Blaise Zerega: Hello everyone. Good evening. Welcome to Alta Journal's California Book Club. It's a thrill to be here tonight with Dave Eggers' special guest, Caterina Fake and host John Freeman to discuss The Every. My name is Blaise Zerega, Alta Journal's editorial director. I'm Zooming in tonight from San Francisco, and I encourage everyone to please say hello in the chat and where you're joining from. I'm going to start the night off actually with a little bit of housekeeping. The event tonight is a part of the California Book Club. It's Alta's free monthly gathering featuring books that reflect the wonderful diversity and humanity of life in the Golden State. And in the weeks leading up to each club's meeting, altaonline.com publishes numerous articles about that month's pick. So go to altaonline.com if you haven't seen these yet. Wonderful essay by John Freeman, an interview with Roger McNamee, terrific pieces by Bridget Quinn and Chris Vognar.
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John Freeman: Hey, Blaise, thanks for having me again. Everyone welcome back. It's great to have you here. Thank you for moving the club for a week. When we started this club a couple years ago, we wanted to highlight the best writing about and from California, but we also wanted to write and celebrate the people that had made California literary culture what it is today. And God, the guy that we have on today, Dave Eggers, has a lot to do with that. You could say that the 826 Valencia program alone would be enough to have him here with its drop-in writing labs, which have grown writers from Javier Zamora to others, to the art classes it has today in San Francisco and elsewhere. His Voices of Witness series that is oral histories from Zimbabwe and Palestine that is partly run out of UC Berkeley has given us the stories of people from around the world in oral history format in ways that I think will take a long time for us to absorb.
Lots of you are probably fans of McSweeney's The Journal with its inventive design and amazing contributions, the way it brought levity and fun back into the literary magazine. As publishers, they also brought us Lydia Davis sort of back from the dead when she was not really that dead. Alan Grossman and including most recently an Egyptian memoirist named Ahmed Naji, who's up for the National Book Critic Circle. The list of what Dave gets up to as a journalist covering Trump rallies and writing about jet packs to as an illustrator drawing very ungrateful animals, he's done so much, but essentially he is a storyteller. And most of what he's been doing as a storyteller is thrilling to remind us what it feels like to be alive and how absurd and hard and wonderful that can be, and telling us stories that are about searchers and people who are sorting themselves out, who are starting over, or maybe just trying to stay afloat or people that are trying to stay sane or maybe even just sell some coffee.
How do you begin with a guy like this who has over 40 books? At some point, I will switch my camera around and there was a pile on every corner of this desk with Dave Edgar's books of journalism, children's literature. He recently won the Newbery Prize for The Eyes and the Impossible, an extraordinary fable for all readers that everyone should read. But the books we decided to focus on were two books that seemed very, very, very California at heart because they're in some ways about a startup, about the internet, about the growth of the industry which now permeates almost every aspect of our lives. In 2013, Dave published this novel, The Circle, which was his first actually with Knopf and McSweeney's working together. It's an extraordinary book about a woman Mae Holland who decides to go and work for a company that sounds a little bit like a company named after a South American part the world.
And as she goes in and she finds herself adapting to it, she changes. She begins to value what the company values. She begins to let go of privacy and certain values that are at the core of what drew her to this place and why she wanted to make some money there. In 2021, David released the sequel to this, The Every, which is set in the near future and it follows another woman, this one, Delaney Wells, who at the very start of this has decided, "You know what, I'm going to go inside this company." It's not called The Circle anymore. It's called The Every, and she's going to take it down from within. It's a book about what it means to live within a society where everything is watched and everything is controlled by a few small companies. It's an extraordinary, funny, disturbing book, and I think it will take a long time for us to all appreciate what is at the heart of it. But right now we have him here with us. Dave Eggers, please join us.
Eggers: Hi.
Freeman: Hey, how are you?
Eggers: Good, how are you doing? Good to see you.
Freeman: You feeling better?
Eggers: I am, yeah. I apologize for everybody that I succumbed whenever we were supposed to be doing this the first time to late era COVID. So anyway, I'm back. Good to see you.
Freeman: I'm glad you're okay. I just want to start right in. This book sounds, in some ways, like in its description like it could be mostly about technology, but it's also really about free will and choice and how the ways that technology as it's being adapted has slowly, we've given it all of our free will because we are overwhelmed by choice. And what happens when that assembly gets going? I wonder if you agree with that sort of vagueish assessment. Talk to me about what choices you find hard, what choices you wish you could give up.
Eggers: I have a good friend from high school who is a clinical psychologist, and she was attached to a university state school for a lot of years. And every year her caseload in the last, since smartphones especially, every year her caseload doubled to the point where she had to quit and go into private practice because she couldn't get anywhere near to meeting the demand for mental health services. And of course, so much of it is paralleling exactly the rise of smartphones, this young people being just completely overwhelmed with technology, but along with it is being overwhelmed by choice. And she said that that was one of the main things that they would come in. They would be paralyzed by the choices for what to do with the day, what to do with their lives, what to do with career, what to do. We were blessed with the internet giving us everything in the world, every destination, we can book a flight to anywhere within 10 minutes, we can access just about any product in the world, but with that comes a paralysis almost.
