Kevin J. Anderson has published more than 175 books, 58 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune Universes , as well as a unique steampunk fantasy trilogy beginning with Clockwork Angels, written with legendary rock drummer Neil Peart. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series, the Wake the Dragon and Terra Incognita fantasy trilogies, the Saga of Shadows trilogy, and his humorous horror series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.

the Dune Chronicles, is a science fiction media franchise that originated with the 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert. The political, scientific, and social fictional setting  is known as the Dune universe or Duniverse.

The latest book released in 2021  the the Universe of  Dune: The Lady of Caladan 

The Butlerian movement  was the powerful and hyper-fanatical sect of humanity which violently destroyed computers, thinking machines and conscious robots.

DUNE The Graphic Novel, Book 1: Dune  a powerful, fantastical tale for a new generation of readers. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s adaptation retains the integrity of the original novel, and Raúl Allén and Patricia Martín’s magnificent illustrations truly bring the book to life

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a 2013  documentary directed by Frank Pavich. The film explores cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt to adapt and film Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune in the mid-1970s.

Dune Part One is a 2021  film directed by Denis Villeneuve from a screenplay by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth. It is the first of a two-part adaptation of the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, primarily covering the first half of the book

Writers of the Future (WOTF) is a science fiction and fantasy story contest that was established by L. Ron Hubbard in the early 1980s

Doug Beason is a scientist with a dual major in physics and math, a retired Air Force Colonel with  and science fiction author who works with KJA.

▬ Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

01:21 – Welcome Kevin J Anderson author & futurist

03:17 – How collaborative scenario planning helps authors

06:22 – How i write Dune novels

11:10 – Setting out rules for a universe

14:29 – Divergent Scenario planning

19:40 – Dune Universe graphic novels

30:59 – Writers of the future contest

this week on the futurists as a sci-fi author could you possibly have envisioned a world where there’d be a global pandemic and fires and floods and all this biblical stuff going on that locks us down at home and actually makes us afraid to touch other people i mean it’s very much reminding me of some of the stuff in doing that we have the movements called the butlerians the the anti-technology anti-science i’ve learned since that it’s sort of an apocryphal story but the when galileo was seeing the moons going around jupiter and he could see them with his telescope and he was showing them to the cardinals of the catholic church and which at the time their teachings were no the earth is the center of everything so there couldn’t possibly be moons orbiting anything else and and he showed through the telescope the cardinals to look at the moons going around jupiter and they looked through the telescope and said nope i don’t see anything

