Exploring Humanity’s Future: John C. A. Manley On His New Novel, All the Humans Are Sleeping
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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. I've got a great guest that's been on a couple times, John C.A. Manley. He's got a new book out called All the Humans Are Sleeping. John's got a really great list, you know, that comes out through email. I believe it's called Blazing Pinecone. You know, the name was changed to a bunch of months ago.

But John's got really interesting things to say about, you know, what's happening in our society. And he's really careful and spends a lot of time and a lot of effort writing really great books. He wrote one about COVID and that whole situation. His new one is called All the Humans Are Sleeping. His old one about COVID specifically was called Much Ado About Corona, A Dystopian Love Story.

I just think it's fascinating to talk to him. He's got a lot of great opinions and experiences, and it all goes into the writing. So welcome back, John. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me back. I think this is episode... Third time on the show, so that's nice. I'm not sure if I'm more of a genius, but I'm glad to be back. And just a little higher than a charm. Okay.

And just a note for your audience, just so they realize these are fiction books, too. They're not nonfiction, which is, I think, something I offer different in the kind of the freedom and philosophy space. Yeah, I think they would say in the movies it's inspired by true events or, you know, based on real events.

Very good side of the horn. Yeah, definitely with the first. And the second one, I hope some of the events don't happen because this one set, the new one set about 16 years in the future. So I like what Ray Bradbury said, you know, where he's not always trying to predict the future, but prevent it.

So what's added the seed for this idea? Well, first of all, let's talk about what's the idea of all the humans are sleeping. And then we'll talk about where the idea came from and how it went as you wrote it, etc. Can I read the synopsis at the back? Because I worked so hard on the synopsis that, you know, it does a good job. Sure. Go ahead. Okay. The title is A Farmer, A Robot, and the End of the World. World War III lasted six days.

Within the first few hours, my farm in Manitoba burned to the ground. The blast that destroyed our home came from the same mushroom cloud that killed my wife. I wish it had nuked me too, but those heartless robots saved me. They also rescued my daughter, so I can't damn them. She was the only thing keeping me alive until the metaverse took her away. Yes, I've tried to kill myself. I may do it again.

But that purple domestic bot with the pompous British accent keeps on interfering. The robots won't let us go to heaven, and the humans have made Earth a living hell. As an alternative, the United Nations has offered our minds a virtual purgatory in the metaverse, while our bodies are preserved in synthetic amniotic fluid like overgrown babies. One billion survivors live in these pods, hardwired to the internet, forced to dream a digital fantasy.

where flowers never wilt and wither. Well, I refuse their full flowers, so what if they burnt all the real ones? Still, how can I accept this post-apocalyptic world? Can I endure being cloistered on this desolate mountaintop, on the northernmost tip of Norway, with an unhinged robot that wears a suit and tie and aspires to be a poet? My name is Peter Stevens, the last of the Luddites.

But I don't know if I can remain awake when all the humans are sleeping. Nice. Well, I have to say, when I ran that through ChatGPT to check for typos, it came back and it was very concerned I was going to commit suicide. Really? Yeah, yeah. Well, you said, yeah, actually, you literally said that, yeah, I may...

MA off myself too. Yeah, no, the book does deal with that. Because it deals a lot with the path I see governments doing a lot where it's like, we're not going to force you to do things. We're just going to make life unlivable unless you do it our way. Yeah, we saw that with the COVID mandates, a lot of the vaccine ones where we're not going to force you to take the shots. You just can't go to the gym, can't go to the restaurant, can't go to church, can't see your family, your family will shun you. But we're not forcing you. Exactly. Exactly.

Well, I mean, from what I've heard in Canada, I guess euthanasia now is a thing. Did that play into what goes on in the book at all or just maybe as a sidebar? Like, what's your experience or thoughts with that?

It wasn't... Well, I should just say just last week I found out my next-door neighbor just went on medically-assisted suicide and... What is it called? Made medical assistance in dying after she had been tortured by the medical system for like four years with all these treatments for throat cancer. I was... It's something I, you know...

the book deals with in the fact that the character does get very suicidal at one point because I mean it's living in a post-apocalyptic world where only a very small part of the planet is habitable at that point and everyone else has gone into a virtual reality simulation and he's trying to stay on the outside and he'd rather die than live some fake life and some type of digital fantasy not that I necessarily think I agree with him but

I have a lot of problems with the euthanasia program in Canada, especially, you know, you've probably heard of these things where people can be put under, not put to sleep, they can be killed by the government if they're depressed. Do they have to, well, this could turn from, yeah, okay, I'm volunteering to do this to,

you know, I was coerced into doing this to straight up. We're doing it to you. I get that's a slippery slope. Like what have you seen so far where it becomes mandatory? Yeah. You know, it's been great. Sure. It can go there, you know,

Yeah, well, especially if you have certain conditions where you're determined. And that comes back to the whole problem. It's like, you just get government out of everything. Because the argument there is be like, well, we got government welfare, social health care, welfare and all that. So we don't want to pay for people who are going to just be a burden on the system. Well, it doesn't mean you have to kill them. I mean, maybe you could just take away the whole welfare system completely and just let people be free to decide themselves.

