The Man Who Sees The Future - EP 94 Neal Stephenson

Speaker 2: Everyone wants to know, like, utopia or dystopia? Oh, yeah.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, where are we heading? Do we take our foot off the gas, hit the pause button, China gets it, or, you know, do we keep the pedal to the metal? They may not necessarily be amoral, but they gotta do what they gotta do.

Speaker 2: Very well-known tech figures fully think we are living in the singularity.

Neal Stephenson: I'm more of an S-curve guy. The two big problems that I'm scared of are too much carbon in the atmosphere and the fact that people cannot agree on what is real. They found a cube of uranium in some guy's garage. He'd built a nuclear fuser in his garage.

Speaker 2: Bedroom using only Claude as his guide. He'd never built a hardware system before. Anyone should have tons of TV shows and movies based on their work. It's you.

Neal Stephenson: The whole AI revolution sort of blindsided me in a lot of ways. You become an instant expert in whatever you're writing about and then you walk away from it. [music]

Speaker 2: Normally this time I would be doing an introduction or would have already done an introduction, but our guest today needs no such introduction. I'll embarrass you by saying living legend, one of the greats among us, Neil Stevenson, famous author, sci-fi author, historical fiction, and some nonfiction now and then at least in magazines and whatnot. Yeah. While most, as a fellow author, since most people will be listening now, I think we should get right to the point at the beginning, which is you have a new book out. I do.

Neal Stephenson: Do you want to?

Speaker 2: D. Yeah, D. And whatever you want to tell us about it. Sure. I know it's a sequel, and I'll let

Neal Stephenson: you do it. Yeah, well, it's the second book in a series that'll probably go to three. Yeah. And it's so the name of the series is Bomb Light. The first book was called Polo Stan. Dee is continuing the story from pretty much where Polo Stan left off. And this is a story about the whole series is about developments in physics during the 30s that led up to the Manhattan Project and the bomb. But it's stuff that I didn't really know about. Until comparatively recently, everyone knows kind of the basic story of the Manhattan Project about Oppenheimer and Groves and the other big players in that project. But that stuff all happened. It was all kind of teed up in the mid to late 30s by other things that went on in Europe that I think are equally interesting in a lot of ways. So I decided to write about that. It's not, I mean, I say it's about physics and it is, but in case that's scaring anyone off, it is also kind of an espionage and action kind of book because... Like one of the weirdest things about this part of history is that these incredibly important developments that led to nuclear energy and the bomb just happened by pure coincidence to be going on at exactly the same time as the rise of the Nazis and Hitler's invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War. So that's Merely a coincidence, but the fact that those things were happening simultaneously made for a really interesting situation.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. And I'm sure our audience in particular, I'm sure you have many, many readers among our listeners who have been waiting for this book and are excited to grab it. So I'm going to go, now I'm going to go off script, if that's okay, because

Neal Stephenson: I figured you have to... I didn't know there was a script.

Speaker 2: No, there isn't. There isn't really. But it's really, it's hard to interview someone who's been interviewed so many times. And instinctually, I put up on X, what should I ask you? And then everyone wants to know your vision of the future. And I know you don't really like to do that. What's it like being... I was curious how you feel about the whole book tour exercise. It's never my favorite thing to do. I feel like you have to go on autopilot and repeat yourself over and over again.

Neal Stephenson: You know, so obviously it's a huge privilege to publish a book at all. And among people who get to publish books, it's a huge privilege to have a book tour. Now you're going to make me look

Speaker 2: like an asshole.

Neal Stephenson: Well, I mean, I have to preface the answer by saying that. You understand, you know. But the, I mean, I actually don't mind it. I think, I mean, I only have to do it for like two weeks every two or three years, right? And I could do anything. And, I mean, they make it pretty easy. It's not... People used to go on these endless book tours for months that were just terrible.

Speaker 2: That's what I was going to ask you. It must be different than when you first started writing because especially even before COVID, it felt like they were slowing down and it felt like COVID almost killed the book tour to some degree. And then I noticed now all my author friends, it's very condensed.

Neal Stephenson: Well, I think they are, yeah, it could be that the author friends you have now are different from the ones you had before because I think that... The old school, like driving from city to city with a bunch of books in the trunk of your car style of book tour is something that people used to do to get their career going. And the modern, so publisher-financed and publisher-organized book tour is a whole different animal. And what they're basically trying to do is... Is hit the bookstores that they think are going to give the best numbers and cram as many of those events into, say, a two-week period as is physically possible with airplanes.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: And so, because, you know, what you want to do is jack up the sales figures for those key stores. And that's partly about, you know, hopefully you get a position, a better position on the bestseller list, which leads to knock-on effects. And even if you don't, it's a way of making friends with the people who run those bookstores. You know, it's not a high... Paying job a lot of times. I think one of the perks if you're a person who works in a bookstore or runs a bookstore is being able to do an event. So it's kind of win-win.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they love it. I live in Mountain View and Andy Weir used to live there. And for a moment in time, I will not compare myself to Andy Weir, but we... Had cornered the market on Mars and the bookstore loved it.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, I've done two events on two occasions when he came to Seattle. I got to be the interlocutor who talked to him. Yeah, that's perfect. Third place books. Yeah, it was fun.

Speaker 2: Um, I mean, there's, there's, you know, there's, I feel bad because I know people will throw similar questions at you, but then there's some things where I feel like I have to, I have to ask you this

Neal Stephenson: stuff and I'm going to be, doesn't matter, just turn my brain off.

Speaker 2: I'm going to be indulgent and, um, and ask, and ask these things. Yeah. I mean, look, so many, I feel like I've spent my entire career pretty much covering, so I, I tend to cover things that are like at the very edge of What's just becoming possible and the, yeah, the sort of, you know, not, I mean, a little bit crazy, like real ideas, but at the fringe end of science and technology. And quite often it's things that you predicted would happen and or people who were inspired by your books and ideas who then went off to make them real. And then clearly we're living in this peculiar moment where AI is... Lighting up in some sort of fashion. And yeah, I mean, I got you here. I just couldn't be more curious about what you make about this particular moment in time.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, well, that's pretty broad. I'll see what I can do with that. Yeah. I mean, you know, for me, the whole AI... You know, revolution sort of blindsided me in a lot of ways. I mean, I've obviously been aware for decades that there was this thing called artificial intelligence and people were working on it, you know. And until pretty recently, it seemed like it was just software, you know. And AI was always used to refer to something that we haven't quite got working yet. And that's clearly no longer the case. And so after decades of kind of, I guess, downplaying it a little bit, I've been a little slow to realize that, you know, something's happening now. So I have, you know, kind of belatedly come to it and started using it.

Speaker 2: I mean, that's sort of amusing. Yeah,

Neal Stephenson: I know. Yeah. But I mean, when you're writing books, like one thing that people may not realize is that you become an instant expert in whatever you're writing about and then you walk away from it. And so... And so people tend to assume I know a lot of things about stuff that I stopped paying attention to like 30 years ago because I finished the book and I'm like, okay, you know, what am I going to write about next? So... Um, so anyway, I mean, um, the, uh, I think I'm kind of up to speed on it now as much as you can be without actually working at a, at an AI lab. And I've been using it, um, quite a bit, not, not for writing, but for other stuff.

