The Devil’s Dictionary Launch Party with Steven Kotler and Sarah Sarkis

Oxytocin does not show up in flow. It shows up in group flow, but it is only produced in group experiences. But when we have flow experiences in the natural world, if we have nature-relatedness, we may also be getting oxytocin. That's amazing. Right? Really weird.

That shows the interconnectedness at a neurobiologic level, and that's pretty remarkable.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Everybody, want to welcome you to the Devil's Dictionary launch party with Stephen Kotler and Dr. Sarah Sarkis. This is going to be a, uh, I feel it's going to be an extra fun crowdcast, so I'm glad you're all attending and online with us. Sarah, I know you have, it seems, an infinite number of questions about everything related to the book. So I'm excited for you to take the reins on the questions, but I'm going to kick us off here, Stephen, with a question that leads in with a quote from The Devil's Dictionary, which is for context for everyone, is going to be the main topic today. And that's Stephen's newest novel. So this is about— I think this is a couple of chapters in, Stephen. You say, uh, Iboga gives you a whole life review. With Evo, you get a whole species review. The trip starts at the beginning of evolution and plays the tape forward. Different people experience different developmental paths. One arc goes from bacteria, viruses, um, I'm gonna get this word wrong, protozoa, into insects, dinosaurs, and birds. Another goes small mammals Large mammals, humans. You trip evolution? Ibrahim nodded. No shit, said Lion. I mean, with our abilities, you fire up those circuits. I mean, no shit. When can I try some? So that's a little snippet from The Devil's Dictionary. And for anyone who's not clear, ibogaine is a very powerful psychedelic. So the context here is Evo, which is, um, psychedelic featured in the book. So Steve, I'm curious if you can give us a breakdown on, uh, on how that shows up throughout The Devil's Dictionary and, uh, what Evo is within the context of Devil's Dictionary.

This one, to answer the— you started the hard question, Rand. Thank you so much. Um, I think so the only way to answer this one is to back up and talk about There was a prequel book, Last Tango in Cyberspace. You don't have to have read it at all to read The Devil's Dictionary because Rian skipped over 2 chapters, and I'm going to summarize what's in some of those. In the first book, there is a novel psychedelic that expands nature-relatedness, which is an innate human characteristic. It's our fondness for nature. People high in nature-relatedness, their sphere of caring extends to plants, animals, and ecosystems. Kind of thing. And this is a, this is a psychedelic that massively expands and allows humans and animals to share consciousness. So this is in the first book. In the second book, I had to build on that. I had to give you a psychedelic that was more delicious and more interesting than the first psychedelic. And the reason is this: if you look at sort of the history of psychedelics and the history of like people using these substances, we tend to go from— we like more extreme substances. So we, you know, we started with mellow stuff and we've now worked our way up to DMT, where DMT is a psychedelic that people are widely using in counterculture these days and often in mainstream culture. And a lot of people are going down and having ayahuasca trips and things like that. But you go back to the '60s, people were terrified of DMT. It was a crazy, outlandish drug that nobody did. And acid was as strong. But now evolved. So our taste for psychedelic altered state experiences evolved, and I wanted something that would expand nature-relatedness sort of beyond— I had already like created a drug that produced pure cross-species empathy, or what, what is known as cross-species empathy. I wanted to take that farther, so I created a drug, a psychedelic, that allowed you to experience evolution and evolutionary time and what that feels like. So that's what you're referring to. And, um, yes, I'd like to try that drug, right?

I mean, yeah, definitely be fun to take together. Um, Stephen, I want to ask you one broad question before, uh, we dive into Sarah, your questions here in a second, just to make sure everyone's got context and we're all on the same page. Could you zoom us out a bit and talk to us about Last Tango, how that came about, and the beginning of your fiction writing career, at least with respect to Last Tango and this book, so everyone's up to speed, and then we'll go into more specifics.

So I am actually trained as a poet as an undergraduate and a novelist in graduate school, which means if you're getting human performance advice from us, you're taking human performance advice I'm a poet, so let's just get that out of the way.

Exactly. I love that so much. It's like, also, where's my poem?

Um, there's a reason I haven't written poetry in 40 years or 30 years or something like that. Uh, but, uh, I— well, I went away from it for, uh, after I wrote a first novel, took about 11 years to write, and then I literally stopped writing fiction for 20 years and When I was researching The Future Is Faster Than You Think with Peter Diamandis, and we were trying to imagine what the world was like when all these exponentially accelerated technologies that we've been writing about in Abundance and Bold, and I'd worked on in Tomorrowland, sort of started meshing together and converging and appearing in one world. And this is over like what happened in the next 10 to 15 years. And it was really hard for me to answer that question. So what I did is I took all those technologies, I put them in a world, and I started telling stories in that world. Last Tango was the first, The Devil's Dictionary is the second. So I created a world that is our world 15 to 20 years hence. And the major difference is I said in this world that I'm creating, we've solved on a certain level the major environmental challenges we now face. We've beaten back the worst parts of climate change and species die-off. And both books were an attempt to to answer the question, what kind of major shifts in society would need to take place for us to be able to solve those environmental challenges? So that's sort of the backstory. And it features a character named Lion Zorn, both books. Lion Zorn is an empath, which is a genetic mutant that shows up in the early 21st century. It's sort of like an empath on super steroids. Lion feels empathy, his sense of empathy doesn't just doesn't extend to all humans. It extends to plants, to animals, to ecosystems. So it extends far beyond the borders of species. And it can also sense— sympathy isn't just individual, like most of our sense of empathy is. It's cultural. So we can start to sense how culture shifts and merges based on kind of emotional behavior, which makes it a useful skill for a certain kind of company. And in both of these thrillers, Lion gets sort of embroiled in huge sort of multinational versus multinational conspiracy theory weirdness with major environmental consequences. And both books sort of examine those two ideas.

So I want to just ask you then about the big themes in Last Tango and Devil's Dictionary. I mean, there's a reasonably high degree of overlap. We've got empathy, environmentalism, nature relatedness, which sort of relates to both of those components, futurism. Can you speak to the big themes across the two books and how they emerged and how those themes are changing between Last Tango and Devil's Dictionary?