And I think that we have to realize that our time is finite. Our minds are not meant to necessarily process infinite choice all day. And so some level of constraint and some level of limits, it's necessary to live a sane and calm day. But when you think about a young mind being overwhelmed every day, and then we hear that kids aren't sleeping as much as... And they feel strung out. And the one word that you always hear from teenagers is that they're overwhelmed. And it all makes sense. It's all part of the same thing, which is that they were not meant, especially the young mind, it's not meant to contend with that level of information, that level of choice, that level of sort of infinite possibility every day. And we are sort of meant to be mostly offline. We're supposed to be living in the world, interacting with humans and the few humans that you might have in your neighborhood, the few humans in your school, not the world's humans, not every relative you've ever had, every friend you've ever had, everybody all at once at all times.
So I think for the sake of the sanity of the young people, I think we do have to help them be free of this level of exposure. Does that make sense? So much of this book is about younger people, and Delaney is right out of college and a lot of it covers her younger years. And going from a rural Idaho background where she's out in nature every day, and then suddenly her parents give her a phone and she's indoors and online 18 hours a day and infinitely less happy. And so I've just been obsessed with ways that we as parents, as teachers, as gatekeepers, can try to bring more of the young people's experiences offline because we have a role to play there to say, "You know what, you're not going to read this on your iPad. Here's a book. We're going to give you a variety of experiences during the day and not force you to live your life through a screen." That's a very long answer, John.
Freeman: Yeah, no, I think it's a beautiful answer. I think there's this writer in Portland that used used to write for Portland magazine. I was going to forget his name, David something or other, and he said, "The best cure to anything is going outside." And you've been writing a lot of children's books in between your novels. And if you just look at the titles, Better Natural Things in the World, The Ships...
Eggers: The Lights and Types of Ships at Night.
Freeman: Yeah. We Became Jaguars.
Eggers: Say Jaguars again. I like how you say it.
Freeman: I've lived in England long enough to sound like an asshole.
Eggers: Yeah, that's the English way.
Freeman: Yeah, Jaguars. Faraway Things. But I feel like your literature for children, picture books, and your books for all readers, and for adults, they do have an overlapping impetus to say, "Hey, get out there. Get out. Remember what it felt like a little bit."
Eggers: Yeah. I grew up outdoors most of my life, even though it was just a suburb, but we felt like the creek behind our house was the Mississippi, and we thought that the maybe three foot slope that went from my house to the woods was Kilimanjaro. We really did and we were in that free range child and benign neglect stage of American parenting, where we were on our bikes all day and left in the morning and came back after dark and there was no contact in between with your parents. So I feel like kids are just like any sort of creature. They need light, they need sun, they need exercise, they need all of these things that we know. It just like how you would care for any plant or animal or anything. There's certain things that kids especially need. And so I love visiting classes where they read outside from books.
I was visiting a classroom in San Anselmo a few weeks ago where they have a book club in a small redwood forest. And they've cut chairs for all the kids out of old redwoods, so they all sit in this like, I think you call it a fairy circle, where it's like trees above. And then they all read from physical books. And I think it's a real existential fight right now to make sure that we availed these kids of these opportunities, have to force them upon them almost to say, we know that you need exercise. We know you need exposure to the forest and the sea and barefoot on grass, and all of these things that are just so intuitive. We're going to make sure that you get them here at school and that you have time after school to do these things and freedom to do it.
But I do, there is a lot of pressure to do one's homework on screens, to turn in your homework on screens, to check your grades on a screen, to read books on a screen. And I think that we really have to fight for the kids to be... Every minute that we force them back onto a screen, we really have to think about it like, "Can this be done in a different way and give them a variety of experiences in a given day? And not this mono just screen, screen, screen, screen." But it's tough. I've been seeing it really trending the wrong way in the last 10 years, and I think we all have a role to play to push back a bit.
Freeman: Delaney, I sometimes think about this novel as a techno thriller. It could be your portrait of a lady in a certain way. Sometimes I think of it as a satirical novel about human behavior 'cause it's very, very funny.
Eggers: A book that I was reading that inspired me was Custom of the Country. There's almost no way to see the overlap. But I thought that Custom of the Country is such a sophisticated and such a funny book, and it does such a great job with social satire. That was my entry point for The Every, because it's a really different tone than The Circle. And I allowed Delaney to think thoughts that I might think she has sort of a cynical take on tech companies and her experience there. So it's always a counterintuitive inspiration, I think. But that, it surprised even me. But once I read that again, right before writing this, I thought, "Oh, maybe that's the way in to this, to write a book that takes off after maybe 10 years or seven years after the last book, but it has a radically different tone, I think." I wanted this to be funnier and I wanted it to be more wry, and I wanted to be able to express my own, I guess, skepticism throughout. And so Delaney was a way to channel that.
Freeman: And the part you're going to read is where we meet her sort of becoming herself, right?
Eggers: Oh, you know what, I'm going to read a part about, she meets a guy named Alessandro who's in charge of improving fiction because the boss of The Circle, Eamon Bailey, finds himself not finishing books and he wants to know why, and because it's clearly the book's fault. And so he wants to create software that will help authors write better books that get read all the way to the end. So this is Alessandro explaining the software. Should I go?
Freeman: Yeah.
Eggers:
"Bailey's first goal was to find out why he couldn't get through certain novels and why, by inference, others put certain books down," Alessandro said and pulled up a second stool for Delaney. She took it. "People pick up a book," he said, "and stop in the middle. Why? With e-books, we can study all of this in aggregate. We can take, for example, 2000 readers of Jane Eyre and see who finished it. We actually did that. Turns out 188 people did finish it. That's not good, right? People who read it all seem to like it." He tapped one of his screens a few times and got the answer. "It's at 83% approval, which is high for a dead author. So we dug deeper and saw that of the 2000 or so people who started Jane Eyre, most quitters put it down around page 177.
