You have to understand that the majority of the time that Black Americans is spent in this country, it's been spent on the side of being an other and it still is today, and it's important for someone to understand what the other feels like so that they can have compassion for someone else.

You can get into the complexities of the stories and the complexity of the individual characters and everything they're going through.

Ultimately, it's like, listen, this is what it feels like.

And if you look at that book and you go it makes me uncomfortable.

Understand that that discomfort is what other people are feeling when you aren't recognizing them in their context of what's really going on in the country.

Hey va, fam, I am honestly what an amazing idea.

I had to create a podcast where I can just get incredible people to talk to me and people whose work I have gotten to enjoy.

And this is the first time I feel like I don't think I've had an author of a fiction novel.

We do lots of author interviews at Brown Ambition BA fan, you know, we do because we love our career in our finance books.

But I am such a fiction fan.

I mean, my guilty secret as a personal finance and negotiation expert is that the majority of what I read has nothing to do with business and finance.

It is escapism, It is science fiction, it is fantasy, little romance.

I love books.

They are so especially at a time like this, crucial, as like an escape route from reality.

Sometimes and then there are books like sky Full of Elephants by today's guest ce Bo Campbell, not Williams.

Even though I will never live down the mistake I made when I don't know why I want you to be Williams so bad, we'll just leave that alone.

I have the author of the novel sky Full of Elephants with us today, be a fan, and I couldn't be more grateful.

This is just such a treat and such a joy for me to be here.

And he's in New York at Simon and Schuster.

On the seventh we talked about the seventeenth floor on the celebrity floor.

Now as someone who has always loved books, and like also we'll talk about your career path.

You know you you work full time, you have your own business.

I'm just geeked for you, like I am excited for you as a person who has written this book who has which has become such a massive success, and everybody black is talking about this book.

Everybody black.

It's like sky full of elephants cinners.

That's my thread speed.

That's it, that's the that's what I want, that's what I want.

I want.

It was for black people, so it was it was important to me, indeed, And when we did the initial marketing, I was like, I know, you want to like try to get it in your times.

You want to try to get it in you know, Alley Town's a possim Clobet's find the black bookstrogrammers.

Let's go talk to them first.

Let's give them arcs, Let's give them space.

And I put it out.

I was like, anyone that's trying to do a book club, there's four people in that book club.

There's twenty people in that book club.

I'm coming.

Or you got to do is say the word and I'll be there.

And I did.

I mean, I was, I don't even know.

I did like a hundred book clubs.

I've done so many, and it's like I want to have a conversation with black people.

And that the impetus came from like coming to my a I first wrote the book my mom.

I went home to visit my mom and she invited all of her church friends to the house and she was like, they all need to talk to you about this book.

And I was like okay, and I said how they had read it.

My mom had an arc, so I gave her a couple of early arts and she was passing the minds all beat up, and they just they were like, we want to talk to you.

And it was the range of conversation, the things that they really didn't have space to communicate, didn't have space to get into, they did and it was really remarkable, and I realized, that's what that's what it's all about.

The book is a flat tape that we can gather around.

That's metaphor number two that I will steal.

And the anchor, fine, you can have it, you can have it.

What a book?

All right?

I got to tell you something, so bea fam I'm by the way, spoilers are ahead.

I'm not Terry Gross.

I don't know how to do a book interview and not reveal spoilers about the plot.

And the great thing about Sky Full of Elephants is that the plot feels like a spoiler.

And that's when you know it's going to be good, because they're telling you upfront.

All the white people in the in America, in North America, I think that's what we established in the book, have found the nearest body of water and unlive themselves just walked on in.

And we come to this New America about a year after this so called event, and we meet a couple of characters.

We first meet Charlie, who I love and do you are you someone?

Cibo?

Like do you have?

Do you picture someone in your mind when you're writing your characters like we readers do?

Can I tell you the guy I was picturing the whole time was the boxing coach from the Wire?

Did you watch the Wire?

Whoever that boxing was?

That's good, That's pretty accurate.

That's pretty accurate.

Who all the moms in the neighborhood would come up and be like, Oh, we got a pie for you, coach.

I don't even know his name.

That's pretty accurate.

Though I don't know his name either, but I honestly I had whenever I write, I will have like I'll make my sort of outline, and outline is literally just a sentence free chapter.

And then I will start to accumulate photos of people places, and I have a whole board, like a Pinterest board, like a visual Pints board of just like celebrities that I think, people that I think will fit the characters sort of way, not necessarily always how they look, but their way of being.

And then I have a whole bunch of like places that I can describe them, you know.

And so you're not far off, you know, for who did you picture?

You tell me?

I actually actually actually had my dad.

I know it sounds that's lame, but my dad was trying because my dad was just like Charlie.

He was very He was really really gifted.

He could he could make anything.

He could make anything.

So watch him sketch houses that he wanted to build when I was a kid, and he was sketching in blueprint and he could do most of it.

He could, you know, he could do he could make his own concrete before the foundation, he could do the carpentry work, he could do the plumbing.

He was really gifted.

But he was just not fulfilled, and like his potential sort of crashed down onto itself and he became angry all the time.

And you know, he went from having the potential of being extraordinary father to being a really terrible one.

And I wanted to imagine a world in which he was fulfilled, like he got to achieve all the things that he wanted.

What would that look like?

And so Charlie was the arc of that, that transition into feeling unworthy to feeling worthy.

Wow, I'm just blown away.

I mean I'm not blown away, but when you hear something like that, you know, we're both parents now and you look at these little humans and it's like our only jobs as parents really feels like giving you the tools to cope with this world.

And it's a miracle when parents are damaged and aren't able to heal that their kids go on to, you know, become such a great dad.

Like I can already tell that you're a great dad and an artist, and like, in spite of all that, it's just really beautiful.

And the way that you incorporated that story into your art is just like, that's what it's about.

Yeah, that's what That's how we process these process those the feelings that we don't have language for.

We try to articulate them in such a way that other people can share in it too.

In whatever form that they they sort of experience it.

And so yeah, I think I've always thought that our kids are like and Charlie it was the same way he looked at Sydney's sort of like she was the she could redeem it.

Any our children came in, Oh my god, my dms are all Sydney.

Everybody's Sydney.

They they're so it's either love or hate, and that there's no in between, knowing between.

Hard to write that character Sydney, but yeah, the idea is that she reflects he reflects back to Charlie his own sort of value system.

I think I think as a dad of girls, and in particular the girls will look I look at them and I see, you know, how they're developing.

I see the space that they feel like they occupy.

I see, you know, whether or not they're aspirations no matter what they are, or at least have the space to be fulfilled if that's not happening.

It's reflection on me.

It's reflection on the type of father that I am, the type of person that I am.

It's reflection on what I've given them.

And so when you think of it from a cultural standpoint, my wife is biracial, and so our kids are multiracial in that way, and I go, we live in a predominantly white area in the UK, and I go, I gotta take them to Florida so they can see my mom.