welcome to the futurists where we meet and talk to the people who are envisioning and inventing the future i’m rob terczyk and i’m brett king and our objective here is to find the most intelligent uh people talking about the future and figuring out how we can get to that place as fast as possible that’s what all futurists really want we want to get to the future as fast as possible so in in that vein we’ve invited a phenomenal futurist but more probably known in the creative aspects as a science fiction author a new york times best-selling author i’ve lost count of the number of new york times bestsellers he’s had but kevin j anderson welcome to the futurists hello guys and and to be honest i’ve kind of lost count too you just i work all the time and i publish books and i tell a new story and and uh by the time a book comes out and hits the bestseller list i’ve done six books after that and i’m working on it so um your wikipedia is helpful because it says that you’ve published more than 140 books and more than 50 of those have been best sellers and you’ve got a whopping 23 million books in print that’s pretty substantial you’re a prolific guy yeah well i i keep busy and i if i’d stop writing my head would explode so all these these ideas and short stories and see my my outlet for all these crazy ideas is to put them into stories because a story is almost like a thought experiment for a crazy idea so i could i could write a technical paper and put it out to some obscure audience but i’d rather project an imaginary story where what if this happens and then you just show the of course as a science fiction writer our favorite phrase is but something went wrong and then that’s a really useful starting point because one of the key techniques for projecting into the future is to do scenario planning you know scenario planning is a fancy way of saying storytelling where we think about situations including what might go wrong and so you’ve got a great deal of experience doing that and and you do it in an interesting way in the sense that much of your work kevin has been collaborative where you’re working with somebody else’s story franchise whether that’s star wars or the dune franchise which we’re certainly going to talk about today because that’s coming out soon and also you’ve worked with other writers you’ve been a collaborative author a co-author with a number of different writers and i’ve noticed you also do fan fiction as well and so you’ve got a great deal of experience in collaborative scenario planning tell us a little bit about that well and i’m i’m going to actually spin off on a tangent which which none of you has heard before so it’s an interest so for 14 years i worked as a technical writer for the lawrence civil war national laboratory which is a big government nuclear weapons design facility i had a security clearance and i worked with in some of like the main the main offices where um i was writing remember remember star wars and brilliant pebbles and all the uh the missile defense things in the 80s i was actually doing some of the documentation for that so um to get to in the long run rambling way to my my point there was another entire division in the office building where i was in where they were the scenario planners they were they were doing their um you know the war gaming and and what if what if this happens and what if this happens and at the time i was writing these big epic like tom clancy fall of civilization things political clashes uh with a with a co-author doug beason who is a phd physicist a colonel in the air force and the two of us would would come up with these scenarios and then we’d write a book about it and then we’d come up with another one and one day because i i had already started publishing novels so people at work knew that i was a writer and one day at work one of these guys from the wargaming scenarios people came up to me like super super proud because he and his team of ten people had spent six months developing this two-page scenario about what if this happens in the set and he wanted my opinion and i read it and i went well that’s pretty good and i gave it to him and i thought man doug and i do this in like two hours and so you just sort of like imagine things and go and right right and it it is we watch the news all the time which is as horrific as any post-apocalyptic novel sometimes but to get more to the point of of your question robert that i feel that ideas work best when you’re bouncing them off of people it’s sort of like it picks up energy when it ricochets sort of like a like a super ball or something like that there are other writers i know of who are very um play it close to the chest they don’t want to tell anybody what they’re working on they don’t want to show anybody but to me it’s more like a jazz performance that everybody’s up there and everybody knows what they’re doing and and if you’ve seen some great uh jazz ensembles it’s all improv they just go and they know how to work with each other and it builds and the synergy comes up uh and so you know specifically we’re talking about dune perhaps brian herbert and i just finished our first draft of i think it’s our 17th dune novel in the past 20 years uh and it’s called the heir of caledon it’s the third book in a trilogy that all right it’s like the year before the classic novel dune so it ends right before noon starts and brian and i um we would meet together face to face although with kobet the last year we’ve had to do it all by zoom which is um you know it we do it but it’s much better to be sitting there um on his deck just sort of throwing ideas back and forth about what about this and what about that and you have to be with somebody you trust because you need to have somebody who’s a good filter who just says no kevin that’s stupid and then we throw it out we do something else you have to be in a position where where there’s honesty and in feedback where you can really just no let’s not