00:00:00.000Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker.
00:00:05.980This week's guest is one of my favorite writers working today, Megan O'Giblin.
00:00:11.440And actually, I want to explain how I encountered her work because I think that that is going to explain why I wanted to bring her on the show.
00:00:20.320When I was writing More Everything Forever, I realized that I was at a disadvantage.
00:00:28.280There were a lot of echoes between transhumanism and the sort of extreme science fictional
00:00:36.760philosophies that I was dealing with in the book and, you know, sort of examining critically
00:02:30.440I guess to introduce you, I think of you as just a brilliant writer and author and essayist and a very clear and careful thinker around questions about religion and spirituality and its connection to technology and modernity.
00:02:53.680Thank you. Yeah, I sometimes worry there's not a lot of coherence to my career or my thoughts. I've been writing for a long time about Christianity and evangelicalism, especially I grew up in a fundamentalist family.
00:03:09.220I left the faith in my early 20s after studying theology at a very conservative college, Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
00:03:18.840And yeah, I had always had this sort of private fascination with technology and started writing some tech criticism, you know, around my late 20s, early 30s.
00:03:29.560And, yeah, it just really felt like there was this weird, you know, I kept seeing all these parallels between the religious narratives that I was immersed in through much of my life and studied and these narratives about emerging technologies, particularly about AI.
00:03:47.100um you know and this was around the time i think it was around the time of like the deep learning
00:03:51.640revolution so maybe 2017 2018 where i started noticing all of these religious metaphors popping
00:03:59.540up in conversations about ai so people would say like oh we're building a god you know it's the
00:04:04.900most obvious one but also talking about how like you know these opaque systems we have to take their
00:04:09.760answers on faith. Yeah, I just wanted to, I mean, my last book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, was
00:04:17.320basically just this deep dive into those connections and a way to explore what was
00:04:22.460happening there and why this language kept reappearing in a technological context.
00:04:27.360I love that book. I mean, that book was sort of my introduction to you and your work and
00:04:33.560was just incredibly helpful just for for sort of walking me through a lot of those connections as
00:04:41.900well because i don't have the religious background that you do you know i i was raised jewish i'm
00:04:48.240jewish and as a result when it comes to christianity it's always been sort of like i've
00:04:54.600had my face pressed up against the glass trying to figure out what's going on in there uh and
00:05:01.100And that put me, I think, at a disadvantage in some ways when I was writing More Everything Forever and trying to understand what was going on inside of these communities like the effect of altruists and the rationalists and these, you know, these people that I put under the umbrella of the ideology of technological salvation.
00:05:24.100a word that I picked deliberately for its religious connotations without, I think,
00:05:29.140fully understanding what those religious connotations were. I had to go to a friend
00:05:32.440who was also raised in a sort of fundamentalist Christian background and say, hey, I want to use
00:05:37.860this word salvation. What does it mean in that context? Because I just, you know, it's all a
00:05:44.540little bit alien to me, but I knew that the connections were there. And yeah, and then when
00:05:51.520i when i found your work a friend of mine suggested that i read god human animal machine and you know
00:05:56.580he was obviously correct yeah i wonder sometimes how much the people who are gung-ho with these
00:06:04.960narratives of technological progress so people identify as transhumanists or long-termists or
00:06:09.660effective altruists like whether they are aware of the religious narratives yeah occasionally they
00:06:15.820are but a lot of times i mean the thing that's weird about these communities is they're often
00:06:19.860like fiercely rationalist and atheist. But, you know, I think anyone who is immersed in
00:06:27.120Western culture is sort of vaguely aware of the redemptive arc of the Christian narrative. And0.87
00:06:33.580yeah, there's a weird way in which that those ideas kind of seep in osmotically.
00:06:38.960I don't know. I think they've got to be aware of it to some degree. I just think that
00:06:43.700I go back and forth on this. I mean, I'm going to I'm going to engage for a moment in
00:09:12.380Yeah. And it turns out he was raised Mormon. And he said, you know, it sounds like you weren't raised in that background. So maybe that made it difficult for you to find a way into this community. And then, you know, said something like, you know, people from high demand religious backgrounds are used to accepting statements about the world that make large demands on them in their daily lives.