I gotta take them Florida so they can have this chicken.

They take them in Florida, taken experience this culture because it needs to be balanced, and I want to be the person that gives them that, Like, that's my gift, and so I wanted Charlie to experience that too.

I love that stopped giving me so many distracting things to talk about, because now I'm going to be like, that's why we had the insane I like, my family's from Georgia and my dad's from Georgia.

Oh, I'm going to get into my history.

It's going to blow your mind.

But so my dad's from Georgia, I'm obviously biracial.

Maybe not obviously, but I am, and my kids are half Hispanic.

My husband's Dominicans, so they're multiracial.

And the world I think we'll see them racially as Hispanic or Dominican or whatever, because that's how they present.

And I'm just like, oh no, they're gonna know they have a black mama from the South and back, and it's like I want them to see so many different like iterations, like so many different examples of what blackness can look like, and to love it, like they love my dad, they love my aunt, their great aunt Brenda, who's like my grandma, Like they love their cousins on that side, Like I want them to see and be around, you know, and to feel like I love that, you know, so that they can grow up without a doubt, like being consciously aware of the beauty of blackness and the pride of it, and to know that they are.

And I mean it's a brag, but my son colors himself with a brown cranky talk about the apparent night.

They do their like their giant portraits of themselves.

I was like Leo, his name is Rio, like baby, not even in the brightest summer would you ever achieve that shape.

But I love that he wants to be chalk.

I love it.

That's beautiful.

That gives me a lot of joy.

That gives me a lot of joy.

And he did girls on his hair.

That's magical.

It's magical.

Honestly, the idea of the culture is really funny because like it's one you almost have to claim it.

It claims you, but you almost have to claim it.

But when you leave America, the specifically the black American experience is the American experience.

For so many people outside of the country they think of like when they think of America, so many of the traits they are thinking are part of the black culture.

It's not necessarily the white culture, right or not shocking at all.

It's fascinating they you know, they're they're wearing the j's, they're they're talking to talk, you know of maybe like occasionally acting like a Texan or a Californian.

Everything else is just black, Like they think of it as black and it's and it's a counterweight to the concept of like like trump Ism.

You get to like they almost treat it like it's odd and over there.

They're like, that's why are you guys doing that?

And I'm like, I know why i a'll be doing that.

And to them, it's like that the export is blackness, not trump Ism, and not these other elements.

So the art, the music, the films, the TV, the pop culture that is us and so deeply it's very insidious on the other side.

Okay, well I stopped distracting me, all right, We're gonna get to Charlie.

So to establish Charlie, we meet and you know and thank you for telling that.

Example of how that you know your father is woven into Charlie's character.

We meet him twenty years after he's been imprisoned and he is released after the event they break out because all the white people are unalive, they're dead.

And he is a professor at Howard when we meet him, he's teaching what is he teaching?

Solar solar Yeah, it's.

Like electrical systems, and he's teaching a portion of that class is solar panels.

Oh gotcha.

I selfishly, I really wanted to like see what one of his classes would sound like and what the kids are asking him about and if they're kids whatever.

But anyway, maybe the sequel And he gets a call from someone he never knew existed, his daughter, Sydney, who lives in far Flung, Wisconsin, and basically tells him she's in.

Sydney's mother is white, and she tells him you're my dad, and I need you to come.

I need you to come get me because I've been here.

For a year.

Surviving, and I'm trying to get to, of all places, Alabama.

She wants to go to Alabama for some reason.

Sydney feels like Alabama is where the world hasn't changed, and she's going to find her people, her people, her people, her people, the ones that could be left in Alabama.

And Charlie gets in his little Prius or whatever whatever it is.

It's definitely a prius, says, no doubt.

There's a lot of preous So well, Prius.

I know just a picture that it's very like interesting.

The blackmail hero not driving like a muscle car or something.

She gets into the electric car.

He finds his way to Wisconsin, so I'll pause there.

He's about to meet his daughter.

She's nineteen.

Will we meet Sydney nineteen?

And I'll tell you that I actually started to read The Sky Full of Elephants, or listen.

I listened to it.

I did a combo listening and reading on my on my on my phone, like an e book thing.

And I was visiting my sister in Wisconsin and my mother in Wisconsin where my mother's from.

What my mother is white?

My mother is white, She's born and raised in Wisconsin.

Oh, my gosh, my sister and I have different fathers, so my older sister and my older brother are fully white.

We were raised as siblings, so you know whatever.

And then my younger brother and I are both biracial.

And when we meet Sydney, she's not only in Wisconsin, she's also the biracial, the only biracial child in her family.

So she's had to watch her brothers, her mother, her stepfather walk into the lake behind their house and kill themselves, and she's tried to save them, you know, at that scene where she's trying to save them and she can't and she can't make herself drown because her will to live, Like whatever.

I got chills just telling you that.

And I started to read it, and I was in the kitchen with my mom and my sister, and I was like, so, I'm reading this book.

No, no, I don't know why sometimes I choose violence.

It is really uncomfortable to tell your white mom that you're reading a book about how all the white people are dead.

She was like, now, listen, we've she and I we have gotten through two Trump terms, you know, like two Trump elections, and in the first one, she did not vote on the right side of progression and she's come around, like she's made so many strides, but that was a tough one for her to swallow.

She wasn't pleased about the premise.

And then I realized, I can't explain this to her.

It's not for her.

You know, Hey, ba fam, we got to take a quick break, pay some bills, and we'll be right back.

All right, ba fam, We're back.

But the way that, like, there is so much overlap with my story in Sydney's story, and like I would have been Sidney Devin, I could I could actually kind of put I could put myself and how she might have put myself in her shoes?

Like what if it had been in my teenage years when we all did live together and only my brother and I would be left because my mom and dad split up, So then I would have had to go find well, he wasn't there, he was in Atlanta anyone that party.

But wow, I don't think I've ever met anyone that has that close to parallel.

That's incredible, right, So I was like, why, Wisconsin, why you know what?

How did Sydney the character get formed?

Well, she was initially based off of my wife and my older daughter to some degree, right, so my wife, like when I first wrote the first chapter with just Charlie early on, I gave it to my wife and she responded to it like she was like, this isn't my experience.

She goes my experience growing up bi racial in West London, I didn't have black culture around me.

I didn't indeed, I didn't even know how to interact with it.

There were times when I would see a bunch of black women together, I didn't feel like I could just roll up on them like that.

I didn't feel my blackness.

And she traveled back and forth to New York quite a lot as a kid, and she goes the only time I felt when I was in New York with my grandmother, who was from Trinidad.

But then she'd go back to London and she would be disconnected, and so I started to think, well, I want to incorporate her experience.

At the same time, my daughter was having trouble with her hair and she was just like, Dad, I just want you to like either shave it or just do dreadlocks, because I don't even want to have to.

I don't want to have to comb these curls out every day, I don't want to deal with it.