So then we look at what happens on page 177, and we see that people don't seem to like this character named Grace Poole. They find her scary and depressing. They want more of the romance with Mr. Rochester. Now, if the author were alive, we could tell him..." "Her," Delaney corrected. "Oh, her? Oh," Alessandro said reflexively then went pale. "But anyway, but a living author or a publisher can avail themselves of the numbers and act on them," he said. "And this kind of data has been invaluable to publishers and some of their authors already. Just those data points, sales versus book starts versus completions, that's huge. Completions, of course, convert favorably to sales of the author's next book.
So for publishers, figuring out where and why people are stopping is crucial. Sometimes it's obvious like unlikeable characters. We can help fix that. Algo Mas," that's like the algorithm part of the business, "Algo Mas actually wrote a pretty simple code for turning an unlikeable character into your favorite person." "Wow, Delaney said." "The main thing is that the main character should behave the way you want them to and do what you want them to do." "That's just common sense," Delaney said. "Right?" Alessandro said. "It makes you worry about a lot of writers, the fact that they didn't know this, but we're making inroads with colleges and MFA programs. So now they have the information, we give it to them free as a public service."
How's that? Is that enough?
Freeman: That's great.
Eggers: My first time reading on a Zoom.
Freeman: Well, success, but it's also terrifying because when I read The Circle-
Eggers: All of that that I just read is being done, by the way.
Freeman: Yes, that's right.
Eggers: I make it up or I think I'm making it up. And then a week after the book comes out, people are like, "Well, that's my job. I already created that software," or, "I work at a company that's doing exactly that," so I can never stay ahead more than a week.
Freeman: You told me once that you, almost immediately upon finishing The Circle, you knew that there would be a sequel. And I'm curious if that was sort of because you could see where things were going or if you had more jokes.
Eggers: Yeah, I kept taking notes. I didn't know what I would do with them, but I had hundreds of pages of notes that I didn't use on The Circle, and then I accumulate stacks of notes. So I just write notes on loose leaf, pieces of printer paper, and then I put them in a drawer. And then once that stack grows to about four or five inches, then I think, "Huh, maybe there's something there." So it was a good eight years before I was sure, maybe seven years, that I had enough to justify a follow-up. But a lot of it was about free will. And I think a lot about, if the first book was more about surveillance and the morality of, do we become better people if we're under constant surveillance? Do we have a right to a private life? These questions like that.
And of course The Circle's answer was no. Anything private is a theft from the greater good and society at large because you owe your whole self, including your private self to your fellow humans, especially those humans running tech companies. But the second book is more about how this startling trend that I've been seeing, and it's really accelerating with AI, is how quickly and readily and desperately we're willing to give up our own agency and our decision-making and our humanness, I guess. It started when I remember somebody I heard saying like, "I would never trust myself to plan my day." And they were using an early iteration of AI to help them plan their days. And now you have people using AI to plan their vacations. A couple weeks ago, I heard somebody say, very intelligent person whose best friend's parent had died, and they didn't know what to say to the best friend, a friend of 40 years or something.
And they said, "I was so happy to have ChatGPT at that moment because I fed it into ChatGPT that my best friend's mother passing away. And it wrote a beautiful eulogy, a beautiful note that I was able to email her." And I thought, "Well, I don't know where we go from there." When the thing that is the most human about us, our friendships and our connections with old loved ones and our human way of grieving and our way of expressing compassion and love to each other is shopped out to a machine. And again, it wasn't like, this wasn't somebody trying to sell this software or it wasn't a cynical thing. It was how a very normal person used this tool and didn't think about it with any kind of moral or ethical qualms. And I thought that's always most interesting to me, not the tech companies, but how we acquiesce and how we give up our humanity so readily.
And so I think that it's accelerated week to week with AI, and I am very curious what will be left for us to decide, what part of our day and what part of our life will we think is still ours to decide, and how do we... If so many people making so-called artwork with ChatGPT, so many people helping or having AI help write their papers and poems and even novels now. My question for those people is, well, where are you in this? Where's the core humanity that's preserved? How do you define your humanity if you express yourself, if you let a machine express yourself for you? So, much of The Every is really about seeding our decision making, seeding our way of looking at the world to a machine.
And there's a piece of software in it called Friendy. It started out being called Authentic Friend, where if you and I are talking, John, and we've known each other maybe 20 years, it would be examining your facial movements, your nodding, your way of responding. And it would be telling me if you are sincere, if you're a true friend, if you can be trusted. And Delaney invents this in hopes that it would be a bridge too far for the users, but of course it's instantly adopted and beloved. Because I think that anything that eliminates any uncertainty in our lives is quickly adopted, even as horrifying as that is in practice is to subjecting a friend to a unthinking algorithm that supposedly will tell you if they're sincere. But I do think that that's coming, too. That's the one that hasn't come yet. But the other, mostly of the other things I thought I invented in this book have already happened.
Freeman: Well, I want to bring on someone that knew you, and knew you from back in before the algorithm days and who you worked with in the mid nineties at Salon, who was an art director at Salon back then, but has gone on to co-found Flickr and Hunch, was chairwoman of Etsy. She gave me my first ride in a driverless car last time I was in San Francisco, which was scary as all hell. But it was fun and it was amazing how quickly I adapted to it. Her name is Caterina Fake, and I think she's sitting right next to you or she going to kick that door open.
Eggers: Yeah, she's here, and now she's going to be here.
Fake: All right. Here I am.
Eggers: Caterina and I overlapped at salon.com when it was new in maybe '94 or '95, right?
