Boy Meets Girl Meets AI Therapist: Fred Lunzer on Sike, Fictional Realism, and the Future of Love

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Today, Mark Zuckerberg, not perhaps the most popular of men, laid off thousands of employees at his company, Meta, as it transforms, apparently, at least according to The Wall Street Journal, around something called AI, artificial intelligence. He's cutting 8,000 jobs or 10% of the entire staff of his company. One wonders what these people will do. Some of them may go to therapy, and some of them may indeed become friends of AI because Zuckerberg himself has suggested that in the future, we will have more AI friends than real people. I'm not sure whether real people has any meaning in our age of AI. These are issues which my guest today, has addressed in a novel that came out last year that is now in paperback, in The United States. It's called Sike, and its author is Fred Lunzer, who is talking to us from West Sussex in England. Fred, what are we gonna do when we're all laid off in this brave new world?

00:01:43 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. Good question. Find new jobs or invent new jobs, I imagine. It feels like there might be a huge amount of disruption coming. And one hopes that what happens with other technologies happens here as well, that everyone begins to build on top of the new technology and create new jobs. But it feels like a worrying time, especially for meta employees, I suppose.

00:02:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Very worrying. Although, I'm not sure how sorry we should feel for people at Meta. Some people who read your book, it got well reviewed, got a very nice review in the Washington Post, suggests that you should have been a little bit more explicit about the connection between Sike and the narrative in it and, Facebook matter. Is that a fair criticism of the book?

00:02:35 Fred Lunzer: I think it's a criticism, but it's a bit, I'm not sure that was the point of the book. And in fact, it was specifically not the point of the book. I think there's some very good meta bashing to be done and some very, good people who do it. But it wasn't me and it wasn't what the book was gonna do. The book was really an attempt to look beyond some of the immediate big important, dangers and issues with AI and AI therapy. And try and try and try and look and look sort of into the future. So the world here is sort of AI is ubiquitous already, smart glasses everywhere. Everyone's wearing smart glasses. And it's trying to picture what it would be like once we're past the initial, fears and concerns of AI and try and tackle what happens then. You know? What becomes dangerous then? What becomes worrying? What's good? What etc.. Beyond that as well, you know, I set out firmly to write a book that was non-polarized. And I think to write a book in which, you know, it slams either explicitly or implicitly, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. I can't defend that as a non-polarized opinion regardless of what I kinda think.

00:03:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I think that's a fair response. We live in odd times. You describe it in a piece you wrote for Literary Hub as an increasingly surreal world. I mean, that seems self-evident, although I'm not sure whether self-evident surrealism is surreal. But whatever it is, it's an odd world. You seem to be suggesting that to write about this world, we need to be realists or at least exist in the realist tradition, presumably for nonfiction, which is, of course, a realist genre, but even for fiction. Why is realism so important, Fred, in terms of making sense or at least representing the world we live in?

00:04:39 Fred Lunzer: Well, the first thing I'd say is that you could try and write sci-fi and dystopia and find that reality catch catches up before you finished is exactly what happened with my book, Sike. I wrote it speculatively. And as I finished it, ChatGPT came out. And, you know, what I had written as speculation suddenly became reality. So I still would sort of think as authors

00:05:02 Andrew Keen: Can you admit that, Fred? I wouldn't I wouldn't go public with that one. Shouldn't you tell everyone that you expected this?