And I realized how much her hair as signed itself to her identity, and she didn't understand it.

I hadn't done the work to help her understand how important it was.

Now she loves her hair, and so I started there.

And then Wisconsin was for two reasons.

One that there are cities in Wisconsin.

I'm sure you know that are like the whitest cities literally in America.

Like one I was looking at her.

I want to say it was maybe Kenosha.

It was ninety eight point one per white, which is like, that's crazy, Like that's a lot that's like a lot of not it's a lot of homogical happening right Like it's it's real strong and so.

And it just so happened that many years before I wrote this book, I was profiled in the store one time and it wasn't bad, but it was one of those things that you know, you're just annoyed that somebody comes up to you asking a bunch of stupid questions, wanted you to show them your bag to make sure you didn't steal anything, like come on, So I walk out of the store.

This was this was in Florida.

But I was with I was with a bunch of friends who were from Wisconsin.

They're from White white Fish Bay and from Milwaukee.

And I walk out and I tell them I was like, this thing just happened.

And I was kind of like, you know what happens, you know to black people.

And one of the people, this girl shoes there, she goes, she goes, could you just be making that up?

I was like, why the world would I make that up?

And she goes, well, black people say that type of stuff all the time and more if you're just maybe picking up on it because you just feel connected to other black people.

And I'm looking at her like that doesn't need one does it even makes sense?

But two, It's like I'm trying to tell you the sky is full of elephants, and I can see the elephants and you can't.

And one day those elephantsre gonna crash down.

And you said it just like that to her, And that became eventually the title of the book.

And because she was from Wisconsin, and because Wisconsin was such a strong concentration of whiteness and sort of culturally in my experience at least, I was like this feels right, and then you know, Kenosha with that guy Kyle Rittenhouse happened and I was like, yeah, let's go there, let's do it there, and so it worked out that way.

Yeah.

Way, let me tell you what I thought about hit me and you know your name?

I couldn't tell.

I'm like, oh, is this a guy written who's written this?

Or a woman?

So I found out I don't like to necessarily go into a book understanding everything about the author because it's not always super relevant.

But I did.

I had.

The more I got into the book, we meet Sydney and she has internalized so much.

Well, I mean, I'll tell you what my perception is, and you can kind of tell me.

But when I feel like when we meet her, she's so she's so traumatized and devastated by the death of her family that she looks to the only people that she feels like she can blame.

Who is who's left?

And who's left?

Yes, appear to be you know, well, actually I don't think I'm even clear on who's all left.

Is it just black people who are left?

Or are there others?

It's there are others, there's you know, Latinos are left and Asians are left, and Native Indigenous people are left.

But I had this image in my head or to sound bite in my head, and it was a James Baldwin.

He has said something along the lines of he goes, I know white people don't know a lot of things, but I do know this, you don't want to be black here.

And it was that.

I was like, it was the concept of like sort of anti blackness that created the event, and it was less about you know, if a person is this type of black or this type of black, but rather the desire to not be black was what sort of inspired it.

That was how I was picturing it in my mind.

Is like, because people ask me all the time that like is this is this white?

Or is this white?

And I'm like, I'm not really thinking about what it's white.

I'm thinking about what doesn't want to be black?

What is avoidant of black?

And that's what was important to me.

Well, when we meet Sydney, she definitely doesn't want to be black.

I know she does not.

She is so much internalized, well even like delusion, because I don't even think she really fully accepts her blackness.

You know, she's kind of grown up in this all white area and I too.

I mean, I mean I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, so I wasn't as isolated from you know, diversity in a good way.

But then I would still go to schools where I was the only chocolate chip in the pancake.

And then it's like, do you feel othered?

And my dad was in my life, so I couldn't, but I still, you know, I did have that tug of war that she feels when she finally does does get to have community and meet other you know, black people, that feeling of like does she belong here?

And all of that.

I definitely grapple with that is just like your wife, you know, did feeling like, well, if there's a that's who I want to be around, but do they want me?

Am I gonna like pass the test to get you know?

And but yeah, it was really difficult to read the character of Sydney because she has internalized so much racism and bigotry and prejudice.

And I was like, all right, Sydney girl, I'm gonna trust we are gonna go on a ride.

You're gonna figure this out.

That's it.

That's it.

So people, I'm not surprised people.

It's been so polarizing.

Like you said the response to her, I also feel like it was a brave character choice for her because those feeling are very real, Like they're very believable if we give into the idea that like humanity is capable of incredible racism and prejudice and self hatred, self loathing.

Those are human feelings and emotions that exist, and at a time like this, I think it's I think it's important to acknowledge that they exist so that we can try to change them or you know, or be aware of them.

We can't be in this like state of you know, a state of like I don't know, a little bit of delusion or ignorance about what's really happening, because then we end up being like, wait, what how is take here again?

I definitely think it's an ignorance.

It's in part because we're constantly sort of distracted and put in the teams, and then you go, the only community I have is this team that I'm on, and you haven't really vetted in because it's probably distracted all the time about something else.

And Sydney, for her part, you're exactly right in that you know, she was internalized and she had developed, you know, these similar feelings about about black blackness and black culture.

But simultaneously, the loss of her mother, the loss of her her family, made her want to hold on to it.

And so at once she's gripping in order to claim something and unwilling to release that claim, to claim something else, claim claim more.

And there's this tension.

And so there's actually two parts in the book, and I realized they sort of I wrote them to be ripped quite subtly, but there were projections of both Charlie and Sidney Psyche.

So you had when Charlie leaves DC and he's driving across to go meet Sidney.

The first person Charlie encounters is is uh the woman?

The woman?

And again I like that she was she was, I really like it.

I know she was great.

The earth was burned black all around.

And he arrives to her and she immediately like sort of reorients him to himself.

She gives him some food, nourishes him, she gives him wisdom, and she sort of goes, you know, who are you going to be?

And sends him on his way to become it.

In my mind, that was a projection of his psyche.

He literally had to drive into the blackness in order to reach a person that felt ancestral, who could go, let me point you in the right direction.

Right, And she says, she's like, you're going to Wisconsin to figure out your life, right, to find something.

When Sydney leaves Wisconsin, or leaves Oscosch, the first place she comes as Kenosha, and that town is spray painted in white and a chaos of whiteness.

And she meets Little, and Little is wearing the KKK uniform.

His blackness is shrouded in white, and he grabs Sydney and he says, you're one of us, and he doesn't want to let her go.

That's her psyche, that's her whiteness going.

You can't leave this place, you can't leave this way of being, and it is chaotic, and the whole town is the only town is busted again.

All the other towns are actually intact, but that one's busted up.

And when she falls into Charlie's arms, that's when her journey towards claiming blackness begins.

But up until then, she's sort of starting to go the route of Little, where it's breaking something's breaking in her mind, and so both of those things are true.

What's the total I'm trying to think like that the novel takes place over how many days?