Fake: It was a long time ago. '95, '96, something like this. Yeah. This is how we know each other.
Eggers: Yeah. And I remember, so one of the impetuses for The Circle, and I don't know if you remember this 'cause I didn't tell you what I was going to spring on you.
Fake: Oh, no.
Eggers: But I remember that one of the other editors at Salon who was an early adopter of technology, we were there because it was a good way to publish good writing, and it was exciting, and it paid. It was one of the few paying jobs where you could edit and get paid. But I remember another coworker called me over to his desk and he said, "Check this out." And it was some sort of software that allowed you to watch people search. So somebody would be online looking up like, "How to get rid of my eczema," or, "What to do if you have chronic halitosis," and you could watch this person searching without them knowing that you were watching and it was anonymized, so you didn't know who it was.
Fake: I vaguely remember this software, actually. I vaguely remember this. Yes. No, I think it was actually a feature on HotBot or AltaVista or one of those-
Eggers: It was AltaVista.
Fake: It was one of those very early pre-Google search engines, where you could actually, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, that's what that was. Yeah, no, it was just like a view. It was some kind of, it was very early surveillance, very early spying.
Eggers: Like a one-way mirror.
Fake: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Eggers: That's when I thought, "All right, you take a great thing where you can search the world for information and find all kinds of stuff right away, so this beautiful idea, and a minute later you make it so creepy and terrifying." And I thought, "Whoever's creating this stuff, there's a set of creepy minds that are part of the creation of so many of these companies, and no one is holding them back and saying, 'We don't like that. That's so sick.'"
Fake: Is it actually just the technology itself? Is it like the Marshall McClean, like the medium actually makes you that way, right? Because you can't, because if you're a technologist, if you're an engineer and you code this stuff and you're behind the scenes, you can.
Eggers: Well, but here's the comparison.
Fake: But if you don't have any moral compunction against that...
Eggers: That's what I'm saying. Imagine if a contractor is building your bathroom and while they're building it, they build in a peak hole so that you can watch your guest. That's the exact same thing. Is it the people building the machine? There's a sickness.
Fake: Well, there's always a backdoor. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that was actually it because so much of, and it was just that, it all goes back to that original New Yorker cartoon, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. It is just anonymous. Nobody knows you're there. It's like that was the original internet New Yorker cartoon.
Eggers: Speaking of early internet. So when you started Flickr, we agree on so much about this, and I think that you are one of the great moral voices out there because you started Flickr and it was a great service that was beloved by a lot of artists and photographers, but you made people pay to use it, which was the simple honest way where you don't have to surveil them to make a profit. You don't have to even sell ads. Can you talk about that decision making process?
Fake: I mean, it was $59.99. I mean, I really believe that if you are providing a service on the internet, the most reasonable way of monetizing that, right? 'Cause this is like a word that even emerged from the internet, "monetize." How do you turn this into a business? So how do you monetize your internet business? And I think there's only really five models. There's like the freemium model, there's the paid model, you know what I'm saying? There's the advocacy model. And so the most honest way is to actually just charge for the service. I always believe that. It's very straight forward. It's very straightforward. And that inhibited the growth of the platforms.
So Flickr preceded by only a few months actually, but preceded Facebook and had the first Feed. The Feed was actually, I didn't call it the Feed, I call it Recent Activity, but the Feed 'cause I always thought that sounded like pigs at a trough or it sounded, it was just a horrible term. It inhibited the growth of the platform, which is why they removed it. And then they started data harvesting and just using all of your activity as a way of selling advertising to you and then selling propaganda to you and then selling ideology to you, and then all of the things that we later came to be quite familiar with.
Eggers: In your travels as a consultant, investor and friend of a lot of tech founders and stuff, do you have these discussions with them? Do you find that there are sort of moral questions being asked? Like, "We could do this, but should we," or does that come up very often?
Fake: I'm the host of a podcast, so I was invited to. And it was really funny because I don't think I'm some kind of moral arbiter of the internet. And yet I think just my sense of continual outrage of like, "What?" was so unusual that I was invited to come and talk about tech ethics. And I wasn't trying to do this. This was not something that I was trying to do, but I just kept on raising my hand and speaking out and saying like, "Are you sure that we should be doing this?" And the podcast is called Should This Exist? And so we ended up talking a lot about a lot of surveillance. We talked about software exactly like you're describing in The Every. Affectiva was a project that came out of MIT where it would analyze your facial expressions. It would say like, "This person is disagreeing with you," or, "This person is confused," or, "This person is..." It would just look at all of your micro expressions and tell you what the other person was thinking.
Eggers: Well, and what's so weird to me is the trust that algorithms can do these things because they can't most of the time. And so for a while I was tracking, there was a lot of software companies that were selling an earlier version of AI that would grade papers for students. So I was talking to teachers and administrators about whether or not they were aware because a lot of state level exit exams are graded by AI. So you'll write an essay as an eighth grader and then type it out, and it will be fed into AI to determine whether you're ready to go on to the next grade. But at the same time, the software companies, because I did a deep dive into all of their research and their literature online, they always are careful to say that their machines cannot read because I think that they know it's some legal boondoggle. And so the machines cannot read. All they can do is scan for keywords.
Fake: And so if you add those keywords into your essay, it means that you have been presumably somehow understood what was in the reading that you wrote in your essay.
Eggers: Yeah. And it doesn't have to make any sense, but I think there are blind faith in the machines to make these decisions to decide if somebody is sincere or there's another piece of software in The Every that decides whether someone's beautiful because they use facial symmetry and relationships.
