost want to,  I want to insist that, that printing and publishing are sort of cousins to manufacturing. It's easy to overlook the technology, really the still really profound technology involved in, in every step of the printing, publishing bookmaking process. Uh, this is kind of, I think, familiar terrain for readers of Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore. Um, but, uh, books that are so familiar and so, you know, cozy that I think we often forget, or it's just easy to sort of overlook the, the deeply kind of technical and technological aspect. You know, the printed book is a technology. I could go on and on and argue about how it's like kind of a, a more reliable technology than, you know, the computers we're talking on right now, but it's, it's just to say manufacturer is my way of saying like, yeah, we're doing some, we're doing some real industry here.

This is not just, uh, you know, arts and crafts.

Neil:

Right. Absolutely.

And by the way, I did order Fat Gold to my assistant who lives in New York because I'm in Canada. And of course it was such a great disappointment that we can't ship up there yet, but you know, she reports it was delicious. She's a real foodie.

So thank you. Uh, Fat Gold, olive oil made in California.

Robin:

Made by yours truly. You could, somebody could have a real 360 experience if they sat down to read Monbound while perhaps, you know, drizzling their salad with some Fat Dold, which, you know, I, operate the, the olive mill during the harvest season. So they could just have a real Robin Sloan evening.

It sounds like they either won or lost a contest if they do.

Neil:

I think it sounds, it sounds delicious. And for every sense I want to kind of park that the olive oil, cause I have a couple of questions about that, but we'll save them for a little bit. But on the bio thing you just mentioned, you know, you kind of enter, you hang up mostly online, but mostly on your website, robinsloan.com.

You have this wonderful 29 and a half day newsletter, which I subscribe to. I love, I recommend. And then you also mentioned your, you know, you could put it on social media.

And then when I go on your Instagram, you know, you only have three posts total. And you even have a little note there saying I post frequently to stories, stories rarely to the grid.

Yeah. Why is that? So I went and checked your Instagram stories.

It's like, you know, the fear a lot report. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Literally the only holiday recognizing you're like zooming on the, like, you know, it's very niche.

Robin:

Yeah.

It's very,  my stories, t's a, the definition of niche, I think, or cult is, you know, that you have few, but intense, you know, fans and aficionados and not very many people look at my Instagram stories, but I do think I have turned the feral, you know, overgrown lot in my neighborhood into like a mini, mini micro celebrity in a certain community, which I, which I'm very proud of. I think that's great.

Neil:

But what was the reason for not posting to the grid? I thought it was something suspicions or something.

Robin:

No, no, it's honestly, I don't think this is uncommon.

I, um, like a lot of people have been historically early to a lot of these platforms. Um, you know, again, I was here in the Bay area in the mid two thousands and onward, and you know, all this stuff was, was appearing and it was literally bubbling up out of right here. You know, the people who made Twitter and these other platforms that are now defunct and Instagram,  they were all either people that I had encountered or knew, or, you know, people, friends of mine knew them.

And you'd kind of be walking around the neighborhood and someone would point and say, oh, that's that office of that new thing called Twitter. So it's all very like present and, frankly felt pretty cool and exciting at that time. It was, it was really a different time before this stuff had grown and I don't know, kind of darkened into its, into its present form.

It was also frankly time before, the iPhone, which is, which is a weird thing to recall, but, but our relationship to these platforms and, and how we use them was, was really, really different when they didn't follow us around everywhere we went in the world. So that's all to say time has passed. I spent a lot of years on timeline based algorithmic social media platforms.

And several years ago, this is actually not a recent thing for me, but it's at this point, pretty, pretty well established. I just realized I had burned out on the, on the experience. Um, I personally wasn't getting much out of it, um, either personally or really professionally to be candid.

I mean, it's, it's not like this was, was doing much for me in terms of finding readers or selling books or, or anything like that. Um, and, and I didn't like the companies running in these platforms either. So, um, because I was like, I was like, don't, don't like doing it.

Don't like the people who are making it, or their values or their objectives. So maybe I'm going to kind of scale this back.

I'm not a complete abstainer and I'm certainly not evangelical about it. I think people, if people want to use these platforms more power to them. But, uh, for me, it's just, it's just not a big part of my life.

Neil:

Was there a note, could you point to a part of anywhere in time where it went from exciting and local to a value, you know, kind of conflicting values? 

Robin:

That's a good question. It was for me, I think some people did have, you know, there's, there's a lot of stories kind of, of breaking points, right.

Or these like sharp ruptures that really wasn't the case for me. Um, it was more of a slow crossfade. And, and I think the amazing to, to consider that people have been using these platforms for this long, but as I recognize that I had been using a lot of this stuff for about 10 years, you know, give or take.

So that's, this is kind of, you know, a little about 10 years ago, or maybe a little under 10 years ago. I kind of went like, well, I'm just, am I just going to do this for another 10 years and 10 years after that? You know?

And that thought did not fill me with excitement and, uh, and optimism. You know, if I think about other activities going on for decades, like writing books, publishing books, you know, zines, you name it. I'm like, yeah, oh man, I should be so lucky.

But when it came to Twitter and when it came to, you know, building up a big library of weird old images on Instagram, I kind of went, oh, I think, I think maybe I've had enough. 

Neil:

So it was a novelty wearing off thing, as opposed to you sort of sensing that what they were prioritizing and what they were doing to society was like.

Robin:

Oh no, it's both. No, no, it's both. It's I would say, you know, if they're, if they're, um, if they were different organizations,  run with different objectives and,  you know, in some , imagine some fantasy world where this is, I mean, this is like something out of Moonbound.

It's so, uh, fantastical. Imagine, that Twitter, instead of being, you know, bought by a, you know, industrialist super billionaire had, been converted into a great, worker owned tech cooperative. And they said, we're going to try to make Twitter into a truly public space and a healthy platform.

And it's just like wonderful ecosystem for conversation. Now, I actually think I probably might still not be on Twitter because I really just, I just am not interested in like posting on the timeline anymore. I will say that would be a much more interesting alternative.

It’d be a much more live question than the, than the current reality. 

Neil:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And that was always the sort of fabled, future kind of vision for it at the beginning. 

Robin:

I mean, again, you know, you, you don't want to, it's easy to feel like quite naive. Um, and, and maybe I should, and maybe a lot of people who were around at that time in, in San Francisco should, but, um, there were, there were some real utopian visions for the web. Um, some real, real, you know, I think very lovely dreams in that kind of call it 2005 to 2010, 2012, um, era.

It was, it was, of course it had followed the great dot com bust, you know, this, this previous bubble that was just off the charts. Um, and, and as is often the case, um, sometimes those busts and the, and the, the disappointments, the way the money all kind of runs away. Oh, it's almost like the tide going out, you know?

And, and suddenly like there's like new spaces and new opportunities. Uh, it was a cool time. It was a cool and fertile time in, in this area.

Neil:

Well, speaking of lovely visions and mythological dreams, it's a nice transition into your first of three formative books. You've been kind enough to share with us. I wouldn't mind taking just quick 30 seconds to introduce this book to our listeners.

Then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with it. Why don't we begin with D'Aulaires  Book of Greek myths. 

Robin:

D'Aulaires  Book of Greek myths.

There, there is of course also a D'Aulaires  Book of Norse Myths, which is, which is very good as well, but it is not, it doesn't have the same umami as the, as the Greek compendium. So this is a book notionally for children, uh, always, always published in large format. Um, it's just a big, you know, armful of a book and, um, it was written and illustrated by this, by this married couple, the D'Aulaires um, uh, years ago.

I mean, I think, yeah. And I, I, you know, actually I, I don't know that I even could tell you the publication date, um, off the top of my head other than that is definitely before the eighties. It may be a book.

Neil:

Random House Children's Books, 1962. 

Robin:

There you go. 62 boy. God, that's great. 

Neil:

So, so do you want me to just say a couple of quick things about it for listeners holding it in a bookstore? So you're picking it up in a bookstore.

It's like, as Robin said, it's like, you know, it gotta be eight inches wide by 12 inches tall. It's a big book, kind of the size and shape of like a big design magazine, dark blue cover with the title in gold Greek style font. Below the title is a drawing of a person riding in a chariot drawn by four white horses.

They are stylized gold borders adorning the top and the bottom with small gold silhouettes containing centaur and minotaur type of figures across the bottom. Ingrid and Edgar Perrin D'Aulaire, um, you know, uh, were a married couple who met in art school in Munich in 1921. Born in the 1800s, they came to America and were successful artists.

They won the Caldecott for a book called Abraham Lincoln, actually. Um, and you know, Edgar illustrated the books, Ingrid painted portraits. They were considered some of the very first picture book artists ever.

What is the book? It is a children's slash middle grade collection of ancient Greek and Roman myth narratives with lyrical prose and whimsical illustrations. Dewey decimal has please follow us under 398.21 for social sciences slash folklore slash tales and lore of paranatural beings of human and semi-human form. Semi-human. That is the filing. Robin, please tell us about your relationship with D'Aulaires  book of Greek myths by Edgar Perrin D'Aulaire and Ingrid Perrin D'Aulaire.

Robin:

So, you know, it begins in elementary school. Um, I grew up in a suburb of Detroit called Troy. Um, and, uh, my little elementary school was a, uh, short, but not too short walk from my house.

I would kind of walk down the sidewalk and then go down this path that went over a bridge, um, across a Creek, um, with this kind of in this overgrown sort of semi wild area. Maybe that's where I got my taste for feral urban spaces. Cause I kind of passed through one every day of my young life.

And there, uh, in this elementary school, we had a really, really nice library kind of in a central area in the school. And of course, once a week, um, our teacher, you know, every year that I was in school there would, would march us down to the library to, to return a book, check out a book, whatever. Uh, I believe it was third grade.

