Eliot Peper's new novel 'Foundry' and the Future

Danny Crichton:
Hello, and welcome to Securities, a podcast and newsletter devoted to science, technology, finance, and the human condition. I'm your host, Danny Crichton, and today we have a special recurring guest star, Eliot Peper, a Bay Area-based novelist who's latest book, Foundry, was just published. Eliot, welcome to the program.

Eliot Peper:
Thanks so much for having me. It's good to be back.

Danny Crichton:
Eliot, were you here for Reap3r? Did we do an episode on Reap3r?

Eliot Peper:
We did.

Danny Crichton:
And then we did-

Eliot Peper:
I think it was maybe a year and a half ago.

Danny Crichton:
A year and a half ago. And then you were here talking about speculative fiction. And now you're here, I think you're the first triple returnee on the podcast, which is super exciting.

Eliot Peper:
It's an honor. Do I get a T-shirt or a prize?

Danny Crichton:
You're already looking for swag, but nonetheless, we have a podcast here. You have an amazing new novel out with Foundry, and you're touching on a hot geopolitical topic, which is semiconductors, fabricators, and the ability to control the supply of chips. And we were talking a little bit before the show, and you were talking about how in your novel-writing process you're almost up to a dozen, at a dozen, past a dozen, near a dozen.

Eliot Peper:
Foundry is my 11th novel.

Danny Crichton:
11 novels. So you're almost there and then almost to a baker's dozen. But when you wanted to build this or write this story, you approach it in a very different way from some of the thrillers you've done in the past. I'm curious, what was your creative process as were you're getting into this new field?

Eliot Peper:
So Foundry started with a dream. So I actually woke up in the middle of the night and I had a single remnant image in my mind where you can't remember the dream's larger context. I'm sure listeners have experienced this, right? You don't remember what was happening. You don't remember why you're there in the dream, but you're left with this one image and the emotional hangover from it. And I rolled over and I made a note and I went back to sleep. And then the next morning I woke up and I read the note and I was like, "Wow, that's a killer opening line for a novel." So with Foundry, unlike in my previous books, I actually wrote the whole thing line by line. I just took that one note and I typed it into my computer, and then I wrote another sentence and another sentence and another sentence.
And those sentences became paragraphs, the paragraphs became chapters, and then eventually, the book grew from there. And it was a very unusual process for me because usually I have more of a plan. I sort of know where I'm going with a story. And with this one, it really felt more like I was a reader. I was discovering the plot alongside the reader. And one thing that it really made me think about that certainly applies for me as a writer, but I think would also apply to people almost making anything, whether you're a writer, writing stories, whether you're making software, whether you're working on the frontiers of science, there are parallels between human creative process across fields. And for me, one thing that was really interesting about this is that in previous books, I actually think we may have spoken about this when we did a podcast about Reap3r, but in previous books where I've had a plan, inevitably there's some kind of creative crisis that happens in the writing of the book. And Ed Catmull at Pixar said that every movie Pixar ever made there was a catastrophe, right?

Danny Crichton:
And not just at the box office.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah. No, in the production of the film. And what they learned at Pixar was initially, early on when there was a catastrophe, afterwards, they did a post-mortem, right? They said, "Hey, there was this catastrophe. How do we prevent this from happening in the next movie?" And then a new catastrophe would happen in the next movie. So no matter how much they tried to plan around to avoid a catastrophe, a catastrophe would happen. So they realized that rather than trying to de-risk the production of a film from catastrophes, that instead, they needed a creative team who was good at responding to catastrophes. And for me, I sort of went through as an individual. I had a similar experience writing Foundry where on previous books where I had a plan and then that plan exploded on contact with reality, I would think, "Oh my God, do I have to trash this manuscript? Is this book just not going to work? Is it broken?"
And with certain books, I'd be almost in a crisis with the project for months at a time, trying to figure out different paths that might work and thinking that I'd need to separate it into multiple books or just throw out the whole thing and start something fresh and new. And what was interesting with Foundry was, effectively, I was in a single extended creative crisis because I didn't have a plan at all. So it actually felt like every chapter or every scene I was writing, I was in that position where I had no idea what was going to happen. And it felt like everything was on the line in a way. And the irony is I just got used to it. It was like a climatization where suddenly I felt like, "Oh, okay, well, this is fine. I'm going to just play in this playground of the unknown despite not having a plan." And that actually led the story to places I didn't expect. And I think that it's certainly going to inform how I approach future projects.

