The following is a conversation with Neil Stevenson, a legendary science fiction writer
exploring ideas in mathematics, science, cryptography, money, linguistics, philosophy,
and virtual reality, from his early book Snow Crash to his new one called Termination Shock.
He doesn't just write novels. He worked at the space company Blue Origin for many years,
including technically being Blue Origin's first employee. He also was the chief futurist
at the virtual reality company Magic Leap. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now here's my conversation with Neil Stevenson.
You write both historical fiction like World War II in cryptonomicon and science fiction,
looking both into the past and the future. So let me ask, does history repeat itself?
In which way does it repeat itself? In which way does it not?
I'm afraid it repeats itself a lot. So I think human nature kind of is what it is. And so
we tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again. And so it's kind of the
exception rather than the rule when something new happens.
What role does technology play in the suppression or in revealing human nature?
Well, the standards of living, life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within the
last, particularly the last 100 years. I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification,
the internet. These are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health
and longevity that exceed anything that was seen before in human history. So people are living longer,
they're generally healthier, and so on. But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior
patterns, some of which are not very attractive. So some of it has to do with the constraints on
resources. Presumably with technology, you have less and less constraints on resources. So we get
to maybe emphasize the better angels of our nature. And in so doing, does that not potentially
fundamentally alter sort of the experience that we have of life on earth?
Until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think. But people will find ways to
be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind of psychological itch that they have got. And
we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of Germany
prior to the rise of Hitler, World War II, and kind of explain Hitler, at least partially, by just the misery
that people were living in at that time.
The economic collapse.
Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and the decline in standard of living. And that sounds
like a plausible explanation. But there are economic troubles now for sure. We had the bank
collapse in 2008. And there's stagnation in some people's standards of living. But it's hard to
explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years, just strictly on the basis of
people are poor and angry and sad. I think they want to be angry.
So, without being political in a divisive kind of way, can we talk about the lessons you can
draw from World War II, this singular event in human history, it seems like. And yet, as you say,
history rhymes, at the very least.
Yeah. Being who I am, I tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened
in conjunction with that war, which may not be where you want to go, but.
Well, there's several things that started to interrupt. So, one in cryptanomicon is more
like the allentouring side of things, right? And then there's the outside of technology.
First of all, there's the tools of war, which is a kind of technology. But then there's just
like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.
Yeah. Well, so one of the things that emerges from the war and from the
extermination camps is that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature.
So, you have to learn that lesson to be an educated person and you have to know that
even in a supposedly enlightened civilized society, people can become monsters quite easily.
So, that is for sure the big takeaway.
So, do you agree with Solzhenitsyn about what is it, the line between good and evil
runs through the heart of every man that all of us are capable of evil?
Great line, yeah. I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager,
because my grandfather had it in his house, because he was one of these Americans who
was obsessed with the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat and wanted people to be aware
of some of what had happened. So, he had those books lying around and I would read them.
And it's a similar kind of parallel story to what happened in Germany during the war,
this creation of this system of camps and oppression and lots of troubling behavior.
To me, it's a story of how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead
to evil. But it's also a story of bravery, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood and
and basically survival. You have a man's search for meaning, which is the story of a man in
a concentration camp, basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions.
So, to me, World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature. It's a little
moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity. So, I'm not so sure that it leads me
to a pessimistic view of the world, the fact that somebody like Hitler could happen, the fact that
a lot of people could follow Hitler and get excited and maybe even love the hate of the other
for some moment of time. I think that's all of us are capable of that, but I think all of us also
have a capacity for good. And I think, I don't know what you think, but I think we
have a greater desire for good than evil. And it seems like that's where technology is very
useful as a guide, as a helping hand. Okay. Can you give me an example, maybe? So, I give you
examples of futuristic technologies and I can give you examples of current technologies.
Current technologies, knowledge in the form of very basic knowledge, which is like Wikipedia,
and search the original dream of Google that I think is very much a success, which is making
the world's information accessible at your fingertips. That kind of technology enables
the natural, if this axiom, this assumption that people want to do good is true, then letting them
discover all of the information out there, false information and true information, all of it,
and let them explore that's going to lead to a better world, to better people. futuristic
technologies is, I personally, I mentioned you offline, sort of love artificial intelligence.
And so AI, that's an assistant, that's a guide, like a mentor to you, that you can,
in the way that Google searches, but smarter, where you can help send it out and say,
this is the direction in which I want to grow, not authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm
of telling you, this is how you should grow, but almost the opposite, where you use it as
an assistant, a servant in your journey towards knowledge. That sounds like an easy thing,
but it's actually, from an AI perspective, very difficult.
I mean, this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which talks about a
book that essentially does that. And I've been sort of watching people try to come at the problem
of building that thing from different directions for ever since the book came out, basically.
And so I kind of have a, although I haven't worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the
level of difficulty in realizing that goal. So that book is in the 90s. So as Google
is coming to be, it's essentially not Google, but the search engine, the initial search engine
of that, which gave birth to Google essentially in contrast. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That was still in
the era of Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines. And yeah, I'm pretty
sure I had not heard of Google at that point. That would have been 95, 96. I think the book came
out in 94. And then of course, the social networks followed, which is another form
of guidance through the space of information. Yeah. Well, what happens is that these things come
along and then people find ways to game them. And so I saw an interesting thread the other day
pointing out that 20 years ago, if you had Googled Pythagorean Theorem, chances are you would have
been taken directly to a page explaining the Pythagorean Theorem. If you do it now, the top
hits are going to be from somebody who's got an angle, who's got a scheme. They're trying to sell
you math tutoring or they're working some kind of marketing plan on you. So the traditional
engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational purpose. That
doesn't mean that they shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones. First of all, to defend
the people with the angle, right? They're trying to find business models, fund oftentimes,
which is funny, you went with Pythagorean Theorem. You went at math, those greedy bastards. Yeah, I know.
But it's great. How can we monetize the Pythagorean Theorem? Well, I mean, education, right?
Yes. To figure out, people who love math education, for example, love it purely, not purely, but
very often love it for itself, for just teaching math. But then they start, you know, when coming
face to face with, for example, the YouTube algorithm, they start to try to figure out,
okay, how can I make money off of this? The primary goal is still that love of education,
but they also want to make that love of education their full-time job. But I see that dance of
humanity with the algorithms as it finds this kind of local pocket of optimality or sub-optimality,
whatever. It gets stuck in it. It's a pocket of some sort. But I see that pocket is way better
than what we had before in the 80s, right? The 90s before the internet. But like, and now we're
now, this is also human nature, we start writing very eloquent articles about how this pocket is
clearly pocket. It's not very good. And we can imagine much better lands far beyond. But the
reality is, it's better than before. And now we're waiting for- We have to escape from the local
minimum. And you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group
of geniuses that just say, enough is enough. I have an idea. This is how we get out. And
it's too easy to be sort of, I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks in your articles
being cynical about being in this pocket. And we are forever stuck in this pocket.
And then coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally- It's collapsing,
stuck forever, like a prison in this pocket. But reality, it's just clickbait articles
and books until one curious ant comes up with the next pocket.
Yeah, tunnels through the barrier or gets enough energy to jump over the barrier.
And eventually we'll be, as you've talked about me, we'll colonize the solar system
and then we'll be stuck in the solar system. And then people will say, well, we're screwed
one because when the sun energy runs out, there's no way to get to the next solar system.
And then so on. It goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.
Yeah. I think getting out of the solar system is going to be a hard one.
So can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think back to sort of a
serious question, why do you think it's hard to get outside of our solar system?
It's just an energy calculator. I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want.
But the idea of getting there in, you know, one lifetime or multiple,
a few lifetimes, requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate. And then as soon as you get halfway
there, you need to expend an equal amount of energy to decelerate, or you'll just go shooting by.
And so that means carrying a lot of energy. And there's ideas like Uri Milner,
I think, is still funding the idea to use laser propulsion to send something
to another star system, a small object. But it'll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.
They never talk about that part. Like how do we slow down?
Yeah. It's a quick fly by. You take a good picture, I guess.
Yeah. You better take some good pictures on your way by. And that's great if it happens. I'm not
knocking it. But the amount of energy that's needed is just staggering. And there's other issues like
there's other issues like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation?
How do you prevent people from going crazy? What happens if you hit something while traveling
at a significant fraction of the speed of light? What about some combination of expanding human
lifespan, but also just good old-fashioned, stable society on a spaceship?
Yeah. Yeah. The generation ship. Yeah. No, I think that's the only way. It would have to
keep going for a long time. And they might get to where they're going and find a shitty
solar system. We can try to do some advanced survey, but if you get there and all the planets
in that solar system are just garbage planets, then it's a big letdown for this 1,000-year
voyage that you've just been on. We have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay
between in order to survive in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with.
So that sets a bound on the size of the planet and what we need in the way of temperature
and atmosphere and so on. So when you look at all those complications, then basically building
sort of exactly the environment we want out of available materials in this solar system
starts to look a hell of a lot better. It's hard to make an economic argument,
let's say, for making that journey. One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that
the people who are trying to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for
religious reasons. I think that's the only reason that you would do it because economically,
it just makes more sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.
Well, isn't everything done for religious reasons? Why do we exploration? Why do we go to the moon
again and do the other things? What is JFK said? It's not because they're easy but because they're
hard. Isn't that kind of a religious reason? I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once
said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement.
Yeah, so the conflict between nations is a kind of...
Not exactly a religion but it's what you're talking about.
Well, it's a struggle for meaning. I mean, and that meaning isn't found in some kind of...
It's hard to find meaning in mathematics. It's found in some kind of
in music and religion, whatever art. I mean, some people do but those are probably not enough of
them to... Well, people that find meaning in mathematics, they usually find meaning between
the lines nevertheless, not in the actual form like the approving. Approving some kind of thing.
Fair enough. Yeah. So, from a cost perspective, do you actually see a possible future where we're
building these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them one a year
out like wandering ants into the galaxy? I have nothing against it. It's just,
like I said, the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual or
kind of non-tangible calculus. So, from a business model perspective,
you don't think there's a business model there? No, no way. One of the many fascinating things
you've done in your life, you were at the very beginning, you were the person that convinced
you based us to start a spaceship company, a space company. You were there at Blue Origin
for a few years in the beginning working on alternate propulsion systems and at least
according to Wikipedia, alternate business models. Yeah. I mean, to go back to the first thing you
said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required a lot of convincing. He'd been thinking about it since
he was five years old and it was an inevitability. But the idea that kind of got hatched in 1999 was
to just do some advanced kind of scouting work, explore the corners of the space of possibilities.
