Writing The Future, And Being More Human In An Age of AI With Jamie Metzl

Summary

The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers

Episode 838: Writing The Future, And Being More Human In An Age of AI With Jamie Metzl
Host: Joanna Penn
Guest: Jamie Metzl, author and futurist
Date: November 24, 2025

---

Overview

In this episode, Joanna Penn interviews Jamie Metzl, a technology futurist, speaker, entrepreneur, and author of both sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction, including Super Convergence. Their conversation explores the intersection of writing, technology, and humanity, especially as artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly transforms our world. They discuss writing science-driven fiction without overwhelming readers, the real and complex impacts of AI far beyond creative industries, and strategies for thriving creatively in the fast-evolving AI era.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Jamie Metzl’s Writing Journey and Human-Centered Storytelling

[23:18 – 26:13]

• Jamie started writing early—he found his autobiography written at age nine. His academic work evolved into storytelling, especially as he saw the need to bring out the human element in historical topics like the Cambodian genocide.
• His fiction and nonfiction focus on central human stories, even when grappling with vast scientific or technological themes.
• Quote:

  "I felt like the dissertation had missed the human element of the story... And that, that kind of set a pattern for the rest of my life as a writer at least, where in my non fiction books I really am thinking about whatever the issues are that are most important to me..."
  — Jamie Metzl [24:55]

From Historian to Futurist: Lifelong Learning and Disciplined Curiosity

[26:35 – 32:20]

• Jamie’s academic background is in Southeast Asian history, but his curiosity led him toward technology and futurism.

• Emphasizes the importance of a disciplined self-learning process to keep up with rapid change:

• Quote:

  "The world is changing so fast that if anyone says, 'oh, I have a PhD in whatever, physics, chemistry, biology from 30 years ago', what you learned 30 years ago is not as significant as the process for continuous learning."
  — Jamie Metzl [28:06]

• Jamie drew on his policy experience at the National Security Council, integrating his broad perspective to anticipate shifts in technology, biotech, and AI.

Writing Science-Based Fiction Without “Info Dumping”

[33:17 – 36:39]

• Fiction should always be led by character and story rather than research; avoid turning fiction into policy memos or textbooks.

• "Haiku writing": distill research to its emotional and narrative essentials while ensuring enough grounding to make the speculative elements believable.

• Quote:

  "Everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters...What is the essential piece of information that can convey something that is both important to your story and to your character development and is an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be?"
  — Jamie Metzl [33:39]

• Jamie feels writing both fiction and nonfiction helps him balance immersive storytelling with factual foundations.

The Big Picture: AI’s Transformative Promise (and Risks)

[37:10 – 41:59]

• AI’s impact is far broader than most authors realize—it is woven into “everything,” analogous to electricity.

• AI enables breakthroughs in healthcare, personalized and predictive medicine, and could help address global challenges in agriculture and resource management.

• Balance between optimism and caution is essential; governance and broad societal involvement are key.

• Quote:

  "When people think of AI right now, people are thinking very, very narrowly about these AI tools and ChatGPT, but we don't think of electricity that way... That's what AI is."
  — Jamie Metzl [38:44]

• The rate and complexity of change make it crucial for all citizens to get educated and become involved in the conversation—passive disengagement is dangerous.

Fiction as a Tool for Wrestling with Complexity

[43:28 – 45:41]

• There are rarely clear answers with new technologies—fiction provides a space to explore ambiguity and moral dilemmas.
• Example: Autonomous drone weapons. In the abstract, most are against them, but real-world circumstances (e.g., Ukraine’s defense needs) complicate the picture.
• Quote:

  "If every novel was, 'Oh, there's some situation and every character says, I know exactly the right answer.' It wouldn't make for great fiction...We're dealing with really complex humans and we have these, these conflicting impulses and we're not perfect, and maybe there are no perfect answers, but how do we stumble towards or strive maybe towards better rather than worse outcomes?"
  — Jamie Metzl [45:14]

How Jamie Uses AI & a Firsthand Account of AI-Collaborative Writing

[46:07 – 53:38]

• Jamie found Joanna’s podcast via ChatGPT (“make me a list of really interesting people to talk to”).
• Early tools (ChatGPT-3/4) created fake citations when asked to convert URLs—"hallucinations" are still a problem.
• Jamie used ChatGPT both as a sophisticated thesaurus and as a creative partner. In his forthcoming novel about a robot pianist, he used GPT to role-play the robot’s inner experience, enriching character development.
• For an upcoming nonfiction book (The AI Ten Commandments), Jamie co-authored with GPT-5: outlined his argument, trained GPT-5 on his style, and let the AI produce focused research summaries which he then edited, massively reducing drafting time.
• Quote:

  "This book that I could have written on my own in a year, I wrote a first draft with GPT5 as my named co author in two days."
  — Jamie Metzl [52:05]

• Stresses that a human–AI partnership requires massive human editing and full transparency about AI’s contribution.

Publishing Experiment: Traditional vs. Indie with AI Collaboration

[54:04 – 56:09]

• Jamie’s AI co-authored book won’t be traditionally published—transparency about AI as “co-author” made it necessary to go indie.
• He’s “disaggregated” the publishing process, hiring professional teams for different components.
• Quote:

  "It was essential to me to have GPT5 listed as my co author because I felt like if it was just my name on it, I feel like it would be dishonest...for this book which is called the AI Ten Commandments, that's what I've decided."
  — Jamie Metzl [55:54]

Surviving—and Thriving—in the Coming “Flood” of AI-Generated Content

[57:12 – 60:33]

• The short-term worry is a “flood of crap” (low-quality AI-generated books), but soon tools will produce high-quality “better-than-human” prose in certain domains.
• The answer: be “a first-rate human, not a second-rate machine.”
• Jamie is a “true humanist”—while machines will surpass us in some tasks, human value remains in irreplaceable, creative, and meaning-driven work.
• Quote:

  "Whatever you're doing, don't be a second rate machine, be a first rate human...we really have to invest, believe in and invest in the magic of our core humanity."
  — Jamie Metzl [59:29]

---

Memorable Quotes

• On lifelong learning in a fast-changing world:

  "The world is changing so fast that if anyone says, 'oh, I have a PhD in whatever, physics, chemistry, biology from 30 years ago', what you learned 30 years ago is not as significant as the process for continuous learning."
  — Jamie Metzl [28:06]

• On research in fiction:

  "Everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters...What is the essential piece of information that can convey something that is both important to your story and to your character development and is an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be?"
  — Jamie Metzl [33:39]

• On AI and electricity:

  "We don't think of electricity that way... We've just internalized this idea that electricity is woven into not just our communication systems or our houses, but it's into our clothes, it's in our glasses...That's what AI is."
  — Jamie Metzl [38:44]

• On facing technological complexity in fiction:

  "If every novel was, 'Oh, there's some situation and every character says, I know exactly the right answer.' It wouldn't make for great fiction."
  — Jamie Metzl [45:14]

• On human value in the AI era:

  "Whatever you're doing, don't be a second rate machine, be a first rate human."
  — Jamie Metzl [59:29]

---

Notable Moments & Timestamps

• Jamie’s childhood autobiography & path to writing: [23:18]
• Transition from historian to futurist: [26:57]
• On policy memos masquerading as novels: [33:17-34:31]
• How fiction can inform nonfiction (and vice versa): [36:39]
• Electricity as an analogy for AI: [38:44]
• Medicine and agriculture as AI frontiers: [39:24-41:13]
• Fiction as a safe space for moral ambiguity in technology: [45:03]
• How Jamie found Joanna’s show through ChatGPT: [46:07]
• Writing a book with GPT-5 as co-author: [52:05]
• Why he chose indie publication for an AI-collaborative book: [54:15]
• Being a "first-rate human": [59:29]
• Jamie’s website and book links: [60:37]

---

Where to Find Jamie Metzl

• Website: jamiemetzl.com
• Books: Available everywhere; upcoming AI Ten Commandments releasing April 2026

---

Closing Thoughts

Jamie Metzl’s approach to technology, storytelling, and humanity offers both caution and inspiration for writers and creators. His insights remind us that while tools and the world will evolve rapidly, the human spark—curiosity, meaning, and empathy—remains at the heart of great writing and enduring creativity.