I could be wrong of course, cause it kind of all smushes together, but I think that's right. It was in third grade. Um, when I discovered D'Aulaires  book of Greek myths on the shelf.

Neil:

So we're talking like late eighties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah.

Robin:

Um, yeah, just, that's all right. That's all right.

Late eighties. Um, and, um, woe unto any of my classmates that year that also might've been interested in checking out that book because it was not available. I would take it dutifully back, you know, to school, back to the library on library day, and then just present it again to the library and be like, I'll take this one again.

I did that in my, in my, of course it's again, you, who knows? Memory is a little unreliable in my memory. I literally did that all year.

I don't, I don't think that's really the case. I think maybe it was for a couple months or something like that. But the point is I kept that book.

Um, and, and I have this, these, these memories of like laying cause it is, it's such a big, beautiful book. So you kind of lay on your belly, you know, on the carpet and the books open. And I, I was looking at it so intensely.

I almost like it felt like my gaze might like etch something in the page, you know, or, or produce, produce heat there on the page. It was just, it was, I mean, if the dictionary definition of captivation of readerly captivation, I loved it. I read it.

I reread it. I looked at the, the beautiful, weird, you know, interesting illustrations. There's big, they're small, they're large, they're kind of interspersed in the text, summer, monochrome, summer, summer color.

And, um, I just had a ball. So I never forgot about it ever since I, of course, I shortly after that, um, we, we did get our own copy at home and, um, I read it for years and years after that. And then I will say that the kind of the, the cherry on top, the thing that really sort of has sealed dollars, um, position in my, in my cosmology is that, um, as after, you know, kind of grew up and started my adult life every so often, I would meet somebody who, I don't know, I just brought it up randomly.

We just mentioned it. And, and the response was not like, oh yeah, I read that. And said, it was like dollars.

I mean, there's a, there's a cult, there's a cult of us out there. I, in fact, I guarantee there's some, some folks listening to this podcast who, when, at the moment you first mentioned it, they may have leapt up out of their chair and said, dollars. Um, you know, there's a lot of books, a lot of kids books that people love.

I think there is, and has been something really special and deep about this book, the way it has, um, captured and molded, um, the attention and imagination of a certain kind of kid. So it's been, it's been fun to meet my, uh, fellow cultists. Yeah.

Neil:

Yeah. And what a formative book. So early in your child experience, I love the image of you checking it out over and over again.

Of course, the book has the word myth in, in the cover and thinking about today with where we are in life, I really loved and enjoyed your long form essay that you wrote on AI earlier this year called, Is It Okay? And I want to quote back to you a couple of pieces for near the end of that quote. Of course, it doesn't do justice to the full piece, which I will share in the show notes as well, but talking about AI, and I want to talk to you a little bit about the mythology of AI and where we are today and what your views are.

To answer that question in the title, you said, if their primary application, speaking of the LLMs or the large language models, is to produce writing and other media that crowds at human composition, human production, no, it's not okay. You also say, if an AI application delivers some profound public good, or even if it might, it probably is okay that its value is rooted in this unprecedented opera, opera. I know that's that word.

Robin:

I literally have never been able to say that word aloud straight. Why did I use the word operationalization? It's no, no, no.

It was, it was, it was brutal as a brutal choice of the common.

Neil:

So you are openly wrestling with the idea of what is happening in AI right now. Is it okay or not?

And of course, by whenever this podcast is released, it will become outdated because everything's changing so fast, but you have a profound insight and a very close feel and grasp of this universe. I'd really love you to share your thoughts with everybody here. Where are you today on the ethical side of AI?

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the ethical question, it's like the ethical questions, there's many of them overlapping. For me, especially given my interests, and these are interests that predate, you know, all of this AI stuff, they have to do with the commons, with the things that, you know, artistic and cultural creations that people share.

And you're, I mean, I think you're right to, to connect myths to that. Cause like, what is a book of like Dallaire's book of Greek myths, if not this, you know, this genius couple who went digging in the, in the shared toy box of humanity, you know, picked up some of the great, some of the classics and said, oh, I wanna, I wanna, we want to play with these toys. And then they did, and they, they, you know, retold those stories.

But of course, every retelling brings something new. So in a way, they are also, they're carrying them forward to like new generations, literally, you know, to me. And, and, you know, now, now I've become someone who, who also is in, in different ways and in different, you know, different pieces of work, a myth retailer.

And, you know, I'm, I'm playing with toys myself. So deep interest. And, and I think that connects very, very directly to one of the huge questions and really the, the central question of my essay and that, you know, the, the big, is, is it okay?

You know, is this even like permissible? Is this something we can contemplate? And it has to do with the fact that every one of these large language models, regardless of the particular technology behind them, you know, the kind of the, the, the math and the code underpinning them, regardless of the status of the organization that has put them together, regardless of the cost, you know, at which they're offered to the world, they share one thing in common, which is that they are trained, you know, grown. I think, I really think that like the, the analogy of, of growth, almost organic growth, like a, like a rose bush growing on a trellis is, is, is really not only, you know, kind of artful and appealing, but, but actually very technically accurate. When they do that growing, the sunlight they're responding to, the forest that's guiding that shape is that commons.

It's this incredible shared body of work. And of course it's not only the Greek myths and not only, you know, books and stories and poems, it's like weird web pages about like, you know, agricultural equipment and, you know, stock markets and people's posts about, you know, how they fixed their power outlets in their house. Everything else.

I mean, it's, it's actually an basically unfathomable, unfathomable amount of text and writing and human expression. But the point is it is human expression. It's this huge shared cultural.

Neil:

You call it everything. 

Robin:

Call it everything. Yeah.

I mean, it's not, that's, you know, it's like everything asterisk because of course there's actually, there's actually a lot and a lot of really important stuff that's not online and never has been. By the way, the AI companies are like working really hard to get their hands on it now and to digitize it because that's like, it's almost their fossil fuel. And I think that's another analogy that's, that's both kind of appealing and also technically correct.

There's this, this resource that was built up over time. And the only way to, to kind of amass it was with the passing of time. And now they're tapping into the energy, the latent energy sort of stored in there.

So anyways, that's just all to say, that was a big windup to say, I think anybody, particularly folks who are, who feel kind of invested in the idea of like, um, the public domain, um, a cultural commons, you know, the shared, you know, sort of written inheritance of of humanity, um, ought to, to kind of consider how these things are being used and, and, and say like, I mean, is that, is that a, do we agree as, as, as people invested in the commons that that's like an okay use of, um, of this material to kind of fold it into these machines, um, which then are able to do really impressive and valuable tasks and then charge people for those tasks. I think reasonable people can answer, yes, it's, it's totally fine. Um, I'm kind of on like, you know, as you, as you quoted from the essay, I'm kind of on like, it depends, it depends what the output is.

Um, it might be okay. In other cases, I think it's quite, it's quite, um, offensive actually. Yeah.

Neil:

You've really kind of predicted some of this, right? And so, cause I think Mr. Penumbra came out in 2011, 2012, 2012, right? And on page 86, just to read you a quote from your own book, ah, books, Raj pauses a moment chewing, then his brain slots into a groove.

You know, old books are a big problem for us. Old knowledge in general, we call it okay. Old knowledge.

Okay. Did you know that 95% of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite.

In fact, okay. Accounts for most things that most people know and have ever known. That was like 12, 13 years.

And that was a conversation that takes place in the Google cafeteria. Yeah. Right.

And, um, uh, my big worry is that, uh, you know, you wrote this essay from your own brain with your own fingers on your own blog and this endless recursive nature. Like I was, um, asking chat GPS something yesterday and it quoted my own blog back to me, like my own blog. My own blog was the source right in the label.

I thought, well, if it's quoting my own blog back to me, well then, you know, it's an endlessly recursive thing. It's like a homogenization of everyone's thoughts. And of course I go really far out of my way to like, not use AI to come up with my podcast questions just because I want them to be coming from me.

Yeah. I don't know how long it can last. 

Robin:

I think you can, I think you can hold out.

I think you can hold out. It does. You gotta, you gotta care.

Um, I, I, I really think, um, we're, we're starting to see a sort of, um, bifurcation there's, you know, it's, it's not the only one, but, but it's an important kind of cleavage in the world and, and the set of tasks and, and people, you know, doing work. And on one hand there's, you know, the people who, who care about what they're doing and they like, they want it to be at the highest possible level, the best they can do. They want it to, as you say, they want it to reflect their own, you know, real specific personality and, and viewpoint on the world.

And then there's, I don't know, a set of tasks, a set of people, maybe it's a set of companies and managers who are like, I mean, I don't really care. Just, just do something. And, um, and you know, AI slop, um, is, is kind of good enough.

And there's always been a difference in the world between the, the, you know, the good enough universe and the, I don't know, call it the, the, we really care universe, the artisanal universe, the, the, the, the, you know, the world-class workers of the world. Um, and I think this just sharpens that distinction. And I think if, if a person feels like they want to be in the, in the world that cares, I actually, I do think it's really important to, to hold the line and take that responsibility really seriously.

Neil:

Wow. Be in the world that cares. I love that.

Okay. Next question on this topic. So obviously this book is written by husband and wife, a husband and wife team, um, on the fat gold, uh, olive oil page, Catherine Tomajan.

I don't know if I said her.

Robin:

Tomajan.

Neil:

Tomajan. Yeah. It's a little tricky.

Yeah. Catherine Tomajan. Has an incredible bio, an olive oil maker, taster educator with a master's degree in food culture from the university of gastronomic sciences in Palenzo, Italy.

