The Numlock Podcast

Walter Hickey
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The Numlock Podcast

Numlock News is a daily morning newsletter that pops out fascinating numbers buried in the news, highlighting awesome stories you're missing out on. Every Sunday, Walt Hickey interviews someone cool. Sometimes he records it in quality befitting a podcast. www.numlock.com

  1. 4D AGO

    Numlock Sunday: Alissa Wilkinson on We Tell Ourselves Stories

    By Walt Hickey Double feature today! Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. I’m a huge fan of Alissa, she’s a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It’s a really wonderful book and if you’re a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it’s a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless. Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s good to be back, wherever we are. Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It’s a really exciting book. It’s a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work? Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn’t read any books, because they don’t make you read books in school, or they didn’t when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in ’03. It’s sort of a meditation on grief, but it’s not really what that sounds like. If people haven’t read it’s very Didion. You know, it’s not sentimental, it’s constantly examining the narratives that she’s telling herself about grief. So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn’t have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I’d never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else. Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don’t remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades. From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn’t realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that’s 20 years of history. Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I’ve always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.” It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don’t really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she’s a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief. So that’s the long-winded way of saying I wasn’t, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer. That’s really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion’s experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there? The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she’s in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John’s brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it’s all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it’s at. So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That’s the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the ’80s as screenwriters still. People sometimes don’t realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don’t realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives. John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn’t understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It’s a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it. So it’s, it’s really, that’s all very interesting. They’re threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion’s early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns. Then in the ’80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There’s an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together. So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there’d be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn’t seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens. Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she’s such an interesting figure, but she’s also lived so very publicly that I’m just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also

    35 min

  2. 4D AGO

    Numlock Sunday: Olga Khazan on how to change your personality

    By Walt Hickey Double feature today! Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better. Olga appears all the time in Numlock because I really like her work, she’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote a delightful book that I really enjoyed called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. The book dives into the science of personality, where it comes from, and the real ways that we can change our own personalities in one direction or another. In it, Olga becomes a guinea pig for all kinds of radical experiences to change her personality. Olga can be found at The Atlantic, and the book is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Olga Khazan, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You are the author of the brand new book Me But Better. I loved your book Weird which was out just a few years ago. This book is all about how to change your personality. It is a really exciting journey. I know that it started with an article that you published in The Atlantic, but what drew you to the art and science of changing one’s personality? Really it’s because personality is at the root of so much self-improvement and personal growth. I noticed that I tended to see things really negatively a lot of the time, and I was also really socially isolated. it was keeping me from enjoying life and appreciating what I had and just getting the most out of what life had to offer me. I really saw personality change as a way to fix all or improve that in one fell swoop. Great. You talk a lot from the framework of the Big Five. I really enjoyed how grounded in the scientific literature it was. The Big Five is potentially somewhat different from the Myers-Briggs structure that a lot of people know. Before we dive into how you went about doing a gut renovation on your personality, I would love to hear a little bit about what the Big Five are, where you came in on some of it, and what you wanted to see if you could change. Yeah, so generally the accepted scientific view today is that there are five traits that make up personality. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. The first is Openness to experiences, which is like imaginativeness and creativity. The next is Conscientiousness, which is being super organized, being on time. The next is Extroversion, which is being friendly and cheerful and sociable. Then there’s Agreeableness, which is being warm, empathetic and also trusting of others. Then there’s Neuroticism, which is a bad thing; it is depression and anxiety. The opposite of that, which is the one that you want, is emotional stability. When I started taking these scientific personality tests at the start of the project, I scored very low on Extroversion, very high on Neuroticism and I scored about average on Agreeableness. Those were the ones that I wanted to change. That’s fascinating. I want to actually follow up with that. I did not hear you put a good, bad valence on any of the other ones besides neuroticism. It seems like most of these…people can have a full and fulfilling life with one or the other. What made Neuroticism pop out? You can have a full and fulfilling life without being on the outer extreme on any of these, but I would say it’s generally better to be higher on all of them other than Neuroticism. You don’t want to be all the way to the extreme. You don’t want to be so agreeable that you’re just like a doormat. It’s generally better for your mental health and well-being and stuff to be pretty agreeable, pretty extroverted, pretty conscientious. Neuroticism popped out to me because that is one that I was super high on. It’s very bad for your mental health. The definition is pretty much having bad mental health. It was keeping me from having a fun life, having a good life. Your happiness is determined by how you feel moment to moment and not by how many goodies you have. Even when I had a lot of goodies, I was sort of still miserable. Fascinating. Just to get into some of the literature on that, there was this amazing study that you cited in the book that says knocking down your Neuroticism by a few points was worth the equivalent of getting a $300,000 annual income increase. It seems like this is a really significant reverberation on just how people assess themselves. Yeah, even a really minor decrease in neuroticism can have a really big benefit for your life and have a lot of benefits for your mental health. This is why people spend so much time in therapy and get on SSRIs and things like that. Both of those have been shown to decrease neuroticism. So it really is a very popular personality trait that people like to work on. So how’d you go about it? For Neuroticism, the technique is really a lot of meditation. It’s really hard to get away from that. People keep wanting me to say something else, but it’s a lot of mindfulness meditation. The other component that I did was gratitude journaling. You can do this exercise where you write a letter to someone in your life that you’re really grateful for, which will inevitably make you just weep hot tears because you’re like “I’m so thankful.” So you can do exercises like that. But really the day-to-day practice that I did and that people recommend is mindfulness meditation. In particular, a lot of the Buddhist teachings in the mindfulness class that I took were really helpful to me. I think often in the day-to-day of life, I get really wrapped up in these negative thought spirals, and it really helped me have a more realistic way of looking at things that were less negative. Fascinating. I always love it when you ask “What’s the one simple trick to solving your problem?” It’s always just “Oh, you just have to exercise every day. Oh, you just have to meditate” I know! Just completely change your life in every way and spend all your time on self-care. Let’s go through some of the other ones. Definitely Extroversion I think is a really interesting one. Again, you have happy introverts in life. You have happy extroverts in life. You wanted to get more extroverted. I think I would still identify as an introvert. It’s not like you have to abandon that identity if that’s important to you, but really it’s about: am I getting enough social connection to fill up that bucket in my life? I really was not. I almost reflexively (even before the pandemic) if people would invite me out for a happy hour or something, I would just reflexively say no. Now as a new parent, I’m kicking myself because I’m never going to get to go to happy hour again. I would kill for a happy hour with people. Please come have happy hour with me. I would just kind of say no because I was like, “Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be that fun. Who all is going to be there?” I was doing these cost-benefit analyses. I found that once I actually forced myself and I was like “Okay, I’m actually going to go out a lot. I’m actually going to socialize. I’m going to do improv. I’m going to go to Sailing Club.” Once I go to these things and do them, I actually do feel happier. I felt better afterward, even if I wasn’t in the mood to go beforehand. Again, you took some incredibly extreme steps over the course of this. People should consult a doctor before joining an improv group. But you went ahead and did that. Yeah. Improv was probably the scariest thing for me to try. But it was also the most efficacious, I would say. Really? Yeah, because it is such good practice with so many things that bother neurotic, introverted control freaks. It’s basically shattering the pretty little world that you live in, if you’re like me. It’s a completely uncontrolled environment. You don’t get a say over what is said or what happens in improv because it’s all up to other people. It’s a performative thing, which makes me very uncomfortable. I have stage fright. It’s silly, and I have issues being silly. It’s spontaneous. It is very whimsical. It involves really reading other people very closely, moment to moment, which can also be really challenging if you don’t get out much and you are super introverted. So I would say improv just plunges you into figuring out other people all in one go. Amazing. I want to back out a little bit and talk about this book in the context of your previous book. Can we talk a little bit about the distinction between personality and identity? Your previous book, Weird, really honed in on some of the advantages of being weird, being somewhat different than those around you had. It was interesting in this book because you were pursuing qualities that not necessarily made you less weird necessarily, but also made it easier to plug in with other people at times, right? Obviously, these are different things, but you’re still a very unique person. You still have a fascinating background. I don’t think any part of this book really comes across as you losing anything. It’s interesting to just have this book and it just in perspective of your previous one, just because it seems like it’s an interesting way to perceive working on yourself without changing yourself too fundamentally. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think, honestly, what this helped me to do is to embrace the positive things about being weird or my unusual identity. For people who haven’t read my previous book or don’t know who I am, I am a Russian immigrant and I grew up in West Texas. That element of me was like in this book, Weird, where wrote about other people and how being different from other people around you can be both a source of pain and a source of strength. I think now I am better able to focus on the source of strength element of this because I am less sensitive by virtue of being less neurotic to the slight microaggressions that you sometimes

