Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity
Guests: Neal Stephenson
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents15 chapters
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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,
and 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 the experience
that we have of life on Earth?
- You know, 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 wanna 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?
- Sure. - This singular event
in human history, it seems like.
- Yeah. - 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 wanna go, but--
- Well, there's several things, and sorry to interrupt.
So one in cryptonomicon is more like
the Alan Turing side of things, right?
- 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 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're 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?
- Yeah.
- That all of us are capable--
- Great line, yeah.
- Of evil?
- I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago
when I was a teenager, 'cause my grandfather had it
in his house, 'cause 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.
And 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 basically survival.
You have like "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 to 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.
- Yeah. - 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'm not a scientist,
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,
is essentially, not Google, but the search engine,
the initial search engine, which gave birth to Google,
essentially, in contrast.
- Right, yeah, yeah, that was still in the era of AltaVista
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.
§02Transcript · 10:41–21:10
- 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, you're probably gonna,
the top hits are gonna be from somebody who's got an angle,
who's got a scheme, right?
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 can't,
it 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 to fund oftentimes,
which is funny you went with Pythagorean,
like you went at math, those greedy bastards.
But it's great.
- How can we monetize the Pythagorean theorem?
- Well, I mean, education, right?
It's to figure out like,
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, when coming face to face with,
for example, like 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 sort of 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. - Pocket anyway.
- It's a pocket of some sort.
But I see that pocket is way better
than what we had before in the '80s, right?
In 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 a 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 a 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,
I mean, 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
'cause when the sun energy runs out,
there's no way to get to the next solar system.
And so on, it goes on until we colonize
the entirety of the observable universe.
- Yeah, I think getting out of the solar system
is gonna 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, I mean, you can do it slowly
whenever you want, but the idea of getting there
in a 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 Yuri 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.
- So it's a quick flyby, you take a good picture, I guess.
- Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by.
So, 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 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 sort of some combination
of expanding human lifespan, but also just good old fashion,
stable society on a spaceship?
- Yeah, yeah, the generation ship, yeah, 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.
Like we can try to do some advanced survey,
but I mean, if you get there and all the planets
in that solar system are just garbage planets,
then it's kind of a big letdown
for this like thousand year voyage
that you've just been on, right?
So I mean, 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
'cause economically it just makes more sense
to build rotating cylindrical space habitats
and make them perfect.
- Well, isn't everything done for religious reasons?
Like why do we, exploration?
- Yeah.
- Like why do we go to the moon again
and do the other things?
What is JFK said, it's because,
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, like proving,
proving 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 out into the galaxy?
- I have nothing against it.
It's just, like I said, it's got a,
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 Jeff Bezos
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 scouting work,
explore the corners of the space of possibilities.
And so that's what, 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
§03Transcript · 21:15–32:16
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.
It 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 gonna lob warheads into it with rockets,
which is a terrible misallocation of resources.
It's a terrible idea.
But 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.
They, you know, 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.
'Cause if you've got atomic bombs,
you need a way to deliver them.
You can do it 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 the fact that, okay,
so then Hitler started using rockets.
That's an accident.
Okay, that's fascinating.
It'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.
And--
- I'd love to be in a meeting
where the first guy brought that up as an idea.
- Yeah.
(both laughing)
- It's probably a Russian.
Why don't we strap a person to the rocket?
- Yeah, yeah.
Well, it probably was 'cause 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 the 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 'cause 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 all that rockets do.
That'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.
- Yeah.
- 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, I mean, 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 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 Kantrowitz
and some others where you take a pulse 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-soled 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.
- What's 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.
- 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
out of recent articles and reports and so on about UFOs,
like the Tic Tac 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.
And 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,
§04Transcript · 32:18–43:29
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 gotta be like a really dumb drone
that just got lost.
It's definitely not the pinnacle of intelligence.
It's like some teenagers--
- Science fair experiment.
- Yeah, it just flew for a few centuries out
and just landed and then we humans
are all like really excited about this wild thing.
I mean, what do you think about those,
first of all, like 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.
Like, 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 gotta decelerate into our solar system by,
unless it got here really, really, really slowly.
So I guess that's a possibility and just kind of 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,
like 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.
