Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Neal Stephenson, a legendary science fiction writer
00:00:04 exploring ideas in mathematics, science, cryptography, money, linguistics, philosophy, and virtual
00:00:10 reality, from his early book Snow Crash to his new one called Termination Shock.
00:00:17 He doesn’t just write novels.
00:00:19 He worked at the space company Blue Origin for many years, including technically being
00:00:25 Blue Origin’s first employee.
00:00:27 He also was the chief futurist at the virtual reality company Magic Leap.
00:00:33 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
00:00:35 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:00:38 And now, here’s my conversation with Neal Stephenson.
00:00:43 You write both historical fiction, like World War II in Cryptonomicon, and science fiction,
00:00:50 looking both into the past and the future.
00:00:53 So let me ask, does history repeat itself, in which way does it repeat itself, in which
00:00:58 way does it not?
00:00:59 I’m afraid it repeats itself a lot.
00:01:02 So I think human nature kind of is what it is.
00:01:05 And so we tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again.
00:01:12 And so it’s kind of the exception rather than the rule when something new happens.
00:01:20 What role does technology play in the suppression or in revealing human nature?
00:01:25 Well, the standards of living, life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within
00:01:33 the last, particularly the last hundred years.
00:01:36 I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification, the internet.
00:01:44 These are all improvements in most people’s standard of living and health and longevity
00:01:51 that exceed anything that was seen before in human history.
00:01:57 So people are living longer, they’re generally healthier, and so on.
00:02:02 But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns, some of which are not very
00:02:09 attractive.
00:02:10 So some of it has to do with the constraints on resources, presumably with technology you
00:02:15 have less and less constraints on resources.
00:02:17 So we get to maybe emphasize the better angels of our nature.
00:02:22 And in so doing, does that not potentially fundamentally alter the sort of the experience
00:02:30 that we have of life on earth?
00:02:32 You know, until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think.
00:02:37 But you know, people will find ways to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind
00:02:49 of psychological itch that they have got.
00:02:51 And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of
00:02:57 Germany prior to the rise of Hitler, World War II, and kind of explain Hitler, at least
00:03:09 partially by just the misery that people were living in at that time.
00:03:17 The economic collapse.
00:03:18 Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and the decline in standard of living.
00:03:25 And that sounds like a plausible explanation.
00:03:29 But there are economic troubles now for sure.
00:03:32 We had the bank collapse in 2008.
00:03:36 And there’s stagnation in some people’s standards of living.
00:03:39 But it’s hard to explain what we’ve seen in this country in the last few years just strictly
00:03:44 on the basis of people are poor and angry and sad.
00:03:49 I think they want to be angry.
00:03:52 So without being political in a divisive kind of way, can we talk about the lessons you
00:03:58 can draw from World War II?
00:04:01 Sure.
00:04:02 This singular event in human history, it seems like, and yet, as you say, history rhymes
00:04:09 at the very least.
00:04:10 Yeah.
00:04:11 Being who I am, I tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened in conjunction
00:04:17 with that war.
00:04:20 Which may not be where you want to go.
00:04:22 Well, there’s several things.
00:04:23 Sorry to interrupt.
00:04:24 So one in Cryptonomicon is more like the Alan Turing side of things, right?
00:04:30 And then there’s the outside of technology.
00:04:35 First of all, there’s the tools of war, which is a kind of technology.
00:04:38 But then there’s just like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.
00:04:41 Yeah.
00:04:42 Well, so one of the things that emerges from the war and from the extermination camps is
00:04:49 that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature.
00:04:55 So you have to learn that lesson to be an educated person, and you have to know that
00:05:03 even in a supposedly enlightened, civilized society, people can become monsters quite
00:05:09 easily.
00:05:10 So that is for sure the big takeaway.
00:05:13 Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil runs through the heart
00:05:22 of every man?
00:05:23 Yeah.
00:05:24 That all of us are capable?
00:05:26 Great line.
00:05:27 Yeah.
00:05:28 Of evil?
00:05:29 I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager because my grandfather
00:05:35 had it in his house because he was one of these Americans who was obsessed with the
00:05:41 Soviet Union and the Soviet threat and wanted people to be aware of some of what had happened.
00:05:49 And so he had those books lying around and I would read them.
00:05:55 And it’s a similar kind of parallel story to what happened in Germany during the war,
00:06:03 this creation of this system of camps and oppression and lots of troubling behavior.
00:06:13 To me it’s a story of how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead
00:06:22 to evil.
00:06:23 But it’s also a story of bravery, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood and basically
00:06:31 survival.
00:06:32 You have a man’s search for meaning, which is the story of a man in a concentration camp
00:06:40 basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions.
00:06:45 So to me World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature.
00:06:53 It’s a little moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity.
00:07:02 So I’m not so sure that it leads me to a pessimistic view of the world, the fact that somebody
00:07:08 like Hitler could happen, the fact that a lot of people could follow Hitler and get
00:07:14 excited and maybe even love the hate of the other for some moment of time.
00:07:20 I think all of us are capable of that, but I think all of us also have a capacity for
00:07:28 good.
00:07:29 And I think, I don’t know what you think, but I think we have a greater desire for good
00:07:36 than evil.
00:07:38 And it seems like that’s where technology is very useful as a guide, as a helping hand.
00:07:44 Okay.
00:07:45 Can you give me an example maybe?
00:07:48 So I give you examples of futuristic technologies and I can give you examples of current technologies.
00:07:54 Current technologies, knowledge in the form of very basic knowledge, which is like Wikipedia
00:08:04 and search the original dream of Google that I think is very much a success, which is making
00:08:12 the world’s information accessible at your fingertips.
00:08:15 That kind of technology enables the natural, if this axiom, this assumption that people
00:08:24 want to do good is true, then letting them discover all of the information out there,
00:08:31 false information and true information, all of it, and let them explore that’s going to
00:08:36 lead to a better world, to better people.
00:08:40 Fascist technologies is, I personally, I mentioned to you offline, sort of love artificial intelligence.
00:08:48 And so AI that’s an assistant, that’s a guide, like a mentor to you, that you can in the
00:08:55 way that Google searches, but smarter, where you can help send it out and say, this is
00:09:02 the direction in which I want to grow, not authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm
00:09:08 of telling you this is how you should grow, but almost the opposite, where you use it
00:09:16 as an assistant, a servant in your journey towards knowledge.
00:09:23 That sounds like an easy thing, but it’s actually from an AI perspective very difficult.
00:09:27 I mean, this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which talks about
00:09:33 a book that essentially does that.
00:09:35 And I’ve been sort of watching people try to come at the problem of building that thing
00:09:41 from different directions for ever since the book came out, basically.
00:09:47 And so I kind of have, although I haven’t worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the
00:09:55 level of difficulty in realizing that goal.
00:10:01 So that book is in the 90s, so as Google is coming to be, it’s essentially not Google,
00:10:10 but the search engine, the initial search engines, which gave birth to Google essentially
00:10:14 in contrast.
00:10:15 Right.
00:10:16 Yeah.
00:10:17 Yeah.
00:10:18 That was still in the era of Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines.
00:10:24 And yeah, I’m pretty sure I had not heard of Google at that point.
00:10:28 That would have been 95, 96.
00:10:30 I think the book came out in 94.
00:10:33 And then, of course, the social networks followed, which is another form of guidance through
00:10:39 the space of information.
00:10:41 Yeah.
00:10:42 Well, what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them.
00:10:48 And so I saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that 20 years ago, if you
00:10:55 had Googled Pythagorean theorem, chances are you would have been taken directly to a page
00:11:05 explaining the Pythagorean theorem.
00:11:07 If you do it now, you’re probably going to…
00:11:10 The top hits are going to be from somebody who’s got an angle, who’s got a scheme, right?
00:11:15 They’re trying to sell you math tutoring or they’re working some kind of marketing plan
00:11:23 on you.
00:11:25 So the traditional engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational
00:11:33 purpose.
00:11:35 That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be replaced by newer and better ones.
00:11:41 First of all, to defend the people with the angle, right?
00:11:45 They’re trying to find business models to fund, oftentimes, which is funny you went
00:11:50 with Pythagorean, like you went at math, those greedy bastards, but it’s great.
00:11:58 How can we monetize the Pythagorean theorem?
00:12:01 Yeah.
00:12:02 Well, I mean, education, right, is just to figure out like people who love math education,
00:12:08 for example, love it purely, not purely, but very often love it for itself, for just teaching
00:12:17 math.
00:12:18 Yeah.
00:12:19 Because, you know, when coming face to face with, for example, like the YouTube algorithm,
00:12:23 they start to try to figure out, okay, how can I make money off of this?
00:12:27 The primary goal is still that love of education, but they also want to make that love of education
00:12:36 their full time job.
00:12:38 But I see that sort of that dance of humanity with the algorithms as it finds this kind
00:12:45 of local pocket of optimality, or suboptimality, whatever, it gets stuck in it.
00:12:52 It’s a pocket of some sort.
00:12:54 But I see that pocket as way better than what we had before in the 80s, right, or the 90s
00:12:59 before the internet.
00:13:00 But like, and now we’re now, this is also human nature, we start writing very eloquent
00:13:06 articles about how this pocket is clearly a pocket, it’s not very good, and we can imagine
00:13:11 much better lands far beyond, but the reality is it’s better than before, and now we’re
00:13:17 waiting for a new book.
00:13:20 Yeah.
00:13:21 And you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group of
00:13:25 geniuses that just say, enough is enough, I have an idea, this is how we get out.
00:13:31 And it’s too easy to be sort of, I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks
00:13:37 in your articles being cynical about being in this pocket, and we are forever stuck in
00:13:42 this pocket, and then coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally,
00:13:48 like it’s collapsing, stuck forever like a prison in this pocket, but reality, it’s just
00:13:54 clickbait articles and books until one curious ant comes up with the next pocket.
00:14:01 Yeah, tunnels through the barrier or gets enough energy to jump over the barrier.
00:14:06 And eventually we’ll be, as you’ve talked about, I mean, we’ll colonize the solar system,
00:14:12 and then we’ll be stuck in the solar system, and then people will say, well, we’re screwed
00:14:18 because when the sun energy runs out, there’s no way to get to the next solar system, and
00:14:24 so on.
00:14:25 It goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.
00:14:28 Yeah.
00:14:29 I think getting out of the solar system is going to be a hard one.
00:14:33 So can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think, back to sort of a serious question,
00:14:40 why do you think it’s hard to get outside of our solar system?
00:14:44 It’s just an energy calculation.
00:14:46 I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want, but the idea of getting there in one
00:14:56 lifetime or a few lifetimes requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate.
00:15:05 And then as soon as you get halfway there, you need to expend an equal amount of energy
00:15:10 to decelerate, or you’ll just go shooting by.
00:15:15 And so that means carrying a lot of energy.
00:15:18 And there’s ideas like Yuri Milner, I think, is still funding the idea to use laser propulsion
00:15:26 to send something to another star system, a small object.
00:15:32 But it’ll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.
00:15:35 They never talk about that part, like how do we slow down?
00:15:39 Yeah.
00:15:40 It’s a quick flyby to take a good picture, I guess.
00:15:42 Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by.
00:15:45 So, and that’s great if it happens, I’m not knocking it.
00:15:49 But the amount of energy that’s needed is just staggering, and there’s other issues
00:15:55 like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation?
00:16:02 How do you prevent people from going crazy?
00:16:05 What happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of
00:16:09 light?
00:16:10 So that’s sort of some combination of expanding human lifespan, but also just good old fashioned,
00:16:18 stable society on a spaceship.
00:16:20 Yeah, yeah, the generation ship.
00:16:23 Yeah, yeah.
00:16:24 No, I think that’s the only way.
00:16:26 It would have to keep going for a long time.
00:16:31 And they might get to where they’re going and find a shitty solar system.
00:16:38 We can try to do some advanced survey, but if you get there and all the planets in that
00:16:46 solar system are just garbage planets, then it’s kind of a big let down for this like
00:16:52 thousand year voyage that you’ve just been on, right?
00:16:57 So we have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive
00:17:07 in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with.
00:17:12 So that sets a bound on the size of the planet and what we need in the way of temperature
00:17:19 and atmosphere and so on.
00:17:21 So when you look at all those complications, then basically building sort of exactly the
00:17:31 environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell
00:17:36 of a lot better.
00:17:39 It’s hard to make an economic argument, let’s say, for making that journey.
00:17:47 One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that the people who are trying
00:17:51 to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religious reasons.
00:17:57 I think that’s the only reason that you would do it because economically it just makes more
00:18:04 sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.
00:18:10 Well, isn’t everything done for religious reasons?
00:18:13 Like why do we exploration?
00:18:16 Why do we go to the moon again and do the other things?
00:18:20 What does JFK said is not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard.
00:18:23 Isn’t that kind of a religious reason?
00:18:25 I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once said that the Apollo moon landings were
00:18:31 communism’s greatest achievement.
00:18:34 Yeah, so the conflict between nations is a kind of…
00:18:40 Not exactly a religion, but it’s what you’re talking about.
00:18:43 Well, it’s a struggle for meaning and that meaning isn’t found in some kind of…
00:18:49 It’s hard to find meaning in mathematics.
00:18:52 It’s found in some kind of in music and religion, whatever, art.
00:18:56 Some people do, but those are probably not enough of them to…
00:19:02 People that find meaning in mathematics, they usually find meaning between the lines nevertheless,
00:19:08 not in the actual proving some kind of thing.
00:19:15 So from a cost perspective, do you actually see a possible future where we’re building
00:19:22 these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them one a year out like wandering
00:19:31 ants out into the galaxy?
00:19:36 I have nothing against it.
00:19:38 It’s just, like I said, it’s got the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual
00:19:46 or kind of non tangible calculus.
00:19:50 So from a business model perspective, you don’t think there’s a business model there?
00:19:54 No, no way.
00:19:56 One of the many fascinating things you’ve done in your life, you were at the very beginning,
00:20:01 you were the person that convinced Jeff Bezos to start a spaceship company, a space company.
00:20:08 You were there at Blue Origin for a few years in the beginning working on alternate propulsion
00:20:16 systems and at least according to Wikipedia, alternate business models.
00:20:22 Yeah, I mean, to go back to the first thing you said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required
00:20:28 a lot of convincing.
00:20:31 He’d been thinking about it since he was five years old and it was an inevitability.
00:20:36 But the idea that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to just do some advanced scouting work,
00:20:50 explore the corners of the space of possibilities.
