 Well, I welcome everybody. Thanks so much for coming out tonight to see Randall Monroe, the quarterly doctor role in conversation on the occasion of the release of Thorny's latest book, Thorny confided that Thorny locked down he wrote nine books. I made a little friend. And it's just so wonderful to have them here tonight. I'll introduce them in just a second. My name is Dr. Citrin. I have been a fan of exclusive stories available for a long time. And how to start what became the work of the client center for the society's gear at HLS. And one thing to know logistically is that in the year, this year, our great local indie comic book store, and they have probably used Thorny's book all night, but just this one. They have a few of them, and they should have some of Randall's. Excellent. On the other side of this fall, that will be available after our session is over here. May I make an honorable term. And we are recording everything as is probably the agency, so just be aware. So how to describe Thorny doctoral? Well, at the back of the book describes this book as swarming and ruthless. And I think that they love people for swarming and ruthless. And I see Thorny in action with the electronic frontier foundation as an advocate. I think they are saying at this point you are a connoisseur of experts. He is most recently coined the word shitification. But that word was just recognized by the American dictionary. It's not the American Dialectical Society. They've got different ideas. They will go by ideas. They can dialect society named in shitification its word of the year. I think I'm going to read one of them. And this was a wonderful quote from about 25 years ago. He was very excited about Napster. I don't know if anybody has said that. They were excited about Napster, but quote, in the Napster University act of downloading a file made another copy of it available. And this is an entirely new kind of economics. It's a tragedy. The problem is it's reversed. So the sheep shit rats. We don't feel like that. But I think that is part of Thorny's ability to uphold the world as it is. And to convey that message to the rest of us who may have a natural tendency to whistle past certain great yards present to you. And in doing so to help envision a better society, kind of one, just one, a three-year one, with a definition of freedom that isn't sort of just the pedos to definition. So, Colleen has a way of viewing the world just so so fiercely and so observantly. And that's something that I think we share so well with Randall Monroe. Randall Monroe will offer a book such as What Give, How To, and Think, Explainer. And then how the XKCB is somebody who also is so intensely curious about how things work, how they might be made better. And if looking at the negative for the purpose of concerning advancing and even fighting for the possible. And that's why I am so excited to see both Randall and Cory get started at the time. And so I think we're going to turn it over to you to begin the acquisition. And John, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure. So I want to start by saying I owe you a very specific thank you. Because about, so it's 18 years, 19 years ago now. When I first started drawing comics, I was posting them on my website, which like many people I had a website wasn't sure what to put on it. I started posting drawings to my old notebooks. And linking them on my live and sharing with some friends. And one day I got a message on AOL's messenger from someone who I did not know and actually still don't know who this was. And they said, hey, I saw one of the people, one of the little girls who you grew, and I sent it to my friend Cory. And he really liked it and wanted to know if he could put it on his blog. And I said, sure. And figured out what the blog this was and was like, I don't know, I need more web server states. And Cory, he got a server septic handle traffic because suddenly there would be more than like one person a day would be in my comics. And then you posted one of my comics to your blog. And that was the first time I had suddenly a bunch of people reading it. And was absolutely the single event that kicked off me getting to have a career doing this. So thank you. Thank you. And I don't know, I know that writing stuff for the internet is both like you get a ton of feedback maybe more than you necessarily want all the time. But you also it can feel like you're just throwing things out in the void and like only imaginary internet commenters are reading it or thinking anything about it. And, and so I just want to say like thanks because this was a you posted a thing and it materially changed someone's life in a really cool way. And thank you to hear that Randall. Thank you. And it goes without saying but obviously, I amplified something very clever that you did and then you went on to do a string of things that were each of the more clever than the last and that, you know, it's I'm I'm I'm very honored by the credit you give me but I think the credit is really due to you. You've done something really remarkable. We'll say it's 5050. I'll take half of it. So, so I really enjoyed your book. I was really curious reading it. I read a lot of it when I was on an airplane and didn't have an internet connection to look things up. And a lot of the a lot of the things that happened in the book sounded both like this villain is doing a thing that's like clearly, you know, extremely out there and how horrible it is but also wait I kind of think I saw a news story about this. Is this a real thing? And, and I just had to go through the whole book not being able to go and check which things were real and which ones weren't but I did start to wonder more and more were you as you write about these characters who are very thinly veiled or sometimes named outright doing horrible things and you're you're describing them