Speaker 2: But I mean, the, you know, there's people who are, I guess, perhaps more, um, fully directly associated with something like the singularity, like Ray Kurzweil, although you explore These themes in your book, but there's guys I hang out with. Well, I mean, this is, you know, it's not like I'm in some private company here. I mean, the very well-known tech figures fully think we are living in the singularity right now or whatever, the beginning of the takeoff. I mean, do you have any?

Neal Stephenson: I mean, I'm more of an S-curve guy. So the only... Example I can really think of where it didn't tail off at some point become an S-curve was nuclear weapons. Okay, so that was a case where it went from, you know, people in labs doing little tabletop experiments to Hydrogen bombs in like 15 years. And so that was a case where there wasn't there never was really a ceiling that That it tapered off to, like the Russians end up building the Tsar Bomba, which is like 50 megatons, and basically figured out that you could go on making them bigger all you want, but beyond a certain size, all it does is punch a hole in the atmosphere and vent out into space. So there wasn't a technical ceiling on how big you could make a bomb. And the... But other than that, most technologies do at some point hit some kind of natural limitation. And so what seemed like an exponential curve at a certain point ends up being an S-curve. So I assume that AI is one of those. I could be wrong.

Speaker 2: I mean, it's a weird moment because it feels like What we've done so far is extremely brute force vacuuming up all these words, um, kind of getting, I don't know if lucky is the right word, but having some things like transformers come out that unlock these new powers on this stuff. And then it's not at all clear to me, even though they're clearly getting better and better. There is something about this that still feels very, uh, almost rudimentary and early days to me. And like we could sort of hit a wall, um, But when you talk to the people at OpenAI and Anthropic, they argue something very different, that it is totally clear to them that this just keeps going from the computers we put in.

Neal Stephenson: Okay. I mean, they know more than I do.

Speaker 2: You're so bellow about all this. I thought this would be sort of a profound moment of sorts, maybe.

Neal Stephenson: Well, all I can do is play with it. Yeah. Play with what's publicly available, you know, see how it might be interesting or useful to me. So I think right now the steepness of the curve feels very palpable to a lot of people because there's whole swaths of the economy that Where people are looking at this and saying, okay, I think my job is becoming obsolete, right? Or at least it's going to get radically transformed now. And so I think that adds a strong sense of anxiety and crisis to what's going on because it's obviously showing the potential to disrupt a lot of people's lives and careers. So I think that adds to a sense that, you know, kind of something explosive is going on. But again, I just don't have enough knowledge of my own knowledge to know where it might end up.

Speaker 2: There's other themes that you've written about that seem to be taking place among these AI companies, or at least to me, you have them. It looks to me a moment in time when corporations are clearly quite a bit more powerful than the government in a lot of ways. You have whatever the number is you want to put on it, four or five of these giant labs. They're run by figures that at the moment all seem to kind of hate each other and are... Are chasing, I mean, it's almost, it always reminds me of Lord of the Rings. They're all sort of chasing the ring, but they're deeply afraid of the ring at the same time. And I mean, that part could be comical at times. But, you know, this is something I've been writing about for a long time, which was even back when, like when Tesla started building a nationwide charging network and then SpaceX started. With its success, with its rockets, you could just tell that companies were doing things that governments used to do and doing them much, like the government seems almost incapable of doing things like this now. And then you reach this point where these AI companies, they have so much more computing capacity, even if the, I think if the US government wanted to build data centers of the scale that these companies are, I'm not sure that it could.

Neal Stephenson: Oh, that it could,

Speaker 2: yeah. Yeah, and so you end up in this spot where If this technology even remotely lives up to its billing, the companies are in charge with something very powerful. Yeah, you know, this is a very long-winded way. I don't even know how much you pay attention to this stuff, but clearly... One large group of people think these tech companies are evil. All five of these people running these labs are to be questioned. Do you come down one side or the other on any of this? I mean,

Neal Stephenson: the question that keeps coming up is, do we take our foot off the gas, hit the pause button, And think about this a little bit, in which case China gets it, or do we keep the pedal to the metal? So a funny thing about this book, about Dee, is that that question has a lot of parallels with what I'm talking about in Dee, because I didn't Know that when I started it. So I started this series a long time ago, like 2012, and put it aside for a long time and then kind of got back into it about four years ago, four or five years, I think. And the whole AI revolution has happened during the time I've been working on it. So if you look at, actually, there was just a big story that broke last week. About the German bomb program. And because the big the big impetus behind the Manhattan Project was obviously the fear that the Germans might have it. OK, so in the early eventually this will will end up wrapping back around to AI, by the way, but it's going to take me a minute. The The reactor that the Germans wanted to make to start working on the bomb was uranium cubes suspended in a vat of heavy water. So the uranium does the fission and the heavy water is there as a moderator to slow the neutrons down. And so they needed a lot of those two things. And in February of 1940, so it's after the invasion of Poland, But it's before the invasion of Europe, the rest of Europe, I should say. The head of IG Farben, the soon-to-be infamous giant German chemical company, sends a letter to the manager of this plant in Norway. It's the only place in the world that makes heavy water. And says, we want to buy all of your heavy water now. And so this guy... Gets in touch with his banker, who's a French guy named Jacques Allier, and Allier notifies the Deuxième Bureau, which is the French intelligence service, and they talk to physicists, and the physicists are like, this is really frightening. This is really important. It's hard to explain why, but just take our word for it. We do not want the Germans to get all of the heavy water. So that happens in February. By March, Allie is in Oslo, evacuating the existing stock of heavy water out from under the noses of the Germans just right before the Germans invade Norway. And he succeeds in doing that. There's a whole story downstream of that that's in the book. But it's in June. Then that the Germans do invade westward and they overrun Belgium and Belgium has the Belgian Congo, which is where uranium comes from. And the first thing they do upon getting control of Belgium is to place an order for basically all of the uranium they can get from the Belgian Congo mines.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Neal Stephenson: So if you're A person in the know, in the intelligence services of France or England or the US, and you know that they are aggressively moving to get all of the heavy water and they're aggressively moving to get as much uranium as they can get their hands on, then there's only one conclusion that you can safely draw from that. So that's what kicks off the Manhattan Project. And just last week, they they found a cube of uranium in some guy's garage somewhere. He was, I think, a Harvard professor who had is one of the cubes that the German nuclear project made during the war that they were going to suspend in the big tank of heavy water. OK. And I might get to see it in a couple of weeks. But But the point being that I told you this was going to get back to AI. If if all you know is, you know, Germany trying to corner the market on heavy water and uranium, you have no further info. Then the only thing you can do at that point is launch the Manhattan Project. And then later on, we find out, now we know that the Germans never came anywhere near making a bomb. Their reactor didn't work. They didn't have enough stuff. They were maybe screwing up the calculations because Heisenberg wasn't a great experimentalist. So it turned out to be unnecessary paranoia, but you can't know that. You know, when you're in the middle of the actual war. So that's kind of where we are, I think, vis-a-vis China with the whole AI thing. It's like, okay, sure, if AI is scary, we could take our foot off the gas. But then, you know, what if there's, you know, stuff we don't quite understand that's happening in China that would allow them to seize a commanding lead?

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Neal Stephenson: Core Memory.

