The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Into the Bobiverse (Interview)

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Dennis E. Taylor joins the show to take us "Into the Bobiverse" and other books he's written. Dennis shares the backstory on how he went from programmer to author/writer and creator of Audible's Best Science Fiction Book of 2016, his process for iterating and developing the story as he writes, plans for a Bobiverse movie, and what's next in book 5 coming out in September 2024.

What's up friends, welcome back. This is the changelog and today we're going into the Babaverse. Yes, I'm joined by my most favorite author out there for plausible science fiction, Dennis E. Taylor, the author of the Bobaverse series, as well as many other books that are just amazing. And you should listen to them and or read them. For me, I listen to books, so there you go. Of course, to my friends out there who are Bobaverse series fans, we're going through all the details.

All the books, all the whys, the behind the scenes, the guppies, the true AI, the Quinlan world, all the things. Kind of. Some spoilers, but not so much. There you go. This show has literally been years in the making, and I hope you enjoy it. A massive thank you to our friends

and our partners over at fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com. Launch your apps, launch your databases, and launch your AI near your users with very limited cortisol. No stress and no ops, and they'll do it for you too. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's go into the Bobiverse.

What's up, friends? I'm here with Dave Rosenthal, CTO of Sentry. So Dave, when I look at Sentry, I see you driving towards full application health, error monitoring where things began, session replay, being able to replay a view of the interface a user had going on when they experienced an issue with full tracing, full data, the advancements you're making with tracing and profiling, cron monitoring, co-coverage, user feedback,

and just tons of integrations. Give me a glimpse into the inevitable future. What are you driving towards? Yeah, one of the things that we're seeing is that in the past, people had separate systems where they had like logs on servers, written files. They were maybe sending some metrics to Datadog or something like that or some other system. They were monitoring for errors with some product, maybe it was Sentry. But more and more what we see is people want all of these sources of telemetry logically tied together somehow. And that's really what we're pursuing

at Sentry now. We have this concept of a trace ID, which is kind of a key that ties together all of the pieces of data that are associated with the user action. So if a user loads a web page, we want to tie together all the server requests that happened, any errors that happened, any metrics that were collected. And what that allows on the back end, you don't just have to look at like three different graphs and sort of line them up in time and try to draw your own conclusions. You can actually like analyze and slice and dice the data and say, hey, what did this metric look like for people with this operating system versus this metric looks like for people with this operating system and actually get into those details. So this kind of idea of

tying all of the telemetry data together using this concept of a trace ID or basically some key, I think is a big win for developers trying to diagnose and debug real world systems in something that is, we're kind of charged the path for that for everybody. Okay. Let's see you get there. Let's see you get there tomorrow. Yeah. Perfectly. How will systems be different? How will teams be different as a result? Yeah. I mean, I guess again, I just keep saying, and maybe, but I think it kind of goes back to this debug ability experience. When you are digging into an issue, you know, having a sort of a richer data model that's, you know, your logs are structured.

They're sort of this hierarchical structure with spans. And not only is it just the spans that are structured, they're tied to errors, they're tied to other things. So when you have the data model that's kind of interconnected, it opens up all different kinds of analysis that were just kind of either very manual before, kind of guessing that maybe this log was, you know, happened at the same time as this other thing, or were just impossible. We get excited not only about the new kinds of issues that we can detect with that interconnected data model, but also just for every issue that we do detect, how easy it is to get to the bottom of it. I love it. Okay, so they mean it when they say code breaks, fix it faster with Sentry.

More than 100,000 growing teams use Sentry to find problems fast, and you can too. Learn more at Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io. And use our code, changelog. Get $100 off the team plan. That's almost four months free for you to try out Sentry. Once again, Sent E. Taylor.

Thank you for coming on the show. I think that I've been a fan for, I think, since COVID, I want to say, before COVID. I listened to your books. I've read your books. I say listen because I mostly listen to the phenomenal Ray Porter voice, your books. But I've also not been able to listen. I've had to read too. So I've had the Audible slash Kindle versions of your books.

I've been a reader and fan of yours for many, many years. I've been looking forward to getting you on the show for quite a long time and just was never, I guess, bold enough to get you here, but now you're here. So hello. Cool. Hi. How does it feel to make, have somebody be such a fan of yours for many years and then finally get to meet you like I am? I'm still boggled by the whole concept of fandom directed at me. I still feel like the computer programmer guy working at ICBC. You know, when people recognize me, which happens occasionally, or recognize my name or whatever, I'm just completely floored by it.

Yeah, I can imagine that. You seemed, what I liked about your personhood, not so much your authorship, was when I looked behind the scenes at the person who, which is you, of course, who made and created all these books and thought of all these worlds and was so detailed and all this stuff was that you were a retired programmer living in Vancouver, British Columbia, an everyday person, a snowboarder, a mountain biker. I see in the background, a stump jumper with a Fox 38 on the front. So good job. You at least have good taste. Yeah.

That's attached to a Wahoo spinner. A trainer, yeah. Yeah, a trainer. It's set up for rainy days and winters. Yeah. But you have a lot of there. But you also have very big mountains, and I'm so envious of the mountain biking that you get to do there. I live in Austin, Texas.

We live in the hill country, so we have little mountains, little hills, not quite the same version of your mountains and hills. But I was just really impressed with your normalcy, I suppose, as a person. Got a wife, got a daughter, mountain bike, snowboard. But somehow after you decided to retire from programming, you decided to become an author, which I'm not familiar with that full story. That's just the Cliff Notes version of what I know. Can you share that? Can you share that journey from retire programmer, enjoy being a programmer to this idea that you can somehow write books and you're successful and very good at it? OK, well, first off, I wrote before I retired.

Is that right? Okay. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a cautious individual. I, if I was a mountain climber, I'm the person who never lets go of one handhold before I've securely got the next one. I was working as a computer programmer at ICBC at the time when I started writing. The writing gig started out as a bet with my wife, basically, or a challenge, I guess, a dare. And it worked out, which was a surprise to everybody concerned. We Are Legion was published September 2016. And my agent said to me at the time, if you make back the advance, which was $2,500, if you make back the advance, you can consider yourself to be doing well. So we made back the advance in the first 10 days and then it just snowballed. So by February of 2017, I bought my wife a new car. And by June of 2017, I quit. Well, actually, I retired and went through writing full time. Where did the revenue come from? Primarily,

Amazon is a primary source? Or how did you, obviously, through your publisher, but like, well, primarily Audible. But the thing is, I'm not a traditionally published author. And this has made a huge difference. Most authors published through Del Rey or, you know, one of the other big publishers, they get maybe two checks a year. And they get a small percentage of the book and audio revenue. And, you know, I mean, it's enough for a lot of authors to live on, obviously. Scalzi makes great money. Stephen King makes great money. But, you know, you have to be up there to be able to live full time comfortably on the money that you get from a traditional publisher. I'm hybrid. I have a contract with Audible directly. And other than that, my agent is acting as my publishing house for eBooks and paperbacks and so forth. So as a result from Audible, I get the full, it's nominally 20%, but there is a formula involved of the list price. And from Amazon, I get 70% of the list price, less my agent's commission, but that's always assumed. Then there's Kindle Unlimited,

which is a pretty significant revenue stream. Anyway, the upside of all of this is that I get a lot more of the revenue from my unit sales than somebody who's traditionally published. Did you just luck into that? How did you discover that? How did that happen for you? Was that just like timing? It's luck and timing. Yeah. I came along when, when audible was just starting to take off. I mean, they're big now, but at one point they were, audiobooks in general were still a bit niche. So there wasn't a huge selection of science fiction on the Audible menu. And when mine came along, all the science fiction fans jumped on it. So yeah, if I'd done this a couple of years earlier or a couple of years later, I don't think I would have had the same results.