00:09:37.480And I was like, OK, yeah, that's one way of seeing it. But there was another one.
00:09:44.800Yeah, sure. Which is like, yeah, maybe a certain level of gullibility or credulity or.
00:09:51.820Well, that's actually not what I was going to say. I was, I mean, maybe, but I was going to say more that there was a certain comfort with the ideas about how the world works that come, like that there's something familiar about transhumanism, right? It's comforting in a way that I didn't find it.0.63
00:10:12.780I don't know. There's so much there. And if I can use my own anecdotal evidence, I feel like I know a lot of former Christians, particularly former evangelicals who have become hardcore rationalists. And I've always thought about it in terms of like, I mean, on one hand, it is true. Like if you're in, what was the phrase you used? High demand religious background?
00:10:36.800Yeah, high-demand religious background or community. I don't remember whether it was background.
00:10:43.400Yeah, that there's, you know, there is a big focus on the truth and even apologetics and, like, coming with arguments and defending your arguments.
00:10:52.060So there's a natural parallel there to, you know, I think the rationalist communities.
00:10:56.420the other thing is is i was guess i was thinking about is this desire to have some all-consuming
00:11:03.300universal idea and explanation for everything which i see in a lot of these narratives about
00:11:10.240the future is just you know well and it gets like really blurry about the details where it's like
00:11:16.400oh well you know we have these calculations and we can prove this but really this is just it's
00:11:20.280you can tell it's just sort of this this notion of this is where history is going you know this
00:11:25.080one sort of one simple idea is going to explain everything and, you know, relieve us of the
00:11:30.180burdens of the human condition, which feels very religious to me.
00:11:34.780Not to pry too much, but you talk about this in God, Human, Animal, Machine, you know,
00:11:40.260you went through a phase of this as well.
00:11:44.120I mean, this is basically where this whole idea started with my own experience, which
00:11:49.140is that I encountered transhumanism through Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual
00:11:55.500Machines, shortly after I lost my faith and had left Bible school.
00:12:01.500And I was coming to this book with, like, a friend loaned it to me.
00:12:05.760I had zero technological background, you know, besides, like, whatever a 22-year-old
00:12:11.240needs to do for, you know, their daily work on computers.
00:12:15.200But, yeah, I was fascinated. I kind of like went down this this rabbit hole of like transhumanist message boards. This was in the early 2000s and was really compelled by this idea that like, for one thing, that history was heading somewhere, which that was actually, I think, the biggest loss when I lost my faith was a sense of like, well, where is this all going?
00:12:38.220what's the point of this and you know you have these uh these you know trajectories in you know
00:12:45.960the age of spiritual machines is like moore's law you know this is this is basically everything and
00:12:50.620going back in history to everything since the beginning of time has been about increases in
00:12:56.860intelligence and more sophisticated forms of intelligence and this is going to lead to the
00:13:01.620singularity there was that and then also yeah the promise of immortality which was a big thing you
00:13:07.480know this idea that we could we could continue in some form to to outsmart death um that we could
00:13:13.940our minds could compute could continue in some form on uh you know uploaded to supercomputers or
00:13:20.080what have you which is you know again i think something that people find really comforting
00:13:24.180about religion this was one of the things that i found so that i found so compelling about your
00:13:32.720book, I mean, aside from the fact that it's just beautifully written, that you went through
00:13:38.800this experience of, okay, you were raised in this high demand religious community and then left that
00:13:46.620community and then found your way into transhumanism in part because it provided some of
00:13:55.640what you felt you had lost. And I didn't, I wasn't aware of like the psychological motivation
00:14:02.140in the moment you know i just thought like this is fascinating i'm gonna i want to know all about
00:14:06.860this and um and then i you know i kind of like as i started learning more about technology and
00:14:12.380writing some tech criticism you know it's very clear these ideas are not supported by evidence
00:14:18.200and there's a lot of conjecture there's a lot of speculative scenarios that are based on very
00:14:24.260flimsy evidence and it was at that point where i became interested in that whole experience as
00:14:29.920Like, what is the motivation or the psychology behind it? Like, why do people find this so attractive? And for me, it was because, yes, it is this very familiar narrative. And it's restoring through science, which is, I think, the crucial thing, right? It's not just pure, believe me on faith, this text said so. It is, there is this level of like, you know, we have charts, we have data.