00:20:55 And so that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to Blue Origin.
00:21:03 And so it was a small staff of people that did that for a few years.
00:21:08 And I think it was about 2003, 2004 that it swung decisively towards the direction it’s
00:21:17 been following ever since, which is using basically existing aerospace technologies
00:21:24 and models to make chemical fueled rockets for space tourism.
00:21:31 I believe and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets is just
00:21:36 an accident of history that comes out of World War II.
00:21:40 So until World War II, rockets are being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard.
00:21:48 But then Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, but he can’t quite reach it and the
00:21:55 Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized.
00:21:58 So he decides he’s going to lob warheads into it with rockets, which is a terrible misallocation
00:22:07 of resources.
00:22:08 It’s a terrible idea.
00:22:10 So it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic.
00:22:17 But that’s the situation that existed.
00:22:20 So they built these rockets, that’s the V2.
00:22:25 And then it’s just a complete coincidence that that war ends with atomic bombs being
00:22:32 developed in a completely separate super weapon program.
00:22:37 And so suddenly the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn’t exist
00:22:44 before because if you’ve got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them.
00:22:50 You can do it with bombers, but it’s a lot better to just hurl them to the other side
00:22:56 of the world on the top of a rocket.
00:23:00 So suddenly rockets, which had gotten a boost because of Hitler’s V2 program, got a much
00:23:06 bigger boost during the 50s and 60s.
00:23:10 And it is a complete, you’re right, for some reason I never thought of this, it is an accident
00:23:15 of history that nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time.
00:23:20 First of all, nuclear weapons didn’t have to be developed at the same time as World
00:23:25 War II.
00:23:26 That’s an accident in history.
00:23:27 And then the fact, okay, so then Hitler started using rockets, that’s an accident of, okay,
00:23:34 that’s fascinating.
00:23:35 That’s a fascinating set of coincidences.
00:23:38 Yeah, which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way.
00:23:42 By the time these rockets are kind of working, we’ve got hydrogen bombs that are so big and
00:23:50 so devastating that nobody really wants to use them.
00:23:54 But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the socket on
00:24:00 the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb.
00:24:08 So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war.
00:24:15 I’d love to be in the meeting where the first guy brought that up as an idea.
00:24:22 It’s probably a Russian.
00:24:23 Why don’t we strap a person to the rocket?
00:24:25 Yeah, yeah.
00:24:26 Well, it probably was because they did it first, right?
00:24:30 The Russians did it first.
00:24:31 And they had perhaps less respect for sort of safety protocols.
00:24:34 Could be.
00:24:35 They were a little bit more willing to sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to risk the life
00:24:40 of an astronaut.
00:24:41 Could be.
00:24:42 Yeah, yeah.
00:24:43 This is basically the story of how through all of this competition and because of these
00:24:47 historical accidents, trillions of R&D dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical
00:24:56 rocket technology, which has now advanced to an incredibly high degree.
00:25:02 But there’s other ways to make things go really fast, which is all that rockets do.
00:25:08 That’s all orbit is.
00:25:09 It’s just going really fast.
00:25:12 And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about alternate
00:25:19 schemes for as long as they’ve been thinking about rockets.
00:25:24 And so one of the first things that I learned kind of trying to explore new possibilities
00:25:33 was that I could put all of my brainpower to work and be creative as I could and invent
00:25:42 some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast.
00:25:46 And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had thought the same
00:25:51 idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math.
00:25:57 And so at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and
00:26:03 just go poking around trying to find those guys.
00:26:10 So there’s a number of ideas that we looked at.
00:26:15 Some are crazier, some are less crazy.
00:26:18 And the direction that that company eventually took was chemical rockets.
00:26:23 Is there something you can comment on possible ideas?
00:26:26 So first of all, you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion.
00:26:34 Yeah.
00:26:35 So that’s, I mean, you’ve probably heard of Project Orion, which was the…
00:26:40 Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to power a large space vehicle
00:26:50 by detonating atomic bombs behind it.
00:26:53 And so one of the other people who was working at Blue Operations during this time was George
00:26:58 Dyson, the son of Freeman.
00:27:01 And so we knew all about Project Orion and he found an old film that they’d shot on a
00:27:08 beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like lumps of C4.
00:27:16 So that was an idea, but for a private company, obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was
00:27:21 probably out of scope.
00:27:23 So it was more of a theoretical thing.
00:27:27 There’s a conceptually similar approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur
00:27:38 Kantrowitz and some others, where you take a pulsed laser and you fire it at a vehicle
00:27:44 that has a block of ice on the back.
00:27:47 And the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma.
00:27:55 And plasma is opaque because it conducts.
00:27:58 And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets
00:28:04 really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice.
00:28:10 And then you wait a moment for that to dissipate and then you do it again.
00:28:14 So it would just kind of vibrate its way.
00:28:19 Like it sounds really violent, but Freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber
00:28:23 sold tennis shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a mild vibration.
00:28:31 So there your source of energy is on the ground and you’re getting higher specific impulse
00:28:35 than you could get by burning chemicals.
00:28:39 Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr, that just
00:28:47 would heat up a heat exchanger by many converging solid state lasers from the ground.
00:28:55 And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that.
00:29:05 We looked at tall towers.
00:29:07 I spent a while looking kind of semi seriously at giant bullwhips.
00:29:13 What’s a bullwhip?
00:29:15 Just a whip, you have them here in Texas, right?
00:29:19 Yeah, I understand.
00:29:21 But how does that have to do with propulsion?
00:29:23 If you think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the
00:29:29 speed of sound.
00:29:31 So it’s unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people with no technology have been
00:29:39 able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural trick.
00:29:49 Just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this.
00:29:58 So that’s the thing I still think about from time to time.
00:30:02 You can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain or other flexible materials
00:30:10 that just kind of stand up under their own physics.
00:30:14 I mean, it’s kind of awesome to imagine.
00:30:19 So imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip, but have at the end of it a spaceship.
00:30:28 That would detach at the moment of maximum velocity.
00:30:34 Why not?
00:30:36 Why wouldn’t that?
00:30:37 So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question.
00:30:43 It was more almost a symbolic way of saying, look, there’s all kinds of physics we haven’t
00:30:52 explored yet.
00:30:55 It’s no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets.
00:31:01 It’s just that more money’s gone into chemical rockets, right?
00:31:08 Can I ask you a question on propulsion that’s a little bit more out there?
00:31:14 So I don’t know if you’ve seen quite a lot of recent articles and reports and so on about
00:31:21 UFOs, like the Tic Tac aircraft.
00:31:26 I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it, but I haven’t gone deep into it.
00:31:32 So the DOD released footage filmed by pilots, and there’s a lot of reports about objects
00:31:42 that moved in ways they haven’t seen before that seem to defy the laws of physics if we
00:31:49 consider the aircraft that we have today.
00:31:52 So the reason I asked you that is because it kind of, to me, whatever the heck it is,
00:32:02 it’s inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion.
00:32:08 If it’s like secret projects from foreign nations or it’s physical phenomena that we
00:32:15 don’t yet understand, like ball lightning, all those kinds of things, or if it is aliens
00:32:20 or objects from an alien civilization.
00:32:23 I most likely believe if it’s an object from an alien civilization, it’s got to be like
00:32:28 a really dumb drone that just got lost.
00:32:32 It’s definitely not like the pinnacle of intelligence.
00:32:37 It’s like some teenager’s science fair experiment.
00:32:42 Yeah, it just flew for a few centuries out and just landed, and then we humans are all
00:32:47 like really excited about this wild thing.
00:32:51 I mean, what do you think about those…
00:32:54 First of all, like the millions of reports of UFOs, right?
00:32:57 There’s some psychology there that’s deeply cultural, but also the possibility of aliens
00:33:03 having visited Earth.
00:33:05 Yeah, I mean, I’d like to see some better pictures.
00:33:09 For the reason I mentioned earlier, having to do with the difficulty of traveling between
00:33:14 star systems, it’s really hard for me to believe it’s aliens.
00:33:19 I just can’t understand why you would go to all that trouble to transport something across
00:33:25 light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly doing.
00:33:32 Like how is that interesting?
00:33:34 How does that justify the trip?
00:33:36 So if you travel across those kinds of distances, you would make a bigger splash.
00:33:45 First of all, I would expect that the arrival of these things would be something we’d notice.
00:33:51 It’s got to decelerate into our solar system unless it got here really, really, really
00:33:58 slowly.
00:33:59 So I guess that’s a possibility and just kind of snuck in.
00:34:04 So at the end, we would detect some kind of footprint in terms of energy.
00:34:08 You would think.
00:34:09 So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad, it makes more sense
00:34:17 in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies, they’re just kind
00:34:23 of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason, like not trying to communicate.
00:34:32 Can you imagine a scenario where aliens have visited Earth or are visiting Earth and we
00:34:39 wouldn’t notice it at all?
00:34:41 Oh, sure.
00:34:42 I mean, if they’ve got technology to get here, they’ve probably got technology to conceal
00:34:48 the fact that they’re trying to conceal themselves.
00:34:50 I meant more like they’re not trying to conceal themselves, but we’re just our cognitive capabilities
00:34:56 are like too limited and we are not thinking big enough.
00:35:00 We’re looking for little green men, we’re looking for things that operate at a time
00:35:05 scale that’s human like, you know.
00:35:10 I love thinking about ideas like that.
00:35:13 That’s great science fiction novel fodder that the aliens are so different that we simply
00:35:20 don’t see them.
00:35:22 Is there, in terms of language, do you think it would be difficult, not aliens visiting
00:35:29 us but traveling to other places to find a common language?
00:35:34 You’ve written about the importance of language in intelligent civilizations.
00:35:41 How difficult is the problem to bridge the gap between aliens and humans in terms of
00:35:47 language so we’re not lost in translation?
00:35:50 Yeah, I mean, there’s different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they
00:35:54 are to us, you know.
00:35:56 I mean, there’s a school of thought that says, basically, advanced life has to be carbon
00:36:04 based for just reasons of chemistry.
00:36:07 So right away, if you impose that limitation, then you’re kind of assuming something that’s
00:36:14 starting to be biologically similar to us.
00:36:17 So if they’re about as big as we are and they kind of move around in space, in a physical
00:36:25 body the way we do, then there’s probably a way to solve that communication problem.
00:36:32 If they’re beings of pure energy from Star Trek or something like that, then it’s a different
00:36:40 story.
00:36:41 Well, I love thinking about that kind of stuff too.
00:36:42 I mean, consciousness itself may be alien.
00:36:47 I mean, it could be, like you said, beings of pure energy.
00:36:55 I think of life as just complex systems, and the kind of forms those complex systems can
00:37:01 take seems to be much larger than the particular biological systems we see here on Earth.
00:37:06 I have to ask a Twitter question about aliens.
00:37:11 You ready?
00:37:12 This is for Twitter.
00:37:13 I’m ready.
00:37:14 What would you expect from Twitter?
00:37:15 Can humans have sex with aliens?
00:37:19 Neil Stevenson.
00:37:20 You could pass.
00:37:24 I asked a language question.
00:37:25 Can they communicate?
00:37:26 Yeah.
00:37:27 Can they fall in love before sex?
00:37:30 That’s how it works.
00:37:33 So which question am I answering?
00:37:35 The sex or the love?
00:37:37 I mean, it depends what is more fundamental to relations across intelligent species.
00:37:45 Yeah.
00:37:46 I mean, sex can mean a lot of things.
00:37:49 So I mean, if you’re…
00:37:51 Your production, right?
00:37:53 You know, in Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to really suspend your disbelief to
00:38:02 think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human, right?
00:38:07 Because that’s just not going to work DNA wise.
00:38:15 So if by sex, you mean reproductive sex, then I would say no, unless you go to a panspermia
00:38:26 kind of theory, which is that, you know, humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic,
00:38:34 you know, program of some sort.
00:38:40 And then we’re just returning home, hanging out with our old relatives.
00:38:44 Distant cousins.
00:38:45 Yeah.
00:38:46 But that doesn’t seem, you know, it doesn’t seem plausible.
00:38:52 We know that humans had sex with Neanderthals, with Denisovans, so you could think of them
00:39:00 as aliens that came from our planet.
00:39:06 So that’s a kind of data point, I guess.
00:39:11 But you know, if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind of gratifying physical
00:39:19 interaction then sure.
00:39:21 Right.
00:39:22 Dancing.
00:39:23 And that’s how we get to love.
00:39:27 And love can take many forms.
00:39:28 Love can certainly take many forms.
00:39:30 I have to ask you, in terms of space, just looking at where Blue Origin is, looking at
00:39:36 where SpaceX is today, and maybe looking out 10, 20 years out from now, are you impressed
00:39:43 at what’s happening?
00:39:44 We just saw William Shatner go up to space.
00:39:47 Yeah, I was just watching his video this morning before I came here.
00:39:51 Yeah.
00:39:52 Are you impressed at where things stand today?
00:39:54 Yeah.
00:39:55 I mean, SpaceX in particular has done things that are just unbelievable.
00:40:03 And I don’t think anyone was anticipating 20 years ago, let’s say, when this all started,
00:40:12 just the speed with which they’d be able to rack up these incredible achievements.
00:40:19 If you’ve kind of even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made and so the difficulty
00:40:26 of doing any kind of space travel, what they’ve achieved is just unbelievable.
00:40:36 What about maybe a question about Elon Musk?
00:40:40 Even more than Jeff Bezos, he has a very kind of ambitious vision of this project that we’re
00:40:50 on as a species, of becoming a multi planetary species and becoming that quickly, as soon
00:40:58 as possible, landing on Mars, colonizing Mars.
00:41:01 What do you think of that project?
00:41:03 There’s two questions to ask.
00:41:04 First, the question is, what do you think about the project of colonizing Mars?
00:41:09 And second, what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically ambitious
00:41:19 at achieving the impossible, what a lot of people would say is impossible?
00:41:23 I think that colonizing Mars is the kind of goal that’s easily stated.
00:41:32 It’s catchy.
00:41:34 It’s the kind of thing that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs
00:41:41 might not.
00:41:42 So I think it’s well chosen in that way.
00:41:45 I have technical questions about, there’s a problem of perchlorates on the surface of
00:41:54 Mars that’s going to be big trouble.
00:41:58 And there’s radiation.
00:42:00 This is known.
00:42:04 What about business questions?
00:42:05 Do you think, because you mentioned sort of going outside of the solar system would best
00:42:12 be done for religious reasons.
00:42:15 What about colonizing Mars?
