Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
neil stephenson 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
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and now here's my conversation with neil
stevenson
you write both historical fiction like
world war ii in
kryptonomicon and science fiction
looking both into the past and the
future so let me ask
does history repeat itself in which way
does it repeat itself in which way does
it not
i'm afraid it repeats itself a lot um so
i 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 it's kind of the uh 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 hundred 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
that exceed anything that was seen
before in in human history
so 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 in so doing does that not
potentially
fundamentally alter the sort of
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 um
you know
people who will find ways to be
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 the rise of hitler
world war ii
[Music]
and kind of
explain
hitler at least partially by
just the the misery that people were
living in at that time
the economic collapse yeah
hyperinflation
and unemployment and um the
the decline in standard of living and
that sounds like a plausible
uh explanation but there are economic
troubles now for sure we had the bank
collapse in 2008
and there's stagnation
in some people's standards of living but
it's hard to explain what we've seen in
this country in the last few years just
strictly on the basis of people are poor
and angry and sad
i think they want to be angry
so
without being political in a divisive
kind of way
can we talk about the lessons you can
draw from world war ii
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 in conjunction with that war
um
which may not be where you want to go
but uh well there's several things
inside to interrupt so one in crypto
nomicon is more like the alan turing
side of things right right and then
and then there's the
outside of technology
first of all there's the tools of war
which is the kind of technology but then
there's just like the human nature the
nature of good and evil yeah well so one
of the things that emerges from
uh from the war and from the um the
extermination camps is that we we're
never allowed to have illusions anymore
about human nature
so you you have to to learn that lesson
to be
an educated person and you have to know
that
that even in a supposedly you know
enlightened civilized society people can
become monsters
quite easily
so that is for sure the big takeaway so
do you agree with solzhenitsyn about the
what is it uh
the line between good and evil runs
through the heart of every man yeah that
all of us are capable great line yeah
i read
a good chunk of the gulag archipelago
when i was a teenager um because my my
grandfather had it in his house because
he was one of these
americans who was obsessed with the
soviet union and the soviet threat
and and wanted
people to to be aware of some of what
what had happened um and so
so he had those books lying around and
and uh you know i would i would read
them and it's a similar
kind of parallel story to the
to what happened in in in germany during
the war you know this creation of this
system of camps and and oppression and
and uh lots of um
troubling behavior
to me it's a story of um
how fear and desperation
combined with a charismatic leader can
lead
to uh to evil but it's also a story of
of bravery of of love of brother
brotherhood and sisterhood and
basically survival you have like a man
search for meaning which is the stories
of uh the story of a man
in a concentration camp
basically finding beauty in life even
under
uh most extreme conditions so to me
world war ii is not necessarily
um
a bleak view of human nature
it's it's a little
moment of evil that revealed a much
bigger
good mm-hmm in humanity
so i'm not i'm not so sure that it leads
me to a pessimistic view of the world
the fact that uh somebody like hitler
could happen the fact that uh
a lot of people could follow hitler and
get excited and maybe even love the hate
of the other yeah 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 what
you think but i think we
have a greater desire for good
than evil and that it seems like that's
where technology is very useful as a
guide
has a helping hand okay 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
uh
knowledge
uh in the form of
very basic knowledge which is like
wikipedia
and
search the original dream of google yeah
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 if this
axiom this assumption that people want
to do good is is true yeah 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
uh futuristic technologies is
uh i personally
i mentioned you offline sort of love
artificial intelligence and so
ai that's an assistant that's a guide
like a mentor to you yeah 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 what
this is how you should grow but almost
uh the the opposite where you use it as
um
an assistant a a servant in your journey
towards knowledge
yeah that that sounds like an easy thing
but it's actually from an absolutely
very difficult i mean
this is the theme of a book i wrote
called the diamond age which you know
talks about a book that essentially does
that
and i've been sort of watching people
try to come at the the problem of
building that thing uh from different
directions for
ever since the book came out basically
um and so
uh the uh
and so i i kind of have a although i
haven't worked on it myself i do get a
sense of the the level of difficulty
in in realizing that
that that goal
um so that book is in the 90s so as
google
is coming to be
essentially
uh not google but the search engine the
initial search engines event which gave
birth to google essentially in in
contrast
right yeah yeah that was still in the
era of alta vista and ask jeeves and
multiple different uh 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 um
guidance through the space of
information yeah
well what happens is that these things
come along and then people find ways to
game them
and so i saw an interesting thread the
other day pointing out that
you know
20 years ago if you had googled
pythagorean theorem
uh
chances are you would have been taken
directly to the page explaining the
pythagorean theorem if you do it now
you're probably going to
the top hits are going to be from
somebody who's who's got an angle who's
got a scheme right they're like trying
to sell you math tutoring
or you know they're
they're working some kind of marketing
plan on you
so
the 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
yeah fund
oftentimes which is funny you went with
i think
like you went at math
those greedy bastards
but it's great it's great how can we
monetize the pythagorean theorem yeah
well
i mean education right yes 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 yeah
but then they start
you know 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 the
primary goal is still
that love of education but they also
want to to make that love of education
of their full-time job but
i see that sort of that dance of
humanity with the algorithms as uh it
finds this kind of local pocket of
optimality that's or sub-optimality
whatever yeah it gets stuck in it anyway
it's a pocket of some sort and but i see
that pocket is way better than what we
had before
in the 80s right 90s before the internet
but like and now we're now this is this
is also human nature we start uh writing
very eloquent articles about how
this pocket is clearly pocket it's not
very good and we can imagine much better
lands far beyond and but the reality is
it's better than before yeah and now
we're waiting for
we have to escape yeah 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 yeah this is how we get
out and it's too easy to be sort of i
think uh partially because you can get a
lot of clicks in your articles being
cynical about being in this pocket and
we were forever stuck in this pocket and
then like coming up with this grandiose
theory that humanity has finally
like is collapsing
stuck forever like a prison in this
pocket but reality they're just it's
like it's just clickbait articles and
and books until we
one curious aunt 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 be
we'll colonize the solar system and then
uh we'll be stuck in the solar system
and then people will say well we're
screwed when because when the sun energy
runs out there's no way to get to the
the next solar system and then and so on
it goes on until we colonize the
entirety of the observable universe yeah
i think i think getting out of the solar
system is going to be a hard one but so
can you you mention 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
calcul i mean
you can do it slowly
uh whenever you want um
but uh the idea of getting there in you
know one lifetime or multiple
a few lifetimes is requires huge amounts
of energy to
to accelerate um and then you've 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 um
that means carrying a lot of energy and
there's there's
ideas like yuri milner
i think is still funding the the idea to
use laser propulsion to send something
uh to another star system a small object
um
but it'll have no way to slow down
as far as i know they never talk about
that part yeah like how do i slow down
yeah
um 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 is is that's needed
is just staggering and there's there's
other issues like just how do you
maintain
uh
an ecosystem for that long in isolation
uh 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 it sort of
some combination of expanding human
lifespan but also just
good old-fashioned
stable society on a spaceship yeah yeah
the generation ship yeah yeah yeah no i
think that's the only way it would it
would have to keep going for a long time
um
and they might get to where they're
going and find
a shitty um solar system like we can try
to
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 for this like thousand-year voyage
that you've just uh you've just been on
right so i mean we have a pretty narrow
range of
of parameters that we need to stay
between in order to survive um in terms
of the the gravitational uh field that
we can deal with um
so that such a sets of bound on the size
of the the planet
and um what we need in the way of
temperature and atmosphere and so on
so
when you look at all those complications
then basically
building uh
uh 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 for
for making that journey
uh one of the things i like about the
expanse is the fact that the people who
are trying to build the starship to go
to the other solar system are doing it
for religious reasons
i think that's the only reason that you
would do it
because economically it just makes more
sense to build
rotating cylindrical space habitats and
make them perfect
well is isn't everything done for
religious reasons like why do we
exploration yeah like what why why do we
go to the moon again
and do the other things uh what does jfk
said is because not because they're easy
but because they're hard it's not 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
um not exactly a religion but it's what
you're talking about well it's a
struggle for meaning yeah i mean uh and
that meaning isn't found in some kind of
it's it's hard to find meaning in
mathematics yeah it's 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 they uh people that find beauty uh
meaning in mathematics they usually find
meaning between the lines nevertheless
not in the actual uh
for like the proving
proving some kind of thing fair enough
yeah so
from a cost perspective do you actually
see a possible future where we're b
building these kind of generation ships
and just
why not launch them one a year
out
like uh like wandering ants i'll come to
the
into the galaxy