---

For additional resources, backlist episodes, and Joanna’s writing tutorials, visit thecreativepenn.com.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Creative Penn Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots [e-mail] and that's Pen with a double n. And here's the show hello creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 838 of the podcast and it is Friday 21st November 2025. As I record this in today's show I talk to Jamie Metzl, author of Super Convergence, about writing the future and being more human in an age of AI. We discuss how to write science based fiction without info dumping. Your research has how you can use AI tools in a creative way while still focusing on a human first approach and why adapting to the fast pace of change is so difficult. So that's coming up in the interview section. So in Writing and publishing well last week I mentioned there's a scam going around asking people to pay to be on this podcast from someone claiming to be from my team. That is a scam email. I bet there's a similar email going around for any podcast with a decent sized audience. So please mark that as a scam and delete. And of course there's loads more other scam emails at the moment. And Written Word Media has done a great post going through all the different scams happening at the moment, which probably are flooding your email box as well as mine every day with very personalized targeted email that on first reading seems real. So in the article on writtenwordmedia.com they go into why scammers target authors and other creatives in these emotional ways. And sorry everyone, it is because our egos are so desperate for someone to notice us. We want to be pitched by book clubs or agents or whatever it is. And there's lots of them. So Written Word Media go into the emotional red flags to watch out for the common scams. Right now, how AI helps these scams target you individually. So the email reads very sort of well, how to protect yourself and some trusted resources for authors. Now I talked last week about discernment when it comes to choosing vendors or software and that same thing applies to your email. Now discernment is the ability to judge well and perhaps we all just need to slow down a bit and not just click and respond. And maybe you're not falling for this, but maybe you have parents or friends who may My dad emailed me with one of these and I had to Talk him away from giving these people more information. He was so flattered by their attention. He's a printmaker, so I think we just have to keep an eye out. I think the spam filters will get better. Obviously, this is what happened. If you can remember back in the day or if you ever look in your spam folder, a lot of these things will get caught at some point. But until then, be careful out there. In audio news, Spotify is expanding its audiobook offering to eight additional markets. Your eligible audiobooks are now reaching audiences in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Monaco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and South Africa. So you might be in one of those countries, in which case you now get Spotify audiobooks. And it's good for everyone else because we get to potentially have our audiobooks in front of those people. Now, you can obviously publish your audiobook on Spotify for authors. That is a great way to do it. Or you can still get to them through inaudio.com as well, which was previously the Findaway Voices. So yes, all of these companies, things change. But Spotify for authors is what I've basically moved over for Spotify Audiobook Publishing and continuing with audiobooks. TheNewPublishingStandard.com has a great article charting Spotify's entry into the audiobook market. Basically where it started with the industry resistance and then how things have changed. Saying the publishing industry's resistance to Spotify mirrored almost exactly the music industry's initial response to streaming, fears of devalued content, artist exploitation and industry collapse. Yet music streaming didn't destroy the industry, it saved it. Spotify isn't cannibalizing existing audiobook sales. It's bringing entirely new audiences to the format. And Mark, who writes the new publishing standard, looks at Audible, says Audible, backed by Amazon's resources and wider ambitions, is flexing its financial and creative muscles in new ways to keep consumers on board with prestige productions. Talking about the full cast audio edition of Harry Potter, which recently launched, and the production is genuinely spectacular. Over 200 voice actors. Now, I did leave Audible a while back now for and I use Spotify, but that really is a premium production and there are some quite famous actors in it now. Apparently the new recordings would surpass the 1.8 billion listening hours. It's a cinematic audio experience that redefines what audiobooks can be. But it looks like Audible strategy is resources in premium productions of already massive properties to delight existing subscribers in established markets versus what Spotify seems to be doing, which is pursuing aggressive geographic expansion into markets where Audiobook infrastructure is mostly weak now. Obviously there are exceptions in Scandinavia, where there is a mature market, but the Spotify strategy seems to be audience acquisition over production, spectacle expansion over entrenchment. So while Audible pours resources into making Harry Potter even more magical for existing fans, Spotify opens the doors for millions of potential listeners who've never even tried an audiobook. So this is all from the article in the new publishing standard, and I'm barely reading any of it. It's a really good article to continue. Perhaps no aspect of Spotify's audiobook strategy has generated more controversy than Its embrace of AI narrated content. Supporting ElevenLabs, AI, but also other ones distributed through Spotify's platform in 29 languages. Spotify isn't replacing human narration with AI. It's enabling content that would otherwise never exist in audio format. The backlist of global publishing runs to millions of titles. The vast majority never converted to audio because the economics don't justify professional narration. And just to say there about the different languages, it certainly doesn't justify professional narration in smaller markets and smaller languages. But this is going to enable it. And I think this is one of my pet annoyances around people who are anti AI audio. You can potentially be against it in a market like an English language market, where there is a mature group of people who work in it. But there are hundreds of languages all over the world where people are not served audio in their own language at all. So if there is nothing at all, then surely it is important for accessibility to provide people with audio in their own language. I just think the only way to do that is with AI. And I say that I went to Frank. Well, I was at Frankfurt Book Fair like four or five years ago now, maybe even pre pandemic actually. And I went to the audio panel there and that's when I was converted to Spotify because they spoke. And I kind of saw the future. I actually asked a question about AI audio narration that day and was shouted down. And people said, oh, it will never be good enough. So actually, I really don't know what year that was, but I was thinking about it back then. And also at that time a woman from Ghana spoke on the same group and she said, in Ghana, we just don't have an audiobook ecosystem. If you don't know Ghana is in Africa. And she said, we would love to have all books in our language, but we can't. And she basically noted that the only way forward would be AI. So let's think about that when we think about what this could potentially mean. But yes. So back to the article. AI narration provides a pathway for these works to reach audio audiences, expanding, not replacing the market. So yeah, and I've always said this, I've always said that audiobooks will change and become more like a stratified market. Well, there'll be mass market AI narrated audio and then there'll be these incredible productions. And that's basically what is happening. However, the article says Audible is of course no stranger to AI, recently launching a new beta option for self publishers to produce AI assisted audiobooks through Audible, saying it's notable how subdued the opposition is when Audible does the same thing that incites spasms of self righteous indignation when Spotify is behind the move. And that that is correct. Actually I have really haven't seen such a backlash to the Audible AI narration. So what Mark says is AI narration will probably follow a similar trajectory to streaming adoption, initial resistance, quality improvements, market expansion, and eventual integration as one tool among many. So it says, the lessons are clear. The publishing industry ignored Spotify's potential at its peril back in 2020. Those who embraced the platform early or pivoted quickly once results became undeniable have reaped rewards. Those who clung to gatekeeping impulses and protectionist instincts have been left scrambling to catch up. And you could say that same thing about some other issues in publishing for sure. So it is a great article. I've only read parts of it. It's really really great in depth. Audible versus Spotify and the developments over the last five plus years. So that is thenewpublishing standard.com fantastic blog, one that I read every article on and I have wanted to have Mark on this podcast but he is also in Africa and when I've tried to connect with him before his Internet is off and it just hasn't been practical. But you can always read his great articles there. And also over on the Self Publishing with Ally podcast, Orna Ross and I discuss our thoughts on Author Nation. I know you heard my thoughts on the show last week, but it's not a rehash of that, it's more a discussion. And Orna talked about how she resonated with that idea of constraints giving up the easy thing and the hard thing. So we talked a lot about that. I also talked a bit more about my master's course and we discussed that and it's more a conversation between good friends that you get to listen to. So that is the Self Publishing with Ally podcast. So in personal news, I have been working hard on my three essays that I have due in December and early January. And academic research and writing is pretty dense as you can say you have an opinion, but then you have to back up everything with citations. So I am reading a lot and the study and I'm enjoying that and the discussions and the people. I'm just, I'm really enjoying it and it is intense. But it's totally what I needed as a sort of refresh. And Orna said in our discussion that it's kind of like a sabbatical, but a sabbatical for someone who really likes working because it's hardly time off. It's just a different kind of writing. But of course I'm also still doing things to keep my author business running. The only thing I'm not doing is writing new books, at least right now, although I just can't. I have some things in the works, but of course the money is in the backlist. A lot of the time if you keep marketing and reaching new readers and you have a decent backlist, you can keep selling books. So I had a BookBub featured deal this week. First time in years actually. I submit to them a couple of times a year and I used to get more of them and then since traditional publishers found BookBub, it's been a lot harder to get a featured deal which is their big push. You can obviously anyone can do bookbub ads which anytime and I also run those occasionally. But this feature deal for Stone of Fire, the first in my Arcane series and the 13 books in that series and it's kind of Dan Brown fast paced action adventure and with the Secret of Secrets like Dan Brown's most recent book out recently, I thought it was a good time to try and I did apply for it and I got it this time and I've been advertising the first in series free for more than a decade. So I wondered if it would be worth it if maybe I tapped out the audience. But. But what is great about these email blasts and written word media do these very well. If you want to try those, I do those as well. The free booksy and bargain booksy. And they're stacking bundles that they do. So anyway, I had only checked Amazon and Kobo, but I got over 7000 downloads on Amazon, a thousand on Kobo, but it's only the day after so literally it went out yesterday. Well not it's not even 24 hours yet. So I can see some of the initial downloads but I can't see any sell through it's not in ku so it the number of people that go on to read the second book in a series when they're standalone thrillers. Well they're in a series, they're characters in the series but each book is can be read as a standalone. So and that's very thrillerish. That's what we do in thrillers. So I can't see any sell through now but I didn't check the other stores as I said. But hopefully I will get some read through to other books in the series. I'll get some email sign ups, a general lift in branding, but I will definitely want to revisit that in the new year to see how it impacts it. So I guess you want to see it over a month or two with thrillers are not like romance. Like people don't really read a thriller a day. That's not we don't have so many whale readers I think as some of the romance genres. But now I have AI tools to help me analyze data. I'm pretty much open I'm much more open to doing data analysis. So I might actually look at this. I'll put something in my diary to look at it again. But you can pretty much use Chat, GPT, Gemini or Claude to just dump your data in your book sales data, download the spreadsheets from KDP or Shopify, whatever you use and then say what's my read through on these books? That kind of thing. And it just does it all for you. You don't even need to do your own spreadsheets anymore, which is fantastic. So also over on my books and travel podcast I talk to Lisa M. Lilly about alchemical history and beautiful architecture in Prague. And in fact back to Dan Brown, the Secret of Secrets, his latest book is set in Prague. It's like a Prague thriller with a side of a very in depth topic around spirituality. I love Dan Brown, but this is it's quite a dense book. But Prague is wonderful. He really does does bring it alive in the book. And Lisa and I recorded it, recorded the interview before the book came out. But I've been to Prague a couple of times in the winter. Lisa's been a couple of times in the summer. So we talk about how all the wonderful things about Prague and also remember you can if you do go, you can do a day trip from there to Sedlec's the Bone Chapel which inspired my thriller Crypt of Bone. So that is on my books and travel podcast. So thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week. Jim sent a gorgeous Picture of autumnal trees in red and orange. It looked like the sunset there. And Jim said, I often listen to the podcast on the drive to the golf course. This was one of those moments when the lighting was dramatic for a few seconds. Really lovely picture, Jim. Thank you. And Linda Brown, 29 on YouTube, commenting on my solo episode about Author Nation last week, said, I really appreciated you taking the time to point out that some things like direct sales are not for beginning writers with no audience in all of the direct sales workshops I've taken, no presenter has ever made this clear. I figured it out when I looked under the hood of what exactly running an online store would involve and discovered the intricacies of taking on customer service, customer security and liability, and sales tax responsibilities. You're right. So many of us in the audience at these more advanced workshops are beginning indie authors wanting to get in on the new hot trend instead of considering where we are in the publishing journey. On the plus side, I did some very in depth research as a result of these workshops and came away with an idea of what I want to do in the future after I've written more books and have mastered publishing wide. There's a lot to look forward to. So thank you so much Linda. I'm really glad you got that. And I'm just going to keep harping on about this I think, because I, I feel like right now direct sales have become so trendy and people are jumping into it without really considering their business plan around that. So yeah, I think it's good to revisit what your idea is. And in fact I have an episode coming up in a few weeks time with my friend Sasha Black and we're doing two different approaches to selling direct because I do selling direct is not even one thing. There are so many ways to sell direct. And Sasha, the way Sasha does it and the way I do it are very different. So that will be more advanced. I mean, personally I'm going nowhere near having a warehouse or anything like that. You don't need to. But yeah, so we'll be talking about the levels and different ways of selling direct. Well, I think we'll also talk about Kickstarter and we'll go into all the different things. But yes, as you said Linda, it is not a beginning writer method of sales. Okay, so please leave a comment on the podcast, show Notes at the Creative Pen or on the YouTube channel. Or you can email me, send me pictures of where you're listening or any thoughts. Joannathecreativepenn.com and remember, if you get an email from me it will be joannathecreativepen.com it won't be from some random email address. If it's from a random email address then it might be a scam. But yes, please do email me. I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation so this episode is sponsored by Draft2Digital, who I use to publish ebooks to Apple and Nook and other ebook services as well as library and subscription services. I also use them for my co written book the Relaxed Author with Mark Leslie Lefebvre as they do payment splitting and they also do Print Are you an indie author in need of an easy and efficient print on demand service backed by a world class customer support team? Look no further than D2D print from draft2digital.com D2D print is ideal for authors who've already published ebooks but haven't yet experimented with print. You can convert an ebook to a print on demand file with just a few clicks, turn an ebook cover image into a full wraparound print cover in seconds, choose from dozens of beautiful interior layouts for that professional look, choose from industry standard trim sizes and formatting options, distribute worldwide order Author copies within 32 countries, order print proofs from a variety of shipping options, and you can use free change tokens every 90 days to make updates to the published books. All this and more with no setup or recurring fees. And I'll just emphasize again that they have a customer support team. Some services have print options, but they don't have a customer support team who are available quickly to help you. Sometimes that can just be a reason to do things if you need more help. Print on Demand is a game changer for indie authors because while brick and mortar bookstores can't physically stock every book, they can check for Print on Demand availability. If you only publish digitally, you could be missing a huge opportunity to reach more readers. Let's fix that with D2D [e-mail] so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my [e-mail] TheCreativePen thanks to the 10 new patrons who've joined this week, and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio covering writing, craft and author business as well as AI tutorials this week. In fact, as I record this yesterday I did a tutorial on NotebookLM. So that's Google NotebookLM and I did a tutorial on this like a year ago and so much has got better and now you can use handwritten pages so photos of handwriting as input. And so I did some examples with that. Also Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro also launched yesterday so I had to go back in and add because they now do infographics and slide decks which are just incredible. So that all went out to my patrons this morning. Lots of tips for fiction and non fiction authors. So the Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees or a flat white if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview.

