back to indexNeal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #240
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The following is a conversation with Neal Stephenson, a legendary science fiction writer
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exploring ideas in mathematics, science, cryptography, money, linguistics, philosophy, and virtual
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reality, from his early book Snow Crash to his new one called Termination Shock.
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He doesn't just write novels.
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He worked at the space company Blue Origin for many years, including technically being
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Blue Origin's first employee.
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He also was the chief futurist at the virtual reality company Magic Leap.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Neal Stephenson.
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You write both historical fiction, like World War II in Cryptonomicon, and science fiction,
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looking both into the past and the future.
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So let me ask, does history repeat itself, in which way does it repeat itself, in which
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I'm afraid it repeats itself a lot.
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So I think human nature kind of is what it is.
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And so we tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again.
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And so it's kind of the exception rather than the rule when something new happens.
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What role does technology play in the suppression or in revealing human nature?
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Well, the standards of living, life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within
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the last, particularly the last hundred years.
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I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification, the internet.
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These are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health and longevity
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that exceed anything that was seen before in human history.
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So people are living longer, they're generally healthier, and so on.
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But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns, some of which are not very
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So some of it has to do with the constraints on resources, presumably with technology you
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have less and less constraints on resources.
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So we get to maybe emphasize the better angels of our nature.
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And in so doing, does that not potentially fundamentally alter the sort of the experience
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that we have of life on earth?
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You know, until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think.
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But you know, people will find ways to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind
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of psychological itch that they have got.
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And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of
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Germany prior to the rise of Hitler, World War II, and kind of explain Hitler, at least
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partially by just the misery that people were living in at that time.
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The economic collapse.
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Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and the decline in standard of living.
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And that sounds like a plausible explanation.
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But there are economic troubles now for sure.
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We had the bank collapse in 2008.
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And there's stagnation in some people's standards of living.
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But it's hard to explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years just strictly
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on the basis of people are poor and angry and sad.
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I think they want to be angry.
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So without being political in a divisive kind of way, can we talk about the lessons you
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can draw from World War II?
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This singular event in human history, it seems like, and yet, as you say, history rhymes
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at the very least.
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Being who I am, I tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened in conjunction
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Which may not be where you want to go.
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Well, there's several things.
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Sorry to interrupt.
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So one in Cryptonomicon is more like the Alan Turing side of things, right?
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And then there's the outside of technology.
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First of all, there's the tools of war, which is a kind of technology.
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But then there's just like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.
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Well, so one of the things that emerges from the war and from the extermination camps is
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that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature.
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So you have to learn that lesson to be an educated person, and you have to know that
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even in a supposedly enlightened, civilized society, people can become monsters quite
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So that is for sure the big takeaway.
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Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil runs through the heart
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That all of us are capable?
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I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager because my grandfather
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had it in his house because he was one of these Americans who was obsessed with the
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Soviet Union and the Soviet threat and wanted people to be aware of some of what had happened.
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And so he had those books lying around and I would read them.
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And it's a similar kind of parallel story to what happened in Germany during the war,
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this creation of this system of camps and oppression and lots of troubling behavior.
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To me it's a story of how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead
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But it's also a story of bravery, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood and basically
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You have a man's search for meaning, which is the story of a man in a concentration camp
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basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions.
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So to me World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature.
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It's a little moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity.
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So I'm not so sure that it leads me to a pessimistic view of the world, the fact that somebody
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like Hitler could happen, the fact that a lot of people could follow Hitler and get
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excited and maybe even love the hate of the other for some moment of time.
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I think all of us are capable of that, but I think all of us also have a capacity for
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And I think, I don't know what you think, but I think we have a greater desire for good
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And it seems like that's where technology is very useful as a guide, as a helping hand.
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Can you give me an example maybe?
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So I give you examples of futuristic technologies and I can give you examples of current technologies.
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Current technologies, knowledge in the form of very basic knowledge, which is like Wikipedia
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and search the original dream of Google that I think is very much a success, which is making
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the world's information accessible at your fingertips.
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That kind of technology enables the natural, if this axiom, this assumption that people
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want to do good is true, then letting them discover all of the information out there,
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false information and true information, all of it, and let them explore that's going to
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lead to a better world, to better people.
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Fascist technologies is, I personally, I mentioned to you offline, sort of love artificial intelligence.
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And so AI that's an assistant, that's a guide, like a mentor to you, that you can in the
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way that Google searches, but smarter, where you can help send it out and say, this is
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the direction in which I want to grow, not authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm
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of telling you this is how you should grow, but almost the opposite, where you use it
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as an assistant, a servant in your journey towards knowledge.
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That sounds like an easy thing, but it's actually from an AI perspective very difficult.
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I mean, this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which talks about
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a book that essentially does that.
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And I've been sort of watching people try to come at the problem of building that thing
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from different directions for ever since the book came out, basically.
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And so I kind of have, although I haven't worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the
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level of difficulty in realizing that goal.
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So that book is in the 90s, so as Google is coming to be, it's essentially not Google,
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but the search engine, the initial search engines, which gave birth to Google essentially
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That was still in the era of Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines.
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And yeah, I'm pretty sure I had not heard of Google at that point.
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That would have been 95, 96.
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I think the book came out in 94.
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And then, of course, the social networks followed, which is another form of guidance through
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the space of information.
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Well, what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them.
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And so I saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that 20 years ago, if you
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had Googled Pythagorean theorem, chances are you would have been taken directly to a page
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explaining the Pythagorean theorem.
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If you do it now, you're probably going to...
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The top hits are going to be from somebody who's got an angle, who's got a scheme, right?
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They're trying to sell you math tutoring or they're working some kind of marketing plan
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So the traditional engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational
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That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones.
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First of all, to defend the people with the angle, right?
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They're trying to find business models to fund, oftentimes, which is funny you went
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with Pythagorean, like you went at math, those greedy bastards, but it's great.
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How can we monetize the Pythagorean theorem?
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Well, I mean, education, right, is just to figure out like people who love math education,
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for example, love it purely, not purely, but very often love it for itself, for just teaching
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Because, you know, when coming face to face with, for example, like the YouTube algorithm,
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they start to try to figure out, okay, how can I make money off of this?
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The primary goal is still that love of education, but they also want to make that love of education
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their full time job.
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But I see that sort of that dance of humanity with the algorithms as it finds this kind
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of local pocket of optimality, or suboptimality, whatever, it gets stuck in it.
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It's a pocket of some sort.
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But I see that pocket as way better than what we had before in the 80s, right, or the 90s
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before the internet.
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But like, and now we're now, this is also human nature, we start writing very eloquent
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articles about how this pocket is clearly a pocket, it's not very good, and we can imagine
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much better lands far beyond, but the reality is it's better than before, and now we're
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waiting for a new book.
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And you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group of
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geniuses that just say, enough is enough, I have an idea, this is how we get out.
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And it's too easy to be sort of, I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks
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in your articles being cynical about being in this pocket, and we are forever stuck in
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this pocket, and then coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally,
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like it's collapsing, stuck forever like a prison in this pocket, but reality, it's just
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clickbait articles and books until one curious ant comes up with the next pocket.
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Yeah, tunnels through the barrier or gets enough energy to jump over the barrier.
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And eventually we'll be, as you've talked about, I mean, we'll colonize the solar system,
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and then we'll be stuck in the solar system, and then people will say, well, we're screwed
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because when the sun energy runs out, there's no way to get to the next solar system, and
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It goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.
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I think getting out of the solar system is going to be a hard one.
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So can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think, back to sort of a serious question,
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why do you think it's hard to get outside of our solar system?
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It's just an energy calculation.
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I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want, but the idea of getting there in one
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lifetime or a few lifetimes requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate.
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And then as soon as you get halfway there, you need to expend an equal amount of energy
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to decelerate, or you'll just go shooting by.
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And so that means carrying a lot of energy.
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And there's ideas like Yuri Milner, I think, is still funding the idea to use laser propulsion
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to send something to another star system, a small object.
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But it'll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.
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They never talk about that part, like how do we slow down?
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It's a quick flyby to take a good picture, I guess.
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Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by.
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So, and that's great if it happens, I'm not knocking it.
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But the amount of energy that's needed is just staggering, and there's other issues
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like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation?
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How do you prevent people from going crazy?
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What happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of
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So that's sort of some combination of expanding human lifespan, but also just good old fashioned,
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stable society on a spaceship.
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Yeah, yeah, the generation ship.
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No, I think that's the only way.
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It would have to keep going for a long time.
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And they might get to where they're going and find a shitty solar system.
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We can try to do some advanced survey, but if you get there and all the planets in that
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solar system are just garbage planets, then it's kind of a big let down for this like
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thousand year voyage that you've just been on, right?
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So we have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive
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in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with.
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So that sets a bound on the size of the planet and what we need in the way of temperature
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and atmosphere and so on.
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So when you look at all those complications, then basically building sort of exactly the
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environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell
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It's hard to make an economic argument, let's say, for making that journey.
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One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that the people who are trying
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to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religious reasons.
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I think that's the only reason that you would do it because economically it just makes more
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sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.
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Well, isn't everything done for religious reasons?
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Like why do we exploration?
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Why do we go to the moon again and do the other things?
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What does JFK said is not because they're easy, but because they're hard.
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Isn't that kind of a religious reason?
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I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once said that the Apollo moon landings were
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communism's greatest achievement.
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Yeah, so the conflict between nations is a kind of...
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Not exactly a religion, but it's what you're talking about.
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Well, it's a struggle for meaning and that meaning isn't found in some kind of...
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It's hard to find meaning in mathematics.
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It's found in some kind of in music and religion, whatever, art.
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Some people do, but those are probably not enough of them to...
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People that find meaning in mathematics, they usually find meaning between the lines nevertheless,
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not in the actual proving some kind of thing.
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So from a cost perspective, do you actually see a possible future where we're building
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these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them one a year out like wandering
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ants out into the galaxy?
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I have nothing against it.
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It's just, like I said, it's got the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual
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or kind of non tangible calculus.
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So from a business model perspective, you don't think there's a business model there?
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One of the many fascinating things you've done in your life, you were at the very beginning,
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you were the person that convinced Jeff Bezos to start a spaceship company, a space company.
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You were there at Blue Origin for a few years in the beginning working on alternate propulsion
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systems and at least according to Wikipedia, alternate business models.
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Yeah, I mean, to go back to the first thing you said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required
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a lot of convincing.
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He'd been thinking about it since he was five years old and it was an inevitability.
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But the idea that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to just do some advanced scouting work,
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explore the corners of the space of possibilities.
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And so that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to Blue Origin.
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And so it was a small staff of people that did that for a few years.
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And I think it was about 2003, 2004 that it swung decisively towards the direction it's
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been following ever since, which is using basically existing aerospace technologies
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and models to make chemical fueled rockets for space tourism.
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I believe and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets is just
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an accident of history that comes out of World War II.
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So until World War II, rockets are being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard.
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But then Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, but he can't quite reach it and the
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Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized.
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So he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with rockets, which is a terrible misallocation
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It's a terrible idea.
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So it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic.
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But that's the situation that existed.
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So they built these rockets, that's the V2.
