Transcript
Speaker: You know who else is ready, Phil?
Speaker: Who?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody!
Speaker: Oh, God!
Speaker: Us!
Speaker: Us!
Speaker: We're ready!
Speaker: It was?
Speaker: It's us?
Speaker: It's us!
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixel It!
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me, as always, is Phil.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: How you doing today, Phil?
Speaker: Man, I'm having a good day.
Speaker: How about you?
Speaker: Having a great day.
Speaker: We just finished talking to FX9 himself, Seth Godin.
Speaker: And I got to tell you, that was probably one of the most unexpectedly uplifting phone calls we've ever had.
Speaker: We've only had two of them with authors and they've both been wonderful.
Speaker: But Seth is such a sweetheart.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Along with a really kick ass, you know, history lesson on the 80s and the, you know, it turns out he is literally the first person to adapt a video game to a book.
Speaker: He himself wrote the first video game adaptation.
Speaker: That's crazy.
Speaker: That's literally what we're basing this entire podcast around where we had the originator on the show.
Speaker: So it's all downhill from here, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker: It's all downhill from here.
Speaker: Kiss your friends and family goodbye.
Speaker: This is it.
Speaker: So we we spoke to Seth a little bit about the FX9 and Nintendo Worlds of Power, how that got started.
Speaker: He gave us literally the beat for beat of how that happened between himself, Nintendo, the third party companies, Scholastic and all that stuff.
Speaker: It was a great conversation.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anything you want to add before before we throw it over to to our past selves?
Speaker: No, let's let's I want I want to know what our past selves are up to.
Speaker: Let's let's hit them.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Let's let's go take a listen.
Speaker: Thank you so much for taking us up on this, by the way.
Speaker: What a blast.
Speaker: Yeah, we're excited.
Speaker: We I told Kevin, I was like, this might be a long shot.
Speaker: But I went ahead and reached out to Seth Godin.
Speaker: And I think it was I think, Kevin, I think you actually were like, he's already replied and said yes.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: I got the push notification on my phone and it was like a few minutes later said, yes, sure.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, okay, why not?
Speaker: I'm actually saying no to almost all podcasts because I did a whole bunch last year, but I mean, how could I resist?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That's so great to hear.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker: Well, do we want to just jump right into it?
Speaker: Let's jump right into it.
Speaker: Tell me what you want to know.
Speaker: I will reveal all.
Speaker: I mean, the obvious first start is what's how did this begin?
Speaker: How did you start with worlds of power with this this project?
Speaker: So I used to be a book packager for a living, and it's a really cool profession that almost no one knows about.
Speaker: It has nothing to do with making book covers.
Speaker: It has to do with being a movie producer, but for books.
Speaker: So I did 120 books, a book a month for 10 years.
Speaker: I did books on the first book about emojis and smileys.
Speaker: I did the first book on digital cash.
Speaker: I did almanacs.
Speaker: I did stain removal books.
Speaker: I spent seven years getting Stanley Kaplan, the person to let me do the Stanley Kaplan test prep books.
Speaker: It was just what can we bring to the world that the world needs?
Speaker: And so I was always...
Speaker: waking up in the morning, having a book problem, which is I needed enough to keep proposing so that I could keep my team of eight people busy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And along the way, I had also been spending time in the computer game business in 1983.
Speaker: I was brand manager for a line of computer games at Spinnaker.
Speaker: I worked with Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton.
Speaker: I was 23 years old.
Speaker: It was amazing.
Speaker: That's wild.
Speaker: That sounds amazing.
Speaker: I could talk about that all day.
Speaker: Then I went to Prodigy as their first outside provider, and I built the most successful online game of all time at the time called Guts.
Speaker: But when video games showed up, I had a real problem.
Speaker: And the problem was they make me really dizzy.
Speaker: It's part of my ADD, but I can't easily recover from playing a typical video game.
Speaker: Well, along the way, I discovered that the first project that I worked on was kids were buying these magazines filled with step-by-step cheats about how to win at video games.
Speaker: They were buying millions of them.
Speaker: And it occurred to me that kids who don't want to read, don't want to read a magazine either.
Speaker: So why not make a videotape showing them how to win at video games?