00:42:17 Can you spin it into a business proposition?
00:42:20 It’s hard to think of a resource that’s on Mars that could be brought back here cheaply
00:42:27 enough to compete with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here.
00:42:37 So I don’t know if there is a business plan for that or if it’s just strictly we’re going
00:42:42 to go there and see what happens.
00:42:49 Maybe again we need communism to get us going, to give us a reason, a little bit of the competition.
00:42:55 Well there’s plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonize Mars vision that they’re
00:43:02 willing to just go all in on it, even if there’s not a business plan behind it.
00:43:12 But I think it’s well chosen.
00:43:17 I think it’s probably the only approach to take.
00:43:23 A lot of the, when white people came to this continent and started colonizing it, there
00:43:32 was not a lot of coherent planning.
00:43:35 What plans they did have turned out to be terrible plans.
00:43:40 Trying to come up with plans that extend decades into the future is a waste of time.
00:43:47 So do it for the kind of unexplainable love of the unknown, like the journey towards exploring
00:43:58 the unknown and just kind of keep going.
00:44:03 You saw it with Shatner and his reaction to the flight yesterday.
00:44:10 He, for him that trip was more than worth it just for these intangible reasons.
00:44:20 What did he say?
00:44:21 I haven’t watched the video yet.
00:44:22 He was trying to express, talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of rise
00:44:28 above the thin blue blanket of the atmosphere and you’re up into the blackness.
00:44:37 And that had a huge impact on him.
00:44:41 So he was kind of, I wouldn’t say groping for words because he was pretty eloquent,
00:44:45 but he was trying to express his feelings about that in a way that is pretty gripping
00:44:52 to watch.
00:44:55 So you worked on this kind of stuff, we can go back 10 years ago.
00:45:00 You wrote an essay called Innovation Starvation.
00:45:03 You worked on this kind of idea since then, kind of looking at maybe a little bit cynically
00:45:13 about our age today and our unwillingness to take on big risky projects.
00:45:19 So in the face of that, what do you think of people like Elon Musk?
00:45:23 Because to me, people like that are inspiring and gives you hope in the face of a more kind
00:45:31 of pessimistic perspective of our age.
00:45:36 Yeah, well he’s clearly willing to tackle big ambitious projects without a lot of kind
00:45:45 of soul searching or trying to make up his mind, right?
00:45:52 It’s just like, let’s dig tunnels under cities.
00:45:58 Go.
00:45:59 Step one, make a joke about it on Twitter.
00:46:02 Step two, actually do it.
00:46:04 Yeah.
00:46:05 Yeah.
00:46:06 And I mean, things have slowed down quite a bit.
00:46:09 Our ability to build things at pace is a lot less than it was, and there’s reasons for
00:46:19 that.
00:46:20 We’re more concerned with safety and environmental impacts than people were when they were building
00:46:26 some of the great Publixworks projects of the mid 20th century.
00:46:32 But we’re at the point now where even just maintaining the stuff that we’ve got is such
00:46:36 a huge project that we need to put big resources into it and good minds into it, or else we’re
00:46:45 going to be losing things that we take for granted.
00:46:52 Do you think that there’s a lot to be done in the digital space?
00:46:57 You mentioned sort of Wikipedia and knowledge, don’t you think there could be a lot of flourishing
00:47:02 in the space of innovation, in terms of innovation in the digital space?
00:47:06 Yeah, I mean, I’d like to see that.
00:47:08 I think it’s where a lot of the brainpower went during the last couple of generations,
00:47:16 because people who might previously have been building rockets or other kinds of hard technologies
00:47:24 ended up instead going into programming, computer science, which is understandable and great.
00:47:33 We’ve got structural problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty
00:47:38 severe, and so I certainly hope that we’re not, 10 years from now, that we’re not exactly
00:47:46 where we are today when it comes to that stuff.
00:47:49 We need to move on.
00:47:51 The beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do things, and they give
00:47:59 opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the old, which is a
00:48:07 dream for me to see new social media that beats out the ways of the old.
00:48:15 So I tend to, you perhaps agree that it’s not, that it’s impossible to do social media
00:48:21 well.
00:48:22 Oh, not at all.
00:48:23 I mean, I listened to your interview with Jaren a couple of weeks ago, and I know Jaren,
00:48:28 and we’ve talked about this.
00:48:31 He went hard on me.
00:48:32 He basically said, like, it’s impossible.
00:48:35 It was very nice.
00:48:36 Well, the last time I kind of paid attention to Jaren’s thoughts on it, he was thinking
00:48:42 in terms of that basically there should be micro payments such that if I, by clicking
00:48:50 the like button on something, I’m essentially giving valuable intellectual property to Facebook
00:49:01 or Twitter or whatever.
00:49:03 It’s not a very large amount of IP, but it’s definitely a transfer of information that
00:49:08 when they aggregate it is beneficial to them.
00:49:12 So and now I do remember that he, on his interview with you, was talking about what, data unions
00:49:20 or?
00:49:21 Yeah.
00:49:22 Those are a lot of interesting ideas, but for me, the biggest disagreement was in the
00:49:28 level of cynicism.
00:49:30 He has a distrust and cynicism towards people in Silicon Valley being able to do these kinds
00:49:36 of things.
00:49:38 And I’m really, okay, when you have a large crowd of people that are doing things the
00:49:43 wrong way, you should nevertheless maintain optimism because what’s important is to find
00:49:50 the one person in that room that’s going to do things the right way.
00:49:54 Cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room.
00:49:57 So he was saying, I’ve been here a long time.
00:50:00 Oh yeah.
00:50:01 I’ve known, you know, I understand like how these folks work, they think they’re gods
00:50:09 and they know the right way to do things and they will tell you how to do those things.
00:50:15 And that kind of hubris is going to always lead you astray when you are the one who’s
00:50:20 engineering the algorithms.
00:50:22 And there’s a lot of deep truth to that because algorithms are powerful.
00:50:27 And many people when given power do not do the best of things.
00:50:32 I mean, most, what is it, the old Lincoln line, if you want to test the man’s character,
00:50:38 give him power.
00:50:39 Yeah.
00:50:40 Yes.
00:50:41 But that doesn’t mean that some people are not able to handle the power, that some people
00:50:46 are not able to come up with good ideas that create better social media.
00:50:51 Yeah, I didn’t interpret Jaren’s statements as being entirely cynical and hopeless.
00:50:58 He’s definitely raising, you know, issues of concern.
00:51:03 But he wouldn’t be out, you know, writing the books that he’s written and talking about
00:51:07 this stuff if he didn’t think there was a way.
00:51:09 If he didn’t think there was hope, yeah.
00:51:11 And part of it, as you probably know with Jaren, he just loves a good argument.
00:51:15 Yeah.
00:51:16 He just loves to have a little bit of fun.
00:51:19 Well I have to ask you about, I mean, we talked about taking all big, bold, risky ideas.
00:51:27 So in your new book, Termination Shock, it’s set here in Texas.
00:51:33 Part of it is, yeah.
00:51:34 Yeah.
00:51:35 Most of it.
00:51:36 Yeah.
00:51:37 It’s a great place to set it.
00:51:38 So in it, the main character, TR McCooligan, a Texas billionaire oil man and truck stop
00:51:43 magnate, decides to solve climate change, to take on climate change by himself.
00:51:48 So this is an interesting philosophical exploration of how to solve climate change from a perspective
00:51:54 that’s perhaps different than we’ve been thinking about.
00:51:57 I wouldn’t use the word solve, but let’s say ameliorate the temporary effects.
00:52:04 But please.
00:52:05 Take on.
00:52:06 Yeah.
00:52:07 Take on the challenge.
00:52:08 So it’s very interesting, but as, so there’s a gradual nature to this process.
00:52:15 And I mean, just like in your book, the power of innovation is something that has saved
00:52:28 us quite a few times in history.
00:52:30 So what role does that play in this gradual process?
00:52:34 Right.
00:52:35 So ultimately we don’t solve the problem until we get the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
00:52:43 But that is going to take a while.
00:52:46 We’re still adding more.
00:52:49 We haven’t even started to reduce the amount.
00:52:52 So there’s two possibilities inside to interrupt is reduce the amount that we’re putting in
00:52:58 the atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere.
00:53:03 We have to do both.
00:53:04 Right.
00:53:05 And those are two different kind of efforts in terms of like what’s involved.
00:53:11 Because it stays up there.
00:53:12 So I think just last week, China announced that they’re going to try to level off their
00:53:19 CO2 emissions in like 2030.
00:53:23 So 2031, they’ll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they did in 2030, which
00:53:30 is still a lot of CO2 in 2060, they’re saying will be net zero.
00:53:36 So if everyone in the world does that and the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere by then is
00:53:42 say 450 parts per million, it’ll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out.
00:53:51 And taking it out is hard.
00:53:54 It’s a big, it took us a long time.
00:53:58 We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs and burn all that stuff.
00:54:04 We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create all of that CO2.
00:54:11 And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove the CO2 and get
00:54:19 it back down, hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used to be.
00:54:26 So how about you get a single Texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts huge quantities
00:54:32 of sulfur into the upper atmosphere.
00:54:35 That’s idea number one.
00:54:38 This is called solar geoengineering.
00:54:40 And it’s a, we know that it’s a possibility on a technical level because volcanoes have
00:54:46 been doing it forever.
00:54:49 So many times in human history, we’ve seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a
00:54:55 global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years.
00:54:59 And one of these things happened I think in the 60s or 70s in Indonesia and the Australians
00:55:06 sent a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume.
00:55:11 And when it came back down, the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it.
00:55:17 So one of the Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid.
00:55:26 So that was our first kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was
00:55:31 sulfur dioxide.
00:55:37 And so we know then Pinatubo came along in the 90s and did this experiment for us.
00:55:43 So we know that sulfur in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric
00:55:50 acid after it combines with water and those bounce back some of the sun’s rays and reduce
00:55:58 the amount of solar energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live.
00:56:05 So we know that it works and we also know that the stuff goes away after a couple of
00:56:10 years.
00:56:12 So it gradually washes out.
00:56:14 And so it’s not a permanent thing.
00:56:16 The good news, bad news is it’s not permanent.
00:56:22 So if you don’t like what’s happening, you can just stop and wait a couple of years and
00:56:28 you’ll get back to where you started.
00:56:31 The bad news if you’re in favor of this kind of thing is that you have to keep doing it
00:56:35 forever.
00:56:39 So this guy is one of those, he’s read these papers, the TR, the character in the book.
00:56:46 He knows all this and all people who are familiar with climate science kind of know this.
00:56:54 It’s a pretty well established fact.
00:56:57 And so he just decides he’s going to take action unilaterally and do this.
00:57:05 And so there’s different ways to get the sulfur up there, but because it’s Texas, he builds
00:57:11 the biggest gun in the world.
00:57:13 It’s just six barrels pointed straight up and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur
00:57:18 into the stratosphere.
00:57:20 And so the book is about not so much that as how people react to his doing that, what
00:57:26 the political ramifications are around the world because this is an extremely controversial
00:57:34 idea and not everyone’s on board with it.
00:57:37 And even if you are willing to consider using a technological intervention, the fact is
00:57:45 that it’s going to have different effects on different parts of the world.
00:57:49 So some areas may suffer more negatives than positives and they’re not going to be happy.
00:57:59 So what do you think, so in his case, in TR’s case, he can get around getting permission
00:58:07 from governments.
00:58:10 If we were to look at us facing outside of the story, us facing climate change, where
00:58:19 do you think the solution will come from?
00:58:21 Governments working together or from bold billionaire Texans?
00:58:28 I’m pretty sure that this kind of intervention is never going to emerge from Western democracies.
00:58:38 This kind of, sorry, government coordinated, which option one?
00:58:42 Solar geoengineering.
00:58:43 Solar geoengineering.
00:58:44 Yeah.
00:58:45 From a government, from a, like those are, I want to sort of the distinction, one is
00:58:51 the idea, the technological idea you’re talking about, but two is like who comes up with the
00:58:57 idea and agrees on it, governments or individuals.
00:59:00 Yeah.
00:59:01 If this were to happen, I think it would be either an individual or more likely just some
00:59:07 government somewhere that just decides it’s in their interests to unilaterally do this.
00:59:15 And you know, that’s not me advocating it, it’s just, it would be comparatively so cheap
00:59:24 and easy to implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do
00:59:31 it once things get bad enough.
00:59:34 But I don’t think that governments will, or Western governments, just because they’re
00:59:39 not, well, we’ve seen what happened with vaccines, right?
00:59:45 So getting people to take vaccinations or wear masks, you know, has turned out to be
00:59:54 incredibly hard, even though it might save those people’s lives.
00:59:59 See, I blame, that’s not Western, that’s, I blame failure of leadership there, of leaders
01:00:07 being not coming off as authentic, not being inspiring, uniting, all those kinds of things.
01:00:13 I think that’s possible.
01:00:14 I think it’s just that we’ve gotten, the leaders we have right now aren’t the right people
01:00:20 because we’ve lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively comfortable times.
01:00:24 And it feels like unfortunate if you just look at history, that hard times made great
01:00:31 leaders and easy times make like bureaucrats that are egotistical and greedy and not very
01:00:40 interesting and not very bold.
01:00:41 Yeah.
01:00:42 No, I think that’s fair.
01:00:43 So, you know, we may be entering one of those interesting times, you know, in the Chinese
01:00:48 curse sense, yeah.
01:00:53 So I could be wrong, but I mean, there’ve been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering.
01:01:00 There was a plan to send up some balloons, high altitude balloons to take some measurements
01:01:08 in Scandinavia that got squashed by objections from people who lived up there who were just
01:01:17 opposed to the whole program on principle.
01:01:22 So we’ll see a lot more of that.
01:01:24 And it’s going to be a hard program to advocate for just because I think people don’t quite
01:01:31 understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and how far we are from even slowing
01:01:40 down the rate that we’re adding more to say nothing of bringing that number down.
01:01:48 We’re a long way out from that.
01:01:50 Do you see in terms of portfolio of solutions, us becoming a multi planetary species as part
01:01:55 of that?
01:01:57 Is this also being a motivator for investing some percent of GDP into becoming a multi
01:02:05 planetary species?
01:02:06 And what percent should that be, you think?
01:02:09 You know, in an indirect way, maybe.
01:02:11 I mean, you know what people will say, which is the same argument that has been leveled
01:02:16 against space exploration since the Apollo program, which is why don’t we solve our problems
01:02:22 here on Earth before we spend money going into space.
01:02:27 So I’ve never been a believer in that argument.