    26 min

  3. FEB 2

    Numlock Sunday: Olivia Walch on the science of sleep

    By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Olivia Walch, author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. Olivia’s a good friend of mine and I’ve been hearing about her research and her work for years, and now she’s finally got a whole book diving into why ideal sleep is more than just the eight hours number we hear so much about. It’s a delightful book with all sorts of cool insights that can have major impacts on your life and health. We spoke about the human body's numerous circadian rhythms, why sleep regularity is more important than sleep duration, and why permanent daylight saving time is a bad idea. Walch can be found at oliviawalch.com and the book can be found wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Olivia, thank you so much for coming on. I'm so delighted to be here. You are the author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. It's a really, really fun book. It covers a lot of the science behind sleep and actually has some pretty surprising stuff in there for folks who are interested in their own sleep health. You have a really interesting story about how you even fell into being interested in the science behind sleep. You did a sleep study at some point in grad school that changed your life, it sounds like. Well, you knew me before then. We were in college together. Each diabolically bad at sleeping. I would give each of us a failing grade — you maybe a lower grade than me. I was bad, but you were exploring new horizons of bad, like with polyphasic sleep. I tried it once. It was such a bad idea. Maybe a D, D-minus. I knew when I went to grad school something had to change. I was not sleeping; I was not making new memories; I was getting sick. I got MRSA in college and I wonder all the time, was it because my immune system was like a frail Cheeto trying to hold the door closed to the germs? But at the time, I thought at college, you have to do everything. You have to be in every club and miss no opportunity for an experience. And I now remember no experiences from that time period. In grad school, I decided I was going to sleep more. I did, but I didn't actually notice that huge of a difference with fewer things filling my schedule, even though I was sleeping more. It was better, but it wasn't that much better. It took a sleep study in which I had to keep a really regular bedtime and researchers were spying on me. They would know if I didn't, because I was wearing a device, ye olde Jawbone, which is not even a thing anymore. For months, I went to bed at 11:30 every single night. The changes were so profound. I didn't just instantly fall asleep at 11:30, though that did happen. I got faster, I lost weight, skin conditions cleared up. In every dimension, my life was better. And the thing that had shifted was not really sleep duration, but sleep regularity. You get at this idea early in the book. There's this very common number that everybody associates with the right thing to do about sleep, which is that you should sleep for eight hours. The book goes the next level deeper, looks at some of the other dimensions of sleep, and it turns out that eight hours is good, that's a good thought to keep in your mind, but it's really the rhythm. What is the conceit here? Why are rhythms important when it comes to this stuff? Our understanding of sleep health is so fixated on duration that there's a creepypasta on Reddit that goes, "Oh, these Russians were kept awake and they went crazy." The creepypasta has always been funny to me because it's like, "Yeah, and after five days of no sleep, they started eating their own organs." (Spoilers for the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta.) Yet we've kept lots of people up for five days and they don't start eating their organs. We have this conception in our minds that losing sleep duration is going to be really bad. It's not good, but it also doesn't make you self-cannibalize after five days of no sleep. That definition of sleep health is woefully inadequate. The movement in the sleep field is higher dimensional. There are more things that matter to sleep health. There's this big, long list of things. People say you should think about how many times you wake up in the middle of the night, and you should think about how alert you feel during the day. All of those are great, but they're not memorable. People don't keep two things in their head, let alone five. I'm trying to get people to keep two, which is duration and regularity, as the latitude and longitude of sleep health. You don't say Madrid and New York are close together just because they have the same latitude; longitude also matters. You shouldn't say somebody who sleeps eight hours a night is healthy if they have horrible regularity. That's a case where they are probably pretty far from health, just like New York and Madrid are pretty far from each other. A lot of this comes down to circadian rhythms. What are they in your view? What kind of bodily processes are governed by them? The whole shebang. The problem with circadian rhythms is that their UI is terrible. People talk about the circadian rhythm, but that's not really right because circadian rhythms are plural. Sleep is under the subhead of circadian rhythms, but so is everything else in your body: when you're strongest, when you metabolize food, when your immune system peaks, when you repair DNA. There's this real problem. I think that because circadian rhythms are kind of everything, people just say, "You know, the rhythms." This leads to everyone who doesn't study this all day, every day, walking around having no idea what they are and just thinking it's probably the same thing as sleep. Your body has an internal clock, and it schedules things according to when it thinks you need to do more or less of them. That clock is set by your light exposure, and in modern life, we get light whenever we want it, which is not particularly traditional or natural. Circadian rhythms developed as a process because we live on Earth, right? We know there's a certain amount of daylight and when certain things should happen, and we evolved specifically to have a circadian rhythm. Yes. The circadian rhythm is so tuned to Earth that if you put us on a planet with 28-hour days, we probably wouldn't be able to adjust. We would basically continue to have close to a 24-hour period in our rhythms that would continue, even though the sun on this planet would be up and down at different times. It's baked into us, and it's the case that there's just stuff in your body at some times that isn't there at other times. The hormone melatonin, for example. If I made you spit into a tube right now, you would not have melatonin in your spit. We're speaking in the middle of the afternoon. It's very, very bright outside. No melatonin. But 10 hours from now? Different story. The thing to imagine is just a bunch of switches in your body getting flipped on and off depending on the time of day, which has massive implications for health, drug efficacy, how you feel, and people have lost their connection to that. Number one, we can have light whenever we want it, so our rhythms are squished relative to where they otherwise would be. But number two, I think we don't have a great way of talking about rhythmic health, which my book tries to address. I'm sure there's much better I can do and other people can do in the future, but this is my first stab at it. You get at this inflection point where so much of these functions are the result of, if not tens of thousands, then millions of years of evolutionary processes really locking us into a day/night process. Then you have the emergence of electricity, and a lot of your book reflects on how that's actually changed the way our bodies work, in ways we wouldn't ordinarily expect. What are some of those ways? I would say signs of rhythms having different effects on your body in the winter versus summer. Any study that reports on those, I'm always very cautious about, because I was involved in a study where we looked at Twitter patterns over the course of the year. We wanted to know if people tweeted differently at different times of the year in a way that reflected the sun and circadian rhythms, and we saw this pretty incredible trend where things seemed to really shift around the spring. Daylight saving time is happening then, the sun is changing, so you think, okay, maybe it's related to the sun. Then we dug a little more closely into the data and saw that the entire effect was just driven by people going on spring break. You would see that people tweeted later when they were on break because they were sleeping in. The fact that we have light available to us whenever we want it and we're not just sitting around in the dark at 6 p.m. in December with nothing to do means that we're in a sort of perpetual summer. We have light as late as we want, as long as we want, and that's stepping on these natural rhythms that would be emerging in the absence of that light. The title of the book is Sleep Groove, and sleep groove is actually a thing you talk about quite a bit in the book. It's getting locked into a really strong, robust, resilient rhythm, and there are lots of advantages to having that. What are some of the advantages that you have by having that rhythm, and what are some things that can go wrong if you don't? I would say you die sooner. This is a brand-new result, that sleep regularity predicts dying better than sleep duration, but it does. Again, this definition of sleep health being how long you sleep would say, okay, shoot for eight hours on average, it doesn't matter when, and you're good. But if you actually look to see what predicts whether you die, the people who have the worst sleep regularity are highly correlated with dying younger, and it keeps coming