Fake: ...the greatest artist of all time, which I loved actually, by the way. Who is the greatest artist of all time?
Eggers: I forget who I had in there.
Fake: Norman Rockwell.
Eggers: Yeah, Norman Rockwell. Because what's funny is that we do. Rotten Tomatoes has it down to a percentage about what the quality of some film that somebody might've spent two years making, and then it comes down to a 52.6%. And why would we limit it to film when we could use that in art? We could use it to rate poetry and rate people. And I don't know. What gives you hope? I'm always hopeful that facial recognition, there was a college up in Canada that recently they found out that the vending machine had facial recognition that was scanning faces and storing them.
Fake: Exactly. If you just want your Snickers bar, why does it need [inaudible 00:38:20].
Eggers: Where's the profit, right? There was an outcry.
Fake: They're like, they know who's buying Snickers bar.
Eggers: Yeah. I'm always looking for those little moments where somebody stands up and says, "This is sick." And so they closed.
Fake: Somebody did this.
Eggers: Yeah.
Fake: Oh, they said... Okay.
Eggers: But usually there isn't much argument.
Fake: There's not a lot of protests.
Eggers: Yeah.
Fake: Well, but it's like you say, it's eliminating uncertainty. It's providing convenience. And those are, I think these sort of, you would call them exploits of taking advantage of these idiosyncrasies of the human brain, that you're basically just exploiting these weird biological features that we have, that we are averse to thinking too much about things, that you want things to make choices for you, that eliminating uncertainty is a real good for somebody.
Eggers: I think at this point, maybe to get investors, you have to say these same words. This is a bagel company, but we make AI bagels, just to put it in there somehow.
Fake: If you just add the AI. Did you research this book, by the way?
Eggers: I never do any real...
Fake: Is this like ambient knowledge? It just picked it up.
Eggers: Yeah.
Fake: Because here's the thing that I found really freaky about this. After I read The Every, one of the things that gave me nightmares, I have to say, was the men in Lycra, okay? So universally women wear Lycra all the time. You go to your yoga class, you wear Lycra. People who ride bikes, they wear Lycra shirts. But in They Every, and that was the thing that was really stood out for me, it haunted me.
Eggers: Yeah, sorry about that.
Fake: Actually after that, what had happened was awful. If you read the book, you'll reach this section where they describe the clothing of the people at The Every, people that are working there. And the manner and all of these tight Lycra suits. And every time you look up you're like, "I didn't want to see that."
Eggers: Well, right. I mean, that was just me allowing it to be silly here and there.
Fake: But this is like a real thing because I actually wrote a blog post that I had encountered The World's Least Sexy Man, and the World's Least Sexy Man actually was wearing Vibram FiveFingers shoes, was on a Segway, and was wearing Lycra, and also had on Google Glass.
Eggers: He felt sexy though.
Fake: And I was like, it is just like an aphrodisiac outfit. How do you put this all together to make yourself just, I mean, just like the least appealing man alive?
Eggers: And of course there's a lot of retinal tracking going on in The Every, which is another thing. It's coming. It's around us now, but it's going to be coming a lot more, where the same way that we enforce behavioral standards by filming each other all day, retinal tracking will tell you what you're looking at, what somebody's looking at. So you have all these people in Lycra and they're not allowed to look at each other for fear that they're going to be merited.
Fake: Well, Jesus Christ. Well, one of my very first tech company experiences was, this is actually 1995. I was at Organic or Online, one of the very first web agencies that was actually spun out of Wired because they needed to figure out how to get advertisers online for Wired magazine. And so I worked there. And then I went to, and you guys claim to be Californians, but I'm the only real Californian because I went to Burning Man. You didn't go to Burning Man.
Eggers: Yeah, I did. I was there third year.
Fake: Freaking out, man.
Eggers: '94.
Fake: That's cool. So you're there before me.
Eggers: Yeah.
Fake: Where? Was it at the...
Eggers: It was already in the desert.
Fake: Oh, okay. Okay, got it. But here's the thing that I saw. Here's the thing that I saw, is I was there at Burning Man and suddenly I was sitting there on the fire and the entire engineering department that I worked with was stark naked and running towards me screaming, "Caterina. Caterina." I was like, "I'm never going to be able to unsee this."
Eggers: What prompted that story?
Fake: The Lycra.
Eggers: Oh, the Lycra. I like it.
Fake: That would've been a step up from that.
Freeman: I was trying to change into my all body Lycra suit to segue back into our interview.
Eggers: It would be a good look for you, John.
Fake: Oh, god, John. Can I go?
Freeman: You can just stay there. Stay there.
Fake: I'll stay. I'll stay.
Freeman: There's some questions coming in from the audience. And for anyone who hasn't read the book, the first 175 pages nearly are Delaney's onboarding into The Every, which is like this maze, where she gets into an interview and then another interview. And then she meets someone else who works there, and then she goes further into the company, and then she meets the people who are running the AI-driven hospital. She meets the sort of gatekeeper of the library, where books are being updated and she gets her first job, which is to basically catalog people's stuff and tag it to their relatives and then ship it to Denmark where it's boiled down into a black sludge, which is used to build California prisons among other things.
Eggers: I mean, yeah, thoughts, not things. It's a way to eliminate clutter and eliminate things from the world. And you take a photo of it or a three dimensional scan, and then they burn it.
Fake: You can see by the decor here that I love stuff.
Freeman: This are things, not thoughts.
Fake: This was such a nightmare. That section of the book, I was like, "Oh, my God."
