The following is a conversation with Neil Stevenson, a legendary science fiction writer

exploring ideas in mathematics, science, cryptography, money, linguistics, philosophy,

and virtual reality, from his early book Snow Crash to his new one called Termination Shock.

He doesn't just write novels. He worked at the space company Blue Origin for many years,

including technically being Blue Origin's first employee. He also was the chief futurist

at the virtual reality company Magic Leap. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,

please check out our sponsors in the description. And now here's my conversation with Neil Stevenson.

You write both historical fiction like World War II in cryptonomicon and science fiction,

looking both into the past and the future. So let me ask, does history repeat itself?

In which way does it repeat itself? In which way does it not?

I'm afraid it repeats itself a lot. So I think human nature kind of is what it is. And so

we tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again. And so it's kind of the

exception rather than the rule when something new happens.

What role does technology play in the suppression or in revealing human nature?

Well, the standards of living, life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within the

last, particularly the last 100 years. I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification,

the internet. These are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health

and longevity that exceed anything that was seen before in human history. So people are living longer,

they're generally healthier and so on. But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns,

some of which are not very attractive. So some of it has to do with the constraints on resources.

Presumably with technology, you have less and less constraints on resources. So we get to maybe

emphasize the better angels of our nature. And in so doing, does that not potentially

fundamentally alter sort of the experience that we have of life on earth?

You know, until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think. But

people will find ways to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind of psychological itch

that they have got. And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic

collapse of Germany prior to the rise of Hitler, World War II, and kind of explain Hitler at least

partially by just the misery that people were living in at that time.

The economic collapse.

Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and the decline in standard of living. And that

sounds like a plausible explanation. But there are economic troubles now for sure. We had the bank

collapse in 2008. And there's stagnation in some people's standards of living. But it's hard to

explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years, just strictly on the basis of

people are poor and angry and sad. I think they want to be angry.

So, without being political in a divisive kind of way, can we talk about the lessons you can

draw from World War II? This singular event in human history, it seems like. And yet, as you say,

history rhymes, at the very least.

Being who I am, I tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened in conjunction

with that war, which may not be where you want to go.

Well, there's several things that started to interrupt. So, one in cryptanomicon is more

like the allentouring side of things. And then there's the outside of technology.

First of all, there's the tools of war, which is a kind of technology. But then there's just

like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.

Yeah. Well, so one of the things that emerges from the war and from the extermination camps is

that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature. So, you have to learn

that lesson to be an educated person. And you have to know that even in a supposedly,

you know, enlightened civilized society, people can become monsters quite easily. So, that is for

sure the big takeaway.

So, do you agree with Solzhenitsyn about what is it, the line between good and evil runs

through the heart of every man that all of us are capable of evil?

Great line, yeah. I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager,

because my grandfather had it in his house, because he was one of these Americans who was obsessed

with the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat and wanted people to be aware of some of what

had happened. And so, he had those books lying around and, you know, I would read them. And

it's a similar kind of parallel story to what happened in Germany during the war, you know,

this creation of this system of camps and oppression and lots of troubling behavior.

To me, it's a story of how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead

to evil. But it's also a story of bravery, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood and

basically survival. You have like a man's search for meaning, which is the story of a man

in a concentration camp, basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions.

So, to me, World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature. It's a little

moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity. So, I'm not so sure that

it leads me to a pessimistic view of the world, the fact that somebody like Hitler could happen,

the fact that a lot of people could follow Hitler and get excited and maybe even love the hate of

the other for some moment of time. I think that's all of us are capable of that, but I think all

of us also have a capacity for good. And I think, I don't know what you think, but I think we

have a greater desire for good than evil. And it seems like that's where technology is very

useful as a guide, as a helping hand. Okay. Can you give me an example, maybe?

So, I give you examples of futuristic technologies and I can give you examples of current technologies.

Current technologies, knowledge in the form of very basic knowledge, which is like Wikipedia,

and search the original dream of Google that I think is very much a success, which is

making the world's information accessible at your fingertips. That kind of technology

enables the natural, if this axiom, this assumption that people want to do good is true,

then letting them discover all of the information out there, false information and true information,

all of it, and let them explore that's going to lead to a better world, to better people.

Now, futuristic technologies is, I personally, I mentioned you offline, sort of love artificial

intelligence. And so AI, that's an assistant, that's a guide, like a mentor to you, that you can,

in the way that Google searches, but smarter, where you can help send it out and say,

this is the direction in which I want to grow, not authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm,

of telling you, this is how you should grow, but almost the opposite, where you use it as

an assistant, a servant in your journey towards knowledge. That sounds like an easy thing,

but it's actually, from an AI perspective, very difficult.

I mean, this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which talks about a book that

essentially does that. And I've been sort of watching people try to come at the problem of

building that thing from different directions for ever since the book came out, basically.

And so I kind of have a, although I haven't worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the

level of difficulty in realizing that goal. So that book is in the 90s. So as Google is coming

to be, essentially, not Google, but the search engine, the initial search engine, which gave

birth to Google, essentially, in contrast. Right. Yeah. That was still in the era of

Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines. And yeah, I'm pretty sure I

had not heard of Google at that point. That would have been 95, 96. And I think the book came out

in 94. And then, of course, the social networks followed, which is another form of guidance

through the space of information. Yeah. Well, what happens is that these things come along

and then people find ways to game them. And so I saw an interesting thread the other day,

pointing out that 20 years ago, if you had Googled Pythagorean theorem, chances are you would have

been taken directly to a page explaining the Pythagorean theorem. If you do it now, you're

probably going to, the top hits are going to be from somebody who's got an angle, who's got a scheme.

Right. They're like trying to sell you math tutoring or, you know, they're working some kind

of marketing plan on you. So the traditional engines become actually less useful over time

for their original educational purpose. That doesn't mean that they can't, it shouldn't be

replaced by newer and better ones. First of all, to defend the people with the angle,

right? They're trying to find business models, fund oftentimes, which is funny you went with Pythagorean.

Like you went at math, those greedy bastards. I know. But it's great. How can we monetize

the Pythagorean theorem? Well, I mean, education, right? It has to figure out, like,

people who love math education, for example, love it purely, not purely, but very often love it

for itself, for just teaching math. Yeah. But then they start, you know, when coming face to

face with, for example, like the YouTube algorithm, they start to try to figure out, okay, how can I

make money off of this? The primary goal is still that love of education. But they also want to

make that level of education their full time job. But I see that sort of that dance of humanity

with the algorithms as it finds this kind of local pocket of optimality, or suboptimality,

whatever. Yeah. It gets stuck in it. It's a pocket of some sort. But I see that pocket is way

better than what we had before in the 80s, right, in the 90s before the internet. But like, and now

we're now, this is also human nature, we start writing very eloquent articles about how this

pocket is clearly pocket is not very good. And we can imagine much better lands far beyond.

But the reality is it's better than before. Yeah. And now we're waiting for

We have to escape from the local minimum. And you have to wait either for lone geniuses,

or for some kind of momentum of a group of geniuses that just say, enough is enough,

I have an idea. Yeah. This is how we get out. And it's too easy to be sort of,

I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks in your articles,

being cynical about being in this pocket. And we are forever stuck in this pocket. And then,

like, coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally, like, is collapsing, stuck

forever like a prison in this pocket. But reality, they're just, it's like, it's just clickbait

articles and books until we, one curious ant comes up with the next pocket.

Yeah, tunnels through the barrier or gets enough energy to jump over the barrier.

And eventually we'll be, as you've talked about me, we'll be, we'll colonize the solar system.

And then we'll be stuck in the solar system. And then people will say, well, we're screwed

one because when the sun energy runs out, there's no way to get to the next solar system.

And then, and so on, it goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.

Yeah. I think, I think getting out of the solar system is going to be a hard one.

But so can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think back to sort of a

serious question, why do you think it's hard to get outside of our solar system?

It's just an energy calculator. I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want.

But the idea of getting there in, you know, one lifetime or multiple, a few lifetimes is,

requires huge amounts of energy to, to accelerate. And then you, as soon as you get halfway there,

you need to expend an equal amount of energy to decelerate, or you'll just go shooting by.

And so that means carrying a lot of energy. And there's, there's ideas like Urie Milner,

I think is still funding the, the idea to use laser propulsion to send something

to another star system, a small object. But it'll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.

They never talk about that part. Like, how do we slow down?

Yeah. So, the quick fly by, you take a good picture, I guess.

Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by. So, and that's great if it happens,

I'm not knocking it. But the amount of energy is, is that's needed is just staggering. And there's,

there's other issues like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation?

How do you prevent people from going crazy? What happens if you hit something while traveling

at a significant fraction of the speed of light? What about it sort of some combination of expanding

human lifespan, but also just good old fashioned, stable society on a spaceship?

Yeah. Yeah. The generation ship. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's the only way it would,

it would have to keep going for a long time. And they might get to where they're going and find

a shitty solar system. Like, we can try to, we can try to do some advanced survey, but I mean,

if you get there and all the planets in that solar system are just garbage planets, then it's kind

of a big letdown for, for this like thousand year voyage that you've just, you've just been on.

Right? So, I mean, we have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay between in

order to survive in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with. So that's such a,

sets a bound on the size of the planet and what we need in the way of temperature and atmosphere

and so on. So when you look at all those complications, then basically building

sort of exactly the environment we want out of available materials in this solar system

starts to look a hell of a lot better. It's hard to make an economic argument, let's say,

for, for, for making that journey. One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that

the people who are trying to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for

religious reasons. I think that's the only reason that you would do it. Because economically, it

just makes more sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.

Well, isn't everything done for religious reasons? Like, why do we exploration? Like,

what, why, why do we go to the moon again and do the other things? What is JFK said is because,

not because they're easy, but because they're hard. Isn't that kind of a religious reason?

I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once said that the Apollo moon landings were

communism's greatest achievement. Yeah. So the conflict between nations is a kind of,

not exactly a religion, but it's what you're talking about. Well, it's a struggle for meaning.

Yeah. I mean, and that meaning isn't found in some kind of, it's hard to find meaning in

mathematics. Yeah. It's, it's found in some kind of in music and religion, whatever art.

I mean, some people do, but those are probably not enough of them to. Well, they, people that find

meaning in mathematics, they usually find meaning between the lines. Nevertheless,

not in the actual form, like the approving, approving some kind of thing. Fair enough. Yeah.