i have nothing against it uh it's just
like i said it's got a
the motivation to do it has to come from
um some kind of spiritual or
or kind of non-tangible
uh calculus 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 can feel convinced basis 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 uh
alternate business models
yeah i mean to go back to the first
thing you said uh jeff bezos is not a
guy who required a lot of convincing
um he'd been thinking about it since he
was five years old and it was an
inevitability but
um the
the idea um
that that kind of got hatched in 1999
was to um
just do some uh advanced scouting work
you know
explore the corners of the the space of
possibilities
and so that's what uh
that was blue operations llc which was
the precursor to blue origin
and um
so it was a small staff of people that
that did that for a few years and i
think it was about 2003 2004 that
uh it swung decisively towards the
direction it's it's been following ever
since which is you know using
basically existing aerospace
technologies and models to make chemical
fueled rockets
for for space tourism
uh i believe and i continue to believe
that the the fact that we use chemical
rockets is just an accident of history
that comes out of world war ii
so until world war ii rockets are being
built on a small scale by people like
robert goddard
but then
hitler
desperately wants to bomb london
but he can't quite reach it and the
liftwaffe has been kind of neutralized
so
he he decides he's going to lob warheads
into it with 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 um
but that's that's the situation that
existed so they built these rockets they
you know that's the v2
um and then it's just a complete
coincidence that that war ends with um
atomic bombs being developed in a
completely separate
super weapon program
and so suddenly the the existence of the
bombs
creates a demand for rockets that didn't
exist before
because if you've got
atomic bombs you need a way to deliver
them you can do with bombers but
it's a lot better to just hurl them
to the other side of the world on the
top of a rocket
so um so suddenly
rockets which had gotten a boost
because of hitler's v2 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 right that's an accident in
history yeah and the fact
that okay so then hitler started using
rockets that's an accident okay
that's fascinating it's a fascinating uh
set of coincidences yeah and which is
true of a lot of technologies by the way
but by the time these rockets are kind
of working um 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 the socket on the end of a of a
missile that was made to hold a hydrogen
bomb
so um
so we start doing that instead
as a proxy
for for having a war
um
and um i'd love to be in the meeting
where the first guy brought that up as
an idea
it's probably a russian why don't we
strap a person to the rocket yeah
yeah well it probably was because they
did it first right uh the russians did
it and they had perhaps less respect for
sort of safety protocols could be
they're a little bit more uh willing to
sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to
risk the life of an astronaut
yeah yeah this is basically the story of
how
through all of this competition and
because of these historical accidents
you know trillions of r d dollars and
rubles were put into
development of chemical rocket
technology which is you know now
advanced to an incredibly high degree
but there's other ways to make things go
really fast
which is like 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
uh thinking about alternate schemes for
as long as they've been thinking about
rockets
um and so one of the first things that
you that i learned
kind of trying to explore new
possibilities
uh
was that
i could
put all of my brain power to work and
and be creative as i could and 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 had thought the same
idea up 50 years ago
and figured out all the math yeah you
know and so
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
um so there's a number of uh
of ideas that we looked at
you know some are crazier some are less
crazy but um the direction that that
company eventually took was was chemical
rockets is there something you can
comment on possible ideas like so first
of all like
i mean uh
uh like you could use nuclear so nuclear
pulse propulsion
yeah so that's i mean you've probably
heard of project orion which um
was the
freeman dyson and
some of his collaborators
had a scheme to um
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
uh like
uh lumps of c4
so that was an idea but for 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
uh that freeman worked on
with arthur kantrowitz and some others
where you take a pulse blazer
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 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 uh 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 care and others worked on another
laser system the late dr jordan care
that just would heat up a heat exchanger
by
converging many converging solid-state
lasers from the ground
and kevin parkin
um works on a similar scheme that just
uses uh microwaves
to do that
we looked at
tall towers
i spent a while looking kind of semi
seriously a giant bull whips
um with a bull lip
just a whip just uh
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
to accelerate objects through the speed
of sound
just through an architectural trick
just just you know just the physics of a
moving bend of material in a medium
can do this so
[Music]
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
or other
flexible materials
that just kind of stand up under their
own
[Music]
physics
i mean it's kind of awesome
to imagine so 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
why not
why wouldn't that so part of
my motivation in studying that was to
ask that that question it was it was
more uh almost a
symbolic way of saying
look
there's
all kinds of physics we haven't
explored yet um that it's no more crazy
than the idea of chemical rockets
um
it's just that uh more money's gone into
chemical rockets right
but can i ask you uh
a question on propulsion that's a little
bit more
out there so
i don't know if you've
seen
quite a
a lot of recent articles and reports and
so on about
uh 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 um
to me
whatever the heck it is
it's inspiring
for the possibilities of ideas for
propulsion
if it's like um
secret projects from foreign nations
or it's physical phenomena that we don't
yet understand like ball lightning all
those kinds of things or if it is aliens
or
objects from an alien civilization i
most likely believe it's if it's an
object from an alien civilization it's
got to be like
a really dumb drone they just like got
lost it's definitely not
like the pinnacle
of intelligence it's like some like
teenagers like uh science fair
experiment yeah he just flew for for a
few centuries out and just landed and
then we humans are all like really
excited about this
yes this wild thing i mean what what do
you think about those um
first of all like the millions of
reports of ufos right there's some
psychology there that's deeply cultural
uh 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
you know those kinds of distances you'd
make a bigger splash
first of all i would expect that the
the arrival of these things would be
something we'd notice it's gotta you
know decelerate into into our solar
system
by
unless it got here really really really
slowly so i guess that's
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 gone bad
you know it makes more sense
in in that it would explain why these if
these things are alien technologies
they're just kind of
hanging around our aircraft carriers for
no particular reason like doing doing
not trying to communicate yeah you know
is it can you imagine a scenario
where
aliens have visited earth or are
visiting earth and we wouldn't notice it
at all oh sure i mean if they've got
technology to
to get here they've probably got
technology to conceal the fact oh
they're trying to conceal themselves i
meant more like they're not trying to
conceal themselves but we're just our
cognitive capabilities are
like too limited and we are not thinking
big enough we're looking for a little
green men yeah we're looking for things
that operate at a time scale that's
human-like
uh you know it's
yeah no i i love thinking about ideas
like that that's great science fiction
novel father you know that the aliens
are are so different uh that we simply
don't don't see them
i mean is there um you know 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 you've written about the importance
of language in intelligent civilizations
um
how difficult is the problem to bridge
the gap between aliens and humans
yeah 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 you know i mean there's a school
of thought that says
basically
uh
advanced life has to be carbon based
for just reasons of chemistry so right
away if you impose that limitation then
you're you're kind of assuming a uh
something that's starting to be
biologically similar to us
so if they're about as big as we are and
uh you know they um they they kind of
move around in in space you know a
physical body the way we do then then
there's probably a way to to solve that
communication problem
uh if they're you know like 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 this
you know
consciousness itself may be maybe
i mean it could be
like you said beings of pure energy
um i i think 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 um i have to ask a twitter
question okay about aliens yeah you're
ready this is for twitter i'm ready what
would you expect from twitter can humans
have sex with aliens
and yes
you can pass
i asked the language question can the
community communicate yeah
can they fall in love before before sex
that's how it works
so which question are am i answering the
sex or the the love
um i mean
it depends what is more fundamental to
relations across
yeah across intelligent species yeah i
mean um
you know sex can mean a lot of things um
so i mean
uh if your production right you know the
the
when in star trek in classic star trek
you had to
to really
suspend your disbelief to to think that
um
spock was half vulcan and half human
right because that's just
not gonna not gonna work dna wise um
so um
so if by sex you mean reproductive sex
then um
uh i would say no unless
you unless you go to a panspermia
kind of theory which is that
uh you know humans were seeded onto the
planet as part of a galactic uh you know
uh
program of some of some sort
and then we're just returning home yeah
and hanging out with our
old relatives assistant cousins yeah
yeah
but that that doesn't seem
you know it doesn't seem
seem plausible we know that we know that
humans had sex with neanderthals with
denisovans denisovans
so you could think of them as aliens
that that came from our
planet
um
so um so that's a kind of data point i
guess
but
you know if you broaden your definition
of sex to mean any kind of
uh gratifying physical
interaction then sure
right
dancing and that's 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 um 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 i was just watching his video
this morning before i came here yeah
are you impressed to where things stand
today yeah i mean
i mean spacex
in particular is has
done things that are just unbelievable
um
and um
yeah i don't think anyone was
anticipating
um 20 years ago let's say when this all
started just the uh the speed with which
they'd be able to um rack up these
incredible
achievements
if you've kind of uh
even seen a little bit of how the
sausage is made and and so the the the
difficulty of of doing any kind of space
travel
um
what they've achieved is uh
is just uh
is is unbelievable what about the maybe
a question about elon musk
um even more than jeff bezos