you know, what kind of treatment they want to get if no treatment. And so I don't know. It's it smells pretty bad, especially when you see them doing things to like making drugs more legal so that people get into like serious addiction situations that will then naturally lead to health problems. Then, you

open up this door for euthanasia. You know, one of the big things that we saw, especially after the COVID lockdowns, was there was a lot of elective surgeries that had piled up because they had to keep the hospitals empty. And hip surgery is, you know, they started offering people who were having on a long waiting list for hip surgery,

euthanasia as an alternative would save the government a lot of money because seniors, if they don't have hip surgery and they can't walk, their lifespan is very short. Whilst if they do get hip surgery, their lifespan can be like 10, 15 years longer, which means they're on, you know, taking from the government pension. So you could see where there was a lot of motivation there for them to

Get rid of seniors. And then, you know, there's the whole stories that's coming out, too, with the younger people, you know, the depressed 18-year-old that they want to euthanize for organ harvesting. Ugh. Sand. So what led you to write this book, All the Humans Are Sleeping? How long have the ideas in it been in your head and now up for publication?

Yeah, it goes back 20 years. So it was way back when I first saw the Matrix movie and that scene when, you know, the famous scene when Neo wakes up in the pod and realizes that the Matrix was an illusion. And that's basically where I started my story originally. It was more about someone coming out of the Matrix and being in the Matrix. So the idea of people having lived in there a long time and then having to rehabilitate back to living in reality. Yeah.

Yeah. So, cause I mean, a big theme in the story is our whole relationship with technology and whether we're going to use it to allow us to become more human or less human, which I think is, you know, I guess a good example would be for myself is like, I met my fiance over Zoom in another country. So, and you know, that's something that wouldn't have happened without technology, but you know, our everyday existence is not with your head stuck into a

Like Ready Player One, like your everyday existence all day is not sitting there with a screen, not touching anybody or talking to anyone in real life, you know? No, no. I mean, and this is where it comes down to how we're going to use these tools. But there's a big threat to it because people are becoming more disassociated from their physical experiences.

existence and the idea that they can live a better existence in some type of fabricated reality I personally I think it's absolutely nuts like you know like with my fiance it was like you know once we got to know each other well if I basically said hey can I take you out to dinner and she lived in the Netherlands and I live in Canada but I didn't make that an obstacle because you know you don't want to have a relationship over Zoom no that

So it comes down to, I'm, you know, this is what I see is like, even like in growing up in school, one of the things that really spurred me to write the book was I was always upset that we never had a dance class in school. Like most of what we're taught in school is all in our head. It's about memorizing things and so forth. You know, a lot of exceptions. Gym used to be really good, but they've canceled a lot of that. Oh, so they're canceling gym class now. Oh, that's been going on for a long time in the U.S. Very long.

Very interesting. That doesn't surprise me. And, you know, so it's like, I think it was Ken Robinson, he had this famous quote where he said, you know, there's something curious about professors in my experience. Not all of them, but typically they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. And everybody's

Basically, that's where we see this going with technology, like with the goggles and so forth, which have been to a large degree a failure because when people strap on these goggles to go into some virtual reality simulation, they're having too many physical side effects, nausea, dizziness, headaches. So that's why I think it was Apple. I forget the name of the device they use, but they had thousands and thousands of returns. Oh, good. Yeah.

Well, it is good and bad because that means the only real solution if they're going to make this work is it has to be direct implants, you know, right into the brain, spinal cord, the nervous system. Like this external stuff's not going to work. And that's, you know, largely what I dealt with in the novel. Even if one looks on the cover, it's like it looks like someone in ICU because if you're basically just going to...

override the whole nervous system in the brain, you're going to have to not be aware that you're still have a physical body. So everyone's basically living in these pods with ventilators hooked up and feeding tubes up their nose catheters, you know, the whole works with wires going into their body. And, you know, to me, that's an ICU situation. It looks absolutely horrible, but some people are actually considering it. And I

How do you know? Have you gone online or spoken to people and they actually want to be in the Matrix-like world?

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Well, more so that, I mean, the technology is being developed and experimented with, you know, extensively with primates right now. There's been actually a lot of controversy over it because, and this is, I think, the only big hope we have is that with the primates, I mean, they got them so they could play video games just using their brain, but they keep on developing massive tumors. And so animal rights groups have become involved because apparently the tumors are just amazingly big that grow in the head.

heads when they've been wired into the internet so but yeah as far as people doing it i'm i can't say i've um met anyone who's volunteered for something like this so you've heard about like elon musk's work with the neural nets and how he has yeah you're yeah so i i mean people were willing to do it that way i mean we have uh there was that one kid in korea i think he played a video game for like 30 36 48 hours straight and had a heart attack oh person i hope

human beings won't go this low. But that's why with my novel, I had set it to create a situation where the government could push it, where there was a nuclear holocaust and most of the surface of the Earth wasn't habitable, so that there would finally be this choice between a harsh reality or a perfect unreality. And if it came down to that, I'm not sure what people would choose. Yeah, there was a show on Netflix or something called Upload in the U.S. a couple years ago. And it was the same thing. People have, you know, people...