The other thing that happened was I was not able to get a traditional publisher because we tried that route first, simply because it's what you do. And Weird Legion had a couple of problems. One is that you don't have an unknown author try to sell the first book of a trilogy. Publishers are very gun-shy about that kind of thing. It has to be a standalone or you're just not going to get picked up. So, you know, there it was. And so we had a lot of trouble picking up a traditional publisher, but Audible offered us a contract.

And, you know, in the end we took it they published it and we are a legion ended up being science fiction book of the year for 2016 i believe it i mean i'm an old school audible listener i primarily read books via listening so it's always strange to explain that because like it's not reading right it's listening and uh a friend of mine suggested the book i checked it out and thankfully i think maybe also to your credit not that your book is not worth it but i think ray porter does a great job like ray porter is stunning i think you were probably very lucky many you know swirls of luck in there for you timing reporter phenomenal voice actor really yeah well i should add there that that's not luck that's uh basically skill on the part

of my editor uh steve philberg made the decision about who the narrator would be i at that point had only listened to uh ready player one as an audiobook so i was familiar with will whedon anyway because you know will whedon yeah and that would have been my first choice for for narrator you know he's he's well known he he puts a lot of enthusiasm into his books he does but steve said no Ray Porter does multiple characters far better. And We Are Legion needs multiple characters with distinctive voices. So I didn't argue the point because I didn't know. You've got to recognize somebody else's expertise when it's there.

So we did Ray Porter and he just did this incredible job and uh bang bang is right i agree yeah i'm always impressed by rape where i actually i discover more books because i'm like you know what i want to listen to more of him acting and voicing books and i've discovered a couple other i think it's uh nick jones i believe if I can recall correctly. He's got a book series that starts with, and then she vanished. It's the Joseph Bridgman series. So good. I love time travel. I love science fiction.

I call it plausible science. I don't know if there's a better term for it. I think it's called hard science, potentially. I saw that in your biography on Wikipedia, but I've always called it plausible science. Yeah. biography on wikipedia but i've always called it plausible science yeah personally i think there's hard sf and then there's plausible sf and then there's science fantasy yeah and then there's fantasy and i'm not really into the fantasy that much like i kind of like it i like to push the edge a little bit maybe an example of it where it's more like maybe non-plausible science fiction would be edge of

tomorrow with tom cruise i'm sure you know that that story yeah it's a pretty well-known story that's probably that's aliens like it's an alien invasion it's alien blood creating the time travel and this time loop thing that's science fantasy yeah right yeah that's not quite plausible science i mean i guess it could be if an alien invasion came and that was a plausibility for that but that's really stretching it yeah but you get drenched in the blood and yada yada yeah it's just a mcguffin intended to set up a particular situation they have to have somebody who time loops and they have to have a situation where you can't just give this to every soldier in the army right you know and it can be taken away so the blood thing yeah and you had in that

case a past character who had it happen to her and she was able to add supposition and backstory and you know not supposition but exposition where they're exposing and espousing different facts about the storyline, which is kind of cool. Yeah. I enjoyed watching Edge of Tomorrow, and I think that's the thing. You can have non-plausible science fiction, or what I'd call science fantasy, and enjoy it. Yeah. If the storyline is good, if it's well-produced, if the script is good, and so forth. You can have hard science fiction that's terrible.

I do want to go one layer deeper and figure out. So this, there was a challenge between you and your wife to write, and this is pre-retirement. So you were safeguarding yourself. In what way had you begun to prepare for writing? Had you ever thought about the story? Did you have these stories packed in your brain and they were just, they had to come out? What's the backstory there? Well, I'm not a writer or I wasn't a writer. I am not one of those people who's had these stories in them all their lives that they just have to get out. You know, they spend 10 years writing

the great American novel or they write because they have to. I've been on writers' forums, and I've listened, well read, to people who said that I've got this story, I've got to get it out, I'm trying to get published. And it's like a need for them. And I didn't have that. I wrote a story for grade 11 English, and it was a novelette. And that was the last time I wrote anything. I mean, that's, you know, dinosaurs still roam. 30 years between, maybe? 35 years between? Yeah, dinosaurs.

You're being generous there. Okay. Well, I did say sir in our pre-call, so just to be clear. Yeah. But I've been reading science fiction since I was in grade five. And in the same way that an AI expert system will pick up a pattern just from lots of sample data, I've picked up the rhythm, I guess you'd call it, of writing just from having read thousands and thousands of books. So when I sat down to begin writing, I had the basic rhythm. I did make a lot of mistakes.

And that's why I went on to the Writer's Forum, because I knew Dunning-Kruger. I don't know enough to know how little I know. So I went on to the Writer's Forum, found out about points of view, found out about show don't tell and all the other sort of quote unquote rules that writers should follow. There are more best practices than rules and went back and started modifying my writing to do that. But I do the research to figure out what needs to be done. Other than that, but I do the research to figure out what needs to be done. Other than that, I have no training. I just have a lot of years as a reader under my belt. Well, I'm sure you've been told this once or twice before. You can't tell that you haven't been a writer your whole life. It's as if you've been born to do this. I love your stories. And just to zoom out a little bit,

you've got the Babaverse series, which you said was always a trilogy, now beyond a trilogy, technically, right? Now it's a sexology. Yeah. If that's even, would you say sexology? How would you say? Not a trilogy.

Septology? Quadrology, quintology, sextology. Gotcha. Roadkill was an interesting book.land i think was first if i recall correctly then earthside which were both good books uh i mentioned in the pre-call potentially in the show there's a book that i haven't read of yours yet and it's because i haven't been able to get through it and i'm not sure if it's me or timing or because i'm just so in love with other stories that you've written, then I can't

really get into this one, which is the Singularity Trap. But one of my, I would probably say one of my most favorite books of yours, potentially, potentially more than the Bobaverse series, is Feedback. It's a short story, to my knowledge, only on Audible. You can listen to it in 50 minutes. And it's just, I want to see that story expanded. I don't know what else is there or if there's anything in the works, you get a smile because you can't reveal the future as an author to some degree. But man, that is such a good book. Such a good story. Yeah. I get a lot of pushback from my agent and my editor when I mentioned time travel stories. They don't like them. Well, that's an absolute shame.

Yeah, I would like to try a time travel story, but it's not like I'm digging the bottom of the barrel for ideas. So it's something that may happen in the future, but meanwhile I've got a lot of other things to write. The thing that both of them say is that once you get into time travel stories it's like edge of tomorrow you have to start coming up with reasons why the characters can't just go back and keep trying till they get it working and it it becomes it becomes another mcguffin it's like uh multiverse stories which are all the rage right now apparently

i've heard a lot of people say, and I agree with them, that you lose interest in the stakes in multiverse stories because no matter what happens to the character, there's another universe where they win. Yeah. I can see that. I think what was interesting about this one in particular and the time travel slash, it's more of a loop, and it is definitely multiverse

and maybe it does belong just as a short story because maybe that's why it's so good because it couldn't unpack the details maybe it couldn't unpack the edges and the fringes as your editor has said and maybe that's wise I mean that's wise feedback I think this story is just so unique because it's I don't want to like kill too many plots in our conversation for people who will listen to your books that haven't yet. Maybe we're going to expose some people to you and your authorship and the books you've written. But this story starts out in science. It's in a lab. It's in a university.