And so, that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to Blue Origin. And so,
it was a small staff of people that did that for a few years. And I think it was about 2003-2004
that it swung decisively towards the direction it's been following ever since, which is using
basically existing aerospace technologies and models to make chemical-fueled rockets
for space tourism. I believe and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets
is just an accident of history that comes out of World War II. So, until World War II, rockets are
being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard. But then, Hitler desperately
wants to bomb London, but he can't quite reach it. And the Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized.
So, he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with rockets, which is a terrible
misallocation of resources. It's a terrible idea. So, it only could have happened in a
dictatorship controlled by a lunatic. But that's the situation that existed. So,
they built these rockets. That's the V-2. And then, it's just a complete coincidence that
that war ends with atomic bombs being developed in a completely separate superweapon program.
And so, suddenly, the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist
before. Because if you've got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them. You can do with bombers,
but it's a lot better to just hurl them to the other side of the world on the top of
a rocket. So, suddenly, rockets which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V-2 program got a
much bigger boost during the 50s and 60s. And it is a complete, you're right. For some reason,
never thought of this. It is an accident of history that nuclear weapons are developed
at a similar time. First of all, nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time
as World War II. That's an accident in history. And then, the fact that, okay, so then Hitler
started using rockets, that's an accident. Okay, that's fascinating. That's a fascinating
set of coincidences. Yeah, which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way. But by the time
these rockets are kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and so devastating
that nobody really wants to use them. But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple
of people in it into the socket on the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb.
So, we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war.
I'd love to be in a meeting where the first guy brought that up as an idea.
It's probably a Russian. Why don't we strap a person to the rocket?
Yeah, well, it probably was because they did it first, right? The Russians did it.
And they had perhaps less respect for sort of safety protocols.
Could be.
They're a little bit more willing to sacrifice a life of an astronaut or to risk the life of an
astronaut. Could be. Yeah, yeah. This is basically the story of how through all of this competition
and because of these historical accidents, trillions of R&D dollars and rubles were put into
development of chemical rocket technology, which is now advanced to an incredibly high degree.
But there's other ways to make things go really fast, which is why all the rockets do.
It's all orbit is. It's just going really fast. And because so many nerds are obsessed with
space, people have been thinking about alternate schemes for as long as they've been thinking
about rockets. And so, one of the first things that I learned, kind of trying to explore new
possibilities, was that I could put all of my brain power to work and be creative as I could
and invent some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast. And I would always find
out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had thought the same idea up 50 years ago and figured
out all the math. And so, at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new
ideas and just go poking around trying to find those guys. So there's a number of ideas that we
looked at. Some are crazier, some are less crazy, but the direction that that company eventually
took was chemical rockets. Is there something you can comment on possible ideas? So first of
all, you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion. Yeah. So that's, I mean, you've probably heard
of Project Orion, which was Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to
to power a large space vehicle by detonating atomic bombs behind it. And so one of the other
people who was working at Blue Operations during this time was George Dyson, the son of Freeman.
And so we knew all about Project Orion. And he found an old film that they'd shot on a beach in
La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like lumps of C4. So that was an idea. But
for a private company, obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was probably out of scope. So
there's more of a theoretical thing. There's a conceptually similar
approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur Kantrewitz and some others,
where you take a pulsed laser and you fire it at a vehicle that has a block of ice on the back.
And the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma. And plasma is
opaque because it conducts. And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser
pulse and gets really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice. And then you wait a
moment for that to dissipate and then you do it again. So it would just kind of vibrate its way.
Like it sounds really violent, but Freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber sold tennis
shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a mild vibration. So there your source of
energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific impulse than you could get by burning
chemicals. Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr
that just would heat up a heat exchanger by many converging solid state lasers from the ground.
And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that.
We looked at tall towers. I spent a while looking kind of semi seriously at giant bull whips
with a bull whip. Just a whip. Just you have them here in Texas, right?
Yeah, I understand. But how does that have to do with propulsion?
If you think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the speed
of sound. So it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people with no technology
have been able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural
trick. Just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this. So
that's the thing I still think about from time to time. You can use the same physics to make
freestanding loops of chain or other flexible materials that just kind of stand up under their
own physics. I mean, it's kind of awesome to imagine. So you imagine using the same kind of
physics of a whip, but have at the end of it a spaceship.
Yeah, that would detach at the moment of maximum velocity.
Why not? Why wouldn't that?
So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question. It was more almost a
symbolic way of saying, look, there's all kinds of physics we haven't explored yet.
That it's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets.
It's just that more money's gone into chemical rockets, right?
Can I ask you a question on propulsion that's a little bit more out there? So I don't know if
you've seen quite a lot of recent articles and reports and so on about UFOs, like the TicTac
aircraft. I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it, but I haven't gone deep into it.
So the DOD released footage filmed by pilots, and there's a lot of reports about objects that
moved in ways they haven't seen before that seem to defy the laws of physics,
if we consider the aircraft that we have today. So the reason I asked you that is because it kind
of, to me, whatever the heck it is, it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion.
If it's like secret projects from foreign nations or it's physical phenomena that we
don't yet understand, like ball lightning, all those kinds of things. Or if it is aliens
or objects from an alien civilization, I most likely believe if it's an object from an alien
civilization, it's got to be like a really dumb drone that just got lost. It's definitely not
like the pinnacle of intelligence. It's like some teenagers like science fair experiment.
Yeah, just flew for a few centuries out and just landed. And then we humans are all really excited
about this wild thing. I mean, what do you think about those? First of all, the millions of reports
of UFOs, right? There's some psychology there that's deeply cultural, but also the possibility of
aliens having visited Earth. Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see some better pictures. For the reason
I mentioned earlier, having to do with the difficulty of traveling between star systems,
it's really hard for me to believe it's aliens. I just can't understand why you would go to all
that trouble to transport something across light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly
doing. How is that interesting? How does that justify the trip? So if you travel
across those kinds of distances, you'd make a bigger splash. First of all, I would expect that
the arrival of these things would be something we'd notice. It's got to decelerate into our solar
system by, unless it got here really, really, really slowly. So I guess that's a possibility
and just snuck in. So at the end, we would detect some kind of footprint in terms of energy?
You would think. So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad. It makes more
sense in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies, they're just kind of hanging
around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason, not trying to communicate. Can you imagine
a scenario where aliens have visited Earth or are visiting Earth and we wouldn't notice it at all?
Oh, sure. I mean, if they've got technology to get here, they've probably got technology to
conceal the fact. Oh, they're trying to conceal themselves. I meant more like they're not trying
to conceal themselves, but we're just, our cognitive capabilities are like too limited
and we are not thinking big enough. We're looking for little green men. We're looking for things that
operate at a time scale that's human-like. Yeah. No, I love thinking about ideas like that. That's
great science fiction novel fodder that the aliens are so different that we simply don't see them.
I mean, is there, in terms of language, do you think it would be difficult, not aliens visiting
us but traveling to other places to find a common language? You've written about the importance
of language in intelligent civilizations. How difficult is the problem to bridge the gap
between aliens and humans in terms of language so we're not lost in translation?
Yeah. I mean, there's different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they are
to us. I mean, there's a school of thought that says basically advanced life has to be
carbon-based for just reasons of chemistry. Right away, if you impose that limitation,
then you're assuming something that's starting to be biologically similar to us.
So, if they're about as big as we are and they move around in space in a physical body
of the way we do, then there's probably a way to solve that communication problem.
If they're beings of pure energy from Star Trek or something like that, then it's a different
story. Well, I love thinking about that kind of stuff too. Consciousness itself may be alien.
It could be, like you said, beings of pure energy. I think of life as just complex systems and the
kind of forms those complex systems can take seems to be much larger than the particular
biological systems we see here on earth. I have to ask a Twitter question. Okay.
About aliens. Yeah. We're ready. This is for Twitter. I'm ready. What would you expect from
Twitter? Can humans have sex with aliens? Neil Stevenson. You could pass.
I asked the language question. Can they communicate? Yeah.
Can they fall in love before sex? That's how it works.
So, which question? Am I answering the sex or the love?
I mean, it depends what is more fundamental to relations across intelligence species.
Yeah. I mean, sex can mean a lot of things. So, I mean, if you're-
Production, right?
Right. In Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to
really suspend your disbelief to think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human,
right? Because that's just not going to work DNA-wise. So, if by sex you mean reproductive sex,
then I would say no, unless you go to a panspermia kind of theory, which is that
humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic program of some sort.
And then we're just returning home and hanging out with our old relatives.
Distant cousins. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't seem plausible. We know that humans had sex
with Neanderthals, with Denisovans. So, you could think of them as aliens that came from our
planet. So, that's a kind of data point, I guess. But if you broaden your definition of sex to mean
any kind of gratifying physical interaction, then sure. Right. Dancing. And that's how we
get to love. Okay. And love can take many forms. Love can certainly take many forms.
I have to ask you, in terms of space, just looking at where Blue Origin is, looking at where SpaceX
is today, and maybe looking at 10, 20 years out from now, are you impressed with what's happening?
We just saw William Shatner go up to space. Yeah. I was just watching his video this morning
before I came here. Yeah. Are you impressed with where things stand today?
Yeah. I mean, SpaceX, in particular, has done things that are just unbelievable.
And I don't think anyone was anticipating 20 years ago, let's say, when this all started,
just the speed with which they'd be able to rack up these incredible achievements.
Yes. If you've kind of even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made, and so the difficulty
of doing any kind of space travel, what they've achieved is just unbelievable.
What about maybe a question about Elon Musk? Even more than Jeff Bezos,
he has a very kind of ambitious vision of this project that we're on as a species,
of becoming a multi-planetary species, and becoming that quickly, as soon as possible,
landing on Mars, colonizing Mars. What do you think of that project?
There's two questions to ask. First, the question is, what do you think about the project of
colonizing Mars? And second, what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically
ambitious at achieving the impossible, at what a lot of people would say is impossible?
I think that colonizing Mars is the kind of goal that's easily stated. It's catchy. It's the kind
of thing that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs might not.
So, I think it's well-chosen in that way. I have technical questions about...
