Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #240
the following is a conversation with neil stephenson a legendary science fiction writer exploring ideas in mathematics science cryptography money linguistics philosophy and virtual reality from his early book snow crash to his new one called termination shock he doesn't just write novels he worked at the space company blue origin for many years including technically being blue origin's first employee he also was the chief futurist at the virtual reality company magic leap this is the lex friedman podcast to 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 kryptonomicon and science fiction looking both into the past and the future so let me ask does history repeat itself in which way does it repeat itself in which way does it not i'm afraid it repeats itself a lot um so i i think human nature kind of is what it is and so we tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again and so it's it's kind of the uh exception rather than the rule when something new happens what role does technology play in the suppression or in revealing human nature well the standards of living life expectancy all that have gotten incredibly better within the last particularly the last hundred years i mean just antibiotics modern vaccines electrification the internet these are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health and longevity that that exceed anything that was seen before in in human history so so people are living longer they're generally healthier and so on but again we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns some of which are not very attractive so some of it has to do with the constraints on resources presumably with technology you have less and less constraints on resources so we get to maybe emphasize the better angels of our nature and in in so doing does that not potentially fundamentally alter the sort of the experience that we have of life on earth you know until the last 10 or so years i would have taken that view i think but um you know people who will find ways to be to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind of psychological itch that they have got and we used to look at the weimar republic what happened in the economic collapse of germany prior to the the rise of hitler world war ii [Music] and kind of explain hitler at least partially by just the the misery that people were living in at that time the economic collapse yeah hyperinflation and unemployment and um the the decline in standard of living and that sounds like a plausible uh explanation but there are economic troubles now for sure we had the bank collapse in 2008 and there's stagnation in some people's standards of living but it's hard to explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years just strictly on the basis of people are poor and angry and sad i think they want to be angry so without being political in a divisive kind of way can we talk about the lessons you can draw from world war ii sure this singular event in human history it seems like yeah and yet as you say history rhymes at the very least yeah being who i am i tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened in in conjunction with that war um which may not be where you want to go but uh well there's several things inside to interrupt so one in crypto nomicon is more like the alan turing side of things right right and then and then there's the outside of technology first of all there's the tools of war which is the kind of technology but then there's just like the human nature the nature of good and evil yeah well so one of the things that emerges from uh from the war and from the um the extermination camps is that we we're never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature so you you have to to learn that lesson to be an educated person and you have to know that that even in a supposedly you know enlightened civilized society people can become monsters quite easily so that is for sure the big takeaway so do you agree with solzhenitsyn about the what is it uh the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man yeah that all of us are capable great line yeah i read a good chunk of the gulag archipelago when i was a teenager um because my my grandfather had it in his house because he was one of these americans who was obsessed with the soviet union and the soviet threat and and wanted people to to be aware of some of what what had happened um and so so he had those books lying around and and uh you know i would i would read them and it's a similar kind of parallel story to the to what happened in in in germany during the war you know this creation of this system of camps and and oppression and and uh lots of um troubling behavior to me it's a story of um how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead to uh to evil but it's also a story of of bravery of of love of brother brotherhood and sisterhood and basically survival you have like a man search for meaning which is the stories of uh the story of a man in a concentration camp basically finding beauty in life even under uh most extreme conditions so to me world war ii is not necessarily um a bleak view of human nature it's it's a little moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good mm-hmm in humanity so i'm not i'm not so sure that it leads me to a pessimistic view of the world the fact that uh somebody like hitler could happen the fact that uh a lot of people could follow hitler and get excited and maybe even love the hate of the other yeah for some moment of time i think that's all of us are capable of that but i think all of us also have a capacity for good and i think i don't know what you what you think but i think we have a greater desire for good than evil and that it seems like that's where technology is very useful as a guide has a helping hand okay okay can you give me an example maybe so i give you examples of futuristic technologies and i can give you examples of current technologies current technologies uh knowledge uh in the form of very basic knowledge which is like wikipedia and search the original dream of google yeah that i think is very much a success which is making the world's information accessible at your fingertips that kind of technology enables the natural if if this axiom this assumption that people want to do good is is true yeah then letting them discover all of the information out there false information and true information all of it and let them explore that's going to lead to a better world to better people uh futuristic technologies is uh i personally i mentioned you offline sort of love artificial intelligence and so ai that's an assistant that's a guide like a mentor to you yeah that you can in the way that google searches but smarter where you can help send it out and say this is the direction in which i want to grow not authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm of telling you this is what this is how you should grow but almost uh the the opposite where you use it as um an assistant a a servant in your journey towards knowledge yeah that that sounds like an easy thing but it's actually from an absolutely very difficult i mean this is the theme of a book i wrote called the diamond age which you know talks about a book that essentially does that and i've been sort of watching people try to come at the the problem of building that thing uh from different directions for ever since the book came out basically um and so uh the uh and so i i kind of have a although i haven't worked on it myself i do get a sense of the the level of difficulty in in realizing that that that goal um so that book is in the 90s so as google is coming to be essentially uh not google but the search engine the initial search engines event which gave birth to google essentially in in contrast right yeah yeah that was still in the era of alta vista and ask jeeves and multiple different uh search engines and yeah i'm pretty sure i had not heard of google at that point that would have been 95 96 i think the book came out in 94. and then of course the social networks followed which is another form of um guidance through the space of information yeah well what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them and so i saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that you know 20 years ago if you had googled pythagorean theorem uh chances are you would have been taken directly to the page explaining the pythagorean theorem if you do it now you're probably going to the top hits are going to be from somebody who's who's got an angle who's got a scheme right they're like trying to sell you math tutoring or you know they're they're working some kind of marketing plan on you so the the traditional engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational purpose that doesn't mean that they can't it shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones first of all to defend the people with the angle right they're trying to find business models yeah fund oftentimes which is funny you went with i think like you went at math those greedy bastards but it's great it's great how can we monetize the pythagorean theorem yeah well i mean education right yes to figure out like people who love math education for example love it purely not purely but very often love it for itself for just teaching math yeah but then they start you know when coming face to face with for example like the youtube algorithm they start to try to figure out okay how can i make money off of this the the primary goal is still that love of education but they also want to to make that love of education of their full-time job but i see that sort of that dance of humanity with the algorithms as uh it finds this kind of local pocket of optimality that's or sub-optimality whatever yeah it gets stuck in it anyway it's a pocket of some sort and but i see that pocket is way better than what we had before in the 80s right 90s before the internet but like and now we're now this is this is also human nature we start uh writing very eloquent articles about how this pocket is clearly pocket it's not very good and we can imagine much better lands far beyond and but the reality is it's better than before yeah and now we're waiting for we have to escape yeah minimum and you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group of geniuses that just say enough is enough i have an idea yeah this is how we get out and it's too easy to be sort of i think uh partially because you can get a lot of clicks in your articles being cynical about being in this pocket and we were forever stuck in this pocket and then like coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally like is collapsing stuck forever like a prison in this pocket but reality they're just it's like it's just clickbait articles and and books until we one curious aunt comes up with the next pocket yeah tunnels through the barrier or gets enough energy to jump over the barrier and eventually we'll be as you've talked about i mean we'll be we'll colonize the solar system and then uh we'll be stuck in the solar system and then people will say well we're screwed when because when the sun energy runs out there's no way to get to the the next solar system and then and so on it goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe yeah i think i think getting out of the solar system is going to be a hard one but so can you you mention this can you elaborate why you think back to sort of a serious question why do you think it's hard to get outside of our solar system it's just an energy calcul i mean you can do it slowly uh whenever you want um but uh the idea of getting there in you know one lifetime or multiple a few lifetimes is requires huge amounts of energy to to accelerate um and then you've as soon as you get halfway there you need to expend an equal amount of energy to decelerate or you'll just go shooting by and so um that means carrying a lot of energy and there's there's ideas like yuri milner i think is still funding the the idea to use laser propulsion to send something uh to another star system a small object um but it'll have no way to slow down as far as i know they never talk about that part yeah like how do i slow down yeah um so it's a quick flyby you take a good picture i guess yeah you better take some good pictures on your way by so and that's great if it happens i'm not knocking it but the amount of energy is is that's needed is just staggering and there's there's other issues like just how do you maintain uh an ecosystem for that long in isolation uh how do you prevent people from going crazy what happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light what about it sort of some combination of expanding human lifespan but also just good old-fashioned stable society on a spaceship yeah yeah the generation ship yeah yeah yeah no i think that's the only way it would it would have to keep going for a long time um and they might get to where they're going and find a shitty um solar system like we can try to we can try to do some advanced survey but i mean if you get there and all the planets in that solar system are just garbage planets then it's kind of a big letdown for for this like thousand-year voyage that you've just uh you've just been on right so i mean we have a pretty narrow range of of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive um in terms of the the gravitational uh field that we can deal with um so that such a sets of bound on the size of the the planet and um what we need in the way of temperature and atmosphere and so on so when you look at all those complications then basically building uh uh sort of exactly the environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell of a lot better it's hard to make an economic argument let's say for for for making that journey uh one of the things i like about the expanse is the fact that the people who are trying to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religious reasons i think that's the only reason that you would do it because economically it just makes more sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect well is isn't everything done for religious reasons like why do we exploration yeah like what why why do we go to the moon again and do the other things uh what does jfk said is because not because they're easy but because they're hard it's not kind of a religious reason i knew a veteran of the apollo program who once said that the apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement yeah so the conflict between nations is a kind of um not exactly a religion but it's what you're talking about well it's a struggle for meaning yeah i mean uh and that meaning isn't found in some kind of it's it's hard to find meaning in mathematics yeah it's it's found in some kind of in music and religion whatever art i mean some people do but those are probably not enough of them to well they uh people that find beauty uh meaning in mathematics