biggest argument go collaboration it makes a good deal sense right because everybody’s got blind spots and it’s easy for us to see other people’s blind spots but it’s impossible to detect our own and if you’re doing scenario planning you want to have as many viewpoints as you can just to make sure you’re not missing something so that makes a good deal of time uh one other thing robert you you probably don’t know about how kevin actually does the writing process often is he dictates it to a dictaphone while he’s out hiking the colorado hills and then uh i find this astonishing as as an author myself and and you as well i i i i don’t know how he does that it like keeps the plot lines and everything in his head that’s talk about it kevin you know like how does that actually work well i mean i one fundamental thing that i do as a writer is that i outline everything very carefully i’ve got like a dude novel with brian uh like the era of calling in right now it has i think 75 chapters in it 74 chapters something like that so we have a full outline where we know chapter one is duke lato’s point of view and this happens in chapter two is lady jessica’s point of view and this happens in chapter so we we’ve sat face to face and we brainstormed we’ve talked out this whole book and we’ve we’ve crystallized it down into the exact story that we want to tell so we we both have the same vision of this this book and then we split the chapters half and half um yeah we pick it by story lines like i’ll uh in in this particular case i did the duke lado story line and he did the lady jessica storyline and and i’m doing the baron harkins storyline and he’s doing the paula tradies and duncan storyline and that that whole thing that so we split it up and so i know the chapters i’m supposed to write and i know today i’m writing chapter 34 and chapter 37 and i have a little paragraph this is chapter 37 and this is and i know basically you know it’s sort of a beat points i know what’s going to happen in that chapter and then i go out on the trail there are some we have many many like grueling hiking trails but there’s also lots of you know bike trails and level level things where i can just walk and there have been many studies showing that your creativity increases when you when you have physical activity that if you’re actually moving and doing something that your imagination can flow better so if you’re just sitting there with your butt in the chair staring at a screen um it’s almost like you’ve got constipation it’s hard to to to get things out and also in in today’s world sitting in my office i am prey to the phone ringing and the doorbell ringing and the cats wanting attention and and all kinds of things but if i’m out on the trail and i’m and i’m a very strong hiker i’ll go 10 miles out somewhere i’ll go on and on and on and not see anybody so i can just get into this zone and it’s the same as typing i’ll think of a sentence but instead of thinking up a sentence and moving my fingers to type something i think of a sentence and it comes straight out my mouth and i’m sure we’ve all met people that just have things come right out of their mouth without any sort of filtering mechanism whatsoever uh and so i’m i’ll go out and and just hike many miles and i’ll dictate today’s chapters and i that way i get to do my two loves i’m living in this beautiful state in the rocky mountains i get to go out and be surrounded by uh scenery and and see brett you’re doing non-fiction so it’s not as important but in in in fiction there’s well i have to do the world building and the how does it smell and how does it look and how does it sound and and talk a little bit about that if you would kevin because that world building aspect is real really important it’s really pertinent to what we’re trying to cover especially when you’ve got such sacred cows and structure to it how do you like how do you set those rules do you like list out all of the rules of each universe at the start of the book so you’ve got your head straight or is it from memory well kind of i mean if there’s not a like i wish there would somebody would do like a wiki of all my books so that i don’t have to refer to everything but i didn’t even know i was going to get to plug this book i’ve written a book called world building from small towns to entire universes and it sort of got my uh it’s sort of a checklist of all these different things that you have to think about when you’re and we’re talking like a full-on science fiction universe or full-on fantasy universe or something but but all the rules are the same with with just if you’re setting a uh see if if i were setting a story in you’re in thailand now brett if i were studying a story in thailand correct to me that’s a fantasy country i mean everything about it the history the the the foliage the culture the the clothing the cooking the everything is a is a foreign a different different fantasy world to my american reading audience but if i’m writing a story set in denver somebody who’s living in shanghai to them that’s a fantasy world too and so i actually have this whole list of um and i probably won’t remember them all off the top of my head but but the the climate i mean is it a does it have seasons is it is it a pacific island is it the northern is it is a pl a tidally locked planet well exactly some well tidally that planet that’s a huge that means that there’s no day or night right well i mean there’s no alternating day and night and you know we we have seasons because our orbit is a little bit elliptical if it was a perfectly circular orbit you wouldn’t have seasons and imagine how your culture would change if you didn’t have seasons and think about this just the cooking that like in thailand there’s a lot of very spicy stuff because it’s a hot and humid climate and things spoil fast so they need to put hot spices into it to to cut down on the food spoilage but if you were like living up in the arctic circle you