00:05:10 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. I could say I mean, I was I was pretty certain that this was gonna happen. But it's interesting now seeing it happen, seeing what's come out in terms of things like AI therapy, and seeing how it's different to how I imagined it. But, of course, AI, you know, I didn't I didn't predict the advent of AI, and, it was on its way. But that thing of reality, you know, I think William Gibson, the sci-fi writer, he says something about, you know, reality. He has to write further and further away. If you write if you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow's a news story. You know, news headlines might be telling the exact same story. And so realism then, you know, it becomes really difficult to do. It especially when the world feels sci-fi and feels dystopic, it's hard to write realism. Most realist literature doesn't involve lots of technology. It doesn't you know, that isn't a kind of mainstay. We think of technology as vaguely grubby, so we push it into genre. You know, and there are different ways of treating technology. Usually, it's negative. Sometimes, it's positive. James Bond obviously loves technology. In films, there are films like Men in Black, which are fascinating because they treat technology as kind of great thing, and they like it, and then there's back to the future and things like that. But often, it's a kind of negative negatively treated. And any overtly negative or overtly positive treatment of technology feels a bit unrealistic to me. And, it feels like it can't be tackling the topic head on, I think. You've you've got to try and find some sort of realism in it, try and, be a bit ambivalent about it. And as a kind of modern example of this, you know, before smartphones came along, the idea of carrying, you know, the world's knowledge, give or take, in your pocket and everything else it does too, and a TV and a and a phone, etc., etc.. Just would have been so completely bamboozling. It cut it's hardly imaginable. And yet now, you know, I barely even know what smartphone model I have. I barely, I barely think about it. It's just sort of there. And that's the point I wanted to get to, this kind of realist approach where it's already here, and then you start to explore. You know, it's here. It's ubiquitous. People aren't paying attention to it. People can be a bit ambivalent about it. And then you begin to ask, okay. What does it mean for us? What's gonna happen? And I was sort of that's what I became interested in.

00:07:39 Andrew Keen: You mentioned William Gibson. Of course, one of his other famous quotes is about the future being here. It's just unequally distributed. Is that also true when it comes to realism that for your job as a novelist of the future or of the present or of the future present is to find the realism amidst all the surrealism.

00:08:07 Fred Lunzer: I think that's maybe that's the job I set myself with this book, yeah, to try and find the realism. And I don't think that's every novelist's job. I you know, I'm very big fan of sci-fi. You know, I'm not, it's not that I think that this is a this is more important. It just it just is the job I set myself. And I think that's because I grew up on quite realist literature, and it's just it's just my taste. But if I want to write realism today, and that's what the Lit Hub piece was about, if I want to write realism today, I found it challenge. I found it difficult because everything feels so unrealistic. It feels so surrealist. And that's, yeah, that's the that's the challenge I set myself aside.

00:08:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, it's true in politics as well. I don't wanna Sure. Come listen to another boring conversation about Trump, but, just as with the smartphone, we take Trump for granted these days. Although if we'd have imagined him twenty or thirty years ago, we would all say, well, that's that's just fictional. That couldn't happen. I take your point on the on the challenge of realism, and that's why the best books, I think, on the future, as you argue, are themselves realistic or at least written in the realist genre. One of my favorite is Klara and the Sun, 2021. It's called a science fiction novel, at least, by Gemini. I'm not sure what Gemini knows about anything, by Kazuo Ishiguro. But I thought that dealt with an AI world in which, unimaginable things were taken for granted, as you say.

00:09:48 Fred Lunzer: Mhmm. Yeah. I thought that was a great book too. And, he has a sort of talent of that doesn't he kind of can approach these topics and be realist about them. And I think he wrote about some of his early stuff, which is kind of dystopic that he felt he kind of had to, and he gave himself permission to move into these genre tropes even though he you know, genre not fiction is kind of, I don't know, considered lowbrow perhaps or maybe that was his point. And he gave himself permission to go into this kind of genre area in order to deliver, what was a kind of highbrow realist or maybe not realist, but a highbrow literature. I think that's that's interesting. That's a that's a sort of that's that's inspiring in some ways. And I think Klara and the Sun does this, you know, it still is pretty fantastical. Right? It's still about a robot, and everything's disastrous, and there are all these horrible genetic new kind of treatments going on for children. And it's sort of ghastly and a horrible world that he's created, but he kind of he kind of really sort of sits back and, doesn't become too overt. And he's quite blase, or maybe that's the wrong word, but seemingly blase about it.

00:11:08 Andrew Keen: The book, Sike is, of course, a pun, if you like. I'm not sure that's the right word on psychotherapy or psychology. We live in an age, Fred, you don't need me to tell you this, where on the one hand, we live in a very high-tech age. On the other hand, it's an age of anxiety where more and more of us seem to be going to therapists. And, indeed, they're the one group of people who won't perhaps ultimately be laid off, although many of us will also use low end therapy tools, AI tools to figure ourselves out. Is it coincidental that these two things are going on simultaneously, or are they just in parallel?