they usually find meaning between the lines nevertheless not in the actual uh for like the proving proving some kind of thing fair enough yeah so from a cost perspective do you actually see a possible future where we're b building these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them one a year out like uh like wandering ants i'll come to the into the galaxy i have nothing against it uh it's just like i said it's got a the motivation to do it has to come from um some kind of spiritual or or kind of non-tangible uh calculus from a business model perspective you don't think there's a business model there no no way one of the many fascinating things you've done in your life you were at the very beginning you were the person that can feel convinced basis to start a spaceship company a space company you were there at blue origin for a few years in the beginning working on alternate propulsion systems and at least according to wikipedia uh alternate business models yeah i mean to go back to the first thing you said uh jeff bezos is not a guy who required a lot of convincing um he'd been thinking about it since he was five years old and it was an inevitability but um the the idea um that that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to um just do some uh advanced scouting work you know explore the corners of the the space of possibilities and so that's what uh that was blue operations llc which was the precursor to blue origin and um so it was a small staff of people that that did that for a few years and i think it was about 2003 2004 that uh it swung decisively towards the direction it's it's been following ever since which is you know using basically existing aerospace technologies and models to make chemical fueled rockets for for space tourism uh i believe and i continue to believe that the the fact that we use chemical rockets is just an accident of history that comes out of world war ii so until world war ii rockets are being built on a small scale by people like robert goddard but then hitler desperately wants to bomb london but he can't quite reach it and the liftwaffe has been kind of neutralized so he he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with with rockets which is a terrible misallocation of resources it's a terrible idea but so it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic um but that's that's the situation that existed so they built these rockets they you know that's the v2 um and then it's just a complete coincidence that that war ends with um atomic bombs being developed in a completely separate super weapon program and so suddenly the the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist before because if you've got atomic bombs you need a way to deliver them you can do with bombers but it's a lot better to just hurl them to the other side of the world on the top of a rocket so um so suddenly rockets which had gotten a boost because of hitler's v2 program got a much bigger boost during the 50s and 60s and it is a complete you're right for some reason never thought of this it is an accident of history that nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time first of all nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time as world war ii right that's an accident in history yeah and the fact that okay so then hitler started using rockets that's an accident okay that's fascinating it's a fascinating uh set of coincidences yeah and which is true of a lot of technologies by the way but by the time these rockets are kind of working um we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and so devastating that nobody really wants to use them but it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the the socket on the end of a of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb so um so we start doing that instead as a proxy for for having a war um and um i'd love to be in the meeting where the first guy brought that up as an idea it's probably a russian why don't we strap a person to the rocket yeah yeah well it probably was because they did it first right uh the russians did it and they had perhaps less respect for sort of safety protocols could be they're a little bit more uh willing to sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to risk the life of an astronaut yeah yeah this is basically the story of how through all of this competition and because of these historical accidents you know trillions of r d dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical rocket technology which is you know now advanced to an incredibly high degree but there's other ways to make things go really fast which is like all that rockets do that's all orbit is it's just going really fast and because so many nerds are obsessed with space people have been uh thinking about alternate schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets um and so one of the first things that you that i learned kind of trying to explore new possibilities uh was that i could put all of my brain power to work and and be creative as i could and and invent some idea that i thought was new for making things go fast and i would always find out that some guy in russia or somewhere had had thought the same idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math yeah you know and so so at a certain point you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and just go poking around trying to find those guys um so there's a number of uh of ideas that we looked at you know some are crazier some are less crazy but um the direction that that company eventually took was was chemical rockets is there something you can comment on possible ideas like so first of all like i mean uh uh like you could use nuclear so nuclear pulse propulsion yeah so that's i mean you've probably heard of project orion which um was the freeman dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to um to power a large space vehicle by detonating atomic bombs behind it and so one of the other people who was working at blue operations during this time was george dyson the son of freeman and so we knew all about project orion and he found an old film that they'd shot on a beach in la jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by uh like uh lumps of c4 so that was an idea but for private company obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was probably out of scope so there's more of a theoretical thing there's a conceptually similar approach using lasers that uh that freeman worked on with arthur kantrowitz and some others where you take a pulse blazer and you fire it at a vehicle that has a block of ice on the back and the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma and plasma is opaque because it conducts and so being opaque it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets really hot and just pushes on the back of the the block of ice and then you wait a moment for that to dissipate and then you do it again so it would just kind of uh vibrate its way like it sounds really violent but freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber soled tennis shoes standing in this vehicle you would just feel a mild vibration so there your source of energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific impulse than you could get by burning chemicals jordan care and others worked on another laser system the late dr jordan care that just would heat up a heat exchanger by converging many converging solid-state lasers from the ground and kevin parkin um works on a similar scheme that just uses uh microwaves to do that we looked at tall towers i spent a while looking kind of semi seriously a giant bull whips um with a bull lip just a whip just uh you have them here in texas right yeah i understand but how does that have to do with propulsion if you think about it a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the speed of sound so it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years people with no technology have been able to to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural trick just just you know just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this so [Music] so that's the thing i still think about from time to time you can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain or or other flexible materials that just kind of stand up under their own [Music] physics i mean it's kind of awesome to imagine so imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip but have at the end of it a spaceship yeah that would detach at the moment of maximum velocity why why not why wouldn't that so part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that that question it was it was more uh almost a symbolic way of saying look there's all kinds of physics we haven't explored yet um that it's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets um it's just that uh more money's gone into chemical rockets right but can i ask you uh a question on propulsion that's a little bit more out there so i don't know if you've seen quite a a lot of recent articles and reports and so on about uh ufos like the tic tac aircraft i keep seeing a lot of chatter about it but i haven't gone deep into it so the dod released footage filmed by pilots and there's a lot of reports about objects that moved in ways they haven't seen before that seem to defy the laws of physics if we consider the aircraft that we have today and so the reason i asked you that is because it kind of um to me whatever the heck it is it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion if it's like um secret projects from foreign nations or it's physical phenomena that we don't yet understand like ball lightning all those kinds of things or if it is aliens or objects from an alien civilization i most likely believe it's if it's an object from an alien civilization it's got to be like a really dumb drone they just like got lost it's definitely not like the pinnacle of intelligence it's like some like teenagers like uh science fair experiment yeah he just flew for for a few centuries out and just landed and then we humans are all like really excited about this yes this wild thing i mean what what do you think about those um first of all like the millions of reports of ufos right there's some psychology there that's deeply cultural uh but also the possibility of aliens having visited earth yeah i mean i'd like to see some better pictures for the reason i mentioned earlier having to do with the difficulty of traveling between star systems it's really hard for me to believe it's aliens i just can't understand why you would go to all that trouble to transport something across light years and then do what these ufos are allegedly doing like how is that interesting how does that justify the trip so if you travel across you know those kinds of distances you'd make a bigger splash first of all i would expect that the the arrival of these things would be something we'd notice it's gotta you know decelerate into into our solar system by unless it got here really really really slowly so i guess that's that's a possibility and just kind of snuck in so at the end we would detect some kind of footprint in terms of energy you would think so i actually think your idea of a science fair project gone gone bad you know it makes more sense in in that it would explain why these if these things are alien technologies they're just kind of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason like doing doing not trying to communicate yeah you know is it can you imagine a scenario where aliens have visited earth or are visiting earth and we wouldn't notice it at all oh sure i mean if they've got technology to to get here they've probably got technology to conceal the fact oh they're trying to conceal themselves i meant more like they're not trying to conceal themselves but we're just our cognitive capabilities are like too limited and we are not thinking big enough we're looking for a little green men yeah we're looking for things that operate at a time scale that's human-like uh you know it's yeah no i i love thinking about ideas like that that's great science fiction novel father you know that the aliens are are so different uh that we simply don't don't see them i mean is there um you know in terms of language do you think it would be difficult not aliens visiting us but traveling to other places to find a common language you you've written about the importance of language in intelligent civilizations um how difficult is the problem to bridge the gap between aliens and humans yeah in terms of language so we're not lost in translation yeah i mean there's different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they are to us you know i mean there's a school of thought that says basically uh advanced life has to be carbon based for just reasons of chemistry so right away if you impose that limitation then you're you're kind of assuming a uh something that's starting to be biologically similar to us so if they're about as big as we are and uh you know they um they they kind of move around in in space you know a physical body the way we do then then there's probably a way to to solve that communication problem uh if they're you know like beings of pure energy from star trek or something like that then it's a different story well i love thinking about that kind of stuff too i mean this you know consciousness itself may be maybe i mean it could be like you said beings of pure energy um i i think i think of life as just complex systems and the kind of forms those complex systems can take seems to be much larger than the particular biological systems we see here on earth um i have to ask a twitter question okay about aliens yeah you're ready this is for twitter i'm ready what would you expect from twitter can humans have sex with aliens and yes you can pass i asked the language question can the community communicate yeah can they fall in love before before sex that's how it works so which question are am i answering the sex or the the love um i mean it depends what is more fundamental to relations across yeah across intelligent species yeah i mean um you know sex can mean a lot of things um so i mean uh if your production right you know the the when in star trek in classic star trek you had to to really suspend your disbelief to to think that um spock was half vulcan and half human right because that's just not gonna not gonna work dna wise um so um so if by sex you mean reproductive sex then um uh i would say no unless you unless you go to a panspermia kind of theory which is that uh you know humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic uh you know uh program of some of some sort and then we're just returning home yeah and hanging out with our old relatives assistant cousins yeah yeah but that that doesn't seem you know it doesn't seem seem plausible we know that we know that humans had sex with neanderthals with denisovans denisovans so you could think of them as aliens that that came from our planet um so