01:02:32 I think there could be a sense in which the new perspective that could be obtained by
01:02:42 thinking about like if we’re thinking about terraforming Mars, changing its atmosphere,
01:02:49 making it more amenable to life and survival.
01:02:55 You could see that maybe changing people’s opinions about terraforming the Earth.
01:03:00 There are some dangerous consequences to this particular idea of blasting software of geoengineering.
01:03:12 What do you make of sort of big, bold ideas that are a double edged sword?
01:03:18 Are all ideas like this, all big ideas like this, they have the potential to have highly
01:03:29 beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences?
01:03:34 I wouldn’t say all.
01:03:35 I think, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, how technology developed
01:03:41 in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when people maybe had unrealistic
01:03:48 ideas about new technology and weren’t sufficiently attentive to the possible downsides.
01:03:57 So we got, and there’s a reason why, I mean, in the mid 20th century, we saw antibiotics,
01:04:08 we saw the polio vaccine, we saw just simple things like refrigerators in the home.
01:04:18 My grandmother to her dying day called the refrigerator the ice box because when she
01:04:23 grew up, it was a box with ice in it.
01:04:26 So you see all that change and it’s largely for the benefit of people.
01:04:31 And so if somebody comes along and says, hey, we’re going to build nuclear reactors to make
01:04:37 energy or here’s a new chemical called DDT that’s going to kill mosquitoes, then it’s
01:04:48 easy to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides.
01:04:55 And of course, we know that the way that those early reactors were built and the way that
01:05:02 the supply chain was built to create the fuel and deal with the waste was poorly thought
01:05:13 out and we’re still dealing with the resulting problems at places like Hanford in the state
01:05:22 of Washington.
01:05:23 And we know that DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects, also had terrible effects
01:05:30 on bird populations.
01:05:32 So the kind of backlash that happened in the 70s that is still kind of going on is to sort
01:05:40 of assume that everything is a double edged sword and always to look for, we have to absolutely
01:05:49 convince ourselves that the downside isn’t going to come back and bite us before we can
01:05:57 adopt any new technology.
01:06:00 And I think the people are overly sensitized to that now.
01:06:09 Yeah, it’s funny, depending on the technology, people are a little bit too terrified of certain
01:06:16 technologies, like artificial intelligence is one.
01:06:20 My sense is that the things that they’re afraid of aren’t the things that are likely going
01:06:27 to happen in terms of negative things.
01:06:30 It’s probably impossible to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences.
01:06:36 But what’s also interesting is for AI as an example, people don’t think enough about the
01:06:42 positive things.
01:06:43 I mean, the same is true with social media.
01:06:45 It’s very popular now, for some reason, to talk about all the negative effects of social
01:06:50 media.
01:06:51 We’ve immediately forgotten how incredible it is to connect across the world.
01:06:59 There’s a deep loneliness within all of us, we long to connect and social media, at least
01:07:04 in part, enables that even in its current state.
01:07:08 And all the negative things we see with social media currently are also in part just revealing
01:07:15 the basics of human nature.
01:07:16 It didn’t make us worse, it’s just bringing it to the surface.
01:07:20 And step one of solving a problem is bringing it to the surface.
01:07:23 The fact that there’s a division, the fact that we’re easily angered and upset and all
01:07:31 of that, the witch hunts, all those kinds of things, that’s human nature and it just
01:07:35 reveals that allowing us to now work on it, it’s therapy.
01:07:40 And so that’s another example of a technology that’s just, we’re not considering the positive
01:07:47 effects now and in the future enough of.
01:07:51 I have to ask you about, there’s a million things I can ask you about, but virtual reality,
01:07:56 I gotta ask you.
01:07:59 You’ve thought about virtual reality, mixed reality quite a bit.
01:08:05 What are the interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality
01:08:11 or mixed reality in the next few years?
01:08:13 Yeah, so I was at Magic Leap for, what, five years.
01:08:19 With the best title of all time.
01:08:21 Oh, thanks.
01:08:22 Chief Futurist?
01:08:23 Yeah.
01:08:24 Yeah.
01:08:25 And so I sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content
01:08:32 R&D, so we’re trying to make content for AR, but because it’s such a new medium, it’s more
01:08:43 of an engineering R&D project almost than a creative project.
01:08:48 So it was fascinating to see everything that goes into making an AR system that runs.
01:09:00 So AR, an AR device, if it’s really gonna do AR, needs to be running Slam in real time.
01:09:09 And that alone is a big…
01:09:11 So for people who don’t know, first of all, virtual reality is creating an almost fully
01:09:18 artificial world and putting you inside it.
01:09:21 Augmented reality, AR, is taking the real world and putting stuff on top of that real
01:09:29 world, and when you say Slam, that means in real time, the device needs to be able to
01:09:33 sense, accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently to be able to reconstruct
01:09:41 the 3D structure of it so you can put stuff on top of it.
01:09:47 And doing that in real time, presumably not just real time, but in a way that creates
01:09:53 a pleasant experience for the human perception system is, yeah, that’s an engineering project.
01:10:00 Right.
01:10:01 Yeah, well said, and it’s just one of the things that the system has to do.
01:10:07 It’s also tracking your eyes so it knows what you’re looking at, how far away what you’re
01:10:13 looking at is.
01:10:18 It’s performing all those functions, and it’s got to keep doing that without burning up
01:10:26 the CPU or depleting the battery unreasonably fast, and that’s just table stakes.
01:10:35 It’s just the basic functions of the operating system, and then any content that you want
01:10:41 to add has to sit on top of that.
01:10:43 It’s got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real
01:10:51 and you don’t get sick.
01:10:52 So it’s an amazing thing, and a magically shipped device that can do that in 2019.
01:11:02 And they’re about to ship the ML2, but I don’t know any more about that than anyone else
01:11:08 because I don’t work there anymore.
01:11:12 Does it still, to some degree, boil down to a killer app, a content question?
01:11:19 Like you said, it’s kind of a wide open space.
01:11:21 Nobody knows exactly what’s going to be the compelling thing.
01:11:25 So doesn’t a super compelling experience of some sort alleviate some of the need for engineering
01:11:33 perfection?
01:11:34 Well, there’s a base layer of engineering that you have to have no matter what, but
01:11:41 you’re certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with
01:11:47 kind of low frame rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having
01:11:53 so much fun playing Doom or whatever.
01:11:56 Even Tetris.
01:11:57 Yeah, yeah.
01:11:59 So for sure that’s true.
01:12:01 And so I was working on consumer facing content, there was a great team in Wellington, New
01:12:13 Zealand that made a game called Dr. Groydbrod’s Invaders that realized the potential of AR
01:12:26 gaming in a way that I don’t think anything else has before or since.
01:12:33 And so that was definitely the strategy until, what, April 2020, which is when the company
01:12:43 decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead.
01:12:53 And I haven’t seen their financial projections, but I assume they had good reasons for making
01:13:02 that strategic decision.
01:13:05 It just means that it’s no longer necessarily targeted at just end users who want to play
01:13:13 a game or be entertained.
01:13:17 That to me from a dreamer, futurist perspective is heartbreaking because I don’t know necessarily
01:13:24 from in the VR space, but I see this kind of thing with robotics where to me the future
01:13:33 of robotics is consumer facing and a lot of great roboticists, Boston Dynamics and companies
01:13:42 like that are focused on sort of industrial applications for financial business reasons.
01:13:50 Yeah.
01:13:51 Now I can see the parallels for sure.
01:13:54 We’ll see.
01:13:55 It was a fun project.
01:14:00 We worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats, which just populated your room with
01:14:06 baby goats.
01:14:07 That seemed like a killer app right there.
01:14:09 No, we thought highly of the idea for sure.
01:14:14 But because of the SLAM, the system knew, for example, here’s a table, here’s a little
01:14:22 end table.
01:14:24 We know the heights.
01:14:26 We know how high our animated baby goat can jump.
01:14:33 So our engineers had to build a system for converting the SLAM primitives into game engine
01:14:40 objects that the AIs in the game could navigate around.
01:14:49 And that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how to a sample app than
01:14:56 as a finished consumer facing.
01:15:00 You mean the baby goat AI?
01:15:04 That seems to me like a world I could entertain myself for hours, just every day coming home
01:15:10 to see baby goats.
01:15:13 Yeah.
01:15:14 I mean, it was an ambient kind of…
01:15:17 It’s not a thing that you would sit there and play like a video.
01:15:21 Just life.
01:15:22 Yeah.
01:15:23 Yeah.
01:15:24 But now there’s baby goats.
01:15:25 I mean, what’s the purpose of having dogs and cats in your life exactly?
01:15:29 It’s kind of ambient.
01:15:30 They’re not really helping you do anything, but it’s enriching your life.
01:15:34 You can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want, but you don’t have to.
01:15:42 So we worked on that in a bigger project that was more of a storytelling in a fictional
01:15:48 universe.
01:15:50 The hardware is worth a look.
01:15:52 There’s still a belief, I just saw it this morning looking at Twitter, that the Magic
01:15:57 League never shipped anything.
01:16:00 But they’ve been, since 2019, you can go to their website and buy one of these devices
01:16:07 anytime you want to spend the money.
01:16:11 Yeah.
01:16:12 And the new one is coming out, I think in 2022, so in a few months.
01:16:17 What do you think, looking out 50 years from now, what wins?
01:16:24 Virtual reality, augmented reality, or physical reality?
01:16:30 What wins?
01:16:32 Meaning like, what do people that have financial resources enjoy spending most of their time
01:16:41 in?
01:16:43 I’ve always been a fan of AR and it’s kind of an easy answer because if you’re wearing
01:16:49 an AR device and you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device.
01:16:56 If you block out what’s really there, then all you’re seeing is a VR.
01:17:03 But you are, with AR, constrained to kind of operate in something that’s similar to
01:17:11 physical reality.
01:17:12 Yeah.
01:17:13 With VR, you can go into fantastical worlds.
01:17:15 True.
01:17:16 True.
01:17:17 But there are still issues in those fantastical worlds with motion sickness.
01:17:29 If your body is experiencing acceleration, your inner ear, that differs from what your
01:17:37 eye thinks it’s seeing, then you’ll get sick, unless you’re a very unusual person.
01:17:43 So it doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it’s just a constraint that VR designers have to learn
01:17:51 to work with.
01:17:52 So do you think it’s possible that in the future, we’re living mostly in a virtual reality
01:17:59 world?
01:18:00 Like, we become more and more detached from physical reality?
01:18:04 For entertainment, maybe, for certain applications, I’m personally more, I mean, we have to make
01:18:12 a distinction between what I would personally find interesting and what might win in the
01:18:17 market.
01:18:18 So maybe some people, maybe lots of people, would like to spend a huge amount of time
01:18:24 in VR.
01:18:26 I’m personally more interested in enhancing the experience that I have of the physical
01:18:33 world, because the physical world’s pretty cool, right?
01:18:37 There’s a lot to be said for moving around in the real world.
01:18:42 And I ask you for you personally, to try to play devil’s advocate, or to try to construct,
01:18:49 to imagine a VR world where you and Neal Stephenson wouldn’t want to stay.
01:19:00 Not because the physical world all of a sudden became really bad, for some reason, like you’re
01:19:04 trying to escape it.
01:19:06 Like, literally, it’s just more enriching.
01:19:10 In the same way, like, there’s a glimmer in your eye when you said you enjoy the physical
01:19:15 world.
01:19:16 Like, double up on that glimmer for the virtual reality.
01:19:21 Can you imagine such a world?
01:19:23 Well, like, I’ll give maybe an example that’s a bridge, which is that I like making things.
01:19:30 So I like working in a machine shop and making objects with 3D printers or machines or whatever.
01:19:37 And so I’ve had to learn how to get good at using a CAD program.
01:19:45 There’s many to choose from.
01:19:46 I use one called Fusion 360.
01:19:51 And I can spend hours in that trying to create, imagine and create the things I want to create.
01:20:01 And it’s not virtual reality exactly, but that whole time, my whole field of view is
01:20:11 occupied by this monitor that’s showing me a window into a three dimensional space.
01:20:18 I’m rotating things around.
01:20:20 I’m imagining things.
01:20:22 I’m making things.
01:20:23 And so that is pretty close to being in virtual reality.
01:20:31 Does that thing have to exist for you to experience true joy?
01:20:34 Can you stay in Fusion 360 the whole time?
01:20:38 Do you have to 3D print it and touch it?
01:20:41 Yeah, I mean, that’s my game.
01:20:44 That’s what I’m up to.
01:20:45 But it happens that if you’re building a virtual environment, if you’re making a game level
01:20:54 or creating a virtual set for a film or TV production, the thing that you’re designing
01:21:00 in the program may never physically exist.
01:21:04 And in fact, it’s preferable that it doesn’t because the whole point of that is to make
01:21:11 imaginary things that you couldn’t build otherwise.
01:21:17 So I think lots of people spend a good chunk of their working hours in something that’s
01:21:22 pretty close to VR.
01:21:25 It’s just that currently the output device happens to be a rectangular object in front
01:21:30 of them.
01:21:31 You could replace that with a VR headset and they’d be doing the same stuff.
01:21:39 There’s all kinds of interfaces.
01:21:40 For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks, but let’s say actually podcasts
01:21:44 because there’s an intimate human connection in a podcast.
01:21:49 It’s one way.
01:21:50 But you get to learn about the person you’re listening to and that’s a real connection
01:21:54 and that’s just audio.
01:21:55 For a lot of people, that’s just audio.
01:21:58 And for me, that’s just audio as a fan of people and you kind of a little bit are friends
01:22:05 with those people.
01:22:06 Yeah, they’re in your life, you’re listening to them, yeah.
01:22:11 And I mean, they’re as far away from real as it gets.
01:22:18 There’s not even a visual component.
01:22:21 It’s just audio.
01:22:22 But they’re as real, like if I was on a desert island, like my imagination, like this thing
01:22:29 works pretty good in terms of imagination.
01:22:33 It creates a very beautiful world with just audio.
01:22:40 Or even just reading books.
01:22:42 Exactly, reading books.
01:22:45 Even more so with reading books because there are certain mediums which stimulate the imagination
01:22:51 more.
01:22:54 When you present less, the imagination works more and that can create really enriching
01:22:59 experiences.
01:23:02 To me, the question is, can you do some of the amazing things that make life amazing
01:23:09 in virtual worlds?
01:23:11 It seems to me the answer there is obviously yes.