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 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.
So right away, if you impose that limitation,
then you're kind of assuming something
that's starting to be biologically similar to us.
So if they're about as big as we are
and they kind of move around in space,
in a physical body 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.
I mean, consciousness itself may be alien.
I mean, 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 about aliens.
You're ready, this is for Twitter.
- I'm ready.
- What would you expect from Twitter?
Can humans have sex with aliens?
Neil Stevenson.
(laughing)
You can 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 intelligent species.
- Yeah, I mean, sex can mean a lot of things.
So I mean, if you're--
- Reproduction, 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?
'Cause that's just not gonna 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.
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 out 10, 20 years out from now,
are you impressed of 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 of 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.
If you've kind of even seen a little bit
of how the sausage is made,
and sort of the difficulty of doing any kind of space travel,
what they've achieved is just, is unbelievable.
- What about the, 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 multiple 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,
you know, there's a problem of perchlorates
on the surface of Mars that's gonna be big trouble,
and there's radiation, so, and this is known, but--
- What about business questions?
Do you think, 'cause 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 gonna go there
and see what happens.
- Maybe again, we need communism to kinda--
- Yeah. - 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.
Again, a lot of the, when white people came to this continent
and started colonizing it,
there was not a lot of coherent planning.
§05Transcript · 43:35–53:36
Like 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, like the journey
towards exploring the unknown.
- Yeah. - And just kinda keep going.
- Yeah.
And 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
'cause 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've 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?
'Cause 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?
It's just like- - Just go and do it.
Let's dig tunnels under cities, go.
- Step one, make a joke about it on Twitter,
step two, actually do it.
- Yeah, yeah, 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 gonna 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 brainpower went
during the last couple of generations
because people who might previously
have been building rockets
or other kinds of sort 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 not,
that it's impossible to do social media well.
- Oh, not at all.
I mean, I listened to your interview with Jaron
a couple of weeks ago, and I know Jaron,
and we've talked about this.
- He went hard on me.
He basically said like, it's impossible.
- It's very nice.
Well, the last time I kind of paid attention
to Jaron's thoughts on it,
he was thinking in terms of that basically
there should be micro payments 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.
So, and now I do remember that he,
on his interview with you was talking about,
what, data unions or, yeah.
- Those are a lot of interesting ideas,
but for me, the biggest disagreement
was in the level of cynicism.
He has a distrust and 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.
- Oh yeah.
- I know, I understand 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 a man's character, give him power.
- Yeah.
- 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 Jaron's statements
as being entirely cynical and hopeless.
I mean, 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 Jaron,
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, T.R. 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 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.
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 gonna take a while.
We're still adding more.
We haven't even started to reduce the amount.
So.
- So there's two possibilities in solving climate change.
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 like what's involved.
- 'Cause it stays up there.
So I think just last week China announced
that they're gonna 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,
§06Transcript · 53:38–1:04:23
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.
It 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?
Like that's idea number one.
- This is called solar geoengineering.
And 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 Pinatubo 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.
The good news, bad news is,
good 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 under, the TR, the character in the book,
he knows all this.
And all people who are familiar with climate science
are kind of know this.
It's a pretty well-established fact.
And so he just decides he's gonna 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 pointed 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,
'cause this is a 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 gonna have different effects
on different parts of the world.
So some areas may suffer negative,
more negatives than positives,
and they're not gonna be happy.
- So what do you think,
so in his case, in TR'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 gonna emerge from Western democracies.
- This kind of, sorry, government coordinate,
which option, one or--
- Solar geoengineering.
- Solar geoengineering.
From a government, from a,
like those are, I wanna sort of, the distinction,
one is the idea, the technological idea
you're talking about, but two is like,
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's so,
it would be comparatively so cheap and easy
to implement a solar geoengineering scheme
that someone is probably gonna 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, right?
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,
that's, I blame failure of leadership there,
of leaders being, 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.
- Aren't the right people, 'cause 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 like 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, yeah.
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,
high 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 gonna 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,
as 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 a 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 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 a 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, you know, 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.
So we got, and there's a reason why.
I mean, 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 icebox
because when she grew up, it was a box with ice in it.