would have things like preserved salted fish all the time and and seal blubber and whatever else that you can get uh and then there’s there’s the education do the i mean if i’m writing a fantasy world here’s a couple of absolute major questions do they have gunpowder or not do they have education or not right i mean think about does the average person read or not what about communications think about the lord of the rings if somebody could pick up the phone and call frodo and say get your butt moving and get that ring destroyed rather than sitting on on your thumbs for a year then the move then the story would move faster um there there are so many things the the i don’t know if i mention religion or not but um architecture think of how thai architecture looks different from uh norwegian architecture which looks different from moroccan architecture it’s because of the raw materials that they have but also think about the um like because the islamic religion doesn’t allow depiction of human figures all of their artwork is different but that means they’ve developed the most beautiful calligraphy and architecture and things and as you’re developing a story all these details are are part of the story that you go go to so let me see if i can play it back because when we do scenario planning for thinking about the future uh we start with a process what we call diverge we’re trying to think about as many possible ideas sometimes as crazy as they might be right we start with that you want to go open but then you start to apply filters and that’s where you converge down to something it’s a little bit more plausible and it sounds like you have a similar process where you start out with a lot of creativity in a wide open scenario and then you start to apply these logical filters to it to make sure that there’s very similitude so that the audience the fans can actually believe that this is a credible scenario is that similar to the way you’re working well right and and as you come up and you start cursing yourself as you do more and more books in the series because you go why did i set that limitation it’s the uh but but to use dune as a perfect example frank herbert’s original dune they have it’s not faster than light travel that’s navigators that that have holtzman engines that can fold space so they basically go in this ship from point a to point b because they dimensionally fold and go okay that’s that’s how they do things but here are the consequences that means that there’s no faster-than-light communication so you can’t be on the planet and send a signal to the imperial capital and say something bad’s going down here you have to send a messenger you actually have to send a physical messenger because the ship can go faster than a signal can and and that you wouldn’t believe how many headaches that’s caused us writing it because we really want somebody to make a phone call somewhere but you can’t because that’s what the rules are and once you set these rules then you have to abide by them and you know that’s we have these rules now if i’m writing a a a cowboy story in the old west i would really like to have like airplanes to get from one place to another well you can’t have airplanes from one place together because if they have weren’t invented yet so you you follow these through and there are there are consequences and that’s one of the things that i i think i do best in my fiction is instead of just taking here’s idea a you know here’s idea a and then what happens afterward and then what happens after that and what happens after that because that the repercussions and the second and third order um consequences are what i find the most interesting well kevin uh let’s take a quick break um uh you’re listening to the futurists i’m brett king and robert turcheck we’re the hosts of the futurists we’re talking to kevin j anderson we’ll be right back after these brief words 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okay so we’re back in the futurist with kevin j anderson no not the south african tennis player we’re talking about the science fiction author he’s worked with great franchises like star wars and also most probably most relevant right now dune herbert family has said is the definitive depiction of dune and you you you advised on that film i know that that’s one of the projects you worked on but you also have a book coming out just before that another book in the dunes series can you tell us about the lady of caledon i could do better i could show off because i’m just saying here look at this and then what’s then what happens is somebody says but kevin this is a radio show but but here’s this is the second one and uh it’s showing up this is this is dune the duke of caledon uh i mentioned earlier that we just finished the third one called the heir of caledon that’s our new it’s a whole trilogy that’s that that’s the year before dunes so it’s all these pivotal events as to how uh the harkonnens got ousted from running the spice operations in dune and the machinations of emperor saddam iv and how house house atreides which is a relatively backwater uh noble family how do they get the most powerful thief in the entire uh imperium so it that’s just it leads you up to to what’s going on uh in in well the movie and the novel dune so uh brian and i have been working together um our first dune novel was public called house of treaties was published in 1999 so we’ve been working together for 21 years and over those those two decades there have been many film things building up and then crashed and then they go up again and then they’d crash brian and i were consultants we worked on it early on in the in the script process and we helped them develop it and we’re we are just so involved in the in the dune universe not just with our novels but uh we’re very proud that last year we produced a graphic novel adaptation of frank herbert’s original novel so it’s a a scene-by-scene adaptation of of dune never