So from a cost perspective, do you actually see a possible future where we're building

these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them one a year out like a, like

wandering ants out into the, into the galaxy? I have nothing against it. It's just, like I said,

it's got a, the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual or,

or kind of non tangible calculus. It's a business model perspective. You don't think

there's a business model there? No, no way. One of the many fascinating things you've done in your

life, you were at the very beginning, you were the person that convinced you based us to start

a spaceship company, a space company. You were there at Blue Origin for a few years in the

beginning, working on alternate propulsion systems, and at least according to Wikipedia,

alternate business models. Yeah. I mean, to go back to the first thing you said,

Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required a lot of convincing. He'd been thinking about it since

he was five years old, and it was an inevitability. But the, the idea that, that kind of got hatched

in 1999 was to just do some advanced kind of scouting work, you know, explore the corners of

the, the space of possibilities. And so that's what, that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the

precursor to Blue Origin. And so it was a small staff of people that, that did that for a few

years. And I think it was about 2003, 2004, that it swung decisively towards the direction it's,

it's been following ever since, which is, you know, using basically existing aerospace

technologies and models to make chemical fueled rockets for space tourism. I believe,

and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets is just an accident of history

that comes out of World War II. So until World War II, rockets are being built on a small scale

by people like Robert Goddard. But then Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, but he can't

quite reach it. And the Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized. So he decides he's going to lob

warheads into it with, with rockets, which is a terrible misallocation of resources. It's a

terrible idea. But so it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic.

But that's, that's the situation that existed. So they built these rockets, they, you know,

that's the V2. And then it's just a complete coincidence that that war ends with atomic

bombs being developed in a completely separate super weapon program. And so suddenly that the

existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist before. Because if you've got

atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them. You can do with bombers, but it's a lot better to just

hurl them to the other side of the world on the top of a rocket. So, so suddenly rockets,

which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V2 program, got a much bigger boost during the

50s and 60s. And it is a complete, you're right. For some reason, never thought of this. It is an

accident of history that nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time. First of all,

nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time as World War II. That's an accident

in history. And then the fact that, okay, so then Hitler started using rockets, that's an accident.

Okay, that's fascinating. That's a fascinating set of coincidences.

Yeah. And which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way. But by the time these rockets are

kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and so devastating that nobody really

wants to use them. But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it

into the socket on the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb.

So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war. I'd love to be in the meeting

where the first guy brought that up as an idea. It's probably a Russian. Why don't we strap a

person to the rocket? Yeah. Well, it probably was because they did it first, right? The Russians

did it. And they had perhaps less respect for safety protocols. Could be. They're a little bit

more willing to sacrifice a life of an astronaut or to risk the life of an astronaut. Could be.

Yeah. This is basically the story of how through all of this competition and because of these

historical accidents, trillions of R&D dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical

rocket technology, which is now advanced to an incredibly high degree. But there's other ways

to make things go really fast, which is all that rockets do. It's all orbit is. It's just going

really fast. And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about

alternate schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets. And so one of the first

things that I learned kind of trying to explore new possibilities was that I could put all of my

brain power to work and be creative as I could and invent some idea that I thought was new

for making things go fast. And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had

thought the same idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math. And so at a certain point,

you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and just go poking around trying to find

those guys. So there's a number of ideas that we looked at. Some are crazier, some are less crazy,

but the direction that that company eventually took was chemical rockets.

Is there something you can comment on possible ideas? So first of all,

like you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion.

Yeah. So that's, I mean, you've probably heard of Project Orion, which was Freeman Dyson and

some of his collaborators had a scheme to power a large space vehicle by detonating atomic bombs

behind it. And so one of the other people who was working at Blue Operations during this time

was George Dyson, the son of Freeman. And so we knew all about Project Orion. And he found an old

film that they'd shot on a beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like

lumps of C4. So that was an idea. But for a private company, obtaining a large number of

atomic bombs was probably out of scope. So there's more of a theoretical thing. There's a

conceptually similar approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur Cantrowitz

and some others where you take a pulsed laser and you fire it at a vehicle that has a block of ice

on the back. And the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma.

And plasma is opaque because it conducts. And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the

energy from the laser pulse and gets really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice.

And then you wait a moment for that to dissipate, and then you do it again.

So it would just kind of vibrate its way. Like it sounds really violent, but Freeman said that

if you were wearing like rubber sold tennis shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a

mild vibration. So there your source of energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific

impulse than you could get by burning chemicals. Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser

system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr that just would heat up a heat exchanger by many converging solid

state lasers from the ground. And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves

to do that. We looked at tall towers. I spent a while looking kind of semi seriously at giant

bullwhips. What's a bullwhip? Just a whip. Just you have them here in Texas, right?

Yeah, I understand. But how does that have to do with propulsion?

If you think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the speed

of sound. So it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people with no technology

have been able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural

trick. Just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this. So that's the

thing I still think about from time to time. You can use the same physics to make freestanding

loops of chain or other flexible materials that just kind of stand up under their own physics.

And it's kind of awesome to imagine. So you imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip

but have at the end of it a spaceship that would detach at the moment of maximum velocity.

Why not? Why wouldn't that?

So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question. It was more almost a

symbolic way of saying, look, there's all kinds of physics we haven't explored yet that it's no

more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets. It's just that more money's gone into chemical

rockets. Right? Can I ask you a question on propulsion that's a little bit more out there?

So I don't know if you've seen quite a lot of recent articles and reports and so on about

UFOs, like the Tic Tac aircraft. I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it but I haven't gone deep

into it. So the DOD released footage filmed by pilots and there's a lot of reports about objects

that moved in ways they haven't seen before that seem to defy the laws of physics.

If we consider the aircraft that we have today. So the reason I asked you that is because it kind

of, to me, whatever the heck it is, it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion.

If it's like secret projects from foreign nations or it's physical phenomena that we

don't yet understand like ball lightning, all those kinds of things. Or if it is aliens or

objects from an alien civilization, I most likely believe if it's an object from an alien

civilization, it's got to be like a really dumb drone that just got lost. It's definitely not

like the pinnacle of intelligence. It's like some teenagers like science fair experiment.

Yeah, it just flew for a few centuries out and just landed. And then we humans are all

like really excited about this wild thing. I mean, what do you think about those?

First of all, like the millions of reports of UFOs, right? There's some psychology there that's

deeply cultural. But also the possibility of aliens having visited Earth.

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see some better pictures. For the reason I mentioned earlier,

having to do with the difficulty of traveling between star systems, it's really hard for me

to believe it's aliens. I just can't understand why you would go to all that trouble to transport

something across light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly doing. How is that

interesting? How does that justify the trip? So if you travel across those kinds of distances,

you'd make a bigger splash. First of all, I would expect that the arrival of these things would be

something we'd notice. It's got to decelerate into our solar system by, unless it got here,

really, really, really slowly. So I guess that's a possibility and just kind of snuck in.

So at the end, we would detect some kind of footprint in terms of energy?

You would think. So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad.

It makes more sense in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies,

they're just kind of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason,

not trying to communicate. Can you imagine a scenario where aliens have visited Earth

or are visiting Earth and we wouldn't notice it at all?

Oh, sure. I mean, if they've got technology to get here, they've probably got technology to

conceal the fact that they're here. Oh, they're trying to conceal themselves.

I meant more like they're not trying to conceal themselves, but we're just,

our cognitive capabilities are like too limited and we are not thinking big enough.

We're looking for little green men. We're looking for things that operate at a time scale that's

human like. Yeah, no, I love thinking about ideas like that. That's great science fiction novel,

father, that the aliens are so different that we simply don't see them.

I mean, is there, in terms of language, do you think it would be difficult,

not aliens visiting us, but traveling to other places to find a common language?

You've written about the importance of language in intelligent civilizations.

How difficult is the problem to bridge the gap between aliens and humans

in terms of language so we're not lost in translation?

Yeah, I mean, there's different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they are

to us. I mean, there's a school of thought that says basically,

advanced life has to be carbon based for just reasons of chemistry.

So right away, if you impose that limitation, then you're assuming something that's starting

to be biologically similar to us. So if they're about as big as we are and they kind of move

around in space, in a physical body the way we do, then there's probably a way to solve that

communication problem. If they're beings of pure energy from Star Trek or something like that,

then it's a different story. Well, I love thinking about that kind of stuff too.

Consciousness itself may be, like you said, beings of pure energy.

I think of life as just complex systems and the kind of forms those complex systems can take

seems to be much larger than the particular biological systems we see here on Earth.

I have to ask a Twitter question about aliens. Ready? This is for Twitter.

What would you expect from Twitter? Can humans have sex with aliens?

You can pass. I asked the language question. Can they communicate?

Can they fall in love before sex? That's how it works.

So which question? Am I answering the sex or the love?

I mean, it depends what is more fundamental to relations across intelligence species.

Yeah. I mean, sex can mean a lot of things. So I mean,

production, right? In Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to

really suspend your disbelief to think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human,

right? Because that's just not going to work DNA wise. So if by sex you mean reproductive sex,

then I would say no unless you go to a panspermia kind of theory, which is that

humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic program of some sort.

And then we're just returning home and hanging out with our old relatives.

Distant cousins. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't seem plausible. We know that humans had sex

with Neanderthals, with Denisovans. So you could think of them as aliens that came from our planet.

So that's kind of data point, I guess. But if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind

of gratifying physical interaction, then sure. Right. Dancing. And that's how we get to love.

And love can take many forms. Love can certainly take many forms.

I have to ask you, in terms of space, just looking at where blue origin is,

looking at where SpaceX is today, and maybe looking at 10, 20 years out from now,

are you impressed with what's happening? We just saw William Shatner go up to space.

Yeah. I was just watching his video this morning before I came here. Yeah.

Are you impressed with where things stand today?

Yeah. I mean, SpaceX in particular has done things that are just unbelievable.

And I don't think anyone was anticipating 20 years ago, let's say, when this all started,

just the speed with which they'd be able to rack up these incredible achievements.

If you've kind of even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made, and so the difficulty of

doing any kind of space travel, what they've achieved is just unbelievable.

What about maybe a question about Elon Musk, even more than Jeff Bezos?

He has a very kind of ambitious vision of this project that we're on as a species,

of becoming a multiplanetary species, and becoming that quickly.

As soon as possible, landing on Mars, colonizing Mars. What do you think of that project?