    37 min

  4. 10/27/2024

    Numlock Sunday: Stephen Follows on the horror movie boom

    By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Stephen Follows, author of The Horror Movie Report. Stephen and I go back a ways, he’s a pop culture data journalist I really respect and you’ve seen him in the newsletter lately based on his great work on stuff like Hallmark movies. He’s out with a really fun new book diving into horror movies, one of the more exciting genres in the film industry these days. We spoke about the rise of horror as a genre, its unique relationship with audiences, and how certain trends have evolved over time. Follows can be found at his website, and the book can be found at HorrorMovieReport.com. This interview has been condensed and edited. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for inviting me. It's always a joy to have a chat with a fellow nerd who likes to go as deep as we do on this stuff. You have this really interesting new book out called The Horror Movie Report: The Ultimate Data Analysis of Horror Films. This thing's amazing. We're going to get into it. But before we dive in, I'd love to start off by hearing about how you'd describe the work you do. Can you tell folks a little about your history as a writer, blogger and analyst? Definitely. I kind of came to this in a strange way. I always knew I wanted to do film and thinking, but I didn't know what that meant. I was a teenager, and everyone told me to go and study thinking, study science and do film on the side. So I did the opposite, because I'm a contrarian. I went to film school and went down a path of writer/producer, and I set up a production company. It still runs, but is now doing more advertising for the charity sector in the UK. I'm still involved with that, but it meant that as my stuff moved away from film, I missed being connected to the film industry. I started to use my thinking principles and maybe 15 years ago I started studying film through the lens of data. I have no training in data. I stopped studying math at about 15, but I have an aptitude for it, and I enjoy it. Not many people do in film. I thought, oh, this is fun. This is a place for me. I started blogging about that, and some in the film industry like it. Not many people run away to do the accounts for the circus. It's nice to have a place. Then that evolved. I've done stuff within gender and other forms of inequality, and things within business to help filmmakers' profitability — but also crazy things, like looking at which Bond film mentions its own title most frequently in the dialogue. Which I don't think you're going to guess. GoldenEye is my only guess. It's a good guess, and you're on the right path, but it's the wrong answer. The answer is Moonraker. You were right to think object instead of character. But that led me on, and I now work for Guinness World Records as a side gig, finding out movie records. That's the sum total of 20 years of numbers and film fun. I love your work. I've always enjoyed your work quite a bit, and I've done a lot of work myself in the pop culture data space and there's not a lot of folks in here. Particularly back in the day, there weren't many folks at all, so it was always really cool to see your stuff. It definitely always got me thinking and is really one-of-a-kind. That's nice to say. And I agree; I would often think of an idea, or someone would ask me about an idea, and I'd be like, I wonder if anyone's done that. Then I'd Google it and it would either be you, me and I'd forgotten, or no one's done it. That's great. What a privilege to have a space to actually make some progress in. It's good. Again, I admire your stuff so much, and this is why when you hit me up and mentioned you were working on this project, I was so excited. Horror movies have been one of the biggest success stories of the past couple of years, particularly in the postpandemic box office. They tend to overperform; they tend to get good ROI. We've seen a surge in horror film production and we've seen the market share increase. Can you talk a little bit about why this is historically anomalous? We've always had horror movies, since the beginning of the invention of the medium, but why are we now seeing a bit of an uptick? You're absolutely right. It's way more than an uptick. If we were looking at how many horror films were made last year worldwide, it was over 1,500, whereas around 2000, it was 500-something, and in the 1980s it was below 200. It's really transformed. As you said, not only have the raw numbers gone up, but also has the market share. Now about 12 percent of movies are horror films. That's a large percentage. It's a number of factors. Certainly all genres have grown in raw numbers, because it's easier and cheaper to make a film than ever before. Every device I own has some sort of HD camera on it — you can do it on a doorbell. It's possible to do that. You also have the ubiquity of information. I went to film school in 2001 and there was education from tutors, there were a few hardback books, but that was how you learned how to do stuff. Now there's so much content online telling you amazing stuff from awesome people for free. That has an effect. But that's across all films. With horror itself, the market share growth is, as you said, the more interesting part of it. There are a few factors. One, we're more accepting that a film is a horror film. A film that we might think of as horror now, if it had been made in the '80s, it might've been pitched as a psychological thriller. There's more acceptance; there's no shame in it. People are like, yeah, it's a horror film, whereas in the past they might not have done. There's also that generation that grew up with VHS horror films, The Evil Dead generation — and maybe even the generation after that, when it comes to executives — where people have grown up loving horror, but also knowing that it does well. Therefore, if there's no business shame and there's no art shame and there's no personal shame, why not say, yeah, I'm making a horror. There's still a bit of way to go. The awards are pretty poor for horror, and the trade press doesn't cover it properly. It's still not as fully accepted as other genres, but production-wise and audience-wise, it's really evolved and grown and, in the last 20 years, really matured. It's so funny that you mentioned the award stuff. I remember when Jamie Lee Curtis won her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once, I thought it was actually really special that she took a moment and shouted out the horror fans. That's a constituency in movies that does not get a lot of shout-outs from award stages, but nevertheless really did keep her in business for a few years. And it was keeping her in business because it was delivering to audiences. There's no hiding from that. It's the most audience-connected genre, in my opinion. All my stuff is from raw data and from doing my own research, but sometimes I'll do a bit of Googling around to get a context before or after I do the work. With the awards, I found a few blog articles about how horror does at the Oscars, and all the numbers were wrong. They were all different, and they were different from mine. I was like, what is going on? It turns out there is a very, very small number of horror films that do well at the Oscars. Most of them are quite questionable horrors, as in, is it a horror or not? Silence of the Lambs. Jaws. Those are two films that IMDB says are not horror films. You can argue either way, and it doesn't matter what my opinion is, but there are a few like that. Or Black Swan, which is very much a horror film, but because it's female led and about a female perspective, people often go, “Ah, it's a psychological thriller,” in a very misogynistic way. A small number of films that have outperformed have really changed that data. You end up almost immediately talking about existential questions of what horror is. I love that. That's what the data immediately suggests we should chat about. I want to talk a little more about that audience for horror. You had a stat in here that was really interesting to me about how horror is the only genre where the audiences that actually go to the cinema to watch it are direct reflections of the actual national audience. I know you write about the UK in there, but also in general, one really interesting thing about the cinema is that you do have quote-unquote “four quadrants” for movies. For the most part, you're going to see a gender skew or an age skew in terms of who attends a film. But I'd love to hear you speak to how horror is really one of the most universal genres. It really is. It's interesting, because as you've mentioned, there are a few different ways we can cut up the data. The one way that horror is not like the population is age. It has the largest percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds. If you split them into the different buckets, as they often do, horror has the lowest percentage of people under 18 and the lowest percentage of people over 45, which is fascinating. It's really condensed within your 20s. However, it's a good gender split, and also crucially, in the UK, they do just the most British thing ever and do stats around social status. Interesting. It's a rabbit hole. If ever you're looking for a rabbit hole, Google social status. Everyone's classed into different groups, usually based on the job they do or that their parents did, or whether they went to university — things that are sort of falling apart. But it does mean they put people in different brackets. They do that for all the different audiences because it's part of the cinema business' advertising: They want to know whether to sell Rolex watches or lager. And when you compare it to the UK population, every other genre is posher. To a large degree, things like biographies are unbelievably posher than the average population. Horror is the one that just reflects the public. Also, almost every genre has a very strong