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And then it's just a complete coincidence that that war ends with atomic bombs being
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developed in a completely separate super weapon program.
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And so suddenly the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist
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before because if you've got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them.
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You can do it with bombers, but it's a lot better to just hurl them to the other side
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of the world on the top of a rocket.
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So suddenly rockets, which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V2 program, got a much
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bigger boost during the 50s and 60s.
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And it is a complete, you're right, for some reason I never thought of this, it is an accident
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of history that nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time.
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First of all, nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time as World
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That's an accident in history.
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And then the fact, okay, so then Hitler started using rockets, that's an accident of, okay,
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that's fascinating.
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That's a fascinating set of coincidences.
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Yeah, which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way.
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By the time these rockets are kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and
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so devastating that nobody really wants to use them.
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But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the socket on
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the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb.
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So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war.
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I'd love to be in the meeting where the first guy brought that up as an idea.
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It's probably a Russian.
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Why don't we strap a person to the rocket?
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Well, it probably was because they did it first, right?
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The Russians did it first.
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And they had perhaps less respect for sort of safety protocols.
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They were a little bit more willing to sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to risk the life
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This is basically the story of how through all of this competition and because of these
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historical accidents, trillions of R&D dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical
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rocket technology, which has now advanced to an incredibly high degree.
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But there's other ways to make things go really fast, which is all that rockets do.
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That's all orbit is.
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It's just going really fast.
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And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about alternate
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schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets.
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And so one of the first things that I learned kind of trying to explore new possibilities
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was that I could put all of my brainpower to work and be creative as I could and invent
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some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast.
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And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had thought the same
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idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math.
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And so at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and
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just go poking around trying to find those guys.
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So there's a number of ideas that we looked at.
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Some are crazier, some are less crazy.
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And the direction that that company eventually took was chemical rockets.
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Is there something you can comment on possible ideas?
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So first of all, you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion.
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So that's, I mean, you've probably heard of Project Orion, which was the...
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Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to power a large space vehicle
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by detonating atomic bombs behind it.
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And so one of the other people who was working at Blue Operations during this time was George
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Dyson, the son of Freeman.
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And so we knew all about Project Orion and he found an old film that they'd shot on a
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beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like lumps of C4.
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So that was an idea, but for a private company, obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was
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probably out of scope.
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So it was more of a theoretical thing.
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There's a conceptually similar approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur
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Kantrowitz and some others, where you take a pulsed laser and you fire it at a vehicle
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that has a block of ice on the back.
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And the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma.
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And plasma is opaque because it conducts.
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And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets
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really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice.
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And then you wait a moment for that to dissipate and then you do it again.
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So it would just kind of vibrate its way.
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Like it sounds really violent, but Freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber
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sold tennis shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a mild vibration.
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So there your source of energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific impulse
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than you could get by burning chemicals.
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Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr, that just
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would heat up a heat exchanger by many converging solid state lasers from the ground.
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And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that.
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We looked at tall towers.
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I spent a while looking kind of semi seriously at giant bullwhips.
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What's a bullwhip?
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Just a whip, you have them here in Texas, right?
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Yeah, I understand.
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But how does that have to do with propulsion?
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If you think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the
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So it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people with no technology have been
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able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural trick.
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Just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this.
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So that's the thing I still think about from time to time.
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You can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain or other flexible materials
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that just kind of stand up under their own physics.
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I mean, it's kind of awesome to imagine.
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So imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip, but have at the end of it a spaceship.
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That would detach at the moment of maximum velocity.
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Why wouldn't that?
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So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question.
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It was more almost a symbolic way of saying, look, there's all kinds of physics we haven't
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It's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets.
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It's just that more money's gone into chemical rockets, right?
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Can I ask you a question on propulsion that's a little bit more out there?
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So I don't know if you've seen quite a lot of recent articles and reports and so on about
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UFOs, like the Tic Tac aircraft.
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I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it, but I haven't gone deep into it.
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So the DOD released footage filmed by pilots, and there's a lot of reports about objects
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that moved in ways they haven't seen before that seem to defy the laws of physics if we
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consider the aircraft that we have today.
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So the reason I asked you that is because it kind of, to me, whatever the heck it is,
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it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion.
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If it's like secret projects from foreign nations or it's physical phenomena that we
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don't yet understand, like ball lightning, all those kinds of things, or if it is aliens
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or objects from an alien civilization.
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I most likely believe if it's an object from an alien civilization, it's got to be like
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a really dumb drone that just got lost.
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It's definitely not like the pinnacle of intelligence.
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It's like some teenager's science fair experiment.
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Yeah, it just flew for a few centuries out and just landed, and then we humans are all
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like really excited about this wild thing.
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I mean, what do you think about those...
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First of all, like the millions of reports of UFOs, right?
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There's some psychology there that's deeply cultural, but also the possibility of aliens
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having visited Earth.
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Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see some better pictures.
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For the reason I mentioned earlier, having to do with the difficulty of traveling between
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star systems, it's really hard for me to believe it's aliens.
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I just can't understand why you would go to all that trouble to transport something across
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light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly doing.
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Like how is that interesting?
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How does that justify the trip?
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So if you travel across those kinds of distances, you would make a bigger splash.
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First of all, I would expect that the arrival of these things would be something we'd notice.
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It's got to decelerate into our solar system unless it got here really, really, really
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So I guess that's a possibility and just kind of snuck in.
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So at the end, we would detect some kind of footprint in terms of energy.
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So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad, it makes more sense
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in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies, they're just kind
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of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason, like not trying to communicate.
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Can you imagine a scenario where aliens have visited Earth or are visiting Earth and we
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wouldn't notice it at all?
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I mean, if they've got technology to get here, they've probably got technology to conceal
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the fact that they're trying to conceal themselves.
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I meant more like they're not trying to conceal themselves, but we're just our cognitive capabilities
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are like too limited and we are not thinking big enough.
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We're looking for little green men, we're looking for things that operate at a time
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scale that's human like, you know.
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I love thinking about ideas like that.
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That's great science fiction novel fodder that the aliens are so different that we simply
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Is there, in terms of language, do you think it would be difficult, not aliens visiting
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us but traveling to other places to find a common language?
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You've written about the importance of language in intelligent civilizations.
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How difficult is the problem to bridge the gap between aliens and humans in terms of
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language so we're not lost in translation?
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Yeah, I mean, there's different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they
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are to us, you know.
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I mean, there's a school of thought that says, basically, advanced life has to be carbon
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based for just reasons of chemistry.
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So right away, if you impose that limitation, then you're kind of assuming something that's
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starting to be biologically similar to us.
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So if they're about as big as we are and they kind of move around in space, in a physical
link |
body the way we do, then there's probably a way to solve that communication problem.
link |
If they're beings of pure energy from Star Trek or something like that, then it's a different
link |
Well, I love thinking about that kind of stuff too.
link |
I mean, consciousness itself may be alien.
link |
I mean, it could be, like you said, beings of pure energy.
link |
I think of life as just complex systems, and the kind of forms those complex systems can
link |
take seems to be much larger than the particular biological systems we see here on Earth.
link |
I have to ask a Twitter question about aliens.
link |
This is for Twitter.
link |
What would you expect from Twitter?
link |
Can humans have sex with aliens?
link |
I asked a language question.
link |
Can they communicate?
link |
Can they fall in love before sex?
link |
That's how it works.
link |
So which question am I answering?
link |
The sex or the love?
link |
I mean, it depends what is more fundamental to relations across intelligent species.
link |
I mean, sex can mean a lot of things.
link |
So I mean, if you're...
link |
Your production, right?
link |
You know, in Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to really suspend your disbelief to
link |
think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human, right?
link |
Because that's just not going to work DNA wise.
link |
So if by sex, you mean reproductive sex, then I would say no, unless you go to a panspermia
link |
kind of theory, which is that, you know, humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic,
link |
you know, program of some sort.
link |
And then we're just returning home, hanging out with our old relatives.
link |
But that doesn't seem, you know, it doesn't seem plausible.
link |
We know that humans had sex with Neanderthals, with Denisovans, so you could think of them
link |
as aliens that came from our planet.
link |
So that's a kind of data point, I guess.
link |
But you know, if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind of gratifying physical
link |
interaction then sure.
link |
And that's how we get to love.
link |
And love can take many forms.
link |
Love can certainly take many forms.
link |
I have to ask you, in terms of space, just looking at where Blue Origin is, looking at
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where SpaceX is today, and maybe looking out 10, 20 years out from now, are you impressed
link |
at what's happening?
link |
We just saw William Shatner go up to space.
link |
Yeah, I was just watching his video this morning before I came here.
link |
Are you impressed at where things stand today?
link |
I mean, SpaceX in particular has done things that are just unbelievable.
link |
And I don't think anyone was anticipating 20 years ago, let's say, when this all started,
link |
just the speed with which they'd be able to rack up these incredible achievements.
link |
If you've kind of even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made and so the difficulty
link |
of doing any kind of space travel, what they've achieved is just unbelievable.
link |
What about maybe a question about Elon Musk?
link |
Even more than Jeff Bezos, he has a very kind of ambitious vision of this project that we're
link |
on as a species, of becoming a multi planetary species and becoming that quickly, as soon
link |
as possible, landing on Mars, colonizing Mars.
link |
What do you think of that project?
link |
There's two questions to ask.
link |
First, the question is, what do you think about the project of colonizing Mars?
link |
And second, what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically ambitious
link |
at achieving the impossible, what a lot of people would say is impossible?
link |
I think that colonizing Mars is the kind of goal that's easily stated.
link |
It's the kind of thing that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs
link |
So I think it's well chosen in that way.
link |
I have technical questions about, there's a problem of perchlorates on the surface of
link |
Mars that's going to be big trouble.
link |
And there's radiation.
link |
What about business questions?
link |
Do you think, because you mentioned sort of going outside of the solar system would best
link |
be done for religious reasons.
link |
What about colonizing Mars?
link |
Can you spin it into a business proposition?
link |
It's hard to think of a resource that's on Mars that could be brought back here cheaply
link |
enough to compete with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here.
link |
So I don't know if there is a business plan for that or if it's just strictly we're going
link |
to go there and see what happens.
link |
Maybe again we need communism to get us going, to give us a reason, a little bit of the competition.
link |
Well there's plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonize Mars vision that they're
link |
willing to just go all in on it, even if there's not a business plan behind it.
link |
But I think it's well chosen.
link |
I think it's probably the only approach to take.
link |
A lot of the, when white people came to this continent and started colonizing it, there
link |
was not a lot of coherent planning.
link |
What plans they did have turned out to be terrible plans.
link |
Trying to come up with plans that extend decades into the future is a waste of time.
link |
So do it for the kind of unexplainable love of the unknown, like the journey towards exploring
link |
the unknown and just kind of keep going.
link |
You saw it with Shatner and his reaction to the flight yesterday.
link |
He, for him that trip was more than worth it just for these intangible reasons.
link |
I haven't watched the video yet.
link |
He was trying to express, talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of rise
link |
above the thin blue blanket of the atmosphere and you're up into the blackness.
link |
And that had a huge impact on him.
link |
So he was kind of, I wouldn't say groping for words because he was pretty eloquent,
link |
but he was trying to express his feelings about that in a way that is pretty gripping
link |
So you worked on this kind of stuff, we can go back 10 years ago.