[B]

Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur and the author of sci fi thrillers and futurist non fiction books, including the revised and updated edition of how the Genetics, Biotech and AI Revolutions.

[A]

Will Transform Our Lives, Work and Worlds. So welcome Jamie.

[C]

Thank you so much Jo. Very happy to be here with you.

[B]

Oh there is so much we could talk about, but let's start by you telling us a bit more about you.

[A]

And how you got into writing.

[C]

Well, I think like a lot of writers, I didn't know I was a writer. I was just a kid who loved writing. And actually just last week I was going through a bunch of boxes from my parents house and I found my autobiography and I wrote it when I was nine years old. And so I've been writing my whole life and loving it. And it was always something that was was very important to me. And when I finished my I did my DPhil, my PhD at Oxford and when my dissertation came out it just got scooped up by Macmillan in like two minutes. And I thought God, that was easy. And that kind of got me started on thinking about writing books. And then because I wanted to write a novel based on basically the Same historical my PhD was in Southeast Asian history. I wanted to write a historical novel set in the same period as my dissertation because I felt like the dissertation had missed the human element of the story that I was telling, which was related to the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath. Then I wrote what became my first novel and I thought, wow, now I'm a writer. And I thought, well, all right, now.

[D]

I already published one book.

[C]

I'm going to get this other book.

[D]

Out into the world. And then I ran into the brick.

[C]

Wall of geez, it's really hard to be a writer.

[D]

It's almost easier to write something then to get it published. I had to learn a ton. And it took nine years from when I started writing that, my first novel, the Depths of the Sea, to when it, it finally came out. But it was such a positive experience and to have something that was so personal to me as that story.

[C]

And I'd lived in Cambodia for, for two years and I worked on the Thai Cambodian border and I'm the child of a Holocaust survivor. So there was a whole lot that was very emotional for me and that, that kind of set a pattern for the rest of my life as a writer at least where in my non fiction books I really am thinking about whatever the issues are that are most important to me and whether it was that, that historical book which was my first book, or Hacking Darwin on the, excuse me, on the future of Human Genetic Engineering, which was my last book, or Super Convergence, which as you mentioned in the intro, is my, is my current book. But in every one of those stories, the human element is so deep and so profound and you can get at some of that, that in nonfiction. But I also have really loved exploring those issues in deeper ways in my fiction. And so in my more recent novels, Genesis Code in the Depths of the Sea, I've looked at the kind of human side of the story of genetic engineering and human life extension. And even now my agent has just submitted my new novel, Virtuosa, about the intersection of AI, robotics and classical music. Because I think with all of this fiction, fiction is, I mean, who knows what's the difference between fiction and nonfiction? We're all humans trying to figure things out on many different levels.