There's a problem of perchlorates on the surface of Mars that's going to be big trouble,
and there's radiation. This is known. But... What about business questions? Do you think,
because you mentioned sort of going outside of the solar system would best be done for religious
reasons? What about colonizing Mars? Can you spin it into a business proposition?
It's hard to think of a resource that's on Mars that could be brought back here cheaply enough to
compete with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here.
So, I don't know if there is a business plan for that, or if it's just strictly we're going to go
there and see what happens. Maybe, again, we need communism to get us going,
to give us a reason, a little bit of the competition. Well, there's plenty of people who are
sufficiently excited by the colonized Mars vision that they're willing to just go all in on it,
even if there's not a business plan behind it. So, I think it's well-chosen. It's just...
I think it's probably the only approach to take. A lot of the... When white people came to this
continent and started colonizing it, there was not a lot of coherent planning. What plans they
did have turned out to be terrible plans. Trying to come up with plans that extend
decades into the future is a waste of time. So, do it for the kind of
unexplainable love of the unknown, the journey towards exploring the unknown,
and just kind of keep going. Yeah. Well, you saw it with Shatner and his
reaction to the flight yesterday. For him, that trip was
more than worth it just for these intangible reasons. What did he say? I haven't watched the video yet.
He was trying to express, talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of rise above the
thin blue blanket of the atmosphere and you're up into the blackness. And that had a huge
impact on him. So, he was kind of... I wouldn't say groping for words because he was pretty
eloquent, but he was trying to express his feelings about that in a way that is pretty gripping to
watch. So, you worked on this kind of stuff. We can go back to 10 years ago. You wrote an essay
called Innovation Starvation. You worked on this kind of idea since then. Kind of looking at
maybe a little bit cynically about our age today and our unwillingness to take on big risky projects.
So, in the face of that, what do you think of people like Elon Musk? Because to me, people like that
are inspiring and gives you hope in the face of a more kind of pessimistic perspective of our age.
Yeah. Well, he's clearly willing to tackle big ambitious projects without a lot of
kind of soul searching or trying to make up his mind, right? Just like... Just go and do it.
Let's dig tunnels under cities. Go. Let's... Step one, make a joke about it on Twitter. Step two,
actually do it. Yeah. And I mean, things have slowed down. Quite our ability to build things at
pace is a lot less than it was. And there's reasons for that. We're more concerned with
safety and environmental impacts than people were when they were building some of the great
public's works projects of the mid-20th century. But even... We're at the point now where even
just maintaining the stuff that we've got is such a huge project that we need to put big
resources into it and good minds into it or else we're going to be losing things that we
take for granted. Do you think that there's a lot to be done in the digital space?
That's... We mentioned sort of Wikipedia and knowledge. Don't you think there could be a
lot of flourishing in the space of innovation in terms of innovation in the digital space?
Yeah. I mean, I'd like to see that. I think it's where a lot of the brain power went during the
last couple of generations because people who might previously have been building rockets or
other kinds of hard technologies ended up instead going into programming computer science,
which is understandable and great. We've got structural problems right now in the way social
media works that are pretty severe. And so I certainly hope that we're not... 10 years from
now that we're not exactly where we are today when it comes to that stuff we need to move on.
The beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do things and they give
opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the old, which is a dream for
me to see new social media that beats out the ways of the old. So I tend to... You perhaps agree that
it's impossible to do social media well. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I listened to your interview with
Jaren a couple of weeks ago and I know Jaren and we've talked about this. He went hard on me.
He basically said it's impossible. It is very nice. Well, the last time I kind of
paid attention to Jaren's thoughts on it, he was thinking in terms of that basically there should
be micropayments such that if I, by clicking the like button on something, I'm essentially giving
valuable intellectual property to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. It's not a very large
amount of IP, but it's definitely a transfer of information that when they aggregate it
is beneficial to them. And now I do remember that he, on his interview with you, was talking about
what, data unions? Those are a lot of interesting ideas, but for me, the biggest disagreement
was in the level of cynicism. He has a distrust in cynicism towards people in Silicon Valley being
able to do these kinds of things. And I'm really... Okay, when you have a large crowd of people that
are doing things the wrong way, you should nevertheless maintain optimism because what's
important is to find the one person in that room that's going to do things the right way.
Cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room. So he was saying, I've been here a
long time. I've known, I just like how these folks work. They think they're gods and they know
the right way to do things and they will tell you how to do those things. And that kind of hubris
is going to always lead you astray when you are the one who's engineering the algorithms.
And there's a lot of deep truth to that because algorithms are powerful and many people, when
given power, do not do the best of things. I mean, most... What is it, the old Lincoln line,
if you want to test the man's character, give him power. Yes, but that doesn't mean that some people
are not able to handle the power and that some people are not able to come up with good ideas
that create better social media. Yeah, I didn't interpret Jaren's statements as being entirely
cynical and hopeless. He's definitely raising issues of concern, but he wouldn't be out
writing the books that he's written and talking about this stuff if he didn't think there was a
way. If he didn't think there was hope. Yeah. And part of it, as you probably know with Jaren,
he just loves a good argument. Yeah. He just loves to have a little bit of fun. Well, I have
to ask you about... I mean, we talked about taking all big, bold, risky ideas. So in your new book,
Termination Shock, it's set here in Texas. Part of it is, yeah. Yeah. Most of it. Yeah,
it's a great place to set it. So in it, the main character, TR, McCooligan, a Texas billionaire,
oil man and truck stop, Magnate decides to solve climate change, to take on climate change by
himself. So this is an interesting philosophical exploration of how to solve climate change from
a perspective that's perhaps different than we've been thinking about. I wouldn't use the
word solve, but let's say ameliorate. Ameliorate. The temporary effects, but please.
Take on. Yeah. Take on the challenge. So it's very interesting, but as... So there's a gradual
nature to this process. Yeah. And I mean, just like in your book, the power of innovation
is something that has saved us quite a few times in history. So what role does that play in this
gradual process? Right. So ultimately, we don't solve the problem until we get the CO2 out of
the atmosphere, but that is going to take a while. We're still adding more. We haven't even started
to reduce the amount. So there's two possibilities inside to interrupt. Reduce the amount that we're
putting in the atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere. We have to do both.
Right. And those are two different kind of efforts in terms of what's involved.
Because it stays up there. So I think just last week, China announced that they're going to try to
level off their CO2 emissions in like 2030. So 2031, they'll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere
as they did in 2030, which is still a lot of CO2. In 2060, they're saying we'll be net zero.
So if everyone in the world does that and the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere by then is say 450
parts per million, it'll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out. And taking it out
is hard. It's a big... We took us a long time. We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs
and burn all that stuff. We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create
all of that CO2. And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove
the CO2 and get it back down hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used
to be. So how about you get a single Texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts
huge quantities of sulfur into the upper atmosphere? That's idea number one.
That's... This is called solar geoengineering. And it's... We know that it's a possibility
on a technical level because volcanoes have been doing it forever. So many times in human history,
we've seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a global cooling trend that lasted for a couple
of years. And one of these things happened, I think in the 60s or 70s in Indonesia. And
the Australians sent a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume.
And when it came back down, the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it. So one of the
Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid. So that was our first
kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was sulfur dioxide. And so we
know... Then Pinotubo came along in the 90s and did this experiment for us. So we know that
sulfur in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric acid after it
combines with water. And those bounce back some of the sun's rays and reduce the amount of solar
energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live. So we know that it works. And we also
know that the stuff goes away after a couple of years. So it gradually washes out. And so
it's not a permanent thing. So the good news, bad news is it's not permanent. So if you don't like
what's happening, you can just stop and wait a couple of years. And you'll get back to where
you started. And the bad news, if you're in favor of this kind of thing, is that you have to keep
doing it forever. So this guy is one of those... He's read these papers. He's the TR, the character
in the book. He knows all this. And all people who are familiar with climate science kind of
know this. It's a pretty well-established fact. And so he just decides he's going to take action
unilaterally and do this. And so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there. But because
it's Texas, he builds the biggest gun in the world. It's just six barrels planted straight up,
and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur into the stratosphere. And so the book is about
not so much that as how people react to his doing that, what the political ramifications are
around the world, because this is an extremely controversial idea. And not everyone's on board
with it. And even if you are willing to consider using a technological intervention, the fact is
that it's going to have different effects on different parts of the world. So some areas may
suffer more negatives than positives, and they're not going to be happy.
So what do you think? So in his case, in Tiara's case, he can get around
getting permission from governments. If we were to look at our
us facing outside of the story, us facing climate change, where do you think the solution will come
from governments working together, or from bold billionaire Texans? I'm pretty sure that this
kind of intervention is never going to emerge from Western democracies.
This kind of sorry, government-coordinated, which option one? Solar geoengineering.
Solar geoengineering, from a government. I want to sort of the distinction, one is the
idea, the technological idea you're talking about, but two is who comes up with the idea and agrees
on it, governments or individuals. Yeah. If this were to happen, I think it would be either
an individual or more likely just some government somewhere that just decides it's in their interests
to unilaterally do this. And that's not me advocating it. It's just, it would be comparatively
so cheap and easy to implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do it
once things get bad enough. But I don't think that governments will or Western governments,
just because they're not, well, we've seen what happened with vaccines. So getting people to
take vaccinations or wear masks has turned out to be incredibly hard, even though it might save
those people's lives. See, I blame, that's not Western. I blame failure of leadership there,
of leaders not coming off as authentic, not being inspiring, uniting, all those kinds of
things. I think that's possible. I think it's just that we've gotten the leaders we have right now
aren't the right people because we've lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively
comfortable times. And it feels like unfortunate if you just look at history, that hard times
make great leaders and easy times make bureaucrats that are egotistical and greedy and not very
interesting and not very bold. Yeah. No, I think that's fair. So we may be entering one of those
interesting times of hardship in the Chinese curse sense. So I could be wrong. But I mean,
there have been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering. There was a plan to send up
some balloons, altitude balloons to take some measurements in Scandinavia that got squashed
by objections from people who lived up there who were just opposed to the whole program on
principle. So we'll see a lot more of that. And it's going to be a hard program to advocate for
just because I think people don't quite understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere
and how far we are from even slowing down the rate that we're adding more to say nothing of
bringing that number down. We're a long way out from that. Do you see in terms of portfolio of
solutions us becoming a multi-planetary species as part of that? Is this also being a motivator for
investing some percent of GDP into becoming a multi-planetary species? And what percent
should that be, do you think? You know, in an indirect way, maybe. I mean, you know what people
will say, which is the same argument that has been leveled against space exploration since the
Apollo program, which is why don't we solve our problems here on Earth before we spend money going
into space. So I've never been a believer in that argument. I think there could be a sense in which
the new perspective that could be obtained by you thinking about, like if we're thinking about
terraforming Mars, changing its atmosphere, making it more amenable to life and survival,
you could see that maybe changing people's opinions about terraforming the Earth.
