Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity

Lex Fridman (02:22.680)

And in so doing, does that not potentially fundamentally alter the sort of the experience

Lex Fridman (02:30.520)

that we have of life on earth?

Lex Fridman (02:32.120)

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

Lex Fridman (02:37.940)

But you know, people will find ways to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind

Lex Fridman (02:49.000)

of psychological itch that they have got.

Lex Fridman (02:51.840)

And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of

Neal Stephenson (02:57.640)

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

Neal Stephenson (03:09.140)

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

Lex Fridman (03:17.120)

The economic collapse.

Neal Stephenson (03:18.440)

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

Lex Fridman (03:25.560)

And that sounds like a plausible explanation.

Lex Fridman (03:29.360)

But there are economic troubles now for sure.

Lex Fridman (03:32.240)

We had the bank collapse in 2008.

Lex Fridman (03:36.320)

And there's stagnation in some people's standards of living.

Lex Fridman (03:39.920)

But it's hard to explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years just strictly

Neal Stephenson (03:44.180)

on the basis of people are poor and angry and sad.

Lex Fridman (03:49.440)

I think they want to be angry.

Lex Fridman (03:52.180)

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

Lex Fridman (03:58.960)

can draw from World War II?

Neal Stephenson (04:01.400)

Sure.

Neal Stephenson (04:02.400)

This singular event in human history, it seems like, and yet, as you say, history rhymes

Neal Stephenson (04:09.100)

at the very least.

Lex Fridman (04:10.280)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (04:11.280)

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

Lex Fridman (04:17.620)

with that war.

Neal Stephenson (04:20.160)

Which may not be where you want to go.

Lex Fridman (04:22.720)

Well, there's several things.

Neal Stephenson (04:23.720)

Sorry to interrupt.

Lex Fridman (04:24.720)

So one in Cryptonomicon is more like the Alan Turing side of things, right?

Lex Fridman (04:30.400)

And then there's the outside of technology.

Lex Fridman (04:35.240)

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

Lex Fridman (04:38.240)

But then there's just like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.

Lex Fridman (04:41.840)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (04:42.840)

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

Lex Fridman (04:49.040)

that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature.

Lex Fridman (04:55.200)

So you have to learn that lesson to be an educated person, and you have to know that

Neal Stephenson (05:03.040)

even in a supposedly enlightened, civilized society, people can become monsters quite

Neal Stephenson (05:09.160)

easily.

Lex Fridman (05:10.560)

So that is for sure the big takeaway.

Lex Fridman (05:13.520)

Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil runs through the heart

Lex Fridman (05:22.680)

of every man?

Neal Stephenson (05:23.680)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (05:24.680)

That all of us are capable?

Neal Stephenson (05:26.720)

Great line.

Lex Fridman (05:27.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (05:28.720)

Of evil?

Neal Stephenson (05:29.720)

I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager because my grandfather

Neal Stephenson (05:35.480)

had it in his house because he was one of these Americans who was obsessed with the

Neal Stephenson (05:41.040)

Soviet Union and the Soviet threat and wanted people to be aware of some of what had happened.

Lex Fridman (05:49.920)

And so he had those books lying around and I would read them.

Lex Fridman (05:55.800)

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

Neal Stephenson (06:03.440)

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

Neal Stephenson (06:13.520)

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

Neal Stephenson (06:22.440)

to evil.

Lex Fridman (06:23.920)

But it's also a story of bravery, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood and basically

Neal Stephenson (06:31.760)

survival.

Neal Stephenson (06:32.760)

You have a man's search for meaning, which is the story of a man in a concentration camp

Neal Stephenson (06:40.520)

basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions.

Lex Fridman (06:45.840)

So to me World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature.

Neal Stephenson (06:53.600)

It's a little moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity.

Lex Fridman (07:02.640)

So I'm not so sure that it leads me to a pessimistic view of the world, the fact that somebody

Neal Stephenson (07:08.460)

like Hitler could happen, the fact that a lot of people could follow Hitler and get

Lex Fridman (07:14.040)

excited and maybe even love the hate of the other for some moment of time.

Neal Stephenson (07:20.920)

I think all of us are capable of that, but I think all of us also have a capacity for

Lex Fridman (07:28.000)

good.

Lex Fridman (07:29.120)

And I think, I don't know what you think, but I think we have a greater desire for good

Lex Fridman (07:36.360)

than evil.

Lex Fridman (07:38.000)

And it seems like that's where technology is very useful as a guide, as a helping hand.

Lex Fridman (07:44.600)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (07:45.600)

Can you give me an example maybe?

Lex Fridman (07:48.600)

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

Neal Stephenson (07:54.200)

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

Lex Fridman (08:04.640)

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

Neal Stephenson (08:12.000)

the world's information accessible at your fingertips.

Neal Stephenson (08:15.240)

That kind of technology enables the natural, if this axiom, this assumption that people

Neal Stephenson (08:24.480)

want to do good is true, then letting them discover all of the information out there,

Neal Stephenson (08:31.040)

false information and true information, all of it, and let them explore that's going to

Neal Stephenson (08:36.360)

lead to a better world, to better people.

Neal Stephenson (08:40.780)

Fascist technologies is, I personally, I mentioned to you offline, sort of love artificial intelligence.

Lex Fridman (08:48.360)

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

Neal Stephenson (08:55.440)

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

Neal Stephenson (09:02.160)

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

Neal Stephenson (09:08.760)

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

Neal Stephenson (09:16.320)

as an assistant, a servant in your journey towards knowledge.

Neal Stephenson (09:23.480)

That sounds like an easy thing, but it's actually from an AI perspective very difficult.

Neal Stephenson (09:27.240)

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

Lex Fridman (09:33.080)

a book that essentially does that.

Lex Fridman (09:35.840)

And I've been sort of watching people try to come at the problem of building that thing

Lex Fridman (09:41.920)

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

Lex Fridman (09:47.800)

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

Lex Fridman (09:55.520)

level of difficulty in realizing that goal.

Lex Fridman (10:01.920)

So that book is in the 90s, so as Google is coming to be, it's essentially not Google,

Lex Fridman (10:10.380)

but the search engine, the initial search engines, which gave birth to Google essentially

Neal Stephenson (10:14.600)

in contrast.

Lex Fridman (10:15.600)

Right.

Neal Stephenson (10:16.600)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (10:17.600)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (10:18.600)

That was still in the era of Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines.

Lex Fridman (10:24.880)

And yeah, I'm pretty sure I had not heard of Google at that point.

Neal Stephenson (10:28.160)

That would have been 95, 96.

Lex Fridman (10:30.200)

I think the book came out in 94.

Lex Fridman (10:33.360)

And then, of course, the social networks followed, which is another form of guidance through

Lex Fridman (10:39.520)

the space of information.

Neal Stephenson (10:41.080)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (10:42.080)

Well, what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them.

Lex Fridman (10:48.160)

And so I saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that 20 years ago, if you

Neal Stephenson (10:55.620)

had Googled Pythagorean theorem, chances are you would have been taken directly to a page

Neal Stephenson (11:05.280)

explaining the Pythagorean theorem.

Lex Fridman (11:07.560)

If you do it now, you're probably going to...

Lex Fridman (11:10.720)

The top hits are going to be from somebody who's got an angle, who's got a scheme, right?

Neal Stephenson (11:15.480)

They're trying to sell you math tutoring or they're working some kind of marketing plan

Neal Stephenson (11:23.440)

on you.

Lex Fridman (11:25.020)

So the traditional engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational

Neal Stephenson (11:33.000)

purpose.

Lex Fridman (11:35.160)

That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones.

Lex Fridman (11:41.200)

First of all, to defend the people with the angle, right?

Neal Stephenson (11:45.680)

They're trying to find business models to fund, oftentimes, which is funny you went

Neal Stephenson (11:50.520)

with Pythagorean, like you went at math, those greedy bastards, but it's great.

Lex Fridman (11:58.400)

How can we monetize the Pythagorean theorem?

Neal Stephenson (12:01.360)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (12:02.360)

Well, I mean, education, right, is just to figure out like people who love math education,

Neal Stephenson (12:08.320)

for example, love it purely, not purely, but very often love it for itself, for just teaching

Lex Fridman (12:17.280)

math.

Neal Stephenson (12:18.280)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (12:19.280)

Because, you know, when coming face to face with, for example, like the YouTube algorithm,

Lex Fridman (12:23.520)

they start to try to figure out, okay, how can I make money off of this?

Neal Stephenson (12:27.960)

The primary goal is still that love of education, but they also want to make that love of education

Neal Stephenson (12:36.000)

their full time job.

Lex Fridman (12:38.320)

But I see that sort of that dance of humanity with the algorithms as it finds this kind

Neal Stephenson (12:45.160)

of local pocket of optimality, or suboptimality, whatever, it gets stuck in it.

Lex Fridman (12:52.200)

It's a pocket of some sort.

Lex Fridman (12:54.440)

But I see that pocket as way better than what we had before in the 80s, right, or the 90s

Lex Fridman (12:59.520)

before the internet.

Lex Fridman (13:00.520)

But like, and now we're now, this is also human nature, we start writing very eloquent

Neal Stephenson (13:06.000)

articles about how this pocket is clearly a pocket, it's not very good, and we can imagine

Neal Stephenson (13:11.640)

much better lands far beyond, but the reality is it's better than before, and now we're

Lex Fridman (13:17.280)

waiting for a new book.

Neal Stephenson (13:20.280)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (13:21.280)

And you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group of

Neal Stephenson (13:25.680)

geniuses that just say, enough is enough, I have an idea, this is how we get out.

Lex Fridman (13:31.520)

And it's too easy to be sort of, I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks

Neal Stephenson (13:37.360)

in your articles being cynical about being in this pocket, and we are forever stuck in

Neal Stephenson (13:42.080)

this pocket, and then coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally,

Neal Stephenson (13:48.800)

like it's collapsing, stuck forever like a prison in this pocket, but reality, it's just

Neal Stephenson (13:54.960)

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

Neal Stephenson (14:01.920)

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

Lex Fridman (14:06.700)

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

Lex Fridman (14:12.820)

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

Neal Stephenson (14:18.320)

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

Lex Fridman (14:24.600)

so on.

Lex Fridman (14:25.600)

It goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.

Neal Stephenson (14:28.840)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (14:29.840)

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

Lex Fridman (14:33.480)

So can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think, back to sort of a serious question,

Lex Fridman (14:40.700)

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

Neal Stephenson (14:44.020)

It's just an energy calculation.

Neal Stephenson (14:46.640)

I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want, but the idea of getting there in one

Neal Stephenson (14:56.340)

lifetime or a few lifetimes requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate.

Lex Fridman (15:05.340)

And then as soon as you get halfway there, you need to expend an equal amount of energy

Neal Stephenson (15:10.340)

to decelerate, or you'll just go shooting by.

Lex Fridman (15:15.060)

And so that means carrying a lot of energy.

Lex Fridman (15:18.360)

And there's ideas like Yuri Milner, I think, is still funding the idea to use laser propulsion

Lex Fridman (15:26.740)

to send something to another star system, a small object.

Lex Fridman (15:32.420)

But it'll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.

Lex Fridman (15:35.660)

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

Neal Stephenson (15:39.180)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (15:40.180)

It's a quick flyby to take a good picture, I guess.

Neal Stephenson (15:42.980)

Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by.

Lex Fridman (15:45.780)

So, and that's great if it happens, I'm not knocking it.

Lex Fridman (15:49.440)

But the amount of energy that's needed is just staggering, and there's other issues

Lex Fridman (15:55.260)

like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation?

Lex Fridman (16:02.740)

How do you prevent people from going crazy?

Lex Fridman (16:05.180)

What happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of

Lex Fridman (16:09.940)

light?

Lex Fridman (16:10.940)

So that's sort of some combination of expanding human lifespan, but also just good old fashioned,

Neal Stephenson (16:18.580)

stable society on a spaceship.

Lex Fridman (16:20.860)

Yeah, yeah, the generation ship.

Neal Stephenson (16:23.460)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (16:24.460)

No, I think that's the only way.

Neal Stephenson (16:26.700)

It would have to keep going for a long time.

Lex Fridman (16:31.780)

And they might get to where they're going and find a shitty solar system.

Neal Stephenson (16:38.240)

We can try to do some advanced survey, but if you get there and all the planets in that

Neal Stephenson (16:46.620)

solar system are just garbage planets, then it's kind of a big let down for this like

Lex Fridman (16:52.860)

thousand year voyage that you've just been on, right?

Lex Fridman (16:57.620)

So we have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive

Neal Stephenson (17:07.060)

in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with.

Lex Fridman (17:12.660)

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

Lex Fridman (17:19.360)

and atmosphere and so on.

Lex Fridman (17:21.740)

So when you look at all those complications, then basically building sort of exactly the

Neal Stephenson (17:31.180)

environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell

Lex Fridman (17:36.220)

of a lot better.

Neal Stephenson (17:39.180)

It's hard to make an economic argument, let's say, for making that journey.

Neal Stephenson (17:47.340)

One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that the people who are trying

Neal Stephenson (17:51.420)

to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religious reasons.

Neal Stephenson (17:57.420)

I think that's the only reason that you would do it because economically it just makes more

Neal Stephenson (18:04.220)

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

Lex Fridman (18:10.020)

Well, isn't everything done for religious reasons?

Lex Fridman (18:13.260)

Like why do we exploration?

Lex Fridman (18:16.580)

Why do we go to the moon again and do the other things?

Lex Fridman (18:20.180)

What does JFK said is not because they're easy, but because they're hard.

Lex Fridman (18:23.740)

Isn't that kind of a religious reason?

Neal Stephenson (18:25.980)

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

Lex Fridman (18:31.100)

communism's greatest achievement.

Neal Stephenson (18:34.380)

Yeah, so the conflict between nations is a kind of...

Lex Fridman (18:40.500)

Not exactly a religion, but it's what you're talking about.

Neal Stephenson (18:43.740)

Well, it's a struggle for meaning and that meaning isn't found in some kind of...

Lex Fridman (18:49.940)

It's hard to find meaning in mathematics.

Neal Stephenson (18:52.220)

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

Lex Fridman (18:56.540)

Some people do, but those are probably not enough of them to...

Neal Stephenson (19:02.900)

People that find meaning in mathematics, they usually find meaning between the lines nevertheless,

Lex Fridman (19:08.600)

not in the actual proving some kind of thing.

Lex Fridman (19:15.780)

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

Neal Stephenson (19:22.420)

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

Lex Fridman (19:31.420)

ants out into the galaxy?

Lex Fridman (19:36.280)

I have nothing against it.

Neal Stephenson (19:38.420)

It's just, like I said, it's got the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual

Lex Fridman (19:46.220)

or kind of non tangible calculus.

Lex Fridman (19:50.180)

So from a business model perspective, you don't think there's a business model there?

Lex Fridman (19:54.940)

No, no way.

Neal Stephenson (19:56.500)

One of the many fascinating things you've done in your life, you were at the very beginning,

Neal Stephenson (1:00:07.140)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:00:13.180)

I think that's possible.

Neal Stephenson (1:00:14.180)

I think it's just that we've gotten, the leaders we have right now aren't the right people

Neal Stephenson (1:00:20.220)

because we've lived through kind of a long stretch of relatively comfortable times.

Lex Fridman (1:00:24.860)

And it feels like unfortunate if you just look at history, that hard times made great

Neal Stephenson (1:00:31.020)

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

Lex Fridman (1:00:40.060)

interesting and not very bold.

Neal Stephenson (1:00:41.700)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:00:42.700)

No, I think that's fair.

Neal Stephenson (1:00:43.700)

So, you know, we may be entering one of those interesting times, you know, in the Chinese

Lex Fridman (1:00:48.820)

curse sense, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:00:53.380)

So I could be wrong, but I mean, there've been some efforts to explore solar geoengineering.

Neal Stephenson (1:01:00.620)

There was a plan to send up some balloons, high altitude balloons to take some measurements

Neal Stephenson (1:01:08.780)

in Scandinavia that got squashed by objections from people who lived up there who were just

Lex Fridman (1:01:17.620)

opposed to the whole program on principle.

Lex Fridman (1:01:22.500)

So we'll see a lot more of that.

Lex Fridman (1:01:24.860)

And it's going to be a hard program to advocate for just because I think people don't quite

Neal Stephenson (1:01:31.380)

understand how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and how far we are from even slowing

Neal Stephenson (1:01:40.020)

down the rate that we're adding more to say nothing of bringing that number down.

Neal Stephenson (1:01:48.180)

We're a long way out from that.

Lex Fridman (1:01:50.580)

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

Lex Fridman (1:01:55.740)

of that?

Neal Stephenson (1:01:57.340)

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

Lex Fridman (1:02:05.820)

planetary species?

Lex Fridman (1:02:06.820)

And what percent should that be, you think?

Neal Stephenson (1:02:09.300)

You know, in an indirect way, maybe.

Neal Stephenson (1:02:11.500)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:02:16.940)

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

Lex Fridman (1:02:22.620)

here on Earth before we spend money going into space.

Lex Fridman (1:02:27.800)

So I've never been a believer in that argument.

Neal Stephenson (1:02:32.220)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:02:42.900)

thinking about like if we're thinking about terraforming Mars, changing its atmosphere,

Lex Fridman (1:02:49.100)

making it more amenable to life and survival.

Neal Stephenson (1:02:55.060)

You could see that maybe changing people's opinions about terraforming the Earth.

Neal Stephenson (1:03:00.940)

There are some dangerous consequences to this particular idea of blasting software of geoengineering.

Lex Fridman (1:03:12.540)

What do you make of sort of big, bold ideas that are a double edged sword?

Neal Stephenson (1:03:18.780)

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

Lex Fridman (1:03:29.060)

beneficial consequences and a potential to have highly destructive consequences?

Lex Fridman (1:03:34.180)

I wouldn't say all.

Neal Stephenson (1:03:35.340)

I think, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, how technology developed

Neal Stephenson (1:03:41.460)

in the 50s and 60s, there was a period of time there when people maybe had unrealistic

Neal Stephenson (1:03:48.240)

ideas about new technology and weren't sufficiently attentive to the possible downsides.

Lex Fridman (1:03:57.420)

So we got, and there's a reason why, I mean, in the mid 20th century, we saw antibiotics,

Neal Stephenson (1:04:08.540)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:04:18.340)

My grandmother to her dying day called the refrigerator the ice box because when she

Neal Stephenson (1:04:23.780)

grew up, it was a box with ice in it.

Lex Fridman (1:04:26.940)

So you see all that change and it's largely for the benefit of people.

Lex Fridman (1:04:31.420)

And so if somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to build nuclear reactors to make

Neal Stephenson (1:04:37.820)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:04:48.140)

easy to just buy into that and not be alert to the possible downsides.

Lex Fridman (1:04:55.580)

And of course, we know that the way that those early reactors were built and the way that

Neal Stephenson (1:05:02.620)

the supply chain was built to create the fuel and deal with the waste was poorly thought

Neal Stephenson (1:05:13.180)

out and we're still dealing with the resulting problems at places like Hanford in the state

Neal Stephenson (1:05:22.280)

of Washington.

Lex Fridman (1:05:23.340)

And we know that DDT, although it did kill a lot of insects, also had terrible effects

Neal Stephenson (1:05:30.220)

on bird populations.