§07Transcript · 1:04:26–1:15:34
So you see all that change, and it's largely
for the benefit of people.
And so if somebody comes along and says,
"Hey, we're gonna build nuclear reactors to make energy,"
or "Here's a new chemical called DDT
"that's gonna kill mosquitoes,"
then it's easy to just buy into that
and not be alert to the possible downsides.
And 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.
And we know that DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects,
also had terrible effects on bird populations.
So the kind of backlash that happened in the '70s
that is still kind of going on is to sort of assume
that everything is a double-edged sword
and always to look for,
we have to absolutely convince ourselves
that the downside isn't gonna come back and bite us
before we can adopt any new technology.
And I think the people are overly sensitized to that now.
- Yeah, it's funny.
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.
I mean, 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 and social media, at least in part,
enables that even in its current state.
And 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.
And step one of solving a problem
is bringing it to the surface.
The fact that there's a division,
the fact that they're more easily angered and upset,
and all of that, the witch hunts,
all those kinds of things, that's human nature.
And it just reveals that allowing us to not work on it,
it's therapy.
And so that's another example of a technology
that's just, we're not considering
the positive effects now and in the future enough of.
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 few years?
- Yeah, so I was at Magically for, what, five years?
- With the best title of all time.
- Oh, thanks.
Chief Futurist?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And so I sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle
doing what you might call content R&D.
So we're trying to make content for AR,
but because it's such a new medium,
there's more of an engineering R&D project almost
than a creative project.
So it was fascinating to see everything that goes
into making an AR system that runs.
So 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 is, yeah,
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 gotta 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 wanna add
has to sit on top of that.
It's gotta 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
'cause I don't work there anymore.
- But 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, 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. Groydbrodt'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 April 2020,
which is when the company decided to pivot
to commercial industrial applications instead.
So, 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, you know.
- That to me from a sort of a dreamer,
futurist perspective is heartbreaking
'cause 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.
- Yeah.
- Because for financial business reasons.
- Yeah, no, I can see the parallels for sure.
You know, we'll see.
It was a fun project.
You know, 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.
- So, 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 game, the AIs in the game could navigate around.
So, and that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit
or a sort of how-to, a sample app
than as a finished consumer facing.
- You mean the Baby Goat AI?
Yeah. - Yeah.
- That seems to me like a world
I can entertain myself for hours,
just every day coming home to see 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, 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.
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
§08Transcript · 1:15:36–1:26:12
if you want, but you don't have to.
- Right. - Yeah.
So, we worked on that and a bigger project
that was more of a storytelling in 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 Leap
never shipped anything, but they've been,
since 2019, you can go to their website
and buy one of these devices anytime you
wanna spend the money.
- Yeah, and the new one's coming out, I think in 2022,
so in a few months.
What do you think, looking out 50 years from now,
what wins, virtual reality, augmented reality,
or physical reality?
- What wins?
- Meaning like what's, what do people,
of, that have financial resources,
enjoy spending most of their time in?
- I've always been a fan of AR,
and it's kind of an easy answer,
because if you're wearing an AR device,
you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device.
You know, it just, if you block out the,
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, right?
So if your body is experiencing accelerations
in 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's 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, we 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 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,
'cause the physical world's pretty cool, right?
There's a lot to be said for moving around
in the real world.
- 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 Stephenson
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 audio books.
Let's say actually podcast
'cause there's a intimate human connection in a podcast.
It's one way, but you get 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.
- True.
- And 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 as far away from real as it gets.
There's not even a visual component.
It's just audio, but they're as real.
Like 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.
So I mean-
- Or even just reading books.
- Exactly, reading books.
Even more so with reading books
'cause 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 where 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 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 lasting friendship.
- Yeah, yeah, real deal.
Yeah, yeah.
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 imagining things and making things
in a particular way.
- 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?
Is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?
- Will anyone ever see it?
- Right.
There's a source of your enjoyment,
because I would argue that perhaps,
turtles all the way down,
when you get to the bottom turtle,
it has to do with sharing with other humans.
And if you can then put those humans inside the VR world,
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.
It could just be an abstract, theoretical someone.
And it's like another app I spend a lot of time in
is Mathematica, okay?