The easiest place to start talking about the big themes, I think, is to talk about nature-relatedness. And it's sort of like, what does it take to solve our current environmental challenges? And the argument that I'm making in the books and thinking about is sort of the major theme. And it's the best sort of place to start answering your question is talk to most psychologists, Sarah included, about why the world is currently facing so many environmental challenges. One of the main answers you hear is, and I've written a couple of emails, if you read the emails recently, I've written a couple of things about this recently, is the brain takes in millions and millions of bits of information every second. Consciousness, a couple thousand bits at most, and attention, right? And this is Csikszentmihalyi's work among other people, is maybe 200, 300 bits. So, most of reality gets filtered out and you know, the brain is charged with survival. So anything that doesn't help us survive is what goes first. And in the modern world, we live in boxes, we stare at boxes all day, and we stare at boxes inside of boxes. Right now we're staring at like 11 boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes, right? That's our experience. The brain says, oh, box world is what's super important to survival, and it starts filtering everything else out, including much of the natural world. So if you talk to psychologists or neuroscientists, they'll say, look, we have this huge problem, which is we literally can't see or perceive what we're trying to protect. And we have to— that has to shift. That's a big mind shift. And this is literally a perceptual challenge. It's like a cognitive bias against nature, essentially. So, one of the ways this gets shifted is empathy. Empathy expands our sphere of caring and it expands what information the brain says is important and not important things. But that in flow, this is what happens to us when we're deep in flow. Nature relatedness increases, empathy expands. This happens sort of naturally in flow. There's a bunch of different reasons for why, but it's one of the things that the state does is it expands empathy, expands nature relatedness. And we know from a lot of— and by the way, flow is not the only altered state that will do this. Meditative states do it, trance states will do it.

Motherhood does it. Like, motherhood, nursing does it, right? Like, oh, I didn't know that. You know, there's loads of places where you get these— you get this expansion in your capacity to relate and live inside the experience of others, right? So I think there's like loads of states you can get to, but I also think there's like, you know, biological And I will, like, a lot of this.

So a lot of the, my biggest experience with this shift and a lot of where this book came from, I wrote an email about Misha, right? When I, we were starting our dog rescue, it was really hard going from like 8 dogs in a pack to 25. Life got really crazy and we dealt with really severely traumatized dogs, dogs with cancer and heart disease and lots of ailments and a lot of like mental challenges, brain damage. And some of the— a lot of these dogs were abused, and a lot of the abusers were men. So even though they started healing once they got to our sanctuary, they sort of like come into their personalities, and a lot of those personalities were, we hate men. And I used to get attacked by our dogs on a regular basis. Now we do small dog rescue predominantly, so these were sometimes Chihuahuas, but I'd get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to go take a piss, I'd be getting back into bed and I'd get bit. Or I'd— this dog Misha used to stalk me on my way back from the office. End of the day, I'm exhausted, I've worked like 14 hours. And all I want is food. And she would like hide in the fields and try to attack me, and I was getting madder and madder. And I've discovered that if you shout at already traumatized dogs, it's both bad for the dog and very bad for your marriage. So that was not good, uh, couldn't do more of that. And, uh, as a result, I needed a strategy. So I, I really, out of absolute desperation— I don't even know where the idea came from— I basically sort of forced myself to put my money where my mouth was. I've been walking around talking about equal rights for animals and stuff like that for a long time. And suddenly I was like, okay, you got to treat Misha like he was a close family member who was losing his mind. He was super angry for whatever reason. And in that case, you wouldn't get mad back. You try to calm them down, you try to help them. And so I forced myself every time sort of Misha would try to attack me, I would treat him as if he was my brother having a nutty, or the way my brothers taught, you know, treated me when I was having a nutty. And the weirdest thing was, was 2-3 weeks in, I started noticing massive amounts of more details about Misha's behavior and all the other animals in the pack. And it was suddenly— since my wife and I started this rescue, Joy, my wife, uh, would always come up to me and say things like, yeah, Misha's having a bad day, blah blah, this is happening, this I had no idea what she was talking about. I actually thought she was making it up. I thought she was crazy.

She's crazy.

Suddenly I was like, holy shit, I'm seeing all the details. And what with Misha, I started to notice that like in the house, if I'd walk into a room, like a tiny hair on his butt would stand up and it was the beginning of a fear response. And if I crouched down and talked softly at that moment, it wasn't threatening. He calmed down and over time, reacting like that changed the whole behavior and everything else. So when I started thinking about The Devil's Dictionary and these things, and nature-relatedness. That was the shift I was interested in providing with people, because once you start seeing that level of behavior in, in dogs, once you start noticing that level of detail in dogs, you start to realize that there's a lot of— there's so many similarities between dogs and humans at a really deep kind of behavioral level that you don't notice until you start seeing these details. And that— so empathy for the animal actually, and treating— seeing the animal more as a human being actually ended up making the animal much more like a human being in the end. And I was like, oh, wow, that's an unlocking move. How do we get— how can other people have that experience? You obviously, you know, I could ask you to like think about the animals in your world differently or the plants in your world differently. But that's why I started thinking about novel psychedelics and things like that. And, you know, you said motherhood produced it. I would— yeah, I was interested in stuff that happened naturally, sometimes in flow, sometimes, you know, through a shift in perspective. But it, you know, both of those things are not super easy to give to people.

Right. Right. And also bring up a really good—

Thus I wrote a fun book.

I know it's such a good book. But you also bring up a really good point about empathy there that is about like sort of it's really anchored in this co-regulation process that people get that you develop in infancy. Right. So it's like you could notice the hair on the back of Misha's butt, right? And you could start co-regulating right then. And that's really where like the shift— I'm assuming Misha made major strides in his behavior, or at least he did.

He never really stopped barking at me, but he did stop attacking at me. He still felt it was important to warn everybody that I was coming because of course I was a threat. But he did stop attacking me. And for that, I really am grateful.

Yeah. And it's— that's a huge, like, that's a developmental— that's a Herculean milestone.

And now it's 10 years later. So now he just sort of ignores me. But it's good.

Yeah.

In a good way.

Yeah. It's also proof that, like, you know, you can teach old dogs new tricks.

It's true. It is. It is true. I've actually got a whole new book on that coming out. But not this one.

And not the other one that I also somehow know about. And let's not forget that you told me after Art of Impossible that you were taking a full 12 months off of writing. But I won't keep pointing out the obvious that this is clearly at this point, it's like a syndrome or something.

It's an addiction. This is now just an addiction.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brian, did you have questions? Sarah, do you have questions?

Sarah, I'm going to let you go first.

Yeah, well, I mean, so I have so many different spaces. I don't want to ruin this book. It's so good. I also want to tell people, like everybody out there, that I am, in the interest of full disclosure, not a fiction reader. I have read 2 fiction novels in 20 years. This one and one that Stephen recommended to me in 20— like late 2020 or early 2021. This is so good. So I don't want to ruin this, but I will say it tucked inside this book is all this super interesting like tech stuff. So I have technical questions about the tech, mostly so I know when to invest in getting to another planet. I don't want to be here when it happens. Okay. So like one of my questions is, You know, you talk a lot about in here, like, there's really disruptive technology. Obviously there's the M tracking stuff, there's the brain connectome mapping system, right? There's the ghost tech. Is that a real genre? Are these all— are these going to happen in my lifetime?