um so that's a kind of data point i guess but you know if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind of uh gratifying physical interaction then sure right dancing and that's that's how we get to love okay and love can take many forms love can certainly take many forms i have to ask you um in terms of space just looking at where blue origin is looking at where spacex is today and maybe looking out 10 20 years out from now are you impressed of what's happening we just saw william shatner go up to space yeah i was i was just watching his video this morning before i came here yeah are you impressed to where things stand today yeah i mean i mean spacex in particular is has done things that are just unbelievable um and um yeah i don't think anyone was anticipating um 20 years ago let's say when this all started just the uh the speed with which they'd be able to um rack up these incredible achievements if you've kind of uh even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made and and so the the the difficulty of of doing any kind of space travel um what they've achieved is uh is just uh is is unbelievable what about the maybe a question about elon musk um even more than jeff bezos he has a very kind of ambitious vision of um this project that we're on as a species yeah of becoming a multiplanatarian species and becoming that quickly yeah as soon as possible landing on mars colonizing mars what do you think of that project there's two questions to ask first the question is what what do you think about the project of colonizing mars and second what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically ambitious at achieving the impossible at what a lot of people would say is impossible i think that colonizing mars is the kind of of gold that's uh it's easily stated uh it's um it's catchy it's it's it's the kind of thing that that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs might not um so i think it's well chosen in that way i have technical questions about um you know there's there's a problem of perchlorates uh on the surface of mars that's going to be big trouble um and there's there's radiation so and this is known i'm uh but um what about business questions do you think cause you mentioned sort of uh going outside of the solar system would would best be done for religious reasons um what about colonizing mars can you spin it into a business proposition it's hard to think of a resource that's on mars that could be brought back here cheaply enough to compete with um with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here so i don't know if there is a business plan for that or if it's just strictly we're going to go there and and see what happens um you know maybe again we need communism to kind of yeah to get us going to give us a reason a little bit of the competition well there's plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonized mars vision that they're willing to to just go all in on it even if there's not a business plan behind it so so i think it's well chosen it's just uh um [Music] i i think it's probably the only um the only approach to take um you know a lot of the when when white people came to this continent and and started colonizing it you know uh there was not a lot of coherent planning like what what plans they did have turned out to be terrible plans um you know trying to come up with plans that extend decades into the future is uh is a waste of time to do it for the kind of like unexplainable love of the unknown like like the the uh the journey towards exploring the unknown yeah and just kind of keep going yeah well you saw it with shatner and his uh reaction to the the flight uh yesterday um he uh um for him that trip was more than worth it just for these intangible reasons what did he say i haven't watched the video yet he was trying to express the the talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of rise above the the thin blue blanket of uh of the atmosphere and and you're up into the the blackness um and uh that had a huge impact on him so he was kind of uh i wouldn't say groping for words because he was pretty eloquent but he was trying to express his feelings about that in a way that is pretty pretty gripping to watch so you've worked on this kind of stuff we can go back to 10 years ago you wrote an essay called innovation starvation you worked on this kind of idea uh since then kind of looking at uh maybe a little bit cynically about our age today and our unwillingness to take on big risky projects so in the face of that what do you think of people like elon musk because to me people like that are inspiring and gives you hope in the face of a more kind of um pessimistic perspective of our age yeah well he's clearly willing to tackle um [Music] big ambitious uh projects uh without a lot of kind of soul searching or uh or were trying to make up his mind right it's just like um just go and do it let's dig tunnels under cities go you know let's uh um step one make a joke about on twitter step two actually do it yeah yeah yeah and uh i mean things have slowed down uh quite our ability to um to build things uh uh at pace um is is a lot less than it was and there's there's reasons for that you know we're more concerned with safety and environmental impacts than um than people were when they were building uh some of the great publix works projects of the mid 20th century but even we're at the point now where even just maintaining the stuff that we've got is such a huge project that we need to put big resources into it and and good minds into it or else we're going to be we're going to be losing things that we take for granted do you think that there's a lot to be done in the digital space that's uh we mentioned sort of wikipedia and knowledge don't you think there could be a lot of flourishing in the space of innovation in terms of innovation in in the digital space yeah i mean i'd like to see that i think it's where a lot of the brain power went during the last couple of generations because people who who might previously have been building rockets or or other kinds of sort of hard technologies ended up instead going into programming computer science which is understandable and great we've got structural problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty severe and so i certainly hope that we're not 10 years from now that we're not exactly where we are today when it comes to to that stuff we need to move on the beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do things yeah and they give you give opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the old which is uh a dream for me in in to see um new social media yeah that beats out the ways to go so i i tend to you perhaps agree that it's not that it's impossible to do social media well well not at all i mean i i listened to your uh interview with jaren a couple weeks ago and i i know jaren and we've you know we've talked about this and he went he went hard on me he basically said like it is very impossible he's very nice well the last time i kind of paid attention to jaron's thoughts on and he was thinking in terms of that basically there should be you know payments uh such that if i by clicking the like button on something i'm essentially giving um valuable intellectual property to facebook or twitter or whatever it's not a very large amount of ip but it's definitely a transfer of information that that when they aggregate it is beneficial to them so and now i now i do remember that he uh on on his interview with you was talking about what data unions or yeah those are a lot of interesting ideas but for me the biggest disagreement was in the level of cynicism he has a distrust and cynicism towards people in silicon valley being able to do these kinds of things and i'm really okay when you have a large crowd of people that are doing things the wrong way you should nevertheless maintain optimism because what's important is to find the one person in that room that's going to do things the right way cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room so he was saying i've i've been here a long time oh yeah i i've known you know i i underst like how these folks work they think they're gods and they know the right way to do things and they will tell you how to do those things and that kind of hubris is going to always lead you astray when you are the one who's engineering the algorithms and there's a lot of deep truth to that because algorithms are powerful and uh many people when given power do not do the best of things i mean most what is it uh the old lincoln line if you want to test the man's character give him power yeah yes but that doesn't mean that some people are not able to handle the power that some people are not able to come up with good uh ideas that create better social media yeah i didn't interpret jaron's statements as being entirely cynical and hopeless i mean he's definitely raising you know issues of concern but he wouldn't be out you know writing the books that he's written and talking about this stuff if you didn't think there was a way if if you didn't think there was hope yeah and part of it as you probably know with jiren he just loves a good argument yeah he's just loves to have a little bit of fun well i have to ask you about uh i mean we talked about taking all big bold risky ideas so in your new book termination shock it's set here in texas part of it is yeah yeah most of it yeah it's a great place to set it so in it the main character tr mccool again a texas billionaire oil man and truck stop magnate decides to solve climate change to take on climate change by himself so this is an interesting philosophical exploration of how to solve climate change from a perspective that's perhaps different than we've been thinking about i wouldn't i wouldn't use the word solve but let's say ameliorate ameliorate the temporary effects but please take on yeah take on the challenge so it's it's very interesting but as there's a gradual nature to this process and i mean just like in in your book um the power of innovation is something that has uh saved us quite a few times in history so what role does that play as in this gradual process right so ultimately we don't solve the problem until we get the co2 out of the atmosphere um but that is going to take a while um we're still adding more uh we haven't even started to to reduce the amount so um so there's two possibilities inside to interrupt reduce the amount that we're putting in the atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere we have to do both right and those are two different kind of uh efforts in terms of like what's involved because it stays up there so i think just last week china announced that they're going to try to level off their co2 emissions in like 2030 so 2031 they'll only put as much co2 into the atmosphere as they did in 2030 which is still a lot of co2 in 2060 they're saying will be net zero so if everyone in the world does that and the ppm of co2 in the atmosphere by then is say 450 parts per million it'll stay at 450 parts per million until we take it out and taking it out um is hard it's a you know it's a big we took us a long time we had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs and burn all that stuff we had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create all of that co2 and so we have to reverse all of those processes uh somehow in order to remove the co2 and get it back down hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used to be so how about you get a a single texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts huge quantities of sulfur into the upper atmosphere so that's idea number one that's uh this is called solar geoengineering and it's uh we know that it's a possibility on a technical level because volcanoes have been doing it forever um so many times in human history we've seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years and one of these things happened i think in the 60s or 70s in indonesia and and the australians sent a a plane up into the stratosphere to take some samples of the plume and when it came back down the windscreen of the plane had sort of a deposit on it so one of the australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid so that was our first kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was sulfur dioxide so um and and so we know then well pinot tubo came along in the 90s and and did this experiment for us so we know that sulfur in the in the stratosphere it forms little uh spherical droplets of sulfuric acid after it combines with water and those bounce back some of the sun's rays and reduce the amount of solar energy entering the troposphere which is where we live so um so we know that it works and we've we also know that this stuff goes away after a couple of years so it gradually washes out and so it's not a permanent thing you have to the it's the good news bad news is um good news is it's not permanent so if you don't like what's happening you can just stop and wait a couple years and you'll get back to where you started and the the bad news if if you're in favor of this kind of thing is that you have to keep doing it forever or um so so this guy is one of those he's read these papers he under the tr the character in the book he knows all this and all all people who are familiar with climate science are kind of know this it's a pretty well established fact and so um he just decides he's going to take action unilaterally and and do this um and so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there but because it's texas he builds the biggest gun in the world he's just six barrels pointed straight up and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur into the stratosphere and so the book is about not so much that as how people react to his doing that what the political ramifications are around the world because you know this is a extremely controversial idea and not everyone's on board with it and even if you are willing to consider using a technological intervention the the fact is that it's going to have different effects on different parts of the world so some areas may suffer negative uh you know more negatives than positives uh and they're not going to be happy so what do you think uh so in in his case in tr's case he can get around you know getting permission from governments if we were to look at our us facing um outside of the store us facing climate change where do you think the solution will come from governments working together or from bold billionaire texans i'm pretty sure that this kind of intervention is never going to emerge from western democracies um this kind of sorry government coordinated uh uh which which option one solar geo engineering soldier engineering yeah from a government from our offer like those are i i want to sort of the distinction one is the idea the technological idea you're talking about but two uh two is like who comes up with the idea and agrees on it governments