- 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.
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
§09Transcript · 1:26:14–1:36:19
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 created 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.
- Yes.
- And--
- An actual globe?
- Well, any spherical--
- Any spherical, okay.
- 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, there's a, 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 send me a link to make fun of me.
So, as some--
- One of those people, Roger Penrose, or?
- I think Roger's a little above my level.
- Well, he's into hexagons as well, and tiling.
- Yeah, yeah, so I did a lot of that,
and I thought it was pretty cool,
but there's some surprisingly intractable problems
that keep coming up.
Like, you've always gotta have some pentagons.
Like, if you start with an 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, interesting, so it's all hexagons,
and then there's a pentagon at the intersections.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Cool, how'd you figure that out?
Is that a known fact?
- Well, it's just if you look at it,
just by inspection. - It's an obvious thing.
Got it.
- Yeah, so, and you can't make that go away.
So, any system that you come up with to do this
has gotta have this exceptions built into it for those 12.
You could have quintillions of hexagons,
but you've still gotta 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, yeah.
And I think Uber did it, 'cause 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 was a couple years ago,
to some code base that I think came out of Uber
where they had done this.
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,
or 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 a sufficient amount of complexity.
- Yeah, yeah.
So, but no, 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 brainiacs 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,
'cause 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
sort of granular bottom-up ideas,
rather than big picture, top-down.
- Oh, got it, so like very specific algorithms,
like how are they going to,
what problem are they going to solve in society,
such that it has a lot of big ripple effects?
I mean, we could talk about
particular successful AI systems
and success defined in 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
that'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.
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 it stuff?
- Where am I?
And what am I looking at?
I don't need to deeply understand my surroundings
at a level of like,
at a level beyond of what will hurt if I run into it.
- Yeah, yeah.
- 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 of that's happening,
even if they're dumb.
- Yeah, yeah.
No, 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 BattleBots competitions.
And that's not, like, 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 salad 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 other robots might be like the bad guy
in, 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 can be intelligent, and they can be biological,
or they can be almost close to inanimate objects.
- Yeah.
- And that, to me, is kind of fascinating.
§10Transcript · 1:36:21–1:46:36
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 a...
But you're right, humans, based on feedback,
will change their appearance, their dress.
- 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 wanna...
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.
Like, you won't take my gun, whatever the saying is.
- Yeah.
- 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 with social media algorithms
is the lack of transparency.
It's not the existence of the algorithms.
It's, well, there's many things.
One is the data.
Data should be controlled by people themselves.
So, but also the lack of transparency
in how the algorithms work.
- And change your perception of what's real.
Yeah, in hidden ways, yeah.
- In hidden ways.
Like, 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.
And second, you should, I mean, become a student
and a scholar, and there should be research done.
There should be open conversation
about how your perception has changed.
And then you are, become your own guide
in this world of altered 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 perceptions sort of layer stuff.
Is there, let's go to Plato.
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 is 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.
(clears throat)
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 in the, 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,
with these kinds of questions.
- How did you come to grips with it?
Like why does this table feel solid?
- Well, I mean, we're an evolved system that there's,
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.
The, 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 that, 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.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But see, that doesn't mean any of it is real.
You just establish a consensus.
It could be very, very distant from something that,
something that's real in the engineering sense of real,
like that you could build it using physics.
- But I think that a valuable application
for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except that.
It just, so--
- Consensus.
- It just sits there.
- Yeah.
- 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, I mean--
- Yeah.
- That's, by love, I mean depth of human connection.
- Yeah.
- That's, or not--
- You arrive at similar reactions
without having to explicitly communicate it.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- But we could start with a robot
that listens explicitly for the slam doors.
- Yeah, but no, I've--
- 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
this person is reacting, this person heard what I heard.
They're reacting the way I reacted.
- Yeah.
- 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.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause 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,
that it's establishing that you're on the same wavelength.
- Yeah.
- At some level.
- Yeah.
- There's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that.
(Dave laughs)
I'm just saying.
- Does this smell burn to you?
(Dave laughs)
- Exactly.
- I think it's burn.
- If a toaster could just say that to you.