00:14:51.180But it's sort of restoring those religious promises through science, which is, I think, sort of the trick that makes it appealing to a lot of people.0.69
00:15:01.080One of the things it reminded me of is, you must remember this, the new atheists.
00:15:07.420Oh, yeah. I read all of them. Dawkins and Hitchens. Yeah.
00:15:11.520Exactly. And and like the community that sprung up around them online and like, you know, the early to mid 2000s back when I was in college. And I remember looking at this community and thinking, you know, I can tell that these people used to be Christians.
00:15:29.900because like the way that they are dealing in absolutes like the way the way that they that0.93
00:15:40.020they are like just grasping for like some entire system of the world and I mean I'm an atheist I
00:15:47.660don't believe in God which is part of what sort of got me looking at that community in the first
00:15:52.100place it was like oh are these my people and ultimately it came to the conclusion no they
00:15:56.140they really aren't yeah and not because we are you like i'm an atheist they're atheist but like
00:16:01.560in some ways that's where the similarity ends i well what were you about to say i could tell that
00:16:06.500you're about to say something and then well no i think uh it's interesting to hear your experience
00:16:11.740with them i mean my that was my experience reading them was sort of the typical religious
00:16:15.780ex-religious person who's like yes they're saying everything i suspected was wrong with this faith
00:16:21.220and exposing all the lies but i mean when i read them now which i mean i haven't gone back and read
00:16:27.100a lot of them but sort of thinking about their basic arguments it relied on this very like
00:16:31.800straw man form i guess not straw man because it does exist but they they take like the easiest
00:16:36.560most literalist form of religion to debunk and say like oh there's no way that the creation
00:16:42.320story could have happened in six days and it's like right right right yeah if that's the story
00:16:46.700you were told as a christian then yes it's very appealing to have somebody say this but there was
00:16:50.920no sense there of like these are myths that give people's life meaning you know which i think a lot
00:16:55.840of religious people see it in that much looser more like mythopoetic fashion um and that's why
00:17:02.160it just seems sort of myopic those critiques reading it now exactly like it's it's something
00:17:07.620that ignores the spiritual needs that people were feeling with religion right yes like i mean
00:17:17.420a good way to put it. Thank you. One of the reasons it was so like when I said like I could
00:17:22.160tell that these people used to be Christians specifically is like not just Christians,
00:17:26.300but American Christians mostly. Yes. Because it's like this is a kind of atheism that you can only
00:17:32.040have if you were part of like the dominant cultural group within a country. Because they're
00:17:41.580saying, oh, yeah, all religion is completely terrible and we should get rid of all vestiges0.99
00:17:45.860of all religions. It's like, you know, I'm an atheist. And also there's a lot of things I like0.99
00:17:52.320about Judaism. And I'm not going to stop being Jewish as like my cultural identity just because
00:18:01.180I don't believe in God. And if you, you know, new atheist had ever had any sort of like experience0.94
00:18:09.020as a cultural minority, you would understand why maybe some of us are not really liking what you're
00:18:15.640saying well it was just such a weird phenomenon of that time too and now like dawkins calls
00:18:21.580himself a cultural christian like i feel like all these all these guys are becoming religious now
00:18:26.020like they totally had a 180 what's happening i mean i do think that dawkins is and always was
00:18:32.540a cultural christian right for exactly the reasons like i mean you know uh uh not to not
00:18:38.340to keep ragging on them but like the well okay yeah to keep ragging on them but like i was
00:18:43.580You know, it's not surprising that this community then ended up having really serious problems with, like, sexism and racism and, like, sexual harassment, right?
00:18:53.480Because, like, okay, these are people who were raised in a community that was, you know, had, like, a lot of baked-in misogyny and racism, and then they realize, you know, come to the realization that some of the things that they were told were not true and that there's no God.