Yeah. There are some dangerous consequences to this particular idea of blasting software,
of geoengineering. What do you make of sort of big, bold ideas that are double-edged sword?
Are all ideas like this, all big ideas like this, they have the potential
to have highly beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences?
I wouldn't say all. I think going back to what we were talking about earlier,
you know, how technology developed in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when
people maybe had unrealistic ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently
attentive to the possible downsides. There's a reason why. In the mid-20th century,
we saw antibiotics, we saw the polio vaccine, we saw just simple things like refrigerators in the
home. My grandmother, to her dying day, called the refrigerator the ice box because when she
grew up, it was a box with ice in it. You see all that change and it's largely for the benefit
of people. If somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to build nuclear reactors to make
energy, or here's a new chemical called DDT that's going to kill mosquitoes, then
it's easy to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides.
Of course, we know that the way that those early reactors were built and the way that the supply
chain was built to create the fuel and deal with the waste was poorly thought out and
we're still dealing with the resulting problems at places like Hanford in the state of Washington.
We know that DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects, also had terrible effects on bird
populations. The backlash that happened in the 70s that is still going on is to
assume that everything is a double-edged sword and always to look for. We have to absolutely
convince ourselves that the downside isn't going to come back and bite us before we can adopt any
new technology. I think people are overly sensitized to that now.
Depending on the technology, people are a little bit too terrified of certain technologies,
like artificial intelligence is one. My sense is that the things that they're afraid of aren't
the things that are likely going to happen in terms of negative things. It's probably impossible
to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences, but what's also interesting
is for AI as an example, people don't think enough about the positive things. The same is true
with social media. It's very popular now for some reason to talk about all the negative effects of
social media. We've immediately forgotten how incredible it is to connect across the world.
There's a deep loneliness within all of us. We long to connect. Social media, at least in part,
enables that, even in its current state. All the negative things we see with social media
currently are also in part just revealing the basics of human nature. It didn't make us worse,
it's just bringing it to the surface. Step one of solving a problem is bringing it to the surface.
The fact that there's a division, the fact that they're easily angered and upset,
and all of that, the witch hunts, all those kinds of things, that's human nature. It just
reveals that allowing us to now work on it is therapy. That's another example of a technology
that's just, we're not considering the positive effects now and in the future enough.
I have to ask about, there's a million things I can ask about, but virtual reality, I gotta ask you.
You've thought about virtual reality, mixed reality, quite a bit. What are the
interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality or mixed reality?
In the next eight years. Yeah. I was a magically for five years.
With the best title of all time. Oh, thanks. Chief futurist?
Yeah. Yeah. I've had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content,
R&D. We're trying to make content for AR. Because it's such a new medium,
it's more of an engineering R&D project almost than a creative project. It was fascinating to see
everything that goes into making an AR system that runs. AR, an AR device, if it's really gonna do
AR, needs to be running SLAM in real time. And that alone is a big...
So for people who don't know, first of all, virtual reality is creating an almost fully
artificial world and putting you inside it. Augmented reality AR is taking the real world
and putting stuff on top of that real world. And when you say SLAM, that means in real time,
the device needs to be able to sense accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently
to be able to reconstruct the 3D structure of it so you can put stuff on top of it.
And doing that in real time, presumably not just real time, but in a way that creates a pleasant
experience for the human perception system. That's an engineering project.
Right. Yeah, well said. And it's just one of the things that the system has to do. It's also
tracking your eyes so it knows what you're looking at, how far away, what you're looking at is.
It's performing all those functions and it's got to keep doing that without burning up the
CPU or depleting the battery unreasonably fast. And that's just table stakes. It's just the basic
functions of the operating system. And then any content that you want to add has to sit on top
of that. It's got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real
and you don't get sick. So it's an amazing thing and a magically shipped device that can do that
in 2019. And they're about to ship the ML2, but I don't know any more about that than anyone else
because I don't work there anymore. Does it still, to some degree, boil down to a killer app,
a content question? Like you said, it's kind of a wide open space. Nobody knows exactly what's going
to be the compelling thing. So doesn't a super compelling experience of some sort
alleviate some of the need for engineering perfection?
Well, there's a base layer of engineering that you have to have, no matter what. But you're
certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with kind of low frame
rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having so much fun playing Doom
or whatever. Even Tetris. Yeah. So for sure, that's true. And so I was working on consumer
facing content. There was a great team in Wellington, New Zealand that made a game called Dr. Groyd
Broad's Invaders that realized the potential of AR gaming in a way that I don't think anything else
has before or since. And so that was definitely the strategy until, but April 2020, which is when
the company decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead.
And I haven't seen their financial projections, but I assume they had good reasons for
making that strategic decision. It just means that it's no longer necessarily targeted at
just end users who want to play a game or be entertained. But it's...
That, to me, from a sort of a dreamer, futurist perspective is heartbreaking because I don't
know necessarily from in the VR space, but I see this kind of thing with robotics where,
to me, the future of robotics is consumer facing. And a lot of great roboticists,
Boston Dynamics and companies like that are focused on sort of industrial applications
because for financial business reasons. Yeah. Now, I can see the parallels for sure.
We'll see. It was a fun project. We worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats,
which just populated your room with Baby Goats. That seemed like a killer app right there.
Well, we thought highly of the idea, for sure. Yes.
But because of the SLAM, the system knew, for example, here's a table. Here's a little end
table. We know the heights. We know how high our animated Baby Goat can jump. And so our engineers
had to build a system for converting the SLAM primitives into game engine objects
that the AIs in the game could navigate around. And that ended up shipping as more of a dev
kid or a sort of how-to, a sample app, than as a finished consumer facing.
You mean the Baby Goat AI? Yeah. That seems to me like a world, I can entertain myself for hours,
just every day coming home to see of Baby Goats. Yeah. I mean, it was an ambient kind of,
it's not a thing that you would sit there and play like a video. Just life. Yeah.
But now there's Baby Goats. I mean, what's the purpose of having dogs and cats in your life?
Exactly. It's kind of ambient. Yeah. They're not really helping you do anything, but it's
enriching your life. You can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want,
but you don't have to. Right. Yeah. So we worked on that in a bigger project that was more of a
storytelling and a fictional universe. The hardware is worth a look. There's still a
belief. I just saw it this morning looking at Twitter that the Magic League never shipped
anything, but they've been, since 2019, you can go to their website and buy one of these devices
anytime you want to spend the money. Yeah. And then you want it's coming out, I think in 2022,
so in a few months. What do you think, looking at 50 years from now, what wins virtual reality,
augmented reality, or physical reality? What wins? Meaning like what's, what do people
that have financial resources enjoy spending most of their time in?
Mm-hmm. I've always been a fan of AR and it's kind of an easy answer because if you're wearing
an AR device and you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device. If you block out what's
really there, then all you're seeing is a VR. But you are with AR constrained to kind of operate in
something that's similar to physical reality. Yeah. With VR, you can go into fantastical
worlds. True, true. So there are still issues in those fantastical worlds with motion sickness.
So if your body is experiencing acceleration, your inner ear, that differs from what your eye
thinks it's seeing, then you'll get sick unless you're a very unusual person. So it doesn't mean
you can't do it. It just, it's a constraint that VR designers have to learn to work with.
So do you think it's possible that in the future, we're living mostly in a virtual reality world?
Like it would become more and more detached from physical reality?
For entertainment, maybe, for certain applications, I'm personally more,
I mean, we have to make a distinction between what I would personally find interesting and,
you know, what might win in the market. So maybe some people, maybe lots of people,
would like to spend a huge amount of time in VR. I'm personally more interested in enhancing the
experience that I have of the physical world, because the physical world's pretty cool, right?
And there's a lot, a lot to be said for, for moving around in the real world.
And can I ask you for you personally to try to play devil's advocate or to try to construct,
to imagine a VR world where you and Neil Stevens wouldn't want to stay? Not because the physical
world all of a sudden became really bad, for some reason, like you're trying to escape it.
But like literally, it's just more enriching, in the same way, like there's a glimmer in your
eye when you said you enjoy the physical world, like double up on that glimmer for the virtual
reality. Can you imagine such a world? Well, like, I'll give maybe an example that's a bridge,
which is that I've been, I like making things. So I like working in a machine shop and making
objects with 3D printers or machines or whatever. And so I've had to learn how to get good at
using a CAD program. There's many to choose from. I use one called Fusion 360. And I can spend hours
in that trying to create, imagine and create the things I want to create. And it's not virtual
reality exactly. But that whole time, my whole field of view is occupied by this monitor that's
showing me a window into a three-dimensional space. I'm rotating things around. I'm imagining things.
I'm making things. And so that is pretty close to being in virtual reality.
Does that thing have to exist for you to experience true joy? Can you stay
in Fusion 360 the whole time? Do you have to 3D print it and touch it?
Yeah. I mean, that's my game. That's what I'm up to. But it happens that if you're building
a virtual environment, if you're making a game level or creating a virtual set for a film or
TV production, the thing that you're designing in the program may never physically exist.
And in fact, it's preferable that it doesn't because the whole point of that is to
make imaginary things that you couldn't build otherwise. So I think lots of people spend
a good chunk of their working hours in something that's pretty close to VR. It's just that currently
the output device happens to be a rectangular object in front of them. You could replace that with
a VR headset and they'd be doing the same stuff. There's all kinds of interfaces. For example,
I enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks. Let's say actually podcasts because there's
intimate human connection in a podcast. It's one way, but you have to learn about the person
you're listening to. And that's a real connection. And that's just audio for a lot of people. That's
just audio. For me, that's just audio as a fan of people. And you kind of a little bit are friends
with those people. Yeah. They're in your life. You're listening to them. Yeah. And I mean,
they're not, they're as far away from real as it gets. There's not even a visual component.