Speaker 2: In the Manhattan Project, clearly you had big personalities who were driving that, but ultimately it was the government at the end of the day that owned and controlled the technology for quite some time. Whereas in this case, you have companies and individuals. And I mean, look, everybody knows. I tend to be more on the optimistic side and fascinated by all this stuff. There's large, just, you know, I don't know when this podcast will air, but as we're recording this, I think we've got a movie coming out on Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, SPF, and Elizabeth Holmes. None of these movies are flattering. People do not trust these people now. Yeah, just as somebody who's, like, explored this intellectually, I'm just curious what you make of...

Neal Stephenson: Well, I mean, the... You know, you start a company. If you're lucky, it grows. It gets big. And then you find yourself Having a fiduciary responsibility, a legally enforceable fiduciary responsibility to pay the investors back and pay them back as much as you can. And if you don't take all necessary steps to do that, then the board will replace you. Unless you're really smart, that is, and you've got special shares that make that impossible. But the point is still the same, is that I think when you're running one of these companies, you have to make certain business decisions based on business, not on kind of highfalutin ethical decisions. Considerations. And that's the dilemma that these people are in. They may not necessarily be amoral people, but they got to do what they got to do.

Speaker 2: And I sense you're a little... I don't know if reluctant is the right word. It's hard to generalize across five, six individuals. But you don't seem to want to be casting judgment on our current batch of tech overlords, in my sense.

Neal Stephenson: Well, I mean, they're all different people. So, I mean, it's hard to make... I'm trying to speak in general terms. And so what I've said is kind of broadly true of anybody in that position. I don't know the specific... Decisions that these individuals have to make necessarily.

Speaker 2: When we were talking about China, how much do you pay attention to what's going on in China at the moment from a tech and science standpoint?

Neal Stephenson: Tech and science. I mean, I don't have any great insights that go beyond what another reasonably well-informed person would know. I don't have a lot of contacts there. I don't visit there. So I don't know if I can be super interesting about that.

Speaker 2: No, I find it fascinating. I have become quite convinced that they will be leading our technological future. Oh, yeah.

Neal Stephenson: There's all kinds of evidence to support that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And I didn't know if you'd played out in your head maybe what that looks like at all. How much do you follow the brain-computer interface stuff that's going on?

Neal Stephenson: I, you know, have, I've known a couple people who've gotten involved in that stuff. I don't, I mean, it's obviously great for, you know, if you've got ALS, let's say, you know, or locked in syndrome or something like that. So, so that's wonderful. I don't, I'm, my whole life and career is, Everything that makes me happy is about words. It's about translating concepts into words and then words back into concepts. So the interface of letters on a page is what I like. It's where I'm happy. I've never felt any particular desire to have something different. So I've tended, I guess, not to pay super close attention to that stuff just because I don't see how it's applicable to my life.

Speaker 2: This is so different than I was picturing in my head. I just thought you'd be obsessed with all this stuff and where it was at.

Neal Stephenson: I mean, it's still a little too abstract for me, I guess. So if I could look at specific examples of what people are doing with it, then maybe it would be more something I could react to. But I think we are embodied creatures, and I think that... Bypassing the body, I just don't understand it. I write with a fountain pen on paper. The full engagement of the body, not just the abstract stuff up here, but the motor cortex and down the arm to the hand, that is all part of thinking to me. It's not It's not that there's thinking, which is this separate thing up here, and then this chunk of meat attached to it that's kind of dumb and stupid. It's all, you know, we're all one big kind of brainified, you know, creature. So, I mean, I guess it's an interesting thought experiment to think about bypassing the body, but I can't get any real traction on it myself.

Speaker 2: I read you talking about this and how you write. I was envious when I was younger in my teenage years. Always had the notebook and was writing short stories and things like that. But my handwriting is so bad that I could barely read it then. Couldn't read your own handwriting? Wow, that's

Neal Stephenson: pretty bad.

Speaker 2: Like, okay, but I wouldn't want to write an entire book and then have to transcribe what I've done. But that sensation you're talking about, I do miss that. I feel like I am totally a different, I think, quite differently person. Writing than I do just speaking what's coming out of my... Like when I think about, oh, what would it be like if you had a BCI and you could just think out the thoughts, I think I would do really quite poorly because there is something about this movement and this process of how the words get shaped that feels so natural.

Neal Stephenson: I think so. I mean, I got really interested in... Here's a weird like side... I think it's a related but weird thing. So I started watching a lot of WNBA and so watched a lot of video of Caitlin Clark. And she does something that Michael Jordan used to do, which is that Basically, if you're on the opposing team and you see their tongue come out, you know something bad is about to happen to you. So it's the moments of maximum concentration when they're about to do some amazing thing, athletic feat, that suddenly the tongue is sticking out and then they do the amazing thing. And then sometimes after it's done, The tongue comes out again when they're exulting in a dunk or an amazing shot or a great pass or whatever. And so I was kind of thinking about the whole tongue thing because it was a Michael Jordan thing and you see it with some other great athletes. Why would you do that? There's got to be a reason, right? So... You know, your brain at that moment fully engaged in taking in this whole sensory world around you and every muscle in your body kind of working in concert to carry out a three-dimensional plan. You know, what's the point of sticking your tongue out? And I don't know the answer, but there must be a reason. And, you know, one thing that... The curse to me is that, you know, uh, your, your tongue is, um, I don't know if it, if it never touches the spinal cord. I don't know if there's nerves that go straight from your brain to your tongue without going through your spinal cord or, um, or if it's just very, very high up in the spinal cord. But, um, you know, maybe that's part of it. Um, and, and, um, Kind of to the earlier point about BCIs, the human tongue does amazing stuff when you think about speech. I mean, it's this multivalent tool. We use it to eat, obviously. But... But we also use it in speech. And speech is one of the things that differentiates us from primates or other higher primates. So this is a question for people who study evolution and neurology, but what's the evolutionary pathway Where, um, we, uh, where early humans kind of repurposed this basically food swallowing machine. Right. To, to make sounds, uh, to, to speak in a way that I think led to, um, Led to us very rapidly lapping all of the other animals in the world in terms of our brain size and our brain complexity. So that's one of the things that I... It's not really a clear train of thought or a clear conclusion, but when I think about brain-computer interfaces, I'm like, well... What's the, are we gonna bypass the tongue? And what does that mean for an embodied creature to not have to use that weird, complicated muscle anymore?

Speaker 2: Yeah, okay. So I've spent a lot of time on the BCI. I've been filming a Neuralink documentary and hanging out with the patients. And like you said, I mean, if you have ALS or you're paralyzed, I mean, It's quite obvious what we do. Then I try to play it forward in my head and I'm like, what superpower would I be sort of wanting from this? I mean, you know, we're already at the point where if I wanted to be controlling a robotic arm or something like that with my mind, I basically could be. Or if I had a prosthetic or an extra arm, I could. It's like, I don't know if I would want that. We can't really... Put information in yet in any like meaningful way. Although, you know, the thought of just like in The Matrix downloading Kung Fu or Spanish or something like that seems appealing. My favorite is the one that I like feel on some sort of visceral level and I don't know if it would be good or bad is more of like the arrival style where the aliens are communicating with a This symbol and it's, I do feel like our words are limited and that like if I go to a concert and I'm, it's like hitting me in this euphoric way and you almost want to share that with the person next to you as you express it, you, I don't really have a mechanism to convey to them what I'm feeling in my body and head and I have this, this

Neal Stephenson: You'd have to go home and write poetry.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but even then, it still wouldn't be as visceral. Of chemicals and energy and stuff. And I wonder, I do sometimes wonder if we could get somewhere like that with BCI. But maybe that's horrible. I don't know if we all want to experience each other that way.