00:19:10.080And then don't question so many of the other cultural things that came along with that society that, you know, that they were raised in. And so instead of having these, you know, misogynistic Christians, we have misogynistic atheists.
00:19:23.760Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And it does, yeah, again, it just feels like it was, I mean, I don't know, maybe there's people who are still doing this now, but there's this whole other trend right now in evangelicalism where people are not deconverting, they're deconstructing. Have you heard this term?0.94
00:19:42.040no i haven't what is this well they they lifted it from like derrida basically but i don't think
00:19:49.160they've actually read him but uh there's this idea that you're you're keeping your faith in
00:19:55.060the christian story but you're trying to uncouple it from like patriarchy and religious natural
00:20:00.820nationalism and all that stuff that you're talking about you know like i think there is a larger
00:20:04.860movement and it's a lot of women too who are yeah trying to hold on to the faith somehow but like
00:20:11.180letting go of maybe the literalist and sort of the you know all the the power and and stuff that's
00:20:16.960bound up with it but yeah it's it's i don't know that also feels like a a sort of cultural shift
00:20:22.600that's been taking place over the past 20 years or so i don't know about that but that's nice
00:20:27.800to hear i mean it's i don't know it reminds me of um talarico down in texas yeah i love talarico
00:20:36.820Yeah, I do too. I just, I don't know when this podcast is, when this episode is going to go out, but it's presumably going to be before the election. I just really, I want him to win. But I'm also like, really, it seems like he's doing a good job of pointing out the contradictions in the Christians who are running around supporting the Republicans.
00:21:04.280Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It feels like it's like a necessary, you know, reconciliation or sort of a correction to Christian nationalism. And I mean, I don't know if there's a lot of controversy, obviously, about how whether he could win, you know, big enough.0.98
00:21:25.320i feel like he should be president but it's funny because i i like was curious what actual like
00:21:33.200fundamentalist christians would think about him and so i sent uh an interview his interview with
00:21:40.300ezra klein to uh my parents and my sister my parents were like he's not a christian
00:21:46.480well i don't know if they said exactly that he's not a christian but basically that he was getting
00:21:52.000the bible wrong um and then so but then my my sister who's younger than me said that she really
00:22:00.520liked him and would possibly vote for him so i don't know maybe there's a generational disconnect
00:22:05.620there but it there is this i think this myth or this this hope on the left that like oh he's
00:22:12.300talking about christianity so then he'll get all the trump people or whatever they're you know the
00:22:16.820religious right and yeah they i think there's there's sectors of the religious right that
00:22:21.680belong or you know they sort of believe in in the right more than they do in their religion
00:22:27.180no i think that's true and i don't know about what sort of coalition he can assemble and whether or
00:22:32.880not he can win i just feels like a breath of fresh air yeah yeah yeah and i know that that
00:22:41.420My producer, Nick, who lives in Texas, is probably, like, jumping up and down right now, wishing he could say something about how much he likes Tallarico.
00:22:49.720But anyway, but in any event, yeah, Nick, okay, this is audio only, but Nick just turned on his camera without unmuting himself and just nodded with, like, the biggest eyes ever.
00:25:32.360i'm terrified to ask this like we've we've talked before you know we're friends um but i i haven't
00:25:39.640asked you this and i realized when i was thinking about our conversation today that that this was a
00:25:44.400question i hadn't asked you and i could ask you on air i'm curious what your experience was
00:25:51.500reading more everything forever because i know you read it yeah i i felt the same it's funny
00:25:57.980When you were saying that, I was like, I felt exactly the same way, specifically when it came to long-termism and effective altruism, where those were movements that, I don't know, just because of the time I was writing the book, they didn't take up as much sort of cultural space as I would have liked to address it more.
00:26:17.120But yeah, I have been reading a lot about these movements and thinking like these are the natural successors to transhumanism. And what is it? Like, I was just immediately skeptical of it and about these narratives about the future, even though they were slightly different than the ones I was writing about. And yeah, I felt like you did your book did the same thing where it completely clarified. And it was like, yes, that's what I wanted to say.