Lex Fridman (1:05:32.980)

So the kind of backlash that happened in the 70s that is still kind of going on is to sort

Neal Stephenson (1:05:40.460)

of assume that everything is a double edged sword and always to look for, we have to absolutely

Neal Stephenson (1:05:49.900)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:05:57.940)

adopt any new technology.

Lex Fridman (1:06:00.700)

And I think the people are overly sensitized to that now.

Neal Stephenson (1:06:09.380)

Yeah, it's funny, depending on the technology, people are a little bit too terrified of certain

Lex Fridman (1:06:16.820)

technologies, like artificial intelligence is one.

Neal Stephenson (1:06:20.380)

My sense is that the things that they're afraid of aren't the things that are likely going

Lex Fridman (1:06:27.580)

to happen in terms of negative things.

Neal Stephenson (1:06:30.300)

It's probably impossible to predict exactly the unintended negative consequences.

Lex Fridman (1:06:36.100)

But what's also interesting is for AI as an example, people don't think enough about the

Neal Stephenson (1:06:42.540)

positive things.

Lex Fridman (1:06:43.540)

I mean, the same is true with social media.

Neal Stephenson (1:06:45.540)

It's very popular now, for some reason, to talk about all the negative effects of social

Lex Fridman (1:06:50.220)

media.

Neal Stephenson (1:06:51.220)

We've immediately forgotten how incredible it is to connect across the world.

Neal Stephenson (1:06:59.820)

There's a deep loneliness within all of us, we long to connect and social media, at least

Neal Stephenson (1:07:04.300)

in part, enables that even in its current state.

Lex Fridman (1:07:08.940)

And all the negative things we see with social media currently are also in part just revealing

Neal Stephenson (1:07:15.240)

the basics of human nature.

Lex Fridman (1:07:16.620)

It didn't make us worse, it's just bringing it to the surface.

Lex Fridman (1:07:20.180)

And step one of solving a problem is bringing it to the surface.

Neal Stephenson (1:07:23.220)

The fact that there's a division, the fact that we're easily angered and upset and all

Neal Stephenson (1:07:31.300)

of that, the witch hunts, all those kinds of things, that's human nature and it just

Lex Fridman (1:07:35.500)

reveals that allowing us to now work on it, it's therapy.

Lex Fridman (1:07:40.880)

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

Lex Fridman (1:07:47.940)

effects now and in the future enough of.

Neal Stephenson (1:07:51.340)

I have to ask you about, there's a million things I can ask you about, but virtual reality,

Lex Fridman (1:07:56.340)

I gotta ask you.

Neal Stephenson (1:07:59.940)

You've thought about virtual reality, mixed reality quite a bit.

Lex Fridman (1:08:05.900)

What are the interesting trajectories you see for the proliferation of virtual reality

Lex Fridman (1:08:11.380)

or mixed reality in the next few years?

Lex Fridman (1:08:13.380)

Yeah, so I was at Magic Leap for, what, five years.

Neal Stephenson (1:08:19.460)

With the best title of all time.

Lex Fridman (1:08:21.540)

Oh, thanks.

Lex Fridman (1:08:22.540)

Chief Futurist?

Lex Fridman (1:08:23.540)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:08:24.540)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:08:25.540)

And so I sort of had a little squad of people in Seattle doing what you might call content

Neal Stephenson (1:08:32.780)

R&D, so we're trying to make content for AR, but because it's such a new medium, it's more

Lex Fridman (1:08:43.180)

of an engineering R&D project almost than a creative project.

Lex Fridman (1:08:48.620)

So it was fascinating to see everything that goes into making an AR system that runs.

Lex Fridman (1:09:00.720)

So AR, an AR device, if it's really gonna do AR, needs to be running Slam in real time.

Lex Fridman (1:09:09.940)

And that alone is a big...

Lex Fridman (1:09:11.940)

So for people who don't know, first of all, virtual reality is creating an almost fully

Neal Stephenson (1:09:18.360)

artificial world and putting you inside it.

Neal Stephenson (1:09:21.100)

Augmented reality, AR, is taking the real world and putting stuff on top of that real

Neal Stephenson (1:09:29.160)

world, and when you say Slam, that means in real time, the device needs to be able to

Neal Stephenson (1:09:33.660)

sense, accurately detect everything about that world sufficiently to be able to reconstruct

Neal Stephenson (1:09:41.640)

the 3D structure of it so you can put stuff on top of it.

Lex Fridman (1:09:47.200)

And doing that in real time, presumably not just real time, but in a way that creates

Neal Stephenson (1:09:53.100)

a pleasant experience for the human perception system is, yeah, that's an engineering project.

Lex Fridman (1:10:00.900)

Right.

Neal Stephenson (1:10:01.900)

Yeah, well said, and it's just one of the things that the system has to do.

Neal Stephenson (1:10:07.640)

It's also tracking your eyes so it knows what you're looking at, how far away what you're

Neal Stephenson (1:10:13.460)

looking at is.

Neal Stephenson (1:10:18.760)

It's performing all those functions, and it's got to keep doing that without burning up

Neal Stephenson (1:10:26.060)

the CPU or depleting the battery unreasonably fast, and that's just table stakes.

Neal Stephenson (1:10:35.640)

It's just the basic functions of the operating system, and then any content that you want

Neal Stephenson (1:10:41.340)

to add has to sit on top of that.

Neal Stephenson (1:10:43.960)

It's got to be rendered by the optics at a sufficiently low latency that it looks real

Lex Fridman (1:10:51.160)

and you don't get sick.

Lex Fridman (1:10:52.520)

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

Lex Fridman (1:11:02.600)

And they're about to ship the ML2, but I don't know any more about that than anyone else

Lex Fridman (1:11:08.360)

because I don't work there anymore.

Lex Fridman (1:11:12.600)

Does it still, to some degree, boil down to a killer app, a content question?

Lex Fridman (1:11:19.000)

Like you said, it's kind of a wide open space.

Neal Stephenson (1:11:21.560)

Nobody knows exactly what's going to be the compelling thing.

Lex Fridman (1:11:25.320)

So doesn't a super compelling experience of some sort alleviate some of the need for engineering

Lex Fridman (1:11:33.960)

perfection?

Neal Stephenson (1:11:34.960)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:11:41.760)

you're certainly right that people, like in the early days of video games, put up with

Neal Stephenson (1:11:47.400)

kind of low frame rate and what we would now call crappy graphics because they were having

Lex Fridman (1:11:53.080)

so much fun playing Doom or whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:11:56.240)

Even Tetris.

Neal Stephenson (1:11:57.240)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:11:59.720)

So for sure that's true.

Lex Fridman (1:12:01.620)

And so I was working on consumer facing content, there was a great team in Wellington, New

Neal Stephenson (1:12:13.600)

Zealand that made a game called Dr. Groydbrod's Invaders that realized the potential of AR

Neal Stephenson (1:12:26.880)

gaming in a way that I don't think anything else has before or since.

Lex Fridman (1:12:33.440)

And so that was definitely the strategy until, what, April 2020, which is when the company

Neal Stephenson (1:12:43.640)

decided to pivot to commercial industrial applications instead.

Lex Fridman (1:12:53.320)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:13:02.120)

that strategic decision.

Neal Stephenson (1:13:05.920)

It just means that it's no longer necessarily targeted at just end users who want to play

Neal Stephenson (1:13:13.040)

a game or be entertained.

Neal Stephenson (1:13:17.080)

That to me from a dreamer, futurist perspective is heartbreaking because I don't know necessarily

Neal Stephenson (1:13:24.080)

from in the VR space, but I see this kind of thing with robotics where to me the future

Neal Stephenson (1:13:33.960)

of robotics is consumer facing and a lot of great roboticists, Boston Dynamics and companies

Neal Stephenson (1:13:42.880)

like that are focused on sort of industrial applications for financial business reasons.

Lex Fridman (1:13:50.360)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:13:51.360)

Now I can see the parallels for sure.

Lex Fridman (1:13:54.000)

We'll see.

Neal Stephenson (1:13:55.000)

It was a fun project.

Neal Stephenson (1:14:00.560)

We worked on an app, for example, called Baby Goats, which just populated your room with

Neal Stephenson (1:14:06.660)

baby goats.

Lex Fridman (1:14:07.660)

That seemed like a killer app right there.

Neal Stephenson (1:14:09.520)

No, we thought highly of the idea for sure.

Lex Fridman (1:14:14.680)

But because of the SLAM, the system knew, for example, here's a table, here's a little

Neal Stephenson (1:14:22.860)

end table.

Lex Fridman (1:14:24.280)

We know the heights.

Neal Stephenson (1:14:26.280)

We know how high our animated baby goat can jump.

Lex Fridman (1:14:33.100)

So our engineers had to build a system for converting the SLAM primitives into game engine

Neal Stephenson (1:14:40.000)

objects that the AIs in the game could navigate around.

Lex Fridman (1:14:49.760)

And that ended up shipping as more of a dev kit or a sort of how to a sample app than

Neal Stephenson (1:14:56.320)

as a finished consumer facing.

Lex Fridman (1:15:00.320)

You mean the baby goat AI?

Neal Stephenson (1:15:04.280)

That seems to me like a world I could entertain myself for hours, just every day coming home

Lex Fridman (1:15:10.800)

to see baby goats.

Neal Stephenson (1:15:13.800)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:15:14.800)

I mean, it was an ambient kind of...

Neal Stephenson (1:15:17.680)

It's not a thing that you would sit there and play like a video.

Lex Fridman (1:15:21.360)

Just life.

Neal Stephenson (1:15:22.360)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:15:23.360)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:15:24.360)

But now there's baby goats.

Lex Fridman (1:15:25.360)

I mean, what's the purpose of having dogs and cats in your life exactly?

Neal Stephenson (1:15:29.120)

It's kind of ambient.

Lex Fridman (1:15:30.840)

They're not really helping you do anything, but it's enriching your life.

Neal Stephenson (1:15:34.780)

You can go and play fetch or something for a while if you want, but you don't have to.

Lex Fridman (1:15:42.440)

So we worked on that in a bigger project that was more of a storytelling in a fictional

Neal Stephenson (1:15:48.160)

universe.

Lex Fridman (1:15:50.680)

The hardware is worth a look.

Neal Stephenson (1:15:52.460)

There's still a belief, I just saw it this morning looking at Twitter, that the Magic

Lex Fridman (1:15:57.680)

League never shipped anything.

Lex Fridman (1:16:00.680)

But they've been, since 2019, you can go to their website and buy one of these devices

Lex Fridman (1:16:07.840)

anytime you want to spend the money.

Neal Stephenson (1:16:11.120)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:16:12.120)

And the new one is coming out, I think in 2022, so in a few months.

Lex Fridman (1:16:17.800)

What do you think, looking out 50 years from now, what wins?

Lex Fridman (1:16:24.400)

Virtual reality, augmented reality, or physical reality?

Lex Fridman (1:16:30.600)

What wins?

Neal Stephenson (1:16:32.240)

Meaning like, what do people that have financial resources enjoy spending most of their time

Lex Fridman (1:16:41.640)

in?

Neal Stephenson (1:16:43.280)

I've always been a fan of AR and it's kind of an easy answer because if you're wearing

Neal Stephenson (1:16:49.840)

an AR device and you put a bag over your head, it becomes a VR device.

Lex Fridman (1:16:56.800)

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

Lex Fridman (1:17:03.800)

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

Lex Fridman (1:17:11.320)

physical reality.

Neal Stephenson (1:17:12.320)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:17:13.320)

With VR, you can go into fantastical worlds.

Neal Stephenson (1:17:15.760)

True.

Lex Fridman (1:17:16.760)

True.

Lex Fridman (1:17:17.760)

But there are still issues in those fantastical worlds with motion sickness.

Neal Stephenson (1:17:29.080)

If your body is experiencing acceleration, your inner ear, that differs from what your

Neal Stephenson (1:17:37.760)

eye thinks it's seeing, then you'll get sick, unless you're a very unusual person.

Lex Fridman (1:17:43.440)

So it doesn't mean you can't do it, it's just a constraint that VR designers have to learn

Neal Stephenson (1:17:51.240)

to work with.

Lex Fridman (1:17:52.240)

So do you think it's possible that in the future, we're living mostly in a virtual reality

Lex Fridman (1:17:59.520)

world?

Lex Fridman (1:18:00.520)

Like, we become more and more detached from physical reality?

Neal Stephenson (1:18:04.580)

For entertainment, maybe, for certain applications, I'm personally more, I mean, we have to make

Neal Stephenson (1:18:12.400)

a distinction between what I would personally find interesting and what might win in the

Neal Stephenson (1:18:17.920)

market.

Lex Fridman (1:18:18.920)

So maybe some people, maybe lots of people, would like to spend a huge amount of time

Neal Stephenson (1:18:24.040)

in VR.

Neal Stephenson (1:18:26.680)

I'm personally more interested in enhancing the experience that I have of the physical

Lex Fridman (1:18:33.880)

world, because the physical world's pretty cool, right?

Lex Fridman (1:18:37.120)

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

Lex Fridman (1:18:42.440)

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

Lex Fridman (1:18:49.400)

to imagine a VR world where you and Neal Stephenson wouldn't want to stay.

Neal Stephenson (1:19:00.700)

Not because the physical world all of a sudden became really bad, for some reason, like you're

Lex Fridman (1:19:04.640)

trying to escape it.

Neal Stephenson (1:19:06.120)

Like, literally, it's just more enriching.

Neal Stephenson (1:19:10.720)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:19:15.600)

world.

Lex Fridman (1:19:16.600)

Like, double up on that glimmer for the virtual reality.

Lex Fridman (1:19:21.360)

Can you imagine such a world?

Neal Stephenson (1:19:23.240)

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

Lex Fridman (1:19:30.940)

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

Lex Fridman (1:19:37.860)

And so I've had to learn how to get good at using a CAD program.

Neal Stephenson (1:19:45.160)

There's many to choose from.

Lex Fridman (1:19:46.880)

I use one called Fusion 360.

Lex Fridman (1:19:51.160)

And I can spend hours in that trying to create, imagine and create the things I want to create.

Lex Fridman (1:20:01.540)

And it's not virtual reality exactly, but that whole time, my whole field of view is

Neal Stephenson (1:20:11.160)

occupied by this monitor that's showing me a window into a three dimensional space.

Lex Fridman (1:20:18.080)

I'm rotating things around.

Neal Stephenson (1:20:20.400)

I'm imagining things.

Lex Fridman (1:20:22.960)

I'm making things.

Lex Fridman (1:20:23.960)

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

Lex Fridman (1:20:31.320)

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

Lex Fridman (1:20:34.640)

Can you stay in Fusion 360 the whole time?

Lex Fridman (1:20:38.000)

Do you have to 3D print it and touch it?

Neal Stephenson (1:20:41.560)

Yeah, I mean, that's my game.

Lex Fridman (1:20:44.500)

That's what I'm up to.

Lex Fridman (1:20:45.920)

But it happens that if you're building a virtual environment, if you're making a game level

Neal Stephenson (1:20:54.280)

or creating a virtual set for a film or TV production, the thing that you're designing

Neal Stephenson (1:21:00.000)

in the program may never physically exist.

Lex Fridman (1:21:04.560)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:21:11.840)

imaginary things that you couldn't build otherwise.

Lex Fridman (1:21:17.940)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:21:22.880)

pretty close to VR.

Neal Stephenson (1:21:25.840)

It's just that currently the output device happens to be a rectangular object in front

Neal Stephenson (1:21:30.360)

of them.

Lex Fridman (1:21:31.860)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:21:39.040)

There's all kinds of interfaces.

Neal Stephenson (1:21:40.040)

For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts or audiobooks, but let's say actually podcasts

Neal Stephenson (1:21:44.080)

because there's an intimate human connection in a podcast.

Lex Fridman (1:21:49.080)

It's one way.

Lex Fridman (1:21:50.080)

But you get to learn about the person you're listening to and that's a real connection

Lex Fridman (1:21:54.320)

and that's just audio.

Neal Stephenson (1:21:55.320)

For a lot of people, that's just audio.

Lex Fridman (1:21:58.240)

And for me, that's just audio as a fan of people and you kind of a little bit are friends

Neal Stephenson (1:22:05.880)

with those people.

Lex Fridman (1:22:06.880)

Yeah, they're in your life, you're listening to them, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:22:11.000)

And I mean, they're as far away from real as it gets.

Lex Fridman (1:22:18.600)

There's not even a visual component.

Neal Stephenson (1:22:21.040)

It's just audio.

Lex Fridman (1:22:22.040)

But they're as real, like if I was on a desert island, like my imagination, like this thing

Neal Stephenson (1:22:29.320)

works pretty good in terms of imagination.

Lex Fridman (1:22:33.200)

It creates a very beautiful world with just audio.

Neal Stephenson (1:22:40.600)

Or even just reading books.

Lex Fridman (1:22:42.440)

Exactly, reading books.

Neal Stephenson (1:22:45.600)

Even more so with reading books because there are certain mediums which stimulate the imagination

Lex Fridman (1:22:51.520)

more.

Neal Stephenson (1:22:54.560)

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

Lex Fridman (1:22:59.520)

experiences.

Neal Stephenson (1:23:02.160)

To me, the question is, can you do some of the amazing things that make life amazing

Lex Fridman (1:23:09.600)

in virtual worlds?

Neal Stephenson (1:23:11.280)

It seems to me the answer there is obviously yes.

Neal Stephenson (1:23:14.720)

Even if I, like you, am attached to a lot of stuff in the physical world, I think I

Neal Stephenson (1:23:20.280)

can very readily imagine coming up with some of the same magical experiences in the virtual

Neal Stephenson (1:23:27.120)

world where you make friends and you can fall in love, where the source of love in your

Neal Stephenson (1:23:34.520)

life is to a much greater degree inside of a virtual world.

Lex Fridman (1:23:43.280)

And then love means fulfillment, that means happiness, that's the thing you look forward

Neal Stephenson (1:23:47.280)

to.

Lex Fridman (1:23:48.280)

And not some kind of dopamine rush type of love, but like long lasting like friendship.

Neal Stephenson (1:23:53.960)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:23:54.960)

The real deal.

Neal Stephenson (1:23:55.960)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:23:56.960)

The question is on what is there in the way of applications, the content, and can it feed

Lex Fridman (1:24:02.280)

you those things?

Neal Stephenson (1:24:04.280)

Can it give you, like in my example of using the CAD program, it gives me the ability to

Neal Stephenson (1:24:11.320)

do something I enjoy, which is imagining things and making things in a particular way.

Lex Fridman (1:24:18.320)

Can we psychoanalyze you for a second?

Neal Stephenson (1:24:21.040)

Sure.

Lex Fridman (1:24:22.040)

What exactly do you enjoy?

Neal Stephenson (1:24:23.640)

Is there some component of you building the thing where you get to at least a little bit

Lex Fridman (1:24:29.560)

share with others?

Lex Fridman (1:24:32.320)

Like is there a human in the loop outside of you in that picture?

Lex Fridman (1:24:37.520)

Will anyone ever see it?

Neal Stephenson (1:24:39.480)

Right.