Her thesis explored the opportunities and challenges of new world, olive oil in Australia, New Zealand, and California. Of course, you're listed on the bio page right below as our apprentice Miller communications chief. Yeah.

So my question was really around how do you work well with your wife? 

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I, for us, it's a good question.

Um, I mean, for us, it has been such a boon and a, I don't know, like, um, just a wonderful shared project. It's it truly to have something, um, that we, and of course it, you know, started small and was not always, it was, it was neither our design nor our, um, you know, we didn't imagine that, um, this thing that we work on together very closely would grow to become really a big, big part of our professional lives and, and economic lives and everything else. Um, it just started as kind of a, how big is it?

It's, I mean, it's, it's big. It's a, for us, it's a, it's a, it's a super successful, small olive oil producer. Um, and, uh, you know, where before, uh, it was writing and publishing books that, that, you know, accounted for most of my income.

Now it's pretty evenly shared with, um, with fat gold, which is great. I mean, it's just, it's, it's super, um, it's thriving, um, not shipping to Canada yet that we're really, we're, we're, I wish, I wish I know that. Yeah.

Neil:

Tariffs are coming down. 

Robin:

So, yeah, I, yeah. I mean, they do.

We, we actually, in all sincerity, we, um, we were, we were all set to go. Like, we were like, we finally figured this out. And it was like, literally the month before the entire universe of global trade was sort of like upended.

And like, it was like, it was like, uh, you know, pressing reset on your Nintendo. You're like, oh my, I was doing so well at super Mario brothers. Um, I got to start over.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, so that's, that's all to say, um, uh, having, having the shared project has been great.

Uh, we're, we're, um, you know, our, our temperaments are very compatible and I will add that the, um, division of labor, I mean, this is, this is true for any partnership, any professional partnership. Um, not just one where you happen to be married to the other person. I think the division of labor and, and this real sense of, of sort of complimentary strengths is just so great.

And so it can be so effective and also like quite fun because there's always this set of tasks that like one person finds just, just disgusting. I mean, just like, oh God, for just, for example, to make a concrete mine would be something like, um, bookkeeping. I just, the idea, the idea of going through receipts in any part of my life, I'm like, oh God, oh, I'd never, I just, I don't know, round it up or round it down.

Uh, so Catherine has no problem with that. She handles it with precision and a plume. Um, you know, conversely, uh, I do do all of our marketing.

I write the emails, I manage the website. I, I, um, uh, write and, and, and print these, um, zines that we pack with, with every order that we send. And that's not something that Catherine would be excited to do.

She, she's done that in other jobs before. And for her, it was always, uh, it was grind, you know, she was like, you know, I'm, I can do it. I can do it to a very high, you know, degree of, uh, quality, but, uh, this is not what I would choose to do with my, you know, Thursday afternoon.

Whereas God has actually accused me. Um, she has said, you know, looking at something I'm, I'm writing for, for fat gold, maybe a little more substantial than it needs to be. And she'll say, you really will find a way to turn anything into a publishing project.

Won't you? Oh, that's so funny. And I'm, uh, I'm forced to confess that's probably true.

Neil:

Yeah. Yeah. Which is to, to all, uh, we, we love it, but yeah, I can see why not everybody would, and I can relate to that completely.

And a curiosity, just because I know so little about, you know, food culture globally, are there some macro food trends happening? I mean, this new world olive oil seemed to be an interesting thing, but when you and she are talking, you must have some visibility to some macro level trends globally that the rest of us can't see. Yeah.

Robin:

I mean, that's a, that's a huge question. Of course, um, there are, there, there's some, some huge, um, mega, mega, mega trends. Um, I mean, one of them is this is probably a little more obvious, but the, the idea that sort of global trade is going to never quite be the same is, is really big and really important for, um, for food production because food production for better, for worse is fully globalized.

I mean, it's just stuff is coming from all over and going everywhere. Um, that's, you know, thanks really in, in large part to this, this incredible technological, I don't know, um, triumph that is the cold chain. You know, you go back even 50 years, 60 years, and it was not possible to transfer a pork chop from, you know, America to China and back.

You're like, you can't do that. And now you totally can and people do. Um, so although maybe not, maybe not for much longer, maybe that's gonna, that's gonna change.

Um, but that's just to say that that creates all sorts of new costs, but also new opportunities for, for all sorts of folks. And that is, I would say at this moment, um, accounts for the great majority of what people are talking about. I do think this is a little, um, you know, aspirational on my part.

It's, it's both, it's my observation, but it's also my hope. Um, I do think that a recognition, um, that, I mean, it really is as simple as this, like there's been a lot of food for a lot of years now that has a list of ingredients on the side and you're like, what are all those long, strange words? Um, and that's just been, you know, kind of the normal culture of, of food, particularly, you know, in the United States and at the supermarket, it's just a, it's a bunch of weird stuff in, in boxes and, you know, in the freezer case.

Neil:

Everything in a 7-Eleven. Yeah. Oh boy.

Robin:

Oh yeah. That's some, those are some long, some long chemical names on the, on the side of the 7-Eleven wrapper. Um, and you know, that's obviously not going to change overnight, but I do, I really do believe that more and more people are kind of waking up to the reality that like one of the best changes you can make for your, both for yourself in terms of your health and frankly, your enjoyment of food and also for like your community and your ecosystem is to sort of insist on eating foods that you, that you recognize the ingredients of, you know, that are like, ah, ah, yes, flour, salt. I know what those things are.

And that sounds simple. It sounds simplistic. Um, and I think for some people, including, I suspect many listening to this podcast, um, they'll be like, yeah, no kidding.

Been there a long time. Um, but the truth is, you know, there's, there's a lot of people out there eating a lot of different stuff. And I, I think that wave of kind of awareness and in a way it's, it's going back in time, you know, it's kind of unwinding some of the, um, weird machinations of the, of the very industrial, um, 20th century.

Um, and I think, I think in this particular case, a sort of, uh, turning back the clock to, to a simpler approach, um, is actually just a better thing for everybody. And certainly for the, for the whole planet. I hope, I hope you're right.

Neil:

I like how you called it, um, aspirational. Yeah. Um, so let's transition now.

Thank you for opening that up. Thank you for talking about your partner. Thank you for talking about the, the, the fat gold company.

Thank you for talking about your, your current views on AI, which we may be, maybe poke at a little bit more, a little bit deeper in a moment, but the Player of Games is by Ian M. Banks. I want to hold this up published in 1989 by a little Brown group.

Um, the cover, there's different covers. Uh, the most famous one actually is a blurry photo of a man's silhouette on a set of stairs. He stands obscure with his arms folded, looking at the reader cover comes in varying shades of blue with the author's name standing out.

I happen to have a black and yellow kind of speckled cover. Ian M. Banks, by the way, Scottish sci-fi writer who died in 2013 at the age of 29.

What is this book about? I'm going to pronounce this wrong, but Jamal Moragirgay, a skilled player of various games is recruited by the culture's contact division to participate in an alien game called Azad. Azad is not just a game, but a high stakes political contest that determines the social hierarchy of the alien empire of Azad.

File this one, Dewey Decimal Heads under 823.08762 for literature slash old English literature slash adventure fiction slash speculative fiction slash science fiction. Robin, tell us about your relationship with the player of games.

Robin:

Yeah, I will. I will.

For the record, Ian M. Banks died. He was in his fifties.

He wasn't 29, but still, still.

You know, incredibly, incredibly, way too, way too young. Um, it's really, it's one, I mean, no, no shortage of, uh, of, you know, tragic stories like that. But, um, he, uh, he was just way too young to the thought that he, you know, in just except for the roll of the dice and, um, some, some real bad luck, he would still be here writing more culture novels is just almost too much to bear.

Um, yeah. So let me situate player games just slightly in a, in a slightly larger context, then I'll, then I'll talk about the book in particular. Um, so Ian M.

Banks prolific author, um, wrote a lot in, in many genres, the genre that I'm most familiar with and the books of his that have meant so much to me are his science fiction books, um, which are interesting because they, they take place in a shared universe with sort of a shared history and, and, and you get to know it over the course of reading many of the books, but it's not a series. I mean, it's not, it doesn't have that sort of unbig, large-scale unfolding story the way that say the expanse books, um, by James essay, Corey do, or, or even, you know, foundation, the foundation series from Asimov or, you know, there's a, there's a bunch more, obviously you could choose as, um, uh, as comparisons. Um, so it, it has this odd status of being, I mean, a very developed far future science fictional world.

I mean, it is way out there. This is not, um, this is not merely Star Trek where we're like, Oh, look, these earthlings going out in their spaceships. No, nobody's ever heard of earth in the culture.

It's, you know, it's, we're just way out, way out there in the galaxy doing, doing stuff tens of thousands of years from now. Um, but it's not like you can pick up one and then book two and then book three and book four. It's still a more of a sampling platter.

You know, when you kind of follow your nose in terms of which books you're interested in. Um, player of games is the first one that I read. It was my introduction to this universe.

I've now read almost all of them. In fact, I haven't actually read all of them because, um, a couple, I just thought were pretty bad and pretty boring. Um, I've read almost all of them, but player games was my first and it is still my favorite.

Um, because it is, first of all, a, I think a very, um, uh, useful, practical and sort of seductive introduction to the culture, you know, to this, this creation, this imaginative creation of, um, Ian and Banks's. And also it's a story basically about games. Uh, and there's, there's, there's other, you know, novels about games or, you know, stories that have games at their heart.

And if there's a name for that sub subgenre, whatever it is, I think it's a really good one. Games are fun. They're interesting.