Danny Crichton:
That's amazing. So you had a dream, you wrote down the opening lines, you're going line by line, paragraph, pages, chapters. When did you figure out that it was going to be about chips? Was that the dream was about chips? I've never had a semiconductor dream. I have had a dream of being stuck at Target at the checkout counter in which I kept trying to use a Walmart card and they wouldn't accept it and I was very confused why my Walmart card wasn't working at a Target. And in Dreamland, you're just like, "I want to pay. Why won't you let me pay?" But I'm curious because the focus on semiconductors and fabs and chips, how did you end up over there? Was that from the dream itself or did you just stumble upon that?

Eliot Peper:
No. So one of the joys of writing the book line by line was that I was able to weave in live anything that fascinated me. It was almost like your jazz musician riffing, and the minute that you have an idea, you can incorporate it into the next session or into the next series of chords even. So for me, the way that I reached the semiconductor angle... So Foundry is a spy thriller about semiconductor manufacturing and how the chips that power our phones and our computers are so central to 21st century geopolitics and the power games that governments are playing with each other.
So what got me fascinated by chips was I actually just learned how they were made. Listeners are probably listening to us on their phone, maybe a few on their laptops, but probably your phone. The way the chip in your phone was actually fabricated, one step in a long process uses a machine made by a Dutch company called ASML that's an EUV lithography machine. When engineers are making chips since the invention of the transistor, they've been trying to pack more and more transistors onto a single chip. We've gotten very good at it, right? So Moore's law is about how much faster and cheaper chips have gotten so, so quickly in the last, what, 60 years, 70 years. We've gotten so good at it that now it's just totally ridiculous what you have to do to pack more circuits onto a chip. And the way that it works today is that the size of the circuit on the chip that powers the phone you are listening to my voice on right now, the actual circuit drawn on that chip is smaller than the wavelength of any visible light on Earth.
Totally nuts. If you imagine that you were drawing something, you could use a thick Sharpie highlighter, then you use a narrower and narrower pencil, right? We're talking small. The tip of your pencil needs to be smaller than any visible light on earth. And when semiconductor engineers reached this threshold because they were like, "What is the narrowest pencil we can use to draw circuits on a chip?" And the answer was light. And then you reached the boundaries of light itself. The thing that they did, they invented a new kind of material, an alloy of tin. The way your phone's chip was made is there is a machine the size of a room. In that room, there is a vacuum chamber. Now you take the tiniest droplet of this special molten tin, you drop it into the vacuum chamber, you hit that droplet with a laser, the laser flattens the droplet into a pancake.
You hit it with a more powerful laser, which vaporizes the pancake. And in a vacuum, that release of energy emits a special kind of light that has such a short wavelength that can't even exist in our atmosphere. It only exists in outer space in nature. Then you take mirrors and you bounce that light around and you pass it through a special tool that gives it a pattern, and then you bounce that light around some more to shrink it and shrink it and shrink it and shrink it. And then finally, that little tiny piece of light hits your piece of silicon. And that's what actually draws the circuit onto the chip. And in order to do this, you have to do what I just described perfectly without any mistakes 50,000 times a second. What it takes to power the phone you're using right now is the most sophisticated science and engineering project humanity has ever embarked on.
It makes the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program look silly or moreover, just like child's play in comparison. So when I was learning about this, I was like, "This is just bonkers." This is this weird world that I just take complete for granted. I am on my phone looking at Instagram or whatever, and I'm not thinking about the extraordinary human achievement that's sitting right there in my hand and powering so much of our civilization. So that's what got me initially excited about, "This is fascinating me so much." This is this weird little world that actually influences all of our lives in ways we take for granted and don't understand. What a cool world to explore in a novel, to invite a reader into. And then, of course, I just described how you're making the chip, but that whole picture gets so much more complicated once you realize where chips are made.
Because so much of the chip supply chain these days depends on TSMC in Taiwan where most of the world's advanced chips are fabricated, and it's become just a magnet for geopolitical intrigue and real-world espionage because China and the US are just vying over it. And what many people don't realize is this was actually intentional. Taiwan very intentionally created industrial policy to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the island in order to make themselves integral to the global economy so that they couldn't easily be ceded to China by the rest of the world. So it's just fascinating. It was like the more I learned about this, the more there was to explore. And when you encounter questions like that, at least for me, that's where I know there's a novel there because it's messy, and that mess is what fiction is so good for.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I think we had Chris Miller on the podcast last year who Chip War has done very well on the nonfiction side, and it's very readable. He has very bite-sized chapters that make it very readable. But it is a very complex story and one that I think is interesting. You can obviously understand it from the nonfiction side, understand the historical development, why this has generated the industrial policy of Taiwan, et cetera. But on the other side, there's this drama effect, which is actually understanding at the human level, the dynamics here. The book that comes closest in my mind, and it's not a particularly popular one, but it does share a namesake, is Michael Crichton's Airframe-

Eliot Peper:
Totally, yeah.