he has a very kind of
ambitious vision
of um this
project that we're on as a species yeah
of becoming a multiplanatarian species
and becoming that quickly
yeah 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 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
of gold that's uh it's easily
stated uh
it's um it's catchy it's it's it's the
kind of thing that
that can inspire people to get involved
in a way that some other programs might
not
um so i think it's well chosen in that
way
i have technical questions about um
you know there's there's a problem of
perchlorates uh on the surface of mars
that's going to be big trouble
um
and there's there's radiation so and
this is known i'm uh
but um what about business questions
do you think cause you mentioned sort of
uh
going outside of the solar system would
would best be done for religious reasons
um 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 um
with stuff we could just dig out of the
ground here or grow here
so i don't know if there is a business
plan for that or if it's just strictly
we're going to go there
and and see what happens
um you know
maybe again we need communism to kind of
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 to just go all in on it
even if there's not a business
plan behind it
so so i think it's well chosen it's just
uh
um
[Music]
i i think it's probably the only um
the only approach to take
um
you know a lot of the when when white
people came to this continent and and
started colonizing it
you know
uh
there was not a lot of coherent planning
like what what plans they did have
turned out to be terrible plans um you
know trying to come up with plans that
extend decades into the future is
uh is a waste of time to do it for the
kind of
like unexplainable love of the unknown
like like
the the uh the journey towards
exploring the unknown yeah and just kind
of keep going yeah
well you saw it with shatner and his
uh reaction to the the flight uh
yesterday
um
he uh
um
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 the
the talking a lot about the moment where
suddenly you kind of
rise above the the thin blue blanket of
uh
of the atmosphere and and you're up into
the the blackness um and uh
that had a huge
impact on him so he was kind of uh i
wouldn't say groping for words because
he was pretty eloquent but
he was trying to express his feelings
about that
in a way that is pretty 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 uh since then
kind of looking at
uh maybe a little bit cynically about
our age today and our unwillingness to
take on big risky projects
so in the face of that what do you think
of people like elon musk
because to me people like that
are inspiring and gives you hope in the
face of
a more kind of um
pessimistic perspective
of our age
yeah well he's clearly willing to tackle
um
[Music]
big ambitious uh projects uh without a
lot of
kind of
soul searching or uh or were
trying to make up his mind right it's
just like
um
just go and do it let's dig tunnels
under cities go you know let's uh um
step one make a joke about on twitter
step two actually do it yeah yeah
yeah
and uh i mean things have slowed down uh
quite our ability to um
to build things uh uh
at pace um is is a lot less than it was
and there's there's reasons for that you
know we're more concerned with safety
and
environmental impacts than um than
people were when they were building
uh some of the great publix 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 and good minds into it
or else we're going to be we're going to
be losing
things that we
take for granted
do you think that there's a lot to be
done in the digital space that's uh 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 in the digital
space
yeah i mean i'd like to see that i think
it's where
a lot of the brain power went during the
last couple of generations
because people who who might previously
have been building rockets or
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 to that stuff we need
to move on
the beautiful thing
about problems is they show you how not
to do things yeah and they give you give
opportunity to
new ideas to flourish
and to beat out the ideas of the old
which is uh
a dream for me in in
to see um
new social media yeah that beats out the
ways to go so i i tend to you perhaps
agree that it's not that it's impossible
to do social media well well not at all
i mean i i listened to your uh interview
with jaren a couple weeks ago and i
i know jaren and we've
you know we've talked about this and he
went he went hard on me he basically
said like it is very impossible he's
very nice well the last time i kind of
paid attention to jaron's thoughts on
and he was thinking in terms of
that basically there should be you know
payments
uh such that if i by clicking the like
button on something i'm essentially
giving
um
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 that when they
aggregate it is beneficial to them so
and now i now i do remember that he uh
on 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 i've been here a
long time oh yeah i i've known you know
i i underst 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 uh many people when given power
do not do the best of things i mean most
what is it uh the old lincoln line if
you want to test the man's character
give him power yeah
yes but that doesn't mean that some
people are not able to handle the power
that some people are not able to come up
with good uh
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
you know issues of concern
but he wouldn't be out you know writing
the books that he's written and talking
about this stuff if you didn't think
there was a way if if you didn't think
there was hope yeah and part of it as
you probably know with jiren he just
loves a good argument yeah
he's just loves to have a little bit of
fun
well i have to ask you about uh i mean
we talked about
taking all
big
bold risky ideas so in your new book
termination shock
it's set here in texas
part of it is yeah yeah most of it yeah
it's a great place to set it so in it
the main character tr
mccool again 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 i wouldn't use the word solve
but let's say
ameliorate ameliorate the temporary
effects but please take on yeah take on
the challenge so it's it's very
interesting but as
there's a gradual nature to this process
and
i mean just like in in your book
um
the power of innovation
is something that has uh
saved us quite a few times in history
so what role does that play as in this
gradual process right so ultimately
we don't solve the problem until we get
the
co2 out of the atmosphere
um but that is going to take a while um
we're still adding more
uh we haven't even started to
to reduce the amount so
um so there's two possibilities inside
to interrupt reduce the amount that
we're putting in the atmosphere and two
is removing what we got in the
atmosphere we have to do both right and
those are two different kind of uh
efforts in terms of like what's involved
because it stays up there so
i think just last week china
announced that they're going to try to
level off
their co2 emissions
in like 2030
so 2031 they'll only put as much co2
into the atmosphere as they did in 2030
which is still
a lot of co2
in 2060 they're saying will be net zero
so if everyone in the world does that
and the ppm
of co2 in the atmosphere by then is say
450 parts per million it'll stay at 450
parts per million
until we take it out
and taking it out
um is hard it's a you know it's a big
we took us a long time we had to empty
out huge coal mines
and oil reservoirs and burn all that
stuff we had to chop down forests and
dig up peat bogs
in order to create all of that co2 and
so we have to reverse all of those
processes uh 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 a single texas
billionaire
to have a massive gun that blasts huge
quantities of sulfur into the upper
atmosphere so that's idea number one
that's uh this is called solar
geoengineering and it's uh
we know that it's a possibility on a
technical level because volcanoes have
been doing it forever
um 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
and the australians sent a 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
so um
and and so we know
then well pinot tubo came along in the
90s and and did this experiment for us
so we know that
sulfur in the in the stratosphere it
forms little uh 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 um
so we know that it works and we've we
also know that this stuff goes away
after a couple of years
so it gradually washes out and so it's
not a permanent thing you have to the
it's the good news bad news is
um
good news is it's not permanent so if
you don't like
what's happening you can just stop and
wait a couple years
and you'll get back to where you started
and the the bad news if if you're in
favor of this kind of thing is that you
have to keep doing it
forever
or um
so 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 all people who
are familiar with climate science are
kind of know this it's a pretty well
established fact
and so um
he just decides he's going to take
action unilaterally and and do this
um
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
he'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 because
you know 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
the fact is that it's going to have
different effects on different parts of
the world so some areas may suffer
negative uh you know more negatives than
positives
uh and they're not going to be happy
so what do you think uh so in in his
case in tr's case he can get around
you know getting permission from
governments
if we were to look at our
us facing um
outside of the store us facing climate
change where do you think the solution
will come from governments working
together or from
bold
billionaire texans
i'm pretty sure that this kind of
intervention is never going to emerge
from
western
democracies
um this kind of sorry government
coordinated uh uh which which option one
solar geo engineering soldier
engineering yeah from a government from
our offer like those are i i want to
sort of the distinction
one is the idea the technological idea
you're talking about but two uh 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
a
some government somewhere that just
decides it's in their interests to
to unilaterally do this
and you know that's not me advocating it
it's just
it's so
it would be comparatively so cheap and
easy to implement the solar
geoengineering scheme
that
someone is probably going to do it once
things get get bad enough but i don't
think that the government will i think
or western governments just because
they're not um
well we've seen what happened with with
vaccines right so
you know getting
getting people to to take vaccinations
or wear masks you know has turned out to
be
incredibly hard even though it might 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 it's just that we've gotten the
leaders we have right now aren't the
right people aren't the right people
because we've lived through kind of a
long stretch of relatively comfortable
times
and if 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 you know
we may be entering one of those
interesting times you know of hardship
in the chinese curse sense yeah
so um
um so i could be wrong but i mean there
have been some efforts to uh
explore
solar geoengineering uh there was a
uh
a plan to send up some balloons high
altitude balloons to take some
measurements
uh
in scandinavia that got um squashed by
uh objections from people who lived up
there uh uh who
who were just opposed to
the whole program on on principle
um so we'll see a lot more of that
and it's going to be a hard program to
advocate for just because i think people
don't quite understand how much carbon
dioxide is in the atmosphere
and how far we are from 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 from that