They're, they're kind of weird to think about. I think they, they bring out a lot of the best in, in thinkers, actually, you know, um, we, we see this with, uh, you know, uh, economists and physicists in the, in the 20th century. It's, it's weird actually how many of these people, these brilliant thinkers were like low key obsessed with all sorts of games and, and kind of as much as they thought about like protons or computers or black holes, they like thought about games.

Um, and the, that the interactions of these games and the complexities that could emerge out of the simple rules of the games became really, really rich and really instructive for all these, um, all these people. So player games has at its heart, this super weird game. I don't even going to try to characterize it cause it's weird and cool and wild.

I mean, it's a game kind of big enough to, to obsess an entire civilization in, uh, in this story. Uh, but it's cool. It's just, it's a great, it's a great thing to read about.

And, and the main thing I, to, to kind of wrap up my, my initial response, the thing that has meant so much to me about by the, the, the thing about Ian M. Banks and the culture that has meant so much to me is that I love science fiction. Uh, and having read a lot of it at this point, I now believe that there is science fiction and there is science fiction and the latter kind just goes bigger in terms of, uh, the scope in terms of a time and space it considers more, um, you know, that, that bigger, more muscular, um, more wildly imaginative science fiction is like not satisfied with like the solar system, earth and Mars and Jupiter. It's gotta go to like the boundaries of the cosmos and maybe to the end of time in the universe. Um, you know, another example, just, just to kind of frame it up another example of a, a book and a, and a series that, that play in culture level scale is the, um, the series that begins with the three body problem.

Um, I mean, this is big, big, big, big stuff. And I find that as a writer, I find that really, um, inspiring. It's, it's in some ways quite challenging.

It's a, you know, it's a implicit challenge. Like, Hey, can you imagine something this big? And you know, the answer is usually no, not quite, not yet.

Um, it's, it's really just, uh, it's, it's almost, it's an almost athletic feat to observe on the page. 

Neil:

Wow. Wow.

That's a great way to describe it. Um, so the phrase that I had written down, but you didn't mention, but maybe it's the same thing is, is world creation. 

You know, and, and so I was picturing this phrase, uh, world creation, creating a world and you do this of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, and you're writing so well. Um, I love that. I think it's Cory Doctorow review of, of Moonbound where he says like, this is quite a leap.

What you try to pull off and he lands it perfectly.

Robin:

Yeah.

And also I got to say, coming from the great Cory Doctorow, that was a, that was a meaningful, a meaningful assessment.

It is, you know, I will say, I mean, to that, to that, to that point, and it's, it's all actually very connected. My, my appreciation for banks and for the culture is not just sort of, you know, casual and like, oh yeah, as a reader, it is linked in deep with my writing and my aspirations for myself as a writer. Um, as I have read more of the culture novels and thought about them more deeply, um, and, and other science fiction too, um, that's kind of operates on that scale.

I have thought, you know, that's what I want to do. I want to, I want to be able to think that big and imagine that big. Now I am not at banks scale yet or three body problem scale.

Um, but Moonbound does represent a leap for me. It's bigger. It's much bigger than my, than my previous two novels.

Um, and I'm proud, I'm proud of the, uh, the way I kind of have pushed it out. 

Neil:

Yeah. And thank you.

And you know, a lot of people listening to this are, this is the only pockets in the world, buy in four book, lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians like that's our audience. There's all, there's all the best people in the world, all the best people in the world. And so I was curious, cause you do this, you're inspired by it.

It's formative to you. If you were, you know, I've only counted that kind of richness myself. I'm like maybe a junior reader, but like in like books like Lord of the Rings or cloud Atlas.

And, um, so if you were teaching a master's in world creation at like Syracuse or Iowa writers workshop, what would your curriculum look like? 

Robin:

Oh boy, that's a great question. Great question.

So not sure of the exact list, but I can tell you it would, it would, it would approach it a few different ways because there's, there's at least, you know, again, it's, it's multidimensional, but you can imagine at least one kind of two dimensional or, you know, one, a linear spectrum in the approach to this. Um, because often when people talk about world building and the, the, the creation of these, you know, rich histories and, you know, fantasy backdrops, they, they do think of Tolkien as they should. So we would read Tolkien.

And that's like, that's like one end of my, of my spectrum because it's explicit and it's the, you know, you can think of it as the writer who, you know, put all this amazing detail on the page. And that was only 2% of the detail in their notes, which are stacked up in a huge, insane pile, you know, on their desk.

Neil:

Oh really? I mean, that's like all the languages he created. 

Robin:

Exactly.

The history. And so you could ask, you know, and you know, the, the, it seems that probably not at Tolkien level, but it seems like George R.R. Martin was also operating on that end of the spectrum. You know, you could, a fan could email in and yeah, the Game of Thrones and say, um, um, the second day of this month, what was Sir Robinius doing?

And what color was the horse that he was riding? You know, and George R.R. Martin would probably ask his assistant or consult the files and say, ah, it was a, it was a brown horse, you know? Um, so great, incredible, you know, impressive.

Um, and, and often, you know, the results are quite, um, captivating, right? There is another approach and I think it's important because I think fantasy readers, fantasy fans, they often fixate on that, on that approach. Um, and it's, it really, Tolkien is just this, this like gravity well, just this, this just always kind of pulling in people's attention, people's affection and literally describing every element of a new place and then writing from that.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, and I think part of, you know, part of the reason also people respond to it is that it's both, it seems fun to do and it is fun to do.

I mean, that's anyone who, for instance, has ever played, um, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, as a, as a game master and who's like kind of worked up a scenario and a, in a cool quest for their, their friends to go through, they've done a little bit of that world building and it's not, you know, they haven't figured every single thing out, but they probably drew some maps and made a list of the people you might encounter and you know, all this cool stuff.

And you realize like, it's really fun. It's a fun thing to do, but it's important to say that there is a whole other approach. Um, and I admire it just as much.

And I think it's just as important and it's what I'll call, you know, if that's, if that, that end is the explicit, there's the implicit or the sort of art, the, the world building of artful gaps. Um, and there's a lot of people who do it well. There's two writers that I think of.

One is Ursula K. Le Guin, um, particularly in her, in her series about Earthsea that begins with a wizard of Earthsea and another, another David Mitchell, our guest. I mean, just it's, it's one of the great, really one of the all-time greats that could have easily been on my list.

Um, another is, um, uh, M. John Harrison, who's a writer of mostly science fiction. I think some of books you, you could just call weird, uh, and or literary.

I mean, he actually is just a phenomenal, phenomenal prose writer. One of the best actually in any genre, um, uh, working today, um, in English, just, just outstanding. And in particular, um, again, I could select from, from his books, but he has a little trilogy and it begins with a book called Light.

Tremendous book. And it's, you know, we were talking before about imagination and scope. The scope of light is big, you know, it might not be quite culture level, but, but it's big and it's about people zooming around faster than light and doing weird things with physics and, and it hopscotches through time.

You know, there's sort of scenes that are set here in our time. And then suddenly you're like, you know, in the, on the edge of a throbbing pulsar, you know, on some, some strange space scene. And it's, it's dizzying.

Um, and the way, but this is, I think what's so interesting, the world there feels more than rich. It feels almost psychedelic. Um, and it's completely captivating, super cool.

I mean, you just, you kind of look around the page and go, wow, this is great. And this is M. John Harrison.

Didn't, didn't imagine a thing except the words on the page. There's no secret guidebook. There's no stack of, you know, drawings and maps and the names of all the planets.

This is a writer who, who kind of just goes straight at the language, um, and puts it down and leaves things out. I mean, sometimes there will be an omission and you kind of go, well, wait, am I supposed to know what that is or, or who that is? Or it'll just be someone or something that's mentioned once.

And then we kind of leave them behind. And rather than being like confusing or disappointing, it's absolutely delicious. I mean, it's just, it's phenomenal.

The energy that creates on the page. It's very different from the energy of the, the Tolkien esque, you know, info dump, which, which honestly can be plotting sometimes if you're not careful, if you don't know, definitely. 

Neil:

I read the first one out loud last year to my oldest child.

And it was like, it's a little rough.

Robin:

It's a little rough.

Yeah. So, so anyways, that's, that's, that's, I would call it implicit and explicit. Yeah.

It was interesting.

Neil:

So I, I don't know. I don't know if that would, the role is contained within the book. There's not, it's not drawing upon like a kind of a false history somewhere else.

Robin:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and, and also the sense that like, you know, in a way there's a recognition in the implicit, um, I think this by the way, applies to a lot of art, you know, and this is not just about novels. I think this applies to movies and visual art, all sorts of things. Um, there's the recognition that it's all co-created.

Um, I mean, that's especially true for fiction, for fiction to come alive, you know, it's words on a page. Don't do anything. A movie can play in an empty room, but, uh, words on a page are inert, um, until, until activated, um, by the, the imaginative mind of a reader.

And, and I think the implicit world builder recognizes how much country, the, the depth of the contribution that a reader makes and, and frankly, leaves a little more space for that. Um, I, I mean, I, I kind of like both ends of the spectrum and I think there's instruments from both that are, that are worth using. I think my heart, it's a little challenging to say, cause I do love Tolkien, but I think my heart is with the implicit world builders, the ones who say like, I mean, famously, uh, Ursula K.

Le Guin, she's got these great lines at the conclusion of, uh, the first Wizard of Earthsea book. She didn't know she was going to write more in that world. And, um, actually, no, it's at the beginning of the book.

It's at the very beginning. She says, she's kind of setting it up, you know, the story we're going to hear about this character. And she says, well, this was before he had sailed the dragon's run or, you know, recovered the ring of Ereth-Akbe.

And then it goes on and says some more stuff. And then the kind of story begins. And, you know, at that time, if people asked her, Whoa, like the ring of Ereth-Akbe, that sounds sick.