01:23:14 Even if I, like you, am attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world, I think I
01:23:20 can very readily imagine coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual
01:23:27 world where you make friends and you can fall in love, where the source of love in your
01:23:34 life is to a much greater degree inside of a virtual world.
01:23:43 And then love means fulfillment, that means happiness, that’s the thing you look forward
01:23:47 to.
01:23:48 And not some kind of dopamine rush type of love, but like long lasting like friendship.
01:23:53 Yeah, yeah.
01:23:54 The real deal.
01:23:55 Yeah.
01:23:56 The question is on what is there in the way of applications, the content, and can it feed
01:24:02 you those things?
01:24:04 Can it give you, like in my example of using the CAD program, it gives me the ability to
01:24:11 do something I enjoy, which is imagining things and making things in a particular way.
01:24:18 Can we psychoanalyze you for a second?
01:24:21 Sure.
01:24:22 What exactly do you enjoy?
01:24:23 Is there some component of you building the thing where you get to at least a little bit
01:24:29 share with others?
01:24:32 Like is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?
01:24:37 Will anyone ever see it?
01:24:39 Right.
01:24:40 There’s a source of your enjoyment because I would argue that perhaps when like the turtles
01:24:48 all the way down, when you get to the bottom turtle, it has to do with other sharing with
01:24:52 other humans.
01:24:53 Yeah.
01:24:54 And if you can then put those humans inside the VR world, then you start to…
01:25:01 Then you can…
01:25:02 Okay, for example, you could do it in the physical world, the 3D printing, but you share
01:25:07 it in the virtual world and that’s where the source of happiness is.
01:25:12 I think at least speaking for myself, I’m always thinking in terms of an audience and
01:25:18 at some level I feel like I’m doing this for someone or communicating to someone, even
01:25:24 if there’s not a specific someone in mind, it could just be an abstract theoretical someone.
01:25:33 And it’s like another app I spend a lot of time in is Mathematica.
01:25:36 Okay.
01:25:37 Yeah.
01:25:38 Incredible app.
01:25:39 Yeah.
01:25:40 Yeah.
01:25:41 And when I do a Mathematica notebook, if I’m trying to figure something out, I spend a
01:25:44 lot of time typing, just my stuff is just huge blocks of text, just me thinking out
01:25:51 loud and then some graphs and calculations and stuff.
01:25:57 Because to me, that act of explaining things and commenting helps me understand what I’m
01:26:06 doing.
01:26:07 And there’s kind of an audience, amorphous audience in mind.
01:26:12 Yeah.
01:26:13 I mean, most of this stuff nobody will ever see and yet I’m creating it as if there were
01:26:18 an audience that might read this stuff because that’s a necessary constraint that helps me
01:26:27 do a better job.
01:26:29 What’s the, this might be a tricky question to answer, what comes to mind as a particularly
01:26:36 beautiful thing that you’re proud of that you created inside Mathematica visualization
01:26:40 wise or something that just comes to memory if it’s possible to retrieve?
01:26:47 So the thing I’ve spent the most amount of time on is I got obsessed a long time ago,
01:26:58 was trying to tile the globe with hexagons.
01:27:01 Yes.
01:27:02 And.
01:27:03 An actual globe?
01:27:05 Well, any spherical.
01:27:06 Any spherical.
01:27:07 Okay.
01:27:08 But with an eye towards putting it on the earth.
01:27:12 And so, and have it be recursive.
01:27:15 So you can have hexagons within hexagons, which is hard because and probably a bad idea
01:27:22 because you can’t tile a hexagon with smaller hexagons.
01:27:28 They don’t, they stick out.
01:27:30 Got it.
01:27:31 So they’re, oh, they stick out.
01:27:33 So there’s a, can you do some kind of fractal hexagon situation?
01:27:37 Yeah.
01:27:38 Yeah.
01:27:39 So it’s that and people who know me are always, now make fun of me for this.
01:27:47 So they’ll send me, if they see a picture with hexagons in it, they’ll like send me
01:27:52 a link to make fun of me.
01:27:56 So as some.
01:27:57 One of those people, Roger Penrose or.
01:28:00 I think Roger’s a little above my level.
01:28:03 He’s into hexagons as well and tiling.
01:28:08 Yeah.
01:28:09 Yeah.
01:28:10 So I did a lot of that and I thought, you know, it was pretty cool, but there’s some
01:28:15 like surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up.
01:28:19 Like you’ve always got to have some pentagons.
01:28:25 Like if you start with the icosahedron, which is equilateral triangles, which is a logical
01:28:31 place to start, you can cover those with hexagons, but every vertex where the triangles come
01:28:42 together is a pentagon.
01:28:44 Has to be a pentagon.
01:28:45 Oh, interesting.
01:28:46 So it’s all hexagons and then there’s a pentagon at the intersections.
01:28:49 Yeah.
01:28:50 Yeah.
01:28:51 Cool.
01:28:52 How’d you figure that out?
01:28:53 Is that a known fact?
01:28:54 Well, it’s just, if you look at a.
01:28:55 Yeah.
01:28:56 Like just by inspection.
01:28:57 It’s an obvious thing.
01:28:58 Got it.
01:28:59 Yeah.
01:29:00 So any system that you come up with to do this has got to have this exceptions built
01:29:08 into it for those 12.
01:29:10 You could have quintillions of hexagons, but you’ve still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere.
01:29:20 So I’ve blown a hell of a lot of time on that over the years.
01:29:26 By the way, a lot of those kind of problems are very difficult to prove something about.
01:29:33 Yeah.
01:29:34 Yeah.
01:29:35 Yeah.
01:29:36 I think Uber did it because someone, one of my friends who knows of my interest in this
01:29:44 and who likes to give me a hard time sent me a link.
01:29:49 This is a couple of years ago to some code base that I think came out of Uber where they
01:29:56 had done this.
01:29:59 You break down the whole surface of the earth into little hexagons.
01:30:04 So that was a real knife through the heart.
01:30:09 But I’ll probably come back to it someday.
01:30:14 Is there something special about hexagons or are you interested in all kinds of tiling?
01:30:19 Well, I’m interested in all kinds of tiling, but I know my limitations as a math guy.
01:30:29 So hexagons are about my speed.
01:30:34 Just sufficient amount of complexity.
01:30:36 Yeah.
01:30:37 Yeah.
01:30:38 But no, tiling is a really interesting problem.
01:30:41 Both two and three dimensional tiling problems are fascinating and they’re one of those ancient
01:30:48 puzzles that has attracted brainiacs for centuries.
01:30:59 Let me ask you a little bit about AI.
01:31:03 What are some likely interesting trajectories for the proliferation of AI in society over
01:31:10 the next couple of decades?
01:31:11 Do you think about this kind of stuff?
01:31:14 I do not think about it a lot because it’s a deep topic and I don’t consider myself super
01:31:20 well informed about it.
01:31:22 And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different things.
01:31:28 So I’ve messed around just a tiny little bit with neural nets, with what’s it called PCA,
01:31:36 principal component analysis.
01:31:38 So I guess I tend to think in terms of some granular bottom up ideas rather than big picture
01:31:48 top down.
01:31:49 Oh God.
01:31:50 So like very specific algorithms, like how are they going to, what problem are they going
01:31:55 to solve in society such that it has like a lot of big ripple effects.
01:32:01 I mean, we could talk a particular successful AI systems and success defined in different
01:32:08 ways of recent years.
01:32:09 So one is language models with GPT3.
01:32:15 Most importantly, they’re self supervised, meaning they don’t require much supervision
01:32:19 from humans, which means they can learn by just reading a huge amount of content created
01:32:25 by humans.
01:32:26 So read the internet and from that be able to generate text and do all kinds of things
01:32:30 like that.
01:32:31 It’s possible they have a big enough neural network.
01:32:34 It’s going to be able to have conversations with humans based on just reading human language.
01:32:41 That’s an interesting idea.
01:32:42 To me, the very interesting idea that people don’t think about it as AI because they’re
01:32:49 kind of dumb currently is actual embodied robots.
01:32:53 So robotics like Boston Dynamics have downstairs and upstairs legged robots.
01:33:01 You know, the currently Boston Dynamics robots and most legged robots, most robots period
01:33:08 are pretty dumb.
01:33:11 Most of the challenges have to do with the actual, first of all, the engineering of making
01:33:15 the thing work, getting a sensor suite that allows you to do the same thing as with Magic
01:33:20 Leap.
01:33:21 It’s like a layer of like, where am I and what am I looking at?
01:33:29 I don’t need to deeply understand my surroundings at a level beyond of what will hurt if I run
01:33:39 into it.
01:33:40 Yeah, yeah.
01:33:41 But even that is hard.
01:33:43 That’s hard.
01:33:44 But the thing that I think people don’t in the robotics space explore enough is the human
01:33:51 robot interaction part of the picture, which is how it makes humans feel, how robots make
01:34:00 humans feel.
01:34:01 And I think that’s going to have a very significant impact in the near future in society, which
01:34:08 is the more you integrate AI systems of whatever form into society where humans are in contact
01:34:17 with them regularly.
01:34:19 So that could be embodied robotics or that could be social media algorithms.
01:34:23 I think that has a very significant impact.
01:34:26 And people often think like AI needs to be super smart to have an impact.
01:34:31 I think it needs to be super integrated with society to have an impact and more and more
01:34:37 that’s happening, even if they’re dumb.
01:34:40 Yeah.
01:34:41 Yeah.
01:34:42 No, I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is that I’m associated with a combat robotics
01:34:52 team.
01:34:53 And I’ve been to a few battle bots competitions.
01:34:55 And that’s not like a lot of ways that’s pretty far from the kind of robotics you’re talking
01:35:01 about because these robots are remote controlled.
01:35:06 They’re not autonomous.
01:35:08 And so they’re pretty simple, but it’s interesting to watch people’s emotional reactions to different
01:35:17 robots.
01:35:18 So there was one that was in the last year’s season, the 2020 season called Rusty that
01:35:26 was just like put together out of spare parts and it looked kind of cute and it became this
01:35:32 huge crowd favorite because you could see it was made of like salad bowls and random
01:35:39 pieces of hardware that this guy had like scavenged from his farm.
01:35:43 And so immediately people kind of fell in love with this one particular robot.
01:35:49 Whereas other robots might be like the bad guy, if you think of professional wrestling,
01:35:57 the heel and the baby face.
01:36:00 So people do, for reasons that are hard to understand, form these emotional reactions.
01:36:06 And we form narratives in the same way we do when we meet human beings, we tell stories
01:36:10 about these objects and they can be intelligent and they can be biological or they can be
01:36:16 almost close to inanimate objects.
01:36:19 That to me is kind of fascinating.
01:36:21 And if robots choose to lean into that, it creates an interesting world.
01:36:29 If they start using feedback loops to make themselves cuter.
01:36:34 Not just cuter, but everything that humans do, let’s not speak harshly of robots, humans
01:36:41 do the same thing.
01:36:42 Oh no, I wasn’t meaning it in a, but you’re right, humans based on feedback will change
01:36:48 their appearance.
01:36:49 Yes, I do this on Instagram all the time, how do I look cuter?
01:36:52 That’s the fundamental question I ask myself.
01:36:54 So why wouldn’t a robot wanna, it’s like oh wow, people really don’t like the quad mount
01:37:02 machine gun on top of my turret, maybe I should get rid of that and people would feel more
01:37:08 at ease.
01:37:10 Or lean into it, be proud of it.
01:37:13 Like you won’t take my gun, whatever the saying is, from my dead cold hands.
01:37:20 I mean their personality, adding personality such that you can start to heal, you can start
01:37:26 to weave narratives.
01:37:27 I think that’s a fascinating place where there’s this feedback loop, like you said, where AI,
01:37:41 especially when it’s embodied, puts a mirror to ourselves.
01:37:46 Just like other humans, our close friends, they kind of teach us about ourselves.
01:37:52 We teach each other and through that process grow close.
01:37:57 And to me it’s so fascinating to expand the space of deep meaningful interactions beyond
01:38:06 just humans.
01:38:10 That’s the opportunity I see with robots and with AI systems and that’s why I don’t like,
01:38:18 my biggest problem with social media algorithms is the lack of transparency.
01:38:22 It’s not the existence of the algorithms, it’s, well there’s many things.
01:38:27 One is the data.
01:38:28 Data should be controlled by people themselves.
01:38:33 But also the lack of transparency in how the algorithms work.
01:38:36 You change your perception of what’s real in hidden ways.
01:38:41 In hidden ways.
01:38:42 Yeah.
01:38:43 Like you should be aware, just like when you take, I don’t know, if you take psychedelics,
01:38:47 you should be aware that you took the psychedelics, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
01:38:52 And second, you should become a student and a scholar and there should be research done,
01:38:59 there should be open conversation about how your perception has changed and then you become
01:39:05 your own guide in this world of altered perception because arguably none of it is real.
01:39:13 You get to choose the flavor of real.
01:39:16 I mean, this is something you explore quite a bit.
01:39:22 Do you yourself think that there is a bottom to it where there is reality, there’s a base
01:39:31 layer of reality that physics can explore and our human perception sort of layer stuff?
01:39:39 Is there, let’s go to Plato, is there such a thing as truth?
01:39:44 I lean towards the Platonic view of things.
01:39:48 So I believe that mathematical objects have a reality that it’s not all made up by human
01:39:56 minds.
01:39:59 And I don’t know where that reality comes from.
01:40:03 I can’t explain it, but I do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not invented.
01:40:15 I did a lot of, not a lot, but I did some reading of Husserl when I was writing Anathem
01:40:25 and he’s a 20th century phenomenologist and he’s writing in the, he’s writing at the same
01:40:34 time as scientists are starting to understand atoms and becoming aware that when we look
01:40:43 at this table, it’s really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum and there’s a very
01:40:51 sparse arrangement of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space that interact with
01:41:00 each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object.
01:41:07 So that’s kind of the beginnings of phenomenology and his stuff is pretty hard to read.
01:41:20 You really have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time.
01:41:27 But he’s trying to come to grips with these kinds of questions.
01:41:32 How did you come to grips with it?
01:41:36 Why does this table feel solid?
01:41:38 Well, I mean, we’re an evolved system that there’s, we have biological advantages in
01:41:44 knowing where solid objects are.
01:41:46 So we’ve got this system in our head that integrates our perceptions into this coherent
01:41:54 view of things.
01:41:59 One of the take homes that I like from Husserl is the idea of intersubjectivity and the idea
01:42:06 that the fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to share our perceptions
01:42:16 and have them ratified by other, they don’t even have to be people, but a prisoner in
01:42:23 solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects because they perceive the
01:42:32 same things that the prisoner perceives and so convince him that he’s not just hallucinating.