So We've been— the, the, the connectome, right?

Terrifying. Okay, let's start here.

Connect the brain's connections, right?

Horrifying.

Now, I have taken this technology and rolled it considerably forward, but this work has been going on for 20 years. There's the whole brain, uh, Paul Allen's Whole Brain Mapping Project is one version. There's, there's a bunch of different versions, and a lot of the really interesting And in fact, some of the work that we've been doing on flow, the functional connectivity work, utilizes these connectome maps. Now, where it gets super interesting is when they get really hyper-detailed and they start being predictive and you can start— right, and things like that. And those are all questions that I, you know, that are raised by the book. And I think one of the super things—

in such a great way, you raise these questions.

I just, I sort of feel like the stuff people are upset about or worried about or concerned about or thinking about technologically, like they're the wrong, they're the wrong questions. And it's also like a lot of the things we're talking about, they're already over. Like there are so many new, big, crazy questions coming within the next 10 to 15 years. One of the reasons I wrote the book is I want to get out ahead of some of these questions and say, okay, let's, let's really look at these things because these are, these are all interesting issues. Okay, so opportunities or their challenges, they're both.

And this book, I told you before we got on, this is like I'm, I'm opening the door to my midlife crisis. This is like an existential crisis for me inside the pages of this book. And I loved it. But you bring up that you wanted to get ahead of some of these questions. So one of the things you do brilliantly in this book is while there is lots of tech and there's this thriller taking place, this is really a story about the most disruptive technology of all, which is empathy, which is this capacity of empathy and what it can be used for and against. Right. That's sort of this bigger story that's tucked inside of this book. And you ask this great question, which I think people should really think about. You ask, that the— who's the character that asks this question? He says the question about improving upon nature. Is it—

Oh, you're talking—

it's— no, it's Changzi. It's the bad guy in the last— in the final speech in the book. Right.

But then you start to think, is he the bad— I mean, I guess he's a bad guy, but like you— that's another part of my crisis.

Well, most of my characters tend to do a lot of things, right? They invert on themselves. They start out one thing, they become something else, especially in this book. And that, that in this book, that's very intentional. But the bad guy does ask questions about is it important to improve life, right? If we have genetic technology, should we improve upon life? What's interesting about this question is—

Here's how you phrased it, that humans have a moral obligation to improve on nature. That's a huge proposition.

And again, put into the mouth of the bad guy. I know, not be entirely the bad guy, but, um, The, my point on that thing on that is, so what, and I got, I don't even know how to give this away, but I know it's so hard. We're talking about removing humanity's violent instincts from the gene code. So let's just put, let's put it there. Um, and those start to become hard and uncomfortable and weird questions that, you know, most of us have 2 or 3 or 4 answers to, and I have no clear way to get there. But like what I was going to say earlier is Here's something that you probably don't think about, but so I was in, uh, I'm one of the organizations that I do a lot of work with is the Lab to Land Collective. It's a synthetic biology approach to forest health and catastrophic wildfire. And I was at a meeting there recently, and it's— DARPA's involved and a bunch of top geneticists and genomicists at top labs. And when they talk about restoration, ecology. Like, we're going to restore the landscape to how it originally was. When is the question that you have, because it was a very different landscape 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. And which one is natural is a really weird question in restoration ecology and how we think. So it's not just we're going to change the species going forward, but we're making like weird sort of decisions going backwards too. And That's what I mean by like the questions that are coming are really complicated. Like the ones we're looking at now are a lot simpler and the stuff that's coming gets really complicated.

Yeah, it's super complicated. This book does a great job. Like the story around it is fantastic, but man, does it make you think about both how that might look in the future, how that looks in the hands of different personality structure.

And by the way, Robert Suarez is, is with us, and Robert's one of the geniuses behind Lab to Land.

This is the type of crossroads that this thriller is. Basically, it's a psychological thriller set in the future, is sort of, is tapped into, right? And it literally spans the United States. In the coolest way possible. But you also in here, like talk a little bit about your whole thing with empathy in this book. Like give people a sense of the role that empathy plays here.

I mean, you know, the book is just a call for empathy for all, right? It's extending empathy for plants, animals, and ecosystems. All humans and all plants, all animals, all ecosystems. And I think that is the shift we need to make as a world in order to actually solve climate change, to solve species die-off. When we think about plants, animals, and ecosystems, when the forests are our family, right? We do, we go to extraordinary measures to protect our families. And that is, I mean, if you look, even if you look at like some of the brilliant, like John Doerr's recent books, Speed and Scale, which is a really great detailed fight climate change plan, really good. The amount of effort it's going to require, right? When Peter and I wrote Abundance and I was really interested in using that disruptive technology in abundance and bold to solve environmental challenges, we said, look, we have the tech to solve the problems, but it's going to require the largest cooperative effort in history. And that's like all human beings working together in flow, right? Performing at our best. To solve these challenges. And I wrote Abundance and wrote Bold, and I saw humanity pick up the mantle on poverty and energy scarcity and healthcare and education. All of the human challenges got solved, but the environmental stuff sort of got pushed to the wayside, and nobody really was using this technology, right? It didn't even matter. Like, I'd written a bunch of books about it. I kept trying to like get people to see this problem. And I started to realize that like people literally are not seeing and perceiving the natural world. I was, you know, it didn't matter how much I talked about it or shouted. Like, there was a literal cognitive bias. There was an information processing problem. So how to bridge that gap to get a plan like John Doerr's Speed and Scale or a plan like Peter and I laid out in Abundance or anything like that actually going, you have to massively expand our sphere of caring. You need cross-species empathy. And that means empathy is how you expand empathy, right? It just grows it. And I mean, there's lots of techniques, right? Loving kindness meditation and spend the Tibetan loving kindness practice that Richie Davidson spent so much time studying at the University of Wisconsin. Really effective. Meditation technique, but it's known to expand empathy and expand your sphere of caring. And if you make plants, animals, and ecosystems the focus of that meditation, it will even stretch it further. But those are the questions I was sort of trying to poke at. And again, novels, they slip past the ego. This has been known for a long time.

Well, you say it in the book.