been done before in comics and and abram’s books did that uh i know you mentioned earlier about creative collaboration and things so brian and i brainstorm and i talked about that but writing the the comic in the graphic novel we’ve got uh the artist and the colorist and we were from the very beginning when we write a book we kind of describe things but i don’t actually have to draw or model what one of the ornithopter ships looks like but the artist has to know what it looks like because he’s drawing it and we spent a lot of time doing um conceptual sketches with the artists and and what do the like when i’m writing a book it’s it’s paul and duncan go do something well the artist actually has to know what their shirt looks like what their shoes look like what their pants look like and you know i don’t pay that much attention to my own clothes when i put them on so so developing these that that’s an added focus of creativity that um i didn’t have to do in some ways you and brian are the custodians of this legacy and it really matters right people listening might think why does that stuff matter but the fans know right and the fans will jump on your case immediately if you get it wrong oh the the tiniest uh little inconsistency or glitch and uh and you know i’m a big star trek fan too i think a lot of a lot of you are and and star trek i we we love it to pieces but i think we have to admit that it’s not 100 consistent all the way through from the captain kirk era to the um but they they try and for doom we’re really trying to keep it uh as consistent as as possible and when we’re we’re watching the canon from uh both our books and frank herbert’s books when i think about doom one of the things themes that one of the through lines i guess that makes it consistent from book to book or from episode episode is that it’s um a story about power and also about nature and environment power in environments people projecting power trying to control power and it’s all informed by deep history this is one of the things that frank herbert really figured out is that you can write a story about the future but that future has to come with its own history and so they’re all constantly referring back to it that’s important for our show too because a lot of folks when they think about the future fail to account for decisions that were made in the past they’re going to kind of constrain the future in some respects that’s something you have to work within too when you’re working on the dune series well and and frank herbert left this whole i mean he created this galactic empire science fiction universe but it looks very medieval there are no computers there are no aliens there are dukes and barons and and emperors and and they live in castles and i mean the aesthetic of it yeah the aesthetic of it was um you know it was a great story but then you asked the question well why do they have dukes and castles and where did the computers go and and he developed this entire history about this massive uh revolt against technology and overthrowing uh basically a a uh tyrannical thinking machines that enslaved humanity and the humans uh rose up and overthrew them and destroyed all the computers and they said they’re never going to do that again but then we need computers so they’ve developed mentats which are like human computers with with super identic memories and and fast thing so basically what the underpinnings in dune is instead of using technology and crutches to help us uh achieve great things it’s humanity itself that has evolved and improved itself to do the great things right the benefits are at sisterhood the navigators these these they’re mutated that the navigators can foresee like every possible course through millions of star systems when they fold space and and it’s it’s a unique thing right instead of like um and again i like star trek but in star trek the engineer always invents something that fixes what their problem is and they get out of it well in in the frank herbert universe it’s the humans that find the solutions to it and use their own abilities to to solve things and also to screw things up completely as a science fiction author who thinks about scenarios and sometimes sometimes you’re forced to think about the worst case scenario tell me about the last two years the last 18 months or so as a sci-fi author could you possibly have envisioned a world where there’d be a global pandemic and fires and floods and all this biblical stuff going on that locks us down at home and actually makes us afraid to touch other people tell me about that scenario well what i can tell you is if i wrote it they would laugh at me the critics would have that novel i mean they they literally would have we still um are robertson in the us and and and brett’s overseas but we uh we have this massive percentage of the population that is still flat out denying global warming they’re flat there are people dying in our covent wards with respirator tubes who are furious and saying that kovid doesn’t exist as they’re dying they’re they’re refusing a vaccine that has gone to 1.4 billion people with virtually no no deaths and terror i mean how about 40 40 recorded deaths from the vaccine role and we’re getting closer to 2 billion now i mean it’s very much reminding me of some of the stuff in doing that we have the the movements called the butlerians the the anti-technology anti-science the the uh it this i’ve learned since that it’s sort of an apocryphal story but the when galileo was seeing the moons going around jupiter and he could see them with his telescope and he was showing them to the cardinals of the catholic church and which at the time their teachings were no the earth is the center of everything so there couldn’t possibly be moons orbiting anything else and and he showed through the telescope the cardinals to look at the moons going around jupiter and they looked through the telescope and said nope i don’t see anything no i i