do you see in terms of portfolio of
solutions us becoming a multi-planetary
species as part of that
as a as this also being a motivator for
investing some percent
of gdp into becoming a multi-planetary
species and what percent should that be
you think you know in an indirect way
maybe i mean you know what people will
say which is this the same argument that
has been leveled against
space exploration since the apollo
program which is why we solve
our problems here on earth before we uh
spend money going into space so i've
never been a believer in that that
argument
i think
um
there could be uh a sense in which the
new perspective that
could be obtained by
uh
thinking about
like if we're thinking about
terraforming
mars
changing its atmosphere making it more
amenable to to life and survival
um
you could see that maybe changing
people's opinions about terraforming the
earth
yeah
there are some dangerous consequences to
this particular
uh idea
of blasting sulfur uh of geoengineering
um
what do you make of sort of
big bold ideas that have uh
that are a double-edged sword are all
ideas like this all big ideas like this
they have uh
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 the
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
so we got um
and and there's a reason why i mean uh
the
the there's
you know in in the mid 20th century we
saw you know antibiotics we saw the
polio vaccine we saw
just simple things like refrigerators in
the home you know
my my grandmother to her dying day
called the refrigerator the ice box
because when she grew up it was a box
with ice in it
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 going to build
nuclear reactors to to make energy or
here's a new
chemical called ddt that's going to kill
mosquitoes then
it's easy to
to just buy into that and not be alert
to the possible downsides
and of course we know that um
the the way that those early reactors
were built and the way that the the
supply chain uh was built
to to create the fuel um
and deal with the the waste
was was poorly
thought out and uh
and and we're still dealing with
the uh
the resulting problems that places like
hanford in 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 the kind of backlash that
happened in the 70s that's is still kind
of going on is is to
sort of assume that
everything is a double-edged sword and
always to look for
to you know we have to absolutely
convince ourselves that the the downside
uh isn't going to come back and and bite
us uh before we can adopt any new
technology and
i i think the the
people um
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
not 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 how there's a 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 the 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 rev is
bringing it to the surface and step one
of solving a problem is bringing it to
the surface the fact that we are divisi
there's a division
the fact that there were easily angered
and upset and all all of that the witch
hunts all those kinds of things that's
human nature and it just reveals that
allowing us to now work on it it's
therapy
and so that's another example of a
technology that's just
where we're not considering this the
positive effects now and in the future
enough of
i have to ask about um
there's a million things i can ask you
about but virtual reality i got got to
ask you
you've thought about virtual reality
mixed reality
uh
quite a bit what are the
interesting trajectories you see for the
proliferation of virtual reality or
mixed reality yeah so i was
i was in magic leap for
what
five years um with the best title of all
time oh
thanks chief 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 um
because it's such a new medium uh we
there's it's more of an engineering r d
project almost than a 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 going to do
needs to be running
slam in real time
and that alone is a big as so for people
who don't know first of all virtual
reality
is
creating a almost fully artificial world
and putting you inside it augmented
reality ar
is taking the real world
and putting top on top
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 the 3d
uh 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's creates a pleasant experience
for the human perception system
is uh
yeah that's a that's an engineering
project
right yeah will 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 uh
how far away
what you're looking at is
it's uh
um
it's performing all those functions um
and it's gotta uh
keep doing that without you know
burning up the
the cpu or
or uh depleting the battery uh
unreasonably fast and that's that's just
table stakes it's just the basic
functions of the the operating system
and then any content that you want to
add has to sit on top of that it's got
to be rendered by the optics
at a sufficiently low latency that
it looks real and you don't get sick so
it's an amazing thing and
you know magically shipped a device that
can do that in 2019
and they're about to ship the ml2
but i don't know any more about that
than anyone else because i don't work
there anymore
um does it still ins 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 yeah
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 um
so for sure that's true and so
um
you know
i was
uh
working on consumer-facing content um
there was a great team in
wellington new zealand that that made a
game uh called uh dr groybrot's uh
invaders that
um
that uh
realized the the potential of ar gaming
in a way that i don't think anything
else has
uh before or since um
and um
so that was definitely the strategy um
until uh
what april
2020 which is when the company decided
to
pivot to commercial industrial
applications instead um
so um
and
you know i
i haven't seen their their
their financial projections but i
assumed they had good reasons for
for making that
strategic decision um
it just means that it's no longer
uh necessarily targeted at
at just end users who want to play a
game or or be entertained but it's
you know that to me from a sort of a
dreamer futurist perspective is
heartbreaking because i i i don't know
necessarily from
in the vr space but i see this kind of
thing
with uh 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 now i i can see the parallels for
sure
you know we'll see it was a fun uh
project you know we uh
we worked on um
an app for example called baby goats
which just populated your room with
with baby goats that seemed like a
killer app right there well
we we thought highly of the of the idea
for sure yes um so
but because of the slam
uh the
the um
the system knew for example here's a
table here's a little end table
we know the heights
uh we know how high our animated baby
goat can jump
um
and so um
so our engineers had to to build a
system for converting the slam
primitives into um
game engine objects um that that the uh
the
game uh the ai's in the game could
navigate around um
so um and that ended up shipping as more
of a dev kit or a sort of how-to a
sample app than as a
a finished
consumer facing
you mean the baby goat ai
yeah yeah
i that seems to me like a world
i couldn't entertain myself for hours
just every day coming home to to to to
see if baby goes yeah i mean it was an
ambient
kind of it's not it's not a thing that
you would sit there and play like a a
video just life yeah yeah but now this
baby goes you i mean what's the purpose
of having dogs and cats right in your
life exactly it's kind of ambient yeah
they're not really helping you do
anything but it's enriching your life
and you can go and play fetch or
something for a while if you want but
you don't have to right yeah
so uh
so we worked on that in 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
want to spend the money yeah and the new
one is coming out i think in 2022 so in
in 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 uh yeah what do
people
of that have financial resources
enjoy spending most of their time in
i've always
been a fan of of of ar and it's kind of
an easy answer because if you if you're
wearing an ar device you put a bag over
your head it becomes a vr device you
know it just
it if you block out the
what's really there then all you're
seeing is is is a vr
but you are with ar constrained
to 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 in those
fantastical worlds with um
with motion sickness
right so um
if if your uh
body is experiencing
acceleration your inner ear
um that this differs from what your eye
thinks it's seeing then you'll get sick
unless you're a very unusual person so
it doesn't mean you can't do it it just
it's a constraint that vr
designers have to uh 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 um i'm personally more
i mean we have to make a distinction
between what i would personally find
interesting and you know what might
win in the market so
maybe some people
maybe lots of people would like to spend
a huge amount of time in
in vr um
i'm
personally more interested in
enhancing the experience that i have of
the physical world because the physical
world's pretty cool
right and there's a lot a lot to be said
for uh for moving around in the real
world and can i ask you for you
personally yeah to try to play devil's
advocate or to try to construct to
imagine
a vr
world
where you and neil stevens wouldn't want
to
stay
not because the physical world all of a
sudden became really bad for some reason
like you're trying to escape it yeah 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 uh double up on that glimmer for
the
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 um i like making things um
so i like working in a machine shop and
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
you know 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 a
it's not virtual reality exactly but
that whole time
i'm you know my whole field of view
is occupied by
uh by this monitor that's showing me a
window into a three-dimensional space
i'm rotating things around i'm
i'm
i'm imagining things i'm making things
and so that is um you know pretty close
to
um
to 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 uh that's my
game that's that's what i'm up to but
you know it happens that um
if you're building
a virtual environment if you're uh
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
uh
and in fact it's preferable that it
doesn't because the whole point of that
is to um
is to to make imaginary things that
you couldn't
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
to vr
it's just that currently the output
device happens to be a rectangular
object
in front of them
you could replace that with a vr headset
and they'd be doing the same stuff
there's all kinds of interfaces for
example i enjoy listening to podcasts or
audiobooks but let's say actually
podcast
because 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 i think for me
that
that's just audio as a fan of people
and you're kind of a little bit are
friends with those people
yeah you know they're in your life
you're listening to them yeah
and
i mean
they're not they're as far away from
real as it gets there's not even a yeah
there's not even a visual component it's
just audio but they're as real
like if i was on a desert island
like my imagination
like this thing works pretty good
in terms of imagination
like that it creates a very
beautiful world with a with just audio
so i i mean or even just reading books
yeah exactly you're reading books yeah
even more so with reading books because
uh there are certain mediums which
stimulate the imagination more the yeah
the when 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 i'm 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
uh to a much greater degree inside of a
virtual world
and like and then love means fulfillment
that means happiness that's the thing
you look forward to and not some kind of