Stories work because they slip past the ego. They turn off the prefrontal cortex. We don't judge them the way we judge other stuff. And the information goes sort of right into our soul. So you can sneak attack people. And hopefully the book— I don't know, you guys have read it. I wrote it. So it's a different experience, but it should produce some level of cross-species empathy, should help expand that. That was sort of the goal, that I give my readers a little feel for what this feels like and what it's like to live in that world and see it through that lens. Does any of that make sense?

A question for you around the, uh, the biology of cross-species empathy, which I think is fascinating. You were telling me, and you wrote in a recent newsletter, that you had a conversation with Dr. Paul Zak.

Yeah, yeah, this is— yeah, it's a— it's a— so Paul and I, we— so cross-species empathy happens for a bunch of different reasons. Most of it, like, how wide our sphere of self is sort of located in the parietal lobe, the right parietal lobe, the temporal-parietal junction, which does perspective-taking. Out-of-body experiences happen there. That's an extreme form of perspective shifting, for example. But also, you know, how big and how wide is the boundary around self? Similarly, there's a neurochemical that underpins nature-relatedness. We know, right, when you go into nature, we get serotonin. And we get— and it lowers— increases serotonin. We just found out in 2020 that it also lowers cortisol levels. So, we now have— now, why does a 20-minute walk in the woods outperform most antidepressants and treatments of anxiety and depression? Because it's amplifying serotonin and lowering cortisol. But, what happens once you have nature-relatedness, when you go into nature, what Paul and I were talking about is I was like, Paul, Some of my best friends are trees. So when I go into a forest, am I just getting serotonin or am I getting other prosocial chemicals? And he said, no, no, I also think you're getting oxytocin. And that explains something that shows up with nature relatedness. So nature relatedness, and this is well known, when you have this trait or when it's induced via altered states of consciousness, be it flow, psychedelic states or whatever, it almost immediately starts producing environmental activism. there's a behavior. It's not just a perceptive change. There's a behavioral change on the back end. And Paul has pointed out— his lab has done a lot of work. Both— he was the one— his lab first discovered that oxytocin produces trust and underpins human cooperation. He has since figured out that when you have more oxytocin in your system, it doesn't just increase empathy and trust. It also directly increases charity and activism and tribalism.

And as well, in terms of belonging, get increased, right? You don't get to pick what the oxytocin impacts. It's in your system, and it impacts all the ways in which— yeah, right. Yeah.

Yes. It— I mean, but you draw your tribal— I mean, the interesting thing about this, so most people don't realize this, but at a really foundational level, right? Whenever a life form— humans, plants, animal, whatever— meets another life form, it asks a really simple yes or no question. Is this thing like me or not like me? Yes or no? Us or them? If it's like me, maybe I can mate with it, or maybe I can befriend it. If it's not like me, maybe I should run away so it doesn't eat me, or maybe I should eat it, right? Like me or not like me is— and this border initially, like our family is like us, our tribe is like us, but those people who live in that other city over there, they're not exactly like us, right? Like we draw these like us, not like us border, and it happens automatically. Oxytocin helps draw that line, right? It's if in our system, we're hanging out with dogs and plants and we notice it, suddenly the line gets extended that far out. But So, good and bad. And what's interesting about this is, so oxytocin does not show up in flow. It shows up in group flow, but it is only produced in group experiences. But when we have flow experiences in the natural world, if we have nature relatedness, we may also be getting oxytocin. That's amazing. That's a really weird—

That shows the interconnectedness at a neurobiological level. And that's pretty remarkable.

Stephen, in the same way that oxytocin plays a role in both bonding, but also tribalism and in-group, out-group dynamics, is there, do you think, a negative role oxytocin can play when it comes to environmental destruction or potentially an in-group dynamic that justifies—

Such a good question.

Yeah, kind of destroying or damaging the environment?

Yeah. I mean, I like where, so I'm just stay out of trouble. So that, what say you? Well, when everything got really crazy, in my opinion, it was crazy before, but, uh, James Watt, um, who I've met actually, and he's a nice man, even though he's the devil. Um, uh, I think you just got yourself in trouble. Secretary of the, I told him he was the devil. The first, I've said this to his face. But he, when he was Secretary of Interior under Reagan, he created something called the Wise Use Movement. And it was a, up to that point, conservatives in America had been very big on environmentalism and conservation and all those things. From the Wise Use Movement basically said, no, no, no, this is private property. You should have the right to do whatever you want on your private property and undercut a lot. It wasn't wise use. It undercut a lot of environmental, major environmental laws. And how I got introduced to all this is Mad Magazine used to, uh, on their back page, they used to do those fold-it things where you'd fold it up and there'd be a puzzle or something. And, uh, for the first time ever, they didn't put that puzzle there. They put a picture of James Watt. They listed everything he did, and they said, we at Mad don't think it's funny. And it was like the first piece of like environmental— probably I was 10 or 11, but it was like it cemented something in me because I was— I read what he was— this is just wrong and hypocritical. And, you know, a bunch of words I probably didn't know when I was 12, but you know.

That was the feeling. That was your early, that was Stephen Kotler, the early days of outrage.

Exactly.

The budding outrage. But I do think, Rian, I really love that question and I kind of want to weigh in on it too. 'Cause I think if you think about it this way, that essentially it's like morally and ethically neutral. So it really will go, if you have like the dark, dark triad in you and you're a high empath or even a moderate empath, we think there's roughly sort of 10 to 13%.

Sarah, you got— most people aren't going to know what the dark triad is. So why don't you start there?

So the dark triad is narcissistic. Now I'm going to forget the exact 3 things. What is it? It's narcissistic, my God.

I've got it. It's narcissistic, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

It's, yeah, it's—

Narcissism. Jonathan, my friends tell me I look like Alfred E. Newman.

Narcissism, it's sociopathy, and it's something else. But when you have— I think what I would say is that your neurochemistry meets sort of, if you're an adult, this very complex and only partially understood thing we call sort of morality and a conscience and all of our attachment patterns. So if that oxytocin meets up with, you know, somebody who's got radical beliefs that involve you do harm to people if they don't believe— because empathy is a really complex thing. It is not something you wake up one day and you age into it. It's got complexity and nuance how we become these pro-social empathic creatures. Much is inborn. We see it young. We see it very early. There's the emotional empathy and the mirror neurons, but much develops over the first sort of 7 to 10 years of life. And so I think that as we've seen in cults and other sort of very radical expressions of extreme in-group bonding. I do think that oxytocin can be used as a weapon. I think pretty much anything inside the human spectrum can be. I think there's no shortage of evidence that we're pretty good at that. We're, you know, we can use things for either, you know, incredible change and beauty or like really horrific destruction. So I do think it's something to think about like who you are, how your empathy aligns you with people, because once you're aligned with a certain ally, it necessitates another that isn't you guys. It's searching for that, in fact, right?