It doesn't feel like that long.

No, it's not that long.

It's I wanna say, maybe like seven eight days something like that.

Yeah, it's like a week.

So for me, when I realized that, like towards the end of the novel, I don't want to give anything away.

Also, Doug, go buy the novel.

I'm trying to give Sydney grace because she has such a long way to go.

Like it's not like I'm glad that she got her hair moist and she got loved on by some beautiful black queens like, but Homegirls still doesn't know how to do her hair by herself.

If she ever has children, like she's gonna have to deal with it all again.

Like she needs a lot of therapy.

And you know, I tried to have compassion for her.

Yeah, it was definitely painful to you to see her be in so much pain and to like miss out on all the love she could have for herself.

But I try to like what gave me peace was like it's only been a week.

She has a long life ahead of her.

Working away.

I think that was that was something that kind of got lost as well.

There are two.

The one there is like a constant motif of the lavender, and the lavender was a nod to have.

Great my mom's favorite scent.

I didn't even mention that, Oh, that's.

So funny, weird.

And Elizabeth Laura Jane.

I have not talked about your book with her since I read it because she really didn't like.

I was like, I was like, Mom, it's not like I want you to die.

She's like, but you're reading this book.

I'm like, yeah, but I didn't think it.

This guy did.

Let me talk to your mom to get jump in a book?

What would you say?

I mean, you don't have to answer to her, like or anybody really about it's your book.

But it's not about answering.

The whole point is to expand us a little bit, to make us, you know, to expand our minds towards imagining a different reality.

Because the truth is is, while your mom might go, you know, I don't this this is suggestive of like killing all the white people.

You have to understand that the majority of the time that black Americans is spent in this country.

It's been spent on the side of being an other and it still is today.

And it's important for someone to understand what the other and feels like so that they can have compassion for someone else.

You can get into the complexities of the stories and the complexity of the individual characters and everything they're going through.

Ultimately, it's like, listen, this is what it feels like.

And if you look at that book and you go it makes me uncomfortable, understand that that discomfort is what other people are feeling when you aren't recognizing them in the context of what's really going on in the country, what their needs are.

And so if you feel that that's an important feeling, it's an important feeling to process, an important pathway towards empathy.

I think then you get into the characters.

You know, when you get into the characters, you understand that the idea that some of these characters in the story could endure what would be a massive, massive, massive change in the country.

To have that many people, I mean, that's sixty percent of the country disappearing.

Like to see that and to go that's really really bad.

And somehow I feel free, Like if someone said that to you, saying that because they're mean.

They're not saying that because they dislike you.

They're saying that because that is the degree to which they feel oppressed.

And I want people to understand that, like, that's not if someone says to you they would feel freer.

That's that's an orient yourself to that, to like where they at, because that means that they're in a place that they feel really really restricted and half for a long time, so much so that they are breath of this, like they've been indoors for the last two hundred years and all of a sudden, they're like, this is what air feels like.

It's amazing.

And I think there's there's certainly a need for understanding and compassion, but I think when I think about it, the word is always empathy.

It's like, just exchange the emotion and you'll see, and when you see, hopefully it impacts your emotions.

And there's no reason to be angry, no no reason to be mad, there's no reason to feel I mean, I say this to people all the time, like the whole of Middle Earth was created in a book and they're ain't a single black person like they're elves.

Man, there's like hobbits where they're no black people.

You know, there's so much logic.

People don't listen.

I mean, there's so much logic.

We don't have time for logic.

I mean, like it's not this datage.

So but yeah, I like that conversation and I and frankly, I think Sidney, you know, ultimately, I think she represents the grace that black people have had towards what is an astounding amount of racism over a long period of time.

It's always been with grace.

It's always been with like you you slap me, and yet I'm still standing here, willing to be at the table with you.

I'm still here, you know.

And I feel like that is Sidney sort of represents the other side of that, and it does.

It's like Lavender is like a reminder of grace, and then at the end of the book without giving away the full inning, and she has to go off man and go figure that out.

And a lot of people say that to me, They're like, I want more, I want to see what happens after that, and it's like, I know, you do.

That's why I wrote it that way, because at point that's the point, like think, like take it with you and imagine, like imagine what that that the healing feels like, you know, and so yeah, Sidney's I would love it.

I would love that conversation with your mouth.

Yeah.

I just wanted Sydney to know that that what was a guy's name, the cutie that she was crushing on.

Sugar fella fella.

Oh what a beautiful name, fella fella.

Uh yeah, tell me little things.

I wondered, is it too much on the nose too, like the parallel between the Great Passage, you know, like slaves being brought across the sea and dying in the water and then that's how the white people die.

Was that too much of a parallel for me to draw?

What was the water?

The water?

No, no, no, the water was meant to be an erasure.

So it was partially tactical because I wanted I didn't want a whole bunch of dead bodies lying around, so I couldn't like have you know, Stephen Kenby wanted it to feel right.

It just wont me to look, so I needed the erasio.

I definitely wanted the idea of the tide coming back to be prevalent, and then I wanted to be visible that no matter where you went, you couldn't escape this sensation.

If you saw a river, if you saw a lake, if you saw a bath, the water suggested a rebirth and a change in a sort of evolution.

And you know it.

When Charlie had his bath, when Sydney had her bath, they were changed.

You know, there's a lot of these sort of interactions with water, but the Middle Passage specifically one of the early questions I got.

And I don't think they think I had an answer.

They were like, well, bodies float.

This was my first book talk I did in New York.

I think this guy thought he had in the corner.

He was like, well, bodies float.

So if the body's walking into the water, water were they're flating all over?

And I just went, have you heard of the Middle Passage?

He's like yeah.

And I was like, our ancestors held them down, and so they got us.

That's all.

That's all you need to know.

In that water, they got us, and so they gave the world back to us.

So there was a connection.

It wasn't as as clear as like, it wasn't as metaphoric for me as quite literal in that they were there, the spirits of them, you know, held them down and wouldn't let those bodies float.

They sort of allowed the world to come back to us.

There's a scene where Sydney's where her parents walked to the water and she says she tried to pull them up as she physically couldn't.

It was like trying to pull the whole earth up with him.

And that is the idea is they were being held.

Hey, ba fam, We're going to take a quick break, pay some bills, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back, be a fam.

Let's get back to the show.

Well, I haven't had a chance to read it again.

Like I said, I have two small children.

I read a book through one time.

So that's a when that shows you how much I wanted to.

Read the book.

Huge if she wanted and I really wanted to read this book, you like, I haven't even read the plot twist.

I know there's going to be we're going to find out who did this and what did this?

But I want to read it again because I'm still trying to My brain is still trying to unravel the last like twenty five percent of the book because the emotion, you know, and yeah, it's the emotions were carrying me through the first part of the book and the feeling and the whoa, I'm just like on this ride, and then the technical stuff comes in and I'm like, I can't.

I can't process this exactly.