There's two questions to ask. First, the question is, what do you think about the project of

colonizing Mars? And second, what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically

ambitious at achieving the impossible, what a lot of people would say is impossible?

I think that colonizing Mars is the kind of goal that's easily stated. It's catchy. It's the kind

of thing that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs might not.

So I think it's well chosen in that way. I have technical questions about,

you know, there's a problem of perchlorates on the surface of Mars that's going to be

big trouble, and there's radiation. So this is known.

But what about business questions? Do you think, because you mentioned sort of

going outside of the solar system would best be done for religious reasons?

What about colonizing Mars? Can you spin it into a business proposition?

It's hard to think of a resource that's on Mars that could be brought back here cheaply enough to

compete with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here. So I don't know if there

is a business plan for that, or if it's just strictly, we're going to go there and see what

happens. Maybe again, we need communism to get us going, to give us a reason, a little bit of the

competition. Well, there's plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonized Mars

vision that they're willing to just go all in on it, even if there's not a business plan behind it.

So I think it's well chosen. I think it's probably the only approach to take.

A lot of the, when white people came to this continent and started colonizing it,

there was not a lot of coherent planning. What plans they did have turned out to be terrible

plans. Trying to come up with plans that extend decades into the future is a waste of time.

To do it for the unexplainable love of the unknown, the journey towards exploring the

unknown and just keep going. Well, you saw it with Shatner and his reaction to the flight

yesterday. For him, that trip was more than worth it just for these intangible reasons.

What did he say? I haven't watched the video yet.

He was trying to talk a lot about the moment where suddenly you rise above the thin blue

blanket of the atmosphere and you're up into the blackness. That had a huge impact on him.

So he was kind of, I wouldn't say groping for words because he was pretty eloquent, but

he was trying to express his feelings about that in a way that is pretty gripping to watch.

So you worked on this kind of stuff. We can go back to 10 years ago. You wrote an essay

called Innovation Starvation. You worked on this kind of idea since then.

Kind of looking at maybe a little bit cynically about our age today and our unwillingness to

take on big risky projects. So in the face of that, what do you think of people like Elon Musk?

Because to me, people like that are inspiring and gives you hope in the face of a more kind of

pessimistic perspective of our age. Yeah. Well, he's clearly willing to tackle

big, ambitious projects without a lot of kind of soul searching or trying to make up his mind.

Just go and do it. Let's dig tunnels under cities. Go.

Step one, make a joke about it on Twitter. Step two, actually do it.

Yeah. And I mean, things have slowed down quite our ability to build things

at pace is a lot less than it was. And there's reasons for that. We're more concerned with

safety and environmental impacts than people were when they were building some of the great

public's works projects of the mid 20th century. But we're at the point now where even just

maintaining the stuff that we've got is such a huge project that we need to put big resources

into it and good minds into it or else we're going to be losing things that we take for granted.

Do you think that there's a lot to be done in the digital space that we mentioned sort of

Wikipedia and knowledge? Don't you think there could be a lot of flourishing in the space of

innovation in terms of innovation in the digital space? Yeah. I mean, I'd like to see that. I think

it's where a lot of the brain power went during the last couple of generations because people who

might previously have been building rockets or other kinds of hard technologies ended up instead

going into programming computer science, which is understandable and great. We've got structural

problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty severe. And so I certainly hope

that we're not 10 years from now that we're not exactly where we are today when it comes to that

stuff. We need to move on. The beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do

things and they give you give opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the

old, which is a dream for me to see new social media that beats out the ways of the old. So I

tend to, you perhaps agree that it's impossible to do social media well. No, no, no. I mean, I

listened to your interview with Jaren a couple of weeks ago and I know Jaren and we've talked about

this. He went hard on me. He basically said it's impossible. It is very nice. Well, the last time

I kind of paid attention to Jaren's thoughts on it, he was thinking in terms of that basically

there should be micropayments such that if I, by clicking the like button on something, I'm

essentially giving valuable intellectual property to Facebook or Twitter or whatever. It's not a

very large amount of IP, but it's definitely a transfer of information that when they aggregate

it is beneficial to them. So, and now I do remember that he, on his interview with you,

was talking about what, data unions or yeah. Those are a lot of interesting ideas, but for me,

the biggest disagreement was in the level of cynicism. He has a distrust in cynicism towards

people in Silicon Valley being able to do these kinds of things. And I'm really, okay, when you

have a large crowd of people that are doing things the wrong way, you should nevertheless

maintain optimism. Because what's important is to find the one person in that room that's going

to do things the right way. Cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room. So,

he was saying, I've been here a long time. Oh, yeah. I've known, you know, I just like how these

folks work. They think they're gods and they know the right way to do things and they will

tell you how to do those things. And that kind of hubris is going to always lead you astray

when you are the one who's engineering the algorithms. And there's a lot of deep truth to

that because algorithms are powerful. And many people when given power do not do the best of

things. I mean, most, what is it, the old Lincoln line, if you want to test the man's character,

give him power. Yes. But that doesn't mean that some people are not able to handle the power,

that some people are not able to come up with good ideas that create better social media.

Yeah. I didn't interpret Jaren's statements as being entirely cynical and hopeless. I mean,

he's definitely raising, you know, issues of concern. But he wouldn't be out, you know,

writing the books that he's written and talking about this stuff if he didn't think there was a

way. If he didn't think there was hope. Yeah. And part of it, as you probably know with Jaren,

he just loves a good argument. Yeah. He just loves to have a little bit of fun.

Well, I have to ask you about, I mean, we talked about taking all big, bold, risky ideas. So in

your new book, Termination Shock, it's set here in Texas. Part of it is, yeah. Yeah. Most of it.

Yeah. It's a great place to set it. So in it, the main character, TR, McCooligan, a Texas billionaire,

oil man at truck stop, Magnate decides to solve climate change, take on climate change by himself.

So this is an interesting philosophical exploration of how to solve climate change from a perspective

that's perhaps different than we've been thinking about. Yeah. I wouldn't use the word solve, but

let's say ameliorate. Ameliorate. The temporary effects, but please. Take on. Yeah. Take on

the challenge. So it's very interesting, but as, so there's a gradual nature to this process.

And, I mean, just like in your book, the power of innovation is something that has

saved us quite a few times in history. So what role does that play in this gradual process?

Right. So ultimately, we don't solve the problem until we get the CO2 out of the atmosphere, but

that is going to take a while. We're still adding more. We haven't even started to reduce the amount.

So there's two possibilities inside to ensure up is reduce the amount that we're putting in the

atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere. We have to do both.

Right. And those are two different kind of efforts in terms of what's involved.

Because it stays up there. So I think just last week, China announced that they're going to try to

level off their CO2 emissions in like 2030. So 2031, they'll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere

as they did in 2030, which is still a lot of CO2. In 2060, they're saying we'll be net zero.

So if everyone in the world does that, and the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere by then is say 450

parts per million, it'll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out. And taking it out

is hard. It's a big. We took us a long time. We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs

and burn all that stuff. We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create

all of that CO2. And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove

the CO2 and get it back down hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used

to be. So how about you get a single Texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts

huge quantities of sulfur into the upper atmosphere? That's idea number one.

This is called solar geoengineering. And we know that it's a possibility on a technical level,

because volcanoes have been doing it forever. So many times in human history, we've seen a

volcanic eruption that was followed by a global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years.

And one of these things happened, I think in the 60s or 70s in Indonesia and

the Australians sent a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume.

And when it came back down, the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it. So one of the

Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid. So that was our first

kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was sulfur dioxide.

And so we know, then Pinatubo came along in the 90s and did this experiment for us. So we know that

sulfur in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric acid after it

combines with water. And those bounce back some of the sun's rays and reduce the amount of solar

energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live. So we know that it works. And we also

know that this stuff goes away after a couple of years. So it gradually washes out. And so

it's not a permanent thing. Good news, bad news is it's not permanent. So if you don't like

what's happening, you can just stop and wait a couple of years and you'll get back to where

you started. And the bad news, if you're in favor of this kind of thing, is that you have to keep

doing it forever. So this guy's one of those, he's read these papers, the TR, the character in the

book, he knows all this. And all people who are familiar with climate science kind of know this.

It's a pretty well established fact. And so he just decides he's going to take action unilaterally

and do this. And so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there. But because it's Texas,

he builds the biggest gun in the world. It's just six barrels pointed straight up and he

begins firing shells loaded with sulfur into the stratosphere. And so the book is about not so much

that as how people react to his doing that, what the political ramifications are around the world,

because this is an extremely controversial idea. And not everyone's on board with it. And even if

you are willing to consider using a technological intervention, the fact is that it's going to

have different effects on different parts of the world. So some areas may suffer more negatives

than positives and they're not going to be happy. So what do you think? So in his case, in TR's case,

he can get around getting permission from governments. If we were to look at our

us facing outside of the store, us facing climate change, where do you think the solution

will come from? Governments working together or from bold billionaire Texans?

I'm pretty sure that this kind of intervention is never going to emerge from western democracies.

At this kind of, sorry, government coordinated, which option one?

Solar geoengineering.

Solar geoengineering. From a government, from a, like those are, I want to sort of the distinction.

One is the idea, the technological idea you're talking about, but two is like who comes up

with the idea and agrees on it, governments or individuals.

Yeah. If this were to happen, I think it would be either an individual or more likely just some

government somewhere that just decides it's in their interests to unilaterally do this.

And that's not me advocating it. It's just, it would be comparatively so cheap and easy to

implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do it once things

get bad enough. But I don't think that the government will, or western governments,

just because they're not, well, we've seen what happened with vaccines.

Right. So getting people to take vaccinations or wear masks has turned out to be incredibly hard,

even though it might save those people's lives.

See, I blame, that's not western. That's, I blame failure of leadership there, of leaders

being not coming off as authentic, not being inspiring, uniting, all those kinds of things.

I think that's possible. I think it's just that we've gotten the leaders we have right now,

aren't the right people because we've lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively

comfortable times. And it feels like unfortunate if you just look at history that hard times

make great leaders and easy times make bureaucrats that are egotistical and greedy and not very

interesting and not very bold. Yeah. No, I think that's fair. So we may be entering one of those

interesting times of hardship in the Chinese curse sense. Yeah. So I could be wrong. But I mean,

there have been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering. There was a plan to send up

some balloons, high altitude balloons to take some measurements in Scandinavia that got

squashed by objections from people who lived up there who were just opposed to the whole program

on principle. So we'll see a lot more of that. And it's going to be a hard program to advocate for

just because I think people don't quite understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere

and how far we are from even slowing down the rate that we're adding more to say nothing of

bringing that number down. We're a long way out from that.