I think that's so cool. They it kind of fast forward right away because it is a short story. You kind of have to get to the point quickly. You can't character develop and stuff like that. you kind of just jump right into the mix and before you know it they've already gotten into this time loop and this thing is already happening it's already in motion and then right about 10 minutes left 15 minutes left of the book you've got this really interesting plot twist that i had to listen to this i've probably listened to this book 20 times maybe more potentially because like it's just that good. It's a good short read,

a good short listen. So I want to listen to something I can enjoy again. And I've got 40 minutes over the next couple of days or a drive. I like to re-listen because there's details in this story that I think are just so unique. But that plot twist, I had to listen several times to be like, okay, that's's exactly when and I know you know because you wrote the book when this whole entire story changes and there's a flip and I thought that the way you pull that off and just the way that book was written and was just uh so cool and I'm a big fan of time travel I I do agree that you kind of get stuck in that motion and I don't disagree with that but you know what that's what happens that's what happens when you've got movies like Tenant, which are just masterpieces for Christopher Nolan. Like that's an

absolute masterpiece of a movie from a visual perspective and a storyline perspective. Masterpiece. He'll probably never make a sequel because why do you need to make one? But I would love it one day in the future when you are done with Bobaverse and there's, you've done all the writing you can there. Look back at feedback and see what you can do. Yeah, what I liked about feedback was that it was a good alternative explanation for the whole multiverse versus fixed time stream question. It handles all the questions.

Because time simply fixes itself, simplifies itself, which was the basic concept there. You could make a full book out of that. Somebody who just keeps trying and keeps trying and keeps trying and just can't get things back to the way they were. It becomes almost a variation on a genie's perverted wishes kind of thing. You know, you wish for this, you get that. Well, it was also interesting that it was kind of accidental. Like, there was a reason why they did the math. They thought it could happen, and they devised this, I don't know,

device that could do this time travel. And, you know, so I suppose if you think about time, it was always going to happen. But from a listener's perspective or a reader's perspective, it seemed like they hypothesized this could happen. It was an experiment. And then it happened. It wasn't like they were like, well, there's this magnificent time machine and I'm going to get in it and go back to a time and I can change things. It's almost as if they stumbled into this rewriting of history that they could not rewrite.

Because as you said, time fixes itself. I thought it was cool. It's an oops story. There you go. Oops story. I like that better. I wanted to give you some praise for feedback before we got deep into Bobaverse because we can go super, super deep with Bobaverse and all the things there. I think that's a really cool, unexpected short read. So if you want a – if you're listening to this and you want an easy 40-minute, 50-minute listen, read Feedback. You've got my praise on that. Well, friends, I'm here in the Briggs with one of my new friends over at 1Password, Martin Shosh, software developer at 1Password on the SDK team. 1Password now has SDKs as well as

their CLI that allows you to build secrets management integrations using Go, JavaScript, or Python, and they're available right now. So Martin, how can developers use these SDKs today? Give me some examples. Yeah, so the CLI was built more for managing your 1Password account and accessing it from the terminal and writing various scripts for local automations. But the SDKs really go a step beyond that, where you can build these automations. But the SDKs really go a step beyond that, where you can

build these automations into other pieces of software. You can run them in cloud functions. You can build them into your natively running desktop apps, which now are also able to leverage functionality such as loading data from 1Password, rotating secrets in 1Password, creating new items and more. Yeah. so in addition to this awesome new functionality you're going to give developers to leverage 1Password in such unique ways, I think it's also worth noting how you built these SDKs. You have a core Rust library that generates these various SDKs. What's the backstory?

When we started the SDK project, one of our goals was to really build the SDKs. What's the backstory? When we started the SDK project, one of our goals was to really build the SDKs in a scalable way where a relatively small team can maintain multiple SDKs at the same time. And we can add support for more languages and also add more functionality to them as time goes on. To achieve that level of scalability, we designed the SDKs in a way that they all leverage a shared Rust library that's written once and it has all the features of all the SDKs inside of it. Now to make this library accessible in each language, we generated a wrapper for that library in each of the supported languages. This wrapper is code is automatically generated. So this gives us even more speed agility when adding new features to the SDKs because we just add the feature to the SDK core library and each of the SDKs automatically

gets updated to expose the new functionality in all of the languages. That's so cool. Okay. The next step is to go to 1password.com slash changelogpod. They've given our listeners an exclusive extended free trial to all the developers out there to use 1Password for 28 days. That's not 14 days, but 28 days. They doubled it. Make sure you go to 1password.com slash changelogpod to get an exclusive signup bonus or head to developer.1password.com to learn about 1Password's new SDKs available right now.

Their amazing developer tooling, their CLI, their SSH and Git integrations, their CICD integrations, and so much more. Again, 1password.com slash changelogpod or developer.onepassword.com to learn more. Okay, so let's go into Bob, we are legion, for we are many. That was kind of hard too, I guess. Initially it was, we are legion, and in parentheses, we are Bob. I was not sure what to expect. As I mentioned, a friend of mine suggested we are bob i was not sure what to expect as i mentioned a friend of mine suggested this so i was not sure what to expect that's actually a fairly common reaction is that right yeah i get a lot of people who say despite the title ah well i wasn't sure and even i don't even know if you really explained the idea of legion in the book i don't

i almost feel like it doesn't fit in a way i'm cool with it because i'm a fan but like in retrospect i'm like does it really explain we are legion well we are legion is a misquote of i am legion from the bible okay where the uh the person contained multitudes of demons i am legion didn't feel quite right. So I went with We Are Legion. And since Bob replicates like crazy, that part makes sense. But then I wanted it to – because Bob is an everyman. He's a nerd. He's just a guy.

So I didn't want a title that came across as too pretentious. So quoting or misquoting the Bible, a little pretentious. So quoting or misquoting the Bible, a little pretentious, so put we are Bob, it brings it down a little bit. Okay. And that was the idea. As it turns out, it makes at least some people think that it's sort of a Douglas Adams kind of flavor of science fiction, which I don't know if you'd call that absurdist or

farcical, but his stuff tends to be a little more red dwarfish rather than plausible science fiction. Yeah. Well, I do think this is very much in the plausible science fiction. It reminds me a little of Vanilla Sky, where, again, another Tom Cruise movie where I guess he froze his head and the whole thing was a dream. But that's not the case here. But Bob was successful as a software developer. He created a company.

This is all in early the book. So this is not plot twisting or story, you know, like ruining in any way. I'm sure we'll ruin some plots here and I will put maybe a spoiler. We have a spoiler horn we're going to throw in somewhere. So I'm sure we're going to do it. So listeners, if we get there, I'll do my best in post to make sure we throw that horn up because I don't want to ruin your work. But at the same time, I've listened and read all of your books. So I'm deep in all these things. But I love how even like you said, he's an everyman.

You kind of get into that pretty quickly too, where this initial event to spark the whole entire story happens within the first few chapters. Like it's pretty sudden. He has success. He sells his company. He's walking across the street. Something happens.

And then the whole entire story arc blossoms from there. Thankfully, he went to the cryogenic center and did some things to enable himself, and that's how it all happened. But there you go. How do you come up with, since this was the first and you hadn't written anymore, how do you get to this big story? How did you even, did you map it all out first? Did you begin to write? And it was iterative like software? How did you even, did you map it all out first? Did you begin to write? And it was iterative like software. How did you get there? It is very iterative and it also benefits a lot from suggestions from editor and publisher and, well, agent in this case. For instance, you're talking about how quickly Bob dies. That's not the way my first

draft went. Okay. I spent considerably more time setting it up. And my agent basically said, there's too much before you get to the point. So we discussed it a little and I shortened it down. And once you get to where he gets killed, that's when things really start to roll. And that's when, if you're going to hook not sure what the book is and you're either listening or reading and you're humming along with the character development and then bam something unexpected happens and so it's at that point the question mark comes about and you have to stick around till the question mark becomes an answer and so you're like while this person died and these things happened uh i think even the stuff in the lab where he becomes or he realizes he's a replicant and that whole discovery process was great because you you kind of set bob was a uniquely positioned character to be good at being a replicant

and you know this because you wrote the book gosh i'm gonna keep telling you this is if you don't know these things dennis because he had this software background he i didn't know this this was written out there but i was always thinking like bob is such a macgyver in every scenario he reminded me of mark watney from the martian and there's even people who have said if if there was a love child between Andy Weir and Ernest Cline, it would be potentially you. I don't know how you feel about that quote, but I don't disagree with it because I'm a fan of both of those authors as well. But Mark Watney is an Andy Weir character from The Martian. And MacGyver is not at all from either of those authors, but from the older time back in the 80s, I think potentially 90s.