    33 min

  5. 10/20/2024

    Numlock Sunday: Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales on the reign of Marvel Studios

    By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, coauthors of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, out in paperback this week. I really loved the book, it dives into what is the main flywheel of mainstream entertainment, for better or for worse, and dives into the fascinating history of the MCU. Whether you're a fan of Marvel movies or just someone living in a world dominated by them, the book is a really interesting look into contemporary filmmaking and the pressures and economics and just simply human scale of these massive operations. We spoke about Marvel’s journey from underdog to cultural icon, how its moviemaking process has changed over time, and what it was like covering a narrative that was developing in real time. Robinson and Gonzales can both be found on the podcast Trial by Content, and the book can be found wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Dave and Joanna, thank you so much for coming on. GONZALES: Absolutely. ROBINSON: Thanks for having us. I really, really love this book. So happy to see it out in paperback. I guess I'll just kick it off with an easy one: What were each of your first experiences with Marvel? How'd you get into this? ROBINSON: As in the comic books or the films? Anything. ROBINSON: Anything at all. Gosh, I think X-Men: The Animated Series was my introduction, back in my infancy. It really got into the world they created, the various characters, their character sets, the trading cards, and then everything spirals out from there. That was my introduction. GONZALES: Mine was probably with the comics. I might have had some X-Men: The Animated Series in there, but I got much more into the comics around late 1993, early '94, when I happened to buy a Spider-Man issue that was part of “The Trial of Peter Parker.” Suddenly I had questions: Why was Peter Parker on trial? How many different Spider-Man books were there? Because I bought an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man, but the next part of “The Trial of Peter Parker” was The Amazing Spider-Man. That led me to get a cubby at my local comic book shop in Louisville, Colorado, which was Time Warp Comics at the time. That was my way in, just being a comic book fan. I also jumped in on one of the longest and mostly considered worst Spider-Man arcs, but loved it. So imagine how good “good” Spider-Man was to me as a child, because I got weaned in on “bad” Spider-Man. Amazing. One reason I really dug the book is that it's about the MCU, but it's also about Marvel, the history of this entire company, and its very different evolution over time, from the '60s to the period of the '90s. What was it like trying to cover not just a film series, but a big franchise with a lot of moving parts as part of an even bigger company with even more moving parts? ROBINSON: A good question we asked ourselves was both where to start and where to end, and where to end was a constant, ongoing question mark. I'll let Dave address that. But in terms of where to start, there were certain things we felt we had to backdate, because there were players involved in the major “How did Marvel Studios come to be?” question and you had to know who they were, why they were important, how did we get here and what were the stakes? Being able to loosely explain who's Stan Lee, who's Perlmutter, who's Avi Arad, who are all these people, helped us tell that story without losing the audience entirely by throwing a bunch of new names at them. Dave, what about ending the book? GONZALES: Oh, ending the book. That was super fun. We started right as Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. I remember seeing Endgame and knowing that Joanna and I were going to work on this, so we started off thinking, what a fantastic hill that Marvel climbed, this interconnected universe with three phases. Everything surely was planned out from the beginning and could only go up from here. The book