understand that may be an apocryphal story but it’s still an instructive story so um i i did want to ask you if i could for to to go back to dune history a little bit where does jodorowsky’s dune fit into all of sort of the creative timeline it was obviously it didn’t get into the movie but there was a lot of really creative interesting work done for it well i to use since i’ve also written for dc comics and those analogies i’d say that jodorowsky’s dune is in like earth 12. it’s an entirely different alternate universe somewhere um i did see the documentary about jodorowsky’s yeah it was fascinating and yeah i mean it’s a fascinating documentary the guy was filled with imagination all kinds of stuff and if he had actually made dune it would have been an absolute disaster in my mind i think it would have been so so freaky and bizarre and and strange that and we think that the david lynch movie is a bit strange and off generosity’s would have been so far off the deep end that’s just that’s just my opinion i i have and i will confess that i i have not seen the finished version of the new movie and i’m uh uh because of ndas and stuff i can’t really talk about it but um it what i’ve seen and what they’ve released and the trailer this the the new movie just really looks like they’ve captured dune so i’m i’m very very hopeful um what what other universes do you enjoy working in obviously with 17 books that you and frank have done is it 17 you said right right 17 we’re on the 17th one i think yeah so um obviously you must enjoy the june universe it works for you but what other universes are you particularly attached to well and see the the thing is as a writer and being creative i i don’t if i have to write the same kind of book all the time day after day year after year then it would feel like i’m actually working a regular job so why would i want to do that um so i i have my own it’s a massive science fiction universe called the saga of seven sons yeah uh where’s my favorite 13 13 books in that now i did a seven book arc and then a sequel trilogy and some other things in that so i developed that and that’s such a huge universe and i love it and i’ve just now finished a a giant epic fantasy kind of game of thrones lord of the rings thing uh called spine of the dragon was the first one venge war like revenge war was the second one and the third one gods and dragons comes out in january and so that and that’s fantasy so there’s magic and things in it but magic still has rules just like science does you can’t just have gandalf saying i’m gonna do the spell of convenience now to do whatever it is the plot needs to do uh so i i spent a long time developing that history of the magic system and the races and the maps and all that sort of thing and then just to be very quirky um i have a a ridiculous humorous uh horror mystery series about a continuing character who is dan shamble zombie pi and it’s sort of like the naked gun sam spade and it’s a a quirky noir with uh he’s he’s a private detective and he’s a zombie and he solves crimes with werewolves and ghosts and mummies and that’s exactly what i’m doing right now since i finished writing the heir of caledon with brian big huge dune serious stuff i i’m going into this universe the dan shamble universe because it’s just so quirky and and frankly ridiculous and stupid it’s kind of like the adams family or the naked gun or uh any of those that might might be resonant to people so it’s i i just love writing i love telling stories um i i have worked a real job i think i’m unemployable if i were to stop writing um but i i really do enjoy it i play with my my characters i develop their worlds and then i torture the characters and destroy the world so it’s uh that’s my job as a writer um i did did want to ask you what was it like riding with l ron hubbard well i didn’t actually write with l ron hubbard so it’s uh so uh but you’ve got a book credit together i’ve got a book credit i’ve got let’s see for now it’s almost 30 years uh i’ve been a judge for the writers of the future contest which is a a very successful international uh writing contest that elrond hubbard endowed before he died he left a large chunk of money to fund this concept contest and actually frank herbert was one of the judges brian herbert is one of the judges um uh let’s see greg benford um anne mccaffrey was um todd mccaffrey her son is one of them other and jody lynn nye nancy kress their major science fiction writers are are judges in this contest uh and obviously ron hubbard died in 1980 something 485 something like that and his publisher uh who also manages the the contest they had found an old movie script that l ron hubbard had written back in the late 50s or early 60s and obviously they were eager to have like a new book for them to publish and so they asked me to take this old movie script to his and novelize it and actually it is it’s quite funny it’s like a spy versus spy uh about people um an evil uh rebel south american dictator who happens to look exactly like this very straight-laced um uh upper cross cia operative and they both look exactly the same and of course circumstances happen so that they switch places so that the straight lace guy everybody thinks he’s the rebel leader and and uh our subtitle is when intelligence goes wrong and uh it it was uh so i worked on that it was a lot of fun i filled it in and then it was published and that actually is how i i earned my guinness world record that when they when they launched that book they it just the massive publicity campaign that i i mean i’ve never had anything like this and we had a book signing down in hollywood they shut down streets they they gave they had bands playing they gave out free banana splits and i signed thousands and thousands and thousands of hardcovers that night and that gave me the the first guinness world record for the largest book signing ever so that’s amazing so so that’s my experience writing a book that that