But MacGyver could get out of any situation. He always had a way. And that's the thing with Bob is Bob was uniquely positioned, maybe even from a mental state, to be a good replicant. Can you expand a little bit on the difficulty of being a good replicant? That was the whole point of the book, was to make Bob a replicant, stick him in a ship, and shoot him off into space.

So everything that happened in the plot had to further that destination. So to start with, you know, he has to be a software guy, he has to have a physics background, he has to be a nerd, and he has to be a bit of a MacGyver. But you mentioned earlier about the process of writing being iterative, and that's true. I don't have the whole thing mapped out, you know, right off the bat. I don't know how many authors really do. You can have a map for the book, but it's still, you know, the 10,000 foot view. And there's still a lot of detail down there that you have to wade your way through when you're actually writing it. So a lot of stuff got added in.

For instance, the VR, which actually has turned into a major part of the whole concept of the series. The VR was an add-in. Really? Yeah. What I discovered once Bob got into space, and I had gotten as far as him being in, in Epsilon, Aridani and, uh, or Aridani depending. I would have said Aridani.

Yeah. Uh, pronunciations are, are something you don't have to deal with when you're reading, but once you start getting into audio, it becomes important. I've always said Aridani, Ray pronounced it Aridani,

and I went and looked it up and actually either one's good. I had gotten as far as they were in Epsilon Aridney. They'd blown up Medeiros. Bob had cloned himself several times and they're all sitting around talking. And I realized that what I had was a book with a bunch of invisible talking heads. If you ever made it into a movie, it would just be a background of stars for most of the book. There was no visual, there was no visual, no physical action other than the spaceships. So I thought, well, put a VR in there so that he can at least have a virtual reality. And then once you add the VR, of course, you can do anything if you have complete control of the VR.

So now you have baseball games and pubs and moots and offices and a cat and a butler and stuff like that. So that was an iterative addition. And that's one I would definitely concur with being a wise choice because I think you get a chance to show off a lot of what made Bob a great replicant, which was you show off a lot of the unique nerdisms, if that's even a word. Like, they're playing baseball. Badly. They're replicants. Badly. But they

do it for fun. And somehow that's like their pastime. And they're replicants badly but they do it for fun and somehow that's like their past time and they're all bob which i thought was just like the the entire premise of that is such a anomaly in storylines anyways i don't know where else it's happened honestly where you have the main character be many of them the same character but derivatives and whatnot. And there's obviously, you know, what do they call it? What did you call it whenever they drifted? What was the drift word? Replicative drift. Yeah, there you go.

Replicant drift. There was a Michael Keaton movie. Multiplicity. Multiplicity, yeah. I actually never watched it, but it was the same idea where he kept cloning himself yes i will give you that i think you did it uh in a much more unique way like i didn't understand or i was not aware of von leumann probes so you you exposed me to new plausible science fiction that one day might be real and i'm just thinking like wow how did we is this the

future is the future of eventual humanity one person or several people are replicants of nation states fighting against each other and they escape and fight in space and eventually save us and take us somewhere else and terraform different earth like is, it's crazy what you've created. Honestly, it's really, really wild. But I love that back to the VR, because I'm not a big fan as a human, as an individual today, of VR, I guess. It's like, it hasn't quite come about. And then even early iterations of the Bob Nat and VR were iterative too. Like the early versions of VR, there was, even as a replicant, Bob acted like human Bob.

It was still Bob. It was just in a different manifestation, basically, or a different form where he was like, well, let me create this virtual reality for the Bobs to enjoy and do moods and go to the pub and play baseball. And eventually that got more and more unique and each bob had their own background or different settings and i think the cat was

involved and like the taste of the beer was iterated on like all these little unique things that you don't really think about that you can truly enjoy in a book form that was there i thought was really cool well i think one of the reasons that that the VR works in the series and isn't a problem, it's a situation similar to multiverses. There have been a lot of movies where people get stuck in a VR and they have to fight their way out or something like that. And you always have this problem of trying to justify real stakes. Oh, if you die in the vr you die in real life

you know so when you have a movie or a story where the vr is the main combat arena if you will and you're trying to give people a reason to care about or you know the reader a reason to care about what happens in the vr that can be difficult because it is by definition virtual. So in the Bobverse books, the VR is a supporting structure, but it's not plot determinant. It doesn't save the day. You know, it doesn't cause life or death situations. It's a way for Bobs to communicate and all the real action, all the real stakes-based stuff happens in the real universe. Right. It's like the town square for the Bobs. It's a way for you to show the interaction in

between Bob that is Bobs, that is not simply communication from one probe to the next. Because they can do that too, and they do that. Yeah. But they tend to have their moots, as you've called them. And I was, I didn't even know what a moot was. I was like, okay, this is a thing. It's a real thing.

Like moots are, I don't know, meetings, basically. I never called it a moot before. I just called them meetings. I held an air horn over my head and pressed the button. A loud plop filled the room. All conversation ceased as every head turned towards me. Hey everyone, welcome to the first Bob Moot. I've built a matrix here at the Skunk Works that is more than big enough to handle everyone in the Bobiverse in VR.

Bobiverse? Really? Garfield gave me the stink eye. I laughed. Just thought of it. I think it's pretty good, actually. Bobiverse. Bobnet. This galaxy may not be big enough for our ego. That's really cool, the way that you've mapped that out, that they can just have this place to show their character and to, I guess, show their continued humanistic character in a non-humanistic form. They were still human in who they were as Bob. Yeah. And it allows me to throw in a little physical humor once in a while, too. Well, like Admiral Ackbar, I think, was...

Ackbar. Yes. I think even like that, it shows, you know, your... As an author, it shows your exposure to different science fictions out there because that's kind of interesting how this character from star wars doesn't have any emotion even that like he bob is always wondering if he's an ai if he's evolving if he's you know becoming sentient if he's just like this manifestation of bob or a different like he he's talking to himself. I think early on he was like, am I just talking to myself or is Akbar really becoming real? I leaned back, put my hands behind my head and stretched.

It felt good. More importantly, it felt right. If I didn't think about it, I experienced the VR environment as if I was a real person in a real room. Okay, shut it down, Guppy. Push the latest source through the de-obfuscator and we'll run through that when it's done. Aye, aye, sir. I raised a virtual eyebrow.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Guppy was actively developing a sense of humor. He behaved like a dead fish most of the time, but every once in a while there was a moment of snark so let's go a little deeper because the book is multi-booked obviously and i think what made you make bobs or the bobiverse or however you want to phrase it become these guardians because it doesn't seem like at all og bob's way og bob was a developer programmer he wasn't being a guardian of the galaxy by any means but somehow they felt like they had a mission in a way a responsibility almost to save the day that's what it is it's

just a sense of responsibility bob as a human being, was somebody with an overdeveloped sense of, I guess you'd say morals, of responsibility. So as a replicant, if he finds himself in a position where he can either save humanity or shrug and go off and do his own thing. The only thing that he feels he can do is save humanity. That was unexpected, though. Yeah. With Bob, I had to tread a fine line between a character who set his own destiny and a character to whom things happened. You don't want him to be hapless. You don't want him to be just a foil and the universe is blowing him around and stuff like that. But you also don't want him to be completely in control of his destiny.