00:11:56 Fred Lunzer: Sorry. Which two things? So AI therapy and AI?

00:11:59 Andrew Keen: Well, no. High-tech and our therapeutic culture. Lots of people we've had a lot of people on the show arguing that therapeutic culture is a catastrophe. You Yeah. Addressed this in your book. And, of course, the issue of AI is ubiquitous. It's hard to have a conversation with you guys these days with anyone about anything without AI coming up. Are they connected?

00:12:24 Fred Lunzer: I think so. Yeah. I think I think there's a huge connection. And I put I would put it like this that we basically think that both of them are we kind of give them both too much power, and it's something to do with knowledge. We sort of hope and we fear that psychology, psychotherapy, and AI are going to know everything. And, you know, we hope AI is gonna answer all sorts of different problems or different questions. We also fear it's gonna know everything and take over the world. The same with therapy. Although I think we've moved on a bit, but, you know, the cliches, you're you're scared to go to therapy because of what you might find out about yourself, what sort of box you might open up. And at the same time, especially today, I think we peep we kind of go to therapy expecting all sorts of answers, expecting it to tell us everything about basically how to be happy and to solve all these all these different problems. And that, you know, that is also literature or and film have gone in this direction of saying, you know, the trauma plots of Parul Sehgal, has written loads about the trauma plot where you look back, you know, you have a character, they look back to the trauma that made them like they are. And if only they can solve that trauma, if only they can kind of unpick it, then everything will be okay in the world. That fictional world has been solved. That's the kind of character journey. I think both these hopes and fears are, overegged. I don't I don't believe it, either of them. I don't think AI can do everything, and I don't think AI will destroy everything either. And similarly with therapy, I don't think it can do everything, and I don't think most therapists think it can do everything. And similarly, I don't, you know, I don't find it scary or kind of problematic either.

00:14:17 Andrew Keen: But why do we live, Fred, in an age of therapy? Why are more and more people, particularly the younger generation, so reliant on therapy?

00:14:30 Fred Lunzer: I think you could point to some sort of kind of traditional and nontraditional. So I can think of in geopolitics, I think they talk about traditional and nontraditional security threats, traditional being war, nontraditional being, terrorism, disease, you know, pandemics, things like that. And I wonder if this has an effect on us as well. You know, traditional threat to me might be that I get conscripted, have to go to war, go into the trenches, and get killed. A non-traditional threat. Well, where is it? What is that threat? Is it is it to do with my job? Is it something else? I think anxiety is a kind of mainstay of twenty-first-century culture. You could define anxiety as the fear of something that can't materialize or possibly just won't materialize. So the fear of something that isn't there, and I have no idea, but I wonder, is there something in the fact that we face no kind of present physical threats to our lives? That means we have to we have to invent them a bit more, and we have to look somewhere else for them. I think that's one theory. Anxiety is also is also just very addictive, isn't it? It's kind of fascinating. It's interesting. It's it's extraordinary thinking of the monster inside yourself. Psychology is kind of a sacred area. Your mental health is sacred, and it's very hard to, it's very hard to kind of attack it. So it's so it's a form of defense. There's a bit in Sike where, it's a riff on the scene in Good Will Hunting, if you've seen that movie. In Good Will Hunting, there's this great bar scene where Will, played by Matt Damon, is having a kind of brain off with some other Harvard snob who's who's been rude to Ben Affleck and has made him look like a fool. And, in comes Matt Damon, who turns out to be a kind of absolute wunderkind genius. And he metaphorically pulls the pants down of this Harvard snob and makes him look like an idiot. And he's way cleverer than him. And then at the very end of that scene so what he's showing there is this kind of beautiful new strength that he has of power, and that's, kind of interesting male strength. And at the very end of the scene, he says, but, hey. You know, if we've got a problem, we can step outside and the kind of reading between the lines, we can step outside, and I'll I'll beat you up type of thing. And so in this scene, you kind of have the perfect kind of our hero male, he's kind of he's very strong, and he's got brawn. He's also extremely clever. He's got brain. But Will's big fault, you know, in this is that he doesn't have vulnerability or he doesn't understand his mental health. He hasn't tackled his youth. And we go through the film with him, and he meets the amazing psychotherapist who helps him through this. And by the end of the film, he's perfect because he's got vulnerability as well. I think that's fascinating. That's just a new this kind of mental awareness, self-awareness. That's a new area for, I think, you know, it's kind of a bit of a macho thing, isn't it? A new area for men to be strong around to for people to feel strength in it. Once you can control your own inner demons, then really, you know, you're unstoppable. And so there's a scene in Sike where this kind of this is ripped on a bit. So I think it's a new it's it's as if anxiety or mental health or therapy, it's a new area for us to be strong. And indeed, we can weaponize it. We can weaponize our trauma against other people. We can weaponize, our self-awareness to our to our own benefit, not always in a negative way, of course, but, yeah, that's that's possibly one reason.