- Yeah, 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,
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,
§11Transcript · 1:46:39–1:57:04
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 at that point, I was kind of reacting
to what I was seeing among people
like the Bay Area cypherpunks in Berkeley.
There was a branch here in Austin as well.
And a lot of their thinking was,
so based on the idea that you would have to have
a physical region of the earth
that was free of government interference.
You couldn't achieve that freedom
by purely mathematical means on the network.
You actually had to have a room somewhere
with servers in it
that a government couldn't come 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 Sealand, which is a platform in the North Sea.
And so there was a lot of effort
that went into finding these physical locations
that were deemed kind of safe.
And that all goes away with blockchain.
It's no longer necessary.
And so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways
because 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,
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's the, like the new wrinkle
is the need to do a lot of computation
and to keep your GPUs from melting down.
So people building things in Iceland
or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean
or whatever.
So-
- But there's still governments evolved
and there's still from a novelist perspective,
interesting dynamics.
What is big governments like China
and more sort of renegade governments
from all over the world,
trying to contend with this idea
of what to do in terms of control and power
over these kinds of centers that do the mining
of the cryptocurrency?
- Yeah, so we're in a stage now
that kind of goes beyond the initial,
like there's the stuff I was describing
in "Cryptonomicon" had a little bit of air
about it of the underpants gnomes
in that we're going to build this system
and then we'll make money somehow.
But the intermediate step was left out.
And that is,
I think we're now sort of into that phase
of the thing where Bitcoin,
blockchain exists, people know how it works.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist,
people are using them.
And it's sort of like, okay, what now?
Where does this all lead?
So.
- Do you have a sense of where it all leads?
Like, is it possible that the set of technology
kind of continues to have
transformational effects on not just sort of finance,
but who gets to have power in this world?
So the decentralization of power.
- Yeah, 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 gonna sort of control it.
I guess an easy answer is that
maybe it won't be a big change in the end.
There's a utopian strain sometimes
in the way people think about this
that I'm not so sure about.
- There is a technological aspect to Bitcoin
and other cryptocurrencies that make it a little easier
to pull along the utopian thread.
- Yeah.
- Because it's harder for governments to control Bitcoin.
- Yeah.
- I mean, they have much fewer options.
They can ban, they can make it illegal.
It's more difficult.
- Yeah.
- And 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 more power
to people that haven't had power before in a good way,
like distributing power
and enabling sort of more,
greater resistance to sort of dictatorships
and authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing.
And also enabling all kinds of technologies
built on top of it.
Ultimately, when you digitize money,
money is a kind of speech,
or it's a kind of like 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 can have the,
then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality
with the toaster.
And then.
- 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,
it's been digitized to a large extent by,
you know, the stripes
and the credit card companies of the world.
- And I also love the idea of like connecting,
to connect to two smart contracts, connecting data.
Sort of making it more formal, it's like Mathematica,
more structured, the integration of data,
of weather data, of all kinds of data
about the stuff in the world,
so they can make contracts between people
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's an interesting kind of resistance
against the powerful in the space of narrative.
- Yeah, David Brin has been saying for a while
that the only way to settle arguments
with, you know, across the political divide
is to make bets.
So people can say, you know, the election was stolen,
or, you know, whatever controversial position
they're taking, and they'll keep saying it
until you wager real money on it.
So maybe there's something there,
if you could kind of turn that into a,
put a user interface on that, say, you know.
- Yeah, have a stake in your divisiveness,
in your arguments.
- Right, right, yeah.
- Will Dogecoin take over the world?
Twitter question.
- You know, I don't follow 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 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 resist 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 memes, whether humor,
whether narrative will go a long way in the future,
like much farther than some kind of boring,
old 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 food, and the basic needs covered,
are we going to then operate in the space of fun?
That's what I think about Dogecoin,
because it seems like fun spreads faster than anything else,
fun of different kinds, and that can be bad fun,
and that could be good fun.
§12Transcript · 1:57:06–2:07:39
And so it's a battle of good fun versus bad fun.
- It goes viral very, very quickly,
when you post something that people find fun to.
- Yeah, and that's what Dogecoin represents.
So there's like, so Bitcoin represents like financial,
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 an open question to me
of what is the internet?