dopamine rush type of love but like long
long lasting yeah yeah friendship deal
yeah yeah it just depends on
what is there in the way of of
applications the content and can it feed
you
those things can it give you
like in my example of of using the cad
program
it gives me the ability to do something
i enjoy
which is making
imagining things and making things in a
particular way but can we psychoanalyze
you for a second sure
what exactly do you enjoy is there some
component
of you building the thing
where you get to at least a little bit
share with others
like is there a human in the loop
outside of you in that picture
will anyone ever see it
right
yeah there's a source of your enjoyment
because i would argue that
perhaps
when like the the turtles all the way
down when you get to the bottom turtle
it has to do with other sharing with
other humans yeah and if you can then
put those humans
inside the vr world
then then you start to
then then you can okay for example you
could do it in the physical world
the the 3d printing but you share it in
in 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 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
um
and it's like another app i spend a lot
of time in is mathematica okay and when
i do particular
yeah yeah and when i do a mathematica
notebook if i'm trying to figure
something out i spend a lot of time
typing
just
my stuff is just a huge blocks of of
text just me thinking out loud and then
some graphs and calculations and stuff
because to me
that act of of explaining
things and commenting
helps me understand what i'm doing and
there's kind of an audience uh an
amorphous audience in your mind yeah
like i mean most of this stuff nobody
will ever see and yet
i'm creating it as if there were an
audience that might read this stuff
because that i have to that's a
necessary constraint that helps me
um do a better job
what's the uh
this might be tricky question to answer
what's uh comes to mind as a
particularly beautiful thing that you're
proud of that you create inside
mathematica
visualization-wise or
uh something that just comes to memory
if it's possible to retrieve
so
the the thing i've spent the most
amount of time on
is i got obsessed um
a long time ago
was trying to tile
the globe with hexagons yes
and um or actual globe
well any spherical and
object yeah but but with an eye towards
uh putting it on the earth and so uh 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 so it's that and
people who who know me um are always uh
now now make fun of me for this so
they'll send me if they if they see
a picture with hexagons in it they'll
like send me a link you know to to
to make fun of me
um so as some one of those people roger
penrose or i i think
roger's a little above my my level um
he's into hexagons as well yeah and
tiling yeah yeah so um so i did a lot of
that and i thought you know it was
pretty cool but um if there's some like
surprisingly intractable
problems that keep coming up like
you you've always got to have
some pentagons like if you start with a
icosahedron which is
equilateral triangles which is a logical
place to start
you can cover those with hexagons but
every
vertex where
where the
the triangles come together
is a pentagon has to be a pentagon
oh interesting so there's all hexagons
and then there's a pentagon at the
intersections yeah yeah cool how do you
figure that out is that a known fact
well it's just if you look at uh yeah
like just by incidentally this thing got
it yeah yeah so
so you can't make that go away
so
any system that you come up with to do
this has got to have
this
exceptions built into it for for those
12 you could have
quintillions of hexagons
but you've still got to have 12
pentagons somewhere
so um
so i've blown a hell of a lot of time on
on that over the years by the way
a lot of those kind of uh problems are
very difficult to prove something about
yeah
and i think uber did it because someone
one of my friends who uh
who knows of my
my interest in this and who likes to
to give me a hard time
sent me a link this is a couple years
ago to
some
code base that i think came out of uber
where they had done this
you know you break break down the whole
surface of the earth into into little
hexagons
so um that was a real knife through the
heart
um
but
i'll probably come back to it
someday
is there something special about
hexagons are you interested in all kinds
of tiling
uh well
i'm interested in all kinds of tiling
but i'm not
i know my limitations like as a as a
math guy um
so
hexagons are about my speed
um you know 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 for centuries
let me ask you a little bit about ai
okay
what are some
[Music]
likely
interesting trajectories for the
proliferation of ai in society over the
next couple of decades do you think
about this kind of stuff i
do not think about it a lot because it's
a deep topic and i'm not i don't
consider myself super well informed
about it and ai seems to be a term that
has applied to a lot of different
things
so i've messed around just a tiny little
bit with with neural nets
with uh
what's it called pca principle component
analysis so i guess i tend to think in
terms of sort of granular bottom-up
um
ideas rather than big picture
top down you know oh god so like very
specific algorithms like how are they
going to
what problem are they going to solve in
society such that that has like a lot of
big ripple effects so yeah
i mean
we could talk a particular successful ai
systems
and success defining different ways of
recent years so
one is language models with gpt-3
most importantly they're self-supervised
meaning they don't require much
supervision from humans which means
they can learn by just reading a huge
amount of content created by humans so
read the internet and from that be able
to generate text and do all kinds of
things like that
it's possible to have a big enough
neural network it's going to be able to
have conversations with humans
based on just reading human language
that's an interesting idea to me the
very interesting idea
that people don't think about it
as ai because it's they're kind of dumb
currently is actual
embodied robots so robotics like boston
dynamics i have
downstairs and upstairs uh legged robots
uh
you know
the currently boston dynamics robots and
most
legged robots most robots period are
pretty dumb
this is 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 it's the same thing as with
magically that base layer of like where
is that stuff where am i yeah
and uh
what what am i looking at
yeah i don't need to deeply understand
uh my surroundings at a level of like
like uh
at a level beyond of what will hurt if i
run into it yeah yeah yeah but even that
is hard that's that's hard but the thing
that i think
people don't
uh in the space explorer enough is the
human robot interaction
part of the
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 uh
in the near future in society which is
the more you integrate ai systems of
whatever form into society where humans
are
uh
in contact with them regularly
so they could be embodied robotics or
that could be social media algorithms i
think that has a very significant impact
and
people often think like ai needs to be
super smart to have an impact i think it
needs to be super
integrated with society to have an
impact and more and more that's
happening
even if they're dumb
yeah yeah no the um i mean a lot of my
exposure
to robots is 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 um because
the these robots are remote controlled
they're they're not autonomous um
and so
um they're pretty simple but
um 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 uh
was just uh like 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
like salad bowls and you know random
pieces of hardware that this guy had
like scavenged from his farm
and so immediately
people kind of fell in love with this
one particular robot
whereas they might
other robots might be like the bad guy
in a
yeah you know if you think of
professional wrestling you know the heel
and the baby face
so people do for reasons that are hard
to understand form these emotional
reactions 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
in almost almost close to inanimate
objects yeah and that to me is kind of
fascinating and
if robots
choose to lean into that
it creates an interesting world
if they start uh using feedback loops to
make themselves cuter
not just cuter but everything that
humans do let's not let's let's let's
let's not speak harshly robots humans do
the same no i didn't was wasn't meaning
it
but right humans
based on feedback
will change their appearance yes they're
just on instagram all the time how do i
look cuter that's the fundamental
question i ask myself yeah so why
wouldn't why wouldn't a robot wanna it's
like oh wow people
people really don't like the you know
quad mount
machine gun you know on top of my turret
maybe i should get rid of that and that
would you know people would feel more at
ease
uh or or lean into it yeah proud of it
yeah uh like uh you won't take my gun
whatever the saying is
from my dead cold hands
um
i mean their their personality adding
personalities 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
when it's especially when it's embodied
puts a mirror to ourselves
just like other humans are our close
friends
they kind of teach us about ourselves
we teach each other and through that
process grow close
and it to me it's so fascinating to um
to expand the space
of deep meaningful interactions beyond
just humans
that um
that's the opportunity i see
with with robots and with ai systems
and that's why i don't like
my biggest problem social media
algorithms
is the lack of transparency it's not the
existence of the algorithms it's
uh well there's many things one is the
data data should be controlled by the
individual by people yeah themselves
so uh but also the lack of transparency
and how the algorithms work and change
your perception of what's real
yeah yeah in hidden ways yeah
in hidden ways yeah 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
second hour it shouldn't be a surprise
yeah and second you should
i mean
uh become a student and a scholar and
there should be research done there
should be open conversation about how
your perception is changed and you
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
um
i mean
this is something you explore
quite a bit do you um
yourself
think that there is
a bottom to it where there is reality
there's a base layer of reality
that physics
can
explore and our human perception sort of
layer stuff is there's 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 haven't
a reality that
it's not all made up by by human minds
um
and i don't know
where that reality
comes from i can't explain it but but i
do think that mathematical objects are
discovered and not uh invented
the
um
i i did a lot of
not a lot but i did some
some reading of husserole when i was
writing anathem
um
and he's a
you know 20th century phenomenologist
and he's writing in the he's writing at
the same time as
as scientists are starting to understand
atoms
and and becoming aware that
that when we look at this table
it's really just a
slab of almost entirely vacuum and
there's a very sparse
uh arrangement of tiny tiny little
particles there um occupying that space
that interact with each other in such a
way that
our brains perceive this object
so
that's kind of kind of the beginnings of
phenomenology
um
and um and his stuff is pretty hard to
um
hard to read
it 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 of questions
how did you come to grips with it
like why why is this table feel solid
well i mean we're an evolved system that
there's we have biological advantages in
in knowing
where solid objects are so we've got
this system in our head that
that integrates our perceptions into
this
coherent view of things
that
one of the
take-homes that i i like