00:42:01.560I mean, my understanding is that a lot of that sort of separation or this idea that we're going to put consciousness in brackets and not talk about it was also this way to sort of protect the Christian idea of the soul and say, like, okay, well, science won't intrude on that.
00:42:17.900Whereas, yeah, now we've sort of gotten into this problem where we still can't really talk about it or even prove that it's anything as opposed to nothing.
00:42:27.040like if it is if it is actually a problem i mean this is reminding me of uh uh actually like a story
00:42:35.200about a philosopher a true story that came to mind when again when i was reading your book uh i never
00:42:42.460met this guy but there was a there was a philosopher at columbia who is very well known in the second
00:42:48.220half of the 20th century named uh sydney morgan besser and at one point bf skinner the the
00:42:55.540a behavioralist psychologist came and gave a talk at Columbia or somewhere in New York City.
00:45:33.860something you said in that interview that I really liked. You said that you'd witnessed
00:45:39.180several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication,
00:45:44.000remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult
00:45:48.140for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it's been trained on.
00:45:53.360I've found that having a name for this kind of writing, synthetic text or slop,
00:45:58.340makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing.
00:46:02.300Yeah. I mean, you know, almost as soon as the first commercial language models were released, there was this notion, which I think is probably most famously distilled by Sam Altman's tweet where he said, you know, I am a stochastic parrot and so are you.
00:46:17.440So this notion that humans are using language in the same way that we use language thoughtlessly, that we defer to cliches, you know, and even like this very Lacanian idea that we're all sort of like drawing from this shared pool of language and that nothing we say is original.
00:46:36.480all and you know i i was like i don't know i was really upset by that tweet like many people were
00:46:43.260particularly writers but i started thinking about it and i was like i don't totally disagree with
00:46:47.740him like i think a lot of the times we are stochastic parrots like a lot of our language
00:46:52.660is really thoughtless you know i find myself repeating myself all the time you know i find
00:46:58.440myself deferring to cliches to saying things maybe i don't i haven't really thought through
00:47:03.200and instead of being like oh well let's just shrug and use these machines instead I feel like
00:47:10.520you could see that as a challenge to be like no I'm going to be more deliberate in my thinking
00:47:14.380and I'm going to you know try to actually not slip into that mindless habit that we all are
00:47:22.660prone to as humans and I became really interested in in writers who had had written about that that
00:47:28.680tendency of human language to become static and thoughtless like you know Hannah Arendt especially
00:47:34.280was writing a lot about the dangers of thoughtlessness and how it contributed to fascism
00:47:39.120and these sort of yeah ideological structures where people just don't actually think about
00:47:44.480the moral implications of what they're doing they are just sort of saying the party line
00:47:48.980or deferring to these truisms but there's that there's like an ethical component to using language
00:47:57.920that way and then there's also like an artistic problem which is yeah that that um you know you
00:48:04.460have to try really hard and i think anyone who's a writer who has worked spent a lot of time on a
00:48:10.240piece of writing knows just how hard it is to try to say something true that you believe in and to
00:48:15.280try to say it in a way that is surprising you know because everything's been said yeah and you know
00:48:19.980it takes a lot of work but it's possible and i see it all the time in human writing this is exactly
00:48:27.360like the challenge and the fun and the struggle and terror of of doing this kind of art you know
00:48:39.620the stuff that you were saying about how easy it is to just fall into cliched language and the
00:48:45.140the moral responsibility that comes along with that the thing that I always think of and that
00:48:49.500I've been thinking about more and more with LLMs is um the classic Orwell essay politics in the
00:48:55.200English language. He talks about this, like, it's what the whole thing is about. And, you know,
00:49:01.000there's one line in particular in there that I keep thinking about when I think about LLMs,
00:49:09.800but also writing well, where he says, you know, something like, it is easier and sometimes even
00:49:16.080faster once you've gained the habit to say, you know, in my opinion, it is not unreasonable to