Because fun seems to prevail on the internet.
And is that a fundamental property
of the internet moving forward
when you look 100 years out?
Or is this a temporary thing that was true
at the birth of the internet,
and it's just true for a couple of decades
until it fades away 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 I think that's pretty much unstoppable.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause even people who are very serious
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 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.
It'd 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.
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've 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've 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's 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.
- You, let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question,
'cause Emacs has been around forever.
Do you think in 100 years, we will still have Emacs in Vim?
Or like, pick a, let's say 50, 100 years, 20 years.
- 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,
to get out of that problem,
you might need to enter an editor and alter a file.
So I think on that level,
there'll 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,
there's a certain amount of,
what's the story of the,
there's 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
'cause he can't drive the spikes fast enough.
So there's a sense in which,
Microsoft like,
who knows how much they've invested in code,
Visual Studio to, 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, if you just have enough Linux hackers
writing Emacs Lisp macros.
But at some point it's gonna be hard
to maintain that level of,
to keep up feature for feature.
- The interesting thing about Emacs
just is it lasted a long time.
- Yeah.
- 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 the, what is it?
How do they get by?
It's like the cockroaches of software
or the bacteria 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.
- Yeah.
- And they outlast everybody else.
And I wonder if that might be the story
for a lot of technologies,
especially in the software space.
- Yeah, shell scripts, all that stuff.
You can't run the modern world
without a bunch of shell scripts,
booting up machines and running things.
So that is gonna be a hard thing to replace.
- And then tech for typesetting that you use, you said.
- For 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 sort of regular expressions.
So I was to do italics in,
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 its search and replace UI.
- You can do regular expressions.
- Is just reg Fs.
- 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, 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
in a sans serif font?
You know, 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 sort of 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,
§13Transcript · 2:07:46–2:18:29
if you can tell the story of how you escaped
from the hyenas or how Uncle Bob 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.
- 'Cause the language is required to do the storytelling.
Or maybe they evolve together.
- Maybe they co-evolve, yeah.
So I think that you've gotta 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 like,
which you do a technological scientific rigor
like to the accuracy and as much as possible.
How does that add to Bob telling the story,
or telling the story about Bob around 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 gonna 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
about some that involves some technology like a rocket
or orbital maneuvers or whatever,
then delving into those details
eventually is gonna turn up some weird, unexpected,
you know, thing that gives me material to work with.
But also subliminally readers who see that
are gonna be drawn in more
because they're going to find that,
oh, I didn't see that coming, you know.
You know, it's got some of the complexity
and surprise value of the real world.
- Yeah, it does something.
Alex Garland, director who wrote, directed Ex 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.
- Right.
- And once it's broken, it's really hard to get it back.
You know, a lot of times that's the end.
Somebody will just close the book and not pick it up.
- I gotta ask you, you've answered this question,
but I gotta ask you the most impossible question
for an author to answer.
But which Neil Stevenson book should one read first?
- So when people ask me that,
I usually ask them what they like to read, right?
'Cause I mean, there's the best known one
is probably Snow Crash, but that's a cyberpunk novel
that's at the same time making fun of cyberpunk.
So it's kind of got some layers to it
that might not seem so funny
if you don't have that, if you don't get the joke, right?
So there's, I've written, as you point out,
I've written historical novels.
Some people like those, some people prefer those.
So if that's what you like,
then Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle
is where you would start.
If you like sort of techno thrillers
that are set in a modern day setting,
but aren't science fiction-y per se,
then Reamde is one of those.
And Termination Shock is definitely one of those.
So it just depends on what people like.
- When people a long time ago recommend I read Snow Crash,
they said, "It's Neil Stevenson lite."
It's the, if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the depth,
like the rigor of a book,
like that's a good introduction to the man.
So essentially you broke it down by topics,
but if you wanted to read all of them,
what's a good introduction to the man?
Because obviously these worlds are very different.
The philosophies are very different.
What's a good introduction to the human?
People ask the same thing of Dostoevsky.
It's a hard one to answer.
- Maybe Seveneves, 'cause it's got big themes.
It's about heavy things happening to the human race,
but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters
that people can relate to, and 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.