They die. There's like this digital representation that gets uploaded. They can live in these. It's like a senior care facility, but just for people that have died in the real world, but at least they can live there. They can interact with people and all that. So yeah, there's been a couple of people that have played around with this concept in different ways. Yeah. But my, you know, that's a lot of what I tried to dealt with in the novel was I just don't think human being...

like part of being a human being is being in a physical body. And I think that too is, you know, largely a lot of what creates emotions is the interaction between our consciousness, the physical body and the outside world. So,

So if you do some type of virtual reality situation, you're going to basically bring us down to consciousness and a mind with no body and no outside world. And I don't know if that's still being a human being. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, have you gone through periods where you're on the computer all the time or are you pretty conscious and you go outdoors a lot and spend time in nature?

What's been your life experience? Yeah, I mean, I start my day with like a seven kilometer run in the woods. I have a timer set on my computer because my chiropractor was making way too much money. So every 30, 45 minutes, I take a break and do some type of body weight exercise and stretching. So I'm pretty good at breaking it up. And I don't sit at the desk anymore. I gave that up years ago. I do everything standing.

I might use a grounding cord. So, because I, like I said, I think it was about 15 years ago, like I used to be the type of person who just sat there and just worked for hours nonstop. And I was having just massive, um,

back pain, like the type where he couldn't move afterwards. And like I said, the chiropractor was doing very well. I was like seeing her every day because it was that painful. Sheesh, that's crazy. So the story has been in you for a long time. Why now did you choose to finish it off and get it into writing?

I'd actually published it as a novella way back in, I don't know, 2005, 2006. This was back before Kindle was out. I was just selling this through my own website. I had a few novellas. So it was, I think at that time, 20,000 words and did quite well as far as the market was at that time.

Then I moved away from that. Other problems I had with my life and my wife was quite sick and stuff. So I took down the publishing business at the time. So I mean, fast forward, I had three novellas. One novella before COVID, I was turning into a full length novel. Then COVID came out and I wrote Much Ado About Corona instead and put that on hold. And I remembered I had this other novella, All the Humans Are Sleeping. And I thought, I'm just going to finish this up. Well, I published...

Much Ado About Corona, and the sequel was coming out, but I thought, I'll just get this novella done quick, because it's already almost done. I just got to edit it a little, and I'll put this out and get back to the sequel to Much Ado About Corona. And it went from a 20,000-word novella to a 65,000-word novel over the course of one year, so I just couldn't help expanding it. Wow.

So what kind of reception have you got to the book? How long has it been out there and what comments are you getting? Yeah, it's been out about, I guess it's been about a month and a half now. I've been actually really surprised because I wasn't sure if people, if they'd find it maybe possibly too philosophical or the other issue, of course, I've been dealing with this story for 20 years. So the novelty, you know, started to wear off a bit on me. But yeah, no, so far I've been very, very pleasantly surprised. Like, I mean, I have people telling me, like,

Okay, one of the best examples, this shocked me, was have you ever read the Silo series by Hugh Howey? No, I haven't heard of him.

Yeah, and I think they got an Apple version of it out, Apple TV thing. Yeah, it's a very amazing story. I'd recommend that one too. It was actually originally just a short story that he put on Amazon Kindle called Wool, and it started selling like, I forget, it was like 1,000 copies a week. It was just naturally from word of mouth. Everyone was telling everybody else to go buy this short story. So he's

Started putting out sequels and eventually produced a whole novel and ended up, you know, selling millions and millions of copies. So he's one of those...

guys who just was writing short stories on kindle and got really lucky um the story is actually it's set like in the um i think 500 years in the future and that's about i think uh 3 000 people who have been living generation after generation buried under the ground unable to go to the surface of the earth very good story but anyways i have um an elderly neighbor who i um bought her that book for christmas and she like read two chapters and said this is too dark i can't read it

So I was like, oh, okay, no problem. So when I published All the Humans are Sleeping, I was like, this has to be too dark for her too. But she insisted she wanted to read it. So I gave Karen the book on a Friday. And I said, you know, I literally expected by the next day she would not be able to read it. Next day she calls me at 5 p.m. and says, and I'm expecting to hear, I just can't read this, I'm sorry. And she told me she finished the whole thing in one day. I was like, oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, she said, I just wouldn't put it down. Yeah. So I've had a few people who have read it like in one day or they said Louise Tremblay, who's a Canadian, French-Canadian fiction author. I mean, she said she found herself waking up at three o'clock in the morning. She went to bed, got to bed, but then woke up at three o'clock in the morning to finish reading the thing. So yeah, and just other people too. I wasn't sure what the reaction was going to be. And I mean, it's been over the top with a lot of them. I mean, the

Bob Naps, right? Yeah. I was going to say, word queue networking. Get it made into a movie. Sounds like a word. Wow. Yeah, I was thinking of sending it to Night Shyamalan. Yeah, no, why not? I mean, if people really liked it that much and they said they couldn't put it down, that's, you know, if one of those people knows somebody that's, you know, associated with movies, and they say, hey, check this out. I literally couldn't put it down. I read it in one day.

Yeah, that's powerful praise. And I bet you that something would happen if you keep asking all your readers who do they know and who could they refer to. I think you should do that. That'd be really cool. Maybe one of your listeners. Yeah, that too. Yeah, I'm happy to do the same. But that's high praise. Well, the one I love too is when people tell me they got goosebumps because I love goosebumps. Like Earth.