Otherwise, he's too much of a Gary Stu. I don't know who a Gary Stu is. Oh, sorry. Well, a Mary Sue is the traditional term for a character who's just too good. Okay. for a character who's just too good okay you know who always gets their way and and always knows the answer and and stuff like that so with a male character the gary stew term has sort of evolved okay gotcha i i didn't know that term so there's definitely some things in there that that you are aware of that i i haven't caught Now, so you wrote the original book, We Are Lesion,

We Are Bob, as a trilogy. You've described it being iterative. How in the world do you write an iterative book that is evolving as you write it in a way and know it's going to be a trilogy? How did you know it was going to be a trilogy? What made you, I mean, you had to think about something beyond book one. So the way it works with trying to get a publisher is you have to query your book to either publishers or agents. I would recommend agents myself. So you send out, these days it's email, which is a lot simpler. In the old days, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, you would actually package up your entire manuscript, mail it to an agent with a postage paid return envelope inside so they could send it back. And they would either say yes or no or whatever. These days you can use Query Tracker, which is a website that lists agents and what genres they look for and how you query them and stuff like that.

So I was querying We Are Legion. But while I was doing that, I was continuing to write. And well before I finished the first book, I knew there would be at least another book. By the time Ethan called me to offer me an agency agreement, I was already most of the way through book two, and I knew there would be a third book. So it was already in the works, I guess is basically what it comes down to. Gotcha. Which I find a little fascinating. Remind me who Ethan is. Is he from Audible or is this your agent? Ethan Nellenberg is my agent.

Okay. And so your agent gives you a contract, but then you also have a direct contract with Audible. Do those compete in any way? Ethan always gets a cut of what you do, right? Yes. And Ethan arranges the contracts. That's what the agent does, basically, is everything other than writing. He takes care of all the other stuff so that all I have to do is write and interact with the editor. Wow. And, you know, think up new ideas. Ethan has managed to get me published in, I think, at least a dozen languages now. That's intense. Yeah, a lot of stuff going on.

He's working on a Kickstarter campaign right now to get my books published in paperback form, pre-printed rather than print-on-demand, which is what Amazon does. The print-on-demand books, I mean, they're okay, but they're basically laser printed. So if you can get them done the traditional way with an offset printer and stuff, the quality is higher. You can smell the ink. They smell like books. And anybody who's a book reader, a physical book reader, knows what I mean about that. So he's working on that. Because I've never been beyond audible with your books, I guess I didn't realize at all that your books weren't printed. They're not printed? Well, print is available through Amazon.

But the way that print-on-demand books work on Amazon is they'll print, I don't know, maybe a dozen, some number at a time. They'll keep them in a warehouse and then send them out as they're ordered. And when they're getting low, they'll print another dozen or whatever the number is. But they're essentially print on demand. It's not a large run and it's done with, like I say, a laser printer. That's interesting. Well, good thing for Ethan being such an advocate. Does that relationship, is there a lot of autonomy in there? Do they get to do a lot of things without asking you like this language thing or this Kickstarter thing? Are these things your ideas? Do you collaborate quite well? How is that relationship for you? without checking with me because he is my agent rather than yeah i'm not even sure if a traditional

publisher would do things without checking with the author i i don't have the experience in that area so i don't know but it would be one one level more removed if you will audible is my publisher is what it comes down to i'm different than most authors in that most traditional publishers are, you tend to think of them as text publishers with a side of audio, whereas Audible is audio and we don't care about the text. Interesting. Is that why, because I've seen before, I think I've seen you tweet about these things and I guess now it might be something different because it's X. Folks have asked you about the Bobaverse series becoming a movie, which thankfully we just talked about VR because it makes it more possible to actually visualize some of this exposition between the Bobs, basically. Is that why it's uniquely

challenging for you to go to just being in the movies, so to speak, like having a movie deal? I had a movie option quite a few years ago, maybe five now. Endeavor signed us up for We Are Legion, but they were never able to effect a deal with any publishers. I think I want to be careful here because I'm doing a lot of supposition and I don't want to insult anybody, but I think that basically they're a, a holding company kind of thing. They, they look for assets, products, whatever that they think can make a good movie. They sign people up and then they go looking for a producer and financing and stuff like that and try to bring everything together.

You know, perfectly legitimate business and a laudable way to do things, but it does require a lot of extra work. They were never able to bring things together. They did have a script towards the end and they shopped it around and they just couldn't get anybody interested. So, you know, there's the trouble where you are looking for other people to, you know, to pony up the cash and the resources and stuff. Lord Miller, who signed us up not all that long after Endeavor's contract expired, they're associated with Universal. They have huge backing. They've done a lot of their own stuff, right? My mind's going blank. I just keep thinking the Lego movie.

But there's a lot more than just the Lego movie. But they're a major producer. Yeah. So they don't have to do a lot of that extra legwork to find a writer, to find a script, to find a backer, you know, to find a production company. They've got it all. So if they decide they're going to do a movie, they're going to do a movie. Well, that's good to have. I mean, I would see considering, you know, science fiction book of the year 2016, all the success, you know, you've as a, as a backer in terms of content, you've proven that you can go beyond the trilogy to the fourth book and now the fifth book coming out soon.

I've got it on pre-order. So the moment it's out, I'm going to start queuing it up, obviously. I think Heaven's River was a unique twist to all the books. Not bad. I think it went really deep in the Quinlan world and it was different. Let's just say it's it like immersed yourself it was the whole thing was about Quinlan's in the Quinlan world which was unexpected having been through three books with you already but I think it was a good twist because you eventually got to this

what I always thought Bob was the eye I never really thought of him as replicant until like I was preparing for this conversation with you because i was thinking like i've mentioned your books several times in our podcasts we talk to nerds we talk to software developers and so like they're going to be primed for like your books and so i don't mind mentioning them and i think i've even i've even said i'm eventually gonna get dennis on this show so just wait and see and this has been years in the making basically basically. But I've never thought as Bob is not artificial intelligence, but I guess he's more replicant than he is AI. And in book four, you begin to expose spoiler, by the way. You begin to expose this idea of this pursuit of what you call in the book, true AI, which was unexpected. But all that to say is that like, wow, I would just imagine at this point,

you must be buddies with Andy Weir. Like he's got to have your phone number and you probably are text buddies or whatever. Just be like, Andy, how did you get the Martian into a movie? Can you help me? Or can you make the connections? I think, wouldn't that just be the way to go? Well, the Martian, I'm not the slightest bit surprised it was turned into a movie. It's incredibly visual.

You know, it's got great stakes. It's got, what I really like about The Martian more than anything else is that there's no bad guy. And I say this quite often. This is man versus nature. Nobody in the book is evil or in the movie for that matter. The stakes are all versus circumstance. Ingenuity. Ingenuity, yeah. It's what some people call engineering porn. It's problem solving, serial problem solving, and he makes a point of that at the end of the movie. But I love that kind of story, and I try to make that a part of the at the end of the movie but i love that kind of story and i try to make that a

part of the bobiverse whenever possible as well i think you do have some enemies though you've got some bad guys madero's is the first one or first several i suppose maybe just generally on earth prior to bob leaving this is in book one yeah a lot of you know infighting a lot of um i would not say like world war it's you know everyone's against each other there's a lot of, you know, infighting, a lot of, I would not say like world war. It's, you know, everyone's against each other. There's a lot of things happening that really turn the nations against each other. There's this race to create a replicant and leave Earth. Earth is, I forget exactly what's happening to Earth, but something really bad's happening.

And then obviously Medeiros is that first replicant in space there's the first battle so to speak see you know you have not avoided it then you have the others yeah then you've got was it um remind me who bob was the god of it wasn't the pavlonians it was who was that no deltons the deltons which i thought was interesting too. You found other life out there. Obviously, there's other life out there. I think, well, I say obviously. We think obviously to this day as real life humans, we have not found, in quotes, other intelligent life that we're aware of or that we've been made aware of. more insight because you're an author who writes science fiction maybe you have different access to information in the world but i don't think so but you know the deltons was cool discovering them and bob being a god over them you mentioned ray porter his ability to voice things i think the pavlonian voice was really interesting in how it was like a very i don't want to attempt it because ray does such a great job he does a great job of that meeting with the Pavalonians when he, when the Bobs are trying to give back their original planet.