00:49:23.320suppose rather than to say, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Where it's just like fluffy verbiage. Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:33.080There's something about the LLM language that just, my eyes just slide right off it. Yes. That's
00:49:40.240exactly my experience too. And this is my fear is that if I have been reading LLM output for even a
00:49:47.100short amount of time when i go back to read some actual human generated text uh i start to read in
00:49:53.820that way where it's like you know it's like almost like language becomes cheap yep you know and it's
00:49:58.620like it's really wild to me that it's been so recently that we've come to just take it for
00:50:04.520granted that i mean like i think what is wild is that you know five years ago basically and and
00:50:11.240all of history before that you just assumed that any text you held in your hand was produced by
00:50:16.200a human thought, right? And now that writing has been detached from that assumption and that
00:50:23.680context, it really changes how you see writing as a whole, not just slob, you know? And I almost
00:50:31.480worry that human language is being devalued the way that like a currency is devalued through
00:50:38.020inflation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That the bad writing will drive out the good. Yeah. No, I worry about
00:50:43.920that too. I don't know. One of the things that I do as a writer to try to make sure that I can keep
00:50:50.140writing sentences that feel true and fresh, I make sure that if I'm, especially if I'm working
00:50:57.100on like a big writing project, like a long feature or a book, is I have some something,
00:51:04.040like a book or a long feature that I'm reading my way through as I'm writing that, that is not
00:51:11.000related to the work but that has pros of like i i think of it as like the pros needs to be high
00:51:17.800enough quality like the same way that like fuel needs to be good enough for the car to run yeah
00:51:23.760oh that's so interesting that you do that too i do the same thing yeah because like well because
00:51:29.340it's like in the same way that what you eat becomes who you know becomes your body yeah um
00:51:34.640like what you read becomes what you write you know nothing's going in nothing's going to come out
00:51:39.160But then, like, when I saw people, you know, and I quote some of them in More Everything Forever saying, you know, like, well, you know, we're going to have an internet that's mostly non-human text, and then we're going to have AIs trained on that, and it's going to be a copy of a copy, and, you know, what's that going to do?
00:52:04.420Because like, I can't have my stuff sound like this. It's not going to work for me. It's going to make it impossible for me to keep doing this job because I'm just going to be too unhappy with what I'm producing. And also like, as much as it's infuriating and terrible and makes me tear my hair out, one of the great privileges of my life is that I get to write for a living.
00:52:42.240And it's not just an aesthetic thing either.
00:52:44.980Like, I think that really, like, the best books are, it's a sort of technology for changing your way of thinking or your way of seeing the world.
00:52:54.120And that's exactly why I do the same thing when I'm working on something.
00:52:57.900i just read a writer that's been influential to me a writer that i really admire and i mean there
00:53:04.640is some like complexity and beauty to the sentences but that's a secondary effect of the
00:53:09.740complexity of thought right that's taking place and um yeah i worry a lot about losing that i
00:53:17.000have noticed even in in magazines including some magazines i really admire um that have sort of
00:53:23.780been slowly simplifying and streamlining a lot of the writing to the point where I almost can't
00:53:30.400read magazine work while I'm working on something because I get that sort of voice and that pacing
00:53:36.160and that cadence in my head. Oh man. Okay. So what, tell me, tell me more about your process.
00:53:43.720I know I keep saying this, but like your sentences are really great. You, you were a very good pro
00:53:50.040And I want to know more about how you do that very selfishly.
00:53:54.960But I also think, I don't know, good art is part of what makes the world a good place.
00:54:04.220And, you know, you were saying before that I'm more enlightened than you are.
00:54:19.480I mean, with God, Human, Animal, Machine, I really feared I was going to lose something about the quality of the writing because I was writing about such technical subject matter.
00:54:30.580And it's really hard to write about that in a way that is lively and beautiful.
00:54:38.320And it was just so much trial and error, which I know is not like a satisfying answer, but I wrote and rewrote so much of that book.