Neal Stephenson: Well, and then it becomes, if it's just a bunch of bits... Then it's repeatable. And so, you know, you could just sit there like the monkey hitting the lever, you know, hitting your pleasure centers over and over again to inhabit this kind of fake, euphoric, imaginary world.

Speaker 2: And I'll, like, veer off. There's a lot of questioning. But, you know, okay, so I'm here. I'm covering BCI stuff. I'm covering... Artificial wombs, you know, everything. There is this weird class of, especially in biotech, things that are right on the edge of becoming possible now. As I stated, I mean, I tend to get excited about these things. Obviously, other people can see them in quite dystopian points of view. And so there's nothing about this particular moment in 2026 that's making you tilt Utopian or dystopian one way more. Like this moment feels a little unnerving and different.

Neal Stephenson: I mean, so if I've got ALS, then the biggest problem in my life is that. And if a BCI helps with that, then BCI is solving a huge problem. It's really important. Okay, so that's great. For me, the two big problems that I'm scared of are too much carbon in the atmosphere and And the fact that people cannot agree on what is real. OK. And so any technology or doesn't have to be a technology, but, you know, any any thing of any action of any kind that addresses those problems is really interesting to me. I'm all over it. OK. OK. But if it's not like. ECI, I don't see how it solves any problems that I'm currently having.

Speaker 2: I think you wrote an essay, I think it was 2011-ish in Wired about the struggle to come up with new big ideas. And if I remember right, I mean, there was at least part of it that was things have become so specialized. You know, you have to be so... Knowledgeable about this minutiae in your field that it was kind of hard to think maybe broad enough and be able to push things for you. There was more to it than that. And when you wrote that, I remember, I think in just a couple of years earlier, this guy, Jonathan Huebner, who was in the Navy, he'd written this quite a paper that a lot of people had paid attention to, which is he'd gone through all the patent record and was trying to argue that Similar thing that we just weren't having these big world changing breakthroughs anymore. We'd kind of gone to the edges of the tree of invention. And so I was thinking I paid a lot of attention to that essay. And then I noticed that yours was nearish in time. And I was thinking back to that moment in time. And, you know, a lot of it. Clearly now, if you look, AI would be something that is quite different, at least there were hints of it back in 2011, but nothing like we have now. And then there's things like a ton of fusion startups now. There's people doing some interesting things in space, although I don't know if it would be revolution in some ways, but in other ways not. Yeah, I was just kind of curious. It's been, I would think, 15 years since you wrote that. Do you still feel the same way?

Neal Stephenson: Well, the, um, I think that came out of, uh,

Speaker 2: I totally got the date wrong.

Neal Stephenson: No, no, that sounds about right. I had, um, uh, I don't know if it was in Wired though, but, um, I had been on a panel discussion with Michael Crow, the president of Arizona state. And, and he was sort of, uh, jokingly saying, you know, um, you know, we've got all this technology and, you know, uh, We're ready to go. You know, we're ambitious. And you science fiction writers are letting down the side because all you do is write kind of sad dystopian garbage that, you know, depicts a future we don't want to live in. So why don't you, you know, shape up and write some futures that are worthy of being made real, you know, and kind of go back to your You know, be more productive members of the society basically by inspiring engineers to do cool things. And so out of that came a book that was about then. I mean, I did write a piece about it. But I worked with the Arizona State people. We brought out an anthology of science fiction stories called Hieroglyph that was meant to depict more kind of positive futures. And so my contribution to that was a story about making a tall tower. Which was kind of the one, you know, of all the alternative space launch technologies that we looked at in the early years of Blue, that was the one that kind of stuck with me as, hey, you know, this is actually worth doing. Just for the non-space nerds for Blue Origin. Blue Origin, yeah. At the time it was... It was Blue Operations, LLC, but then it became Blue Origin. So anyway, this is a common theme. I've heard this from a lot of people, even within the last few months. I've heard multiple times from people in the tech world, investors, mostly investors, who I kind of like, hey, you know, uh, you know, is there any way we can foster the, uh, the writing of, you know, science fiction that's inspiring and that makes people want to go out and build, build cool things again?

Speaker 2: I hear this all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah.

Speaker 2: No, it's, uh, I was actually, I was going to ask you about this very thing.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, um, I, I just, uh, three weeks ago, um, Was one of the judges on a SpaceX, not SpaceX, XPRIZE competition to make films that presented technology and particularly AI in a somewhat more encouraging light.

Speaker 2: Go ahead. Do you feel like you at all have a... Okay, so I've been through this exercise. After ChatGBT came out, There were a bunch of people in Silicon Valley who kind of got together. It wasn't like a cloak and dagger thing, but it was a little under the radar. And it was like, can we get, people don't know what's coming. We see what's coming. We don't want to scare them. And we're pretty optimistic about what's happening. We need to very quickly make some science fiction mass media that's on Netflix or somewhere where enough people will see it that people can...

Neal Stephenson: When was this?

Speaker 2: This is like... This is probably like 2024-ish. Oh, okay. It's possible it's all spilled over and spilled out in some ways.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, or a little parallel evolution or something. Yeah. It was co-sponsored by Google, 100 zeros.

Speaker 2: Okay, so mine's a little different, but... Okay. And... You know, and so I'm sitting here in these conversations. It's like I sort of get the spirit of it. Almost all good science fiction tends to have things going wrong in some way for the most part, I think, is fair to say. And then, you know, so you're sort of in this battle of, well, you can't just write some everything is wonderful type thing. And the tech people tend to struggle with that. And then... Struggle quite badly. And then, you know, it's not all clear to me, like someone like you, you know, you write about these futures where things do go wrong, but you're clearly very interested in technology. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know. So that is something that appeals to you on some level, is that you do think you can...

Neal Stephenson: Well, I'm happy to help, you know, foster that stuff. You know, it's a little side... Project or series of little side projects that doesn't, you know, I mean, it could have some kind of constructive effect. It could, you know, maybe help some writers or filmmakers, you know, get some traction somewhere. And, you know, like you say, a lot of people in the tech world are keen on the idea. So, you know. Clearly make the worst films, though. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, this is a kind of hobby horse of mine for a long time, but I do think that, um, in my theory is that the big bang of this was the, the last shot of Planet of the Apes where you see the Statue of Liberty, it's fallen over, you know, and, um, it's a super powerful image and, um, uh, But a very inexpensive one, right? So, I mean, they got a model of the Statue of Liberty and they kicked it over and threw some dirt on it. And, you know, so that was a really cheap and easy way to make a very powerful image. And so you kind of see this in a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopian movies. You see examples where they've just taken something that exists today And sort of, you know, bang it around and throw some dirt on it. And, you know, it looks cool. And it doesn't require a big imaginative investment, okay? Whereas if you're trying to show a more positive kind of future, you know, you do have to... To do some pretty hard imagining. At this XPRIZE thing I was at, one part of the program was a documentary called The 60-Year Mission, which is a documentary about the creation of Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry and all of that. And they had to put some energy into imagining what that future world was going to look like. And so that's the kind of thing that you have to do if you're going to create any kind of positive science fiction. And I don't think it's tremendously hard, but it seems to be just the path of least resistance for people. For movie companies and TV companies to kind of go the dystopian route. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. So they have to try harder, be more creative.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 2: So there's a person on our staff. His name is Kamen Hodges. He's an enormous fan of yours. It is his life's ambition to see Snow Crash made into a movie. He has an idea where... I'll read it to you. I don't know if he expressed it. I have a question. He wants to adapt it exactly how Hollywood... Would have treated it in 1992 when the book came out. Pretend it's a lost, unfinished artifact that got shelved before release. Blair Witch style marketing. And I, you know, that I was looking through all your works and you've addressed this before. But my God, I mean, if anyone should have... Tons of TV shows and movies based on their work. It's you, you seem like me to have, in a much bigger way, to have been caught in some kind of the typical Hollywood option rights hell where things get started and don't get finished and they just get, it's crazy to me though. I mean, this must be frustrating. Well, first of all, to your friends... Can we have the rights to Snow Crash?