Speaker: So what I did was I hired my 12 year old cousin and hooked up a super VHS recorder to his, the output of his Nintendo and had him win all these games.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: And then I hired a professional voiceover actor named, I named Skip Rogers, not his real name, world video game champion.
Speaker: And he would read the script while the video was playing of how he was winning each level.
Speaker: Oh my God, that explains so much.
Speaker: We were literally speculating as we- I didn't even get into the books yet.
Speaker: So-
Speaker: I had done a video with Isaac Asimov of a murder mystery game called Robots that Siskel and Ebert gave two thumbs up, which was pretty exciting.
Speaker: And so I had a relationship with Kodak and I sold Kodak at the time sold a lot of videotapes and sold Kodak these two videos of how to win at video games.
Speaker: And it was still to this day, one of my five best ideas.
Speaker: And unfortunately, there was a lot of politics at Kodak and a guy who didn't like me and he intentionally spiked the project.
Speaker: And at the same time, another company two months later came out with the same thing and sold millions and millions of them.
Speaker: And I was a really struggling book packager at the time, and it would have made a big difference in
Speaker: If it worked.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I'm reeling from this and I think, well, but clearly I'm onto something.
Speaker: So I went back to my cousin's house and at the time he lived, I didn't live here, but he lived three blocks from where I am right now.
Speaker: And I went to his house and I realized that Eric had never read a book for fun in his whole life.
Speaker: He was now 13 years old and he and his friends, all of whom came from privileged, literate households, were spending their whole day playing video games.
Speaker: And I realized that the same way I had seen people like Alan Dean Foster who novelized
Speaker: movies, it's possible to novelize a game.
Speaker: And when I was back in the days of doing my computer games, I had actually done the first novelization of a computer game, a game called Shadowkeep, which we worked with Alan Dean Foster on.
Speaker: So I knew it could be done.
Speaker: And so the plan was let Eric play the games because I didn't want to get dizzy.
Speaker: I would come up with a three page summary of ostensibly what was happening.
Speaker: I would turn it into a 15 page.
Speaker: We called it a Bible that had who the characters were, what their personalities were, et cetera.
Speaker: And then I would hire movie novelizers who knew, or people who wrote Sweet Valley High and Babysitter's Club books, who knew how to turn a 15-page Bible into a 125-page book.
Speaker: But before I did that, I had to get the rights from these companies.
Speaker: And it was different in the videotape thing, because I could argue fair use in the videotape thing, because I wasn't actually impacting their intellectual property rights.
Speaker: But here, I had to go and get the exclusive rights.
Speaker: And it was really very straightforward.
Speaker: Mr. A, who was a key player at Nintendo, didn't want to do business with me, but all the other ones did.
Speaker: Once I had this guy on my side who was their distributor, I could call up, I can't remember the guy's name, Konami, but he was like the first guy who said yes.
Speaker: And I was like, you're going to get money and I'm going to sell a lot of games.
Speaker: If someone buys the book, they're going to make, and that's what you do for a living.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I went down the street to Scholastic and I said, here's the deal.
Speaker: Now, at the time, I know I'm talking too much, but I had never been able to.
Speaker: This is literally why we have you on here.
Speaker: At the time, Scholastic hadn't published Harry Potter yet.
Speaker: It was a couple of years before Harry Potter.
Speaker: And I went to the woman, Jean Fywell, who actually brought Harry to the US.
Speaker: And I said, Jean, here's what I want to do.
Speaker: I know how to do this part, this part, this part.
Speaker: I have all the rights.
Speaker: This is really straightforward.
Speaker: And we're going to spread a lot of literacy.
Speaker: And Jean was fantastic.
Speaker: She said yes immediately.
Speaker: And then I just had to do all the pieces.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: My editor, on the other hand, Greg, nice guy, had all these rules that Scholastic was enforcing.
Speaker: Rules like characters aren't allowed to die because we're Scholastic.
Speaker: There's no devils, vampires, or cult allowed.
Speaker: Now, remember, three years later, Harry Potter showed up.
Speaker: They're like, joke every single one of these rules.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right around these rules.
Speaker: And if you read Castlevania again now, you will see how like the gloom and doom of the game isn't quite in the book.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So anyway, I found like three or four people who could write these books.
Speaker: It took less than five days for one of them to write a book because once they're good at it.