or individuals yeah if this were to happen i think it would be either an individual or more likely just a some government somewhere that just decides it's in their interests to to unilaterally do this and you know that's not me advocating it it's just it's so it would be comparatively so cheap and easy to implement the solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do it once things get get bad enough but i don't think that the government will i think or western governments just because they're not um well we've seen what happened with with vaccines right so you know getting getting people to to take vaccinations or wear masks you know has turned out to be incredibly hard even though it might it might save those people's lives see i blame that's not western that's i blame failure of leadership there of leaders being not coming off as authentic not being inspiring uniting all those kinds of things i think that's possible i think it's it's just that we've gotten the leaders we have right now aren't the right people aren't the right people because we've lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively comfortable times and if it feels like unfortunate if you just look at history that hard times make great leaders and easy times make like bureaucrats that are egotistical and greedy and not very interesting and not very bold yeah no i think that's fair so you know we may be entering one of those interesting times you know of hardship in the chinese curse sense yeah so um um so i could be wrong but i mean there have been some efforts to uh explore solar geoengineering uh there was a uh a plan to send up some balloons high altitude balloons to take some measurements uh in scandinavia that got um squashed by uh objections from people who lived up there uh uh who who were just opposed to the whole program on on principle um so we'll see a lot more of that and it's going to be a hard program to advocate for just because i think people don't quite understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and how far we are from from even slowing down the rate that we're adding more to say nothing of bringing that number down we're a long way out from from that do you see in terms of portfolio of solutions us becoming a multi-planetary species as part of that as a as this also being a motivator for investing some percent of gdp into becoming a multi-planetary species and what percent should that be you think you know in an indirect way maybe i mean you know what people will say which is this the same argument that has been leveled against space exploration since the apollo program which is why we solve our problems here on earth before we uh spend money going into space so i've never been a believer in that that argument i think um there could be uh a sense in which the new perspective that could be obtained by uh thinking about like if we're thinking about terraforming mars changing its atmosphere making it more amenable to to life and survival um you could see that maybe changing people's opinions about terraforming the earth yeah there are some dangerous consequences to this particular uh idea of blasting sulfur uh of geoengineering um what do you make of sort of big bold ideas that have uh that are a double-edged sword are all ideas like this all big ideas like this they have uh they have the potential to have highly beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences i wouldn't say all i think you know going back to the what we were talking about earlier you know how technology developed in the 50s and 60s there was a period of time there when people maybe had unrealistic ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently attentive to the possible downsides so so we got um and and there's a reason why i mean uh the the there's you know in in the mid 20th century we saw you know antibiotics we saw the polio vaccine we saw just simple things like refrigerators in the home you know my my grandmother to her dying day called the refrigerator the ice box because when she grew up it was a box with ice in it so you see all that change and it's largely for the benefit of people and so if somebody comes along and says hey we're going to build nuclear reactors to to make energy or here's a new chemical called ddt that's going to kill mosquitoes then it's easy to to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides and of course we know that um the the way that those early reactors were built and the way that the the supply chain uh was built to to create the fuel um and deal with the the waste was was poorly thought out and uh and and we're still dealing with the uh the resulting problems that places like hanford in in the state of washington and we know that ddt although it did kill a lot of insects also had terrible effects on bird populations so the the kind of backlash that happened in the 70s that's is still kind of going on is is to sort of assume that everything is a double-edged sword and always to look for to you know we have to absolutely convince ourselves that the the downside uh isn't going to come back and and bite us uh before we can adopt any new technology and i i think the the people um people are overly sensitized to that now yeah it's funny depending on the technology people are a little bit too terrified of certain technologies like artificial intelligence is one my sense is that the things that they're afraid of aren't the things that are likely going to happen in terms of negative things it's probably impossible to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences but what's also interesting is for ai as an example not people don't think enough about the positive things i mean the same is true with social media it's very popular now for some reason to talk about all the negative effects of social media we've immediately forgotten how incredible it is to connect across the world how there's a there's a deep loneliness within all of us we long to connect and social media at least in part enables that even in its current state and the all the negative things we see with social media currently are also in part just revealing the basics of human nature it didn't make us worse it's just rev is bringing it to the surface and step one of solving a problem is bringing it to the surface the fact that we are divisi there's a division the fact that there were easily angered and upset and all all of that the witch hunts all those kinds of things that's human nature and it just reveals that allowing us to now work on it it's therapy and so that's another example of a technology that's just where we're not considering this the positive effects now and in the future enough of i have to ask about um there's a million things i can ask you about but virtual reality i got got to ask you you've thought about virtual reality mixed reality uh quite a bit what are the interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality or mixed reality yeah so i was i was in magic leap for what five years um with the best title of all time oh thanks chief chief futurist yeah yeah and so i sort of had a little squad of people in seattle doing what you might call content r d so we're trying to make content for ar but um because it's such a new medium uh we there's it's more of an engineering r d project almost than a than a creative project so it was fascinating to see everything that goes into making an ar system that runs so ar an ar device if it's really going to do needs to be running slam in real time and that alone is a big as so for people who don't know first of all virtual reality is creating a almost fully artificial world and putting you inside it augmented reality ar is taking the real world and putting top on top putting stuff on top of that real world and when you say slam that means in real time the device needs to be able to sense accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently to be able to reconstruct the the 3d uh structure of it so you can put stuff on top of it and doing that in real time presumably not just real time but in a way that's creates a pleasant experience for the human perception system is uh yeah that's a that's an engineering project right yeah will said and it's just one of the things that the system has to do it's also tracking your eyes so it knows what you're looking at uh how far away what you're looking at is it's uh um it's performing all those functions um and it's gotta uh keep doing that without you know burning up the the cpu or or uh depleting the battery uh unreasonably fast and that's that's just table stakes it's just the basic functions of the the operating system and then any content that you want to add has to sit on top of that it's got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real and you don't get sick so it's an amazing thing and you know magically shipped a device that can do that in 2019 and they're about to ship the ml2 but i don't know any more about that than anyone else because i don't work there anymore um does it still ins to some degree boil down to a killer app a content question like you said it's kind of a wide open space nobody knows exactly what's going to be the compelling thing yeah so doesn't a super compelling experience of some sort alleviate some of the need for engineering perfection well there's a base layer of engineering that you have to have no matter what but you're certainly right that people like in the early days of video games put up with kind of low frame rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having so much fun playing doom or whatever even tetris yeah yeah so um so for sure that's true and so um you know i was uh working on consumer-facing content um there was a great team in wellington new zealand that that made a game uh called uh dr groybrot's uh invaders that um that uh realized the the potential of ar gaming in a way that i don't think anything else has uh before or since um and um so that was definitely the strategy um until uh what april 2020 which is when the company decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead um so um and you know i i haven't seen their their their financial projections but i assumed they had good reasons for for making that strategic decision um it just means that it's no longer uh necessarily targeted at at just end users who want to play a game or or be entertained but it's you know that to me from a sort of a dreamer futurist perspective is heartbreaking because i i i don't know necessarily from in the vr space but i see this kind of thing with uh with robotics where to me the future of robotics is consumer facing and a lot of great roboticists boston dynamics and companies like that are focused on sort of industrial applications yeah because for financial business reasons yeah now i i can see the parallels for sure you know we'll see it was a fun uh project you know we uh we worked on um an app for example called baby goats which just populated your room with with baby goats that seemed like a killer app right there well we we thought highly of the of the idea for sure yes um so but because of the slam uh the the um the system knew for example here's a table here's a little end table we know the heights uh we know how high our animated baby goat can jump um and so um so our engineers had to to build a system for converting the slam primitives into um game engine objects um that that the uh the game uh the ai's in the game could navigate around um so um and that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how-to a sample app than as a a finished consumer facing you mean the baby goat ai yeah yeah i that seems to me like a world i couldn't entertain myself for hours just every day coming home to to to to see if baby goes yeah i mean it was an ambient kind of it's not it's not a thing that you would sit there and play like a a video just life yeah yeah but now this baby goes you i mean what's the purpose of having dogs and cats right in your life exactly it's kind of ambient yeah they're not really helping you do anything but it's enriching your life and you can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want but you don't have to right yeah so uh so we worked on that in a bigger project that was more of a storytelling in a fictional universe the hardware is worth a look there's still a belief i just saw it this morning looking at twitter that the magic leap never shipped anything but they've been since 2019 you can go to their website and buy one of these devices anytime you want to spend the money yeah and the new one is coming out i think in 2022 so in in in a few months what do you think looking out 50 years from now what wins virtual reality augmented reality or physical reality what wins meaning like what's uh yeah what do people of that have financial resources enjoy spending most of their time in i've always been a fan of of of ar and it's kind of an easy answer because if you if you're wearing an ar device you put a bag over your head it becomes a vr device you know it just it if you block out the what's really there then all you're seeing is is is a vr but you are with ar constrained to to kind of operate in something that's similar to physical reality yeah with vr you can go into fantastical worlds true true so there are still issues in in those fantastical worlds with um with motion sickness right so um if if your uh body is experiencing acceleration your inner ear um that this differs from what your eye thinks it's seeing then you'll get sick unless you're a very unusual person so it doesn't mean you can't do it it just it's a constraint that vr designers have to uh to learn to work with so do you think it's possible that in the future we're living mostly in a virtual reality world like we become more and more detached from physical reality for entertainment maybe for certain applications um i'm personally more i mean we have to make a distinction between what i would personally find interesting and you know what might win in the market so maybe some people maybe lots of people would like to spend a huge amount of time in in vr um i'm personally more interested in enhancing the experience that i have of the physical world because the physical world's pretty cool right and there's a lot a lot to be said for uh for moving around in the real world and can i ask you for you personally yeah to try to play devil's advocate or to try to construct to imagine a vr world where you and neil stevens wouldn't want to stay not because the physical world all of a sudden became really bad for some reason like you're trying to escape it yeah but like literally it's just more enriching in the same way like there's a glimmer in your eye when you said you enjoy the physical world like uh double up on that glimmer for the for the virtual reality can you imagine such a world well like i'll give maybe an example that's a bridge which is that i've been um i like making things um so i like working in a machine shop and and making objects with 3d printers or