Neal Stephenson: To your friend's point, there was actually... I mean, I've been watching people think about adapting Snow Crash since it came out. Yeah. Okay. And at every stage along the way, I've kind of said, boy, it's a good thing that they never made that movie in 1995 or 2000 or 2005 because... Because just a few years later, the computer graphics had gotten so much better. So I remember having gotten so much better that it would it would look dated. OK, in the way like the original Tron looks. Yeah, looks dated today. So I had a during one of these during one phase of this Conversation, one of these guys had the idea to use HDR photography. Instead of rendering the metaverse using computer graphics, just shoot it straight, but then manipulate the film to kind of send you a message that this is actually generated by computer graphics, right? And so that was the first point when People began to think, okay, the graphics are so good that in this future world, you know, it's just going to look like photography. And now, of course, we're to the point where it simply would look like photography. You wouldn't be able to tell it apart from... Uh, from, from something that really happened unless there was some other visual cue, like something that was physically impossible, you know, in, in the scene. So, um, so, so, uh, I just found that an interesting, uh, reflection from the, the, the, the message you just read, um, because, um, you know, you, you could kind of flip that on its back and, um, Go ahead and make it using 1995 Doom.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's what he wants, yeah. Can we do that? Is it still tied up?

Neal Stephenson: It is.

Speaker 2: It is, yeah. You started Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. I assume you guys are still friendly. I mean, he owns an entire media organization. Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: Well, it's at a different media organization. It has been for a long time. So it's been at Paramount and Paramount slash Skydance for a long time. So they just write you a check every year? That was true for a while and then they just bought it. Okay. So at some point they're like, we have to stop writing the analyst check every year.

Speaker 2: I mean... Like, honestly, tell me to fuck off if I'm just going too far. But, like, there's no way in hell Jeff must want to make at least some handful of things you've written.

Neal Stephenson: Well, I think they did have Seven Eves for a bit. I think they might have had Snow Crash. No, they didn't. But he delegates those kinds of decisions to the people who run those organizations. That's stupid. But yeah, I mean, it's a mystery. It's a tragedy is what it is. Well, yeah. I mean, it's given me, I think, some kind of... Some insights and some thoughts about the nature of that business, how it works, how it doesn't work.

Speaker 2: You've got this started, is it Wenair?

Neal Stephenson: Wenair, yeah.

Speaker 2: I mean, I was reading about it. I think I get it, but I mean, so you're trying to use AI to let people create these worlds from fictional works, but you'd be able to kind of change them a bit. Or it's like if Lord of the Rings, I mean, you're reading... Yeah, and if you look at the...

Neal Stephenson: The fan reaction to Rings of Power, there's multiple subreddits full of serious Lord of the Rings fans talking about how much they don't like it. And so that's been the fate of fans. For a long time, right? Is that there's all these fictional universes that have very intense fan groups. And this is how entertainment works now. I was at Comic-Con in New York just a few days ago. And that's like a giant monument to multiple fandoms obsessed with multiple story worlds. And their only way to see these things get translated into visual media... Has been to, to wait for Hollywood to disgorge something.

Speaker 2: Right.

Neal Stephenson: You know, sometimes after decades. Yeah. You know, and, and, and very expensively. And then, um, a lot of times they're not happy with, with the result. Right. As we can all think of examples of, you know, like the last season of Game of Thrones or what have you, where, um, if you're a fan of the, um, Source material and you know the source material, you can just see that, oh my God, the person who wrote this scene doesn't understand that character at all. It's unsatisfying. Yeah, or the showrunners, you know, what were they thinking? So there's this kind of frustrating situation for fandoms who just want to see stories told in their favorite worlds.

Speaker 2: So what? I mean, but are you guys, do you have massive... Compute to go power this? I don't know.

Neal Stephenson: What state is that? No, we're not using Gen AI video.

Speaker 2: Oh, that's right. You're doing a Unity thing, right?

Neal Stephenson: Unreal. Oh, off a game engine. Unreal editor for Fortnite. Sorry. The generation of the pixels happens at the edge using tried and true game engines and game engine compatible hardware. So we're not hitting data centers for just churning out lots of pixels. But there's all kinds of other ways that you can use AI to assist people in writing Writing scripts or to power sort of AI-powered non-player characters in these worlds. There's a bunch of ways that AI can be kind of efficiently used, I think, that don't take creative agency away from the creator. We're working with a company called Dreamlands.ai that has a system that That enabled us to generate a realistic environment in the universe of Pride and Prejudice incredibly efficiently. Is that in the public domain? Well, that's the thing is that, yeah, certainly Pride and Prejudice is. So you can't do Snow Crash because somebody has it, but you can do

Speaker 2: somebody else's.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, exactly. But the source material is also public domain. So, I mean, for the visuals, right? So if you want a Regency or a chair... Well, you know, there's a million pictures of chairs on the internet just from antique shops or whatever. So you're not screen scraping like somebody else's creative output to repurpose it. You're working with just historical documents, basically.

Speaker 2: And then I'm exploring this world like a game or I'm watching it like a movie?

Neal Stephenson: It's... You can write scripts with a web-based script editor in which you say what you want to happen. And then in Unreal, UEFN, basically in Fortnite, you see that script get played out.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay. So I'm like in a Jane Austen novel, just getting to like... Tweak the story a little bit or just make one up. Okay.

Neal Stephenson: Yes. So there's all kinds of AI enhancements that make that easier. So, you know, you could type in, you know, tell Darcy he sucks and then hit a button and then, you know, Claude comes back with a perfectly written sort of Regency era English. Yeah. You know, I must observe Mr. Darcy that, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That actually rings true in that world and that sounds like what that particular character would say.

Speaker 2: Yeah, go ahead. Is this like early days kind of small thing or this is like big, big, you guys are going full?

Neal Stephenson: Well, it's still, it's where we are right now is getting ready for kind of early play tests. So looking for people. So there's hundreds of millions of people who play Fortnite. Somewhere there's some Venn diagram overlap between them and people who like these kinds of books. The most popular sort of genre of books in the world is Jane Austen and Bridgerton and all of that. So we're looking for a few of those people who are willing to put up with a still kind of janky early days kind of version of this thing and play with it and point out all of the things we're doing wrong. And once we get past that phase, then the next step would be to launch it and see if people want to play with it.

Speaker 2: And you're friends with Tim Sweeney from Epic?

Neal Stephenson: We certainly have a friendly relationship. We're in touch from time to time.