What's that? If Le Guin was Tolkien, she would have said, Oh, I'm so glad you asked, you know, and pulled out her notes. The answer was, I don't know, just sounded cool.

Um, and that's so fabulous because on the page I can report as a reader, you know, I read that book when I was young and have read it many times since on the page, it is freaking dynamite. Um, and it doesn't matter that it wasn't written down in some stack of notes somewhere. All that matters is that it's there on the page you encounter as a reader, you go, wow, cool.

And then you keep going with the story. 

Neil:

So that split between the implicit and explicit and this type of, you know, kind of curriculum, the reading list would kind of be how the course starts. And then for people that want to learn how to write this way, is there any early writing prescription you would recommend writing tools or ideas for how, I'm a nonfiction writer as an example, I've never written fiction.

Uh, I'm just looking for a way in here. 

Robin:

You know, I actually think, you know, I'd probably have to think about that some more and maybe I could come up with a better, you know, yeah, better kind of exercise sequence.

But, um, my instinct is to say that it's the same as the preparation for any kind of fiction writing, which is that you do just have to do it. I actually think again, it's, it's maybe paradoxical. I think, you know, if I was, if somebody said, I want to, I want to learn how to create captivating worlds, other worlds in my fiction.

And, you know, particularly if they, if they had in mind a game of Thrones or the Lord of the Rings, whatever my assignment to them would be to write something. And I'm not kidding here. I would say, I want you to write something four paragraphs long.

It's going to be a story or something. It's going to, it's going to produce an effect. It's going to be captivating and readable, and it's going to create a whole world.

It's going to conjure it. And I'm going to be in that. I'm going to go say, wow, so cool.

And you get one page. And I, cause I think that's really, really important to be able to do that and create that sense of otherness and of, and of, and of richness and of like the great Vista with just, you know, one or two or three strokes of the, the metaphorical, you know, brush of fiction. I think that's the key.

And then, cause you can always build up, you can build out from there. But, but I guess I would go so far as to say that if you can't do that and do that well, then, then your, your large scale attempt is going to, it's going to be a problem. Right.

Neil:

Right. Okay. That's, that's a great, that's a great homework assignment for anyone listening.

Because it's small and it also makes it much more intellectually manageable.

It might not be easy.

Robin:

That's important, right?

Yeah. I mean, this is my thing. This is about my, my thing about writing.

I actually think any, any kind of writing, of course I know fiction best, but I think it applies across the board. I think the most important thing anybody can do, especially as they're learning and getting better is finished things. To have a draft that is kind of half done or trails off or is constantly in that state of like, oh yeah, I've been working on that for a while.

It is, I mean, it's, it's better than nothing maybe. But it's fundamentally not useful because you can never show it to someone and say like, tell me what you think, because it's always like, well, yeah, it's not, what's not finished or like, oh no, it's not actually a whole thing or like, oh, I'm going to change that. No, it's gotta be finished and it's gotta be something that you yourself or other people can actually evaluate.

And the beautiful thing is that it is possible, totally possible and quite fun to evaluate a story that is four paragraphs long or two pages long or 3000 words long. Um, and that's how you get better. That's it.

You write things, you get an idea, you start it, you draft it, you revise it, you finish it. Yeah. Most important.

No. And you get feedback, difficult. And then you go and then you go again and again and again.

And that's it. 

Neil:

I really appreciate and like that. When I was running a blog that published every night, um, sometimes they were good.

Sometimes they were bad, but there are other books I've been working on for years and giant Scribner files are just like sitting there as 75,000 words about something. It was like, I'm not even done chapter two. I guess it's problematic for many reasons, but yeah, I can relate to the idea of wanting to finish it or ship it as Seth Godin chapter three of our show.

Okay. Now, uh, more conversation potentially about writing, but let's use your third formative book as a way in. And that would be the Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper.

C O O P E R.

Robin:

Look, I've got my copy here too. 

Neil:

Oh, look, they're identical. 

Robin:

Yeah, there are. Well, one of them's a little more loved.

Yeah. This is the, this is the copy. This copy I read when I was like 10 years, 10 years old.

Neil:

Amazing. Yeah. Amazing.

Published in 1973. The cover shows a drawing of a young boy in a long cape riding a black stallion with its front legs high in the air above a second boy in a red sweater sitting maybe tossed or fallen in front of a brightly lit open door with black birds flying all around paces across the top is the title. The dark is rising in Navy blue calligraphy with Susan Cooper in a white all caps sans seriff below on top of the book, there's a ribbon saying a Newberry honor book and below the dark is rising sequence.

Susan Cooper born in 1935, I believe alive today, age ninety

Went to Oxford where she was the first ever female editor of the school paper and then went to be a reporter for London Sunday times. She wrote her first book oversee Understone for a publishing house competition.

And it became the first book in the five book darkness and is rising series. This would be the second. What's the book about?

11 year old Will Stand discovers h e is the last of the old ones and mortal beings dedicated to defending the world against dark forces as the newest and youngest old one will must undertake a quest to find six magical signs that together can ward off the rising power of the dark file. This one, Dewey decimals are eight to 3.914 for literature slash English and old slash English fiction. Robin, tell us about your relationship with the dark is rising. I see. 

Robin:

This is this is another young read.

It's interesting that to, you know, two out of my three here are young reads. And I do think there's a reason for that. I wish this wasn't the case, but I do pretty strongly believe that no book can hit you as hard as a book you read when you're like between the ages of 10 and maybe 20.

You know, it's just your brain is boring. Yeah. Your neurons are all squishy and they just get they just get the impressions, you know, they really stick.

And I've got a whole a whole list of books I read in those years that still continue just to mean so much to me. This one is it's good in a lot of ways. When I think of it, one of the distinctions, you know, compared to maybe some of the others that are favorites is that, I mean, I can sort of recount the story.

I know I know what happens and what the situation, the scenario is, although it kind of gets fuzzed out. There's there's more books in the series and I'm like, yeah, then they go to find a guy with a sword. I don't know what I can recall and and kind of line up with just like perfect precision is the images.

And they are as like perfect and evocative and deep as like, you know, the classic freaking Rider Waite tarot card deck, you know, where you look at each card and you're like, I don't know, but this is doing something in my brain. It just is this this pile up of these like culturally resonant images. Susan Cooper, just a terrific writer of prose.

I mean, she's one of the people I would say like Ursula K. Le Guin, who just writes a wonderful, clear sentence so that kind of the prose becomes this transparent, you know, glass holding the story and the content and the images. But then her images.

And I would say this is more so than many others, including even Le Guin, which is which is really saying something. Her images are just perfect. I always want to use the word delicious, I think, as if it's like a bag of chips.

Neil:

And you're like, you know, umami a lot. 

Robin:

Yeah, I do. I do.

For some reason, the taste. Yeah. The taste of these things, really, that seems like the right analogy to me for some reason.

I think that makes total sense. Yeah, I could go through. But it's like it's like, I mean, a, you know, a red haired writer pounding down this this dark village lane, you know, between dark pines on a winter's day, a bright country, English country house, you know, totally snowed in.

But inside, it's bright and warm. And all these siblings are kind of running around and harassing each other while the parents are cooking in the kitchen. There's this you could call it the MacGuffin, except I think it's they actually are important, you know, to the story in the world.

There's this set of signs that our protagonist, young Will, has to has to assemble. And there are these like sort of like proto crosses. And so he can thread them on his belt like it was like Batman, you know, this sort of weird, like pagan utility belt.

And over the course of the book, he you know, he's given the quest. He's got to find them. It's very important to like the cosmos.

And he does in all these different situations, but they represent the elements. You know, there's one for iron and there's one for stone and there's one for water. There's one for wood and a couple more.

And it just is like, I don't know. Those are like it's like it's like Susan Cooper just so clearly could see the keyboard in front of her. I don't mean the computer keyboard or the typewriter keyboard.

I mean, like the like the piano keyboard and the keys are like myth. I mean, we've been talking about myth a lot. It's myth and it's legend and it's, you know, vibe.

And it's just all ghosts and castles and swords and King Arthur. And just I mean, everybody kind of everybody kind of plays not everybody, but a lot of people play that keyboard. I don't think everybody sees it clearly and and or plays it like with that virtuoso command.

And and Susan Cooper does and did. It just it's awesome. 

Neil:

Absolutely.

It is awesome. There's a really famous quote from this book. It's the most popular quote when you look online.

Every man has a last choice after the first. A chance of forgiveness. Turn, period.

Come to the light. I was just struck by the concept of light, you know, in life. You actually use that.

You used light in a couple of the the images you just cast for for us. And I know it's a trope across many stories, but I just wondered what light looks like to you in life or more broadly to you. What are the elements of a good life?

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, those are those are kind of two different questions. The light I actually think is profound in the context of this conversation, talking about books, readers, libraries, bookstores, because reading is, among many other things, reading is the empire of light.

There's I think it's hard if you just imagine some weird alternate history where I don't know, maybe human culture got real weird and everybody around the whole world decided there's no artificial light. That's no, that's not we don't do that. And so there were no candles, no lanterns, no lamps, no LED bulbs, no phones, you know, that could like make their own light.

None of that stuff in that world. I actually think it's kind of hard to imagine fiction being an important medium. I think it's so crucial to reading that we that we have these bubbles of light and they can be private and they can be quiet and they can, you know, be at night and all this all this other kind of stuff.

I don't I don't think I don't think the sun is enough to enjoy books and comic books and newspapers. And so I have often thought of reading as being kind of like it kind of has traveled with light and with humankind's mastery and kind of command of light. And so I am I'm very I'm very grateful for for all the all the ways we make light, you know, that that can't you know, it doesn't have to be freaking high tech stuff.