Neal Stephenson (1:24:40.480)

There's a source of your enjoyment because I would argue that perhaps when like the turtles

Neal Stephenson (1:24:48.360)

all the way down, when you get to the bottom turtle, it has to do with other sharing with

Lex Fridman (1:24:52.720)

other humans.

Neal Stephenson (1:24:53.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:24:54.720)

And if you can then put those humans inside the VR world, then you start to...

Neal Stephenson (1:25:01.560)

Then you can...

Neal Stephenson (1:25:02.560)

Okay, for example, you could do it in the physical world, the 3D printing, but you share

Neal Stephenson (1:25:07.800)

it in the virtual world and that's where the source of happiness is.

Neal Stephenson (1:25:12.240)

I think at least speaking for myself, I'm always thinking in terms of an audience and

Neal Stephenson (1:25:18.040)

at some level I feel like I'm doing this for someone or communicating to someone, even

Neal Stephenson (1:25:24.760)

if there's not a specific someone in mind, it could just be an abstract theoretical someone.

Lex Fridman (1:25:33.600)

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

Lex Fridman (1:25:36.960)

Okay.

Neal Stephenson (1:25:37.960)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:25:38.960)

Incredible app.

Neal Stephenson (1:25:39.960)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:25:40.960)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:25:41.960)

And when I do a Mathematica notebook, if I'm trying to figure something out, I spend a

Neal Stephenson (1:25:44.320)

lot of time typing, just my stuff is just huge blocks of text, just me thinking out

Neal Stephenson (1:25:51.520)

loud and then some graphs and calculations and stuff.

Neal Stephenson (1:25:57.280)

Because to me, that act of explaining things and commenting helps me understand what I'm

Neal Stephenson (1:26:06.520)

doing.

Lex Fridman (1:26:07.520)

And there's kind of an audience, amorphous audience in mind.

Neal Stephenson (1:26:12.080)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:26:13.080)

I mean, most of this stuff nobody will ever see and yet I'm creating it as if there were

Neal Stephenson (1:26:18.600)

an audience that might read this stuff because that's a necessary constraint that helps me

Lex Fridman (1:26:27.920)

do a better job.

Neal Stephenson (1:26:29.920)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:26:36.280)

beautiful thing that you're proud of that you created inside Mathematica visualization

Lex Fridman (1:26:40.760)

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

Lex Fridman (1:26:47.280)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:26:58.080)

was trying to tile the globe with hexagons.

Lex Fridman (1:27:01.680)

Yes.

Neal Stephenson (1:27:02.680)

And.

Lex Fridman (1:27:03.680)

An actual globe?

Neal Stephenson (1:27:05.480)

Well, any spherical.

Lex Fridman (1:27:06.680)

Any spherical.

Neal Stephenson (1:27:07.680)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (1:27:08.680)

But with an eye towards putting it on the earth.

Lex Fridman (1:27:12.520)

And so, and have it be recursive.

Lex Fridman (1:27:15.440)

So you can have hexagons within hexagons, which is hard because and probably a bad idea

Neal Stephenson (1:27:22.100)

because you can't tile a hexagon with smaller hexagons.

Lex Fridman (1:27:28.360)

They don't, they stick out.

Neal Stephenson (1:27:30.800)

Got it.

Lex Fridman (1:27:31.800)

So they're, oh, they stick out.

Lex Fridman (1:27:33.520)

So there's a, can you do some kind of fractal hexagon situation?

Lex Fridman (1:27:37.880)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:27:38.880)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:27:39.880)

So it's that and people who know me are always, now make fun of me for this.

Lex Fridman (1:27:47.200)

So they'll send me, if they see a picture with hexagons in it, they'll like send me

Lex Fridman (1:27:52.520)

a link to make fun of me.

Lex Fridman (1:27:56.620)

So as some.

Lex Fridman (1:27:57.620)

One of those people, Roger Penrose or.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:00.280)

I think Roger's a little above my level.

Lex Fridman (1:28:03.760)

He's into hexagons as well and tiling.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:08.640)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:28:09.640)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:28:10.640)

So I did a lot of that and I thought, you know, it was pretty cool, but there's some

Lex Fridman (1:28:15.760)

like surprisingly intractable problems that keep coming up.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:19.960)

Like you've always got to have some pentagons.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:25.960)

Like if you start with the icosahedron, which is equilateral triangles, which is a logical

Neal Stephenson (1:28:31.880)

place to start, you can cover those with hexagons, but every vertex where the triangles come

Lex Fridman (1:28:42.120)

together is a pentagon.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:44.800)

Has to be a pentagon.

Lex Fridman (1:28:45.800)

Oh, interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:28:46.800)

So it's all hexagons and then there's a pentagon at the intersections.

Lex Fridman (1:28:49.720)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:50.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:28:51.720)

Cool.

Lex Fridman (1:28:52.720)

How'd you figure that out?

Lex Fridman (1:28:53.720)

Is that a known fact?

Neal Stephenson (1:28:54.720)

Well, it's just, if you look at a.

Lex Fridman (1:28:55.720)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:56.720)

Like just by inspection.

Lex Fridman (1:28:57.720)

It's an obvious thing.

Neal Stephenson (1:28:58.720)

Got it.

Lex Fridman (1:28:59.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:29:00.720)

So any system that you come up with to do this has got to have this exceptions built

Lex Fridman (1:29:08.360)

into it for those 12.

Neal Stephenson (1:29:10.600)

You could have quintillions of hexagons, but you've still got to have 12 pentagons somewhere.

Lex Fridman (1:29:20.480)

So I've blown a hell of a lot of time on that over the years.

Neal Stephenson (1:29:26.920)

By the way, a lot of those kind of problems are very difficult to prove something about.

Lex Fridman (1:29:33.040)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:29:34.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:29:35.040)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:29:36.040)

I think Uber did it because someone, one of my friends who knows of my interest in this

Lex Fridman (1:29:44.960)

and who likes to give me a hard time sent me a link.

Neal Stephenson (1:29:49.960)

This is a couple of years ago to some code base that I think came out of Uber where they

Lex Fridman (1:29:56.840)

had done this.

Neal Stephenson (1:29:59.400)

You break down the whole surface of the earth into little hexagons.

Lex Fridman (1:30:04.480)

So that was a real knife through the heart.

Lex Fridman (1:30:09.240)

But I'll probably come back to it someday.

Lex Fridman (1:30:14.220)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:30:19.280)

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

Lex Fridman (1:30:29.160)

So hexagons are about my speed.

Neal Stephenson (1:30:34.600)

Just sufficient amount of complexity.

Lex Fridman (1:30:36.760)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:30:37.760)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:30:38.760)

But no, tiling is a really interesting problem.

Neal Stephenson (1:30:41.960)

Both two and three dimensional tiling problems are fascinating and they're one of those ancient

Lex Fridman (1:30:48.160)

puzzles that has attracted brainiacs for centuries.

Neal Stephenson (1:30:59.000)

Let me ask you a little bit about AI.

Lex Fridman (1:31:03.120)

What are some likely interesting trajectories for the proliferation of AI in society over

Lex Fridman (1:31:10.640)

the next couple of decades?

Lex Fridman (1:31:11.640)

Do you think about this kind of stuff?

Neal Stephenson (1:31:14.080)

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

Lex Fridman (1:31:20.380)

well informed about it.

Lex Fridman (1:31:22.760)

And AI seems to be a term that is applied to a lot of different things.

Lex Fridman (1:31:28.880)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:31:36.440)

principal component analysis.

Lex Fridman (1:31:38.420)

So I guess I tend to think in terms of some granular bottom up ideas rather than big picture

Neal Stephenson (1:31:48.520)

top down.

Lex Fridman (1:31:49.520)

Oh God.

Lex Fridman (1:31:50.520)

So like very specific algorithms, like how are they going to, what problem are they going

Lex Fridman (1:31:55.800)

to solve in society such that it has like a lot of big ripple effects.

Neal Stephenson (1:32:01.080)

I mean, we could talk a particular successful AI systems and success defined in different

Lex Fridman (1:32:08.120)

ways of recent years.

Lex Fridman (1:32:09.880)

So one is language models with GPT3.

Neal Stephenson (1:32:15.320)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:32:19.840)

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

Lex Fridman (1:32:25.960)

by humans.

Lex Fridman (1:32:26.960)

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

Lex Fridman (1:32:30.400)

like that.

Neal Stephenson (1:32:31.840)

It's possible they have a big enough neural network.

Neal Stephenson (1:32:34.120)

It's going to be able to have conversations with humans based on just reading human language.

Neal Stephenson (1:32:41.760)

That's an interesting idea.

Neal Stephenson (1:32:42.760)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:32:49.520)

kind of dumb currently is actual embodied robots.

Lex Fridman (1:32:53.640)

So robotics like Boston Dynamics have downstairs and upstairs legged robots.

Neal Stephenson (1:33:01.920)

You know, the currently Boston Dynamics robots and most legged robots, most robots period

Lex Fridman (1:33:08.700)

are pretty dumb.

Neal Stephenson (1:33:11.800)

Most of the challenges have to do with the actual, first of all, the engineering of making

Neal Stephenson (1:33:15.920)

the thing work, getting a sensor suite that allows you to do the same thing as with Magic

Neal Stephenson (1:33:20.760)

Leap.

Lex Fridman (1:33:21.760)

It's like a layer of like, where am I and what am I looking at?

Neal Stephenson (1:33:29.360)

I don't need to deeply understand my surroundings at a level beyond of what will hurt if I run

Lex Fridman (1:33:39.920)

into it.

Neal Stephenson (1:33:40.920)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:33:41.920)

But even that is hard.

Neal Stephenson (1:33:43.640)

That's hard.

Lex Fridman (1:33:44.640)

But the thing that I think people don't in the robotics space explore enough is the human

Neal Stephenson (1:33:51.920)

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

Lex Fridman (1:34:00.560)

humans feel.

Lex Fridman (1:34:01.560)

And I think that's going to have a very significant impact in the near future in society, which

Neal Stephenson (1:34:08.720)

is the more you integrate AI systems of whatever form into society where humans are in contact

Neal Stephenson (1:34:17.480)

with them regularly.

Lex Fridman (1:34:19.640)

So that could be embodied robotics or that could be social media algorithms.

Neal Stephenson (1:34:23.640)

I think that has a very significant impact.

Lex Fridman (1:34:26.160)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:34:31.200)

I think it needs to be super integrated with society to have an impact and more and more

Lex Fridman (1:34:37.200)

that's happening, even if they're dumb.

Neal Stephenson (1:34:40.480)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:34:41.480)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:34:42.480)

No, I mean, a lot of my exposure to robots is that I'm associated with a combat robotics

Lex Fridman (1:34:52.600)

team.

Lex Fridman (1:34:53.600)

And I've been to a few battle bots competitions.

Lex Fridman (1:34:55.960)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:35:01.760)

about because these robots are remote controlled.

Lex Fridman (1:35:06.200)

They're not autonomous.

Lex Fridman (1:35:08.500)

And so they're pretty simple, but it's interesting to watch people's emotional reactions to different

Lex Fridman (1:35:17.160)

robots.

Lex Fridman (1:35:18.160)

So there was one that was in the last year's season, the 2020 season called Rusty that

Neal Stephenson (1:35:26.840)

was just like put together out of spare parts and it looked kind of cute and it became this

Neal Stephenson (1:35:32.920)

huge crowd favorite because you could see it was made of like salad bowls and random

Lex Fridman (1:35:39.080)

pieces of hardware that this guy had like scavenged from his farm.

Lex Fridman (1:35:43.360)

And so immediately people kind of fell in love with this one particular robot.

Neal Stephenson (1:35:49.560)

Whereas other robots might be like the bad guy, if you think of professional wrestling,

Neal Stephenson (1:35:57.520)

the heel and the baby face.

Lex Fridman (1:36:00.960)

So people do, for reasons that are hard to understand, form these emotional reactions.

Lex Fridman (1:36:06.080)

And we form narratives in the same way we do when we meet human beings, we tell stories

Neal Stephenson (1:36:10.860)

about these objects and they can be intelligent and they can be biological or they can be

Neal Stephenson (1:36:16.920)

almost close to inanimate objects.

Lex Fridman (1:36:19.760)

That to me is kind of fascinating.

Lex Fridman (1:36:21.680)

And if robots choose to lean into that, it creates an interesting world.

Lex Fridman (1:36:29.760)

If they start using feedback loops to make themselves cuter.

Neal Stephenson (1:36:34.760)

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

Lex Fridman (1:36:41.040)

do the same thing.

Neal Stephenson (1:36:42.040)

Oh no, I wasn't meaning it in a, but you're right, humans based on feedback will change

Lex Fridman (1:36:48.260)

their appearance.

Lex Fridman (1:36:49.260)

Yes, I do this on Instagram all the time, how do I look cuter?

Lex Fridman (1:36:52.360)

That's the fundamental question I ask myself.

Lex Fridman (1:36:54.880)

So why wouldn't a robot wanna, it's like oh wow, people really don't like the quad mount

Neal Stephenson (1:37:02.100)

machine gun on top of my turret, maybe I should get rid of that and people would feel more

Neal Stephenson (1:37:08.640)

at ease.

Lex Fridman (1:37:10.680)

Or lean into it, be proud of it.

Neal Stephenson (1:37:13.680)

Like you won't take my gun, whatever the saying is, from my dead cold hands.

Neal Stephenson (1:37:20.440)

I mean their personality, adding personality such that you can start to heal, you can start

Neal Stephenson (1:37:26.280)

to weave narratives.

Neal Stephenson (1:37:27.840)

I think that's a fascinating place where there's this feedback loop, like you said, where AI,

Neal Stephenson (1:37:41.320)

especially when it's embodied, puts a mirror to ourselves.

Neal Stephenson (1:37:46.000)

Just like other humans, our close friends, they kind of teach us about ourselves.

Neal Stephenson (1:37:52.840)

We teach each other and through that process grow close.

Lex Fridman (1:37:57.360)

And to me it's so fascinating to expand the space of deep meaningful interactions beyond

Neal Stephenson (1:38:06.200)

just humans.

Neal Stephenson (1:38:10.480)

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

Neal Stephenson (1:38:18.080)

my biggest problem with social media algorithms is the lack of transparency.

Lex Fridman (1:38:22.280)

It's not the existence of the algorithms, it's, well there's many things.

Neal Stephenson (1:38:27.920)

One is the data.

Lex Fridman (1:38:28.920)

Data should be controlled by people themselves.

Lex Fridman (1:38:33.280)

But also the lack of transparency in how the algorithms work.

Lex Fridman (1:38:36.320)

You change your perception of what's real in hidden ways.

Neal Stephenson (1:38:41.640)

In hidden ways.

Lex Fridman (1:38:42.640)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:38:43.640)

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

Lex Fridman (1:38:47.680)

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

Lex Fridman (1:38:52.040)

And second, you should become a student and a scholar and there should be research done,

Neal Stephenson (1:38:59.440)

there should be open conversation about how your perception has changed and then you become

Neal Stephenson (1:39:05.920)

your own guide in this world of altered perception because arguably none of it is real.

Lex Fridman (1:39:13.360)

You get to choose the flavor of real.

Neal Stephenson (1:39:16.560)

I mean, this is something you explore quite a bit.

Lex Fridman (1:39:22.720)

Do you yourself think that there is a bottom to it where there is reality, there's a base

Lex Fridman (1:39:31.580)

layer of reality that physics can explore and our human perception sort of layer stuff?

Lex Fridman (1:39:39.840)

Is there, let's go to Plato, is there such a thing as truth?

Neal Stephenson (1:39:44.920)

I lean towards the Platonic view of things.

Lex Fridman (1:39:48.480)

So I believe that mathematical objects have a reality that it's not all made up by human

Neal Stephenson (1:39:56.640)

minds.

Lex Fridman (1:39:59.180)

And I don't know where that reality comes from.

Neal Stephenson (1:40:03.200)

I can't explain it, but I do think that mathematical objects are discovered and not invented.

Neal Stephenson (1:40:15.800)

I did a lot of, not a lot, but I did some reading of Husserl when I was writing Anathem

Lex Fridman (1:40:25.880)

and he's a 20th century phenomenologist and he's writing in the, he's writing at the same

Neal Stephenson (1:40:34.120)

time as scientists are starting to understand atoms and becoming aware that when we look

Neal Stephenson (1:40:43.040)

at this table, it's really just a slab of almost entirely vacuum and there's a very

Neal Stephenson (1:40:51.400)

sparse arrangement of tiny, tiny little particles there occupying that space that interact with

Neal Stephenson (1:41:00.080)

each other in such a way that our brains perceive this object.

Lex Fridman (1:41:07.120)

So that's kind of the beginnings of phenomenology and his stuff is pretty hard to read.

Neal Stephenson (1:41:20.400)

You really have to take it in small bites and go a little bit at a time.

Lex Fridman (1:41:27.800)

But he's trying to come to grips with these kinds of questions.

Lex Fridman (1:41:32.800)

How did you come to grips with it?

Lex Fridman (1:41:36.160)

Why does this table feel solid?

Neal Stephenson (1:41:38.000)

Well, I mean, we're an evolved system that there's, we have biological advantages in

Lex Fridman (1:41:44.080)

knowing where solid objects are.

Lex Fridman (1:41:46.820)

So we've got this system in our head that integrates our perceptions into this coherent

Lex Fridman (1:41:54.540)

view of things.

Neal Stephenson (1:41:59.040)

One of the take homes that I like from Husserl is the idea of intersubjectivity and the idea

Neal Stephenson (1:42:06.600)

that the fundamental requirement for us to stay sane is for us to share our perceptions

Lex Fridman (1:42:16.000)

and have them ratified by other, they don't even have to be people, but a prisoner in

Neal Stephenson (1:42:23.960)

solitary confinement might domesticate a mouse or even insects because they perceive the

Neal Stephenson (1:42:32.440)

same things that the prisoner perceives and so convince him that he's not just hallucinating.

Neal Stephenson (1:42:41.040)

Yeah, there's the establish a consensus, but see, that doesn't mean any of it is real.

Neal Stephenson (1:42:49.320)

You just establish a consensus.

Neal Stephenson (1:42:52.600)

It could be very distant from something that's real in an engineering sense of real.

Neal Stephenson (1:43:05.080)

Like you could build it using physics.

Lex Fridman (1:43:07.840)

But I think that a valuable application for an AI robot would be just to do nothing except

Neal Stephenson (1:43:16.160)

that.

Neal Stephenson (1:43:17.160)

It just sits there and if you hear a door slam, you might turn to see what it is.

Neal Stephenson (1:43:27.000)

If the robot at the same time turns to look at the door slam, it's ratifying your perception.

Lex Fridman (1:43:34.720)

But isn't that the basis of love is when the door slams, you both look, but for deeper

Neal Stephenson (1:43:42.920)

things, you both hear the same music and others don't.

Lex Fridman (1:43:48.960)

I mean, isn't that what that means?

Neal Stephenson (1:43:52.160)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:43:53.160)

By love, I mean depth of human connection.

Neal Stephenson (1:43:55.680)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:43:56.680)

Yeah, you arrive at similar reactions without having to explicitly communicate it.

Neal Stephenson (1:44:05.360)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:44:06.360)

But we could start with a robot that listens explicitly for the slam doors or scary sounds.