Eggers: Yeah, and then, of course, everything is eventually lost, all the data.
Freeman: And all the things.
Eggers: Other things, heirlooms. Everything.
Fake: Yeah, heirlooms.
Eggers: If it's put online, it will be lost at some point. Not that it can't be refound, but it's certainly always lost at some point or insecure.
Fake: Yeah. I mean, I lost a whole year of my life, a whole digital year of my life. And I really fretted about it for a while, and then I felt free. Actually, I was like, "Oh, my God, 2004 is gone."
Freeman: Dave, you've talked about this publicly, so I don't think I'm outing you as a houseboat worker, but you stay pretty much off the internet, working on a very old computer on air-gapped computers.
Fake: What's an air-gapped computer?
Freeman: Oh, my God. Okay. Isn't an air-gapped computer a computer that's never been connected to the internet?
Eggers: Oh, yeah. My usual computer, I don't know the lingo. Yeah, the computer I write on is from 2003 and it was never connected. And then I get online twice a day in the morning. I get email, and then I get it at night. And in between, I get to be free, but I can't do both. I can't write on a computer where there's messages coming in. It's like trying to work in the middle of a circus.
Freeman: I just want to show you what's possible to do when you don't connect to the internet. This is most of what Dave has published since 2000.
Fake: Wow.
Freeman: I know, which includes this lovely book, which has three short story collections in the middle of it. There was a question from the audience about how when you got to stop researching and start writing. And I think you talk about inventing things that you didn't realize existed here, but there's some scenes, especially the Friday talks where I think Dave has to have gone to inside a tech company and heard people because it's such a great satire of that kind of guru complex you see at all-hands tech talks.
Eggers: I haven't been to any of those. I've never been on a tech campus, as far as I can remember. I'm trying to think if I have. I've been on sort of tech-adjacent campuses once or twice, never been to one of these all-staff meetings, but you see them online. There's Ted Talks, there's a lot of stuff that's like it. I think, and then the Apple rollout talks were always big in the nineties when we were coming up, and you'd hear what Steve Jobs had invented, and that was always big news. But it's really ambient research. I'd never sat down and looked anything up. And to really aid myself, I actually clip articles from newspapers and magazines and I put them in my drawer. That's my research is like, if I see something funny in some weird trend in The Economist or The Chronicle or whatever it is, I'll just clip it and I'll be like, "Oh, that's a funny anecdote that might make its way into a novel," or, "That's of a very scary development," so I'll clip it.
I just ran into a clip that I remember when AI was newer. There was Vanderbilt, some chancellor at Vanderbilt got in trouble after there was a shooting at another college. Their message of condolence to their fellow university was written by AI. And this is at the university level, so you just know that there isn't, I don't know, maybe we're just all looking for that shortcut, I guess. But I think, I'm going to start a class at 826 Valencia in a week or so, where we're going to write picture books. It's going to be fifth and sixth graders.
And what 862 is still doing is just instilling that love of creating something and owning it and feeling like that came out of you and only you. There's nobody else in the history of the world that could have done what you just did. And you're always going to hold that and know where your mind was at that moment. And I think it's so tragic if any kid at any point thinks, "What I think doesn't really matter, I'll have a machine do it." And if we can really instill that love of seeing one's thoughts on paper and expressing them well and being rewarded for it, then I think we might have a chance. But when adults themselves are using these shortcuts, then I think we're in deep trouble.
Freeman: Someone asked about the New York Times case against OpenAI. Do either of you have any thoughts on that?
Eggers: So here's so funny. The Atlantic listed all of the books that were fed into, I think it must've been OpenAI, and whatever 160,000 books. And so all of us who write books were looking to see if our books were fed. And most of the stuff I've written, maybe a bunch of books were fed into it, but two books were not, The Every and The Circle. Isn't that great? Somebody somewhere thought, they don't want the AI to become self-aware or feel bad about itself, so they couldn't feed those books into it. And I felt like that was almost encouraging, that somebody was thinking.
Fake: Somebody hesitated there.
Eggers: Yeah. But that's where like, The Authors Guild is an organization that I love, and they do a lot of fighting on our behalf when these things happen, and PEN America. That's when we really need those agencies that advocate for us, and they take these things to court. They have the lawyers. They know how to sort of push back when these atrocities happen.
Freeman: One of the most sinister uses of AI was the report recently that it was being used in the Middle East during the current war. And Dave, you went to Kiev on behalf of PEN about a year and a half ago. And I wonder if you could say anything about how important it is to actually have a person seeing what's happening and when it comes to reporting about an event or a region.
Eggers: Yeah. I always tell this to teenagers in my life. You can look some things up and you can learn a lot, but you don't know a place. You don't know one minute or one inch of a place until you go there. I mean, you know maybe half of an inch or half of a minute if you read about it.
Fake: Or watch a video about it.
Eggers: Yeah. No place bears any resemblance to anything that you think you know. And when I went to Ukraine, the second we crossed the border from Poland and went to the first gas station, it was full of everything you'd ever want. It was completely stocked. It was beautiful place. Every grocery store we went to was completely stocked. Life was going on. And the resilience of the Ukrainians and their commitment to living, to carrying on and to living as fully as they can during a war was so astonishing. It really sort of reminded you of Londoners during the Blitz, just this like, "We're not going anywhere. We're going to keep working." I interviewed artists and even animators, and they're still doing work for, they're freelancing for companies all over the world from their apartments in Lviv, and Kiev, and other suburbs around the capitol. And they all said the same thing like, "Don't forget about us. We're still here. We're carrying on. We need work."