01:42:41 Yeah, there’s the establish a consensus, but see, that doesn’t mean any of it is real.
01:42:49 You just establish a consensus.
01:42:52 It could be very distant from something that’s real in an engineering sense of real.
01:43:05 Like you could build it using physics.
01:43:07 But I think that a valuable application for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except
01:43:16 that.
01:43:17 It just sits there and if you hear a door slam, you might turn to see what it is.
01:43:27 If the robot at the same time turns to look at the door slam, it’s ratifying your perception.
01:43:34 But isn’t that the basis of love is when the door slams, you both look, but for deeper
01:43:42 things, you both hear the same music and others don’t.
01:43:48 I mean, isn’t that what that means?
01:43:52 Yeah.
01:43:53 By love, I mean depth of human connection.
01:43:55 Yeah.
01:43:56 Yeah, you arrive at similar reactions without having to explicitly communicate it.
01:44:05 Yeah.
01:44:06 But we could start with a robot that listens explicitly for the slam doors or scary sounds.
01:44:15 I can think of an example of this is when I went to college, we’d be sitting at the
01:44:24 cafeteria, a bunch of people eating our dinner together that we had just met, let’s say.
01:44:34 So a bunch of new people in your life and someone might make a funny remark or a not
01:44:41 so funny remark or something would happen and you might then at that moment make eye
01:44:48 contact with someone you didn’t know at the other end of the table.
01:44:54 In that moment, you would realize this person is reacting.
01:44:59 This person heard what I heard.
01:45:01 They’re reacting the way I reacted.
01:45:04 Nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened, but random
01:45:10 stranger down there and I, we have this connection and then you build on that.
01:45:15 So then the next time something happens, you automatically look at your new friend and
01:45:22 they look back at you and before you know it, you’re hanging out together because you
01:45:28 know you’ve already established without even talking to each other that you’re on the same
01:45:34 wavelength.
01:45:35 Yeah.
01:45:36 It’s seemingly so simple, but so powerful that establishing that you’re on the same
01:45:41 wavelength at some level.
01:45:43 There’s no reason why you and a toaster can’t have that.
01:45:48 I’m just saying.
01:45:49 Does this smell burned to you?
01:45:52 Exactly.
01:45:53 I think it’s burnt.
01:45:55 If a toaster could just say that to you.
01:45:59 Yeah.
01:46:00 Yeah.
01:46:01 Cryptonomicon published in 1999, set in the late 90s and involves hackers who build essentially
01:46:07 cryptocurrency.
01:46:08 Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008.
01:46:14 So I have to kind of ask, from you looking at this layout of what’s been happening in
01:46:23 cryptocurrency, the evolution of this technology, how has it rolled out differently than you
01:46:32 could have imagined in two ways?
01:46:34 One the technology itself and two the human side of things, the human stories of the hackers
01:46:42 and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless, the human side of things.
01:46:48 Yeah.
01:46:49 Well, Cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin, it’s pre Satoshi, it’s pre blockchain as you point
01:46:55 out.
01:46:56 So at that point I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing among people like the Bay
01:47:05 Area Cypherpunks in Berkeley.
01:47:07 There was a branch here in Austin as well and a lot of their thinking was based on the
01:47:17 idea that you would have to have a physical region of the earth that was free of government
01:47:26 interference.
01:47:28 You couldn’t achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network.
01:47:34 You actually had to have a room somewhere with servers in it that a government couldn’t
01:47:42 come and meddle with.
01:47:44 And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there were efforts to
01:47:50 figure out jurisdictions where this might work.
01:47:53 There was a lot of interest for a while in Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island that
01:47:58 had some unusual jurisdictional properties.
01:48:02 There was SeaLand, which is a platform in the North Sea.
01:48:09 And so there was a lot of effort that went into finding these physical locations that
01:48:14 were deemed kind of safe.
01:48:17 And that all goes away with blockchain, it’s no longer necessary.
01:48:25 And so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways because you no longer have…
01:48:32 From a novelist point of view, the old system was a lot more fun to work with because it
01:48:38 gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in strange parts of the world trying
01:48:44 to set up server rooms.
01:48:46 So that’s a great storytelling thing.
01:48:48 There’s still a little bit of that in the modern world, but it’s just there’s several
01:48:54 server rooms as opposed to one centralized one.
01:48:57 Yeah.
01:48:58 Whereas the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your GPUs
01:49:07 from melting down.
01:49:08 So people building things in Iceland or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean
01:49:14 or whatever.
01:49:16 So…
01:49:17 But there’s still governments involved and there’s still from a novelist perspective
01:49:21 interesting dynamics with big governments like China and more sort of renegade governments
01:49:28 from all over the world trying to contend with this idea of what to do in terms of control
01:49:34 and power over these kinds of centers that do the mining of the cryptocurrency.
01:49:41 Yeah.
01:49:42 So we’re in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial…
01:49:46 Like there was…
01:49:47 The stuff I was describing in Cryptonomicon had a little bit of air about it of the underpants
01:49:54 gnomes in that we’re gonna build this system and then we’ll make money somehow.
01:50:03 But the intermediate step was left out.
01:50:08 And that is…
01:50:11 I think we’re now sort of into that phase of the thing where Bitcoin, blockchain exists,
01:50:19 people know how it works, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist.
01:50:24 People are using them and it’s sort of like, okay, what now?
01:50:28 Where does this all lead?
01:50:31 So…
01:50:32 Do you have a sense of where it all leads?
01:50:35 Like is it possible that the set of technology kind of continues to have transformational
01:50:44 effects on not just sort of finance but who gets to have power in this world?
01:50:52 So the decentralization of power.
01:50:55 Big questions, right?
01:50:56 So I guess there’s a little bit of the cynic in me thinking that as soon as it becomes
01:51:03 important enough, the existing banks and people in power are gonna sort of control it.
01:51:10 I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won’t be a big change in the end.
01:51:16 There’s a utopian strain sometimes in the way people think about this that I’m not so
01:51:23 sure about.
01:51:26 There is a technological aspect to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that make it a
01:51:32 little easier to pull along the utopian thread because it’s harder for governments to control
01:51:41 Bitcoin.
01:51:42 I mean, they have much fewer options.
01:51:48 They can ban, they can make it illegal.
01:51:50 It’s more difficult.
01:51:52 So technology here is on the side of the powerless, the voiceless, which is a very interesting
01:51:57 idea.
01:51:58 Of course, yes, it does have a utopian feel to it, but we have been making progress throughout
01:52:04 human history.
01:52:05 Maybe this is what progress looks like.
01:52:07 There will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that take advantage of
01:52:12 it, skim off the top kind of thing, but maybe this does give more power to people that haven’t
01:52:19 had power before in a good way, like distributing power and enabling sort of more greater resistance
01:52:29 to sort of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing, and also enabling
01:52:36 all kinds of technologies built on top of it.
01:52:40 Ultimately, when you digitize money, money is a kind of speech, or it’s a kind of mechanism
01:52:49 of how humans interact, and if you make that digital, more and more of the world moves
01:52:56 to the digital space, and then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality with the
01:53:04 toaster.
01:53:05 In a lot of ways, I think in that realm of technology that the money per se is one of
01:53:11 the less interesting things you can do with it, so I think cryptographically enforceable
01:53:16 contracts and organizations built on those, that seems to me like it’s got more potential
01:53:24 for change just because we do already have money, and although it’s an old system, it’s
01:53:33 been digitized to a large extent by the stripes and the credit card companies of the world.
01:53:42 I also love the idea of connecting two smart contracts, connecting data, sort of making
01:53:51 it more formal, it’s like Mathematica, more structured, the integration of data, of weather
01:53:58 data, of all kinds of data about the stuff in the world, so they can make contracts between
01:54:06 people that’s grounded in data, and that’s actually getting closer to something like
01:54:14 truth, because then you can make agreements based on actual data versus kind of perceptions
01:54:20 of data, and if you can formalize, like distribute the power of who gets to tell the story, and
01:54:28 that’s an interesting kind of resistance against the powerful in the space of narrative.
01:54:35 Yeah, David Brin has been saying for a while that the only way to settle arguments across
01:54:42 the political divide is to make bets, so people can say the election was stolen, or whatever
01:54:52 controversial position they’re taking, and they’ll keep saying it until you wager real
01:55:02 money on it.
01:55:07 So maybe there’s something there, if you could kind of turn that into a, put a user interface
01:55:14 on that.
01:55:15 Yeah, have a stake in your divisiveness, in your arguments.
01:55:25 Will Dogecoin take over the world?
01:55:27 Twitter question.
01:55:28 You know, I don’t follow the different coins that much, so I don’t, I mean I hear about
01:55:33 Dogecoin and I’ve kind of followed the story of it.
01:55:37 So the interesting aspect of Dogecoin is it, so in contrast to like Bitcoin and Ethereum,
01:55:47 which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek to solve some of
01:55:52 the problems that we’re talking about with smart contracts and resist the banks and all
01:55:59 those kinds of things, Dogecoin operates more in the space of memes and humor, while still
01:56:06 doing some of the similar things.
01:56:09 And it presents to the world sort of a question of whether memes, whether humor, whether narrative
01:56:20 will go a long way in the future.
01:56:25 Like much farther than some kind of boring old grounded technologies.
01:56:32 Whether we’ll be playing in the space of fun.
01:56:35 Like once we’ve built a base of comfort and stability and like a robust system where everyone
01:56:41 has shelter, everyone has food and the basic needs covered, are we going to then operate
01:56:50 in the space of fun?
01:56:53 That’s what I think about Dogecoin.
01:56:55 Because it seems like fun spreads faster than anything else.
01:57:02 Fun of different kinds, and that could be bad fun and that could be good fun.
01:57:06 And so it’s a battle of good fun versus bad fun.
01:57:09 It goes viral very, very quickly when you, if you post something that people find fun
01:57:14 to.
01:57:15 Yeah.
01:57:16 And that’s what Dogecoin represents.
01:57:17 So there’s like, so Bitcoin represents like financial, like serious financial instruments
01:57:25 and then Dogecoin represents fun.
01:57:27 And it’s interesting to watch the battle go on on the internet to see which wins.
01:57:33 This is also like open question to me of what is the internet?
01:57:39 Because fun seems to prevail on the internet.
01:57:43 And is that a fundamental property of the internet moving forward when you look a hundred
01:57:48 years out, or is this a temporary thing that was true at the birth of the internet and
01:57:53 it’s just true for a couple of decades until it fades away and the adults take over and
01:57:58 become serious again?
01:57:59 Well, I think the adults took over initially and then it was later on that people started
01:58:05 using it for fun, frivolous things like memes.
01:58:10 And that’s, I think that’s pretty much unstoppable, you know, because even people who are very
01:58:16 serious, you know, enjoy sending around a funny picture or something that amuses them.
01:58:26 Yeah.
01:58:27 I personally think we spoke about World War II.
01:58:30 I think memes will save the world and prevent all future wars.
01:58:35 You’ve been handwriting your work for the past 20 years since writing The Baroque Cycle.
01:58:41 What are the pros and cons of handwriting versus typing?
01:58:44 For me, I started it as an experiment when I started The Baroque Cycle because I had
01:58:49 noticed that sometimes if I was stuck having a hard time getting started, if I just picked
01:58:54 up a pen and started writing, it was easy to go.
01:59:00 So I just decided to keep with that.
01:59:04 If it got in my way, I didn’t like it, I could always just go back to the word processor
01:59:08 and be fine.
01:59:09 But that never happened.
01:59:11 So there’s a certain security that comes from knowing that it’s ink on paper and there’s
01:59:16 no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it.
01:59:28 It’s a slower output technique.
01:59:31 And so a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here before it
01:59:39 gets committed to paper, whereas I can type really fast.
01:59:43 And so I can slam things out before I’ve really thought them through.
01:59:48 So I think the first draft quality ends up being higher.
01:59:54 And then editing, first draft of editing is just faster because instead of like trying
02:00:00 to move the cursor around or whatever or hitting the backspace key, I can just draw a line
02:00:07 through a word or a sentence or just around a whole paragraph and exit out.
02:00:14 And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit, but I’ve also left behind a record of
02:00:18 what the text was prior to the edit.
02:00:22 Of course, all the digital versions have those quote unquote features, but their experience
02:00:28 is different.
02:00:31 Is there a romance to just the physical, the touch of the pen to the paper doing what has
02:00:41 been done for centuries?
02:00:43 I think there is.
02:00:44 I think there’s just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology
02:00:50 beyond the pen and the paper is just very simple and clean and so I’ve got a bunch of
02:01:01 fountain pens.
02:01:03 I started buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago because I thought I would be
02:01:10 more conservative with it, but it’s still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn’t really
02:01:19 alter my habits very much.
02:01:24 So all that said, once you do type stuff up, you use Emacs.
02:01:30 I use Emacs, obviously the superior editor.
02:01:33 Of course.
02:01:34 Let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question because Emacs has been around forever.
02:01:41 Do you think in 100 years we will still have Emacs and Vim, or like pick a let’s say 50,
02:01:52 100 years.
02:01:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:01:54 No, I mean whenever you’re doing anything in Linux, you’re spending a lot of time editing
02:02:00 little config files and scripts and stuff and you need to be able to pop in and out
02:02:06 of editing those things and it needs to work.
02:02:12 Like even if the windowing GUI is dead and all you’ve got is like a command line, to
02:02:19 get out of that problem, you might need to enter an editor and alter a file.
02:02:26 So I think on that level, there will always have to be sort of very simple, well Emacs
02:02:34 isn’t very simple, but you know what I mean.
02:02:37 There have to be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a GUI
02:02:44 just for administering systems.
02:02:47 Now how widespread they’ll be, there’s a certain amount of, what’s the story of the American
02:02:58 folktale of the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry, trying to keep
02:03:06 up with the steam hammer and eventually the steam hammer wins because he can’t drive the
02:03:12 spikes fast enough.
02:03:14 So there’s a sense in which Microsoft, who knows how much they’ve invested in code visual
02:03:25 studio or Apple with Xcode.
02:03:29 So they’ve put huge amounts of money into enhancing their IDEs and Emacs in theory can
02:03:38 duplicate all of those features by if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs
02:03:47 Lisp macros, but at some point it’s gonna be hard to maintain that level of, to keep
02:04:00 up feature for feature.