Neal Stephenson (1:44:15.360)

I can think of an example of this is when I went to college, we'd be sitting at the

Neal Stephenson (1:44:24.920)

cafeteria, a bunch of people eating our dinner together that we had just met, let's say.

Lex Fridman (1:44:34.040)

So a bunch of new people in your life and someone might make a funny remark or a not

Lex Fridman (1:44:41.780)

so funny remark or something would happen and you might then at that moment make eye

Neal Stephenson (1:44:48.160)

contact with someone you didn't know at the other end of the table.

Lex Fridman (1:44:54.040)

In that moment, you would realize this person is reacting.

Neal Stephenson (1:44:59.560)

This person heard what I heard.

Lex Fridman (1:45:01.720)

They're reacting the way I reacted.

Neal Stephenson (1:45:04.880)

Nobody else appears to get the joke or to understand what just happened, but random

Lex Fridman (1:45:10.560)

stranger down there and I, we have this connection and then you build on that.

Lex Fridman (1:45:15.600)

So then the next time something happens, you automatically look at your new friend and

Neal Stephenson (1:45:22.120)

they look back at you and before you know it, you're hanging out together because you

Neal Stephenson (1:45:28.520)

know you've already established without even talking to each other that you're on the same

Lex Fridman (1:45:34.400)

wavelength.

Neal Stephenson (1:45:35.400)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:45:36.400)

It's seemingly so simple, but so powerful that establishing that you're on the same

Neal Stephenson (1:45:41.160)

wavelength at some level.

Lex Fridman (1:45:43.880)

There's no reason why you and a toaster can't have that.

Neal Stephenson (1:45:48.080)

I'm just saying.

Lex Fridman (1:45:49.560)

Does this smell burned to you?

Neal Stephenson (1:45:52.760)

Exactly.

Lex Fridman (1:45:53.760)

I think it's burnt.

Neal Stephenson (1:45:55.720)

If a toaster could just say that to you.

Lex Fridman (1:45:59.000)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:46:00.000)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:46:01.000)

Cryptonomicon published in 1999, set in the late 90s and involves hackers who build essentially

Neal Stephenson (1:46:07.640)

cryptocurrency.

Lex Fridman (1:46:08.640)

Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008.

Lex Fridman (1:46:14.720)

So I have to kind of ask, from you looking at this layout of what's been happening in

Neal Stephenson (1:46:23.360)

cryptocurrency, the evolution of this technology, how has it rolled out differently than you

Lex Fridman (1:46:32.120)

could have imagined in two ways?

Neal Stephenson (1:46:34.280)

One the technology itself and two the human side of things, the human stories of the hackers

Lex Fridman (1:46:42.360)

and the financial folks and the powerful and the powerless, the human side of things.

Lex Fridman (1:46:48.800)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:46:49.800)

Well, Cryptonomicon is pre Bitcoin, it's pre Satoshi, it's pre blockchain as you point

Lex Fridman (1:46:55.720)

out.

Lex Fridman (1:46:56.720)

So at that point I was kind of reacting to what I was seeing among people like the Bay

Lex Fridman (1:47:05.200)

Area Cypherpunks in Berkeley.

Neal Stephenson (1:47:07.760)

There was a branch here in Austin as well and a lot of their thinking was based on the

Neal Stephenson (1:47:17.840)

idea that you would have to have a physical region of the earth that was free of government

Neal Stephenson (1:47:26.200)

interference.

Lex Fridman (1:47:28.720)

You couldn't achieve that freedom by purely mathematical means on the network.

Neal Stephenson (1:47:34.580)

You actually had to have a room somewhere with servers in it that a government couldn't

Lex Fridman (1:47:42.680)

come and meddle with.

Lex Fridman (1:47:44.880)

And so a lot of ideation happened around that view of things that there were efforts to

Lex Fridman (1:47:50.560)

figure out jurisdictions where this might work.

Neal Stephenson (1:47:53.280)

There was a lot of interest for a while in Anguilla, which is a Caribbean island that

Lex Fridman (1:47:58.860)

had some unusual jurisdictional properties.

Neal Stephenson (1:48:02.360)

There was SeaLand, which is a platform in the North Sea.

Lex Fridman (1:48:09.520)

And so there was a lot of effort that went into finding these physical locations that

Neal Stephenson (1:48:14.200)

were deemed kind of safe.

Lex Fridman (1:48:17.360)

And that all goes away with blockchain, it's no longer necessary.

Lex Fridman (1:48:25.780)

And so that really changes the picture in a lot of ways because you no longer have...

Neal Stephenson (1:48:32.240)

From a novelist point of view, the old system was a lot more fun to work with because it

Neal Stephenson (1:48:38.080)

gives you a situation where hackers are wandering around in strange parts of the world trying

Lex Fridman (1:48:44.240)

to set up server rooms.

Lex Fridman (1:48:46.300)

So that's a great storytelling thing.

Neal Stephenson (1:48:48.640)

There's still a little bit of that in the modern world, but it's just there's several

Neal Stephenson (1:48:54.680)

server rooms as opposed to one centralized one.

Lex Fridman (1:48:57.720)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:48:58.720)

Whereas the new wrinkle is the need to do a lot of computation and to keep your GPUs

Lex Fridman (1:49:07.640)

from melting down.

Lex Fridman (1:49:08.800)

So people building things in Iceland or in shipping containers on the bottom of the ocean

Lex Fridman (1:49:14.420)

or whatever.

Neal Stephenson (1:49:16.920)

So...

Lex Fridman (1:49:17.920)

But there's still governments involved and there's still from a novelist perspective

Neal Stephenson (1:49:21.520)

interesting dynamics with big governments like China and more sort of renegade governments

Neal Stephenson (1:49:28.600)

from all over the world trying to contend with this idea of what to do in terms of control

Lex Fridman (1:49:34.960)

and power over these kinds of centers that do the mining of the cryptocurrency.

Lex Fridman (1:49:41.200)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:49:42.200)

So we're in a stage now that kind of goes beyond the initial...

Lex Fridman (1:49:46.440)

Like there was...

Neal Stephenson (1:49:47.800)

The stuff I was describing in Cryptonomicon had a little bit of air about it of the underpants

Lex Fridman (1:49:54.980)

gnomes in that we're gonna build this system and then we'll make money somehow.

Lex Fridman (1:50:03.120)

But the intermediate step was left out.

Lex Fridman (1:50:08.680)

And that is...

Neal Stephenson (1:50:11.680)

I think we're now sort of into that phase of the thing where Bitcoin, blockchain exists,

Lex Fridman (1:50:19.980)

people know how it works, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies exist.

Lex Fridman (1:50:24.960)

People are using them and it's sort of like, okay, what now?

Lex Fridman (1:50:28.680)

Where does this all lead?

Neal Stephenson (1:50:31.840)

So...

Lex Fridman (1:50:32.840)

Do you have a sense of where it all leads?

Neal Stephenson (1:50:35.040)

Like is it possible that the set of technology kind of continues to have transformational

Lex Fridman (1:50:44.200)

effects on not just sort of finance but who gets to have power in this world?

Lex Fridman (1:50:52.840)

So the decentralization of power.

Lex Fridman (1:50:55.680)

Big questions, right?

Lex Fridman (1:50:56.920)

So I guess there's a little bit of the cynic in me thinking that as soon as it becomes

Neal Stephenson (1:51:03.520)

important enough, the existing banks and people in power are gonna sort of control it.

Neal Stephenson (1:51:10.080)

I guess an easy answer is that maybe it won't be a big change in the end.

Neal Stephenson (1:51:16.760)

There's a utopian strain sometimes in the way people think about this that I'm not so

Neal Stephenson (1:51:23.460)

sure about.

Neal Stephenson (1:51:26.360)

There is a technological aspect to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that make it a

Neal Stephenson (1:51:32.960)

little easier to pull along the utopian thread because it's harder for governments to control

Lex Fridman (1:51:41.680)

Bitcoin.

Neal Stephenson (1:51:42.680)

I mean, they have much fewer options.

Lex Fridman (1:51:48.200)

They can ban, they can make it illegal.

Neal Stephenson (1:51:50.920)

It's more difficult.

Lex Fridman (1:51:52.360)

So technology here is on the side of the powerless, the voiceless, which is a very interesting

Neal Stephenson (1:51:57.200)

idea.

Neal Stephenson (1:51:58.200)

Of course, yes, it does have a utopian feel to it, but we have been making progress throughout

Neal Stephenson (1:52:04.320)

human history.

Lex Fridman (1:52:05.920)

Maybe this is what progress looks like.

Neal Stephenson (1:52:07.400)

There will be the powerful and the greedy and the bureaucrats that take advantage of

Neal Stephenson (1:52:12.800)

it, skim off the top kind of thing, but maybe this does give more power to people that haven't

Neal Stephenson (1:52:19.240)

had power before in a good way, like distributing power and enabling sort of more greater resistance

Neal Stephenson (1:52:29.200)

to sort of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, that kind of thing, and also enabling

Neal Stephenson (1:52:36.600)

all kinds of technologies built on top of it.

Neal Stephenson (1:52:40.400)

Ultimately, when you digitize money, money is a kind of speech, or it's a kind of mechanism

Neal Stephenson (1:52:49.520)

of how humans interact, and if you make that digital, more and more of the world moves

Neal Stephenson (1:52:56.320)

to the digital space, and then you can finally fully live in that virtual reality with the

Neal Stephenson (1:53:04.120)

toaster.

Neal Stephenson (1:53:05.120)

In a lot of ways, I think in that realm of technology that the money per se is one of

Neal Stephenson (1:53:11.840)

the less interesting things you can do with it, so I think cryptographically enforceable

Neal Stephenson (1:53:16.480)

contracts and organizations built on those, that seems to me like it's got more potential

Neal Stephenson (1:53:24.120)

for change just because we do already have money, and although it's an old system, it's

Neal Stephenson (1:53:33.680)

been digitized to a large extent by the stripes and the credit card companies of the world.

Neal Stephenson (1:53:42.160)

I also love the idea of connecting two smart contracts, connecting data, sort of making

Neal Stephenson (1:53:51.000)

it more formal, it's like Mathematica, more structured, the integration of data, of weather

Neal Stephenson (1:53:58.120)

data, of all kinds of data about the stuff in the world, so they can make contracts between

Neal Stephenson (1:54:06.960)

people that's grounded in data, and that's actually getting closer to something like

Neal Stephenson (1:54:14.600)

truth, because then you can make agreements based on actual data versus kind of perceptions

Neal Stephenson (1:54:20.560)

of data, and if you can formalize, like distribute the power of who gets to tell the story, and

Neal Stephenson (1:54:28.080)

that's an interesting kind of resistance against the powerful in the space of narrative.

Neal Stephenson (1:54:35.000)

Yeah, David Brin has been saying for a while that the only way to settle arguments across

Neal Stephenson (1:54:42.520)

the political divide is to make bets, so people can say the election was stolen, or whatever

Neal Stephenson (1:54:52.720)

controversial position they're taking, and they'll keep saying it until you wager real

Neal Stephenson (1:55:02.760)

money on it.

Lex Fridman (1:55:07.240)

So maybe there's something there, if you could kind of turn that into a, put a user interface

Neal Stephenson (1:55:14.040)

on that.

Lex Fridman (1:55:15.040)

Yeah, have a stake in your divisiveness, in your arguments.

Lex Fridman (1:55:25.040)

Will Dogecoin take over the world?

Lex Fridman (1:55:27.160)

Twitter question.

Neal Stephenson (1:55:28.280)

You know, I don't follow the different coins that much, so I don't, I mean I hear about

Lex Fridman (1:55:33.880)

Dogecoin and I've kind of followed the story of it.

Lex Fridman (1:55:37.880)

So the interesting aspect of Dogecoin is it, so in contrast to like Bitcoin and Ethereum,

Neal Stephenson (1:55:47.040)

which are these serious implementations of cryptocurrency that seek to solve some of

Neal Stephenson (1:55:52.880)

the problems that we're talking about with smart contracts and resist the banks and all

Neal Stephenson (1:55:59.080)

those kinds of things, Dogecoin operates more in the space of memes and humor, while still

Neal Stephenson (1:56:06.040)

doing some of the similar things.

Lex Fridman (1:56:09.000)

And it presents to the world sort of a question of whether memes, whether humor, whether narrative

Neal Stephenson (1:56:20.040)

will go a long way in the future.

Lex Fridman (1:56:25.040)

Like much farther than some kind of boring old grounded technologies.

Neal Stephenson (1:56:32.600)

Whether we'll be playing in the space of fun.

Neal Stephenson (1:56:35.440)

Like once we've built a base of comfort and stability and like a robust system where everyone

Neal Stephenson (1:56:41.880)

has shelter, everyone has food and the basic needs covered, are we going to then operate

Lex Fridman (1:56:50.720)

in the space of fun?

Neal Stephenson (1:56:53.880)

That's what I think about Dogecoin.

Lex Fridman (1:56:55.280)

Because it seems like fun spreads faster than anything else.

Neal Stephenson (1:57:02.300)

Fun of different kinds, and that could be bad fun and that could be good fun.

Lex Fridman (1:57:06.400)

And so it's a battle of good fun versus bad fun.

Neal Stephenson (1:57:09.000)

It goes viral very, very quickly when you, if you post something that people find fun

Lex Fridman (1:57:14.200)

to.

Neal Stephenson (1:57:15.200)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:57:16.200)

And that's what Dogecoin represents.

Lex Fridman (1:57:17.200)

So there's like, so Bitcoin represents like financial, like serious financial instruments

Lex Fridman (1:57:25.160)

and then Dogecoin represents fun.

Lex Fridman (1:57:27.240)

And it's interesting to watch the battle go on on the internet to see which wins.

Lex Fridman (1:57:33.900)

This is also like open question to me of what is the internet?

Neal Stephenson (1:57:39.080)

Because fun seems to prevail on the internet.

Lex Fridman (1:57:43.560)

And is that a fundamental property of the internet moving forward when you look a hundred

Neal Stephenson (1:57:48.000)

years out, or is this a temporary thing that was true at the birth of the internet and

Neal Stephenson (1:57:53.640)

it's just true for a couple of decades until it fades away and the adults take over and

Lex Fridman (1:57:58.720)

become serious again?

Neal Stephenson (1:57:59.720)

Well, I think the adults took over initially and then it was later on that people started

Neal Stephenson (1:58:05.440)

using it for fun, frivolous things like memes.

Lex Fridman (1:58:10.100)

And that's, I think that's pretty much unstoppable, you know, because even people who are very

Neal Stephenson (1:58:16.800)

serious, you know, enjoy sending around a funny picture or something that amuses them.

Lex Fridman (1:58:26.080)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (1:58:27.080)

I personally think we spoke about World War II.

Lex Fridman (1:58:30.480)

I think memes will save the world and prevent all future wars.

Neal Stephenson (1:58:35.960)

You've been handwriting your work for the past 20 years since writing The Baroque Cycle.

Lex Fridman (1:58:41.060)

What are the pros and cons of handwriting versus typing?

Neal Stephenson (1:58:44.140)

For me, I started it as an experiment when I started The Baroque Cycle because I had

Neal Stephenson (1:58:49.340)

noticed that sometimes if I was stuck having a hard time getting started, if I just picked

Neal Stephenson (1:58:54.640)

up a pen and started writing, it was easy to go.

Lex Fridman (1:59:00.100)

So I just decided to keep with that.

Neal Stephenson (1:59:04.040)

If it got in my way, I didn't like it, I could always just go back to the word processor

Lex Fridman (1:59:08.240)

and be fine.

Lex Fridman (1:59:09.240)

But that never happened.

Lex Fridman (1:59:11.160)

So there's a certain security that comes from knowing that it's ink on paper and there's

Neal Stephenson (1:59:16.880)

no operating system crash or software failure that can obliterate it.

Lex Fridman (1:59:28.600)

It's a slower output technique.

Lex Fridman (1:59:31.880)

And so a sentence or a paragraph spends a longer time in the buffer up here before it

Lex Fridman (1:59:39.520)

gets committed to paper, whereas I can type really fast.

Lex Fridman (1:59:43.800)

And so I can slam things out before I've really thought them through.

Lex Fridman (1:59:48.900)

So I think the first draft quality ends up being higher.

Lex Fridman (1:59:54.300)

And then editing, first draft of editing is just faster because instead of like trying

Neal Stephenson (20:01.460)

you were the person that convinced Jeff Bezos to start a spaceship company, a space company.

Neal Stephenson (20:08.540)

You were there at Blue Origin for a few years in the beginning working on alternate propulsion

Lex Fridman (20:16.040)

systems and at least according to Wikipedia, alternate business models.

Neal Stephenson (20:22.180)

Yeah, I mean, to go back to the first thing you said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required

Lex Fridman (20:28.700)

a lot of convincing.

Neal Stephenson (20:31.140)

He'd been thinking about it since he was five years old and it was an inevitability.

Lex Fridman (20:36.140)

But the idea that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to just do some advanced scouting work,

Neal Stephenson (20:50.060)

explore the corners of the space of possibilities.

Lex Fridman (20:55.340)

And so that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to Blue Origin.

Lex Fridman (21:03.460)

And so it was a small staff of people that did that for a few years.

Lex Fridman (21:08.820)

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

Neal Stephenson (21:17.100)

been following ever since, which is using basically existing aerospace technologies

Lex Fridman (21:24.580)

and models to make chemical fueled rockets for space tourism.

Neal Stephenson (21:31.020)

I believe and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets is just

Lex Fridman (21:36.220)

an accident of history that comes out of World War II.

Lex Fridman (21:40.860)

So until World War II, rockets are being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard.

Lex Fridman (21:48.760)

But then Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, but he can't quite reach it and the

Neal Stephenson (21:55.620)

Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized.

Lex Fridman (21:58.580)

So he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with rockets, which is a terrible misallocation

Neal Stephenson (22:07.580)

of resources.

Lex Fridman (22:08.580)

It's a terrible idea.

Lex Fridman (22:10.920)

So it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic.

Lex Fridman (22:17.780)

But that's the situation that existed.

Lex Fridman (22:20.300)

So they built these rockets, that's the V2.

Lex Fridman (22:25.420)

And then it's just a complete coincidence that that war ends with atomic bombs being

Neal Stephenson (22:32.320)

developed in a completely separate super weapon program.

Lex Fridman (22:37.160)

And so suddenly the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist

Neal Stephenson (22:44.140)

before because if you've got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them.

Neal Stephenson (22:50.420)

You can do it with bombers, but it's a lot better to just hurl them to the other side

Neal Stephenson (22:56.700)

of the world on the top of a rocket.

Lex Fridman (23:00.300)

So suddenly rockets, which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V2 program, got a much

Neal Stephenson (23:06.100)

bigger boost during the 50s and 60s.

Lex Fridman (23:10.740)

And it is a complete, you're right, for some reason I never thought of this, it is an accident

Neal Stephenson (23:15.500)

of history that nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time.

Neal Stephenson (23:20.580)

First of all, nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time as World

Neal Stephenson (23:25.100)

War II.

Lex Fridman (23:26.420)

That's an accident in history.

Lex Fridman (23:27.420)

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

Lex Fridman (23:34.060)

that's fascinating.

Neal Stephenson (23:35.060)

That's a fascinating set of coincidences.

Lex Fridman (23:38.620)

Yeah, which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way.