00:18:15 Andrew Keen: And, of course, the word weaponized seems to be very much, a popular word for one reason or other of our age. The title of your, of the a review of your book last year in the Washington Post has said it came out last year. It's out, this week in paperback. What if AI therapists could make us our best selves? Two questions, Fred. Is the self can it survive the age of AI, and what exactly is a best self? I know you didn't write this You didn't write the review, let alone the headline, but is there a moral quality to the book? Are you trying to suggest that we can be our best selves? It sounds a very American notion. You're, an English writer who grew up in Japan even if your book got picked up in The US.

00:19:09 Fred Lunzer: No. I'm no. I'm definitely not trying to suggest as a best self. Although in the book, there is. And as everyone wears everyone who uses Sike wears something called the Sike smile, you know, the smile suggesting that they're at their best self. I'm not suggesting there is one. And in reality, and, I'm not really even suggesting that So in the book, I'm suggesting that Sike for a while can get people to what everyone else sees to be their best self. And there's this there's a sense that, you know, if you can really unpick your psychology, but not just unpick it, track it, you know, see what you're doing every single day, watch how much you've eaten, how your blood sugar levels are dipping, how close you are to birdsong, how many people you hug in your day, how many people you kiss, etc., etc., and on. There's this sense that, you know, if you if you could just get all the data, you might then be able to work out who your best self is or you might then be able to get the answers to how to be happy. And I think that goes back to our kind of hopes and expectations of AI. I don't think that there's a there's a kind of I think that sort of turns out to be wrong in the book, eventually. And that's not it's not necessarily a spoiler or anything. I think that it's kind of unraveled in various different ways. To your first question about can we, can ourself survive this time? I mean, yeah, I think so. I'm I'm not I wouldn't say I'm kind of wholeheartedly optimistic about AI, but I'm not necessarily concerned about the human element remaining or whatever humanness is remaining beyond it and through it.

00:20:56 Andrew Keen: What about the future of invention? The main character in your book, Sike, in the novel, is a North London Jew who makes his living writing lyrics for rappers, not a very Jewish occupation or maybe a very Jewish occupation. When it comes to the future of the self, Can we or will we continue to invent and reinvent ourselves and imagine others? Or, is AI gonna lock us more and more in ourselves or free us?

00:21:37 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. I don't know. It feels it feels like I mean, a lot is spoken. It's almost a cliche to talk about AI and creativity. And

00:21:53 Andrew Keen: It is. It's not almost, Fred. It is.