So if anybody out there has anything that you can hire Ukrainian artists, freelancers, writers, anybody to do, they want that work. And I just heard from, I interviewed a curator of Ukrainian history. There was the one air raid that I was there for. We ended up hiding in the basement of the National Museum of Ukrainian History. That was the closest building. And we happened to interview this woman, Sana, who's a curator. And I just heard from her the other day, and she's saying, "We're still trying to live it every day as normally as we can," but they worry always that the world will tire of their struggle and will no longer fund the war that... They're fighting for the rest of Europe, they're fighting it for Taiwan, they're fighting it for a lot of countries that otherwise would be subsumed by imperialistic neighbors. And so we have to stay resolved to support them till the end because they deserve it.
Freeman: I've always wondered if you could tell me a little bit more about, You Shall Know Our Velocity, which is that your first novel, which came out after your memoir. And it's about these two friends who get some money and they go around the world trying to give it away as rapidly as possible because it is almost like a weight is upon them. And looking at your body of work, you've studied journalism, you studied art. You go into Trump rallies makes a certain sense. Dave Eggers from a Chicago suburb going to Syria makes a little bit less sense. And I'm curious, when you left the American part of your upbringing and traveled into the wider world and began writing the kinds of stories that came back in Zeitoun, and The Monk of Mokha, and What is the What, and some of your other overseas reporting?
Eggers: Well, I didn't get a passport until I was 26. That was the first time I left the country, so I was a late starter. And where I grew up, I mean, people there were sophisticated. And I think a lot of the families I knew had been places, but it just was never even discussed in our family. We just stayed. And if a family trip was a ride in the Ford Pinto to Kentucky or something or maybe out east. So when I finally, I started as a travel writer, another little startup magazine called Eco Traveler, that I used to write for. And I was first sent to the Amazon, actually, speaking of the South American company or named after the South American jungle. And I was just leveled by how different everything was than any assumption that I ever would've had. And everywhere I went, it was like that.
And I just fell madly in love with travel and just sort of a travel where I never make an itinerary. I just sort of get off the plane and then just be led around. And if you come in with no expectations, no assumptions, and you just let people show you their country and you do it humbly, I think, and with an open mind, it's just never not revelatory. And so I was trying to write a travel book for so many years, but I can never really get it right because I don't know how properly to express just how... I can never quite get it, the astonishment and the revelations that I feel, I can't always get it on the page as well as I want it to be, especially writ large with all of the different travels. So maybe here and there, I chip away at it.
I can write a piece about one experience or another. And I do worry. The Every has some, they're talking about that. I forget what the Scandinavian word is for plane shame. They try to shame you if you get on a plane. And I understand that we do need to worry about carbon loads and not too much unnecessary travel, but I do worry that generations are going to be afraid to see the world for fear of its impact, their impact, because you really don't know a thing until you go. And I think it makes for very well-rounded, empathetic, intellectually elastic minds if you can see the world. And that's the thing, when college students ask me, "What's a piece of advice for aspiring writer?" I always say like, "Spend the next five years just going places. Don't sit in your room. Don't sit in a cafe in Manhattan and become a writer that way. You got to go see the world first. See something of it. Get a job. Join the Merchant Marine. Do something weird so that you have something to write about."
Freeman: Caterina, when you both worked at Salon in the mid nineties, I remember Salon then, and it felt like a utopian news project. Here was this website that was saying like, "Hey, the news is boring and it stinks, and it doesn't do all the things that ought to do. We're going to have a site that does some of that." And one of the things that made me sad reading The Every, Dave, is the death of the media is a foregone conclusion in the book. And I wonder if either of you can ever feel that utopian feel about a news organization? It doesn't have to be a website.
Fake: Well, I mean, he was saying that he cuts things out of magazines. And I was thinking to myself, "You and me are keeping the magazines alive," because I have magazines. Everything's gone online. And it's like every week, there's something else that's being announced as like, "Sorry, we're no longer having our print publication. It will all be online. Great news." And it's really crushing. And I do think that this is one of the reasons for McSweeney's and all of the other things that we do.
Eggers: Add reasons on our board. We're about to have a board meeting. But the good news is actually, what one piece of Utopian good news is our subscriptions are up in the last few years. And we have a magazine for kids called Illustoria, that we took over when the founders asked us to continue it. And that's the fastest growing magazine that we have. And kids love that, getting something in the mail, being able to work on projects that are inside, and also getting a break from their 18 hours of screens all day. So I think that if you offer these things, it's not going to be like a hundred million subscribers, but you can offer these things.
And I think that there's plenty of people that will rush to these things, but you have to... It's going to be, a lot of it is sort of an artisanal kind of project. It's not mass profits. And I think that we also have to be thankful for the book industry here in the US, which is the best one in the world. I think still, we're still the main place that publishes hardcovers. In most of the world, they don't have anywhere near the hardcover market. And I think that authors can still make a living as writers here, a lot of authors, and people still read books. And so I don't know. I am always thinking we still have it pretty good as a book industry.
Fake: Yeah, I think it doesn't go away. Whatever. The death of books has been frequently heralded, but it hasn't happened yet.
Eggers: Yeah, I mean, it was really encouraging. You saw those e-book numbers going up for a while, then they stopped at about 28%, and then they went down a bit. And I think people really want that break. I understand if you travel a lot, you need to have an e-reader. But I think most people are looking for like, "Okay, what can I do? Do I want to bring a book into the tub or out into the woods or on a beach and give myself a variety of experiences in a given day?" So we have to, back to what we were originally talking about, give ourselves a diversity of experiences during the day. And I think that the more we try to channel everything through one or two devices, that's one of the reasons for, if you feel malaise, it's because you're not giving yourself the balanced diet of sort of experiences during the day, outdoor experiences, paper, tactile things that feel good to the touch, sun, water, all of these things.