machines or whatever and so i've had to learn how to get good at using a cad program you know there's many to choose from i use one called fusion 360. and i can spend hours in that trying to create imagine and create the things i want to create and it's a it's not virtual reality exactly but that whole time i'm you know my whole field of view is occupied by uh by this monitor that's showing me a window into a three-dimensional space i'm rotating things around i'm i'm i'm imagining things i'm making things and so that is um you know pretty close to um to to being in virtual reality does that thing have to exist for you to experience true joy can you stay in fusion 360 the whole time do you have to 3d print it and touch it yeah i mean uh that's my game that's that's what i'm up to but you know it happens that um if you're building a virtual environment if you're uh making a game level or creating a virtual set for a film or tv production the thing that you're designing in the program may never physically exist uh and in fact it's preferable that it doesn't because the whole point of that is to um is to to make imaginary things that you couldn't couldn't build otherwise so i think lots of people spend a good chunk of their working hours in something that's pretty close to to vr it's just that currently the output device happens to be a rectangular object in front of them you could replace that with a vr headset and they'd be doing the same stuff there's all kinds of interfaces for example i enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks but let's say actually podcast because there's a intimate human connection in a podcast it's one way but you get to learn about the person you're listening to and that's a real connection and that's just audio for a lot of people that's just audio true i think for me that that's just audio as a fan of people and you're kind of a little bit are friends with those people yeah you know they're in your life you're listening to them yeah and i mean they're not they're as far away from real as it gets there's not even a yeah there's not even a visual component it's just audio but they're as real like if i was on a desert island like my imagination like this thing works pretty good in terms of imagination like that it creates a very beautiful world with a with just audio so i i mean or even just reading books yeah exactly you're reading books yeah even more so with reading books because uh there are certain mediums which stimulate the imagination more the yeah the when when you present less the imagination works more and that can create really enriching experiences so i mean to me the question is can you do some of the amazing things that make life amazing in virtual worlds it seems to me the answer there is obviously yes even if i like you i'm attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world i think i can very readily imagine coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual world where you make friends and you can fall in love where the source of love in your life is uh to a much greater degree inside of a virtual world and like and then love means fulfillment that means happiness that's the thing you look forward to and not some kind of dopamine rush type of love but like long long lasting yeah yeah friendship deal yeah yeah it just depends on what is there in the way of of applications the content and can it feed you those things can it give you like in my example of of using the cad program it gives me the ability to do something i enjoy which is making imagining things and making things in a particular way but can we psychoanalyze you for a second sure what exactly do you enjoy is there some component of you building the thing where you get to at least a little bit share with others like is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture will anyone ever see it right yeah there's a source of your enjoyment because i would argue that perhaps when like the the turtles all the way down when you get to the bottom turtle it has to do with other sharing with other humans yeah and if you can then put those humans inside the vr world then then you start to then then you can okay for example you could do it in the physical world the the 3d printing but you share it in in in the virtual world and that's where the source of happiness is i think at least speaking for myself i'm always thinking in terms of an audience and at some level i feel like i'm i'm doing this for someone or communicating to someone even if there's not a specific someone in mind it could just be an abstract theoretical someone um and it's like another app i spend a lot of time in is mathematica okay and when i do particular yeah yeah and when i do a mathematica notebook if i'm trying to figure something out i spend a lot of time typing just my stuff is just a huge blocks of of text just me thinking out loud and then some graphs and calculations and stuff because to me that act of of explaining things and commenting helps me understand what i'm doing and there's kind of an audience uh an amorphous audience in your mind yeah like i mean most of this stuff nobody will ever see and yet i'm creating it as if there were an audience that might read this stuff because that i have to that's a necessary constraint that helps me um do a better job what's the uh this might be tricky question to answer what's uh comes to mind as a particularly beautiful thing that you're proud of that you create inside mathematica visualization-wise or uh something that just comes to memory if it's possible to retrieve so the the thing i've spent the most amount of time on is i got obsessed um a long time ago was trying to tile the globe with hexagons yes and um or actual globe well any spherical and object yeah but but with an eye towards uh putting it on the earth and so uh and have it be recursive so you can have hexagons within hexagons which is hard because and probably a bad idea because you can't tile a hexagon with smaller hexagons they don't they stick out got it so they're oh they stick out so there's a can you do some kind of fractal hexagon situation yeah yeah so so it's that and people who who know me um are always uh now now make fun of me for this so they'll send me if they if they see a picture with hexagons in it they'll like send me a link you know to to to make fun of me um so as some one of those people roger penrose or i i think roger's a little above my my level um he's into hexagons as well yeah and tiling yeah yeah so um so i did a lot of that and i thought you know it was pretty cool but um if there's some like surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up like you you've always got to have some pentagons like if you start with a icosahedron which is equilateral triangles which is a logical place to start you can cover those with hexagons but every vertex where where the the triangles come together is a pentagon has to be a pentagon oh interesting so there's all hexagons and then there's a pentagon at the intersections yeah yeah cool how do you figure that out is that a known fact well it's just if you look at uh yeah like just by incidentally this thing got it yeah yeah so so you can't make that go away so any system that you come up with to do this has got to have this exceptions built into it for for those 12 you could have quintillions of hexagons but you've still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere so um so i've blown a hell of a lot of time on on that over the years by the way a lot of those kind of uh problems are very difficult to prove something about yeah yeah yeah and i think uber did it because someone one of my friends who uh who knows of my my interest in this and who likes to to give me a hard time sent me a link this is a couple years ago to some code base that i think came out of uber where they had done this you know you break break down the whole surface of the earth into into little hexagons so um that was a real knife through the heart um but i'll probably come back to it someday is there something special about hexagons are you interested in all kinds of tiling uh well i'm interested in all kinds of tiling but i'm not i know my limitations like as a as a math guy um so hexagons are about my speed um you know just a sufficient amount of complexity yeah yeah so but no tiling is a really interesting problem both two and three dimensional tiling problems are fascinating and they're one of those ancient puzzles that has attracted brainiacs for for centuries let me ask you a little bit about ai okay what are some [Music] likely interesting trajectories for the proliferation of ai in society over the next couple of decades do you think about this kind of stuff i do not think about it a lot because it's a deep topic and i'm not i don't consider myself super well informed about it and ai seems to be a term that has applied to a lot of different things so i've messed around just a tiny little bit with with neural nets with uh what's it called pca principle component analysis so i guess i tend to think in terms of sort of granular bottom-up um ideas rather than big picture top down you know oh god so like very specific algorithms like how are they going to what problem are they going to solve in society such that that has like a lot of big ripple effects so yeah i mean we could talk a particular successful ai systems and success defining different ways of recent years so one is language models with gpt-3 most importantly they're self-supervised meaning they don't require much supervision from humans which means they can learn by just reading a huge amount of content created by humans so read the internet and from that be able to generate text and do all kinds of things like that it's possible to have a big enough neural network it's going to be able to have conversations with humans based on just reading human language that's an interesting idea to me the very interesting idea that people don't think about it as ai because it's they're kind of dumb currently is actual embodied robots so robotics like boston dynamics i have downstairs and upstairs uh legged robots uh you know the currently boston dynamics robots and most legged robots most robots period are pretty dumb this is most of the challenges have to do with the actual first of all the engineering of making the thing work getting a sensor suite that allows you to do it's the same thing as with magically that base layer of like where is that stuff where am i yeah and uh what what am i looking at yeah i don't need to deeply understand uh my surroundings at a level of like like uh at a level beyond of what will hurt if i run into it yeah yeah yeah but even that is hard that's that's hard but the thing that i think people don't uh in the space explorer enough is the human robot interaction part of the of the picture which is how it makes humans feel how robots make humans feel and i think that's going to have a very significant impact in uh in the near future in society which is the more you integrate ai systems of whatever form into society where humans are uh in contact with them regularly so they could be embodied robotics or that could be social media algorithms i think that has a very significant impact and people often think like ai needs to be super smart to have an impact i think it needs to be super integrated with society to have an impact and more and more that's happening even if they're dumb yeah yeah no the um i mean a lot of my exposure to robots is is that i'm associated with a combat robotics team and i've been to a few battlebots competitions and that's not like in a lot of ways that's pretty far from the kind of robotics you're talking about um because the these robots are remote controlled they're they're not autonomous um and so um they're pretty simple but um it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different robots so there was one that was in the last year's season the 2020 season called rusty that uh was just uh like put together out of spare parts and it looked kind of cute and it became this huge crowd favorite because you could see it was made of like salad bowls and you know random pieces of hardware that this guy had like scavenged from his farm and so immediately people kind of fell in love with this one particular robot whereas they might other robots might be like the bad guy in a yeah you know if you think of professional wrestling you know the heel and the baby face so people do for reasons that are hard to understand form these emotional reactions we form narratives in the same way we do when we meet human beings we tell stories about these objects and they can be intelligent and they can be biological or they can be in almost almost close to inanimate objects yeah and that to me is kind of fascinating and if robots choose to lean into that it creates an interesting world if they start uh using feedback loops to make themselves cuter not just cuter but everything that humans do let's not let's let's let's let's not speak harshly robots humans do the same no i didn't was wasn't meaning it but right humans based on feedback will change their appearance yes they're just on instagram all the time how do i look cuter that's the fundamental question i ask myself yeah so why wouldn't why wouldn't a robot wanna it's like oh wow people people really don't like the you know quad mount machine gun you know on top of my turret maybe i should get rid of that and that would you know people would feel more at ease uh or or lean into it yeah proud of it yeah uh like uh you won't take my gun whatever the saying is from my dead cold hands um i mean their their personality adding personalities such that you can start to heal you can start to weave narratives i think that's a fascinating place where there's this feedback loop like you said where ai when it's especially when it's embodied puts a mirror to ourselves just like other humans are our close friends they kind of teach us about ourselves we teach each other and through that process grow close and it to me it's so fascinating to um to expand the space of deep meaningful interactions beyond just humans that um that's the opportunity i see with with robots and with ai systems and that's why i don't like my biggest problem social media algorithms is the lack of transparency it's not the existence of the algorithms it's uh well there's many things one is the data data should be controlled by the individual by people yeah themselves so uh but also the lack of transparency and how the algorithms work and change your perception of what's real yeah yeah in hidden ways yeah in hidden ways yeah like you should be aware just like when you take i don't know if you take psychedelics you should be aware that you took the second hour it shouldn't be a surprise yeah and second you should i mean uh become a student and a scholar and there should be research done there should be open conversation about how your perception is changed and you and then you are become your own