[B]

And I knew that you were a polymath, like someone who's interested in so many things. But the music angle with robotics and AI is fascinating.

[A]

But I do just want to ask.

[B]

You, because I was also at Oxford.

[A]

What college were you at?

[C]

I was St. Anthony's okay.

[B]

I was at Mansfield. So we were in this, if people don't know the slightly smaller, less famous colleges, you know.

[C]

But we're small but proud.

[B]

Exactly. Well, that's fantastic. Well, so you mentioned there that you were in the historical side of things at the beginning and now you've moved into technology but also science because this book, Super Convergence, has a lot of science. So how did you go from history and the past into science and the future?

[C]

Yeah, it's a great question. I'll start at the end. And then back up. So a few years ago I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the biggest big scientific labs here in the United States. And I was a guest of the director and I was speaking to their 300 top scientists. Then I said to them, I'm here to speak with you about the future of biology at the invitation of your director. And I'm really excited, but if you hear something wrong, please raise your hand and let me know. Because I'm entirely self taught. And the last biology course I took was in 11th grade of high school in Kansas City. And of course I wouldn't say that if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my process. But in many ways I'm self taught in the sciences and everything. As you know, Joe, and as all of your listeners know, everything, the foundation of everything is curiosity and then a disciplined process for learning. And even our greatest super specialists in the world, now really we all, whatever our background, the world is changing so.

[D]

Fast that if anyone says, oh, I have a PhD in whatever, physics, chemistry.

[C]

Biology from 30 years ago, what the.

[D]

Exact topic that you learned 30 years ago is not as significant as the process for continuous learning. And so more specifically for me, in.

[C]

The 1990s, I was working on the National Security Council for President Clinton, which is the President's foreign policy staff. And my then boss, and now close friend, Richard Clark, who became famous as the guy who had essentially tragically predicted 9, 11. He used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems that other people can't see. And so for me, this was almost 30 years ago now. I really felt to my bones that this intersection of what we now call AI and the nascent genetics revolution and the nascent biotechnology revolution was going to have a profound implication, profound implications for humanity. And so I just started obsessively educating myself. And when I was ready, I started writing obscure national security articles. And those got a decent amount of attention. So I was invited to testify before the United States Congress. And I was then speaking out a lot, saying, hey, this is a really important story, a lot of people are missing it, and here are the things that we should be thinking about for the future. And I wasn't getting the kind of traction that I wanted. And so I mentioned to you before that my first book had been the kind of dry Oxford PhD dissertation and that had led to my, my first novel. And I thought, well, why don't I try this same approach again? Writing novels to Tell this story about the genetics, biotech and what later became known as popularly as the AI revolution. So that was my two near term sci fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. And when I was on my book.

[D]

Tours for those novels and I explained the underlying science to people, in my way, as someone who'd taught myself, I could just see in people's eyes that they were recognizing not just that something big was happening, but they could understand it and they could feel like they were part of that story. And that's what led me to write Hacking Darwin, as I mentioned. And hacking Darwin really unlocked a lot of things after that. I had essentially predicted the CRISPR babies that were being born in China before it happened, down really to the specific gene that I thought would be the one that was targeted, which in fact was the case. And so after that book was published, Dr. Tedros, the director General of the.

[C]

World Health Organization, invited me to join the WHO expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, which I did. And it was a really great experience and really was thinking a lot about what's the upside of this revolution and the downside. And I get a lot of. Of wonderful invitations to speak. And I have two basic rules for speaking is one, never use notes, never ever. And never stand behind a podium. Never ever. And because of that, when I speak about things, my talks tend to migrate. And I would be speaking with people about the genetics revolution as it applied to humans. And I'd say, well, this is just a little piece of a much bigger story. And the bigger story is that after nearly 4 billion years of life on Earth, our one species has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re. Engineer life. And the big question for us, and frankly for the world, is whether we're going to be able to use that almost godlike superpower wisely. And as that idea got bigger and bigger, it was this kind of inevitable force. You write so many books, Joe, that I think it's second nature for you. Every time I finish a book, I think, wow, that was really hard. I'm never doing that again. And then these books kind of creep up on you, and then they're calling to you and saying. And then at some point you say, all right, now I'm going to do it. So that was my current book, which you mentioned, which is Super Convergence. And it's like everything, every journey you take a step, and that step inspires another step and another step. And that's why writing and living creatively is such a wonderfully exciting thing, because there's always more to learn. Always great opportunities to push ourselves in new ways.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you've just kind of followed your curiosity and then done this disciplined process for learning. I, I completely understand that. But one of the big issues with.

[A]

People like us who love the research.

[B]

And having read your super convergence, I know how deeply you go into this and you care deeply that it's correct and all this stuff, but with fiction, one of the big problems with too much research is the danger of sort of brain dumping. And readers go to fiction for escapism. And, and yes, they, they want the interesting side of it, but they want a story first. So what are your tips for authors who might feel like, oh, where's the line between putting in my research so that it's interesting for readers, but also not going too far and turning it into a textbook? Like, how do you find that balance?

[C]

It's such a great question. As I mentioned, I used to, I live in New York now, but I used to, used to live in Washington when I was working for the United States government. Government. And there were a number of people who I served with in the United States government who, who later wrote novels. And some of those novels, they, they felt like policy memos with a few sex scenes. And that's not what to do. And, and so for this, I think it's kind of to write something that is informed by science or really kind of by anything out into the world. Everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters. And so the question is, I mean, it's almost like haiku writing. Like, what is the essential piece of information that can convey something that is both, both important to your story and to your character development and is an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be. And so for me, because I certainly write novels that are set in the future, although some of them actually were a future that's, that's now on already happened because I wrote them a long time ago. So you, you can make stuff up, but you have to decide as an author what your connection to existing science.

[D]

And existing technology and the existing world.

[C]

What you want it to be. So I always try to start, like.

[D]

Kind of come at it from two different angles.

[C]

One is, I read a huge number.

[D]

Of scientific papers and I always think, well, what does this mean for now? And if you extrapolate over and over into the future, where might that go?