Speaker 2: I didn't know if he was kind of behind this or helping. He's not.

Neal Stephenson: Well, I'll say that Epic overall has been incredibly helpful.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Neal Stephenson: So they've been great. But they're... You know, they're very scrupulous people, I think. And that comes from the top. It comes from Tim. And, you know, so I think when they see, you know, if there's something that we need that has general utility for their developers, you know, a lot of developers might want, then... Then, you know, then we can have a conversation about that. But they're also very even handed about not privileging one developer over another.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I'm keeping an eye on time. I do want to get to a little bit of a rapid fire round for people who sent in. Sure. But before we do that, there were just kind of like two last things that I really wanted to be indulgent on. I know you've talked about your time at Blue Origin before, just to give people some context. I think you were basically. Employee number one or with Jeff and the idea in the early days was to explore quite different ideas of what we could do in space. We know how to make liquid-fueled rockets and there's really not that much you can do to tweak their design. And so it was kind of like, what else could we do that would be a bit more adventurous? What comes next? This is not meant to be mean or anything like that. I just, I've written books about all this stuff and it was such a nice chance to talk to you about this. But, you know, so you're at that, I think for about six years. Blue Origin eventually gets going. I've seen you say that you left when things got a bit more conventional after all. And then, you know, Blue, I mean, I admire, especially where they're at now, but when you compare them to SpaceX, I mean, it's, It looks like one company was almost standing still for about 18 years while the other was developing four rocket families and learning how to land rockets and dominating satellites and taking over the entire space industry. And Blue is still trying to prove that it could even deliver satellites to space and all that. So, I mean, is that painful? Obviously, you haven't been there on a day-to-day basis for these 20 years. I've always been... Blue's the only space company I really haven't spent time at in part because it was quite secretive. Jeff is the only kind of tech billionaire type I've never really hung out with. Just I've always worked somewhere where somebody else covered Amazon and never had that chance. And so I don't know. Blue's the one place I don't know much about. Yeah. It's frustrating, you know, to have all those resources and then get stuck for such a long time. Although, you know, they really are seeming to kind of come on strong now. But yeah, I mean, so what's your, I guess my question is twofold. It's like, I don't know if you have an emotional attachment to Blue still and sort of how do you feel about how it's done. And then second, and I've heard you say you're impressed of SpaceX, but I'd be curious, like sort of, How impressed, given that context of you were looking at doing things quite different. And so they've done some different things, but then some that aren't that radical.

Neal Stephenson: Well, I mean, for starters, I'm very impressed with SpaceX. I mean, you just, you know... You can't not be if you know anything at all about rockets and space. So that's easy. That's an easy one. I was there from sort of the inception of it in 1999 up until the end of 2006 after Launched the first kind of rocket-powered vehicle at West Texas.

Speaker 2: And with Pablo Holman, who's been in that chair as well, who I think is a friend of yours. Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, he was probably one of the first five people who was involved in Blue Operations, LLC. Yeah, and so the... And then after that, I just said... This is great, this is fun, really interesting, but I feel like I could walk away for 20 years and I wouldn't be missed. Simply because in the early years, we were doing studies on different alternative launch technologies, which is different from Engineering, per se. And once Jeff made the decision to build rockets and picked a path to follow, then it became an engineering organization from that point on. And I could have probably talked my way into some kind of engineering organization. But when you're a member of a team like that, you have responsibilities. You can't go on a book tour and fail to deliver a document in time for the design review or what have you. And so I just didn't really see my relevance there from that point on. So it was a completely amicable parting of the ways at that point. But from that point, end of 2006, I haven't had hardly any real insider knowledge of how things work there, what's going on.

Speaker 2: And again, if I'm overstepping my bounds, tell me, are you and Jeff, are you guys friends? Are you pretty tight?

Neal Stephenson: We communicate a few times a year, I would say.

Speaker 2: Have you asked him over the years, like, what the fuck is going on with me? It went a little crazy for a while. It must have been very frustrating to see SpaceX just racing ahead.

Neal Stephenson: Well, strangely enough, the one enduring thing that I contributed was that... The it was would have been, I don't know, 04 or 05. And Jeff wanted to make a Like a seal or a coat of arms that would embody the company's values. The motto, yeah. Yeah, and I think at that point it was already evident that SpaceX, which it started at about the same time, was jackrabbiting forward at an incredible pace. And I think part of the message that Jeff wanted to send was, you know, we don't care. We just don't care. We're just going to keep, you know, working at our pace. And so there's a thing that you see in coats of arms called supporters. You'll get animals that support the escutcheon. Okay. So like in the case of the arms of like the King of England, it's a lion and a unicorn, you know, hold up the shield. And so I said, well, you know, Maybe the supporters should be tortoises. Yeah. And so that's still there. It's like painted on the wall.

Speaker 2: I always love that. And then as the years went on, it started. It was looking like the tortoise was maybe too slow. I mean, Blue Origin, they might get the moon. They might get the moon, but they have a lot of work to do still on that.

Neal Stephenson: Although it seems like suddenly in the last few months, Elon is getting interested in the moon.

Speaker 2: Well, he is because that's where there's money and Trump is, the government's turning its eye there. I mean, Elon was always, we're going to do Mars and not the moon. The moon is just, you're just wasting time if that's where you go. But clearly, you know, I think there's things to be gained now and all the stuff is expensive. It's interesting that Blue Origin is taking outside money for the first time.

Neal Stephenson: Raising money, yeah. Well, the... Rob Meyerson, who was the CEO of Blue Origin for a long time, and Gary Lai, who was a very senior engineer there that I used to work with, have started a startup called Interlune, which is going to mine helium-3 on the moon's surface. It's pretty close to me in Seattle.

Speaker 2: I saw this and you guys, you've got Stokes Base up there, which is interesting. And yeah, Washington still has a couple interesting things. I saw you when you first came in, you peeked at my little rocket.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, can't help it.

Speaker 2: Which is, so that's Skyroot. So that's an Indian private rocket company. They went to orbit on their first try like two or three months ago, which basically never. Yeah, that's rare. They made it to orbit and they put a satellite in the right spot. Wow. Although it's a... I mean, it's technically a four-stage rocket. It's really three stages with solid rocket fuel, so they went a little bit easier. And the four-stage is kind of a kick stage, and it wasn't clear if their stage... It wasn't totally clear how clean their stage separation was on a couple things. But... It's a hard problem. You know what they built that for? I think they... So they started, I think, in 2018 at the time... Commercial space was illegal in India, but they started anyway. So they started designing. And then around 2022, 2023, the Indian government made commercial space legal. And so these guys had a rocket that was coming ready. And I think they did it. I think they built that whole thing for $60 million, which I don't think has ever been done for less than a billion years.

Neal Stephenson: Where did they launch from?

Speaker 2: From Sri Harikota. It's an island off the east coast of India. It's the same place where the Indian government, ISRO, launches the PSLV and all its rockets. I've been there for a launch. It's amazing. It's right by Chennai, which is a little bit north.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, there must be some great sights there.

Speaker 2: It's unbelievable. So when I went, I got to stay on the island, and there are... Monkeys crawling all over the rocket. There's cows at the launch site. It's full on jungle. And it was amazing.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, I know a couple of people who've been to the Baikonur site. Yeah. And apparently that's also pretty rural.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. The launch sites is one of my favorite things to do because they're always in the weirdest places like French Guiana.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah.