committing crimes like did you expect to get sued by anyone and was it more like who are you the most expecting to sue you and were you hoping for it or hoping right well let me let me step back and say this is the second book in a in a series that you can read in any order. I wrote the first one during lockdown red team blues about the last adventure of a hard fighting two-fisted forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley busting high-tech finance stands and I had this this conceit that I could write the last novel in a long-running beloved series without writing any other books. Nice. And that it would just have that that last episode of mash vibe without the tedious previous 11 seasons and my editor liked it so much that he bought two more which then presented this conundrum because it's very decidedly his last adventure and then I realized you don't have to tell them in order you know nominally you take away some of the suspense maybe this beloved long-running character well won't die at the end of this book but of course you know one ever expects like Spencer to die at the end of the book and so that suspense is never really there and if you tell the story backwards or out of order you don't have any continuity problems because you're not foreshadowing you're backshadowing and the more kind of Baroque detail you chuck in there the more of like a premeditated motherfucker you appear to be even if you're just winging at the whole time so the last book the first book is his last adventure it's a cryptocurrency heist because if you're going to write about high-tech finance scams the place to start is with cryptocurrency but the this book is set in the in this dot-com era the time when Yahoo bought and destroyed every successful tech company that anyone could imagine and and and it's during this period that that is itself a bezel be easy le bezel not be easy l the black rectangle is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for the magic interval after the con artist has your money but before you know it's gone and in that moment the national stalk of happiness if it goes up because you know so long so long as no one asks Sam Benjamin Fried for the money yet they're rich and so is he right it's only when you try to redeem that you that you've got a problem and he'll tell you that in his sentencing hearing just let me go back to the casino and I'll make the money to make everybody whole again so the bezel in this case is like the moment after the dot-com crash right up to the great financial crisis where everyone is feeling very flush and this was a time rife with all kinds of scams that were later on uncovered things that seemed legitimate later on fell apart and so it's a good moment for it and yeah I invoke a lot of stuff that really happened in that period and this is a kind of epiphenomenon of being a blogger right if you're a if you're a like a regular writer whenever you have an idea or something seems interesting you make a note to yourself in a little notebook like this I do carry a little notebook like this but it's almost entirely boggle words because my family plays a lot of boggle on vacation and I'm the only one who carries around a notebook what I do when something seems important is I write it up for public consumption which is like this very mnemonic exercise right when instead of like scribbling something cryptic to yourself that you promise yourself a you'll be able to decipher your handwriting and b you'll figure out what you meant when you've done so you write it up for other people and that makes you remember it it also sticks it in a database right so there's like literally like just a minusql back end on a wordpress site with 60,000 blog posts I wrote about everything that ever seemed important so you get this like sort of super saturated soup of little fragmentary story ideas that are kind of knocking around your head and they nucleate and they crystallize and you get like a novel or a story out of it and then you can find the details in your blog and then there's the annotations from the people who showed up to tell you you're full of shit and and so you can really like kind of pull together a lot of work very quickly one of the things I discovered during all these years of writing is that it's very hard to predict who's going to sue you or threaten you and that both things have happened a lot and that the the primary predictor is not whether you've actually inflicted a wound on someone it's really how thin skin they are like there's just you know the saplers threatened me at one point over something really piddly especially given all the other stuff that happened but they had you know they had just like just vicious attack lawyers on retainer that anytime anyone breathed a hint that the saplers weren't just like good natured slobs who are funding art galleries and helping people with the fourth vital sign the that all important fourth vital sign pain you know that that they would just show up and like dig for you now in terms of like whether I want to get sued I don't like getting sued I don't like getting threatened either there was one thread I really liked but the rest of them I don't like I'll tell you about the thread I like but but um you know I work for the electronic frontier foundation right I hang out with great lawyers I remember when my first novel came out down at the magic kingdom it had a blurb from Larry Lessig on it and I was like oh please oh please oh please oh please this would be great and I think that they looked at it they were like no no no but you know the one threat that I really liked so when when bird rolled out their scooters their dockless scooters and then they just sort of had this thing where they were encouraging people to just leave them anywhere and people who were used wheelchairs couldn't get down the sidewalk and they were all over the