So that's just Yeah, if the environment can become, or trees can become friends, you know, theoretically they can also equally become enemies under certain circumstances. So you referenced an article which was, the subtitle of the article was, "An Ecological Idea Whose Time Has Come." And I'm curious if you could tell us about megalinkages in general, what they are and why you have talked about them, I think a number of times. As a potentially, you know, interesting environmental initiative that could be implemented?

So, uh, conservation biology was a field that sort of emerged in the '70s predominantly from the work of a man named Michael Soule. And Soule studied island biogeography, which is the study of population on islands. And one of the things that happens on islands is they're prone to extinction events. So a volcano goes off on an island and a bunch of the species there go extinct. And one of the reasons they go extinct is not that the volcano kills them, but it kills off enough of the species that because there's a body of water around the island and you can't import new ones, they're just— the gene code gets— gene pool gets too small and you have inbreeding, incest, and the line dies out. This is known as an extinction event. What Suley figured out is, holy crap, if you're a snake, you don't need the Pacific Ocean to create an island. You won't cross a road. If you're a snake and you're preyed upon by birds, you are innately hardwired not to cross a highway. And a lot of animals are actually wired this way. So he started to realize that the modern world, our roads, our suburbs, our cities, sprawl literally was putting animals on islands and making them extremely prone to extinction. So why are animals going— extinction rates 1,000 times greater than normal? And why have we lost 50% of all life on Earth? It's because of massive habitat fragmentation. Problem A. Problem B is in ecosystems, you have what are known as keystone predators. These are the predators that's at the top of the pile, and it's usually when they're not there, the ecosystem can't function. They sort of keep the ecosystem super healthy. So the example is when they reintroduced wolves into Yosemite, suddenly the wolves were preying on moose and deer, and that population dropped a little bit. And so a lot of the flora and fauna rebounded, which brought in other animals and so forth. And the Ecosystem could get restored. The problem when you have these keystone species is usually they're very, very migratory. A mountain lion, for example, can have a 500-mile territory, but a mountain lion won't cross a highway or something like that. Bears, similarly, these keystone species that are keeping our ecosystems safe and healthy need lots of room to roam. So one, habitat fragmentation is terrible. Two, if we want healthy ecosystems, Animals need big room to roam. Finally, climate change means it's getting hotter, and so animals and plants have to migrate north to survive. And if there's fragmented habitat, they're not going to be able to migrate. So Soule came up with the idea that what we now— what we used to talk about as megalinkages— this, this term has sort of fallen out of favor, but a megalinkage is was an idea that you could take all of our national parks and try to connect them with migration corridors. So you, you've seen, for example, on freeways now we have overpasses, animal overpasses where animals can cross over freeways. These are parts of migration corridors that are being built. And there's, uh, the, the, there's been a number of efforts to create, uh, mega linkages in America. The most famous is the Yellowstone to Yukon effort, which is still going on today. They're trying to connect Yellowstone Yukon in one contiguous wildland streak. E.O. Wilson wrote about this in Half-Earth. The UN has adopted megalanguages in this level of kind of continent-wide conservation approaches. This is not like— we don't use the term megalanguages as much, but this is at the heart of the rewilding movement in Europe. This is— the Defense Department is involved in building migration corridors and things like that. So this is a widespread effort. When I started my work on technology, I actually started with the question of, okay, if we're going to create mega languages, where the hell are we going to get the land? And I realized that most of the land came from being used was either cattle ranching or agriculture, which is why I started becoming a huge advocate of vertical farming and cultured beef. It was, if we can get agriculture and cattle ranching off the land and give the land back to the animals to create mega-landscapes, we actually have a chance to beat back both climate change and, uh, the biodiversity crisis. So that when I started writing Abundance and working with Peter and thinking about those kinds of questions, that's the stuff that I've been thinking about and why I had been looking at disruptive technology for environmental challenges was how do we build mega-landscapes to protect species?

Stephen, I think megalinkages, which you just gave a phenomenal breakdown on, by the way, are one really good, interesting example of something that can be integrated into fiction. And as you said, kind of slipped through. It's almost like a little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Well, I mean, this is— so this is a book about two billionaires, tech billionaires, who are competing in our ecological-friendly future to build megalinkages in their own image. Right. This is Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos competing to get into space only 15 years later. And it's new versions of those.

Interesting use of the word friendly. The way that you wove this into this story, though, I would not call this friendly competition.

Oh, I don't think it's friendly competition. Yeah.

This is life or death.

For sure. Yeah. It's, uh, I mean, it's a cyberpunk thriller. You gotta have menacing shadow corporations. Okay, cyberpunk.

I know we do. So this is the other thing about this book. This needs to be released with a soundtrack for every chapter. It just begs to have music playing. That's like, it's so, it's almost like it reads like a screenplay. Do you write with music on typically?

It depends. Often I will build a playlist that has the emotional vibe that I'm trying to get at in the book. And that was the same with what I was doing with Slipknot and a lot of the, like, stuff I was listening to in this book. It was just the book— like, it's a, it's an optimistic future, but it's a troubling future. And there's some angry stuff in the book that was different from how I would normally write about stuff, right? And so it required, like, me to— this is oddly— you'll never— I don't think anybody will notice it. Hopefully you don't notice this at all. This is the most technical book I've ever had to write. It's more— it's more— it's much— there's much more going on under the hood. And there was— there was— I read almost— between Last Tango and this book, I read 100 thrillers. To— because I wanted to— there was a bunch of questions I had about writing. I thought Last Tango was really fun, but I really— my mission has always been in novels, I want to convey really big ideas, but I want really compelling stories. It's always been the same. If you're gonna give me 6 hours or 7 hours of your life to read a book, I want you to have an amazing time. I want to blow your mind. I want to— you I want you to learn a bunch of stuff, but I want you to really have fun. Some writers, that's not important too, but for me, it's really important. I want my audience to have a blast reading my books.

So, um, okay, well, mission accomplished with this fangirl. I had a blast.