Like that series or The Phenomenon? The Phenomenon, yeah. Yeah, no, when people... I mean, for me, stories always...

they produce an emotional response and it's but this is distinct feeling especially when the story culminates like all my not both my novels as you go chapter by chapter they build on each other and a lot of that's because I rewrote them so many times I mean I've usually done 15 to 20 rewrites so I don't want to get to the end of it and go back I'm able to foreshadow things and add stuff to the beginning that will build up to the end so I think it's a great way to

So it's... But there's a feeling I always want throughout the novel, but especially one that grows and when you get to the end, it has that very satisfying feeling, but also something that, I don't know, I hope makes people feel better about life. So...

when I can achieve that and well at least I won't publish a book if I don't think it's achieving it but at least for me but it's I'm happy to hear afterwards that other people will get in the same feeling and this one too it has a twist at the end and then it has another twist and another twist so if you if you like twists there's three of them at the end and I get very disappointed with a novel or a story I don't care how good the whole thing was if the ending's not good I'd

I don't know. I'm just very upset by the end then. Well, because you spent your time and energy and you got emotionally invested and then it just dumps you in the back alley and you're like, what the fuck? You know, why would you end up like that? That's how I feel, I guess. Yeah, it's like they didn't, uh,

Oh, I like Neil Gaiman's work a lot. Like, I love his novels up until the end. And then when I get to the end, I just like, I just, how he could have done better. So, I don't know. I kind of felt that the last TV show I ever watched was Lost. And maybe that's why, because I was very upset with the ending. Did you see Lost? No, I just heard about it, but I never watched it. Yeah. I mean, they were doing brilliant stuff. I saw it and then it got to the end and it was like,

They had so many open plot elements and I just didn't feel they tied it together. It's like they gave up or went on to some other project and it felt like an abortion to me. So...

I was going to tell you something interesting. I don't know why it just came to mind. Weird ways of use ChatGPT. So I use it to write marketing material sometimes. And, you know, I got that book, 20 Master Plots by Tobias. So I had it do an advertisement and I said, rewrite this using the Eero's Journey framework. And it did. And it came out really good.

And then I said, all right, rewrite this using the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, you know, framework. And it did. And it was pretty cool. So I don't, it just came out of nowhere, but it's just something interesting that you or listeners may want to try with any written material is put it in and see what it does just to see how it changes it. According to like these, these master plots. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. I know you wouldn't publish anything like that, but it's just something interesting.

because you're a writer, maybe you'd like to do. Well, I have been using ChatGPT to provide feedback on my own writing, almost like a first editor, which I've been... Really? Yeah, also Cloud AI, I find, is a little better for writing, but... Tell me about that. What do you do and what kind of prompts does it give you back or how does it help you? Well, I'll basically copy and paste like a chapter or section of a chapter. My chapters are usually very short, but...

directly into it and I will say kind of editorial feedback that you have on this and he'll give like a lot of times even if I don't like his suggestions or ideas it usually prompts me to actually change that sentence or whatever it is

Nonetheless, even if I don't go with something maybe he suggested or I even don't agree with what he thought was wrong with it. On the flip side, a lot of times I don't go with his suggestions at all because I find they're kind of cliche. And sometimes I can tell he doesn't understand the story. Obviously, he can't to some degree. So I'm fairly like I was recently seeing something someone had had Chad GPT do and it

It was very well written, but it just lacks a human quality to it and an emotion to it. There's something about it that I find still mechanical. And, you know, it's like when I've when I played chess against a computer engine, it makes no sense that it feels different, but it feels different. It's really weird that how the pieces move and the move it makes. It just does not seem human. And I have no idea how to describe why I feel like that, but I do.

And you probably experience the same thing with the writing. Yeah. Yeah. Like I can spot a chat GPT material almost very, very easily.

So, I mean, he's been good for, great for research. I've been using him a lot. You know, stuff that would have took me 20, 30 minutes to research, I'm able to do in like two sometimes. Because, I mean, especially with novels and like, that's one of the compliments people have been given about the book is that it feels, despite the fact it's at 16 years in the future, which, you know, it's not that far in the future. We're all probably going to be living that.

it seems very real and it's a lot of it's just the number of details I have in there like just how a helicopter works like I would spend a half an hour just reading um usually what I'll do is first I'll go and read the Wikipedia article on a helicopter and just learn as much as I can about the helicopter so that when I depict a helicopter in the story it actually has that concrete realness to it but then as I'm writing the story I'll get questions and that's where I found ChatGPT was helpful because

You know, even just simple questions like which way does the rotor blade in a helicopter go? Does it go counterclockwise, clockwise? And he's able to provide that answer very quickly versus me having to spend quite a lot of time looking it up. So from a research point of view, he's been very helpful. From an editorial point of view, he's been helpful. But I've never used him to like create drafts or anything like that. Okay. So that was interesting, you know.

Well, in the story itself, I mean, everyone's favorite character in the story, sadly, or good, I'm not sure, is Domestico, who is the six-foot-tall purple robot who is aspiring to be a poet. So throughout the novel, he keeps on trying to write new poems, which adds a tad bit of humor to the story, which it kind of needs. And...