Fake: Well, people.
Eggers: People, yeah.
Freeman: There's a really lovely comment by Marge in the comment saying, "My favorite time of the day is when the sun hits my chair in the yard and it's time to take my book outside."
Eggers: Wow. That's like a nice poem, Marge.
Freeman: I have to say...
Eggers: Don't change it. That's a nice one.
Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. She says, "Thank you." Since we have probably one or two minutes left, I wonder if you could say something about, like how do you change... Putting together this pile of books of yours was a real pleasure 'cause it made me pick up things, like this a hundred and something stories in a box, which has this amazing illustrated case. And then the story itself is, this is all ribbed. And I feel like you have a real love of the book object. And I'm curious what you do when you're making a book that you find enjoyable. When you were putting [inaudible 01:03:52] as a publisher 'cause you have an issue of McSweeney's coming out the lunchbox.
Eggers: Yeah. That's designed by Art Spiegelman. And Caterina and I both went to art school, different art schools, and we have even art classes here and there at McSweeney's offices where we do life drawing and other things. But I love the book as an object. And we have an amazing art director named Sunra Thompson, who he's always experimenting with new forms. He'll get one of our printers to send him a lunchbox prototype, and then we send that to Art Spiegelman and say, "Hey, do you ever want to design a lunchbox?" And then he says, "Well, indeed, I would like to design a lunchbox." And then we think what we're going to put inside the lunchbox.
And so it's like a really fun, we're just trying to reinvent it every time, but entertain ourselves. And Sunra is always cooking up something unprecedented. So we're very lucky to have him. But if you're not making something that hasn't been made before, I don't know what the point is. There's no constraints. We don't have any bosses, so no one can tell us not to do something. And our subscribers are so great that they support all of this experimentation by giving us their dollars with the faith that we'll give them something worthy of their faith. Did I said that right? That sounded weird. So we thank all the subscribers out there and we're always looking for new ones. So we are still-
Freeman: Well, keep having fun. This is my edition of The Every, which you thankfully sign, but it's one of 40, 50 different covers, 60, that you did?
Eggers: Another one. I think we ended up with...
Fake: Here's mine.
Eggers: I think we ended up with 64 editions. I'm trying to remember.
Fake: 64?
Eggers: Yeah. This is Kristen Farr, a great artist here in the Bay Area. The one I showed you was Claire Rojas. Yeah. It turns out it doesn't cost anything extra to have 64 covers because the way the printing works, they're printing all these covers on a large sheet and then cutting it, so you can lay out as many different ones as you want on that sheet. And then they just bind them randomly. And so there's so much that you can do as a publisher that's so easy and not expensive, and there doesn't seem to be any reason not to do it. So we're always trying to think of something that hasn't been done or that would be just fun to do. I mean, the word fun, it's so simple, but it really, we've been doing it for 25 years now at McSweeney's.
And we're still having a blast because there's still a thousand new ways to do it and new forms to explore. The stuff Sunra has cooked up for the next couple years is ludicrous, so I'm already picturing what he's... There's going to be one cover that's with an image that's made with yarn that they can do, mass produce with... The Eyes and the Impossible had a wooden cover that we didn't know was possible until it was possible. And so anything you can dream of. When we first started printing in Iceland, they had books bound with sharkskin, and I always wanted to do a sharkskin, but you'd need a lot of sharks, I think. Maybe some sort of synthetic sharkskin we can do. Anyway, but we are really grateful for those readers and subscribers out there that give us the fuel to carry on.
Freeman: Well, it's been a lovely talk, but we should probably let you get on with your evening there in San Francisco.
Eggers: Well, and thank you, John. You were the editor on The Every. I don't know if we buried that lead, but John was my editor, though. John's the greatest. And so this is a little bit of an inside job here, this book club, given we have the editor as also the moderator. But thank you to Caterina and thanks for having-
Freeman: Nice to see you again, Caterina.
Fake: Good to see you.
Eggers: And subscribe to Alta, too. I guess if you're spreading that money around, they're doing fantastic work.
Freeman: Yeah. Blaise, I think that's your cue to come back on and walk us out.
Zerega: All right. Thank you so much Dave and Caterina and John. As we are unapologetically a print first publication, big, beautiful oversized pages. Print is great technology. I think that's something to hammer home tonight, too. But back to technology, tonight's program was recorded. It'll be up on californiabookclub.com or go to altaonline.com. We'll be there tomorrow. You'll receive a thank you note in tomorrow's email with links to all the cool things discussed tonight. Please be sure to join us on March 21st for our next gathering is three weeks. The Other Americans by Laila Lalami.
And don't forget, this is a limited time offer I promise you, I'm like such a sales guy, the hat and the Best Bookstore Guide, or go to your local independent bookstore. We're selling, being sold in many places. And please support our partners. If you haven't read it, mine's a green cover. Read it, please. Go buy it. And finally, we'd be grateful if you would participate in a one-minute survey that's going to pop up at the very end. And thank you again everybody so much for tuning in tonight. It was really just a special night. And thank you again to Caterina, Dave, and John. Be well everyone. Thanks again.
Fake: Bye. Thank you.
Eggers: See you.
Zerega: Bye-bye.•