And they're like, no, that's a monument. That's the museum. Now that whole meeting that took place in that, I think it was the beginning of book three where that takes place. If I recall correctly, it's cool. Yeah. The whole multiple species thing uh i set that up at the beginning of book one with a little bit of exposition on panspermia because i wanted to establish early on that there was going to be a large level of biological compatibility across different planets and i i don't mean you know sex right we're not talking half klingon half human stuff but um you know you can eat the animals on vulcan right

and the path can eat human food and stuff like that so it's set in book one early on and then it becomes a theme all the way through that that most of the life that they've encountered is carbon-based, liquid water-based, has proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and is able to eat each other. It sets a certain tone. You can have a different universe, a different background where life is so fundamentally incompatible between different planets that they can't even breathe each other's air without picking something up. Which was the case, and I don't know if you read this book yet or not. We mentioned, or at least I have, Andy Weir a couple times. The book Hail Mary, there's an incompatibility between the two main characters in that book. I don't want to plot twist or ruin for anybody, but there's a visit, let's just say, to somebody else's planet, and it's not easy to live there without some version of technology to make it possible. Yeah. Are you a fan of that book? I am, yeah.

I read, well, I listened to it. Yeah. Are you a fan of that book? I am. Yeah. I, I read, well, I listened to it. Yes. And, uh, Ray, he did a great job. Yeah. A lot of people say that they had a little trouble with the book at the beginning because they just kept hearing Bob, but that happens with Ray. What can you do? Yeah. He's so identified with the character to Boba Fett's fans. Okay, we're here in the breaks. I'm here with Firas Aboukdij, founder and CEO of Socket.dev. Socket is a developer-first security platform that protects your code from both vulnerable and malicious dependencies. Firas, the status quo of security tools for developers seems to be broken. It seems to be just riddled with tools that may not actually help developers to be more secure and to shift left.

What are your thoughts? I totally agree that current security tools are super broken. There's really two ways that they're broken. The first, they send too many alerts. The second, they send not enough alerts. What I mean by that is they send too many alerts. They send false positives. They send, they inflate the severity. They say that it's a critical security issue when it's actually a low security issue.

They tell you about vulnerabilities and developer dependencies that are never going to run in production. So there's all these reasons why they're just wasting your time with this noise. And on the other hand, they're not alerting you about things that actually matter. So if you look at like the news and you look at kind of the attacks that are affecting companies and that are affecting developers today, there are things like malicious dependencies, typosquat attacks, hijacked dependencies, risky dependencies that have like hidden behavior in them that will open up pop-ups to random sites or steal certain data from your system. Things that you do see in the news quite frequently, right? And we see them literally, we see a hundred attacks per week at Socket that we're detecting

right now that are an NPM, PyPy, Maven, and the Go ecosystems, which are the four we support today. The current tools, they send you too many alerts, all this low importance stuff, but then they don't even alert you about all the attacks that actually matter. And so that's what we're doing at Socket. We're sending you the right alerts, the alerts that actually matter. So you get, when you are alerted, you actually believe it and you take it seriously because it's real, you know, that's what we're trying to do. And that's what I think we're doing really well.

That's why we have over 6,000 organizations that have added Socket into their GitHub. It's a two-click installation. It's literally super easy. You go to the GitHub marketplace, you search Socket, you click install, and you click all repos. Boom, your entire company is protected. And it doesn't block developers. It doesn't prevent you from shipping code. Initially, it's all just kind of in a worn mode. So it's really easy to get started. No source code access. We don't read your source. We just need a list of dependencies that you're using.

So it's a really light and easy installation. Very, very developer-friendly tool. Okay, they've made it too easy to install the GitHub app. Go to socket.dev. There's a button right there on the homepage. Install GitHub app. Or if you want to go deeper and see behind the scenes and get questions answered, you can book a demo. But the first step is to go to socket.dev, learn about Socket for GitHub, Socket CLI, and the Socket dependency search.

Find any packet for your project and see its security concerns or lack thereof. Once again, socket.dev, that's S-O-C-K-E-T dot dev. Well, Intel Innovation 2024 Accelerate the Future is right around the corner. It takes place September 24th and 25th in San Jose, California. This event is all about you, the developer, the community, and the critical role you play in tackling the toughest challenges across the industry. Ignite your passion for AI and beyond, grow your skills to maximize your impact, and network with your peers as they unleash the next wave of advancements in technology. Understand the emerging innovation and trends in dev tools, languages, frameworks, and technologies in AI and beyond.

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Register using the link in the show notes or to learn more, go to intel.com slash innovation. speaking of ray then i guess what kind of relationship do you have with ray porter are you guys buddies do you guys hang out have you had dinner like what's your relationship with him uh we've met once uh we had dinner actually in la i was down there for the X Prize a couple years ago and we called Ray up and said hey we should meet and we did we exchanged emails occasionally we almost ended up on a panel at Comic-Con in San Diego but COVID hit that year yeah so yeah yeah, I mean, buddies know. We know each other. We have great mutual respect. I wouldn't have anybody else do the Bobaverse books if I had anything to say

about it. But, yeah, that's about the limit. Gotcha. See, I would think that, and maybe this is the fact that you're in the early part of the show, you mentioned you're not sure how to handle this fandom right towards you. You're not quite a superstar. You're just a normal human being. But I would imagine that you might be a little closer to Ray Porter because he is so iconic for, and even as you said, when they were listening to Andy Weir's book, Hail Mary, they were hearing Bob and Bobaverse echoes in it, that Ray is so tied, Ray Porter is so tied to the Bobaverse series.

Like, I agree. I think he had done a phenomenal job. I mean, maybe would have I enjoyed the books as much if he didn't voice it? I think still, yeah. I think I would still enjoy it, but I think there's something special. There's a new ingredient that forms, a new element that gets formed when you put your writing and his voice together. There's a whole new thing that happens

because you've got great writing, you've got great storylines, but he's also a great voice actor. And as you had said before, many different voices, which he does quite well. Yeah. Well, people who read the Bobaverse still like the Bobaverse, but people who listen to the Bobaverse really like the Bobaverse. Okay. That's the difference. Yeah. In terms of voices, we did exchange some emails when he was getting ready to voice the first book.

And he asked me, you know, how do I visualize these people? So we talked about Homer and we talked about Colonel Butterworth and Admiral Ackbar was pretty obvious and a few other characters like that. And Ray just nailed it. You know, absolutely nailed it. And it's those distinctive voices that really make you sit up and take notice. Yeah. I should add that, of course, one of the reasons why we're not, I guess, what you'd say, closer buddies. Better buddies.

Better buddies is that I live in Canada. So travel down to California is, you you know it's a significant undertaking it's it's not like we live in igloos or anything but I have to go to the airport which is not fun for anybody on the planet and uh you know fly down it's two and a half hour flight I do it a couple of times a year for various reasons but Ray has a huge scheduling things too he spends a significant time in england uh for various reasons you know on projects and stuff so trying to connect would be would be difficult at the best of times well i alluded to potentially having andy weir on text how possible would it be or i guess how motivated are you to see this non-trilogy trilogy turn into maybe a multi-movie

movie i don't know how to describe it like to be on the big screen how motivated are you by that i'm not sure how you intend the word motivated i mean i'm i'm motivated to like the idea because it means lots more exposure and lots more money. I mean, there's no downside unless somebody did a terrible job, but not with Lord Miller. You're not going to get that with Lord Miller. It's going to be a good job. Now, in terms of multiple movies, the contract allows for multiple movies but doesn't specify multiple movies, i interpret to mean well we'll see

how the first one goes well you mentioned being a listener of ready player one will wheaton i'm a big fan of will wheaton i'm a big fan of ready player one and it took me a little bit to really enjoy ready player two as an example of a sequel let's see how it goes because i can't imagine uh a movie version of ready player 2 i've listened to the book before i watched the movie thankfully because the the movie is good but it's standalone unique good rather than uh you've literally just watched a movie version of the book i think the book goes way deeper yeah way more into the details obviously that's what books do but i think they're two separate works of art based on a similar storyline and then you have ready player