Speaker: You're just cranking out.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think I paid $3,000, $4,000 for a straight buyout.
Speaker: And they're sort of making $1,000 a day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we sold more than a million books.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And so now I will tell you the question you should ask me next, and then I'll stop talking while you can do that.
Speaker: Please, by all means.
Speaker: We should say, why are the books written by FX9?
Speaker: We did, you know, it's because on the cover, it says FX9.
Speaker: And then when you open it up, it's FX9 Seth Godin production.
Speaker: And then you actually do get the author's name.
Speaker: So I think everyone assumes that FX9 wrote these.
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: So the way bookstores are organized in the fiction section is not so much by genre and subgenre.
Speaker: They're organized by author.
Speaker: And if you want to go look for the Nintendo books,
Speaker: You might look on N I N. So I needed a name that started with N I N and that's work.
Speaker: That is amazing.
Speaker: That's that was literally, that's one of the questions.
Speaker: Now, where does the FX just kind of pop in your head?
Speaker: Cause what you're doing is the kind of futuristic sort of thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Also, I didn't want it to be gender specific.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: I mean, that's pretty forward thinking of you considering that in those days, the stereotype that video games for boys was very prevalent, much more than nowadays.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we were pushing a lot of envelopes about if you look in the books, I'm still proud of how every we did not fall into any of the misogynistic traps that are so easy to do.
Speaker: I'm like,
Speaker: I don't do this just for the money.
Speaker: If I want to make money, I would have done something else for a living.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And I like, I don't know that they're going to sell a million copies.
Speaker: And I only made 10 cents a copy.
Speaker: So it's not like this was winning the lottery, but it was a lot of work.
Speaker: And one of the authors I hired, some of the people who do this for a living are not the sort of people you would imagine coming over to your house for a barbecue.
Speaker: And writers go on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There was one person who just had an enormous amount of trouble letting go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there was no email or anything.
Speaker: I mean, I had email, but I didn't have file transfer or anything.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So I ended up driving to this person's house and I had to like practically break into the house to take the print out from their hands.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Other people, like Peter, who did three of them, was amazing.
Speaker: He beat every deadline.
Speaker: Everything was formatted.
Speaker: It was clean copy.
Speaker: It was delightful.
Speaker: And then we also, I typeset the books myself on my Mac.
Speaker: And those were the first, one of the early examples of desktop publishing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: getting the end spaces right on the ellipse, stuff like that.
Speaker: So you basically, you basically did, you did all of this, all the work and just took it to Scholastic and said, here you go.
Speaker: Here's, here is a finished product.
Speaker: Go, we'll make a bunch of money with this.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Now we do.
Speaker: It does say in a couple of books that it's it's how did they put it?
Speaker: That it's not an official adaptation or it's not officially recognized by.
Speaker: Yeah, there's some very strong, strong legalese in the front saying, but Nintendo had nothing to do with this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because remember, so the deal, I don't know if you know how much you know about how the industry was working in those days.
Speaker: So if you were the guys who made the Commodore 64 and Spinnaker was making a game and selling millions and millions of copies, Commodore got nothing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so the lesson that they learned in Japan when they decided to make the Nintendo cartridges was come up with a patent so that nobody can make a game without your permission.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And they used really strict monopoly power to control how many units they would ship of your thing.
Speaker: They could control how many Konami would make.
Speaker: And so all of the people I was dealing with were really afraid of offending Nintendo because Nintendo could shut them down in a minute.
Speaker: So I had to say, Mr. A doesn't want you to say no.
Speaker: He just doesn't want to have Nintendo do it, but nothing bad will happen to you.
Speaker: You can call his office and they will confirm this.
Speaker: And they all checked before they did that.
Speaker: But because I wasn't a party to any of the transactions, I had to say, Nintendo, the corporation is hands off about this.
Speaker: Did that leave you feeling a little shaky?
Speaker: Like you were worried that maybe they changed their mind and like they did with TenGen, for example, and some other gaming companies in those days?
Speaker: Well, having just had the videotape thing completely blow up on me, the magic of being a book packager in those days was I didn't have any assets.
Speaker: So what are they going to take?
Speaker: If it blew up, that would be a shame.
Speaker: But the advance from Scholastic was big enough that we were even before we started.