I mean, it is a bit of a trope, you know, the robot trying to be human, but I feel I did it in a unique way. And like, I never really liked, you know, Data from Star Trek's probably one of the iconic robot trying to be human characters. And I

I didn't enjoy his character very much, whilst domestical I do. But I just don't think, like, I think, you know, that fundamentally one of the things that makes humans different, and I talk about in the novel, is our ability to love. Even whether it's people or even occupations or passions and all that, you're just never going to get, I don't think it's possible to have artificial love, artificial passion. I mean, I may have been a bit questionable if we really do have artificial intelligence, but I'm at

At the same time, I didn't think it would be as advanced as it is already. But I don't think we can have artificial love. I don't think we can have artificial humanity. And even then, artificial intelligence is kind of an oxymoron in itself. Yeah, it's not intelligence. I mean, if you were disciplined enough and able to have all the knowledge that was on the internet about a certain subject...

And, you know, you ran algorithms to, like, maximize. You looked for the commonalities. You were able maybe to tie it to results and look for what worked best. You would get pretty good quickly at some narrow thing. You know, chess, go...

whatever it is outside of that. Oh, but I think that's what these models are doing because they're just, that's why they're, they sound trite because they're taking like the least common denominator of stuff. If you keep prompting it and working it, I guess, yeah, you would get better things, but it's not really able to create anything new. It puts things together in a clever way. And again, on a narrow subject, it just has access to a lot more information. They can very quickly process

put it together in a usable format. But I don't know for innovation, if it's going to be able to do that for you, you know, like the human mind has to do that. I don't think you'll ever be able to do that, but it's just, you know, my thought. No. And I, in some ways I think that's where the benefit is of all is going to come because like I said, for this novel, I was able to write this novel quicker because of AI being able to do that kind of legwork, so to speak, you know, the research and being able to collect information quickly. So,

I mean, I think the more, even on a robotic level, I mean, the more robots can take over doing mundane stuff so humans can do more, whether it's creativity, whether it's, you know, more inner work. I mean, humans probably use a lot more time to kind of deal with a lot of our own personal psychological issues, spiritual exploration, but then also, like I said, creativity, probably improving human relationships. Maybe actually, you know, like we were kind of

referring to at the beginning though it could give humans a lot more opportunity to become more connected to their human form in their body like they could have more time for exercise or sports or dancing you know things that would actually give them time to be more human or traveling and meeting other cultures and going to more places in the world so I mean if we could get rid of the you know the oligarchy that's kind of sucking up all the resources and then have technology that frees us from both mundane physical and mental activities I mean

Things could get really good for being a human being on Earth. Well, there's this battle. There's never any battle. There's literally good and evil, I would say, you know? People wanting to live and be free and be as they are. And other people that want to control, extract resources from them. That's what I see it as, you know?

Yeah. And it's kind of, you know, the curious thing to see with artificial intelligence, whether it's just going to be a neutral tool that could be used for good or evil, whether it's going to prefer the evil, it's going to prefer the good. Like, you know, in the Matrix movie, it was basically the robots kind of took over being the evil overlords of the Earth. And I'm not sure if in my novel, basically, the robots aren't. They actually end up becoming the caretakers of the humans, whilst the humans kind of voluntarily go into abyss.

virtual hibernation where almost like the humans and the robots are trying to switch places where the robots are coming out and they're trying to be the caring stewards of the earth and of the humans and the humans are trying to go into a digital computerized reality and that both

that both are not working i mean the story is not in favor of that but you know first of all i don't have i don't personally have any fears that the robots are going to take over the earth i'm actually just naive maybe that's how maybe this happens you know you know some people theorize every whatever 20 000 years we get involved enough to build ai and then ai destroys us and we go back to the stone age and do it all over again i don't like that story i made with you it's

That's a lousy story, though. So if that happens every time, I hope this time it doesn't. Well, that's what the Matrix story was, you know? Yeah, and I don't like that. Yeah, that's the story of the Matrix. They rebuild, it happens. Does it apparently, and they keep on going back to 1900 or something? I don't know what they go back to, but it's always the same cycle. You know, the machines let them build up to a certain spot. They build that hidden city. They get to it, destroy it. There's some remnant that rebuilds.

and the cycle repeats. So you saw all three Matrix movies? Yeah. I couldn't... I was so disappointed with the second film, I refused to go see the third one. Because I thought the first movie was kind of a masterpiece of storytelling, and then the second one just... I don't know, I was... I didn't enjoy it at all. It just...

I just got bored with the fight scenes and it just seemed a loss. Did you enjoy the second one or were you just trying to see all three because you had to? I just saw them as I was, you know, as I was going along. I saw them when they first got in the movies. The second one, I remember it being amazing. But the third one, you know, that was an interesting twist at the end.

It was like, oh, man, you know, what was the point of all this if it's just going to repeat and repeat and repeat? So, yeah, the third one got really psychological and really just that really made me think by the end of it. So I think it redeemed itself in the end, maybe. Well, it sounded like you thought it was kind of a pointless ending. Well, it wasn't pointless, like a bad ending. It was like, oh, man, if that's the case and it's just a cycle that's repeating, then what's really important, you know?