link |
You wrote an essay called Innovation Starvation.
link |
You worked on this kind of idea since then, kind of looking at maybe a little bit cynically
link |
about our age today and our unwillingness to take on big risky projects.
link |
So in the face of that, what do you think of people like Elon Musk?
link |
Because to me, people like that are inspiring and gives you hope in the face of a more kind
link |
of pessimistic perspective of our age.
link |
Yeah, well he's clearly willing to tackle big ambitious projects without a lot of kind
link |
of soul searching or trying to make up his mind, right?
link |
It's just like, let's dig tunnels under cities.
link |
Step one, make a joke about it on Twitter.
link |
Step two, actually do it.
link |
And I mean, things have slowed down quite a bit.
link |
Our ability to build things at pace is a lot less than it was, and there's reasons for
link |
We're more concerned with safety and environmental impacts than people were when they were building
link |
some of the great Publixworks projects of the mid 20th century.
link |
But we're at the point now where even just maintaining the stuff that we've got is such
link |
a huge project that we need to put big resources into it and good minds into it, or else we're
link |
going to be losing things that we take for granted.
link |
Do you think that there's a lot to be done in the digital space?
link |
You mentioned sort of Wikipedia and knowledge, don't you think there could be a lot of flourishing
link |
in the space of innovation, in terms of innovation in the digital space?
link |
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see that.
link |
I think it's where a lot of the brainpower went during the last couple of generations,
link |
because people who might previously have been building rockets or other kinds of hard technologies
link |
ended up instead going into programming, computer science, which is understandable and great.
link |
We've got structural problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty
link |
severe, and so I certainly hope that we're not, 10 years from now, that we're not exactly
link |
where we are today when it comes to that stuff.
link |
We need to move on.
link |
The beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do things, and they give
link |
opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the old, which is a
link |
dream for me to see new social media that beats out the ways of the old.
link |
So I tend to, you perhaps agree that it's not, that it's impossible to do social media
link |
I mean, I listened to your interview with Jaren a couple of weeks ago, and I know Jaren,
link |
and we've talked about this.
link |
He went hard on me.
link |
He basically said, like, it's impossible.
link |
Well, the last time I kind of paid attention to Jaren's thoughts on it, he was thinking
link |
in terms of that basically there should be micro payments such that if I, by clicking
link |
the like button on something, I'm essentially giving valuable intellectual property to Facebook
link |
or Twitter or whatever.
link |
It's not a very large amount of IP, but it's definitely a transfer of information that
link |
when they aggregate it is beneficial to them.
link |
So and now I do remember that he, on his interview with you, was talking about what, data unions
link |
Those are a lot of interesting ideas, but for me, the biggest disagreement was in the
link |
level of cynicism.
link |
He has a distrust and cynicism towards people in Silicon Valley being able to do these kinds
link |
And I'm really, okay, when you have a large crowd of people that are doing things the
link |
wrong way, you should nevertheless maintain optimism because what's important is to find
link |
the one person in that room that's going to do things the right way.
link |
Cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room.
link |
So he was saying, I've been here a long time.
link |
I've known, you know, I understand like how these folks work, they think they're gods
link |
and they know the right way to do things and they will tell you how to do those things.
link |
And that kind of hubris is going to always lead you astray when you are the one who's
link |
engineering the algorithms.
link |
And there's a lot of deep truth to that because algorithms are powerful.
link |
And many people when given power do not do the best of things.
link |
I mean, most, what is it, the old Lincoln line, if you want to test the man's character,
link |
But that doesn't mean that some people are not able to handle the power, that some people
link |
are not able to come up with good ideas that create better social media.
link |
Yeah, I didn't interpret Jaren's statements as being entirely cynical and hopeless.
link |
He's definitely raising, you know, issues of concern.
link |
But he wouldn't be out, you know, writing the books that he's written and talking about
link |
this stuff if he didn't think there was a way.
link |
If he didn't think there was hope, yeah.
link |
And part of it, as you probably know with Jaren, he just loves a good argument.
link |
He just loves to have a little bit of fun.
link |
Well I have to ask you about, I mean, we talked about taking all big, bold, risky ideas.
link |
So in your new book, Termination Shock, it's set here in Texas.
link |
Part of it is, yeah.
link |
It's a great place to set it.
link |
So in it, the main character, TR McCooligan, a Texas billionaire oil man and truck stop
link |
magnate, decides to solve climate change, to take on climate change by himself.
link |
So this is an interesting philosophical exploration of how to solve climate change from a perspective
link |
that's perhaps different than we've been thinking about.
link |
I wouldn't use the word solve, but let's say ameliorate the temporary effects.
link |
Take on the challenge.
link |
So it's very interesting, but as, so there's a gradual nature to this process.
link |
And I mean, just like in your book, the power of innovation is something that has saved
link |
us quite a few times in history.
link |
So what role does that play in this gradual process?
link |
So ultimately we don't solve the problem until we get the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
link |
But that is going to take a while.
link |
We're still adding more.
link |
We haven't even started to reduce the amount.
link |
So there's two possibilities inside to interrupt is reduce the amount that we're putting in
link |
the atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere.
link |
We have to do both.
link |
And those are two different kind of efforts in terms of like what's involved.
link |
Because it stays up there.
link |
So I think just last week, China announced that they're going to try to level off their
link |
CO2 emissions in like 2030.
link |
So 2031, they'll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they did in 2030, which
link |
is still a lot of CO2 in 2060, they're saying will be net zero.
link |
So if everyone in the world does that and the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere by then is
link |
say 450 parts per million, it'll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out.
link |
And taking it out is hard.
link |
It's a big, it took us a long time.
link |
We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs and burn all that stuff.
link |
We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create all of that CO2.
link |
And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove the CO2 and get
link |
it back down, hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used to be.
link |
So how about you get a single Texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts huge quantities
link |
of sulfur into the upper atmosphere.
link |
That's idea number one.
link |
This is called solar geoengineering.
link |
And it's a, we know that it's a possibility on a technical level because volcanoes have
link |
been doing it forever.
link |
So many times in human history, we've seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a
link |
global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years.
link |
And one of these things happened I think in the 60s or 70s in Indonesia and the Australians
link |
sent a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume.
link |
And when it came back down, the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it.
link |
So one of the Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid.
link |
So that was our first kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was
link |
And so we know then Pinatubo came along in the 90s and did this experiment for us.
link |
So we know that sulfur in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric
link |
acid after it combines with water and those bounce back some of the sun's rays and reduce
link |
the amount of solar energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live.
link |
So we know that it works and we also know that the stuff goes away after a couple of
link |
So it gradually washes out.
link |
And so it's not a permanent thing.
link |
The good news, bad news is it's not permanent.
link |
So if you don't like what's happening, you can just stop and wait a couple of years and
link |
you'll get back to where you started.
link |
The bad news if you're in favor of this kind of thing is that you have to keep doing it
link |
So this guy is one of those, he's read these papers, the TR, the character in the book.
link |
He knows all this and all people who are familiar with climate science kind of know this.
link |
It's a pretty well established fact.
link |
And so he just decides he's going to take action unilaterally and do this.
link |
And so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there, but because it's Texas, he builds
link |
the biggest gun in the world.
link |
It's just six barrels pointed straight up and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur
link |
into the stratosphere.
link |
And so the book is about not so much that as how people react to his doing that, what
link |
the political ramifications are around the world because this is an extremely controversial
link |
idea and not everyone's on board with it.
link |
And even if you are willing to consider using a technological intervention, the fact is
link |
that it's going to have different effects on different parts of the world.
link |
So some areas may suffer more negatives than positives and they're not going to be happy.
link |
So what do you think, so in his case, in TR's case, he can get around getting permission
link |
If we were to look at us facing outside of the story, us facing climate change, where
link |
do you think the solution will come from?
link |
Governments working together or from bold billionaire Texans?
link |
I'm pretty sure that this kind of intervention is never going to emerge from Western democracies.
link |
This kind of, sorry, government coordinated, which option one?
link |
Solar geoengineering.
link |
Solar geoengineering.
link |
From a government, from a, like those are, I want to sort of the distinction, one is
link |
the idea, the technological idea you're talking about, but two is like who comes up with the
link |
idea and agrees on it, governments or individuals.
link |
If this were to happen, I think it would be either an individual or more likely just some
link |
government somewhere that just decides it's in their interests to unilaterally do this.
link |
And you know, that's not me advocating it, it's just, it would be comparatively so cheap
link |
and easy to implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do
link |
it once things get bad enough.
link |
But I don't think that governments will, or Western governments, just because they're
link |
not, well, we've seen what happened with vaccines, right?
link |
So getting people to take vaccinations or wear masks, you know, has turned out to be
link |
incredibly hard, even though it might save those people's lives.
link |
See, I blame, that's not Western, that's, I blame failure of leadership there, of leaders
link |
being not coming off as authentic, not being inspiring, uniting, all those kinds of things.
link |
I think that's possible.
link |
I think it's just that we've gotten, the leaders we have right now aren't the right people
link |
because we've lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively comfortable times.
link |
And it feels like unfortunate if you just look at history, that hard times made great
link |
leaders and easy times make like bureaucrats that are egotistical and greedy and not very
link |
interesting and not very bold.
link |
No, I think that's fair.
link |
So, you know, we may be entering one of those interesting times, you know, in the Chinese
link |
curse sense, yeah.
link |
So I could be wrong, but I mean, there've been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering.
link |
There was a plan to send up some balloons, high altitude balloons to take some measurements
link |
in Scandinavia that got squashed by objections from people who lived up there who were just
link |
opposed to the whole program on principle.
link |
So we'll see a lot more of that.
link |
And it's going to be a hard program to advocate for just because I think people don't quite
link |
understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and how far we are from even slowing
link |
down the rate that we're adding more to say nothing of bringing that number down.
link |
We're a long way out from that.
link |
Do you see in terms of portfolio of solutions, us becoming a multi planetary species as part
link |
Is this also being a motivator for investing some percent of GDP into becoming a multi
link |
planetary species?
link |
And what percent should that be, you think?
link |
You know, in an indirect way, maybe.
link |
I mean, you know what people will say, which is the same argument that has been leveled
link |
against space exploration since the Apollo program, which is why don't we solve our problems
link |
here on Earth before we spend money going into space.
link |
So I've never been a believer in that argument.
link |
I think there could be a sense in which the new perspective that could be obtained by
link |
thinking about like if we're thinking about terraforming Mars, changing its atmosphere,
link |
making it more amenable to life and survival.
link |
You could see that maybe changing people's opinions about terraforming the Earth.
link |
There are some dangerous consequences to this particular idea of blasting software of geoengineering.
link |
What do you make of sort of big, bold ideas that are a double edged sword?
link |
Are all ideas like this, all big ideas like this, they have the potential to have highly
link |
beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences?
link |
I wouldn't say all.
link |
I think, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, how technology developed
link |
in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when people maybe had unrealistic
link |
ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently attentive to the possible downsides.
link |
So we got, and there's a reason why, I mean, in the mid 20th century, we saw antibiotics,
link |
we saw the polio vaccine, we saw just simple things like refrigerators in the home.