Danny Crichton:
... which was a 1990s... Have you ever read Airframe?

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I love Crichton's work.

Danny Crichton:
I think it's a 1990s book, but it was focused on Chinese industrial espionage against presumably Boeing or an aircraft manufacturer, which are trying to protect the mechanics of the design of the wing. The idea was the fuselage was relatively simple and very similar to what you just described, it's really not that complicated, requires precision, but it's widely known how to do. Building the wing is the magic to an aircraft. That's what puts it into the sky. The geometry and the dynamics are really hard.
The materials to make that actually perform and perform in different weather conditions is the intellectual property of these companies. So he was able to dramatize in the same way I think you were able to of, "Okay, here's this really complicated industrial technology topic." And you can learn that in the papers, you can learn that in books, but to actually dramatize what's really taking place from different governments and people is really what brings it to life to a much broader audience.

Eliot Peper:
I was just talking to a friend the other day who invests in a lot of biotech companies, and we were talking about how effectively every synthetic biologist of our generation became a synthetic biologist because they read or watched Jurassic Park. And I think that's part of what makes fiction special. When they watched Jurassic Park as a kid or as an adult, whenever they encountered that story, I very much doubt they were necessarily the kind of person who would've read an article in the New Scientist about genetic engineering, necessarily. Jurassic Park was their way in.
It was like after having read or watched Jurassic Park, then they sought out that article in the New Scientist. Then they thought about maybe getting a degree in it or, "What could be possible if?" And I think that's something that I love as a reader in fiction is that it's this magic portal into these worlds that can be very new to you, but are compelling because it's baked into the story rather than you needing to come with the enthusiasm a priori. And I think that's really special. I loved reading Michael Crichton's novels for that reason. And it's certainly something I seek to achieve as a writer.

Danny Crichton:
Well, and I will say, I read last year, Neuromancer by William Gibson and very behind on the reading list. I'm in the 80s, I'm working on it.

Eliot Peper:
Maybe it was 1983 you read it.

Danny Crichton:
Exactly. I'm almost on Jurassic Park. Almost to The Lost World.

Eliot Peper:
Talk to you next decade.

Danny Crichton:
Exactly. But when you're talk about synthetic biology, I think of the biological human connections that Neuromancer and at the beginning of Cyberpunk, but really trying to evoke that mood, the sense of scientific progress. And I feel that's what speculative fiction does really, really well. Now, I feel in your context, so to just go back a little bit in history, this one's about semiconductors and the geopolitics around chips. You had Reap3r, and then previous to that, you had Veil focused on geoengineering. So I'm curious how you balance this idea of evoking a mood, evoking a change in science, something that's inspirational, optimistic with that drama and thriller aspect of, "Well, there's danger here." Right?
Because when I think about a lot of, we mentioned some Michael Crichton, but I think the core of his work is that tension between, "Look, we have the ability to do recombinant DNA, we can bring the wooly mammoth back from life or dinosaurs." But at the same time, that tool can be used in a dual-use way for evil. And I think you've tried to balance that as well in a lot of your works all the way back to Cumulus and Bandwidth and the Analog series. So how do you think about balancing that because I feel you attract an optimistic reader who's also fearful of some of the potential that can come out of these technologies?