00:21:56 Fred Lunzer: Great cliche. I think what's changed in the last few years of AI is our understanding of what it means to be creative. And creative maybe used to be able to say it meant be kind of original and effective or creative something was original and effective. And, are you know, there would a whole their whole industry is built around the idea of creativity and, you know, that in advertising, there's a job title creative. You know, someone someone whose job was to be creative. And I think AI has sort of undermined what we thought was creative and creativity. You know? We and, crucially, we thought that the creative jobs were safe. We thought that, you know, there was something inherently human in what we thought creativity was. And we said we sort of said, you know, bad luck if you're a shelf stacker at Sainsbury's or at your local supermarket. Bad luck if you're a shelf stacker because robots are here tomorrow. But it's okay if you're creative, if you're, you know, if you're if you're an artist, if you're an author, if you do anything creative in your job, great, because AI can't do creativity. Well, that's completely wrong. You know, it's exactly the opposite way around. The creative roles were kind of the first to be really severely challenged. And lo and behold, you know, robots still aren't good enough to do shelf stacking quite yet, or at least at least not in a kind of public supermarket. So I think that we've got to really sort of reimagine what we think is, what we think is the innately human part. And I would summarize, generally, my thought on this, the sort of product versus process. We used to judge every sorry. We still we judge things based on the product. So if you if you imagine at school, you have to write loads of essays. The essays are what got marked. But to be honest, at the end of school, you know, your teachers didn't care if you came out. They didn't want you to come out with a portfolio of essays. They really didn't care about your essays. They just used the essay as a way to make sure you were doing the process, as a way of judging the process. And I think that gradually that's that's you know, AI is getting better and better at building the product, and we have to somehow we have to somehow shift the emphasis from product onto process. And I think if we do that, then we can get to the point of, worrying a bit less about, you know, are we, you know, are we is our is our human value being presented at the end? And think more of it as a kind of doing, that as the, like, real human thing. But that's a that's a massive shift. I'm I'm not sure how on earth you get to that. It would be like mixing dough and water, kneading it, leaving it to rise, putting it in the oven, and taking out of the loaf of bread and just throwing it away. You know, just chucking it away. You get rid of the product. And you say that just that making part was the important part, but that's not, you know, that you'd be labeled a sociopath if you did that. That's not how it works. Either way, I think there's something in that, Yeah. That's sort of quite rambling, answer to your question. I'm not sure I really, tackled it head on.

00:25:24 Andrew Keen: You used the phrase innately human. I have to admit, whenever the h word comes up, human, I'm a little skeptical. Why? I mean, I'm not sure it human needs anything innate about it. Either you're human or you're not. But are these terms whether we say innately human or human, are they useful in the AI age, or are they just they could be spewed by AI. In fact, they usually are spewed by AI, ironically. You know?

00:25:57 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. I know what you mean. And it seems I mean, that's sort of that's sort of close to what I was thinking about creativity. You know, that creativity was sort of irrelevant. People thought there was something special about it. It's it's not really. And AI can AI can do a whole load of stuff. And it's not human, but it can still do a lot of things that we used to say were human or that we still think are human. I think human, you know, humanness has a value in the AI world. And I think especially in the arts, I think, AI can either now or soon do everything that an artist can do. It can reproduce all these paintings. It can write whole books. You know, it can it can do all this stuff. The only thing that keeps it, keeps art having any value is the fact that a human did it. And I think that's fair. I think I think that's what we've always thought of art. We've always looked for the human at the other end of it. Even if you don't know who the painter is or don't care, there's still a sense that a human did it, and I think there's value in that. I think it's hard to I think that's the kind of saving grace of art in the world of AI, and something that AI can't ever do just simply because it's not human. And that's a sliding scale because humans can use AI to create art. And, of course, then, there'll be loads of, art that includes AI that we will value because we'll perceive the human role to have been big enough.

00:27:30 Andrew Keen: Well, that assumes, though, Fred, that we are able to, and I use this word carefully, pour our humanness into our art. I mean, you look at a lot of art made by humans. It doesn't appear any different from art created by an AI. We did a show a couple of days ago on tech, our weekly show, our roundup of technology. That was the week show with Keith Teare, who's based in Palo Alto. He imagines a future where everyone will be artists, but everyone will be producing bad art that can't be sold. Your argument is that the idea of good or bad art in the AI future is the wrong way of thinking about it, that all human art or all art created by humans is interesting. Is that fair?