Speaker 2: You're in, I think it's in the bottom five of the poorest countries in the world. And then all of a sudden there's this huge European rocket launch site. I've been to Alaska, Ukraine, New Zealand. Rocket Lab is one of the most beautiful launch sites you can imagine.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, I'm sure they have a spectacular site.

Speaker 2: So when you were looking at these different concepts, I mean, the only ones that I know that are quite radical today are... Spin launch with sort of the centrifuge type system where you're going to throw something to space. I don't know if you've seen Longshot. We did a video on them. They're making like a 10 kilometer long space gun, more or less. Obviously not human rated. This is all satellites. But it sort of pushes a projectile along this tube and accelerates it

Neal Stephenson: with gas. Is there anything that you feel like? Yeah, we looked at both of those. There's a... Is it, well, we're really about to go down a deep rabbit hole here, but there's a ramjet accelerator that was developed at the University of Washington that sounds like what you're... It's close to the long shot, yeah. ...Talking about that. And then the... Centrifuge. The centrifuge thing... Existed back then under the name of Slingitron. It was the same idea. It's a spiral thing. It's a big table that goes like this, and you have a spiral passage in it. It's a big gun, basically. It's all big gun systems have got... Problems that you're obviously aware of around, you know, what happens when you meet the atmosphere, you know, and that kind of thing. But the, I mean, as a kind of almost tongue-in-cheek thing, I looked at gigantic steel bullwhips, which is still a topic I'm obsessed with. I've got five Substack posts about that kind of technology now. But the one that... That I, I still think somebody out of build is the tall tower. Okay. So this came out of a paper by Jeff Landis, um, that, um, uh, where he, he went through and, and enumerated all of the advantages that you would be able to benefit from by launching from the top of a tower. And some of them are kind of non-obvious, like, um, well, if you know rocket engines, you know that, um, One that's designed to operate in vacuum has a big bell and it's more efficient. So you'd be able to do that. Some really odd things like you have to build the rocket so it won't destroy itself with its own noise. And it's not as noisy up there. You have to build it so it won't buckle at max Q. Up there, max Q is going to be a lot lower. And so you do have to put less weight into structural strength of the airframe. So when you add all those things up, And factor those into the rocket equation, you know, an exponential equation. It turns out that, at least according to Landis' calculations back then, for a given kind of rocket configuration, you could get twice as much mass into LEO. So, um... Okay.

Speaker 2: I don't want to... No, sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. Well, no, I can... Okay, so then, I mean, SpaceX is... Clearly, they've gotten cadence way up for people who aren't space nerds. Governments, we're super lucky to do 12 launches a year. SpaceX is going almost every two days. They've got reuse down. We've gone from roughly 2,500 satellites in space now to about 15,000. Almost the vast majority of that is overnight and driven by Starlink. The Starship is coming. So you're talking mass to orbit. I mean, a giant... Leap forward on that. And you've already said SpaceX is impressive, but are you dissatisfied because you still want these far more? Does Starship scratch your itch, or do you still want more?

Neal Stephenson: Well, yeah, I mean, so the question that was before us, you know, at the beginning of Blue Origin was... Are there optimizations that you can apply to chemical rockets that would radically transform the economics of space launch? So it turns out the answer is yes. That was not totally obvious back then. You know, it was kind of felt that if you look at, you know, let's say the space shuttle main engine, you know, it's a pretty amazing engine. It's, you know, the specific impulse of that engine is very impressive. Um, so, well, that's not going to get a lot better. You know, the specific impulse is not going to get a lot better. So, um, that's just a thermodynamic reality. And so is there a way that you can, um, do something that's not all about that? And so, you know, we looked at laser launch, we looked at electromagnetic propulsion, you know, uh, and, um, you know, all kinds of ideas, but the, um, um, For me, the attraction of the tall tower went beyond just it's a good way to launch rockets. And there's this additional factor of it would be really cool to have something that big, you know. And so it goes to the whole American dynamism, you know, why don't we build big things anymore kind of questions. And if it were built, I think it would be possible to monetize it in a whole bunch of additional ways beyond just launching rockets from it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I haven't seen anything that interesting, but China seems to be... It's got its own thoughts on reuse and things like that, which is kind of interesting. I think India is actually, so from the moment the government made commercial space legal, which is roughly 2023 till now, now there are 500 space startups in India. Wow. And there's about, there's probably around like eight rocket startups, three to four of which I would say are sort of legit and have a chance. Yeah. Not hugely radical ideas that are different yet, but we'll see.

Neal Stephenson: Well, yeah, it's interesting that I think one thing that we did figure out, it was sort of like a cold water in the face moment, was that... The business of space, at least then, probably now, is essentially launching these huge satellites up to geo that are incredibly expensive and their time is incredibly valuable.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: And if you, uh, so to begin with the cost of the rocket itself is kind of a round off error, you know, it's just, uh, it's compared to everything else. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I mean, uh, yeah, a launch, even if it was expensive Lockheed or somebody was 300 million, those satellites could be like $2 billion each.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah. And the, um, You need insurance, you know, and you're not going to get insurance on a brand new launch, you know, a radically new launch concept. And I assume that's why Elon launched that car into space. You know, he had to show that he could do it. Yeah. But no one was going to risk an expensive satellite, you know, until...

Speaker 2: That was on the first Falcon Heavy one, I think. Yeah. Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, and I think Elon wanted.

Neal Stephenson: I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah. But it was a cold water moment in that we kind of realized, oh, man, you know, we could, you know, come up with the coolest new idea imaginable and it would never go anywhere commercially. Because it would be uninsurable. If one of these launches gets delayed by a few weeks or a few months by technical issues, then that's a few weeks or a few months that it's not generating revenue for the owner of that satellite. And that's an enormous loss. So why not just pay Lockheed to send the thing up?

Speaker 2: Okay, I'm looking at the time. I'm really pushing my limits now. I have to let you go in about 10 minutes. Can I go rapid fire?

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, and we can go a little over if you want.

Speaker 2: Okay, I just want to be careful, and I want to... Anyway, people tweeted these in, so I'm not responsible for what comes out next. There's quite a bit of interest in your interest in sword fighting. I'll let you pick one, which I think is... One is extreme. It was your 20 favorite swords. And the other was ask about sword fighting techniques. Anything you want to tell the people about swords currently.

Neal Stephenson: I mean, I assume they mean 20 favorite types of swords. Yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 2: I don't know what I said, but that's correct.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah. I don't know. There's – I have – In the last probably 10 years have focused entirely on kind of niche sword type, which is the basket-hilded broadsword. And that is a—it's not done by a lot of people these days, which is funny because it's— I think it's the longest lived sword category that was in actual use in the West anyway, because, you know, we know it was in use in the 1500s and, you know, it was in active military use until basically the First World War. But it's a... A single-handed sword where the hand is completely protected by a basket. And there were versions of it that existed in Italy called the Schiavone and in Germany, but it's mostly associated with English and Scottish military. And so I did a video about it. It's viewed as being kind of a weirdly heavy weapon for a single-handed user, but I think that that's because people are doing it wrong. So that's the thing that I do. I started doing it partly because I got tired of having my hands broken, working with long swords, which don't have hand protection. And partly because it's a historical era that I'm kind of interested in. So that's the particular style that I practice. It's based on mostly on the work of a guy named George Silver, who was a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth and all of those guys. And... And is a well-known and somewhat controversial figure in the world of historical European martial arts.

Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. This question comes from one of my favorite readers. I don't know if it's answerable.

Neal Stephenson: Okay. We'll see. We'll soon find out.

Speaker 2: What are the mystics of America? I mean, the mystics, they're kind of choose which technology they want to adopt and bring into their society. Right? I mean, sort of inspired by the Amish. Yeah.

Neal Stephenson: Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, so this is an idea that is from Kevin Kelly, who kind of pointed out a long time ago that the Amish don't reject all technology. They use rollerblades. They just reject specific technologies. And so... I mean, you see it all the time now if you're trying to communicate with people because you've got people who use Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, you know, plain old SMS messages, email. And so that's a very common and kind of trivial example of people deciding which technology they're going to use and not going to use. But... Clearly, there's people now who are being super fastidious about AI. You know, I refuse to use AI. There's a huge debate over should we allow students in classrooms to have screens or children in any circumstance to have access to screens. So you can kind of see examples of it all over the place.

Speaker 2: So the screens, I assume you've had to answer this question before. The screens kind of hits on another thing that came up about six or seven times, which is, can we now make the young lady's illustrated primer? Should we be doing that? Can we, should we? Are you?

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, so this is now.

Speaker 2: Should we describe what it is?

Neal Stephenson: Yeah, it's a hypothetical device, a nanotech, a magic book in my book, The Diamond Age, that teaches kids that it's an educational system. And the... So this is now hot in a way that the metaverse was like five or six years ago. So I hear about it every day. I mean, I've been thinking about it a lot, I guess is the first thing to say. I'm actively thinking about this stuff. What I have been doing is... I'm trying to pay attention to what teachers actually want. So I follow the teachers subreddit and a bunch of other channels of information where actual teachers and actual classrooms talk about the problems they face, none of which can be solved by giving them a piece of technology. That is at the bottom of their list in terms of what they actually want. So I, you know, I think it's fine to to think about ed tech, but I think it's really important to go about it in a way that is is observant of the fact that there have been many ed tech initiatives, you know, down through the years that haven't worked out and that don't address the the pressing issues that teachers actually have to to deal with day to day.

Speaker 2: And this is all meant to be directly to you. I'll say one thing. One of the most read stories I've done recently, I had this experience. I was with this 22 year old and I was hanging out with him. He had built a nuclear fuser in his bedroom using only Claude as his guide. He'd never built a hardware system before. And we were hanging out in his little San Francisco apartment and he had like seven different AI systems running at the same time. You know, he was speaking into one of them. He was like sending in all the receipts from Amazon that he had bought for this fuser thing, getting his diagrams back. And he had this like fluidity with the computer that, I mean, I'm... Even though I'm on the older side now, I'm pretty good. I use all the latest and greatest tech. I go pretty deep. He had a different relationship with his computer. It wasn't exactly a tutor, but it was this symbiotic thing going on that I did not have.

Neal Stephenson: The first question that comes up when you seriously start talking about this is... Okay, you know, we don't want to just make a gadget that is going to serve a small privileged population, you know, that doesn't need it because they're going to be fine anyway. No, we should, you know, make something that's going to work for everyone, you know, that's going to have broad social impact. And then, so once you go down that road, which is very feel good, and again, start Looking at the real problems of education, then very soon you sort of focus back down to, okay, let's try a pilot program for a few kids. So the kid that you're describing, I would put it to you, would have been just as successful 100 years ago. My analogy for this is Abe Lincoln. So when Abe Lincoln was a kid, he didn't have paper. So he had a shovel. So he would stick the shovel in the fire. And so it was covered with soot. And then he would flip it over, wait for it to cool down. And then he would scratch his lessons out on the shovel by scratching the soot off. And then when the shovel was full of words, he would Stick it back in the fire again. So there is Abraham Lincoln kids, you know, who just cannot be stopped, you know, no matter how rugged their circumstances might be. But they don't need help. So I'm not saying I have the answer. I'm just saying that these are the immediate questions you have to start thinking about when you begin to ponder, you know, Bringing out a new kind of ed tech.

Speaker 2: Okay. I'll leave you with the last one. I mean, I was going down this road before. There's just a million things. I mean, this must be so frustrating because people see you as some kind of oracle. I mean, talking to you has been different than I thought it would be in some ways. Like, I thought you would be a total... Latest and greatest tech obsessive across all these fronts. I can just tell now. I mean, you're just super thoughtful. You research things. You must have this unique ability to, like, conjure these worlds and futures in your head. But it must be frustrating. I'm sure people turn to you all the time hoping for you to tell us what the future will be like. But it is—it's all on here. Everyone wants to know, like, utopia or dystopia. Oh, yeah. Yeah, where are we heading?

Neal Stephenson: Well, look, the— Well, so what you're seeing is essentially a storyteller or a novelist method to thinking about these things because the first duty of a storyteller or a novelist is to keep people turning the page. And so you've got to try to put them into an immersive world A fictional world that is coherent and makes sense. And there's all kinds of signals that you can inadvertently send to the reader that they may not even be fully conscious of them, but they'll immediately kind of say, oh, wait a second, that doesn't make sense. I don't know why that character did that. This seems kind of simplistic. And they closed the book and they put it down. So... And this goes to what I was saying earlier about Hollywood adaptations, what makes them succeed or fail. So if you're going to write a fictional scenario that involves technology, you need to embrace the full complexity of that technology, how it can go bad, how it can succeed, and also how would a society interact with that technology. And what would happen when people misused it or used it in really unexpected creative ways? And you also have to think about what's the business plan? How would it make sense economically for a given fictional technology to actually be rolled out and put to use? And so if you do all those things and you do a good job of it, then the reader reading the book will say, okay, yeah, that kind of adds up. You know, this rings true to me. And if you don't, again, they'll get a sense that it's false and they won't like the results. So I think what you're seeing, you know, if you see me as being ambivalent or kind of complicated in my Some of my responses, it's me, the novelist brain, trying to constantly ask the question of, you know, how could we tell stories here that have that complexity and subtlety about them?

Speaker 2: Yeah, no, which is fair. And I wish the world was wired a bit more like that. Neil, I can't thank you enough. Honestly, I don't want to embarrass you or anything, but it's like an honor of a lifetime to talk to somebody who's, first of all, just Prolific and wonderful at writing and, and it was really like shaped the world in ways that I don't think I really, it's rare to run into. So, uh, please definitely buy the book. That's the most important thing. Yeah. I knew I should get it first cause I knew we were going to get distracted a little bit, but, um, but please buy the book and, and, um, yeah, no, just a highlight of, um, Highlight of the year.

Neal Stephenson: Thank you. It's been fun. I've enjoyed talking to you and looking at your cool rocket models. Are those Tesla batteries? Are those whatever they are?

Speaker 2: They are lithium ion batteries, but they got made in a laboratory in Tennessee. We collect these artifacts as we go around. Of course. That's my face built by some robots in Los Angeles. Yeah, we just keep adding as we go. Cool.

Neal Stephenson: Okay. Yeah. Great. It's been fun. Thank you, man. Thank you so much. Yeah. Pleasure. And good luck with the rest of the tour. Thanks. Okay.

Speaker 2: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland. And the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brext for all your support and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you and we'll see you again. [music]