Eliot Peper:
From my perspective, this is something where fiction can really shine. Where it can shine is that it gives you room for complexity and nuance that is really hard to achieve on your internet platform of choice or even in the best long-form journalism. Because novels are effectively sprawling, because they mix interiority of how people are experiencing the world with how the external world is changing, there's a lot of room to play with difficult questions that don't have easy answers. So I think that there is a very common thriller plot archetype. There's some new invention, and it all goes to hell, right? Something breaks and it causes a disaster. And the meta-story is about returning to the status quo. It's about saying, "We invented this thing, it turned out to be dangerous, and it broke. And it seems like it's going to destroy the world or insert stakes here. But we assembled this team of people, or the protagonist was so creative and resourceful that they were able to avert disaster and bring us back to safety."
And I would say at a meta-level, that's every Michael Crichton book, right? Not just Crichton, that's like many technology thrillers. And it's hard as someone writing these stories to gain perspective on your own work. So if Michael Crichton were alive, he should really be the one judging me. But I would say that if I try to do that, if I try to take a step back myself, I would say that the way that I think about the metaplot of my novels is they play with that similar piece of, "We invented something new, and look at these unintended consequences," right? These second and third-order effects of how we are changing the world very quickly, get beyond what we can imagine. But the arc of my story doesn't return to the status quo. My stories, yes, you have to resolve whatever has gone wrong, you have to resolve it. But where they land is in a new synthesis that, in fact, you can't go back in time.
You can't go back and say, "Oh, okay, we got so good at genetic engineering that we brought back the dinosaurs and we created this park, and now all the dinosaurs got out, so now we just shut the park down and kill them all and put this on ice." My books don't end that way. My books tend to end with, "We invented this new thing, a bunch of crazy stuff happened because of it, and the characters have to grapple with those unintended consequences." But then where they land is, "And now we live in a new world where we need to use this thing in a way with more intention," or where you're synthesizing the good and the bad into taking the next step. And for me, the reason I write that way is, basically, that's how it feels to me growing up. As a person, you can have nostalgia for a time in your past that you enjoyed, but you can never return to that. It can inform who you become next, the person you grow into tomorrow, but there is no status quo to return to.
So for me, that's a really crucial part of how I look at telling a story that I think maybe is a little different than sometimes some thriller archetypes would feel like to a reader. Does that make sense? I know that's maybe a little mystical.

Danny Crichton:
Well, books and novels are mystical. I'm looking at The Blurbs. You have Kim Stanley Robinson as an example. And I think what's interesting is you're up to almost a dozen, 11 books, but working on a dozen, I'm sure, you're always cooking up another tale. But when I think of the Eliot Peper DNA, one of the interesting things to me is this balance in the text. Kim Stanley Robertson is on the back cover. His books sprawl, and they get longer and longer, very similar. I used to read Neal Stephenson back when the works were a little bit more reasonable, and I didn't have a job and I was in high school.
It's amazing to think about. I just don't have the ability to read a thousand-page speculative sci-fi and hundreds of pages on whatever the last one, Terminator Shock or whatever, Termination Shock. But I'm curious because the lengths of your novels stay roughly in tune with each other. They're sort of medium-length. You haven't gone down the route of a lot of speculative fiction where it just gets longer and longer, more detailed, more detailed, more speculative, more speculative. And I'm curious, is that a deliberate decision or how do you think about, from the reader's perspective, how you set that book up for the reader?

Eliot Peper:
Oh, it's very deliberate. So I always try to think of myself as a reader first and a writer second. And I try to have that perspective inform every decision I make, both creatively when I'm writing a story, also how I publish. That's really where I try to start from. I love reading short novels. They're a beautiful form. It's a really special experience to read a story that is a novel. It's not a short story. You get to go deep. You get to actually get to know the characters. You get to do the special things that a novel gets to do, but where the story is also tight, where the writer is doing a lot of work for you to try to... I feel the experience of reading a novel is the author holding you by the hand and walking you through a labyrinth.
It's not you exploring a labyrinth. That would be maybe if you were gaming, it would be you exploring the labyrinth. But with a novel, the writer is actually leading you through the labyrinth. And I try to play host to the reader. I want to be the best guide I can be. And to me, that means being really aware of when is the right time for the next turn in the labyrinth? When is the right time for an extended passageway? When is the right time for the oil lamps to gutter out on the wall or to cue the strings? So I just feel that there is a real beauty to tight narratives. And I actually find a lot of inspiration from stand-up comedians and pop music, like Taylor Swift. If you listen to her songs, they are extremely tight stories. And the same with a joke.
If you're a stand-up comedian, you don't have the luxury of writing a thousand-page doorstopper of a story. You need to figure out what are the components in the joke that make the joke work. And you figure that out through trial and error, getting up in front of an audience and trying that joke hundreds of times and having it bomb and occasionally seeing where people are laughing. And then you're subtracting and adding things to the joke to figure out, "Okay, these are the components that are required to make that joke work." And I try to think about that in literature, to think, "What are the pieces in this story that really matter, and how can I lean everything into just those pieces so that I'm really earning the reader's attention with every sentence?" Because the world is full of noise. There are so many things you could be doing that do not include reading a novel. Even literature in general is niche, right? Very niche. And just my books are insanely niche. So I take the attention of my readers really seriously, and I want to keep earning it with every sentence. I could imagine a certain kind of listener assuming that that means that everything is just plot-driven, but that's not true. If you watch a movie that's really good, what makes it compelling is not just that there are fight scenes, right? It is-

Danny Crichton:
I don't know what movies you're watching.