i share credit with without ron hubbard so i can tell you it’s yeah that’s an amazing that was a lot of fun if you ask me cool you know um kevin we had a chat briefly and and we were talking a little bit about covet and and and one of the things that’s so surprising to me about the covet outbreak and the subsequent the social unrest and so on from my perspective it was very predictable uh you know people act like it was something nobody could have expected and nobody knew that this could happen but in fact for 20 years people have been saying it’s going to be an outbreak there’s going to be another pandemic it’s probably going to be a coronavirus it’s probably going to come from wuhan it’ll probably come from a bat in a cave like that level of precision was available and in fact even just a year before the the initial outbreak there was some speculation about that and so i guess one of my things i’d ask you for is some advice for our listeners um how can we think better about the future how can we think more athletically about the future well and and here i and i get exactly what you’re saying and as a science base my my undergrad degree is in physics and astronomy i mean as a science guy i i get all these predictions and i understand that science isn’t always right okay but there are other people that think if if the cdc says something it must be forever true and never changed and then when the cdc modifies their their things then they feel like they’ve been lied to or they’ve been cheated and why can i believe anything that they’re saying but but i think the main point that i want to do is it’s the the boy who cried wolf syndrome and we have been warned for decades but the problem is we’ve been warned about the uh the bird flu or the swine flu the we’ve been warned about these things over and over again that compared to kovid kind of fizzled they didn’t really turn out to be worldwide walking dead zombie apocalypse kind of plagues and so when we’re told the the avian flu it’s going to wipe out the entire population of the earth and it doesn’t happen and then we’re told again that the next one is going to wipe out yeah so then when it finally does happen we go oh well somebody cried wolf five times and we didn’t take it seriously it’s it’s the same thing with the weather report how many tornado watches do you get and you never see a tornado um but you don’t want them to not do the tornado warning exactly just in case but you get to the point where you go i’ve heard this before there’s nothing nothing big with it and i remember that because people have a misunderstanding between a prediction and and a projection or a probability right when they talk about the weather they’re talking about probabilities and there’s always a plus or minus in accuracy right but most people don’t get that concept they think a prediction is a certainty and it’s just not possible to make certain predictions that’s not you you can’t do it well i do kind of as a side note though so i just just last weekend as we’re recording this just last weekend i went to my first big comic-con convention in a year and a half and it was in kansas city which which was a fairly hot spot for the delta variant and and everybody used the precautions we hoped for everybody in the hotel was masked everybody in the convention center was masked everybody on the airplane was masked and we all did our thing but as i was standing there at my booth and i was signing autographs and i was i was talking to the fans and i was all day long with this mask on and i believe in them i’m not anti-master but i hate it i mean it really is inconvenient so you can understand why why people would be we just want this magically over so yeah um but that’s not going to happen we got to figure it out so anyway i i just we could rant on on covent for a while that’ll get you a bunch of hate mail i think that’s that’s how you do it just yeah now we we well um as you know i’ve talked about the the impact of some of this in the new book as well but um where can people find because we just got to wrap up in a couple of minutes where can people find the lady of calidan and and more information on the book well the lady of caledon um it it’s available all where books are sold if you’ve got amazon in your country or uh my own publishing house word fire press is doing the uk edition uh random house is doing the australian edition uh it should be easily uh available or the first book the duke of caladan is out now uh my own website is word fire like words on fire wordfire.com and there are some links on there there’s also a dune novels.com which has a bunch of dune information and we just hope you’ll check it out i’ve got a lot of books to read so pick one where do you stay in touch with your fans twitter facebook yeah i’ve got i’ve got twitter which is the word the and then my initials the kja uh and on facebook just look for the official kevin j anderson page that’s where i do my like daily interacting for for conversations um we have a newsletter and stuff like that too but but check me out on social media and there will be breadcrumbs for you to follow other places well kevin j anderson um award-winning author new york times bestseller guinness book of world record holder um thank you dune the lady of calidan is out now wherever good books are sold thank you very much for uh for joining us today well great to be stopped for talking to both of you guys thank you very much thanks kevin we’ll see you in the future yes absolutely well that’s it for the futurists this week if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don’t forget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the show and you can ping us anytime on instagram and twitter at futurist podcast for the folks that you’d like to see on the show or the questions you’d like us to ask thanks for joining and as always we’ll see you in the future

Breaking Banks
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