Speaker: So there were lots of, there still are lots of very risk averse people in book publishing.
Speaker: But I took the position that ideas that spread win.
Speaker: If you're doing good work that helps people, you will probably be fine.
Speaker: And if someone has a real problem, we'll just move on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Mr. A, that's Minoru Arakawa that you're referring to, right?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The president's then president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa.
Speaker: He was incredibly powerful in order to get to him.
Speaker: I did a partnership with the distributor, the sales rep, sorry, the sales rep for almost all the Nintendo games in America from Nintendo and the third parties.
Speaker: So what he used to do
Speaker: is he would go to Toys R Us' headquarters in New Jersey for three days.
Speaker: That's how long the sales call lasted.
Speaker: And for three days, he would tell Toys R Us how many they were going to get of every item.
Speaker: It wasn't a sales call.
Speaker: It was sort of a, I'm going to give you your allocation today.
Speaker: And he made a commission on every single one.
Speaker: His house, I went to his house in Long Island.
Speaker: It had...
Speaker: 11 bedrooms and it was his home office.
Speaker: So like before anyone had a home office, so like 14 people came to work there.
Speaker: They were, I don't think he had a roles, but it was something that looked like a roles parking front.
Speaker: Really nice guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he was my, my Nintendo whisperer.
Speaker: And he owned a tiny piece of all the things that we did.
Speaker: But mostly we just got along and he understood that if Nintendo was going to become a permanent cultural force, it had to get outside of that aisle at Toys R Us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It actually worked.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that level of monopolization, the control, all of that is still, I mean, in play with Nintendo to this day.
Speaker: So, yeah, makes sense.
Speaker: Now, how did you choose the books you went with?
Speaker: Because when you look at the dates of when the books came out versus when the games came out, sometimes I think Mega Man 3 had come out by the time Mega Man 2 as a book came out, that sort of thing.
Speaker: How did you make those decisions?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the first lens is three circles.
Speaker: Can it be turned into a story?
Speaker: Is it controlled by Nintendo?
Speaker: And can we get the rights from the person who does control?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So if it's all three of those things, it gets on the short list.
Speaker: And then it takes a year after you start for a book to come out.
Speaker: So that's some of your timing issue.
Speaker: But the other thing is, if I'm talking to Heitkamp at Konami and he's nervous about his new title, give me an old title.
Speaker: It's backlist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so it's much easier to do those sorts of transactions.
Speaker: And given how well movie novelizations have done, it wasn't that hard to persuade.
Speaker: They could see that movie novelizations were a thing.
Speaker: I had already shown that a computer game could be novelized.
Speaker: I was giving them a chance to read the book to make sure they weren't embarrassed.
Speaker: I got to tell you, none of them read the books, or if they did, they never once gave me a comment.
Speaker: It's not what was on their agenda.
Speaker: Maybe they were just kind of like if he if he didn't, he wouldn't send us a piece of garbage or something like that.
Speaker: So that's like, I'm sure it's fine.
Speaker: It's actually that's actually a funny point, because we we we just talked to William C. Deetz a few days ago, and he wrote the second novelization for the Halo series.
Speaker: And he was talking about how Bungie was very, very particular and hands on with everything that he was allowed to put in the book.
Speaker: I just think it's a funny parallel because you were so ahead of the curve.
Speaker: This was so early days in the concept of adapting games to books that they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's fine.
Speaker: I mean, I think it's part of the personality.
Speaker: So yeah, true.
Speaker: Having, you know, I helped build computer games at the beginning.
Speaker: And if you had wanted to novelize something that I had helped build, I was going to be all over it because I was emotionally invested.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But if you're in, you know, some suburb of Chicago and Konami is sitting there turning this crank, that's making money.
Speaker: You're not in it because you deeply believe in Mega Man or whatever.
Speaker: You're in it because there's this spectacular market opportunity where there was a shortage for years.
Speaker: And if you could just get through all the hoops, the cash register was going to, you know, a lot of these people came from the pinball machine industry or the, there was a company, do you know about Handelman?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So Handelman, this goes all the way back to when I was at Spinnaker.
Speaker: Handelman, I'm not going to make any statements at all about whether or not organized crime was above.
Speaker: All I'm going to say is that there are companies like Handelman that would go to companies like Kmart and say, these 18 feet of Kmart, we own them now.