two and and i guess where i'm going with this is like, we'll see how the sequel goes because Ernest Klein has gotten a lot of pushback on Ready Player Two. A lot of just, I don't want to expose it too much, but a lot of things in there that was uniquely different than Ready Player One. And I didn't expect that story from to be the part two. So I'm not sure we'll ever see a Ready Player Two based on Ready Player Two, the book, as a movie, based on that, as a reader, as a fan. Right. I have not read or listened to Ready Player Two,

so I can't comment either way on the story itself. But the thing about Ready Player One is that it was a standalone story. It came to a very satisfying conclusion. And we're done. And the problem always, when you have a story that ends that well, and they all lived happily ever after,

is how do you generate a new conflict? Right. For the next story. How do you generate a new storyline well i don't want to ruin the book for you i think i don't know how frequently you queue up new books but i will say it's a as a reader and listener of radio player one to me it's a must listen like you have to okay if you're a big fan of radio player one as a book to me it's a must read must listen and i'd even say must read must listen maybe twice maybe three times it's a really good storyline it's got a lot of cool stuff in it specifically

i think the way you think about and the way you introduce true science into your books that make it somewhat plausible i wouldn't say that say that the Babaverse is truly plausible science fiction. I think it's plausible science fiction fantasy, let's just say. There's some fantasy in there, and there's also some plausibility in there. I think with Ready Player Two, the unique things that happen there is how they go into the Oasis or back into the Oasis through a whole new interface that i think is worth exploring as someone that's in your position as an author and a thinker in this way that benefits financially

from creating new worlds and thinking very vividly i think it's a must listen for you so i think you enjoy it's just it was different enough where it was like wow i didn't expect that to be the next layer of it and there's just a lot of cultural things that happen and that make it a little bit a little bit strange let's just say but that being said you know i would personally enjoy watching any of the baba verse anything from the baba verse as a movie at least once even if you even if you only have a standalone movie and it's only good enough to be a single movie fine by me just take my money all right me. Just take my money. All right, Dennis? Just take my money right now. I'm going to pre-buy the 4K Blu-ray because I like to watch 4K Blu-rays in my home theater.

I'll pre-buy it today. And I'll wait five years. No problem. Okay. What's next? When's the movie out? I'm joking with you. What's next?

When's the movie out? Well, here's the thing. Lord Miller is currently wrapping up production on project tail. Mary. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, Ryan Gosling. Equally excited about that equally. Yeah. But I should add as an aside here, one of the things that happens when you as an author sign an option deal with a Hollywood production company or holding company or whatever

is they sign you up and then you never hear from them again. There's no communication. My agent is always talking about this. It's like a black hole descends on everything and you cannot get anything out of them. Lorder is a little more communicative than that with um with endeavor we just never heard anything the point is that a lot of what i say when i'm talking about the movie deal and such is supposition on my part with no insider knowledge but i think what's happening is project hail m was signed before me. I'm pretty sure that's true. And they've been working on that movie. And as it's wrapping up, they're going to be starting to a background on some of the past work. Very excited about Hail Mary. You mentioned the Lego movie. Two that stand out to me that I've definitely watched and thoroughly enjoyed as adaptations are what I would call brand new visuals to a well-known, well-played-out,

well-done character line is Spider-Man. So you've got into the Spider-Verse and across the Spider-Verse, I think are absolutely phenomenally cinematically done adaptations of a over and over and over done storyline that I think brought brand new visuals to the Spider-Man world. And so if, if that person is a producer of that and part of that, then I have high hopes for Hail Mary and obviously high hopes for The Bobaverse in their hands. You mentioned a, you know, tangentially, I suppose, you mentioned a black hole or maybe happenstance. I look at the cover of Not Till We Are Lost, which is the Bobaverse book five book coming out.

I mentioned I've got it on pre-order releases September 5th this year, 2024. It's in my pre-orders. I'm ready. I'm queued up. I can't wait. I see what looks like a version of a black hole, potentially like we saw in Interstellar. Are you a fan of that movie by any chance? Yep.

Okay. Obviously you are, right? You're steeped in all science fiction. Tell me about that. What are we not seeing? What can you tease about book five? Given the black hole in the cover, your accidental mention of a black hole, which I'm just going to use as a good segue.

What can you say about book five? Okay. I will say this. That is Sagittarius A star. Okay. And they arrive a little bit ahead of schedule. And that's it? That's it. That's it. Okay.

Well, if you think about it, 26,000 years. It's not a black hole. It looks like a black hole. Sagittarius A-star is a black hole. It's the central black hole of the galaxy. Okay, gotcha. It's where they were heading after they finished blowing up the other's homeworld. And it's a 26,000 light year trip at sublight velocity. So arriving a little ahead of schedule has to tell you something's going on.

Yeah. Okay. All right. I'll have to go and re-listen to piece back your breadcrumbs to make that make sense. And I guess on that note, we didn't talk about the software you've written behind the scenes. I know we don't have much time left and I want to ask you a couple more questions about different things you have going on. So just paraphrase and cliff notes as much as you'd like to, but you've written some software behind the scenes to help you piece together this timeline. I think it was super wild and tantalizing how you were able to play with this idea of time.

I think even from the perspective that the Bobs are all computers, essentially, replicants. So they're no longer in human form. They speak in milliseconds. That took one millisecond i thought that was super cool the way you even brought that into the storyline you spoke in time as if it was milliseconds not like we as humans you know experience long seconds long minutes long hours and you mentioned this you know timing it would take to get to the star

well to a human that's like we'll just forget it because i'm dead by time like even a quarter of a percent uh of the trip is taken you know in the as a bob as a replicant as a von neumann probe you don't really care about time because you have all the time theoretically in the world yeah also it's flexible i mean i don't specifically go into it in book five but icky and Day could very well have just set their frame rate down really, really low. So the whole 26,000 year trip takes 10 minutes to them. Precisely. If they wanted to. Which I think is cool because, but like just fast forward through the thing, right?

I think that's a cool property because it gives you flexibility as an author to fast forward or slow down time and you have full control. I think it's pretty wild. Well, let's zoom out from the Babaverse, which I think we can probably talk literally at length about you lightly mentioned it during our conversation so far about XPRIZE I think it's potentially wild that you've are part of a working group I'm not sure what this really is and what you've done there but it seems like wow you're a retired programmer now a successful author as well as a retired programmer, now a successful author, as well as a retired programmer. What in the world are you doing around XPRIZE and the integer requirements of AI?

You obviously think a lot about artificial intelligence as an author because it's part of your storylines, at least in the Bobaverse. What is the XPRIZE working group for you? What are you doing there? Well, I was invited to become part of the Science Fiction Advisory Council back in, I think, 2019. And I'm always a little nervous about giving years because I'm usually a year off either way. It might have been 2018. 18. But anyway, I was invited to become part of the Science Fiction Advisory Council and invited down to the XPRIZE conference, which happens at the end of October down in California. Locations changed a couple of times. And it was fun. It was interesting. It was an introduction

to something that I really didn't even know existed. But it was basically a one-off because, for one thing, COVID got in the way and we had a couple of years there where, you know, nothing was happening. Once COVID was over, I got an invitation from the XPRIZE people to come down and they changed the format a little bit it was no longer a science fiction advisory council so much as individual science fiction authors among a lot of other people who were being invited to give input on generating new x prizes it's an amazing cross-section of people industry leaders, deep technological experts, and in my case, wild-eyed blue-sky thinkers, I guess. But I went down last year and had a great time again. And they've invited me again this year, so I must have done something right.