Neal Stephenson (23:42.580)

By the time these rockets are kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and

Lex Fridman (23:50.160)

so devastating that nobody really wants to use them.

Lex Fridman (23:54.540)

But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the socket on

Lex Fridman (24:00.620)

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

Lex Fridman (24:08.140)

So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war.

Lex Fridman (24:15.500)

I'd love to be in the meeting where the first guy brought that up as an idea.

Neal Stephenson (24:22.460)

It's probably a Russian.

Lex Fridman (24:23.460)

Why don't we strap a person to the rocket?

Neal Stephenson (24:25.980)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (24:26.980)

Well, it probably was because they did it first, right?

Neal Stephenson (24:30.100)

The Russians did it first.

Lex Fridman (24:31.100)

And they had perhaps less respect for sort of safety protocols.

Neal Stephenson (24:34.340)

Could be.

Neal Stephenson (24:35.340)

They were a little bit more willing to sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to risk the life

Neal Stephenson (24:40.180)

of an astronaut.

Lex Fridman (24:41.180)

Could be.

Neal Stephenson (24:42.180)

Yeah, yeah.

Neal Stephenson (24:43.180)

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

Neal Stephenson (24:47.500)

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

Lex Fridman (24:56.260)

rocket technology, which has now advanced to an incredibly high degree.

Lex Fridman (25:02.120)

But there's other ways to make things go really fast, which is all that rockets do.

Lex Fridman (25:08.220)

That's all orbit is.

Neal Stephenson (25:09.340)

It's just going really fast.

Lex Fridman (25:12.620)

And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about alternate

Neal Stephenson (25:19.620)

schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets.

Lex Fridman (25:24.440)

And so one of the first things that I learned kind of trying to explore new possibilities

Neal Stephenson (25:33.020)

was that I could put all of my brainpower to work and be creative as I could and invent

Lex Fridman (25:42.020)

some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast.

Lex Fridman (25:46.540)

And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had thought the same

Lex Fridman (25:51.760)

idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math.

Lex Fridman (25:57.620)

And so at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and

Lex Fridman (26:03.940)

just go poking around trying to find those guys.

Lex Fridman (26:10.100)

So there's a number of ideas that we looked at.

Lex Fridman (26:15.420)

Some are crazier, some are less crazy.

Lex Fridman (26:18.540)

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

Lex Fridman (26:23.740)

Is there something you can comment on possible ideas?

Lex Fridman (26:26.660)

So first of all, you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion.

Lex Fridman (26:34.380)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (26:35.380)

So that's, I mean, you've probably heard of Project Orion, which was the...

Neal Stephenson (26:40.860)

Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to power a large space vehicle

Neal Stephenson (26:50.180)

by detonating atomic bombs behind it.

Lex Fridman (26:53.580)

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

Neal Stephenson (26:58.700)

Dyson, the son of Freeman.

Lex Fridman (27:01.280)

And so we knew all about Project Orion and he found an old film that they'd shot on a

Neal Stephenson (27:08.220)

beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like lumps of C4.

Lex Fridman (27:16.420)

So that was an idea, but for a private company, obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was

Neal Stephenson (27:21.820)

probably out of scope.

Lex Fridman (27:23.420)

So it was more of a theoretical thing.

Neal Stephenson (27:27.340)

There's a conceptually similar approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur

Neal Stephenson (27:38.420)

Kantrowitz and some others, where you take a pulsed laser and you fire it at a vehicle

Neal Stephenson (27:44.620)

that has a block of ice on the back.

Lex Fridman (27:47.480)

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

Lex Fridman (27:55.600)

And plasma is opaque because it conducts.

Lex Fridman (27:58.420)

And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets

Neal Stephenson (28:04.380)

really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice.

Lex Fridman (28:10.060)

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

Lex Fridman (28:14.140)

So it would just kind of vibrate its way.

Neal Stephenson (28:19.140)

Like it sounds really violent, but Freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber

Neal Stephenson (28:23.380)

sold tennis shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a mild vibration.

Lex Fridman (28:31.060)

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

Neal Stephenson (28:35.420)

than you could get by burning chemicals.

Neal Stephenson (28:39.480)

Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr, that just

Neal Stephenson (28:47.740)

would heat up a heat exchanger by many converging solid state lasers from the ground.

Lex Fridman (28:55.500)

And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that.

Neal Stephenson (29:05.180)

We looked at tall towers.

Lex Fridman (29:07.420)

I spent a while looking kind of semi seriously at giant bullwhips.

Lex Fridman (29:13.940)

What's a bullwhip?

Lex Fridman (29:15.460)

Just a whip, you have them here in Texas, right?

Neal Stephenson (29:19.580)

Yeah, I understand.

Lex Fridman (29:21.980)

But how does that have to do with propulsion?

Neal Stephenson (29:23.940)

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

Lex Fridman (29:29.580)

speed of sound.

Lex Fridman (29:31.880)

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

Neal Stephenson (29:39.860)

able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural trick.

Neal Stephenson (29:49.100)

Just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this.

Lex Fridman (29:58.940)

So that's the thing I still think about from time to time.

Neal Stephenson (2:00:00.840)

to move the cursor around or whatever or hitting the backspace key, I can just draw a line

Lex Fridman (2:00:07.880)

through a word or a sentence or just around a whole paragraph and exit out.

Lex Fridman (2:00:14.600)

And in doing so, I very quickly created an edit, but I've also left behind a record of

Lex Fridman (2:00:18.880)

what the text was prior to the edit.

Neal Stephenson (2:00:22.200)

Of course, all the digital versions have those quote unquote features, but their experience

Lex Fridman (2:00:28.880)

is different.

Neal Stephenson (2:00:31.280)

Is there a romance to just the physical, the touch of the pen to the paper doing what has

Lex Fridman (2:00:41.240)

been done for centuries?

Neal Stephenson (2:00:43.160)

I think there is.

Neal Stephenson (2:00:44.160)

I think there's just the simplicity of it and not having any intermediary technology

Neal Stephenson (2:00:50.940)

beyond the pen and the paper is just very simple and clean and so I've got a bunch of

Lex Fridman (2:01:01.840)

fountain pens.

Neal Stephenson (2:01:03.960)

I started buying fancy paper from Italy a few years ago because I thought I would be

Neal Stephenson (2:01:10.680)

more conservative with it, but it's still a trivial expenditure, so it doesn't really

Neal Stephenson (2:01:19.920)

alter my habits very much.

Lex Fridman (2:01:24.280)

So all that said, once you do type stuff up, you use Emacs.

Neal Stephenson (2:01:30.200)

I use Emacs, obviously the superior editor.

Lex Fridman (2:01:33.480)

Of course.

Neal Stephenson (2:01:34.480)

Let me just ask the ridiculous futuristic question because Emacs has been around forever.

Lex Fridman (2:01:41.160)

Do you think in 100 years we will still have Emacs and Vim, or like pick a let's say 50,

Neal Stephenson (2:01:52.200)

100 years.

Lex Fridman (2:01:53.200)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:01:54.200)

No, I mean whenever you're doing anything in Linux, you're spending a lot of time editing

Neal Stephenson (2:02:00.980)

little config files and scripts and stuff and you need to be able to pop in and out

Neal Stephenson (2:02:06.960)

of editing those things and it needs to work.

Neal Stephenson (2:02:12.100)

Like even if the windowing GUI is dead and all you've got is like a command line, to

Neal Stephenson (2:02:19.680)

get out of that problem, you might need to enter an editor and alter a file.

Lex Fridman (2:02:26.560)

So I think on that level, there will always have to be sort of very simple, well Emacs

Neal Stephenson (2:02:34.280)

isn't very simple, but you know what I mean.

Neal Stephenson (2:02:37.060)

There have to be basic editors that you can use from either the command line or a GUI

Neal Stephenson (2:02:44.080)

just for administering systems.

Neal Stephenson (2:02:47.440)

Now how widespread they'll be, there's a certain amount of, what's the story of the American

Neal Stephenson (2:02:58.580)

folktale of the hammer guy who drives the railroad spikes, John Henry, trying to keep

Neal Stephenson (2:03:06.960)

up with the steam hammer and eventually the steam hammer wins because he can't drive the

Neal Stephenson (2:03:12.660)

spikes fast enough.

Lex Fridman (2:03:14.160)

So there's a sense in which Microsoft, who knows how much they've invested in code visual

Neal Stephenson (2:03:25.360)

studio or Apple with Xcode.

Lex Fridman (2:03:29.880)

So they've put huge amounts of money into enhancing their IDEs and Emacs in theory can

Neal Stephenson (2:03:38.200)

duplicate all of those features by if you just have enough Linux hackers writing Emacs

Neal Stephenson (2:03:47.000)

Lisp macros, but at some point it's gonna be hard to maintain that level of, to keep

Neal Stephenson (2:04:00.600)

up feature for feature.

Neal Stephenson (2:04:03.680)

The interesting thing about Emacs just is it's lasted a long time and I think you talked

Neal Stephenson (2:04:09.160)

about that there's a certain fads certainly in the software engineering space and it's

Neal Stephenson (2:04:21.160)

interesting to think about technologies that sort of last for a very long time and just

Lex Fridman (2:04:28.760)

kind of being in the, what is it, how do they get by?

Neal Stephenson (2:04:33.440)

It's like the cockroaches of software or the bacteria software or something like this base

Neal Stephenson (2:04:41.240)

thing that nobody, everybody's just became reliant on and they just outlast everything

Neal Stephenson (2:04:47.520)

else and slowly, slowly adjust with the times with a little bit of a delay, with a little

Neal Stephenson (2:04:52.880)

bit of customization by individuals kind of that, but they're always there in the shadows

Lex Fridman (2:04:58.560)

and they outlast everybody else.

Lex Fridman (2:05:01.360)

And I wonder if that might be the story for a lot of technologies, especially in the software

Lex Fridman (2:05:05.880)

space.

Neal Stephenson (2:05:06.880)

Shell scripts, all that stuff, you can't run the modern world without a bunch of shell

Lex Fridman (2:05:14.040)

scripts booting up machines and running things.

Lex Fridman (2:05:18.880)

So that is gonna be a hard thing to replace.

Lex Fridman (2:05:25.680)

And then tech for typesetting that you use, you said.

Neal Stephenson (2:05:29.200)

For when I want to print it out, yeah, I just have some simple macros that I use, but then

Neal Stephenson (2:05:35.240)

I have to, the publisher put their foot down and they want it in Word format now.

Lex Fridman (2:05:42.440)

So years ago I wrote some macros to convert and this time, what did I do?

Lex Fridman (2:05:52.440)

Copy paste?

Neal Stephenson (2:05:53.440)

No, I use sort of regular expressions.

Lex Fridman (2:05:57.440)

So I was to do italics in, you put it in curly brackets and you do backslash IT and then

Neal Stephenson (2:06:05.680)

you type what you want to type and that's how you get italics in tech.

Lex Fridman (2:06:09.900)

So you can create a regular expression that'll look for some text between curly brackets

Neal Stephenson (2:06:16.520)

preceded by backslash IT and then instead convert that to italics.

Lex Fridman (2:06:24.800)

And Word will do that.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:28.240)

Word if you go deep enough into its search and replace UI.

Lex Fridman (2:06:31.520)

You can do regular expressions.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:34.160)

Is just regfs.

Lex Fridman (2:06:35.160)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:36.160)

It's funny that you did that.

Lex Fridman (2:06:38.160)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:39.160)

I mean, I'm sure there's tools that help you with that kind of thing, but the task is sufficiently

Neal Stephenson (2:06:45.840)

simple to where you can do a much better job than anyone, anybody else's tool can.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:51.240)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:06:52.240)

So.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:53.240)

That's a fascinating process.

Lex Fridman (2:06:54.240)

That's fine for me.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:55.240)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:06:56.240)

And it keeps you from messing around with formatting.

Neal Stephenson (2:06:58.600)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:06:59.600)

Like, Oh, what if I put this chapter heading, you know, in, you know, a sans serif font?

Neal Stephenson (2:07:06.000)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:07:07.000)

It's a, it's just classic wanking.

Lex Fridman (2:07:09.400)

And so those options are closed off in what I'm doing.

Lex Fridman (2:07:16.360)

Is there advice you could say, what does it take to write a great story?

Neal Stephenson (2:07:20.960)

The power of, of good yarns, good narratives to, um, pull people in is, is, uh, incredible.

Lex Fridman (2:07:28.080)

And I think my sort of amateur theory is that it's an evolutionary development that if you're,

Neal Stephenson (2:07:36.800)

um, you know, uh, uh, cave person sitting around a fire in the rift valley a million

Neal Stephenson (2:07:45.320)

years ago, um, if you can tell the story of how you escaped from the hyenas, um, or how

Neal Stephenson (2:07:57.000)

uncle Bob, you know, didn't escape from the hyenas, and if the people listening to you

Neal Stephenson (2:08:02.480)

can take that in and they can build that scenario in their heads, like a kind of virtual reality

Lex Fridman (2:08:09.200)

and see what you're describing, then you've just conferred an incredibly important advantage

Lex Fridman (2:08:16.920)

on the people who've heard that story.

Neal Stephenson (2:08:19.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:08:20.040)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:08:21.040)

And so they know a bunch of stuff now about how to stay alive that they could not have

Lex Fridman (2:08:25.280)

learned in any other way.

Neal Stephenson (2:08:28.400)

Um, I mean, animals who don't have speech though, they might warn each other, they might

Neal Stephenson (2:08:34.520)

make a sound that says danger, danger, um, but, uh, but as far as we know, they can't

Neal Stephenson (2:08:42.800)

tell more complicated stories.

Lex Fridman (2:08:44.560)

So it's a part of us.

Neal Stephenson (2:08:47.520)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:08:48.520)

I, the, the, the collective intelligence seems to be one of the key characteristics of the,

Neal Stephenson (2:08:53.360)

of homo sapiens, the ability to share ideas and hold ideas together in our minds and storytelling

Lex Fridman (2:09:00.180)

is the fundamental aspect of that.

Neal Stephenson (2:09:01.860)

Maybe even language itself is more fundamental because the language is required to do the

Lex Fridman (2:09:08.440)

storytelling or maybe they evolve together.

Neal Stephenson (2:09:11.440)

Maybe they co evolve.

Lex Fridman (2:09:12.680)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:09:13.680)

So I think that you've got to work with that and I think, uh, sometimes it seems like in

Neal Stephenson (2:09:18.880)

kind of, um, literary circles that having a lot of plot is a little bit frowned upon

Neal Stephenson (2:09:27.440)

as it's pulpy or it's exploitative, but, um, for me, I don't have any compunctions whatsoever

Lex Fridman (2:09:35.040)

about that.

Neal Stephenson (2:09:36.040)

I like stories that, um, are grabby and fun and exciting to read.

Lex Fridman (2:09:40.720)

And once you've got one of those going, once you've got a good yarn going that people will

Neal Stephenson (2:09:46.480)

enjoy reading, then you're free to do whatever you want, uh, in the frame of that story.

Lex Fridman (2:09:52.000)

Um, but if you don't have that, um, then you got nothing.

Lex Fridman (2:09:56.400)

What about having like, uh, which you do at a technological scientific rigor, like to

Neal Stephenson (2:10:02.800)

the, to the accuracy and as much as possible, how does that add to the, to, to Bob telling

Lex Fridman (2:10:09.400)

the story or telling the story about Bob or on the campfire?

Neal Stephenson (2:10:12.640)

Well, the main thing that it does is, um, present, um, little details that you might

Neal Stephenson (2:10:19.520)

not have come up with on your own.

Lex Fridman (2:10:23.080)

So if you're just sitting there freely imagining things, um, you, uh, you, your, your brain

Neal Stephenson (2:10:30.880)

probably isn't going to serve up the wealth of details and the resulting complications

Lex Fridman (2:10:36.320)

and surprises that real, that the real world is constantly presenting us with.

Lex Fridman (2:10:42.560)

And so, um, in my case, if I'm, um, trying to write a story about, you know, some that

Neal Stephenson (2:10:49.780)

involves some technology like a rocket or, uh, orbital maneuvers or whatever, then delving

Neal Stephenson (2:10:56.080)

into those details eventually is going to turn up some weird unexpected, you know, thing

Neal Stephenson (2:11:02.760)

that, uh, gives me material to work with, but also subliminally readers who see that

Neal Stephenson (2:11:09.640)

are going to be drawn in more, uh, because they're going to, uh, to, to find that, um,

Neal Stephenson (2:11:17.080)

oh, I didn't see that coming, you know, you know, it's got some of the complexity and

Neal Stephenson (2:11:21.880)

surprise value of the real world.

Lex Fridman (2:11:23.920)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:11:24.920)

It does something, um, uh, Alex Garland, director who did, uh, who wrote, uh, directed Ex Machina.

Neal Stephenson (2:11:33.240)

I think about AI movies and the more care you take in making it accurate, the more compelling

Neal Stephenson (2:11:41.920)

the story becomes somehow.

Lex Fridman (2:11:44.320)

I'm not, I'm not sure what that is.

Neal Stephenson (2:11:47.200)

Um, maybe because it becomes more real to the people writing the story, maybe it just

Lex Fridman (2:11:52.960)

makes you a better writer.

Neal Stephenson (2:11:54.640)

The key to any storytelling is getting the, the readers to suspend their, their disbelief.

Lex Fridman (2:12:00.880)

And there's all kinds of triggers and little tells that can break that.

Neal Stephenson (2:12:05.040)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:12:06.040)

Um, and once it's broken, it's really hard to get it back.

Neal Stephenson (2:12:09.240)

Uh, you know, a lot of times that's the end.

Lex Fridman (2:12:12.440)

Everybody will just close the book and not pick it up.

Neal Stephenson (2:12:15.760)

Um, I gotta ask you, you've answered this question, but I gotta ask you the most impossible

Lex Fridman (2:12:22.480)

question for an author to answer, but which Neal Stephenson book should one read first?

Lex Fridman (2:12:30.240)

So when people ask me that, I usually ask them what they like to read, right?

Neal Stephenson (2:12:35.040)

Because, uh, I mean, there's the best known one is probably snow crash, but that's a cyber

Neal Stephenson (2:12:42.360)

punk novel.

Lex Fridman (2:12:43.360)

That's at the same time, making fun of cyber punk.

Neal Stephenson (2:12:46.480)

Um, so it's kind of got some layers to it that, uh, might not seem so funny if you don't

Lex Fridman (2:12:53.800)

have that, if you don't get the joke, right?

Neal Stephenson (2:12:57.000)

So, um, there's, uh, I've written, as you point out, I've written historical novels.

Lex Fridman (2:13:03.120)

Some people like those.

Neal Stephenson (2:13:04.560)

Some people prefer those.

Lex Fridman (2:13:06.520)

So if that's what you like, then kryptonomicon or the baroque cycle is where you would start

Neal Stephenson (2:13:12.340)

if you like sort of techno thrillers that are set in a modern day setting, but aren't

Lex Fridman (2:13:17.800)

science fictiony per se, then, uh, Reamdy, um, is one of those.

Lex Fridman (2:13:25.160)

And termination shock, um, is, is, is definitely one of those.

Lex Fridman (2:13:29.440)

Um, so it just depends on, on, uh, what people like.