It's just audio, but they're as real. If I was on a desert island, my imagination,
this thing works pretty good in terms of imagination. It creates a very beautiful world
with just audio. Or even just reading books. Exactly. Reading books. Even more so with
reading books. Because there are certain mediums which stimulate the imagination more.
When you present less, the imagination works more. And that can create really enriching
experiences. So I mean, to me, the question is, can you do some of the amazing things that make
life amazing in virtual worlds? It seems to me the answer there is obviously yes. Even if I,
like you, am attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world, I think I can very readily imagine
coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual world.
Or you make friends and you can fall in love where the source of love in your life
is to a much greater degree inside of a virtual world. And like, and then love means fulfillment.
That means happiness. That's the thing you look forward to. And not some kind of dopamine rush
type of love, but like long, long lasting friendship.
It just depends on what is there in the way of applications, the content. And can it feed you
those things? Can it give you, like in my example of using the CAD program,
it gives me the ability to do something I enjoy, which is making imagining things
and making things in a particular way.
But can we psychoanalyze you for a second?
Sure.
What exactly do you enjoy? Is there some component of you building the thing
where you get to at least a little bit share with others?
Like, is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?
Sure.
Will anyone ever see it?
Right. There's a source of your enjoyment, because I would argue that perhaps it's when,
like the turtles all the way down, when you get to the bottom turtle,
it has to do with other sharing with other humans. And if you can then put those humans
inside the VR world, then you start to, then you can, okay, for example,
you could do it in the physical world, the 3D printing, but you share it in the virtual world,
and that's where the source of happiness is.
I think, at least speaking for myself, I'm always thinking in terms of an audience. And
at some level, I feel like I'm doing this for someone or communicating to someone,
even if there's not a specific someone in mind, because you could just be an abstract theoretical
someone. And it's like another app I spend a lot of time in is Mathematica.
Yeah, incredible app.
Yeah, yeah. And when I do a Mathematica notebook, if I'm trying to figure something out,
I spend a lot of time typing. Just my stuff is just huge blocks of text, just me thinking out
loud, and then some graphs and calculations and stuff. Because to me, that act of explaining
things and commenting helps me understand what I'm doing.
And there's kind of an audience, amorphous audience in mind.
Yeah, like, I mean, most of this stuff nobody will ever see. And yet, I'm creating it as if
there were an audience that might read this stuff. Because that's a necessary constraint
that helps me do a better job.
What's the, this might be a tricky question to answer. What comes to mind as a particularly
beautiful thing that you're proud of that you create inside Mathematica, visualization-wise,
or something that just comes to memory if it's possible to retrieve?
So, the thing I've spent the most amount of time on is, I got obsessed a long time ago
with trying to tile the globe with hexagons.
And actual globe?
Well, any spherical object, yeah, but with an eye towards putting it on the earth,
and so, and have it be recursive. So, you can have hexagons within hexagons,
which is hard because, and probably a bad idea, because you can't tile a hexagon with smaller
hexagons. They don't, they stick out.
Got it. So, they're, oh, they stick out. So, can you do some kind of fractal hexagon situation?
Yeah. Yeah. So, it's that, and people who know me are always now make fun of me for this. So,
they'll send me, if they see a picture with hexagons in it, they'll like send me a link
to make fun of me. So, as some-
So, one of those people, Roger Penrose, or?
I think Roger's a little above my level.
It's easy to put hexagons as well in tiling.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I did a lot of that, and I thought it was pretty cool, but there's some,
like surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up. Like, you've always got to have
some pentagons. Like, if you start with the icosahedron, which is equilateral triangles,
which is a logical place to start, you can cover those with hexagons, but every
vertex where the triangles come together is a pentagon, has to be a pentagon.
Oh, I just think so. There's all hexagons, and then there's a pentagon at the intersections.
Yeah. Yeah.
Cool. How did you figure that out? Is that a known fact?
Well, it's just if you look at a, like, just by institution.
An obvious thing. Got it.
Yeah. So, you can't make that go away. So, any system that you come up with to do this
has got to have these exceptions built into it for those 12. You could have quintillions of
hexagons, but you still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere. So, I've blown a hell of a lot of
time on that over the years. By the way, a lot of those kind of problems are very difficult to
prove something about. Yeah. Yeah. I think Uber did it because someone, one of my friends who
knows of my interest in this and who likes to give me a hard time, sent me a link. This
is a couple of years ago to some code base that I think came out of Uber where they had
done this. You know, you break down the whole surface of the earth into little hexagons.
So, that was a real knife through the heart, but I'll probably come back to it someday.
Is there something special about hexagons? Are you interested in all kinds of tiling?
Well, I'm interested in all kinds of tiling, but I know my limitations as a math guy.
So, hexagons are about my speed. Just sufficient amount of complexity.
So, tiling is a really interesting problem, both two and three-dimensional. Tiling problems are
fascinating, and they're one of those ancient puzzles that has
attracted braniacs for centuries.
Let me ask you a little bit about AI. What are some likely interesting trajectories for the
proliferation of AI in society over the next couple of decades? Do you think about this kind
of stuff? I do not think about it a lot because it's a deep topic, and I don't consider myself
super well-informed about it. And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different
things. So, I've messed around just a tiny little bit with neural nets with what's it called PCA,
Principal Component Analysis. So, I guess I tend to think in terms of granular bottom-up ideas
rather than big picture top-down. Oh, God. So, very specific algorithms. How are they going to...
What problem are they going to solve in society such that it has a lot of big ripple effects?
See, I mean, we could talk about a particular successful AI systems and success defining
different ways of recent years. So, one is language models with GPT-3. Most importantly,
they're self-supervised, meaning they don't require much supervision from humans, which means
they can learn by just reading a huge amount of content created by humans. So, read the internet
and from that, be able to generate text and do all kinds of things like that. It's possible
they have a big enough neural network. It's going to be able to have conversations with humans
based on just reading human language. That's an interesting idea. To me, the very interesting
idea that people don't think about it as AI because they're kind of dumb currently is
actual embodied robots. So, robotics, like Boston Dynamics. I have downstairs and upstairs
legged robots. You know, the currently Boston Dynamics robots and most legged robots,
most robots period are pretty dumb. Most of the challenges have to do with the actual...
First of all, the engineering of making the thing work, getting a sensor suite that allows
you to do the same things with Magic Leap, that base layer of like... Where is that stuff?
Where am I? And what am I looking at? I don't need to deeply understand my surroundings at a
level beyond of what will hurt if I run into it. Yeah. But even that is hard.
That's hard. But the thing that I think people don't... In the robotics space,
explore enough is the human-robot interaction part of the picture, which is how it makes
humans feel, how robots make humans feel. And I think that's going to have a very significant
impact in the near future in society, which is the more you integrate AI systems of whatever form
into society where humans are in contact with them regularly. So that could be embodied robotics,
or that could be social media algorithms. I think that has a very significant impact.
And people often think like AI needs to be super smart to have an impact. I think it needs to be
super integrated with society to have an impact, and more and more that's happening,
even if they're dumb. Yeah. I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is that I'm
associated with a combat robotics team, and I've been to a few battle bots competitions.
And in a lot of ways, that's pretty far from the kind of robotics you're talking about,
because these robots are remote-controlled. They're not autonomous, and so they're pretty simple.
But it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different robots. So there was one
that was in the last year's season, the 2020 season called Rusty, that was just put together
out of spare parts, and it looked kind of cute. And it became this huge crowd favorite, because
you could see it was made of solid bowls and random pieces of hardware that this guy had
scavenged from his farm. And so immediately, people kind of fell in love with this one particular
robot, whereas they might, other robots might be like the bad guy, if you think of professional
wrestling, the heel and the baby face. So people do, for reasons that are hard to understand,
form these emotional reactions. And we form narratives in the same way we do when we meet
human beings, we tell stories about these objects, and they could be intelligent,
and they could be biological, or they could be almost close to inanimate objects. And that,
to me, is kind of fascinating. And if robots choose to lean into that, it creates an interesting
world. If they start using feedback loops to make themselves cuter? Not just cuter,
but everything that humans do. Let's not speak harshly of robots. Humans do the same thing.
Oh, no, I wasn't meaning it in that. But right, humans, based on feedback, will change their
appearance. Yes, I do this on Instagram all the time. How do I look cuter? That's the fundamental
question I ask myself. Yeah, so why wouldn't a robot want to? It's like, oh, wow, people really
don't like the quad mount machine gun on top of my turret. Maybe I should get rid of that,
and people would feel more at ease. Or lean into it. Be proud of it. You won't take my gun,
whatever the saying is, from my dead cold hands. I mean, their personality, adding personality,
such that you can start to heal, you can start to weave narratives. I think that's a fascinating
place where there's this feedback loop, like you said, where AI, especially when it's embodied,
puts a mirror to ourselves. Just like other humans are close friends, they kind of teach us about
ourselves. We teach each other. And through that process, grow close. And to me, it's so fascinating
to expand the space of deep meaningful interactions beyond just humans. That's the opportunity I see
with robots and with AI systems. And that's why I don't like my biggest problem, social media
algorithms, is the lack of transparency. It's not the existence of the algorithms. Well, there's
this many things. One is the data. Data should be controlled by people themselves. But also the
lack of transparency and how the algorithms work. And change your perception of what's real
in hidden ways. In hidden ways. You should be aware, just like when you take, I don't know,
if you take psychedelics, you should be aware that you took the psychedelics. It shouldn't be a
surprise. Yeah. And second, you should become a student and a scholar. And there should be
research done. There should be open conversation about how your perception is changed. And then
you become your own guide in this world of ultra perception, because arguably none of it is real.
You get to choose the flavor of real. I mean, this is something you explore quite a bit. Do you
yourself think that there is a bottom to it, where there is reality? There's a base layer of
reality that physics can explore and our human perception layer stuff. Let's go to Plato.
So, is there such a thing as truth? I lean towards the Platonic view of things. So,
I believe that mathematical objects have a reality that it's not all made up by human minds.
And I don't know where that reality comes from. I can't explain it, but I do think that
mathematical objects are discovered and not invented. I did a lot of, not a lot, but I did
some reading of Husserl when I was writing Anathem. And he's a 20th century phenomenologist,
and he's writing at the same time as scientists are starting to understand atoms and becoming
aware that when we look at this table, it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum.
And there's a very sparse arrangement of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space
that interact with each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object. So,
that's kind of the beginnings of phenomenology. And his stuff is pretty hard to read. You really
have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time. But he's trying to come to grips
with these kinds of questions. How did you come to grips with it? Why does this table feel solid?