link |
My grandmother to her dying day called the refrigerator the ice box because when she
link |
grew up, it was a box with ice in it.
link |
So you see all that change and it's largely for the benefit of people.
link |
And so if somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to build nuclear reactors to make
link |
energy or here's a new chemical called DDT that's going to kill mosquitoes, then it's
link |
easy to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides.
link |
And of course, we know that the way that those early reactors were built and the way that
link |
the supply chain was built to create the fuel and deal with the waste was poorly thought
link |
out and we're still dealing with the resulting problems at places like Hanford in the state
link |
And we know that DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects, also had terrible effects
link |
on bird populations.
link |
So the kind of backlash that happened in the 70s that is still kind of going on is to sort
link |
of assume that everything is a double edged sword and always to look for, we have to absolutely
link |
convince ourselves that the downside isn't going to come back and bite us before we can
link |
adopt any new technology.
link |
And I think the people are overly sensitized to that now.
link |
Yeah, it's funny, depending on the technology, people are a little bit too terrified of certain
link |
technologies, like artificial intelligence is one.
link |
My sense is that the things that they're afraid of aren't the things that are likely going
link |
to happen in terms of negative things.
link |
It's probably impossible to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences.
link |
But what's also interesting is for AI as an example, people don't think enough about the
link |
I mean, the same is true with social media.
link |
It's very popular now, for some reason, to talk about all the negative effects of social
link |
We've immediately forgotten how incredible it is to connect across the world.
link |
There's a deep loneliness within all of us, we long to connect and social media, at least
link |
in part, enables that even in its current state.
link |
And all the negative things we see with social media currently are also in part just revealing
link |
the basics of human nature.
link |
It didn't make us worse, it's just bringing it to the surface.
link |
And step one of solving a problem is bringing it to the surface.
link |
The fact that there's a division, the fact that we're easily angered and upset and all
link |
of that, the witch hunts, all those kinds of things, that's human nature and it just
link |
reveals that allowing us to now work on it, it's therapy.
link |
And so that's another example of a technology that's just, we're not considering the positive
link |
effects now and in the future enough of.
link |
I have to ask you about, there's a million things I can ask you about, but virtual reality,
link |
You've thought about virtual reality, mixed reality quite a bit.
link |
What are the interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality
link |
or mixed reality in the next few years?
link |
Yeah, so I was at Magic Leap for, what, five years.
link |
With the best title of all time.
link |
And so I sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content
link |
R&D, so we're trying to make content for AR, but because it's such a new medium, it's more
link |
of an engineering R&D project almost than a creative project.
link |
So it was fascinating to see everything that goes into making an AR system that runs.
link |
So AR, an AR device, if it's really gonna do AR, needs to be running Slam in real time.
link |
And that alone is a big...
link |
So for people who don't know, first of all, virtual reality is creating an almost fully
link |
artificial world and putting you inside it.
link |
Augmented reality, AR, is taking the real world and putting stuff on top of that real
link |
world, and when you say Slam, that means in real time, the device needs to be able to
link |
sense, accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently to be able to reconstruct
link |
the 3D structure of it so you can put stuff on top of it.
link |
And doing that in real time, presumably not just real time, but in a way that creates
link |
a pleasant experience for the human perception system is, yeah, that's an engineering project.
link |
Yeah, well said, and it's just one of the things that the system has to do.
link |
It's also tracking your eyes so it knows what you're looking at, how far away what you're
link |
It's performing all those functions, and it's got to keep doing that without burning up
link |
the CPU or depleting the battery unreasonably fast, and that's just table stakes.
link |
It's just the basic functions of the operating system, and then any content that you want
link |
to add has to sit on top of that.
link |
It's got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real
link |
and you don't get sick.
link |
So it's an amazing thing, and a magically shipped device that can do that in 2019.
link |
And they're about to ship the ML2, but I don't know any more about that than anyone else
link |
because I don't work there anymore.
link |
Does it still, to some degree, boil down to a killer app, a content question?
link |
Like you said, it's kind of a wide open space.
link |
Nobody knows exactly what's going to be the compelling thing.
link |
So doesn't a super compelling experience of some sort alleviate some of the need for engineering
link |
Well, there's a base layer of engineering that you have to have no matter what, but
link |
you're certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with
link |
kind of low frame rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having
link |
so much fun playing Doom or whatever.
link |
So for sure that's true.
link |
And so I was working on consumer facing content, there was a great team in Wellington, New
link |
Zealand that made a game called Dr. Groydbrod's Invaders that realized the potential of AR
link |
gaming in a way that I don't think anything else has before or since.
link |
And so that was definitely the strategy until, what, April 2020, which is when the company
link |
decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead.
link |
And I haven't seen their financial projections, but I assume they had good reasons for making
link |
that strategic decision.
link |
It just means that it's no longer necessarily targeted at just end users who want to play
link |
a game or be entertained.
link |
That to me from a dreamer, futurist perspective is heartbreaking because I don't know necessarily
link |
from in the VR space, but I see this kind of thing with robotics where to me the future
link |
of robotics is consumer facing and a lot of great roboticists, Boston Dynamics and companies
link |
like that are focused on sort of industrial applications for financial business reasons.
link |
Now I can see the parallels for sure.
link |
It was a fun project.
link |
We worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats, which just populated your room with
link |
That seemed like a killer app right there.
link |
No, we thought highly of the idea for sure.
link |
But because of the SLAM, the system knew, for example, here's a table, here's a little
link |
We know the heights.
link |
We know how high our animated baby goat can jump.
link |
So our engineers had to build a system for converting the SLAM primitives into game engine
link |
objects that the AIs in the game could navigate around.
link |
And that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how to a sample app than
link |
as a finished consumer facing.
link |
You mean the baby goat AI?
link |
That seems to me like a world I could entertain myself for hours, just every day coming home
link |
to see baby goats.
link |
I mean, it was an ambient kind of...
link |
It's not a thing that you would sit there and play like a video.
link |
But now there's baby goats.
link |
I mean, what's the purpose of having dogs and cats in your life exactly?
link |
It's kind of ambient.
link |
They're not really helping you do anything, but it's enriching your life.
link |
You can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want, but you don't have to.
link |
So we worked on that in a bigger project that was more of a storytelling in a fictional
link |
The hardware is worth a look.
link |
There's still a belief, I just saw it this morning looking at Twitter, that the Magic
link |
League never shipped anything.
link |
But they've been, since 2019, you can go to their website and buy one of these devices
link |
anytime you want to spend the money.
link |
And the new one is coming out, I think in 2022, so in a few months.
link |
What do you think, looking out 50 years from now, what wins?
link |
Virtual reality, augmented reality, or physical reality?
link |
Meaning like, what do people that have financial resources enjoy spending most of their time
link |
I've always been a fan of AR and it's kind of an easy answer because if you're wearing
link |
an AR device and you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device.
link |
If you block out what's really there, then all you're seeing is a VR.
link |
But you are, with AR, constrained to kind of operate in something that's similar to
link |
With VR, you can go into fantastical worlds.
link |
But there are still issues in those fantastical worlds with motion sickness.
link |
If your body is experiencing acceleration, your inner ear, that differs from what your
link |
eye thinks it's seeing, then you'll get sick, unless you're a very unusual person.
link |
So it doesn't mean you can't do it, it's just a constraint that VR designers have to learn
link |
So do you think it's possible that in the future, we're living mostly in a virtual reality
link |
Like, we become more and more detached from physical reality?
link |
For entertainment, maybe, for certain applications, I'm personally more, I mean, we have to make
link |
a distinction between what I would personally find interesting and what might win in the
link |
So maybe some people, maybe lots of people, would like to spend a huge amount of time
link |
I'm personally more interested in enhancing the experience that I have of the physical
link |
world, because the physical world's pretty cool, right?
link |
There's a lot to be said for moving around in the real world.
link |
And I ask you for you personally, to try to play devil's advocate, or to try to construct,
link |
to imagine a VR world where you and Neal Stephenson wouldn't want to stay.
link |
Not because the physical world all of a sudden became really bad, for some reason, like you're
link |
trying to escape it.
link |
Like, literally, it's just more enriching.
link |
In the same way, like, there's a glimmer in your eye when you said you enjoy the physical
link |
Like, double up on that glimmer for the virtual reality.
link |
Can you imagine such a world?
link |
Well, like, I'll give maybe an example that's a bridge, which is that I like making things.
link |
So I like working in a machine shop and making objects with 3D printers or machines or whatever.
link |
And so I've had to learn how to get good at using a CAD program.
link |
There's many to choose from.
link |
I use one called Fusion 360.
link |
And I can spend hours in that trying to create, imagine and create the things I want to create.
link |
And it's not virtual reality exactly, but that whole time, my whole field of view is
link |
occupied by this monitor that's showing me a window into a three dimensional space.
link |
I'm rotating things around.
link |
I'm imagining things.
link |
I'm making things.
link |
And so that is pretty close to being in virtual reality.
link |
Does that thing have to exist for you to experience true joy?
link |
Can you stay in Fusion 360 the whole time?
link |
Do you have to 3D print it and touch it?
link |
Yeah, I mean, that's my game.
link |
That's what I'm up to.
link |
But it happens that if you're building a virtual environment, if you're making a game level
link |
or creating a virtual set for a film or TV production, the thing that you're designing
link |
in the program may never physically exist.
link |
And in fact, it's preferable that it doesn't because the whole point of that is to make
link |
imaginary things that you couldn't build otherwise.
link |
So I think lots of people spend a good chunk of their working hours in something that's
link |
pretty close to VR.
link |
It's just that currently the output device happens to be a rectangular object in front
link |
You could replace that with a VR headset and they'd be doing the same stuff.
link |
There's all kinds of interfaces.
link |
For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks, but let's say actually podcasts
link |
because there's an intimate human connection in a podcast.
link |
But you get to learn about the person you're listening to and that's a real connection
link |
and that's just audio.
link |
For a lot of people, that's just audio.
link |
And for me, that's just audio as a fan of people and you kind of a little bit are friends
link |
with those people.
link |
Yeah, they're in your life, you're listening to them, yeah.
link |
And I mean, they're as far away from real as it gets.
link |
There's not even a visual component.
link |
But they're as real, like if I was on a desert island, like my imagination, like this thing
link |
works pretty good in terms of imagination.
link |
It creates a very beautiful world with just audio.
link |
Or even just reading books.
link |
Exactly, reading books.
link |
Even more so with reading books because there are certain mediums which stimulate the imagination
link |
When you present less, the imagination works more and that can create really enriching
link |
To me, the question is, can you do some of the amazing things that make life amazing
link |
in virtual worlds?
link |
It seems to me the answer there is obviously yes.
link |
Even if I, like you, am attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world, I think I
link |
can very readily imagine coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual
link |
world where you make friends and you can fall in love, where the source of love in your
link |
life is to a much greater degree inside of a virtual world.
link |
And then love means fulfillment, that means happiness, that's the thing you look forward
link |
And not some kind of dopamine rush type of love, but like long lasting like friendship.
link |
The question is on what is there in the way of applications, the content, and can it feed
link |
Can it give you, like in my example of using the CAD program, it gives me the ability to
link |
do something I enjoy, which is imagining things and making things in a particular way.