    33 min

  6. 07/28/2024

    Numlock Sunday: Julia Alexander on the insatiable maw of human attention

    By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander, digital strategy consultant and author of the new blog Posting Nexus. Julia’s brilliant, she’s been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now, and when I learned about this new project I was incredibly excited to get her on a Sunday edition to hear more about what’s got her, well, attention. We spoke about the incentive structures of the internet, attention as digital currency, and how online trends redefine culture. Alexander can be found on X and Threads, and the project is Posting Nexus This interview has been condensed and edited. Julia Alexander, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. What an honor. It’s always great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for a long time, and whether it was your independent newsletter or this new thing, it is always really, really fun to talk to you about what people are consuming and watching and reading and seeing. Thank you, I appreciate it. I wanted to talk about Posting Nexus. It’s a new project that you are launching and it is a really fascinating dive into attention and essentially how it has become commoditized, how we use it on the internet, and where it goes. Just to back out a bit, can you tell me a little about why you wanted to go in this direction and start this thing up? Posting Nexus came out of this obsession I have with understanding why people do what they do on the internet and how that affects what they do or don't do off the internet. I now work at Disney, and we won’t get into any of that, unfortunately, but a large part of my career was spent looking at the development of the streaming industry and the reality that people's attention was moving away from these closed-circuit traditional distributors to more open-circuit digital distributors who were operating at a pace that was almost relentless, and that was in large part because the attention we gave to digital services was relentless. When I moved into Disney, it didn't stop me thinking a lot about why people do things, where they give attention, and what they want out of attention. So, I decided to launch Posting Nexus, which is me and a few friends who are doing this, edited by the brilliant Allegra Frank until someone very smartly hires her full time. As I say in the intro, it's not a newsletter, it's not a blog, it's kind of just a harbor for thoughts about a lot of this stuff. It really came out of this idea that you can boil down a lot of what people want and where they decide to give their attention into a matrix that I call the IPA matrix, which has nothing to do with beer. It has everything to do with identity, platforms and attention, and when you take those three circles and you put them into a Venn diagram, you get incentive structures and quite often hidden incentive structures. These exist for both the bottom up, so that's us doing things on the internet, and the top down, which are these massive conglomerates who build things on the internet. A great example would be when we look at something like Barbenheimer, which was effectively just an offline manifestation of online attention. Part of the reason that movie did as well as it did is because it leaned into the idea that my identity, which is formed by my interests and the platforms where I socialize, where I'm getting my social capital, and the attention that I receive for participating in this culture then create an incentive structure for me to go out and participate in something in order to post. My general theory on a lot of the tension now is that you give attention in order to receive attention, and through the democratization of a lot of the stuff that we do, we've made it much easier to receive attention by giving attention. I think that constant focus on receiving attention by giving attention leads to this kind of posting nexus. I am very interested in this, just as you are, and our jobs touch on this a bit. You saw it with the technology of film. Charlie Chaplin used to be able to do three shows a night and hit three audiences, and the technology of film made it so that he could be in every cinema in North America, if not further. It seems like what we've had recently is the next advance of that, so now all those audiences within those audiences can entertain each other as well. It's fundamentally inverted a lot of where we gather our attention from and how we disperse it, to the extent that I think it does terrify some people. I would love your thoughts on how this very unique moment we find ourselves in makes this such a fun topic to go into. What's really fascinating is that what's underlying this entire structure is the idea that growth is the end state, that growth is the final destination, and if that is the final destination then there’s no real final point. If we think about that in terms of your own life, if you're listening to this, maybe you're a writer and your end point is a book, or you want to write a novel. If you're working within a large company, maybe your end point is CEO or vice president. There actually is an end point. When we think about the way our lives are constructed, which are intrinsically more digital than they are physical at this point, there is no end point. The numbers on your follower count continue to go up and your value, you as a person, is intrinsically tied to making those numbers go up, which means you create labor for companies effectively for free, right? There's this idea that if you do it enough, some offline benefits will occur. If you're an influencer, maybe you'll get a free trip to Rome; if you’re a poet, maybe you'll get a book deal out of it. There’s this incentive to continue creating free labor for these conglomerates. But if you're the conglomerate — and this is what I like to spend a lot of time on in Posting Nexus. It's not just why we do what we do, it’s how are we incentivized by companies that are then incentivized by their own ambitions. If you look at what they've started to realize, it’s that they've run out of space to grow, and by space I mean they've literally run out of people. They cannot reach any more people than they're going to reach. If the planet is the best example of finiteness, that's where they are, but they’re designed to incentivize growth, so what do they do? If you're on Instagram, all of a sudden you're posting photos, but have you thought about posting a video on this new form of entertainment called Reels? If you’re on YouTube, it's Shorts, and if you are an Uber customer because you love taking cars somewhere, have you considered getting your food via Uber? It's finding different ways to capture more slices of pie within someone's attention based on the necessities of their life. Getting into the mixture of business strategy and cognitive behavioral reasoning really starts to help us illustrate why we do what we do on the internet. What I want to do with Posting Nexus quite a bit, and maybe this is going to sound a little naive or a little childish, but I want to figure out a way for us to build a better internet that we understand. If we know that we do this for Facebook, that might not stop us from posting because we like to connect with our friends. Or on Twitter, I like to post to get likes because I am also addicted to the dopamine rush from when we do those things. But if we intrinsically understand that what we're doing is operating within this growth state and we want to get to a steady state where actually just the right level of attention and just the right level of input is going to provide a much happier and a much more mentally healthy lifestyle, how do we get there by working on what we can do and what we can control versus what we can't do? I want to dive into so much from there, just because you hit on something really interesting that got me thinking. There are basically 330 million Americans and there are 24 hours in a day, so that’s essentially 8 billion hours that you can have from America. That is the total addressable American time. I think what you’re getting at is that we are brushing up on that; there’s a point at which growth really can maximize. Let’s say you’ve got 2 billion hours for sleep in the aggregate, and another 4 billion hours for work. We are getting to the total addressable market of American time if we really think that growth is the only way to go about it. I would love for you to speak more to that element of it, because that was really interesting. I think about this joke from a few years ago that you'll remember. The prompt for the joke is that at one point, Netflix's former CEO, Reed Hastings, said “Our only competition is sleep,” and then a few years later, the Pokémon company came out with Pokémon Sleep. All of a sudden it was like, well, Pokémon figured out how to beat sleep. The eight hours a day you actually don't have my attention, finally they figured out a way to get into it. It almost feels matrix-y, right? It feels very dystopian. The thing about growth is that we don't talk a lot about cost. A great example of this comes from this great economist, Herman Daly, who died in 2022. He pointed out that GDP is a really weird factor of just looking at the economic value of a country. It’s the growth of product, and when we look at the growth of product, it's been 50 times what it was 50, 60 years ago — in large part because of private companies, because of Reagan economics, you can get into a whole economic debate about it. We don't talk about the cost, both of resources and of time and health that go into creating that product. And if we look at the cost, actually, is it a net benefit or is it a net consequence? Attention by nature plays on two core strings: It plays on how I view myself and my v