It's as simple as simple as the candle. But that's it's good stuff. And I think I think readers ought to recognize the the debt they owe to to, you know, all the ways we we make and manage light.

Neil:

You even said in your very first ever newsletter in 2020, what is a book? I'm fond of Craig Mott's argument that what makes a book is its edges to which I will add a book requires collimation. 

Robin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The collimation of light. The idea is light is said to be collimated when all of its photons are pointing in the same direction. Yeah, that's right.

Neil:

So there's reading is I wrote down reading is the empire of light.

The next question is, you know, to you, because I've heard you talk a lot about animals and birds and nature and fear a lot. And so and but you've also described yourself as techno hyphen, lots of different words at the end of that.

Robin:

Yeah, I have.

Neil:

You know, you're you got your you got an Apple Watch on, I think, right now.

Robin:

I do. I do.

Neil:

You've got, you know, headphones plugged in. I think your shirt says. 

Robin:

Yeah, this is my this is my homage to that here.

I'll back up so you can see this is wonderful. One of my favorite, favorite T-shirts is actually printed by the writer and musician Claire Evans. And it's she made the ENIAC six, the original original computer programmers look kind of like a punk rock band.

And I just I love it. Beautiful. 

Neil:

Yeah, it's a great shirt.

So you've got a really, you know, you've tilted heavily into the techno technological world. You're writing, you know, thousands of words long essays about the ethics and morals of AI. Yeah.

And you also speak very confidently through your books. And as I as I watch you online about like how, you know, nothing that we create through computers will ever match the flight of a hummingbird and so on. 

So I and you make you're physically making olive oil, you know, what are the elements of a good life to you? 

Robin:

You know, I always enjoy kind of recognizing some of those what seem like contradictions. Right. You know, sort of like, well, hey, well, which one is it?

And I remember it always makes me think back a little bit to when I first published Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore. And, you know, because that's a novel very much about the interplay between old technology, you know, books and printing. And there's a lot in it.

You know, if you don't know it already, you learn a lot about the deep history of books and typography. But there's also a ton of technology, you know, and you can make my clear interest in, you know, data visualization and programming and, you know, ebooks and all that kind of stuff is very apparent on the page as well.

So people would often, you know, to be kind of clever, you know, you know, or kind of, you know, provocative in a interview or something would ask, well, OK, well, which which is it, Robin? You know, do you print books or ebooks, you know, the paper, paper or the Internet? And I just always had to say, like, there's no decision or rather I choose all of it.

I'll take. Yes. Yes, please.

I'll take one of each. And I actually think it's really important to insist that there there is no contradiction. There is no dichotomy.

We are we are human beings. You know, the world and all these interesting things are there for us to explore and enjoy and and evaluate. By the way, it doesn't mean that it's all good or all healthy.

But I guess this has been true ever since I was a kid, you know, the same period of time that I was, you know, vibing out on the book of Greek myths and, you know, reading The Dark is Rising. We had a early, early Macintosh computer down and down in our basement was a Mac plus. And I would go down there and I would use that Mac plus and I would like draw little pixel figures and I would I would write stuff and print it out, you know, and make weird little books.

And I saw as a as a, you know, naive child, I saw no contradiction there. I just seemed like it seemed like it was a bunch of cool stuff for me to explore. And I guess that's how I still feel.

I just I you can't nobody nobody can get me to choose because it's just all interesting. Yeah. 

Neil:

A bunch of cool stuff for me to explore.

It's all interesting.

Robin:

Doesn't that sound by the way, but it doesn't that sound it's that's I often very often I'm I feel very grateful to both my parents, of course, for just creating the space and the life, you know, that made that possible, but also to that community. It was a it was a cool place to grow up.

It was, you know, safe and interesting. And, you know, there was kind of enough to do and there was a great public library. And, you know, there's the library in my school and that I that I had that feeling is really not something to be taken for granted.

Neil:

No, absolutely not. It's what affords us the ability to be able to play with these curiosities. And it has been the fertile ground for your massive mind, which we're enjoying the fruits of through your books and your blogs and your zines and your olive oil.

So to close things off, I got just a few fast money round questions here. Let's wrap things up. I will avoid the hardcover paperback audio or e-question because we kind of covered it at the beginning.

Robin:

Yeah, I could only pass on that one. 

Neil:

But how about how do you organize your books on your bookshelf? 

Robin:

Yeah, if my, you know, if my if my camera here wasn't was mobile, I could I could show you because I've got huge shelves on both sides of the of the room here.

Neil:

What room are you in? It's for most people are listening to this.

They won't be able to see. But I see so much happening in this room. 

Robin:

It's a mess.

Yeah, that's that's fair. You're very diplomatic. Yeah, I'll do the description. Robin stands in a room that seems to be cluttered with a strange assortment of machinery, stacks of papers, weird bibliographic detritus and on the back wall, a neon sign currently dark. That is the neon sign from the pages of Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore. Yeah, this is my office, which I call the media lab. And it's really cruddy. But in a way, I've become sort of proud of the fact that it's like not for show.

I feel like I have sometimes seen other people's, you know, creative offices in person or maybe, you know, in the background of a video. And yeah, and they're really they're so nice. I mean, they're beautiful.

And all the all the all the surfaces are clean and everything. And I'm like, I don't know if you do any any real work there. I don't know if that's really where the magic totally.

Neil:

You've heard the Albert Einstein quote, probably. If you know, I have a desk is the sign of a cluttered mind. Then please tell me what the sign of an empty desk is.

Robin:

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So anyways, that's where I am. But but yeah.

Neil:

So so do you organize the books on the shelves? I love that phrase, bibliographic detritus. 

Robin:

Yeah, detritus.

I do. I do a rough I do a rough chop. I do believe in thematic shelving, you know, basic subjects.

So I've got a science fiction shelf. I've got a kind of nature and ecology shelf. I've got a hard, weird science shelf.

I've got actually the shelf that's been most active lately because of the printing is kind of the book history graphic design shelf. And those kind of, you know, those grow and sometimes we'll take over part of another shelf within that space. It is pure chaos.

It is random. It is just books. I just don't I cannot manage.

I'd like, you know, alphabetical or, you know, Library of Congress system. But it is I used to actually used to be even believe it or not used to be even more of a mess. And I and I found it was with the number of books I have, it was getting hard to when I would think of something, I'd be like, I want to see that book.

And then I would turn into like an afternoon project to find the book. And I was like, this is not going to work. This has got to be this collection of books.

If I'm going to have this many books, it's got to actually be a tool that works for me. So I've gotten much better, actually, about about kind of keeping books in the right place. And yeah, yeah, perfect.

It really works.

Neil:

What is your book lending policy? 

Robin:

Oh, yeah, I'm I actually am a bit of a what would you call it?

And I'm extreme on this end. And I don't think it's going to be what you expect. I think that if you lend a book or borrow a book, the expectation should actually be that it's never coming back.

I just think it's like, and you know what, if it's like if it is that precious and you're like, no, no, no, this needs to come back. I do not think you should be lending it. I think I think the right I think the healthy, generous modality is, you know, either either I just give someone a book and say, yeah, keep it, keep it, enjoy it.

Or I say you can bring it back if you want. But it's this is not this is this is not a lending library. This is this is we are we are in full circulation mode here.

Neil:

Yeah, exactly. I love that. Does a book come to mind that you wish you could read again for the first time?

Robin:

Oh, yeah. You know, well, I'll tell you, that's a great question. Interesting sometimes to just note literally the first thing that leaps to mind.

And I will say the book Hild by Nicola Griffith, which is kind of kind of almost fits in actually to The Dark is Rising in terms of Hild, H-I-L-D. It came out a few years ago and it is it's big. It's a fat book.

I mean, it probably is 600 pages. It's a it's historical fiction. It's set in England in like the I don't can't remember if it's like the 800s or 900s.

It's really a quite a remote, you know, bit of English medieval history. Yeah. And it's it's just one of those books.

I truly believe you have to read it either in wintertime or like, I don't know, during like during a rainstorm or something. You need to be home and cozy for like a period of time so that you can just dive into this book and like not come out until it's over. It's so completely 360 like you are in this world.

It's full of detail. The voices are great. The characters are great.

And you know, I I'm sure I could read it again and and I probably ought to. And it'd be a good time. But I remember so vividly that first time reading it and just true.

I mean, as as cozy and comfortable as like a big blanket, you just were like, I'm just so happy to be here. And that's a great that's a great feeling. Yeah.

Neil:

Hild okay, I’ll Check that out.

That's great. I didn't ask you about your writing process per se. Yeah.

But with how much stuff you're doing is do you have a like a set practice or is that day and time or way you write or it's not?

Robin:

I don't I don't do a day and time. My you know, my it's interesting the way it's kind of connects to the to the manufacturing and the olive oil and some other things to my year has become really seasonal was not always the case.

You know, back years and years ago, I worked in an office and, you know, the rhythm was kind of more weekly, like many people, I think. Now it's very seasonal, you know, in the sense that there is this period of the year, really about three months in the fall and winter when I mean, that is not a time for writing. There is not a spare minute for me to sit down and, you know, work on Chapter seven of my manuscript of whatever it is, because it is the olive harvest and it waits for no one and you got to do it all then.

And rather than that feeling like a burden or like a problem, it has actually felt really clarifying and liberating because you're like, oh, good. I know exactly what I need to be doing. There's no question.

And I kind of don't have a choice in the matter. But then as kind of the complement to that, I have discovered that there can be other times of year that are almost like the season for writing, you know, the season for zine printing. And so kind of making the modularity less about hours of the day or even days of the week and more about like weeks and months of the year.