link |
Can we psychoanalyze you for a second?
link |
What exactly do you enjoy?
link |
Is there some component of you building the thing where you get to at least a little bit
link |
share with others?
link |
Like is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?
link |
Will anyone ever see it?
link |
There's a source of your enjoyment because I would argue that perhaps when like the turtles
link |
all the way down, when you get to the bottom turtle, it has to do with other sharing with
link |
And if you can then put those humans inside the VR world, then you start to...
link |
Okay, for example, you could do it in the physical world, the 3D printing, but you share
link |
it in the virtual world and that's where the source of happiness is.
link |
I think at least speaking for myself, I'm always thinking in terms of an audience and
link |
at some level I feel like I'm doing this for someone or communicating to someone, even
link |
if there's not a specific someone in mind, it could just be an abstract theoretical someone.
link |
And it's like another app I spend a lot of time in is Mathematica.
link |
And when I do a Mathematica notebook, if I'm trying to figure something out, I spend a
link |
lot of time typing, just my stuff is just huge blocks of text, just me thinking out
link |
loud and then some graphs and calculations and stuff.
link |
Because to me, that act of explaining things and commenting helps me understand what I'm
link |
And there's kind of an audience, amorphous audience in mind.
link |
I mean, most of this stuff nobody will ever see and yet I'm creating it as if there were
link |
an audience that might read this stuff because that's a necessary constraint that helps me
link |
What's the, this might be a tricky question to answer, what comes to mind as a particularly
link |
beautiful thing that you're proud of that you created inside Mathematica visualization
link |
wise or something that just comes to memory if it's possible to retrieve?
link |
So the thing I've spent the most amount of time on is I got obsessed a long time ago,
link |
was trying to tile the globe with hexagons.
link |
Well, any spherical.
link |
But with an eye towards putting it on the earth.
link |
And so, and have it be recursive.
link |
So you can have hexagons within hexagons, which is hard because and probably a bad idea
link |
because you can't tile a hexagon with smaller hexagons.
link |
They don't, they stick out.
link |
So they're, oh, they stick out.
link |
So there's a, can you do some kind of fractal hexagon situation?
link |
So it's that and people who know me are always, now make fun of me for this.
link |
So they'll send me, if they see a picture with hexagons in it, they'll like send me
link |
a link to make fun of me.
link |
One of those people, Roger Penrose or.
link |
I think Roger's a little above my level.
link |
He's into hexagons as well and tiling.
link |
So I did a lot of that and I thought, you know, it was pretty cool, but there's some
link |
like surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up.
link |
Like you've always got to have some pentagons.
link |
Like if you start with the icosahedron, which is equilateral triangles, which is a logical
link |
place to start, you can cover those with hexagons, but every vertex where the triangles come
link |
together is a pentagon.
link |
Has to be a pentagon.
link |
So it's all hexagons and then there's a pentagon at the intersections.
link |
How'd you figure that out?
link |
Is that a known fact?
link |
Well, it's just, if you look at a.
link |
Like just by inspection.
link |
It's an obvious thing.
link |
So any system that you come up with to do this has got to have this exceptions built
link |
into it for those 12.
link |
You could have quintillions of hexagons, but you've still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere.
link |
So I've blown a hell of a lot of time on that over the years.
link |
By the way, a lot of those kind of problems are very difficult to prove something about.
link |
I think Uber did it because someone, one of my friends who knows of my interest in this
link |
and who likes to give me a hard time sent me a link.
link |
This is a couple of years ago to some code base that I think came out of Uber where they
link |
You break down the whole surface of the earth into little hexagons.
link |
So that was a real knife through the heart.
link |
But I'll probably come back to it someday.
link |
Is there something special about hexagons or are you interested in all kinds of tiling?
link |
Well, I'm interested in all kinds of tiling, but I know my limitations as a math guy.
link |
So hexagons are about my speed.
link |
Just sufficient amount of complexity.
link |
But no, tiling is a really interesting problem.
link |
Both two and three dimensional tiling problems are fascinating and they're one of those ancient
link |
puzzles that has attracted brainiacs for centuries.
link |
Let me ask you a little bit about AI.
link |
What are some likely interesting trajectories for the proliferation of AI in society over
link |
the next couple of decades?
link |
Do you think about this kind of stuff?
link |
I do not think about it a lot because it's a deep topic and I don't consider myself super
link |
well informed about it.
link |
And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different things.
link |
So I've messed around just a tiny little bit with neural nets, with what's it called PCA,
link |
principal component analysis.
link |
So I guess I tend to think in terms of some granular bottom up ideas rather than big picture
link |
So like very specific algorithms, like how are they going to, what problem are they going
link |
to solve in society such that it has like a lot of big ripple effects.
link |
I mean, we could talk a particular successful AI systems and success defined in different
link |
ways of recent years.
link |
So one is language models with GPT3.
link |
Most importantly, they're self supervised, meaning they don't require much supervision
link |
from humans, which means they can learn by just reading a huge amount of content created
link |
So read the internet and from that be able to generate text and do all kinds of things
link |
It's possible they have a big enough neural network.
link |
It's going to be able to have conversations with humans based on just reading human language.
link |
That's an interesting idea.
link |
To me, the very interesting idea that people don't think about it as AI because they're
link |
kind of dumb currently is actual embodied robots.
link |
So robotics like Boston Dynamics have downstairs and upstairs legged robots.
link |
You know, the currently Boston Dynamics robots and most legged robots, most robots period
link |
Most of the challenges have to do with the actual, first of all, the engineering of making
link |
the thing work, getting a sensor suite that allows you to do the same thing as with Magic
link |
It's like a layer of like, where am I and what am I looking at?
link |
I don't need to deeply understand my surroundings at a level beyond of what will hurt if I run
link |
But even that is hard.
link |
But the thing that I think people don't in the robotics space explore enough is the human
link |
robot interaction part of the picture, which is how it makes humans feel, how robots make
link |
And I think that's going to have a very significant impact in the near future in society, which
link |
is the more you integrate AI systems of whatever form into society where humans are in contact
link |
with them regularly.
link |
So that could be embodied robotics or that could be social media algorithms.
link |
I think that has a very significant impact.
link |
And people often think like AI needs to be super smart to have an impact.
link |
I think it needs to be super integrated with society to have an impact and more and more
link |
that's happening, even if they're dumb.
link |
No, I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is that I'm associated with a combat robotics
link |
And I've been to a few battle bots competitions.
link |
And that's not like a lot of ways that's pretty far from the kind of robotics you're talking
link |
about because these robots are remote controlled.
link |
They're not autonomous.
link |
And so they're pretty simple, but it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different
link |
So there was one that was in the last year's season, the 2020 season called Rusty that
link |
was just like put together out of spare parts and it looked kind of cute and it became this
link |
huge crowd favorite because you could see it was made of like salad bowls and random
link |
pieces of hardware that this guy had like scavenged from his farm.
link |
And so immediately people kind of fell in love with this one particular robot.
link |
Whereas other robots might be like the bad guy, if you think of professional wrestling,
link |
the heel and the baby face.
link |
So people do, for reasons that are hard to understand, form these emotional reactions.
link |
And we form narratives in the same way we do when we meet human beings, we tell stories
link |
about these objects and they can be intelligent and they can be biological or they can be
link |
almost close to inanimate objects.
link |
That to me is kind of fascinating.
link |
And if robots choose to lean into that, it creates an interesting world.
link |
If they start using feedback loops to make themselves cuter.
link |
Not just cuter, but everything that humans do, let's not speak harshly of robots, humans
link |
do the same thing.
link |
Oh no, I wasn't meaning it in a, but you're right, humans based on feedback will change
link |
Yes, I do this on Instagram all the time, how do I look cuter?
link |
That's the fundamental question I ask myself.
link |
So why wouldn't a robot wanna, it's like oh wow, people really don't like the quad mount
link |
machine gun on top of my turret, maybe I should get rid of that and people would feel more
link |
Or lean into it, be proud of it.
link |
Like you won't take my gun, whatever the saying is, from my dead cold hands.
link |
I mean their personality, adding personality such that you can start to heal, you can start
link |
to weave narratives.
link |
I think that's a fascinating place where there's this feedback loop, like you said, where AI,
link |
especially when it's embodied, puts a mirror to ourselves.
link |
Just like other humans, our close friends, they kind of teach us about ourselves.
link |
We teach each other and through that process grow close.
link |
And to me it's so fascinating to expand the space of deep meaningful interactions beyond
link |
That's the opportunity I see with robots and with AI systems and that's why I don't like,
link |
my biggest problem with social media algorithms is the lack of transparency.
link |
It's not the existence of the algorithms, it's, well there's many things.
link |
Data should be controlled by people themselves.
link |
But also the lack of transparency in how the algorithms work.
link |
You change your perception of what's real in hidden ways.
link |
Like you should be aware, just like when you take, I don't know, if you take psychedelics,
link |
you should be aware that you took the psychedelics, it shouldn't be a surprise.
link |
And second, you should become a student and a scholar and there should be research done,
link |
there should be open conversation about how your perception has changed and then you become
link |
your own guide in this world of altered perception because arguably none of it is real.
link |
You get to choose the flavor of real.
link |
I mean, this is something you explore quite a bit.
link |
Do you yourself think that there is a bottom to it where there is reality, there's a base
link |
layer of reality that physics can explore and our human perception sort of layer stuff?
link |
Is there, let's go to Plato, is there such a thing as truth?
link |
I lean towards the Platonic view of things.
link |
So I believe that mathematical objects have a reality that it's not all made up by human
link |
And I don't know where that reality comes from.
link |
I can't explain it, but I do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not invented.
link |
I did a lot of, not a lot, but I did some reading of Husserl when I was writing Anathem
link |
and he's a 20th century phenomenologist and he's writing in the, he's writing at the same
link |
time as scientists are starting to understand atoms and becoming aware that when we look
link |
at this table, it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum and there's a very
link |
sparse arrangement of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space that interact with
link |
each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object.
link |
So that's kind of the beginnings of phenomenology and his stuff is pretty hard to read.
link |
You really have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time.
link |
But he's trying to come to grips with these kinds of questions.
link |
How did you come to grips with it?
link |
Why does this table feel solid?
link |
Well, I mean, we're an evolved system that there's, we have biological advantages in
link |
knowing where solid objects are.
link |
So we've got this system in our head that integrates our perceptions into this coherent
link |
One of the take homes that I like from Husserl is the idea of intersubjectivity and the idea
link |
that the fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to share our perceptions
link |
and have them ratified by other, they don't even have to be people, but a prisoner in
link |
solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects because they perceive the
link |
same things that the prisoner perceives and so convince him that he's not just hallucinating.
link |
Yeah, there's the establish a consensus, but see, that doesn't mean any of it is real.
link |
You just establish a consensus.
link |
It could be very distant from something that's real in an engineering sense of real.
link |
Like you could build it using physics.
link |
But I think that a valuable application for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except
link |
It just sits there and if you hear a door slam, you might turn to see what it is.
link |
If the robot at the same time turns to look at the door slam, it's ratifying your perception.
link |
But isn't that the basis of love is when the door slams, you both look, but for deeper
link |
things, you both hear the same music and others don't.