00:28:25 Fred Lunzer: No. Not no. I don't no. I don't think that. I mean, I think I think I'm just saying that if you compare a, maybe that it's a response to people saying, well, what's gonna happen to artists once AI can do everything that they can do? That doesn't scare me at all because I still think that the human producer of the art is the important part of the art. But, no, I'm not I'm not sure that, suddenly when everyone becomes an artist, that means you like every single person's art. I still think that's huge number of other reasons. And provenance, you know, provenance is kind of what we're talking about. The cliches, you go to an art gallery and you see a late Picasso and you say, well, you know, my six-year-old could have done that. Maybe your six-year-old could have could have could have done that. But the truth is no one would care. You know? No. You even you wouldn't care. Even the parent has a tough time caring about their six-year-old's art. And the reason for that is the provenance and everything that Picasso did, every everything about who he was and what he felt, good or bad, and, you know, all of his progress through life as an artist is what makes you care about the piece he provides there at the end. I think in that analogy, the six-year-old is AI, and I just I think that people I think people have a will have a tough time caring about stuff produced by AI.

00:29:46 Andrew Keen: But what about this argument? Maybe I didn't express myself clearly. What about this idea that in the future, we'll all be free because the machines will do all the, literally and metaphorically, the heavy lifting, that we'll all be free to be artists both in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening? Is that is that a utopia or a dystopia?

00:30:10 Fred Lunzer: I mean, it sounds like a utopia, but the important thing that will be the process of making art. If everyone's making art, definitely no one, you know, no one's no one's got the capacity to care about everyone else's art. But if everyone's making art, then what becomes important is the process. And I think if you speak to, you know, ceramicists or, various types of painters, the process is the really important stuff, and then the piece is created. And, you know, that process of doing the art has value regardless of whether anyone cares about what comes out the other side. I think if everyone's an artist, it's very unlikely that everyone will care about what comes out the other side. But I can I can picture people? And also, we're sort of there already, aren't we? You know, everyone is an artist posting photos on social media. When blogs became a big thing, you know, suddenly everyone was a writer. It doesn't matter.

00:31:04 Andrew Keen: Runs a podcast, of course, including myself.

00:31:07 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. Yeah.

00:31:11 Andrew Keen: What about the economic value? Does that matter at all? I mean, you mentioned Picasso. There was a time when Picasso struggled to sell his art. Now, of course, it's extremely expensive. It's the conventional narrative is that you have geniuses, Van Gogh or Picasso. They struggle, and then they die, and their art becomes enormously value valuable. Is there any significance in the economic value of art, or is that something that perhaps we're gonna do away with and we should be happy about that?

00:31:48 Fred Lunzer: It's a tricky one. I mean, especially as a writer, you know, the book world is a is a tough place to make any money from, and it's a tough place to have a sustainable career in. I don't know the answer to that, and that I don't know what the economic value of art should be. You know? I also feel like a lot of people would say, you know, art, there should be no kind of monetary value placed on it. I can't really understand that. Or even if I can even if I can understand why capitalism is maybe not the healthiest, approach to structuring society, let alone, let alone, a kind of art market. But I, yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I think that the kind of that there's obviously technology is massively changing how we how we consume art. The fact that you can pay 10, £10 or $10, whatever, a month and get every single song or a huge number of songs in your pocket via whatever platform, that feels extraordinary. That does feel like there's a there's a misalignment in value, and especially when all the money is going to the big the big singers and not to not to the person that you listen to four hours a day. They're they're not getting they're not getting your the kind of lion's share of your £10 a month. All of that is, you know, there the I don't know I don't know well enough to have a great comment on it beyond just finding it finding it extraordinary and interesting, as you say.

00:33:21 Andrew Keen: What about your own personal experience? You've published this book. Everyone claims to have a novel in them, but you actually got Sike published. You're you're not a full time writer. Your day job is, in as it happens, AI research, at Sony. Do you think that if you'd have had more time, if someone had paid you more for this book, it would have been a better book? I mean, what's your experience in the trenches, and they literally are the trenches, First World War like trenches, of trying to write creatively, and make money at the same time.