[C]

Into the, into the future. But then to really think about how do you condense things? Because we've all read books where you're kind of humming along because people read fiction for a story, for, for an emotional connection. And if you get to the point of like, and, and then I sat down to the, in front of the president and the president said, tell me what I need to know about the nuclear threat. And then it's like, insert memo like that, that's kind a deal killer. And, and so it's like all things, it's like, how do you have a meaningful relationship with another person? It's not by telling them your story, it's even when you're telling them something about you, to be telling your thing and to be sitting in their shoes hearing you telling your thing. So I don't have a complete answer to it, but I just do think that those are very different disciplines, fiction and nonfiction writing. But for the speculative nonfiction that I write of, like, here's where things are now and here's where the world is heading. There's a lot of imagination that goes into that. And so it feels in many ways that we're living in a sci fi world because the rate of technological change is accelerating continuously for the last, certainly for the last 12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture. But it's a balance. And I do think, like, for me, I feel like I'm a better fiction writer because I write nonfiction, and I'm a better nonfiction writer because I write fiction. Because when I'm writing my nonfiction, I also don't want it to be boring. I also want people to feel like there's a story and there's characters and they can feel themselves inside of the story.

[B]

Yeah, it's definitely, I think, having some distance as well. So if you really deep into your topic as, as you are, you have to leave that manuscript a little bit so you can go back to it with the eyes of the reader, as opposed to your eyes as an expert, so that you can get their experience, which, which is great. But I want to come to your technical knowledge because AI is a big thing in the author and creative community like everything else.

[A]

But one of the issues is that.

[B]

Creators are focusing on just this tiny, tiny, tiny part of the impact of fact of AI. And there's a much bigger picture. And so, for example, in 2024, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind and his collaborative partner John Jumper won the Nobel Prize for chemistry with Alphafold. And it feels to me like there's this massive world of what's happening with AI and health and climate and things, and yet we're just so focused on a lot of the negative stuff. So maybe you could just give, give us a couple of things about what is there to be excited and optimistic about in terms of AI powered science?

[C]

Sure. Well, I'm so excited about all of the new opportunities that AI creates. But I also think there's a reason why evolution has preserved this very human feeling of anxiety, because there are real dangers. And so anybody who's Pollyannish who says, oh, the AI story is inevitably positive, I would be distrustful. And anyone who says says we're absolutely doomed, this is the end of humanity, I would also be distrustful of that. So let me tell you the positives and the negatives and maybe some, some thoughts about how we navigate towards the former and away from the latter. So when people think of AI right now people are thinking very, very narrowly about these AI tools and ChatGPT, but we don't think of electricity that way. Nobody thinks of, oh, electric, I know, electricity. Electricity is what happens at the power station. We've just internalized this idea that electricity is woven into not just our communication.

[D]

Systems or our houses, but it's into.

[C]

Our clothes, it's in our glasses, it's.

[D]

Just woven into everything and it has super empowered almost everything in our, in our modern lives.

[C]

That's what, what AI is. So in super convergence, I write in.

[D]

The majority of the book is about, well, here are these positive opportunities in healthcare, moving us from generalized healthcare based on population averages to personalized or precision healthcare based on a molecular understanding of each person's individual biology. But as we build these massive data sets like the UK Biobank, we can then take a next jump toward predictive.

[C]

And preventive healthcare, where we're able to.

[D]

Address health, health issues both for better and for worse way earlier in the process when the interventions can be far more benign. So I'm really excited about that. Not to mention the incredible new kinds of treatments, whether it's gene therapies or just pharmaceuticals that are based on genetics and systems, biological analyses of different patients. Agriculture.

[C]

I know in Europe and certainly in the uk, there's a big debate about the future of agriculture. But the short story is, over the last hundred years, because of the technologies of the green revolution and because of synthetic fertilizers, we've had this incredible increase in agricultural productivity. And that's what's allowed us to quadruple the global population. But if we just continue agriculture as it is, as we get towards 10 billion people and 10 billion wealthier, more empowered people wanting to eat like we eat, we're going to have to wipe out all of the wild spaces on earth in order to feed them. And so these technologies also help provide different paths towards increasing agricultural productivity with fewer inputs of land and water and fertilizer and insecticides and pesticides. And that's really positive. And I could go on and on and on about these positives, and I do. And there are very real negatives, as I said. I was a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing after the first CRISPR babies were very unethically. I don't know whether created is the right word, but whatever it was in China, I'm extremely aware that these same capabilities have potentially incredible upsides and very real downsides. And that's the same as every technology in the past.

[D]

But this is happening so quickly that.

[C]

I think it's triggering a lot of anxieties.

[D]

And so now the question is, how do we optimize the benefits and minimize the harms? And the. The short unsexy word for that is governance, which is not just what governments do, it's what all of us does. And that's why I try to write books, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring people into this story. Because if people other this story, that there's a technology revolution has nothing to do with me, I'm going to keep my head down and just do my own thing. I think that's dangerous. The way that we're going to handle this as responsibly as possible is if everybody says, well, I have some role, maybe it's small, maybe it's big. And the first step of that is I need to educate myself and then I need to have conversations with people around me and I need to express.

[C]

My desires and wishes or thoughts with others. Maybe it's political leaders, maybe in organizations I'm involved with, maybe businesses. And that really needs to happen on every level. You're in the uk, you remember? Not remember, but no. The anti slavery movement, it started, started with a handful of people in Cambridge and it grew to a global movement. So I really believe in the power of ideas. But ideas don't spread on their own. These are very human networks. And that's why writing, speaking, communicating, I think for. For probably for every single person listening to this podcast.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's interesting. I was thinking then, have you read the AI 2041 by Kai Fu Lee and Chen Chu Fan?

[D]

No.

[C]

I mean, I heard a bunch of their interviews when the book came out, but I haven't read it.

[B]

Yeah, well, that. I think that's another one because it's actually fiction.

[A]

It's a whole load of short stories.

[B]

And it came out a few years ago now, as you say. But actually the issues that they cover in the short stories about different people in different countries, I remember one right now about deep, deep fakes and stuff like that make you think more about the topics and can kind of help you figure out where you sit it on these things. And I think that's the issue right now is that it is so complex. There are so many things. So I'm generally positive about AI, but of course I don't want autonomous drone weapons, you know.

[C]

But can I, can I, Joe, can.

[D]

I ask you that?