Neal Stephenson (2:13:35.920)

What, what, uh, when people a long time ago recommend I read snow crash, they said, uh,

Lex Fridman (2:13:43.040)

it's the, it's Neil Stevenson light.

Neal Stephenson (2:13:47.920)

It's the, uh, like if you don't want to be overwhelmed by the depth, like the rigor book,

Lex Fridman (2:13:54.240)

like that's a good, that's a good introduction to the man.

Lex Fridman (2:13:57.720)

So essentially you broke it down by topics, but if you wanted to read all of them, what's

Neal Stephenson (2:14:05.160)

a good introduction to the, to the man, because obviously these worlds are very different.

Neal Stephenson (2:14:10.320)

The philosophies are very different.

Lex Fridman (2:14:12.920)

What's a good introduction to the human?

Neal Stephenson (2:14:17.640)

People ask the same thing of Dostoyevsky, people, it's a, it's a hard one to answer.

Lex Fridman (2:14:23.240)

Maybe seven eves because it's got big themes.

Neal Stephenson (2:14:26.920)

Um, it's, you know, it's about heavy, heavy things happening to the human race.

Neal Stephenson (2:14:32.920)

Uh, but hopefully the story is told through a cast of characters that, uh, people can

Neal Stephenson (2:14:39.320)

relate to, you know, and it moves along, uh, so, uh, it, it does go kind of deep eventually

Neal Stephenson (2:14:47.360)

on how rockets work and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, but, um, people were able

Neal Stephenson (2:14:54.320)

to get through it anyway, or some people just skip over that.

Lex Fridman (2:14:57.600)

It's fine.

Neal Stephenson (2:14:58.600)

You know, um, as an author, let me ask you what books had a big impact on your life that

Lex Fridman (2:15:06.560)

you've read.

Neal Stephenson (2:15:07.560)

Is there any that jumped to mind that, uh, you learned from as a writer, as a philosopher,

Lex Fridman (2:15:14.040)

as a mathematician, as an engineer?

Neal Stephenson (2:15:17.160)

This is one of these questions where I always blank out.

Lex Fridman (2:15:19.520)

And then when I'm walking out the door, I'll, I'll remember 12, so this is a random selection

Neal Stephenson (2:15:26.000)

that doesn't represent the top.

Neal Stephenson (2:15:27.680)

The top ones, um, well, I mentioned, you know, gulag archipelago and it's kind of a hefty

Lex Fridman (2:15:34.400)

and dark, but, and then it has a personal connection as well.

Lex Fridman (2:15:37.920)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:15:38.920)

Just like where you found the book to the part, the time in your life, where you found

Lex Fridman (2:15:44.040)

it, who recommended it.

Neal Stephenson (2:15:45.620)

That's also part of the story.

Lex Fridman (2:15:46.920)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:15:47.920)

So there's definitely that there's, you know, I, I circle back to Moby Dick a lot, um, because

Lex Fridman (2:15:54.200)

we read it in a, uh, a really great English class I had in high school.

Lex Fridman (2:15:59.620)

And I came in with an oppositional stance because I thought that the teacher was going

Neal Stephenson (2:16:05.040)

to try to talk me into having all kinds of highfalutin ideas about allegory and what

Lex Fridman (2:16:11.640)

does this mean?

Lex Fridman (2:16:12.640)

What's the symbolism?

Lex Fridman (2:16:13.640)

And it turned out that, uh, it turned out to be a lot more interesting and satisfying

Lex Fridman (2:16:20.960)

than that.

Neal Stephenson (2:16:21.960)

Um, what was the first powerful book you remember reading that like convinced you that this

Lex Fridman (2:16:29.920)

form could have depth?

Neal Stephenson (2:16:32.440)

Hmm.

Lex Fridman (2:16:33.440)

Was it Moby Dick?

Lex Fridman (2:16:34.440)

Was it like in high school?

Lex Fridman (2:16:35.440)

I'm trying to remember, well, Moby Dick was definitely a big one.

Neal Stephenson (2:16:39.320)

Um, I mean, I used to read a lot of classics comics when I was, I don't know if you've

Lex Fridman (2:16:45.160)

seen these, it's a whole series of comic books that, um, uh, it was viral.

Neal Stephenson (2:16:53.080)

You could, uh, in the, in the back of each comic book was an order form.

Neal Stephenson (2:16:57.760)

You could check some boxes and fill out your address and mail it in and more would show

Neal Stephenson (2:17:03.240)

up.

Neal Stephenson (2:17:04.240)

And, but it was like, they would do the Count of Monte Cristo, you know, Moby Dick, you

Neal Stephenson (2:17:10.040)

know, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, you know, all this of classic books, uh, were,

Lex Fridman (2:17:17.240)

they had put into comic book form.

Neal Stephenson (2:17:19.480)

That's amazing.

Lex Fridman (2:17:21.040)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:17:22.040)

Reading Moby Dick, if you're nine years old is a tall order.

Neal Stephenson (2:17:26.240)

There's some very complicated sentences in there and a lot of digressions, but if you're

Lex Fridman (2:17:32.080)

just looking at the comic books, like, holy shit, look at that whale, you know?

Neal Stephenson (2:17:36.960)

Um, and, um, and ultimately the power of the story doesn't need the complicated words.

Neal Stephenson (2:17:43.600)

It's, it's all about the man and the, and the whale.

Lex Fridman (2:17:47.720)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:17:48.720)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:17:49.720)

So you could get kind of a grounding in a lot of classic works of literature without

Neal Stephenson (2:17:52.600)

actually reading them, which is, you know, it's great when you're nine years old.

Lex Fridman (2:17:57.560)

So, so I read a lot of that stuff, uh, for sure.

Neal Stephenson (2:18:01.540)

The annotated Sherlock Holmes, um.

Lex Fridman (2:18:07.240)

You mentioned David Deutsch too, as an inspiration for some of your work.

Neal Stephenson (2:18:10.360)

I mean, you've, you've obviously didn't like really a lot of research for the books you,

Lex Fridman (2:18:14.520)

you do.

Neal Stephenson (2:18:15.520)

Roger Penrose.

Neal Stephenson (2:18:16.520)

What, uh, do you remember a book that made you want to become a writer or a moment that

Lex Fridman (2:18:22.900)

made you become a writer?

Neal Stephenson (2:18:23.900)

I think like the, you know, the answer I usually give is that when I was in like fifth grade

Lex Fridman (2:18:31.520)

and one of my friends came to school one day, he was wearing leather shoes, like dress shoes

Lex Fridman (2:18:40.040)

and I hated dress shoes cause mine never fit.

Lex Fridman (2:18:44.520)

And so they were uncomfortable.

Lex Fridman (2:18:45.880)

I couldn't run, you know, they were cold, it was Iowa.

Lex Fridman (2:18:50.420)

So I kind of said, I remember very clearly thinking, okay, I don't like where this is

Lex Fridman (2:18:57.000)

going.

Lex Fridman (2:18:58.000)

Like, does this mean that next year all of the kids are going to be wearing leather shoes?

Lex Fridman (2:19:08.720)

So I need to find a job where I don't have to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:19:12.640)

So that was like the first time I thought about trying to find such a job, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:19:17.920)

being a writer.

Lex Fridman (2:19:18.920)

And then, and then I just read a lot of, uh, just classic science fiction short stories

Lex Fridman (2:19:24.680)

and started trying to write some of my own.

Lex Fridman (2:19:28.480)

And there were just classic young adult stories like by Heinlein and the other classic names

Lex Fridman (2:19:36.720)

that you think of.

Lex Fridman (2:19:37.720)

But the Heinlein ones stuck, have stuck with me in a way that the others didn't.

Lex Fridman (2:19:42.160)

What's the greatest science fiction book ever written, just removing your work from consideration?

Neal Stephenson (2:19:54.440)

I'm loving torturing you right now.

Lex Fridman (2:19:56.400)

Greatest ever non Stevenson.

Lex Fridman (2:19:58.360)

Do we include fantasy or does it have to be science fiction?

Lex Fridman (2:20:02.360)

Oh, interesting fantasy.

Neal Stephenson (2:20:05.560)

Hmm.

Lex Fridman (2:20:07.600)

I did not expect that twist.

Lex Fridman (2:20:09.640)

Uh, well, for in a weird way, they're lumped together in people's minds, right?

Lex Fridman (2:20:13.680)

So they are, but there, but there's also a boundary somehow.

Neal Stephenson (2:20:17.680)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:20:18.680)

I'm not sure what that is exactly.

Neal Stephenson (2:20:20.480)

Nobody is.

Lex Fridman (2:20:21.480)

It's a mystery.

Neal Stephenson (2:20:22.480)

So, I mean, if we do include it, then it's easily the, the Lord of the rings.

Lex Fridman (2:20:27.640)

But, um, I mean, greatness is a interesting quality to, uh, to try to define.

Neal Stephenson (2:20:34.960)

Um, and for me, a lot of the, the fun and the joy of such books is, is not in what you'd

Lex Fridman (2:20:43.240)

call greatness, but just storytelling.

Lex Fridman (2:20:46.860)

So I was always a big fan of has have space suit will travel, which is a Heinlein young

Lex Fridman (2:20:53.040)

adult book.

Neal Stephenson (2:20:54.040)

It's just, uh, it's just a fun, good read.

Lex Fridman (2:20:56.480)

Um, so, so fun is a big component.

Neal Stephenson (2:21:01.220)

Greatness is overrated.

Neal Stephenson (2:21:02.220)

Well, I don't know it's overrated, but it's just, you know, it's, it might be underdefined

Neal Stephenson (2:21:08.040)

to put it that way.

Lex Fridman (2:21:10.120)

So how space it will travel now, I definitely have to read that one.

Neal Stephenson (2:21:13.920)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:21:14.920)

You mentioned Iowa.

Neal Stephenson (2:21:15.920)

It was, uh, there a couple of times I got to spend, uh, quite a bit of time with Dan

Neal Stephenson (2:21:20.680)

Gabel with Tom Brands who are wrestlers was, uh, is it now wrestling, martial arts, part

Lex Fridman (2:21:30.200)

of your life, any part of your form formation of who you are as a human being?

Lex Fridman (2:21:35.360)

I think so.

Neal Stephenson (2:21:36.360)

In a, it was a late, it was a late thing for me, but growing up in Ames, um, Dan Gabel

Lex Fridman (2:21:45.040)

was, uh, a few years older than me.

Lex Fridman (2:21:47.760)

And so sometimes we would go to the arena at the university and watch wrestling meets

Lex Fridman (2:21:54.180)

and um, and this was before his Olympic career.

Lex Fridman (2:21:58.980)

So everyone knew he was the star of that team and that he was the best, but people didn't

Lex Fridman (2:22:04.460)

yet know he was the greatest of all time.

Neal Stephenson (2:22:07.600)

You saw Gabe.

Lex Fridman (2:22:08.600)

So that was part, it's, it's funny is, uh, it feels like a small world that you would

Neal Stephenson (2:22:14.280)

be in the same space as Dan Gabel a hundred feet away, a little dot on the mat trouncing

Lex Fridman (2:22:20.400)

his opponents, him and him and Chris Taylor.

Lex Fridman (2:22:23.560)

So the other star was this 400 pound plus guy named Chris Taylor who, uh, also went

Lex Fridman (2:22:30.680)

to the Olympics.

Lex Fridman (2:22:32.240)

So yeah, people, you know, he was, he was a no, he was a, uh, athletic hero and wrestling

Neal Stephenson (2:22:38.880)

is there's certain States like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Iowa, where wrestling is the sport because

Neal Stephenson (2:22:47.240)

those are States of small towns.

Lex Fridman (2:22:49.120)

And so if you're a small town is if you're like Dan Gabel, uh, and you have to be on

Neal Stephenson (2:22:55.640)

a football team with 20 other guys who are not Dan Gabel, then no matter how good you

Lex Fridman (2:23:01.320)

are, your team might, might suck.

Neal Stephenson (2:23:04.600)

Uh, but if in a solo thing, you can, you can go to the Olympics.

Lex Fridman (2:23:11.920)

So we did a lot of wrestling in our gym classes in school and I didn't like it.

Lex Fridman (2:23:16.200)

And I think partly it's just that it was so, so competitive and the people who were cared

Lex Fridman (2:23:22.400)

about it really cared about it a lot, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:23:26.480)

And so it was, it was pretty tough and I didn't think I had the right body type.

Lex Fridman (2:23:31.300)

But then when I was, uh, after college, I was in Iowa city for a few years when he was

Neal Stephenson (2:23:36.600)

coaching the, that the wrestling team there and the, he won like nine championships out

Lex Fridman (2:23:43.720)

of 10 years, you know, during that, during that time.

Lex Fridman (2:23:47.380)

So he was both the greatest individual wrestler of all time and like the greatest team coach.

Neal Stephenson (2:23:53.720)

Um, so I know I've never met him, but we've, uh, he's kind of been like in my sphere of

Neal Stephenson (2:24:02.280)

awareness since I was, you know, kind of my whole life.

Lex Fridman (2:24:04.880)

And people would always tell stories about him, like I think he got arrested once for

Neal Stephenson (2:24:10.200)

some kind of, I don't know, minor offense in Ames.

Lex Fridman (2:24:15.720)

And so he just basically stayed up all night.

Neal Stephenson (2:24:17.600)

He was in this cage in the jail, just stayed up all night doing pull ups on, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:24:23.320)

it sounds about right.

Neal Stephenson (2:24:24.320)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:24:25.320)

And, uh, uh, so yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:24:30.080)

So has that been, I mean, I was such an interesting place in the world and wrestling is just part

Lex Fridman (2:24:35.980)

of that story.

Lex Fridman (2:24:40.520)

Is that somewhere in there?

Lex Fridman (2:24:41.960)

Does that resonate deeply with who you are?

Neal Stephenson (2:24:44.860)

It was a formative thing for me growing up there for sure.

Neal Stephenson (2:24:48.960)

It's just a, uh, you know, uh, uh, or at least used to be a very orderly place, high social

Neal Stephenson (2:24:57.160)

capital, very minimal class differences.

Lex Fridman (2:25:02.200)

So like you'd have some people who would drive a Cadillac instead of a Chevy, but, uh, that

Neal Stephenson (2:25:08.760)

was it.

Lex Fridman (2:25:09.760)

That was, you know, those were the rich people, right?

Neal Stephenson (2:25:11.400)

So, um, and a college town is always a different environment like, uh, you know, Austin, uh,

Neal Stephenson (2:25:20.400)

has some of this, um, so it was a pretty kind of utopian, uh, other than the weather and

Neal Stephenson (2:25:27.400)

a few other things, uh, environment to, to grow up in the, the martial art I ended up

Neal Stephenson (2:25:33.440)

doing is sword stuff, which is interesting because it uses a different feedback loop.

Lex Fridman (2:25:39.400)

So when you're, if you're grappling, everything is through sense of touch and your sense of

Lex Fridman (2:25:47.040)

touch is very old and simple, right?

Neal Stephenson (2:25:50.840)

Like earthworms don't have, don't even have eyes, but they can tell when they're being

Lex Fridman (2:25:55.840)

touched, right?

Lex Fridman (2:25:56.840)

So it's very fast.

Neal Stephenson (2:25:59.480)

Um, and uh, with, um, with a standoff or like boxing or some kinds of sword fighting, you're,

Neal Stephenson (2:26:10.360)

you're not touching the other person.

Neal Stephenson (2:26:11.720)

Most of the time, your, your, your visual system is doing something way more, it's doing

Neal Stephenson (2:26:17.200)

slam and trying to figure out what the other person is up to.

Lex Fridman (2:26:23.440)

And so, um, that always felt more my speed.

Lex Fridman (2:26:28.300)

So in an Olympic style fencing, you're, it doesn't start really until you're crossing

Neal Stephenson (2:26:36.040)

blades with the other person and now you're back to wrestling, you're feeling what they're

Neal Stephenson (2:26:41.320)

doing and it's all about that.

Lex Fridman (2:26:43.600)

But some of the older sword arts, um, don't engage the blade that way.

Neal Stephenson (2:26:50.020)

You stand off at range and then you make cutting attacks and, um, and, uh, and so, so those

Neal Stephenson (2:26:59.440)

are all processed visually and I think I'm more of a slow thinker, so it works for me

Neal Stephenson (2:27:07.080)

better.

Neal Stephenson (2:27:08.080)

I mean, the same, it has the same, the artistry and the beauty of boxing, I suppose, just

Neal Stephenson (2:27:13.720)

like you said, is like, there's no, there's no contact and it's all processed visually

Lex Fridman (2:27:18.680)

and I'm sure there's a dance of its own that, that depends on the characteristic of a sword

Neal Stephenson (2:27:24.080)

involved.

Lex Fridman (2:27:25.080)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:27:26.080)

There is a set of, of stances and, and, uh, basic reactions that you try to learn that

Lex Fridman (2:27:31.240)

are thought to be defensible, um, and, and safe or safer.

Lex Fridman (2:27:37.400)

And so it tends to be a series of short engagements where you'll, you'll close in, you'll try

Lex Fridman (2:27:43.440)

out your, your idea and it works or it doesn't, then you, you back off again.

Neal Stephenson (2:27:50.960)

It's interesting to think about like human history because martial arts, okay, that's

Lex Fridman (2:27:56.360)

a thing.

Lex Fridman (2:27:57.680)

But in terms of sword fighting, just the full range of humans that existed who mastered

Neal Stephenson (2:28:07.040)

sword fighting or sought the mastery of sword fighting, just to imagine the thousands of

Neal Stephenson (2:28:11.840)

people who, the heights they have achieved because the stakes are so incredibly high

Lex Fridman (2:28:18.480)

to be good.

Lex Fridman (2:28:19.760)

And it's the richest, most powerful people in those societies spending whatever it takes

Neal Stephenson (2:28:27.280)

to get the best gear and the best training because you're right, everything depends on

Neal Stephenson (2:28:33.060)

it.

Lex Fridman (2:28:34.060)

And it's still life and death.

Neal Stephenson (2:28:35.060)

I mean, that, that's fascinating, um, that, that's fascinating and we perhaps have lost

Lex Fridman (2:28:43.440)

that forever with greater weapons.

Neal Stephenson (2:28:46.280)

I mean, the artistry of sword fighting when it's life and death and you go into war, you

Lex Fridman (2:28:52.400)

have the Miyamoto Musashi's of the world, right?

Neal Stephenson (2:28:54.960)

The, I don't know, there's a, there's a poetry to that, that there's a mastery to that that

Lex Fridman (2:29:02.040)

I don't know if we could achieve with any other kind of martial art.

Neal Stephenson (2:29:05.640)

Well the, one of the good, you were talking earlier about the, the, the good effects of

Lex Fridman (2:29:11.720)

the internet, social media that we sometimes overlook.

Neal Stephenson (2:29:15.680)

And, and one of those is that, um, there were all these isolated people around the world

Neal Stephenson (2:29:20.680)

who were interested in this, who found each other and kind of created a network of, of

Neal Stephenson (2:29:26.960)

people who help each other learn these things.

Lex Fridman (2:29:28.960)

So that doesn't mean that anyone is, is up to the level of the you're talking about yet,

Lex Fridman (2:29:35.000)

but um, but it is happening and um, and so, um, there's a, a, a large number of old treatises,

Neal Stephenson (2:29:44.840)

old written documents, uh, that have been dug up from libraries and, and people have

Neal Stephenson (2:29:50.180)

been going over these and translating them from old dialects of Italian and German, um,

Neal Stephenson (2:29:57.280)

to make sense of them and, and learning how to do these techniques with different, uh,

Neal Stephenson (2:30:03.600)

different weapons.