Speaker: And we will pay you for these 18 feet, but you don't get a lot of say about what happens there.
Speaker: So almost all the records that were sold at discounters like Kmart and mass marketers went through a company like Handelman.
Speaker: So you would go, if you work for CBS Records or Spinnaker and say, we want to get this there.
Speaker: And they, because they had so many shelves, they could get the best possible price.
Speaker: They would then give some of the savings back to Kmart and they would keep the rest.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And there was a long history at Toys R Us and at Kmart and places like that, that there was this middleman thing going on.
Speaker: And so the conversations that you would have with these people weren't, this is a really good song on a really good record.
Speaker: They were, it's going to be on this many radio stations.
Speaker: And if it's going to be on that many radio stations, you would get the distribution.
Speaker: And then you'd have to go take some money and give it to disc jockeys to get it on all those radio stations.
Speaker: So you would have credibility the next time.
Speaker: That's where Payola came from.
Speaker: Payola.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the, I have always come at this as a creator, not as somebody who wants to play those games, but the people who play,
Speaker: are in these industries, the music business, anything that touches the big mass merchants or the National Enquirer type cash register stuff, you just got to deal with that.
Speaker: And that's what they do for a living.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, even even even early days in in the arcade industry over in Japan, there is rumors of of Yakuza involvement with with companies like Taito or what have you.
Speaker: There's always and and and back when pinball was banned in New York City in the 1940s, there was there was kind of like that was LaGuardia doing it because of of the
Speaker: you know, mob involvement or what have you.
Speaker: So there's always something there in these types of industries.
Speaker: Not, it's not visible.
Speaker: It's always kind of looming in the shadow of, of that kind of thing.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And, you know, I, I keep,
Speaker: hovering around the edges of the game business, because that's where I started.
Speaker: And I still believe human beings changed by what they do, not what they read.
Speaker: And it is possible to create all sorts of really fascinating interactions on the internet now that aren't about, you know, I mean, if you just look at something like Wordle, you know, you can get a lot of really smart people to spend a lot of time interacting in that sort of way.
Speaker: And, but ever since, you know,
Speaker: When I started Yo-Yo Dine, which was one of the first internet companies, we did email games online.
Speaker: And that was thrilling.
Speaker: But after I sold it to Yahoo in 1999, that was sort of the end of the gaming world for me.
Speaker: But I still wanted to get back into it.
Speaker: That was actually one of my questions.
Speaker: Do you ever think about how you could get back involved in it, that sort of thing?
Speaker: Yeah, I just, it would not be this sort of fictional world thing, just because the overhead, it's easier now to make a blockbuster movie than it is to make an AR, you know, multiplayer game.
Speaker: And that
Speaker: overhead makes it harder to have the kind of game design leverage that I've always been into.
Speaker: The one I was playing with last year would be a blockchain-enabled auction that could be run by nonprofits.
Speaker: And the idea is put something up for auction that's almost priceless.
Speaker: And here we have a signed script from the first episode of Star Trek or whatever.
Speaker: And it's up for bids.
Speaker: And the starting bid is $10.
Speaker: It's a standard auction with one twist, which is the top five bidders all have to pay whatever they bid last, but only the top bidder gets it.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You think about it, you bid $30.
Speaker: Should you stop?
Speaker: Now you're going to lose $30, so you might as well bid $40 and people to keep going because it's for charity, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: I just love the game theory of that and figure their way through it.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, because the strategy changes completely at that point.
Speaker: You can't come at it from the usual auction style way.
Speaker: And people would start, you would get a Ferrari for $10,000 because no one was willing to outbid you.
Speaker: The charity would still do fine, but the word would spread that someone got a Ferrari for $10,000.
Speaker: So the next auction would do even better.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: You could almost make that a spectator sport.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would tune in to see that.
Speaker: That's some high stakes stuff there.
Speaker: That is high stakes bidding right there.
Speaker: Now, you mentioned finding your writers from, you know, you have a collection of, you know, YA authors, that sort of thing.
Speaker: How did you choose them beyond just like they were part of a team that you knew?
Speaker: Like, did you try to pick someone who had maybe some science fiction background for like Mega Man, for example, that sort of thing?