Do you see in terms of portfolio of solutions us becoming a multi planetary species as part of

that? Is this also being a motivator for investing some percent of GDP into becoming a multi

planetary species? And what percent should that be, you think? In an indirect way, maybe. I mean,

you know what people will say, which is the same argument that has been leveled against

space exploration since the Apollo program, which is why don't we solve our problems here on Earth

before we spend money going into space? So I've never been a believer in that argument.

I think there could be a sense in which the new perspective that could be obtained by

and like if we're thinking about terraforming Mars, changing its atmosphere, making it more

amenable to life and survival, you could see that maybe changing people's opinions about

terraforming the Earth. Yeah. There are some dangerous consequences to this particular

idea of blasting software, of geoengineering.

What do you make of sort of big bold ideas that are double edged sword? Are all ideas

like this, all big ideas like this, they have the potential to have

highly beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences?

I wouldn't say all. I think going back to what we were talking about earlier,

how technology developed in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when

people maybe had unrealistic ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently

attentive to the possible downsides. There's a reason why. In the mid 20th century,

we saw antibiotics, we saw the polio vaccine, we saw just simple things like refrigerators in the

home. My grandmother to her dying day called the refrigerator the ice box because when she grew up,

it was a box with ice in it. You see all that change and it's largely for the benefit of people.

If somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to build nuclear reactors to make energy,

or here's a new chemical called DDT that's going to kill mosquitoes, then it's easy to

just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides. Of course, we know that

the way that those early reactors were built and the way that the supply chain was built to

create the fuel and deal with the waste was poorly thought out. We're still dealing with

the resulting problems at places like Hanford in the state of Washington. We know that DDT,

although it did kill a lot of insects, also had terrible effects on bird populations.

So the backlash that happened in the 70s that is still going on is to assume that

everything is a double edged sword and always to look for. We have to absolutely convince

ourselves that the downside isn't going to come back and bite us before we can adopt any new

technology. I think people are overly sensitized to that now.

Depending on the technology, people are a little bit too terrified of certain technologies,

like artificial intelligence is one. My sense is that the things that they're afraid of aren't

the things that are likely going to happen in terms of negative things. It's probably impossible

to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences. But what's also interesting

is for AI as an example, people don't think enough about the positive things. I mean,

the same is true with social media. It's very popular now for some reason to talk about all

the negative effects of social media. We've immediately forgotten how incredible it is

to connect across the world. There's a deep loneliness within all of us. We long to connect

and social media, at least in part, enables that even in its current state. And all the

negative things we see with social media currently are also in part just revealing the basics of

human nature. It didn't make us worse. It's just bringing it to the surface. And step one of solving

a problem is bringing it to the surface. The fact that there's a division, the fact that there

were easily angered and upset and all of that, the witch hunts, all those kinds of things,

that's human nature. And it just reveals that allowing us to now work on it is therapy. And so

that's another example of a technology that's just, we're not considering the positive effects now

and in the future enough of, I have to ask you about, there's a million things I can ask you

about, but virtual reality, I gotta ask you. You've thought about virtual reality, mixed reality,

quite a bit. What are the interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality

or mixed reality in the next eight years? Yeah. So I was a magically for what, five years?

With the best title of all time. Oh, thanks. Chief futurist? Yeah. Yeah. And so I

sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content R&D. So we're

trying to make content for AR, but because it's such a new medium, it's more of an engineering

R&D project almost than a creative project. So it was fascinating to see everything that goes into

making an AR system that runs. So an AR device, if it's really going to do AR,

needs to be running slam in real time. And that alone is a big... So for people who don't know,

first of all, virtual reality is creating an almost fully artificial world and putting you

inside it. Augmented reality AR is taking the real world and putting stuff on top of that

real world. And when you say slam, that means in real time, the device needs to be able to sense

accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently to be able to reconstruct it. The

3D structure of it so you can put stuff on top of it. And doing that in real time, presumably,

not just real time, but in a way that creates a pleasant experience for the human perception system

is... Yeah, that's an engineering project. Right. Yeah, well said. And it's just one of the things

that the system has to do. It's also tracking your eyes so it knows what you're looking at,

how far away what you're looking at is. It's performing all those functions and it's got to

keep doing that without burning up the CPU or depleting the battery

unreasonably fast. And that's just table stakes. It's just the basic functions of the

operating system. And then any content that you want to add has to sit on top of that. It's

got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real and you don't get

sick. So it's an amazing thing and a magically shipped device that can do that in 2019. And

they're about to ship the ML2. But I don't know any more about that than anyone else because

I don't work there anymore. Does it still, to some degree, boil down to a killer app,

a content question? Like you said, it's kind of a wide open space. Nobody knows exactly what's

going to be the compelling thing. So doesn't a super compelling experience of some sort

alleviate some of the need for engineering perfection?

Well, there's a base layer of engineering that you have to have, no matter what. But you're

certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with kind of low frame

rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having so much fun playing

Doom or whatever. Even Tetris. Yeah, yeah. So for sure that's true. And so I was working on

consumer facing content. There was a great team in Wellington, New Zealand that made a game

called Dr. Groedbrot's Invaders that realized the potential of AR gaming in a way that I

don't think anything else has before or since. And so that was definitely the strategy until

April 2020, which is when the company decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications

instead. And I haven't seen their financial projections, but I assume they had good reasons

for making that strategic decision. It just means that it's no longer necessarily targeted at

just end users who want to play a game or be entertained. But it's, you know.

That to me from a sort of a dreamer, future perspective is heartbreaking because I don't

know necessarily from in the VR space, but I see this kind of thing with robotics where,

to me, the future of robotics is consumer facing. And a lot of great roboticists,

Boston Dynamics and companies like that are focused on sort of industrial applications.

Yeah. Yes. For financial business reasons. Yeah. Now, I can see the parallels for sure.

We'll see. It was a fun project. We worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats,

which just populated your room with Baby Goats. That seems like a killer app right there.

Well, we thought highly of the idea for sure. Yes. But because of the slam, the system knew,

for example, here's a table. Here's a little end table. We know the heights. We know how high

our animated Baby Goat can jump. And so our engineers had to build a system for converting

the slam primitives into game engine objects that the AI's in the game could navigate around.

So, and that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how to, a sample app

than as a finished consumer facing. You mean the Baby Goat AI, yeah.

Yeah. That seems to me like a world, I can entertain myself for hours, just every day

coming home to see of Baby Goats. Yeah. I mean, it was an ambient kind of,

it's not a thing that you would sit there and play like a video. Just life. Yeah. Yeah. But no,

there's Baby Goats. I mean, what's the purpose of having dogs and cats in your life? Exactly.

It's kind of ambient. Yeah. They're not really helping you do anything, but it's enriching

your life. And you can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want, but you don't

have to. Right. Yeah. So we worked on that in a bigger project that was more of a storytelling

and a fictional universe. The hardware is worth a look. There's still a belief, I just saw it

this morning looking at Twitter that the Magic League never shipped anything. But they've been,

since 2019, you can go to their website and buy one of these devices anytime you

want to spend the money. Yeah. And then you want it's coming out, I think in 2022, so in a few months.

What do you think, looking at 50 years from now, what wins virtual reality, augmented reality,

or physical reality? What wins? Meaning like what's, what do people that have financial resources

enjoy spending most of their time in? I've always been a fan of AR and it's kind of

an easy answer because if you're wearing an AR device and you put a bag over your head,

it becomes a VR device. If you block out what's really there, then all you're seeing is a VR.

But you are with AR constrained to kind of operate in something that's similar to physical

reality. With VR, you can go into fantastical worlds. True. So there are still issues in

those fantastical worlds with motion sickness. So if your body is experiencing acceleration,

your inner ear, that differs from what your eye thinks it's seeing, then you'll get sick

unless you're a very unusual person. So it doesn't mean you can't do it. It's a constraint that

VR designers have to learn to work with. So do you think it's possible that in the future,

we are living mostly in a virtual reality world? Like it would become more and more detached from

physical reality? For entertainment maybe, for certain applications. I'm personally more,

I mean, we have to make a distinction between what I would personally

find interesting and what might win in the market. So maybe some people,

maybe lots of people would like to spend a huge amount of time in VR. I'm personally more interested

in enhancing the experience that I have of the physical world because the physical world's

pretty cool. There's a lot to be said for moving around in the real world.

Can I ask you for you personally to try to play devil's advocate or to try to construct,

to imagine a VR world where you and Neil Stevens wouldn't want to stay?

Not because the physical world all of a sudden became really bad,

for some reason, like you're trying to escape it. But like literally it's just more enriching,

in the same way, there's a glimmer in your eye when you said you enjoy the physical world,

like double up on that glimmer for the virtual reality. Can you imagine such a world?

Well, I'll give maybe an example that's a bridge, which is that I've been, I like making things.

So I like working in a machine shop and making objects with 3D printers or machines or whatever.

And so I've had to learn how to get good at using a CAD program. There's many to choose from.

I use one called Fusion 360. And I can spend hours in that trying to create, imagine and

create the things I want to create. And it's not virtual reality exactly, but that whole time,

my whole field of view is occupied by this monitor that's showing me a window into a

three dimensional space. I'm rotating things around. I'm imagining things. I'm making things.

And so that is pretty close to being in virtual reality.

Does that thing have to exist for you to experience true joy? Can you stay

in Fusion 360 the whole time? Do you have to 3D print it and touch it?

Yeah. I mean, that's my game. That's what I'm up to. But it happens that if you're building

a virtual environment, if you're making a game level or creating a virtual set for a film or TV

production, the thing that you're designing in the program may never physically exist.

And in fact, it's preferable that it doesn't because the whole point of that is to

make imaginary things that you couldn't build otherwise.

So I think lots of people spend a good chunk of their working hours in something that's pretty

close to VR. It's just that currently the output device happens to be a rectangular object

in front of them. You could replace that with a VR headset and they'd be doing the same stuff.

There's all kinds of interfaces. For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks,

but let's say actually podcasts because there's an intimate human connection in a podcast.