Neal Stephenson (2:30:04.600)

Um, actually there's a guy here in Austin named Damond Stith who does African, historical

Neal Stephenson (2:30:11.960)

African martial arts.

Neal Stephenson (2:30:14.120)

Um, also martial arts of, uh, of enslaved Africans who would learn machete fighting

Neal Stephenson (2:30:22.800)

techniques in the Caribbean, South America.

Lex Fridman (2:30:26.200)

He's probably within a mile of us.

Neal Stephenson (2:30:28.040)

He's an amazing guy.

Lex Fridman (2:30:29.040)

That's awesome.

Neal Stephenson (2:30:30.040)

I'm going to look him up.

Lex Fridman (2:30:31.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:30:32.040)

Can I ask you for advice?

Lex Fridman (2:30:34.240)

Can you give advice for young people, high school, college, you know, undergrads thinking

Lex Fridman (2:30:42.040)

about their career, thinking about life, how to live a life that you'd be proud of?

Neal Stephenson (2:30:48.560)

You think quite a bit about like what it's required to be innovative in this world.

Neal Stephenson (2:30:53.480)

You think quite a bit about the future.

Lex Fridman (2:30:55.120)

So if somebody wanted to be a person that makes a big impact from the future, what advice

Lex Fridman (2:31:00.720)

would you give them?

Neal Stephenson (2:31:02.840)

I think a big part of it is finding the thing that you will do happily and, um, I don't

Neal Stephenson (2:31:12.280)

want to say obsessively because that sounds like maybe it's pathological, but, but if

Neal Stephenson (2:31:17.720)

you can find a thing that you'll, you know, you'll sit down, you'll start doing it and

Lex Fridman (2:31:22.560)

hours later you kind of snap out of it, where did the time go?

Neal Stephenson (2:31:27.080)

Um, then, um, that's a really key discovery for anyone to make about themselves when they're

Neal Stephenson (2:31:35.720)

young.

Neal Stephenson (2:31:36.720)

Uh, because if you don't have that, um, it's hard to, uh, to figure out where you should

Neal Stephenson (2:31:42.800)

put your energies, you know, and as you might have the best intentions, you might say, I,

Neal Stephenson (2:31:48.400)

you know, I want world peace or whatever, uh, but, um, uh, at, at the end of the day,

Lex Fridman (2:31:56.160)

what really matters is how do you spend your time and, and are you spending it in a way

Neal Stephenson (2:32:01.560)

that's productive, uh, and, um, uh, because it doesn't matter how smart you are or well

Neal Stephenson (2:32:09.880)

intentioned you are unless you've figured that out.

Lex Fridman (2:32:13.880)

And so it's finding the thing in which you can sort of, you naturally lose yourself in.

Neal Stephenson (2:32:18.640)

The thing is, um, at least for me, there's a lot of things like that, but I first have

Lex Fridman (2:32:25.960)

to overcome the initial hump of really sucking at that thing.

Neal Stephenson (2:32:31.140)

Like the fun starts a little bit after the first hump of really sucking and then you

Lex Fridman (2:32:36.000)

could suck just regular.

Neal Stephenson (2:32:37.960)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:32:38.960)

Okay.

Lex Fridman (2:32:39.960)

So often people, oftentimes people can give up too early, I think.

Neal Stephenson (2:32:42.800)

I mean, that's true with mathematics for me, it's for a lot of people is if you just give

Neal Stephenson (2:32:48.260)

it a chance to struggle, if you give yourself time to struggle, you'll find a way, you'll

Lex Fridman (2:32:54.320)

find the thing within that thing that you can lose track of time with.

Neal Stephenson (2:32:58.720)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:32:59.720)

That's a key detail that, um, that's an important thing to add to, to what I said, which is

Neal Stephenson (2:33:06.200)

that, uh, this might not happen the first time you do a thing.

Neal Stephenson (2:33:10.920)

Maybe it will, but, um, uh, you might have to climb that learning curve and, um, if there's

Neal Stephenson (2:33:17.880)

pressures in your life that are making you feel bad about that, then, um, it might prevent

Lex Fridman (2:33:24.080)

you from, from getting where you need to be.

Neal Stephenson (2:33:28.760)

Um, so there's some complexity there, uh, that make, can make this kind of non obvious.

Lex Fridman (2:33:35.800)

Um, but, uh, that's what, that's why we need, you know, good teachers.

Neal Stephenson (2:33:42.400)

Um, you know, another beneficial thing, uh, of the internet is YouTube and being able

Neal Stephenson (2:33:49.520)

to learn things, how to do things on YouTube, the, the, the dude who made the YouTube video

Neal Stephenson (2:33:56.360)

doesn't care how many times you hit pause and rewind, um, they're never going to like

Lex Fridman (2:34:03.160)

roll their eyes and, and be impatient with you.

Neal Stephenson (2:34:07.320)

Um, and sometimes, uh, spending a huge amount of time on one video or one book, like making

Neal Stephenson (2:34:15.760)

that the thing you just spent a huge amount of time on rereading, rereading, or rewatching,

Neal Stephenson (2:34:21.320)

rewatching that, that somehow really, um, solidifies your love for that thing.

Lex Fridman (2:34:30.160)

And like the depth of understanding you start to gain and it's okay to stay with that.

Neal Stephenson (2:34:34.160)

I used to think like, there's all these books out there, so like, I need to keep reading

Lex Fridman (2:34:39.120)

or keep reading.

Lex Fridman (2:34:40.120)

But then I realized, um, I think it was somewhere in college, uh, uh, where you could just spend

Lex Fridman (2:34:48.480)

your whole life with a single textbook.

Neal Stephenson (2:34:50.960)

There's nothing in that textbook to really, really stay.

Neal Stephenson (2:34:55.080)

Meisner, Thorne and Wheeler, Gravitation, you know, is, is one of those, or another one is,

Neal Stephenson (2:35:00.360)

um, The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, which is just incredibly deep and it starts

Neal Stephenson (2:35:06.160)

with like two plus two equals four and it, at the end you're at the boundaries of, of

Neal Stephenson (2:35:12.040)

physics.

Lex Fridman (2:35:13.040)

Uh, it's an amazing, amazing book.

Neal Stephenson (2:35:17.600)

Let me ask you the big ridiculous question.

Lex Fridman (2:35:19.720)

Okay.

Neal Stephenson (2:35:20.720)

You've pondered some big ridiculous questions in your work.

Lex Fridman (2:35:25.320)

What's the meaning of this whole thing?

Lex Fridman (2:35:27.480)

What's the meaning of life?

Lex Fridman (2:35:28.480)

Wow.

Neal Stephenson (2:35:29.480)

Human life.

Lex Fridman (2:35:30.960)

Well, as far as I know, we're unique in the, the universe.

Neal Stephenson (2:35:37.600)

There's no evidence that there's anything else in the universe that's as complicated

Lex Fridman (2:35:41.800)

as what's between our ears.

Neal Stephenson (2:35:44.040)

Might be.

Neal Stephenson (2:35:45.040)

I can't rule it out, but, um, so we appear to be pretty special and, um, so it's got

Neal Stephenson (2:35:53.920)

to have something to do with that and one of the reasons I like David Deutsch, in particular

Neal Stephenson (2:35:59.960)

his book, The Beginning of Infinity, um, is that he talks about the power of explanations

Lex Fridman (2:36:06.360)

and the fact that, um, most civilizations are static that they've got a set of dogmas

Neal Stephenson (2:36:14.240)

that they arrive at somehow and they just pass those on from one, uh, generation to

Neal Stephenson (2:36:21.800)

the next and nothing changes.

Lex Fridman (2:36:24.520)

But that huge changes have happened when people sort of follow whatever you want to call it,

Neal Stephenson (2:36:32.000)

the scientific method or enlightenment, uh, there's different ways of thinking about it,

Lex Fridman (2:36:38.280)

but basically explanatory, it's, it's about the power of, of explanations and being able

Neal Stephenson (2:36:45.160)

to figure out why things are the way they are and that has created changes in our, um,

Neal Stephenson (2:36:52.440)

thinking and our way of life over the last few centuries that are explosive compared

Neal Stephenson (2:36:58.620)

to anything that came before and David sort of verges on classifying this as like a force

Lex Fridman (2:37:05.740)

of nature in its potential transformative power.

Neal Stephenson (2:37:10.760)

If we keep going, um, you know, we could, uh, you know, if we figure out how to colonize

Neal Stephenson (2:37:17.720)

the universe like you were talking about earlier, how to spread to other star systems, um, then

Neal Stephenson (2:37:25.080)

it is effectively a force of nature.

Neal Stephenson (2:37:29.520)

This kind of drive to understand more and more and more, deeper and deeper and deeper

Lex Fridman (2:37:34.520)

and to engineer stuff so that we can understand even more.

Lex Fridman (2:37:37.640)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:37:38.640)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:37:39.640)

It's the, well, it's the old, the universe created us to understand itself.

Neal Stephenson (2:37:43.960)

Maybe that's the, uh, the whole purpose.

Lex Fridman (2:37:46.920)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:37:47.920)

It is an interesting peculiar side effect of the way we've been created is we seem to

Lex Fridman (2:37:54.840)

be conscious beings.

Neal Stephenson (2:37:56.080)

We seem to have little egos.

Lex Fridman (2:37:57.400)

We seem to, uh, be born and die pretty quickly.

Neal Stephenson (2:38:01.360)

There's a bunch of drama.

Neal Stephenson (2:38:03.160)

We're all within ourselves pretty unique and we fall in love and start wars and there's

Neal Stephenson (2:38:09.360)

hate and all the, the full interesting dynamic of it.

Lex Fridman (2:38:12.720)

So it's not just about the individual people, somehow like the concert that we played together.

Neal Stephenson (2:38:19.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:38:20.040)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (2:38:21.040)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:38:22.040)

So.

Neal Stephenson (2:38:23.040)

That's kind of interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:38:24.040)

And there's a lot of peculiar aspects of that, that, um, I wonder if they're fundamental

Neal Stephenson (2:38:28.200)

or just quirks of evolution, whether it's, whether it's death, whether it's love, whether

Neal Stephenson (2:38:33.560)

all those things, I wonder if they're, um, from an engineer perspective when we're trying

Neal Stephenson (2:38:40.280)

to create that intelligent toaster that listens for the, for the slam door and this, and the

Neal Stephenson (2:38:47.560)

smell of burning toast, whether, uh, that toaster should be afraid of death and should

Neal Stephenson (2:38:54.960)

fall in love just like we do, you know, you're a fascinating human being.

Lex Fridman (2:39:01.200)

You've impacted the lives of millions of people.

Neal Stephenson (2:39:03.280)

It's a huge honor that you would spend your valuable time with me today.

Lex Fridman (2:39:08.160)

Thank you so much.

Neal Stephenson (2:39:09.160)

Thank you for coming down to beautiful, hot Texas.

Lex Fridman (2:39:13.840)

And thank you for talking today.

Neal Stephenson (2:39:15.320)

It was a pleasure and I'm glad I came and did it.

Neal Stephenson (2:39:19.080)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neal Stephenson to support this podcast.

Neal Stephenson (2:39:23.180)

Please check out our sponsors in the description.

Lex Fridman (2:39:26.160)

And now let me leave you with some words from Neal Stephenson himself in his novel, Snow

Neal Stephenson (2:39:31.280)

Crash.

Neal Stephenson (2:39:32.280)

The world is full of things more powerful than us, but if you know how to catch a ride,

Neal Stephenson (2:39:37.940)

you can go places.

Lex Fridman (2:39:40.240)

Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.

Neal Stephenson (30:02.300)

You can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain or other flexible materials

Lex Fridman (30:10.940)

that just kind of stand up under their own physics.

Neal Stephenson (30:14.700)

I mean, it's kind of awesome to imagine.

Lex Fridman (30:19.900)

So imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip, but have at the end of it a spaceship.

Neal Stephenson (30:28.220)

That would detach at the moment of maximum velocity.

Lex Fridman (30:34.220)

Why not?

Lex Fridman (30:36.900)

Why wouldn't that?

Lex Fridman (30:37.900)

So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question.

Neal Stephenson (30:43.260)

It was more almost a symbolic way of saying, look, there's all kinds of physics we haven't

Lex Fridman (30:52.560)

explored yet.

Neal Stephenson (30:55.200)

It's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets.

Lex Fridman (31:01.500)

It's just that more money's gone into chemical rockets, right?

Lex Fridman (31:08.100)

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

Lex Fridman (31:14.440)

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

Neal Stephenson (31:21.860)

UFOs, like the Tic Tac aircraft.

Lex Fridman (31:26.660)

I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it, but I haven't gone deep into it.

Lex Fridman (31:32.740)

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

Neal Stephenson (31:42.420)

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

Neal Stephenson (31:49.620)

consider the aircraft that we have today.

Lex Fridman (31:52.640)

So the reason I asked you that is because it kind of, to me, whatever the heck it is,

Neal Stephenson (32:02.420)

it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion.

Neal Stephenson (32:08.040)

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

Neal Stephenson (32:15.020)

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

Lex Fridman (32:20.500)

or objects from an alien civilization.

Neal Stephenson (32:23.740)

I most likely believe if it's an object from an alien civilization, it's got to be like

Lex Fridman (32:28.980)

a really dumb drone that just got lost.

Neal Stephenson (32:32.660)

It's definitely not like the pinnacle of intelligence.

Lex Fridman (32:37.100)

It's like some teenager's science fair experiment.

Neal Stephenson (32:42.180)

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

Lex Fridman (32:47.660)

like really excited about this wild thing.

Neal Stephenson (32:51.820)

I mean, what do you think about those...

Lex Fridman (32:54.940)

First of all, like the millions of reports of UFOs, right?

Neal Stephenson (32:57.420)

There's some psychology there that's deeply cultural, but also the possibility of aliens

Lex Fridman (33:03.520)

having visited Earth.

Neal Stephenson (33:05.020)

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see some better pictures.

Neal Stephenson (33:09.420)

For the reason I mentioned earlier, having to do with the difficulty of traveling between

Neal Stephenson (33:14.300)

star systems, it's really hard for me to believe it's aliens.

Neal Stephenson (33:19.460)

I just can't understand why you would go to all that trouble to transport something across

Neal Stephenson (33:25.600)

light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly doing.

Lex Fridman (33:32.420)

Like how is that interesting?

Lex Fridman (33:34.040)

How does that justify the trip?

Lex Fridman (33:36.420)

So if you travel across those kinds of distances, you would make a bigger splash.

Neal Stephenson (33:45.540)

First of all, I would expect that the arrival of these things would be something we'd notice.

Neal Stephenson (33:51.340)

It's got to decelerate into our solar system unless it got here really, really, really

Neal Stephenson (33:58.300)

slowly.

Lex Fridman (33:59.300)

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

Lex Fridman (34:04.200)

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

Lex Fridman (34:08.020)

You would think.

Lex Fridman (34:09.080)

So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad, it makes more sense

Neal Stephenson (34:17.280)

in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies, they're just kind

Neal Stephenson (34:23.760)

of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason, like not trying to communicate.

Lex Fridman (34:32.300)

Can you imagine a scenario where aliens have visited Earth or are visiting Earth and we

Lex Fridman (34:39.420)

wouldn't notice it at all?

Lex Fridman (34:41.180)

Oh, sure.

Neal Stephenson (34:42.180)

I mean, if they've got technology to get here, they've probably got technology to conceal

Lex Fridman (34:48.580)

the fact that they're trying to conceal themselves.

Neal Stephenson (34:50.940)

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

Lex Fridman (34:56.380)

are like too limited and we are not thinking big enough.

Neal Stephenson (35:00.940)

We're looking for little green men, we're looking for things that operate at a time

Lex Fridman (35:05.500)

scale that's human like, you know.

Neal Stephenson (35:10.940)

I love thinking about ideas like that.

Neal Stephenson (35:13.260)

That's great science fiction novel fodder that the aliens are so different that we simply

Neal Stephenson (35:20.080)

don't see them.

Neal Stephenson (35:22.540)

Is there, in terms of language, do you think it would be difficult, not aliens visiting

Lex Fridman (35:29.860)

us but traveling to other places to find a common language?

Lex Fridman (35:34.140)

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

Lex Fridman (35:41.800)

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

Lex Fridman (35:47.420)

language so we're not lost in translation?

Neal Stephenson (35:50.100)

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

Lex Fridman (35:54.460)

are to us, you know.

Neal Stephenson (35:56.540)

I mean, there's a school of thought that says, basically, advanced life has to be carbon

Lex Fridman (36:04.380)

based for just reasons of chemistry.

Lex Fridman (36:07.560)

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

Lex Fridman (36:14.460)

starting to be biologically similar to us.

Lex Fridman (36:17.660)

So if they're about as big as we are and they kind of move around in space, in a physical

Neal Stephenson (36:25.660)

body the way we do, then there's probably a way to solve that communication problem.

Neal Stephenson (36:32.840)

If they're beings of pure energy from Star Trek or something like that, then it's a different

Lex Fridman (36:40.300)

story.

Neal Stephenson (36:41.300)

Well, I love thinking about that kind of stuff too.

Lex Fridman (36:42.500)

I mean, consciousness itself may be alien.

Neal Stephenson (36:47.700)

I mean, it could be, like you said, beings of pure energy.

Neal Stephenson (36:55.140)

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

Neal Stephenson (37:01.220)

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

Lex Fridman (37:06.900)

I have to ask a Twitter question about aliens.

Lex Fridman (37:11.420)

You ready?

Lex Fridman (37:12.420)

This is for Twitter.

Neal Stephenson (37:13.420)

I'm ready.

Lex Fridman (37:14.420)

What would you expect from Twitter?

Lex Fridman (37:15.700)

Can humans have sex with aliens?

Lex Fridman (37:19.540)

Neil Stevenson.

Neal Stephenson (37:20.540)

You could pass.

Lex Fridman (37:24.540)

I asked a language question.

Lex Fridman (37:25.900)

Can they communicate?

Lex Fridman (37:26.900)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (37:27.900)

Can they fall in love before sex?

Lex Fridman (37:30.980)

That's how it works.

Lex Fridman (37:33.660)

So which question am I answering?

Lex Fridman (37:35.420)

The sex or the love?

Neal Stephenson (37:37.820)

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

Lex Fridman (37:45.300)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (37:46.300)

I mean, sex can mean a lot of things.

Lex Fridman (37:49.980)

So I mean, if you're...

Lex Fridman (37:51.980)

Your production, right?

Neal Stephenson (37:53.260)

You know, in Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to really suspend your disbelief to

Lex Fridman (38:02.660)

think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human, right?

Lex Fridman (38:07.940)

Because that's just not going to work DNA wise.

Lex Fridman (38:15.900)

So if by sex, you mean reproductive sex, then I would say no, unless you go to a panspermia

Neal Stephenson (38:26.820)

kind of theory, which is that, you know, humans were seeded onto the planet as part of a galactic,

Neal Stephenson (38:34.980)

you know, program of some sort.