It's a lot, but it's it's it's complex, and I wanted it to be really complex because a lot of there's a there's like an excavation of history and if I'm tangenting, just tell me, but there's a lot of excavation of history about America and then Haiti and I wanted to give a nod to the relationship is something larger than that, something big.

And the Shango bone is a note in that that that bone is real, Like I didn't make that up.

That bone is literally twenty five thousand years old and it has we talk about the bone.

You decided to say, I don't want to be super spoiling spoilery.

But got it.

Got it.

The bone it's called the jungle bone, and it was found on the Nile, not far from the Congo and they when they discovered this bone, it's not big bones like the size of a pencil.

There are striations on the bones.

Marking on the bones that did note it a very complex mathematical system.

I think it's the equivalent of computational binary, like really complex like mathematics on a bone the size of a pencil.

And when they first found it, they did the carbon dating on it, and they thought it was five thousand years old.

Now, for context, the Greeks are three thousand, so it's still older than the Greeks.

And what we're talking about is like Pythagoras and all that is two thousand years older than they thought.

It was two thousand years older than Pathagonas America is only two hundred, two hundred and seventy years old, So two thousand years before Pythagoras.

They found his bone, and then they a couple of years later they redid the carbon dating on it.

Because of the technology for carbon dating evolved, they found it was twenty five thousand years That's it's hard for me to comprehend.

It's not hard now, but like when I first heard about this, I'm like, wait a minute.

The people that you've been telling me all of my life are like living in huts and trees.

Were able to put the equivalent of computational mathematics on a bone twenty five thousand years ago.

That happened, and it had and then I started to look at more stuff discover such amazing stuff like the Dogon and Mali and all these different places they were doing extraordinary things, and so I wanted the book to sort of have a turn towards that and go, hey, what we're talking about here is we're talking about America.

We're talking about this the healing of all of the trauma of enslavement and Jim Crow and all of it.

But there's a whole lot more stuff that you still don't know yet that are signals in the air that you can have access to, and it's really found is really complex, and so the whole nod to Nikola Tesla was was to that because he's doing a lot of the experiments that he did was based off of experiments that were already done in Egypt and different parts of Kimmit, and so I was like, I want to give a nod to that.

And so it went a bit complex, but I like it.

But our history is complex and it's it's it's deep, you know.

I think being black in America you do kind of grow up with the understanding and like our history was stolen from us and we don't know where we come from and all of that.

But but we we have to do more work.

But it's there.

So if you were picking, if you were like putting together a great like like you know, read Sky Full of Elephants and then go to this museum or read this book or you know what kind of if someone's really curious to learn more about these topics, what we're in, sources of inspiration for you or places you can point be a fan too.

Yeah, I mean I love the book anything about France Fanan.

His work is a lot about decolonization and colonization and decolonization.

Uh Chinwa Chepe who wrote Things Fall Apart, and he wrote it, I want to say he wanted in the sixties, but it was like telling the actual stories of people that were living in nations when a colonization was happening.

Things Fall Apart is great or God is Great and anything about Friends fort On.

But I really love Wretched of the Earth.

It's like, man, it's intense, really intense.

And then I would say Maladoma Patrisse some who wrote of Water and Spirit and I love this book so much.

It's about this kid who's growing up in Burkina Fosso, which Burkina Fosso right now is like leading the sort of African ascendency right now.

They're doing amazing stuff.

He was he was Braisen Bikino fossil in a tribe that had a specific religion called Tagara, and he was kidnapped.

Although the children were kidnapped and taken to a monastery to become you know, preachers and nuns, and then they were sent back to sort of bring the people to Christ, and so he was.

And this was happening over generations and many jurations.

So he was kidnapped when he was like eight, taken to this place and he was never able to do his When they turned thirteen, they do their ceremony to become an adult.

He was never able to do it.

He ran away when he was nineteen.

He goes back to his tribe and he's begging them to take him back, and they're like, no, we can't.

You're encoded with a completely different system because you went and he begged them.

He got his father to beg him, and they were like, we're going to put you through this ceremony.

And it's probably going to kill you, but if you get through the ceremony, you'll be reconnected with our people and the story.

And it's a it's not it's an audible, it's like it's a true story.

It's what he experienced going through that, what he had to shed and what he had to gain.

It's extraordinary, extraordinary.

Oh, I can see how that might have inspired the bath and yeah, exactly some of those.

Okay, I'm trying to like use my time wisely and I have questions just career wise, Like you wrote this book.

You run your own creative brand agency.

You're not a professional author as a job.

Turns out that's really hard to do and make.

Money from the struggle.

Talk about, like I know, on very much time, but tell me a little bit about your career trajectory and how it led you to, you know, getting the time to write this book.

Now, Yeah, I was.

I went to college on a football scholarship.

But while I was there, I sort of became a writer, which is on an interesting story, but I sort of became a writer.

And I was trying to decide if I wanted to write and I wanted to do film, or if I wanted to try to actually go to the NFL, which was my dream.

And then I realized I was a little too small to go to the NFL, even though I made go to college, and I decided to write.

I wrote, right, we got to step into it, America, We got to step into it.

But I wrote my first book when I was like twenty at four to as a part of the course that I was in, and it got published, but it wasn't.

It was terrible novel.

I was what, this was your debut novel?

Oh, you have a secret.

It was, but this other book was like it was like a small press and it just wasn't And they fell apart like it was a whole mess.

Well, it's just now that you're human and you also can write terrible stuff.

So that's fine.

Oh, which.

His first novel was like this out the ballpark, I.

Write, I write, this is the thing.

This is the thing I tried to teach everyone, which is a relative to this story, is we have to give ourself room to fail.

We have to give ourself room to make the mistakes.

I teach my team, my design team, you have to you're literally bringing something that doesn't exist in this world.

To a three dimensional space.

When you're being a creative, it doesn't exist.

It's up here in this, in this sort of ethereal realm.

When you're bringing it into three dimensions, that's not easy, and it's wrought with with mistakes, especially if you go from that ethereal space to a program, because the program has to interpret whatever you're hearing in your head.

Don't do that.

Get you yourself a pencil and a piece of paper and start sketching, start writing, and you will iterate faster that way.

You'll make your mistakes faster that way.

I wrote All the Sky Full of Melphons by hand first, all of every single page, what in every single page, I'm not kidding, Every single page I wrote by hand first, and because because I well, interestingly enough, I wrote it my remarkable.

Let's go, I'll show you actually have it here.

I'll actually show you the whole book.

This is my remarkable.

It's like an electronicy.

Yeah, it's like an electronic writing pad.

Situation a little I'm going to show you.

I'm gonna show you the entire novel right now, Skott Full of Elephants, because it's on here.

All of my books, in my writing.

I used to write everything on a on a sketch like a like a proper notebook.

But then I don't know if I had a hand strength to do that.

It's it's it's no joke.

Here look this is you see the pages here, and I'm gonna show you.