guide in this world of altered perception because arguably none of it is real you get to choose the flavor of real um i mean this is something you explore quite a bit do you um yourself think that there is a bottom to it where there is reality there's a base layer of reality that physics can explore and our human perception sort of layer stuff is there's is there let's go to plato is there such a thing as truth i lean towards the platonic view of things so i believe that mathematical objects haven't a reality that it's not all made up by by human minds um and i don't know where that reality comes from i can't explain it but but i do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not uh invented the um i i did a lot of not a lot but i did some some reading of husserole when i was writing anathem um and he's a you know 20th century phenomenologist and he's writing in the he's writing at the same time as as scientists are starting to understand atoms and and becoming aware that that when we look at this table it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum and there's a very sparse uh arrangement of tiny tiny little particles there um occupying that space that interact with each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object so that's kind of kind of the beginnings of phenomenology um and um and his stuff is pretty hard to um hard to read it you really have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time but he's trying to come to grips with these with these kinds of of questions how did you come to grips with it like why why is this table feel solid well i mean we're an evolved system that there's we have biological advantages in in knowing where solid objects are so we've got this system in our head that that integrates our perceptions into this coherent view of things that one of the take-homes that i i like from whosoereal is the idea of inter-subjectivity and the idea that a fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to share our perceptions and have them ratified by other and they don't even have to be people but um that you know a prisoner in solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects uh because they perceive the same things that the prisoner perceives um and uh and so convince convince him that he's not just hallucinating yeah there's a establish a consensus yeah but see that doesn't mean it's any of it is real you just establish a consensus it uh it could be very um yeah very distant from something that um something that's real in in um engineering sense of real like that you could build it using physics but i think that uh you know valuable application for an ai robot would be just to do nothing except that it just um so um consensus it just sits there yeah and if if you hear a door slam you might turn to to see what it is if the robot at the same time turns to to look at the door slam it's ratifying your perception but isn't that the basis of love is when the door slams you both look but for deeper things you both hear the same music and others don't i mean isn't that what that that's by by love i mean depth of human connection yeah like it that that's or not you arrive at similar reactions uh without having to to explicitly communicate it yeah yeah but we could start with a a robot that listens explicitly for the slam doors yeah but no i've scary sounds i i can think of so an example of this is you know when i when i went to college you know we'd be sitting at the cafeteria a you know a bunch of people you know eating our dinner together that we had just met let's say yeah so um a bunch of new people in your life and um and someone might make a funny remark or a not so funny remark or um something would happen and you might then at that moment make eye contact with someone you didn't know at the other end of the table and in that moment you would realize this person is reacting this person heard what i heard they're reacting the way i reacted yeah nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened but random stranger down there and i we have this connection yeah and then you build on that so then the next time something happens you automatically look at your new friend and they look back at you and and before you know it you know you're you're hanging out together yeah because you you know you've already established without even talking to each other that uh you're on the same wavelength yeah it's seemingly so simple what's so powerful that's establishing that you're on the same wavelength yeah at some level yeah there's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that i'm just saying this smell burned to you [Laughter] exactly i think it's if a toaster could just say that to you yeah yeah cryptonomicon published in 1999 set in the late 90s and involves hackers who build essentially cryptocurrency bitcoin white paper came out in 2008 so i i have to kind of ask uh from you looking at this layout of what's been happening in cryptocurrency the evolution of this technology how has it rolled out differently than you could have imagined in two ways one the technology itself into the human side of things the human stories of the hackers and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless the human side of things yeah well cryptonomicon is pre bitcoin it's pre pre-satoshi it's pre-blockchain as you point out so um at that point uh i was kind of reacting to what i was seeing among people like the bay area cypherpunks in berkeley there was some sun there was a branch here in austin as well and a lot of their thinking was so based on the idea that you would have to have a physical uh region of the earth that was free of government interference you couldn't achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network you actually had to have you know a room somewhere with servers in it um that that a government couldn't come and and meddle with and so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there were efforts to figure out jurisdictions where this might work there was a lot of interest for a while in anguilla which is a caribbean island that had some unusual jurisdictional properties there was sea land sea land which is a platform in the north sea um and so there was a lot of effort that went into finding these physical locations that that were deemed kind of safe and that all goes away with blockchain it's no longer necessary and so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways because [Music] you no longer have i mean from a novelist point of view the old system was a lot more fun to work with because it gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in strange parts of the world you know trying to set up server rooms so that's a great storytelling thing there's still a little bit of that right in the modern world but it's just there's several server rooms as opposed to one centralized one yeah yeah and there's the like the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your your uh your your gpus from melting down so people building things in iceland or or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean or whatever um so um but there's still governments involved and there's they're still from a novelist perspective interesting dynamics what is big governments like china and and more sort of renegade governments from all over the world trying to contend with this idea of what to do uh in terms of control and power over these kinds of centers that do the mining of the yeah of the cryptocurrency yeah so we're in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial like there's the stuff i was describing in kryptonomicon had a little bit of error about it of the underpants gnomes uh in that you know we're gonna we're gonna build this system and then we'll make money somehow uh but the the intermediate step was was left out um and that is uh uh i i think we're now so into that phase of the thing where the where bitcoin you know blockchain exists people know how it works uh bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist people are using them and it's sort of like okay what now you know where does this all lead um so um do you have a sense of where it all leads like is it is it possible that the set of technology kind of continues to have transformational effects on not just sort of finance but who gets to have power in this world so the decentralization of power you know big questions right so i guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me thinking that as soon as it becomes important enough the existing banks and people in power are gonna sort of control it i guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change in the end um there's a utopian strain sometimes in in the way people think about this that i'm not so sure about there there's a there is a technological aspect to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that make it a little easier to uh pull along the utopian thread yeah because it's harder for governments to control bitcoin yeah i mean they they have much fewer options the they can ban they can make it illegal it's more difficult yeah so technology here is on the side of the powerless the voiceless which is a very interesting idea of course yes it does have a utopian feel to it but we have been making progress throughout human history yeah maybe this is what progress looks like there will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that take advantage of it skim off the top kind of thing but maybe this does give um more power to people that haven't had power before in a good way like distributing power and enabling sort of more um greater resistance to sort of uh dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that kind of thing um and also enabling all kinds of technologies built built on top of it ultimately when you digitize money uh you know money is a kind of speech or is it's kind of like um mechanism of how humans interact and if you make that digital more and more of the world moves to the digital space and then you could have the then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality with the toaster and then yeah yeah in a lot of ways i think in that realm of technology that the money per se is one of the less interesting things you can do with it so i think you know cryptographically enforceable contracts and um and organizations built on those that seems to me like it's got more potential for change just because we do already have money and although it's an old system um it's been digitized to a large extent by you know the the stripes and the credit card companies of the world and i also love the idea of like uh connecting so to connect to smart contracts connecting data sort of uh making it more formal it's like mathematica more structured the integration of data of weather data of uh all kinds of data about the the the stuff in the world so they can make contracts between people that in that's grounded in data and that's actually getting closer to something like truth because then you can make agreements based on actual data versus kind of perceptions of data and if you can formalize like distribute the power of who gets to tell the story yeah that that's an interesting kind of um resistance yeah again the powerful in the space of narrative yeah david brin has been saying for a while that um the only way to settle arguments with you know across the political divide is to to make bets so people can say you know the election was stolen or you know what whatever controversial position they're they're taking um and they'll keep saying it until you you uh you wager real money on it so um so maybe there's something there if you could uh kind of turn that into a put a user interface on that thing you know yeah have a stake in your uh in your divisiveness in your your arguments right right will uh dogecoin take over the world twitter questions you know i don't i don't follow the the different coins that much so i don't i i hear about dogecoin and you know i've kind of followed the story of it so the interesting aspect of doshcoin is it so in contrast to like uh bitcoin and ethereum which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek to solve some of the problems that we're talking about with smart contracts and and uh resist the the banks and all those kinds of things deutsche coin operates more in the space of memes and humor while still doing some of them similar things and it presents to the world sort of a question of whether um memes whether humor whether narrative will go a long way in the future like much farther than some kind of boring old uh grounded technologies whether we'll be playing in the space of fun like once we built a base of comfort and stability and like a robust system where everyone has shelter everyone has uh food and the basic needs covered are we going to then operate in the space of fun that's that's why i think about deutsche going because it seems like fun spreads faster than anything else fun of different kinds and that could be bad fun and they could be good fun yeah and so it's a battle of good fights goes very very quickly when you when you if you post something that people find fun to yeah and that's what does coin represents so there's like so bitcoin represents like financial uh like serious financial instruments yeah and then deutsche represents fun and it's interesting to watch the battle go on on the internet to see which wins this is also like open question to me of what is the internet because um fun seems to prevail on the internet and is that a fundamental property of the internet moving forward when you look 100 years out or is this a temporary thing that was true at the birth of the internet and it's just true for a couple of decades until it fades away and and the adults take over and become serious again well i think the adults took over initially and then it was later on that people started using it for fun frivolous things like memes and that's i think that's pretty much unstoppable you know yeah because even people who are very serious uh you know enjoy um sending around a funny picture or uh something that amuses them yeah i i personally think we spoke about world war ii i think memes will save the world and prevent all future wars you've been handwriting your work for the past 20 years since writing the baroque cycle what are the pros and cons of handwriting versus typing for me i started it as an experiment when i started the baroque cycle because i had noticed that if i sometimes if i was stuck having a hard time getting started if i just picked up a pen and started writing it was easy to to go so i just decided to keep with that if it got in my way i didn't like it i could always just go back to the word processor it'd be fine so but i never that never happened so there's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's ink on paper and there's no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it there's it's a slower output technique and so um