place and police were impounding these by the thousands and then bird wasn't bothering to get them back and they were being sold at auction for like 10 bucks each there was a company that made a chinese company that made a screw-in alternative controller for it so you could just go buy one at the at the auction and then put your own controller on it and then it was your electric scooter for like five bucks and so I wrote about this and I'm not making this up the chief counsel of birds was called Linda quack and according to her linkedin profile her her specialty was employment law and she sent me a dmca 1201 threat which you know without getting into a lot of detail this is like to call it a red rag to a bowl is to do violence to good hard working red rags and bulls I this like you could not have sent it to someone who was more anxious to have someone really stupid with a lot of money try and make a bad precedent so that we could finally create some case law in a place where every time something bad happened the bad guys ran away as soon as the cavalry arrived and I was like maybe this person is stupid enough to hang in there and let us have a case and we can get a precedent wouldn't that be great and then my colleague hit wall shitty ff who's a proud daughter of of of mit in Cambridge she sent a a very sternly worded letter to them and they folded like a cheap soup which is a pity I just thought it was the one fight I really I would have loved to cook Linda quacks goose them just for it I'm wondering when when when you were writing about a scenes set in 2006 you know at the beginning of the book it's 2006 and you jump around you know you we jump forward in time throughout but I remember you were describing you know which smartphone the character had in what year were there any anachronism things where you looked it up and you're like whoa wait a minute that wasn't around then or or anything like that like I always feel like I I have such a like weird view of what was it's like I swear I saw this on YouTube and then I look it up it was in 2004 that it was viral and I'm like it wasn't on YouTube what did I even watch things on before you know right right you see yeah you saw it in a flash video player yeah so I have this thing that I do every morning where I not that I go to uh I go to my blog archives for this day from 20 oh nice years ago five years ago one year ago and I pull out the headlines that seem interesting and I put them in my newsletter and I compare this to like when you're working dough you get the stuff at the edge that's kind of dried out and crumbly and you fold it back into the middle and so it's a real interesting way to kind of revisit your priors you know these hands up and says oh here's this funny thing that you used to say 25 years ago like I sort of remember saying that because I quoted myself saying that 20 years ago and last week I found that blog post from 20 years ago and so I have a pretty good it's like on the one hand it's very atemporal because I have there's a lot of currency for things that happened a long time ago all kind of jumbled around in there on the other hand I have a pretty good sense of that timeline of when it all happened and you know and I do get a nice frisson often where I'll be like oh it's been 10 years it's been 10 years since that thing that I've been thinking about has happened or it's been 15 years often it's obits and you know you get a moment where you're like no it's been 10 years or 15 years since they left us and you know that's also quite nice if bittersweet to to have a way that you revisit the people that that you know aren't with us anymore and in a kind of structured way I actually get a little anxious about it when I go on vacation because I don't do that day you know if I'm on holiday I don't do it and I'm like well I'm going to have to wait five years for that data roll around again before I'll I'll revisit it but I will you know I'm two years out from doing my 25 year post adding 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 and 1 so I love that kind of exercise I subscribe to a random email newsletter where someone does that with the onion 20 years ago and they just like what are the headlines that the onion had this week 20 years ago how do these jokes look now what how do we feel about like would this joke work now is this even like we can't even figure out what the joke is because ever it's all forgotten I like that kind of exercise yeah I go through I have gazetteers of punch magazine from the 19th century and they have the small front of the book pieces where they're like little jokes and there'll be things like an American gentleman has invented a type writing machine that will allow you to record your thoughts faster than you can think them no longer will we have to endure the indignity of bad tavern nibs and clearly this was very funny in the mid 19th century and I'm like a bad tavern nibs I'm not sure what that is but I don't want one I love reading the jokes I love so I always would read through any kind of the humor section in the library and I feel like for me it was something like 1955 was the point where if I read those like one panel you know New Yorker style cartoons that was the point where like half of them I couldn't figure out what the joke was you know because it's like a reference something and then but then you go back like another another 50 years another you know century and and I am more often baffled than not but I love the I love the ones where they'll it's not just like Americans invented a type writing machine it's like I see President Chester Arthur has decided to use his hat rack for hanging hats now and you're like what there's like 10 assumed things here you know so the thing is if you go far back enough you don't have that problem anymore because you get to the golden age of the editorial cartoon where everything