It's been a change for me, but it's been one that's been just really, really, I don't know, energizing and it's felt really productive. I mean, we both publish on the lunar calendar. Part of what relieves me about the lunar calendar is just that hint back to time being measured in circles as opposed to lines.

It just feels so much more relaxing. And it's not up to you. I mean, yeah, part of it is like, hey, I didn't make it up.

It's the, you know, the world is telling me that now is the time. It is. It's great.

Neil:

I like that. 

I like that as a challenge for all of us, which is how can we tap back into natural cycles in our lives a bit more. Do you have a favorite bookstore, Living or Dead? Yeah, you know, I do.

Robin:

It's a bit sentimental, but the sentiment is powerful. So it's like the freaking warp core, you know, in the enterprise. Green Apple Books, they have two locations in San Francisco.

I mean, I still go there all the time. They've been great allies to my novels and to me just in a really meaningful way. And back actually around the time this kind of comes full circle because we were talking about, you know, years ago when I first decided maybe I could call myself a writer in public.

At that time, I was living in a neighborhood in San Francisco called the Richmond, and my apartment was just around the corner, just like two blocks up and one block over from the main, the largest Green Apple Books on Clement Street there in San Francisco. Amazing bookstore, big, weird, shadowy and open till 10 p.m., which for San Francisco is like kind of late. Actually, that's like that's like quite that's that's really luxurious.

And so I would go there at that time and I would just usually kind of toward closing time and I'll kind of just wander in and I would always look at the new books, particularly the paperbacks. You know, as we as we discussed, I really like those paperbacks and I would just see what was new and I'd see the little bookseller notes describing, you know, how great these books were. And I would look at the titles.

I would look at the author names. And I mean, honestly, I would just like dream of being there on that shelf. And I would say, oh, man, that'd be so cool.

You know, I want I want that to be me. I want that to be something that that I made. I mean, I did that a lot.

I think I probably I don't know, maybe some bookseller there was like worried about me. They're like, oh, is that guy OK? But it just was a very meaningful place to go and kind of see the goal.

And frankly, you know, of course, I bought books and I and I read them and I loved them. And it was really just an inspiring, yeah, an inspiring destination. The paperback table at Green Apple Books turned into a vision that you manifest.

Yeah, that's true. And my books, my books have been on that on that exact paperback table so that it just means a lot to me. 

Neil:

Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Robin, so much for your time, for your thought, for energy. The very last question I have written down my page is the one I always close with, which is if you know, this is a show with a lot of writers and book lovers. I know writers is the first of kind of three words now in your bio.

But if you could give one last hard fought piece of advice to those out there who are aspiring to write, is there one thing that would come to mind that you would share with us to help close off this conversation? 

Robin:

Yeah, I would say that, you know, in some respects, storytelling across different media is kind of the same, right? You know, you can imagine certain principles or approaches being broadly useful.

I think fiction has at least one really important and liberatory difference, which is that the only thing a work of fiction has to do, and it is mandatory, it has to do this one thing, but the only thing it has to do is just make you want to keep reading and make you want to read to the next page. And what's awesome is that there are an infinite number of ways to do that. I mean, you can read, obviously, and I'm sure you've had many of these conversations on the show.

You can, lots of people will tell you how to do it and they'll say, oh, you got to make your story work this way, or you got to like sequence it out like this. So you got to create this sense of conflict. Oh, you got to create these kinds of images, you know, all that kind of stuff.

All true. However, you could also not do any of those things. Anything like this is so true.

Anything can work as long as it works. I mean, there's examples of truly the most unbelievable books. Like, um, I think Nicholson Baker actually is a, is a great example for kind of the outer limits of like, that's a novel.

Like it'll be literally he's, he's written novels that like take place in someone's thought process for the like 45 seconds they're on an escalator and they're, and they're captivating because, because, you know, there's a version of that story in that book that is really, really boring and maybe unreadable, but Nicholson Baker made it work because the voice on the page is wonderful and smart and funny and interesting.

And anyway, I just think that anybody who wants to write and wants to, you know, maybe get published by a publisher, large or small ought to really take that to heart that like, it doesn't mean that it's easy, but it does mean that like anything you imagine, any approach, any structure, any voice can work. And like, what an exciting thing. And there's like, it's like staring out at like a huge cosmos of, of stars and planets.

And you're like, yeah, you could go to anyone, just, uh, just choose and then, you know, put in the work to, to actually make it good. 

Neil:

Absolutely. Uh, I love your books, Robin.

I find them dizzying vertiginous. They really do, uh, are seductive. Uh, they're challenging.

I find my mind being very stretched by them. And, uh, it's, it's fun talking to you because you're, you go very fast. You, your brain is like going a mile a minute and you have really big thoughts.

And thank you for kind of stepping down to the level of this show, talking about your childhood books. It's been a really inspiring and engaging conversation. I really appreciate it.

Robin:

Well, hey, thank you. Thank you for your, your kind invitation. It's really, it's great to be here.

Neil:

Hey, everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement with, thank with all of you from around the world to the wise, brilliant and wonderful Robin Sloan. Oh my gosh.

That guy thinks so fast and he moves so quickly. I don't know if you could hear my brain, like trying to catch up with them the whole time. So many quotes jumped out to me in that conversation.

Uh, hard to pick favorites, but I'll choose a few on the ethics at AI. I like what Robin said. I think if a person feels like they want to be in the world that cares, it's really important to hold the line and take that responsibility seriously.

I feel so puzzled and confused by what's going on with AI. I just read this book, Empire of AI, which you would know if get my book club. If you don't go to neil.blog, you can sign up for my book club. And, uh, it's by Karen Howe, H-A-O. And it really opened my eyes to the negative sides of AI. Not just the environmental stuff.

I mean, they're building data centers now that are the size of Manhattan that you can't live within 20 miles of because they're buzzing all day. And by the way, they take, they only run on distilled water. So they also need like huge purified water plants near them.

It's not just the environmental stuff. It's not just the human impact. Like there's people in a lot of developing countries, which she calls the global South in the book that are doing a lot of the sort of harder jobs, like assessing whether content is like, you know, sexual assault or not.

And they have to look at it to help the AI learn what's appropriate or not. But then people are getting traumatized. It's also just the sort of unethical way that the industry started.

And yet, simultaneously, even though my eyes are open to all that, here I am using, you know, Clode and ChatGPT and Grok and Gemini and all these new software pieces because I'm like, oh, this could be a quick, easy way to like find a six minute baby bok choy recipe. Like I have six minutes to make it and rather than looking on Google. So I find myself both using it and also not liking it, but I'm trying to figure out where I land on that.

Robin's wonderful essay on AI on his website, we will point to in the show notes, by the way, if you go to threebooks.co, you can click every chapter, we have a full notes and summary of everything we discussed. The essay is called I believe, Is It Okay? And it's just a wonderful take on whether or not there's, it's ethically appropriate what we're doing with AI right now.

That doesn't mean it will stop. But it's just a really nice way to sort of see some of the ethical sides of this thing. All right, that was just one quote.

I kind of went on a big rant there. And then how about this one? I think that if you lend a book or borrow a book, the expectation should be that it's never coming back.

I just like that as a principle. We had a babysitter over at our house last night, Leslie and I got our weekly date night. It's not always weekly, but we call it a weekly date night so that we try to always put it in because even if we don't feel like it, even if we're too tired, and if we don't think we have the time, when we go on a date, just the two of us, of course, it infuses our the energy of our total system, our total family system with what's needed in order to make a busy life with four boys run and hum.

And anyway, as we said goodnight to our babysitter, I noticed on my bookshelf I have this mass market paperback shelf. I noticed there's this metal rail on the top of my ceiling. And I started realizing that only mass market paperbacks can sit on that rail because something like four-fifths of the book sits on them and one-fifth sits off them.

So if I was to hit them, they would fall off, but every other book would completely fall off. And I looked up there and I said, oh, Lisa, we've got two copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And she's like, oh great, I've never read that book.

I've always wanted to read it. I said, oh great, you can have it. Yes, I had two copies specifically to give away.

By the way, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was, of course, chosen by Robin Dunbar in chapter 132 as one of his three most formative books. So I gave her the book. I never need to see it again.

Even if I had one copy, would I give it away? I'm not sure, but point is, Robin's point stands. All right, another quote.

I think this one is good for writers. You know, whenever we have a novelist on the show, as we've had with David Mitchell, as we had with Mohsen Haman and George Saunders in chapter 75, I really do want to try to get some writing craft tips. And the tip that we got out of writing from Robin is, the only thing a work of fiction has to do, and it is mandatory, is just make you want to keep reading.

Three quotes from the wise and wonderful Robin Sloan, who adds three more books to our top 1,000, including number 558, D'Aulaires  Book of Greek Myths by Ingrid and Edgar Dolaire. Number 557, Player of Games by Ian Banks, B-A-N-K-S. Note that Ian is spelled I-A-I-N.

And then number 556, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Three more books that will be added to our top 1,000. If you want to read the top 1,000, i.e. a list of every single formative book mentioned on the show, just go to threebooks.co slash, you guessed it, the top 1,000. And they are there. We are getting close to 500 now. We are getting close to 500 now.

That will be halfway down our list. But of course, the pace slowed because from 2018 to 2023, we were releasing a new chapter, every new moon and full moon. Now we're just releasing a chapter every full moon to help preserve my sanity as I try to read all these books and interview all these people.

And of course, we aren't abandoning new moons. We're just dropping classic chapters on them. Most recently, of course, the classic chapter was with Blue Jays announcer Cherry Howard.

And the next classic chapter will be coming out from Robin the bartender. Mixing, you know, big names, small names, interesting. Always trying to go for interesting.