I want to ask you about that actually, because I think that's going to be something that people are really interested in. And you speak about this in Flow for Writers. There was a quote from you in Flow for Writers, something along the lines of, if you're writing a book, and, you know, someone hangs a gun up on the wall in chapter 2, you have to make sure that that gun has been fired by the end of the book. In other words, every loop that gets opened has to be closed, and it's very easy to open loops. So what does this—

so wait, I want— yeah, I want to, I want to say the thing about hanging the guns on the walls, um, that's not mine. I can't take— that is a famous— so there's a Chekhov play where all these people come into a room and they hang guns, you have to check your gun at the door. So you hang your gun on the peg as you come into the saloon. All those guns have to be fired, right? That's— and so it's, it's, it's a— it actually, I think it came out of, uh, theater, um, and how to like close the loop in playwriting. But it's incredibly true in, uh, all books. And very— the most difficult thing in fiction, and this is where novelists have the most problems, is it is really easy because you're making it up to fall in love with every tangent you come up with. And the truth of the matter is the success of The Devil's Dictionary, in my opinion, was due to what I called like plot adherence. Like I literally started every scene, I knew where it started, I knew where it ended, and I did not deviate because it's so easy and you don't think about it. You'll have a little tangent, a character will say something, you'll introduce a new character. Or you'll do— and suddenly you have another gun hanging on the wall. And when you get 300 pages later and you've got to, like, tie everything up, um, it's really, really difficult. You want to— by the way, um, I'm massively influenced, and I love William Gibson, but if you read Neuromancer, his first book, that's a book where he hung way too many guns on the wall, and, like, he cannot bring it together at the end of the book. And you see this in a lot of Even in a lot of sci-fi, and it sort of bugs me in sci-fi that, like, people, they keep introducing these cool things because it's really easy to do in sci-fi, but if it doesn't drive the plot forward, your readers don't know what to pay attention to. It's too confusing and you never close the loop and it's not fulfilling.

Yeah, it leaves too many, like, untucked corners then at the end, and the reader may not know cognitively, but they'll feel like either dissatisfaction or an agitation that things aren't closed down.

Yep.

It's not, it's not bearing the reader in mind. It's kind of the writer, writer's indulgence in a sense.

Yeah, it feels masturbatory to me. I don't like it.

That's a good way to describe it.

Yeah.

How do you go about, you know, at the start of the fiction, at the start of writing Last Tango or Devil's Dictionary, you know, you're kind of starting to write. Have you got all the characters mapped out in advance? Have you got a visual up on your wall with the plot? Like, what does the process actually look like? Or are you literally just writing it, coming up with it as you go, and then going back to the beginning and making sure it all syncs up?

Or no, I— yeah, so with this book and with the— I knew like what the opening— I sort of knew where they started I knew the major, like, couple of the major plot ideas. Like, I, like, I knew there were going to be rival mega linkages at the heart of Devil's Dictionary and in weird ways. And I know where we're going. I sort of like, I know the last scene with this book, with Last Tango. What I did is I would map out 50 to 70 pages in advance and make a really— like, I'd be writing it. I wouldn't know all the characters, but I would know where every chapter started. Like, it starts with this here and it ends with this here, starts here, ends here. And as long as I could keep those in mind— but you'd have to— it was a lot of like resisting temptation. Um, the other thing about this book is this book is more sci-fi than Last Tango. It's a it's farther into the future and there's crazier shit that goes down, right? And when you write really crazy— there's crazy scenes and there's a flying motorcycle chase scene, for example, which I think is the first flying motorcycle chase scene in literature. But you have to like keep it very tight and not get carried away. It's really, it's really easy. Like, I learned this lesson when I was writing screenplays. It's a common error around— if you're writing action screenplays, you just start blowing shit up, and pretty soon, like, you've blown up the house, and then you've blown up the church, and then it's the school, and no, no, that— it's the White House. And then, like, oh, you gotta blow up a mountain. And right, like, it's that problem. And so you can't use those— those kinds of things aren't easy solutions. They're actually bigger problems than you think they are. So you have to, like— everything's got to be a tighter than you think it is. And fiction— it's funny, nonfiction is actually freer in a sense in the writing than fiction is, to do it well, in my experience. This may not be for other writers, but to do what this— this was a really tight— like, I felt like I was walking a really narrow tightrope. It was really fun, and I loved writing the book, but it was, it was a challenge in a good way.

Stephen, on that note, actually, that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about. You know, in one sense it seems like, or would seem like, writing fiction is just like a total blast. You get to think up all these crazy things and jam out about them, but I can imagine it is actually very tricky in certain respects. Yeah, what are those?

Okay, so like, the only— this is the only thing I have to say on that one. My first novel Angle Cookus for Flight took 11 years. Why did it take 11 years? Because I had to throw out 500 pages one time, 800 pages another time, 400 pages a third time, because I kept falling in love with my tangents and I kept introducing new characters. And like, the plot just got thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. And you know, this— that was— I played with metafiction like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace. How far can push on language before it totally breaks down and you're not communicating, but you're still getting the feelings. I wanted to push that back a little bit and still be communicating, but have that like level of art and intensity. But it was really like trying to do that took 11 years. And I, I mean, I got my ass kicked forever, um, on that book. And I will say, by the way, I'd like to point out that I made— I was paid, uh, $5,500 for that book. So I think hourly after 11 years of work, I was like less than like, I mean, it was like, it was some micro fraction.

You actually owe them money back?

Yeah, we worked it out at one point. It was like some fraction micro of a penny per year kind of thing. It's terrible. Yeah. Very glamorous learning how to be a writer.

Yeah, well, I will say that you can see like, and I hope I, I'm assuming everybody listening can hear like that how much discipline there is to the writing process. Like, not just the discipline of getting your ass in the chair and your ideas on paper, but the actual discipline, even when you're in flow, to not take every single self-indulgent whim, right?

Well, that's— yeah, that's— so that's— that is the L. If you're Like, obviously I'm pretty good at getting into flow, especially when I'm writing. And when you're in flow, man, tangents are delicious, right?

Yeah, they're intoxicating.

Super delicious. But so this is, um, this is the same problem that people have at work all the time. This is a question we answer all the time, um, from, from, you know, people who have, you know, started, you know, training with us and whatever. And so they, they're, you know, their work life is filled with a lot more flow, but the tangents are delicious. And you have to— first, you have to— I think it takes practice in flow to be able to start to distinguish the good tangents from the bad tangents, the good ideas, the bad. You know what I mean? Like, you start to get a sense over time. And I don't— other than pattern recognition, I don't know what that is. I don't know what I'm looking at neurobiologically, what we're talking about. But you start to get a sense of these are the ideas I want to follow, they're fruitful, and these are the sideways ones. And you don't know what— you got to go a little bit way into the idea, you know what I mean? Usually with, with my writing, I'll give it a pair— like, I'll, I'll indulge it for a paragraph, and then I'll be like, oh wow, this is not this, I gotta get, get rid of it. And, um, that's the discipline, is just saying no, no, as much as I like this. And I have an excerpt file, like, all the stuff that I like but I cut, and maybe I get to use it someplace else.