Lex Fridman (38:40.100)

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

Neal Stephenson (38:44.500)

Distant cousins.

Lex Fridman (38:45.500)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (38:46.500)

But that doesn't seem, you know, it doesn't seem plausible.

Neal Stephenson (38:52.260)

We know that humans had sex with Neanderthals, with Denisovans, so you could think of them

Neal Stephenson (39:00.620)

as aliens that came from our planet.

Lex Fridman (39:06.860)

So that's a kind of data point, I guess.

Lex Fridman (39:11.780)

But you know, if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind of gratifying physical

Lex Fridman (39:19.700)

interaction then sure.

Neal Stephenson (39:21.900)

Right.

Lex Fridman (39:22.900)

Dancing.

Lex Fridman (39:23.900)

And that's how we get to love.

Lex Fridman (39:27.100)

And love can take many forms.

Neal Stephenson (39:28.540)

Love can certainly take many forms.

Neal Stephenson (39:30.260)

I have to ask you, in terms of space, just looking at where Blue Origin is, looking at

Neal Stephenson (39:36.260)

where SpaceX is today, and maybe looking out 10, 20 years out from now, are you impressed

Lex Fridman (39:43.780)

at what's happening?

Neal Stephenson (39:44.780)

We just saw William Shatner go up to space.

Lex Fridman (39:47.460)

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

Neal Stephenson (39:51.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (39:52.820)

Are you impressed at where things stand today?

Neal Stephenson (39:54.700)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (39:55.700)

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

Lex Fridman (40:03.660)

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

Neal Stephenson (40:12.100)

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

Neal Stephenson (40:19.260)

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

Lex Fridman (40:26.520)

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

Lex Fridman (40:36.820)

What about maybe a question about Elon Musk?

Neal Stephenson (40:40.980)

Even more than Jeff Bezos, he has a very kind of ambitious vision of this project that we're

Neal Stephenson (40:50.140)

on as a species, of becoming a multi planetary species and becoming that quickly, as soon

Lex Fridman (40:58.140)

as possible, landing on Mars, colonizing Mars.

Lex Fridman (41:01.300)

What do you think of that project?

Lex Fridman (41:03.100)

There's two questions to ask.

Lex Fridman (41:04.100)

First, the question is, what do you think about the project of colonizing Mars?

Lex Fridman (41:09.060)

And second, what do you think about a human being who is so unapologetically ambitious

Lex Fridman (41:19.420)

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

Lex Fridman (41:23.420)

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

Neal Stephenson (41:32.580)

It's catchy.

Neal Stephenson (41:34.340)

It's the kind of thing that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs

Neal Stephenson (41:41.020)

might not.

Lex Fridman (41:42.020)

So I think it's well chosen in that way.

Neal Stephenson (41:45.740)

I have technical questions about, there's a problem of perchlorates on the surface of

Lex Fridman (41:54.260)

Mars that's going to be big trouble.

Lex Fridman (41:58.060)

And there's radiation.

Lex Fridman (42:00.540)

This is known.

Lex Fridman (42:04.060)

What about business questions?

Lex Fridman (42:05.460)

Do you think, because you mentioned sort of going outside of the solar system would best

Neal Stephenson (42:12.140)

be done for religious reasons.

Lex Fridman (42:15.620)

What about colonizing Mars?

Lex Fridman (42:17.820)

Can you spin it into a business proposition?

Neal Stephenson (42:20.460)

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

Neal Stephenson (42:27.660)

enough to compete with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here.

Lex Fridman (42:37.020)

So I don't know if there is a business plan for that or if it's just strictly we're going

Neal Stephenson (42:42.480)

to go there and see what happens.

Neal Stephenson (42:49.140)

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

Neal Stephenson (42:55.860)

Well there's plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonize Mars vision that they're

Lex Fridman (43:02.180)

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

Lex Fridman (43:12.180)

But I think it's well chosen.

Lex Fridman (43:17.540)

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

Neal Stephenson (43:23.620)

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

Lex Fridman (43:32.340)

was not a lot of coherent planning.

Lex Fridman (43:35.620)

What plans they did have turned out to be terrible plans.

Neal Stephenson (43:40.860)

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

Lex Fridman (43:47.660)

So do it for the kind of unexplainable love of the unknown, like the journey towards exploring

Lex Fridman (43:58.700)

the unknown and just kind of keep going.

Neal Stephenson (44:03.100)

You saw it with Shatner and his reaction to the flight yesterday.

Lex Fridman (44:10.380)

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

Lex Fridman (44:20.060)

What did he say?

Lex Fridman (44:21.060)

I haven't watched the video yet.

Neal Stephenson (44:22.180)

He was trying to express, talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of rise

Lex Fridman (44:28.700)

above the thin blue blanket of the atmosphere and you're up into the blackness.

Lex Fridman (44:37.340)

And that had a huge impact on him.

Lex Fridman (44:41.060)

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

Lex Fridman (44:45.860)

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

Lex Fridman (44:52.980)

to watch.

Lex Fridman (44:55.980)

So you worked on this kind of stuff, we can go back 10 years ago.

Lex Fridman (45:00.660)

You wrote an essay called Innovation Starvation.

Neal Stephenson (45:03.980)

You worked on this kind of idea since then, kind of looking at maybe a little bit cynically

Lex Fridman (45:13.300)

about our age today and our unwillingness to take on big risky projects.

Lex Fridman (45:19.980)

So in the face of that, what do you think of people like Elon Musk?

Neal Stephenson (45:23.540)

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

Neal Stephenson (45:31.620)

of pessimistic perspective of our age.

Neal Stephenson (45:36.300)

Yeah, well he's clearly willing to tackle big ambitious projects without a lot of kind

Lex Fridman (45:45.900)

of soul searching or trying to make up his mind, right?

Lex Fridman (45:52.540)

It's just like, let's dig tunnels under cities.

Neal Stephenson (45:58.020)

Go.

Lex Fridman (45:59.020)

Step one, make a joke about it on Twitter.

Neal Stephenson (46:02.620)

Step two, actually do it.

Lex Fridman (46:04.820)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (46:05.820)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (46:06.820)

And I mean, things have slowed down quite a bit.

Neal Stephenson (46:09.740)

Our ability to build things at pace is a lot less than it was, and there's reasons for

Lex Fridman (46:19.780)

that.

Neal Stephenson (46:20.780)

We're more concerned with safety and environmental impacts than people were when they were building

Lex Fridman (46:26.700)

some of the great Publixworks projects of the mid 20th century.

Lex Fridman (46:32.540)

But we're at the point now where even just maintaining the stuff that we've got is such

Neal Stephenson (46:36.880)

a huge project that we need to put big resources into it and good minds into it, or else we're

Neal Stephenson (46:45.420)

going to be losing things that we take for granted.

Lex Fridman (46:52.300)

Do you think that there's a lot to be done in the digital space?

Neal Stephenson (46:57.020)

You mentioned sort of Wikipedia and knowledge, don't you think there could be a lot of flourishing

Lex Fridman (47:02.300)

in the space of innovation, in terms of innovation in the digital space?

Neal Stephenson (47:06.700)

Yeah, I mean, I'd like to see that.

Neal Stephenson (47:08.860)

I think it's where a lot of the brainpower went during the last couple of generations,

Neal Stephenson (47:16.880)

because people who might previously have been building rockets or other kinds of hard technologies

Neal Stephenson (47:24.700)

ended up instead going into programming, computer science, which is understandable and great.

Neal Stephenson (47:33.620)

We've got structural problems right now in the way social media works that are pretty

Neal Stephenson (47:38.580)

severe, and so I certainly hope that we're not, 10 years from now, that we're not exactly

Neal Stephenson (47:46.060)

where we are today when it comes to that stuff.

Lex Fridman (47:49.740)

We need to move on.

Neal Stephenson (47:51.780)

The beautiful thing about problems is they show you how not to do things, and they give

Neal Stephenson (47:59.180)

opportunity to new ideas to flourish and to beat out the ideas of the old, which is a

Neal Stephenson (48:07.660)

dream for me to see new social media that beats out the ways of the old.

Lex Fridman (48:15.700)

So I tend to, you perhaps agree that it's not, that it's impossible to do social media

Neal Stephenson (48:21.700)

well.

Lex Fridman (48:22.700)

Oh, not at all.

Neal Stephenson (48:23.700)

I mean, I listened to your interview with Jaren a couple of weeks ago, and I know Jaren,

Lex Fridman (48:28.300)

and we've talked about this.

Neal Stephenson (48:31.520)

He went hard on me.

Lex Fridman (48:32.800)

He basically said, like, it's impossible.

Neal Stephenson (48:35.220)

It was very nice.

Neal Stephenson (48:36.860)

Well, the last time I kind of paid attention to Jaren's thoughts on it, he was thinking

Neal Stephenson (48:42.600)

in terms of that basically there should be micro payments such that if I, by clicking

Neal Stephenson (48:50.940)

the like button on something, I'm essentially giving valuable intellectual property to Facebook

Neal Stephenson (49:01.020)

or Twitter or whatever.

Neal Stephenson (49:03.220)

It's not a very large amount of IP, but it's definitely a transfer of information that

Neal Stephenson (49:08.980)

when they aggregate it is beneficial to them.

Lex Fridman (49:12.060)

So and now I do remember that he, on his interview with you, was talking about what, data unions

Lex Fridman (49:20.980)

or?

Lex Fridman (49:21.980)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (49:22.980)

Those are a lot of interesting ideas, but for me, the biggest disagreement was in the

Lex Fridman (49:28.780)

level of cynicism.

Neal Stephenson (49:30.880)

He has a distrust and cynicism towards people in Silicon Valley being able to do these kinds

Lex Fridman (49:36.820)

of things.

Lex Fridman (49:38.140)

And I'm really, okay, when you have a large crowd of people that are doing things the

Neal Stephenson (49:43.940)

wrong way, you should nevertheless maintain optimism because what's important is to find

Neal Stephenson (49:50.860)

the one person in that room that's going to do things the right way.

Lex Fridman (49:54.100)

Cynicism is going to completely silence out the whole room.

Lex Fridman (49:57.780)

So he was saying, I've been here a long time.

Lex Fridman (50:00.740)

Oh yeah.

Neal Stephenson (50:01.740)

I've known, you know, I understand like how these folks work, they think they're gods

Lex Fridman (50:09.060)

and they know the right way to do things and they will tell you how to do those things.

Lex Fridman (50:15.340)

And that kind of hubris is going to always lead you astray when you are the one who's

Lex Fridman (50:20.460)

engineering the algorithms.

Lex Fridman (50:22.820)

And there's a lot of deep truth to that because algorithms are powerful.

Lex Fridman (50:27.620)

And many people when given power do not do the best of things.

Neal Stephenson (50:32.820)

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

Lex Fridman (50:38.620)

give him power.

Neal Stephenson (50:39.620)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (50:40.620)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (50:41.620)

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

Lex Fridman (50:46.100)

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

Neal Stephenson (50:51.020)

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

Lex Fridman (50:58.060)

He's definitely raising, you know, issues of concern.

Lex Fridman (51:03.540)

But he wouldn't be out, you know, writing the books that he's written and talking about

Lex Fridman (51:07.220)

this stuff if he didn't think there was a way.

Neal Stephenson (51:09.500)

If he didn't think there was hope, yeah.

Lex Fridman (51:11.460)

And part of it, as you probably know with Jaren, he just loves a good argument.

Neal Stephenson (51:15.380)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (51:16.380)

He just loves to have a little bit of fun.

Neal Stephenson (51:19.740)

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

Lex Fridman (51:27.780)

So in your new book, Termination Shock, it's set here in Texas.

Neal Stephenson (51:33.100)

Part of it is, yeah.

Lex Fridman (51:34.100)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (51:35.100)

Most of it.

Lex Fridman (51:36.100)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (51:37.100)

It's a great place to set it.

Lex Fridman (51:38.100)

So in it, the main character, TR McCooligan, a Texas billionaire oil man and truck stop

Neal Stephenson (51:43.460)

magnate, decides to solve climate change, to take on climate change by himself.

Lex Fridman (51:48.460)

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

Neal Stephenson (51:54.580)

that's perhaps different than we've been thinking about.

Lex Fridman (51:57.740)

I wouldn't use the word solve, but let's say ameliorate the temporary effects.

Lex Fridman (52:04.980)

But please.

Lex Fridman (52:05.980)

Take on.

Neal Stephenson (52:06.980)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (52:07.980)

Take on the challenge.

Lex Fridman (52:08.980)

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

Lex Fridman (52:15.380)

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

Neal Stephenson (52:28.340)

us quite a few times in history.

Lex Fridman (52:30.900)

So what role does that play in this gradual process?

Neal Stephenson (52:34.620)

Right.

Lex Fridman (52:35.620)

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

Lex Fridman (52:43.900)

But that is going to take a while.

Lex Fridman (52:46.940)

We're still adding more.

Neal Stephenson (52:49.080)

We haven't even started to reduce the amount.

Lex Fridman (52:52.500)

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

Neal Stephenson (52:58.920)

the atmosphere and two is removing what we got in the atmosphere.

Lex Fridman (53:03.700)

We have to do both.

Neal Stephenson (53:04.700)

Right.

Lex Fridman (53:05.700)

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

Neal Stephenson (53:11.020)

Because it stays up there.

Lex Fridman (53:12.600)

So I think just last week, China announced that they're going to try to level off their

Neal Stephenson (53:19.140)

CO2 emissions in like 2030.

Lex Fridman (53:23.380)

So 2031, they'll only put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they did in 2030, which

Neal Stephenson (53:30.500)

is still a lot of CO2 in 2060, they're saying will be net zero.

Lex Fridman (53:36.820)

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

Neal Stephenson (53:42.780)

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

Lex Fridman (53:51.860)

And taking it out is hard.

Neal Stephenson (53:54.820)

It's a big, it took us a long time.

Lex Fridman (53:58.340)

We had to empty out huge coal mines and oil reservoirs and burn all that stuff.

Neal Stephenson (54:04.260)

We had to chop down forests and dig up peat bogs in order to create all of that CO2.

Lex Fridman (54:11.380)

And so we have to reverse all of those processes somehow in order to remove the CO2 and get

Neal Stephenson (54:19.660)

it back down, hopefully into the 200 and some parts per million range where it used to be.

Lex Fridman (54:26.420)

So how about you get a single Texas billionaire to have a massive gun that blasts huge quantities

Neal Stephenson (54:32.320)

of sulfur into the upper atmosphere.

Lex Fridman (54:35.660)

That's idea number one.

Neal Stephenson (54:38.320)

This is called solar geoengineering.

Lex Fridman (54:40.700)

And it's a, we know that it's a possibility on a technical level because volcanoes have

Neal Stephenson (54:46.540)

been doing it forever.

Lex Fridman (54:49.060)

So many times in human history, we've seen a volcanic eruption that was followed by a

Neal Stephenson (54:55.240)

global cooling trend that lasted for a couple of years.

Lex Fridman (54:59.120)

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

Neal Stephenson (55:06.420)

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

Lex Fridman (55:11.780)

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

Lex Fridman (55:17.700)

So one of the Australian scientists licked it and reported that it was painfully acid.

Lex Fridman (55:26.260)

So that was our first kind of clue that what was being injected into the stratosphere was

Neal Stephenson (55:31.940)

sulfur dioxide.

Lex Fridman (55:37.260)

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

Lex Fridman (55:43.140)

So we know that sulfur in the stratosphere, it forms little spherical droplets of sulfuric

Neal Stephenson (55:50.580)

acid after it combines with water and those bounce back some of the sun's rays and reduce

Neal Stephenson (55:58.100)

the amount of solar energy entering the troposphere, which is where we live.

Lex Fridman (56:05.940)

So we know that it works and we also know that the stuff goes away after a couple of

Neal Stephenson (56:10.820)

years.

Lex Fridman (56:12.380)

So it gradually washes out.

Lex Fridman (56:14.300)

And so it's not a permanent thing.

Lex Fridman (56:16.500)

The good news, bad news is it's not permanent.

Lex Fridman (56:22.620)

So if you don't like what's happening, you can just stop and wait a couple of years and

Lex Fridman (56:28.220)

you'll get back to where you started.

Neal Stephenson (56:31.260)

The bad news if you're in favor of this kind of thing is that you have to keep doing it

Lex Fridman (56:35.180)

forever.

Lex Fridman (56:39.960)

So this guy is one of those, he's read these papers, the TR, the character in the book.

Neal Stephenson (56:46.460)

He knows all this and all people who are familiar with climate science kind of know this.

Neal Stephenson (56:54.020)

It's a pretty well established fact.

Lex Fridman (56:57.100)

And so he just decides he's going to take action unilaterally and do this.

Lex Fridman (57:05.780)

And so there's different ways to get the sulfur up there, but because it's Texas, he builds

Lex Fridman (57:11.220)

the biggest gun in the world.

Neal Stephenson (57:13.460)

It's just six barrels pointed straight up and he begins firing shells loaded with sulfur

Lex Fridman (57:18.900)

into the stratosphere.

Lex Fridman (57:20.420)

And so the book is about not so much that as how people react to his doing that, what

Neal Stephenson (57:26.780)

the political ramifications are around the world because this is an extremely controversial

Neal Stephenson (57:34.020)

idea and not everyone's on board with it.

Lex Fridman (57:37.820)

And even if you are willing to consider using a technological intervention, the fact is

Neal Stephenson (57:45.460)

that it's going to have different effects on different parts of the world.

Lex Fridman (57:49.420)

So some areas may suffer more negatives than positives and they're not going to be happy.

Lex Fridman (57:59.060)

So what do you think, so in his case, in TR's case, he can get around getting permission

Lex Fridman (58:07.820)

from governments.

Neal Stephenson (58:10.940)

If we were to look at us facing outside of the story, us facing climate change, where

Lex Fridman (58:19.340)

do you think the solution will come from?

Lex Fridman (58:21.020)

Governments working together or from bold billionaire Texans?

Neal Stephenson (58:28.980)

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

Lex Fridman (58:38.420)

This kind of, sorry, government coordinated, which option one?

Lex Fridman (58:42.940)

Solar geoengineering.

Neal Stephenson (58:43.940)

Solar geoengineering.

Lex Fridman (58:44.940)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (58:45.940)

From a government, from a, like those are, I want to sort of the distinction, one is

Neal Stephenson (58:51.740)

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

Neal Stephenson (58:57.460)

idea and agrees on it, governments or individuals.

Lex Fridman (59:00.740)

Yeah.

Neal Stephenson (59:01.740)

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

Neal Stephenson (59:07.220)

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

Lex Fridman (59:15.700)

And you know, that's not me advocating it, it's just, it would be comparatively so cheap

Lex Fridman (59:24.240)

and easy to implement a solar geoengineering scheme that someone is probably going to do

Neal Stephenson (59:31.660)

it once things get bad enough.

Lex Fridman (59:34.740)

But I don't think that governments will, or Western governments, just because they're

Lex Fridman (59:39.980)

not, well, we've seen what happened with vaccines, right?

Lex Fridman (59:45.500)

So getting people to take vaccinations or wear masks, you know, has turned out to be

Neal Stephenson (59:54.060)

incredibly hard, even though it might save those people's lives.

Neal Stephenson (59:59.500)

See, I blame, that's not Western, that's, I blame failure of leadership there, of leaders