link |
I mean, isn't that what that means?
link |
By love, I mean depth of human connection.
link |
Yeah, you arrive at similar reactions without having to explicitly communicate it.
link |
But we could start with a robot that listens explicitly for the slam doors or scary sounds.
link |
I can think of an example of this is when I went to college, we'd be sitting at the
link |
cafeteria, a bunch of people eating our dinner together that we had just met, let's say.
link |
So a bunch of new people in your life and someone might make a funny remark or a not
link |
so funny remark or something would happen and you might then at that moment make eye
link |
contact with someone you didn't know at the other end of the table.
link |
In that moment, you would realize this person is reacting.
link |
This person heard what I heard.
link |
They're reacting the way I reacted.
link |
Nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened, but random
link |
stranger down there and I, we have this connection and then you build on that.
link |
So then the next time something happens, you automatically look at your new friend and
link |
they look back at you and before you know it, you're hanging out together because you
link |
know you've already established without even talking to each other that you're on the same
link |
It's seemingly so simple, but so powerful that establishing that you're on the same
link |
wavelength at some level.
link |
There's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that.
link |
Does this smell burned to you?
link |
I think it's burnt.
link |
If a toaster could just say that to you.
link |
Cryptonomicon published in 1999, set in the late 90s and involves hackers who build essentially
link |
Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008.
link |
So I have to kind of ask, from you looking at this layout of what's been happening in
link |
cryptocurrency, the evolution of this technology, how has it rolled out differently than you
link |
could have imagined in two ways?
link |
One the technology itself and two the human side of things, the human stories of the hackers
link |
and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless, the human side of things.
link |
Well, Cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin, it's pre Satoshi, it's pre blockchain as you point
link |
So at that point I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing among people like the Bay
link |
Area Cypherpunks in Berkeley.
link |
There was a branch here in Austin as well and a lot of their thinking was based on the
link |
idea that you would have to have a physical region of the earth that was free of government
link |
You couldn't achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network.
link |
You actually had to have a room somewhere with servers in it that a government couldn't
link |
come and meddle with.
link |
And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there were efforts to
link |
figure out jurisdictions where this might work.
link |
There was a lot of interest for a while in Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island that
link |
had some unusual jurisdictional properties.
link |
There was SeaLand, which is a platform in the North Sea.
link |
And so there was a lot of effort that went into finding these physical locations that
link |
were deemed kind of safe.
link |
And that all goes away with blockchain, it's no longer necessary.
link |
And so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways because you no longer have...
link |
From a novelist point of view, the old system was a lot more fun to work with because it
link |
gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in strange parts of the world trying
link |
to set up server rooms.
link |
So that's a great storytelling thing.
link |
There's still a little bit of that in the modern world, but it's just there's several
link |
server rooms as opposed to one centralized one.
link |
Whereas the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your GPUs
link |
from melting down.
link |
So people building things in Iceland or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean
link |
But there's still governments involved and there's still from a novelist perspective
link |
interesting dynamics with big governments like China and more sort of renegade governments
link |
from all over the world trying to contend with this idea of what to do in terms of control
link |
and power over these kinds of centers that do the mining of the cryptocurrency.
link |
So we're in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial...
link |
The stuff I was describing in Cryptonomicon had a little bit of air about it of the underpants
link |
gnomes in that we're gonna build this system and then we'll make money somehow.
link |
But the intermediate step was left out.
link |
I think we're now sort of into that phase of the thing where Bitcoin, blockchain exists,
link |
people know how it works, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist.
link |
People are using them and it's sort of like, okay, what now?
link |
Where does this all lead?
link |
Do you have a sense of where it all leads?
link |
Like is it possible that the set of technology kind of continues to have transformational
link |
effects on not just sort of finance but who gets to have power in this world?
link |
So the decentralization of power.
link |
Big questions, right?
link |
So I guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me thinking that as soon as it becomes
link |
important enough, the existing banks and people in power are gonna sort of control it.
link |
I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change in the end.
link |
There's a utopian strain sometimes in the way people think about this that I'm not so
link |
There is a technological aspect to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that make it a
link |
little easier to pull along the utopian thread because it's harder for governments to control
link |
I mean, they have much fewer options.
link |
They can ban, they can make it illegal.
link |
It's more difficult.
link |
So technology here is on the side of the powerless, the voiceless, which is a very interesting
link |
Of course, yes, it does have a utopian feel to it, but we have been making progress throughout
link |
Maybe this is what progress looks like.
link |
There will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that take advantage of
link |
it, skim off the top kind of thing, but maybe this does give more power to people that haven't
link |
had power before in a good way, like distributing power and enabling sort of more greater resistance
link |
to sort of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing, and also enabling
link |
all kinds of technologies built on top of it.
link |
Ultimately, when you digitize money, money is a kind of speech, or it's a kind of mechanism
link |
of how humans interact, and if you make that digital, more and more of the world moves
link |
to the digital space, and then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality with the
link |
In a lot of ways, I think in that realm of technology that the money per se is one of
link |
the less interesting things you can do with it, so I think cryptographically enforceable
link |
contracts and organizations built on those, that seems to me like it's got more potential
link |
for change just because we do already have money, and although it's an old system, it's
link |
been digitized to a large extent by the stripes and the credit card companies of the world.
link |
I also love the idea of connecting two smart contracts, connecting data, sort of making
link |
it more formal, it's like Mathematica, more structured, the integration of data, of weather
link |
data, of all kinds of data about the stuff in the world, so they can make contracts between
link |
people that's grounded in data, and that's actually getting closer to something like
link |
truth, because then you can make agreements based on actual data versus kind of perceptions
link |
of data, and if you can formalize, like distribute the power of who gets to tell the story, and
link |
that's an interesting kind of resistance against the powerful in the space of narrative.
link |
Yeah, David Brin has been saying for a while that the only way to settle arguments across
link |
the political divide is to make bets, so people can say the election was stolen, or whatever
link |
controversial position they're taking, and they'll keep saying it until you wager real
link |
So maybe there's something there, if you could kind of turn that into a, put a user interface
link |
Yeah, have a stake in your divisiveness, in your arguments.
link |
Will Dogecoin take over the world?
link |
You know, I don't follow the different coins that much, so I don't, I mean I hear about
link |
Dogecoin and I've kind of followed the story of it.
link |
So the interesting aspect of Dogecoin is it, so in contrast to like Bitcoin and Ethereum,
link |
which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek to solve some of
link |
the problems that we're talking about with smart contracts and resist the banks and all
link |
those kinds of things, Dogecoin operates more in the space of memes and humor, while still
link |
doing some of the similar things.
link |
And it presents to the world sort of a question of whether memes, whether humor, whether narrative
link |
will go a long way in the future.
link |
Like much farther than some kind of boring old grounded technologies.
link |
Whether we'll be playing in the space of fun.
link |
Like once we've built a base of comfort and stability and like a robust system where everyone
link |
has shelter, everyone has food and the basic needs covered, are we going to then operate
link |
in the space of fun?
link |
That's what I think about Dogecoin.
link |
Because it seems like fun spreads faster than anything else.
link |
Fun of different kinds, and that could be bad fun and that could be good fun.
link |
And so it's a battle of good fun versus bad fun.
link |
It goes viral very, very quickly when you, if you post something that people find fun
link |
And that's what Dogecoin represents.
link |
So there's like, so Bitcoin represents like financial, like serious financial instruments
link |
and then Dogecoin represents fun.
link |
And it's interesting to watch the battle go on on the internet to see which wins.
link |
This is also like open question to me of what is the internet?
link |
Because fun seems to prevail on the internet.
link |
And is that a fundamental property of the internet moving forward when you look a hundred
link |
years out, or is this a temporary thing that was true at the birth of the internet and
link |
it's just true for a couple of decades until it fades away and the adults take over and
link |
become serious again?
link |
Well, I think the adults took over initially and then it was later on that people started
link |
using it for fun, frivolous things like memes.
link |
And that's, I think that's pretty much unstoppable, you know, because even people who are very
link |
serious, you know, enjoy sending around a funny picture or something that amuses them.
link |
I personally think we spoke about World War II.
link |
I think memes will save the world and prevent all future wars.
link |
You've been handwriting your work for the past 20 years since writing The Baroque Cycle.
link |
What are the pros and cons of handwriting versus typing?
link |
For me, I started it as an experiment when I started The Baroque Cycle because I had
link |
noticed that sometimes if I was stuck having a hard time getting started, if I just picked
link |
up a pen and started writing, it was easy to go.
link |
So I just decided to keep with that.
link |
If it got in my way, I didn't like it, I could always just go back to the word processor
link |
But that never happened.
link |
So there's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's ink on paper and there's
link |
no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it.
link |
It's a slower output technique.
link |
And so a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here before it
link |
gets committed to paper, whereas I can type really fast.
link |
And so I can slam things out before I've really thought them through.
link |
So I think the first draft quality ends up being higher.
link |
And then editing, first draft of editing is just faster because instead of like trying
link |
to move the cursor around or whatever or hitting the backspace key, I can just draw a line
link |
through a word or a sentence or just around a whole paragraph and exit out.
link |
And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit, but I've also left behind a record of
link |
what the text was prior to the edit.
link |
Of course, all the digital versions have those quote unquote features, but their experience
link |
Is there a romance to just the physical, the touch of the pen to the paper doing what has
link |
been done for centuries?
link |
I think there's just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology
link |
beyond the pen and the paper is just very simple and clean and so I've got a bunch of
link |
I started buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago because I thought I would be
link |
more conservative with it, but it's still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn't really
link |
alter my habits very much.
link |
So all that said, once you do type stuff up, you use Emacs.
link |
I use Emacs, obviously the superior editor.
link |
Let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question because Emacs has been around forever.
link |
Do you think in 100 years we will still have Emacs and Vim, or like pick a let's say 50,
link |
No, I mean whenever you're doing anything in Linux, you're spending a lot of time editing
link |
little config files and scripts and stuff and you need to be able to pop in and out
link |
of editing those things and it needs to work.
link |
Like even if the windowing GUI is dead and all you've got is like a command line, to
link |
get out of that problem, you might need to enter an editor and alter a file.
link |
So I think on that level, there will always have to be sort of very simple, well Emacs
link |
isn't very simple, but you know what I mean.
link |
There have to be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a GUI
link |
just for administering systems.
link |
Now how widespread they'll be, there's a certain amount of, what's the story of the American
link |
folktale of the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry, trying to keep
link |
up with the steam hammer and eventually the steam hammer wins because he can't drive the
link |
spikes fast enough.
link |
So there's a sense in which Microsoft, who knows how much they've invested in code visual
link |
studio or Apple with Xcode.
link |
So they've put huge amounts of money into enhancing their IDEs and Emacs in theory can
link |
duplicate all of those features by if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs
link |
Lisp macros, but at some point it's gonna be hard to maintain that level of, to keep
link |
up feature for feature.
link |
The interesting thing about Emacs just is it's lasted a long time and I think you talked
link |
about that there's a certain fads certainly in the software engineering space and it's
link |
interesting to think about technologies that sort of last for a very long time and just
link |
kind of being in the, what is it, how do they get by?