had a right you know President Truman brackets standing in for America but but it'll still be references that you you know it'll be the equivalent of that it'll be like like they'll have the 20 to 50 Farrell hogs labeled and it's like you know someone 100 years from now they understand what Farrell hogs are but I don't know why we're suddenly talking about 20 to 50 of them very right I really appreciate the that your book has a you know that you that you've you've got the series of forensic accountant as a main character yeah because I I and you know you describe late in the book your character talks about with a deep sense of you know personal intensity that I can't imagine is an invented trait the love of going through really really complicated documents yeah and trying to figure out what's at the heart of them um I've always one of my weird late at night hobbies is I've always liked like reading NTSB incident reports or like or like other other accident reports ideally the ones where you know no one gets hurt or like where where something really weird happens because and and I was trying to think about like why do I find that so satisfying like why is it so interesting to me and I think um and and I feel like for me part of it is that it's a lot easier to make like it's a lot easier to make a mess than to like clean it up than to figure out what went wrong it's a lot easier to make something complicated than it is to undo that complication and I love the taking something that only took a few minutes to go wrong but that you have a bunch of people working very hard to go back over and trace how did this go wrong how did this get tangled which thing broke where um and and and I'm curious what you like where do what about that appeals to you like sure I mean there are people who do this really well far better than I do so some of you might know an incredible podcast called where there's your well there's your problem about civil engineering disasters and they go into really deep detail with it um Emily Bender and and Tinnit Gebru they say that their superpower is they read the footnotes they follow the references uh and so there are lots of people who do this really well I you know I am not temperamentally a detailed person uh and um that puts me at a certain disadvantage in a lot of policy circles there is a kind of policy fight that you win by being in sort of the sixth sigma of limbic tolerance for boredom right and just being able to like write and also parse extremely complicated like ornamentally complex documents you know when I was at the World Intellectual Property Organization as a UN delegate for EFF you know that it was so hard to understand just what people were saying it wasn't the language barrier and it wasn't even jargon it was a kind of um uh like combat combat by uh trying to bore the other person into a sense of like yeah fine let's just move on uh and in in finance circles they have this term mego which stands for my eyes blaze over where if you make the prospectus thick enough people assume that a pile of shit that big has to have a pony underneath it and and I think because I'm not temperamentally someone who who does like that kind of thing you know I grew up as a fiction writer not as a lawyer and so I uh have spent a lot of my life you know appreciating really good prose that's very clear and so on and there are lots of lawyers who write like that but there's also a kind of legal writing that is the opposite of that for uh deliberately not because you've been poisoned by law school but because that's a uh an effective tactic um and so I think because it doesn't come naturally to me that the joys of it are much more manifest because when I manage it I feel really proud of myself for having gotten to it and I sometimes call these books Panama Papers Fan Fit because when the Panama Papers dropped and the Paradise Papers, Luxe Leagues, IRS Leagues and so on when you if you dug deep into them what you discovered is that a lot of the complexity there was also performative right it was also there just to kind of um ward you off with what Dana Claire calls the shield of boringness and then when you actually dug into it you started to see that there were funny little uh quirks going on in the text so there's a thing I call millionaire on billionaire violence uh and this is where you have these elite enablers right like these law firms like Mosec Fonseca that are helping the worst people in the world hide their money and so they'll go to their client they'll say now look our first wrapper is going to be a Scottish trust right they're anonymous uh but there are tax authorities that you might be adverse to who can pierce that anonymity so we're going to make the officers of the Scottish trusts trust in the Grand Caymans however there are also adversaries who might be able to pierce the the the Grand Caymans trust so we're going to make all of their officers more Scottish trust and you think at first it's like oh yeah sure and then you look but wait I thought the Scottish trusts were permeable so what is the point of making them oh I see it's ten million dollars in additional billings and another eight hundred thousand dollars a year doing the paperwork for them you're just you're just a millionaire stealing from the billionaire and like you know Yolo but also it's great when you figure this out and then you realize they didn't figure this out and that they're just like me I get this pile of paper for my tax preparer and at the top is a thing saying I've read and understood everything from it and I turn all the way to the back of it and I sign it and send it back to him I mean now I doubt you sign it I don't know like I could have promised him a kidney at this point well there's there's it it really highlights that it's not it's not just that this is like an arcane magical language that if you speak it you can