00:54:47.120and it was almost like you know I think part of it too was that I'm not an expert in these fields
00:54:54.020that I was writing about like machine learning you know I'm writing as a lay person who's trying
00:54:57.560to understand it from the outside and it was almost like through the writing process I was
00:55:03.380teaching myself to understand it better also and I was sort of teaching myself you know like I
00:55:09.320absorbed all this information I had like tons and tons of notes that I was working from and like
00:55:14.160how am I going to synthesize this and it really happened through successive drafts where it was
00:55:19.460like okay I got this down so that it's clear and it makes sense now and I feel like I understand
00:55:24.300it but what does this mean and how does it connect to the whole and the larger ideas of the book and
00:55:29.420so that was what happened a lot in the rewriting and yeah I was reading who was I reading around
00:55:35.460that time I think I was reading like Joan Didion's late political essays where there is you know she's
00:55:40.600also writing about very complex subjects she's writing about politics as opposed to uh technology
00:55:47.980but i i noticed that she was able to just convey so much information in just a single sentence
00:55:54.880often i i felt like reading that was some small spur toward maintaining that that focus on on
00:56:02.200rhythm and and sort of the the sound of language while i was writing about these ideas who else
00:56:09.040do you read like who are you reading these days for us as you know fuel for for the writing
00:56:16.220i've kind of gotten away well yeah i'm just i have like because i have like what like three
00:56:23.280weeks until my book comes out so you're not writing at all no i'm not writing but i'm trying
00:56:30.660to just recharge while i still can and just read for pleasure which i haven't been able to do for
00:56:34.940a while so i read virginia wolf's the waves recently which i i had never read i really loved
00:56:39.720um i'm reading uh right now summer in baden baden i don't know it's fantastic it's a it's a book um
00:56:50.120it's a novel about dostoevsky huh and uh it's largely about his his gambling addiction which
00:56:56.340is really hard to read it's like one of the most um intense and recognizable accounts of addiction
00:57:03.940that i've ever read but yeah so i'm just reading novels i i started a iris murdoch novel last week
00:57:10.500to the bell that i haven't read before so um i feel like it's important to do that like uh i don't
00:57:17.520know what to call it non-instrumental reading like reading just for pleasure yeah yeah to stay close
00:57:23.540to that kind of experience i know it's interesting i have found that when i'm writing that like the
00:57:30.900stuff that I'm reading that I think of as reading sort of as fuel when I'm writing is either
00:57:38.380research, you know, something that's relevant in some way, even if it's like feels sort of
00:57:44.220only vaguely relevant or it's something like that where like I'm reading it for pleasure,
00:57:49.560but it can't just be anything. It can't be like trash, which I definitely read my fair share of
00:57:56.800trash sure yeah but like it has to be it has to be something good enough otherwise the writing's
00:58:03.560not going to come out uh and so i end up reading a lot of novels that's great i could ask you so
00:58:09.100many more questions about your prose i really like your writing and i'm so excited that you
00:58:14.000have a new book coming out and i'm really looking forward to reading it oh thanks so much for saying
00:58:17.940that yeah no well i'm i'm saying it because i mean it as preparation for today i was going back and
00:58:23.660looking at god human animal machine and just remembering like yeah i really liked reading
00:58:29.340this this is good so well thanks so much yeah the admiration goes both ways well thank you yeah
00:58:34.920i'm glad we're friends and i'm glad we get to talk about this stuff and also i'm looking forward
00:58:39.880to seeing you next month that's gonna be fun yes i'm gonna be at stanford in uh october which is
00:58:46.500exciting i've never been there uh be prepared it's it's the heart of darkness it's where i know
00:58:50.980Oh, I do. I feel like I'm going into the heart of darkness.
00:59:09.300Do I have any advice about going to Stanford?
00:59:12.060No, I mean, mostly just just make sure that that you have someone to, like, talk with about it afterwards, which, you know, we can do that.
00:59:38.260Well, I think that's a good place to leave it.0.99
00:59:42.060Yeah, I can't think of a better place to end this episode than to say that Stanford sucks. So yeah.0.99
00:59:50.860Thank you so much for having me. It was really wonderful.
00:59:54.020No, thank you for making the time. This was a lot of fun.
00:59:57.840Thanks again to this week's guest, Megan O'Giblin. Next week, we've got something a little bit different. It's just going to be me talking about a variety of different things.
01:00:08.000And I'm also going to be answering questions.