[C]

Because that, this is why it's so complicated like you, I think. I mean, nobody wants these autonomous killer drones anywhere in, in the world. But if, if you right now were the Defense Minister of Ukraine and your children are being kidnapped and your country is being destroyed and you're fighting for your survival and you're getting attacked every night and you're getting attacked by the Russians who are investing more and more in these autonomous killer robots, you kind of have two choices. You can say, hey, I'm going to surrender or I'm going to use what technology I have available to me to defend myself and hopefully fight to either victory or some kind of standstill. And that's what our societies did. I mean, with our nuclear program. I mean, I don't know if every American recognizes that Churchill gave Britain's nuclear secrets to America as kind of a greasing the wheel of the Anglo American alliance during the Second World War. But that was our program. Say we can't afford to lose this war and we can't afford to let the Nazis get nuclear weapons before we do. And so it's like there's the abstract feeling like I'm against all war in abstract. I'm against the autonomous killer robots in abstract. But if I was the Defense Minister of Ukraine, I would say, what's it.

[D]

Going to take for us to build the weapons that we can use to defend ourselves? And so that's why all this stuff gets so complicated.

[C]

And frankly, it's why fiction, the relationship.

[D]

Between fiction and non fiction is so important.

[C]

Because if every novel was, oh, some, there's some situation and every character says.

[D]

Oh, I know exactly the right answer. And then they just do the right answer. Hey, that was the right answer.

[C]

I knew it all along. It wouldn't make for great fiction.

[D]

We're dealing with, dealing with really complex humans and we have these, these conflicting impulses and we're not perfect, and maybe there are no perfect answers, but how do we stumble towards or strive maybe towards better rather than worse outcomes?

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to get too political on things, but let's get back to authors. So in terms of the creative process, the writing process, the research process, and the business of being an author, what are some of the ways that you maybe already use AI tools and some.

[A]

Of the ways, given you're a sort.

[B]

Of future futurist brain, what are some of the ways you think things are going to change for us?

[C]

Yeah, great question. Well, I'll start with a little piece to a middle question. I found you, Joe, through GPT 5 because what I did is I asked ChatGPT, I said, I'm coming out with this book book, and I want to connect with podcasters who are a little different from the ones who I've done in the past. And I've been a guest on Joe Rogan twice and some of those other bigger podcasts. And I said, make me a list of really interesting people who I can have great conversations with that are. And that's how I found you.

[A]

That's wonderful.

[C]

This is one, one rule of that. But let me. I'll just say so in the last year I've worked on three books and I'll explain how my relationship with AI has changed over the course of those books. So first is the paperback, highly revised paperback edition of Super Convergence. When the hardback came out, I had. I don't normally work with research assistants because I just like to dig into everything, but I the one thing that I do use a research assistant for is I just can't be bothered when I'm writing something. And if I'm already referencing an academic paper to do the full Chicago style citation. So I'll just put the URL as the footnote and then I'll hire my researchers and say, just go to this URL and all you have to do is change the URL into a Chicago style footnote. That's it. So unfortunately, my research assistant in the hardback version, he. I told him what I wanted. He went, he did the whole thing. It was early days of ChatGPT came back, everything looked perfect.

[D]

And I said, wow, that was amazing.

[C]

What a great job you did. And it was only later as I was going through them that it was like 50% of them were just invented footnotes.

[D]

So it was very painful to kind of go back. It took 10 times more time.

[C]

And then, so then with the paperback.

[D]

Edition, I Didn't use it that used AI that much.

[C]

But I did say here's all the.

[D]

Information and say generate a Chicago style citation. And that that was, was better.

[C]

But I noticed there were a few.

[D]

Things like I stopped using the thesaurus function on Microsoft Word because I would just put the whole paragraph in and I would say I'm looking for, you know, give me 10 options other than this one word. And it would be just, it was like contextual, the sort of. So I thought that was. Was pretty good.

[C]

Then I mentioned my new novel Virtuosa. And I was writing that and I was. One of the characters is a futurist robot who plays the piano just very, very beautifully in a very way, not just humanly, but in almost finding new things in the music, in music that we have written that we wouldn't maybe have found and composing music that resonates for us. And so I describe the actions of that robot in the novel, but I didn't describe in the novel the inner workings of the mind of that robot. But in thinking about that character, I was the first science fiction writer in history writing about a robot that can interrogate a machine about what are you thinking in this particular context? And I had the most Beautiful conversations with ChatGPT where I would give scenarios and say what are you thinking? What are you feeling in this context? And it was all background for that character. But it was truly profound and that was just an amazing experience. And then third, I have another book that's coming out in May, at least in the United States. And that was I gave a talk this summer in July at the Chautauqua Institution, which is in upstate New York.

[D]

Here in the United States States.

[C]

And it was about AI and spirituality. And I talked a lot about just the history of our humans relationship with our technology, how all of our religious and spiritual traditions have deep technological underpinnings, whether we recognize it or not. Certainly our Abrahamic religions are obviously deeply connected to farming and Protestantism and the printing press. And then I had a section where I talked about the role of AI in generating moral codes that would resonate with humans. And everybody went nuts for this talk. And I thought, I think I'm going to write a book. And I decided to write it differently. And so I decided that I was going to Write it with GPT5 as my named co author of the book. And the first thing I did is I outlined the entire book, which was based on my talk, that I'd spend a huge amount of time thinking about and organizing it and then I did a full outline of the book. All of the arguments, all of the structures. Then I trained GPT5 on my writing style. And then I have the way I did it, which I fully describe in the introduction to the book is that I would do everything about framing, so the full introduction, everything where it's about the argument. But if there was this time where I was for a few paragraphs summarizing a huge amount field of data, even something that I knew, well knew about out, what I would do is I would give the intro sentence to GPT5 and then I would say in my writing style, prepare four paragraphs on this. And like this is a real example. AI has the potential to see us humans like we humans see ant colonies. And so give me four paragraphs on the relationship between the individual and the collective in ant colonies. I could have written those four paragraphs my myself. But it would have taken me a month to read the life works of E.O.

[D]

Wilson.

[C]

And really. And then I could have written those, those four parag paragraphs and they had been pretty good. But GPT5 wrote it in, in seconds or maybe minutes in its thinking mode. And then I said yeah, it's, it's not quite right. You change this, change that. And so we'd go three or four back and forth and then I would edit the whole thing and then I would, would put it, I put it into the text. And so this book that I could have written on my own in a year, I wrote a first draft with GPT5 as my named co author in two days. And I'm doing it much faster. So it's going to be six months from start to finish. I'm going to have massive human editing. I mean I've done multiple edits of the entire book and I'm having a professional editor. And so it's not like the magic AI break button. But this is. And the reason why I feel so strongly about listing GPT5 as a CO author is I feel like this.