you can weave these spells and only someone who's willing to put in the time to read it can undo it it's also just like it's an expression of power it's saying like like I can write all kinds of complicated you know things but no one has to read them or listen to them or you know that's a common citizen movement yeah exactly and and like some so in a way this kind of complexity that you're highlighting here is like a way of saying like we can write these legal documents and we have the legal system backing us up which is why it's really when you want to have that heroic moment of disentangling it you know without without spoiling things too much you have to bring in the the force that also that is you know that is both you know piercing through all of this by following all of the trails back and forth but also has the force of of like political power behind it you know to terry pratchett had a good bit I think it was in going postal where the bad guy was like a baron buying up communication systems and and it was just like throughout the book the financial machinations just got more and more complicated and then there was a heroic scene at the end like where the dictator comes along and is like you know what we're going to figure out every single purchase here we're just going to have hundreds of clerks go through all of the books and just unwind every purchase figure out where all the money went and like set things right and it was like the only time I've had a climactic scene in a book that's like a bunch of clerks in a room carefully going over papers and and I and but it it works because the clerks are employed by a dictator government that is willing to enforce the law yeah for you I try to kind of reverse that dynamic a little I think in this one so the main storyline in this is a revenge story about prison tech you may have read recently that there have been a couple of high-profile victories over prison tech providers prison tech providers sort of embody the idea that capitalists hate capitalism and they would prefer to have captive customers who just pay whatever they demand and what they've done is they've gone to prisons and they offer them bribes to remove postal mail parcels in person visits phone calls the library continuing education and then they give the prisoners quote unquote free tablets where all of those services can be had but at a significant multiple of what you or I would pay on the outside and of course these are people who themselves are earning in six states prohibited from earning anything as they do force labor that reminder that the constitution does still allow slavery for prisoners and in most other states average 53 cents an hour except in North Carolina where it's capped at one dollar a day and they're paying three dollars a minute for phone calls and four dollars for mp3 and then to kind of add insult to injury when these prison tech providers who are all owned by private equity roll-ups and they change hands over and over again the PE companies roll their debt and roll the debt and then a new PE entity steps in and grabs it when this happens they change technology providers they're like you know that thing where every now and again like Microsoft will say hey we sold you these drmd books but now we're shutting down the drm server imagine that but the file that you're losing is the hand drawn birthday card that your kid paid five dollars to have scanned so that you could see it because no postal mail will be delivered to you and you're serving a 25 year sentence and so figuring out the underlying scam that's going on here in this in this element of the plot is this very urgent mission for for Marty Hinch for the forensic account because his friend has gone to prison and it's kind of enmeshed in this and as they work on uncovering what's going on they also are incurring the wrath of the prison management and that puts the the person who's doing this that puts their life in danger and I made the kind of peak of that happen just after the the Trump change over in 2016 and I the piece that I like most about that that scene setting is there's a moment where he's talking to an enforcer and the enforcer says look I know that this is a ripoff but you should see the ripoffs that we're ignoring them right you should see just how bad things have gotten you should see what our triage looks like we're leaving a lot of blood on the floor and this just doesn't even rise to the level where we pay attention to it and it that is a thing that I think we have all felt at various times as the bezel of our current day economy gets worse and worse and the the the drumbeat of the headlines about different kinds of great beasts getting away with worse and worse crimes becomes faster and louder and you know I I think that one of the things about going retrospective and writing a story set in the past lets you do is it lets you remember that we felt this way in 2016 we were like you remember like what fuck you 2016 I can't wait for 2017 to come along that's going to be the good year right and that this has been a that every year we seem to wake up this way and and you know that one of the things about the the first book in the series that's chronologically the last book in the series is that it embodies a bit of Stein's law that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops and there's some reckoning there and and I'm I'm sort of getting the shape of what this whole series is going to be there's there's three in the can and there's a couple more on the drawing board but I think that's what it's going to be about is this build up to this moment where finally Stein's law takes hold and I think that can't go on forever eventually stops the third one of these I'm really excited about it comes out next February it's called picks and shovels and it's set in the heroic era of the pc in the 1980s it's Marty Hentch's