Oh, I see why you wrote it.

You have nice handwriting.

I don't have nice hands.

Look at that every page you can scroll for days?

And does this converted to type after you're done?

Thank the Lord, because I'm like.

For your editor.

But I know right, And so I as a when I graduated college, I written my first book and I was like, I'm gonna go be a writer and I but it did.

It didn't.

It wasn't a good book and it didn't.

I didn't make any money off It was like I think I got a thousand dollars bands or something.

And so I moved back home.

Didn't know what I wanted to do, and I started working at the front desk of a hotel and I was doing it just to write books.

I was like, Okay, I'm gonna sit at this desk check people in and keep messing around.

And the job that I had, they were offering another position for someone in marketing.

They were like, we need a marketing person and they didn't have a website.

They were like, me a marketing person, and I went, I could do that.

And the boss at the time, he goes, I need someone that can build me a website.

Can you build a website?

And remind you this is two thousand and four, and I was like, no, I you know, I don't even have a computer, but I can build your website.

And he goes, Okay, I'm gonna leave.

I'm going to Did you.

Leave with the fact that you don't have a computer or was that internal dialogue?

That was internal dialogue.

I just said to him, I got it, don't worry, I got it.

I could do.

This is like very low.

We're talking like Zanga vibe.

This is I still had Zanga back then.

So you're you're exactly spot on.

What was your background music.

Back then?

I want to say it was tried.

I think it was tried because they had a Yeah, it was tribe.

It was Oh my gosh, I could tell you the song Midnight Marauder.

That's what it was.

That's what I'm not here.

And I remember I remember how I did it.

I snked it m P three into it and I was able to like upload it somehow.

So that was if you could figure out.

Because I was coding on Zanga, I was full on doo and I was like, I want mine was John Legends, ordinary people, and I wanted it.

I wanted it to scroll with the page like I had all the.

All ages space that you play.

Man.

I wasn't.

I wasn't like at that time because websites require like real high functionality, and that website required booking integration, so I.

Had to hotel website is not like creating someone's like portfolio page.

That's a big ask.

Okay, It's pretty pretty complicated coding, and so I designed first.

I have no idea how to design, but I ended up buying a cheap deal computer.

I pirated a copy of Photoshop on lime wire back then and basically gave my computer aids.

To do it.

I was about to say that for its life.

Works works on my on my laptop.

It's crazy.

And so I got photoshopped, like figured out how to code or design, and then like break it into slices and then export the slices into dream Weaver.

And I was like tinkering with it, and then I and then it clicked.

It clicked.

I was like, wait a minute, the design and the code they're working together and I and it wasn't like someone's designed and someone's a coder.

I was like, Oh, I need to be both of these things, because ultimately, what I'm trying to do is tell a story.

Hotel is a physical space that needs to be sold in a digital environment, and it needs to be sold at what is the equivalent of a luxury purchase right now?

A luxury purchase is anything over seventeen hundred dollars.

If you go and you stay at a hotel that's three hundred dollars a night and you stay for a week, guess what you're hitting that luxury status.

And so you're like, it's a very difficult online purchase to make unless you're going through a third party.

If you're going through hotels dot car, you feel a little bit more comfortable.

But if you're doing it direct at the hotel, it's got to be a nice experience otherwise you're gonna feel comfortable doing it, and the hotel has to sell you on it to sell you on yourself in that space.

And so I was like, I'm going to design something that makes other people feel the energy of the physical space.

It isn't going to be just about like empty bedroom shots.

It's going to make you feel something.

I want a beautiful lifestyle, I want video.

I wanted to feel like a thing.

And so I started to start to design, trying to evoke a sense of place and then coding functionality that matched that sense of place.

So like over states, that made sense.

Having the filtration of all of the rooms make feel smooth and intuiting, and so that hotel did not have a website experience.

Within a year they had made over a million dollars in digital on web web based.

Bookings over that person from the site you made.

From the film site that I made, and so they were like, you're doing great, and I was like, I still didn't didn't know what I was doing.

I was just tinkering, messing around.

And then I realized I by that by the end of it, I have learned to write PHP, I learned to write a little bit of job script, I learned to write HTML.

And I learned this pretty quickly.

And so did you get the job.

Though, or they weren't paying you as a front desk person.

They gave me the job, the promotion.

I got the promotion as soon as I finished the website.

They gave me the promotion.

It wasn't a lie.

It was like twenty seven a year or something.

And I was jumping for joy back then because I does the first salary.

Yeah, it was enough.

It was enough.

You know, I wasn't eating McDonald's every day, so or ramen, and so I did that.

And then as I've done it, I was getting a lot of people asking me, you did be building this website, can you do something for me?

And I had a spring break group that was coming from Canada come down and they were like, Hey, we want to build a co op site.

Can can you do that?

And I'm like co op in one way and they go, well, we want anyone is booking spring break travel to come to our website and be able to book any of the hotels on beach.

And I thought, okay, so like you want the hotels to advertise on the site and they're like yeah.

And then I had to suddenly learn s CEO.

I had to learn organic, I had to learn like conversion optimization, like all of these things that I wasn't thinking about before to think of it more like an e commerce experience, and so I built that and it was but pre dates Google Ads.

So I had to create a function that allowed the ads to rotate on a certain amount of click and then clock the clicks for pay for us.

And it was ridiculous.

And then all of the hotels they didn't they didn't have anyone to design the ads, so then they paid me to design all their ads and then they paid they were like, can you build our websites?

And then I had to open a business.

And that was the first business I opened.

That was two thousand and six, and I have no idea what I was doing.

So you've been doing it for almost twenty years now full time because now you in your company Creative Design Agencies.

I was sorry, Creative Work Circle Circle.

Sorry, I just made that up out of nowhere at all.

What your company's going Creative Creative Arts is DC, and they're amazing.

They're amazing.

But we did that.

We were like back then I had that was my first company and it was fine, like we did I It was mostly me and I had one person that was an assistant, But I did the best I could and then I had a friend come up to me and he was like, you want to be the creative rector of my agency?

And his agency was did humanitarian work all over the world, and so he took on that job and he was amazing.

Just he's still my dear friend, but he's one of those people that's like, we're not just doing work, We're here to change the world.

And so we did.

I travel everywhere with him and doing all sorts of stuff from working with Shakespeare, shakespeare Birthplace Trust to you know, doing like campaigns with UNICEF, all the stuff.

And then I while I was doing that, my other friend Adam, he was like, hey, I got this opportunity to do these hotel websites.

I know that's what you used to do.

Do you want to do it again?

And I was like, well, let's let's look at it.

And flew to New York and he had five pitches to do in one day, and I didn't know what he was doing.

He was just like, come with me on these pitches, and I'm like okay, And that day we win all those five pitches.

One aftergether.

We went four out of the five and the fifth one the person we were pitching, came to work for the agency, and those out of those four, two of them were the top two hotel operators in all of New York.