That's funny, I do the same thing on anything that I write. There's always a page that's like completely committed to the— it's like a concept or a thought or even just a phrasing that I think will be repurposed somewhere else. It's like, like just everything that was left on the editing floor.

Right.

Yeah. It helps you discern though to know that you can kind of pop them somewhere else because then you're not completely out of—

yeah, you're not like totally breaking up. You're like seeing other people.

You know, but I have learned never go into the clipping folder. You just don't do it because, well, it's all delicious. I know, great stuff you wrote that didn't fit.

It's the loves that got away. You're right.

I know.

Sarah, I'm curious from your perspective as a psychologist, what do you see the role being for reading fiction? For high performance or just psychological well-being.

Oh, that's such a great thing. Well, having done this experiment, first of all, this is the first time I read a book, like, probably honest to God, a fiction book since college that I engaged this way. Like, it was like a full— and even Stephen, when I talked to you a few weeks ago, and I was like, I haven't finished it yet, you're like, you have to be done by that night. And I was like, I am luxuriating in these characters. Like, I'm having a moment with them, right? So, Rian, I am like now committed. So I read probably somewhere between, I don't know, 60 and 65 books a year. It's kind of what I try to estimate, right? And up until this year, zero were fiction. So my lofty goal for 2022 is to have at least another fiction book in. It was so enjoyable, and I saw myself also— I noticed this, like, in the beginning.

You're gonna read one more novel for all of 2022, so two novels a year. Okay, 65 to 2.

I'm taking the 1% rule, by the way, sir. Okay, I'm setting my goals.

No, I'm just— I just want to make sure my math is correct.

Yeah. Your math is correct. So here's the thing too, is here's where I think— I don't know whether or not I would say I think this will directly result in high performance. But when you take the overall, like, quotient of curiosity, this is a philosophy book as much as it it's anything. At least that's how I metabolized it. And, um, like, for me, it let my brain think in a way and tangent and imagine in ways that nonfiction doesn't. And so that added this whole layer to my life. And then there was something lovely about having these characters. It was like anytime I sort of like needed to like escape reality, I was like, oh, I can go connect with lions. Like, I can go like hang out with my friends in the Magallanes. You know, I can, I can go do that. So I just think it's something I'm certainly going to incorporate it more regularly. And I do think that it probably lends to a type of creative thinking. That if you live in the nonfiction world the way that I do, you sort of live inside of facts that—

Let me make my case for it from a flow perspective.

Oh, I want to say one more thing before you say this. Okay, because I forgot about— Okay, so I could see myself too. When I would sit down, there would be this friction period, the first sort of 8 pages where I'd kind of be like resisting getting into it, right? And then I could feel myself like slip into the story. I could see my— I could see it better in my mind. And when I would get there, I could tell, oh, I'm in flow. I'm in the fiction version of flow, of enjoying this. And That if I paired that, if I did this reading before I needed to go do other work that was super concentrated, it always worked. It always worked. Even if I carved out just 30 minutes and I was like, oh, I'll read and then I'll go do this work, work, it always worked. All right, go, Steve.

So wait a minute, you were using Devil's Dictionary to get you into flow and then carrying that flow state into your work. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's—

I could feel myself resisting it. Like, I wouldn't— it was like, well, there's—

so we actually— the pages are impregnated with a chemical. No, um, but, uh, people like to be like, really?

I was like licking them.

All right, uh, what I have found is, you know, reading is a— I mean, Csikszentmihalyi had said once that reading is probably the most common flow state on earth. So, well known. I think, what I think, why I think reading fiction is so important, one, I say, you know, nonfiction gives you facts, fiction gives you perspective. Because it forces you to go live in a world that's not your world. And that, first of all, that expands empathy. It expands worldviews. It's multiperspectival thinking. It's good for us. But what I think is really critical about it is brain does pattern recognition. It produces dopamine. And so, I always tell people to read 25 to 50 pages a day in a book that's pretty far outside your core subject because the farther away from your core subject, the brain's going to automatically automatically find the link. It does pattern recognition automatically. So if you're reading something far away from your core subject, sooner or later the brain is going to find a way to link it together. And when those are big links, those lead to big aha moments. And so what I find is if I'm just reading facts, even if I'm reading far away from my core subject, it doesn't produce as much fodder for pattern recognition. So for flow proneness overall, I think having fiction regularly in the mix, and I usually go like 3 nonfiction books for every novel I tend to read. And with novels, I tend to alternate like fun thriller, something that moves fast, that I, you know, sci-fi, that kind of stuff, and harder, chunkier, meatier fiction. Which I also think is really good, but sometimes it's a little more work. But so is reading philosophy.

In this one, you get both.

Right. Yeah.

This one, you sneak in a whole bunch of philosophy.

One of the things, Steven, that you snuck in that I was fascinated by, and I'd love you to comment a little bit more on, is biophilia, or the biophilia hypothesis from E.O. Wilson, who's a Harvard biologist. Um, which is the idea that life has a deep affinity for life. So I would love if you could explain that hypothesis or concept of E.O. Wilson's to folks and how it relates to nature-relatedness as well.

Yeah, it's— I mean, biophilia, uh, is really— it's— I mean, there have been a lot of ecological awareness was another term that was used. Cross-species empathy. Biophilia was E.O. Wilson's idea. It was published, published a book by that name in 1984, uh, that it was one of the sort of— all right, the idea that like time in nature is good for our health, it's really old, like dates all the way back to the, to the Greeks and before that. In early America, it became really prominent, the nature cure. There was— they started to believe that the modern world was bad for our brains it produces anxiety and stress and irritability and a whole bunch of other conditions.

I'm here to say that's true.

Right. Nature therapy, which was then known as the West cure, became really a big deal. And really prominent Americans, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, other people sought the West cure and were healed. And this led scientists, right? This is the same time as science is becoming sort of more formalized, it becomes a full body of research. So why is nature good for us? Has been a topic in the '80s and '90s. These ideas sort of get summarized and crystallized really for the first time in a really solid way. And the first book is E.O. Wilson's Biophilia, where he's talking about why is nature good for us? Because we're living creatures and life has a natural affinity for life. And from an evolutionary psychology perspective, being in nature, being in an environment we evolved in less stress, we feel safer. Initially, this got really linked to, uh, uh, vision, and it was— it originally was wide vistas, right? We evolved on the veldt in Africa, and so really wide vistas with big nature in the distance seems to, you know, have the most common effect. Um, since then it's gone into a lot of other senses and, uh, There's a lot of crossover work with cannabis research because of all the terpenes in cannabis. All of them are basically, you know, chemicals that exist naturally. And terpinene, which shows up in cannabis, is the scent produced by pines, right? That pine needle scent is pinene. Sometimes shows up in— so there's been a lot of work on how these terpenes impact mood and behavior and things like that. So it's gone on, but biophilia was one of the early kind of big ideas here.