Speaker: So I had done two other series.
Speaker: One of them I'm really proud of, which was Walter Dean Myers, who was the most honored black children's book writer of his generation, won the Coretta Scott King Award two or three times.
Speaker: I said to Walter, I'm
Speaker: I lived in a really successfully integrated neighborhood outside of New York City.
Speaker: I said, Walter, my neighbors are all busy reading Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley High.
Speaker: There are no black kids in those stories.
Speaker: And I said, can I just use your name?
Speaker: You'll approve everything.
Speaker: And I'm going to make Babysitter's Club for black kids and kids who aren't black, but anybody who wants to read about real community.
Speaker: And he was great.
Speaker: And so we did 10 of those.
Speaker: And I'm really proud of how they came out.
Speaker: same kind of authors, right?
Speaker: The, the, the goal, the, the science fiction parts were, came from me.
Speaker: I had to write a Bible that was worth turning into a book and I loved it because I didn't have to be on the hook for, for serial commas or semicolons and stuff like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And somebody like Peter could switch from writing sort of sisters, which was one of those to writing a babysitter's club to writing one of these because the,
Speaker: What you were just good at is directly telling a story in words that were exciting for 12 year olds.
Speaker: And it's a skill.
Speaker: So I mostly the hard part was winnowing down the people who I could know, who I knew I could reliably count on to get this part of the work done.
Speaker: Because when you pick one that's no good, you don't discover it until too late and you have to start over and it's a mess.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Did you choose what books were on the, if you liked this book, you might enjoy these books list?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: I think if you quizzed me, I could not remember, but yeah.
Speaker: They were a good collection, Seth.
Speaker: I only had two employees.
Speaker: So if it wasn't me, I don't know who it was done.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think at the end of Mega Man 2, I think it was the other suggestions included Isaac Asimov for iRobot and Robert Heinlein, which threw me for, I was like, Robert Heinlein.
Speaker: And then, and, and how to eat fried worms was also in the, and I was like, I've read all of these books at very different points in my life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That sounds like my handwriting to me.
Speaker: It actually did inspire us, though, with with our social media.
Speaker: We like when we finish up a book, we like throwing out a suggestion box of four or five books that they might enjoy if they like the one we just finished.
Speaker: So we have you to thank for that at the very least.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: So my tip for people who like the kinds of stuff you like is an author named Elliot Pepper, P-E-P-E-R.
Speaker: And his bandwidth series will suck you in and you will never let go.
Speaker: It's you're going to be so grateful that I highlighted Elliot Pepper for you.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right, everyone, write that down.
Speaker: Elliot Pepper.
Speaker: Oh, this does look good.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Now you mentioned, I also literally officially was diagnosed with ADHD today.
Speaker: And you mentioned that earlier.
Speaker: He was just on the phone with the psychiatrist.
Speaker: And it's one of those things that we were like, oh no, we had no idea.
Speaker: But I know what you mean when it comes to how certain kinds of games, certain kind of books, media in general, can really throw you for a loop.
Speaker: Do you play games still these days?
Speaker: Do any of them?
Speaker: On my phone, I have Wordmaster, which is a Scrabble analog.
Speaker: I have trouble watching thrilling television.
Speaker: I can't.
Speaker: The internet was built for people like you and me because, oh, look, a puppy kind of thing.
Speaker: But I also need an enormous amount of discipline to be able to produce what I produce.
Speaker: And so I went 20 years without turning on a television.
Speaker: And I don't go to meetings because it was enervating.
Speaker: And, you know, now thanks to streaming, I can find just like a little thing that can, you know, soothe part of my brain.
Speaker: But even like I love the Matrix movies so dearly, but I'll feel it for hours afterwards.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: So what do you what do you do to relax then?
Speaker: If it's not too personal a question, like what's what do you find works for you?
Speaker: I paddle my canoe on the Hudson River every day where the weather is good enough.
Speaker: So it's been a few months without that.
Speaker: And I listen to a lot of jazz.
Speaker: Oh, that's great.
Speaker: That sounds good.
Speaker: Jazz is wonderful.