It's one way, but you get to learn about the person you're listening to.

And that's a real connection. And that's just audio for a lot of people. That's just audio.

True. And like for me, that's just audio as a fan of people. And you kind of a little bit

are friends with those people. Yeah, they're in your life. You're listening to them. Yeah.

And I mean, they're not, they're as far away from real as he gets. There's not even a,

there's not even a visual component. It's just audio, but they're as real.

Like if I was on a desert island, like my imagination, like this thing works pretty good

in terms of imagination. Like that it creates a very beautiful world with just audio.

So, I mean... Or even just reading books. Exactly. Reading books. Even more so with

reading books. Because there are certain mediums which stimulate the imagination more.

When you present less, the imagination works more. And that can create really enriching

experiences. So, I mean, to me, the question is, can you do some of the amazing things that make life

amazing in virtual worlds? It seems to me the answer there is obviously yes. Even if I like you

and attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world, I think I can very readily imagine

coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual world. Or you make

friends and you can fall in love where the source of love in your life is to a much greater degree

inside of a virtual world. And then love means fulfillment. That means happiness. That's the

thing you look forward to. And not some kind of dopamine rush type of love, but like long,

long, long lasting friendship. Yeah. It just depends on what is there in the way of applications,

the content, and can it feed you those things? Can it give you... Like in my example of using

the CAD program, it gives me the ability to do something I enjoy, which is making, imagining

things and making things in a particular way. Can we psychoanalyze you for a second? Sure. What

exactly do you enjoy? Is there some component of you building the thing where you get to at least

a little bit share with others? Like, is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?

Will anyone ever see it? Right. There's a source of your enjoyment because I would argue

you that perhaps when like the turtles all the way down, when you get to the bottom turtle,

it has to do with other sharing with other humans. And if you can then put those humans

inside the VR world, then you start to... Then you can... Okay. For example, you could do it in

the physical world, the 3D printing, but you share it in the virtual world. And that's where

the source of happiness is. I think at least speaking for myself, I'm always thinking in terms

of an audience. And at some level, I feel like I'm doing this for someone or communicating

to someone, even if there's not a specific someone in mind. It could just be an abstract

theoretical someone. And it's like another app I spend a lot of time in is Mathematica.

Yeah, incredible app. Yeah. And when I do a Mathematica notebook,

if I'm trying to figure something out, I spend a lot of time typing. My stuff is just huge blocks

of text, just me thinking out loud, and then some graphs and calculations and stuff.

Because to me, that act of explaining things and commenting

helps me understand what I'm doing. And there's kind of an audience,

amorphous audience in mind. Yeah. I mean, most of this stuff nobody will ever see. And yet,

I'm creating it as if there were an audience that might read this stuff. Because that's a

necessary constraint that helps me do a better job.

What's the, this might be a tricky question to answer. What comes to mind as a particularly

beautiful thing that you're proud of that you create inside Mathematica, visualization wise,

or something that just comes to memory if it's possible to retrieve?

So the thing I've spent the most amount of time on is I got obsessed a long time ago,

was trying to tile the globe with hexagons. Yes.

And actual globe? Well, any spherical object. Yeah. But with an eye towards putting it on the

earth. And so, and have it be recursive. So you can have hexagons within hexagons,

which is hard because, and probably a bad idea, because you can't tile a hexagon with smaller

hexagons. They don't, they stick out. Got it. So they're, oh, they stick out. So can you do some

kind of fractal hexagon situation? Yeah. Yeah. So it's that, and people who know me are always

now make fun of me for this. So they'll send me, if they see a picture with hexagons in it,

they'll like send me a link, you know, to make fun of me. So as some...

One of those people, Roger Penrose, or? I think Roger's a little above my level.

Oh, he's into hexagons as well, in tiling. Yeah. So I did a lot of that. And I thought, you know,

it was pretty cool. But if there's some like surprisingly intractable problems that keep

coming up, like you've always got to have some pentagons. Like if you start with the icosahedron,

which is equilateral triangles, which is a logical place to start, you can cover those with

hexagons. But every vertex where the triangles come together is a pentagon, has to be a pentagon.

Oh, I just think so. There's all hexagons and then there's a pentagon at the intersections.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. How did you figure that out? Is that a known fact?

Well, it's just if you look at them, like just by instantiation.

The obvious thing, got it. Yeah. So you can't make that go away. So any system that you come

up with to do this has got to have this exceptions built into it for those 12, you could have quintillions

of hexagons, but you still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere. So I've blown a hell of a lot of

time on that over the years. By the way, a lot of those kind of problems are very difficult to

prove something about. Yeah. Yeah. I think Uber did it because someone,

one of my friends who knows of my interest in this and who likes to give me a hard time,

sent me a link, this was a couple of years ago, to some code base that I think came out of Uber

where they had done this. You break down the whole surface of the earth into little hexagons.

So that was a real knife through the heart, but I'll probably come back to it someday.

Is there something special about hexagons? Are you interested in all kinds of tiling?

Well, I'm interested in all kinds of tiling, but I know my limitations as a math guy.

So hexagons are about my speed. Just sufficient amount of complexity.

So, but no, tiling is a really interesting problem, both two and three dimensional.

So, tiling problems are fascinating and they're one of those ancient puzzles that has

attracted Brainiacs for centuries.

Let me ask you a little bit about AI. What are some likely interesting trajectories

for the proliferation of AI in society over the next couple of decades?

Do you think about this kind of stuff?

I do not think about it a lot because it's a deep topic and I'm not, I don't consider myself

super well informed about it. And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different

things. So I've messed around just a tiny little bit with neural nets with what's it called PCA,

principal component analysis. So I guess I tend to think in terms of granular bottom up

ideas rather than big picture top down.

Oh, God. So like very specific algorithms, like how are they going to,

what problem are they going to solve in society such that it has like a lot of big ripple effects?

See, I mean, we could talk a particular successful AI systems and success defining

different ways of recent years. So one is language models with GPT3.

Most importantly, they're self supervised, meaning they don't require much supervision

from humans, which means they can learn by just reading a huge amount of content created by humans.

So read the internet and from that be able to generate text and do all kinds of things like that.

It's possible they have a big enough neural network, it's going to be able to

have conversations with humans based on just reading human language. That's an interesting

idea. To me, the very interesting idea that people don't think about it as AI because they're kind

of dumb currently is actual embodied robots. So robotics like Boston Dynamics, I have downstairs

and upstairs legged robots. The currently Boston Dynamics robots and most legged robots,

most robots period are pretty dumb. Most of the challenges have to do with the actual,

first of all, the engineering of making the thing work, getting a sensor suite that allows

you to do the same things with Magic Leap, that base layer of like, where is it stuff? Where am I?

And what am I looking at? I don't need to deeply understand my surroundings at a level of like,

at a level beyond of what will hurt if I run into it. But even that is hard.

That's hard. But the thing that I think people don't in the robotics space explore enough is

the human robot interaction part of the picture, which is how it makes humans feel,

how robots make humans feel. And I think that's going to have a very significant impact

in the near future in society, which is the more you integrate AI systems of whatever form

into society where humans are in contact with them regularly. So that could be embodied robotics,

or that could be social media algorithms. I think that has a very significant impact.

And people often think like AI needs to be super smart to have an impact. I think it needs to be

super integrated with society to have an impact and more and more that's happening,

even if they're dumb. Yeah. Yeah. No, the, I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is that I'm

associated with a combat robotics team. And I've been to a few battlebots competitions. And that's

not like, in a lot of ways, that's pretty far from the kind of robotics you're talking about,

because these robots are remote controlled. They're not autonomous. And so they're pretty simple. But

it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different robots. So there was

one that was in the last year's season, the 2020 season called Rusty, that was just like put together

out of spare parts. And it looked kind of cute. And it became this huge crowd favorite. Because

you could see it was made of like salad bowls and random pieces of hardware that this guy had

like scavenged from his farm. And so immediately, people kind of fell in love with this one particular

robot. Whereas they might, other robots might be like the bad guy, you know, you know, if you

think of professional wrestling, you know, the heel and the baby face. So people do, for reasons

that are hard to understand, form these emotional reactions. And we form narratives in the same

way we do when we meet human beings, we tell stories about these objects, and they can be

intelligent, and they could be biological, or they could be in almost close to inanimate objects.

Yeah. And that to me is kind of fascinating. And if robots choose to lean into that,

it creates an interesting world. If they start using feedback loops to make themselves cuter?

Not just cuter, but everything that humans do. Let's not speak harshly of robots. Humans do

the same thing. Oh, no, I wasn't meaning it in a, but right, humans, based on feedback,

will change their appearance. Yes. I do this on Instagram all the time. How do I look cuter?

That's the fundamental question I ask myself. Yeah. So why wouldn't a robot want to,

it's like, oh, wow, people, people really don't like the quad mount machine gun, you know, on

top of my turret. Maybe I should get rid of that. And that would, you know, people would feel more

at ease. Or lean into it. Yeah. Proud of it. Yeah. Like, you won't take my gun, whatever they're

saying, instead of my dead cold hands. I mean, they're personality, adding personality,

such that you can start to heal, you can start to weave narratives. I think that's a fascinating

place where there's this feedback loop, like you said, where AI, when it's, especially when it's

embodied, puts a mirror to ourselves. Just like other humans are close friends, they kind of

teach us about ourselves. We teach each other and through that process grow close. And to me,

it's so fascinating to expand the space of deep meaningful interactions beyond just humans.

That's the opportunity I see with robots and with AI systems. And that's why I don't like

my biggest problem, social media algorithms, is the lack of transparency. It's not the existence

of the algorithms. It's, well, there's this many things. One is the data. Data should be controlled

by the individual, by people themselves. So, but also the lack of transparency and how the

algorithms work. And change your perception of what's real in hidden ways. Yeah. In hidden ways.

Like you should be aware, just like when you take, I don't know, if you take psychedelics,

you should be aware that you took the psychedelics. It shouldn't be a surprise.

Yeah. And second, you should, I mean, become a student and a scholar and there should be

research done. There should be open conversation about how your perception is changed. And then

you are, become your own guide in this world of ultra perception, because arguably none of it is

real. You get to choose the flavor of real. I mean, this is something you explore quite a bit.

Do you yourself think that there is a bottom to it where there is reality? There's a base layer

of reality that physics can explore and our human perception sort of layer stuff. Is there,

is there, let's go to Plato. Is there such a thing as truth?