So this popped up a couple of times in the comments. Um, the question is, how does a more empathic world impact capitalism? I mean, I think, uh, Stephen, at least my interpretation of your writing and, you know, what we do at Flow Research Collective as well, is that the view toward certain forms of capitalism under the abundance frame is quite positive. So I'm curious what your take is there around increases in empathy and how that could impact capitalism positively and just what your overall take is on that topic.

Well, this could go any which way. I'm just going to stay sort of focused on stuff that I know a little about and sort of floats in and around the Devil's Dictionary, which is externalities. Is a very funny word, right? It's the stuff in a market economy that sits outside the economy that isn't priced. So clean air is an environmental externality. A lot of the reasons climate change is such an issue is because the environment was considered an externality. And there were, you know, decades of research, people trying to like fight back against this and, and, you know, We created ecosystem services and then people put, you know, price tags on— Amory Lovins famously from the Rocky Mountain Institute, brilliant environmentalist, and Paul Hawkins wrote in Natural Capitalism. They basically looked at all the things, all the ecosystem services are all the things the environment does for us that we cannot do for ourselves. So wood production. Food production, water filtration, climate regulation is the, is the really famous one. Right. And so there are roughly 36 depending ecosystem services. And like one of them is something we've been talking a lot about in a sense is the spiritual component in nature. Right. We go into nature and there's a soulful connection there. It's hard to put a price on that. But they, they tried very, very hard just trying to get capitalists to understand that these externalities actually have value. And now everything that's going on in the environmental movement is still, you know, now we don't have the word externalities anymore. It's starting finally to go away. And we're starting to see, you know, companies willing to kind of pay for these things. You know, it's, it's, it's producing a slightly different capitalism. When I think about like capitalism and empathy. Capitalism is nothing more or less than a system for sharing value at scale. That's what it is. It's— there was designed— now it— there's better, there's empathic versions of capitalism, and there's ruthless versions of capitalism and everything in between. It's nothing more or less than just a system for how do we cooperate and share value at scale. In an efficient way. And, you know, parts of it are awesome and parts of it are horrific, like, you know, sort of everything else. And certainly you can weaponize capitalism like nothing else. And we've seen that, but we can— we've also seen a giant movement towards, you know, triple bottom line capitalism and things along those lines. So you start to see, I still believe business can be a tremendous force for good for these reasons, but you don't get to have things like externalities. When I think about empathy in capitalism, I think, oh, finally, we're going to get rid of fricking externalities and all the invisible damages being done by capitalism. I'm going to just stop there. Babble into obscurity.

I'll just give to one second, which is that I sort of the, I think that like the discussion about oxytocin and tribalism, right? I think, you know, the research is fairly robust that if we have healthy empathy, actually, our leadership does better, like leaders do better with empathy as sort of a guiding principle and a motto of how they want to fuel their performance, right? And I think that it can go either way because it's inside of a person and people can do horrible things. But in general, I think probably increased empathy will change capitalism because it will change our— it'll change the leaders that are like pulling the major strings inside of this, as Stephen rightly calls it, a system, right? A system of scaling. So, you know, it's really up to us what we do with it. And this book, begs these questions about that sort of what you do with your, let's call them superpowers.

Love it.

Thank you for that answer as well, Sarah. So quick question for you, Sarah, and then Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sarah, what was the biggest thing you were left with after reading Devil's Dictionary? And Stephen, what is the biggest thing you want readers to leave with?

Well, it just so happens that— I mean, there were so many things. This would take a whole nother call. But I will say my favorite, my favorite Lion Zorn quote, which I'm going to happily get this in at the last minute. Stephen, you all right if I read a quote from the book?

Sure. Absolutely.

Why not? All right. There's two, actually. One is the best piece of advice for people. It's tucked away like mid-book. I read it, I highlighted it and circled it. And it's something that often only investigative journalists and shrinks appreciate how good this advice is. So, they're talking about like how they should sort of engage this character to essentially like, open them up, you know, get them talking. And he says, this is Lion, he says, he thought the conversation should start with a little misdirection, just a touch of the weird. Follow the weird with a smooth ego stroke. Tilt him, Lion explained, then make him feel safe and happy and blabby. It's a dopamine thing. He'll open up. And it's like probably the most genius advice if you're needing to get sort of immediately in with somebody. But okay, so my all-time favorite, which I think this is like the heart of Lion Zorn, he says, I travel a lot for work. I meet all kinds of people. You know what's rare in the world? Stupid people. They're out there. But not in the numbers that most believe. You know what is out there? People who speak different languages. Even if they speak the same language, they speak different languages. Know what I mean? If you can figure out what language someone speaks and talk to them about something they truly care about, pretty quickly you figure out everybody's smart about something. And that is why I think it's Lion's Zorn 2024.

Nice, love it, Sarah. Great. Um, Stephen, you—

I think Sarah should have the last word. I don't think I have to follow that with anything. And we're out, mic drop. What were you saying, Rean?

No, just do you want to— do you want to share your final, uh, sentiment on what you hope folks leave with after reading Devil's Dictionary?

Yeah, the burning desire to buy Last Tango in Cyberspace and read the first one backwards.

Of course, sequel.

Like how we saw Star Wars.

This was capital— we were talking about empathetic capitalism, watching it in action.

I love it. All righty, well, listen, thanks, uh, thanks so much, Dr. Sarah Sarkis, for your time. Thank you, Stephen. Everybody, and again, Devil's Dictionary, you can click the link below to buy it on Amazon. It's on Audible as well. The audio version is incredible, by the way. I want to plug that as well. Stephen, you found an amazing voice actor to do the audio version, so definitely recommend. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, anyone's an Audible fan, it brings it to life. I did both written and then I did the audio version about 3 or 4 months afterwards, and both went well together. So everybody, encourage you to grab some copies of Devil's Dictionary. Thank you all for, for tuning in.

See you at the book club meeting.

Yeah, thank you everybody. Sarah, thank you so much for hanging out with us.

I love the notes you play. I say it all the time.

That's nice of you.

It's also true.

Back at you. Okay, all right, and now that we've had our own private little love fest. I'm gonna hang up because I'm embarrassed. Is it time to start drinking? All right, bye everybody. Thanks for doing that, guys. Take care. Bye-bye.

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