Well, we're an evolved system that we have biological advantages in knowing where solid
objects are. So, we've got this system in our head that integrates our perceptions into this
coherent view of things. That one of the take-homes that I like from Husserl is the idea of
intersubjectivity and the idea that a fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to
share our perceptions and have them ratified by other. They don't even have to be people, but
you know, a prisoner in solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects
because they perceive the same things that the prisoner perceives. And so, convince him that
he's not just hallucinating. Yeah, establish a consensus. But see, that doesn't mean it's any
of it is real. You just establish a consensus. It could be very distant from something that's
real in the engineering sense of real, like you could build it using physics.
Well, I think that a valuable application for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except that.
Consensus. It just sits there. And if you hear a door slam, you might turn to see what it is.
If the robot at the same time turns to look at the door slam, it's ratifying your perception.
But isn't that the basis of love is when the door slams, you both look,
but for deeper things, you both hear the same music and others don't. I mean,
isn't that what that means? Yeah. That's by love, I mean depth of human connection.
Yeah. Like that's or not. You arrive at similar reactions without having to
explicitly communicate it. Yeah. But we could start with a robot that
listens explicitly for the slam doors. Yeah. Or scary sounds.
I can think of. So an example of this is when I went to college, we'd be sitting at
the cafeteria, a bunch of people eating our dinner together that we had just met, let's say.
So a bunch of new people in your life and someone might make a funny remark or a not
so funny remark or something would happen. And you might then at that moment make eye contact with
someone you didn't know at the other end of the table. And in that moment, you would realize
is this person is reacting. This person heard what I heard. They're reacting the way I reacted.
Nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened. But random stranger down
there and I, we have this connection. Yeah. And then you build on that. So then the next time
something happens, you automatically look at your new friend and they look back at you. And
before you know it, you're hanging out together because you've already established without even
talking to each other that you're on the same wavelength. Yeah. It's seemingly so simple,
but so powerful. It's establishing that you're on the same wavelength at some level.
There's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that. I'm just saying.
Uh-huh. Does this smell burn to you? Exactly. I think it's burnt.
A toaster could just say that to you. Yeah. Cryptonomicon published in 1999,
set in the late 90s and involves hackers who build essentially cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008. So I have to kind of ask, uh, from you looking at this
layout of what's been happening in cryptocurrency, the evolution of this technology,
how has it rolled out differently than you could have imagined in two ways? One,
the technology itself and two, the human side of things, the human stories of the hackers
and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless, the human side of things.
Yeah. Well, Cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin. It's pre Satoshi. It's pre blockchain,
as you point out. So, um, at that point, uh, I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing
among people like the Bay Area Cipherpunks in Berkeley. There was some, some there was a branch
here in Austin as well. Um, and a lot of their thinking was so based on the idea that you would
have to have a physical, uh, region of the earth that was free of government interference. You,
you couldn't achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network. You actually
had to have, you know, a room somewhere with servers in it, um, that, uh, that a government couldn't
come in and meddle with. And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there
were efforts to figure out jurisdictions where this might work. There was a lot of interest for a
while in Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island that had some unusual jurisdictional properties.
There was Sea Land, Sea Land, which is a platform in the North Sea. And so there was a lot of effort
that went into finding these physical locations that, that were deemed kind of safe. And that all
goes away with blockchain. It's no longer necessary. Um, and so that really changes the picture in a
lot of ways because, um, uh, you no longer have, I mean, from a novelist point of view, the old
system was a lot more fun to work with because it gives you a situation where hackers are wandering
around in strange parts of the world, you know, trying to set up server rooms. So that's a great
storytelling thing. There's still a little bit of that, right? In the modern world, but it's just,
there's several server rooms as opposed to one centralized one. Yeah. Yeah. And there is the,
like the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your, your, uh,
your, your GPUs from melting down. So people building things in Iceland or, or in shipping
containers on the bottom of the ocean or whatever. Um, so, um, but there's still governments evolved
and there's, there's still from a novelist perspective, interesting dynamics. What is big
governments like, uh, China and, and more sort of renegade governments from all over the world,
trying to contend with this idea of what to do, uh, in terms of control and power over these
over these kinds of centers that do the mining of the, of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So we're in a
stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial, like there was the stuff I was describing in
Cryptonomicon had a little bit of air about it of the underpants gnomes, uh, in that, you know,
we're going to, we're going to build this system and then we'll make money somehow. Uh, but the,
the intermediate step was, was left out. Um, and that is, uh, uh, I think we're now
sort of into that phase of the thing where the, where Bitcoin, you know, blockchain exists. People
know how it works. Uh, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist. People are using them
and it's sort of like, okay, what now, you know, where does this all lead? Um, so, um,
do you have a sense of where it all leads? Like, is it, is it possible that the set of technology
kind of continues to have, uh, transformational effects on not just sort of finance, but who
gets to have power in this world? So the decentralization of power.
You know, big questions, right? So I guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me
thinking that as soon as it becomes important enough, the existing banks and people in power
are going to sort of control it. I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change in
the end. Um, there's a utopian strain sometimes in, in the way people think about this that
I'm not so sure about. There, there's a, there is a technological aspect to Bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies that make it a little easier to, uh, pull along the, the utopian thread.
Yeah. Because it's harder for governments to control Bitcoin.
Yeah. I mean, they, they have much fewer options. The, the, they can ban, they can make it illegal.
It's, it's more difficult. Yeah. So technology here is on the side of the powerless, the
voiceless, which is a very interesting idea. Of course, yes, it does have a utopian
feel to it, but we have been making progress throughout human history. Yeah. Maybe this
is what progress looks like. There will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that
take advantage of it, skim off the top kind of thing. But maybe this does give, um, more power
to people that haven't had power before in a good way, like distributing power and enabling sort of
more, um, greater resistance to sort of, uh, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, that
kind of thing. Um, and also enabling all kinds of technologies built on top of it. Ultimately,
when you digitize money, uh, you know, money is a kind of speech or it's a kind of like, um, mechanism
of how humans interact. And if you make that digital more and more of the world moves to the
digital space, and then you could have the, then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality
with the toaster. Yeah. Yeah. In a lot of ways, I think in that realm of technology that
the money per se is one of the less interesting things you can do with it. So I think, you know,
cryptographically enforceable contracts and organizations built on those, that seems to me
like it's got more potential for change just because we do already have money. And although it's
an old system, um, it's been digitized to a large extent by, you know, the, the stripes and the credit
card companies of the world. And I also love the idea of like, uh, connecting to connected to smart
contracts, connecting data, sort of, uh, making it more formal, it's like Mathematica, more structured,
the integration of data, of weather data, of, uh, all kinds of data about the, the, the, the stuff
in the world so they can make contracts between people that in, that's grounded in data. And
that's actually getting closer to something like truth, because then you can make agreements
based on actual data versus kind of perceptions of data. And if you can formalize, like distribute
the power of who gets to tell the story, that that's an interesting kind of, um, resistance.
Yeah. Again, uh, the powerful in the space of narrative.
Yeah. David Brin has been saying for a while that, um, the only way to settle arguments with,
you know, across the political divide is to, to make bets. So people can say, you know,
the election was stolen or, you know, whatever controversial position they're, they're taking.
Um, and they'll keep saying it until you, you, uh, you, you wager real money on it.
So, um, so maybe there's something there, um, if you could, uh, kind of turn that into a,
put a user interface on that thing, you know. Yeah. Have a stake in your, uh,
uh, in your divisiveness, in your, in your arguments. Right. Right. No.
Will, uh, Dogecoin take over the world?
Twitter question. You know, I don't, I don't follow the, the different coins that much.
So I don't, I mean, I hear about Dogecoin and I, you know, I've kind of followed the story of it.
So the interesting aspect of Dogecoin is it, so in contrast to like, uh, Bitcoin and Ethereum,
which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek to solve some of the
problems that we're talking about with smart contracts and, uh, resist the, the, the banks
and all those kinds of things. Dogecoin operates more in the space of memes and humor while still
doing some of the similar things. And it presents to the world sort of a question of whether, um,
um, memes, whether humor, whether narrative will go a long way in the future, like much
farther than some kind of boring old, uh, grounded technologies, whether we'll be playing in the
space of fun. Like once we built a base of comfort and stability and like a robust system where
everyone has shelter, everyone has, uh, food and the basic needs covered are we're going to then
operate in the space of fun. That's, that's what I think about Dogecoin because it seems like fun
spreads faster than anything else, fun of different kinds. And that could be bad fun
and that could be good fun. Yeah. And so this is a battle of, of good fun goes viral very, very
quickly when you, when you, if you post something that people find fun. Yeah. And that's what Dogecoin
represents. So there's like, so Bitcoin represents like financial, uh, like serious financial
instruments. And then Dogecoin represents fun. And it's interesting to watch the battle
go on on the internet to see which wins. This is also like open question to me of what is the
internet because, um, fun seems to prevail on the internet. And that's that a fundamental property
of the internet moving forward when you look a hundred years out, or is this a temporary thing
that was true at the birth of the internet? And this just true for a couple of decades
until it fades away and, and the adults take over and become serious again.
Well, I think the adults took over initially and then it was later on that people started using it
for fun, frivolous things like memes. And that's, I think that's pretty much unstoppable, you know.
Yeah. Because even people who are very serious, you know, enjoy sending around a funny picture or
something that amuses them. Yeah. I personally think we spoke about World War II. I think
memes will save the world and prevent all future wars. You've been handwriting your work for the
past 20 years since writing the Baroque cycle. What are the pros and cons of handwriting versus
typing? For me, I started it as an experiment when I started the Baroque cycle because I had noticed
that if I, sometimes if I was stuck having a hard time getting started, if I just picked up a pen
and started writing, it was easy to go. So I just decided to keep with that. If it got in my way,
I didn't like it. I could always just go back to the word processor and be fine. So, but I never,
that never happened. So there's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's
ink on paper and there's no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it.
But there's, it's a slower output technique. And so a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time
in the buffer up here before it gets committed to paper, whereas I can type really fast. And so
I can slam things out before I really thought them through. So I think the first draft quality
ends up being higher. And then editing, first draft of editing is just faster because
instead of like trying to move the cursor around or whatever, or, you know, hitting the backspace key,
I can just draw a line through a word or a sentence or just around a whole paragraph and exit out.