00:34:09 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. It's a tricky one. I mean, I like, you know, Sike was my debut novel, meaning it was the first to get published by a publisher. It was not the first book I tried to publish. And, like, you know, what seems to be the vast majority of debuts, I had other failed attempts, a whole load of them. And after my undergrad, I tried to write a travel narrative about the Japanese restaurant industry. In 2020, I wrote a early twenty, I finished writing a book about a global pandemic, which, you know, then my lunch was eaten by COVID. We still tried to get it published, in a kind of very tone deaf way, and publishers just knew that everyone had definitely had enough of pandemics. I would also say so there are reasons kind of reasons like the fact that COVID came along, but that didn't get published. But these first two books also just probably weren't very good. It's very difficult to write novels. And I think I need like, takes a long time to practice and learn the craft. And, you know, that's been a that's that's kind of many years of trial and error and of drawing blood from a stone to get to get to a place where Sike could get published, I think. That is very difficult, and it's not, you know, writing a novel. I can't remember what someone like Norman Mailer said. It's like people everyone says, oh, I want to write a book. And he said, yeah. But it's like it's like learning to play the piano well. It's just a it's just a long process. It takes ages. Then getting paid for it. Well, you know, my experience was pretty good because I got a an advance. I think the tricky thing becomes the fact that, you know, the vast majority of books don't sell anything, and you only need to go to a local bookshop. Walk in, look how many people are in there, and look how many books there are. And there are just a lot of books out there, and you can't expect, everyone to be to be reading every book. So it's a tricky one. There's there's they're kind of economic realities in the publishing world that make it tough.

00:36:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I keep on using this word tricky, Fred. I think that's a euphemism. So let's end up with the book. As I said, the book came out last year. Got a very nice review in the Washington Post. It's very hard to write speculative fiction, even if it's realist fiction these days, especially as you say, as a first time writer, even if it wasn't your first book. When people walk into a bookstore and they might see your book, Sike, on the shelf or on the table, why would they wanna read it? What's what's the reason why this book is something they should pick up and pay for and then sit down and spend several hours reading?

00:37:01 Fred Lunzer: Yeah. That's a tricky That's a tricky question.

00:37:05 Andrew Keen: That's a tricky question, Fred.

00:37:08 Fred Lunzer: I think it's a no I mean, it's it's I'll tell you why it's different. It's different because it's non you know, it's not a dystopia, but it's about AI. And I think that's, for better or worse, that's that's that's what came out. You know, it's it's non-dystopic, so it's anti-polarization. So, you know, it's not a spoiler to say that kind of at the at the beginning well, maybe as a spoiler, I shouldn't say. But there's a world where there's an AI therapist, and some people love it and some people hate it. But the book is trying to move beyond there, and it's saying, well, what why don't we move what if you if you want to look beyond the initial hype of something like AI and think more broadly and also in a in a kind of complex way. You know, there are no easy answers, about what AI is gonna do and what AI therapy in particular could mean for everyone. And this is a good book. You know, it's really, it's really trying to engage with that and move beyond the hype. I think it's also definitely for, anyone, not solely for them, but anyone who likes rap because as you said, you know, the protagonist is a rap ghostwriter. It's, it's a love story. It's, a kind of realist love story. It's also vaguely ambivalent about technology, and I think that, I think that's to its credit that it's not it's not really it doesn't become obsessed with the AI, that it's talking about. And as I mentioned earlier, it's deliberately trying to look beyond that and think more about therapy. Yeah. And then and then, of course, anyone interested in therapy today, I think this is this is a book for them.

00:38:46 Andrew Keen: As you said, it's a love story. So there will be love in the future, Fred. And it won't just be love for machines. It'd be love for ourselves, these humans as we call ourselves.

00:38:58 Fred Lunzer: I would I would bank on it. Yeah.

00:39:01 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The book is out now in paperback. It came out last year, in hard copy. Sike by Fred Lunzer. First book, interesting premise on AI, on therapy, on love, on rap, North London, Japan, all sorts of interesting things. Congratulations, Fred, on making it, not onto this show, but, into the publishing world. It's a very hard thing to do, and you've done it. So best of luck with the future.

00:39:31 Fred Lunzer: Thank you so much, Andrew. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.