first adventure and he goes out to the bay area and finds himself working for if you remember there are these really weird pc companies in the early 80s he's working for a company called the three wise men that's run by a Mormon bishop a Catholic priest in an orthodox rabbi but it's an affinity scam and they're doing pyramid selling into faith groups and they're locking down the pcs and making by expensive peripherals and he realizes he's working for the baddies so that's his first adventure his origin story had a lot of fun with these yeah yeah I definitely felt like as I was reading through more and I feel like I've never had quite the experience of reading reading a fiction book and getting so mad at the villain that it was distracting me like I'm like I don't want to finish reading this book I want to go find this villain like I did the part and and so throughout reading this I was like is this is this real the one thing I wanted to ask when you had them they they had access to books on the the ipads but it was only through an app called the library store uh-huh whereas the library but you have to pay I made that up yeah I but but if any of you work in libraries thank you for your service please library people stop calling your patrons customers call them patrons it's much more to be a patron than a customer I don't want to be my doctor's customer I want to be his patient I don't want to be my lawyer's customer I want to be his client I don't want to be my teacher's customer I want to be their people and I do not want to be the library's customer I want to be their patient no no I'm just wondering now I'm just stuck on the linguistics of this like there's a is it like all the good things we have a specific word for when you go to them what kind of person you are you know what it is is that we used to have lots of different ways of expressing value right we would we would you know if you think about the law we can talk about crimes against property and crimes against people and so we have murder which is not theft right it's we don't it's not theft of your life when you're murdered and we've arrived at this place where because we reify property relations above all else we can only describe valuable things using property talk and so I might even be quoting Jonathan here uh you know with with um copyright you know there's this whole like is it theft isn't it theft and there's this sense that if you call bad things that happen to your creative labor something other than theft you're cheapening the offense right there's another way of thinking about it which is that um there are certain things that happen to our labor to our dignity to our posterity and so on that are worse because they're not property crimes right in the same way that crimes committed against people are worse not because uh that we can't accommodate that but specifically because we can't accommodate them as property crimes it would cheapen them if we call murder theft of life right it's it's having a sui generis regime to talk about the value of life that tells you how valuable life is and we used to have a fairly well developed set of values for different parts of how we interact with society a lot of it tied up in professional codes and a sense of vocation and self-regulation among professions which was not always perfect but often imbued a profession with a certain gravitas and and and meant that there was a degree to which you could trust people if they were professionally certified and a lot of that is kind of evaporated and turned into a very commercial relation you know the latest one that's happened is the AMA formally requires doctors to own their practices but what's actually happened with private equity roll-ups of doctors practices um doctors are now saying i am nominally on paper the owner of my practice but i'm not allowed to treat my patients without talking to the management team who come from the private equity company that rolled it up and they've got ways to uh to um control my conduct if i choose not to do that where they can sanction me even though technically they're working for me because in fact they're really working for the people who own the capital and the firm yeah the the there i feel like there are so many sort of expressions of this in your book like of this this phenomenon of of you know systems of humans interacting being taken over by by these various machines and and then made made worse or having to have value extracted at the cost of of you know lives and work and happiness um one i was i you know i just thought of a parallel that i want to bring up and then i want to answer your question yeah so there are lots of things about the old good internet that weren't great but there were some things that were really good and one of them that worked well though didn't always fail well was the sense among people who are running the old good internet that they were doing it because they cared about the internet per se and its transformative power we make a lot of fun of that these days and call those people starry eyed but john postel with a dns under his desk at usc and you know the people who uh ran uh network backbones who own each other's numbers the people who even after like the diaspora from from fair child semiconductor who didn't know any of them none none of them knew exactly how to make a whole microchip and so they would meet at the secret gathering in the bay area once a year to violate their nDAs because it was more important to have microchips like advanced than it was to honor their stupid bosses dumb ideas about about trade secrets um there was this like sense that people were doing it because they cared about the internet and its users they felt a sense of duty to them uh and you know that is a thing that carried over into through the the gradual degradation of the internet where bosses continued to um appeal