I lean towards the platonic view of things. So, I believe that mathematical objects having

a reality that it's not all made up by human minds. And I don't know where that reality

comes from. I can't explain it, but I do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not

invented. I did a lot of, not a lot, but I did some reading of Husserl when I was writing Anathem.

And he's a 20th century phenomenologist and he's writing in the, he's writing at the same

time as scientists are starting to understand atoms and becoming aware that when we look at

this table, it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum. And there's a very sparse arrangement

of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space that interact with each other in such a way

that our brains perceive this object. So, that's kind of the beginnings of phenomenology. And his

stuff is pretty hard to, hard to read. You really have to take it in small bites and go a little

bit at a time. But he's trying to come to grips with these kinds of questions.

How did you come to grips with it? Why does this table feel solid?

Well, I mean, we're an evolved system that there's, we have biological advantages in knowing

where solid objects are. So, we've got this system in our head that integrates our perceptions into

this coherent view of things that one of the take homes that I like from Husserl is the idea of

intersubjectivity and the idea that a fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to

share our perceptions and have them ratified by other. They don't even have to be people, but

that, you know, a prisoner in solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects

because they perceive the same things that the prisoner perceives. And so, convince him that

he's not just hallucinating. Yeah, establish a consensus. But see, that doesn't mean any of

it is real. You just establish a consensus. It could be very distant from something that's

real in the engineering sense of real, like that you could build it using physics.

Well, I think that a valuable application for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except that.

It just sits there. And if you hear a door slam, you might turn to see what it is. If the robot

at the same time turns to look at the door slam, it's ratifying your perception.

But isn't that the basis of love is when the door slams, you both look,

but for deeper things, you both hear the same music and others don't. I mean,

isn't that what that means? Yeah. That's, by love, I mean depth of human connection.

Yeah. Like, that's, or not nothing. You arrive at similar reactions without having to

explicitly communicate it. Yeah. Yeah. But we could start with a robot that

listens explicitly for the slam doors. Yeah. Or scary sounds.

I can think of. So an example of this is when I went to college, we'd be sitting at the cafeteria

a bunch of people eating our dinner together that we had just met, let's say. So a bunch of new

people in your life and someone might make a funny remark or a not so funny remark or

something would happen. And you might then, at that moment, make eye contact with someone you

didn't know at the other end of the table. And in that moment, you would realize this person

is reacting. This person heard what I heard. They're reacting the way I reacted. Yeah. Nobody

else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened. But random stranger down there

and I, we have this connection. Yeah. And then you build on that. So then the next time something

happens, you automatically look at your new friend and they look back at you. And before you know

it, you're hanging out together. Yeah. Because you've already established, without even talking

to each other, that you're on the same wavelength. Yeah. It's seemingly so simple,

but so powerful. It's establishing that you're on the same wavelength at some level. Yeah.

There's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that. I'm just saying.

Does this smell burned to you? Exactly. I think it's burned. If a toaster could just say that to

you. Yeah. Yeah. Cryptonomicon published in 1999, set in the late 90s and involves hackers who build

essentially cryptocurrency. Bitcoin White Paper came out in 2008. So I have to kind of ask

from you looking at this layout of what's been happening in cryptocurrency, the evolution of

this technology, how has it rolled out differently than you could have imagined in two ways. One,

the technology itself and two, the human side of things, the human stories of the hackers

and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless, the human side of things.

Yeah. Well, Cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin. It's pre Satoshi. It's pre blockchain, as you've pointed

out. So at that point, I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing among people like the Bay Area

Cypher punks in Berkeley. There was some, some there was a branch here in Austin as well.

And a lot of their thinking was so based on the idea that you would have to have

a physical region of the earth that was free of government interference. You couldn't achieve

that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network. You actually had to have

a room somewhere with servers in it that a government couldn't come and meddle with.

And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there were efforts to figure

out jurisdictions where this might work. There was a lot of interest for a while in Anguilla,

which is a Caribbean island that had some unusual jurisdictional properties. There was

Sea Land, Sea Land, which is a platform in the North Sea. And so there was a lot of effort that

went into finding these physical locations that that were deemed kind of safe. And that all

goes away with blockchain. It's no longer necessary. And so that really changes the picture in a lot

of ways because you no longer have, I mean, from a novelist point of view, the old system was a lot

more fun to work with because it gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in

strange parts of the world, you know, trying to set up server rooms. So that's a great storytelling

thing. There's still a little bit of that, right? In the modern world, but it's just

there's several server rooms as opposed to one centralized one.

Yeah. Yeah. And there is the, like the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation

and to keep your GPUs from melting down. So people building things in Iceland or in

shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean or whatever. But there's still governments evolved

and there's still from a novelist perspective, interesting dynamics. What is big governments

like China and more sort of renegade governments from all over the world, trying to contend with

this idea of what to do in terms of control and power over these kinds of centers that do the

mining of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So we're in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial,

like there was the stuff I was describing in Cryptonomicon had a little bit of air

about it of the underpants gnomes in that, you know, we're going to, we're going to build this

system and then we'll make money somehow. But the intermediate step was left out.

And that is, I think we're now sort of into that phase of the thing where the, where Bitcoin,

you know, blockchain exists, people know how it works. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

exist. People are using them and it's sort of like, okay, what now, you know, where does this all

lead? So do you have a sense of where it all leads? Like, is it, is it possible that the

set of technology kind of continues to have a transformational effects on not just sort of

finance, but who gets to have power in this world? So the decentralization of power.

You know, big questions, right? So I guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me

thinking that as soon as it becomes important enough, the existing banks and people in power

are going to sort of control it. I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change

in the end. There's a utopian strain sometimes in the way people think about this that I'm not

so sure about. There's a technological aspect to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that make it a

little easier to pull along the utopian thread. Yeah. Because it's harder for governments to

control Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, they have much fewer options. They can ban, they can make it

illegal. It's more difficult. Yeah. So technology here is on the side of the powerless, the voiceless,

which is a very interesting idea. Of course, yes, it does have a utopian

feel to it, but we have been making progress throughout human history. Maybe this is what

progress looks like. There will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that take

advantage of it, skim off the top kind of thing. But maybe this does give more power to people

that haven't had power before in a good way, like distributing power and enabling more

greater resistance to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing,

and also enabling all kinds of technologies built on top of it. Ultimately, when you digitize money,

money is a kind of speech, or it's kind of like a mechanism of how humans interact. And if you

make that digital, more and more of the world moves to the digital space, and then you can finally

fully live in that virtual reality with the toaster. Yeah. In a lot of ways, I think in that

realm of technology that the money, per se, is one of the less interesting things you can do with

it. So I think cryptographically enforceable contracts and organizations built on those,

that seems to me like it's got more potential for change just because we do already have

money. And although it's an old system, it's been digitized to a large extent by

the stripes and the credit card companies of the world.

I also love the idea of two smart contracts connecting data, making it more formal,

it's like Mathematica, more structured, the integration of data, of weather data,

of all kinds of data about the stuff in the world so they can make contracts between people

that's grounded in data. And that's actually getting closer to

something like truth, because then you can make agreements based on actual data versus

kind of perceptions of data. And if you can formalize, distribute the power of who gets

to tell the story, that's an interesting kind of resistance, again, the powerful in the space

of narrative. Yeah, David Brinn has been saying for a while that the only way to settle arguments

with across the political divide is to make bets. So people can say the election was stolen

or whatever controversial position they're taking, and they'll keep saying it until you

wager real money on it. So maybe there's something there if you could turn that into a,

put a user interface on that thing. Yeah, have a stake in your divisiveness,

in your arguments. Will Dogecoin take over the world? Twitter question.

You know, I don't follow the different coins that much. So I hear about Dogecoin and I kind of

followed the story of it. So the interesting aspect of Dogecoin is it, so in contrast to like

Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek

to solve some of the problems that we're talking about with smart contracts and resist the banks

and all those kinds of things, Dogecoin operates more in the space of memes and humor while still

doing some of the similar things. And it presents to the world sort of a question of whether memes,

whether humor, whether narrative will go a long way in the future,

like much farther than some kind of boring old grounded technologies,

whether we'll be playing in the space of fun. Like once we built a base of comfort and stability

and like a robust system where everyone has shelter, everyone has food and the basic needs

covered, I will go into then operate in the space of fun. That's what I think about Dogecoin,

about Dogecoin because it seems like fun spreads faster than anything else, fun of different kinds

and that could be bad fun and that could be good fun. And so it's a battle of good fun.

It goes viral very quickly when you post something that people find fun.

And that's what Dogecoin represents. So Bitcoin represents like financial,

like serious financial instruments and then Dogecoin represents fun. And it's interesting

to watch the battle go on on the internet to see which wins. This is also like an open question to

me of what is the internet because fun seems to prevail on the internet. And that's that a

fundamental property of the internet moving forward when you look 100 years out or is this

a temporary thing that was true at the birth of the internet and it's just true for a couple of

decades until it fades away and the adults take over and become serious again.

Well, I think the adults took over initially and then it was later on that people started

using it for fun, frivolous things like memes. And I think that's pretty much unstoppable.

Yeah. Because even people who are very serious enjoy sending around a funny picture or

something that amuses them. Yeah, I personally think we spoke about World War II. I think memes

will save the world and prevent all future wars. You've been handwriting your work for

the past 20 years since writing the Baroque cycle. What are the pros and cons of handwriting versus

typing? For me, I started it as an experiment when I started the Baroque cycle because I had noticed

that sometimes if I was stuck having a hard time getting started, if I just picked up a pen

and started writing, it was easy to go. So I just decided to keep with that. If it got in my way,

I didn't like it. I could always just go back to the word processor and be fine. But that never

happened. So there's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's ink on paper and there's no

operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it. It's a slower output

technique. And so a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here

before it gets committed to paper, whereas I can type really fast. And so I can slam things out

before I really thought them through. So I think the first draft quality ends up being higher.

And then editing, first draft of editing is just faster because instead of trying to move the cursor

around or whatever, or hitting the backspace key, I can just draw a line through a word or a sentence

or just around a whole paragraph and exit out. And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit,

but I've also left behind a record of what the text was prior to the edit. Of course,

all the digital versions have those quote unquote features, but their experience is different.

Is there a romance to just the physical,

the touch of the pen to the paper, doing what has been done for centuries? I think there is.