a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here before it gets committed to paper whereas i can type really fast and so i can slam things out before i've really thought them through so i think the first draft quality ends up being higher and then editing first draft of editing is just faster because instead of like trying to move the cursor around or whatever or you know hitting the backspace key i can just draw a line through a word or a sentence or just around a whole paragraph and exit out um and in doing so i very quickly created an edit but i've also left behind a record of what the text was prior to the edit of course you know all the digital versions have those quote-unquote features but their experience is different yeah yeah is there a romance to just the physical you know the touch of the pen to the paper doing what has been done for centuries i think there is i think there's a just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology beyond the pen and the paper is just very simple and clean and so i've got a bunch of fountain pens and i i started buying fancy paper from italy a few years ago because uh i i thought i would be more conservative with it you know it but it still doesn't it it's still a trivial expenditure so it doesn't really alter my my habits very much so all that said you once you do type stuff up you use emacs yeah i use emacs obviously the superior editor of course you uh let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question because emacs has been around forever do you think in 100 years we will still have emacs and vim or like pick it pick a let's say 50 100 years yeah yeah yes yeah no i mean whenever you're doing anything in linux you you're spending a lot of time editing little config files and scripts and stuff and uh you need to be able to pop in and out of of editing those things and it needs to work like even if the the windowing gui is dead and all you've got is like a command line you you to get out of that problem you might need to to enter an editor and uh and alter a file so i think on that level there always have to be sort of uh very simple well emacs isn't very simple but you know you know what i mean there there have to be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a gui just for administering systems now how widespread they'll be um you know there's a certain amount of um what's the story of the the there's the the american folk tale of the the the guy who the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes john henry trying to keep up with the steam hammer and eventually this the steam hammer wins because he can't drive the spikes fast enough so there's there's a sense in which you know microsoft like who knows how much they've invested in code you know visual studio to to you know or or apple with xcode so they've put huge amounts of money into enhancing their ides and emacs in theory can duplicate all of those features by you know if you just have enough linux hackers writing emacs lisp macros um but you know at some point um it's gonna be hard to to maintain that level of uh of to to keep up feature for feature the the interesting thing about emacs just is lasted a long time yeah and i i think if you talked about that there's a certain like there's certain fads uh certainly in the in the um software engineering space and it's interesting to think about technologies that sort of last for a very long time and just kind of being in the what is it how do they get by it's like the the the cockroaches of software or yeah the bacteria are soft or something they like this base thing that nobody everybody's just became reliant on uh and they just outlast everything else and slowly slowly adjust with the times with a little bit of a delay with a little bit of customization by individuals kind of that but they're always there in the shadows yeah and they outlast everybody else and i wonder if that's that might be the story for a lot of technologies especially in the software space yeah shell scripts you know all that stuff you you you can't run the modern world without a bunch of shell scripts you know booting out machines and and running things so um it's that is going to be a hard thing to to replace and then tech for type setting that you use you said for when i when i want to print it out yeah i just have some simple uh macros that i use but then i have to um the the publisher put their foot down and they they want it in in word format now so um years ago i wrote some macros to convert and this time what did i do copy paste no i um i use of regular expressions so i was to do italics in you know you you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash id and then you type what you want to type and that's how you get italics in tech so you can create a regular expression that'll look for some text between curly brackets preceded by backslash i.t and then instead convert that to italics and word will do that word if you go deep enough into its search and replace ui can do regular expressions is just reg apps yeah it's funny that you did that yeah i mean i'm sure there's tools that help you with that kind of thing but but the task is sufficiently simple to where you can do a much better job than anyone anybody else's tool can yeah yeah so this is a fascinating process it works fine for me yeah and it keeps you from messing around with formatting yeah like oh what if i put this chapter heading you know in you know a sans-serif font you know it's a it's just classic wanking um and so you the the those options are closed off in what i'm doing is there advice you could say what does it take to write a great story the power of of good yarns good narratives to um pull people in is is an incredible and i think my sort of amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary development that if you're um you know uh a cave person sitting around a fire in the rift valley a million years ago um if you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas um or how uncle bob you know didn't escape from the hyenas and if if the people listening to you can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads like a kind of virtual reality and see what you're describing then you've just conferred an incredibly important advantage on the people who've heard that story yeah right and so they know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have learned in any other way um i mean animals who don't have speech though they might warn each other they might make a sound that says danger danger um but uh but as far as we know they can't tell more complicated stories so it's a part of us yeah the the the collective intelligence seems to be one of the the key characteristics of the of homo sapiens the ability to share ideas and hold ideas together in our minds and storytelling is the fundamental aspect of that maybe even language itself is more fundamental yeah because the language is required to do the storytelling or maybe they evolve together maybe they co-evolve yeah so i think that you've got to work with that and i think sometimes it seems like in kind of um literary circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon as it's pulpy or it's exploitative but for me i don't have any compunctions whatsoever about that i like stories that are grabby and fun and exciting to read and once you've got one of those going once you've got a good yarn going that people will enjoy reading then you're free to do whatever you want in the frame of that story but if you don't have that then you got nothing what about having like would you do a technological scientific rigor like to the the accuracy and as much as possible how does that add to the to to bob telling the story or telling the story about bob or on the campfire well the main thing that it does is present um little details that you might not have come up with on your own so if you're just sitting there freely imagining things you uh you your your brain probably isn't going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications and surprises that real that the real world is constantly presenting us with and so um in my case if i'm um trying to write a story about you know some that involve some technology like a rocket or a orbital maneuvers or whatever then delving into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird unexpected you know thing that gives me material to work with but also subliminally readers who see that are are going to be drawn in more because if they're going to to to find that oh i didn't see that coming you know you know it's got some of the complexity and surprise value of the real world yeah it does something um alex garland director who did who wrote directed ex machina i think about ai movies and the more care you take in making it accurate the more compelling the story becomes smile i'm not i'm not sure what that is uh maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story maybe it just makes you a better writer the key to any storytelling is getting the the readers to suspend their their disbelief and there's all kinds of triggers and little tells that can break that right um and once it's broken it's really hard to get it back uh yeah you know a lot of times that's the end somebody will just close the book and not pick it up i get to ask you've answered this question but i got to ask you the most impossible question for an author to answer but which neil stephenson book should one read first so when people ask me that i usually ask them what they like to read right because i mean there's the best known one is probably snow crash but that's a a cyberpunk novel that's at the same time making fun of cyberpunk so it's kind of got some layers to it that might not seem so funny if you don't have that if you don't get the joke right so there's i've written as you point out i've written historical novels some people like those some people prefer those so if that's what you like then cryptonomicon or the baroque cycle is where you would start if you like sort of techno thrillers that are set in a modern day setting but aren't science fictiony per se then uh reem d um is one of those and termination shock um is is definitely one of those um so it just depends on on uh what people like what uh when people a long time ago recommend i read snow crash they said uh it's the it's neil stevens in light it's it's the uh like if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the depth like the rigor book like that's a good that's a good introduction okay so so essentially you broke it down by topics but if you wanted to read all of them what's a good introduction to the to the man because obviously these worlds are very different yeah the philosophies are very different yeah what's a good introduction to the human um hmm people ask the same thing with dostoyevsky people right it's a it's a hard one to answer maybe seven eaves because it's got big themes um it's you know it's about heavy heavy things happening to the human race um uh but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that uh people can relate to you know it moves along uh so uh it does go kind of deep eventually on how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff but um people were able to get through it anyway or some people just skip over that it's fine you know um as an author let me ask you what books had a big impact on your life that you've read is there any that jump to mind that you learned from as a writer as a philosopher as a mathematician as an engineer this is one of these questions where i always blank out and then when i'm walking out the door oh i'll remember 12. so this is a random selection that doesn't represent the top the top ones um well i mentioned you know gulag archipelago that's kind of a hefty and dark but and then it has a personal connection as well yeah just yeah because like where you found the book too right the part the time in your life where you found it yeah who recommended it that's also part of the story yeah so there's definitely that there's you know i circle back to moby dick a lot um because we read it in a uh a really great english class i had in high school and i came in with an oppositional stance because i thought that the teacher was going to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory and what does this mean what's the symbolism and it turned out that uh it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying than that um what was the first powerful book you remember reading that like convinced you that this form could have depth was it moby dick was it like in high school i'm trying to remember well moby dick was definitely a big one um i used to read a lot of classics comics when i was i don't know if you've seen these it's a whole series of comic books that um it was viral you could uh in the in the back of each comic book was an order form you could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in and more would show up and but it was like they would do the count of money christo you know moby dick you know robert louis stevenson robinson crusoe you know all the sort of classic books uh were they had put into comic book form it's amazing yeah reading moby dick if you're nine years old is a tall order there's some very complicated sentences in there yeah and a lot of digressions but if you're just looking at the comic books like holy look at that whale you know and um and ultimately the power of the story doesn't need the complicated words it's it's all about the man and the and the whale yeah yeah so you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without actually reading them which is you know it's great when you're nine years old so so i read a lot of that stuff uh for sure the annotated sherlock holmes um you you mentioned david deutsche as an inspiration for some of your work i mean you you've obviously didn't like really a lot of research for the books you you do roger apparent rose what uh do you remember a book that made you want to become a writer or a moment that made you become i think like the you know the answer i usually give is that when i was in like fifth grade one of my friends came to school one day is wearing leather shoes like dress shoes and i hated dress shoes because mine never fit and so they were uncomfortable i couldn't run you know they were cold it was iowa so i kind of said i remember very clearly thinking okay i don't like where this is going like does this mean that next year all the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes so i need to find a job where i don't have to do that so that was like the first time i thought about trying to find such a job you know being a writer and then and then i just read a lot of uh just classic science fiction short stories and started you know trying to write some of my own and uh there were just classic young adult stories learned by heinlein and the other classic names that you think of but the heinlein ones stuck have stuck with me in a way that the others didn't what's the