Thank you to you. Thank you to Robin. Thank you so much for being here.

It's a real pleasure, and I really appreciate your time. Okay. Are you still here?

Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club. This is a chat just for me and you just to hang out.

It's the after party of the show. Three bookers reunite. We get together.

We play your voicemails. We read your letters. We talk about a word of the chapter and we just hang out a little bit.

So let's kick it off as we always do by going to the phones.

Robin

Hi, Neil. I live in Boston and I am a huge fan of the show. There are many days that three books is the only thing getting me through my very long commute.

And I just want to thank you for everything you're doing. I just caught up on an old episode that you did with Katie Mack, fascinated by the conversation that you were having around language and kind of the connections between words and reading between the lines. And I wanted to recommend one of my most formative books, which is called Babble by R.F. Kuang. This book lives rent free in my head. It is one of the best things I've ever read. And it has kept me thinking many, many months after I finished reading it.

So I highly recommend you check it out. I think even just reading the description, you'll see that it is a fascinating book about language. And as someone who's trying to learn a second language, I have a whole new appreciation for the weak ties between words and the power they have as you move between one language and another.

So I highly recommend you check that out. And as you were talking with Allie Ward about potentially capitalizing on some of the work you're doing here, I just wanted to throw out a recommendation for some cover to cover club merch. So I would be proud to wear a cover to cover club sweatshirt or tote bag.

So definitely recommend you look into that as well. Thank you so much. And I look forward to the next chapter.

Neil

Thank you so much too. I believe it's Kate from Boston. I think it was Kate, the voicemail cut out like kind of right when you were saying your name.

So I'm hoping I got the name right. What a really generous and kind voice. Now, I'm really glad that you kind of resonated with Katie Mack.

Katie Mack, of course, was our guest, the astrophysicist. We've only had one astrophysicist on the show. Our guest back in chapter 112.

She was really mind expanding for sure. I remember my first question was like, where are we? So what do you mean?

I'm like, well, where are we? And then she's like, she's like, well, obviously we're in the, and then she explains the solar system from such a cool perspective. I want to just shout out the book you recommended, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence, an Arcane History of the Oxford Translator's Revolution, a 2022 novel of speculative fiction by R.

F. Quang, K-U-A-N-G, set in a fantastical version of Oxford in 1830s England. The story goes up to 1840.

It's thematically similar to The Poppy War, his first book series. The book criticizes British imperialism, racism, capitalism, and the complicity of academia and perpetuating and enabling them. Whoa, an alternative reality, fantastical fiction, kind of a nice pairing a little bit with Robin Sloan here, which Britain's global economic and colonial supremacy are fueled by the use of magical silver bars.

Okay, we will add this to our TBR, Babel, an Arcane History by R. F. Quang, a number one New York Times bestseller.

I really appreciate the suggestion. Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't have the courage to call. What am I going to talk to Neil about?

Please do. I love your calls. It's 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

If you're waiting for a push, here it is. Anything's fine. You can suggest a guest.

You can tell us one of your formative books. You can disagree with something that somebody said, or give us your view or your take. There's no wrong questions.

There's no wrong voicemails. And of course, as always, if I play your voicemail, drop me a line with your address so I can sign and send you a book. As I will do from, I think it's Kate from Boston.

If it's not Kate, I will find out your proper name when you email me. Neil at globalhappiness.org. And that's also where you can send letters for the show, too.

Speaking of letters for the show, we opened with a letter for the show. Should we do another one? Let's just see a couple of the comments.

Jean Chrétien got a lot of comments. Marky Mark says, Wow, Neil, thanks for making this one happen. Yes, a very special man, not without faults, not without mistakes.

But after the arena, he only became wiser and more ministerial. That is to serve, to keep serving one another. Thanks for serving us with this great law reform interview.

Avec Jean! And then I had a comment here from Jackson Kirchis who says, On behalf of America, I offer you a collective apology. Smiley face, crying face.

To which I replied, by the way. I replied to that one because it was public on YouTube. I said, You got Mr. Chrétien pretty riled up. But in his memoirs and in many interviews, he talks at length about the long trusting relationship between Canada and the U.S., one I have personally had the pleasure of feeling for really all my life, including when I lived in the States from 2005 to 2007 and Boston. Hopefully the vitriol blasted towards Canada is just a momentary blip because we really do need each other. And I really do mean that and feel that way.

Like all Canadians, we have friends in the U.S. We have family in the U.S. We travel to the U.S. more than any other country. We buy stuff from the U.S. more than any other country. The countries are very connected.

And so I think the whole kind of Trump spew about, you know, making Canada the 51st state, but also just annexing us and just like, you know, tariffing everything that we've been shipping there. It was just like caught Canadians by surprise because we have assumed and taken for granted the strong, healthy relationship forever. Longest, I'll remember as a kid in school, learning that Canada and the United States had the longest undefended border in the world.

And I think that is probably still true today. No walls up here yet. Also appreciate the suggestion to do some merch.

You know what, that is something I have been looking into. If you are in the secret club, which by the way, if you want to be in the secret club, you have to call our phone number 1-833-READALOT. You get a secret code, you enter it on a secret website, you get a secret address, you mail a secret envelope, and then you get onto our analog club, which does include, I mean, I have sent out three books, bookmarks, and three books, merch, you know, a few times.

And yeah, it makes me think maybe we should do something on a larger scale. Also seeing what Robin Sloan is doing with zines, how he's turned his website into like kind of a little shop. Maybe I should do a little Shopify shop on 3books.co and start selling, you know, elements of the show and things like that. It might be fun and I appreciate that. If you have more thoughts on that, like what kind of merchandise you might like, what should it say? Should it say our tagline at the end?

You are what you eat, you are what you read. Should it say the book was better? I always like that, but then people say that's kind of judgy and presumptuous.

And you know what, really? Was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton better than the Steven Spielberg movie? You know, so I have to think about the phrase, but it would be fun to do that.

And I think it will be something I look into. All right, thank you so much. Thank you so much.

We've done letters, we've done phone calls, and now it's time for the word of the chapter. And of course, for this chapter's word, we could do a SoundCloud. I mean, he had so many big, giant, beautiful words, but I think for this one, let's just go back and play one word from Mr. Sloan himself. Here we go. It doesn't have the same umami as the Greek. Yes, indeed.

The word is umami. Umami. Umami.

Umami. U-M-A-M-I. U-M-A-M-I.

Of course, it is Japanese in origin. It means literally deliciousness. It came from 1908.

It's called a neologism, a recently coined word because it's only 117 years old. And it means delicious, right? Umai.

U-M-A-I means delicious. And me, the suffix means quality or essence. Coined in 1908 by Japanese chemists to describe the distinct savory taste of kombu dashi.

But wait, wait, wait, wait. People taste umami through taste receptors that typically respond to glutamate and neoclutides, which who knows what those are, which are widely present in things like meat broths and fermented products. But you probably know that they were able to mimic this taste with MSG or monosodium glutamate, the chemical that, you know, when I was growing up, it was like Chinese restaurants were famous for using MSG.

And then there came a whole spate of Chinese restaurants with giant neon signs saying no MSG. Of course, the MSG stuff tasted better. But now you don't see MSG on ingredients lists anymore, probably because it's not healthy for us.

And yet it naturally occurs, not MSG, but the idea of umami flavor in things like shellfish, including fish sauce, preserved fish like sardines and anchovies, dashi, which I think is a family of stocks used in Japanese cuisine, like the basis for miso soup and broth soup, tomatoes, mushrooms, hydrolyzed vegetable proteins, meat extracts, yeast extracts, kimchi, cheeses, and soy sauce. Yes, thank you to Kanui Ikeda at the University of Tokyo in 1908 for scientifically identifying umami as a distinct taste. Then it wasn't until the year 2000, only 92 years later, where researchers at the University of Miami identified the presence of umami receptors on the tongue.

And then more recently in 2006, less than 20 years ago, where other research libraries found similar umami receptors in the stomach. Isn't it amazing that we know so little about anything? Really, it isn't an amazing that we know so little about a thing.

We come up with these labelings and the norms. I mean, you remember us talking to Susan Orlean about that, how she categorized her shoes and so on. And we talked about Katie Mack, that was a conversation that came up earlier in this chapter.

And what is it like 80 or 90% of outer space is labeled dark matter, i.e. even the smartest astrophysicists in the world have no idea what is composing outer space. We don't even know what outer space is made of. And now I'm reading this book called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake about fungi.

And it's like, he says in the beginning of the book that there's like, you know, tens of thousands of species of fungi in the world. Well, we only know like a few of them. Like we don't even know who we are.

As Tim Urban, I guess I think it was chapter 22 says, we don't even know what the universe is. So when you're having a bad day or a stressful day, as I have, and you have, and we all have sometimes, just remember, no one really knows anything. No one knows anything.

We don't even know what taste receptors we have in our stomachs. We don't. We don't know what AI is going to do.

We don't. We don't know where we are. We don't.

We don't know why we're here. We don't. We come up with purposes and reasons and stories and theses that help us navigate and, you know, kind of quiet the sort of ambiguous static that our lives will be flooded with.

As George Saunders said in chapter 75, the sheer volume of inchoate motion that is sort of the blur of reality that we decipher and distill into something that makes us whir and tick and call friends and go for a run and make nice dinners. Yet we're here and in and across space and time, you are here with me and I am here with you. We have this moment together.

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for listening to chapter 152. Thank you so much for being on the wild ride that is the Three Books Project.

It's an art project. It's a labor of love. I love being here with you.

Drop me a line, neil at globalhoppings.org. Drop me a voicemail or a voice note, 1-833-READALOVE. Let's keep the conversation going.

Thank you all so much. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!