from whosoereal is the idea of
inter-subjectivity 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
and they don't even have to be people
but
um
that you know a prisoner in solitary
confinement might
domesticate a mouse or even insects
uh because
they perceive the same things that the
prisoner perceives um
and uh and so convince
convince him that he's not just
hallucinating yeah there's a
establish a consensus
yeah
but see that doesn't mean it's any of it
is real
you just establish a consensus
it uh it could be very um yeah
very distant from something that um
something that's real in in um
engineering sense of real
like that you could build it using
physics
but i think that uh you know valuable
application for an ai robot would be
just
to do nothing except that it just um
so
um consensus it just sits there yeah and
if if you hear a door slam
you might turn to
to see what it is if the robot
at the same time turns
to to look at the door slam it's
ratifying your perception but isn't that
the basis of love
is when the door slams you both look
but for deeper things
you both hear the same music
and others don't i mean isn't that
what that
that's by by love i mean depth of human
connection yeah like it that that's
or not
you arrive at similar
reactions uh without having to
to explicitly communicate it yeah yeah
but we could start with a a robot that
listens explicitly for the
slam doors yeah but no i've scary sounds
i i can think of so an example of this
is you know
when i when i went to college you know
we'd be sitting at the cafeteria a you
know a bunch of people
you know eating our dinner together that
we had just met let's say yeah
so um
a bunch of new people in your life and
um
and someone might make a funny remark or
a not so funny remark or um 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 and before you know it
you know you're
you're hanging out together yeah because
you you know you've already established
without even talking to each other
that uh you're on the same wavelength
yeah
it's seemingly so simple
what's so powerful that'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
i'm just saying
this smell burned to you
[Laughter]
exactly i think it's
if a toaster could just say that to you
yeah
cryptonomicon published in 1999
set in the late 90s and involves hackers
who build essentially cryptocurrency
bitcoin white paper came out in 2008
so i i have to kind of ask uh
from you looking at this
layout of what's been happening in
cryptocurrency
the evolution of this technology
how has it
rolled out
differently than you could have imagined
in two ways one the technology itself
into
the human side of things the human
stories of the hackers
and
the financial folks and the powerful and
the powerless
the human side of things yeah well
cryptonomicon is pre
bitcoin it's pre pre-satoshi it's
pre-blockchain as you point out
so
um
at that point uh i was kind of reacting
to what i was seeing among
people like the bay area cypherpunks in
berkeley there was some sun 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 uh 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 you know a room somewhere with
servers in it um
that that
a government couldn't come and and
meddle with
and so a lot of ideation happened around
that view of things that
there were efforts to figure out
jurisdictions where this might work
there was a lot of interest for a while
in anguilla which is a caribbean island
that had some unusual jurisdictional
properties
there was sea land sea land which is a
platform in the north sea
um
and so there was a lot of effort that
went into finding these physical
locations that that were deemed kind of
safe
and that all
goes away
with
blockchain
it's no longer necessary
and so that really changes the picture
in a lot of ways because
[Music]
you no longer have
i mean from a novelist point of view the
old system was a lot more fun to work
with because it gives you a situation
where hackers
are wandering around in strange parts of
the world you know trying to set up
server rooms so that's a great
storytelling
thing
there's still a little bit of that right
in the modern world but it's just
there's several server rooms as opposed
to one centralized one yeah yeah and
there's the like the new wrinkle is the
need to do a lot of computation
and to keep your
your uh
your your gpus from melting down so
people building things in iceland or or
in shipping containers on the bottom of
the ocean or whatever
um
so um but there's still governments
involved and there's they're still from
a novelist perspective interesting
dynamics
what is big governments like china and
and more sort of renegade governments
from all over the world trying to
contend with this idea
of what to do uh in terms of control and
power over these kinds of
centers that do the mining of the yeah
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
kryptonomicon had a little bit of error
about it of the underpants gnomes uh in
that you know we're gonna we're gonna
build this system
and then
we'll make money somehow uh but the the
intermediate step was was left out
um
and that is uh
uh i i think we're now
so
into that phase of the thing where the
where bitcoin
you know blockchain exists people know
how it works
uh bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
exist people are using them and it's
sort of like okay what now you know
where does this all lead
um
so um do you have a sense of where it
all leads like is it is it possible that
the set of technology kind of
continues to have
transformational effects on
not just sort of
finance but
who gets to have power in this world
so the decentralization of power
you know big questions right so i guess
there's a little bit of the cynic in me
thinking that
as soon as it becomes important enough
the existing banks and people in power
are gonna sort of control it i guess an
easy answer is that maybe it won't be a
big change in the end um
there's a utopian strain sometimes in in
the way people think about this that
i'm not so sure about
there there's a there is a technological
aspect to
bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
that make it a little easier
to uh pull along the utopian thread yeah
because it's harder for governments to
control
bitcoin yeah i mean they they have much
fewer options
the they can ban they can make it
illegal
it's more difficult yeah so technology
here is on the side of the powerless the
voiceless which is a very interesting
idea of course yes it does have a
utopian
feel to it but we have been making
progress throughout human history yeah
maybe this is what progress looks like
there will be
the powerful and the greedy
and the bureaucrats that take advantage
of it skim off the top kind of thing
but maybe this does give um
more power to people that haven't had
power before
in a good way like distributing power
and enabling sort of more um
greater resistance to sort of uh
dictatorships and authoritarian regimes
that kind of thing
um
and also enabling all kinds of
technologies built built on top of it
ultimately when you
digitize money uh you know money is a
kind of speech or is it's kind of like
um
mechanism of
how humans interact
and if you make that digital more and
more of the world moves to the digital
space and then you could have
the
then you can finally fully live in that
virtual reality with the toaster 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 um and organizations built on those
that seems to me like it's got more
potential for change just because we do
already have
money
and although it's an old system
um it's been digitized to a large extent
by
you know the the stripes and the credit
card companies of the world
and i also love the idea of like uh
connecting so to connect to smart
contracts connecting data
sort of uh
making it more formal it's like
mathematica more structured the
integration of data of weather data
of uh
all kinds of data about the the
the stuff in the world so they can make
contracts between people that in that's
grounded in data and that's actually
getting closer to
something like truth
because then you can make agreements
based on actual data versus kind of
perceptions of data and if you can
formalize
like distribute the power of who gets to
tell the story yeah
that that's an interesting kind of um
resistance yeah again the
powerful in the space of narrative yeah
david brin has been saying for a while
that um
the only way to settle arguments with
you know across the political divide
is to to make bets
so people can say
you know
the election was stolen or you know what
whatever controversial
position they're they're taking
um
and they'll keep saying it until you
you uh
you wager real money on it
so um
so maybe there's something there
if you could uh kind of turn that into a
put a user interface on that
thing you know
yeah have a stake in your uh
in your divisiveness in your your
arguments right
right
will uh dogecoin take over the world
twitter questions you know i don't i
don't follow the the different coins
that much so i don't i i hear about
dogecoin and you know i've kind of
followed the story of it so the
interesting aspect of doshcoin
is it
so
in contrast to like uh bitcoin and
ethereum which are these
serious
implementations of cryptocurrency that
seek to solve some of the problems that
we're talking about with smart contracts
and
and uh resist the
the banks and all those kinds of things
deutsche coin operates more in the space
of memes and humor
while still doing some of them similar
things and it presents to the world sort
of a question of
whether um
memes
whether humor
whether narrative
will go a long way
in the future
like
much farther than some kind of boring
old
uh grounded technologies
whether we'll be playing in the space of
fun
like once we built a base
of comfort and stability
and like a robust system where everyone
has shelter everyone has
uh
food
and the basic needs covered are we going
to then operate in the space of fun
that's that's why i think about deutsche
going because it seems like fun
spreads faster
than anything else
fun of different kinds and that could be
bad fun and they could be good fun yeah
and so it's a battle of
good fights goes very very quickly
when you when you if you post something
that people find fun to yeah and that's
what does coin represents so there's
like so bitcoin represents like
financial
uh
like
serious financial instruments yeah and
then deutsche represents fun
and it's interesting to watch the battle
go on on the internet to see which wins
this is also like open question to me of
what is the internet
because um
fun seems to prevail on the internet
and 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 and
the adults take over and become serious
again well i think the adults took over
initially and then it was later on that
people started using it for fun
frivolous things like memes
and that's i think that's pretty much
unstoppable
you know
yeah
because even people who are very serious
uh
you know enjoy um
sending around a funny picture or uh
something that amuses them
yeah i i personally think
we spoke about world war ii i think
memes will save the world and prevent
all future wars
you've been handwriting your work for
the past 20 years since writing the
baroque cycle what are the pros and cons
of handwriting versus typing for me i
started it as an experiment when i
started the baroque cycle because i had
noticed that if i sometimes if i was
stuck
having a hard time getting started if i
just picked up a pen
and started writing it was easy to
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
um
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
um
and in doing so i very quickly created
an edit but i've also left behind a
record of what the text was prior to the
edit
of course you know all the digital
versions have those quote-unquote
features but their
experience is different yeah yeah is
there a romance to just