And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit, but I've also left behind a record of what the
text was prior to the edit. Of course, you know, all the digital versions have those quote unquote
features, but their experience is different. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a romance to just the physical,
you know, the touch of the pen to the paper, doing what has been done for centuries?
I think there is. I think there is a just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary
technology beyond the pen and the paper is just very simple and clean. And
so I've got a bunch of fountain pens. I started buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago
because I thought I would be more conservative with it, you know, but it still doesn't,
it's still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn't really alter my habits very much.
So all that said, you once you do type stuff up, you use Emacs. Yeah. I use Emacs,
obviously the superior editor. Of course. Let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question
because Emacs has been around forever. Do you think in 100 years we will still have Emacs and Vim?
Or like pick a, let's say 50, 100 years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, whenever you're doing
anything in Linux, you're spending a lot of time editing little config files and scripts and stuff.
And you need to be able to pop in and out of editing those things. And it needs to work
like even if the windowing GUI is dead and all you've got is like a command line,
you, to get out of that problem, you might need to enter an editor and alter a file.
So I think on that level, there will always have to be sort of very simple, well, Emacs isn't
very simple, but you know what I mean. There have to be basic editors that you can use from
either the command line or a GUI just for administering systems. Now, how widespread they'll be,
you know, there's a certain amount of, what's the story of the American folktale of the
guy who, the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry, trying to keep up with the
steam hammer and eventually the steam hammer wins because he can't drive the spikes fast enough.
So there's a sense in which, you know, Microsoft like who knows how much they've invested in code,
you know, Visual Studio or Apple with Xcode. So they've put huge amounts of money into
enhancing their IDEs. And Emacs in theory can duplicate all of those features by, you know,
if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs Lisp macros. But, you know, at some point,
it's going to be hard to maintain that level of, to keep up feature for feature.
The interesting thing about Emacs just has lasted a long time. Yeah. And I think you've
talked about, there's a certain like, there's certain fads, certainly in the software engineering
space. And it's interesting to think about technologies that sort of last for a very
long time. And just kind of being in them. What is it? How do they get by? It's like the
cockroaches of software or the bacteria of software or something. Like this base thing that
nobody, everybody's just became reliant on and they just outlast everything else and slowly,
slowly adjust with the times, with a little bit of a delay, with a little bit of customization
by individuals kind of that. But they're always there in the shadows and they outlast everybody
else. And I wonder if that's, that might be the story for a lot of technologies, especially in
the software space. Yeah. Shell scripts, you know, all that stuff. You can't run the modern
world without a bunch of shell scripts, you know, booting up machines and running things. So
that is going to be a hard thing to replace. And then tech for typesetting that you use,
you said? When I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple macros that I use. But then
I have to, the publisher put their foot down and they want it in Word format now. So years ago,
I wrote some macros to convert. And this time, what did I do? Copy-paste. No, I use of regular
expressions. So I was to do italics in, you know, you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash
IT and then you type what you want to type. And that's how you get italics in tech. So you can
create a regular expression that'll look for some text between curly brackets preceded by
backslash IT and then instead convert that to italics. And Word will do that. Word, if you go
deep enough into it, search and replace UI. You can do regular expressions. It's just regs.
Yeah. It's funny that you did that. I mean, I'm sure there's tools that help you with that kind
of thing. But the task is sufficiently simple to where you can do a much better job than anybody
else's tool can. Yeah. So that's a fascinating process. Works fine for me. Yeah. And it keeps
you from messing around with formatting. Yeah. Like, oh, what if I put this chapter heading,
you know, in, you know, a sans serif font? Yeah, it's just classic wanking. And so
those options are closed off in what I'm doing. Is there advice you could say, what does it take
to write a great story? The power of good yarns, good narratives to pull people in is incredible.
And I think my amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary development that if you're a cave
person sitting around a fire in the Rift Valley a million years ago, if you can tell the story
of how you escaped from the hyenas or how Uncle Bob, you know, didn't escape from the hyenas.
And if the people listening to you can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads
like a kind of virtual reality and see what you're describing, then you've just conferred an
incredibly important advantage on the people who've heard that story. Yeah. Right. And so they
know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have learned in any other way.
I mean, animals who don't have speech, though, they might warn each other,
they might make a sound that says danger, danger. But as far as we know, they can't
tell more complicated stories. So it's a part of us. Yeah. The collective intelligence seems to be
one of the key characteristics of Homo sapiens, the ability to share ideas and hold ideas together
in our minds. And storytelling is the fundamental aspect of that. Maybe even language itself
is more fundamental. Yeah. Because the language is required to do the storytelling.
Or maybe they evolve together. Maybe they co-evolve. Yeah. So I think that
you've got to work with that. And I think sometimes it seems like in kind of literary circles that
having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon as it's pulpy or it's exploitative. But
for me, I don't have any compunctions whatsoever about that. I like stories that are grabby and fun
and exciting to read. And once you've got one of those going, once you've got a good yarn going
that people will enjoy reading, then you're free to do whatever you want in the frame of that story.
But if you don't have that, then you got nothing.
What about having a technological scientific rigor to the accuracy as much as possible?
How does that add to Bob telling the story or telling the story about Bob or on the campfire?
Well, the main thing that it does is present little details that you might not have come up
with on your own. So if you're just sitting there freely imagining things, your brain probably
isn't going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications and surprises
that the real world is constantly presenting us with. And so in my case, if I'm trying to
write a story that involves some technology like a rocket or orbital maneuvers or whatever,
then delving into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird, unexpected thing
that gives me material to work with, but also subliminally readers who see that are going to
be drawn in more because they're going to find that, oh, I didn't see that coming.
It's got some of the complexity and surprise value of the real world.
Yeah, it does something. Alex Garland, director who wrote, directed X Machina,
I think about AI movies and the more care you take in making it accurate,
the more compelling the story becomes somehow. I'm not sure what that is.
Maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story,
maybe it just makes you a better writer. The key to any storytelling is getting the
readers to suspend their disbelief. And there's all kinds of triggers and little
tells that can break that. And once it's broken, it's really hard to get it back.
A lot of times that's the end. Somebody will just close the book and not pick it up.
I got to ask you. You've answered this question, but I got to ask you
the most impossible question for an author to answer, but which Neil Stevenson book
should one read first? When people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read.
The best known one is probably Snow Crash, but that's a cyberpunk novel that's at the same time
making fun of cyberpunk. It's got some layers to it that might not seem so funny if you don't
have that, if you don't get the joke. As you point out, I've written historical
novels. Some people like those. Some people prefer those. If that's what you like,
then Cryptonomicon or the Baroque cycle is where you would start. If you like techno
thrillers that are set in a modern day setting, but aren't science fictiony per se, then Reemdi
is one of those and Termination Shock is definitely one of those.
It just depends on what people like. When people a long time ago recommend
I read Snow Crash, I said it's Neil Stevenson Light. If you don't want to be overwhelmed
by the depth, the rigor of a book, that's a good introduction to the man. You're broken down by
topics, but if you wanted to read all of them, what's a good introduction to the man? Obviously,
these worlds are very different. The philosophies are very different. What's a good introduction
to the human? People ask the same thing with Dostoyevsky. It's a hard one to answer.
Maybe Seven Eves, because it's got big themes. It's about heavy, heavy things happening to the
human race, but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that people can relate to.
It moves along, so it does go kind of deep eventually on how rockets work and orbital
mechanics and all that stuff, but people were able to get through it anyway, or some people just
skip over that. It's fine. As an author, let me ask you, what books had a big impact on your life
that you've read? Is there any that jumped to mind that you learned from as a writer, as a
philosopher, as a mathematician, as an engineer? This is one of these questions where I always
blank out, and then when I'm walking out the door, I'll remember 12 of them.
This is a random selection that doesn't represent the top ones?
Well, I mentioned Gulag Archipelago. That's kind of hefty and dark, but…
And then it has a personal connection as well.
Yeah, just where you found the book, too. The time in your life, where you found it,
who recommended it. That's also part of the story.
Yeah, so there's definitely that. I circle back to Moby Dick a lot,
because we read it in a really great English class I had in high school,
and I came in with an oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going to try to
talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory, and what does this mean,
and what's the symbolism. And it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying than that.
What was the first powerful book you remember reading that convinced you that
this form could have depth? Was it Moby Dick? Was it like in high school?
I'm trying to remember. Well, Moby Dick was definitely a big one.
I mean, I used to read a lot of classics comics. I don't know if you've seen these.
It's a whole series of comic books that… It was viral. In the back of each comic book was
an order form. You could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in,
and more would show up. But it was like they would do the Count of Money,
Christo Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, all the sort of classic books
they had put into comic book form. That's amazing.
Yeah. Reading Moby Dick, if you're nine years old, is a tall order. There's some very complicated
sentences in there and a lot of digressions. But if you're just looking at the comic books,
like, holy shit, look at that whale. And ultimately, the power of the story
doesn't need the complicated words. It's all about the man and the whale.
Yeah. So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without
actually reading them, which is great when you're nine years old. So I read a lot of that stuff
for sure. The annotated Sherlock Holmes.
You mentioned David Doge, too, as inspiration for some of your work. I mean, you've obviously
done really a lot of research for the books you do. Roger Penrose. Do you remember a book that
made you want to become a writer or a moment that made you become a writer?
I think the answer I usually give is that when I was in fifth grade,
one of my friends came to school one day, he was wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes.
And I hated dress shoes because mine never fit. And so they were uncomfortable. I couldn't run.
You know, they were cold. It was Iowa. So I kind of said, I remember very clearly thinking,
okay, I don't like where this is going. Like, does this mean that next year,
all of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes? So I need to find a job where I don't
have to do that. So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job,
you know, being a writer. And then I just read a lot of just classic science fiction short stories
and started trying to write some of my own. And there were just classic young adult stories
like by Heinlein and the other classic names that you think of, but the Heinlein ones have
stuck with me in a way that the others didn't. What's the greatest science fiction book ever
written? Just removing your work from consideration?
Greatest? I'm loving torturing you right now. Greatest ever non-Stevenson. Do we include fantasy?
There's to have to be science fiction. Oh, interesting, fantasy.