greatest science fiction book ever written just removing your uh work from consideration uh i'm loving torturing you greatest ever non-stevenson do we include fantasy there's to have to be science fiction oh interesting fantasy hmm i i did not expect that twist uh well in a weird way they're lumped together in people's minds right so they are but it there but there's also a boundary somehow yeah i'm not sure what that is exactly nobody is it's a mystery [Laughter] so i mean if we do include it then it's easily the the lord of the rings but um i mean greatness is a interesting quality to uh to try to define um and for me a lot of the the fun and the joy of such books is is not in what you'd call greatness but just storytelling so i was always a big fan of has have space suit will travel which is a heinlein young adult book it's just uh it's just a fun good read um so so fun is a big component greatness is overrated well i don't know it's overrated but it's just you know it's it might be under defined let's put it that way so how space it will travel now i definitely have to read that one yeah you mentioned iowa i was uh there a couple times i got to spend uh quite a bit of time with dan gable with tom brands who were wrestlers was uh is it now wrestling martial arts part of your life any part of your form formation of who you are as a human being i think so in a it was a late it was a late thing for me but growing up in ames dan gable was a few years older than me and so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets and and this was before his olympic career so everyone knew he was the star of that team and then he was the best but people didn't yet know that he was the greatest of all time g you saw gabe so that was part it's it's funny it's uh it feels like a small world that you would be in the same space as dan gable well a hundred feet away a little dot on the mat pronouncing his opponents him and him and chris taylor so the other star was this 400 pound plus guy named chris taylor who also went to the olympics so yeah people you know he was he was a no he was a athletic hero and wrestling is there's certain states like oklahoma pennsylvania iowa where wrestling is the sport because those are states of small towns and so if you're a small town if you're like dan gable and you have to be on a football team with 20 other guys who are not dan gable then no matter how good you are your team might might suck uh but if in a solo thing you can you can go to the olympics so we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes in school and i didn't like it and i think partly it's just that it was so so competitive and the people who were who cared about it really cared about it a lot you know and so it was it was pretty tough i didn't think i had the right body type but then when i was uh after college i was in iowa city for a few years when he was coaching the the wrestling team there and he won like nine championships out of 10 years during that during that time so he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the greatest team coach um so i've never met him but we've uh he's kind of been like in my sphere of awareness since i was you know kind of my whole life and people would always tell stories about him like i think he got arrested once for some kind of i don't know minor offense in ames and so he just basically stayed up all night he was in this cage in the jail he just stayed up all night doing pull-ups yeah yeah sounds about right yeah and uh uh so yeah so has that been i mean i was such an interesting place in the world i mean wrestling is just part of that story does is that somewhere in there does that resonate deeply with who you are it was a formative yeah thing for me growing up there for sure it's just a uh you know a at least used to be a very orderly place high social capital very minimal class differences so like you'd have some people who would drive a cadillac instead of a chevy but that was it that you know those were the rich people right so um and a college town is always a different environment like uh you know austin uh has some of this um so as a pretty kind of utopian other than the weather and a few other things uh environment to grow up in the the martial art i ended up doing is sword stuff which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop so when you're if you're grappling everything is through sense of touch and your sense of touch is very old and simple right like earthworms don't have don't even have eyes but you they can tell when they're being touched right so it's very fast um and uh with um with a standoff or like boxing or some kind of sword fighting you're you're not touching the other person most of the time your your uh your visual system is doing something way more it's doing slam and trying to figure out what the other person is up to and so that always fell more my speed so in in olympic style fencing your it doesn't start really until you're crossing blades with the other person and now you're back to wrestling you're feeling what they're doing and it's all about that but some of the older sword arts um don't engage the the blade that way you stand off their range and then you make cutting attacks and um [Music] and uh and so so those are all processed visually and i think i'm more of a slow thinker so it works for me better i mean the same so it has the same the artistry and the beauty of boxing i suppose just like you said is like there's no there's no contact and it's all processed visually and i'm sure there's a dance of its own yeah that that depends on the characteristic of a sword involved yeah there's a set of of stances and and uh basic reactions that you try to learn that are thought to be defensible um and and safe or safer and so it tends to be a series of short engagements where you'll you'll close in you'll try out your your idea and it works or it doesn't then you you back off again it's interesting to think about like human history because martial arts okay that's a thing but in terms of sword fighting just the full range of humans that existed who mastered sword fighting or sought the masteries were fighting just imagine the thousands of people who the the heights they have achieved because the stakes are so incredibly high yeah to be good and it's the richest most powerful people in in those societies spending it whatever it takes to get the best gear and the best training because you're right everything depends on it and it's still life and death i mean that that's fascinating um that that's fascinating we perhaps have lost that forever with greater weapons i mean the artistry of sword fighting when it's life and death and you go into war you have the miyamoto musashi's of the world right the i don't know there's a poetry to it that that there's a mastery to that that i don't know if we could achieve with any other kind of martial art well the one of the good you were talking earlier about the the the good effects of the internet social media that we sometimes overlook and and one of those is that um there were all these isolated people around the world who were interested in this who found each other and kind of created a network of of people who help each other learn these things so that doesn't mean that anyone is is up to the level of that you're talking about yet but um but it is happening and um and so um there's a a a large number of old treatises old written documents uh that have been dug up from libraries and and people have been going over these and translating them from old dialects of italian in german to make sense of them and and learning how to do these techniques with different uh different weapons um actually there's a guy here in austin named damon stith who does african historical african martial arts um also martial arts of uh of enslaved africans who [Music] would learn machete fighting techniques in the caribbean south america yeah he's probably within a mile of us he's awesome amazing guy i'm gonna look him up yeah can i ask you for advice can you give advice for young people high school college you know undergrads thinking about their career thinking about life how to live a life that you'd be proud of you think quite a bit about like what it's required to be innovative in this world you think quite a bit about the future so somebody wanted to be a person that makes a big impact in the future what advice would you give them i think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do happily and i don't want to say obsessively because that sounds like maybe it's pathological but but if you can find a thing that you'll you know you'll sit down you'll start doing it and hours later you kind of snap out of it where did the time go um then that's a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're young because if you don't have that it's hard to to figure out where you should put your energies you know and as you might have the best intentions you might say i you know i want world peace or whatever uh but um uh at the end of the day what really matters is how do you spend your time and are you spending it in a way that's productive uh and um uh because it doesn't matter how smart you are or well-intentioned you are unless you've figured that out and so finding that thing in which you can sort of you naturally lose yourself in the thing is at least for me there's a lot of things like that but i first have to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing like the fun starts a little bit after the first hump of really sucking and then you could suck just regularly yeah so often people oftentimes people can give up too early i think i mean that's true with mathematics for me it's for a lot of people is if you just give it a chance to struggle if you give yourself time to struggle you'll find a way you'll find the thing within that thing that you can lose track of time with yeah that's a key detail that um there's an important thing to add to to what i said which is that this might not happen the first time you do a thing maybe it will but um uh you might have to climb that learning curve and um if there's pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that then it might prevent you from from getting where you need to be so there's some complexity there that may can make this kind of non-obvious but uh that's what that's why we need you know good teachers um you know another beneficial thing of the internet is youtube and being able to learn things how to do things on youtube the the the dude who made the youtube video doesn't care how many times you hit pause and rewind um they're never gonna like roll their eyes and and be impatient with you um and sometimes uh spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book like making that the thing you just spent a huge amount of time on rereading re-reading or re-watching re-watching that that somehow really um solidifies your love for that thing and like the depth of understanding you start to gain and it's okay to stay with that i used to think like there's all these books out there so like i need to keep reading or keep reading but then i i realized um i think it was somewhere in college uh where you could just spend your whole life with a single textbook there's enough in that textbook yeah to really really stay measner thorne and wheeler gravitation you know is one of those or another one is um the road to reality by roger penrose which is just incredibly deep it starts with like two plus two equals four and it at the end you're at the boundaries of of physics uh it's an amazing amazing book let me ask you the big ridiculous question okay since you've pondered some big ridiculous questions in your work what's the meaning of this whole thing what's the meaning of life wow human life well as far as i know we're unique in the the universe there's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated as what's between our ears might be you can't rule it out but um so we appear to be pretty special and um so it's got to have something to do with that and one of the reasons i like david deutsch in particular his book the beginning of infinity um is that he talks about the power of explanations and the fact that um most civilizations are static that they've got a set of dogmas that they arrive at somehow and they just pass those on from one uh generation to the next and nothing changes but that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow and whatever you want to call it the scientific method or enlightenment uh there's different ways of thinking about it but basically explanatory it's it's about the power of of explanations and being able to figure out why things are the way they are and that has created changes in our um thinking in our way of life over the last few centuries that are explosive compared to anything that came before and david sort of verges on classifying this as like a force of nature in its potential transformative power if we keep going um you know we could uh you know if we figure out how to colonize the universe like you were talking about earlier how this spread to other star systems then it is effectively a force of nature this kind of drive to understand more and more and more deeper and deeper and deeper and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more yeah yeah it's the the well it's the old the universe created us to understand itself maybe that's the uh the whole purpose yeah it's it is an interesting peculiar side effect of the way we've been created is we seem to be conscious beings we seem to have little egos we seem to be born and die pretty quickly there's a bunch of drama we're all within ourselves pretty unique and we fall in love and start wars and there's hate and all the the full interesting dynamic of it so it's not just about the individual people yeah somehow like the concert that we played together yeah yeah so that's kind of interesting there's a lot of peculiar aspects of that that i wonder if they're fundamental or just quirks of evolution whether it's whether it's death whether it's love whether all those things i wonder if they're um from an engineering perspective when we're trying to create that intelligent toaster that listens for the for the slam door and this and the smell of burning toast whether that toaster it should be afraid of death and should fall in love just like we do neil you're a fascinating human being you've impacted the lives of millions of people it's a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time with me today thank you so much thank you for coming down uh it's beautiful hot texas and thank you for talking today it was a pleasure i'm glad i came and did it thanks for listening to this conversation with neil stephenson to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from neil stevenson himself in his novel snow crash the world is full of things more powerful than us but if you know how to catch a ride you can go places thanks for listening and hope to see you next time