- So this is a random selection
that doesn't represent the top ones?
- Well, I mentioned "Gulag Archipelago."
That's kind of a hefty and dark, but-
- And then it has a personal connection as well?
- Yeah, just, yeah.
- It's like where you found the book too.
- Right.
- 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 gonna 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 that,
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 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.
When I was, I don't know if you've seen these,
it's a whole series of comic books that,
it was viral, you could,
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 this sort of classic books
were, 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,
it's 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, 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 Deutsch, too,
as an inspiration for some of your work.
I mean, you've obviously done, like,
really a lot of research for the books you do.
Roger Penrose.
Do you remember a book that made you wanna become a writer
or a moment that made you become a writer?
- I think, like, the answer I usually give
is that when I was in, like, fifth grade,
§14Transcript · 2:18:31–2:29:21
one of my friends came to school one day.
He was wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes.
And I hated dress shoes 'cause mine never fit.
And so they were uncomfortable.
I couldn't run.
They were cold.
It was Iowa.
So I kinda 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 gonna 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 they 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?
Or does it have to be science fiction?
- Oh, interesting, fantasy.
I did not expect that twist.
- Well, for 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 a 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 Sue 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 if it's overrated,
but it's just, it might be underdefined,
let's put it that way.
So.
- "Have Space Sue Will Travel,"
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.
Is it now wrestling, martial arts, part of your life,
any part of your formation of who you are as a human being?
- I think so.
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 this was before his Olympic career.
So everyone knew he was the star of that team,
and that he was the best,
but people didn't yet know
that he was the greatest of all time.
- Gee, you saw Gable, so that was part,
it's funny, it feels like a small world,
that you would be in the same space as Dan Gable.
- Well, from 100 feet away, a little dot on the mat,
trouncing his opponents, 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, he was an 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 suck.
But in a solo thing, 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 competitive,
and the people who cared about it,
really cared about it a lot.
And so 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 wrestling team there.
And he won like nine championships out of 10 years
during that time.
So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time
and the greatest team coach.
So I've never met him, but we've,
he's kind of been in my sphere of awareness
since I was, kind of my whole life.
And people would always tell stories about him.
I think he got arrested once for some kind of,
I don't know, minor offense in Ames.
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,
or 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 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 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 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 stand off 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, it has the same,
the artistry and the beauty of boxing,
I suppose, just like you said.
It's like there's no contact
and it's all processed visually.
And I'm sure there's a dance of its own.
- Yeah.
- That depends on the characteristic of a sword involved.
- Yeah, there is 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.
Then you back off again.
- It's interesting to think about like human history,
'cause 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 to master sword fighting,
just to imagine the thousands of people
who the heights they have achieved,
'cause 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.
'Cause 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 Musashi'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
§15Transcript · 2:29:26–2:39:45
of people who help each other learn these things.
So that doesn't mean that anyone is up to the level
of that 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.
He's probably within a mile of us.
He's an amazing guy. - That's awesome.
I'm gonna look him up.
Can I ask you for advice?
Can you give advice for young people, high school,
college, undergrads, thinking about their career,
thinking about life, how to live a life
they can be proud of.
You think quite a bit about what is 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 on 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 wanna 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 so 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 it's finding that thing in which you can sort of,
you 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.
- Yeah.
- So oftentimes people can give up too early, I think.
I mean, that's true with mathematics for me.
It's for a lot of people,
is if you just give it a chance to 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,
that'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.
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 gonna 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 like the depth of understanding you start to gain.
And it's okay to stay with that.
I used to think like 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 enough in that textbook to really, really stay.
- Miesner, Thorne, 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, 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?
- Wow. - 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 gotta have something to do with that.
And one of the reasons I like David Deutsch,
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 wanna 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,
we could, 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.
- Yeah, it's the old,
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.
And we fall in love and start wars and there's hate
and all the full interesting dynamic of it.
So it's not just about the individual people.
- Yeah.
- Somehow like the concert that we played together.
- Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, so.
- That's kind of interesting.
There's a lot of peculiar aspects of that,
that I wonder if they're fundamental
just quirks of evolution,
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.
- Well, thank you. - 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.
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