[D]

I've written it differently than the previous books and I'm a huge believer in, and my novels and my current novel actually is this of like the old fashioned lone author struggling and suffering and getting it out there. But there's other forms that are going to emerge. Just like video games are a very creative artistic form, but they're deeply connected to technologies. It's not like the novel has been around forever. I mean the current format is whatever 17th century. And so these, these forms are always changing. And I think that there are real opportunities for authors.

[C]

And there's going to be so much crap flooding the markets because everybody can write something and put it up on, on Amazon, on and. But I just think there's going to be a very, very special place for thoughtful human authors who have an idea of what humans do at our best and are translating that into content and materials that other humans can enjoy.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely.

[A]

I'm interested.

[B]

You mentioned that your named co author. So is this going through a traditional publisher, this book and what do they think about that? Or were you, you going to publish this yourself or you know.

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[C]

Such a smart question. And so what I found very, very quickly, I mean when you get to be an author later in your career, you have all of the infrastructure. So I kind of have all of those things. I have a record, I have a fantastic agent, I have all those things. But the two things that were really important to me, one is I wanted to get this book out really, really fast. So six months versus is a year and a half. And it was essential to me to have GPT5 listed as my co author because I felt like if it was just my name on it, I feel like it would be dishonest. And certainly to readers who are used to reading books that I have written, I didn't want to present something different than what it was. So I spoke with my agent who I just absolutely love and she said, said for this, this is going to be really hard in traditional publishing. And so that was why I did a huge amount of research because I'd never done anything in the self publishing world before. And I looked at different models. There was one model which of hybrid where it's kind of like it's basically the same model but you just. With traditional publishing they pay for all the things that are required to bring a book out into the world world. And with the hybrid you pay for it. And I ended up not doing that, but I did decide to do a self publishing thing where I've basically disaggregated the publishing process. And I found three great teams. One for producing the book, one for getting the book out into the world and then a much smaller thing for the audiobook. So I still believe in traditional publishing.

[D]

I think there's a lot of wonderful.

[C]

Human value add that comes in traditional.

[D]

Publishing, but there may be just certain kinds of works that don't lend themselves to traditional publishing. That's for this book which is called the AI Ten Commandments. That's what I've decided.

[B]

And when, when's that out then, because I think people will be interested.

[C]

April. Good. April.

[B]

4-26-26.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, those of us who are used to traditional publishing, it's like you think, oh, you finished write the book, you sell the proposal, and then you think, oh, this is coming any day now. And it's. It's like it could be a year and a half. And there's this frustration, this one. I mean, the process can be much faster because it's just possible to essentially control more. More of the variables. But the key, as I was saying before, is to make sure that it's as good of a book as everything else that you've written. Because it's, you know, it's great to speed up, but you don't want to compromise on quality.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. Now, we're almost out of time, but I would just want to come back to your. The flood of crap and the AI stuff slop thing that's going around because. Because you're working with GPT5 and I do as well, and I work with Claude and I work with Gemini. And right now, obviously there's still issues, and like you said about the referencing thing, there are still hallucinations which are getting less and less and.

[A]

But the.

[B]

The flood of crap. Now, fast forward two years, five years. It's not a flood of crap. It's a flood of excellent. It's a flood of better than. Than us. And it is almost that already.

[D]

No, we are humans.

[C]

It's better than us in certain ways. Like if you have farm machinery, it's better than us at certain aspects of farming. I mean, I'm a true humanist, and I think there will be lots of things that these machines are better than us at doing, but there will be tons of things where we will be better than them. And I think there's a reason why humans still care about chess, even though machines can be humans at chess. You know, there are people who are saying all this stuff, which I fully disagree with this concept of AGI, artificial general intelligence. And we always say, I've summarized it in seven letters, AGI is bs. Like the only way you can believe that there's artificial general intelligence of machines doing better. Everything better than humans is if your concept of what a human is and what a human mind is is just so narrow. It's this kind of narrow range of analytical skills. And we are so much more than that. I mean, humans represent almost 4 billion years of embodied revolution. There's so much about ourselves that we don't know. And I just think that we are as, as incredible as these machines are, are, and will continually become. There are always going to be wonderful things that humans can do that are different than machines. And what I always tell people is whatever you're doing, don't be a second rate machine, be a first rate human. So if you're doing something and a machine is doing that thing much better than you, then shift to doing something where your unique capacities as a human gives you the opportunity to do something better than machine science. So I totally agree with you that the quality of that stuff will get better. But I do think that the most creative and even successful humans are going to be the ones who say, I recognize that and that this is creating new opportunities. And I'm going to insert my core humanity to do something magical that is new because people are othering these technologies. I mean these technologies themselves, themselves are magnificent human generated artifacts. These aren't alien UFOs that have landed here.

[D]

And so I do think it's a.

[C]

It'S a scary moment for creatives, there's.

[D]

No doubt about it, because there are things that all of us did in the past and you and a machine.

[C]

Can do some of those things really well. But I think that this is the.

[D]

Moment where the most creative people really ask themselves, what does it mean for me key to be a great human? And it's the pat answers won't apply. Like that's in my virtuosa novel. I explore that a lot. The thing of like, oh, machines don't do creativity, they will do incredible creativity. It just won't be exactly human creativity. So we need, we will be potentially huge beneficiaries of these capabilities, but we really have to invest, believe in and invest in the magic of our core humanity.

[B]

Brilliant.

[A]

So where can people find you and your books online?

[C]

Thank you so much for asking. I thought you'd never asked. So my website is jamiemetzel.com J A M I E M E T Z L.com and my books are available everywhere.

[B]

Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great.

[C]

Thank you, Joan.

[A]

So I hope you found the interview with Jamie interesting. Let me know. Leave a comment on the podcast show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepen.com and again, remember, this is my email. So if you get a scam email and it's not from joannathecreativepen.com then just delete. Also, please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard next Monday. I'm talking about writing free and building a long term career and creative legacy with romance author Jennifer Probst. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show [e-mail] podcast and you can cl get your free author [e-mail] blueprint if you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X hecreative pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.