It just made it seem like you could think about that as normal human life. You know, I mean, we've been around for thousands of years. What's the importance of like my life or your life? Eventually, you know, we'll pass. And then anyone that knows us will pass and, you know, we'll have lived. But no one would know. Like I thought about this with World War Two. You know, it's terrible. Like Hitler, of course, everyone remembers him and all that stuff. There's millions and millions of people that died in that war and had lives and all the other stuff. No one knows their names. They've come, they've gone and we'll never know.

It's weird. And the one that we do know is, you know, this horrible person that did these things and some of the people around them. But the vast majority of the people, like, what was their role? It's weird. You know, their role is unseen. They had a role, of course, in shaping the people today and everything. But this ties into another phenomenon of

Of all the days you've ever lived, how many do you remember? And I think the average person maybe remembers like one-tenth of one percent of all the days they've lived. Yeah, you are who you are. So I know I'm getting philosophical here, but these are just weird things I thought of and I

I figured you'd like to hear them, so why not? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, there's actually quite a bit of what the novel deals with as it progresses, because it is this question of, you know, fundamentally, I guess, you know, for all of us, it's like, what are we here for? And especially when it seems so fleeting and that, you know, if you deal with it some ways, you can get quite depressed and anxious. Yeah.

And then it comes down to questions about what happens after you die and whether consciousness continues and so forth, or whether we had consciousness before we were born and we just don't remember.

So there's these factors too. I kind of try to keep my life simple and it's like, I'm trying to be happy now because that's about all I can deal with. Right. That's all you can do is if you don't, the time's going to pass anyway. So would you want to wake up X number of years from now and think, what have I been doing the past five, 10, 20 years? Like I wasn't aware. I wasn't really thinking about what's going on in the time past and now it's gone, you know? So I tell myself that too. I try to remember.

Remember what I'm doing. Think about what happened today, what was good, what was bad, because otherwise, again, you're not going to remember most of the days and you've lived and most of the things you've done. And I think you lose some richness if you don't do that. Yeah. And that said, I'm great at this introspection, but I'm trying.

I understand. Well, the thing is, too, is if you're building something, well, if you're building something with that, like, you know, I can look at a novel that took me 500 hours to write and say, oh, well, I knew what I did with that 500 hours. But I think there's also the fact that if you're living in that kind of conscious way, trying to make something, I guess, you know, you're trying to do something deliberately meaningful with your life. And it doesn't have to be like solving biggest world problems.

It seems almost like if you have a purpose and you have meaning, it's very fulfilling. But I think the main thing is it changes you. So even if you can't remember everything that happened, but you can feel that you've changed. I'm not sure. Well, what did you get from writing your last book? How do you feel changed by it? What did you learn from it? If that makes sense, you know?

Well, I mean, there's stuff you like, I could say I learned from just the experience, you know, the content in the book. And so I mean, like one thing I could say definitely, and I've been progressing with the books is that one of the just trying to do trying to be a hero was like, you're seeing this novel, it starts off with a very courageous character.

and then it kind of focuses on Peter Stevens for most of the novel and Peter Stevens is kind of on the fence which I also found with my first novel I had one character Stephanie who was kind of like the hero of the story but the protagonist is more like the reluctant hero you know he's on the hero's journey but he's not the hero yet and I

I think literature and movies and stuff has kind of maybe gravitated too far towards this motif of someone who is not really a hero. They're kind of reluctant hero. They're trying to be a hero. And maybe that's more realistic, but I'm not sure that's what we need in our stories. We still need the hero character because the hero is a little crazy because despite the fact life looks fleeting and the battles are too big, he just tries anyways. He does his best. And I think that's the kind of...

even if it's not realistic, it's what we need to make sure that we don't sink too low and that we can actually discover that we're capable of more than we thought. And just from a more other point of view is like, with this novel, I mean, it

In my previous novel, I had no idea I could produce something of this quality. I would have been happy if I had produced something half this quality and I would have been like, I was very satisfied with what I could do. And I am shocked at what I was able to produce. Just by not stopping and just

going over and over and going back to the beginning and rewriting it and rewriting it until I couldn't make it any better. And it got a lot better than I ever expected. It did stuff I never thought it was going to do. The characters were deeper than I expected. The plot twists were better. And I learned things

in there and I went places I couldn't have ever thought I would have gone like even places the story set like the story set in northern Canada on the Baffin Islands which I've never been to and then most of the stories set in northern Norway and it's like I didn't fly there or anything I just did a ton of research partly with the help of chat GPT and Google Maps and things like that but you know basically I produced something I didn't think I was capable of producing and that in itself changes you because you start to realize yeah I'm actually I'm

you know, better than I thought. So what, um, I don't know where, where are you going from here now with it? Now that you've done this, what, um, you know, again, what does it inspire you to do or look at or learn or what directions to take? Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting because it's like when I, um, you know, I got this thing published in, uh, December 1st and then on, uh,

Christmas Eve is when I asked my fiancee if she would marry me. So, you know, that was a big change for me because it's been, you know, my wife died two and a half years ago. And I had actually kind of decided I was just going to be a widower who sat around writing novels for the rest of my life. You know, it's not a bad life. But, you know, I met, you know, online and I fell in love with her like the first five minutes of the meeting. So, yeah.