I think there is just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology beyond the

pen and the paper is just very simple and clean. And so I've got a bunch of fountain pens. I started

buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago because I thought I would be more conservative

with it. But it's still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn't really alter my habits very much.

So all that said, once you do type stuff up, you use Emacs. I use Emacs, obviously the superior

editor. Of course. Let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question because Emacs has been around

forever. Do you think in 100 years we will still have Emacs and Vim? Or pick a, let's say, 50,

100 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, whenever you're doing anything in Linux,

you're spending a lot of time editing little config files and scripts and stuff. And you need

to be able to pop in and out of editing those things. And it needs to work. Like even if the

windowing GUI is dead and all you've got is like a command line, to get out of that problem, you

might need to enter an editor and alter a file. So I think on that level, there will always have to

be sort of very simple. Well, Emacs isn't very simple, but you know what I mean. There have to

be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a GUI just for administering

systems. Now, how widespread they'll be. There's a certain amount of what's the story of the

American folktale of the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry,

trying to keep up with the steam hammer. And eventually the steam hammer wins because he

can't drive the spikes fast enough. So there's a sense in which, you know, Microsoft, like

who knows how much they've invested in code, you know, Visual Studio or Apple with Xcode. So

they've put huge amounts of money into enhancing their IDEs. And Emacs, in theory, can duplicate

all of those features by, you know, if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs Lisp

macros. But, you know, at some point, it's going to be hard to maintain that level of

to keep up feature for feature. The interesting thing about Emacs just is

lasted a long time. Yeah. And I think you've talked about, there's a certain like, there's certain

fads, certainly in the software engineering space. And it's interesting to think about

technologies that sort of last for a very long time. And just kind of being in them.

What is it? How do they get by? It's like the cockroaches of software or the bacteria or

software or something. Like this base thing that nobody, everybody's just became reliant on.

And they just outlast everything else and slowly, slowly adjust with the times with a little bit

of a delay with a little bit of customization by individuals kind of that. But they're always

there in the shadows and they outlast everybody else. And I wonder if that's, that might be the

story for a lot of technologies, especially in the software space. Shell scripts, you know,

all that stuff. You can't run the modern world without a bunch of shell scripts,

you know, booting up machines and running things. So that is going to be a hard thing to replace.

And then tech for typesetting that you use, you said?

For, when I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple macros that I use. But then I

have to, the publisher put their foot down and they want it in Word format now. So years ago,

I wrote some macros to convert. And this time, what did I do?

Copy, paste.

No, I used sort of regular expressions. So I was to do italics and, you know, you put it in

curly brackets and you do backslash it and then you type what you want to type. And that's how

you get italics in tech. So you can create a regular expression that'll look for some text

between curly brackets preceded by backslash it and then instead convert that to italics.

And Word will do that. Word, if you go deep enough into its search and replace UI.

You can do regular expressions.

It's just regs.

Yeah, it's funny that you did that. I mean, I'm sure there's tools that help you with that kind

of thing, but the task is sufficiently simple to where you can do a much better job than anybody

else's tool can. Yeah. So that's a fascinating process. Works fine for me. Yeah. And it keeps

you from messing around with formatting. Yeah. Like, oh, what if I put this chapter heading,

you know, in, you know, a sans serif font? Yeah, it's just classic wanking. And so

those options are closed off in what I'm doing.

Is there advice you could say, what does it take to write a great story?

The power of good yarns, good narratives to pull people in is incredible. And I think my

sort of amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary development that if you're,

you know, a cave person sitting around a fire in the Rift Valley a million years ago,

if you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas or how Uncle Bob, you know,

didn't escape from the hyenas. And if the people listening to you can take that in

and they can build that scenario in their heads like a kind of virtual reality and see

what you're describing, then you've just conferred an incredibly important advantage

on the people who've heard that story. Yeah. Right. And so they know a bunch of stuff now

about how to stay alive that they could not have learned in any other way.

I mean, animals who don't have speech though, they might warn each other,

they might make a sound that says danger, danger. But as far as we know, they can't

tell more complicated stories. So it's a part of us. Yeah. The collective intelligence seems

to be one of the key characteristics of Homo sapiens, the ability to share ideas and hold

ideas together in our minds. And storytelling is the fundamental aspect of that. Maybe even

language itself is more fundamental. Yeah. Because the language is required to do the

storytelling or maybe they evolve together. Maybe they co evolve. Yeah. So I think that

you've got to work with that. And I think sometimes it seems like in kind of literary

circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon as it's pulpy or it's exploitative.

But for me, I don't have any compunctions whatsoever about that. I like stories that

are grabby and fun and exciting to read. And once you've got one of those going,

once you've got a good yarn going that people will enjoy reading, then you're free to do whatever

you want in the frame of that story. But if you don't have that, then you got nothing.

What about having like, which you do at the technological scientific rigor,

like to the accuracy and as much as possible? How does that add to Bob telling the story

or telling the story about Bob or on the campfire? Well, the main thing that it does is

present little details that you might not have come up with on your own. So if you're just sitting

there freely imagining things, your brain probably isn't going to serve up the wealth

of details and the resulting complications and surprises that the real world is constantly

presenting us with. And so in my case, if I'm trying to write a story about that involves

some technology like a rocket or orbital maneuvers or whatever, then delving into those details

eventually is going to turn up some weird, unexpected thing that gives me material to work

with, but also subliminally readers who see that are going to be drawn in more,

because they're going to find that, oh, I didn't see that coming. It's got some

of the complexity and surprise value of the real world. Yeah, it does something.

Alex Garland, director who wrote, directed X Machina, I think about AI movies and the more

care you take in making it accurate, the more compelling the story becomes a mile.

I'm not sure what that is. Maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story,

maybe it just makes you a better writer. The key to any storytelling is getting the

readers to suspend their disbelief. And there's all kinds of triggers and little

tells that can break that. And once it's broken, it's really hard to get it back.

A lot of times that's the end. Somebody will just close the book and not pick it up.

I got to ask you, you've answered this question, but I got to ask you the most impossible question

for an author to answer, but which Neil Stevenson book should one read first?

So when people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read, right? Because I mean,

there's the best known one is probably Snow Crash, but that's a cyberpunk novel that's

at the same time making fun of cyberpunk. So it's got some layers to it that might not

seem so funny if you don't get the joke, right? So as you point out, I've written historical

novels. Some people like those. Some people prefer those. So if that's what you like,

then kryptonomicon or the Baroque cycle is where you would start. If you like sort of techno

thrillers that are set in a modern day setting, but aren't science fictiony per se, then Reemdi

is one of those and termination shock is definitely one of those. So it just depends on

what people like. When people a long time ago recommend I read Snow Crash, I said

it's Neil Stevenson Light. It's the like, if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the depth,

like the rigor book, like that's a good introduction to the man. So essentially,

you're broken down by topics, but if you wanted to read all of them, what's a good introduction

to the man? Because obviously, these worlds are very different. The philosophies are very different.

What's a good introduction to the human? People ask the same thing of Dostoyevsky people,

right? It's a hard one to answer. Maybe Seven Eves, because it's got big themes. It's about heavy

things happening to the human race. But hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters

that people can relate to. It moves along. So it does go kind of deep eventually on

how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff. But people were able to get through

it anyway, or some people just skip over that. It's fine. As an author, let me ask you,

what books had a big impact on your life that you've read? Is there any that jumped to mind

that you learned from as a writer, as a philosopher, as a mathematician, as an engineer?

This is one of these questions where I always blank out. And then when I'm walking out the door,

I'll remember 12. So this is a random selection that doesn't represent the top ones?

Well, I mentioned Gulag Archipelago. That's kind of hefty and dark.

And then it has a personal connection as well. Like where you found the book, too.

The time in your life, where you found it, who recommended it, that's also part of the story.

Yeah. So there's definitely that. I circle back to Moby Dick a lot,

because we read it in a really great English class I had in high school. And I came in with an

oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into

having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory and what does this mean and what's

the symbolism. And it turned out that it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying than

that. What was the first powerful book you remember reading that convinced you that

this form could have depth? Was it Moby Dick? Was it like in high school?

I'm trying to remember. Well, Moby Dick was definitely a big one. I used to read a lot of

classics, comics. I don't know if you've seen these. It's a whole series of comic books that

it was viral. In the back of each comic book was an order form. You could check some boxes and

fill out your address and mail it in and more would show up. But it was like they would do the

count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, all the sort of classic

books they had put into comic book form. That's amazing. Yeah. Reading Moby Dick,

if you're nine years old, is a tall order. There's some very complicated sentences in there and a

lot of digressions. But if you're just looking at the comic book, it's like, holy shit, look at that

whale. And ultimately the power of the story doesn't need the complicated words. It's all

about the man and the whale. Yeah. So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works

of literature without actually reading them, which is great when you're nine years old.

So I read a lot of that stuff for sure. The annotated Sherlock Holmes.

You mentioned David Deutsch, too, as an inspiration for some of your work. I mean, you've

obviously done really a lot of research for the books you do. Roger Penrose.

What, do you remember a book that made you want to become a writer? Or a moment that made you

become a writer? I think like the, you know, the answer I usually give is that when I was in like

fifth grade, one of my friends came to school one day is wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes.

And I hated dress shoes because mine never fit. And so they were uncomfortable. I couldn't run,

you know, they were cold. It was Iowa. So I kind of said, I remember very clearly thinking,

okay, I don't like where this is going. Like, does this mean that next year,

all of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes? So I need to find a job where I don't

have to do that. So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job,

you know, being a writer. And then I just read a lot of just classic science fiction short stories

and started, you know, trying to write some of my own. And there were just classic young adult

stories like by Heinlein and the other classic names that you think of, but the Heinlein ones

have stuck with me in a way that the others didn't. What's the greatest science fiction book ever

written? Removing your work from consideration? Greatest? I'm loving torturing you right now.

Greatest ever non Stevenson? Do we include fantasy? There's to have to be science fiction.

Oh, interesting fantasy. I do not expect that twist.

Well, in a weird way, they're lumped together in people's minds, right? So

they are, but there's also a boundary somehow. I'm not sure what that is exactly.

Nobody is. It's a mystery. So I mean, if we do include it, then it's easily the Lord of the

Rings. But I mean, greatness is an interesting quality to try to define. And for me, a lot of the

fun and the joy of such books is not in what you call greatness, but just storytelling.