Hmm. I do not expect that twist. Well, in a weird way, they're lumped together
in people's minds, right? They are, but there's also a boundary somehow. I'm not sure what that
is exactly. Nobody is. It's a mystery. So I mean, if we do include it, then it's easily the Lord of
the Rings. But I mean, greatness is an interesting quality to try to define. And for me, a lot of
the fun and the joy of such books is not in what you'd call greatness, but just storytelling.
So I was always a big fan of have space suit will travel, which is a Heinlein young adult book.
It's just a fun, good read. So fun is a big component. Greatness is overrated.
Well, I don't know, it's overrated, but it's just, you know, it might be under defined.
Let's put it that way. Have space suit will travel. And now I definitely have to read that one.
You mentioned Iowa. I was there a couple of times. I got to spend quite a bit of time with
Dan Gable with Tom Brands, who are wrestlers. Was is it now wrestling martial arts part of your
life, any part of your form, formation of who you are as a human being? I think so. It was a late,
it was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames, Dan Gable was a few years older than me.
And so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets.
And, and this was before his Olympic career. So everyone knew he was the star of that team.
And then he was the best, but people didn't yet know he was the greatest of all time.
Gee, you saw Gable. So that was part, it's, it's funny is it feels like a small world that you
would be in the same space as Dan Gable. Well, from a hundred feet away, a little dot on the mat
trouncing his opponents, him and him and Chris Taylor. So the other star was this 400 pound plus
guy named Chris Taylor, who also went to the Olympics. So yeah, people, you know, he was,
he was a no, he was a athletic hero. And wrestling is there's certain states like Oklahoma,
Pennsylvania, Iowa, where wrestling is the sport, because those are states of small towns. And so
if you're a small town, if you're like Dan Gable, and you have to be on a football team with
20 other guys who are not Dan Gable, then no matter how good you are, your team might, might
suck. But if you're in a solo thing, you can, you can go to the Olympics. So we did a lot of
wrestling in our gym classes in school, and I didn't like it. And I think partly it's just that it
was so, so competitive. And the people who were, who cared about it, really cared about it a lot.
You know, and so it was, it was pretty tough. I didn't think I had the right body type. But then
when I was, after college, I was in Iowa City for a few years when he was coaching the, the
wrestling team there. And he won like nine championships out of 10 years, you know, during
that, during that time. So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the
greatest team coach. So I've never met him, but we've, he's kind of been like in my sphere of
awareness since I was, you know, kind of my whole life. And people would always tell stories about
him. Like, I think he got arrested once for some kind of, I don't know, minor offense and aims.
And so he just basically stayed up all night. He was in this cage in the jail. He just stayed
up all night doing pull-ups. Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah. And so yeah. So has that been,
I mean, Iowa is such an interesting place in the world. And wrestling is just part of that story.
Is that somewhere in there? Does that resonate deeply with who you are?
It was a formative, yeah, thing for me growing up there for sure. It's just a,
you know, at least used to be a very orderly place, high social capital, very minimal class
differences. So like you'd have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy. But
that was it. Those were the rich people, right? And a college town is always a different environment.
Like, you know, Austin has some of this. So it was a pretty kind of utopian, other than the
weather and a few other things, environment to grow up in. The martial art I ended up doing is
sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop. So when you're,
if you're grappling, everything is through sense of touch. And your sense of touch is very old
and simple, right? Like earthworms don't even have eyes, but they can tell when they're being
touched, right? So it's very fast. And with a standoff art like boxing or some kinds of sword
fighting, you're not touching the other person most of the time. Your visual system is doing
something way more, it's doing slam and trying to figure out what the other person is up to.
And so that always felt more my speed. So in an Olympic style fencing,
it doesn't start really until you're crossing blades with the other person. And now you're
back to wrestling, you're feeling what they're doing. And it's all about that. But some of
the older sword arts don't engage the blade that way. You standoff at range and then you
make cutting attacks. And so those are all processed visually. And I think I'm more of
a slow thinker. So it works for me better. I mean, the same, it has the same, the artistry
and the beauty of boxing, I suppose, just like you said, is like there's no, there's no contact.
And it's all processed visually. And I'm sure there's a dance of its own. That depends on
the characteristic of a sword involved. There's a set of stances and basic reactions that you
try to learn that are thought to be defensible and safe or safer. And so it tends to be a series
of short engagements where you'll close in, you'll try out your idea. And it works
or it doesn't. And then you back off again. It's interesting to think about like human history
because martial arts, okay, that's a thing. But in terms of sword fighting, just the full
range of humans that existed who mastered sword fighting or sought the mastery of sword fighting
just to imagine the thousands of people who, the heights they have achieved because the stakes
are so incredibly high to be good. And it's the richest, most powerful people in those societies
spending whatever it takes to get the best gear and the best training because you're right, everything
depends on it. And it's still life and death. I mean, that's fascinating. That's fascinating. We
perhaps have lost that forever with greater weapons. I mean, the artistry of sword fighting
when it's life and death and you go into war, you have the Miyamoto Masashi's of the world, right?
I don't know. There's a poetry to that, that there's a mastery to that that I don't know if
we could achieve with any other kind of martial art. Well, one of the good, you were talking earlier
about the good effects of the internet social media that we sometimes overlook. And one of those
is that there were all these isolated people around the world who were interested in this,
who found each other and kind of created a network of people who help each other learn
these things. So that doesn't mean that anyone is up to the level of the you're talking about yet.
But it is happening. And so there's a large number of old treatises, old written
documents that have been dug up from libraries and people have been going over these and
translating them from old dialects of Italian and German to make sense of them and learning
how to do these techniques with different weapons. Actually, there's a guy here in
Austin named Daman Stith who does African, historical African martial arts. Also martial arts of
enslaved Africans who would learn machete fighting techniques in the Caribbean, South America.
Yeah. He's probably within a mile of us. He's an amazing guy. I'm going to look him up.
Can I ask you for advice? Can you give advice for young people, high school, college,
you know, undergrads, thinking about their career, thinking about life, how to live a life
thinking you'd be proud of? You think quite a bit about what it's required to be innovative
in this world. You think quite a bit about the future. So if somebody wanted to be a person
that makes a big impact in the future, what advice would you give them?
I think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do happily and I don't want to say
obsessively because that sounds like maybe it's pathological. But if you can find a thing that
you'll sit down, you'll start doing it and hours later you kind of snap out of it. Where did the
time go? Then that's a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're young
because if you don't have that, it's hard to figure out where you should put your energies.
And as you might have the best intentions, you might say, I want world peace or whatever.
But at the end of the day, what really matters is how do you spend your time
and are you spending it in a way that's productive? Because it doesn't matter how smart
you are or well-intentioned you are unless you've figured that out. And so finding the thing in
which you can sort of naturally lose yourself in. The thing is, at least for me, there's a lot
of things like that, but I first have to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing.
Like the fun starts a little bit after the first hump of really sucking and then you
could suck just regularly. So oftentimes people can give up too early, I think.
I mean, that's true with mathematics for me. For a lot of people,
is if you just give it a chance of struggle, if you give yourself time to struggle, you'll
find a way, you'll find the thing within that thing that you can lose track of time with.
Yeah, that's a key detail that there's an important thing to add to what I said,
which is that this might not happen the first time you do a thing. Maybe it will. But
you might have to climb that learning curve and if there's pressures in your life that are making
you feel bad about that, then it might prevent you from getting where you need to be. So there's
some complexity there that can make this kind of non-obvious. But that's why we need good teachers.
You know, another beneficial thing of the internet is YouTube and being able to learn
things, how to do things on YouTube. The dude who made the YouTube video doesn't care how many
times you hit pause and rewind. They're never going to roll their eyes and be impatient with you.
And sometimes spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book, like making that
the thing you just spent a huge amount of time on rereading, rereading, or rewatching,
rewatching, that somehow really solidifies your love for that thing and the depth of
understanding you start to gain. And it's okay to stay with that. I used to think there's all
these books out there. So like, I need to keep reading or keep reading. But then I realized,
I think it was somewhere in college where you could just spend your whole life with a single
textbook. There's nothing in that textbook to really, really stay.
Miesner, Thorn and Wheeler, Gravitation is one of those. Or another one is The Road to Reality
by Roger Penrose, which is just incredibly deep. And it starts with like two plus two equals four.
And at the end, you're at the boundaries of physics. It's an amazing book.
Let me ask you the big, ridiculous question. Since you've pondered some big, ridiculous
questions in your work, what's the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life?
The human life? Well, as far as I know, we're unique in the universe.
There's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated as what's
between our ears might be. You can't rule it out. So we appear to be pretty special.
And so it's got to have something to do with that. And one of the reasons I like David Deutch,
in particular, his book, The Beginning of Infinity, is that he talks about the power of
explanations and the fact that most civilizations are static, that they've got a set of dogmas
that they arrive at somehow, and they just pass those on from one generation to the next,
and nothing changes. But that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow whatever
you want to call it, the scientific method or enlightenment. There's different ways of thinking
about it, but basically, explanatory, it's about the power of explanations and being able to figure
out why things are the way they are. And that has created changes in our thinking and our way of life
over the last few centuries that are explosive compared to anything that came before.
And David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force of nature in its potential
transformative power. If we keep going, if we figure out how to colonize the universe,
like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, then it is
effectively a force of nature. This kind of drive to understand more and more and more,
deeper and deeper and deeper, and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more.
Yeah. It's the universe created us to understand itself. Maybe that's the whole purpose.
Yeah. It is an interesting peculiar side effect of the way we've been created,
is we seem to be conscious beings. We seem to have little egos. We seem to be born and die
pretty quickly. There's a bunch of drama. We're all, within ourselves, pretty unique. We fall in
love and start wars and there's hate and all the, the full interesting dynamic of it. So it's not
just about the individual people. Yeah. Somehow like the concert that we played together.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of interesting. There's a lot of peculiar aspects of that
that I wonder if they're fundamental or just quirks of evolution, whether it's, whether it's
death, whether it's love, whether all those things. I wonder if they're, from an engineering
perspective, when we're trying to create that intelligent toaster that listens for the slam door
and the smell of burning toast, whether that toaster should be afraid of death and should
fall in love just like we do. Neil, you're a fascinating human being. You've impacted
the lives of millions of people. It is a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time
with me today. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming down to beautiful, hot Texas.
And thank you for talking today. It was a pleasure. I'm glad I came and did it.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neil Stevenson. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
Neil Stevenson himself in his novel, Snow Crash. The world is full of things more powerful than us,
but if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places. Thanks for listening and hope to see you
next time.