to technologists residual sense of what phobosia tar calls vocational awe where they'd say yeah the reason you need to like sleep under your desk and miss your miss your mother's funeral and you know use the clinic we set up so you can freeze your eggs because you're going to work through your fertile years is because you are one of the heroes of the digital revolution bringing forth a new world and you know this kind of gets a lot of those bosses in the ass at least when tech workers had bargaining power because then they would turn around and say also by the way we're just going to make this really shitty and those tech workers you know who have been motivated with an appeal to their sense of duty actually felt a sense of duty and they were like nope not going to do that and yet you can't make me the guy across the street will give me a better job if you fire me and uh frankly i'd welcome it and they just couldn't do it for a long time and you know one of the i think un uh underappreciated elements of the increasing precarity of tech workers 260 000 layoffs last year is that tech workers just don't have the power to do that in a way that they did in years previous yeah i think something that that um there's like this thing that people who who are really interested in like looking at how systems work in general like sort of architect people with that sort of architect mindset can fall into is like thinking thinking if you think too much about like the rule sets that are set up and like how they interact with each other to you know carry everyone toward an inevitable goal sort of in in in a number of different ways you can ignore you can start to like ignore the role that like the people in the system play and the the degree to which the things that they care about drive those decisions and like i like i so i like to try to try to emphasize in my you know comics and things how much like things that work so many of them don't just work because the universe like tends toward a system that produces that result it's because the people in the system want it to work or want to do something you know to do that and that like everything will collapse if people aren't trying to keep it going you know and that that that it's both like i don't know it's both good and bad in terms of you know building these you know architecting these systems but like because we can try to build them to work in a good way or work in a bad way but then like ultimately they're just going to work the way that the people in them want them to work um and sometimes and so like it actually does matter what people think and what they want and that's something that i think is easy to lose both in like computer science and and in law to lose track of it's a thing that i say whenever people in publishing say oh no no books are just another copyrighted work be licensed in the same way we license video games or anything else and so library shouldn't be expected to be able to buy books and you're getting this license that comes with it that says you know by being dumb enough to buy this book you agree we're allowed to come over your house and punch your grandmother and wear your underwear make long distance calls it's just like any other copyrighted work you might buy and i'm like you do know that books are like older than copyright and also older than printing and also older than binding and also older than commerce and that like we have this kind of sentimental attachment to books right we buy them even if we don't plan on reading them just to like have them near us right and we like go over to our friends houses and we scope out their piles of books and like our loved ones tell us you can't have that many books in the bathroom and and you know like there is this risk right that you might actually convince people that a book is just a standard data unit right no different from like a database license or you know some other like random piece of data that you license and then throw away and kind of is ephemeral on your hard drive you might actually convince them to abide by the dumb terms in your license in your license agreement at which point you will have jettison the single most valuable asset publishing has which is that it sells a thing that people are enormously sentimental and even mystical about and you might actually get people to just read it like it was an ice cream foam oh yeah no i'm now i'm just thinking about books yeah no i think i think that i think that looking in sort of such a far-reaching and clear-eyed way at both the machine and the humans in it is like at the core of what's so appealing about about what you've been writing ever since you've linked to my blog all those years ago and and and that's really cool and i uh i really i really like your book thank you that all that means a lot to me i think that we're we should probably move to to asking some questions before we run out of time here and and i'll remind you a question has one part and not two and it's not more of a comment than a question it's just a question what did i write down i wrote down well there's your problem emily bender and then uh earlier we were talking about the mode of the books uh timeline explainer because um uh paul de filippo just published a great review of this book in locus where he talked about um the mode of a hind-line novel which you know not all of them are great novels uh but but the mode of a hind-line novel when it works is it puts its arm around your shoulder and says like look kid i can tell you how the world works and he did me the great compliment of saying that this is this is the affect of a marty hand not in an obnoxious way but in a like oh yeah great now i'm finally figuring out how the world works um and it was something that i think jonathan said that made me think of it and then i i made a note but it it went nowhere yeah how does ship voice