02:04:03 The interesting thing about Emacs just is it’s lasted a long time and I think you talked
02:04:09 about that there’s a certain fads certainly in the software engineering space and it’s
02:04:21 interesting to think about technologies that sort of last for a very long time and just
02:04:28 kind of being in the, what is it, how do they get by?
02:04:33 It’s like the cockroaches of software or the bacteria software or something like this base
02:04:41 thing that nobody, everybody’s just became reliant on and they just outlast everything
02:04:47 else and slowly, slowly adjust with the times with a little bit of a delay, with a little
02:04:52 bit of customization by individuals kind of that, but they’re always there in the shadows
02:04:58 and they outlast everybody else.
02:05:01 And I wonder if that might be the story for a lot of technologies, especially in the software
02:05:05 space.
02:05:06 Shell scripts, all that stuff, you can’t run the modern world without a bunch of shell
02:05:14 scripts booting up machines and running things.
02:05:18 So that is gonna be a hard thing to replace.
02:05:25 And then tech for typesetting that you use, you said.
02:05:29 For when I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple macros that I use, but then
02:05:35 I have to, the publisher put their foot down and they want it in Word format now.
02:05:42 So years ago I wrote some macros to convert and this time, what did I do?
02:05:52 Copy paste?
02:05:53 No, I use sort of regular expressions.
02:05:57 So I was to do italics in, you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash IT and then
02:06:05 you type what you want to type and that’s how you get italics in tech.
02:06:09 So you can create a regular expression that’ll look for some text between curly brackets
02:06:16 preceded by backslash IT and then instead convert that to italics.
02:06:24 And Word will do that.
02:06:28 Word if you go deep enough into its search and replace UI.
02:06:31 You can do regular expressions.
02:06:34 Is just regfs.
02:06:35 Yeah.
02:06:36 It’s funny that you did that.
02:06:38 Yeah.
02:06:39 I mean, I’m sure there’s tools that help you with that kind of thing, but the task is sufficiently
02:06:45 simple to where you can do a much better job than anyone, anybody else’s tool can.
02:06:51 Yeah, yeah.
02:06:52 So.
02:06:53 That’s a fascinating process.
02:06:54 That’s fine for me.
02:06:55 Yeah.
02:06:56 And it keeps you from messing around with formatting.
02:06:58 Yeah.
02:06:59 Like, Oh, what if I put this chapter heading, you know, in, you know, a sans serif font?
02:07:06 Yeah.
02:07:07 It’s a, it’s just classic wanking.
02:07:09 And so those options are closed off in what I’m doing.
02:07:16 Is there advice you could say, what does it take to write a great story?
02:07:20 The power of, of good yarns, good narratives to, um, pull people in is, is, uh, incredible.
02:07:28 And I think my sort of amateur theory is that it’s an evolutionary development that if you’re,
02:07:36 um, you know, uh, uh, cave person sitting around a fire in the rift valley a million
02:07:45 years ago, um, if you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas, um, or how
02:07:57 uncle Bob, you know, didn’t escape from the hyenas, and if the people listening to you
02:08:02 can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads, like a kind of virtual reality
02:08:09 and see what you’re describing, then you’ve just conferred an incredibly important advantage
02:08:16 on the people who’ve heard that story.
02:08:19 Yeah.
02:08:20 Right.
02:08:21 And so they know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have
02:08:25 learned in any other way.
02:08:28 Um, I mean, animals who don’t have speech though, they might warn each other, they might
02:08:34 make a sound that says danger, danger, um, but, uh, but as far as we know, they can’t
02:08:42 tell more complicated stories.
02:08:44 So it’s a part of us.
02:08:47 Yeah.
02:08:48 I, the, the, the collective intelligence seems to be one of the key characteristics of the,
02:08:53 of homo sapiens, the ability to share ideas and hold ideas together in our minds and storytelling
02:09:00 is the fundamental aspect of that.
02:09:01 Maybe even language itself is more fundamental because the language is required to do the
02:09:08 storytelling or maybe they evolve together.
02:09:11 Maybe they co evolve.
02:09:12 Yeah.
02:09:13 So I think that you’ve got to work with that and I think, uh, sometimes it seems like in
02:09:18 kind of, um, literary circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon
02:09:27 as it’s pulpy or it’s exploitative, but, um, for me, I don’t have any compunctions whatsoever
02:09:35 about that.
02:09:36 I like stories that, um, are grabby and fun and exciting to read.
02:09:40 And once you’ve got one of those going, once you’ve got a good yarn going that people will
02:09:46 enjoy reading, then you’re free to do whatever you want, uh, in the frame of that story.
02:09:52 Um, but if you don’t have that, um, then you got nothing.
02:09:56 What about having like, uh, which you do at a technological scientific rigor, like to
02:10:02 the, to the accuracy and as much as possible, how does that add to the, to, to Bob telling
02:10:09 the story or telling the story about Bob or on the campfire?
02:10:12 Well, the main thing that it does is, um, present, um, little details that you might
02:10:19 not have come up with on your own.
02:10:23 So if you’re just sitting there freely imagining things, um, you, uh, you, your, your brain
02:10:30 probably isn’t going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications
02:10:36 and surprises that real, that the real world is constantly presenting us with.
02:10:42 And so, um, in my case, if I’m, um, trying to write a story about, you know, some that
02:10:49 involves some technology like a rocket or, uh, orbital maneuvers or whatever, then delving
02:10:56 into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird unexpected, you know, thing
02:11:02 that, uh, gives me material to work with, but also subliminally readers who see that
02:11:09 are going to be drawn in more, uh, because they’re going to, uh, to, to find that, um,
02:11:17 oh, I didn’t see that coming, you know, you know, it’s got some of the complexity and
02:11:21 surprise value of the real world.
02:11:23 Yeah.
02:11:24 It does something, um, uh, Alex Garland, director who did, uh, who wrote, uh, directed Ex Machina.
02:11:33 I think about AI movies and the more care you take in making it accurate, the more compelling
02:11:41 the story becomes somehow.
02:11:44 I’m not, I’m not sure what that is.
02:11:47 Um, maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story, maybe it just
02:11:52 makes you a better writer.
02:11:54 The key to any storytelling is getting the, the readers to suspend their, their disbelief.
02:12:00 And there’s all kinds of triggers and little tells that can break that.
02:12:05 Right.
02:12:06 Um, and once it’s broken, it’s really hard to get it back.
02:12:09 Uh, you know, a lot of times that’s the end.
02:12:12 Everybody will just close the book and not pick it up.
02:12:15 Um, I gotta ask you, you’ve answered this question, but I gotta ask you the most impossible
02:12:22 question for an author to answer, but which Neal Stephenson book should one read first?
02:12:30 So when people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read, right?
02:12:35 Because, uh, I mean, there’s the best known one is probably snow crash, but that’s a cyber
02:12:42 punk novel.
02:12:43 That’s at the same time, making fun of cyber punk.
02:12:46 Um, so it’s kind of got some layers to it that, uh, might not seem so funny if you don’t
02:12:53 have that, if you don’t get the joke, right?
02:12:57 So, um, there’s, uh, I’ve written, as you point out, I’ve written historical novels.
02:13:03 Some people like those.
02:13:04 Some people prefer those.
02:13:06 So if that’s what you like, then kryptonomicon or the baroque cycle is where you would start
02:13:12 if you like sort of techno thrillers that are set in a modern day setting, but aren’t
02:13:17 science fictiony per se, then, uh, Reamdy, um, is one of those.
02:13:25 And termination shock, um, is, is, is definitely one of those.
02:13:29 Um, so it just depends on, on, uh, what people like.
02:13:35 What, what, uh, when people a long time ago recommend I read snow crash, they said, uh,
02:13:43 it’s the, it’s Neil Stevenson light.
02:13:47 It’s the, uh, like if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the depth, like the rigor book,
02:13:54 like that’s a good, that’s a good introduction to the man.
02:13:57 So essentially you broke it down by topics, but if you wanted to read all of them, what’s
02:14:05 a good introduction to the, to the man, because obviously these worlds are very different.
02:14:10 The philosophies are very different.
02:14:12 What’s a good introduction to the human?
02:14:17 People ask the same thing of Dostoyevsky, people, it’s a, it’s a hard one to answer.
02:14:23 Maybe seven eves because it’s got big themes.
02:14:26 Um, it’s, you know, it’s about heavy, heavy things happening to the human race.
02:14:32 Uh, but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that, uh, people can
02:14:39 relate to, you know, and it moves along, uh, so, uh, it, it does go kind of deep eventually
02:14:47 on how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, but, um, people were able
02:14:54 to get through it anyway, or some people just skip over that.
02:14:57 It’s fine.
02:14:58 You know, um, as an author, let me ask you what books had a big impact on your life that
02:15:06 you’ve read.
02:15:07 Is there any that jumped to mind that, uh, you learned from as a writer, as a philosopher,
02:15:14 as a mathematician, as an engineer?
02:15:17 This is one of these questions where I always blank out.
02:15:19 And then when I’m walking out the door, I’ll, I’ll remember 12, so this is a random selection
02:15:26 that doesn’t represent the top.
02:15:27 The top ones, um, well, I mentioned, you know, gulag archipelago and it’s kind of a hefty
02:15:34 and dark, but, and then it has a personal connection as well.
02:15:37 Yeah.
02:15:38 Just like where you found the book to the part, the time in your life, where you found
02:15:44 it, who recommended it.
02:15:45 That’s also part of the story.
02:15:46 Yeah.
02:15:47 So there’s definitely that there’s, you know, I, I circle back to Moby Dick a lot, um, because
02:15:54 we read it in a, uh, a really great English class I had in high school.
02:15:59 And I came in with an oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going
02:16:05 to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory and what
02:16:11 does this mean?
02:16:12 What’s the symbolism?
02:16:13 And it turned out that, uh, it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying
02:16:20 than that.
02:16:21 Um, what was the first powerful book you remember reading that like convinced you that this
02:16:29 form could have depth?
02:16:32 Hmm.
02:16:33 Was it Moby Dick?
02:16:34 Was it like in high school?
02:16:35 I’m trying to remember, well, Moby Dick was definitely a big one.
02:16:39 Um, I mean, I used to read a lot of classics comics when I was, I don’t know if you’ve
02:16:45 seen these, it’s a whole series of comic books that, um, uh, it was viral.
02:16:53 You could, uh, in the, in the back of each comic book was an order form.
02:16:57 You could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in and more would show
02:17:03 up.
02:17:04 And, but it was like, they would do the Count of Monte Cristo, you know, Moby Dick, you
02:17:10 know, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, you know, all this of classic books, uh, were,
02:17:17 they had put into comic book form.
02:17:19 That’s amazing.
02:17:21 Yeah.
02:17:22 Reading Moby Dick, if you’re nine years old is a tall order.
02:17:26 There’s some very complicated sentences in there and a lot of digressions, but if you’re
02:17:32 just looking at the comic books, like, holy shit, look at that whale, you know?
02:17:36 Um, and, um, and ultimately the power of the story doesn’t need the complicated words.
02:17:43 It’s, it’s all about the man and the, and the whale.
02:17:47 Yeah.
02:17:48 Yeah.
02:17:49 So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without
02:17:52 actually reading them, which is, you know, it’s great when you’re nine years old.
02:17:57 So, so I read a lot of that stuff, uh, for sure.
02:18:01 The annotated Sherlock Holmes, um.
02:18:07 You mentioned David Deutsch too, as an inspiration for some of your work.
02:18:10 I mean, you’ve, you’ve obviously didn’t like really a lot of research for the books you,
02:18:14 you do.
02:18:15 Roger Penrose.
02:18:16 What, uh, do you remember a book that made you want to become a writer or a moment that
02:18:22 made you become a writer?
02:18:23 I think like the, you know, the answer I usually give is that when I was in like fifth grade
02:18:31 and one of my friends came to school one day, he was wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes
02:18:40 and I hated dress shoes cause mine never fit.
02:18:44 And so they were uncomfortable.
02:18:45 I couldn’t run, you know, they were cold, it was Iowa.
02:18:50 So I kind of said, I remember very clearly thinking, okay, I don’t like where this is
02:18:57 going.
02:18:58 Like, does this mean that next year all of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes?
02:19:08 So I need to find a job where I don’t have to do that.
02:19:12 So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job, you know,
02:19:17 being a writer.
02:19:18 And then, and then I just read a lot of, uh, just classic science fiction short stories
02:19:24 and started trying to write some of my own.
02:19:28 And there were just classic young adult stories like by Heinlein and the other classic names
02:19:36 that you think of.
02:19:37 But the Heinlein ones stuck, have stuck with me in a way that the others didn’t.
02:19:42 What’s the greatest science fiction book ever written, just removing your work from consideration?
02:19:54 I’m loving torturing you right now.
02:19:56 Greatest ever non Stevenson.
02:19:58 Do we include fantasy or does it have to be science fiction?
02:20:02 Oh, interesting fantasy.
02:20:05 Hmm.
02:20:07 I did not expect that twist.
02:20:09 Uh, well, for in a weird way, they’re lumped together in people’s minds, right?
02:20:13 So they are, but there, but there’s also a boundary somehow.
02:20:17 Yeah.
02:20:18 I’m not sure what that is exactly.
02:20:20 Nobody is.
02:20:21 It’s a mystery.
02:20:22 So, I mean, if we do include it, then it’s easily the, the Lord of the rings.
02:20:27 But, um, I mean, greatness is a interesting quality to, uh, to try to define.
02:20:34 Um, and for me, a lot of the, the fun and the joy of such books is, is not in what you’d
02:20:43 call greatness, but just storytelling.
02:20:46 So I was always a big fan of has have space suit will travel, which is a Heinlein young
02:20:53 adult book.
02:20:54 It’s just, uh, it’s just a fun, good read.
02:20:56 Um, so, so fun is a big component.
02:21:01 Greatness is overrated.
02:21:02 Well, I don’t know it’s overrated, but it’s just, you know, it’s, it might be underdefined
02:21:08 to put it that way.
02:21:10 So how space it will travel now, I definitely have to read that one.
02:21:13 Yeah.
02:21:14 You mentioned Iowa.
02:21:15 It was, uh, there a couple of times I got to spend, uh, quite a bit of time with Dan
02:21:20 Gabel with Tom Brands who are wrestlers was, uh, is it now wrestling, martial arts, part
02:21:30 of your life, any part of your form formation of who you are as a human being?
02:21:35 I think so.
02:21:36 In a, it was a late, it was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames, um, Dan Gabel
02:21:45 was, uh, a few years older than me.
02:21:47 And so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets
02:21:54 and um, and this was before his Olympic career.