And I think I supply the unhinged imagination part. It's the only thing I can think of because I certainly don't have the expertise that some of the people there have. It sounds interesting to get to do that kind of thing. And that's supposed from being an advisor on, let's say, a show called Silicon Valley or something like that, where you're giving input into the psyche and the world of Silicon Valley or into the input or how you might hypothesize solving, you know, AI, the energy used to power today's world's AI, which is just a tremendous amount of energy being used. And then you got to wonder, like, is it for the positive or is it for the negative long term for humanity and we in in today's terms we have to quantify that i think that's what you're talking

about right yeah are you thinking specifically of the energy use or of the whole ai as an existential threat thing uh definitely not as an existential threat i think more the way you described it to me in our email was that it is a working group working on a prize for a new technology to reduce the energy requirements of AI. And I think there's a lot of speculation. I think there's a lot of well-knowns out there of where AI can take humanity. But at the same time, you know, it's been compared that our brains are quite effective and use way less power than a seemingly similar AI, which is not truly AGI, artificial general intelligence, or even true intelligence. It's manufactured intelligence, really.

How much energy usage goes into it. So I imagine this working group you're doing is like evaluating and hypothesizing and supposing how this will play out with the energy requirements to power today's and tomorrow's AI. Yeah. Well, the problem is right now they're generating LLMs, large language models, which is what the current AIs are. They're generating them using brute force techniques. Let's throw more computers at it. Then let's throw more air conditioners at the computers. Then let's throw more electrical substations at the whole thing.

And that's why the power requirements are getting so big, because every time they want to improve or increase the power of their AI, they just throw more computers at it. And yeah, they're energy hungry. They're big. The human brain uses an entirely different technique. It's not software. It's hardware. Everything's done in what Rudy Rucker would call wetware. But the energy generation is so much less. The analogy I like to use is if you generate or use a computer to generate a video of a person rolling dice, just a couple of dice in your hand, shake, roll, and you get something. The amount of power required to generate a video of that happening is not insignificant. It's probably a couple of kilowatts. But the amount of power released if you actually do that,

even if you include the energy of the human hand rolling the dice, it's a couple of calories. And that's because it's done completely in hardware. There's no software emulation. It's more efficient. So if you're going to reduce the power requirements for an AI, you have to get an advisor or as a big sky idea guy kind of thing as you said before yeah that's your role in this working group is to think not so much to implement yeah well thankfully i'm on two groups right now actually i also got invited into the uh health group on consciousness on measuring and detecting consciousness, which is another really neat concept to deal with. But the one correction I have to make is that the XPRIZE working groups aren't there to come up with solutions. They're there to come up with

prizes and goals and let other people come up with the solutions and win the prize. So we're not trying to think, how can you do this in hardware? We're there to say, how can you come up with a way to generate AI using 10,000 times less energy? Go. And the prize is 50 million if you do it. So that's really what we're trying to do. Gotcha.

And because we're short on time, otherwise I'd go deeper. Wow. So that's really what we're trying to do. Gotcha. And because we're short on time, otherwise I'd go deeper. We'll leave that there. I do want to give you a chance to mention two upcoming things. You got The Fly, which I was surprised by as the title, or at least the working title, because there's obviously a very well-known, potentially plausible science fiction movie from, I think, early 90s. I could be wrong. The Jeff Goldblum one.

Yes, sir. Yeah. Jeff Goldblum. And it's a phenomenal rewatch. I mean, if you haven't rewatched it in like a remastered version, it's well done. I need to say that my book is nothing like that. Okay, good. There's no connection at all.

In fact, Steve suggested that I change the working title to The Fly, but not that one. Okay. Good working title. I'm not sure about a good final title. But I suppose parentheses are in your way. Yeah. Definitely not the final title. One possible title that Steve suggested was Flybot.

Yeah. When you're done with book six of the Bobaverse, and since we're mentioning the working title The Fly and this other one, which is a working title of 10,000 Worlds, these are non-Bobaverse books. When you're done with book six, are you going to be roughly in your mind as much as you might be done with the Boba verse series and you're free to sort of like roam new ideas. Yeah. There's,

there's too much happening for me to cut things off at six. Book five opens things up exponentially. Great news. If you think of book four, have ends river as having focused down on one aspect of the Bobaverse universe, Book Five goes in the opposite direction. It's a huge expansion of potential situations, let's say. Okay. It's the Bobs looking outwards.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because, again, I presumed six books, a sixology, however you want to describe it. I'm probably wrong. I was assuming that. I was really hoping that it was not the end. So I'm glad you said that because it does seem like there's just so much you can explore and hopefully you can do it well. Yeah. I use as a working number 10, 10 books. But I'm not limiting myself to it. If it organically heads in that

direction, fine. I do have an ending in mind for the series. And I'll put that at the end of the appropriate book, but only if it organically grows in that direction. Good. Okay. Well, Dennis C. Taylor, it's been fascinating to talk to the author of the books that I love very much. I'm excited that you tested this out, this challenge with your wife many years ago to explore this. I've definitely enjoyed all of your work and will continue to enjoy your work for hopefully years to come. It's great to meet you virtually slash in person. Thank you for making time to sit down with me, a podcaster to thousands and thousands of software developers across this entire globe. I'm sure they're all going to become fans of your work. If they haven't already been so far before,

I'll drop this link obviously in the show notes, but Dennis E Taylor.org is where you can go to find his personal site. He's on X slash Twitter. Of course you can check that out. That's where you can go to find his personal site. He's on X slash Twitter. Of course, you can check that out. That's where I pay attention to your random tweets. You don't tweet too much. But I always enjoy little daps of where you're going to go with the Bobaverse series and the different things you're doing. So, again, I enjoyed feedback.

If Ethan can bless some way, shape, or form, your editor can bless some way, shape, or form, your future backing to expanding on that. Or if you have any ideas, I would be a pre-orderer right then and there. I'm fascinated with time loops and time travel. I think the way you've architected the Bobaverse series has been very well done. So I'm a big fan. Thank you so much for making time. Anything else to say in closing? Anything left that I haven't said yet at all?

No, we've covered a lot of ground. Absolutely. Well, very well then. Dennis E. Taylor, thank you so much for making time. It's been awesome. All right. Thanks for having me on. Well, my Bobaverse fans, thank you for tuning in for this show. So cool talking to Dennis. And there's so much more to enjoy for the Bobaverse. 10 books. I mean, book five is coming out next month, September 2024.

And that means we have five more books to enjoy and a movie. Wow. And to my Andy Weir fans out there, Hail Mary fans out there, I know you're out there. Did you hear Dennis slip and mention? Maybe he slipped. Maybe he didn't. He mentioned Ryan Gosling. He mentioned that Phil Lord is producing Hail Mary as we speak. I didn't know that, but that's good news and I'm excited. One thing we didn't get into as much as

I wanted to, or I thought we might, is the very cool software that Dennis has had to write and produce to maintain Gantt charts and time dilation and all these things to keep the timeline of the Bobaverse intact. Maybe he can make time for a future episode just on that. We'll see. We'll see. A big thank you to our friends and sponsors for this episode. Century. Check them out at century.io. Use our code changelog at a hundred bucks off the team plan. So cool. One password. I love one password.

Socket. Love socket. Socket.dev. And our friends over at Intel producing the Intel Innovations 2024 conference here soon. Intel.com slash innovations. Register today while early bird pricing is in effect. And of course, to our partners, our amazing platform that we build on, Fly.io. You know that is the home of changelog.com.

We love Fly. I think you could try Fly out today. Learn more at Fly.io. And as always, those beats are banging. Breakmaster Cylinder brings those banging beats and we love them. Literally. I hope you do too. Okay. There's more in store for the Bobaverse, but this show is done. Check out Dennis's website, dennisetaylor.org and hop in Slack if you can and share your thoughts on this episode or on the Bobiverse series or any of the books that Dennis has written or any science fiction you love. You can do so for free at changelog.com slash community. Okay, we're done.

See you on Friday. Outro Music