Eliot Peper:
Sure. Well, yeah, it depends what you're into. But at least for me as a reader, I really like bringing in that balance of interiority, of action, of reflection, of personal change and development, of thinking about the world and how it's evolving. All of those mixed together in the right combination just like when you're cooking a meal with different ingredients, that's what makes it compelling to me.

Danny Crichton:
One of the other things I think that is useful here is you have less cynicism than most speculative fiction writers. Kim Stanley Robinson, have not a personal dialogue, but an online dialogue of sorts. I find him very negative and very cynical about humanity and the approach that you have to take, particularly around Ministry for the Future. But I recently read, as an example, Ned Beauman's work, Venomous Lumpsucker, which is a great title, a very bold cover.

Eliot Peper:
I've not read this.

Danny Crichton:
It has won a lot of attention and garnered a lot of attention over the last year. And it's sort of a near-future speculative fiction. Anarcho-capitalists have taken over the world. It's centered around a Bitcoin haven owned by a billionaire, and they can't get the doors open because you have to have a smart contract to open the door, but the smart contract is broken, so all the doors are not functional, and people are stealing credits for killing species. And that's where the title comes in of the Venomous Lumpsucker is you have to have a credit in order to kill a species, but if you don't have it, then you're screwed.
And a company accidentally kills a species and they don't have a credit. So the whole book is of the drama of how do they get this credit for a species they've already killed? But you could argue it's a very corrosive takedown of technology and capital as it exists today. But I also think it's just very cynical in the sense that so much of near-future speculative fiction is dystopia and it's negative, and it's like, "Well, we're clearly going to somewhere bad." And what I find interesting with a lot of your work, having read it for, I think, probably 10 years, is that an exaggeration? I feel Analog was probably the first, I missed your first series, the Uncommon Share series, but I think Analog-

Eliot Peper:
Yeah. Close to it.

Danny Crichton:
.. and Cumulus comes out back in 2014.

Eliot Peper:
Cumulus came out in 2016.

Danny Crichton:
2016, so almost a decade. We're getting there. You sort of do this balance of, yes, there's bad things happening. So in Cumulus, if I'm recalling correctly, Oakland is this high inequality place, and it's really exploring the challenges in the Bay Area and equality in technology, but there's still a hopeful optimistic message that comes out of that. I'm curious, is that part of the Eliot Peper DNA? Are you an optimistic person going into these? Do you go through a trough of disillusionment as part of this catastrophe, as you described it in the plot-driven process from Ed Catmull and others? Do you start optimist and go pessimistic and back, or how does that work?

Eliot Peper:
I think in today's world, it is very easy to be a cynic. And there are good reasons to be cynical in life. There are assholes, 100%, we've all encountered them. They suck. And especially right after you've encountered an asshole, it's very easy to be cynical. It's easy to then assume that everyone's an asshole. And I think that our media environment, just being surrounded by the news cycle all the time helps support that because everyone's talking about everything that's going wrong. It's not unlike gossip on a personal level, right, "Oh, who's getting a divorce?" It's like, "What do people gossip about?" Very often it's the bad things.

Danny Crichton:
It's schadenfreude. We all know that something terrible happened to them. [inaudible 00:31:22].