    36 min

  7. 06/30/2024

    Numlock Sunday: Glenn McDonald on the future of music in the algorithmic era

    By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Glenn McDonald, author of the new book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. I’ve followed Glenn’s work for years now, and this book is the result of decades of work in the field, and comes from a perspective not only of technology’s bleeding edge but also a sincere, personal love of music. We spoke about the mechanics of tracking genre data, how streaming has impacted listening trends, and how the model’s economics are holding up. The book can be found everywhere books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Glenn McDonald. Thank you so much for coming on. You are the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, which is a really compelling title all about the streaming revolution, but more importantly about this really fascinating moment in music data that for much of the past decade, you have been at the front seat for, or even in the driver's seat for. Your work goes back to a really interesting company called The Echo Nest. For new listeners and folks who maybe are unfamiliar with your story, can you just tell me a little bit of the history of this field and your place in it? The Echo Nest was a really fascinating company and I think more people ought to know about it. I had been doing software design for a long time and had worked on a bunch of different things that all had to do with making sense of data for people. None of them had been specific to music data, but I would always use my work tools on my record database or my other various music-related projects. Those were the things that I was really interested in. At some point I ended up tabulating the Village Voice critics music poll every year. This was what big data was for music in the era before streaming: It was like 800 music critics typing 10 album votes into blanks, with typos and everything. The companies I worked for kept getting acquired and my projects would get shut down or something, so every few years I’d need a new job. When this happened in about 2011, I just knew through contacts that there was this company in Somerville a couple of media lab people had started called The Echo Nest, which was trying to do something with music data because there suddenly was a lot more music data. The Echo Nest was trying to do recommendations and categorization stuff for streaming services. This was pre-Spotify launching in the U.S., so 7Digital and Rdio at the time were some of the existing players. And I had done enough music data things to convince them that I was a worthwhile person to add to this effort. I remember my first task at The Echo Nest. I showed up for my first day and they were like, “Oh, Glenn, you're here. Good. We're doing these radio stations for Spotify, this company we're trying to entice into using our services, and we're putting cartoon noises on the Franz Liszt classical station. Can you please figure out why we're doing that and make it stop?” So that was the beginning of the journey. We did not succeed initially at getting Spotify as a customer, because Spotify recognized, correctly, that to do a really good job we had to have listening data, and there was no way they were going to give us listening data when we were also powering their competitors, even though their competitors were small. I remember we tried really hard to convince them. We were like, “We'll keep your data on a server on the totally other side of the closet where we have our servers.” That obviously didn't fly. After a couple of years of doing a lot of other things along the way, it was a race to see whether Spotify would develop their own recommendations and not need us or whether they would just get enough money to buy us first. The money happened faster. We got acquired in 2014 and basically officially became the personalization team at Spotify. A bunch of the things we did had to do with understanding music and understanding taste so that you could do personalization, but it wasn't all directly involved with personalization. That's about when you got on my radar, because I was at the time doing pop culture stuff at 538. I think music was always a bit of an enigma to me, just because there was so much of it, and obviously all the challenges that you were facing at an industrial scale, I was facing on a journalistic scale. When I saw what you were doing — I don't think people really appreciate enough the moment when The Echo Nest got bought by Spotify. Very soon after, that's when you started seeing the level of personalization on the platform skyrocket. Do you want to speak a little bit about that? It was a combination of things, because some of that stuff was stuff that we brought, The Echo Nest, but that acquisition was also Spotify's moment where they bought into the idea that personalization was going to be a big part of this Spotify experience. Discover Weekly, for example, which came along shortly after that, was not an Echo Nest thing. That was done by people who had already been at Spotify, and some of them were annoyed that that feature was described as if it somehow came from the Echo Nest work. But basically everything that came about was because Spotify decided, “All right, personalization is going to be a thing.” At the same time, they acquired another company called Tunigo that was a playlist-making editorial company. And that was the beginning of, “All right, we're really going to have an editorial effort, too.” That was the beginning of both of those areas at once in Spotify's existence. A lot of the interesting stuff in your book comes out of the complications of using algorithms as opposed to taste, and just the serendipity of some of it. I want to play something, because I think it shows the moment that completely shattered something about how I thought about music and how I thought about what the tech was that y’all were building. I have a lot of Spotify playlists, just as anyone else does, and I was on a kick and I added a few songs in a row. The following week, all 10 recommended songs had this kick to start it. It’s the “Be My Baby” kick. There’s no way you could ask a DJ or even an expert, “Hey, can you find me 10 songs that all have this kick that I’m apparently into right now?” But lo and behold, I would go down this recommended songs list and it would all be that. And that showed me that, man, there's a level of depth here that not only could we never accomplish before, but that is going to change the way we really consume a lot of this stuff. I always found it really fascinating how you were really on the front of that for so much of the time at Spotify. One of the most interesting things to realize for me in this journey was that finding those patterns often comes about not the way you think. How did that happen? You imagine that the computer knows there are those drumbeats, it's found that you like them, and knows these songs contain them and lines them up. In fact, in this feature, that's not happening at all. It's just patterns of playlist making. That recommended feature at the bottom, it uses the playlist title when you don't have anything, but then as soon as you've got stuff in your playlist, it's really just doing a complicated search of songs and playlists from other people that overlap with what you put. Here's what else they did. I found over and over that it was more effective to basically mine listening for the implicit signal that people have created by listening in nonrandom ways than it was to try to find the thing you're actually looking for. If you try to find bands from Estonia, you get screwed up by metadata mistakes and missing data all the time. But if you can find a few bands that you know are from Estonia and use them to find an audience and use that audience to find what's different about those people's listening, then you find all the rest of the bands from Estonia without having to rely on metadata. Even the system doesn't know what it's doing. People have encoded that knowledge implicitly by listening. So I did find someone who’d been on a kick of listening to all the “Be My Baby” hooks in a row. It's fascinating stuff. I want to take it to the book now, because that speaks to a chapter specifically all about how you talk about genres and how genres don't really exist; they're just words that people use to talk about things. You describe them as “distributed communities of interest.” Do you want to speak a little bit about what genres are? We got into this genre thing at The Echo Nest because we promised somebody that we had genre radio. It was the era of Pandora. Algorithmic radio was mostly track and artists seated. That was how people mostly thought about it. We had some customer — I've long since forgotten who they were — who was like, that's too complicated. I just want like 16 buttons. It should just say rock and you hit it and it plays some rock music. And we were like, “Oh yeah, totally. We totally have that.” And then we went back to the office and we were like, we don't actually have that. But we better make it really quick. What we did have was this vast database of word frequencies. We knew what artists were written about in what vocabulary, so we were like, this will be fine. We'll just line up the artists for whom rock is a disproportionately occurring term and we'll sort them by popularity and hit play. We did that and then Rihanna came out and we were like, ah crap. People do say rock about Rihanna. I mean, she has a song called “Rockstar.” It's not crazy, but it was definitely not what these people wanted to have happen. So we had a few days, and I'm like, all right, there's cultural knowledge here. It's not complicated what rock is. We just have to mine this very basic cultural knowledge. We had a table full of interns from Tufts, so I'm like, “Here's what we're going to d