02:21:58 So everyone knew he was the star of that team and that he was the best, but people didn’t
02:22:04 yet know he was the greatest of all time.
02:22:07 You saw Gabe.
02:22:08 So that was part, it’s, it’s funny is, uh, it feels like a small world that you would
02:22:14 be in the same space as Dan Gabel a hundred feet away, a little dot on the mat trouncing
02:22:20 his opponents, him and him and Chris Taylor.
02:22:23 So the other star was this 400 pound plus guy named Chris Taylor who, uh, also went
02:22:30 to the Olympics.
02:22:32 So yeah, people, you know, he was, he was a no, he was a, uh, athletic hero and wrestling
02:22:38 is there’s certain States like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Iowa, where wrestling is the sport because
02:22:47 those are States of small towns.
02:22:49 And so if you’re a small town is if you’re like Dan Gabel, uh, and you have to be on
02:22:55 a football team with 20 other guys who are not Dan Gabel, then no matter how good you
02:23:01 are, your team might, might suck.
02:23:04 Uh, but if in a solo thing, you can, you can go to the Olympics.
02:23:11 So we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes in school and I didn’t like it.
02:23:16 And I think partly it’s just that it was so, so competitive and the people who were cared
02:23:22 about it really cared about it a lot, you know?
02:23:26 And so it was, it was pretty tough and I didn’t think I had the right body type.
02:23:31 But then when I was, uh, after college, I was in Iowa city for a few years when he was
02:23:36 coaching the, that the wrestling team there and the, he won like nine championships out
02:23:43 of 10 years, you know, during that, during that time.
02:23:47 So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the greatest team coach.
02:23:53 Um, so I know I’ve never met him, but we’ve, uh, he’s kind of been like in my sphere of
02:24:02 awareness since I was, you know, kind of my whole life.
02:24:04 And people would always tell stories about him, like I think he got arrested once for
02:24:10 some kind of, I don’t know, minor offense in Ames.
02:24:15 And so he just basically stayed up all night.
02:24:17 He was in this cage in the jail, just stayed up all night doing pull ups on, you know,
02:24:23 it sounds about right.
02:24:24 Yeah.
02:24:25 And, uh, uh, so yeah.
02:24:30 So has that been, I mean, I was such an interesting place in the world and wrestling is just part
02:24:35 of that story.
02:24:40 Is that somewhere in there?
02:24:41 Does that resonate deeply with who you are?
02:24:44 It was a formative thing for me growing up there for sure.
02:24:48 It’s just a, uh, you know, uh, uh, or at least used to be a very orderly place, high social
02:24:57 capital, very minimal class differences.
02:25:02 So like you’d have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy, but, uh, that
02:25:08 was it.
02:25:09 That was, you know, those were the rich people, right?
02:25:11 So, um, and a college town is always a different environment like, uh, you know, Austin, uh,
02:25:20 has some of this, um, so it was a pretty kind of utopian, uh, other than the weather and
02:25:27 a few other things, uh, environment to, to grow up in the, the martial art I ended up
02:25:33 doing is sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop.
02:25:39 So when you’re, if you’re grappling, everything is through sense of touch and your sense of
02:25:47 touch is very old and simple, right?
02:25:50 Like earthworms don’t have, don’t even have eyes, but they can tell when they’re being
02:25:55 touched, right?
02:25:56 So it’s very fast.
02:25:59 Um, and uh, with, um, with a standoff or like boxing or some kinds of sword fighting, you’re,
02:26:10 you’re not touching the other person.
02:26:11 Most of the time, your, your, your visual system is doing something way more, it’s doing
02:26:17 slam and trying to figure out what the other person is up to.
02:26:23 And so, um, that always felt more my speed.
02:26:28 So in an Olympic style fencing, you’re, it doesn’t start really until you’re crossing
02:26:36 blades with the other person and now you’re back to wrestling, you’re feeling what they’re
02:26:41 doing and it’s all about that.
02:26:43 But some of the older sword arts, um, don’t engage the blade that way.
02:26:50 You stand off at range and then you make cutting attacks and, um, and, uh, and so, so those
02:26:59 are all processed visually and I think I’m more of a slow thinker, so it works for me
02:27:07 better.
02:27:08 I mean, the same, it has the same, the artistry and the beauty of boxing, I suppose, just
02:27:13 like you said, is like, there’s no, there’s no contact and it’s all processed visually
02:27:18 and I’m sure there’s a dance of its own that, that depends on the characteristic of a sword
02:27:24 involved.
02:27:25 Yeah.
02:27:26 There is a set of, of stances and, and, uh, basic reactions that you try to learn that
02:27:31 are thought to be defensible, um, and, and safe or safer.
02:27:37 And so it tends to be a series of short engagements where you’ll, you’ll close in, you’ll try
02:27:43 out your, your idea and it works or it doesn’t, then you, you back off again.
02:27:50 It’s interesting to think about like human history because martial arts, okay, that’s
02:27:56 a thing.
02:27:57 But in terms of sword fighting, just the full range of humans that existed who mastered
02:28:07 sword fighting or sought the mastery of sword fighting, just to imagine the thousands of
02:28:11 people who, the heights they have achieved because the stakes are so incredibly high
02:28:18 to be good.
02:28:19 And it’s the richest, most powerful people in those societies spending whatever it takes
02:28:27 to get the best gear and the best training because you’re right, everything depends on
02:28:33 it.
02:28:34 And it’s still life and death.
02:28:35 I mean, that, that’s fascinating, um, that, that’s fascinating and we perhaps have lost
02:28:43 that forever with greater weapons.
02:28:46 I mean, the artistry of sword fighting when it’s life and death and you go into war, you
02:28:52 have the Miyamoto Musashi’s of the world, right?
02:28:54 The, I don’t know, there’s a, there’s a poetry to that, that there’s a mastery to that that
02:29:02 I don’t know if we could achieve with any other kind of martial art.
02:29:05 Well the, one of the good, you were talking earlier about the, the, the good effects of
02:29:11 the internet, social media that we sometimes overlook.
02:29:15 And, and one of those is that, um, there were all these isolated people around the world
02:29:20 who were interested in this, who found each other and kind of created a network of, of
02:29:26 people who help each other learn these things.
02:29:28 So that doesn’t mean that anyone is, is up to the level of the you’re talking about yet,
02:29:35 but um, but it is happening and um, and so, um, there’s a, a, a large number of old treatises,
02:29:44 old written documents, uh, that have been dug up from libraries and, and people have
02:29:50 been going over these and translating them from old dialects of Italian and German, um,
02:29:57 to make sense of them and, and learning how to do these techniques with different, uh,
02:30:03 different weapons.
02:30:04 Um, actually there’s a guy here in Austin named Damond Stith who does African, historical
02:30:11 African martial arts.
02:30:14 Um, also martial arts of, uh, of enslaved Africans who would learn machete fighting
02:30:22 techniques in the Caribbean, South America.
02:30:26 He’s probably within a mile of us.
02:30:28 He’s an amazing guy.
02:30:29 That’s awesome.
02:30:30 I’m going to look him up.
02:30:31 Yeah.
02:30:32 Can I ask you for advice?
02:30:34 Can you give advice for young people, high school, college, you know, undergrads thinking
02:30:42 about their career, thinking about life, how to live a life that you’d be proud of?
02:30:48 You think quite a bit about like what it’s required to be innovative in this world.
02:30:53 You think quite a bit about the future.
02:30:55 So if somebody wanted to be a person that makes a big impact from the future, what advice
02:31:00 would you give them?
02:31:02 I think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do happily and, um, I don’t
02:31:12 want to say obsessively because that sounds like maybe it’s pathological, but, but if
02:31:17 you can find a thing that you’ll, you know, you’ll sit down, you’ll start doing it and
02:31:22 hours later you kind of snap out of it, where did the time go?
02:31:27 Um, then, um, that’s a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they’re
02:31:35 young.
02:31:36 Uh, because if you don’t have that, um, it’s hard to, uh, to figure out where you should
02:31:42 put your energies, you know, and as you might have the best intentions, you might say, I,
02:31:48 you know, I want world peace or whatever, uh, but, um, uh, at, at the end of the day,
02:31:56 what really matters is how do you spend your time and, and are you spending it in a way
02:32:01 that’s productive, uh, and, um, uh, because it doesn’t matter how smart you are or well
02:32:09 intentioned you are unless you’ve figured that out.
02:32:13 And so it’s finding the thing in which you can sort of, you naturally lose yourself in.
02:32:18 The thing is, um, at least for me, there’s a lot of things like that, but I first have
02:32:25 to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing.
02:32:31 Like the fun starts a little bit after the first hump of really sucking and then you
02:32:36 could suck just regular.
02:32:37 Yeah.
02:32:38 Okay.
02:32:39 So often people, oftentimes people can give up too early, I think.
02:32:42 I mean, that’s true with mathematics for me, it’s for a lot of people is if you just give
02:32:48 it a chance to struggle, if you give yourself time to struggle, you’ll find a way, you’ll
02:32:54 find the thing within that thing that you can lose track of time with.
02:32:58 Yeah.
02:32:59 That’s a key detail that, um, that’s an important thing to add to, to what I said, which is
02:33:06 that, uh, this might not happen the first time you do a thing.
02:33:10 Maybe it will, but, um, uh, you might have to climb that learning curve and, um, if there’s
02:33:17 pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that, then, um, it might prevent
02:33:24 you from, from getting where you need to be.
02:33:28 Um, so there’s some complexity there, uh, that make, can make this kind of non obvious.
02:33:35 Um, but, uh, that’s what, that’s why we need, you know, good teachers.
02:33:42 Um, you know, another beneficial thing, uh, of the internet is YouTube and being able
02:33:49 to learn things, how to do things on YouTube, the, the, the dude who made the YouTube video
02:33:56 doesn’t care how many times you hit pause and rewind, um, they’re never going to like
02:34:03 roll their eyes and, and be impatient with you.
02:34:07 Um, and sometimes, uh, spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book, like making
02:34:15 that the thing you just spent a huge amount of time on rereading, rereading, or rewatching,
02:34:21 rewatching that, that somehow really, um, solidifies your love for that thing.
02:34:30 And like the depth of understanding you start to gain and it’s okay to stay with that.
02:34:34 I used to think like, there’s all these books out there, so like, I need to keep reading
02:34:39 or keep reading.
02:34:40 But then I realized, um, I think it was somewhere in college, uh, uh, where you could just spend
02:34:48 your whole life with a single textbook.
02:34:50 There’s nothing in that textbook to really, really stay.
02:34:55 Meisner, Thorne and Wheeler, Gravitation, you know, is, is one of those, or another one is,
02:35:00 um, The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, which is just incredibly deep and it starts
02:35:06 with like two plus two equals four and it, at the end you’re at the boundaries of, of
02:35:12 physics.
02:35:13 Uh, it’s an amazing, amazing book.
02:35:17 Let me ask you the big ridiculous question.
02:35:19 Okay.
02:35:20 You’ve pondered some big ridiculous questions in your work.
02:35:25 What’s the meaning of this whole thing?
02:35:27 What’s the meaning of life?
02:35:28 Wow.
02:35:29 Human life.
02:35:30 Well, as far as I know, we’re unique in the, the universe.
02:35:37 There’s no evidence that there’s anything else in the universe that’s as complicated
02:35:41 as what’s between our ears.
02:35:44 Might be.
02:35:45 I can’t rule it out, but, um, so we appear to be pretty special and, um, so it’s got
02:35:53 to have something to do with that and one of the reasons I like David Deutsch, in particular
02:35:59 his book, The Beginning of Infinity, um, is that he talks about the power of explanations
02:36:06 and the fact that, um, most civilizations are static that they’ve got a set of dogmas
02:36:14 that they arrive at somehow and they just pass those on from one, uh, generation to
02:36:21 the next and nothing changes.
02:36:24 But that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow whatever you want to call it,
02:36:32 the scientific method or enlightenment, uh, there’s different ways of thinking about it,
02:36:38 but basically explanatory, it’s, it’s about the power of, of explanations and being able
02:36:45 to figure out why things are the way they are and that has created changes in our, um,
02:36:52 thinking and our way of life over the last few centuries that are explosive compared
02:36:58 to anything that came before and David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force
02:37:05 of nature in its potential transformative power.
02:37:10 If we keep going, um, you know, we could, uh, you know, if we figure out how to colonize
02:37:17 the universe like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, um, then
02:37:25 it is effectively a force of nature.
02:37:29 This kind of drive to understand more and more and more, deeper and deeper and deeper
02:37:34 and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more.
02:37:37 Yeah.
02:37:38 Yeah.
02:37:39 It’s the, well, it’s the old, the universe created us to understand itself.
02:37:43 Maybe that’s the, uh, the whole purpose.
02:37:46 Yeah.
02:37:47 It is an interesting peculiar side effect of the way we’ve been created is we seem to
02:37:54 be conscious beings.
02:37:56 We seem to have little egos.
02:37:57 We seem to, uh, be born and die pretty quickly.
02:38:01 There’s a bunch of drama.
02:38:03 We’re all within ourselves pretty unique and we fall in love and start wars and there’s
02:38:09 hate and all the, the full interesting dynamic of it.
02:38:12 So it’s not just about the individual people, somehow like the concert that we played together.
02:38:19 Yeah.
02:38:20 Yeah.
02:38:21 Yeah.
02:38:22 So.
02:38:23 That’s kind of interesting.
02:38:24 And there’s a lot of peculiar aspects of that, that, um, I wonder if they’re fundamental
02:38:28 or just quirks of evolution, whether it’s, whether it’s death, whether it’s love, whether
02:38:33 all those things, I wonder if they’re, um, from an engineer perspective when we’re trying
02:38:40 to create that intelligent toaster that listens for the, for the slam door and this, and the
02:38:47 smell of burning toast, whether, uh, that toaster should be afraid of death and should
02:38:54 fall in love just like we do, you know, you’re a fascinating human being.
02:39:01 You’ve impacted the lives of millions of people.
02:39:03 It’s a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time with me today.
02:39:08 Thank you so much.
02:39:09 Thank you for coming down to beautiful, hot Texas.
02:39:13 And thank you for talking today.
02:39:15 It was a pleasure and I’m glad I came and did it.
02:39:19 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neal Stephenson to support this podcast.
02:39:23 Please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:39:26 And now let me leave you with some words from Neal Stephenson himself in his novel, Snow
02:39:31 Crash.
02:39:32 The world is full of things more powerful than us, but if you know how to catch a ride,
02:39:37 you can go places.
02:39:40 Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.