And so all of a sudden, it went from like zero business to more business than we had any business doing, right, Like it was ridiculous amount of business.

And I was just me.

Right, it was like me in my dark bedroom trying to get these websites coded up.

But we did it, and it was you know, we ended up branching out and it was like, Okay, we need to hire a photographer, we need to hire writers, we need to hire if we're going to try to make a sense of place and a digital experience, it needs it needs to do the work.

And so i'd be I was sort of the creative director for that agency, co founder and creative director of that agency, and then still the creati director for the other agency.

And I did that for four or five years, and then I just then I was like, I want to go back to writing.

That's that's because I'm still telling stories at this point.

Is that's all I released.

And I was like, I want to go back to writing.

And so I focused on one agency and then I started tinkering, and I wrote I think three novels that I've just shelved because I was like, Nope, that isn't right, Like that's not the test of writing from one from the beginning to the end of a narrative.

Like a lot of people only they're only gonna try that once.

And I'm like, nah, try it, like, get the feeling of the fullness of it.

Don't write like the first chapter and go this isn't working right the whole thing.

And this is why.

And this is really important for anybody listening who thinks of themselves as a creative in any capacity.

It doesn't matter if it's because critical thinking is creative.

Writing specifically is one of the few artistic endeavors where you don't have a tool if you want to If you want to paint, you get a brush, you get some you get some colors.

If you want to be a photographer, you get a camera, you get a videographer, you get a camera.

But with writing, particularly storytelling, you can just speak it and require a tool.

The trick is is your first draft has to be the clay.

If you're not.

If your first draft isn't perfect, it's the clay that you're molding to perfection.

You create the clay.

And I see too many people they think of their draft as that.

They're like, this is the book.

It's not the book, that's the clay.

If you get your clay, you can you can really make something magical, and don't be discouraged.

Know that that's the beginning, not the end.

Build your clay first.

And so I was keen on like figuring out what kind of clay I wanted to work with.

So I write whole books and be like Nope, that's not right, that's not right.

Then I almost gave up.

It was very close to giving up on writing.

And my wife, she was the one that was like, you got it.

You can do it.

You can do this.

Get back to write and get back to focusing on like what there was stories you want to tell.

But I didn't have an agent at that time, and so I was like, okay, let me marry my two realities.

In my agency life, I do a lot of strategy.

So what's the strategy for getting an agent and getting a successful book?

What does that look like?

I thought, well, someone needs any agent wants to know that you have some sort of profile, right, so you need to be indexible, someone needs to type your name in.

They need to be able to see you first, second platform.

Secondly, you need to have some form of sort of self distribution, which is to say, if all they see when they Google is your ur L and all the things that you've done your US not enough, You've got to be able to expand it.

And then you need to have pieces that resonate towards what could be a novel, which is the business proposition, which is any any publishers going I need a novel, and I need to be able to serialize that novel into a lot of work so over the course of a career.

And so I went, okay, I'm going to write a book of poems, and I'm going to use the poems to be indexible, because now if I can, if I can write a book of poems, and even if I just self published them, it'll have distribution across Google, and people can type my name very easily.

They can find me on Amazon, they found you all the places.

It just so happened in that book of poems end up winning an award and being published and it got full distribution.

But that was my initial plan.

And then I thought I'm going to write a collection of short stories, and I'm gonna take each one of those short stories and I'm going to send them to different magazines and see if they'll publish a short story, because if they do, I'm not indexible on their websites as well.

And then I'm going to roll that short stories short stories up into a collection and use that to go get an agent.

And then once I get the agent i'll get, I'll write a novel and that I'll get published.

That was my plan, and Mandy, that plan was exactly that way.

Everything I just described happened exactly with that I just described it just like that, just that.

Kid on his Dell computer figuring it.

Out, backing away with my my very very slow LimeWire affected computer.

So but that's it.

That's grind.

I mean, I want to give respect to the grind.

Thank you for sharing all that the grind, and like the I mean, and you we're also living a full life, like you're meeting your wife, you're having children, like you're traveling, and then you're dealing with the doubt.

I love your wife for you know, motivating you and bringing you, giving you that space and that encouragement because that's all you need in those I mean, I I just submitted my clay to my editor, and I think, what can happen when you're when you're making the clay, is you try to compare your clay to someone's oz that has been the final product.

I ain't about to We can't compare the clay to what's on the bookshelves that you know, because that's been Yeah, there's been multiple, many, many different hands in that final product.

But I just submitted my clay.

Took me three years to make that clay.

Listen, get yourself a bottless champagne, because that's that's a celebration.

That's a real celebration.

To night we celebrate.

I submitted it on Monday.

The book change from when like the Sky Full of Elephants?

Did it change like the premise of it or was it pretty much like I know I'm writing this book, the event's going to happen, and I know it'll be Charlie and Sidney story and then you move forward from there.

Yeah, it didn't change very much.

Indeed, part of the the this sounds I realize what I'm about to say sounds pretentious, But I was able to sort of choose the publisher, and I know that does not happen very often if.

A pretentious is a fact.

But you earned it, just as you had a proof of product already.

I was able to, like, you know, there were a few different publishers that were buying for the book, and it just so happened that Simon Schuster and Olivia they preempted.

They were like, nope, we want it, and they came in early.

And so I was like, well, let me, let me meet with different ones, let me see, because I don't want my book to change.

I want it to be you wrote it at that point.

I mean, it's a novel.

You'd write a chunk of it, if not the whole thing.

I written the whole thing because, like I say, I become accustomed to like I'm trying to get to something I don't want.

I don't want.

I don't want it to mean the work of art if you think of it in those terms.

You want it to at least feel complete enough that no one else is going to change.

If I was writing a song and I gave it to another musician, they'd be like, well do this and do that, and I don't want that.

I wanted it to be.

I want to be mine.

So I wrote the whole thing, and then I gave it to I gave it to my agent that he sensed around and they in Olivia, a wonderful one of our editors.

She preempted it and she was I was like, let's get on a call.

Get on a call.

And the first thing she says, she goes, She's like, I recognize that.

You know, I'm Jewish and white.

I die in this book, and I want to make sure that everyone that that does not change.

We needed to be exactly what you want it to be.

I was like, that's what I'm talking about.

Was like, so what type of stuff.

I was going to ask if your editor was black?

Hard to find?

She's yeah, she's wonderful, remarkable.

She was like, I want to figure out how we can expand the story and make it bigger.

I don't want to change it.

They want to make it bigger.

And so the whole, the whole Vivian Hoseiah piece, like I knew they would get to they would be in Alabama because I'd already written that, but I didn't write how they got to Alabama and how that all that that was all, Olivia, we wrote a couple of additional scenes that that we sort of tinkled through, we reorganized some bits, so she was she was pivotal in getting it into that boss as you described, but we'd never changed from its its concept, and she was she I don't think she would have even allowed it because she wanted She was like.