link |
It's like the cockroaches of software or the bacteria software or something like this base
link |
thing that nobody, everybody's just became reliant on and they just outlast everything
link |
else and slowly, slowly adjust with the times with a little bit of a delay, with a little
link |
bit of customization by individuals kind of that, but they're always there in the shadows
link |
and they outlast everybody else.
link |
And I wonder if that might be the story for a lot of technologies, especially in the software
link |
Shell scripts, all that stuff, you can't run the modern world without a bunch of shell
link |
scripts booting up machines and running things.
link |
So that is gonna be a hard thing to replace.
link |
And then tech for typesetting that you use, you said.
link |
For when I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple macros that I use, but then
link |
I have to, the publisher put their foot down and they want it in Word format now.
link |
So years ago I wrote some macros to convert and this time, what did I do?
link |
No, I use sort of regular expressions.
link |
So I was to do italics in, you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash IT and then
link |
you type what you want to type and that's how you get italics in tech.
link |
So you can create a regular expression that'll look for some text between curly brackets
link |
preceded by backslash IT and then instead convert that to italics.
link |
And Word will do that.
link |
Word if you go deep enough into its search and replace UI.
link |
You can do regular expressions.
link |
It's funny that you did that.
link |
I mean, I'm sure there's tools that help you with that kind of thing, but the task is sufficiently
link |
simple to where you can do a much better job than anyone, anybody else's tool can.
link |
That's a fascinating process.
link |
That's fine for me.
link |
And it keeps you from messing around with formatting.
link |
Like, Oh, what if I put this chapter heading, you know, in, you know, a sans serif font?
link |
It's a, it's just classic wanking.
link |
And so those options are closed off in what I'm doing.
link |
Is there advice you could say, what does it take to write a great story?
link |
The power of, of good yarns, good narratives to, um, pull people in is, is, uh, incredible.
link |
And I think my sort of amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary development that if you're,
link |
um, you know, uh, uh, cave person sitting around a fire in the rift valley a million
link |
years ago, um, if you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas, um, or how
link |
uncle Bob, you know, didn't escape from the hyenas, and if the people listening to you
link |
can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads, like a kind of virtual reality
link |
and see what you're describing, then you've just conferred an incredibly important advantage
link |
on the people who've heard that story.
link |
And so they know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have
link |
learned in any other way.
link |
Um, I mean, animals who don't have speech though, they might warn each other, they might
link |
make a sound that says danger, danger, um, but, uh, but as far as we know, they can't
link |
tell more complicated stories.
link |
So it's a part of us.
link |
I, the, the, the collective intelligence seems to be one of the key characteristics of the,
link |
of homo sapiens, the ability to share ideas and hold ideas together in our minds and storytelling
link |
is the fundamental aspect of that.
link |
Maybe even language itself is more fundamental because the language is required to do the
link |
storytelling or maybe they evolve together.
link |
Maybe they co evolve.
link |
So I think that you've got to work with that and I think, uh, sometimes it seems like in
link |
kind of, um, literary circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon
link |
as it's pulpy or it's exploitative, but, um, for me, I don't have any compunctions whatsoever
link |
I like stories that, um, are grabby and fun and exciting to read.
link |
And once you've got one of those going, once you've got a good yarn going that people will
link |
enjoy reading, then you're free to do whatever you want, uh, in the frame of that story.
link |
Um, but if you don't have that, um, then you got nothing.
link |
What about having like, uh, which you do at a technological scientific rigor, like to
link |
the, to the accuracy and as much as possible, how does that add to the, to, to Bob telling
link |
the story or telling the story about Bob or on the campfire?
link |
Well, the main thing that it does is, um, present, um, little details that you might
link |
not have come up with on your own.
link |
So if you're just sitting there freely imagining things, um, you, uh, you, your, your brain
link |
probably isn't going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications
link |
and surprises that real, that the real world is constantly presenting us with.
link |
And so, um, in my case, if I'm, um, trying to write a story about, you know, some that
link |
involves some technology like a rocket or, uh, orbital maneuvers or whatever, then delving
link |
into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird unexpected, you know, thing
link |
that, uh, gives me material to work with, but also subliminally readers who see that
link |
are going to be drawn in more, uh, because they're going to, uh, to, to find that, um,
link |
oh, I didn't see that coming, you know, you know, it's got some of the complexity and
link |
surprise value of the real world.
link |
It does something, um, uh, Alex Garland, director who did, uh, who wrote, uh, directed Ex Machina.
link |
I think about AI movies and the more care you take in making it accurate, the more compelling
link |
the story becomes somehow.
link |
I'm not, I'm not sure what that is.
link |
Um, maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story, maybe it just
link |
makes you a better writer.
link |
The key to any storytelling is getting the, the readers to suspend their, their disbelief.
link |
And there's all kinds of triggers and little tells that can break that.
link |
Um, and once it's broken, it's really hard to get it back.
link |
Uh, you know, a lot of times that's the end.
link |
Everybody will just close the book and not pick it up.
link |
Um, I gotta ask you, you've answered this question, but I gotta ask you the most impossible
link |
question for an author to answer, but which Neal Stephenson book should one read first?
link |
So when people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read, right?
link |
Because, uh, I mean, there's the best known one is probably snow crash, but that's a cyber
link |
That's at the same time, making fun of cyber punk.
link |
Um, so it's kind of got some layers to it that, uh, might not seem so funny if you don't
link |
have that, if you don't get the joke, right?
link |
So, um, there's, uh, I've written, as you point out, I've written historical novels.
link |
Some people like those.
link |
Some people prefer those.
link |
So if that's what you like, then kryptonomicon or the baroque cycle is where you would start
link |
if you like sort of techno thrillers that are set in a modern day setting, but aren't
link |
science fictiony per se, then, uh, Reamdy, um, is one of those.
link |
And termination shock, um, is, is, is definitely one of those.
link |
Um, so it just depends on, on, uh, what people like.
link |
What, what, uh, when people a long time ago recommend I read snow crash, they said, uh,
link |
it's the, it's Neil Stevenson light.
link |
It's the, uh, like if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the depth, like the rigor book,
link |
like that's a good, that's a good introduction to the man.
link |
So essentially you broke it down by topics, but if you wanted to read all of them, what's
link |
a good introduction to the, to the man, because obviously these worlds are very different.
link |
The philosophies are very different.
link |
What's a good introduction to the human?
link |
People ask the same thing of Dostoyevsky, people, it's a, it's a hard one to answer.
link |
Maybe seven eves because it's got big themes.
link |
Um, it's, you know, it's about heavy, heavy things happening to the human race.
link |
Uh, but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that, uh, people can
link |
relate to, you know, and it moves along, uh, so, uh, it, it does go kind of deep eventually
link |
on how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, but, um, people were able
link |
to get through it anyway, or some people just skip over that.
link |
You know, um, as an author, let me ask you what books had a big impact on your life that
link |
Is there any that jumped to mind that, uh, you learned from as a writer, as a philosopher,
link |
as a mathematician, as an engineer?
link |
This is one of these questions where I always blank out.
link |
And then when I'm walking out the door, I'll, I'll remember 12, so this is a random selection
link |
that doesn't represent the top.
link |
The top ones, um, well, I mentioned, you know, gulag archipelago and it's kind of a hefty
link |
and dark, but, and then it has a personal connection as well.
link |
Just like where you found the book to the part, the time in your life, where you found
link |
it, who recommended it.
link |
That's also part of the story.
link |
So there's definitely that there's, you know, I, I circle back to Moby Dick a lot, um, because
link |
we read it in a, uh, a really great English class I had in high school.
link |
And I came in with an oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going
link |
to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory and what
link |
What's the symbolism?
link |
And it turned out that, uh, it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying
link |
Um, what was the first powerful book you remember reading that like convinced you that this
link |
form could have depth?
link |
Was it like in high school?
link |
I'm trying to remember, well, Moby Dick was definitely a big one.
link |
Um, I mean, I used to read a lot of classics comics when I was, I don't know if you've
link |
seen these, it's a whole series of comic books that, um, uh, it was viral.
link |
You could, uh, in the, in the back of each comic book was an order form.
link |
You could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in and more would show
link |
And, but it was like, they would do the Count of Monte Cristo, you know, Moby Dick, you
link |
know, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, you know, all this of classic books, uh, were,
link |
they had put into comic book form.
link |
Reading Moby Dick, if you're nine years old is a tall order.
link |
There's some very complicated sentences in there and a lot of digressions, but if you're
link |
just looking at the comic books, like, holy shit, look at that whale, you know?
link |
Um, and, um, and ultimately the power of the story doesn't need the complicated words.
link |
It's, it's all about the man and the, and the whale.
link |
So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without
link |
actually reading them, which is, you know, it's great when you're nine years old.
link |
So, so I read a lot of that stuff, uh, for sure.
link |
The annotated Sherlock Holmes, um.
link |
You mentioned David Deutsch too, as an inspiration for some of your work.
link |
I mean, you've, you've obviously didn't like really a lot of research for the books you,
link |
What, uh, do you remember a book that made you want to become a writer or a moment that
link |
made you become a writer?
link |
I think like the, you know, the answer I usually give is that when I was in like fifth grade
link |
and one of my friends came to school one day, he was wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes
link |
and I hated dress shoes cause mine never fit.
link |
And so they were uncomfortable.
link |
I couldn't run, you know, they were cold, it was Iowa.
link |
So I kind of said, I remember very clearly thinking, okay, I don't like where this is
link |
Like, does this mean that next year all of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes?
link |
So I need to find a job where I don't have to do that.
link |
So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job, you know,
link |
And then, and then I just read a lot of, uh, just classic science fiction short stories
link |
and started trying to write some of my own.
link |
And there were just classic young adult stories like by Heinlein and the other classic names
link |
that you think of.
link |
But the Heinlein ones stuck, have stuck with me in a way that the others didn't.
link |
What's the greatest science fiction book ever written, just removing your work from consideration?
link |
I'm loving torturing you right now.
link |
Greatest ever non Stevenson.
link |
Do we include fantasy or does it have to be science fiction?
link |
Oh, interesting fantasy.
link |
I did not expect that twist.
link |
Uh, well, for in a weird way, they're lumped together in people's minds, right?
link |
So they are, but there, but there's also a boundary somehow.
link |
I'm not sure what that is exactly.
link |
So, I mean, if we do include it, then it's easily the, the Lord of the rings.
link |
But, um, I mean, greatness is a interesting quality to, uh, to try to define.
link |
Um, and for me, a lot of the, the fun and the joy of such books is, is not in what you'd
link |
call greatness, but just storytelling.
link |
So I was always a big fan of has have space suit will travel, which is a Heinlein young
link |
It's just, uh, it's just a fun, good read.
link |
Um, so, so fun is a big component.
link |
Greatness is overrated.
link |
Well, I don't know it's overrated, but it's just, you know, it's, it might be underdefined
link |
to put it that way.
link |
So how space it will travel now, I definitely have to read that one.
link |
You mentioned Iowa.
link |
It was, uh, there a couple of times I got to spend, uh, quite a bit of time with Dan
link |
Gabel with Tom Brands who are wrestlers was, uh, is it now wrestling, martial arts, part
link |
of your life, any part of your form formation of who you are as a human being?
link |
In a, it was a late, it was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames, um, Dan Gabel
link |
was, uh, a few years older than me.