And so I was always a big fan of have space suit will travel, which is a Heinlein young adult book.

It's just a fun, good read. So fun is a big component. Greatness is overrated.

Well, I don't know it's overrated, but it's just, you know, it might be under defined.

Let's put it that way. Have space suit will travel. Now I definitely have to read that one.

Yeah. You mentioned Iowa. I was there a couple of times that got to spend quite a bit of time

with Dan Gable, with Tom Brands, who are wrestlers. Is it now wrestling martial arts

part of your life, any part of your form, formation of who you are as a human being?

I think so. It was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames, Dan Gable was a few years

older than me. And so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling

meets. And this was before his Olympic career. So everyone knew he was the star of that team.

And then he was the best. But people didn't yet know that he was the greatest of all time.

Gee, you saw Gable. So that was part, it's, it's funny as it feels like a small world that you

would be in the same space as Dan Gable. Well, from 100 feet away, a little dot on the mat,

trouncing his opponents, him and Chris Taylor. So the other star was this 400 pound plus guy

named Chris Taylor, who also went to the Olympics. So yeah, people, you know, he was, he was a no,

he was a athletic hero. And wrestling is, there's certain states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania,

Iowa, where wrestling is the sport, because those are states of small towns. And so if you're a

small town, if you're like Dan Gable, and you have to be on a football team with 20 other guys

who are not Dan Gable, then no matter how good you are, your team might, might suck. But if in a

solo thing, you can, you can go to the Olympics. So we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes

in school, and I didn't like it. And I think partly it's just that it was so, so competitive.

And the people who were, who cared about it, really cared about it a lot, you know. And so

it was, it was pretty tough. I didn't think I had the right body type. But then when I was,

after college, I was in Iowa City for a few years, when he was coaching the,

that the wrestling team there, and he won like nine championships out of 10 years, you know,

during that, during that time. So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time,

and like the greatest team coach. So I know I've never met him, but we've,

he's kind of been like in my sphere of awareness since I was, you know, kind of my whole life.

And people would always tell stories about him. Like, I think he got arrested once for some kind of,

I don't know, minor offense and aims. And so he just basically stayed up all night. He was in

this cage in the jail. He just stayed up all night doing pull ups. Yeah. Sounds about right. Yeah.

And so yeah. So has that been, I mean, Iowa is such an interesting place in the world.

And wrestling is just part of that story. Is that somewhere in there? Does that resonate deeply

with who you are? It was a formative thing for me growing up there, for sure. It's just a,

you know, at least used to be a very orderly place, high social capital, very minimal class

differences. So like, you'd have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy,

but that was it. Those were the rich people, right? So and a college town is always a different

environment like, you know, Austin has some of this. So it was a pretty kind of utopian,

other than the weather and a few other things, environment to grow up in. The martial art I

ended up doing is sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop. So

when you're grappling, everything is through sense of touch. And your sense of touch is very old

and simple, right? Like earthworms don't even have eyes, but they can tell when they're being

touched, right? So it's very fast. And with a standoff art like boxing or some kinds of sword

fighting, you're not touching the other person most of the time. Your visual system is doing

something way more, it's doing slam and trying to figure out what the other person is up to.

And so that always fell more my speed. So in Olympic style fencing,

it doesn't start really until you're crossing blades with the other person. And now you're back

to wrestling, you're feeling what they're doing. And it's all about that. But some of the older

sword arts don't engage the blade that way. You standoff at a range and then you make

cutting attacks. And so those are all processed visually. And I think I'm more of a slow thinker,

so it works for me better. I mean, it has the same, the artistry and the beauty of boxing,

I suppose, just like you said, is like there's no, there's no contact and it's all processed

visually. And I'm sure there's a dance of its own. That depends on the characteristic of a sword

involved. Yeah, there's a set of stances and basic reactions that you try to learn that are

thought to be defensible and safe or safer. And so it tends to be a series of short engagements

where you'll, you'll close in, you'll try out your, your idea and it works where it doesn't, then you,

you back off again. It's interesting to think about like human history, because martial arts,

okay, that's a thing. But in terms of sword fighting, just the full

range of humans that existed who mastered sword fighting or sought the master sword fighting,

just to imagine the thousands of people who, the heights they have achieved, because the stakes

are so incredibly high to be good. And it's the richest, most powerful people in those societies

spending whatever it takes to get the best gear and the best training, because you're right,

everything depends on it. And it's still life and death. I mean, that, that's fascinating.

I mean, that, that's fascinating. We perhaps have lost that forever with greater weapons.

I mean, the artistry of sword fighting, when it's life and death, and you go into war,

you have the Miyamoto Massaches of the world, right? The, I don't know, there's a, there's a

poetry to that, that there's a mastery to that, that I don't know if we could achieve with any

other kind of martial art. Well, the, one of the good, you were talking earlier about the,

the good effects of the internet social media that we sometimes overlook. And, and one of those is

that there were all these isolated people around the world who were interested in this, who found

each other and kind of created a network of, of people who help each other learn these things.

So that doesn't mean that anyone is, is up to the level of the, you're talking about yet. But,

but it is happening. And, and so there's a, a, a large number of old treatises, old written

documents that have been dug up from libraries and, and people have been going over these and

translating them from old dialects of Italian and German to make sense of them and, and learning

how to, to do these techniques with different, different weapons. Actually, there's a guy here

in Austin named Daman Stith who does African, historical African martial arts. Also martial

arts of, of enslaved Africans who would learn machete fighting techniques in the Caribbean

South America. He's probably within a mile of us. He's an amazing guy. I'm going to look him up.

Can I ask you for advice? Can you give advice for young people, high school, college,

you know, undergrads, thinking about their career, thinking about life, how to live a

life that you'd be proud of. You think quite a bit about like what it's required to be

innovative in this world. You think quite a bit about the future. So if somebody wanted to be

a person that makes a big impact from the future, what advice would you give them?

I think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do

happily. And I don't want to say obsessively, because that sounds like maybe it's pathological,

but, but if you can find a thing that you'll, you know, you'll sit down, you'll start doing it,

and hours later, you kind of snap out of it. Now, where did the time go? Then that's a really key

discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're young. Because if you don't have that,

it's hard to, to figure out where you should put your energies, you know. And as you might have

the best intentions, you might say, you know, I want world peace or whatever. But at the end of

the day, what really matters is how do you spend your time? And are you spending it in a way that

it's productive? And because it doesn't matter how smart you are or well intentioned you are,

unless you've figured that out. And so finding the thing in which you can sort of,

you naturally lose yourself in. The thing is, at least for me, there's a lot of things like that,

but I first have to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing. Like the fun starts

a little bit after the first hump of really sucking, and then you could suck just regularly.

Yeah. So often, people, oftentimes people can give up too early, I think. I mean,

that's true with mathematics for me. It's for a lot of people is if you just give it a chance

of struggle, if you give yourself time to struggle, you'll find a way, you'll find the thing

within that thing that you can lose track of time with. Yeah, that's a key detail that

there's an important thing to add to what I said, which is that this might not happen the first time

you do a thing. Maybe it will. But you might have to climb that learning curve. And

if there's pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that,

then it might prevent you from getting where you need to be. So there's some complexity there

that can make this kind of nonobvious. But that's why we need good teachers.

You know, another beneficial thing of the internet is YouTube and being able to learn

things, how to do things on YouTube. The dude who made the YouTube video doesn't care how many

times you hit pause and rewind. They're never going to roll their eyes and be impatient with you.

And sometimes spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book, like making that

the thing you just spent a huge amount of time on rereading, rereading, or rewatching,

rewatching, that somehow really solidifies your love for that thing. And the depth of

understanding you start to gain. And it's okay to stay with that. I used to think there's all

these books out there. So like, I need to keep reading or keep reading. But then I realized,

I think it was somewhere in college where you could just spend your whole life with a single

textbook. There's nothing in that textbook to really, really stay.

Miesner, Thorn and Wheeler, Gravitation is one of those. Or another one is The Road to Reality

by Roger Penrose, which is just incredibly deep. And it starts with like two plus two equals four.

And at the end, you're at the boundaries of physics. It's an amazing, amazing book.

Let me ask you the big, ridiculous question. Since you've pondered some big, ridiculous

questions in your work, what's the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life,

a human life? Well, as far as I know, we're unique in the universe.

There's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated as what's

between our ears might be. You can't rule it out. So we appear to be pretty special. And

so it's got to have something to do with that. And one of the reasons I like David Deutch,

in particular, his book, The Beginning of Infinity, is that he talks about the power of

explanations and the fact that most civilizations are static, that they've got a set of dogmas

that they arrive at somehow, and they just pass those on from one generation to the next and

nothing changes. But that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow whatever

you want to call it, the scientific method or enlightenment. There's different ways of thinking

about it, but basically, explanatory, it's about the power of explanations and being able to figure

out why things are the way they are. And that has created changes in our thinking and our way of life

over the last few centuries that are explosive compared to anything that came before.

And David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force of nature in its potential

transformative power. If we keep going, if we figure out how to colonize the universe,

like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, then it is

effectively a force of nature. This kind of drive to understand more and more and more deeper and

deeper and deeper and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more. Yeah. Yeah. It's the

well, it's the old, the universe created us to understand itself. Maybe that's the whole purpose.

Yeah. It is an interesting peculiar side effect of the way we've been created is we seem to be

conscious beings. We seem to have little egos. We seem to be born and die pretty quickly. There's a

bunch of drama. We're all within ourselves pretty unique and we fall in love and start wars and

there's hate and all the, the full interesting dynamic of it. So it's not just about the individual

people. Yeah. Somehow like the concert that we played together. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of

interesting. And there's a lot of peculiar aspects of that that I wonder if they're fundamental,

just quirks of evolution, whether it's, whether there's death, whether it's love, whether all

those things. I wonder if they're, from an engineering perspective, when we're trying to create

that intelligent toaster that listens for the, for the slam door and the smell of burning toasts,

whether that toaster, it should be afraid of death and should fall in love just like we do.

Neil, you're a fascinating human being. You've impacted the lives of millions of people.

Well, thank you. It is a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time with me today.

Thank you so much. Thank you for coming down to beautiful hot Texas and thank you for talking

to me. It was a pleasure. I'm glad I came and did it. Thanks for listening to this conversation

with Neil Stevenson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now let me leave you with some words from Neil Stevenson himself in his novel, Snow Crash.

The world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride,

you can go places. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.