the posting and book writing interact i don't do a ton of ship posting i do a lot of long form posting and a little ship posting the ship posting is pretty ephemeral but the long form but the the having the database of everything that i've ever written that is and thought about that is like massively useful that's how i wrote nine books during lockdown without that i i would be lost um you know that and it's the thing that i started doing uh between my first and second novel uh and the thing is that your first novel is the book that has everything you ever thought of putting in a novel in it and then no other novel is like that every other novel is things that you haven't been thinking about putting in a novel all your life and so i was really lucky when the second novel came along that i'd already started blogging and i had this like kind of porphyse that i could access uh yeah hi there i've really respected your work as educators and people who work on outreach not just doing deep dives into technical backgrounds you always make sure to give an amount of background for people who might not be you know crazy linux enthusiasts or whatever reading your books and i wondered if you ever like feel like you have to work really hard to strike that balance if there's a point you're trying to make for both of you that you are really trying to reach for but you're worried it's not going to come across the general audience you go first randall um i i think that at a very young age i appreciated that people are not always interested in hearing the thing that i am interested in talking to them about um and and i know that for a long while i thought okay well i can solve this i just need to talk faster so i can get in i can get everything in before they get out of earshot we're like nobody tell you this other thing about star wars there's this kind of ship that can do this let me explain what i on kens um you know and so i would go really fast and then i'm like okay wait a minute and i think that for me a key realization was um that like you'll see sometimes people get really bitter about this they'll be like people just aren't interested in hearing about this thing that's really bad and really important and it's like and and i think i've i've really tried to keep um what i think what i try to think about is that there's a lot of stuff in the world and everyone i talk to has a bunch of other things going on and like so what i try to think of i i try not to think about like people are interested in this or aren't interested in this and you know how does that reflect on them instead i try to think everyone is busy and i only get a little bit of their time and i try to think like what is the minimum like stuff i need to give them for them to understand the thing that i think is cool and like try to figure out is that possible with this amount of of their time and like just try to have a real sense of like what things do i that i think everyone knows might not be you know well understood by people so like try to have an eye toward that like paying attention to oh i think this is common knowledge but these people don't without thinking uh and those people aren't as smart as me just realize like those people are busy and have their own stuff they're learning about i need to remember they don't know about this thing that i know about and i do they really need to know it in order to understand this thing um but try to really have like genuine respect for people and not condescend to them because i think people can tell when you're condescending to them you know and so like i try to just remember that that um people you know i'm not smarter than other people they're just busy and i can only talk to them a little bit and i need to try to make that count i think with nonfiction you know because it's it's blogging and it's iterative you can try you can rehearse different versions of the explanation and try to tease it out but you can also do the thing that hypertext is great for right which is you can have the thing where you first introduce the concept and you flesh it in a really basic way and then you can build on it and link back to that and you can kind of let the reader follow the breadcrumb trailer or not with fiction you know i always i started really in this mode with um YA fiction with the little brother books where i realized that when i was a kid um facts were really hard to get hold of right like just knowing a thing was itself a kind of social capital right so you know i remember in my friend group there was like this thing this fact that raced around where if you took the receiver of a bell payphone and unscrewed the top part and then short of the two screws in the back of the speaker to the chrome on the cradle you get an open dial tone and you could just make phone calls and this was the thing if you met a another kid at a stranger at a party or you know whatever uh uh out with friends you could tell them this and it was like a thing that they would get excited about and it was social capital by the time i wrote the little brother books this was no longer a thing that you needed what you didn't need to know facts you need to know what words to type into a search engine so you needed to know what was possible not how to do it and so the little brother books and i think i carried this over into the hench books are about trying to imbue these scenarios with enough their similitude that the reader is kind of clued in that if they went and typed it into a search engine they'd figure out how to do it which i think worked on you randall you were saying you know you were reading it you were like oh this seems real i'm going to go look it up in the search engine and and so uh that's a really fun mode to write in and it's um it's very different from the you know the mode of the hind line explainer or other kinds of fact intensive work there's