the physical
you know the touch of the pen to the
paper doing what has been done for
centuries i think there is i think
there'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 and
i i started buying fancy paper from
italy a few years ago because uh
i i thought i would be more conservative
with it
you know it but it still doesn't it
it's still a trivial
expenditure so it doesn't really alter
my
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 uh let me just ask the ridiculous
futuristic question because emacs has
been around forever
do you think in 100 years
we will still have emacs and vim
or like pick it pick a let's say 50 100
years yeah yeah yes yeah no i mean
whenever you're doing anything in linux
you
you're spending a lot of time editing
little config files and
scripts and stuff and uh you need to be
able to pop in and out of
of editing those things and it needs to
work
like even if the the windowing
gui is dead and all you've got is like a
command line you you to get out of that
problem you might need to to enter an
editor
and uh and alter a file so i think on
that level
there always have to be
sort of uh
very simple well emacs isn't very simple
but you know you know what i mean there
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
um
you know
there's a certain amount of um what's
the story of the
the there's the the american folk tale
of the
the
the guy who the hammer guy who drives
the railroad spikes john henry
trying to keep up with the steam hammer
and eventually this the steam hammer
wins because he can't drive the spikes
fast enough so there's there's a sense
in which
you know microsoft like
who knows how much they've invested in
code you know visual studio to to you
know or or apple with xcode so they've
put huge amounts of money into
enhancing
their ides
and emacs in theory can duplicate
all of those
features
by you know
if you just have enough linux hackers
writing emacs lisp macros
um
but you know at some point um
it's gonna be hard to
to maintain that
level of uh
of to to keep up feature for feature
the the interesting thing about emacs
just is lasted a long time yeah and i i
think if you talked about that
there's a certain like there's certain
fads
uh certainly in the in the um
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 the
the cockroaches of software or yeah the
bacteria are soft or something they like
this base thing that nobody everybody's
just became reliant on
uh
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's
that might be the story for a lot of
technologies especially in the software
space yeah shell scripts you know all
that stuff you you you can't run the
modern world without
a bunch of shell scripts
you know booting out machines and
and running things so um
it's
that is going to be a hard thing to to
replace
and then tech for type setting that you
use you said
for when i when i want to print it out
yeah i just have some simple uh
macros that i use but then i have to um
the the publisher put their foot down
and they they want it in in word
format now so
um
years ago i wrote some macros to convert
and this time
what did i do
copy paste
no i um i use of regular expressions so
i was to do italics in
you know you you put it in curly
brackets and you do backslash id
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 i.t and then
instead
convert that to italics and word will do
that
word if you go deep enough into its
search and replace
ui can do regular expressions is just
reg apps
yeah it's funny that you did that yeah i
mean i'm sure there's tools that help
you with that kind of thing but but the
task is sufficiently
simple
to where you can do a much better job
than anyone anybody else's tool can yeah
yeah so this is a fascinating process it
works fine for me yeah
and it keeps you from messing around
with formatting
yeah like
oh what if i put this chapter heading
you know in
you know a sans-serif font you know it's
a it's just classic wanking
um and so you the the
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 of good yarns good
narratives to um
pull people in is is an incredible and i
think my sort of
amateur theory is that it's an
evolutionary
development that
if you're um
you know
uh a
cave person sitting around a fire
in the rift valley
a million years ago
um
if you can tell the story
of how you escaped from the hyenas
um
or
how uncle bob you know didn't escape
from the
hyenas and if 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
um
i mean animals who don't have speech
though they might warn each other
they might make a sound that says danger
danger
um but uh
but
as far as we know they can't
tell more complicated stories
so it's a part of us yeah
the the the collective intelligence
seems to be one of the the key
characteristics of the of homo sapiens
the ability to
share ideas and hold ideas together in
our minds and storytelling is the
fundamental aspect of that maybe even
language itself is more fundamental yeah
because
the language is required to do the
storytelling or maybe they evolve
together maybe they co-evolve yeah
so i think that you've got to work with
that and i think
sometimes it seems like in kind of um
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
would you do a technological scientific
rigor like to the the accuracy and as
much as possible
how does that add to the
to to bob telling the story or telling
the story about bob or on the campfire
well the main thing that it does is
present
um
little details that you might not have
come up with on your own
so if you're just sitting there freely
imagining things
you uh
you
your your brain probably isn't going to
serve up the wealth of details and the
resulting complications and surprises
that real
that the real world is constantly
presenting us with and so
um in my case
if i'm um
trying to write a story about you know
some that involve some technology like a
rocket
or a orbital maneuvers or whatever then
delving into those details eventually is
going to turn up some weird unexpected
you know thing that
gives me material to work with but also
subliminally readers who see that
are are going to
be drawn in more
because if they're going to
to 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 um
alex garland director who did 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
smile
i'm not i'm not sure what that is
uh 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
the readers to suspend their
their disbelief and there's all kinds of
triggers and little tells that can break
that right um and once it's broken it's
really hard to get it back
uh yeah you know a lot of times that's
the end somebody will just close the
book and not
pick it up
i get to ask you've answered this
question but i got to ask you
the most impossible question for an
author to answer but
which neil stephenson book
should one read first
so when people ask me that i usually ask
them what they like to read
right because
i mean
there's
the best known one is probably snow
crash but that's a
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 fictiony per se
then uh reem d um
is one of those and termination shock um
is is definitely one of those
um
so it just depends on
on uh
what people like
what uh when people a long time ago
recommend i read snow crash they said uh
it's the
it's neil stevens in light
it's it's the uh
like if you don't want to be overwhelmed
by the depth like the rigor
book like that's a good that's a good
introduction okay
so so essentially you broke it down by
topics but
if you wanted to read all of them
what's a good introduction to the to the
man because obviously these worlds are
very different yeah the philosophies are
very different yeah what's a good
introduction to the human
um
hmm people ask the same thing with
dostoyevsky people right
it's a it's a hard one to answer
maybe seven eaves
because it's got big themes
um it's you know it's about heavy
heavy things happening to the human race
um
uh but hopefully the story is told
through a cast of characters that uh
people can relate to
you know it moves along
uh
so uh it does go kind of deep eventually
on
how rockets work and orbital mechanics
and all that stuff but
um
people were able to get through it
anyway or some people just skip over
that
it's fine
you know
um
as an author let me ask you
what books had a big impact on your life
that you've read is there any that jump
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 oh i'll remember
12. so this is a random selection that
doesn't represent the top the top ones
um well i mentioned you know gulag
archipelago that's
kind of a hefty and dark but and then it
has a personal connection as well
yeah just yeah because like where you
found the book too right the part the
time in your life where you found it
yeah who recommended it that's also part
of the story yeah so there's definitely
that there's
you know i circle back to moby dick a
lot um
because we read it in a uh
a really great
english class i had in high school and i
came in with an oppositional
stance because i thought that the
teacher was going to try to talk me into
having all kinds of highfalutin
ideas about allegory and what does this
mean what's the symbolism
and it turned out that uh
it turned out to be a lot more
interesting and satisfying than that
um what was the first powerful book you
remember reading that like
convinced you that
this form could have depth
was it moby dick was it like in high
school i'm trying to remember well moby
dick was definitely a big one
um
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 um
it was viral you could uh
in the 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
and but it was like
they would do the count of money christo
you know moby dick
you know robert louis stevenson robinson
crusoe you know all the sort of classic
books
uh
were they had put into comic book form
it's amazing yeah reading moby dick if
you're nine years old
is a tall order
there's some very complicated sentences
in there yeah
and a lot of digressions but if you're
just looking at the comic books like
holy look at that whale you know
and um and ultimately the power of the
story
doesn't need the complicated words
it's it's all about the man and the 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 you know
it's great when you're nine years old
so so i read a lot of that stuff
uh for sure the annotated sherlock
holmes
um
you you mentioned david deutsche as an
inspiration for some of your work i mean
you you've obviously didn't like really
a lot of research for the books you you
do
roger apparent rose
what uh do you remember a book that made
you want to become a writer
or a moment that made you become i think
like the
you know the answer i usually give is
that when i was in like fifth grade
one of my friends came to
school one day is wearing leather shoes
like dress shoes
and
i hated dress shoes because mine never
fit and so they were uncomfortable i
couldn't run
you know they were cold
it was iowa
so
i kind of said
i remember very clearly thinking okay i
don't like where this is going
like
does this mean that
next year
all the kids are going to be wearing
leather shoes
so i need to find a job where i don't
have to do that
so that was like the first time i
thought about
trying to find such a job you know being
a writer and then
and then i just read a lot of uh
just classic science fiction short
stories and started you know trying to
write some of my own
and uh there were just classic young
adult
stories learned by heinlein and
the other
classic names that you think of but the
heinlein ones stuck have stuck with me
in a way that the others didn't
what's the greatest
science fiction book ever written
just
removing your
uh work from consideration
uh
i'm loving torturing you greatest ever
non-stevenson do we include fantasy
there's to have to be science fiction
oh interesting fantasy hmm
i i did not expect that twist uh well in