It was a professional situation. But then I started to sit here and I realized it's like, well, okay, I could sit around writing, you know, maybe I can get like 40 novels done before I die writing about being a human being, or I could maybe write 30 novels before I die and I

actually be a human being. You know what I'm saying? Like, because I think to a large degree, we're getting too much in where we can things if almost anything can become an escape from being a human being, like, you know, work, creativity, but you know, other people, it's like, you know, a doom strolling on drugs or wherever. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's lots of different ways it can go. And you can kind of know when something's helping you.

And when it's crossed the line where it's stopping you from actually living your life. So, and, you know, and I'm going to be moving to Europe too, because she lives in Europe. And I mean, that's like... Oh, really? Yeah, Netherlands. So, I mean, and this is, you know, these are things that I think, you know, doing something like writing a big novel like this, other, you know, stuff I've had to deal with in my life, losing lots of people to death.

and then just keep going. You know, all these things change you where it's like this idea of, you know, moving to the Netherlands and marrying someone I've only known for four months. You know, it may sound absolutely crazy to some people, but I'm like...

Like so much has changed for me that I can like I can trust my intuition on certain things. I can trust how I feel about certain things. And I can, you know, as part of his intellectual, like in this situation, I was like, if she wouldn't make a good wife for me, there's no one in the world. It's just too good of a situation. The connection is too good and so forth that, you know, that's not going to work. I might as well just, you know, hide as a hermit somewhere because nothing's going to work.

So I don't know. I just, it's like my, my cover artist that he says, boy, you know, it's like, we should be trying to live our life like it's a novel in the sense that, you know, we're going to do some daring things and some of it's going to be hard and some of it's going to be risky. I mean, writing a novel is a risky, it's a stupid thing to do because you're going to spend like 500 to 1000 hours writing something that's going to be very difficult to sell, you know? So,

So, yeah. So I think, you know, these things have changed for me where it's like doing daring things has become more natural for me and making big commitments to things that are long term has become natural to me. You know, even just like my exercise routine, I've been doing the same exercise routine for years now and it's just become better and better and I become healthier and it's become second nature to me where it's like I can't imagine not exercising. So, yeah.

Yeah, I'm kind of rambling at this point. And I'm sure you must be able to say, wait, look how long you've done this podcast and how many people you've interviewed. Yeah, about 4,000. 4,000 people. I mean, this is what I love when I see people who have done something for a long time. Like I know musicians that I was listening to in the 90s and they're still...

performing and they still make music and it's just like great you know it's like and I you know I don't know that like a lot of people it's like I got to find the thing that's perfect for me and all that before I can commit and it's like I don't know I think half of it's yeah you got to find something you really like but half of it's a commitment that creates the that sense of a

purpose and accomplishment. It's not like the purpose and accomplishment comes first. I don't know. You know what I mean. It's hard to say what comes first, but they're so intertwined. I think it's a pretty back and forth thing. You do something, you have a desire for it and a hope, and then... I learned...

So I've learned that you just have to do things and by doing them, you learn a lot. Like by looking at something, you know, if I want to, I know if I look at photographs of animals or plants or whatever under high magnification, low magnification, I just know I'm going to learn something.

I have no idea what it is, but I always do. And by talking to someone, I'm going to learn a lot. And by doing a task or trying something out, I learn a lot. Like in marketing, when I have something I'm going to be marketing and selling, I realize I don't know how to sell it. I don't know

I don't know what's going to work, what's not. And the action of doing it and getting into it, you're like, oh, okay. And you realize this out of the other and you get better. So it's like you just have to jump in and do things and the experience of doing them changes you and then you can course correct and change. And that's when you really know what's going to happen. You can't just say, oh, if I do that, this is going to happen. If I do this, that's going to happen. You just got to do. And again, in the doing, if you're aware, that's when you get a lot of good stuff out of it.

That's when you really learn and hone in. No, I agree absolutely with you. I mean, even when writing these novels, I don't plot the whole thing out. I just start writing and I have no idea what the next chapter is going to be about. And I kind of prefer that. I think that's why it has so many unexpected things happen in the story. Because I didn't try to plot it out first. Yeah.

You get into problems all the time. And when you get into a problem, it's like, okay, you just go and like, I'm not just writing a novel, but like anything you're trying to do in life. Once, like you said, you just try stuff. Like I do that all the time. I got told chapters in this novel that I just threw away because I didn't like them, but I had to write them in order to realize what I needed to write. I was just helping with a marketing project too. And we wrote two versions of the flyer and did a market test with two versions. And it was like one that I really liked bombed. Yeah.

when I was but it taught me a lot about the audience so I was like okay well they don't like that I like it but I'm obviously the black sheep here and I think this is a frustrating thing because I see people that can be very reluctant to do anything because they don't know how to do it or even how to start and like I always tell people if you have no idea what to start the first thing to start is uh

a to-do list like the first item on the to-do list is just to start brainstorming and what you like you said that sometimes the first thing to start doing is either get a book on the subject or go interview someone on the subject or just try doing it and it doesn't have to be um it's not going to be perfect and it's kind of feel like you're just groping around in the dark at first and that's okay i've seen that with interviews if i'm in a particular field the first five or ten interviews on a subject you know learning the lingo and all the other stuff and then

Once I get to maybe 20, 30, I'm pretty conversant and I'm starting to like imagine myself floating above the playing field and I'm seeing where all the players are going. And then once I get to, let's say a hundred, which I've done in some industries, then I really feel like I can see all the players and where they're going and what they're doing. And I have a very good

perspective on the industry. And I also see people just aren't talking enough. They're not sharing what they're doing. So a lot of industries could advance a lot further if people came together, communicated everything they're working on. I don't even know where this is coming from, but just telling you my experience of doing the podcast, that's some of what I've seen.