    37 min

  8. 11/12/2023

    Numlock Sunday: Zach Weinersmith talks A City on Mars

    By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Zach Weinersmith, who with his wife Kelly Weinersmith wrote the brand new book A City On Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?, which is out this week. I loved this book. I’ve been looking forward to it for years since they announced it, and I loved their previous book, Soonish. It’s an in-depth look at what exactly it’s going to take to get a permanent human settlement on another world. Zach and Kelly investigate not just the physics problem of getting people and material there, but also the long-term social, legal and biological issues inherent in this kind of venture. It’s an amazing read, and it’s available wherever books are sold. Beyond A City on Mars, Zach can be found at his iconic webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and you should check out his other books, which include Soonish and Bea Wolf, his children’s book adaptation of Beowulf. Remember, you can subscribe to the Numlock Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This interview has been condensed and edited. Zach, thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to talk about space nerd stuff. Boy, are you. You have written a book called A City on Mars. You ask all sorts of really exciting questions throughout the book. It is not just a book about the physics of getting to Mars, which I think a lot of people fixate on. It is a book about sociology. It is a book about how communities work. It is a book about all sorts of different exciting things. Your research process was incredibly thorough. I guess just before we dive in, what was it like to write this thing? What was it like to report it out and dive into the science? Oh man, it was kind of awful. And you know what it was? I think when you do pop science, there's this fantasy you have of, "What if I got a topic and I was out ahead of other people and it was really controversial and awesome." And you'd think that would be romantic and be like a montage. But we were so anxious, because we felt like we were really going against a lot of strongly held views by smart people. And when you do that, you feel like you really have to know what you're talking about so that you can stand your own when they are going to come at you. And so the result of that, and our just general dorkwad-ery, was that there was just a ton of primary and technical source reading, which is awesome. Actually, it's like what I do in my free time, as a boring person. But when at some point I was reading a hundred-something pages a day of hard stuff and like you roll out of bed and you're like, "What? I have to read 50 pages of seabed international law to understand that!" It was brutal. I mean absolutely wonderful kitchen table conversations during this time, but it was tough. Yeah, a lot of it is very compelling because again, you've had some of the finest minds that our society's produced consider what it would take to get us into space and stay there. And that I imagine has got to be a lot of fun. But then you also, you really consider all sides of this, man. You’ve got sociology, but you just mentioned you have the law. There's a lot of legal precedent when it comes to these interesting spaces that are not owned land but nevertheless are important. Do you want to walk people through the structure of the book and what angles you take and how you dive in? So we ended up artificially separating it into six sections, which hopefully I can actually remember, because we fussed a lot with the structure; this is a book that, as you say, goes from lots of angles. There were lots of options for how to structure it and we actually originally had it as we'll go through orders of magnitude from one person to 10 people, then 100 people. And it just turns out, I learned that sociologists don't believe there are actual meaningful, emergent obvious things different between a hundred and a thousand people where

    30 min
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    Ratings & Reviews

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    About

    Numlock News is a daily morning newsletter that pops out fascinating numbers buried in the news, highlighting awesome stories you're missing out on. Every Sunday, Walt Hickey interviews someone cool. Sometimes he records it in quality befitting a podcast. www.numlock.com

    Information

    • Creator
      Walter Hickey
    • Years Active
      2021 - 2025
    • Episodes
      28
    • Rating
      Clean
    • Copyright
      © Walt Hickey
    • Show Website
      The Numlock Podcast

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    Latin America and the Caribbean

    The United States and Canada