Tetragrammaton.

Tetragrammaton.

I love to write about people who do the wrong thing for the right reason.

So I like to find a big topic, ideally one that I want to learn about, that has that moral gray area.

It might be civilian privacy versus national security. It might be AI is going to save us or

AI is going to kill us. It might be the future of human consciousness, whether learning about how our

minds work is a good or a bad thing. And so for me, really, it's choosing a topic. And after that,

comes location. And last of all, come the characters.

Are there other topics floating around for potential future books?

That's funny. Yes, there are, but the bar has gotten so high, having just written about human

consciousness and before that AI. There are plenty of things that interest me, but it's very

difficult to find something that I think resonates on the level of the influence that AI is going to have or the influence that understanding human consciousness is going to have. I do have some new ideas that I'm sketching out, but at the moment, I think I'm pretty tired. This book took eight years. Wow. It was by far the most ambitious thing I've

ever tried to write. And I also happen to think it's the most fun, but maybe that's just

what every author says when they finally finish a book. I'm about midway through and it's a

roller coaster ride. I can't remember going on a roller coaster ride as fun in a long time. So it's

working. Thank you. From you, that's very, very kind.

You said someone who does the wrong thing for the right reason.

Now, when someone does the wrong thing for the right reason, would that person be a hero or a villain?

Well, that's right. That's the question. And that's, you get it. Those are the interesting villains.

I wrote a book called

Inferno where somebody believed that overpopulation was going to kill us as a species and decided

really the only thing to do was to stop overpopulation by cutting the population half to a very

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