Eliot Peper:
Something terrible happened. Oh, my God. And I feel humans are very used to dealing with that on a personal level, that schadenfreude. But I think that if you used to read the Economist once a week or the New York Times on a daily basis, and that was your access to the schadenfreude of the larger culture of literally the globe, and that was a lot of filtration and editorialization and people sort of packaging and digesting it for you. And today it's literally on your phone. Most people, myself included, check my phone way too much. So effectively, I'm always dipping into an infinite supply of schadenfreude.
What could be a better recipe for cynicism than that? You are just always exposed to bad things that are happening right now and people having very strong opinions about them. So it's natural to conclude that everything's going to shit. But the weird part, the thing that I try to remind myself of, is that if you gave me a time machine and said, "Here you go, Eliot, you can go to any time in the past and live there instead." I would hand you back the time machine. Are you serious? Anyone who reads history with any degree of depth knows that the farther back you go, the worst life gets. So yeah, I'm checking my phone and seeing all of these terrible things that are happening around the world, but my phone is the product of the insane human inventions that we talked about earlier in this conversation. So we don't think about that.
We think about the thing we saw on the phone. We don't think about the phone itself. We don't think that we happen to be eating an organic salad while we're reading that news item. So for me, I look at the world and I'm always trying to remind myself of that. I'm always trying to remind myself that, of course, terrible things are happening in the world, and that can make you feel shitty. And also, we have modern plumbing. So that's how I think on the world level. So then what I try to do is extrapolate from a personal level, which is that I have encountered assholes and they've made me feel cynical before. And also, I far more regularly encounter kind people who are trying to do their best. Thankfully, that is way more common than encountering an asshole. And in fact, sometimes I misread a person trying to do their best, who's just in a crappy situation.
Sometimes I misread them as an asshole, which is really on me. When I write a story, I try to think about that on the personal level as well as on the macro level that, yes, bad things are happening. And also, the only thing that can make things better is you making different decisions. No change stems from someone who just says, "Well, everything's broken, so I'm going to sit this one out."

Danny Crichton:
I love that. I'll sit it out. Now I want to go back to your earlier... I told you, I live in a cave. Every once in a while I put up a little antenna to see what's happened. I'm like, "Nope, it's still bad out there," and I just walked back inside. But I do have a Star Trek-style replicator in there, so it's really great.

Eliot Peper:
Nice.

Danny Crichton:
That's-

Eliot Peper:
Crucial.

Danny Crichton:
Thanks for sci-fi progress. But I want to go back to your comment about the time machine because I do think both to interconnect us with Michael Crichton's timeline, which was about a time machine that can only go back in time, and it was about authenticity and it was sort of this capitalist drama of tourism and how do we create the next Disney World? And it was like, "Well, we'll go to the past. That's where Disney is because people want authenticity." And it was turned into, if I recall, a poor movie but a great novel. We had the comment on the podcast a couple of months ago, or maybe a year ago with Josh Wolfe here at Lux, and he asked me, "If you had a time machine, would you go to the future of the past?"
And I said, "Well, I actually wouldn't go either direction. I think we're actually living in the best possible moment." We haven't gone off the cliff into all the crises that we're going to have in the future here, but the past was also pretty bad. So my form of optimism is very in the present. We're living our best possible lives right now. We should enjoy it while it lasts. And I don't know if that's inspirational. It's probably not optimistic. But we're at the peak of the parabola. That's how I think of life. Hopefully, the parabola expands.

Eliot Peper:
Yeah, but I think there's something really profound in that perspective and something that I certainly agree with, and also that is core to what all my novels are about, which is that I think it's very clear that from our perspective right now, the farther back you go, the worse it gets in terms of the past with that time machine. And I think that the open question is what we do next. Just because I think that I wouldn't go anywhere in the past, that does not mean that tomorrow will be better.
I don't think we are on an inevitable road to progress. I feel there should be the word evitable. I think there are many paths we could choose from here, many of which lead to way worse futures. I can't remember the name, but the very dystopian future you were describing, things could absolutely get worse. And if you look at history, there were times when, basically, for large groups of people, things were pretty good and then things got worse. I think it's absolutely possible that things get worse, but I also think it's possible that things get better. And I think that the exciting part and the scary part is that it's up to us.
What we choose to do with the gifts we've been given is what will enable either things to get worse or get better. So it's that uncertainty. It's those series of collective decisions. We are living on the brink of time like everyone is. So just like you're going to make decisions that will inform the path your individual life takes, we are collectively doing the same things for our species. I don't have your conviction that we are at the peak because I think it is totally possible that the peak is still far off in the future, but I also don't think that peak is inevitable. I think that takes a lot of hard work, a lot of kindness, a lot of wisdom and creativity and resourcefulness that we have to show each other.

Danny Crichton:
Well, I'll say, because we're ending up on the podcast here, but I think this is a great analogy for what a novel is, which is nothing's inevitable. You don't know the actions of any of the characters. You don't know which way the plot is going to go. It could be optimistic and it could be pessimistic. Having read Foundry, I already know the answer to that. But in order to know the answer yourself, dear listener, you need to take a read in order to figure out what's next. But, Eliot Peper, author of the latest novel, Foundry, out in stores and on amazon.com, thank you so much for joining us.

Eliot Peper:
Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.