Speaker: I was, I was in the jazz bands when I was younger and yeah, it is, it's a wonderful musical hobby for anyone who can, who can really get into it because it's, it's complex in a way that really suits, it takes your brain places, but without too much work needed because of, of the, the way that the motifs kind of move around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it can absorb as much of your nerdiness as you can handle.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's an infinitely deep musical genre.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: We've got one more big one.
Speaker: And then I think unless, Kevin, you've got anything.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Go ahead, Phil.
Speaker: Now, this kind of ties into what we've been talking about, the concentration required to do what you do in research and finding you, frankly.
Speaker: You have had a stellar career in marketing in particular and that sort of thing.
Speaker: But why don't you tell our audience a little bit about what it is that you do?
Speaker: These days, my full-time gig right now is I'm a volunteer leading a group that's building an almanac about carbon and climate.
Speaker: And it's coming out in June.
Speaker: There's 1800 of us in 91 countries and it fits so many of the things that are important to me, but also my skillset.
Speaker: I'm in it for 11 hours a day answering and building.
Speaker: And we just shipped it to the publisher last week.
Speaker: It's 97,000 words written by 200 different people, edited, designed, laid out.
Speaker: I think it's the most important thing I've ever done.
Speaker: But I also write a blog post every day.
Speaker: I do a podcast every week.
Speaker: I've started a bunch of companies, written 20 bestsellers.
Speaker: But mostly, I just am so lucky that I get to share the noise in my head on a regular basis and people seem to appreciate it.
Speaker: It's all we can hope for, isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there's nothing to complain about.
Speaker: A lot of my peers from the internet age have a B next to their name.
Speaker: I don't want to be a billionaire.
Speaker: I don't think they're happy.
Speaker: They just decided to become evil monopolists.
Speaker: And that's not interesting to me.
Speaker: We have a very strong anti-billionaire stance on our podcast.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, it is part of what we do.
Speaker: Yeah, it's about accumulation after a while, isn't it?
Speaker: It's not about being happy.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Well, Mr. Godin, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Is there anything, I mean, you did it just then.
Speaker: Is there anything you want to plug?
Speaker: Anything our listeners should know?
Speaker: The thing I want to say is,
Speaker: People don't understand what it means for the two of you to show up the way you do over and over again, not because it's your job, but because you just have something to share.
Speaker: And the reason that I said yes is not because I like talking about my past because I almost never do.
Speaker: It's because I want to honor the kind of passion that you're bringing, because this is what the internet is really actually for, is to allow people who care to make things better.
Speaker: So I want to thank both of you.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: What a privilege to talk with you, sir.
Speaker: This has been fantastic.
Speaker: Thank you both.
Speaker: Go make a ruckus.
Speaker: Well, that was a heck of an interview.
Speaker: And Seth just basically warmed our hearts with...
Speaker: I'm going to, I'm going to, that is going to get me through the rest of the month, Kevin, like that.
Speaker: It's not only, it's nice to find someone of your own tribe, but a kindred spirit in the geek realm is especially good.
Speaker: Yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker: And we're going to be continuing with our Nintendo Worlds of Power coverage for the foreseeable future.
Speaker: But with, I guess, a new perspective on how they came to be,
Speaker: It'll be a little bit refreshing to take another look at these.
Speaker: But that's pretty much all we got for you today, folks.
Speaker: Phil, you had some plugins that you want to... Yeah.
Speaker: For those of you who want to get to know Mr. Seth Godin, the FX9 himself, you can check him out at Seths.blog.
Speaker: S-E-T-H-S.blog.
Speaker: That's easy enough to remember.
Speaker: And follow him on Twitter at ThisIsSethsBlog.
Speaker: where he is just he's throwing down all kinds of really interesting news and information and tidbits.
Speaker: Definitely, definitely worth taking a look at.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And as always, if you can share, share this, this episode around to your friends and family, I'd say this episode and the episode with Bill Dietz are pretty good intro episodes for us for just finding out or people who are just interested in the process of writing.
Speaker: Share this with the writers in your life just so they can get a little behind the scenes look.
Speaker: Otherwise, follow us on Twitter at PixLitPod.
Speaker: Go to our website, www.pixlitpod.com.
Speaker: and rate us five stars on iTunes and Spotify.
Speaker: If you have the means, we would greatly appreciate it.
Speaker: But that is all for today's episode.
Speaker: Thank you and have a good night, everybody.
Speaker: Bye.