The one thing that it did say, which was which was really fun is they were like, well, your book is going to come out around the election, so maybe maybe we'd wait until the year after, and I was like, nope, let's do it the year before.

And uh.

And that was when what's his name, Ron DeSantis was everyone thought he was going to be it and he was burning in Florida and all that, and I was like, let's be confrontational, like let's let's let's do it.

And even that she was like, all right, let's do it.

That's so funny to me because I'm like, this book is meant to be a lightning rod, Like right, I mean it's not that, it's not a quiet book.

I'm just gonna scoot this.

Just excuse me.

I'm just gonna casual white people.

There you go.

Yeah, how many banned books list.

Is it on if any?

So far, I don't think.

I don't think it's on.

I haven't seen it on any So it's going to be that I know of, because I'm sure it's going to be, but not that I know of.

I've heard a lot of people saying, like, you know that it will be banned, lots of that, like people constantly get it now before it's banned, that type of stuff.

But I kind of think of it.

If it ever was banned, I'd.

Be like, great marketing.

I mean it's like, literally they're banning the most innocuous, you know books and this I know they're bugging you, like, hey, where are you come do your paperback?

And that was just was also amazing.

She's the publicist.

She was like, are you done.

I'm like, I'm ALMOSTO.

I know a little side to the to the handler.

I know that I do a lot of these, but I'm also selfish and I will not make you leave unless.

Tell me this is this is this is your time, This is your time.

You owe me because you use my life for this book.

You stole my life.

Story and made me stolen.

Laura Laura Jane.

Laura Jane sorry her too.

So yeah, my sister's Mallorie Anne.

I'm a Manda Lee.

You know, my mom moved to the South, so she had a little bit of Southern in her no But I I just want to congratulate you, and I'm so excited for you.

I think that this novel, I don't know, I don't look at like I don't want to, you know, become obsessed about like numbers and all sales and stuff like that.

But I know people are talking about it, so I really hope that they are buying this book.

I feel like it's good, you know, you know good.

Any awards on the horizon is that important for this book?

I realized It's funny was on they were in La at Referations Club and had this talk and said talked about wanting awards, like wanting to win all the awards, but then realize that she couldn't.

They couldn't have the awards at the expense of the audiences that they were trying to speak to.

And so I was nominated for It was longest before the ASP Award.

I think the Wrap Games Award as well.

But I've kind of I've already say this all the time, like I already won like to even write a book and get it published you want you want, but then to have people read it and care about it.

To be on this call makes me feel like I don't want anything.

I'm not desirous in that way.

I just want to be able to sit and talking contributes something to literature.

You know, Tony Morrison is to me the greatest American writer, if not the greatest writer in the history of the world as far as I'm concerned.

And I always imagine that I would write something that she would touch, she would nudge someone.

But have you have you heard of this book?

You know?

Like in that that's it?

Like I don't really to me, that's the height, and I know that won't happen.

But perhaps that's as we sort of find the book, and different people find a book in different environments and they share it with someone else.

That's all.

That's all that.

I can't imagine anything greater than you know, so I don't find myself desirous in that way.

Well, I have an award for you.

It's not really an award, but it is a first.

So I'm going to use this time to let you know that Brown Ambitions launching a book club, and sky Full of Elephants is going to be the first.

Do I get?

Can I get like a button or something?

I get like a yeah, sure, I just.

Made this up, So yeah, we can make a button.

Can I use canvas to do that?

I don't know.

Yeah, listen, that's that's amazing.

Can I do get to come?

Can I be like in it?

Can I come and like?

Sure?

Yeah, I'd love for you to come.

I think, well, ba Fam, you're just finding out about it.

So Ba Fam, you can go to brown Envision podcast dot com and find details about the book club and how you can join it.

BA fan has been asking for a book club.

But like I said, when I read books, I don't necessarily want to be reading about the same stuff that we talk about all the time on the show.

I don't think that life is just money.

That's why we do more than just money and finance here.

It's about the human experience and you know, our wellness.

And I can create the book club that I would like to be a part of, which is a mix of everything.

And so I think sky full of Elephants we barely scratch the surface of what we could have dived into.

But I would love to bring ba fam into this because it's like when you see a really good film Sinners, I'm waiting for other people to read and watch and experience it so that I can then have a PhD level breakdown discussion, Like I want to get into the weeds.

So bea fam.

I need you to like be my reading buddies.

So we're going to read sky full of Elephants.

We're going to reconvene.

We're going to reconvene this summer.

And Cibo Campbell, thank you so much for taking the time for writing this book, for staying true to your art.

For any aspiring writer.

There's so many aspiring writers out there work in nine to five.

So I want to write a novel.

And I hope the takeaway for y'all is, you know Cibo's anecdote about making a plan incrementally understanding that there's small things you can do now to put yourself in a position so that the really amazing opportunities can come to you.

That was so smart, so strategic, and so lacking.

I feel like among many creators is like those incremental steps to getting it done.

So someone else who's like an incremental steps girl, I am, Yeah, just huge kudos.

It's an honor to have met you.

Thank you, thank you, stay, thank you.

Can we be Lena locked in?

Are we like friends?

Now?

I'll be I'll be a mind off.

I would come to London.

Oh, I'm going to be in London for Beyonces, for Beyonce's concert.

Almost see how they get down in London.

Saying that to me, Everyone's like, yo, are you I'm going to be there for Beyonce.

You don't even know how many people said this to me.

I want to be in I'm going to be in the States when Beyonce.

I'm going to see my mom.

I'm going to be be Aflorida.

Oh good boy, Now go see your mom.

That's okay, London's not that far.

No, no, no, And congratulations on getting your book submitted.

Congratulations on finishing it.

It's it's I know, it's like it's a weight off of your shoulders that will only come back when when it's time to do all of the edits and do all of the stuff to get it ready.

But I think I might have a summer.

I don't know.

I think I might have a partial summer.

I didn't expect having a summer.

I guess I got to make plans now.

Yeah, I don't expect summers with kids in general, but like with you kids and a book that you're now editing, it's going to be.

It's going to be a good bit of fun.

So congrats, thanks so much.

All right, good luck.

The paperback is coming out this fall.

Go make an incredible, brilliant marketing plan for that.

I'm sure you will.

Until next time, Yay browny Mission book Club.

VIK can't wait, I can't wait?

Please Okay v a fan, thank you so much for listening to this week's show.

I want to shout out to our production team, Courtney, our editor, Carla, our fearless leader for idea to launch productions.

I want to shout out my assistant Lauda Escalante and Cameron McNair for helping me put the show together.

It is not a one person project, as much as I have tried to make it so these past ten years.

I need help, y'all, and thank goodness I've been able to put this team around me to support me on this journey and to y'all be a fam I love you so so so so much.

Please rate, review, subscribe, make sure you're signed up to the newsletter to get all the latest updates on upcoming episodes, our ten year anniversary celebrations to come, and until next time, talk to you soon via bye