Well, it is neat too. Like you said, once you start diving into something far enough, you suddenly are conversant in it enough that, one, you can start asking the right questions and start going down either, well, sometimes too, if you're new to something, it's kind of good because then you have a perspective that the people that are submerged in it don't. So you point things, or, you know, in

introduce something from something else that you know about and put it in there. And also it's pretty cool. And that's why I like it when people can like articulate what they're doing in a good way, whether it's through speech or especially when they put it in a book form too, because it's that type of collaboration that I think is, you know, we can let chat GPT and the robots take care of all the mundane stuff while we're going to be, you know, right.

doing this kind of high collaboration, collaborative type of work, whether it's more on the left brain or the right brain, I'm not against either. Like people who can, you know, find some new form of cryptocurrency that is, you know, as good as a debit card or people who can, you know, make some type of, um,

you know, figure out how to regenerate human tissue. I mean, it's all cool to me too. It's just not what I'm good at. And, you know, the people who can produce beautiful paintings, music, movies, books, I don't know. It's like, I see that's going to be more the future of humanity. And then, you know, probably too, people, I'd like to see too more, not just technology, but more discovery. Also the discovery side, the discovering more about how,

especially the human body works, the human brain works, human relationships work, but then also just how nature works in general. I mean, ongoing discoveries in science instead of, I think we're stuck too much in where a lot of things are theoretical and we're pretending a lot of theories are facts that haven't been proven. And then that creates a lot of obstacles because then we don't find out what the truth is. Yeah, I can see what you mean.

So what, I guess, last question, you know, this, this would be a good, I know this interview is all over the place. There's no form to it, but for people that read your books, you know, I always want to know more about the author. How do they think? What do they like in real life? So I think that this interview would give, give people a better glimpse into you and, you know, how you are as a regular person and what you think about. So I think it's a good one. So what's, I guess, last thing since we're, you know, out of time. So what's next for you? You're moving over to Europe.

Is there another book, you know, cooking inside you or what's happening there? Oh, I got tons of books cooking. I've been writing, I mean, for the last 20 years I wrote, even when I was so busy with everything else, every single day I would write two pages of fiction, usually handwritten. So I have like four drafts of novels, fire safe. But the one I was probably go back to...

once I'm actually well currently what I'm doing is actually I all the humans are sleeping was the first time I did an audiobook version which was a really intense experience but the audiobook version is also available on audibles and there's a free sample with the first I think two and a half hours for people to download off the website but I

I'm currently working on the Much Ado About Corona audiobook, which, I mean, that's, you know, both have been, especially Much Ado About Corona. That's another example of, you know, going in the territory you're not comfortable with. Because when I wrote Much Ado About Corona, I wasn't thinking about having to do an audiobook at

at the time and the book has because it's set in northern Ontario it has a fair bit of French in it not like tons of French where you need to know French in there but there's enough French in the book because there's French characters and there's French lines and then I had a fair bit of German lead music in there and so I didn't really think about this until

until the audiobook comes along and I was like, okay, now I got to read this French and this German. Plus there's a fair bit of Ojibwe in there, but Ojibwe is actually very easy to read. It was because the Ojibwe, I don't believe they had a written language. So when the Ojibwe was turned into English,

English letters. They just did it with English phonetics. So it's actually easier to read than English, but the French and German is not from, I like not fluent in French and German at all. So literally for like the last two years, I've been working with both French and German tutors to helping me with the pronunciation so that I can at least just read those lines in the book. And then in all those humans are sleeping, I actually had to sing most of all the joy in German. And that was fun. I mean, it was a lot of work, but yeah,

Yeah. So anyways, the audiobook of Much Ado About Corona is the big project right now. Okay. Well, very good. How can people get on your Blazing Pinecone list or, you know, keep in touch and follow up with what you're doing? Well, I'd recommend they head off to, because they go to allthehumansofsleeping.com and they can enter the email address there. They'll get on the newsletter. Plus they'll get ebook copy with the first 24 chapters, plus the audiobook with the first 24.

24 chapters, which is what I encourage people to do. Unless you really prefer to have a print version right from the go, you can just go ahead and buy it. But otherwise, you can go and get the e-book or audio book version and just listen or read the first 24 chapters. And if you can't put it down, buy the thing. And if you're not liking it, well, don't buy it.

Okay. Well, very good. Well, John, thanks for coming. It's always great to speak to you. And like I said, I just know I'm going to hear all kinds of cool stuff. I have no idea what it's going to be, but I just jump in and talk to you and that's what comes out. So, but another great call. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Richard. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.