link |
And so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets
link |
and um, and this was before his Olympic career.
link |
So everyone knew he was the star of that team and that he was the best, but people didn't
link |
yet know he was the greatest of all time.
link |
So that was part, it's, it's funny is, uh, it feels like a small world that you would
link |
be in the same space as Dan Gabel a hundred feet away, a little dot on the mat trouncing
link |
his opponents, him and him and Chris Taylor.
link |
So the other star was this 400 pound plus guy named Chris Taylor who, uh, also went
link |
So yeah, people, you know, he was, he was a no, he was a, uh, athletic hero and wrestling
link |
is there's certain States like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Iowa, where wrestling is the sport because
link |
those are States of small towns.
link |
And so if you're a small town is if you're like Dan Gabel, uh, and you have to be on
link |
a football team with 20 other guys who are not Dan Gabel, then no matter how good you
link |
are, your team might, might suck.
link |
Uh, but if in a solo thing, you can, you can go to the Olympics.
link |
So we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes in school and I didn't like it.
link |
And I think partly it's just that it was so, so competitive and the people who were cared
link |
about it really cared about it a lot, you know?
link |
And so it was, it was pretty tough and I didn't think I had the right body type.
link |
But then when I was, uh, after college, I was in Iowa city for a few years when he was
link |
coaching the, that the wrestling team there and the, he won like nine championships out
link |
of 10 years, you know, during that, during that time.
link |
So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the greatest team coach.
link |
Um, so I know I've never met him, but we've, uh, he's kind of been like in my sphere of
link |
awareness since I was, you know, kind of my whole life.
link |
And people would always tell stories about him, like I think he got arrested once for
link |
some kind of, I don't know, minor offense in Ames.
link |
And so he just basically stayed up all night.
link |
He was in this cage in the jail, just stayed up all night doing pull ups on, you know,
link |
it sounds about right.
link |
And, uh, uh, so yeah.
link |
So has that been, I mean, I was such an interesting place in the world and wrestling is just part
link |
Is that somewhere in there?
link |
Does that resonate deeply with who you are?
link |
It was a formative thing for me growing up there for sure.
link |
It's just a, uh, you know, uh, uh, or at least used to be a very orderly place, high social
link |
capital, very minimal class differences.
link |
So like you'd have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy, but, uh, that
link |
That was, you know, those were the rich people, right?
link |
So, um, and a college town is always a different environment like, uh, you know, Austin, uh,
link |
has some of this, um, so it was a pretty kind of utopian, uh, other than the weather and
link |
a few other things, uh, environment to, to grow up in the, the martial art I ended up
link |
doing is sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop.
link |
So when you're, if you're grappling, everything is through sense of touch and your sense of
link |
touch is very old and simple, right?
link |
Like earthworms don't have, don't even have eyes, but they can tell when they're being
link |
So it's very fast.
link |
Um, and uh, with, um, with a standoff or like boxing or some kinds of sword fighting, you're,
link |
you're not touching the other person.
link |
Most of the time, your, your, your visual system is doing something way more, it's doing
link |
slam and trying to figure out what the other person is up to.
link |
And so, um, that always felt more my speed.
link |
So in an Olympic style fencing, you're, it doesn't start really until you're crossing
link |
blades with the other person and now you're back to wrestling, you're feeling what they're
link |
doing and it's all about that.
link |
But some of the older sword arts, um, don't engage the blade that way.
link |
You stand off at range and then you make cutting attacks and, um, and, uh, and so, so those
link |
are all processed visually and I think I'm more of a slow thinker, so it works for me
link |
I mean, the same, it has the same, the artistry and the beauty of boxing, I suppose, just
link |
like you said, is like, there's no, there's no contact and it's all processed visually
link |
and I'm sure there's a dance of its own that, that depends on the characteristic of a sword
link |
There is a set of, of stances and, and, uh, basic reactions that you try to learn that
link |
are thought to be defensible, um, and, and safe or safer.
link |
And so it tends to be a series of short engagements where you'll, you'll close in, you'll try
link |
out your, your idea and it works or it doesn't, then you, you back off again.
link |
It's interesting to think about like human history because martial arts, okay, that's
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But in terms of sword fighting, just the full range of humans that existed who mastered
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sword fighting or sought the mastery of sword fighting, just to imagine the thousands of
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people who, the heights they have achieved because the stakes are so incredibly high
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And it's the richest, most powerful people in those societies spending whatever it takes
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to get the best gear and the best training because you're right, everything depends on
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And it's still life and death.
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I mean, that, that's fascinating, um, that, that's fascinating and we perhaps have lost
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that forever with greater weapons.
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I mean, the artistry of sword fighting when it's life and death and you go into war, you
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have the Miyamoto Musashi's of the world, right?
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The, I don't know, there's a, there's a poetry to that, that there's a mastery to that that
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I don't know if we could achieve with any other kind of martial art.
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Well the, one of the good, you were talking earlier about the, the, the good effects of
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the internet, social media that we sometimes overlook.
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And, and one of those is that, um, there were all these isolated people around the world
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who were interested in this, who found each other and kind of created a network of, of
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people who help each other learn these things.
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So that doesn't mean that anyone is, is up to the level of the you're talking about yet,
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but um, but it is happening and um, and so, um, there's a, a, a large number of old treatises,
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old written documents, uh, that have been dug up from libraries and, and people have
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been going over these and translating them from old dialects of Italian and German, um,
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to make sense of them and, and learning how to do these techniques with different, uh,
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different weapons.
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Um, actually there's a guy here in Austin named Damond Stith who does African, historical
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African martial arts.
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Um, also martial arts of, uh, of enslaved Africans who would learn machete fighting
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techniques in the Caribbean, South America.
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He's probably within a mile of us.
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He's an amazing guy.
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I'm going to look him up.
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Can I ask you for advice?
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Can you give advice for young people, high school, college, you know, undergrads thinking
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about their career, thinking about life, how to live a life that you'd be proud of?
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You think quite a bit about like what it's required to be innovative in this world.
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You think quite a bit about the future.
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So if somebody wanted to be a person that makes a big impact from the future, what advice
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would you give them?
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I think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do happily and, um, I don't
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want to say obsessively because that sounds like maybe it's pathological, but, but if
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you can find a thing that you'll, you know, you'll sit down, you'll start doing it and
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hours later you kind of snap out of it, where did the time go?
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Um, then, um, that's a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're
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Uh, because if you don't have that, um, it's hard to, uh, to figure out where you should
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put your energies, you know, and as you might have the best intentions, you might say, I,
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you know, I want world peace or whatever, uh, but, um, uh, at, at the end of the day,
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what really matters is how do you spend your time and, and are you spending it in a way
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that's productive, uh, and, um, uh, because it doesn't matter how smart you are or well
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intentioned you are unless you've figured that out.
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And so it's finding the thing in which you can sort of, you naturally lose yourself in.
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The thing is, um, at least for me, there's a lot of things like that, but I first have
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to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing.
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Like the fun starts a little bit after the first hump of really sucking and then you
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could suck just regular.
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So often people, oftentimes people can give up too early, I think.
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I mean, that's true with mathematics for me, it's for a lot of people is if you just give
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it a chance to struggle, if you give yourself time to struggle, you'll find a way, you'll
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find the thing within that thing that you can lose track of time with.
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That's a key detail that, um, that's an important thing to add to, to what I said, which is
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that, uh, this might not happen the first time you do a thing.
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Maybe it will, but, um, uh, you might have to climb that learning curve and, um, if there's
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pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that, then, um, it might prevent
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you from, from getting where you need to be.
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Um, so there's some complexity there, uh, that make, can make this kind of non obvious.
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Um, but, uh, that's what, that's why we need, you know, good teachers.
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Um, you know, another beneficial thing, uh, of the internet is YouTube and being able
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to learn things, how to do things on YouTube, the, the, the dude who made the YouTube video
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doesn't care how many times you hit pause and rewind, um, they're never going to like
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roll their eyes and, and be impatient with you.
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Um, and sometimes, uh, spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book, like making
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that the thing you just spent a huge amount of time on rereading, rereading, or rewatching,
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rewatching that, that somehow really, um, solidifies your love for that thing.
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And like the depth of understanding you start to gain and it's okay to stay with that.
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I used to think like, there's all these books out there, so like, I need to keep reading
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But then I realized, um, I think it was somewhere in college, uh, uh, where you could just spend
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your whole life with a single textbook.
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There's nothing in that textbook to really, really stay.
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Meisner, Thorne and Wheeler, Gravitation, you know, is, is one of those, or another one is,
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um, The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, which is just incredibly deep and it starts
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with like two plus two equals four and it, at the end you're at the boundaries of, of
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Uh, it's an amazing, amazing book.
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Let me ask you the big ridiculous question.
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You've pondered some big ridiculous questions in your work.
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What's the meaning of this whole thing?
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What's the meaning of life?
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Well, as far as I know, we're unique in the, the universe.
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There's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated
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as what's between our ears.
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I can't rule it out, but, um, so we appear to be pretty special and, um, so it's got
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to have something to do with that and one of the reasons I like David Deutsch, in particular
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his book, The Beginning of Infinity, um, is that he talks about the power of explanations
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and the fact that, um, most civilizations are static that they've got a set of dogmas
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that they arrive at somehow and they just pass those on from one, uh, generation to
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the next and nothing changes.
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But that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow whatever you want to call it,
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the scientific method or enlightenment, uh, there's different ways of thinking about it,
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but basically explanatory, it's, it's about the power of, of explanations and being able
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to figure out why things are the way they are and that has created changes in our, um,
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thinking and our way of life over the last few centuries that are explosive compared
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to anything that came before and David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force
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of nature in its potential transformative power.
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If we keep going, um, you know, we could, uh, you know, if we figure out how to colonize
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the universe like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, um, then
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it is effectively a force of nature.
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This kind of drive to understand more and more and more, deeper and deeper and deeper
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and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more.
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It's the, well, it's the old, the universe created us to understand itself.
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Maybe that's the, uh, the whole purpose.
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It is an interesting peculiar side effect of the way we've been created is we seem to
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be conscious beings.
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We seem to have little egos.
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We seem to, uh, be born and die pretty quickly.
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There's a bunch of drama.
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We're all within ourselves pretty unique and we fall in love and start wars and there's
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hate and all the, the full interesting dynamic of it.
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So it's not just about the individual people, somehow like the concert that we played together.
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That's kind of interesting.
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And there's a lot of peculiar aspects of that, that, um, I wonder if they're fundamental
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or just quirks of evolution, whether it's, whether it's death, whether it's love, whether
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all those things, I wonder if they're, um, from an engineer perspective when we're trying
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to create that intelligent toaster that listens for the, for the slam door and this, and the
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smell of burning toast, whether, uh, that toaster should be afraid of death and should
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fall in love just like we do, you know, you're a fascinating human being.
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You've impacted the lives of millions of people.
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It's a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time with me today.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you for coming down to beautiful, hot Texas.
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And thank you for talking today.
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It was a pleasure and I'm glad I came and did it.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neal Stephenson to support this podcast.
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Please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Neal Stephenson himself in his novel, Snow
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The world is full of things more powerful than us, but if you know how to catch a ride,
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you can go places.
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Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.