a weird way they're lumped together in
people's minds right so they are but it
there but there's also a boundary
somehow yeah i'm not sure what that is
exactly nobody is it's a mystery
[Laughter]
so i mean if we do include it then it's
easily the the lord of the rings
but um
i mean greatness is a interesting
quality to uh to try to define
um
and
for me a lot of the the fun and the joy
of
such books is is not in what you'd call
greatness but just storytelling
so i was always a big fan of has have
space suit will travel
which is a heinlein young adult book
it's just uh it's just a fun good read
um
so so fun is a big component
greatness is overrated well i don't know
it's overrated but it's just
you know it's it might be under defined
let's put it that way
so how space it will travel now i
definitely have to read that one yeah
you mentioned iowa
i was uh
there a couple times i got to spend uh
quite a bit of time with dan gable with
tom brands who were wrestlers
was uh
is it now
wrestling martial arts part of your life
any part of your form formation of who
you are as a human being
i think so in a it was a late it was a
late thing for me but
growing up in ames
dan gable was
a few years older than me and so
sometimes we would go
to the arena at the university and watch
wrestling
meets and
and this was before his olympic career
so everyone knew he was the star of that
team
and then he was the best but people
didn't yet know that he was the greatest
of all time g you saw gabe so that was
part it's it's funny it's uh it feels
like a small world that you would
be in the same space as dan gable well a
hundred feet away a little dot on the
mat pronouncing his opponents him and
him and chris taylor so the other star
was this 400 pound plus guy named chris
taylor
who
also went to the olympics
so yeah people
you know he was he was a no he was a
athletic hero and
wrestling is
there's certain states like oklahoma
pennsylvania iowa where wrestling is the
sport
because those are states of small towns
and so if you're a small town if you're
like dan gable
and you have to be on a football team
with
20 other guys who are not dan gable then
no matter how good you are
your team might might suck
uh but if
in a solo
thing you can
you can go to the olympics
so we did a lot of wrestling in our gym
classes in school and i didn't like it
and i think partly it's just that it was
so
so competitive and the people who were
who cared about it
really cared about it a lot you know and
so it was it was pretty tough
i didn't think i had the right body type
but then when i was uh after college i
was in iowa city for a few years when he
was coaching the
the wrestling team there and he won like
nine
championships out of 10 years
during that during that time so he was
both the greatest individual wrestler of
all time and like the greatest
team coach
um
so i've never met him
but we've
uh he's kind of been like in my sphere
of awareness since i was you know kind
of my whole life and people would always
tell stories about him like
i think he got arrested once for some
kind of
i don't know
minor offense 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 yeah sounds about right
yeah
and uh
uh
so yeah
so has that been
i mean i was such an interesting place
in the world i mean wrestling is just
part of that story
does 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 uh
you know a
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 that you know those were the
rich people right so
um and a college town is always a
different environment like uh
you know austin
uh has some of this
um
so as a pretty kind of utopian
other than the weather and a few other
things
uh environment to grow up in
the the martial art i ended up doing is
sword stuff which is
interesting because it uses a different
feedback loop so when you're if you're
grappling
everything is through sense of touch
and your sense of touch is very old
and simple right like earthworms
don't have don't even have eyes but you
they can tell when they're being touched
right so
it's very fast
um
and uh
with um
with a standoff or like boxing or some
kind of sword fighting you're
you're not touching the other person
most of the time your
your uh 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 fell more my speed
so in
in olympic style fencing
your
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 um
don't engage the the blade that way you
stand off their range and then you make
cutting
attacks
and um
[Music]
and
uh and so so those are all processed
visually and
i think i'm more of a slow
thinker
so it works for me
better i mean the same so it has the
same
the artistry and the beauty of boxing i
suppose just like you said
is like there's no there's no contact
and it's all processed visually and i'm
sure there's a dance of its own yeah
that that depends on the characteristic
of a sword involved yeah there's a set
of of stances and and uh basic reactions
that you try to learn that are thought
to be
defensible um and and safe or safer
and
so it tends to be a series of short
engagements where you'll
you'll close in
you'll try out your your idea
and it works or it doesn't then you you
back off again
it's interesting to think about like
human history because martial arts
okay
that's a thing but in terms of sword
fighting
just the full
range of humans that existed who
mastered sword fighting or sought the
masteries were fighting just imagine the
thousands of people who the the heights
they have achieved because the stakes
are so incredibly high yeah
to be good and it's the richest most
powerful people in in those societies
spending it whatever it takes
to get the best gear and the best
training
because you're right everything depends
on it and it's still life and death i
mean that that's fascinating um
that
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 the
i don't know
there's a poetry to it 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 the one of the good
you were talking earlier about
the the the good effects of the internet
social media that we sometimes overlook
and
and one of those is that um there were
all these isolated people around the
world who were interested in this who
found each other
and kind of created
a network of of people who help each
other learn these things so that doesn't
mean that anyone is is up to the level
of that you're talking about yet
but um but it is happening and um
and so um there's a
a a large number of old treatises old
written
documents uh that have been dug up from
libraries and and people have been going
over these and translating them from old
dialects of italian in german
to make sense of them and and learning
how to do these techniques
with different uh different weapons
um
actually there's a guy here in austin
named damon stith who does african
historical african martial arts um
also
martial arts of uh
of enslaved africans who
[Music]
would learn machete fighting techniques
in the caribbean south america yeah he's
probably within a mile of us he's
awesome amazing guy i'm gonna look him
up yeah
can i ask you for advice
can you give advice for young people
high school
college
you know undergrads
thinking about
their career thinking about life how to
live a life that you'd be proud of
you think quite a bit about like what
it's required to be innovative in this
world you think quite a bit about the
future so somebody wanted to be
a person that makes a big impact in the
future what advice would you give them
i think a big part of it is
finding the thing that you will do
happily and
i don't want to say obsessively because
that sounds like maybe it's pathological
but
but if you can find a thing that you'll
you know you'll sit down you'll start
doing it and
hours later you kind of snap out of it
where did the time go
um 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
to figure out where you should put your
energies
you know
and as you might have the best
intentions you might say i you know i
want
world peace or whatever
uh but um
uh
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 uh
and um
uh
because it doesn't matter how smart you
are or well-intentioned you are unless
you've
figured that out
and so 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 often people 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 um
there's an important thing to add to to
what i said which is that
this might not happen the first time you
do a thing
maybe it will but um
uh you might have to climb that learning
curve and um
if there's pressures in your life that
are making you feel bad about that
then
it might prevent you
from
from getting where you need to be
so there's some complexity there
that may can make this kind of
non-obvious
but uh that's what
that's why we
need you know good teachers
um
you know another
beneficial thing
of the internet is youtube and being
able to learn things how to do things on
youtube
the the
the dude who made the youtube video
doesn't care how many times you
hit pause and rewind
um
they're never gonna like roll their eyes
and
and be impatient with you
um
and sometimes uh 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 re-reading or
re-watching re-watching
that
that somehow
really um
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 i realized um
i think it was somewhere in college uh
where you could just spend your whole
life with a single textbook
there's enough in that textbook
yeah to really really stay
measner thorne and wheeler gravitation
you know is one of those or another one
is um the road to reality by roger
penrose which is just
incredibly deep it starts with like two
plus two equals four and it at the end
you're at the boundaries of
of physics
uh it's an amazing
amazing book
let me ask you the big ridiculous
question okay 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 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 but
um
so we appear to be pretty special and um
so it's got to have something to do with
that and
one of the reasons i like
david deutsch
in particular his book the beginning of
infinity
um
is that he talks about the power of
explanations
and the fact that um 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
uh generation to the next and nothing
changes
but that
huge changes have happened
when people sort of
follow and whatever you want to call it
the scientific method or enlightenment
uh there's different ways of thinking
about it but basically explanatory
it's it's about the power of of
explanations
and being able to figure out why things
are the way they are
and that has created changes in our um
thinking in 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
um
you know we could uh
you know if we figure out how to
colonize the universe
like you were talking about earlier
how this 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 the well it's the old the
universe created us to understand itself
maybe that's the uh
the whole purpose
yeah
it's 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
the full interesting dynamic of it so
it's not just about the individual
people
yeah somehow like the concert that we
played together
yeah
yeah so
that's kind of interesting there's a lot
of peculiar aspects of that that i
wonder if they're fundamental or just
quirks of evolution
whether it's whether it's death whether
it's love whether all those things
i wonder if they're um
from an engineering perspective when
we're trying to create that intelligent
toaster that listens for the
for the slam door
and this and the smell of burning toast
whether
that toaster it should be afraid of
death and should fall in love just like
we do
neil
you're a fascinating human being you've
impacted the lives of millions of people
it's a huge honor that you would spend
your valuable time with me today thank
you so much thank you for coming down
uh it's 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 stephenson 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