This week on Retrinuts. Go ahead and destroy the financial district, yeah. Hello, welcome to retrinots. I'm your host Kevin Bunch. Today we are not actually talking about Godzilla directly, although he does factor in.

I want to talk about an interesting book that came out about a month and a half ago as of this recording.

It's called Building SimCity

How to Put the World in a Machine.

As released through MIT Press,

and it delves into the history and design of SimCity,

but moreover, and more interestingly to me, it

contextualizes it in a way that I think may be interesting and surprising to readers as well.

I've got a special guest joining me for this book talk and that's the author.

Yeah, so my name is Kram Ginkled. Thanks for having me on the program, Kevin. I've

excited to talk to you about it. I mean we can also talk about water rights and water quality at some point too.

You were discussing that a little bit before we started recording. We have a lot of thoughts about water rights as it turns

out. This is relevant to some city I think. Yeah I mean it was designed out in California, famously dry region, so.

Land management.

Yeah.

So, I guess my first question is why SimCity what interested you in well actually let me back up a little bit before that

What is your book about in your own words? Yeah, this is a great question.

I think that I struggled a lot with how to summer,

like it's like it was a long, but well the book was a lot longer

and I kept making it shorter and shorter

to hit the word count contract and for like

readability and that it's really hard to get it down to like one line and get to like a title

...